The Triumph of the Idiot

Thomas Hobbes. (Image source: totallyhistory.com)

The word idiot, I am reliably informed, comes from the ancient Greek ἰδιώτης idiōtēs, via the Latin transliteration idiota. On the face of it, an idiōtēs was merely a private individual, as opposed to a government minister or military officer. However, among the Athenians, it was a derisive term applied to anyone who declined to take an active role in civic affairs, or who cut themselves off from the community in pursuit of their own interests. This pejorative application became associated with a person of low intelligence or skill, who could contribute little to the polis.

Res Idiotica

America is becoming (or has become) a nation of idiots, according to writers and thinkers who deliberately reference this half-forgotten sense of idiōtēs. That’s to say, we are becoming increasingly self-absorbed and disconnected, isolated not only from each other but from any sense of community or history. Their critique of millennials has gone beyond sneering at “snowflakes” and hooting over participation trophies. Instead, their concern is for the disturbing number of twenty-somethings checking out of adult social interaction and the burgeoning industry of “self-care” products.

Writes philosopher Michael Liccione, “It’s as if real relationships and real community engagement are all just too much for many people, who prefer to define and live in their own little worlds, insulated as much as possible from the pain and inconvenience of regular involvement with the big bad world.” Another philosopher, Reilly Smethurst, reminds us that St. Augustine “famously associated idiocy with ostentatious self-authorization. In his Confessions, Augustine referred critically to his younger self as ‘a prisoner, trying to simulate a crippled sort of freedom.’ The specter comforting America is that of the juvenile Augustine — free to enjoy its own vacuity, empowered ironically by crippledom.”

The best use of this equation between self-absorption and idiocy came from Notre Dame professor Patrick J. Deneen’s critique of the education system:

Above all, the one overarching lesson that students receive is to understand themselves to be radically autonomous selves within a comprehensive global system with a common commitment to mutual indifference. Our commitment to mutual indifference is what binds us together as a global people. ... Ancient philosophy and practice heaped praise upon res publica — a devotion to public things, things we share together. We have instead created the world’s first res idiotica .... Our education system excels at producing solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history.

NYT: Trump Stole the Left’s License to BS

I must apologize — I thought I’d written my last political commentary. But when I read Casey William’s April 17 New York Times think piece, “Has Trump Stolen Philosophy’s Critical Tools?”, my first impression was, “This is either very subtle satire or the most blatant exposition of cognitive dissonance ever.” The problem: Williams desperately wants to call Pres. Donald Trump a liar.

We’re used to this pattern by now: The president dresses up useful lies as “alternative facts” and decries uncomfortable realities as “fake news.” Stoking conservative passion and liberal fury, Trump stirs up confusion about the veracity of settled knowledge and, through sheer assertion, elevates belief to the status of truth.

Trump’s playbook should be familiar to any student of critical theory and philosophy. It often feels like Trump has stolen our ideas and weaponized them.

However, the very critical tools upon which the academic left has become dependent for intellectual life-support forbids appealing to objective reality to back the claim that Trump lies. After all, if there is such a thing as an objective reality, we can’t know it for certain. The left has their facts, and Trump has his. Under postmodern critique, pace Daniel P. Moynihan,[*] the right to one’s own opinion is the right to one’s own facts.

The Absurdity of “Values-Free” Economics

Image source: marketoracle.co.uk.

While reading John C. Médaille’s Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Healthcare, Deficits, and More (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2010), I couldn’t help thinking of Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s admission three years ago that “economists actually know very, very little, and that a lot of what we thought we knew [prior to the last recession] turned out to be wrong.” Yet the defenders of what Gobry calls “the Washington consensus” still talk and think as though their economic dicta were enshrouded in papal infallibility. Toward a Truly Free Market helped me to realize that the economists were wrong because the entire discipline is not (and never could be) “values-free”; the very notion is inherently absurd. And the values enshrined in modern economic theory not only blind economists to impending market failures but make them inevitable.

What is Distributism?

Distributism holds that a community’s economic health is better secured when the ownership of capital — the means of production, including everything from office ball-point pens to factories, especially land — is spread out (distributed) widely among the population. It champions smaller, more localized businesses, especially cooperatives and employee-owned corporations, and considers globalism and the huge multinational conglomerates positive evils.

Distributism is not, however, a form of socialism. It rejects state ownership of property and demands a reordering of government power to prioritize the community over the nation. Nor does distributism necessarily require a forced redistribution of capital by the government, though Médaille doesn’t rule it out (see pp. 243-245).

Book Review: Particles of Faith, by Stacy A. Trasancos

One challenge Christians face, particularly millennials, is the apparent challenge Science poses to articles of faith. To be brutally blunt, most of this appearance of challenge stems from the inability of believers and nonbelievers alike to respect the limits of both Science and Religion. An impoverished “progressive” education, neglecting even the most rudimentary instruction in philosophy and leading to rampant neo-philistinism, contributes heavily to the confusion. Many Catholics can benefit from a guide that clarifies those limits and defangs the “hermeneutic of conflict” which decrees the challenge. This is what Stacy A. Trasancos, Ph.D., M.A., offers us in Particles of Faith: A Catholic Guide to Navigating Science (Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria Press, 2016; $15.95).

Walking in “No-Man’s Land”

Particles of Faith is not an apologetical work. That’s to say, Dr. Trasancos doesn’t explicitly seek to make converts of atheists, but rather to steer Catholics along a path that will help them comprehend the current state of the sciences that form the “no-man’s land” between belief and unbelief. To this task, she brings an impressive array of education and experience — industrial chemist, theologian, teacher, and mother of seven.

One small complaint: every once in a while, the chemistry talk goes beyond the average layman’s comprehension despite Dr. Trasancos’ obvious attempt to simplify it. I say this as one whose last physical-science course was twenty-three years ago (for what it’s worth, it was organic chemistry, and I got a 4.0). But that’s what Google’s for, right? [Full disclosure: Stacy is not only a friend but the co-publisher and editor emeritus at Catholic Stand; she and Tito Edwards brought me on board there.]

The book is set up in three parts. Part I, “Science in the Light of Faith”, discusses the limitations of science and its necessarily transient state. Part II, “Questions in the Physical Sciences”, delves into the “Big Bang” theory, the relationship of atoms to reality, and the question of whether quantum mechanics explains free will. Part III, “Questions in the Biological Sciences”, discusses evolution from three different angles; particularly useful is the discussion of polygenism versus monogenism (that is, whether humans evolved from a single Adam-and-Eve pair or from a group of independently-evolved individuals).

The foolishness of Western secular morality

Greek philosophers. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons.)

The victory of the LGBT bloc in creating the right to “same-sex marriage” is simply the most recent and most potentially devastating consequence of a tectonic shift in Western morality. Like the culture that produced it, though, the morality which shattered the traditional definition of marriage is something of a cyborg — a half-organic, half-artificial construct produced by combining an intemperate worship of the natural with an equally unrestrained desire to dominate the natural through technology and social engineering.

Consider, for instance, the bill New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently signed into law extending the state government’s “yes means yes” rules to include private schools and universities. The “yes means yes” standard has more potential for court-clogging legal action than the older “no means no” because — theoretically, at least — the least unconsidered, not-previously-agreed-to touch could be interpreted as sexual assault.

However, the standard has become so widespread that, as Heather Wilhelm reports, one group has launched a “Consent Conscious Kit” which features breath mints, a condom, and (of all things) a sex contract by which college kids can lay out the terms and conditions of their sexual contact with each other. Thus, the “Sexual Revolution” degrades from “kicking the government out of the bedroom” to the state-sanctioned micromanagement of affectionate touching, even while maintaining the fiction that sexual restraint is neither possible nor desirable.

As another example, this past Thursday the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution calling for the protection of the family as a fundamental unit of society, a resolution the US and most Western European countries opposed, by a vote of 27-14. The paradoxical nature of the opposition is highlighted by a sentence in a statement issued by the Sexual Rights Initiative: the resolution didn’t “[acknowledge] the harms and human rights abuses that are known to occur within families, or [recognize] that diverse forms of family exist.” Families are bad; yet a diversity of family types is good. The cognitive dissonance is deafening.

Before going further, let me make it clear that secular morality, as I use it in this post, refers to certain moral propositions that differ from traditional Judeo-Christian teachings (religious morality). Taking the whole of the moral sphere into consideration, there are arguably more points of contact between religious morality and secular morality than there are points of separation. Where secular morality separates from religious morality, religious and irreligious people can be found to some extent on both sides. Secular morality, then, should not be construed as held in full or part by all the irreligious, or rejected in whole or part by all the religious.

Free-market economics and bad philosophy

Reading doctrine through ideological glasses

The most pervasive problem facing the Catholic Church in America today is our predilection for reading both Scripture and Tradition through ideological glasses. If bad philosophy leads inevitably to bad science, it leads even more quickly to bad theology.

The left has a history of trying to reconcile Catholicism with socialism, even Marxism, despite the explicit condemnations of various popes beginning with Bl. Pius IX (cf. Syllabus of Errors). The right’s version sometimes goes so far as to baptize Randian objectivism — to which Ayn Rand herself would  have objected — but more often settles for its own version of the “health and wealth gospel”; i.e., invocation of free-market capitalism.

As I’ve outlined before, “cafeteria Catholicism” on the right tends to play a game I call the “appeal to theological weight”. If a citation of pope or dicastery runs counter to a free-market position, the tactic is to claim it sits on a level of theological certainty low enough that a Catholic of good conscience can dispute or ignore it.

Even when the authority of a document, such as Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, is treated as authoritative, it’s creatively interpreted so that all the troublesome bits get ignored. For example, read this post in Ethika Politika, in which Gabriel S. Sanchez takes Joe Hargreaves to task for his sins of omission.

A certain point of view

Ben gives Luke his first lesson in Jedi subjectivism.

“Luke, as you grow older, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend on a certain point of view.”

How many of you, when you first heard Obi-Wan Kenobi offer this remonstrance to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, found yourselves putting a mental question mark next to it? And how many of you were simply too caught up in the moment, in Luke’s feelings of betrayal and loss, to allow it to register? 

“After all, it’s only a movie,” he observed drily.

Movies are stories, and stories can be dangerous weapons. Torn by the pity and terror of tragedy, drawn along in spite of yourself by the drama, weeping and laughing according to its merits and intents, you may find yourself accepting as true propositions and values that, were they presented as arguments, you would question or even reject. Consider the watershed influence of Brokeback Mountain, or the quietly malign effect Atlas Shrugged (the book) has had on our view of the poor, and tell me I’m wrong.

It’s not that Ben Kenobi’s statement as worded is false or an endorsement of subjectivism. Many of the things we hold to be true are only “obviously true” by consensus; shatter that consensus, introduce a substantial party dedicated to denying or contradicting it, and its obviousness is lost.  Identities of people, institutions, and nations are built on and vested in “self-evident truths” that other people, institutions, and nations find dubious propositions at best; mental breakdowns, corporate dissolutions and social chaos follow when those truths collapse under pressure.

Presumptions and the first law of general ignorance

As I sit here typing on my computer, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the wealth of knowledge and benefits science has brought us.  In fact, it’s so easy that we have to a great extent forgotten the appalling depths of our ignorance.

How can I say that?  Very simple: the quantity of unknowns in the universe is by definition unknowable.  This gives us Layne’s First Law of General Ignorance: We don’t know how much we don’t know.  If we know, then, that the extent of our ignorance is unknowable, we know that at least one thing is unknowable.  But we don’t know if there’s anything else that Man cannot comprehend or will not be able to comprehend at some future date.  Therefore, the corollary to the First Law: We don’t know how much we can’t know.

Got a headache yet?

Most thought systems have to start with at least some assumptions that neither need nor admit of proof.  For instance, you can’t get anywhere in plane geometry if you don’t accept that “a line is the shortest distance between two points”, or in algebra if a² = b² + c² is merely an opinion.  Likewise, reason has a fundamental assumption that “a thing cannot both be and not-be at the same time and in the same manner”.

Why can’t we take atheism as self-evidential?  This seems to be the answer the New Atheist prefers, given that philosophers since Socrates have known that it’s impossible to prove that something does not exist.  In law, we take it as a necessary presumption of justice that a person accused of a crime is innocent until proven guilty.  Are there not situations in which we can safely presume that a theory is false until proven true?

C. S. Lewis, memes and logical positivism

Liturgically, the Christmas season is still five weeks and change away; we’re not even into Advent yet.  Alas, we’re governed by the marketing calendar, which begins to push us to buy for one holiday before the previous holiday is spent.  The leaves down here in north-central Texas just turned to fall colors yesterday, and the Muzak is already cranking out “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”

This is also the time of year when American Atheists begin grunting out steaming mounds of “Bah! Humbug!” on the seemingly forgotten religious aspect of the season. 

I’ve written before on some of the problems the atheist must overcome before he can truly claim his position is rational, let alone based on scientific fact.  Largely the problems are philosophical in nature; the error lies not in the structure of the argument but in the initial assumptions.  Ultimately, if your foundation is nothing but sand, it doesn’t matter how well you build the superstructure — it will fall, and great will be the fall of it (cf. Mt 7:26-27).

But the New Atheist is, for the most part, not a philosopher.  In fact, more often than not he rejects formal philosophy, as it seemingly consists of people speculating without adequate basis in verifiable fact; as one person put it to me, it’s “just a bunch of people’s subjective opinions”.  That this demand for verifiable fact is itself a philosophical position — logical positivism — and as such suffers from self-referential incoherence[1] is an irony that passes him by.

Making a mockery of reason

“Mock [believers], ridicule them in public, don’t fall for the convention that we’re far too polite to talk about religion,” Richard Dawkins exhorted an estimated 10,000 atheists near the end of Washington, DC’s “Reason Rally” on Saturday.  “Religion is not off the table.  Religion is not off limits.  Religion makes specific claims about the universe, which need to be substantiated.  They should be challenged and ridiculed with contempt.”

As the inestimable Bugs Bunny was wont to say, “Of course you realize this means war.”

Since we’re all presumably adults, we all know that neither mockery nor contempt demonstrates intellectual superiority.  Especially if one’s preferred form of ridicule relies heavily on four-letter words and sexual references; then you’re just demonstrating your immaturity.  And Dawkins himself has a penchant for an exaggerated incredulousness (“Do you really believe that?”) that has long since become tiresome.  Yes, Rich, we really believe that; prove it false or just get over it.  As I said yesterday, if you’re gonna claim to be more rational, it would help your credibility if you behave like a rational adult instead of like a middle-school bully hazing the geeky-looking wimp.

But more to the point, neither does atheism sit in a privileged place, exempt from the need to prove its assumptions about the nature of the universe.  Indeed, it’s impossible to prove that something does not exist; the best you can do is point out that its existence hasn’t been irrefutably demonstrated.  We can cut the atheist position a little discount: the atheist doesn’t need to prove the non-existence of gods or of a supernatural order so much as make a coherent, convincing case against.

But if you want to play rough ….

Book review: Love song for Homo oeconomicus

I apologize for the long break between posts; I'm finding it more difficult to find time to write than I thought I would. Thanks for hanging in with me!

Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America, by Mark R. Levin (New York: Threshold Editions, 2012)

The political dialogue of today demands not only that complex subjects be reduced to black-and-white simplicities but that personalities be similarly reduced to “good guy/bad guy” homogeneity. It’s not enough that they be corrupt, jack-booted authoritarians trying to ruin The Good Life As We Know It: we must maintain an intellectual separation bordering on naïveté concerning the less savory aspects of our allies.

Such was my overarching impression on reading radio host Mark Levin’s Ameritopia. For the record, I’ve never listened to Levin’s show, nor have I read any of his previous books; the latter may affect this review more, because I may be missing some intended context if Levin didn’t expect Ameritopia to stand on its own. Also for the record, while I have sympathy for many conservative ideas, to identify myself as conservative would be misleading at best, for reasons which I hope will become clear as we go along.

In Ameritopia, Levin traces a quick sketch of the intellectual history behind what he calls “utopianism” and what I’ve called “progressivism”. That history begins with Plato’s Republic, wends through St. Thomas More’s Utopia and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan to fetch up at Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s Communist Manifesto. He also compares these writers to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Charles de Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, along with their impact on the Founding Fathers, and includes the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville some forty and fifty years later.

Bucking the Established Paradigm

In his book Pragmatism, William James recounts a discussion he and his friends had concerning a squirrel on the trunk of a tree: Suppose it were to move from the north face counter-clockwise to the west, then the south, then the east, and then back to the north.  The question they debated (half-fun and in full earnest, I gather): Does the squirrel go around the tree or the tree go around the squirrel?

James answered:  Both answers are correct; it just depends on what you consider the fixed point to be … an answer of which I’m sure Albert Einstein would have approved.

This story popped into my mind when I received an e-mail from Stacy Trasancos concerning the Galileo Was Wrong conference.  As an honest-to-goodness, Ph.D.-and-all scientist who has actually worked in the field, Stacy is more qualified to evaluate the group’s claims than is a guy who’s still trying to pay off the BA in sociology he didn’t get.  (Story for another time.)  Granting that her doctorate is in chemistry, she’s still better prepped than I am: physics isn’t irrelevant to chemistry, after all.

So I gotta give Stacy props for at least considering the GWW’s claims in public.  She’s already demonstrated her courage under threat of physical violence; now she has the courage to risk being marginalized as a tin-foil-hat-wearing loon.  I say this not in detraction but in admiration; there are many scientists alive who will unthinkingly risk their lives for the sake of their children by assaulting a predator, but who won’t risk their reputation for the sake of the truth by bucking the Established Paradigm.

Do religious beliefs matter?

To my dear friend religion is just another personal choice, like who to date or whether to have coffee or tea for breakfast.  It doesn’t matter what religion you choose to follow if it works for you. But that is not what Catholicism is.  It is not just another choice on the buffet of beliefs.  He thinks my stubborn persistence that Catholicism is the True Faith founded by Christ to be nothing more than a desire to be right.  [In the previous paragraph, “He finds it elitist a Catholic’s claim of belonging to the One True Church.”]

What our friend the Crescat is describing, in her post on dating outside the Faith, is described in the old Catholic Encyclopedia as “restricted indifferentism”: “all religions are equally worthy and profitable to man, and equally pleasing to God. … God looks only to the sincerity of intention, and that everybody can serve Him by remaining in the religion in which he has been brought up, or by changing it at will for any other that pleases him [i.e., the worshipper] more.”[1]

This is not an uncommon position to take.  In fact, a very dear friend of mine holds (or at least held at one time) this position almost exactly as stated.  If there’s anything enviable about the position, it allows one the benefit of having religious convictions, even strong convictions, without either the uncomfortable imperative of examining them for flaws or the equally uncomfortable need to challenge the beliefs of others.

Awkward science problems

In Harper Magazine’s “The accidental universe: Science’s crisis of faith,” physicist/novelist Alan Lightman, writing for Harper’s Magazine, explains the dilemma that string theory, which posits multiple dimensions and multiple universes, places the discipline of theoretical physics.

On the one hand, it promises a workable Theory of Everything, the Holy Grail of physics, which would finally reconcile general relativity with particle physics in a coherent, mathematically expressible way.  As well, as Steven Weinberg explains, “The multiverse idea offers an explanation of why we find ourselves in a universe favorable to life that does not rely on the benevolence of a creator, and so if correct will leave still less support for religion.”  No need for “fine tuning” here, so sorry, folks; you can pack up your intelligent-designer bags and go home.

On the other hand, with 10⁵⁰⁰ universes in play, it means that the fundamental principles of our universe are accidental; the whole point of string theory in the beginning was to prove those principles necessary.  Worse, because of technological and financial limitations they can’t prove eternal inflation or string theory true, and won’t be able to for many, many years (if ever):

Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable [sic] [; in] addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes.  But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence.  Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.

Excuse me, I gotta get this out of my system:  BWA-HAHAHAHAHA-AA!  O the irony!

On the doorstep of philosophy

In his classic concert film Bill Cosby: Himself, the storytelling comedian talks about the natural childbirth of his and his wife’s first daughter, Erika.  Cosby, who has an earned doctorate in education, sets up this story with the wry observation, “Now, we were Intellectuals, mind you … Intellectuals go to class to study things that people do naturally.”

This line popped into my brain after an exchange I had on eChurch Blog with “Simian”, an agnostic to whom I was introduced by Stacy Trasancos and who pops up on Accepting Abundance now and then.  Stuart James’ post was on the need of an objective reality by which we can define sanity; to cut this post to size, I’ll just say that Simian has been playing … er, devil’s advocate. 

In his response to me, Simian’s last lines were, “If we are looking for an external validation of our sanity we surely need look no further than other people around us. Why do we need more?”  More out of mischief than anything else, I replied, “Are the people around you sane by definition?”

Strange as it may seem, that’s the kind of question a philosopher asks in full earnest.  You’re at the doorstep of philosophy when you start to ask questions about ideas and facts that people take for granted.

The corrupting influence of utilitarianism

Yesterday on The Impractical Catholic, I wrote with some well-merited fury about the Air Force dumping the cremains of 274 or more soldiers in a Virginia landfill, as reported in the Washington Post (“Betrayal: treating soldiers like garbage”). As I said, this act is far more than a lapse of good judgment; it’s a slap in the face, a betrayal not just of those soldiers and their families but of the entire military community, of everyone who wore the uniform with pride and honor.

But I fully expect the Pentagon to rake through their personnel in an ecstasy of ass-covering to produce some desk-jockey lieutenant colonel, whom they’ll sacrifice in the usual way with the usual media connivance. That’s not sufficient, because this isn’t an “oopsie”: several people in the Air Force and DoD civilian leadership, at least one of which had to be flag rank, had to screw this up. Even desk jockeys don’t take that kind of decision on themselves.

This digs into the deeper question: How could this have happened? How could any collection of human beings lose their heads or their hearts so far as to dump the remains of citizens like so much refuse? How could they have lost sight of the fact that the ashes were once people whom other people loved and lost, that they were owed at minimum a decent burial, a dignity we accord even convicted felons … in full justice, burial with bugle and 21-gun salute, their families given folded flags “with the thanks of a grateful nation”?

Testing the soundness of an argument

Formal propositional logic can make your head hurt. It’s higher mathematics applied to language use, and many people are scared of higher mathematics of any kind. In running through every inference, it often has the appearance of belaboring the obvious. Not only is it accessible only to the trained, because of that limited accessibility it’s off-putting to the untrained, as if though the subject in question belonged only to specialists and therefore the unwashed masses mustn’t even hope to participate.

Why go through such a megillah, then?

The rigor. It belabors the obvious precisely because it doesn’t take the “obvious” for granted; not everything that’s obvious to you and me is obvious to everyone else. By forcing the reader through the supposedly unnecessary steps, it demonstrates irrefutably the internal consistency of an argument. Informal logic tests the soundness of an argument by walking the floors and pounding the walls; formal logic supervises the welding of the steel beams and the pouring of the reinforced concrete.

Over on The Impractical Catholic I posted a formal argument demonstrating the infallible reliability of the Church. Reliability, after all, is the crux of the infallibility question: Can the Church be trusted not only to teach the evangelium correctly but also to teach dogmatic propositions that aren’t explicit or obviously implicit in Scripture?

Religious authority vs. primacy of conscience (Part IV)

Part I covered the problem of having an authoritative doctrinal body in the devastating wake of the primacy of individual conscience. Part II concerned itself with building up the need for religious authority. Part III discussed the proper understanding of the primacy of conscience, put in the light of our common-sense perception of personal responsibility: Religious Authority doesn’t and can’t pull the trigger.

In a sense, the last two posts were meant in part to dispel the myth of the Mind-Controlling Church, that rhetorical bogeyman invoked by critics of the Catholic Church to push the “you’re not the boss of me” button on their audiences. True mind control, or “brainwashing”, is nowhere close to mainline acceptance as a valid psychological phenomenon, which of course hasn’t stopped it from being used as a meme elsewhere. As long as people need to assert and validate their intellectual independence against some Authority, they’ll continue to believe in mind control; here, however, we need not let this pseudo-scientific fallacy detain us further.

So let’s return to where we left off in the first part: Granting that some kind of central authority is needed to distinguish between authentic Christian doctrine and inauthentic or non-Christian doctrine, why must that authority lie with a monarchical Pope? Why can’t it be more like a democracy, with the Pope as kind of a president?

Religious authority vs. primacy of conscience (Part III)

Part I covered the problem of having an authoritative doctrinal body in the devastating wake of the primacy of individual conscience. Part II concerned itself with building up the need for religious authority.

When we left off, we were at a fork in the road: We are either following Christ or we’re simply co-opting some of his teachings for our own. If novelty is all you crave in a philosophy or religion, you should perhaps be a follower of Nietzsche or Rand, or a New Age devoté … not a Christian. By its very nature, Christianity can’t be “new”; people can only say new things about it, or find new applications for 2,000-year-old tenets. By the same rule, you can’t simultaneously hold that Christianity is true and that anything older than 1980 is defective or false; if you’re going to be a chronological snob, your snootiness should at least be consistent.

So I’ve spent the last two posts building up the position of religious authority. However, outside of the occasional sniping comment, I haven’t really said what’s so bloody wrong with the primacy of the individual conscience. After all, isn’t your conscience your best guide? Isn’t handing over your conscience to an Outside Authority immoral … the root of such horrific acts as were seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union?

Religious authority vs. primacy of conscience (Part II)

In Part I, I started discussing the problem of having an authoritative doctrinal body in the devastating wake of the primacy of individual conscience. Simply put, the two are irreconcilable unless the latter means no more than that we bear chief responsibility for our acts. For the decisions of such a body — we postulated a standing ecumenical council or “central committee” — to have any traction, each person must concede three points:

1. The individual conscience is not infallible;
2. Human authority is both a practical necessity and an indispensible feature of education; and
3. Some people are better equipped to decide on matters of faith and morals than others; mere possession of a Bible and ninth-grade reading skills doesn’t make a person an authority on Scripture.

But before we go further, I should probably shore up my position. Granting that we learn indirectly from others far more than we learn directly from our own experiences, does it still follow that we need a central authority to decide what is true Christian doctrine and what is false? Even if I grant I’m not the sharpest knife in the block, and that I don’t know nearly as much as some others about Scripture, history, patristics, theology and all that rot, since it’s my soul on the line for my actions, shouldn’t I be the one to decide what Christ and the apostles taught?