»ἕως θανάτου ἀγώνισαι περὶ τñς ἀληθείας, καὶ Κύριος ὁ θεὸς πολεμήσει ὑπὲρ σοu.« • »Pro iustitia agonizare pro anima tua, et usque ad mortem certa pro iustitia: et Deus expugnabit pro te inimicos tuos.« (Sir. 4:28/33)
Catholic theology should be as close to fideism as possible––without being Fideism. >>
There must be a crucifixion of the intellect. The dark night of the soul––which includes the darkening of the intellect as the soul's chief power––is not a mystical "privilege" for Carmelites only. It is a necessity internal to the Catholic creed, albeit derivable in varying degrees based on the powers of the respective soul.
Catholic metaphysics should be as close to naturalism as it can get––without being Naturalism. >>
The Catholic thinker must respect the radical––and seemingly complete––autonomy of creation as the Creator's chief creature. The contingency of the world can only make sense, much less have any moral or spiritual "oomph" in the light of faith in the Creator.
Catholic anthropology should be as close to determinism as it can be––without being Determinism. >>
Teleology is just conformity with internal drives, and, as such, determinism is a crippled form of teleological anthropology, not its total antithesis. The key difference between the two views is that the willing of the good is internal to teleological personhood, whereas sheer willing of what is sensibly dominant is the linchpin of deterministic personhood.
Catholic piety should be as close to quietism as possible––without being Quietism. >>
Total abandonment to Providence. Indifference to all things, pleasant and repugnant, in the light of Providence. Prayer before all action and no action devoid of "inner quiet." Silence is the strongest expression of anger, which is why Catholic activism is (and out be) more active than raucous, more plodding than plotting.
Catholic ethics should be as close to deontology as imaginable–-without being Deontological. >>
We are obliged to "follow the rules" but the rules only make sense when heeded in communion with the Ruler. To honor a duty is but to honor a debt (Latin, debere; French devoir)––to give what is due-to Him by and from Whom all things are given. There is no deontology even in purely human terms if there are no human persons and a fortiori there is no deontology––no absolute duty for all––if there are no Persons over all.
I've been riffing on E-Prime lately and thought I should provide a little more perspective before providing the ultimate refutation of it. (I know, I'm citing mostly Wikipedia in this post, but it's better than citing myself, I guess.)
Aparrently, E-Prime was developed by a student of Alfred Korzybski, D. David Bourland, Jr. (1928–2000), who "proposed E-Prime as an addition to Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics some years after Korzybski's death in 1950. Bourland, who had studied under Korzybski, coined the term in a 1965 essay entitled A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime (originally published in the General Semantics Bulletin). The essay quickly generated controversy within the General Semantics field, partly because practitioners of General Semantics sometimes saw Bourland as attacking the verb 'to be' as such, and not just certain usages."
Advocates of General Semantics view it as a form of mental hygiene that enables practitioners to avoid ideational traps built into natural language and "common sense" assumptions, thereby enabling practitioners to think more clearly and effectively. General Semantics thus shares some concerns with psychology but some do not consider it specifically as a therapeutic system, evaluating it as more focused on enhancing the abilities of normal individuals than curing pathology.
Korzybski described the central goal of General Semantics as developing in its practitioners what he called a "consciousness of abstracting," or an awareness of the map/territory distinction and of how information gets deleted/distorted in the linguistic and other representations we use. Korzybski considered sporadic and intellectual understanding of these concepts insufficient, rather that humans achieve full sanity only when the consciousness of abstracting becomes constant and a matter of reflex.
The same Wikientry elaborates on the main features of General Semantics:
Time binding: The human ability to pass information and knowledge between generations at an accelerating rate. Korzybski claimed this to be a unique capacity, separating us from other animals. Animals pass knowledge, but not at an exponential rate, that is to say, each generation of animals does things pretty much in the same way as the previous generation. For example, at one time most human societies were hunter-gatherers, but now more advanced means of food production (growing, raising, or buying) predominate. Excepting some insects (for example, ants), all other animals are still hunter-gatherer species, even though many have existed longer than the human species.
Silence on the objective levels: As 'the word is not the thing it represents,' Korzybski stressed the nonverbal experience of our inner and outer environments. During these periods of training, one would become "outwardly and inwardly silent."
The system advocates a general orientation by extension rather than intension, by relational facts rather than assumed properties, an attitude, regardless of how expressed in words, that, for example, George 'does things that seem foolish to me,' rather than that he is 'a fool.'
The entry then notes the 'ascetical' practice of General Semantics:
Much of General Semantics consists of training techniques and reminders intended to break mental habits that impede dealing with reality. Three of the most important reminders are expressed here by the shorthand "Null-A, Null-I, and Null-E".
Null-A is non-Aristotelianism; General Semantics stresses that two-valued (Aristotelian) logics cannot adequately map the totality of human experience. (See also: Abductive reasoning)
Null-I is non-Identity; General Semantics teaches that no two phenomena can ever be shown identical (if only because they may differ beyond the limits of measurement) and that it makes more sense to say that the seemingly-identical phenomena show "sufficient similarity for the purposes of the analysis we are currently performing".
Null-E is non-Euclideanism; General Semantics reminds us that the space we live in is not adequately described by Euclidean geometry.
The underlying purpose of these reminders is both to adjust our conceptual maps better to the territory of reality and to keep us reminded of the limitations of conceptual maps in general. Non-Aristotelian, in this particular case, refers to the use of non-Aristotelian logic rather than the aforementioned philosophical disagreement. However, Korzybski saw these as linked. The complex nature of the objects we interact with means that reasoning from "essence" or definitions will often lead us astray. This creates uncertainty, which general semantics links to the use of non-Aristotelian logic.
The entry then adds a proviso that "Non-Aristotelianism 'does not attack Aristotle,' and in fact does not necessarily concern the Greek philosopher himself. Within the preface to the first edition of his book Science and Sanity––in 1933––Korzybski wrote the following:
"The system by which the white race lives, suffers, 'prospers', starves, and dies today is not in a strict sense an aristotelian system. Aristotle had far too much of the sense of actualities for that. It represents, however, a system formulated by those who, for nearly two thousand years since Aristotle, have controlled our knowledge and methods of orientations, and who, for purposes of their own, selected what today appears as the worst from Aristotle and the worst from Plato and, with their own additions, imposed this composite system upon us. In this they were greatly aided by the structure of language and psycho-logical habits, which from the primitive down to this very day have affected all of us consciously or unconsciously, and have introduced serious difficulties even in science and in mathematics."
The Wikientry notes in its "Criticisms" section that "Martin Gardner wrote of Korzybski that he 'never tired of knocking over 'Aristotelian' habits of thought, in spite of the fact that what he called Aristotelian was a straw structure which bore almost no resemblance to the thought process of the Greek philosopher.'" It then reminds the reader that "the founder of general semantics originally 'took pains to point out' that Aristotle himself might not agree with any of the habits in question." These points are undocumented, so take them for what you will.
In any case, returning to the article on E-Prime, "Korzybski (1879–1950) had determined that two forms of the verb 'to be'—the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication—had structural problems. For example, the sentence 'The coat is red' has no observer, the sentence "We see the coat as red" (where "we" indicates observers) appears more specific in context as regards light waves and colour as determined by modern science, that is, colour results from a reaction in the human brain." The entry also notes that "Bourland and other advocates also suggest that use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of language that reduces the possibility of misunderstanding and for conflict." (Is that a fact?) The Wikientry then explains that
Alfred Korzybski criticized the use of the verb "to be", and stated that "any proposition containing the word 'is' [or its other conjugations 'are,' be' etc] creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies"[5] However, he also justified the expression he coined — "the map is not the territory" — by saying that "the denial of identification (as in 'is not') has opposite neuro-linguistic effects on the brain from the assertion of identity (as in 'is')." Noam Chomsky, "[r]egarded as the father of modern linguistics",[6] commented on Korzybski's "insight":
Sometimes what we say can be misleading, sometimes not, depending on whether we are careful. If there's anything else [in Korzybski's work], I don't see it. That was the conclusion of my undergrad papers 60 years ago. Reading Korzybski extensively, I couldn't find anything that was not either trivial or false. As for neuro-linguistic effects on the brain, nothing was known when he wrote and very little of that is relevant now.[citation needed]
Many supporters and critics of Korzybski reduced his rather complex system to a simple matter of what he said about the verb 'to be.' His system, however, is based primarily on such terminology as the different 'orders of abstraction,' and formulations such as 'consciousness of abstracting.' It is often said that Korzybski opposed the use of the verb "to be," an unfortunate exaggeration…. He thought that certain uses of the verb "to be", called the "is of identity" and the "is of predication", were faulty in structure, e.g., a statement such as, "Joe is a fool" (said of a person named 'Joe' who has done something that we regard as foolish). In Korzybski's system, one's assessment of Joe belongs to a higher order of abstraction than Joe himself. Korzybski's remedy was to deny identity; in this example, to be continually aware that 'Joe' is not what we call him. We find Joe not in the verbal domain, the world of words, but the nonverbal domain (the two, he said, amount to different orders of abstraction). This was expressed in Korzybski's most famous premise, "the map is not the territory". Note that this premise uses the phrase "is not", a form of "to be"; this and many other examples show that he did not intend to abandon "to be" as such. In fact, he expressly said that there were no structural problems with the verb "to be" when used as an auxiliary verb or when used to state existence or location.
The E-Prime Wikientry notes that "James D. French, a computer programmer at the University of California, Berkeley, summarized ten arguments against E-Prime (in the context of General Semantics)," of which I shall cite only those I find most salient:
The context often ameliorates the possible harmful effects from the use of the is-of-identity and the is-of-predication, so it is not necessary to eliminate all such sentences. For example "George is a Judge" in response to a question of what he does for a living would not be a questionable statement.
To be statements do not only convey identity but also asymmetrical relations ("X is higher than Y"); negation ("A is not B"); location ("Berlin is in Germany"); auxiliary ("I am going to the store") etc., forms which would also have to be sacrificed.
Eliminating to be from English has little effect on eliminating identity. For example, a statement of apparently equal identification, "The silly ban on copula continues" can be made without the copula assuming an identity rather than asserting it, consequently hampering our awareness of it. …
A civilization advances when it can move from the idea of individual trees to that of forest. E-Prime tends to make the expression of higher orders of abstraction more difficult, e.g. a student is more likely to be described in E-Prime as "She attends classes at the university".
In a footnote for the E-Prime Wikientry, I discovered that E. W. Kellogg, in "Speaking in E-Prime: an experimental method for integrating General Semantics into daily life", argues that "if you saw a man, reeking of whisky, stagger down the street and then collapse, you might think (in ordinary English) "He is drunk." In E-Prime one would think instead "He acts drunk," or "He looks drunk," both of which statements obviously coming [sic] closer to an accurate description of the actual experience, and involving [sic] fewer covert assumptions than the English original.". But this is almost certainly incoherent. If "being drunk" is intrinsically unclear, as Kellogg suggests, then what do we mean by "He looks drunk"? It would be like objecting to the claim, "That guy over there is my brother" on the grounds that it's more accurate to say, "That guy over there looks like my brother." If "being drunk" has no content in its own right, how can we predicate "drunk" to the man in Kellogg's example? We would first have to know what "being drunk" is before we could decide "He looks drunk," in the same way that we'd first have to know what "the Eiffel Tower" is before could say "that radio tower looks like the Eiffel Tower."
This seems to be the crucial flaw in Korzybski's system, and with any anti-essentialist metaphysics. Consider the following from the Wikientry on General Semantics:
Korzybski's first book, Manhood of Humanity, published in 1921, introduced the notion of time-binding as the defining distinction between humans and other organisms. There, he used the imagery of dimension to spell out the unique niche humans occupy among organisms. The book became an immediate best-seller, and remained in that status for several years. He rejected explicitly the claim that we could consider a human as either a ‘monstrous hybrid’ of animal with some supernatural or immaterial ‘mind’, ‘soul’, or ‘spirit’, or simply as animal. In his defining of humans in terms of what they do rather than attempting to state what they are, he declared a fundamental revision of the 2,500-year old Western philosophic foundations of science, philosophy, and biology.
Note well, "In his defining of humans in terms of what they do…." This lapse indicates not only that "essence" (and therefore substantial finality) is inescapable for practicing scientists, which Étienne Gilson argues so deftly in From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again, but also that Korzybski's "fundamental revision" of the Aristotelian anthropological legacy was very wide of the mark. Aristotle, after all, discerns essence not in pure definition, but in the very actions of a being. A thing's actions indicate its essence without exhausting it. Conversely, a thing's essence grounds its actions without deterministically forcing them out, on a concrete, existential level. Each action is a reduction of the being's material potency in relation to the perfect (but otherwise idealistically 'inert') finality of its essence. The point is that Aristotle, and classical hylomorphism generally, have always emphasized what creatures do in our grasping of their essence. This is why "If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck…" is a decent Aristotelian tagline. Even the austere definition of, say, a rabbit as "a mammal having two long ears and large hind feet" rests on a kind of act, insofar as the persistent having-of (or, teleological maintenance-of) those ears and feet is but a mode of the rabbit's one act of existence. An entity's natural action for Aristotle is the reduction of potency in the thing's essence, so that we can literally only know a thing's essence in its actions, a topic covered at great length in Gilson's Being and Some Philosophers. This is why in Aristotelian psychology, we only know our mind in the act of intellection, which stands in stark contrast to Descartes' doctrine that we have an immediate intuition of ourselves as an existent res cogitans ("thinking thing") apart from all sensible, material potency. We know ourselves in knowing things beyond ourselves; we don't know ourselves as principally knowing ourselves knowing ourselves.
Considering how prominent Korzybski once was and how pronounced his anti-essentialism is, I am disappointed to find no mention of Korzybski in David Oderberg's Real Essentialism. This is not a criticism of Oderberg, since his book already deals with enough strictly metaphysical and analytical arguments for and against essentialism. I first became aware of Korzybski while reading Walker Percy's Message in the Bottle (as he appears on page 193 and probably elsewhere). Hence, I can understand how Korzybski's anti-essentialism seems more properly to belong in (bio-)semiotics and cognitive neuroscience à la Konrad Lorenz, Jakob von Uexküll, Thomas Sebeok, and Gregory Bateson, as suggested by this essay, "Korzybski and Bateson: paradoxes in 'consciousness of abstracting'" by Corey Anton:
Korzybski's Science and Sanity (1933) discusses at length the non-identification between "words" and the "un-speakable objective level," and he succinctly summarizes his ideas with the pithy one-liner: "Whatever one might say something 'is,' it is not" (p. 409). In this very quotation Korzybski's actual utterance goes against his insights as he states them. By the syntax of the utterance he implies that the words "something" and "it" are not already something said. Korzybski undoubtedly would defend himself and say that this exactly is his point, as he sums it up elsewhere: "It is evident that every time we mistake the object for the event we are making a serious error, and if we further mistake the label for the object, and therefore for the event, our errors become more serious" (Korzybski, 1949, p. 245). Here we again find the same difficulties: he uses the words "object" and "event" to state his insights and thereby is forced to use the very resources that he calls into question.
General Semantics has important links with analytic philosophy and the philosophy of science; it could be characterized without too much distortion as applied analytic philosophy. The influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, and of early operationalists and pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, is particularly clear in the foundational ideas of General Semantics. Korzybski himself acknowledged many of these influences.
Plus, I glanced at small sections in Science and Sanity today and I have to say, it's a damn serious book (over 900 pages). Seeing as it managed to spawn the anti-existentialism of E-Prime, I think there may be a very real place for treating Korzybski's work as a nemesis with a lot of kick left in it as semiotic Thomism gathers momentum in our day.
But enough about Korzybski. This is my blog, damn it! (Er, this looks like my blog!) Now it's time for the ultimate refutation of E-Prime.
In my post yesterday, I joked that E-Prime is racist since it literally discriminates against the "I be, You be, He be, etc." that often shows up in "Black English" (or African American Vernacular English). While writing this post I came across the following corroborating statement in the E-Prime Wikientry: "Changes such as those proposed for E-Prime also might eliminate enough ways to express aspect in African American Vernacular English to prove unworkable if applied indiscriminately and pedantically to such language." (Have a look at the Tense and Aspect section in the Wikientry for Afro-American Vernacular English to see the conflict.) Well, here it is, the demise of E-Prime:
It's a joke, sure, but if you stop to ponder, the place of "be/am" in African American culture is peculiar, to say the least. I don't have the energy or time to do even a partially sufficient analysis, but the question is, "What does it show us about a group of people that "be" becomes a dominant syntactical form?" Is there anything more than just circumstance to the constant emphasis on "be-ing" in Black English? Consider the first line of my favorite book, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
If you haven't read Invisible Man––wait a minute, if you haven't read Invisible Man, stop reading my fluff and get on it!––you'll know that the themes of identity, recognition, and meaningful existence in American society for a black man suffuse the novel. Consider two other titles of African American novels by Richard Wright, a colleague and sometime friend of Ellison: Black Boy and Native Son. The titles are loaded with an implicit "copula", as in, "I am just a black boy," or "He is a real native son."
Now consider Booker T. Washington's opening words in Up From Slavery (1900):
I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time. As nearly as I have been able to learn, I was born near a cross-roads post-office called Hale's Ford, and the year was 1858 or 1859. I do not know the month or the day. The earliest impressions I can now recall are of the plantation and the slave quarters -- the latter being the part of the plantation where the slaves had their cabins.
The second word is a form of the copular be. The recollections after that are hampered by their lack of substance, by their predominantly hazy and phenomenal character. Washington's past is comprised of fragmented appearances which were forced upon him by the dominant racial class, yet he immediately asserts his own existence, his own historcal be-ing.
I don't think an exhaustive examination of African American literature and thought would find a conscious, shockingly frequent use of the copular be, but my hunch is that for black Americans historically, there is something very encouraging about the simple word "be," something simple and solid that feels like it might ground their contested and complex existence in a "white man's land." On the one hand, blacks have long known the insidious power of images as manipulated by the powerholders, and, on the other hand, instinctively resonate with the sheer goodness of existence as the primal gift of the Creator, whose essence is to be. As Ellison wrote, "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." His existence is rendered invisible because it is unwelcome in the phenomenal consciousness of the dominant society. Nonetheless, he says, "I am."
Nor should we forget the immense importance of Christianity in historical black consciousness. Is there not something almost diabolical about a language which is diametrically opposed to God's declaration, "I AM WHO I AM"? Historically, this is the God of black Americans––the God Who Be Who He Be! This is not a trivial consideration, either, when we recall that God's "I AM THAT I AM" is found in Exodus, which has been a foundational source of hope for black slaves and their ancestors. Whereas E-Prime would have us divert only to subjective experiences for the sake of operational precision, perhaps there is something defiant about the preponderance of "be" in Black English. "You're not really a human like us," slaveowners and slave traders often argued, "You just appear to be one. Leave the decision about who is and who is not a real person up to us."
Interestingly, this is the same logic behind pro-choice ideology, which insists that fetuses aren't really human persons, they just look that way. As soon as we grant that "a human fetus is a human person," though, the abortion debate becomes much less "complex." That's why The Is Of Personhood must not be applied to fetuses, lest the moral position of pro-choice advocates be seen for what it is: homicide.
The following are a few citations to go with my recent post on scientism, which meandered into some thoughts about information theory and entropy. The key words in my dialogue were:
It's about the cost of information for any closed system. Information about the system produces a decrease in available energy in that system, which is diverted from it, in the form of entropy, into information that is about the system but emerges from outside it. Information is a new, higher-level energy complex which, you could say, "feeds on" the disorder in that system until an informed judgment is made about the system. Greater information about the system--at a higher level--means greater entropy in that system. Hence, an informationally complete judgment of the whole cosmos--a true theory of everything--would require an informed perspective outside the cosmos. And this perspective would require more energy than is available within the system to make it's judgment into information.
The following citations are leads I want to keep pursuing to see if I'm wildly off-base and then to see if there's any way to develop the idea.
"In information theory, entropy is a measure of the uncertainty associated with a random variable. The term by itself in this context usually refers to the Shannon entropy, which quantifies, in the sense of an expected value, the information contained in a message, usually in units such as bits. …
"…in the view of Jaynes (1957), thermodynamics should be seen as an application of Shannon's information theory: the thermodynamic entropy is interpreted as being an estimate of the amount of further Shannon information needed to define the detailed microscopic state of the system, that remains uncommunicated by a description solely in terms of the macroscopic variables of classical thermodynamics."
"The first law of thermodynamics stated that the energy in a closed system is constant. That means that energy cannot be created or destroyed in such systems, but can only be transformed. The second law states, in effect, that part of that unchangeable reservoir of energy becomes a little less stable every time a transformation takes place. When you pour hot water into cold water, you can't separate it back into a hot and a cold glass of water again (without using a lot more energy). Entropy, meaning "transformation," was the word Claudius later proposed for that lost quantity of usable energy. …
"When it was discovered that heat is a measure of the average motion of a population of molecules, the notion of entropy became linked to the measure of order or disorder in a system. If this linkage of such disparate ideas as "heat," "average motion," and "order of a system" sounds confusing, you have a good idea of how nineteenth-century physicists felt. For a long time, they thought that heat was some kind of invisible fluid that was transferred from one object to another. When it was discovered that heat is way of characterizing a substance in which the molecules were, on the average, moving around faster than the molecules in a "cold" substance, a new way of looking at systems consisting of large numbers of parts (molecules, in this case) came into being. …
"A system with high entropy has a low degree of order. A system with low entropy has a higher degree of order. In a steam engine, you have the heat in one place (the boiler) and it is dissipated into the cold part (the condenser). This is a very orderly (low entropy) system in the sense that anyone can reliably predict in which part of the engine the hot molecules are likely to be found. …
"An unshuffled deck of cards has a lower degree of entropy because energy went into arranging it in an unlikely manner. Less energy is then required to put the deck into a more probable, less orderly, less predictable, more highly entropic state….
"What would happen, Maxwell asked, if you could place a tiny imp at the molecular gate, a demon who didn't contribute energy to the system, but who could open and close the gate between the two sides of the container? Now what if the imp decides to let only the occasional slow-moving, colder molecule pass from the hot to the cold side when it randomly approaches the gate? Taken far enough, this policy could mean that the hot side would get hotter and the cold side would get colder, and entropy would decrease instead of increase without any energy being added to the system!
In 1922, a Hungarian student of physics by the name of Leo Szilard (later to be von Neumann's colleague in the Manhattan project), then in Berlin, finally solved the paradox of Maxwell's demon by demonstrating that the demon does indeed need to contribute energy to the system, but like a good magician the demon does not expend that energy in its most visible activity -- moving the gate -- but in what it knows about the system. The demon is a part of the system, and it has to do some work in order to differentiate the hot and cold molecules at the proper time to open the gate. Simply by obtaining the information about molecules that it needs to know to operate the gate, the demon adds more entropy to the system than it subtracts. …
"If there are only two cases in the population, a single yes or no decision reduces the uncertainty to zero. In a group of four, it takes two decisions to be sure. In a group of trillions, you have to guess a little. When you are making predictions about such large populations, averages based on the overall behavior of the population have to replace precise case-by-case calculations based on the behavior of individual members of the population.
"One of the properties of a statistical average is that it is quite possible for a population to be characterized by an average value that is not held by any particular element of the population. If you have a population consisting of three people, and you know that one is three feet tall, one five feet tall, and one is six feet tall, you have quite precise information about that population, which would enable you to pick out individuals by height. But if all you know is that the average height of the population is four feet, eight inches, you wouldn't know anything useful about any one of the three particular individuals. Whenever a system is represented by an average, some information is necessarily lost, just as two energy states lose a little energy when they are brought into equilibrium. …
"… One of the things Shannon demonstrated in 1948 was that the entropy of a system is represented by the logarithm of possible combinations of states in that system -- which is the same as the number of yes-or-no questions that have to be asked to locate one individual case. Entropy, as it was redefined by Shannon, is the same as the number of binary decisions necessary to identify a specific sequence of symbols. …
"Human bodies can be better understood as complex communication networks than as clockwork-like machines. …"
"Shannon called his measure not only the entropy but also the "uncertainty". I prefer this term because it does not have physical units associated with it. If you correlate information with uncertainty, then you get into deep trouble. …
"Information is the very opposite of randomness! … Information is always a measure of the decrease of uncertainty at a receiver (or molecular machine). If you use this definition, it will clarify all the confusion in the literature. …
"…the typical physicists' muddle about "erasure" in which they set the state of a device to one of several states and call this a "loss of information". But setting a device to one state (no matter what it is) decreases the entropy and increases the information. The main mistake that the physicists make is not having any real working examples. It's entirely theoretical for them. (These people believe that they can beat the Second Law. I would simply ask them to build the perpetual motion machine and run the world power grid from it before making such a claim.) …
"Shannon information is a difference between uncertainties. …"
"Because of noise, after a communication there is always some uncertainty remaining, Hafter and this must be subtracted from the uncertainty before the communication is sent, Hbefore. In combination with the R/H pitfall, this pitfall has lead many authors to conclude that information is randomness."
"A better term to use for measuring the state of a set of symbols is "uncertainty". I take the middle road and say that entropy and uncertainty can be related under the condition when the microstates of the system correspond to symbols, as they do for molecular machines."
"Gödel's theorem may be demonstrated using arguments having an information-theoretic flavor. In such an approach it is possible to argue that if a theorem contains more information than a given set of axioms, then it is impossible for the theorem to be derived from the axioms. In contrast with the traditional proof based on the paradox of the liar, this new viewpoint suggests that the incompleteness phenomenon discovered by Gödel is natural and widespread rather than pathological and unusual. …
"A great many different proofs of Gödel's theorem are now known, and the result is now considered easy to prove and almost obvious: It is equivalent to the unsolvability of the halting problem, or alternatively to the assertion that there is an r.e. (recursively enumerable) set that is not recursive. And it has had no lasting impact on the daily lives of mathematicians or on their working habits; no one loses sleep over it any more.
"Gödel's original proof constructed a paradoxical assertion that is true but not provable within the usual formalizations of number theory. In contrast I would like to measure the power of a set of axioms and rules of inference. … "
Yesterday I wrote a post about the peculiar place of ontology in science, which segued to some riffing on E-Prime, which I concluded is just a form of radical idealism (if not solipsism, now that I mention it). The upshot with regard to one of my ongoing interests at FCA--namely, the interrelations of faith, science, and rationality--is that quantitative (i.e., exact physical) science is incapable of affording, much less debunking, an ontology, since the object of ontology--that which is--eludes quantification qua the modus operandi of exact physical science (EPS). Here I just want to add a few more thoughts to the topic.
Listen to Science defending Itself in E-Prime:
"I am true! I mean, uh, I appear to be true! Dang it, I mean, I seem to have truth on my side based on the endorsements of my top users."
Now listen to Optimus E-Prime defending his mother tongue:
"'Is' is a useless word! Oops, I mean to say that 'is' seems like a useless word. To me, at least."
Now listen to how normal people might ought'n respond:
"Why should I care what seems to be the case coming from people who can't even assert such a seeming-to-be is the case?"
Don't get me wrong. I'm actually fond of E-Prime. (Even though it's racist: why else root out "be" from English if not to squash "I be, He be, You be, We be, etc." in Black English!?) I have found it does force me to clarify my writing. But treating it as an entire guide for life--in the way, for instance, Robert Anton Wilson does--is just E-gregious (rimshot!). You end up sounding, and thus living, like the guy who never wants to step on anybody's toes, who of course ends up being a very irritating, passive-aggressive type. I can hear him now:
"My opinions just express how it seems to me, you know? Not being dogmatic. I consider myself an agnostic, on all things, really. I don't want to say you've got false beliefs. I just think the world seems different to me."
Even without E-Prime, scientific hyper-realism (aka scientism) suffers from serious ontological problems, a deficit which I have written about before. The problem emerges like this:
Local Scientismatic: AMAZING NEW THEORY is a fact. Science has proven it.
Methodological (Sane) Realist: What do you mean by "fact"?
LS: I mean we now know that's actually how the world works, how it has always worked.
MR: So what about the theory it replaced? Didn't the world work that way too, according to scientists?
LS: Well, AMAZING NEW THEORY hasn't replaced the old theory, it's just expanded it. It's still true, but under limiting conditions inside the new theory.
MR: So what if this new theory gets "expanded" someday too? Will it be a description of how the world as a whole really works?
LS: Well, that's just conjecture. We can only rely on the science we have to tell us about reality.
MR: So AMAZING NEW THEORY is a global fact but it might be wrong?
LS: It's the most successful model of BIG SCIENTIFIC PROBLEM we've ever known. Its benefits could be incredible.
MR: I saw a documentary the other night about the fastest car we've ever known, but I don't think that tells us anything ultimately true about the nature of speed, motion, or time. So what bearing does our "best model so far" have on the way the world really is? I'm confused.
LS: Now you're talking metaphysics, which is just games with big words. It's like Robert Pirsig said, "Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food." Science gives us something real, something practical, something meaty, not just words and conjectures.
MR: Okay, but, again, I'm still confused what science really gives us. You said AMAZING NEW THEORY is a fact, but then you said it could be disproven at a moment's notice. So why call it a fact? Why not just call it a breakthrough in scientific discourse, since, after all, it does give scientists a new way of talking?
LS: But the validity of AMAZING NEW THEORY is obvious since it works; it produces real results. I mean, people are suggesting AMAZING NEW THEORY will cut energy costs around the world by 35% in just a few years. That's why science is superior to any other kind of thinking: it creates reliable effects based on clear, repeatable set-up conditions. Let's see philosophy or theology do that sometimes, yeah?
MR: So a scientific theory or model is true as long as it produces effects we can see and which make life more comfortable? How can we say, though, that people were less happy before AMAZING NEW THEORY? Even in ancient, pastoral civilizations, people had vast resources for reducing stress and getting by each day.
LS: Yeah, but that was just shaman tricks and guesswork, religious mumbo jumbo. Nothing systematic or falsifiable about it.
MR: I'm not so sure. After all, descendants of those people today would admit, if they bother to think about it, that the abandonment of the old ways for technology and new forms of thought did spell the end of their civilization. It was a clear outcome for the experiment: abandon the gods and they'll abandon you.
LS: Are you seriously trying to argue that shamans are just as effective or rational as modern scientists?
MR: Not exactly, but what I am wondering is what we mean by "effective" and "rational" with regard to AMAZING NEW THEORY. Who's to say that cutting energy costs by 35% is an obvious good, since it might just be prolonging a system with deeper flaws and which is unsustainable in the long run? The vast majority of humans have lived without technology, and they've done so at a fraction of the energy-bill we have.
LS: But they were so miserable and had such short lifespans.
MR: But that just begs the question. Were they really so miserable? And is a long lifespan an unqualified good? Or to put it another way, is a youngish death intrinsically bad? What if you grew up in and then died in a society which showed you how every part of your life and your body connected with the rest of the world at large and all other people, and, what's more, gave you a serenity about death at any age? Would that really be such an awful world?
LS: I don't see what this has to do with AMAZING NEW THEORY.
MR: Exactly. AMAZING NEW THEORY doesn't explain the value of low energy costs, nor does it explain why we should prolong a system that requires so much energy.
LS: But knowledge for knowledge's sake is inherently good.
MR: I agree, which is why I keep wondering what "knowledge" AMAZING NEW THEORY really provides. You can't defend it as dogma--
LS: Damn right, dogma is for godbots and fascists.
MR: You can't defend it as dogma--as absolutely and always true--so why defend it as true at all?
LS: Okay, fine, I see your point. You want me to say that because AMAZING NEW THEORY is tentative, since it might be falsified--which is what good science requires--, that it's not "really true."
MR: Well, yes, that's my basic worry. You insist AMAZING NEW THEORY is a fact, but I keep wondering what it's a fact about: about the world, which presumably does not change, as it is driven by blind natural forces, or about our speech about the world, which obviously keeps on changing? If it's a fact that "John was in Denny's this afternoon for lunch," I don't see how that can cease to be a fact. I can see how the claim that "Johnny was in Denny's this afternoon for lunch" can be falsified, such as if he told me he went to Chili's, or that I had photographic evidence he was elsewhere, or proof that he didn't actually eat lunch. But the fact of the matter--the logical relations of John, afternoon, lunch, as Wittgenstein might put it--just seems beyond falsification. Unless it were actually false all along, and thus not a fact in the first place.
LS: So you're trying to say that AMAZING NEW THEORY is either a fact or it's a construct?
MR: I'm wondering.
LS: Well, you're just being sophistical. In the meanwhile, normal people like me--as well as the countless poor people who will benefit from AMAZING NEW THEORY--accept the fact (heheh) that there is no way of knowing AMAZING NEW THEORY is not true, so we might as well live like it really is true.
MR: In that case, why keep doing science at all? Why not just call a summit to agree on the most beneficial theories now at-hand (hat tip to Heidegger) and then call a moratorium on science?
LS: But that goes against the whole spirit of science, the love of truth, the desire for wonder!
MR: Wait a minute, now who's talking metaphysics?
LS: Bah. Plus, there are lots of other problems in other fields which we need to tackle.
MR: So you admit AMAZING NEW THEORY is not the whole answer? It's not a final theory?
LS: Not at all. The show must go on, as they say!
MR: So is AMAZING NEW THEORY true or merely a future falsehood being promoted as "truth for our time"?
LS: It's true in its own context, in SCIENTIFIC FIELD, but we need to keep linking all the best theories together till we get to a unified theory. It's asymptotic and I can't deny we'll probably never get all the way there. I think it's just beyond the human mind.
MR: I think you mean that "it"--a comprehensive grasp of the world--is just beyond the human mind relying solely on exact physical science, like AMAZING NEW THEORY. It's a philosophical assumption, not a scientific finding, to say that truth is asymptotic. If we utilized other means of inquiry, we might get a picture beneath the asymptote, so to speak. If AMAZING NEW THEORY, or any other scientific model, is true only in its respective field, then why think that science will give us the truth about the world, and therefore disproofs of non-scientific claims about the world? Science seems to have an inherent humility--a sort of technological apophaticism--built into it, such that, in the very doing of science, you can't say it ever gets at truth as such, only that it worked this time, in this small corner of the world, in such and such terms.
LS: Sorry, but that's just jesuitical bullshit. I say put your money where your mouth is: get in your car, insert the key, and start your car--that's science. Now toss your keys out the window and pray for it to start: that's religion. I might have an ear for your sophistry if you can show me prayer works as consistently as cardiology.
MR: I'm not trying to make this a theological debate, but your argument does raise some interesting ideas. For example, who's to say car keys aren't an answer to a prayer for starting the car? And that cars themselves aren't and answer to our ancestors' prayers for being able to travel faster to help sick people or be with family and friends? Or who's to say that the reason cardiology works so much more "obviously" than prayer is because it deals with a vastly less complex system than prayer?
LS: What do you mean?
MR: Well, cardiology, like any exact science, functions best by excluding "extraneous factors," by honing in on the fewest "essential elements" in a system (like the heart). Prayer, by contrast, is aimed at an entire person, just the brain of which is considered by many to be the most complex dynamic system in the universe. What's more, prayer for any person implicates their entire destiny--their entire "world-line," as we might say in Minkowskian terms--including all people intertwined with their world-knot (as Schopenhauer would put it).
LS: What's your point?
MR: If you tried to apply cardiology to forecasting the weather--meteorology is much more complex than cardiology, which is why it is so much less dependable--, I suspect you'd be disappointed just as much as non-believers are by prayer. The premise of the scientific method is that, if we apply a consistent series of minutely varied conditions to a limited field of operations, we will gradually learn "the way the world really works." Every failed experiment--and don't forget that failure is the bulk of normal science--is like an "unanswered prayer." By "asking nature for such and such a result," a failed experiment indicates that the request does not accord with the principles of the real world, or, you could say, doesn't comply with the "cosmic will." Likewise, some prayers get turned down--though we shouldn't forget either that unknown positive answers to prayer are probably the bulk of the spiritual life--because they don't accord with the real world as governed by God. Unanswered prayers no more comply with the will of God than failed experiments comply with the cosmic order.
LS: You might as well keep going.
MR: Prayer doesn't always work, but neither does experimentation. What must keep working, though, are the prayors and the experimenters. Like good scientists, believers keep praying. A lot of the time, we end up performing the same "experiments" as our ancestors, such as asking for peace rather than comfort, or for courage rather than an easy way out--an atavistic doltishness akin to how every generation of science students must re-enact and rehearse the same milestone experiments of their predecessors. They don't learn anything new by re-enacting the old experiments, but they do become better scientists. Likewise, we don't see "new marvels" in praying for a gracious death, or for the grace to forgive our enemies--these are well-worn paths in the science of the soul--but we do become better people for it.
LS: Yeah, but eventually science will track down the loopholes. It will just keep tightening the scope and finding the right path in novel ways.
MR: But I wonder at what point the tracking of truth will shift from covertly metaphysical to blatantly spiritual.
LS: What are you talking about?
MR: Well, based on what I've read, our most ambitious theory, string theory, requires an experimental "prayer" so grandiose that it's beyond all conceivable human means, for the indefinite future. From what I've heard, the only way to empirically falsify or confirm string theory is with a particle collider the size of the Milky Way.
LS: Bring it, baby!
MR: Best of luck to those wild and crazy guys. But for me the incredible empirical distance between us and string theory--and who knows what even more grandiose theories we will see in the future?--points to the same idea: the more complex the plea is, or, I mean, the more complex the system is, the greater the energy required to effect it. If there's anything to the idea that each human is an infinitely valuable "entity"--and an unfathomably complex microcosm of the whole world in each case--, then even a simple prayer for him or her entails a request of power basically commensurate with the cosmos itself. Presumably, someday, the grandest final theory humans might ever conceive will require so much energy to investigate empirically--in a God-like way--that getting the decisive proof will literally require energy from beyond the cosmos.
LR: Now I think you're just making this stuff up. But go on, keep weaving the dream.
MR: It's about the cost of information for any closed system. Information about the system produces a decrease in available energy in that system, which is diverted from it, in the form of entropy, into information that is about the system but emerges from outside it. Information is a new, higher-level energy complex which, you could say, "feeds on" the disorder in that system until an informed judgment is made about the system. Greater information about the system--at a higher level--means greater entropy in that system. Hence, an informationally complete judgment of the whole cosmos--a true theory of everything--would require an informed perspective outside the cosmos. And this perspective would require more energy than is available within the system to make it's judgment into information.
LS: All I can say is, cut back on the Starbucks, Jesuit.
The problem with a rigorous realism in science is akin to the problem of a carpenter saying that because his hammer works, therefore the universe is fundamentally nail-like or essentially nail-having. Science, like any tool, is only as good as far as it goes. It's also only good for as long as people want to use it, which reminds us how exact physical science (EPS) must be situated in a larger framework of beliefs, values, and ends. Treating EPS as an end in itself is, once more, like a carpenter treating a hammer as an end in itself. "Science is good" only if we clarify what it's good for, which, it must never be forgotten, entails being a lot more open about whom it's good for. I won't get into the economical politics of Big Science in this post, but suffice to say that the modern conception of benign, universal, progressive Science For All is a very delicate historical, ethical, and metaphysical construct. Being a metaphysical project, though, Science For All can't use scientific results as proof for its vision, since the vision itself grounds what counts as significant or positive scientific results. The United States is witnessing a profound shift from being "One Nation Under God" to that of "One Government Under Science," and where it will end up is not a scientific question. This is why sound metaphysics have a vital role in the Science For All project. We still need to have serious discourse about what worldview best accounts for the coherence of Science Itself and which worldview directs its awesome power to the proper ends for the All in the Big Science game. Since it can't even grasp existence and immanent temporality (i.e., the Present Moment), EPS has no way of going against certain metaphysical claims.
Let me close by adding some acronyms I think I'll start using at FCA and in my other writings from here on out. I long ago became dissatisfied with how scientism "frames" (à la George Lakoff) the discourse on science, and thus on "science and religion," by conditioning us to say "science" only in reference to EPS, and thus to discount as "not scientific" any form of reasoning unlike that used in EPS. In the classical and medieval worlds, science (scientia) referred to rational knowledge as such, but over time, natural philosophy came to dominate the semantic role of "science," so that by now people don't think twice about bandying around "science" for what are in fact just discrete practices in the pursuit of scientia. I've addressed this problem before at FCA, but I want to start being more methodical about it. So, from now on, I will use "EPS" to refer to "exact physical science(s)," such as physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc. I will use "scientia" to refer to "rational knowledge" and will use metaphysics for what has also been called natural philosophy.
From a controversy now a few weeks stale, Sean Carroll defines his terms:
I want to start with a hopefully non-controversial statement about what science is. Namely: science deals with empirical reality — with what happens in the world. (I.e. what “is.”)
So why not trade out the finite verb for the participle or noun? This won’t change anything: if a guy says he studies what is living, this is the same as saying he studies life. So let’s make the substitution:
I want to start with a hopefully non-controversial statement about what science is. Namely: science deals with empirical reality — with what happens in the world. (I.e. being).
But it doesn’t take much reflection to know that this is pretty clearly false. What could be more absurd than flipping through scholarly scientific journals in search of an article on being? What great scientist has formulated a law of being? How does one run trials on or test for being?
Maybe it's most prudent for science-minded thinkers to say science is a systematic description of how the things we touch in turn touch the world. That is, science is a program for analyzing how various tools interact with various things we can reach with them. As physicalists--allegedly science's greatest advocates--like to tell us, the world is not "really" scented, or colored, or musical, and so on. All there is are fundamental particles in various attraction-repulsion arrays. As such, the colors and sounds we detect when we deploy various photoelectric and radiometric devices are not "really there," but are just emergent functions of how those devices filter and distort what they touch, in the same way we think the Vietnam Memorial is "smooth" (a property which can be quantified and graded) while a sugar ant crawling along it finds it awfully rough going, or how we detect the "sharpness" (another quantifiable, scalable property) of a pin but a dust mite can crouch in its dull, pitted tip. The Scoville Scale for spicy foods is coherent and mathematically graded, but it measures something ("spicyness") with little if any bearing on reality beyond human interests. If "reality" just is what is most basic, and if vibrating strings are what is currently held to be most basic, can we really say there are atoms? For, to a vibrating super-miniscule string, there can't be any such thing as an atom. Yet, presumably, our own devices demonstrate atoms are real.
What does science tell us about "the universe" (which is itself not a properly empirical object) that does not just tell us about ourselves? And what does this strange conceptual bind tell us about reality? If real knowledge is primarily and ultimately empirical, without any metaphysical grounding or inferences beyond the senses (broadly construed, i.e., including our tool-augmented sensory input), then science actually tells us nothing about the world and Ernst Mach was right after all. If, however, there is a power of insight in the mind which both transcends and really unites with the sensible world, then we have a means of getting past our tools. If the world is truly disclosed in the tools we use to probe it, then, by analogy, the essence of a thing is really present in the means we use to ponder it (i.e., the intellect).
Existence is not quantifiable and therefore not a proper object of science; yet existence is obviously real; therefore, science is not the only, let alone chief, means of knowledge in human discourse. Because existence--"is" per se-- I thought it would be fun to try defining science in E-Prime. According to Robert Anton Wilson in "Toward Understanding E-Prime":
E-PRIME, abolishing all forms of the verb "to be," has its roots in the field of general semantics, as presented by Alfred Korzybski in his 1933 book, Science and Sanity. Korzybski pointed out the pitfalls associated with, and produced by, two usages of "to be": identity and predication. His student D. David Bourland, Jr., observed that even linguistically sensitive people do not seem able to avoid identity and predication uses of "to be" if they continue to use the verb at all. Bourland pioneered in demonstrating that one can indeed write and speak without using any form of "to be," calling this subset of the English language "E-Prime." Many have urged the use of E-Prime in writing scientific and technical papers.
Wilson then invites us to consider "the following paired sets of propositions, in which Standard English alternates with English-Prime (E-Prime):
lA. The electron is a wave. lB. The electron appears as a wave when measured with instrument-l. 2A. The electron is a particle. 2B. The electron appears as a particle when measured with instrument-2. 3A. John is lethargic and unhappy. 3B. John appears lethargic and unhappy in the office. 4A. John is bright and cheerful. 4B. John appears bright and cheerful on holiday at the beach. 5A. This is the knife the first man used to stab the second man. 5B. The first man appeared to stab the second man with what looked like a knife to me. 6A. The car involved in the hit-and-run accident was a blue Ford. 6B. In memory, I think I recall the car involved in the hit-and-run accident as a blue Ford. 7A. This is a fascist idea. 7B. This seems like a fascist idea to me. 8A. Beethoven is better than Mozart. 8B. In my present mixed state of musical education and ignorance, Beethoven seems better to me than Mozart. 9A. That is a sexist movie. 9B. That seems like a sexist movie to me. 10A. The fetus is a person. 10B. In my system of metaphysics, I classify the fetus as a person.
Wilson then argues that the "A"-type statements (Standard English) "all implicitly or explicitly assume the medieval view called 'Aristotelian essentialism' or 'naive realism.' In other words, they assume a world made up of block-like entities with indwelling 'essences' or spooks- 'ghosts in the machine.'" By contrast, he says, "The 'B'-type statements (E-Prime) recast these sentences into a form isomorphic to modern science by first abolishing the 'is' of Aristotelian essence and then reformulating each observation in terms of signals received and interpreted by a body (or instrument) moving in space-time" (emphasis added). Wilson then makes an interesting defense of E-Prime, by saying, "Relativity, quantum mechanics, large sections of general physics, perception psychology, sociology, linguistics, modern math, anthropology, ethology, and several other sciences make perfect sense when put into the software of E-Prime. Each of these sciences generates paradoxes, some bordering on 'nonsense' or 'gibberish,' if you try to translate them back into the software of Standard English."
I will not elaborate on how grossly Wilson mischaracterizes Aristotelian essentialism, as if essences were "ghosts." Rather I will return to the portion of Wilson's comments above which I italicized. Despite the arguable semantic advantages E-Prime bestows upon its users, it, along with the de-ontologized scientism undergirding it, is a Pyrrhic victory. (Oops, not "is" a Pyhrric victory but "seems to," uh, "seems to exist-as-such".) Wilson admits that language "isomorphic to modern science" reduces to "signals received and interpreted by a body (or instrument) moving in space-time." In doing so, he forfeits the realism for which modern science strives. Wilson's signal-theory of scientific discourse unhinges it from "reality" (and indeed, Wilson denies reality is anything more than a function of social language programming, but that's a different topic) and plainly shows the operationalist face of science. I refer the reader to an older post of mine about Gordon Clark's operationist critique of science, "Science proves...".
In any case, here's a possible definition of science in E-Prime:
"Science describes how various pieces of equipment, in the hands of various users, react to unknown objects in what many people call 'the natural world.'"
(I admit that definition of science is not as sexy as scientismatics want it to be, but at least it's got humility on its side. Maybe all scientific reports should convert to using E-Prime, after all!)
The point is that if modern science is just a series of signals modulated by our tools, then it's hollow to boast about how "science" consistently and progressively "shows us reality" as opposed to how "religion" consistently blinds us with "socially conditioned fictions" and "linguistic confusion." By its very nature, an anti-essentialist theory of science denies it has access to what is, and therefore its depiction of reality is in fact just a presentation of its own signals--indeed, signals about signals, coming from who knows what.
E-Primers try to salvage existence by replacing "is" with "exists" or "seems," but the two replacements coalesce into the same vacuous placeholder for what normal language comfortably recognizes to be or not to be the case. What does "existence" mean in E-Prime? It can't mean "that which is" or "being," so presumably it means "appearing to an observer." In that case, however, the idealism of E-Prime is (er, seems) manifest. If a thing's be-ing is just a function of a thing's being-perceived-to-exist, and if a thing's existence is just it's being-perceived-to-seem, then E-Prime is the rankest idealism, along with any science based on the same semantic logic.
Interesting thread spooling out at Dr. Feser's blog under the Fr. Davies lecture (on the New Atheism) posted there.
The main topic has now become how to reconcile--or not?--the savage pre-history of the Earth, as described by evolutionary biology, with the claim that God created the world good. For if animal suffering, predation, and death precede the rise of humans, it seems the account in Genesis about evil occuring after the Fall of Adam, is either totally false or in need of serious qualifications. The following is the anonymous post which set the ball rolling along these lines:
Do theistic evolutionists such as Davies and many other Catholics believe that violent predation, parasitism, mass extinction, and other forms of animal suffering were part and parcel of God's "good" creation for billions upon billions of years, long before humans beings ever emerged on Earth to spoil creation via an exercise of their free will, as Genesis is typically taken to be saying? Fossils and other data obtained from archeology do seem to indicate this.
If so, I'm having a great deal of trouble believing that this world is the product of the infinite, inner dance of love of the triune God. On the one hand, we have this exquisite conception of God, yet, on the other hand, we have death, pain, and suffering occurring on vast, unimaginable scales. One view of the world is so overwhelmingly beautiful, the other is so overwhelmingly disgusting. My strong intuition is that these things - violent predation, extinction, parasitism, etc. - can have nothing whatsoever to do with the infinite goodness and love of God as described by Christian theology, but if so, here's the rub: How could such a God will anything but infinite goodness and love, since it is his essence? More specifically, since there would have been absolutely nothing hindering him from willing his essence infinitely at the outset of creation, why all the pain and death before the emergence of human beings? Or was there creaturely free will prior to humanity? Was there some sort of "angelic" fall which ultimately led to Lucifer and his ilk spoiling creation? In the end, I just don't know.
What I do know is that this is the only question that poses a challenge to my Christian faith, and that I'm surprised by the lack of thoughtful responses to this question.
Heady stuff and very much to the point.
The two main lines of response have been either that evolution is wrong or that animal suffering is not really "suffering" (or evil). I am inclined to the latter opinion, but I ultimately want to show how a deeper understanding of the dogma of Creation dissolves some of the tension. As I said in that thread:
As for natural evil and evolution, I think this thread needs a good dose of Fr. Keefe's eucharistic theology. According to Revelation, Creation is IN CHRIST and Christ is in the world IN THE EUCHARIST. The world of natural evolution is not "the real world," as some neutral canvas onto which the Incarnation was (much less eventually) spilled, but, in fact, the opposite is true: the Incarnation is the axis of creation and the Eucharist is the axis of redemption as a matter of spacetime reality. Cf. Scotus, St. Francis de Sales, and T. F. Torrance, et al. God willed to redeem the very world which seems unsightly to us in the very agency of His Son made manifest in the Eucharist in the eternal now. God did not will to undo or reverse the rough draft of evolved contingency as science describes it, but in fact to suspend that same order from the self-giving of His Son in the One Flesh at Calvary and at every Mass.
Even so, it must be asked: Is an African mantis "evil" for catching and consuming a field mouse? I should say not. To say it is "evil" or that the mouse's demise is "immoral," is grossly anthropomorphic. We might just as easily lament the death of a ripe gourd when it falls to the ground and ruptures. Animal suffering is a very slippery notion, and while I hardly wish to come off as a "clockwork Cartesian", I think the likes of Peter Singer's animal moralism is at the exact opposite extreme, and therefore just as untrue. A metaphorical hint of the good order, despite its mortal finitude, may be seen in the way certain Native Americans thanked the animals for their sacrifice of life to the nourishment of brother-man. Decomposition and change are integral to corporeality as we know it (and to art, for that matter), but I should say this hardly raises a moral objection to material finitude as such.
Not too surprisingly, this did not get a response from other readers (so far), so I added a few links to add fresh blood to the discussion:
To reiterate what I said about a "Keefian" reading of this dilemma, I would like to say again that "the good creation" is IN CHRIST and is to be judged by its pristine metaphysical origin in Him as the Creative Word, not on the basis of how much animal pain allegedly "preceded" Him. His immanence in the world suffuses all spacetime and is radically and wholly present in the Eucharist, which is itself the human mode of encountering creation, which is an eternally present act of the One God by the One Word in the One Flesh. The Triune Creator God is the same Triune God worshipped and received in the Eucharist. Christ was not "deployed" after a few million years to "rectify" the "horrors" God was "watching take place." Rather, the animal pain and entropy we are discussing is inscribed in the very Flesh of the Incarnate Word IN THE PRESENT IN EVERY EUCHARIST (which is of course one with Calvary AND with the descent of the Creative Spirit on a chaotic material world). His redemption informs the very world out of which, presumably, His earthly lineage/linemanets evolved, but at the same time, His divine power as the Logos grounds both the creation and redemption of that same world in one act of the One Flesh. That's awfully dense, I know, but, again, you can search my blog (Keefe, Keefian) for more details and, better yet, read Fr. Keefe's Covenantal Theology.
Another reader then asked two questions about specific problems in theistic evolution, to which I replied:
Without, alas, replying to your questions specifically or in any great detail, I want to present once more my Keefian-patristic "hermeutical" lens for all such questions. If we (all) don't get clear on our basic theological modus operandi, we're just talking past each other. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that…” heheh
The profoundest meaning of creation in Christian revelation is not that it is an autonomous canvas on which God creates the rest of the world (like an eternal chessboard with movable and interchangeable pieces), but that the Fall was a metaphysical dimension of the creation itself by the primal free defection of Adam, as the metaphysical prime analogate for all mankind (mankind which is, in turn, the microcosmal prime analogate of creation itself). Adam's nature was based on and active IN CHRIST and his sin was therefore against the Logos in the one creation wrought by that same Word. Original sin means that the same metaphysical, and therefore transtemporal, loss of beatitude is active in us in our very constitution, which is also rooted in Christ and thus also an (Adamic) deviation from Him. Hence, original sin is not so much a bill of goods we all sign when we are born, but more like a harmonic/holographic defect in our constitution which reverberates throughout our being and the rest of the world into/out-of which we are created.
The point is that the metaphysical order of Adam-in-Christ determines, in an omnitemporal, universal way, the whole scope of manifest activities in creation (i.e., the concrete horrors and woes we are discussing). You could loosely imagine the problem as being 'metaphysically retroactive', in the sense that Adam's corruption of creation, as its head, extended 'backward' from a metaphysical vantage/pivot point to corrupt all of creation in a secondarily temporal way. In the fundamentalist conception, Adam was created at time t1, fell at time t2, and then everything went to shit as we now know it (t2+n). But a theology cognizant of real archeology and basic biological exigencies (the like of which we are discussing), is enabled to see how the ugly pre-history of the world is a reflection of the immanent (not subsequent!) fallenness of creation in Adam-in-Christ. This does not mean that the Church waited for science to give it a sounder exegesis, but it does mean certain exegeses are much less viable insofar as theology seeks the harmony of all truth. Indeed, in a way, it took various sciences this long to catch up with the patristic, cosmic exegesis of creation, but that is a historical point. The philosophical-theological point of interest is that “the world as we know it”, in its temporal and biological lineaments, is but a function of the world as created in Christ and then corrupted by Adam in a timeless metaphysical ‘instant’. Had Adam not fallen ab origine (metaphysically, not temporally speaking), biological pre-history would indeed look like we seem to want it to look: idyllic and vegan. Since Adam’s fall reverberates in a (rectilinear) metaphysical way for all of creation, however, life history looks much more, well, fallen. This is not to collapse creation into redemption, but it is to find them both rooted in Christ and the primal “encounter” between mankind in Adam and Christ in Adam.
As you may know, I have written a fair share about Fr. Donald Keefe's Covenantal Theology over the years at FCA. If you'd like to read more, you can look at these search results for Keefe and Keefian in my archives here.
