Hercules and Noah, Scylla and Charybdis, and the Argument from Design
Part of an ongoing conversation. The beginnings of it are here (http://www.scifiwright.com/2010/08/whats-wrong-with-the-world/ ) and here (http://www.scifiwright.com/2010/08/whats-wrong-with-whats-wrong-with-the-world/) And here (http://www.scifiwright.com/2010/08/whats-wrong-with-whats-wrong-with-the-world/comment-page-1/#comment-48427 )
Flamingphonebook (not his real name) and I are discussing the sickness of modern philosophy by means of the conceit of a dialog between Diogenes and an Imaginary Modern Man:
Of the imaginary dialog with an imaginary modern man, I “understand” (comprehend) the thought-avoiding thought process of the illogical self-indulgent whim-worshiper well enough, but I do not “understand” (sympathize with) the endless litany of excuses and self-deceptions an illogical and half-broken mind of necessity embraces in its never-ending struggle to hide from reason and reality.
Likewise, I do not “understand” (sympathize) the Apocalyptic description of those who call upon the mountains to fall on them, rather than face of glory of heaven, albeit I do “understand” (comprehend) how it is possible for a man to be so addicted to falsehood that he would rather die in an avalanche than see what the terrifying looking glass of Reason might reveal.
Hence, there is no point in you and I going through the imaginary dialog line by line. I do not doubt you are accurate in your caricature: but there is nothing to understand. The imaginary Modern man utters some nonsense or paradox, and when asked about it, he repeats the same nonsense or paradox in different words. The key to Modernism is to treat every honest question as an outrageously unfair attack, so that this unfairness excuses whatever tactic malice suggests for changing the subject and strangling the discussion.
The “answers” are non-answers. The “counterarguments” are merely restatements of the original non-argument, which is an expression of the desire for what is not logically possible. Demanding that the impossible be made possible is itself such a desire.
The demand that reality change to suit my whim is insane: not merely unfeasible, but impossible. The additional demand that reality change in order to make the demand that reality change to suit my whim feasible is nothing but insanity squared.
The use of the metaphor of the prisoner’s dilemma (yes, I am very familiar with it) is a trifle obscure, but the explanation seems to be that the Modern is indulging in anthropomorphism: The Modern claims to believe in an atheist universe, but, unlike an honest atheist, he nonetheless expects the universe to act like an absurdly over-indulgent yet omnipotent uncle with a selfish and spoilt nephew. The Modern acts as if the God in which he does not believe nonetheless owes him everything and anything imaginable or unimaginable. He acts as if he is cruelly and unfairly cheated if God does not deliver goods never promised.
Ironically, if the promises made by the Christian faith are to be believed, our God will deliver joy beyond human power to name or imagine, and at the cheapest imaginable cost: all one need do is surrender one’s ingratitude.
Indeed, there is the divine symmetry of poetic justice to such a surrender. On the one hand, God will grant infinite joy to those willing to receive it with gratitude; on the other, not even God could grant joy to an ungrateful and unwilling receiver, because ungratefulness is joylessness. The two words “ungrateful” and “joyless” are merely two names for one concept of “taking no joy in a gift.”
Those things traditionally identified as the seven deadly sins lead to or lead from ingratitude and joylessness: the arrogant or wrathful man is insulted rather than pleased by a gift, for to receive a gift is a slight against his self-sufficiency, the avaricious, lustful, gluttonous or slothful man might be momentarily pleased by a gift, but he cannot be satisfied, since his particular desires are defined by their open-ended and insatiable quality (there is no time when a sloth grows sated of slothfulness); envy is not a desire for good to oneself, but only an inch for evil to be inflicted on another, and it is an itch that grows more irritated when scratched.
Even those who regard with skepticism the supernatural claims of the Church ought not doubt the wisdom of this psychological claim, which is merely based on common sense and centuries of observation of human nature: these seven habits of the mind are pure poison, and forever work toward the misery and unhappiness of whomever they afflict.
I conclude that the Imaginary Modern, were he true to his philosophy (and none are) would be the sum and summit of the Seven Deadly Sins, a creature more wretched than Caliban and Gollum. (And may God Almighty fly to the aid of those real Modern folk who approach in reality even halfway this imaginary antiparagon!)
“Can you tell me in what way this differs from the positions of the Modern?”
None. I think you have identified the essential traits of the post-modern post-rational post-Christian with the clarity of Ayn Rand penning the character of Elsworth Tooey.
On to your other questions:
“No, but you do need to be in charge to save the world from what’s wrong with it, lest the Moderns corrupt and co-opt all the good you do. Or else you must withdraw into a kind of Galt’s Gulch, and save only what can be saved. But where in this world do we see Christian values in their ascendency as regards non-Christians?“
The Christian world view (or, to use the technical term, the Truth) is that this world is doomed in the same way that the antediluvian world was doomed. The Christian man is not in the position of Hercules, able to slay the Hydra-headed and Nemean-lion-hided and brass-winged birds of postmodern post-rational neo-barbarism and able to clean out the Augean stables of modern culture.
The Christian man is in the position of Noah. Our mission is to warn you, dear reader, to leave off making mud pies in the filth of the Augean stables of Modern Life and to get on the boat before the waters rise. Noah’s heroism was not in worldly Herculean strength, but was instead in otherworldly fidelity to an incredible and unbelievable message he heard from heaven: Noah had the strength of character to believe something his reason told him he ought to believe, even if his neighbors mocked, and the skies showed not a single cloud of evidence to support him.
So, no Christians do not need to be in the shoes of Caesar or Pontius Pilot to save the world. That salvation was done by one whose feet were pierced by nails: as far as the world could see, a crackpot agitator who died a traitor’s grisly death. This is because the world sees things backward. The cross the world sees as an instrument of torture, humiliation, and death we Christians see as exalted, and we take it as our labarum of comfort, glory, and victory.
So again I say no, Christians do not need our hands on the levers of worldly power to accomplish our otherworldly goals. Prayers are more powerful than votes.
“The shepherds had time and will enough; the flock did not. The peasant and the tradesman had no occasion to question Christianity philosophically, nor would there have been any advantage in doing so.”
This does not save your original comment (that Christendom lacked the leisure and learning to question the Christian faith) or make it one iota less laughable. The modern sheep educated in the modern schools, or anti-schools, likewise have no occasion to question modern pieties. This generation is simply not wiser, or better educated, or more insightful than that of the Thirteenth Century: as far as I can see, the society as a whole was wiser than ours by a considerable margin. Of course, the raw numbers of educated people in the Third Millennium is indeed higher. Our technical and scientific knowledge is immensely most vast, almost dizzyingly so. But you will get better insight into fallen human nature reading, let us say, Hobbes, or better insight into how to save human nature from St. Augustine, than you will get from any number of the numerous books written by psychologists and self-help gurus. The number of pieces of paper has increased, but so has the amount of human folly.
The idea that Christianity flourishes when people are undereducated or, worse, because people are educated, is not merely condescending nonsense: historically speaking it is the precise reverse of the truth. The rapidest spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire was among the Jews, the educated classes and the military: the smart and disciplined people in the world. The “pagans” who retained the old wives’ tales of the old religion were countrified hillbilly yokels – the word “pagan” means “yokel.”
Now, if you like, you can say that the modern situation is reversed, and that he intellectuals and city-folk of the postwar generations are the neopagans, and the Christianity is diminishing first from the cities. But, again, even in the modern world, the places where Christianity is spreading in the Third World is in the cities outward.
“(quoting me) “The Christians built those industrial plants and laboratories, and when they fall into non-Christian hands, they have an odd tendency to turn into gulags and gas-chambers.” But why?”
Because Christianity is rational and paganism is irrational.
Those who believe in a rational and meaningful universe are capable, without self-contradiction or ad hoc supposition, of investigating and conquering nature, which we hold to be rational and meaningful.
The pagan holds the world to be meaningful but not rational, in that there are gods who impose certain civic and filial duties, but the gods are capricious; the communist and postmodernist holds the world to be rational (somewhat) but not meaningful, in that the world is merely a machine that ground into existence those bald apes called the human race by unintended accident, and which will grind the human race out of existence by unintended accident. The neopagan sort of believes both and neither, but does not really believe in anything, having an artistic picture of life rather than a philosophical model of life: myth rather than theology.
Pagans, post-Christians and neopagans can indeed use the fruits of a Christian and scientific civilization, perhaps for a generation, perhaps two. Whether or not a civilization can exist entirely shorn of Christian metaphysics yet still be able to retain the private virtue needed for civic virtue needed for civility needed for scientific progress, that is an open question: empirically speaking, we have never seen an example.
If the gods of the modern world are worldly power, than the scientists of East Anglia University will sell their souls for the money, applause, and power in the world. If this world is all there is, no pragmatic ground exists on which criticize their dishonest choice. If the next world punishes sin, either under the hand of a wrathful God, or by the operation of inhuman Karma resurrecting these liars as Cuckoo birds, then it is a matter of pragmatic self interest not to indulge in lies, no matter the temporary temptations of this life.
The short answer is that ideas have consequences; but then a lack of ideas or an emptiheadedness when it comes to metaphysics or morality also has consequences.
“If the goods purchased from a non-Christian function just as well as Christian goods, why should anyone find Christianity favorable? It’s all fine to warn about long-term consequences, but only if you can show short-term ones as well.”
I don’t understand the question. There seems to be an assumption here that, in order to be persuasive, a truth has to be not only true, but also be palatable. That assumption is one the Christian Church expressly denies: we believe that we will be hated and persecuted for the faith, and suffer both trials and tribulations. Our Ark is a warship, not a pleasure-cruise-ship. But she is the only ship going through straights and narrows to the promised harbor.
I am not concerned with showing Christianity to be “favorable.” In the marketplace of ideas, I do not expect the boot camp of self-discipline to attract more customers than the whorehouse of self-indulgence. I cannot promise anyone a thought-free, worry-free, logic-free, guilt-free, existence-free existence.
The only person who can make that promise without cracking a smile is the Devil, who has had considerably more practice than any mortal at making promises without cracking a smile. Even the Dark Lord’s unwitting tools (and they are tools, in every sense of the word) have to put on an act of condescending smugness and sneering and loud-mouthed self-righteousness to utter Hell’s utter nonsense without breaking into gales of laughter at their own preposterous lies.
“And when they grow, will they [Christians], and will their children, succumb to the temptations of communism (I hope not), libertinism (I hope so), and Islam via its code-name of multiculturalism (I hope not)? Has not the wellspring of anti-Christian sentiment come directly from the children of the devout?”
A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the wayside; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold.
Let me explain this parable.
The seed is the truth, which is sown into the minds of man when they hear it. They that hear it by the wayside are the Communists, who have a shallow understanding of economics and politics, but who at least pretend to have a Christian concern for the poor and oppressed. Their efforts lead to the poor being trampled underfoot, or the corpses of the dead being torn by carrion birds.
They that hear with stony hearts are the libertines, who justifying their own childless selfishness only by lacking the moisture that comes of human tears, and the cruel winds of history are soon to blow them away. No offense, but one cannot erect a civilization on the principle of disinterested pursuit of self-interest except among Vulcans, Houyhnhnms, and other imaginary creatures, because only imaginary creatures can combine the two opposing ideals of stoicism and hedonism.
Those who hear in the thorn patch are the multiculturalists, whose purpose is to choke and overcome the truth, even if it means their own self-destruction.
Communism and Multiculturalism are heresies of the Christian religion. A “heresy” is not merely a difference of opinion. A heresy is when someone takes the complex and organic beliefs of the tapestry of a living faith, selects one thread of belief, elevates that one Lucifer-like above its peers, and uses it to dismiss or denigrate the others. Communism accepts the Church teaching on care for the poor, but rejects Church teachings on supernatural topics, and also rejects worldly logic on the science of economics, and rejects the moral teaching that the ends do not justify the means. Multiculturalism accepts the Church teaching that all men are made in the image of God, therefore deserving of equal dignity in the eyes of the law, and that Christ makes no distinction between Jew and Greek, Free and Bond; but then rejects Church teachings on Christ being the only way to salvation, and also rejects worldly logic on how not to commit cultural suicide.
Since all modern heresies grow out of the Christian faith, well, yes, the wellspring of anti-Christian sentiment springs out of Christianity. What has this to do with the topic under discussion? My comment was that demographics are running against the Culture of Death, because the Culture of Death is also the Cult of Sterility and the Cult of Infanticide.
Whether or not the Death-Eaters will be able to recruit as Janissaries enough Christian children to save them from self-imposed demographic marginalization is an open question: that the Christians would stand a better chance of outbreeding their opposition if only we actually lived up to Church teachings on contraception, fornication, abortion, euthanasia and divorce is not an open question.
The Culture of Death exists because and only because the Christian majority tolerates and supports it with our votes and our dollars. In the same way that the Jews called for the freedom of Barabbas and the crucifixion of their Messiah, we Christians will no doubt call for the coronation of the Antichrist when he appears and the crucifixion of our Messiah. Every Catholic politician who votes for abortion, and every Catholic voter who votes for that politician, is scourging their Savior and plaiting a crown of thorns for him. Even non-Christians looking at our doings from the outside must be taken aback at the hypocrisy and infidelity.
This is why I never understand, and never believe, protests from my Leftwing friends that the menace of the Theocracy is about to fall upon them like the hordes of Attila. The Theocracy so far seems to support the Abortionocracy in the most supine position I can imagine. Has even a single Catholic politician been excommunicated due to his support for these modern practices of Moloch? Or even chastised in public by his bishop?
“You once stood an atheist like me; did this mean you stood without passion?”
I was as passionate as my cold Vulcan nature allowed, to be sure. Let us not conflate drama with passion. As a Christian gentleman, I think the universe around us is a story with a point to it, and a moral, and happy ending. When I was an atheist, I thought the world was a machine, a dead thing, unintelligent and uncreated by any intelligence. The only meaning issued from what meaning I created in it; there was no innate meaning to find in it.
Now, I was not like a Modern in that I did not ever believe that the rules of logic or the rules of morality were arbitrary or manmade: I held then as I hold now that these rules are something the reason of man discovers, not something the imagination of man invents. There is a type of innate drama in that, the drama of discovery — sort of a science fiction story, if you will. But the tale had an unhappy ending. Entropy always wins in the end.
Far be it from me to doubt the sincerity and the passion of any honest atheist! The honest man of any denomination or nondenomination has to see the folly and evil of the modern world—it is too blatant to miss. Only devout experts in self-deception can believe otherwise, and I do not take you to be one of them! The men who worship Unreason are a mutual enemy of us both; you may disapprove of anyone worshiping anything, but I certainly disapprove of the worship of man-eating idols. I would be honored to have you in the foxhole with me as the worshipers of the House of Dagon advance across the world. I would be even more honored if you would join me at the bridal feast in heaven, garbed in white and crowned with light, after all the battles in this world are ended, and we can grow drunk on the water of eternal life together.
“(quoting me) The message of Christ is simple and clear enough that you do not need a degree in theology to understand it. The poor and miserable and hopeless, the widow and the prisoner and the orphan understand it.” But do the rich and the happy and the hopeful? The pensioner and the free man and the heir? These have become as common as the people you describe, as has the intellectual.”
Yes. I am a Christian not because I am poor and miserable, but because I am lazy, fat and happy, so happy indeed that I can think of no natural explanation to explain my happiness. My gratitude had no outlet for expression back in my atheist days. I was thankful with no one to thank.
“The message is clear; it it applicable to those people?”
That depends on what you mean by applicable. The only solution for the looming horror and reality death is either Stoic resignation, Buddhist resignation, or Christian hope. Death comes to all estates, princes, prelates, potentates; both rich and poor of all degree. He takes the champion in the stour, the maiden in her bower full of beauty, the suckling babe full of benignity. Timor Mortis Conturbat Me.
All mortals die: therefore the message of how to escape death is of immediate and personal interest to all mortals.
We are all of us sitting in a terminal cancer ward or on Death Row. Merely because the patient in the bed next to you or the condemned prisoner in the next cell has an extra toy to play with during the short hours left does not mean he can be so stupid as to not see where he is sitting. The magnificent resolution of the condemned to spend his last few hours in his cell living a life of pleasure and accomplishment, perhaps writing a famous poem or discovering a new invention to make the next occupier of the cell more comfy, is a small and vainglorious resolution, ultimately so meaningless as to be the stuff of nightmare: the mathematician, buried alive prematurely, scribbling in his blood on the inside of his coffin lid that solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem which no one will ever see. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
“(Is this message applicable) To me? I am happy and I am free, yet I fear and fight against modern madness.”
The message is certainly applicable to you, because you are not free. If you are human, then you, no matter who you are, are the miserable slave of your sins and vices and bad habits you cannot break.
For any son of Adam, there is a chain around your neck, and if you do not feel it, it is only because you have never tried to pull against it.
(Speaking for myself, I really and truly thought I was a virtuous man back in my atheist days, because my worldly philosophy mis-categorized my vices as merely harmless entertainment. It was not until I tried to walk away from my “entertainments” that I discovered them to be my master, and myself a wretched and powerless slave.)
“Is my only choice then between Scylla and Charybdis? And do you wonder then that I look for another way of life?”
There is no other way and no third option and no compromise and no half measures. The door of the Ark will soon be shut. The windows of heaven open, and the fountains of the sea break forth, those who are outside must drown, and those who are half inside must be crushed in the jamb.
But who has told you that Christ is Charybdis? He will swallow you entirely, if you let Him, but this is being swallowed by a peaceful ecstasy of which human things called ecstatic are very pale shadows indeed. Being drowned in bliss is not the same as being drowned.
The choice set before us is not between Scylla, who kills six crewmen, and Charybdis, who sinks the boat. The choice set before us is life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live. The choice is between Christ and Nothing.
One last question and answer:
“You have had revelation. You have been inspired. You have been inspired. I have not. I must–must!–work within the structure I have developed until and unless I see evidence otherwise. That structure does not preclude someone knowing things I do not, but it does preclude treating that as an assumption.”
It may or may not be precluded.
Plenty of perfectly reasonable souls are persuaded to attempt entering into communion with Christ without waiting for a personal revelation. The inspiration of the Holy Ghost is yours for the asking; it is a miracle as routine (and as miraculous) as childbirth, and comes to all who are baptized.
As for evidence, allow me to suggest that the type of evidence involved here is more like the evidence used to support Darwin’s theory and less like the evidence used to support Galileo’s. Darwin’s theory is robust because of its simplicity and completeness, but you cannot prove it so merely by throwing two weights off the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The question is whether the better model explains those things the current model leaves unanswered or unanswerable.
There are reasonable grounds for entertaining the theory that the supernatural world exists without reference to revelation. Such grounds are not ironclad and airtight proof that the supernatural world exists; but then again, Darwin’s theory by its very nature is also not ironclad and airtight and cannot be made so — in the final analysis, Darwin’s theory is not an empirical theory, as it cannot be subject to the control of variables in an laboratory setting. (It is nonetheless a more robust theory than Lamarckianism or than Young-Earth theories.)
Someday soon you and I must have a discussion as to whether or not the beauty and felicity of the created universe, not to mention (should the standard model be correct) the absence of an infinite past, creates a sufficiently weighty argument in favor of a Creator that such an argument could operate within the structure you have developed without any undue assumptions.
Let us use the example, if I may, of Peter Watts’ excellent (if flawed) science fiction novel BLINDSIGHT: the author there argues that self-awareness is not only not necessary for intelligence and evolution, but is indeed a draw-back, a hindrance. If we accept Watts’ argument, then the naturalist model does not explain human nature, because it does not explain why human reason and human self-awareness and the human soul is good – indeed, the startling argument is that the human soul is not good, and we would be more advantaged to be soulless beings, or at least un-self-aware, like unto the creatures who, by no coincidence, in his novel, are called vampires.
If Mother Nature, to sate the needs of evolution, should have produced soulless sociopathic but efficient automatons like vampires rather than human beings with our dreams and hopes and doubts and scruples and introspections, the question is not only why she did not (in the naturalist model, there is no answer to any question of why, because all acts by Mother Nature are not “acts” but mere unintentional motions), the question is also why is it a good thing that she did not do what she should have done?
Is it actually an objective fact that it is good for men to be self-aware and possessed of a conscience? Or is this merely the arbitrary if not silly prejudice of men? We men say it is good for men to possess reason merely because we posses it, and not because it is good; no doubt if frogs could talk, they would praise hopping as the pinnacle of nature. So runs the argument of the naturalist model.
The drawback of this model is that innate good now is erased, not merely from the question of whether it is good for men to have souls, but from existence altogether, and is replaced by mere matters of arbitrary opinion.
The model of the universe were there is no such thing as good and evil is not only unworkable, it is unimaginable: those who propose such a model cannot do so without self-contradiction (because the act of proposing is an action, and all actions by nature aim at a good either immediate or remote.)
If it is accepted as a reasonable fact that it is good for men to have “souls” (rational consciousness and capacity for conscience) and if it is accepted as a reasonable conclusion that natural evolution should not or could not have produced the human soul, or made the human soul an objectively good thing as opposed to merely a thing of no objective significance, then which model (the model of unintentional evolution or the model of creation by a supernatural Creator) better reconciles this reasonable fact and this reasonable conclusion?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
