The West's Ongoing Murder of Reason
Faith and Philosophy
| October 15, 2006
| Tim
A while ago, I tried to post a rather simple explanation of the answer to the schoolboy puzzler: "Can God make a rock so big he can't move it?". That post probably generates more responses than anything else here except the Quixtar-related material.
Sadly, many of the comments have revealed the low state of American and European thought. As one commenter remarked, in frustration:
I'm stupider from reading this page! Other than Tim and LR all the comments on this page lack any intelligence at all. Sounds like 2 teachers debating with their grade 3 class.
(Aside: I struggle with the idea of censoring comments. On one hand, I want people to be able to express themselves. On the other hand, I feel for the poor reader who has to wade through the endless mispelled, ungrammatical, irrational, self-important chest-beating and verbal flatulence. And I'm sometimes part of the problem, I admit.)
One sad-but-typical commenter wrote:
with all due respect, it is folly to try and cram the concept of GOD into man's limited spere of rationality. truth is, there is a thin line between the rational and so called irrational and further at some point there is no line at all. we live in a limited environment and clearly it has imparted a sort of effect on iour way of thinking, hence we use terms such as rational and irrational.
dont u think that its arrogance to label wat u understand as rational and acceptable and just ignore tht which u dont? one cant understand GOD with such a state of mind.
plus if GOD was trapped and 'rational' and all we wudnt worship such a god would we?
sufi or not lol, fact is GOD is beyond understanding and transcendent.
This commenter believes it is "folly" and "arrogant" to attribute "rationality" to God because, at the core, he believes we simply created the theistic God as a form of self-flattery. Personally, I don't buy that: the God I found was not at all, in many ways, the god I would have preferred. And the bible is hardly flattering to human character or the reader.
(Further, the statement itself is arrogant, because it prejudicially excludes the possibility anyone else could ever have been contacted by the almighty, and received information from such.)
When people say they believe in something "beyond" reason, what they really mean is that they believe in something below reason. Reason is simply an illusion, a local phenomenon. It is our "regularly-scheduled programming" which could possibly be interrupted at any time when the ultimate intrudes. This is not a new belief; rather it is an old, old, old one, and the cause of much ignorance, poverty, and despair around the world.
Atheists are fond of making pronouncements like: "Belief in Christianity and God is irrational." But the simple truth is Christianity (and Judaism) are rational beliefs (they believe a rational mind is behind existence) and thus were the exception to historical world religions.
For contrast, consider Taoism:
The Tao is conceived as a supernatural essence, an underlying mystical force or princple governing life, but one that is impersonal, remote... and definitely not a being... According to Lao-tzu, the Tao is "always nonexistent" yet "always existent," "unnamable" and "the name that cannot be named." ... One might meditate forever on such an essence, but it offers little to reason about. (Stark, The Victory of Reason, pp. 5-6)
Chinese elite atheists didn't embrace reason. They embraced a Taoist or Buddhist conception of the universe, both which were anthetical to modern rationality and science. Thus China, even though its civilization had once been far more advanced than Europe's, never developed science. Instead, the Europeans found the Chinese living in poverty and squalor, without clocks, guns, eyeglasses, astronomy, printing presses, etc.
In contrast, contemporary Western "infidels" (deists, and later atheists) are simply people who have appropriated Christian rationality, philosophies, and values, while wanting to evict the Christian god from the house he built.
But without the belief in an over-arching, rational mind which gave the first scientists the idea that "law" might drive everything, our religious drive causes us to fall away from reason. And we're seeing that increasingly in our "post-Christian" culture today: probably without knowing why, people like Anonymous -- and even many who label themselves "atheist" or "Christian" -- are embracing a theology which says that irrationality is "beyond" rationality, that it is a "higher" belief to believe the ultimate is more like water or a rock (lacking reason) than like a person (capable of reason).
And when the ultimate is impersonal, the impersonal becomes the ultimate.
Chinese elite atheists didn't embrace reason. They embraced a Taoist or Buddhist conception of the universe, both which were anthetical to modern rationality and science.
I'm not sure exactly who 'elite atheists' refers to. But Taoism, as I understand it (or perhaps a single strain thereof), did notably embrace experimentalism much earlier than the West. When Western philosophers were still doing 'thought experiments' taoists philosophers were concerned with actual experiments. Taoist experimentalists differ most from modern scientists in that Taoists didn't didn't embrace reductionism. And that proved to be a critical development by the West. Non-reductionist experiments can still be scientific, even if less valuable. Taoism is a belief that there's an underlying pattern and order to all things. It tends to be more lassie faire (in some interpretations to the point of denying property rights), while Confucianism is hierarchical. My understanding of Taoist logic, and feel free to correct me here, is roughly this; Language is used to compare and contrast. We can only describe a thing with words if we can contrast it to somthing else. (And such opposites are rarely absolute). But human brains are also capable of pattern recognition. With pattern matching, we can glean information and experience from our environment which we could not get from simple verbal descriptions of those environments because of our capacity to recognize patterns. This view doesn't discard language or logic, so much as recognize a limitation inherant in its use.
Instead, the Europeans found the Chinese living in poverty and squalor, without clocks, guns, eyeglasses, astronmy, printing presses, etc.
Much of Europe was 'living in squalor' in Marco Polo's time, too. Granted, China was often mismanaged. But focusing on technical accomplishments for a moment;
Movable type, which allowed individual characters to be arranged to form words and which is a separate invention from the printing press, was invented in China by Bi Sheng between 1041 to 1048.
link
The mechanical clock was invented in China in the eighth century.
link
The Chinese first used gunpowder in warfare in 904 (several centuries before Europe), as incendiary projectiles called "flying fires." Its use was soon expanded to explosive grenades hurled from catapults. The third step was to use gunpowder as a propellant. Its first such use was recorded in 1132 in experiments with mortars consisting of bamboo tubes. Mortars with metal tubes (made of iron or bronze) first appeared in the wars (1268-1279) between the Mongols and the Song Dynasty.
link
This commenter believes it is "folly" and "arrogant" to attribute "rationality" to God because, at the core, he believes we simply created the theistic God as a form of self-flattery.
In part, he seems to be saying the opposite. He writes;
it is folly to try and cram the concept of GOD into man's limited spere of rationality
In other words he seems to be saying "We can't claim that God's actions are irrational or impossible because we don't have a complete grasp on what is possible or of God's ultimate plan. (echos of Job here. "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth", etc.) Likewise, we would describe a person's actions as irrational if we don't know follow their reasoning, but those actions may in fact be rational.
Of course, these are his words, not mine.
His comment might not be on topic ( I don't know if he was replying to you or to someone else's post ) but the statement on its own makes some sense. Watching a grand master playing chess, we might see him sacrificing piece after piece. His playing seems absurd and irrational until we hear him say 'checkmate' and look back and see the whole thing was one well calculated gambit.
Personally, I agree wholeheartedly in the importance of human rationality. Divine pronouncements from a God who is smarter than you are are easily distorted to the benifit of cunning humans, and such faith is easily abused. But for people who are told to have unquestioning faith in an all knowing God, the "God is beyong our understanding" type of logic doesn't seem too shocking.
I struggle with the idea of censoring comments.
Ideally, comments would be nested so that replies to replies could be visually grouped. But it'd probably be painful to move to that format.
... or did you mean that China had backslid and lost it's advances by a certain time period? What date or event are you using for "East meets West?"
Hiya Ryan,
Just a few quick responses before I have to go do the stuff I get paid to go do...
Sometimes, to try to keep things brief, I deliberately bypass as a lot of points to write the conclusion. I expect that eventually someone will raise all the middle points so I can just respond to them, thus adding content without making the article too long. Thank you.
I'm not sure exactly who 'elite atheists' refers to...
In China, the people widely believed in a pantheons of various 'deities' -- but "elite" philosophers and officials typically rejected such beliefs as ignorant, opting instead for some sort of outlook in which the ultimate (my term) was impersonal, not personal.
For example:
Worship of local gods was a part of every community's shared activities. Officials distrusted the potential of communal organization for heterodoxy, and in didactic statements were unwilling to take seriously any culture but that of their own class. In their writing most of them simply ignored the religious character of popular rites, acknowledging them only as "vulgar practices" (su), and their practitioners as "wizards" (wu, a term we will explore below). The heirs of the old pedants, Nationalist and Communist party ideologues, tried to expunge it, and encouraged scholars to label it "feudal superstition"...
I fully expected you (or someone else) to go into the long history of Chinese inventions or discoveries which ultimately "flopped" (except in European hands). China is a big nation -- it isn't surprising that many creative and innovative individuals should be born there, and a that a good number of discoveries might be made.
Then Romans invented the steam engine, after all. And promply did nothing with it.
But there's more to science than mere technology. (Technology being the cultivation or preservation of useful techniques, discovered however, science being an ordered search for underlying mechanisms.) And there's more to "science" that just one or two bright but isolated individuals who believed in making observations and forming hypotheses. (Science has a collective aspect, involving replicating experiments, sharing data, and debate, proceeding along organized lines.)
So the question, which I won't have time to answer presently, isn't: "Did the Chinese have some neat inventions?" The question is why, for example, these inventions never amounted to anything, even though they happened in the greatest empire existing to that time.
The comment rules will apply. Please post only once.
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Chinese elite atheists didn't embrace reason. They embraced a Taoist or Buddhist conception of the universe, both which were anthetical to modern rationality and science.
I'm not sure exactly who 'elite atheists' refers to. But Taoism, as I understand it (or perhaps a single strain thereof), did notably embrace experimentalism much earlier than the West. When Western philosophers were still doing 'thought experiments' taoists philosophers were concerned with actual experiments. Taoist experimentalists differ most from modern scientists in that Taoists didn't didn't embrace reductionism. And that proved to be a critical development by the West. Non-reductionist experiments can still be scientific, even if less valuable. Taoism is a belief that there's an underlying pattern and order to all things. It tends to be more lassie faire (in some interpretations to the point of denying property rights), while Confucianism is hierarchical. My understanding of Taoist logic, and feel free to correct me here, is roughly this; Language is used to compare and contrast. We can only describe a thing with words if we can contrast it to somthing else. (And such opposites are rarely absolute). But human brains are also capable of pattern recognition. With pattern matching, we can glean information and experience from our environment which we could not get from simple verbal descriptions of those environments because of our capacity to recognize patterns. This view doesn't discard language or logic, so much as recognize a limitation inherant in its use.
Instead, the Europeans found the Chinese living in poverty and squalor, without clocks, guns, eyeglasses, astronmy, printing presses, etc.
Much of Europe was 'living in squalor' in Marco Polo's time, too. Granted, China was often mismanaged. But focusing on technical accomplishments for a moment;
Movable type, which allowed individual characters to be arranged to form words and which is a separate invention from the printing press, was invented in China by Bi Sheng between 1041 to 1048.
link
The mechanical clock was invented in China in the eighth century.
link
The Chinese first used gunpowder in warfare in 904 (several centuries before Europe), as incendiary projectiles called "flying fires." Its use was soon expanded to explosive grenades hurled from catapults. The third step was to use gunpowder as a propellant. Its first such use was recorded in 1132 in experiments with mortars consisting of bamboo tubes. Mortars with metal tubes (made of iron or bronze) first appeared in the wars (1268-1279) between the Mongols and the Song Dynasty.
link
This commenter believes it is "folly" and "arrogant" to attribute "rationality" to God because, at the core, he believes we simply created the theistic God as a form of self-flattery.
In part, he seems to be saying the opposite. He writes;
it is folly to try and cram the concept of GOD into man's limited spere of rationality
In other words he seems to be saying "We can't claim that God's actions are irrational or impossible because we don't have a complete grasp on what is possible or of God's ultimate plan. (echos of Job here. "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth", etc.) Likewise, we would describe a person's actions as irrational if we don't know follow their reasoning, but those actions may in fact be rational.
Of course, these are his words, not mine.
His comment might not be on topic ( I don't know if he was replying to you or to someone else's post ) but the statement on its own makes some sense. Watching a grand master playing chess, we might see him sacrificing piece after piece. His playing seems absurd and irrational until we hear him say 'checkmate' and look back and see the whole thing was one well calculated gambit.
Personally, I agree wholeheartedly in the importance of human rationality. Divine pronouncements from a God who is smarter than you are are easily distorted to the benifit of cunning humans, and such faith is easily abused. But for people who are told to have unquestioning faith in an all knowing God, the "God is beyong our understanding" type of logic doesn't seem too shocking.
I struggle with the idea of censoring comments.
Ideally, comments would be nested so that replies to replies could be visually grouped. But it'd probably be painful to move to that format.
Posted by: Ryan on October 16, 2006 07:26 PM