In some tiny corner of the cosmos
I wanted to say a few words about the pope’s Easter chat yesterday but I had too many words to say about too many other things so I didn’t get to it. Others have said a few words about it now, but I’ve only glanced over them so far because I wanted to say whatever it was that formed in my head when I first heard (in translation, on the BBC World Service) the salient passage, first. See? I know it’s old news; I’m late; but there was something I wanted to say.
It starts with the usual thing about the Logos. In the beginning was the. You know.
The creation account tells us, then, that the world is a product of creative Reason. Hence it tells us that, far from there being an absence of reason and freedom at the origin of all things, the source of everything is creative Reason, love, and freedom.
No it doesn’t. It’s some words in a book. It purports to tell us something, but it doesn’t actually tell us in the sense the pope means. It’s some writing. I can say “In the beginning was the Ice Cream”; that doesn’t make it true; no more does the gospel of John make what it says true. It sure as hell doesn’t make it true that the source of everything is creative Reason, love, and freedom.
Here we are faced with the ultimate alternative that is at stake in the dispute between faith and unbelief: are irrationality, lack of freedom and pure chance the origin of everything, or are reason, freedom and love at the origin of being? Does the primacy belong to unreason or to reason? This is what everything hinges upon in the final analysis.
The pope’s god has nothing to do with freedom, and damn little to do with reason or love. Again it’s just words – just logoi. Words are good but they’re not magic. Popes treat them as if they were magic. That’s their trade, I suppose.
As believers we answer, with the creation account and with John, that in the beginning is reason. In the beginning is freedom. Hence it is good to be a human person. It is not the case that in the expanding universe, at a late stage, in some tiny corner of the cosmos, there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it.
Yes it is. And that itself is an extraordinary and inspiring fact. The pope doesn’t know what he’s missing.
Imagination is a great thing sometimes, but you do risk the problem of getting lost in your own world, and being disappointed that the world is nowhere near as fantastic and magical as how you imagine it. It is impressive that the world is *more* interesting and amazing than we could ever imagine on our own (one only has to look at the old diagrams of the universe being a few spheres with lights on them to see that), but it is not built in a way to flatter and comfort us, to let us live forever in comfort and be told we’re special.
Its sad that me, a 30 year old should desire to tell someone that is 85 that he should just grow up already.
Oh…he does talk such utter bollocks.
My creative accountant tells me my brokeness is a product of lack of money but that he will still love me even during my absence from freedom. Him, I believe.
Religion poisons everything. It is the tool of despots who shower their people with lies and suffering, for which the people return the favour with nothing but love and affection for their masters. Religion will never be democratic, nor in favour of equality. It is the politics of sadists and masochists.
Yes it is! Thank you! And why would this man not want it to be the case that “in the expanding universe, at a late stage, in some tiny corner of the cosmos” etc.? Why is that not good enough for Mr. Holier Than Thou? Because in that case, he’s out of a job.
Criminitely. That is exactly the case. Probably many times over.
And no proclaiming that God=Reason. Using the word “Reason” only obfuscates the issue. And it’s completely wrong.
Here is Dennett in his PNAS paper “Darwin’s Strange Inversion of Reasoning”
“The pre-Darwinian world was held together not by science but by tradition: all things in the universe, from the most exalted (‘‘man’’) to the most humble (the ant, the pebble, the raindrop) were the creations of a still more exalted thing, God, an omnipotent and omniscient intelligent creator—who bore a striking resemblance to the second-most exalted thing. Call this the trickle-down theory of creation. Darwin replaced it with the bubble-up theory of creation. One of Darwin’s 19th century critics put it vividly:
“In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, IN ORDER TOMAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW TOMAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin’s meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all of the achievements of creative skill.”
RB MacKenzie ”
The Pope is living in the past – way in the past.
Nicely put.
Michael Fugate @ # 6
What the quoted writer failed to point out (or to understand) is that:
Wisdom (of humans) can make something correctly on the very first try, and intend to do so.
Ignorance (of nature) can, without any intent, create something, if given enough time, enough chances and a correcting or checking step (natural selection)
It makes much more sense if you include some essential details. (I hope its clear that this is not intended as criticism of Mr. Fugate, but rather his quoted source)
That’s a pretty clear example of refusing to believe something because you find it scary or unpleasant. “There must be a creator who made the universe using reason, because otherwise we’d have to accept this other hypothesis that I really really don’t like. I will only believe something if it validates my conviction that I am special and good!”
Honestly, how childish.
Exactly. I meant to point that out too but…I forgot.
This isn’t a bad way of stating the dichotomy between naturalism and supernaturalism: cranes vs. skyhooks. Did mind grow out of matter, evolving within an environment by slow stages — or did matter pop magically out of a pre-existing, irreducible Mind which existed prior to any environmental conditions to shape it? Are things the way they are because they got that way — or does like come only from like?
Note how the Pope is slyly using the word “primacy” — which means ‘prior to’ — to imply “primacy” — which means ‘most important.’ If reason, freedom and love weren’t there at the beginning of the universe, and are instead the result of long processes of evolution, that doesn’t make them any less significant or important to ourselves. If they didn’t form the way the Pope thinks they formed (or, rather, didn’t form, for in his view they are apparently irreducible primaries, as well as reified abstractions), we don’t suddenly lose them. They still exist. Their existence doesn’t hinge on what explanation for them we come up with or arrive at.
But he wants to pretend it does, because he’s appealing to a mindset that can’t think any deeper than “Like comes from Like.” We get reason from a big, fat, disembodied REASON, which is the reason source because it’s made out of reason, and reasons through the reason force of its reason power. How could it get any clearer and more obvious than that?
And they accuse atheists of thinking too literally. At least we seem to be able to deal with the concept of abstractions.
For some reason the editor was working when I put that post up. The first part is by Dennett, the second is by a critic of Darwin. If you read the paper you will see that Dennett was commenting that you don’t need a mind to create life. It was life first, mind later. Not as the Pope believes – mind first, life later.
Wait a minute, I thought the Pope accepted evolution as fact. Yet he said:
You can no more be a little bit evolutionary than you can be a little bit pregnant. That’s the point Dennett made about Darwins “strange inversion”. Otherwise you’re just a creationist with a smattering of scientific knowledge applied for appearances.
The Pope believes reason preexisted, evolutionists think the process produced reasoning beings after billions of years. I think the former is creationism without the stupider features, but creationism still. Evolution as the Pope imagines it is a travesty, which defies the principles that Dennett articulated when he said that intelligence and design are the products of the evolutionary process, not the cause.
Actually, if you edit a little you get a reasonable line; something that Carl Sagan might almost have said,
[I]n the expanding universe, at a late stage, in some tiny corner of the cosmos, there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it.
The fact that the pope starts that line with ‘It is not the case that..’ perhaps just goes to illustrate what Ophelia often asks….’how does he know?’ Where does the pope’s knowledge that it is not the case some species of living thing capable of reasoning randomly evolved come from, apart from being something someone made up out of whole cloth? And if that’s the case, how come he doesn’t know the answer to the question the Japanese girl put to him the other day,
Elena, seven, a Japanese girl traumatised by the recent earthquake and tsunami, told the Pope in a video message: “I’m very afraid because the house in which I felt safe shook a lot and lots of my classmates were killed. Why do I have to be so afraid? Why do children have to suffer such sadness?” The Pope replied: “I also have the same questions: why is it this way? Why do you have to suffer so much while others live in ease? And we do not have the answers but we know Jesus suffered as you have.”
Such certainty in dogma; such ignorance in the face of reality.
The Rattenfaenger does accept evolution – it would be too hard to deny it without being totally fundamentalist – and fundamentalism doesn’t go with all the catholic woo which is based on privately held, unspecific, made up as you go along interpretation of some meaningless scripture. He thinks that it was directed ab initio by doG in order to deliberately produce this “species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it.” in one tiny “corner” of the cosmos – as if we knew that the entire rest of the universe were devoid of such life (or even much more advanced life, possibly).
It’s amusing that, with about five billion years of evolution still to come on planet Earth before the sun burns out, this aged wanker thinks he is the end product of evolution. In terms of rationality alone he can’t see that atheists, right now, are far more evolved than he is! And actually I think my little stripey cat, Summer, is far more rational than ratzifuehrer! So she is also more evolved than he is.
I sat down to write about Ratzi’s speech, but ended up fuming about his speech from 2007 instead, in which he says that as touching the enzombied Jesus’ nailgun and chainsaw wounds convinced Thomas that Christ had indeed risen, the wounds of humanity (all the suffering everyone has ever suffered and will continue to suffer, even though Ratzi’s god could stop it if he wanted) teaches us only that god is indeed love.
I wish I could say I’m distorting or simplifying the argument. It’s standard sunday-sermon or thought-for-the-day fare: pick an example from the news to make you seem down with the kids; abstract all the actual humanity away from it; and then draw some analogy to a piece of random fucking scripture that doesn’t need to have the slightest bearing on whatever we were talking about in the first place. Providing you smile while you’re saying this and have some kind of special dress on, people won’t notice.
@Phil Marston
Certainty in dogma is usually intolerable. It leads to all sorts of inconsistencies, and can lead to negative outcomes for many. Ignorance in the face of reality doesn’t bother me so much. There are many instances of ignorance on my part and likewise for many others. What’s frequently bothered me about religion instead is the promotion of helplessness in the face of god’s power and dependency on such.
Looking only at the empirical evidence makes it plain that an interventionist god either does not exist, or is undeserving of worship. If the idea that “Jesus suffered as [we] have” is supposed to promote worship in the face of the evidence, it is entirely unsatisfactory. That only makes god a masochist as well as an capricious sadist, but we should worship anyway because we are so powerless or something.
It sure as hell doesn’t make it true that the source of everything is creative Reason, love, and freedom.
Call it a childish indulgence, but I have a little giggle each time a theological negative is prefaced with ‘sure as hell’. A pity ‘as sure as hell isn’t, it doesn’t…’, doesn’t roll off the tongue very well, or avoid flirtation with tautology in such statements. ;-)
I’ll pinch myself now. Hee hee hee, ouch!
Not only is there no evidence that evolution is a guided process, the theory as developed depends on random elements to provide the changes in genomes that produce changes in bodies and ultimately new species. You can’t just substitute guidedness in the theory where you need it to conform to a prior belief. That’s not natural selection, it’s artificial selection. The only beings capable of artificially selecting were themselves the product of natural selection (Dawkins uses the example of bees and flowers, kind of a middle case).
The Pope is endorsing a fake theory of evolution where all the evidence is highjacked for an ersatz theory where divine creation mimics evolution to save appearances. That’s not evolution and it’s not science.
I can’t understand why everyone is getting worked up about this. Personally, I’ve nothing against reason, love and freedom. What’s wrong with talking up those three subjects
The Pope is a religious leader, and it’s not exactly a bad idea to expound upon them for Easter.
And as an intellectual, The Pope certainly t beats other theologians whose ‘sacred’ texts refer to Jews as the descendants of pigs and apes, and who still insist that the earth is flat.
In any case, Christianity can and has reconciled itself with the theory of evolution.
Darwin is merely describing the symptoms, the workings, of something far, far larger than the natural world IN the natural world.
How can one ponder the Madelbrot Equation, watch a computerised video of its workings, its unfolding, and not be intrigued by the intimation that we’re looking at but a small, small part of something much larger, something that functions according to its own pre-established rules, logic, logos?
I don’t find that possibility threatening in the least.
Groan. Sometimes watching people wax theological about science and the nature, is like watching someone ruin the perfect meal with lashings of HP sauce.