…an unintentional but perhaps inevitable result of the removal of religious values from health care has been to cut it off from the very source from which compassion springs. … Compassion is not a quality that can be called up at will. It can be desired, it can be encouraged, it can be cultivated. But without a transcendent and spiritual basis, it lacks the sustenance necessary to nurture and perfect it.
I just finished The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft after reading it on and off for a couple of years. I really enjoyed it, Lovecraft's style of writing is perfectly suited to the contents of the actual stories. I actually have a Cthulhu fish on the back of my car. I planned to list some of my favorite stories, but there were some from the beginning of the book that I loved that will slip my mind because I read them two years ago.
Anyhoo, now I have to decide what other author's oeuvre I'm going to start going through. So I thought I'd ask my reader(s). Should I read The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke?
Just so you know, I'm under no obligation to follow your recommendations. Right now I'm also reading Night of Light by Philip José Farmer, Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction by Gary B. Ferngren, and Beyond Realism and Idealism by Wilbur Marshall Urban.
I've said before that I'm a hoarder but I'm exonerated by the fact that I'm primarily a book hoarder, which is the most forgivable type of hoarding (according to my sister). A further exoneration is that I'm a cheapskate -- I almost never pay more than six bucks for a book -- so my book hoarding hobby is more a problem of storage space than of money. Recently, however, I broke down and bought three books I've been wanting for, like, ever, but which never dropped down to a reasonable price. I spent a hundred bucks on three books. I'm still kind of shaking about it. But I've also received some from publishers to consider as textbooks, and bought others more in line with my normal cheapskate spending habits.
William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.
William Desmond, Being and the Between.
Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction.
Gary B. Ferngren, ed., Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, 2nd edition.
Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley, The Warfare between Science and Religion: The Idea That Wouldn't Die.
Stephen J. Shoemaker, A Prophet Has Appeared: The Rise of Islam through Christian and Jewish Eyes: A Sourcebook.
N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 3.
Daniel Dennett, in his debate with Alvin Plantinga, ended his first presentation with "a little joke". It didn't make it into the published form of the debate for whatever reason -- perhaps the editor's didn't like it or perhaps it didn't play well with the audience. He had published it before, however, in his essay "Natural Freedom" which appeared in Metaphilosophy in 2005. The joke is a play on the Jesus fish. In case you don't know, the Jesus fish is an acronym in Greek. "ἸΧΘΥΣ" is the Greek word for fish. The I stands for Ἰησοῦς (Jesus), the X for Χριστός (Christ), the Θ for Θεοῦ (God), the Y for Υἱός (Son), and the Σ for Σωτήρ (Savior). So ἸΧΘΥΣ stands for "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior."
The early Christians used the fish as a secret symbol to identify themselves to each other when they were being heavily persecuted: one person would draw one arc of the fish, and the other would draw the other arc (if the second person didn't know what to draw, then the first person would know that the second wasn't, or probably wasn't, a Christian). Some contemporary Christians have picked up on this idea, although it's not as anonymous as before, by putting Jesus fish on the backs of their cars, sometimes with "ἸΧΘΥΣ" inside the fish, sometimes with "Jesus" inside it, and sometimes just leaving it empty. This quickly prompted a response in the form of the fish with legs with "Darwin" written inside it. Some Christians countered with a Jesus fish eating a Darwin fish with "Survival of the fittest" written under it, etc. Others picked up on the idea, and now there are numerous fish-like symbols with all kinds of things written in them.
In the debate and earlier article, Dennett decided to make an acronym out of Darwin to copy the origin of the Jesus fish. Instead of Greek he used Latin, and instead of a "w", which doesn't exist in Latin, he used "uu" -- double "u". He came up with Delere Auctorem Rerum Ut Universum Infinitum Noscere and translates it as: "Destroy the Author of things to understand the infinite universe." Now the first thing that struck me, because of my proclivities, is that the universe isn't infinite. This comes from Einstein's general theory of relativity: the universe -- including the dimensions of space -- are expanding outward from a point of zero volume (a singularity). So he fundamentally misunderstands the universe that he says we must destroy God for in order to understand it. But maybe that's just niggling.
The real problem is that first word, delere. I don't know Latin, but everywhere I've looked up that word it doesn't mean destroy, it means delete. And that would make the phrase more sympathetic: we have to delete the concept of God from our sciencing in order to understand the universe. It would be a statement of methodological naturalism, that we should proceed as if God isn't supernaturally altering whatever we're examining. You could make a strong case for that. But that wasn't enough for Dennett. He gave delere an atypical definition in order to say we need to destroy God. Ignoring him isn't enough; doing science without him isn't enough. We need to destroy him.
That doesn't sound like atheism. It sounds like misotheism: hatred of God. I was wondering if there was any philosophy written on this, and I discovered the book Hating God: The Untold Story of Misotheism by Bernard Schweizer. Unfortunately, it's not philosophy, but it still looks pretty interesting. It also makes me think of Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism by Paul Vitz which argues that the most vociferous atheists of the Modern era tended to have deceased, absent, or weak fathers. This isn't an argument against atheism, obviously, it's a psychological study. It just makes me wonder how much of Dennett's apology for naturalism is motivated by hatred of God rather than just disbelief in him.
Update: It reminds me of this quote from War in Heaven by Charles Williams. It's about someone who encounters Jesus without realizing who it is: "...the instant that he spoke became conscious that he actively disliked the stranger, with a hostility that surprised him with its own virulence. It stood out in his inner world as distinctly as the stranger himself in the full sunlight of the outer; and he knew for almost the first time what Manasseh felt in his rage for utter destruction. His fingers twitched to tear the clothes off his enemy and to break and pound him into a mass of flesh and bone, but he knew nothing of that external sign, for his being was absorbed in a more profound lust. It aimed itself in a thrust of passion which should wholly blot the other out of existence."
When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for everything essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.
How do you get blood from a stone? Easy. Start by redefining “blood” to mean “a variety of stone.” Next, maintaining as straight a face as possible, dramatically expound upon some trivial respect in which stone is similar to blood. For example, describe how, when a red stone is pulverized and stirred into water, the resulting mixture looks sort of like blood. Condescendingly roll your eyes at your incredulous listener’s insistence that there are other and more important respects in which stone and blood are dissimilar. Accuse him of obscurantism and bad faith. Finally, wax erudite about the latest research in mineralogy, insinuating that it somehow shows that to reject your thesis is to reject Science Itself.
Of course, no one would be fooled by so farcical a procedure. But substitute “mind” for “blood” and “matter” for “stone,” and you have the recipe for Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back.
I just learned that Quentin Smith passed away last month. He was an atheist philosopher that I respected greatly, despite his controversial claims about Kripke. Smith fully accepted Big Bang cosmology, but argued that the best explanation of it is that the universe just popped into existence without any kind of cause. In case this sounds like the theistic doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing), the difference is that theism maintains that the universe has a cause -- God, in case you were wondering -- but that there was not some pre-existent "stuff" that the universe was made out of. That is, God didn't create the universe out of something else that was already there, he created the stuff itself. So the difference is in saying the universe has an efficient cause but no material cause (theism) and saying that it has neither (Smith). I find this implausible in the extreme, but Smith gave as good a defense of this as can be done. It's impressive. Adolf Grünbaum, a more famous philosopher of science, argued the same thing, but much less convincingly. Smith and William Lane Craig debated a few times (and were apparently friends) and they published a book together highlighting their disagreements, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology.
Christopher Columbus was one of those Genoese navigators who, when Genoa's Asiatic lines of trade were broken by the irruption of the Turks (see p. 467), conceived the idea of reaching India by an ocean route. While others were endeavoring to reach that country by sailing around the southern point of Africa, he proposed the bolder plan of reaching this eastern land by sailing directly westward. The sphericity of the earth was a doctrine held by many at that day; but the theory was not in harmony with the religious ideas of the time, and so it was not prudent for one to publish too openly one's belief in this notion.
Jim's comments: This is a clear and widely-read statement of the flat earth myth -- the idea that, prior to Columbus, people (or at least Europeans) thought the earth was flat on religious grounds. It's false: the sphericity of the earth had been the almost universal view in Europe for two millennia by the time we get to Columbus. Perhaps we can give Myers some grace since the flat earth myth was very common at the time. I wrote about it before here. The best book on it is Jeffery Burton Russell's Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. Another interesting book is Christine Garwood's Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, although only the first chapter is on the flat earth myth, with the rest on the flat earth movement in the 19th and 20th centuries.
William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. (I should have read this one years ago. Written by one of the most important epistemologists of the last hundred years.)
Nathan Aviezer, In the Beginning: Biblical Creation and Science. (A Jewish perspective.)
Raymond E. Brown, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus.
Frederick Copleston, Aquinas: An Introduction to the Life and Work of the Great Medieval Thinker.
Charles Darwin, From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books (Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals), edited by Edward O. Wilson. (Unfortunately, it doesn't include The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits, so I'm kinda bummed.)
Cardinal Avery Dulles, A History of Apologetics. (I've been wanting this one forever.)
The Interlinear NIV Hebrew-English Old Testament. (Almost 3,000 pages. Got it for about $25.)
Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers. (I had this years ago and it was lost in shipping when we moved back to the States.)
John Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?
C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. (One of the few Lewis books I didn't have, although I've read it more than once.)
Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification. (OK, this one I've really wanted forever)
_______, Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology.
_______, The Science of God.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 volumes. (I love Nietzsche, and my impression of Schopenhauer is that he's a forerunner of Nietzsche who was more pessimistic.)
Wilbur Marshall Urban, The History of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. (This was published in 1898, so as a history it's a little out of date. I'm just a big fan of Urban.)
Fiction:
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions. (This is all of his short story collections in one volume.)
Fredric Brown, From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown. (Gold.)
Ted Chiang, Exhalation. (Short stories, and the ones I've already read are amazing. The title story is incredibly relevant to philosophy of mind.)
James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes.
_______, Caliban's War.
_______, Abaddon's Gate. (I've watched The Expanse, the show based on these books, and loved it, but the books were expensive. I got these first three as a boxed set for about $20 which is much cheaper than I've seen any of them.
Cixin Liu, The Wandering Earth. (His short stories. I've loved everything I've read from him.)
Ken Liu, Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation. (Chinese short stories that Ken Liu translated and edited. He also writes his own books and stories, so I'm going to give those a look in the near future.)
Fred Saberhagen, Love Conquers All. (Same author as the Berserker series. I wanted this one because Saberhagen was a Catholic and from what I understand, this is his version of Brave New World.)
John Scalzi, Redshirts.
Lucius Shepherd, The Best of Lucius Shepherd.
Michael Swanwick, The Dog Said Bow-Wow.
John Varley, The Persistence of Vision.
Peter Watts, Blindsight. (This supposedly has some philosophical relevance to the Chinese Room argument.)
Today I read two articles critical of Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism. The first was an exercise in frustration. It took passages in the Bible which say God sent a deceiving spirit or something similar, and use this to argue that the Judeo-Christian God lies. In this case, Judeo-Christian theism gives one a defeater for the belief that their cognitive faculties are reliable just as much as naturalism allegedly does. It was exasperating to read this just because the authors' exegesis was so painfully bad. One of the foundational rules in exegesis -- in exegeting any text, not just the Bible -- is to interpret the unclear in light of the clear. These authors never mention the explicit passages in the Bible that say unequivocally that God does not, will not, and cannot lie. They just superficially accept what they want the text to mean. They go on to suggest that allowing miracles opens the door to chaos, although they condescendingly invite theists to provide some sort of repeatable, predictable evidence of miracles. It was just so incredibly superficial. It reminded me of a fictional conversation between Carl Sagan, Sylvia Plath, and Allen Carpenter in Escape from Hell by Larry Niven and the late great Jerry Pournelle.
"I'm still getting used to this," Carl said. "Allen, you must have thought about this a lot. How can you justify keeping people in Hell? What gives God the right to demand we worship Him?"
"Come now," Sylvia protested. "Where does right come from? You're going to judge God? By whose standards? You say yours, but what makes yours any better than anyone else's?"
"Sylvia--"
"I mean it, Allen. You two are smarter than almost anyone I ever met, but you sure have awful educations! People have been arguing about this for thousands of years! And you act like you've just thought of the questions."
"I notice you never answered my question," Carl said. "What gives God the right to demand we worship Him?"
"I haven't heard any such demand," Sylvia said. Maybe we just need Him, and we're miserable if we don't have Him."
"People have been arguing about this for thousands of years and you act like you've just thought of the questions." That pretty much sums up the article.
A close relative of mine died recently and I inherited her books. About half of them have made it onto my bookshelves, the other half I either haven't gone through yet or are in boxes in my garage. The following list is just the ones on the shelves, as well as books I got for Christmas.
Also, if you've left a comment over the last several months and it never got posted, I apologize. I've just posted all the outstanding comments and replied to a few.
SF short story collections
Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison, eds., Nebula Award Stories 2.
Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh, eds., Flying Saucers.
Lloyd Biggle, Jr., ed., Nebula Award Stories 7.
Ben Bova, ed., The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, volume 2B.
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles.
---, The Illustrated Man.
Avram Davidson, ed., The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 12th series.
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend.
Judith Merril, ed., The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy, 3rd annual volume.
Robert P. Mills, ed., The Worlds of Science Fiction.
Hans Stefan Santesson, ed., The Fantastic Universe Omnibus.
Robert Silverberg, ed., New Dimensions III.
SF novels
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot.
Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney, Bored of the Rings.
David Brin, The Postman.
Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow.
Philip José Farmer, Night of Light.
Alan Dean Foster, Phylogenesis.
Neil Gaiman, American Gods.
---, Anansi Boys.
Tom Godwin, Space Prison (alternate title: The Survivors).
James P. Hogan, Inherit the Stars.
Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud.
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven.
Andre Norton, Key Out of Time.
Tim Powers, Expiration Date.
---, The Stress of Her Regard.
John Ringo, Citadel.
Robert J. Sawyer, Calculating God.
Charles Sheffield, Aftermath.
Allen Steele, Spindrift.
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age.
---, Snow Crash.
Jules Verne, The Works of Jules Verne (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; Journey to the Center of the Earth; Around the World in 80 Days).
Heinlein Beyond This Horizon. Citizen of the Galaxy. Double Star. Have Spacesuit -- Will Travel. Orphans of the Sky. Podkayne of Mars. The Rolling Stones. Space Cadet. Starman Jones. 6 × H (novellas and short stories -- previously titled The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag).
...and there's lots more in the garage. Niven Ringworld. The Ringworld Engineers. N-Space (short stories, excerpts, and essays). Playgrounds of the Mind (same).
With Jerry Pournelle, Oath of Fealty.
Books that are actual literature and so I got for my wife
(Some of these are old, so I put the year these particular copies were published in parentheses)
Jane Austen, Emma.
---, Pride and Prejudice.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote of La Mancha.
Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (1884).
---, Pickwick Papers (old, but no date on the title page).
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
George Eliot, Silas Mariner.
Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera.
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms.
Irving Howe, ed., The Portable Kipling.
F.J. Hudleston, Warriors in Undress (1926).
Washington Irving, The Crayon Papers (old, but no date on the title page).
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Rudyard Kipling, Kim.
Richmond Lattimore, trans., The Iliad of Homer.
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve.
Grant Overton, ed. in chief, The World's One Hundred Best Short Stories, volume 1: Adventure (1927).
---, volume 2: Romance.
---, volume 3: Mystery.
---, volume 4: Love.
---, volume 5: Drama.
---, volume 6: Courage.
---, volume 7: Women.
---, volume 8: Men.
---, volume 9: Ghosts.
---, volume 10: Humor.
Guy Pocock, The Little Room (1926).
Sir Walter Scott, Lay of the Last Minstrel (1898).
---, Ivanhoe. Shakespeare's Hamlet: The Second Quarto, 1604: Reproduction of the Huntington Library Copy.
John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent.
---, The Moon is Down.
---, Travels with Charley: In Search of America.
---, America and Americans.
William Makepeace Thackeray, The Virginians (1884).
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. The Complete Illustrated Works of Oscar Wilde.
Nonfiction
John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.
Frederick Copleston, Contemporary Philosophy: Studies of Logical Positivism and Existentialism.
Fred Dretske, Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes.
This is the actual "debate" between Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett. I put "debate" in quotes because there's not as much back-and-forth as a standard debate. It's just Plantinga's presentation, Dennett's response, and Plantinga's counter-response. You can listen to it elsewhere online, but since the audio is so bad I went through it and added captions. Because I just care that much. (Also because I play it for my students and they couldn't follow it.) If anyone can figure out what Plantinga says at 9:52 let me know.
These three presentations later comprised the first three (of six) chapters in Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (OUP) although Dennett changed several aspects of his presentation. Notably, in the book he doesn't include his "little joke" that he closes with (starting at 1:19:27). I guess it didn't play well with the audience and/or publisher. Dennett's interruption of Plantinga didn't make it into the book either (1:28:35 and following). The final three chapters of the book are Dennett's response to Plantinga's last presentation, Plantinga's response to that, and then Dennett's final response.
So this is my present to you. Merry Christmas. What'd you get me?
-- This is amazing. It is the oldest piece of music known, dating from about 1400 BC. Obviously there is a lot of interpretation since it wasn't written in our musical notation, but it's still incredible. I'm linking to it instead of embedding it because you need to read the comments section.
How do you get blood from a stone? Easy. Start by redefining “blood” to mean “a variety of stone.” Next, maintaining as straight a face as possible, dramatically expound upon some trivial respect in which stone is similar to blood. For example, describe how, when a red stone is pulverized and stirred into water, the resulting mixture looks sort of like blood. Condescendingly roll your eyes at your incredulous listener’s insistence that there are other and more important respects in which stone and blood are dissimilar. Accuse him of obscurantism and bad faith. Finally, wax erudite about the latest research in mineralogy, insinuating that it somehow shows that to reject your thesis is to reject Science Itself.
Of course, no one would be fooled by so farcical a procedure. But substitute “mind” for “blood” and “matter” for “stone,” and you have the recipe for Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back.
I haven't read the book yet, but that description sums up Dennett's whole oeuvre so well it's a little disturbing.
-- Peter van Inwagen, "The Compatibility of Darwinism and Design", in Neil A. Manson, ed., God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 2003).
At about 5 o'clock tomorrow morning, the Cassini spacecraft will plunge into Saturn nearly 20 years after it was launched from Earth and over 13 years after it began orbiting Saturn. It's been the source of an incredible amount of information. Cassini allowed scientists to discover seven new moons of Saturn for example.
I started writing the Religion Blog for OregonLive about the time Cassini entered Saturn's orbit, but as it didn't have much relevance for religion, I couldn't justify blogging about it. However, several months later, Cassini released the Huygens probe to fall towards Saturn's largest moon Titan, hopefully parachuting down while taking pictures, and hopefully landing softly and taking more pictures. All of these hopefullys paid off. Since Titan is one of the potential sites that scientists have speculated might have some form of life, I wrote a blogpost about the origin of life and what the potential discovery of extra-terrestrial life might mean for Christianity.
Below is my original blogpost. The updates are from that post, not something I'm adding on now.
**********
Friday, January 14, 2005
A Caveat on the Origin of Life
In just a couple of hours from the time of this writing (late Thursday night), at 1:05 a.m. Pacific time, the Huygens Probe will plunge into the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. It will then deploy a parachute and take measurements and pictures as it descends, and possibly after it lands if everything goes just right. It will probably be able to function for no more than 30 minutes, and the radio signals it transmits to the Cassini spacecraft will then take a couple of hours to reach Earth.
I am really jazzed about this. It's going to send pictures from within Titan's atmosphere, and possibly from the surface itself. Of course, part of the reason they sent this thing is because Titan's atmosphere is too opaque to see through, so any given picture will probably just be a greyish blur. But it will be a greyish blur from Titan!
I've commented before about how Titan is a primary site-of-interest for origins-of-life research because it meets one of several dozen necessary prerequisites for life to exist (high nitrogen content). I wrote about the religious implications of origin-of-life research last May. But I need to point something out that I haven't before: there is no a priori reason to assume that God created life supernaturally. The Bible constantly refers to God bringing about certain effects through the natural laws he set up. For example, most movies about Moses parting the Red Sea depict it supernaturally: he holds up his staff or strikes it to the ground and the water flees away. But the Bible gives a different picture.
Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the LORD drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. The waters were divided, and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left.
So it seems to me that if God parted the waters by means of a strong wind, he may very well have created the first forms of life by means of natural processes as well. In fact, in Genesis 1 God states "Let the land produce" various forms of life, not once, but twice. This description strikes me as being consistent with God using the elements of nature to bring about an effect (although it certainly doesn't demand such an interpretation). So again, if it is discovered tomorrow that life can come into existence by natural processes, it really wouldn't hurt my faith at all -- anymore than if some scientists came out with a study showing that, under certain conditions, a strong east wind could temporarily blow back the water of the Red Sea.
Of course, if science demonstrated that natural processes are insufficient to account for the origin of life, then other-than-natural processes are pretty much the only alternative. And this seems to be the actual state of affairs.
Update (11:30 a.m.): The Huygens Probe made a soft landing and continued transmitting data! Woo hoo!
We drove south to be in the path of totality of the eclipse last Monday. It was pretty amazing. As we approached totality, the temperature dropped suddenly, and it started getting dark. But it wasn't the same kind of dark you see at twilight. At twilight, the sun's rays are hitting your position horizontally, which means they're travelling through a lot more atmosphere. Here, the sun's rays were almost vertical. So when those rays get blocked the darkness doesn't have the same feel to it.
And seeing the sun's corona was absolutely amazing. My sister-in-law pointed out that at about the eleven o'clock position, the corona was red instead of yellow. Patterico claims he saw a solar flare with his naked eye, which would be pretty amazing. It reminded me of this post where I pointed out that, for millennia, solar eclipses were the only way humankind could observe the sun's corona and so learn about the universe. In fact, there is no other place in our solar system where you can stand on one body and have another body block out the sun, but just barely enough to allow the corona to be visible. There are plenty of other examples like this where it seems like the earth and the universe are not merely set up to allow for advanced life but to allow for science. Another example from the linked post is that a planet has to be in a spiral galaxy and be between spiral arms. In just about any other place in any other type of galaxy, you wouldn't be able to see beyond the nearby stellar neighborhood, much less out of the galaxy.
At one point I realized that a partially eclipsed sun looks like the Cheshire Cat's smile. It was like an emoji in the sky. A smiling mouth. And if that mouth had suddenly puckered up, I would have said, "Eek! Lips!"
Daniel J. Boorstin was a historian and Librarian of Congress. He is known among historians of science for his absurd claims about the flat earth myth in his book The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself. The following is a fisking of one of the more egregious passages from chapter 14, "The Flat Earth Returns." At first I was going to make this a quote of the day with some comments afterwards, but there were so many details I wanted to comment on that I decided to intersperse my comments throughout. As is my pattern (see here and here), Boorstin's text is in red font and indented with my comments in normal text.
"Can any one be so foolish," asked the revered Lactantius, "the Christian Cicero," whom Constantine chose to tutor his son,
OK, stop. Lactantius's views were controversial enough to be condemned as heretical after his death. And yes, the Renaissance humanists called him the Christian Cicero, but this was over a millennium after his death, and it had nothing to do with his views on the shape of the earth (nor did his condemnation for that matter). I don't mean to suggest that he was not held in high esteem by some, but Boorstin is only presenting the positive assessment of him. Leaving out the negative assessment is pretty misleading.
"as to believe that there are men whose feet are higher than their heads, or places where things may be hanging downwards, trees growing backwards, or rain falling upwards? Where is the marvel of the hanging gardens of Babylon if we are to allow of a hanging world at the Antipodes?"
Saint Augustine, Chrysostom, and others of their stature heartily agreed that the Antipodes ("anti"-"podes," a place where men's feet were opposite) could not exist.
Augustine, Chrysostom, and others did not agree that a place where men's feet were opposite could not exist but that men where men's feet were opposite could not exist. "Podes" means feet and a place doesn't have feet -- men do. The references of Augustine and others were not geographical statements about the shape of the earth but anthropological statements about the geographical extent of the human race. One of our earliest references to antipodes, after all, comes from Plato's Timaeusin the fourth century BC, and it explicitly affirms the sphericity of the earth.
Classic theories of the Antipodes described an impassable fiery zone surrounding the equator which separated us from an inhabited region on the other side of the globe.
Yes, exactly right. The issue with antipodes was not whether there was an other side of the earth but whether there could be human beings there. It was thought at the time that the equatorial region was too hot to travel through and the ocean too wide to sail across. As such, if there were "people" on the other side of the earth, they couldn't be the descendants of Adam and Eve because there would have been no way for them to get there from here; and if they weren't descendants of Adam and Eve then they wouldn't be human beings because they would not share a common origin with us. This raised further theological questions as to whether antipodes would be stained by original sin, and if so, whether Christ's atonement would apply to them -- questions that could be avoided if we simply denied the existence of antipodes. However, it should be pointed out that this move was far from universal. Other Christians accepted the possibility of antipodes. It was controversial to affirm their existence, certainly, but not heretical. Note also how similar this is to the question today of whether intelligent extraterrestrials exist; if so whether they are fallen; and if so whether Christ's atonement would apply to them, or whether God will have provided some other form of redemption for them. In both cases, for the antipodes and the aliens, we don't have enough information to answer these questions, so absent further revelation, we can only speculate. I wrote a post to start a series on this issue several years ago but never followed through on it. Now I'm thinking I should reboot it.
So, returning to Daniel Boorstin, at this point I start thinking, aha, at first he sounded like he was going to exaggerate the extent of flat-earthism within Christianity, but he knows that the issue about antipodes was anthropological not geographical, so maybe he's going to get it right.
This raised serious doubts in the Christian mind about the sphericity of the earth.
(Sigh) No, no it didn't Daniel.
The race that lived below that torrid zone of course could not be of the race of Adam,
That's about people, not the shape of the earth.
nor among those redeemed by the dispensation of Christ.
That's about people, not the shape of the earth.
If one believed that Noah's Ark had come to rest on Mt. Ararat north of the equator, then there was no way for living creatures to have an Antipodes.
That's about people, not the shape of the earth.
To avoid heretical possibilities, faithful Christians preferred to believe there could be no Antipodes,
That's about people, not the shape of the earth. Also, as mentioned, affirming the existence of antipodes was controversial but not heretical. I've only ever heard of one guy, Vergilius of Salzburg, receiving any kind of opprobrium for affirming the existence of antipodes. And the issue there was the theological issues mentioned above by myself and Boorstin: if there are inhabitants of the other side of the world, do they share a common origin with us, do they share the stain of original sin with us, and does Christ's atonement apply to them? If the issue raised "heretical possibilities," which it didn't, it would have been in this area, not with regards to the sphericity of the earth
or even, if necessary, that the earth was no sphere.
Saint Augustine, too, was explicit and dogmatic, and his immense authority, compounded with that of Isidore, the Venerable Bede, Saint Boniface, and others, warned away rash spirits.
None of these people claimed the earth was flat. Isidore is sometimes included among the flat-earthers, but most historians deny that he was one.
The ancient Greek and Roman geographers had not been troubled by such matters. But no Christian could entertain the possibility that any men were not descended from Adam or could be so cut off by tropical fires that they were unreachable by Christ's Gospel.
Plenty of people did. It was a controversial issue, and controversies don't become controversies if there aren't people on both sides of them. Most people in the early Middle Ages were skeptical about the possibility of antipodes, but some accepted it.
"Yes, verily," declared Romans 10:18, "their sound went forth all over the earth, and their words unto the ends of the whole world." Neither Faith nor Scripture had any place for beings unknown to Adam or to Christ.
OK, I suspect -- I hope -- "unknown to Adam or to Christ" is a way for Boorstin to refer to the theological issues about creatures with distinct origins from us and the extent of Christ's atonement. Because otherwise it makes no sense. Unknown to Christ? See, here's the thing: according to Christianity God is omniscient. That means he knows everything. So if there are antipodes God knows them. And while Christ gave up the exercise of his omniscience (not his omniscience itself), he only did so during his incarnation. Unknown to Adam? I'm not sure what this even means since everyone alive in the first millennium AD would have been unknown to Adam, having been born after he would have died. Maybe Adam is a stand-in for the human race, so Boorstin is saying "Neither Faith nor Scripture had any place for beings unknown to humanity." But if that's what he means, then it's obviously false. They didn't suffer from delusions of grandeur, they didn't think they might be omniscient, they knew perfectly well that there were many places they hadn't been to yet, and they didn't know precisely what was there. So, again, since I can't make sense of "beings unknown to Adam or to Christ," I strongly suspect Boorstin is just using this as shorthand to refer to the theological issues discussed above. But, regardless, it's just not true that "Neither Faith nor Scripture had any place for beings" outside the human race. Wouldn't angels fit into that category? I'm pretty sure Scripture, faith (whatever Boorstin means by that), and theology affirm the existence of angels.
I further suspect (I could easily be wrong) that Boorstin has in the back of his mind what I'm going to call "The Big Fish in a Small Pond Myth." The suggestion here is that people thought the universe was much smaller in ancient times because they thought the earth was the most important place, and so there couldn't be a lot of space or a lot of locations that were irrelevant to human life. But of course this is completely ridiculous, as I wrote here. Long story short: the earth was considered one of the smallest objects in an unfathomably large universe. The only bodies they thought were smaller than the earth were Mercury, Venus, and the Moon: everything else was bigger, even the smallest stars. And while they thought the universe only extended out to Saturn's orbit plus a sphere of stars, they had approximated the distance to Saturn pretty well, and that distance is simply greater than our imaginations can handle. If you don't believe that, check out If the Moon Were Only One Pixel and scroll right to get an idea of the incredible distances involved. Remember, you only have to go out to Saturn, but also remember that the ancients had gauged that distance pretty accurately. For all practical purposes, they thought the earth was a point of zero volume within an infinitely large universe, and they stated this pretty directly.
The bearing of this on the Big Fish in a Small Pond Myth is that the ancients and medievals thought that the vast, vast majority of the cosmos was completely irrelevant to human existence, at least in a spatial sense. So the idea that there were places outside of humanity's influence was common knowledge. I doubt anyone seriously thought otherwise.
"God forbid," wrote a tenth-century interpreter of Boethius, "that anybody think we accept the stories of antipodes, which are in every way contradictory to Christian faith."
Yep, it was controversial. But not heretical. And it didn't imply that the earth was anything other than a sphere.
"Belief in Antipodes" became another stock charge against heretics prepared for burning.
Really? Like who? Who was burned for believing in antipodes? Who was even excommunicated? Vergilius was reproved, and he's the only one I can find who even suffered that.
Some few compromising spirits tried to accept a spherical earth for geographic reasons, while still denying the existence of Antipodean inhabitants for theological reasons. But their number did not multiply.
Dude. Five Christians denied the earth is a sphere. Apart from them, EVERYONE who denied the existence of the antipodes accepted a spherical earth. "Their number did not multiply"? Other than those five, their number includes EVERYONE.
It was a fanatical recent convert, Cosmas of Alexandria, who provided a full-fledged Topographia Christiana, which lasted these many centuries to the dismay and embarrassment of modern Christians.
Well, yeah, Cosmas is embarrassing, but if only wise and intelligent people could become Christians, that would probably constitute a reason to reject Christianity. At any rate, Cosmas wasn't even translated into Latin to make the Topographia available to western Europe until the early 18th century. You know what Greek works were translated before then? All of them. In 1509, Copernicus translated some short writings of Theophylactus Simocatta from Greek into Latin. He had to settle for such an obscure text because all of the good stuff had already been translated, many of them more than once. Theophylactus was the dregs. Cosmas wasn't translated for another two centuries. He had zero influence.
We do not know his real name, but he was called Cosmas on account of the fame of his geographic work,
I don't know why he was called Cosmas, but I know it wasn't for the reason Boorstin states, viz. "the fame of his geographic work." You know how I know that? Because his geographic work achieved no fame. He was unknown in his own time, unknown throughout the rest of the Middle Ages, unknown during the Renaissance, and unknown in the early Modern era. It was only when he was translated in the 18th century that people became aware of him as a curiosity. That translation was itself motivated by the translation of a few excerpts from his book a few decades earlier by some manuscript collectors. He exerted virtually no influence on his contemporaries or the Middle Ages.
and nicknamed Indicopleustes (Indian Traveler), because he was a merchant who traveled around the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, and had traded in Abyssinia and as far east as Ceylon. After his conversion to Christianity about A.D. 548, Cosmas became a monk and retired to a cloister on Mt. Sinai where he wrote his memoirs and his classic defense of the Christian view of the earth.
Oh for *@#%'s sake. "The Christian view of the earth"? Really? If anything, the Christian view of the earth at the time would have been Ptolemy's view of the earth, since that was the science of the day, and the Ptolemaic view unambiguously affirmed the earth to be a sphere.
This massive illustrated treatise in twelve books gives us the earliest surviving maps of Christian origin.
Well if that just means the earliest surviving maps written by a Christian, then I guess that's true. Of course, given Ptolemy's authority, Ptolemy's map would have been the Christian one at that time for the same reason that Ptolemy's cosmology was the Christian one. It was the science of the day.
Cosmas rewarded the faithful with a full measure of vitriol against pagan error and a wonderfully simple diagram of the Christian universe.
"The Christian universe." Right. Not "The universe as advocated by a lone conspiracy-theory-minded crank" but "The Christian universe." And Cosmas wasn't able to reward the faithful with his vitriol and diagrams because nobody read him.
In his very first book he destroyed the abominable heresy of the sphericity of the earth. Then he expounded his own system, supported, of course, from Scripture, then from the Church Fathers, and finally from some non-Christian sources.
Dude, that's what conspiracy theorists do. They pick and choose some information, remove it from its context, ignore all the evidence supporting that context, and then use the little pieces of information to construct a new context. You can find people doing that in support of just about any view. There's people who defend Christianity or atheism in this way, but that doesn't mean you can smear all Christians and atheists as dishonest and/or unintelligent hacks.
What he provided was not so much a theory as a simply, clear, and attractive visual model.
. . . which nobody read.
When the apostle Paul in Hebrews 9:1-3, declared the first Tabernacle of Moses to be the pattern of this whole world, he conveniently provided Cosmas his plan in all necessary detail. Cosmas had no trouble translating Saint Paul's words into physical reality.
Huh. It's curious that no one else took the author of Hebrews the way Cosmas did. It's almost as if Cosmas was going against the established understanding of the text. Also, Paul probably isn't the author of Hebrews, although it was thought that he was until the Modern era. But I think we can assume that by ascribing Hebrews to Paul, Boorstin is probably just giving what Cosmas would have thought about it.
The first Tabernacle "had ordinances of divine service and worldly sanctuary; for there was a Tabernacle made; the first wherein was the candlestick, and the table and shewbread, which is called the Sanctuary." By a "worldly" sanctuary Saint Paul meant "that it was, so to speak, a pattern of the world, wherein was also the candlestick, by this meaning the luminaries of heaven, and the table, that is, the earth, and the shew-bread, by this meaning the fruits which it produces annually." When Scripture said that the table of the Tabernacle should be two cubits long and one cubit wide, it meant that the whole flat earth was twice as long, east to west, as it was wide.
Huh again. It's also curious that no one followed in Cosmas's footsteps in this interpretation of Hebrews. It's almost as if it has no exegetical basis whatsoever.
In Cosmas' appealing plan, the whole earth was a vast rectangular box, most resembling a trunk with a bulging lid, the arch of heaven, above which the Creator surveyed his works. In the north was a great mountain, around which the sun moved, and who obstructions of the sunlight explained the variant lengths of the days and the seasons. The lands of the world were, of course, symmetrical: in the East the Indians, in the South the Ethiops, in the West the Celts, and in the North the Scythians. And from Paradise flowed the four great rivers: the Indus or Ganges into India; the Nile through Ethiopia to Egypt; and the Tigris and the Euphrates that watered Mesopotamia.
And we have people who think the planes that hit the twin towers on 9/11 were holograms, or that the Moon landings were fake, or that the Holocaust didn't happen, or that Jesus never existed. So what? There's always silly people making silly claims. Unless you have a reason to think the silly claims were more widespread than a single writer who exerted no influence on his contemporaries or the Middle Ages, spending so much time on Cosmas is an attempt to mislead people into thinking he is representative when he isn't.
There was, of course, only one "face" of the earth -- that which God gave to us the descendants of Adam -- which made any suggestion of Antipodes both absurd and heretical.
Only. Five. Christians. Affirmed. A. Flat. Earth. Point to someone who was excommunicated for affirming antipodes, Daniel. Point to an official decree declaring belief in antipodes to be heretical. No? You can't? What a surprise. I should give Boorstin some grace here though: maybe he's just speaking in Cosmas's voice. That is, maybe he's just stating what he thinks Cosmas said or would have said.
Cosmas' work is still very much worth consulting as a wholesome tonic for any who believe there may be limits to human credulity.
You know what other work could be similarly consulted Daniel? Yours. Ba dum ksh.
After Cosmas came a legion of Christian geographers each offering his own variant on the Scriptural plan.
And none of whom affirmed a flat earth. Remember that? The actual subject you're writing about? I mean, the title of this chapter is "The Flat Earth Returns" for Pete's sake. It seems kind of significant that now you're talking about people who denied that the earth is flat without mentioning that fact.
There was Orosius, the Spanish priest of the fifth century who wrote a famous encyclopedia, Historiae adversum paganos, where he retailed the familiar threefold division of the world into Asia, Europe, and Africa, embellished by some generalizations of his own:
Which didn't include a flat earth. The following is a quote from Orosius that Boorstin gives.
Much more land remains uncultivated and unexplored in Africa because of the heat of the Sun than in Europe because of the intensity of the cold, for certainly almost all animals and plants adapt themselves more readily and easily to great cold than to great heat. There is an obvious reason why Africa, so far as contour and population are concerned, appears small in every respect (i.e., when compared with Europe and Asia). Owing to her natural location the continent has less space and owing to the bad climate she has more desert land.
This seems pretty tame and utterly irrelevant to the issue of the earth's sphericity.
Then the even more influential Christian encyclopedist Isidore Archbishop of Seville in the seventh century explained that the earth was known as orbis terrarum because of its roundness (orbis) like a wheel.
"Round like a wheel" (quia sicut rota est) is a phrase that Isidore himself uses, so I can't give Boorstin grief for repeating it here. This is one of the passages that make some people count him among the flat-earthers. However, Isidore is only referring to the land mass that includes Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa. Like all maps of the time (apart from Cosmas's perhaps), he's referring to the known world. Since he gives indications elsewhere that the earth is spherical, most historians do not take him to be affirming a flat earth here.
At any rate, this kind of map is more commonly called a T and O map. These maps were certainly round and flat, but the reason they were flat is . . . wait for it . . . they were maps. You might think that's unnecessary to point out, but I have encountered people who argue from the fact that ancient and medieval maps are flat to the conclusion that the people who drew them must have thought the earth was flat. I'm serious.
"It is quite evident," he observed, "that the two parts Europe and Africa occupy half the world and that Asia alone occupies the other half. The former were made into two parts because the Great Sea called the Mediterranean enters from the Ocean between them and cuts them apart." Isidore's "wheel maps" followed the convention of the time by putting east at the top:
Again, Isidore's maps, like all other maps of the time, were meant to show the known world. I've never heard them referred to as "wheel maps," and Boorstin doesn't give a reference for that phrase. However a google search on "Isidore" and "wheel maps" comes up with a few hundred results, so I guess he could be quoting someone. What follows is a quote from Isidore.
Paradise is a place lying in the eastern parts, whose name is translated out of the Greek into Latin as hortus [i.e., garden]. It is called in the Hebrew tongue Eden, which is translated in our language as Deliciae [i.e., place of luxury or delight]. Uniting these two gives us Garden of Delight; for it is planted with every kind of wood and fruit-bearing tree having also the tree of life. There is neither cold nor heat there but a continual spring temperature.
From the middle of the Garden, a spring gushes forth to water the whole grove, and, dividing up, it provides the sources of four rivers. Approach to this place was barred to man after his sin, for now it is hedged about on all sides by a sword-like flame, that is to say it is surrounded by a wall of fire that reaches almost to the sky.
Once again, I don't see how any of this is relevant to the issue of whether the earth is round. Isidore is merely commenting on his understanding of Genesis 2. I'll just note here that, centuries earlier, Origen, one of the early Church Fathers, argued that "no one of understanding" could take the account of the garden of Eden as referring to an actual place (De Principiis 4:1:16).
Christian geographers who lacked facts to fill their landscapes found a rich resource in the ancient fantasies. While they were contemptuous of pagan science, which they considered a menace to Christian faith,
Yeah, that's complete crap. Of course there are exceptions, but in general Christians accepted pagan science. Certainly they assigned a low priority to it, they thought other things were much more important, but they didn't tend to treat it with contempt, much less did they consider it "a menace to Christian faith." Again, this is in general: it varied from person to person. David C. Lindberg, probably the greatest science historian of the last half century, writes, "No institution or cultural force of the patristic period offered more encouragement for the investigation of nature than did the Christian church. Contemporary pagan culture was no more favorable to disinterested speculation about the cosmos than was Christian culture. It follows that the presence of the Christian church enhanced, rather than damaged, the development of natural sciences."
their prejudice did not include pagan myths.
I'm not sure what he's referring to here. The early Christian church (earlier than the period that Boorstin is writing about) was very hostile to pagan myths. Over time the church certainly adopted some pagan practices, like those we now associate with Christmas, but not the accompanying myths. If Boorstin is just thinking of these practices, then I guess you could make that claim, but once again, it's pretty misleading. It sounds like he's referring to the stories in those myths, not just the practices. So it's interesting that Boorstin gets these two points exactly backwards: he says the Christians were hostile to pagan science but not pagan myths, when actually they were hostile to pagan myths but not pagan science.
Once again, I suspect -- and I could be wrong -- that Boorstin is thinking about the claim that there are parallels to Jesus' life in world mythology, and that these may have influenced the development of Christian theology. So there are allegedly virgin births, resurrections, last suppers, baptisms, etc. in all sorts of myths around the world before the advent of Christianity. The problem with this is that it is not true. The myths in question do not parallel Christianity in any serious detail, and this has been the consensus view of New Testament historians for over a century. To see my earlier posts on this, see here, here, here, and here.
These were so numerous, so colorful, and so contradictory that they could serve the most dogmatic Christian purposes.
Oh that's cute. Pagan myths were contradictory and so could be used to serve Christian dogma. Gosh, what does that imply? Certainly not that most of the great logicians in human history were Christians. Certainly not that Christian theologians spent their lives reflecting on doctrines in order to make them logically coherent and consistent with the larger body of knowledge. You know, one of the first things I discovered when I was trying to refute Christianity was that it couldn't be dismissed as foolish. It might be false, but too many people much, much smarter than me thought it made sense. I couldn't bring myself to seriously think my knee-jerk reaction was a surer guide to truth than the lifelong reflections of some of the most intelligent people who have ever lived.
While Christian geographers feared the close calculations of Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy,
Like who? Who feared these close calculations? What did they write that leads you to that conclusion? What about the Christians who built on their calculations?
they cheerfully embellished their pious Jerusalem-centered maps with the wildest ventures of pagan imaginations. Julius Solinus (fl. A.D. 250), surnamed Polyhistor, or "Teller of Varied Tales," provided the standard source of geographic myth during all the years of the Great Interruption, from the fourth till the fourteenth centuries.
Solinus himself was probably not a Christian. Nine-tenths of his Collectanea rerum memorabilium (Gallery of Wonderful Things), first published about A.D. 230-240, came straight out of Pliny's Natural History, though Solinus does not even mention his name. And the rest was foraged from other classical authors. Solinus' peculiar talent, as a recent historian of geography observes, was "to extract the dross and leave the gold." It is doubtful if anyone else over so long a period has ever influenced geography "so profoundly or so mischievously."
OK, now we're not even talking about Christians anymore, let alone flat-earthers. Boorstin's argument is that "Stupid Christians believed the earth was flat because look at this one guy nobody read. And there's another guy who wasn't a Christian who said some stupid stuff about other subjects too." Come on man, focus.
Yet Solinus' dross had wide appeal. Saint Augustine himself drew on Solinus, as did all the other leading Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages.
I hate to think I'm growing cynical, but I'm starting to suspect that Augustine may have just quoted Solinus once or twice, and a handful of other Christian authors may have as well, and those who didn't are excluded from the guild of "leading Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages" on grounds that Boorstin considers too obvious to mention. And we'll just ignore all those non-Christian authors who quoted Solinus as well because that wouldn't serve our purpose.
The stories and fabulous images that Solinus retailed enlivened Christian maps right down to the Age of Discovery. They became an all-encompassing network of fantasy, replacing the forgotten rational gridwork of latitude and longitude, which had been Ptolemy's legacy.
Holy crap, did he just refer to the forgotten legacy of Ptolemy? Admittedly, Ptolemy's legacy was felt more in astronomy than geography: Almagest was more well-known than Geographia, but the latter was still extremely influential. Moreover, Ptolemy's legacy regarding astronomy involved as a core element that the earth is a sphere, and this legacy was all but universal throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages. As Albert Van Helden writes in Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley, "From the second to the sixteenth century, astronomy was a commentary on Ptolemy. No man ever wielded posthumously such a pervasive and long-lived authority in astronomy, and it is to be doubted that anyone ever will again." Since a spherical earth was one of the foundational elements of Ptolemy's astronomy, for Boorstin to use maps to suggest that people thought the earth was flat in the Middle Ages is just intellectually dishonest. You couldn't explore medieval science sufficiently to find out the influence of Ptolemy's geographywithout finding out the influence of his astronomy and the spherical earth upon which it is predicated.
I'll stop here, but man, Boorstin's scholarship is sloppy to say the least. It's almost like The Discoverers was written by an Internet troll. Just in case you need another example, here's a quote from chapter 20, "Ptolemy Revived and Revised": "No amount of theology would persuade a mariner that the rocks his ship foundered on were not real. The outlines of the seacoast, marked off by hard experience, could not be modified or ignored by what was written in Isidore of Seville or even in Saint Augustine." OK, exactly what theological claims would bear on where rocks were located in the sea? And where did Isidore or Augustine write about the coastlines? (Spoiler: they didn't. Boorstin just made it up.) At some point, you have to disregard an author as a crank, and I'm afraid Boorstin reaches that point all too quickly.
I wrote a little while ago that I would probably have fewer philosophy books listed on my "currently reading" GoodReads widget on the sidebar because I'm going to be focusing on journal articles in the coming months. However, some of the articles I'm going over are in books, but I'm only reading them as need arises, so those books will be spending a lot of time on the sidebar (in fact, they already have). I'm also going over God's Philosophers again because I'm teaching Religion and Science this fall. The punchline is that, after warning my readers that I would have fewer academic books listed, I now have more than usual.
I purchased some of them, the others were given to me, either by the publishers to consider using in classes, or by a friend/benefactor of mine.
Nonfiction:
Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament
Patricia S. Churchland, Touching a Nerve: Our Brains, Our Selves
Jack S. Crumley II, Introducing Philosophy: Knowledge and Reality
Christopher M. Graney, Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo
Gilbert Harman, Thought
Maralee Harrell, What Is the Argument? An Introduction to Philosophical Argument and Analysis
Mary Beth Ingham and Mechthild Dreyer, The Philosophical Vision of John Duns Scotus: An Introduction
Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, with Spiritual Maxims
Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification
Joshua M. Moritz, Science and Religion: Beyond Warfare and Toward Understanding
Ted Peters, God in Cosmic History: Where Science and History Meet Religion
Eric Priest, ed., Reason and Wonder: Why Science and Faith Need Each Other
Barry Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism
Roger Trigg, Beyond Matter: Why Science Needs Metaphysics
Peter Unger, Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism
Peter Unger, Philosophical Relativity
Dallas Willard, The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus
Fiction:
H.P. Lovecraft, The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft
Robert Silverberg, ed., The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, volume 1
"Agent Intellect" is a philosophical term from the De Anima tradition. In giving my blog this title I am not trying to imply anything about its (or my) intellectual credentials. I am merely signaling my interest in, and occasional blogposts on, philosophy. The views expressed here are my own and should not be imputed to any past, present, or future employer or affiliation.
Deconstructionism? Well, now let me see… You know, I don’t have any idea what that means. I know what you think it means, sonny. To me it’s just a made-up word. An ostentatious word, so young fellas like yourself can wear a suit and a tie and have a job. Deconstructionism? It’s just a bullshit word. So you go on and write your papers, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don’t give a shit.
