Wrong, I guess...

Rape is a crime in which one agent external to another forces the latter to engage in sexual activity. By "forces" the law means the activity was initiated and consummated against the latter agent's will. The law also assigns responsibility for that consummation to the former agent. The former agent is guilty of rape by depriving the latter agent of his or her freedom to resist the influence of the external agent.

Determinism is a doctrine in which one or many agents external to an agent force the latter to perform any and all of its actions. By "forces" determinism means the actions were initiated, sustained, and completed wholly on account of conditions external to the latter agent. The external agent (or the set of determining conditions) is the explanation for the latter agent's actions, and this because the latter had no freedom to resist the deterministic influence of the former.

How does rape differ from being a mere deterministic event? Why is a rapist guilty of assaulting a victim but a falling tree is not guilty of assaulting its victim? Compatibilism seeks to integrate "having a will" and "being determined" by saying that "having a will" just means not being coerced to act contrary to one's internal dispositions at time t1. According to compatibilism, being wholly determined by our molecular constitution––under the influence of the weather, magnetic currents, our diet, etc.––does not eradicate our having a will, since we are able to exercise our will precisely as the actions we do in distinction to the things we observe. I may have no choice about wanting to eat a slice of chocolate cake on the table, but my will is still intact as I am integrally involved in nature bringing it about, deterministically, that the cake gets eaten. As long as an agent acts within the parameters of its determined physical and cognitive options, the agent still has a "will" on compatibilism.

If agent B at time t2 influences agent A to act contrary to A's dispositions, then it can be said B deprived A of A's will. Oddly, this means disagreeing with and persuading other people is a form of subjugating their "will," since persuasion brings a listener to a new set of dispositions at time t2 against the original impulses of their will at time t1. If compatibilism is meant to preserve the only kind of meaningful "will" people can have in a deterministic world, why do compatibilists attempt to persuade other people of compatibilism, since doing so would suppress and eliminate other people's wills in exactly the way compatibilism is meant to preserve them? If compatibilists want to salvage my will for me as the ability to act in accord with my own dispositions, as opposed to being coerced to a new set of dispositions, then the best they can do is stop trying to persuade me against my dispositions against determinism.

Unfortunately, it is easy to conceive of a "compatibilist" account of rape: insofar as, say, the woman's legs opened and her vagina widened in response to the insertion of the rapist's penis, her actions did not "violate" her own natural constitution. Nothing in the rape violated the determined parameters of the victim, since it was always in her power to open her legs and a perfectly natural capacity of her vagina to receive a penis. Even more bizarrely, the actions of the rapist are but a whole-body form of persuasion. Typically, men and women use sound waves––and good doses of alcohol––emitted from their lungs (and home stereos) to persuade each other to have sex. Now and then, however, some people are determined by prior conditions to exercise their will in an uncoerced way to persuade others to have sex with them by much more full-bodied means.

It is a mere weak-kneed bias on the part of determinists to regard the "mental states" of an agent as more important than its somatic actions and entire physical constitution in accounting for its actions. After all, for determinists, any agent's mental states are a direct function of "lower level" somatic behavior and total physical influence. I could, by holding a gun to his head, "persuade" a man to shoot a total stranger, and he would do it even if he didn't "feel like it." I can, and often do, tell myself to take out the trash even when I don't feel like doing so. In both cases, the actions would be the result of a successful persuasion by whatever means against another agent's initial dispositions. Persuasion is as persuasion does. In the end, both forms of persuasion––seduction and rape––derive from the same deterministic matrix and both result in the same thing: the target complied with the perpetrator's influence. If every rapist is just an overly determined man, and every man is just an over-determined agent, then there seems to be little to object to in any action from a purely metaphysical standpoint. Strangely, though, for a determinist, rape is wrong, I guess. But I can only guess.

[Cf. the following for similar thoughts:

"Let them fall as they may..."

"The court rules..."

"Just super! Naturalism!"

"Quick notes on mind and will..."

"…guaranteed gifts and forced forgiveness…"

"I kicked you…"

"If you are a determinist…"

"Beware the Magnevonian Myth!"]

Jovial skepticism…

"Scientists Behaving Badly" by Dr. Stephen M. Barr

Scientific knowledge is a highly reticulated structure of mutually supporting facts and inferences. Every well-established scientific fact is held in place by numerous links to other known facts, both closely related and seemingly distant. There are many scientific facts the denial of which would bring vast expanses of the edifice of human knowledge crashing down. …

The scientists who are questioning the “consensus view” on anthropogenic global warming are not proposing such wholesale revisions. Quite the contrary. All the scientists who are involved in these climate controversies, whether skeptics or ardent alarmists, are working within the same basic framework of modern scientific theory. They accept the validity of the same laws of thermodynamics, chemistry, fluid dynamics, and so forth. They disagree only in their analysis of a specific physical system that everyone agrees is tremendously complex.

…there are very well-known, highly respected and accomplished scientists, knowledgeable in the relevant fields, who are openly skeptical about various aspects the “consensus view” on global warming. Just to mention two: Prof. Richard S. Lindzen of MIT, one of the world’s leading climatologists, and Prof. Will Happer of Princeton University [cf. my previous post], who was for several years the director of energy research at the United States Department of Energy (one of the main funders of scientific research in this country). Nor are Lindzen and Happer alone. Scientists who share their views may be in the minority, but it is hardly an insignificant minority.

Read the whole thing, it isn't long.

I want to clarify that my reservations about AGW do not amount to a wholesale rejection of "the very idea," but are rather a two-fold "hold on a second here."

First. If "follow the money" is a good rule of thumb for journalism, the same goes for the AGW research industry. We must be careful and well informed about who is pulling the strings on high-flying scientific politicking. And we must be soberly aware that a "consensus view" in science can all too easily become a clannish code word for the fallacy "majority = truth".

Second. I think climate science is such a vast and immensely complex branch of inquiry that the words "inherently unpredictable" do not seem out of place. Elaborate modeling, if not scrupulously wedded to a truly collegial "trial by facts," is all too easily an Icarus-like play thing for political ends. Dr. Barr's piece well expresses much of my jovial skepticism vis-à-vis "the global warming thing."

Okay, time for a survey...

This is weird.

I was eating dinner a little while ago, mulling over how I had phrased, or should have phrased, a line or two in a recent post or two. It had to with describing someone unaware of an unpleasant reality. On top of that, I've been on a U2 jag the past few weeks, especially How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and No Line on the Horizon. One of the lines in "A Man and a Woman" (track 7 or so on How To) is, "...you can't be numb for love...." Add to this that I'm about halfway through Konrad Lorenz's challenging and informative Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge, his discussion of the compound layers of perception, reflex, and habituation which synthesize to form human cognition. Altogether, I've got perception and cognition on the brain, even more than usual. (Plus, of course, I had food in my mouth, so there you go all over again.)

So, trying to find "the right word" to describe someone's insensitivity to something unpleasant, but not obtrusively upleasant, I considered "numb to," "blind to," "deaf to," etc. Then, to complete the sensory sweep, I threw in "mute" and... and... I tried to throw in a deficiency word for the nose. But I couldn't! So I thought about it in German and Chinese. A miss and another miss!

So help me out:

skin >> feel <-> numb
ear >> hear <-> deaf
eye >> see <-> blind
mouth >> speak <-> mute
nose >> smell <-> ???

I can't think of a simple term that means "can't smell"--and now that I mention it, I can't find a word for "can't taste" either--and it looks like I'm not the only one. See here and here for the same question, and an apparent answer: anosmia, anosmic, hyposmia, hyposmic. To top it off, here's an FAQ by an anosmic man himself!

I admit that answers my question, but I am still, ?, miffed that the word is a piece of medical jargon. Any child knows how to say "deaf" and "blind" in his mother tongue, and with only a few more years she can say "mute" and "numb." But why should a fairly literate person like me, with a strong interest in cognition and medicine, have no idea how to describe "can't smell" in my mother tongue and two foreign languages I love? This asymmetry signals something important about human perception and our sense of our bodies. Think about it: smell and taste are not only closely connected, but also the only senses in which visible objects of sensation physically enter our bodies. Sure, photons enter our eyes and strike our retinae, and sound waves enter our ear canals and vibrate our auditory fibers, but ancient man had no idea about such 'abstract' stimuli. Smoke, incense, perfume, wine, bread, pepper, farts, lemon juice--all these things and more visibly enter our noses and mouths when we perceive them. Shouldn't that add to the significance of smell and taste, so that language reflects their importance more than the virtual absence of "can't smell/taste" words indicates? It probably goes without saing that we are all pretty sensitive about things physically entering our bodies, so it seems we should give greater attention to the sense that literally bring foreign masses into our own system.

Then again, perhaps the bulky obviousness of smelling and tasting made them seem less myserious than sight and hearing. (As for touch, well, surely sexual titillation and physical pain suffice in any culture to make the skin a most pronounced organ of perception!) Sight seems gives us access to things near and far by an unseen mechanism; much the same goes for hearing. Further, smell and taste are connected with eating and drinking, whereas sight and hearing enable us to enjoy music, dance, and visual art. Perhaps the connection between the senses of satiety--smell and taste--compared to the senses of aesthetics--sight and hearing--demoted the former to houses of the poor, to those trapped in the endless toil of finding enough to eat and live another day, whereas the latter connected people with leisure and luxuries outside the margins of sheer survival. I realize the sense of smell has had some recent popularity, in works like Das Parfum and The Emperor of Scent, but all the same, olfaction is the odd man out on Team Senses.

Since I think we should use as little jargon as possible, unless we're actually using jargon in a principled way, I propose a "common man's" neologism for anosmic and hyposmic: unbescented. Clunky, perhaps, but it boasts a little poetry. So, now you know: if you can't see and can't smell you're blind and unbescented. Of course, this still leaves out "can't taste," which I see is "ageusic" (from ageusia), so I guess my shot in the dark proposal wasn't too far off the mark: agustic (from agustia). I admit ageusia and ageusic sound pretty good, but perhaps agustic and agustia can find a place at the table too.

I'm willing to bet a broad linguistic/anthropological survey would yield at least two results.

One, very, very few languages have a simple word for "being unable to smell/taste," but would have easy words for "being unable to feel/hear/see/say." I suspect Greek and Latin have such words, since anosmia and agustia are Greek and Latin terms, respectively.

Two, any languages that do have "everyday" words for anosmia and ageusia both are closely connected in a language family and correspond to a very different sense of the body than most Western people have.

Let them fall as they may...

Last week I was approached by a man selling, of all things, broom handles. Not brooms, just the handles thereof. I instantly thought of selling spoon handles without spoon heads, but the thought left me as I was brought under his spell.

"I, sir, want you to buy three broom handles from me," he crooned.

"But why do I need broom handles?" I asked. "I have brooms."

"Sounds reasonable enough, but let me put it this way," he crooned anew. Whereupon he took five or six broom handles from his cart, grasped them in two hands as one upright bundle, and then let them fall like giant pick-up sticks. "That, sir, is why you should buy three broom handles from me," he concluded.

"I don't follow," I admitted.

"I shall rephrase my argument," he said, whereupon he gathered the scattered broom handles again to form a standing column. He opened his arms and the sticks fell to the ground akimbo. "As I say, sir, that is why you should make my broom handles yours."

"But you haven't given me any reason," I objected, weakly, afraid I was missing something obvious.

"Ah, but I have, sir," he countered, "for I have sent millions of photons into your retinae, along with soothing auditory undulations through the air into your ear canals, and thereby triggered deterministic responses from you which mean you should buy three of my broom handles."

"But I don't see how that is true at all," I objected, more confidently. "You've given me no argument, no reasoning, as to why I should buy them."

"You say tomayto, I say tomahto," he retorted, with a flick of his fingers. "We all know every action of the human is just an action of the human body, and every action of the human body is just an orchestrated cofiring of millions of synapses and efferent nerve impulses. For all I know, you don't want my broom handles--yet--because you had too little, or maybe too much, coffee for breakfast."

"Look," I set in, "even if I grant that we are deterministic organisms, you have to admit your impulses aren't the right ones to trigger my unfree response to your sales pitch. You should at least try to manipulate the relevant areas of my brain. I'm not determined to respond to falling broom handles."

"So," he replied, "you mean to say you have a good reason for not buying my broom handles?"

"Yes. I don't want to buy them," I answered.

"But that's hardly a good reason, sir, since, as we both know, your desire not to buy them is just a deterministic result of 'what lies beneath'. You think the irrational, deterministic fall of my broom sticks is a bad reason, or no reason at all, for deciding to buy them, yet you claim the equally meaningless, deterministic swirl of neurotransmitters in your brain is a good reason not to buy them. Now I don't follow, sir."

"Clever argument," I began, "but the difference is that I can decide from 'within' my own network of determined responses. My deliberation is an internal factor for my reasoning, but your broom handles are outside the relevantly determined network."

"So now you mean to say the real you, the you I should be trying to convince to buy, is a free-floating eye hovering over all the deterministic synapses in your brain that can freely choose which of them to activate? I thought materialism led away from Descartes's so-called ghost in the machine, not towards it."

"No, what I mean is that whatever my consciousness might be--maybe its in my ventromedial prefrontal cortex, like I remember Steven Pinker said--it is the segment of the deterministic world that you need to work on to get me to buy your broom handles. And I admit they are nice broom handles, don't get me wrong."

"So you mean to say I have a free choice about which part of you I run down? Now I am the free-floating analyst of an otherwise locked-down deterministic world?"

"Well..."

"On top of that, how do you or I even know where you and I begin and end in contrast to the environment that determines us? If your consciousness module--maybe in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, like you say--is determined by surrounding modules for perception and motor activity, and if those modules are determined by everything else causally pressing in on them, then how do you make a distinction between inside and outside? I'm just as essential a causal determinant in your whole make-up as the air, the force of gravity, the strong and weak attractions in your molecules, and so on. That's why I have just as much reason to believe dropping broom handles will win you over. I have no reason to trust the automated output of your brain as an truly rational, deliberate basis for you not buying my goods, and therefore you have no reason not to trust that my broom sticks fall in a way that argues compellingly for buying my broom handles. The propositional content of anything you say is a mere epiphenomenon of the air being emitted from your lungs into my ears. Or do you believe that Platonic strips of meaning are waiting for us to say them in any language at any time--that Meaning In General floats 'somewhere out there' waiting to form grammatical sentences which convey it? Do you really think the immaterial meaning of a sentence can effect its material production? If you do, then why not allow for all kinds of immaterial causation? If you don't, though, why do you think an abstract coherent meaning adds anything at all to the causal efficacy of the things we say and hear? It's not up to you to say what a good reason should be for your decisions, since your reasons for parsing good and bad reasons are just deterministic prejudices and impulsive cognitive blind spots that define 'you' long before you ever had a say about it--not that having a say about it would do much good."

By then I was hankering for a broom to sweep the little man away.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

My neural firing is a purposeless, unreasoning and deterministic as the toppling of broom handles. Why is the former "rational" but the latter is not?

"If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms." -- J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds

"One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the popular scientific philosophy]. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears.... [U]nless Reason is an absolute[,] all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based." -- C. S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?

"If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees." -- C. S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?

"It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" -- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

"...with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" -- Charles Darwin, to William Graham (3 July 1881)

Doing my work for me?

I have been working on a couple largish pieces the last few weeks about naturalism and scientific explanation. Needless to say, I am critical of naturalism as a sound metaphysics for sound science, despite the fact that science is commonly conscripted as "proof" of naturalism. I still intend to post the pieces as time permits, but I do feel my thunder was stolen to some degree by the recent appearance of Alex Rosenberg's essay, "The Disenchanted Guide to Naturalism", to the attention of which I was brought [*] by Dr. Feser's post about it. Why do I feel Rosenberg, an ardent naturalist, stole my thunder against naturalism? Well, he is so blunt and so thorough in his assertions that naturalism necessarily leads to nihilism––a world devoid of any meaning, values, purpose, abstract entation[1], desires, beliefs and so on––that I feel like there's little left for me to say besides, "Thanks and keep the tip!" As Dr. Feser says, "the position Rosenberg rightly takes to follow from naturalism is not only depressing; it is incoherent. Therefore, naturalism is false."

As I hope to show in my upcoming essays, most of naturalism's "nature" is terribly impoverished, anemic even. By exalting nature beyond its dignity as a creature, naturalism ends up honoring nature in the breach, leaving her without both a proper character of her own and any 'supremacy' over man apart from his arbitrary manipulations of her resources. Leeching nature of metaphysics is naturalism's greatest assault on nature. Without finality, for instance, natural laws have no proper connection between cause and effect. Likewise, without essence, there are no fermions and bosons all the way down, as Rosenberg puts it, since such things are either are what they are in essence, and this is discoverable by humans, or they are void of any essential character, in which case they are mere constructivist nomenclators which, as a result, can't be said to define the rest of reality. Rosenberg's précis is rather long, and Dr. Feser's analysis is only as short as it ought to be, but I highly recommend reading both posts in full. For my part, at this juncture, I will only note three oddities, from among many, in Rosenberg's essay. As Dr. Feser's analysis shows, Rosenberg's (or any committed naturalist's) metaphysical problem is trying to have his cake for later and eat it now too.

First example. When Rosenberg says, "What science has discovered about reality can’t be packaged into whodunit narratives about motives and actions. … Our demand for plotted narratives is the greatest obstacle to getting a grip on reality", he does so in a paragraph that tells us a story about the world and man's place in it. Once upon a time, humans believed in purpose, magic, and divine realities, but along came the Light of Science and now humans are free (free, that is, from the illusion that they are free). For good measure, in his best nanny-voice, Rosenberg adds a moral for all you younguns still hankering after narrative coherence: "It’s also what greases the skids down the slippery slope to religion’s 'greatest story ever told.' Scientism helps us see how mistaken the demand for stories instead of theories really is." The End. To Rosenberg's claim that concrete organized complexity could not possibly have come about in any other way than by Darwinian "passive envrionmental filtration," I can only retort that our sense of the world cannot come about in any other way than in a narrative mode. So if the apparent conceptual ineluctability of the former is proof of its truth, then the performative ineluctablity of narrative metaphysics is proof of its truth, in which case the former can't cut against the latter as Rosenberg wants it to do.

[A year or two ago I wrote a lengthy post about the irreducibly aesthetic-narrative nature of human existence, and how this points to God. Cf. [2] below for a key quotation from that post in which Bertrand Russell anticipates Rosenberg's narrative anti-narrativism.]

Second example. In his third paragraph, Rosenberg alludes to the methodological fallibility of science, but then brushes it aside so he can get on with his nihilistic narrative. He says one reason more scientists don't draw radically nihilistic, eliminative conclusions from their research is because "science is fallible and scientists are taught never to be definitive even about their own conclusions; the persistent questions are so broad that no scientist’s research program addresses them directly, and few are prepared to stick their necks out beyond their specialty when they don’t have to." Einstein quipped that the man of science makes a poor philosopher, but at least the way Rosenberg portrays them makes them brilliant thinkers. Scientists aren't prepared to stick their necks out––while Rosenberg is quite willing to stick his neck out and up and then lower his nose––about sweeping metaphysical nihilism most likely because they instinctively grasp how destructive naturalistic nihilism would be for their actual work. You can't very well choose to pursue a new line of research, or persist in an old one, if the cosmos literally has no beliefs, desires, purposes, or wills.

Even so, Rosenberg tries to ride over the main difficulty under a cloak of philosophical synthesis. There is an inverse ratio between scientific certainty and scientific rigor. One of the most cherished aspects of science for "scientismatics" (my term of art for devotees of scientism) is its relentless self-correcting process, especially in contrast to dogmatism, revelation, etc. That being so, it is impossible for a scientismatic––a term which Rosenberg would gleefully embrace for himself––to endorse any reigning scientific account of the world as "the final word," since doing so makes a scientific Weltbild into a dogma or revelation. As such, all the weight Rosenberg et alii put on the account of the world according to current science should literally only be taken ex hypothesi. But then how can a hypothesis ground an entire worldview? Indeed, how can the cosmos as a whole, much less the eternal existence of the cosmos, be ascertained by scientific means? As Stanley Jaki has argued in numerous places, the cosmos, as a single coherent whole, is an object of scientific belief, not a rational deliverance of science itself. Likewise, how does one "test for" causality without assuming it? Or how does one "test for" the law of identity if there are no 'minds' over against brute matter to which that law can appear as "self-evident"? It follows that scientism's ideological security devolves to the quality of its metaphysics, but, alas, since physics is the structure of nature, metaphysics has no place in scientism. Basically, then, Rosenberg wants to subsume metaphysics to sheer science, but he can only do so by a metaphysical inflation of "science as we know it" to "the way the world really is." In any case, the foregoing doesn't even touch the problem, raised so acutely by Dr. Feser in this post et alias, as to what a scientific "theory" can even mean (that word again!) in naturalism.

Third example of Rosenberg's eat-cake-have-cake modus operandi. In the third section of the essay, Rosenberg gingerly piles on against finality, purpose, and design by showing how Darwinian natural selection provides a wholly mechanistic account of organized complexity as "the inevitable result of" the second law of thermodynamics. I first encountered Rosenberg's "a priori Darwinism" (my term of art) reading some lectures he gave at Duke a few years ago about Darwinism as "the only game in town." In this latest essay he espouses the same thing by saying Darwinian natural selection follows deductively (and thus irreformably) from the second law of thermodynamics: "Any explanation of the very existence of even the slightest adaptation must be Darwinian. … [G]iven the 2d law, the only possible source of adaptations in the universe that was originally bereft of them is the process Darwin discovered." A trenchant narrative, to be sure, but how is this any longer science? A scientific theory should be falsifiable, but by saying that Darwinism is a logical necessity, Rosenberg pretty much makes Darwinism an axiom of reason. Are we seriously to believe that Darwin's meticulous pondering over mounds and mounds of biological data, after centuries of similar pondering by great explorers, only resulted in a virtual law of logic? I think Darwin would be nonplussed about the supposed obviousness of his insight.

Why does Rosenberg insist Darwinism is the only possible account of organized complexity? I quote:

Scientism, and for that matter science too, needs an explanation of adaptation in general that starts from the complete absence of any. Otherwise, we have not explained how even the simplest, most minimal sliver of adaptation could have emerged in a world with zero adaptation. Since the process of adaptational evolution is, unlike the basic processes in physics, a one-way past to future process, it can only be driven by the 2d law of thermodynamics, since that is the source of all irreversible processes in the universe.

Leaving aside the historically naive hubris which such an account displays––since the history of science is strewn with the corpses of past "final theories" which turn out to be but limiting cases of some higher law––Rosenberg subtly contradicts his a priori Darwinism with reference, in the first section of the essay, to the "fundamental laws of nature [as] mostly timeless mathematical truths that work just as well backwards as forward…." All the biological and organic design we seem to see in the world is "just the foresightless play of fermions and bosons producing, in us conspiracy-theorists, the illusion of purpose." Moreover, "if physics fixes all the facts, it could not have turned out any other way." By coupling "timeless mathematical laws" to temporal 'design' in a rigorously Darwinian way, however, Rosenberg faces two problems. First, what could "trigger" timeless mathematical laws to instantiate temporal sub-mathematical phenomena? Stephen Hawking and, I believe, John Wheeler noted that, for all their beauty and simplicity, the laws of physics lack the ability to breath life into their own content, to give flight to their amazing idealized designs. As Nancy Cartwright has argued in several places, "natural law" requires a lawgiver, which makes Rosenberg's surprisingly blithe reliance on such a Platonic idea as timeless, immaterial, abstract forms a strong pointer toward an eternal lawgiver.

The second problem is that if, somehow, timeless, mindless, and volitionless mathematical laws could make the real world real, and if the result as we now find it "could not have happened in any other way," then the world as we now see it is also a timeless reality, a mere derivation of those timeless mathematical laws. For the timelessness of the most basic mathematical laws, combined with their mysterious but deterministic 'fruition' in the irreversible world as we know it, entails that the irreversible world is necessarily a function of reversible laws. If that were true, however, the basic laws would not be reversible, since their actual operations necessarily result in irreversible phenomena, and do so in a timelessly (eternally). So, the universe is either the way it is from all time, in which case responsible scientific thinkering succumbs to sheer a priori idealism, or the world could have developed other than it actually did so, and scientismatic necessitarianism is false. So, in turn, is Rosenberg's naturalism false.

[1] Yeah, I just made that word up. Entation. It means the act of something actually existing, or a case thereof. Meh. I like it.

[2] From my post, "The center of the circle…":

Physics has demonstrated time and again the irreducibly specific nature of the material universe, a specificity that shouts contingency. For, anything that is one way specifically could exist another way specifically. And this 'could' is the essence of contingency. The universe demonstrates quantifiable specificity on every level, in every nook and cranny, and this is because it is the farthest thing from an eternal, infinite, homogeneous, undifferentiable, nonspecific pantheistic eternal cosmos. From another perspective, however, the universe is a great light show for children. Are they wrong to see faces in the heavens when physicists are busy seeing the heavens in our faces? (We are all stardust…) Is the poet wrong to see the world as a great symphony of light when the physicist is busy seeing the world as a cacophony of dark matter? Neither one is right or wrong in their proper modes of perception. Only when they impose their aesthetic lens on someone using a different lens, will their be a dispute. Only when the poet tries to strangle the physicist's vision with a glistening portrait of Mother Nature, or the physicists tries to explode the poet's vision with a humming portrait of the unified filed theory, will there be a clash. The thing that unites them is not their specific vision of the cosmos (i.e., how big its circumference is or what its texture is), but their bedrock commitment to the idea that the cosmos has a shape at all. Just as no section of the circle can escape the omnipresent primacy of the invisible center

Consider the Ecclesiastes-like somberness of Bertrand Russell's words in "A Free Man's Worship" (1902):

…even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

There are at least two great ironies here. One is that these words are surely among the more immortal words penned by man, though they are driven by a consuming vision of the mortality of all man's words and works. (Methinks he protests too much!) Art, including beautiful rhetoric, is hoisted as a flag of protest against the futility and finality of the world. Art repudiates doom. Art is created as a lasting sign of the human trace upon the world. So even when it accentuates or, as the case may be, glorifies, the frailty of all human efforts, it is intended to outlast the passing flux and be a lasting marker of the unlasting, an intransigent icon of the transient, a feud with futility. (I explored this topic in my story, "From the Forest Itself", if you care to brave the telling of that tortu(r)ous tale.)

In any case, the second irony in Russell's is what really concerns us. Even by painting such a grim picture of the world, Russell did just that––painted a picture. He took a heap of meaningless debris and formed it into a coherent collage of despair. Even when he said the universe is meaningless, he ascribed to it a total meaning, namely, utter meaninglessness. I could just as easily imagine an artist taking a heap of garbage and calling it "Life". It may strike hard against hope and good cheer, but it still strikes artistically, meaningfully, 'shapefully'. We simply cannot escape giving a larger coherent shape to the world as we experience it, even when we say the world shape is ugly, erratic, and pointless. And this is a crucial inevitability. For to live as creatures that inevitably and automatically give a shape to our experience, is to live as beings inevitably and automatically confronted by the point of origin in the same way every segment of a circle is confronted with its central point. The reason the world inevitably takes on a shape in our eyes, is because the world is radically contingent on God as its shapeless shaper, as the uncreated creator. This, then, is what the cosmological argument is getting at: even if the world seems like bad art (as criticisms of the design argument would have it), it still seems like art, and ineluctably so, because it depends for its existence on God in the same way a circle cannot help but be shaped by its center.

The aim of science is to give a coherent picture of the world. But if science cannot account for its own 'shaping' tendency, it falls to religion to give that ultimate level of order and aesthetic depth to the world. Believing in the universe––an empirical object which we can never observe––is necessary for understanding it and admiring it as one 'piece'. Likewise, believing in the Creator, and beholding the world as one 'piece', is even more crucial for knowing and admiring nature's beauty. Dostoevsky is right: The world will be saved by beauty. The world can only be called 'the world' if it is beheld in the mind's eye as one thing with one ultimate shape. And that shape is nothing other than a shape-transcending abstractness as incense vessel, shining mirror, rocking cradle for the glory of God among us. Just as the specific events in the flux of spacetime all depend on God as their uncaused cause, so the entire structure of the cosmos depends for God as its absolute index of shape.

Huffin' and puffin'...

"CO2 is Not a Pollutant: Debunking a Global-Warming Myth" -- an article by William Happer c/o the Witherspoon Institute

In the wake of the "Climate-gate" controversy, a scientist at Princeton University argues for a sensible view on climate change and CO2.

I believe that the increase of carbon dioxide is not a cause for alarm and, in fact, will be good for mankind. Before I explain, let me state clearly where I probably agree with other writers on the climate issue. We have been in a period of global warming over the past 200 years, but there have been several periods, like the last ten years, when the warming has nearly ceased, and there have even been periods of moderate cooling, as from 1940 to 1970.

Read on.