Not Even Remotely Scientific Behaviour !

'whether it ought to be conceded that the Holy Spirit could be increased in man [that is] whether more or less [of it] could be had or given’

Peter Lombard

'For whether it commences from zero degree or from some [finite] degree, every latitude, as long as it is terminated at some finite degree, and as long as it is acquired or lost uniformly, will correspond to its mean degree [of velocity]. Thus the moving body, acquiring or losing this latitude uniformly during some assigned period of time, will traverse a distance exactly equal to what it would traverse in an equal period of time if it were moved uniformly at its mean degree [of velocity].'

William of Heytesbury

I was amused to see Richard Carrier’s horrified reaction to the suggestion that Thierry of Chartres’s commentary on Genesis had anything to do with science. For Carrier, Thierry’s effort - which attempted to set out the creation of the world using Platonism and Aristotelian logic – ‘isn't even remotely scientific behaviour’ and ‘almost in every way exactly the opposite of doing science’. In fact it is so the antithesis of science it even confirms Jim ‘no beliefs’ Walker’s graph of ‘scientific advancement’ which depicts the Christians of the early to high Middle Ages as a bunch of indolent, sub-literate, bible bashers.

This is to miss the point by a couple of million light years. What we recognise today as modern science did not exist in antiquity and the Middle Ages. What did exist were inherited beliefs about nature; theories concerning the origins and structure of the cosmos; speculations about the motions of celestial bodies, the nature of elements, diseases and health and explanations of natural phenomena. These were the ingredients which would eventually develop into modern science.

Furthermore, the natural philosophers of this period were not like modern scientists, though we are often guilty of projecting our worldview onto theirs. Their explanation of the natural world was inseparable from their philosophical views, their religious beliefs and their theological assumptions. The full historical picture is therefore highly complex because science, philosophy and theology are so inextricably entwined. If we want to understand it, we can’t simply go back through the past giving ‘gold stars’ to those who conform to our expectations and red lining those who don’t. It is true that if you submitted Thierry of Chartres's Hexameral treatise to the scientific journal ‘Nature’ today it would doubtless be dismissed as ‘hand-waving’ and ‘kookery’; but in the context of the early Middle Ages these commentaries provided a framework and a context in which natural philosophy could be done and they undeniably furthered the study of the natural world.

Another good example from the Middle Ages is what we would today recognise as the science of the kinematics (dynamics, or causes) of motion. As documented by Edward Grant in ‘The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages’, this actually seems to have developed out of a purely theological speculation made a couple of centuries earlier. In the middle of the Twelfth century, the theologian Peter Lombard asked a question about how grace or charity could be increased in a person. Could a person become more filled with grace or more charitable?, or as Peter put it ‘whether it ought to be conceded that the Holy Spirit could be incread in man [that is] whether more or less [of it] could be had or given’. His answer was that, since grace and charity are gifts of the Holy Spirit, they are absolute quantities and cannot vary. This means that when a person becomes more charitable it is only because of his participation in absolute charity.

All theologians who wanted to get a degree in theology had to write a commentary on Peter Lombard 'Sentences' and this meant addressing this question. One commentary posed an alternate answer which disagreed with Peter Lombard’s original conclusion, one proposed by the Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus (John the Scot; Scot in this case meaning Irishman). Scotus was born around 1265 and died in 1308. His argument was that charity could be added incrementally; in fact every quality in a person could be added or diminished incrementally. This idea would come to be known as the notion of the intention and remission of quality. After this was proposed it came to be applied to Aristotelian notions of quality, but also to motions of place.

Aristotle had said that there were three kinds of motion. Motion of place, from point A to point B. Motion of quantity, when the quantity of something changes; and motion of quality, for example when an apple turns from green to red. Once the notion of intention and remission had been applied to notions of quality (the amount of grace or charity in a person) it could also be applied to motions of place; or in other words an object moving from a to b or moving with increasing speed. This meant that speed could count as a ‘quality’ and we can therefore add speed with conceptual validity. As time went on, the scholastics who debated this point became less and less interested in the theological and ontological aspects and more interested in the mathematical aspects of qualitative change.

In 1330 a group we have touched on before called the Oxford calculators began to use the intention of remission of qualities to talk about local motion. Three of these are William of Heytesbury (who according to Carrier, failed to ‘[advance] the sciences in any important way’ so best not bother reading about him), John Dumbleton and Richard Swineshead. These were all scholars at Merton College Oxford. They defined for the first time, notions of uniform velocity, uniform acceleration and they tried to get a handle on the notion of instantaneous velocity (velocity at one given instant during an acceleration. Uniform velocity was defined as the traversal of equal distances and equal instances of time and that uniform acceleration was the addition of equal increments of velocity added in equal intervals of time. This is pretty much the modern definition, except expressed in a slightly different way.

They also devised the mean speed theorem (which according to Carrier’s definition is a ‘renaissance’ invention; and in any case, it wasn’t used properly until the scientific revolution when some Gibbon-eque ‘scientific values’ mysteriously permeated society and ousted the faithheads; in any case Archimedes probably came up with it, we just don’t have the evidence yet and arguments from silence are invalid etc etc..).

The mean speed theorem goes something like this. Assuming that there is uniformly accelerating motion (a body going from zero to say 60 miles an hour) a body will travel the same distance in the same time as another body moving at a constant velocity which is the mean between the starting velocity and the final velocity of the first object. In other words, if we have an object that is starting at a speed of zero and it goes to a speed of eight, it will traverse in a given interval of time in the same space as a body moving with a velocity the mean between zero and eight (four). William of Heytesbury’s version from ‘Rules for solving sophisms’ goes as follows:

“For whether it commences from zero degree or from some [finite] degree, every latitude, as long as it is terminated at some finite degree, and as long as it is acquired or lost uniformly, will correspond to its mean degree [of velocity]. Thus the moving body, acquiring or losing this latitude uniformly during some assigned period of time, will traverse a distance exactly equal to what it would traverse in an equal period of time if it were moved uniformly at its mean degree [of velocity].”

Why is this at all important? Firstly this set the foundations for kinematic motion. The truth of the mean speed theorem was proven geometrically by (among others in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) Nicole Oresme in 1350 and Oresme’s proof, which appeared in ‘On the Configurations of Qualities and Motions’, was well known thereafter. This was significant because as God’s Philosopher’s shows, Oresme’s proof of the mean speed theorem appeared 300 years later in 1638 as the fundamental axiom of the new science of motion in Galileo’s ‘Two New Sciences’. Part of Galileo’s work is therefore rooted in the work of the Oxford Calculators, who in turn were dependent upon the result of an obscure theological question, first propounded by a ‘woo merchant’ called Peter Lombard in the middle of the twelfth century. This example shows us how enormously far a succession of ideas can move and develop from their original source. An enquiry about the nature of the Holy Spirit, grace and charity eventually contributed to a fundamental axiom of kinematics.

We therefore need to take an extremely wide view when reading the history of science. You cannot simply go through intellectual history, isolating things we recognise as scientific. If you do that, you completely miss the historical context and the causation behind things. You miss an enormous amount of the influences that come in and originate from what we would today segregate as non scientific activity. Sure, it might be 'not even remotely scientific behaviour'; but so what?; appearances can be deceptive.

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Return of the Dark Ages

In the latest round of the historical feud between Mike Flynn and Jim 'No beliefs' Walker, Richard Carrier has waded into the fray with a recent blog post 'Flynn's Pile of Boners'. It makes essentially the same argument as Jim Walker did (although whilst calling his commentary 'wildly erroneous' and trying to distance himself from him) and puts forward a sort of a 'thinking man's Christian Dark Ages'. Although this exchange has involved some 'face palm' moments, I am pleased to see that Jim Walker has at least gone from this:

To this:

Ok, it's not much of an improvement, but at least his presentation skills are improving.

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Contexting

Here's another book series that looks fascinating and yet disappointing: Cambridge Philosophical Texts in Context. The idea is to collect together in one volume various (shorter) texts that led up to or resulted from a seminal work in philosophy. I think it's a wonderful idea; it would really whet one's appetite to dive into a particular work.

That's the good news. The bad news is that they've only published two books so far, the last one appearing ten years ago. They have volumes on Descartes' Meditations and Berkeley's Principles and Dialogues. I have the Descartes volume, and the only other book listed as forthcoming is on Kant's Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals, but it hasn't come out yet. I was so disappointed when I saw this. I'd love to see a volume for Husserl's Logical Investigations.


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Yes Virginia, there are flat-earthers

There are some good essays online on the flat earth myth -- the belief that people thought the earth was flat prior to Columbus. I recently linked to this post by M&M, here's another, and here's one James wrote. Humphrey wrote a couple of excellent blogposts on it here and here. The go-to book for all of this is Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians by Jeffrey Burton Russell (you can read a short essay by Russell here) who traces the myth to about 1830 when Washington Irving wrote his "history" of Columbus.

Rather than add to what they wrote, I'd like to address a parallel issue. Once non-Christians started ridiculing Christianity as promoting a flat earth, some Christians sought to defend their faith by ... accepting a flat earth. The most prominent defender, in the mid-19th century, was Samuel Rowbotham, who wrote the book Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe. Rowbotham compiled dozens of evidences supporting his claim that the earth was flat and stationary, such as lighthouses that could be seen from further away than they should if the surface is curved, cannonballs fired straight up from moving platforms (demonstrating that the earth is not moving), etc. To this day there is a flat-earth society which defends this kind of thing. Here is a list of flat-earth literature available to read online. A list of resources by and about flat-earthers is here.

I collect flat-earth literature. It seems to me to be an extreme example of Christians reacting to the conflict myth by letting secularists tell them what to believe, another example being contemporary defenses of geocentrism, something which has gained support among young-earth creationists.

That leads me to my main point: I think young-earth creationism is another example of Christians letting secularists define Christian belief. I don't think it's on the same level as belief in a flat-earth for the simple reason that, throughout history, many of the holiest Christians believed the earth and universe to be young. Nevertheless, the history of young-earth creationism in the last 50 years reveals it to be a reaction rather than a reasoned response, in a very similar fashion as belief in a flat earth was a reaction against the forces of secularism. I submit that this is not an appropriate way for a Christian to act. You can't love the Lord with all your mind if your theology is based on knee-jerk reactions. Moreover, it leads to two deplorable situations: first, as I've already mentioned, where the dictates of one's faith are actually made up by people trying to mock it. As I've mentioned before, I don't think it's wise to let those who deprecate our faith define it for us. Second, it creates a rather large stumbling block for belief in Christianity. If that's what you have to believe in order to be a Christian, then it just obviously fails the smell test.

There are plenty of parallels between young-earth and flat-earth literature. Both make their claim the linchpin to orthodoxy, so that disagreeing with them leads to the denial of central doctrines. Both locate the problems of contemporary society in the rejection of their claim. Both claim that the denial of their claim makes God into an incompetent Creator. Both claim that the denial of their claim is a purely recent phenomenon. Both explicate their claim via bluster and a feigned over-confidence. Etc.

To illustrate that last point, I have a flat-earth book entitled A Reparation: Universal Gravitation a Universal Fake by C. S. DeFord, originally published in 1931, that begins thus:

To me truth is precious. I love it. I embrace it at every opportunity. I do not stop to inquire, Is it popular? ere I embrace it. I inquire only, Is it truth? If my judgment is convinced my conscience approves and my will enforces my acceptance. I want truth for truth's sake, and not for the applaud or approval of men. I would not reject truth because it is unpopular, nor accept error because it is popular. I should rather be right and stand alone than to run with the multitude and be wrong.

Methinks he doth protest too much.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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Dude, stop digging

OK, remember that post by Michael Flynn refuting one of the more inane atheist websites? Someone told them about it, and they tried to write a rebuttal. You'll think I'm joking, but they actually claim that Flynn's list of references doesn't count because you can't read them online. "This is the world of the internet and Flynn provided no links for his readers to check his sources. They just have to believe that he got his information correct." Well, either that or, you know, read the books.

Fortunately, we're not left to our own resources in debunking their deep learning because Flynn has done it for us. Here's part 1 and part 2. Flynn's also blogging at the TOF Spot so you can read the same posts there as well (part 1; part 2).

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Hollywood pantheism

Here's an interesting review of the SF movie Avatar. It suggests that the religion of the natives is pantheism, "Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now". The review reminds me of something C. S. Lewis wrote in Miracles:

Men are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract and negative deity to the living God. I do not wonder. Here lies the deepest tap-root of Pantheism and of the objection to traditional imagery. It was hated not, at bottom, because it pictured Him as man but because it pictured Him as king, or even as warrior. The Pantheist's God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at His glance. ... And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back -- I would have done so myself if I could -- and proceed no further with Christianity. An "impersonal God" -- well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads -- better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap -- best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband -- that is quite another matter.

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Quote of the Day

"Any comparison of Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 to pagan divine birth stories leads to the conclusion that the Gospel stories cannot be explained simply on the basis of such comparisons. ... For what we find in Matthew and Luke is not the story of ... a divine being descending to earth and, in the guise of a man, mating with a human woman, but rather the story of miraculous conception without the aid of any man, divine or otherwise. As such, this story is without precedent either in Jewish or pagan literature."

Ben Witherington III
"Birth of Jesus"
Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels



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Continental

In the comments to a few posts I've pointed out that while my sympathies definitely lie with Analytic philosophy, I've developed an appreciation for Continental philosophy. It seems to me to leave far too much room for speculation, and thus of determining one's conclusions in advance, but nevertheless I think it has some value. If you have a high view of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, like I do, you simply can't ignore it.

Despite having a strong atheist history, in the last few decades Continental philosophy has taken a rather significant religious turn. It seems that despite their best efforts to avoid God (on their own terms) he just kept popping up. The significance of this was brought home to me recently when I looked through the titles in a series by Fordham University Press, called Perspectives in Continental Philosophy. I was led to it because I own volume 45, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy, a collection of essays by William Desmond (I quoted one of them here for anyone who's interested). What struck me was how many of the titles in this series are explicitly about religion. Here are a few of the books that look most interesting to me at a brief glance:

After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy
Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger: An Ontological Encounter
Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity
Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology
Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida
Overcoming Onto-theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith
Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate
The Question of Christian Philosophy Today
Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy
Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology

Again, this is just a handful of the religious titles in this series -- a series not about Continental philosophy and religion, but just Continental philosophy. However, you should probably take all of this with a grain of salt since Fordham University is a traditionally Catholic school.

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The Naturalists

I have sometimes been told that belief in naturalism -- i.e. that the natural world is all that exists and there is thus no supernatural -- has an inverse relationship with how close the individual is with the hard sciences. In particular, I've heard that physicists are rarely naturalists, chemists slightly more frequently, biologists more, and then when you get into the social sciences and philosophy, naturalism and even anti-religious sentiments often play a large role.

I classify physics as the harder science because it is presupposed by the other levels, although they aren't necessarily reducible to it. You can have physics without chemistry, but you can't have chemistry without physics. Similarly, you can have chemistry without biology, but you can't have biology without chemistry. Of course, biology is still a hard science. But when you get to that level, there is more room for speculation, and so more ways to avoid conclusions one is not predisposed to. But this may all be false, because when you go another level harder from physics, you get to particle physics which strikes me as very speculative.

At any rate, I have often been told that there are many physicists who draw religious conclusions from their studies. Freeman Dyson is one. Paul Davies is another. And the further you go from physics, the less prone a scientist is to see "something going on behind the scenes." If you know of any studies confirming or refuting this, please let me know. I'm interested.

I recently, and surprisingly, found the exact same sentiment expressed in a philosophy book published almost 90 years ago in 1922. The book is Matter and Spirit by James Bissett Pratt. On page 158 he writes the following:

...it is interesting to note that the demand for the absolute universality of physical laws comes, as a rule, not from the physicists, not from the chemists, but from a small number of biologists, a larger number of psychologists, and most of all from the naturalistic school of the philosophers. The mechanistic philosophers are much more royalist than their king, and the demand for the universal sway of the mechanical seems to vary directly with the square of the distance from headquarters.

If this was correct 90 years ago, and is still correct today, it's an interesting point. Those who are face to face with nature think it testifies to something beyond itself, while those who deny this tend to be those furthest removed from it. But of course this observation may be incorrect. I'm just a philosopher myself, after all.

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Craig vs. Spong

I recently listened to a debate between William Lane Craig and John Shelby Spong on the historical Jesus (this was an actual debate, unlike the presentation and response Craig had with Dennett). You can listen to it here. Craig argued that Spong is so insulated that he doesn't know what scholars outside of his small circle actually say. He points out that a survey of NT scholarship of the last few decades indicates that three-fourths of the scholars writing on the subject accept the historicity of Jesus' empty tomb, and almost universally accept his post-mortem appearances as historically demonstrable. Moreover, most scholars today recognize that the four gospels are written as historical writing, specifically in the genre of ancient biography -- not myth, not legend, not allegory, not midrash (as Spong claims). Spong seems genuinely puzzled by this. It reminds me of something N. T. Wright wrote of Spong in Who Was Jesus?

What is central is that Spong apparently does not know what 'midrash' actually is. The 'genre' of writing to which he makes such confident appeal is nothing at all like he says it is. There is such a thing as 'midrash'; scholars have been studying it, discussing it, and analysing it, for years. Spong seems to be unaware of the most basic results of this study. He has grabbed the word out of the air, much as Barbara Thiering grabbed the idea of 'pesher' exegesis, and to much the same effect. He misunderstands the method itself, and uses this bent tool to make the gospels mean what he wants instead of what they say.
...
We may briefly indicate the ways in which genuine 'midrash' differs drastically from anything that we find in the gospels.

First, midrash proper consists of a commentary on an actual biblical text. It is not simply a fanciful retelling, but a careful discussion in which the original text itself remains clearly in focus. It is obvious that the gospels do not read in any way like this.

Second, real midrash is 'tightly controlled and argued'. This is in direct opposition to Spong's idea of it, according to which (p. 184) 'once you enter the midrash tradition, the imagination is freed to roam and to speculate'. This statement tells us a good deal about Spong's own method of doing history, and nothing whatever about midrash. The use made of the Old Testament in the early chapters of Luke, to take an example, is certainly not midrash; neither is it roaming or speculative imagination.

Third, real midrash is a commentary precisely on Scripture. Goulder's theories, on which Spong professes to rely quite closely, suggest that Luke and Matthew were providing midrash on Mark. It is, however, fantastically unlikely that either of them would apply to Mark a technique developed for commenting on ancient Scripture.

Fourth, midrash never included the invention of stories which were clearly seen as non-literal in intent, and merely designed to evoke awe and wonder. It was no part of Jewish midrash, or any other Jewish writing-genre in the first century, to invent all kinds of new episodes about recent history in order to advance the claim that the Scriptures had been fulfilled. It is one of the salient characteristics of Jewish literature throughout the New Testament period that, even though novelistic elements could creep in to books like Jubilees, the basic emphasis remains on that which happened within history.

A moment in the debate that particularly struck me was when Spong related how Carl Sagan had once approached him and said something to the effect of, if Jesus had ascended away from the surface of the earth at the speed of light, he'd still be in the Milky Way galaxy. This is essentially the claim that the Ascension was predicated on a local heaven just above the clouds and thus that the ancients and medievals didn't know the universe is incomprehensibly large, something I showed to be false here.

The fact that Spong thinks this is a good or original point further demonstrates how insulated he is. The South England Legendary, written in the 13th century, says something similar. C. S. Lewis writes in The Discarded Image, that the Legendary is "better evidence than any learned production could be for the Model as it existed in the imagination of ordinary people. We are there told that if a man could travel upwards at the rate of ‘forty mile and yet som del mo’ a day, he still would not have reached the Stellatum (‘the highest heven that ye alday seeth’) in 8000 years." Since this was common knowledge several hundred years before it occurred to Sagan or Spong, I can't get too excited about their "insight", much less their claim that it threatens traditional Christianity -- a point that the South England Legendary somehow misses.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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