Of robber barons and moral codes

Rewind a scant 600 years, and modern science doesn’t yet exist. Men and women live and die in squalor and filth, largely ignorant of the germs that ravage their bodies and of the natural laws that govern the universe, instead imploring an alleged supernatural force to help them navigate this vale of tears.

But thanks to minds such as Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur and Charles Darwin, this is not how we face the world today. They taught us our method of knowing: careful, mathematically precise observation, step-by-step inference and generalization, and systematic, evidence-based theory building.

They had the courage to challenge entrenched authority, toss aside superstition and defy popes. As others followed the trail the first scientists blazed, human knowledge advanced dramatically.

With these words, Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, arguing on CNN.com that our moral code needs modernization, reiterate the atheist myth of scientific development, playing very fast and very loose with the details. However, the point of the article isn’t merely to hoist the superiority of science over religion:

What's the difference between a monk and a friar?

The story goes that a monastery in England decided to open up a roadside fish-and-chips stand to help support themselves. One wag who approached the stand quipped to the religious manning it, "Are you the fish friar?"

"No," the brother replied straight-faced, "I'm the chip monk."

Okay, so the joke's not that funny. But it does bring forth a distinction that you may not be aware of if you're not Catholic … and, given recent history in religious formation, perhaps even if you are Catholic.

The contingency problem—UPDATED

 Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

On rereading my discussion of Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design, I realize that not only did I not explain why “string theory” doesn’t address the problem of contingency, I didn’t even adequately define contingency, or why it constitutes a problem for atheists.  As it is, the conclusion appears to be a two-part exercise in begging an inarticulate question.

So let me make amends by supplying the deficiency:

Hawking's The Grand Design: an epic fail (Part II)

 When we left off, we were discussing "self-creation cosmology" (SCC), which seems to be the fundamental component of Stephen Hawking's argument against God from gravity.

Going a little deeper, one of the problems of physics as an empiriometric science is that it treats physical phenomena only so far as it can be reduced to numbers that can be manipulated by field equations. Matter isn't mass; rather, mass is one property of matter. This ontological distinction is not only critical to our understanding of SCC, it exposes a fatal flaw in Hawking's argument. Simply put, the gravitational and scalar fields may interact to push matter together into bodies of greater mass, but that's not the same thing as creating matter. Given the distinction, the term "self-creation" is misleading: the theory allows the rabbit to pull itself out of the hat, but the hat's existence still precedes the rabbit's. The universe "creates" itself … but not ex nihilo.

Hawking's The Grand Design: an epic fail (Part I)—UPDATED

In his June 16, 2010 post on the website of the National Catholic Register, apologist Mark Shea began, “Stephen Hawking is a brilliant physicist … and an absolutely room temperature average member of the British intelligentsia when he stops talking about his field of expertise and starts talking philosophy and religion.”[1] Indeed, Hawking has already publicly revealed that in his forthcoming book, The Grand Design, he’s going to waste his formidable intelligence by trying to reheat the “self-explaining universe” omelet.

The CNN Online article gives us little of Hawking’s argument to work on; to give credit where credit is most likely due, Hawking has most likely striven to make the connections between string theory, multiple universes and the weak anthropic principle flow together. And doubtlessly he does so in prose that strives to be engaging even while his explanations remain just a bit over the layman’s head. (I read A Brief History of Time—twice—and must admit that, while I kept my head above water for three quarters of the book, I drowned well before I got to the last chapter.)

But when your conclusion is that a rabbit not only pulled itself out of the hat but pulled the hat out of thin air as well, it doesn’t take a physicist to realize that at least one error has been obscured by the technicality of the language.

The "born that way" myth

At the end of November, 2008, I wrote a three-part ramble on some questions surrounding the origins of same-sex attraction (SSA) called “Challenging the Conventional Wisdom”. Although I’ve left it posted, and occasionally refer back to it, it’s not the clearest, most concise effort I’ve ever made. As such, I don’t ever refer to it in posts on other blogs.

However, one paragraph definitely bears repeating:

If homosexuality is not an innate orientation, present at conception, we must still realize that—for the most part—it’s also not … a matter of conscious choice, born of a desire to be different. Rather, if—as the reparative therapists inform us—homosexuality is one of many symptoms of certain childhood traumas, then it is a seeking-out of reconnection with the world of the gender that they were pushed out of. To indulge ourselves in a language that treats them as inferior or intentionally evil is to exacerbate the trauma and separation.

The Euthyphro dilemma

 “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”

—Plato, Euthyphro

With these words, Socrates set forth a dilemma that still challenges theists today: Does God command what is good because it is good, or is it good because God commands it? The first horn implies that “good” has a value independent of God, and therefore God can’t be its source. The second horn implies that “goodness” is arbitrary, that the statement “God is good” is meaningless because a tautology (“God is good” = “God is God”), and that it argues from a putative fact to a statement of value.

Let’s recast the argument into formal logical terms:

1.   If God commands m because m is objectively good, then m’s goodness is independent of God.

2.   If m is good because God commands m, then m’s goodness is contingent: theoretically, He could have commanded ~m, and we would in that case call ~m “good”. Because it’s contingent, it can’t be objective in nature.

3.   Either God commands m because m is good, or m is good because God commands it.

4.   Therefore, either God did not create goodness, or goodness is arbitrary.

God and the Holocaust

 I just recently re-read Salvation is from the Jews: The Role of Judaism in Salvation History from Abraham to the Second Coming, by Roy H. Schoeman (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003). Schoeman, a convert to Catholicism, spends a good portion of the book analyzing the religious and philosophic roots of the German cultural anti-Semitism which Adolph Hitler and the Nazis manipulated and magnified with such malignant, satanic genius. (This in turn led me to start re-reading William L. Shirer’s classic opus The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to see how that background mixed with the political and social semi-anarchy that characterized the Weimar Republic.)

What does God want?

 Does the existence of non-believers prove that God doesn’t exist? Let’s follow a particularly drastic formulation:

1.      If God exists, then God wants everyone to come to believe He exists before they die.

2.      If God exists, then God could bring about a condition such that everyone believes He exists before they die.

3.      If God exists, then God would not want anything that would conflict with and be at least as important as His desire for all people to believe He exists before they die.

4.      If God exists, then God always acts in accordance with what He most wants.

5.      However, not everybody learns to believe in God before they die.

6.      Therefore, God does not exist.

The sedevacantist problem

Recently, Father Dwight Longenecker, a former Anglican priest (and the most prominent of a relative handful of married men to be ordained within the Latin rite) has been writing some angst-ridden blog posts concerning his former communion. The most recent was a “personal offer” to Anglo-Catholics, exhorting them to follow the logic of their position and cross the Tiber: “If you were to become a Catholic it would be both more glorious and more awful than you think. Awful because you really do submit yourself to the Catholic Church and that is hard. More glorious because the graces you will receive through this submission and this step of faith will overwhelm you with goodness.”

Most of the respondents, at the time of this composition, were to the point, discussing the reasons why they went either Catholic or Orthodox. However, one troll, exercising the freedom of the Internet to engage in hysterical jeremiads, let loose with this screed:

Apostate! You are not remotely Catholic. The last 5 “popes” have been antipopes and we are in the Great Apostasy prophesied in the Bible. Vatican II was a false and heretical council. Things are completely out of control right now and most people don’t even know what’s going on or even have a clue about it.