Mark T. Conard's Blog

I’m very pleased to announce that my thriller, A Semblance of Control, was released by by Down&Out Books. This is my fourth title with them, following Dark as Night, Killer’s Coda, and Breaking Character. Here’s a quick pitch for Semblance: “To save his kidnapped girlfriend, Jake must defeat a plot to kill his estranged brother, the Mayor of New York City. As the body count climbs and the stakes rise, Jake discovers the truth: the assassin’s bullet is really meant for him.” Check it out!

I’m very pleased to announce that my thriller, Breaking Character, has been published by Down&Out Books. This book is the result of a great deal of work, writing and re-writing, and not a little heartache. But I’m very excited to be publishing with the good people at Down&Out. They do great work, and I’m more than pleased to be a part of their family of authors.

All, as you may know, my novel Dark as Night is being published next week by the good people at Down & Out Books. It is available for pre-order here.

In anticipation of its release, I’m making available the first chapter as a pdf download. Click on the link below. Enjoy!

dark-as-night-chapter-one-2

Very happy to announce that my novel Dark as Night is being published by the good people at Down and Out books! It’s available now for pre-order, released in February.

DARK AS NIGHT by Mark T. Conard

I’m behind on my blog-posting. So, while I struggle to get caught up, I thought I’d offer a recap of what’s come so far in this “Science, Mind, and God” series. I hope to post the next installment on Descartes soon, within the next few weeks.

Part I: The New Atheists

The series was motivated by the experience I had teaching a class on the so-called “New Atheists.” I started to buy into their empiricistic, neo-Darwinist take on the world, and some fundamental aspects of the world stopped making sense to me. Reading Thomas Nagel helped save me from this philosophical funk. (I hope through the whole series to make all this clear.)

I introduce the Four Horsemen of the atheistic apocalypse: Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens. Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris are philosophers, and Christopher Hitchens was an essayist and cultural and political commentator (he died in 2011). In the wake of 9/11, all four wrote books attacking Western religion

The four of them all claim that there’s something positively harmful about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I make the distinction between attacking the belief in God (an epistemological issue—one regarding belief and grounds for belief) and arguing against the existence of God (a metaphysical issue—one about reality itself). The four authors don’t always keep this distinction clear. I go into some detail about Dawkins’s arguments that the existence of God is a scientific issue. There are some serious problems, and a deep confusion, in his discussion.

Part II: The (IL)liberal college student

Here I discuss an unexpected outcome of my New Atheism class: that the students for the most part bought into the arguments of the four authors and enthusiastically condemned Western religion. I’d anticipated that the New Atheists’ arguments would be unacceptable to them, but once the students learned of the scriptural support for murder, misogyny, and various other forms of oppression, along with historical examples of such oppression, they were ready to condemn the whole enterprise.

I connect this to the contemporary issues of identity politics and the unfortunate examples of illiberalism on college campuses, when seemingly progressive students and often their professors block people from voicing opinions they disagree with. Such illiberalism springs from a rejection of the universality of human nature, which in classical liberalism grounds justice and morality.

Part III: The Greeks discover the cosmos

In this offering, I go back to the Pre-Socratic “naturalist” philosophers, Greek thinkers living in the 5th and 6th Centuries B.C. They represent the transition from mythological thinking to a philosophical and scientific approach to understanding the natural phenomena around us, insofar as they were the first to conceive of the world as a “cosmos,” that is, an ordered whole. This involved two claims: a) there’s nothing beyond the natural world (i.e., they rejected anything supernatural); and b) the natural world operates according to inviolable laws.

I focus on the Pre-Socratic thinker Pythagoras, the head of a mystical cult that was known to believe in reincarnation and to claim that everything is number or is mathematical in nature. The latter idea is crucial for the transition to modern science in the 17th Century, and it may have been a product of Plato’s reconstruction of Pythagoras.

I note that, from the beginning, philosophy and science were concerned with making sense of the world: we wanted to give a rational explanation of the phenomena around us that accorded with our typical and regular experience and that made no use of anything supernatural or divine. That is, the beginnings of science and philosophy were deeply connected to our sense-making faculties.

I contrast this with modern science, which begins to disconnect scientific explorations of the world and scientific theories from our senses and our sense-making faculties. I quote Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who in a recent book says , “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”

(I always want to response: “Nor to you, Professor Tyson. Nor to you.”)

Part IV: Plato

The common version of Pythagoras both as a mystic who believed in reincarnation, and as a mathematical genius who believed that all reality is number, may well have been a construction of Plato’s. This dual image is presented largely in two Platonic dialogues: The Phaedo and the Timaeus. The Phaedo contains the death scene, Socrates’s execution by hemlock poisoning. The discussion leading up to that event concerns the possibility of immortality and reincarnation.

The other dialogue is the Timaeus, and it contains Plato’s creation myth. Plato embraces the picture of the universe as a cosmos, an ordered whole, which in his story is constructed by a rational, ordering god, the Demiurge. The creation myth has two main parts: those concerning the terrestrial and the celestial. In the former, Plato embraces an atomic theory that is geometrical in nature. That is, in his story everything around us is constructed out of microscopic elements, and these elements are triangles that combine and recombine into various objects. Plato had no empirical data for constructing a theory about what goes on at the microscopic level, and he reminds the reader that what he’s offering is merely a possible account.

[image error]

On the other hand, there was a great deal of observational data regarding the movements of the celestial bodies: the stars, the sun, the moon, and the five observable planets. Plato constructs a theory according to which the Demiurge orders the heavens according to inviolable natural laws. This explains the regular motions of the stars, sun, and moon. He refuses to allow supernatural intervention to explain the irregularities of the planetary motions. Rather, he leaves this as a problem for his successors to solve.

 

Looking ahead, I’ll next talk about Descartes, one of the great mathematical and philosophical geniuses of the early modern period. Descartes firmly believed the natural world was a mechanical system that was causally determined and mathematically describable. But he also believed the mind was something quite different, something that stood apart from the body and the rest of the natural world.

 

 

 

 

Not long ago I developed and taught a class on the so-called New Atheists, a group of thinkers who put out books around the same time (2004 – 2007) arguing against Western religion.

I only taught the class twice, and two unexpected things happened in the course of my delving deeply into these authors and their arguments and then teaching them to undergrads. First, contrary to my expectation and fears, the majority of the students (perhaps the vast majority) bought the arguments, accepted them, and were quite ready to say “to hell with religion!” The second unexpected thing that happened—and this was a real surprise, one that had profound reverberations for me—was that I went down a rabbit hole—a deep, dark empiricist rabbit hole in which the world stopped making any kind of sense to me.

I came out of that confusion thanks to the writings of the philosopher Thomas Nagel. He helped me make sense of the world again, and in a way that revolutionized the way I think about human beings, our fundamental nature, and our place in the universe.

You can read the first parts of this tale:

Part I: The New Atheists

Part II: The (IL)liberal college student

Part III: The Greeks discover the cosmos

This series has become a longer meditation on the development of philosophy and science out of myth than I had planned, and so it well-illustrates the fact that I love going on tangents about interesting ideas. I promise, though, that I’ll bring everything back to the class and Nagel soon (well, soon-ish).

 

Science, Mind, and God. Part IV: Plato

In the last segment in this series, I discussed the beginnings of philosophical and scientific thought in the ancient world amongst the naturalist philosophers, or Pre-Socratics. In contrast to their contemporaries, who saw the workings of fickle gods throughout nature, these thinkers conceived of the universe as a true cosmos—an ordered whole operating according to necessary laws. In addition, I discussed the worldview of Pythagoras, one of those Pre-Socratics, who is credited with first thinking of the world as mathematical or mathematically-describable.

In this offering, I want to talk about Plato, the father of Western philosophy, who continued and expanded this conversation dramatically. My reading and interpretation draw from Gregory Vlastos’s fascinating and invaluable work, Plato’s Universe; and also from Charles Kahn’s excellent book, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans.

Because Pythagoras himself never wrote anything, and because his immediate followers were sworn to secrecy, it’s difficult to know with any precision what he said or taught. There is very good scholarship, however, arguing that much of the picture of Pythagoras adopted by late antiquity and lasting through the Middle Ages and into the modern period was invented by Plato. This is the picture of Pythagoras, on the one hand, as a great mathematician who believed that everything was number; and, on the other hand, as a mystic who believed in reincarnation.

[image error]Plato

There are several Platonic dialogues containing distinctly Pythagorean elements. The two most dramatic examples of these are the Phaedo and the Timaeus. Kahn says: “The Phaedo and the Timaeus may serve as emblems for what is most vital and lasting in the Pythagorean contribution to Western thought: on the one hand, a mathematical understanding of the world of nature; on the other hand, a conception of human destiny that points beyond the visible world and beyond the mortal body to a higher form of life.” (4)

The Phaedo contains the death scene, Socrates’s execution by hemlock poisoning, and the conversation leading up to that event. In the face of his impending death, Socrates and his friends turn their attention to the question of immortality. Further, the dialogue discusses reincarnation. Again, this is all very Pythagorean (as we came to understand that term). It’s never been completely clear to me what Plato is up to in this dialogue. The arguments for immortality are poor, perhaps obviously so, and I have a working theory that the dialogue isn’t really about immortality or reincarnation at all, that these are a surface discussion about something else (specifically, about the intersection of logic and metaphysics). But this is a topic for another post.

Atomic Theory

The other very Pythagorean dialogue, the Timaeus, contains Plato’s creation myth. Here, he tells a story of the beginning of the cosmos at the hand of a craftsman god, the Demiurge. There are two very interesting and significant things going on here that I want to point out. The first of these has its roots in the Pre-Socratics, specifically in the thinking of Anaximander and the atomists, Democritus and Leucippus.

As I mentioned in the last post, the Pre-Socratics attempted to explain the phenomena of the world as caused by or evolving out of some primary element. Many of them chose one of the four basic elements, earth, air, fire, or water as the original stuff. However, Anaximander took an intellectual step forward by claiming that the primary element was the “apeiron” or “the indefinite.” That is, the basic material or component out of which everything else arises has no sensible properties of its own. This is significant because it supposes that the sensible characteristics of everyday objects we experience are caused by and reducible to elements at the basic level which do not possess those characteristics. This is exactly what modern atomic theory tells us; that properties at the macro level (the solidity of wood, the wetness of water) are caused by the interaction of microscopic elements that do not possess those properties. E.g., individual water molecules are not wet, the individual molecules making up this table are not solid.

The atomists said something similar, but they argued that everything was reducible at the micro level to a smallest unit that itself couldn’t be perceived. “Atom” in Greek means that which can no longer be divided or cut. These are not the familiar atoms from our table of elements (hydrogen, helium, oxygen, etc.). Rather, they are the smallest, indivisible, indestructible, and imperceptible material elements that make up everything.

Vlastos says: “Why should we assume that if X is red, each of the Ys that make it up must be red, and if not red, then of some other color?” He adds: “This liberation of the theoretical imagination was the finest legacy of the Greek atomists to modern science.” (69) That is, if you don’t assume that the elementary particles must possess the same properties as the everyday objects, your thinking is freed in immeasurable ways to imagine and theorize.

[For those without any background in philosophy, Anthony Gottlieb’s The Dream of Reason makes a good primer on these ideas.]

Plato, in the Timaeus, pushes this further. In his creation myth, he claims—like the atomists—that everything is ultimately made up of primary elements, but unlike the atomists, he claims that the basic components are geometrical shapes. Earth, air, fire, and water are all made up of various equilateral, scalene, and right triangles. This allows for the inter-transformability of these basic elements. That is, how is it that water evaporates when it’s heated—how does it turn into steam, which is air or gas? The triangles making up the elemental shape of water break down and reconfigure into air atoms.

I’ll note in passing that Plato makes it clear that this is to be taken as a myth. He’s well-aware that there is no observable data of what goes on at the microscopic level to work with. This is an educated guess, a story, about what things might be like at the elemental level in order to explain what goes on in the world around us.

Thus Plato is offering an alternative to Democritean atomic theory. The latter gives us an infinitude of atoms of innumerable shapes. The former offers a far more elegant picture. Vlastos says: “If we were satisfied that the choice between the unordered polymorphic infinity of Democritean atoms and the elegantly patterned order of Plato’s polyhedral was incapable of empirical adjudication and could only be settled by asking how a divine, geometrically minded artificer would have made the choice, we wouldn’t hesitate about the answer.” (94) Clearly, the Craftsman, being purely rational and good, would have created the more elegant system. (And if he’s driven by reason, why not make things out of geometrical shapes?)

Celestial Movement

The second very interesting thread in the Timaeus has to do with what we observe in the night sky. As opposed to the issue of the underlying nature of material reality, for which there was no observational data whatsoever available to the Greeks, there was a good deal of such data regarding the movements of the celestial bodies. That’s not only because the planets and stars are directly observable, but also because the positions and movements of those heavenly bodies were of great interest to the ancients. The phases of the moon, the positions of the constellations, the daily overhead course of the sun—all these were of great practical use for navigation and for agriculture, to take two examples.

But the movements of the heavenly bodies also represented an interesting puzzle. The stars move completely uniformly, and the sun and moon have their regular patterns with an occasional eclipse to freak everyone out. But the five observable planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) do not move uniformly in regular arcs across the sky. Plus, their periods of rotation have wide variations among them without any obvious justification. The word “planet,” in fact, means “wanderer.”

[From our vantage point, the planets traverse the night sky, do an odd retrograde motion, then continue on their way. This is of course because the Earth isn’t the center of the solar system. The ancients didn’t know this—though some theorized a sun-centered system.]

I won’t dwell on these issues overly long; I just wanted to note again that for Plato the universe is indeed a cosmos—it’s orderly and rational. His Demiurge isn’t subject to the whims of the typical Greek gods. Consequently, Plato provides a reason-based explanation for the regular and orderly movements of the stars, the sun, and the moon. (Vlastos provides an excellent and detailed description of this in his chapter 2.) However, this did leave the motions of the five planets as a real problem for Plato.

As Vlastos notes, Plato could have said, “Well, if the observational data doesn’t fit into my metaphysics, then forget the data.” However, and to his credit, this isn’t what Plato did. He explained what he could given his theory about how the cosmos worked, but then left the unanswered issues as puzzles to be solved by his successors. This may seem like an abdication of his intellectual responsibility, but it in fact represents profound courage in resisting the old ways of explaining natural phenomena as the chaotic and disorderly effects of various divine wills. “For while Plato’s cosmology fully acknowledges a supernatural power in the universe, it does so with a built-in guarantee that such power will never be exercised to disturb the regularities of nature,” says Vlastos. That is, Plato makes room for a divinity in his cosmology, but it’s a god who would never interfere in the lawful orderliness of the world. Vlastos goes on to say, “How could the Craftsman’s unenvying nature subsequently disrupt the order he put into the world to make it the beautiful thing it is?” (61)

This picture of a rational and orderly universe is what survives from these beginnings of philosophy and science amongst the ancients into the modern period during and after the scientific revolution. However, the belief that it’s our observations that guide and should be preserved by our theories begins to be called into question amongst the moderns. For an explanation why this is so, I turn next to Descartes, one of the most original thinkers of the early modern, or indeed any, age.

Not long ago I developed and taught a class on the so-called New Atheists, a group of thinkers who put out books around the same time (2004 – 2007) arguing against Western religion.

I only taught the class twice, and two unexpected things happened in the course of my delving deeply into these authors and their arguments and then teaching them to undergrads. First, contrary to my expectation and fears, the majority of the students (perhaps the vast majority) bought the arguments, accepted them, and were quite ready to say “to hell with religion!” The second unexpected thing that happened—and this was a real surprise, one that had profound reverberations for me—was that I went down a rabbit hole—a deep, dark empiricist rabbit hole in which the world stopped making any kind of sense to me.

I came out of that confusion thanks to the writings of the philosopher Thomas Nagel. He helped me make sense of the world again, and in a way that revolutionized the way I think about human beings, our fundamental nature, and our place in the universe.

You can read the first two installments of this tale: Part I: The New Atheists and Part II: The (IL)liberal college student.

Science, Mind, and God. Part III: The Greeks discover the cosmos

I’m going to stretch out this story a bit and go back to the beginning of natural science and philosophy in the Western world. I’m particularly fascinated by this history, so much so that I developed a class focusing particularly on Pythagoras and Plato that covers this transition from myth to scientific and philosophical thinking. That transition takes place amongst a group of philosophers who lived in the 5th and 6th Century B.C. in what is now Greece and Turkey, and who are known as the “Pre-Socratics”—as in those philosophers who came before Socrates. They’re also known as the “naturalists,” in Greek, the physiologoi, those who give the “logos,” the account/description/argument of “physis” or nature.

Recall that the gods of the ancient Greeks—Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo, etc.—were very human-like, with desires, jealousies, hatreds, and so on. Any early (and typically polytheistic) religious system can partly be explained as an attempt to make sense out of an unknown and frightening world. Why did my crops flood? Why did the barn burn down? Why did the ship sink? Because Father Zeus was angry, or because I hadn’t sacrificed properly to Poseidon. The causal mechanisms of many natural events were completely unknown to the ancients, so to put a human face on those causes, to make those events the product of human-like motivation was to make them much more understandable. Note also that this gives us some (but only some) measure of control over events. If we do in fact pray and sacrifice in the right kind of way, then those fickle gods may look favorably upon us. But, of course, there’s no guarantee. (I’m being facetious: there’s no causal connection at all between praying and natural events.)

Then, in the 5th and 6th Centuries, the Pre-Socratics, the physiologoi appeared. I’m borrowing my interpretation and reading of these thinkers from the great Gregory Vlastos in his Plato’s Universe.

[image error]

What characterizes these Pre-Socratics, and the reason we call them “naturalists” is that, rather than pointing to supernatural forces, they attempted to explain nature in a systematic way, using arguments, and referencing the material components of things in the world. Recall that the ancients had a general belief that all things were made of four material elements—earth, air, fire, and water. So, several of these thinkers tried to explain the universe by reducing these elements to some one principle out of which everything else developed. That one principle might be one of the four elements (everything is derived ultimately from fire or air, say) or it might be something else—Anaximander’s apeiron, or “the indefinite,” out of which the other, definite material elements flow.

The specific details and content of their cosmologies are crude and only of historical interest. Modern atomic theory sent the theory of the four elements to the intellectual scrap heap. However, and here’s what’s truly monumental and in a sense unsurpassed, the physiologoi were the first to think of nature as not only operating according to lawlike regularities, but also to think of it as being inviolable by any outside (that is, supernatural) forces.

Vlastos takes the example of an eclipse. While earlier Greeks (and of course many contemporaries of the Pre-Socratics) thought such an event was due to divine intervention, the physiologoi agreed that: “1) Solar regularities are either themselves absolutely unbreachable or else any given breach of them will admit of a natural explanation as a special case of some other, still more general, regularity which is itself absolutely unbreachable.” (9) That is, the daily path of the sun from east to west is an inviolable occurrence of nature; and if it ever is violated—as apparently in the case of an eclipse—then that violation must itself be due to some other lawlike regularity that is itself inviolable (e.g., the moon in its orbit passing in front of the sun).

And the physiologoi likewise agreed that: “2) What makes the world a cosmos is the existence of such highest-level, absolutely unbreachable, regularities.” (10) That is, the physiologoi were the first truly to conceive of the universe as a “cosmos,” or an orderly, regular whole in which everything that happens, happens according to necessary, natural laws. As Vlastos says, “for all of them, nature remains the inviolate all-inclusive principle of explanation.” (22)

This, as I said, is the beginning of scientific and philosophical thinking in the Western world: the conception of the world as an orderly whole, and the rejection of supernatural explanation in favor of explanations that make use solely of the material constituents of things and the natural, inviolable laws according to which those materials and those things act. (This gets complicated in the case of the explanation of mind and mental states, as we’ll see; but that’s a story for another day.)

Pythagoras: Mysticism and Mathematics

Pythagoras lived in the same period as the other Pre-Socratics, though he’s a bit of an outlier and even more of a mystery. The big problem is that he was the head of a cult, never wrote anything down, and demanded secrecy from his followers. So, of everything attributed to Pythagoras, it’s impossible to say with any certainty what ideas are original to the actual historical figure, which came from his later followers, and which were invented by Plato in his reinvention of Pythagoras. For example, Pythagoras almost certainly didn’t invent the geometrical theorem that bears his name.

[image error]

The cult Pythagoras led was a mystical one, and one of the things about him that seems certain is that he believed in reincarnation. One of the other major ideas attributed to him is that everything is number or mathematical in nature. It’s not clear what this might have meant. However, the discovery that is said to have led to this metaphysical claim, which might well have been original to Pythagoras himself, was quite profound. This was the realization that the musical consonances (the musical third, the musical fifth, the octave) can be expressed as perfect mathematical ratios.

The great significance of this discovery is that it lays the groundwork for the idea at the core of modern science: the idea that everything in nature is mathematically calculable and describable. Quite simply, without the invention of calculus in the 17th Century, and the coupling of natural science with mathematics, there is no modern physics or chemistry, and following them, modern life sciences.

Let me pause to note that, the first inklings of science and philosophy (the two weren’t distinguished at all at this time and wouldn’t be for over two millennia) derive naturally from our desire to understand the world and control our environment. We’re obviously part of this world, and our bodily senses help us navigate our way through that world, help us not just survive but, hopefully, thrive. At some point, then, we started using our minds to understand what we were sensing, the reasons for it, the causes of the phenomena around us.

To put it in a phrase: The whole project from the beginning was concerned with making sense of the world. When, at some point, we came up with the notion of truth and the distinction between truth and falsity, these ideas were intimately bound up with our perceptions of things. What’s true is what accords with what we perceive in the world (particularly with what we perceive regularly); and that which doesn’t accord with our perceptions—deviates from what we see, hear, feel, etc.—is false.

All that might sound obvious, but in at least some branches of contemporary science it is no longer the case that science is at its core a sense-making enterprise or that truth accords with our perceptions of things. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson says, “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.” (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry,  epigraph)

I hope you find that statement as shocking as I do.

In early modern scientific thought, at the time of the scientific revolution, the divorce between science and sense-making begins. But before I get to that part of the story, I want to talk a bit about Plato. That will be in my next post in this series.

 

Not long ago I developed and taught a class on the so-called New Atheists, a group of thinkers who put out books around the same time (2004 – 2007) arguing against Western religion. As a long-time devotee of Nietzsche, I was intrigued by these books and sympathetic towards many of the arguments they contained. I’ll confess that I was a little nervous about teaching such a course, for fear of profoundly upsetting the students by challenging perhaps their most deeply-held beliefs. After all, these writers don’t pull any punches in their condemnation of the trilogy of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

I only taught the class twice, and shortly I’ll explain why in detail. Suffice it to say, two unexpected things happened in the course of my delving deeply into these authors and their arguments and then teaching them to undergrads. First, contrary to my fears, the majority of the students (perhaps the vast majority) bought the arguments, accepted them, and were quite ready to say “to hell with religion!” I shouldn’t have been as surprised by this as I was, given the students I was teaching, and more about that also momentarily. The second unexpected thing that happened—and this was a real surprise, one that had profound reverberations for me—was that I went down a rabbit hole—a deep, dark empiricist rabbit hole in which the world stopped making any kind of sense to me.

I came out of that confusion thanks to the writings of the philosopher Thomas Nagel. He helped me make sense of the world again, and in a way that revolutionized the way I think about human beings, our fundamental nature, and our place in the universe.

You can read the first installment of this tale: Part I: The New Atheists.

Science, Mind, and God. Part II: The (IL)Liberal College Student.

As I said in the introduction, two unexpected things happened as a result of my having studied the New Atheists and then taught the class. The first, which is the topic of this post, is that a large number of the students bought into their arguments and were ready to chuck Western religion onto the garbage heap. I hadn’t expected this; in fact, I was afraid of upsetting the students by challenging their most deeply held beliefs.

First, some clarification about the demographics. I should note that both classes were something of a self-selecting group. I don’t have any hard numbers on this, but I know that in each case there were students who were theists (no doubt some of the strong believers I was afraid of offending) who showed up at the beginning of the semester for one or two sessions, saw what the class was about, and then dropped the course. I’m not sure what they expected when they saw the title of the class—that we’d be beating up on the New Atheists? I’m don’t know, but when they realized we were taking the authors’ arguments seriously, even sympathetically, these students bolted. This means that those who stuck around were less religiously inclined.

The other element to the makeup of the class is something that has gotten a fair amount of attention in the press in the last few years. This is the picture of liberal college students as “snowflakes” with their “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and fear of “micro-aggressions.” Some claim that these so-called progressive college students are so steeped in identity politics and victimhood that their liberalism turns into illiberalism or anti-liberalism.

Let me explain. Traditional liberalism, dating back to the early modern period and the Enlightenment (and having its roots in classical Greek philosophy), derived its values from the universal elements of our human nature. Because we’re all beings with reason (for example), we understand the world, our place within it, the consequences of our actions, and so we’re all subject to the moral law. We’re worthy of moral regard and subject to moral duties. You see this in the Declaration of Independence, the core ideas of which Jefferson borrowed from the political philosophy of John Locke: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

[image error]John Locke

We’re all the same, says Jefferson. Because of our very nature, we have certain rights that can’t be taken away—all of us have these rights, precisely because we’re human beings. He goes on to say, of course, that because we have these inalienable rights, we have the right to be self-governed, to elect those we want to represent us, to decide our own political futures, etc. (This was the metaphysical reasoning behind the political action of rejecting the monarchy and claiming for ourselves the right of self-determination.)

There’s a fairly large segment of liberal college professors and their students who reject this classical focus on what makes us human, of the universal elements of our nature, often even denying there is such a thing. They focus rather on “marginalized groups,” those who have historically have been oppressed, shut out, denied a voice in society. Each of these groups has its own identity—women, African-Americans, Latinos, the LGBT community, etc.—and hence the idea of “identity politics.” Again, for this segment of academia, we shouldn’t emphasize what makes us all the same—they even doubt that there even is such a thing; they’re skeptical of universals. We should, rather, focus on what makes us individuals, what makes us special, that for which many have throughout history been denied opportunities, enslaved, killed.

The students’ aim—and in its essence, not an unjustified or ignoble one—is to give the individuals within each of these groups a voice, to let them speak freely, to empower them.

However, and here’s where things sometimes go awry, this often leads proponents to two unjustified and unfortunate conclusions. First is the relativistic notion that, since all voices must be heard, all those opinions being articulated are equally valid or true. Second is the ironically anti-liberal notion that whoever disagrees with the college students and those they claim to speak for must necessarily be wrong and very often ought not be allowed even to speak. So, in fact, the first claim is actually worse than typical relativism; it’s rather the view that a claim is true or false depending on who articulates it; it’s true or valid if uttered by someone from a traditionally marginalized group, false or invalid if articulated by someone not from one of those groups.

[The issue of relativism requires a much more careful analysis than I can give it here. I know I’m at risk here of overgeneralizing or mischaracterizing the position of the students and their professors . But, given their actions in relation to these beliefs, I don’t think I’m too far off the mark.]

Thus, we see an all-too-familiar sight on college campuses: student protesters interrupting and shouting down a speaker with whom they disagree, not letting that person voice his or her opinion. This is where the charge of illiberalism comes in: the students seem to be assuming for themselves the power to decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t. You can read about some of these incidents that occurred at Middlebury, University of Michigan, Columbia, William and Mary.

Okay, so how does this relate to my class with the New Atheists, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens? As I said, a large majority bought into their arguments, or at least made it clear that they were ready to reject Western religion. Here’s the connection. Once the students heard the textual evidence of racism, homophobia, misogyny built into Western scripture and heard about the religious incitement to violence historically perpetrated by Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; and once they read that the three great Western religious traditions were patriarchal in nature, those students were prepared to condemn the whole enterprise.

No doubt most or all of these students grew up in households that were at least mildly or moderately religions; many of them probably went to church, synagogue, and/or Sunday school. But it speaks to the very poor religious literacy typical of Americans that they had no idea that most of the things they read about the Bible (much less the Koran) were in there. Granted, reading for the first time actual quotations that not only condone, but in fact command, say, the execution of rebellious children, homosexuals, or those who leave the religion, can be rather shocking.

What’s interesting, and somewhat ironic, is that the students never seemed to even consider the possibility (and, in some cases, historical fact) that religious believers might themselves be part of a marginalized group that has been denied a seat at the table. I suppose that may speak to their lack of historical understanding.

But the whole episode points to two glaring failure on my part as the instructor. First, I failed to give the students any kind of contextualization of these religious systems so that the students might have some sort of historical understanding to work from. In my own defense, I suppose, I was teaching a philosophy class and not a course in religious history; and, further, catching them up on thousands of years of such history just wasn’t feasible at the time.

But, second, and more importantly for me, I failed to push back against their newly found inclinations against Western religion. That is, as a professor, I always see an important part of my role as challenging students on their currently held beliefs (never telling them what to think, but rather compelling them to analyze what they do think). If in class, they made it clear they were theists, then I would challenge them on those beliefs. If they revealed they were atheists, I’d instead push them in the opposite of that direction. However, in this case, I’d gone into the class and arranged the readings and assignments under the impression that they’d be theists, that they’d reject outright the arguments of the New Atheists, such that I’d need to make strong arguments in favor of those thinkers. Once the students unexpectedly made the reverse move, I had no ready ammunition to strike back. That’s why I stopped teaching the class. I needed to go back to the armory and stock up.

In the next post I’ll talk about the second and for me earth-shaking consequence of teaching the course: My decent down an empiricistic rabbit hole and how I climbed back out of it thanks to the help of Thomas Nagel.

Recently I was tagged on a “Ten Day Film Challenge” on Facebook, in which I posted an image from a film that has impacted me but with no explanation (one movie for each of ten successive days). Not much of a challenge, really, and I have to confess that I didn’t give a lot of thought in most cases as to which movies to include. I rather went with my gut.

I decided in this post to list the films I went with and to force myself to think a bit more about why I did in fact include them. I now realize that—perhaps as to be expected—there are some glaring oversights here. But, nonetheless, I had fun doing the exercise.

Anyway, here are the ten films:

[image error]

1) 8 ½, Federico Fellini.

I first saw this movie as a young Ph.D. student not all that long after I moved to Philadelphia. It’s one of the first movies I ever saw that was made outside the Hollywood film system (maybe the first). And, given that it’s Fellini at his best, and with the movie’s use of dream and fantasy sequences, the fractured narrative, all the great, weird and funky characters—I’d quite obviously never seen anything like it. It’s truly a masterpiece, and at that point in my life when I was being exposed to new ideas, the urban life of Philly, the challenges of philosophy grad school, I was really knocked out by it. If you’ve never seen it, well, what are you doing reading this? Get yourself in front of a screen and watch it.

 

[image error]

2) Annie Hall, Woody Allen.

“Brooklyn is not expanding.”

I suppose it was my disposition and my offbeat and wacky sense of humor, but I fell in love with Woody Allen’s movies when I was a kid. I empathized with the neurotic main character, I loved his jokes, I adored the writing, and I just couldn’t get enough of his work. I also romanticized New York City largely through watching and re-watching his films, so it was a bit of karma perhaps that I ended up living here. In my own humble opinion, Annie Hall is Woody Allen’s greatest masterpiece.

One quick story. I was invited to give an informal talk about Woody Allen to a philosophy club on the upper east side one evening—this was six or seven years ago, I suppose. Anyway, as I was walking from the host’s apartment to the subway to go home, I passed Woody in the street. Yep, got to love New York.

 

[image error]

3) Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino.

It’s hard for me to get my head around the fact that Pulp Fiction is almost 25 years old now. Part of the reason might be because the film seems timeless. My own opinion is that it’s a masterpiece and one of the most important movies made in the last quarter century. It’s not just clever; it’s smart. Everything about it is brilliantly executed.

In 2014 I was interviewed by Brian Turnof for his radio show “The Mind’s Eye” on the 20th anniversary of Pulp Fiction. You can listen to that interview here: My interview.  Brian wanted to interview me because of an essay I wrote about the movie and the symbols it contains. You can read that essay: “Symbolism, Meaning, and Nihilism in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.”

 

[image error]

4) Fight Club, David Fincher.

“I am Jack’s broken heart.”

This is one of those movies that I didn’t think too much about adding. Like many people, the film hit me like a sack of wet concrete. I think it’s brilliantly done, and it’s one of those movies I can watch over and over. One major impact that it did have on me that I can articulate is that it introduced me to Chuck Palahniuk’s books. That was a huge deal.

Another story. I heard Chuck Palahniuk read once. This was at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square in New York probably fourteen years ago or so. He was reading a story called “Guts.” He explained that he once heard that people would pass out when they first read chapters from Dickens’s works, so he set himself the task of writing a story that would make people faint. He said on that reading tour already so many people had passed out (I don’t recall the exact number–a dozen or so). The story is about more and more bizarre masturbatory practices. No joke: two people in the audience that night fainted, and I myself got rather woozy (and I don’t have a weak stomach).

 

[image error]

5) The Maltese Falcon, John Huston.

I’ve loved noir films since I was a kid. Back in the 70s, on Saturdays and Sundays, the networks showed old movies, and I’d always be glued to the set. I adored those old black and white flicks, especially the ones starring Bogart. Later I did some scholarship on noir. You can read my essay on the definition of noir: “Nietzsche and the Meaning and Definition of Noir.”

I could have chosen a lot of different classic films for this particular list: Out of the Past, The Killers, Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, amongst others. The Maltese Falcon wasn’t one of the ones that I really went out of my way to watch when I was a kid. It took me a long time to really appreciate its greatness. I think that’s largely because Bogart’s utterly masterful performance is so subtle. He has such a laconic onscreen persona that you have to pay close attention to get the nuances.

The other reason to choose this movie is because it’s considered by most scholars to be the first classic noir film. The movie considered to be the last classic noir, Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, would also certainly be worthy of this list.

 

[image error]

6) Jaws, Steven Spielberg.

A couple of movies on the list are here because of the profound impact they had on me when I was a kid. Jaws came out in 1975. I was ten years old that year, and I still remember the whole family going to see it—which was something a bit unusual. In any event, the movie shocked me to my core, and I wouldn’t go swimming for quite a long time afterwards. It’s a very affecting film, a well-told story, and wildly entertaining. It’s one that I can break out every once in a while and still really enjoy.

With this movie, and Star Wars in 1977 (see #10 below), Steven Spielberg and George Lucas invented the summer Hollywood blockbuster and changed the course of movie-making forever.

 

[image error]

7) Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese.

“You talking to me?”

Scorsese, DeNiro, Keitel, Foster. Need I say more?

 

[image error]

8) Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick.

This was one of the movies I didn’t think too much about putting on this list. I find it very powerful, very affecting, and brilliantly done in that oh-so-cold Stanley Kubrick sort of way. There’s much here that’s unforgettable, and the structure of it is brilliant. The film is broken into two halves, each one culminating in a shooting death. The first half, set on Parris Island, shows the brutal training of the new Marine recruits and ends with Private Pyle murdering his drill instructor, Sergeant Hartman, and then committing suicide. The second half is set in Vietnam and ends with Private Joker killing a wounded sniper who’s been shooting his companions one by one.

I argued in an essay in The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick that the film is about chaos and order and their relationship to ethical values. In the first half, the Marines are attempting to impose an artificially strict order and control on the world of the recruits, and the senseless crimes at the end of that segment reveal the folly of that enterprise. In the second half, chaos rules and we’re witness to the true insanity of war. When Private Joker kills the wounded sniper, he puts her out of her misery—something his more callous fellow soldiers are unwilling to do. In this case, Joker restores the moral order of things by killing.

If I had to redo this list, I’d probably leave this film off here and include instead something by the Coen brothers. Their absence is a glaring omission.

 

[image error]

9) The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Sergio Leone.

This is another of those movies that I watched as a kid whenever it was on TV. I haven’t seen it for years. I’m probably due for a viewing. It’s epic in scope and one of the best of the “spaghetti westerns.”

 

[image error]

10) Star Wars, George Lucas.

There are certain works of art and entertainment that change what’s possible in a particular medium. Some bend or break the rules of story-telling. Others push the boundaries of the medium itself, what’s possible in that form of art. Star Wars is one of those boundary-breakers. It’s hard or impossible to communicate to people who’ve grown up with big budget movies full of special effects what it was like to watch this movie for the first time. It was like nothing we’d ever seen before. It was magical in an almost overwhelming way.

As I said above, for good or ill, after Spielberg and Lucas, movies were never the same.

 

Not long ago I developed and taught a class on the so-called New Atheists, a group of thinkers who put out books around the same time (2004 – 2007) arguing against Western religion. As a long-time devotee of Nietzsche, I was intrigued by these books and sympathetic towards many of the arguments they contained. I’ll confess that I was a little nervous about teaching such a course, for fear of profoundly upsetting the students by challenging perhaps their most deeply-held beliefs. After all, these writers don’t pull any punches in their condemnation of the trilogy of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

I only taught the class twice, and I’ll explain why in detail. Suffice it to say, two unexpected things happened in the course of my delving deeply into these authors and their arguments and then teaching them to undergrads. First, contrary to my fears, the majority of the students (perhaps the vast majority) bought the arguments, accepted them, and were quite ready to say “to hell with religion!” I shouldn’t have been as surprised by this as I was, given the students I was teaching, and more about that later on. The second unexpected thing that happened—and this was a real surprise, one that had profound reverberations for me—was that I went down a rabbit hole—a deep, dark empiricist rabbit hole in which the world stopped making sense to me.

I came out of that confusion thanks to the writings of the philosopher Thomas Nagel. He helped me make sense of the world again, and in a way that revolutionized the way I think about human beings, our fundamental nature, and our place in the universe.

This is a rather involved story, so I will tell it in multiple posts.

Part I: The New Atheists
The Cast of Characters

I. Dawkins. “I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.” (The God Delusion, p. 36)

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and his offering is called The God Delusion. One pertinent question about these authors and these books is: what exactly is it that they’re arguing (or, perhaps more appropriately, arguing against)? Are they arguing positively in favor of atheism, that is, are they arguing that God doesn’t exist; or are they arguing against religion as a practice, claiming that it’s somehow pernicious? There’s some of both going on, but for the most part, the authors are arguing against religion as a practice and a cultural phenomenon. However, Dawkins, for one, does explicitly tackle the question of God’s existence, and he treats it as an empirical question open to scientific study. This is to be expected from a natural scientist. (It was Dawkins, by the way, who coined the term ‘meme’ with which we’re now all too familiar.)

II. Dennett. “The spell that I say must be broken is the taboo against a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many.” (Breaking the Spell, p. 17)

[image error]

Daniel Dennett is a philosopher, but one from what’s known as the “Analytic Tradition,” which means he believes philosophy should accept the conclusions of the natural sciences and should attempt to be as science-like as possible (and should be a kind of handmaiden to science, in the eyes of many). Indeed, and to introduce some technical terminology, Dennett firmly buys into what’s called “scientism,” which is the belief that there is nothing beyond the natural world; and that the methods of the natural sciences (particularly physics) are sufficient for understanding everything there is to know about the universe. Dennett’s book is entitled Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

III. Harris. “Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God.” (The End of Faith, p. 21 – 22)

[image error]

Sam Harris is also a philosopher, and while he’s sympathetic towards the natural sciences, he doesn’t buy into scientism the way that Dennett does. It’s important to note that all of these books came in the near-aftermath of 9-11. The fear, almost panic, induced by religious extremism is most palpable in Harris’s book, and he goes after Islam the hardest of all four authors (although that religion is not at all spared by the others). His book is The End of Faith, and after hammering Western religious traditions for most of the book, Harris makes what to me was a surprising move: He embraces some form of spirituality.

IV. Hitchens. “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” (God is Not Great, p. 150)

[image error]

I was first introduced to “The New Atheism” when I read an excerpt from Christopher Hitchens’s book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (and was blown away by it). I was a big fan of Hitchens, who was a journalist, an essayist, seemingly a polymath, and a real and clear voice of social conscience. His writing was always very smart and very witty. Unfortunately, he died of cancer in 2011, and I’ve said before that in our current political mess, his is the voice we most dearly miss.

Dennett writes in a gentle tone, like a kindly uncle trying to convince you of your foolish ways; Dawkins is so contemptuous of religion he is often sarcastic; as I said, Harris is in something of a panic, though his book is quite smart and, as I said, surprising in ways; Hitchens is blunt and forceful, and his razor wit is unsparing.

 

The Arguments
Harm and absurdity

Two of the most important claims within the four books are that much of traditional Western religion is positively harmful; and that most of the claims made by Western scripture are completely absurd. All four authors hammer both these points over and over, and they all bring out one example after another to thoroughly back their claims. If you look at the Bible and the Koran closely, the authors argue, you can’t miss the hate, the misogyny, the incitement to violence; you can’t miss the fraud perpetrated by ignorant people who want to control others; you can’t miss true insanity of the claims made. [Look for a supplemental post on particular examples of these; it’s quite instructive and sometimes surprising to examine them.]

I can’t help but think it’s a helpful exercise to show believers exactly what’s in their sacred texts, because most Westerners, or at least most Americans, really have no idea. That being said, I doubt very much that many people’s minds have ever been changed by learning about these things. One of the revelations I came to in studying the New Atheists and teaching the class was that when people say they believe in God or claim to believe that Jesus really was resurrected and ascended to heaven, they mean something very different than what one normally means in using the word “belief.” (It’s quite different from what I mean when I say, “I believe I turned off the oven just now,” for example; or when I say, “I believe Donald Trump is a compulsive liar.”) The usual rules of reasoning and evidence don’t apply to most theistic claims for some reason. I can’t say I know exactly what believers mean by their professions of belief, but it seems to me that pointing out the absurdity of the claims they’re making most of the time doesn’t touch or change their conviction.

The existence of God

The second sort of argument presented in these works is an argument against God’s existence, or at least an argument against belief in God. (This, by the way, points to the distinction between atheism and agnosticism: whether you can show, positively, that God doesn’t exist; or merely show that the other guy’s arguments that God does exist are no good.)

Hitchens, for example, has a chapter entitled “The Metaphysical Claims of Religion are False.” However, what he does in that chapter is reject and refute the religious arguments. At most, this should show that you have no justification for believing those claims, not that they’re positively false. But Hitchens is an essayist and not a philosopher writing a philosophical treatise, so we should give him some leeway.

Dennett, on the other hand, in trying to break the spell, pretends like he doesn’t know the answer to all these questions yet—because a proper scientific study of them hasn’t yet been performed. It’s clear that he’s trying to coax along any and every believer he can, saying, “come on, a bit of scientific research won’t kill you! Let’s see where it leads, and if it shows that your beliefs are all a load of bunk, well, then, be prepared to accept that!” But in rejecting anything supernatural, Dennett has already answered all the fundamental questions. He does talk like the kindly old uncle, but you know all along that he thinks you’re a bit dim for believing what you believe.

Dennett’s book does contain a section of a chapter called “Does God Exist?” In it, he covers all the traditional arguments for God’s existence, goes over the usual criticisms of those arguments, and then concludes that they all fail. At that point Dennett implies that the issue has been settled and the question of the title of the section (“Does God Exist?”) answered in the negative. However, he’s fudging a bit, because the chapter in which this discussion takes place concerns belief, not metaphysics. Dennett knows he’s just made a case for agnosticism, not true, positive atheism; but since he’s committed to the latter, I suppose, he allows himself the fudge.

As I said before, Dawkins takes head on, not just the issue of belief in God, but the very existence of God; and his treatment of it is a fascinating mess, in my humble opinion. There’s a deep contradiction in what we mean by God—and what Dawkins accepts as God—and how he proposes to treat the question of God’s existence. In a nutshell, Dawkins accepts the definition of God as a supernatural being but then wants to treat the existence of God as a scientific, empirical question. Since experience and thus scientific study only occurs in (and is only concerned with) the natural world, it’s impossible to understand how these two ideas can fit together.

[image error]

To go into a bit more detail, Dawkins defines “The God hypothesis” as: “There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.” (31) He then claims that the existence of God is one that we can (or should be able to) get an answer to: “God’s existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe, discoverable in principle if not in practice.” (50) However, he shortly goes on to seemingly contradict himself when he says: “That you cannot prove God’s non-exisence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t) but whether his existence is probable.” (54)

It’s a basic principle of logic and reasoning that you can’t prove that something doesn’t exist; however, in calling the existence of God a scientific matter that one should be able to answer, Dawkins seems to commit himself to being able to demonstrate one way or the other whether God exists:  “The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question.” (58 – 59) Very confusing, indeed.

Dawkins lays out his arguments and his evidence, criticizes the traditional arguments for God’s existence, and then claims that “God almost certainly does not exist.” (158) As the good scientist that he is, Dawkins says that he’s an agnostic about the whole business. That is, claiming a priori that God doesn’t exist would be too strong of a claim for someone who works only with empirical evidence and testable hypotheses. (Conveniently forgetting, of course, that he called himself an atheist back on page 13.)

Now, to me at least, this is all a confusing mess. If God is a supernatural being, as I said, and science only works empirically—that is, deals with data and claims about the natural, perceivable world—then how can the existence of God be a scientific question? There is one way that Dawkins might be able to get around that problem. He claims, and quite rightly, I think, that “A universe with a supernaturally intelligent creator is a very different kind of universe from one without.” (58) If he’s then able to argue and present evidence that the universe we find ourselves in is one that almost certainly wasn’t designed, then he could claim by a neat inference that an intelligent designer God almost certainly doesn’t exist. This does in fact seem to be the argument he’s making, though he’s not very clear about it.

However, and this is still where I get stuck, Dawkins denies that there’s anything supernatural at all. The natural world is all that exists (see his discussion in the section “Deserved Respect,” p. 11 – 19). Consequently, I can’t make any sense out of the claim that there’s still a chance, however slight, that there might exist a supernatural being. Like Dennett, Dawkins might be making a pretense to some sort of evenhandedness here, though I’m not sure why he’d bother, especially when in the rest of the book he’s completely contemptuous of belief in God.

Dawkins is a brilliant evolutionary biologist, without a doubt, but he’s not a philosopher, and so he’s not nearly as careful or analytical in his treatment of these issues as he ought to be. Frankly, one gets the impression from reading his book that he thinks the whole business is so idiotic that he can’t be bothered to waste his time on it.

[There’s a fascinating video of the four of these thinkers sitting down together and discussing these issues and the reception of their books. It’s well-worth watching. Check it out here: The Four Horsemen.]

In the next installment of this story, I’ll discuss the two surprising consequences of my teaching the class on these books: The students’ gleeful acceptance of the New Atheists’s arguments and my own descent down the empiricist rabbit hole.