Sunday, April 25, 2010

News

Vox Day throws some more barbs the way of the New Atheists. . The article he links from David Bentley Hart is worth reading in full.

Some interesting articles lately from Online Opinion. Atheism repels feeble Easter attacks, Buddhism and Science.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Links

Ed West reminds us that: The horrific abuse committed by Catholic priests, and the cover-ups by bishops, has given the neo-Bolshevik New Atheists a spring in their step, and led to ever increasing levels of hostility to Catholicism. But it’s worth remembering that, terrible though those crimes were, far, far more terrible things have been done in the name of progress, equality and the pursuit of heaven on earth than in the name of God. Happy Easter. here

Archbishop of NSW Peter Jensen raises an interesting point about modern society and individualism contributing to loneliness. I've long thought this was the case, personally.

Scott Monk argues that the Bible should be part of the National Curriculum. His final point might disgust you, or you might find it particularly potent..or just thought provoking. For me it's mostly the last one.

They’re unpopular ideas—exactly as they were 2000 years ago when Jesus overturned conventional thinking and ended up being crucified, much to the delight of the self-righteous Pharisees. Neither will be the teaching of the Bible in public schools now.

But when boys are accessing internet porn for the first time, on average, aged eleven, teenage guys are using their mobile phones to swap images of sex with their girlfriends like footy cards, and sportsmen and women cheat on their partners by engaging in group orgies, we have to accept that as a society we’ve drifted too far from our common foundations.

If the best and brightest artists of the past were brave enough to explore the wide-ranging impact of the Bible on Western thought, why can’t we challenge our own generation’s best and brightest? The compulsory national curriculum is a perfect time for a rethink.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Feser on scientism

Catholic Philosopher Edward Feser is a blogger at edwardfeser.blogspot.com, and I'm a regular reader of this page. He mainly seems to focus on three things: As a philosopher of mind who espouses substance dualism, a thomist who writes about the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas, and a right wing idealogue who promotes conservative Catholic social positions. I don't agree with all of Feser's positions (especially on the conservative issues) but generally I find that he has lot of potent points to make, and that he's a rhetoritician capable of putting a serious sting in the tail of his writings.

Recently he wrote a two part series on scientism:

Here- Part 1- Blinded by scientism

and

Here-Part 2- Recovering sight after scientism

In Part 1 Feser argues that scientism is either self refuting or trivially true and thus should be rejected. In Part 2 he suggests we need to return to traditional philosophical metaphysics. Part 1 was more convincing that Part 2. I'd like some more detail on exactly what's so special about Aristotle and Aquina's, and I suspect there's some very strong counter arguments which may contend that there's some very good reasons why modern day intellectuals have moved away from those ancient ideas. For this reason, Feser's The Last Superstition is a book I wouldn't mind reading one day.

Here are some quotes that best summarise his main ideas from the two articles:


The claim that scientism is true is not itself a scientific claim, not something that can be established using scientific methods. Indeed, that science is even a rational form of inquiry (let alone the only rational form of inquiry) is not something that can be established scientifically. For scientific inquiry itself rests on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists; that this world is governed by causal regularities; that the human intellect can uncover and accurately describe these regularities; and so forth. Since science presupposes these things, it cannot attempt to justify them without arguing in a circle. And if it cannot even establish that it is a reliable form of inquiry, it can hardly establish that it is the only reliable form. Both tasks would require “getting outside” science altogether and discovering from that extra-scientific vantage point that science conveys an accurate picture of reality—and in the case of scientism, that only science does so.


Here we come to the second horn of the dilemma facing scientism. Its advocate may now insist: if philosophy has this status, it must really be a part of science, since (he continues to maintain, digging in his heels) all rational inquiry is scientific inquiry. The trouble now is that scientism becomes completely trivial, arbitrarily redefining “science” so that it includes anything that could be put forward as evidence against it. Worse, it makes scientism consistent with views that are supposed to be incompatible with it


If a certain method of studying nature affords us a high degree of predictive and technological power, all that shows is that the method is useful for dealing with those aspects of nature that are predictable and controllable. It does not show us that those aspects exhaust nature, that there is nothing more to the natural world than what the method reveals. Neither does it show that there are no rational means of investigating reality other than those involving empirical prediction and control. To assume otherwise is fallaciously to let one’s method dictate what counts as reality rather than letting reality determine what methods are appropriate for studying it. If wearing infrared night vision goggles allows me to perceive a certain part of the world remarkably well, it doesn’t follow that there is no more to the world than what I can perceive through the goggles, or that only goggle-wearing methods of investigating reality are rational ones.


If we are to know what that inner nature is, and to know of anything else about which empirical science is silent, we must go beyond science—to philosophy, the true “paradigm of rationality,” as John Kekes puts it.

But can philosophy really tell us anything? Don’t philosophers notoriously disagree among themselves? Even if it is conceded that there is more to the world than science tells us, mightn’t we nevertheless be justified in throwing up our hands and concluding that whatever this “more” might be, it is simply unknowable—that scientism is a reasonable attitude to take in practice, even if problematic in theory?

The trouble is that this is itself a philosophical claim, subject to philosophical criticism and requiring philosophical argumentation in its defense.



The right answer, in my view, is a return to the philosophical wisdom of the ancients and medievals. Their physics, as Galileo, Newton, Einstein and co. have shown us, was indeed sorely lacking. But their metaphysics has never been surpassed. And while they certainly had disagreements of their own, there is a common core to the tradition they founded—a tradition extending from Plato and Aristotle to the High Scholasticism of Aquinas and down to its descendents today—that sets them apart from the decadent philosophical systems of the moderns. This core constitutes a “perennial philosophy” apart from which the harmony of common sense and science, and indeed even the coherence of science itself, cannot be understood. And it is also in this perennial philosophy that the rational foundations of theology and ethics are to be found.