Bruce Charlton's Notions

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The main reason that science has declined - that it has become absolutely, not just relatively immune from any form of evidence, including evidence of its own corruption and careerism - is that professional science no longer believes in reality.

Science (scientists) no longer believe that reality is real, no longer believe that there really is a reality underneath all of the peer review, bureaucracy, consensus, and competitions for status, security and salary; punditry and prizes...

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Or, if some individual 'scientists' do believe that reality is real, then they do not see reality as important; they do not see themselves (qua scientist) as having a duty to reality -  a non-negotiable and bounden duty to seek-for and speak only this reality - so far as they best understand it.

They simply don't feel this.

For modern 'scientists', reality is just one of the options.

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So, the root of the problem is that science is nihilistic (nihilism means the belief that there is no reality).

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It is the unbelief in reality which allows science to be, to any extent which is expedient, untruthful - non-truth-seeking.

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Because science is only self-correcting when scientists believe in reality, want to know about it, and believe they must always be truthful about what they (think they) know.

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When scientists believe in reality and are motivated to seek the truth about it, then science will work.

That is all that is needed.

Therefore real science is very, very simple.

Questions of scientific methods are irrelevant, questions of organization are irrelevant - such real scientists will find a way.

But, since the pre-requisites are rare (not many reality-based people are truly truth-seeking and truthful), and the pressures for corruption are so strong, that real science is both rare and fragile.

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But.

When scientists do not believe in reality and are not bound by truth; then the fact that all methods are selective and biased approximations and there is always wriggle-room and loopholes; and when science is done in (scientist-choosing) organizations instead of (scientist-chosen) alliances - these mean that the door is opened to limitless deception (of the self, and of others).

So.... here we are!

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Modern man does not believe in God or in gods; he believes in happiness or reduction of suffering.

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Because he does not believe in God/s, modern man does not believe in reality - or if he does then he is not interested by it: after all, without God/s who would choose reality over happiness?

And without God/s happiness is purely within life, within this world - so why should anyone ever want to do anything that which might sacrifice happiness in this life/ world - even if it did lead to reality?

And who would be interested in Truth, Beauty or Virtue unless they led to more happiness? Nobody - that's who.

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What possible reason could there be for sacrificing happiness to TBV? None - that's what...

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So - the world economic crisis... What should be done about it?

Is it real, or is it that people are unhappy?

Is there really an underlying economic reality?

And if so, is anybody interested in finding-out about the economic reality; or, having found-out in improving the economic reality (whatever we regard as improvement - whether that might be real economic growth, or something else).

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Or, are we really interested not at all in economic reality (which we think probably doesn't exists aside from human beliefs and expectations) - but instead in in making people happy about (what they imagine to be) the world economy?

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Yes that's it: of course that's it.

What we really want, here and now, is that people feel better about the world economy - feel happy about it!

Because, after all, who wants to know or really cares about economic 'reality'? Either it doesn't exist - or it is boring - or unimportant - or merely a side effect of feelings (which we do care about).

Insofar as there is any acknowledgment of 'economic' reality, it is that it is a product of feelings ('confidence', 'optimism', 'panic', 'greed'...).

And nothing to do with production of food, shelter and warmth and 'real' stuff like that...

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Thus - the world economic crisis.

Our bottom line is feelings; we regard economic reality as illusion - all significant policy aims at manipulation of feelings.

Our punishment will be to get what we have asked for: we shall have to survive on feelings...

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The question is as follows:

How does science get from:

"Let's see how far we can go using just reason applied to observations, while excluding any reference to God or divine purposes and revelations."

to

"We have disproved the existence of God, divine purpose and revelations."

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And, to take a specific example - how does the biology of natural selection get from:

"Let's assume that all the variations upon which selection operates are un-directed."

(By 'un-directed' I mean that, for example, genetic mutations are not directed towards any function - but that the functionality of a beneficial mutation is a product of selection among rival genetic variants.)

to

"Un-directed variation is the only possible type of variation."

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In other words, how is it that we get from a chosen exclusion, an imposed constraint, to the belief that the exclusion does not exist, and that the constraint is intrinsic to the universe.

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I think the answer is psychological - it is something that is not a consequence of the abstract nature of science, or natural selection - but a product of the minds of scientists and biologists.

And I think the psychological mechanism is a fundamental aspect of the way that humans reason, which an astute author (name of Bruce G Charlton) described in some work on what he termed 'theory of mind delusions':

http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/delusions.html

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What happens to the psychology of the scientist/ biologist is something along the following lines:

As the scientist becomes adept at reasoning within his subject, the exclusion or constraint is 'marked' with a negative emotional evaluation, so that whenever it comes to mind it will tend to be avoided.

If/ when the scientist finds himself 'tempted' to reach for a divine explanation, if a biologist finds himself tempted to ascribe teleology (purpose) to genetic mutations, then a kind of 'metal alarm' goes off and makes the scientist feel bad in some way (ashamed, afraid, disgusted etc).

I mean it literally makes him feel bad - using the taboo concept in reasoning triggers nerves and hormones and alters the body state to feel bad.

And this is a property of the expert scientist, it is a product of proper training.

Over time the scientist learns (becomes conditioned to avoid) these subjects - and becomes able to reason fluently within the zone of constraint and exclusion.

However, if anybody else mentions the taboo subjects, then the negative emotional alarm goes off, and there is an attempt again to steer clear of the subject - to avoid or suppress it. It is a sign of professional incompetence to raise the taboo, excluded subject - annoying or embarrassing. 

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In general terms, assumptions frame investigations, so that investigations can only confirm assumptions (or be irrelevant to them) - and as a rule experience cannot contradict or refute fundamental assumptions.

This applies within science just as much as in other areas of life.

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But this is not a specific problem for specific groups of people with specific beliefs - it is the nature of human discourse, and we all operate within analogous psychological mechanisms.

No amount of anomalous experience can ever cause challenge of fundamental assumptions, because it is the fundamental assumptions which make specific discourses possible, and to reject the assumptions is merely to be incompetent at that specific discourse.

No amount of failed predictions, no lack of precision, no amount of incoherence can ever, therefore, lead to the compelling inference that an exclusion was invalid, nor can it force the adjustment of a constraint.

From within a field of discourse (within philosophy, science, within biology) any acknowledged problems in the accuracy and coherence - and there always are such problems - is merely grist to the mill: they are what provides the discourse with an endless number of 'things to do'.

All problems do is imply the need for further development and elaboration of the existing theory - problems can never of themselves imply the need for a new theory.

So, once a discourse has - like science - succeeded in establishing itself as necessary; then the endless problems it encounters serve to justify endless expansion of the activity, in the case of science endless expansion of funding.

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So - if not from encountering problems - why might the status of science, of natural selection, ever possibly, potentially change?

Because (for whatever reason) it becomes desired to include the exclusions, relax the constraints.

This entails the scrapping of the whole previous system (based on those constraints and exclusions), and the re-building of a new system (having different exclusions and constraints).

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Qua philosopher, philosophy potentially explains everything; qua scientist science explains everything: biologist biology - and it goes further: qua lawyer law; qua journalist journalism etc.

The exclusions and biases which structure the system are invisible to the system which functions within them.

But... nobody is entirely located within their specialist discourse; and therefore nobody is wholly convinced by the hegemony of their expertise. And in society most people are outwith any particular discourse, which impinges upon them in alien ways.

So the larger and more dominating any discourse, the greater pressure is built against it. The discipline itself cannot internally perceive the force of objections to its own constraints and exclusions, but everyone outside that system, and other systems, have a growing interest in attacking those exclusions and constraints.

If and when the system ceases to provide what people want from it, or provide it at too high a cost, or if those outside the system cease to value what the system provides - and if the system is unable coercively to confiscate the resources it needs against the will of those of who provide the resources - then the system will collapse.

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1. Things need to get worse before they can get better

2. People are not-even-trying

3. Humans are simple, dichotomous creatures

4. Repentance must come first

These refer mainly to social and political matters - and especially to plans and schemes for reform.

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1. Things need to get worse before they can get better, because otherwise they already would be better.

This means that things can get better only via getting worse - and that is the reason why it has not already been done.

What stops people doing what needs to be done, is that improvement can come only in the long run while problems arrive immediately.

What needs to be done causes problems for sure whereas its benefits are more remote and conjectural.

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2. It certainly will not happen when people are not even trying to make it happen.

Good things don't happen by accident.

They don't necessarily happen when people are trying to make them happen - but they certainly don't happen unless people are trying to make them happen.

If the mass of people are mostly trying to do one thing, it is unlikely that they will consistently achieve another, quite different, thing.

If you want to achieve something, then that is what you should aim to achieve.

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3. Humans are simple, dichotomous creatures. This means that in practice, policies can only be simple, dichotomous.

This means that complex solutions are always wrong.

And effective solutions are always crude.

(And until there is a simple and crude solution, there cannot be an effective solution.)

Therefore, there are always significant disadvantages to any effective solution.

Therefore you need to decide what is most important. You may get this; but only at a cost.

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4. Repentance must come first.

Politics and management is only serious when it begins with repentance: with a confession of what they did wrong and a resolve to avoid this fault in future.

Our society is only serious about the things it openly repents (which is why we are in so much trouble, i.e. because of the choice of things we repent).

When things are going down, nothing effective will be done about it until there is a clear repentance and repudiation of that which led to the decline.

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In public policy, therefore, You cannot do good by stealth.

You must shout from the rooftops, and repeatedly, what was done wrong, that the wrong has been repented, what are the new priorities. Then shout the crude and simple solution, including the inevitable and expected costs and nature of opposition. And then do it.

The inevitable costs must be borne, the inevitable opposition must be overcome.

The process is not sophisticated nor nuanced - it is crude and conflictual - and it will be vilified by the intellectual elite.

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To which I would add:


5. Inertia means that things get worse slower than you fear; but also that adverse trends are harder to reverse than you hope.

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I may be missing something, but I have seldom (although not never) been troubled by the conflict of Christianity and evolution by natural selection - because when properly considered, natural selection is a set of metaphysical assumptions.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/08/natural-selection-and-me.html

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By metaphysical I mean that these assumptions are (obviously) hierarchically above those of science; and therefore natural selection is not testable by science.

(At least not testable by the doing of science - since a meta-theory which constrains and guides scientific hypotheses and their testing cannot itself be subject to these tests).

This has almost always seemed very obvious to me.

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Of course, when progress is being made within a metaphysical paradigm, and when one is an 'expert' in that paradigm, there is a very strong temptation to assume and to assert that the paradigm is universally true (and that therefore one is an expert in 'everything') - and I have fallen into this trap, from time to time.

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As I see things, the theory of evolution by natural selection says something like the following:

"Let's see if we can devise explanations for adaptation (the specific functionality of living things) without assuming any purpose towards functionality - adaptiveness simply arising as a consequence of the un-directed variation in reproducing entities and the effects that such variation might plausibly have on reproduction."

That competitive selection processes acting on reproducing entities will tend to amplify those variations which reproduce the most effectively, is not really controversial - it is hard to imagine why this would not happen.

But the key metaphysical assumption is concerned with the raw material upon which selection operates - in other words the assumption that the variation is un-directed.

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(It is worth mentioning that variation is not random for the simple reason that in biology nothing is random. Randomness is essentially a mathematical abstraction, although maybe it occurs is some bits of physics - at any rate there is no randomness in biology, although one can sometimes assume randomness as a simplifying approximation.)

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It is the assumption of evolution by natural selection that the source of variation upon which selection operates is un-directed - or, at least, may be assumed to be un-directed in the specific instance under consideration - which is critical.

That the variation actually is un-directed is not subject to test - indeed it is often impossible to test the assumption.

Instead, the theory of natural selection simply says, in effect: "Let's assume that the variation (e.g. of genes, or of some other reproduction-affecting information such as epigenetic variation) is in this instance un-directed, and see if we can construct a scenario which results in the observed phenomena".

I cannot see anything intrinsically wrong with consciously making this assumption, and with proceeding to reason on the basis of this assumption; and this is what I do when wearing my cap as an evolutionary theorist.

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But there surely cannot be any reason for assuming that un-directed variation is the only possible basis for that variation upon which selection works; and to make such an assumption of universality is wholly arbitrary.

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(Indeed, one cannot even be sure that un-directed variation applies even in any one specific instance - the most that can be done is to point at the results of making this assumption: saying, in effect: "Look! when I make this assumption it all seems to fit together very neatly with this set of observations and experiments!" However, another and different assumption, might - whether now or in the future - prove to be equally or more impressive in its coherence and scope. And then what?...)

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I do not feel a need to go further than this negative statement: that the assumption of un-directedness is a metaphysical assumption.

I think we can be absolutely clear and certain that there are no grounds whatsoever for assuming that un-directed variations (such as genetic mutations due to radiation or copying errors) are the only possible form of variation that can ever form the substrate of selection processes.

How on earth would one even go about proving such an assertion? Certainly Darwin didn't attempt it - he merely offered a new explanatory metaphysic, an alternative. And, at any rate, nobody ever has proved any such thing.

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Yet attempts to put forward alternative possible directed sources of variation (such as divine creation, intelligent design, chaos and complexity theory, or morphogenetic fields) are not scientifically proveable as against natural selection - because they are alternative metaphysical assumptions.

No amount of observational or experimental evidence can count either for or against metaphysical theories - since metaphysics is hierarchically above science: metaphysical is a name given to the assumptions which constrain a particular science.

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The problem is that modern culture has no idea what to do about evaluating metaphysical theories - and so keeps on trying to evaluate them scientifically...

But if not by science, then how should metaphysical theories be evaluated?

Ah - that is an almost lost art. The activity by which metaphysical systems are compared and evaluated is called philosophy, and it was invented by the ancient Greeks and perfected by Thomas Aquinas - but almost nobody practices it today...

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The Left - (Liberalism/ Socialism/ Political Correctness) has, of course, triumphed in the West - colonizing the elite intellectuals of government, public administration, law, the churches, education and so on.

But what is the essence of its triumph - what precisely has the Left actually conquered?

The answer is simple and single. The answer is the mass media.

The core triumph is the mass media - but a further element was necessary: the expansion of the mass media to fill the attention of most of the people, most of the time.

So, now, the mass media is reality.

(Reality itself has become merely a matter of opinion: individual anecdote. Worthless, indeed wicked, unless validated by the media.)

So that is the triumph of the West - to conquer the mass media in a situation where the mass media dominates the minds of the mass of people.

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The fact that slavery was all-but universal until a couple of hundred years ago is used as the standard, off-the-peg, number one knock-down argument to justify that because our ancestors were wrong about slavery, they are probably wrong about everything else; and therefore (so the argument goes) every specific aspect of traditional culture should be challenged, subverted then inverted.

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This argument - used many thousands of times per hour in the West - assumes that modern, decent Liberals and Leftists are truly anti-slavery; which of course they are not.

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Liberals and leftists always do say they are anti-slavery, just as they might assert that the moon is made of green cheese (people can say anything they like, cost free - so long as it is socially sanctioned, which naturally this is).

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But if we assume that the people who actually abolished slavery - the abolitionist movement - are those who were really and truly anti-slavery, then it is clear that there are almost no such people in the world today; at least none with significant power.

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To be an abolitionist in the old sense is to be anti-slavery full stop.

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To be an abolitionist was not to be prudential about slavery, not to regard slavery as bad because it led to greater suffering, but to regard slavery as an intrinsic evil.

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An abolitionist might admit that to be a slave with a good and kind master is a happier state than many others regimes under which humans live - but still insist on the abolition of slavery.

The abolitionists took no account of the cost in lives and treasure (including the lives of slaves) of abolishing slavery.

Even when the abolition of slavery left ex-slaves starving, diseased, degraded, and extremely violent (as in Haiti) this made no difference at all to the imperative that slavery be abolished.

Even though slavery was in fact abolished in many parts of the world only at gunpoint: this was a secondary consideration - for abolitionists slavery must  be abolished: end of story.

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In sum - an abolitionist would seek-out and and extirpate slavery by whatever means were effective.

This is how slavery actually was abolished. It did not matter where the slavery was - even in deepest Africa, or in the parched deserts of Arabia - slavery was never left alone, slave states were never allowed to opt-out.

For decade after decade, the full force of the British Empire was brought to bear against slavers and they were forced to yield until slavery was abolished everywhere except in some very poor places in the middle of Africa - which held-out through the war torn 20th century until the British Empire collapsed.

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But slavery came back. Of course. Because slavery is a spontaneous occurrence in all sedentary societies, and if it is not being continually sought-out and extirpated it will be there.

Ignorant folks were surprised to 'discover' long term slavery in the UK in a recent news story - fools! There are at least many hundreds of slaves in the UK- maybe many thousands depending on how slavery is defined, where you draw the line. There must be - what is stopping it?

And if nothing effective is stopping slavery, there will be slavery.

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Slavery was brought back into into England by multiculturalism, and is protected from awareness by multiculturalism. Indeed multiculturalism has created an environment in which all the enlightenment horrors have returned, have been sealed-off from inspection and made immune to effective action. Multiculturalism created a situation in which it is not merely pointless to detect and discuss such matters - but counter-productive, since the attempt to expose and eliminate slavery creates further legalistic evasions and protections for slavery within the system.

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Full-blooded abolitionism was in fact an evil, which is why it was universally abandoned. It was an evil because it was single issue politics, fanatical and without prudence.

Abolitionism naturally led to massive suffering, since it was so devoted to its primary imperative that all other problems were accepted and excused.

This was a particular problem since, as we now see, abolition of slavery was unstable - it was not a matter of getting rid of slavery once for all. Slavery keeps coming back, and keeps needing to be suppressed all the time.

Therefore any society - any culture - which is not subject to this suppression will tend to reintroduce de facto slavery (although it may be disguised legalistically).

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The proper attitude to slavery is prudential, not fanatical - slavery is an undesirable state, and slavery should be suppressed unless to do so makes matters worse, when it should be regulated (i.e. slaves must be treated well, or at least not cruelly and arbitrarily) - but prudence is not what we have now.

The attitude towards slavery we have under triumphant modern Leftism is mere expediency. If Leftist opposition to slavery were prudential then they would argue, explicitly, that slavery was permissible under certain conditions. For example, they would need to argue explicitly that slavery was permissible under multiculturalism, since Leftists are clearly prepared to tolerate slavery in non-Western cultures.

However, the Left do not so argue; instead they pretend to abolitionism: pretend to be always, absolutely and implacably opposed to slavery under all possible circumstances.

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So, the Left spout pure abolitionist rhetoric 24/7 but (implicitly and dishonestly) recognize that actually to act to detect and extirpate slavery would be to weaken their own legitimacy as based in multiculturalism - so they make sure they do not detect it, if detected do not use coercion, do not publicize examples of slavery, and when there are examples the media very quickly forget it. Down the memory hole with it!

Yet, very obviously, in the modern surveillance society that is the UK, if the authorities wanted to detect and extirpate slavery then the task would be facile - it would take a few weeks merely. That this does not happen shows that the authorities place the abolition of slavery as a low priority, a much lower priority than - for instance - advocating, imposing and sustaining multiculturalism.

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Think about it: by revealed preferences the Left - while pretending to absolute abolitionism - wants multiculturalism even at the cost of reintroducing slavery to the West.

That is what we are up against.

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So the triumph of the Left is a peculiar thing indeed.

Abolitionism was the beginning of the modern Left (around the late 18th century), yet it has been tacitly dumped even while the rhetoric around slavery, its usage as a rationalization for subversion of tradition, is more heated than ever.

And nobody notices!

This is because our reality is now the mass media. Never mind what is happening in real life, never mind that (sex) slaves were discovered a few streets away from where I live. So long as slavery has been abolished from the mass media, that is enough, that is the really important thing for Leftism. That way the Left has all the rhetorical benefits of fanatical abolitionism, but none of the destructive implications that effective anti-slavery action would have on the truly sacred imperative of multiculturalism.

Job done...

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From: http://benedictseraphim.wordpress.com/2003/08/19/that-hideous-strength-chs-10-13/

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“I mean this,” said Dimble in answer to the question she had not asked. “If you dip into any college, or schoool, or parish, or family–anything you like–at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous.

Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing.

The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder. . ..”

(That Hideous Strength - by C.S. Lewis - p. 283)

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One might well argue with Lewis whether Dark Age Britain was a place where one could be both Christian and develop knowledge about the elemental powers of the world. Lewis, is, after all, writing a fairy tale, and borrowing from Tolkien.

But what is most certainly true, since the coming of Christ and the bringing forth by the Spirit of the Church, the Truth of the narrowing of choices, the Truth of the two paths and the two masters, has been becoming ever more real.

If there is a narrow and squeezing path, the one of life, there is only one other path, the broad and level one leading to death. This is no melodrama. It is the stark reality of the Gospel. It is why we must repent.

Which does not mean adding a bit here, a bit there, some of this, some of that, and icing it over with some “Christian” words. Christ is the stone on which we are broken, or underneath which we will be crushed. We either know his love as mercy or as judgment. We cannot know it as indifference.

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While some Christian teachers would focus on various world events to foretell the scheduled events of the Apocaplyse, it seems to me that a look at the Christian world of thousands of denominations is perhaps a better barometer.

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Take for example, the Great Schism. In the sixth century, when the council of Toledo introduced the filioque, one could perhaps afford to be somewhat tolerant of the innovation.

But when combined with the Roman bishops’ quest for political supremacy, with the ever-growing distance in language and culture, by Christmas Day 1054, such neutral choices were no longer available.

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Or the Protestant Reformation. At the time, it was intended as, indeed, a reform.

But with social and political retrenchments growing on both sides, excommunication surely came. By the time of Trent, it was no longer possible to be neutral.

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One could bring up lesser, if not the less important, matters of our own recent days. In the Episcopal Church, one might have found it possible to be neutral on the sexuality issue.

But this is no longer a possibility. For good or for ill, one must now choose one’s allegiance across the divide of a non-celibate gay bishop.

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In the evangelical world, the choices are more numerous because the divisions are so rife, and the consistencies of constituencies so inconsistent.

But with the proliferation of choice, one’s actual choices narrow.

Simply because one can choose from dozens of Bible translations, worship styles, ecclesial polities, and ministries, one is finally faced with only one choice: the serving of self or God. (...).

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This, I think, is what C. S. Lewis means through his Dr. Dimble. And I agree with the thought: we live in an age where neutrality is not only impossible, it’s damning.

If we cannot answer “Yes” that some decision will more clearly reveal the Lordship of Christ in our lives, then to make that decision will be to unmake ourselves.

For the reality is that we are servants. It is given to us, in the multiple thousands of choices each day, to decide whom we will serve.

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From: http://benedictseraphim.wordpress.com/2003/08/19/that-hideous-strength-chs-10-13/

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Modernity is predicated on the conviction (derived from Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' argument) that with the right system (e.g. markets, democratic voting, competition and selection, conjecture and refutation, trial and error, peer review, or in general management), bad motivations in individuals can lead to good outcomes - therefore (ultimately) we should ignore motivations and focus on systems.

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We can (and should) rely on the butcher's desire to make a profit in a competitive market in order to ensure that he supplies good meat at a reasonable price; and we can and should ignore whether the butcher personally wants to supply good meat at a reasonable price or whether instead he wants to provide bad meat, and trick people out of their money - or maybe wants to poison them for the fun of it. Don't worry - says modernity - the market will sort it out...

The idea is that the market prevents the butcher from being bad (by punishing bad butchers) and thus the system has an intrinsic tendency to channel humans to do good (even when those individuals are inclined to be bad).

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Similarly in science, the peer review system is supposed to ensure that incompetent and dishonest scientists are prevented from succeeding while those (of whatever motivation) who do 'good work' will thrive.

And in politics, the system of democracy is supposed to take whatever human raw material is fed-into the voting, and create from it good government - good government is that which the electoral system vomits-forth. The old notion that a good system is that which leads to and facilitates good government is now obsolete and deemed 'fascist'.    

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Indeed, the implicit assumption of modernity is that only systems (systems of the right sort) can lead to good outcomes.

Furthermore that requiring good motivations is tantamount to relying entirely on good intentions to yield good outcomes.


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Humans are simple dichotomous souls - and if they infer that creating the best systems is more important than the individual motivations of the humans beings who work in the systems - pretty soon they start ignoring human motivations altogether.

And, motivations are predictions: understood by those 1. 'gut instincts' ('theory of mind') with which normal humans are born ; or 2. the assumption that what people have done, they will probably continue to do; or 3. group knowledge (from experience) that people of a certain type have a tendency to behave in certain ways.

Yet under politically correctness; to infer human motivations - that is, to predict human behaviour on the basis of group membership, past behavior or because of gut feelings - is to be prejudiced.

And prejudice is of course the most evil thing in the world, ever.

Because while predictions of human behavior are right more often than wrong, and are therefore useful - indeed essential; all such inferences may be wrong.

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Yes indeedy - individual decisions may be wrong - but (I ask) compared with what?

If individual decisions may be wrong then this is only relevant if we know what is never wrong, what is always right?

The unstated inference is that while individuals may be wrong, systems may always be right.


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So, as a matter of principle we are compelled to ignore inferences concerning the motivations of others.

We are not allowed to listen to gut feelings, learn from experience or use group level knowledge.

We must rely on systems, must rely completely on systems.

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So what happens?

In the first place and immediately, the quality of systems declines sharply because those who choose the human being in the systems are not even trying to appoint the best motivated, and people who are known to be badly motivated nonetheless get appointed and continue to work.

Then there is an increasing degradation of human motivations due to the continuous societal pressure to suppress consideration of motivations - more and more attention goes into creating the perfect fool-proof system which is (supposedly) utterly immune to the motivations of the humans who implement it.

Indeed, humans are perceived and evaluated in terms of their ability to implement what the system requires: to deliver goods, education, health services.

Systems routinely chew-up and spit-out the best people - it happens all the time; the people who are well-motivated and do a good job are eliminated, because the system ultimately recognizes as 'good' only obedience to perceived and defined system requirements.

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Humans are simple, dichotomous souls: either they will try to choose the best people, with the system shaped in terms of what helps the best people; or to construct the best system, with the people shaped in terms of what helps the system.

Yet systems cannot and do not pursue The Good, because they do not know The Good, therefore do not even try to pursue the Good. The more priority we give to systems the worse things become.

Bad people will always subvert good systems; ultimately because there are an unlimited number of ways of doing evil and wrong, and pursuing ugliness and lies, to do nothing or be selfish when people are thus motivated - yet the system is finite.

And good people will always tend to be rejected by systems, because it is possible for people to be good but systems cannot be good; therefore the pursuit of actual good by individual humans must bring them into conflict with any actual system.

And if the system is intrinsically favored over the individual, then effective good will incrementally be extirpated from social systems...

*

(Looks around... Oh my goodness! - it has already happened!)

*

*


CS Lewis often pointed out the Christianity was added to and a completion of natural law and good paganism.

Therefore much of The Good, most, was taken for granted as being obvious, spontaneous, inborn.

The anciently conceived Good was a unity of virtue, truth a beauty.

*

So modern 'thinkers' arrive on the scene having rejected the vast submerged iceberg of the natural and the spontaneous, and having isolated virtue (ethics) from the true and the beautiful; and they tackle an issue like the death penalty, or war, or marriage by considering it on the assumption that all previous generations were evil fools and a few minutes of sensible consideration by people such as themselves should easily be able to supersede them...

*

And so we discover that the death penalty is evil, and pacifism is imperative, and marriage is just a convenient contract... and all of humanity before a few decades ago, and ninety something percent of humanity now, was and is wicked or stupid or both; and we ourselves, our generation, are in fact and in deed the most virtuous ever - modern enlightened humans are nothing less than ethical giants who colossally bestride human kind: evaluating, judging, laying down the law...

Wow!

*

And yet.

I look around at the world of careerists, expedience merchants and intellectual pygmies who make these amazing moral discoveries such as the intrinsic and universal evilness of the death penalty; these sold-out academics, media pundits and pub debaters who claim to have superseded the justice of the ages (the great philosophers, the Saints and martyrs) - and am simply stunned at the mismatch.

It really is bizarre that the most self-indulgent and hedonistic generations to inhabit the planet should regard themselves as moral experts and exemplars - of all things!

Untrammeled pleasure-seeking, unbridled self-expression and changing the rules to facilitate these are one thing - but to preen oneself as an ethical giant?

Did Caligula and Nero regard themselves as moral authorities?

*

*

The mystery of the in-toeing (pigeon-toed) epidemic among young women continues:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/09/pigeon-toed-gait-endemic-among.html

(I am convinced that this gait is not an affectation - I am sure it is involuntary in most instances.)

The best suggested explanation came from Paul Jaminet - vitamin D deficiency; with its bone-softening effects.

This suggests that in-toeing may be a result of softening of the feet, in some way, shape or form; if not bones them perhaps joints?...

Which then leads on to the idea that it might be due to some increase in estrogen - whether natural, in contraceptives, or as an environmental pollutant (which may explain why surprising numbers of men walk this way too).

The only 'evidence' I can present for this is that estrogen softens and loosens joints (i.e. softening the ligaments that join bones to bones - this is well known in pregnancy) - perhaps making the ankles or internal joints of the foot more 'floppy', and hyper-flexible feet may cause the observed change in gait?

Well, I'm not very convinced by this - but the phenomenon is real and new, and there must be some explanation!

*

NOTE added - on further reflection I think the problem is likely to be neural - neuromuscular - rather than musculoskeletal - and subtly neuromuscular - hence perhaps related to basal ganglia dysfunction.

What ever causes basal ganglion dysfunction might be environmental toxins of some sort; but could also be infective - as many new diseases eventually turn-out to be.

*

I already knew, from his incomplete story The Dark Tower that Lewis had read JW Dunne - and this was also an interest of Tolkien's, and probably the subject of Inklings discussion.

I have found further evidence of critical engagement with JW Dunne's ideas, and of Lewis's interest in Time in a collection of short memoirs and pieces about Lewis, recommended me by commenter Dale (thanks).

The discussion described below was more than a decade after the Inklings Thursday evening meetings had ceased - indicating a prolonged interest in Time on the part of Lewis, even after he had ceased to meet Tolkien regularly.

*

From We Remember CS Lewis edited by David Graham, 2001.

From the chapter by Daniel Morris - Encounter in a Two-Bit Pub. Describing a conversation between Graham and Lewis in 1959. This passage derives from a letter written shortly after the conversation.

*


Then he asked me what I was doing in England. Thence to mathematics, biochemistry, and the fourth dimension.


He was much interested in the latter, and wanted to know if I knew of Hinton's ideas, including the one that with enough practice you can actually visualize the fourth dimension.


I said that with all my practice, I can work with the figures easily enough, but not visualize them - it can't be done.


He was insisting that the whole idea is pure imagination (he's read Hinton and Dunne and Ouspenski and Abbot) like the square root of minus one. And I wasn't willing to make it that imaginary, considering curvature of space, for example, which seems to be experimentally true - and meaningless, unless the universe really is four dimensional. 


He went into Dunne a good bit (that is, JW Dunne: An experiment in time, published in 1925) and he doesn't see (neither do I) why Dunne had to postulate an infinity of times at right angles to one another. Two times would cover he whole thing. Granted, that leaves a mystery as to what makes the thing run, but Dunne simply puts that off at infinity. 


And thence to previsions, and to extrasensory perception, and predestination (...)


In the course of our talk about Dunne, and such, he said it was a shame we couldn't control the rate of flow of time.


As it was, the clock was rapidly moving on towards half past seven, and the end of this delightful talk he was having with me.


(...) 


*

*

There seems to be a hierarchy as follows:

1. Timeless, unchanging eternity percieved all at once - the perspective of God.

2. Eternity experienced serially - the perspective of angels, and Sons of God (i.e. immortal resurrected humans).

3. Unending serial time - the perspective of unsaved souls.

4. Finite serial time, such as humans live in before they die, while on earth.

*

Christian salvation seems to be the promise of a transition from the fourth to the second category (aka Heaven); damnation is the transition from the fourth to the third category (aka Hell).

A difference between unending serial time and eternity experienced serially is related to the sense of duration.

Unending serial is like time on earth but going on forever, experienced by a disembodied soul (a soul severed from its body).

Eternity experienced serially has no subjective duration, no sense of 'time passing'. Experience is added-to serially, the self is changed and 'updated', but the the resulting state is instantaneously apprehended.

*

So, a choice before us at the end of finite time relates to either staying the same as you are forever, versus being transformed into a different kind of state (while retaining selfhood).

The temptation of pride is to stay the same and do what you will; to reject what you are and trust you will be made better and do God's will (not your own) requires humility - and Love of God.

*

On this model, the problem was how to bridge from eternity experienced serially to finite serial time.

The incarnation of Jesus Christ brought eternity into time - fusing eternity and time; and His death and resurrection provided a 'template' for the transition to eternity experienced serially, as a possibility 'from then onward' (as we say who live in time).

*

I imagine this working somewhat like a morphic field as described by Sheldrake, or a strong attractor in chaos theory -

http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/morphic/morphic_intro.html.

The above is, like all human attempts to understand reality, a metaphor - maybe helpful, maybe misleading - ignore if the latter.

*

*

The ancient (pagan/ non-monotheistic) view was that death was a bad thing because the soul survived it and the state of the surviving soul was miserable. Without the body, the soul was maimed.

Various ideas existed about what happened to the soul: a ghostly half existence, some kind of recycling of souls - reincarnation, progression towards the end of unconsciousness and extinction, some kind of eternal/ recurring version of aspects of life in this world...

*

The orthodox Christian view is that death is a bad thing because the soul is unnaturally severed from the body - but that it may leads to a good thing when/ if the soul is purified and given a perfected new body (to dwell in a new place).

*

The modern atheistic views are that either that death is a bad thing because the soul does not exist, therefore death is the end of everything for that person;

...or that death is a matter of indifference for exactly the same reason that death is the end of everything, so there is nothing to be afraid of - just like going to sleep and not waking.

*

Another modern atheistic view is that religious people are wishful thinkers because they make-believe that death is not the end of everything, not extinction.

This leads on to the modern atheistic view that the survival of the soul would (obviously, they think) be a good thing - and that religious people believe this because they want it to be true (which - according to atheists - it isn't).

*

My point is that ancient pagans believed death was a bad thing because the soul survived, while modern atheists believe death is a bad thing because the soul does not survive.

This is because traditionally the meaning of death was the end of the body and continuation of the soul; while in modernity the meaning of death is the end of both soul and body together.

*

The idea that death is, or ought to be, a matter of indifference is - if genuine - an aspect of advanced nihilism - in that life is also, then, a matter of indifference: if death does not matter then this can only be because life has no meaning or purpose and human relationships are unimportant.

So, to fear death (end of the body) and regard it as a bad thing is the natural and spontaneous human attitude - it is the universal human problem for which Christianity offers a solution.

To try and alleviate the fear of the end of the body by trying also to believe in the end of the soul - to regard death as irreversible annihilation of individuality - is a different matter, and one so unnatural and unspontaneous to humans that we hardly know what to make of it, what conclusions to draw from it.

Does the annihilation of the individual by death invalidate everything, and render life an illusion; or is finite life thereby made more precious - and if so to whom is it precious?

*

From the perspective of our own subjectivity, does the presumed annihilation of the soul with the body by death render consciousness and life more precious - in which case we should sleep as little as possible, and remain alert and aware of the preciousness of life and never dull our minds, and never be distracted or do trivial things, and always be doing meaningful, beautiful, virtuous things (all Mozart, no muzak)...

Or does the presumed annihilation of the soul with the body by death mean that - since everything is going to be swept away and nothing remain - then we should try not to think about it. We should, like a Zen aspirant, aim at indifference.

(The modern version of Zen is to attain a state of indifference by continual distraction - mostly technological. The mind is emptied by being continually filled with compelling-nothings.)

*

Yet there an opposite snare: to value life beyond or after death (heaven) so much that this life becomes an irrelevance.

The idea that if this world is such an imperfect thing, if the world is such a sinful wasteland  then the sooner we are done with it the better: the attitude of let me die and go to heaven.

This state of belief is unusual, and is perhaps a snare only for the advanced religious - yet it cannot be right, it must be incomplete - or else life on earth is merely a waste of time, and why would it be part of the divine plan to waste our time?

*

The true answer must account for the meaning and significance of life on earth before death of the body, recognizing that there can only be meaning in life if there is also meaning in death; and that the meaning of death include the meaning of life; and without meaning in death their can be no meaning in life.

*

So most normal people (of whatever religion or non-religion) will rightly continue to fear the change of state brought about by death - and Christians will hope for something much better beyond that change.

*

*

The answer depends on how the question is interpreted.

My interpretation is that society is happiest which would not swap their situation for any other.

A society that is not nostalgic for a better past nor anticipating a better future, nor jealous of any other society elsewhere.

*

This answer excludes pre-civilization hunter-gatherers - who were probably the happiest people ever to have lived (no matter where they happened to be).

*

My answer is: Constantinople through much of the Byzantine Empire (most periods from the foundation to 1204).

The reason these people can objectively be defined as the happiest in history is that they are probably the only significant mass of population (not just a particular class) over a significant timescale of several generations who would not have swapped their situation for anywhere else in the world, past, present, or elsewhere.

*

The Byzantines believed they were living in the City of God, in a replica heaven-on-earth: not the real heaven, of course - not perfect by any means - but a model and a preparation for the real heaven.

Whoever the Emperor was, they were ruled by the thirteenth Apostle, Christ's Vicegerent - chosen by God for their own benefit and salvation: and whatever their own positions in the earthly hierarchy, this was a divinely-ordained hierarchy.

*

Not coincidentally, this was the most devoutly Christian society of any size and duration; every life was permeated with prayer, worship and ritual; with passion, beauty, sublimity.

For the Byzantines, there was nowhere that the grass was greener than Constantinople.

*

*

As Adam Smith first made clear, continually-increasing division of labour is the key to continually-increasing productivity - DoL is necessary but not sufficient to modernity.

(Division of Labour can also be seen as cognitive specialization)

I am continually struck by the way in which this key to the rise of the West is also the key to its collapse.

*

The West began with the primary division of 'labour' between Church and State - and the process has proceeded incrementally ever since.

Presumably, at some point there was an optimal division of labour - which had the best balance between efficiency of units and cohesion between units - but that point has long ago been passed as the number of units has expanded exponentially, and now there is neither efficiency nor cohesion - as can be seen most unambiguously in science.

*

Consider the current world crisis. It is not going to be solved because there is nobody - no powerful individual or group - who has it as their primary job to solve it.

Everybody's job is to solve something smaller - and the small thing can most easily be solved at the cost of the big thing.

Democratic governments do not want to solve the crisis as much as they want to get elected.

The media do not want to solve the crisis as much as they want to attract and hold mass public attention.

Finance people do not want to solve the crisis as much as they want to make money.

Trades unions do not want to solve the crisis as much as they want to enhance the pay and conditions of their members.

And so on all the way through every institution.

(Any leader which did try to make it their job to solve the crisis would by doing so fail at their primary job, and would be ousted by those who did the primary job.)

*

When labour is divided from top to bottom, government is not just difficult - it is impossible.

World government is nobody's job - in nations that are democracies government is not even the job of 'the government'.

Of course, some people believe that democracy is the solution, not the problem - they believe that the magic of mass voting is somehow able to harmonize specialized interests. But obviously it doesn't and cannot - why on earth should it?

*

To be specific, there is no way that the product of diverse cognitive specialization can be synthesized, since each specialization is incommensurable with the others - has different data, rules, language, objectives - you cannot synthesize science and the law, or media and the military, or the economy and the environment.

All that can be done is to put one above the other hierarchically and practice the lower in terms of the higher - and the same is necessary at a societal level.

The division between Church and State was a mistake - when they divided one or the other must rule, or else there will be no integration and society will tear itself apart - since short-term efficiency of the parts will tend to evolve at the expense of long-term efficiency of the whole.

(It is always more immediately expedient for itself for bureaucracy to expand a bit more - even as each incremental expansion is a step closer to killing the host society. Mutatis mutandis for government vote-buying, legal regulation, taxes, trades unions, sceintific hype, media distortions...)

*

The world crisis can be 'solved' - presumably in many separate pieces - only as the division of labour is reversed (as modernity is reversed), and all human activities are again re-integrated in hierarchies under a single principle - because only then will there be a ruling principle that will have an interest in solving the crisis.

The ruling principle may not solve the crisis, but until there is a ruling principle the crisis cannot be solved. (Necessary but not sufficient.)

*

But... the resulting society/ societies will be much less efficient than modernity at its peak, when labour was optimally divided yet disintegration had not yet happened (probably held-off by sheer inertia).

Because the resulting society/ ies will be much less efficient, there will be a 'mass extinction' since the vastly over-expanded and still expanding human species will be unable to support itself (which would happen anyway without further economic growth - but when the world economy declines as a consequence of re-integration then it will be that much more severe).

The implication seems to be that society cannot cohere enough to solve the long-term crisis without very substantial de-differentiation and hierarchical reorganization - which itself must reduce productivity and itself lead to an immediate short term crisis.

As usual/ always things can only get better (or survive at all) via getting worse; and the longer postponed the worse, the worse will have to be - but eventually the worst will happen anyway, want it or not.

*

*

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2011/09/note-on-hobbit-government.html

*

*

There is a material crisis, rooted in economics.

The world is headed for a catastrophic (cataclysmic) collapse in material standards; and is doing nothing to prevent this.

(The only thing which could prevent it are effective, radical, harsh measures to increase productivity - increase the amount of material output of necessaries per capita, preferably by increased efficiency but if not by increased effort - re-allocation of economic man-hours. And this could only be done piecemeal and one place at a time - global strategies do the opposite. And this is impossible due to democracy.)

And the longer nothing is done, the worse the crisis will be.

The nature of the crisis will be the death of hundreds of millions - or maybe a billion or few - people, whom the planet is no longer able to sustain - death by a mixture of starvation, disease and violence.

Current global policy suggests that the crisis will be made to penetrate every corner of the globe; nobody is allowed to exempt themselves.

*

But the economic crisis has its roots in spiritual crisis - the apostasy of the West.

Its symptoms are alienation, psychosis and the active pursuit of evil among the ruling elites; who then enforce this upon those they rule.

Alienation because life has no meaning, no purpose, human individuals have no relationship with anything outside their own thoughts.

Psychosis because reason and common sense are subverted and replaced with nonsense and wishful thinking.

Evil because there is a morality of anti-Good: i.e. the systematic and progressive promotion of vice (inverted Virtue), ugliness (inverted Beauty) and lies (inverted Truth).

*

So the material crisis is inevitable because of the spiritual crisis; however, the material crisis cannot be averted by means of curing the spiritual crisis: the spiritual crisis must be repented for the right reasons (i.e spiritual reasons) - and not in order that the material crisis will be averted.

If we tried - and the attempt could not be sincere hence could not be effective - to promote spiritual reform as a means to the ends of material prosperity, then we would indirectly but certainly amplify the size of the material crisis.

There is no alternative to repentance, and repentance can neither be secret nor strategic.

*

*

When social influence is conceptualized in terms of fields, as described in an earlier posting,

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/09/nature-of-influence.html

then this has many implications at many levels.

*

One is a revival of the idea, articulated by Aquinas, that the soul contains the body, which means that the field of ourselves extends beyond the surface of our bodies; and the same applies to all people, animals, plants and (presumably) other entities.

The medieval world view would also stress the influence of the heavens - planets and stars - and of angels and demons.

So, if your soul, the field of yourself, extends beyond your body then you may affect other persons or entities around you without touching them - indeed without sensory contact of any kind.

And conversely, you may be affected by such fields, without being able to unravel the cause using your senses.

*


As an hypotheses, this make it easy to conceptualize different kinds of interactions between humans and their environments.


The idea seems to have been that such 'field' interactions influence thought-content and emotions - they can 'put ideas into peoples' heads', they can change the way people feel.

On the other hand these field interactions do not control other people - do not affect free will, nor reasoning ability.

*



These fields (like other fields in physics - like gravity or electromagnetism) are not detectable in themselves, but by their action.

A photon (a particle of light) has no mass (it must have zero mass or else it could not travel at the speed of light); therefore it is 'not there' according to common sense.

How do we know a photon exists? By the quantum event (action) when it leaves the sun and the quantum event (action) when it reaches the earth a few seconds later.

Yet although this takes a few seconds from our perspective as observers; from the perspective of the photon, there is zero time between the quantum event in the sun and that at the earth - there are simultaneous (because when travelling at the speed of light, time does not pass).

*

If electromagnetic fields are made of photons that have no mass and do not exist except when they act; and yet we use these theories without problem in modern physics - then it may help get our brains around the idea of immaterial fields that go beyond human bodies, and are detected only by their actions.

*

(Insofar as it is true), This idea means that we are (potentially) in actual contact with the world around us, including other people - not merely in communication with the world, but our personal fields are 'blended' with the fields of other persons, animals, plants and other things - the fields inter-penetrating, influencing.

We are in the world and the world is in us, we are not mere observers.

I say 'potentially', because I think there must be some act of consent for these interactions.

*

So, the idea is that a human's primary mode of relationship, as he moves through the world, is via the field that encloses and organizes his own body.

*

What can we make of this hypothesis - which I get from Rupert Sheldrake, and which has been adapted from a philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle?

Sheldrake has been very active in trying to test this theory by studying evidence that that fields extend beyond the body in a way that is not explicable by the five senses.

The problem with this approach is that each specific piece of evidence taken one at a time, each observation or experiment, is on the one hand necessarily inconclusive (as always in science), and on the other hand susceptible of innumerable alternative ad hoc explanations.

In the end, scientific evidence is orthogonal to metaphysics, science is consistent with all metaphysical theories and does not distinguish between them - and the idea of fields (or souls) is metaphysical.

*

The most compelling reason for assuming that Sheldrake's ideas about fields are correct is therefore that they are much closer to spontaneous, natural human belief: we are born into the world with a perspective that assumes that our own nature extends beyond the surface of our bodies:

...that other people know when we are present even if they cannot perceive us, that we know what other people are thinking and they know what we are thinking, that our fear draws that which is feared, that staring at someone or thinking about them will attract their attention, that we know things which happen remotely, that we make our own luck and - in a sense - 'deserve' what happens to us...

...and that having an idea, especially a strong idea - in one's own mind - in and of itself creates a tendency for this idea to spread and be adopted, whether or not this idea is explicitly communicated...

*

I personally take spontaneous, natural human 'beliefs' very seriously indeed - and I fell that we deny these in-built dispositions only at extreme peril - often at the cost of psychotic irrationality and incoherent relativism.

So I take this as prima facie evidence of the validity of something much along the lines of Sheldrake's field concepts.

And there is a whole complex of beliefs and phenomena which may conveniently be dealt with by this idea of fields extending beyond our bodies; so therefore it seems perfectly reasonable to deal with these phenomena in a unitary way using one over-arching hypothesis - rather than as, at present, either denying the reality of these phenomena or explaining each one using an unlimited number of specific ad hoc theories based on the necessity for sensory contact.

*  

*

Social Justice is the same thing as politics - Christian leaders should, please, stop talking about it.

*

Since Christian leaders cannot be clear and truthful about politics (unless they are prepared for martyrdom) - or, at least they will not be clear and truthful about politics - they should say nothing at all on the subject.

That means shutting-up about Social Justice.

*

I cannot, we all cannot, stand any more dishonesty on the subject - partial views, simplistic views, sounds bites repeated from a lying media, selective words, coded comments - in practice this feeds evil.

*

Stop, please please stop it altogether - this cant about Social Justice.

At this time and in this place Christians must focus on spirituality, where we are pitifully and pathetically weak; focus on the individual, personal, local, directly experiential; and trust to divine Providence instead of plans and strategies.

*  

*


(From an e-mail.)


I see science as working within the assumptions of metaphysics - so that before any science is done there is an implicit metaphysics of causality. And science cannot investigate what it assumes by its very existence.


*


Scientific reasoning studies cause and effect processes, as you say - which means it cannot use cause and effect reasoning to challenge the validity of cause and effect reasoning.


This is also the argument why it is incoherent to challenge free will - but CS Lewis states it much better than I could in Mere Christianity and elsewhere; and indeed I'm sure you have felt the force of it yourself when engaged in such arguments. If free will does not exist, then what are we arguing for or about?


I don't think science has made any contribution at all to understanding of free will, quite the opposite - it has led to great confusion.


*


Before any discourse, before science, we must assume free will - we assume that there is something possessed by humans that is not determined and not random but an expression of our individual ... essence (hard to think of a suitable word).


At least we must assume free will among the participants in the discourse, and of course we would need to exclude those who did not have it else the discourse would be invalidated.


In general, I have behind this a metaphysic that humans come into the world gifted with reason and free will (and other attributes), and these are divine gifts and upon their validity depends... well everything else.


*


Like CSL I argue that reason and free will cannot be challenged coherently because the challenge itself depends on the validity of reason and free will. In fact this is obvious!


But the problem for modern people is that in denying God they deny the validity of free will and reason - because if free will and reason are nothing more than evolutionary products - the products of random variation and differential reproduction - then of course free will and reason are mere contingent and temporary accidents and naturally have zero validity, and no real knowledge is possible of any kind - including exactly this knowledge about the evolutionary causes of free will and reason...


Which is nonsense.


*


Therefore we must believe in 'god' (albeit not necessarily the Christian God, but something much simpler, with metaphysical properties), or we cannot believe anything at all.


The ancient Greeks perceived this - that 'god' is necessary to underwrite the validity of every inference; doubt god and you are (know it or not) plunging into impossible and intractable paradox.


This is probably the deep reason why godless philosophers cannot comprehend even the most basic philosophy, cannot comprehend the stuff that was worked out two and a half thousand years ago.


*