YES!

The Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism

My next book is being published in several days. My title was Naturalized Skepticism but the publisher (Bloomsbury Academic) rejected that in favor of The Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism: Context, Exposition, Repercussions. That's a link to the Amazon page where you can read the the preface, chapter 1, and most of chapter 2. Here's a link to the publisher. You can also read some of it on GoogleBooks. And as I mentioned last December, my first book is available in paperback now, so it's much cheaper.

Quote of the Day

…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. 

Gary B. Ferngren

Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction

It's the end of the world

Oh, this is just glorious: The Centre for Applied Eschatology. "Imagine a world that doesn't exist. That is our commitment." Also: "At present, it is difficult to estimate the likelihood of a global catastrophe. Researchers who study such scenarios vary in their conclusions. The best estimates place the chances of humanity surviving the present century somewhere between 9% and 50%. This is an unacceptable level of uncertainty. We can do better."

For your reading enjoyment

Molyneux's Problem. This was a question posed to Locke whether a person born blind and who knew shapes by feel (cubes, spheres, etc.) would be able to identify those shapes without touching them if they suddenly gained the power of sight. It's basically a question of how unified our senses are, whether we can take information from one source input and draw conclusions from other sources. It's one of those issues where empirical observation -- science -- can step in and solve the problem. Turns out the answer is no.

Finished!

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? 

Or should I read Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges?

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. 

Fly the friendly skies

The Mars Ingenuity, a small helicopter that went to Mars with the Perseverance Rover, is set to take off early tomorrow morning. This will be the first time anything like this has been done. Mars's atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's, so you have to generate an insane amount of lift for whatever weight you have. There have been delays so I'm really hoping they pull this off. I'll update this post accordingly.

Update: It worked! First picture: 

Update: Video!

Update: More!

Update: On its last flight, it took a picture of the Perseverance rover that brought it to Mars. It's in the upper left corner of this photo.

Recent acquisitions

 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.

Frustration

 I made a doctor's appointment with the VA for today. They outsourced it -- they call it the community something or other -- to a non-VA clinic. It took a couple months from the time I requested it to the actual appointment. I show up and they have no record of it. It turns out that they changed it to another clinic in another city and changed the time to last week when I wouldn't have been able to go. And they did this without informing me of the change. Because of this appointment, we couldn't go do certain things this week. So I'm frustrated.

Rant over.

Transcendent

Once on this blog I wrote that the second movement of the New World Symphony is what got me into Dvorak. Similarly, the first movement of Piano Concerto #1 is what got me into Rautavaara. It's not completely atonal, but it's not exactly tonal either. The glorious NOISE at 0:53 makes me hyperventilate and my heart starts beating faster. Calling a piece of art transcendent is cliché and artificial, but I don't know another word that will do the trick here. This is one of the greatest pieces of music I've ever heard.

I love the YouTube phenomenon of putting these great pieces of music on with the accompanying video following the sheet music. But when I got to 8:52 and saw that it said "Untertasten Cluster mit den Arm" I thought, no. No way. They don't pound their entire forearms into the piano to play this piece. So I looked for a live performance of it and . . . yes; yes they do.

A Must-Read

William P. Alston, "The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition," Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991): 29-67.

Books

I've stopped updating my GoodReads list on the sidebar, but just in case anyone's wondering I'm four-fifths of the way through reading The Chronicles of Prydain to my son, and might start the Earthsea books with him next. On my own front, I've just finished Awake in the Night Land and I'm in the midst of A Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Quotes of the Day

The abhuman was grinning, and his eyes glinted like black stones, and his beast mask was transformed, for the force possessing him was the only thing inside his corpse now: it was no longer a him, but an it.

Before, he had been almost a man. Now the face was something wholly opposite a man, something antithetical to all life

The emptiness in the eyes pierce my spirit, and I cowered back, one hand raised as if to ward off a blow.

"Why do you hate us?" I whispered aloud, gasping. "Why do you attack us?"

"Malice is its own reason," The words from the mouth were in an ancient language. "Malice needs no justification. The Great Ones could have smashed your flimsy metal house long and long ago, child of Man, but it is your degradation they crave: death is too noble. For centuries they will torment your dead, until even your memories are a torment. I am made in mockery of you, me and all my race, a crooked copy, merely so that you can be told this final secret: there is nothing."

"What have we ever done? Did our ancestors open up a gate into an ulterior dimension and release these horrors? What is the reason?"

It laughed without breath. "No reason. There is nothing. You are to die. You scream in the night. The silence will not answer you."

John C. Wright

"Silence of the Night"

Awake in the Night Land

Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant for you. Hate.

Harlan Ellison

"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: Stories

The Dennett fish

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."

Theme and variation

 Here's the theme:

And here's the variation:

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.