One of the pretenses of modern thought would seem to be that the declaration that you "believe in science" renders the believer immune to the typical habits of thought that science was invented to try to overcome. Such a belief is not scientifically sustainable because even the most rigorous of scientists and the mathematicians whose methods the sciences aspire to merely approximate have, from time immemorial, been fully capable of acting out of commonly held habits of thought, of reliance on authority unchecked and unverified and, perhaps most of all, the mistaken belief that what is really based on personal preference is based in rigorous scientific methodology. As I am looking more at what I can find of Richard Epstein, he is typical of one stream of that in the pretense of lawyers and economists that they are biologists, a bad habit that certainly is in line with Darwin's use of Thomas Malthus's political economics theory as the basis of his own theory of natural selection.
But that is a pretense, it isn't real, it's no more real than the adherence to The Gospel, or the Law by so many, too many of those who profess such an adherence.
A lot of what is passed off as scientific rigor is not actually founded in rigorous scientific method but in one or several of the above listed deviations from scientific method - often so conventionally done that the person doing it would have to have it pointed out in rigorous terms that that is what they are doing. Very often the desire for something "to work" to produce a desired end is given as the justification for a less than rigorously founded scientific theory to be introduced into and, in the fullness of time and as its use becomes habitual within science, becomes the required ideological holding within science. As I have tirelessly pointed out, natural selection is the quintessential example of that in widely believed science. Often I have had people I've argued the flimsy foundations and definition of natural selection with will, when pressed, fall back on the convenience of believing that it gives you anything from a claimed universal "explanation" of how evolution happened to at least being very "useful" for "understanding" evolution. I think that habit of thought, ubiquitous throughout most of academia and an enforced dogma is what is on display in Richard Epstein's use of it. But, furthermore, is that the theory, itself, was, from the start in Malthusian economics, guaranteed to gain traction BECAUSE IT IS A THEORY THAT FAVORS THOSE ALREADY WITH WEALTH AND POWER OR THOSE WHO CAN GET THOSE FOR THEMSELVES OR WHO BELIEVE THEY MIGHT.
And it is also attractive as a theory because of its use in atheist-materialist-scientistic polemics. I think that is at least as strong a motive in ignoring the many problems with the idea, both as a scientific theory and the malignant effects that it has had since its most noted early adopters, Francis Galton, Thomas Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, etc. have used it to advocate for everything from the refusal of governments and societies to give needed food, clothing, shelter and medical aid to the least among them to the advocacy of genocide. That is something which not only was never denied before the end of WWII, so far as I have found, it was one of the things that caused such proposed amendments as Kropotkin's "mutual aid" to be constructed to mitigate the essential and internal moral injustice and depravity which is an inevitable result of it.
"It works," you see, to produce all of these things. It works for those it works for and that "it works" is a conventionally acceptable reason to retain it even as it produces such terrible effects. I think in at least a large percentage of if not most of the uses of Darwnism, it is used for either those malignant effects that Richard Epstein got from it or for its, I fully believe, related use in promoting materialism, atheism and scientism. The amoral effects of both efforts, the denial or morality, the indifference to the results in terms of life and death, is too strong a result to pretend there is no plausible connection between them.
-------------------------------
But this is the first part of a Lenten post.
The overriding theme of Holy week, starting on Sunday, Good Friday, Easter, is death and life, the same thing that Darwinism is about, it is a far different view of those things founded in the fact that we are all going to die. In light of the atheist-materialist-scientistic use of things "working" to produce an end, if it is valid as science can be claimed for religious believers as a test of ideas within religion. It is one of the little regarded, often disposed of rules of science that you can't use different standards of judgment for different ideas because if you can claim that a standard of judgement is invalid for what you don't like, it is as invalid for the things you do like.
What Do You Get From Believing In A. An Afterlife, B. The Christian Belief In The Resurrection of Jesus?
I am going to go through the last several pages of the Epilogue to Hans Kung's book, Eternal Life? Life After Death as a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Problem, in which Kung lays out how a belief in those works, what you get from it, what it potentially does do. I would say that it potentially does that if you hold fast to the idea that anything which you might get from it which denies the truth of the moral teachings of Jesus, the Law, the Prophets, must not be pursued by the far from easy universalism implied by what is said. I'll start:
What difference would it make . . . ?
Yes, what difference would it make if there were not really this consummation in eternal life? In view of philosophical projects of the present, as we frequently considered them in these lectures, it could be said:
If there is a consummation in eternal life, then I have the justified hope - contrary to Sigmund Freud's atheistic fears - that the "oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind" are not illusions, but are eventually fulfilled;
- then the idea that death is the absolutely final reality - which Theodore W. Ardorno found unthinkable - is in fact unthinkable, because untrue,
- then for me a liberating surmounting, transcending, of the "one-dimensional man" into a really different dimension is areal alternative, as requiredby Herbert Marcuse, even now- even though fundamentally different than it is in Marcuse's work - made possible;
- then even all unpreventable suffering, which the supporters of the Critical Theory find cannot be removed conceptually, then the individual's unhappiness, pain, age and death, and also the threatening eschaton of boredom in a totally managed, dead world are not the ultimate reality, but can point to something quite different;
- then the hope of Max Horkheimer and innumerable other people for perfect justice, for absolute meaning and eternal truth, is not unreal but when all is said and done fulfillable infinitely fulfillable;
- then the infinte longing of man - who, according to Ernst Bloch, is restless, unfinished, never fulfilled, continually starting out afreesh, continually longing, learning, seeking, continually reaching out for what is different and new - has nevertheless a meaning and does not essentially end in a void;
- then the great peut-être of the dying Rabelais - which for Block remained the extreme possibility of a reaction is also definitively reliable, pointing not only to something undefined and uncertain but to a wholly other, new reality.
Yes, if the hope for a God in heaven is justified, then for this earth it can be understood, substantiated and motivated:
- why man bears a responsibility for this earth, which he has not himself created, for nature, which is no longer the object of romantic, religious fervor, but the very foundation of his life, with which he has to cope reasonably;
- why at the same time we must be concerned not only about our own generation but also about future generations; why then subsequent generations also have a justified interest in an inhabited earth, in natural resources not squandered on armaments, on the acceptable burden of financial debt, why then not all economic "growth" itself implies "development" or "progress": why then the question must always be asked, not only about the "how much," but also the "what" of production and consumption, about the quality of growth, about the whither of development and progress.
I think it is entirely legitimate to consider what you can possibly get when you choose to believe in eternal life is at least possible that you will certainly not if you believe it is not there is a legitimate consideration. That is especially true if you hold that there are consequences for individuals in how they conduct their lives here, on earth which will have to be faced in the afterlife as compared to what people will do when they believe there will be no consequences. That is, of course, something you could use as a means of judging whether or not the person who claims to belief based on their actual conduct and what they choose to pretend they believe is moral action. I don't, for a single second, belief that many of the alleged figures of religion in the world have actually believed what they calimed to based in their professions of faith. Right now the Falwell family, the Graham family, the Pence family, various televangilsts and others are proving that they don't, not at all, really believe in what they make their money from. If they did really believe it, they wouldn't act as they do. I would like to know which of them have been influenced by Richard Epstein, either directly from his written claims from the putrid Heritage Institute or second-hand as filtered through the Trump regime.
It is entirely fair to give the famous, or infamous, succinct alternative to the view of reality presented at the end of an enormous three-volume study of these questions by Hans Kung as presented by the recently fashionable high-priest of neo-atheism, Richard Dawkins, something which is, actually, a logical consequence of atheism as noted at least as far back as the 17th century libertines.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
I will pose it as an obvious thing that if you believe in the morally nihilistic materialistic-scientistic-atheistic version of reality, your only consideration other than personal preference, which is only as reliable as the whimsical and unrealible sense of the one holding to it, is the consideration of what you figure you can get away with. Clearly under the enforced naivety of the language of the First Amendment and the Republican-fascist administration of the law the evangelicaliars know they can get away with a lot. I would say that it's clear that goes for their followers in large numbers.
Who would you rather live next to, someone who believes that the morality of the Gospel is something they are going to have to answer for, if not now then in the life after death, or someone who believed they didn't need to do unto others as they would do unto them, to do for the least among us what we would do to God, to love their enemies and pray for them, to love their neighbor as themselves, so long as they could rig things to act accordingly and get away with doing it? Who would you rather have conduct national policy in this pandemic? Someone who believes in the Gospel and that there will be consequences for our conduct in an afterlife, or in the people who are in charge in the United States?
Note: I've listed things in Kung's text in this form because it makes it easier to understand, I hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment