Graphic: United Federation of Teachers.

Like most informed people, I’ve watched in disgust as over a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted laws to prevent Democrats from voting.

They don’t come right out and say that’s what they’re doing, of course. To hear them talk, it’s about preventing “vote fraud.” That follows a script from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing group that works for America’s super-rich against the 99.9 percent.

Those same people were curiously incurious about vote fraud in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The 2000 election was stolen by rigged electronic voting machines, voter suppression, and “spoiled” ballots in Florida — where the election machinery was controlled by George W. Bush’s brother Jeb. The Bushes’ dirty tricks made the vote count so close that a recount was needed. Then, Bush’s friends on the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a halt to the recount and they awarded the presidency to Bush. Rather than cast doubt on the legitimacy of the U.S. government, Democratic candidate Al Gore conceded without a fight. Later, a consortium of six major newspapers (including The New York Times) and the University of Chicago did a comprehensive recount and analyzed the data under various assumptions. In every scenario, Gore won.

The 2004 presidential election was stolen by the Bush-Cheney machine in much the same way, but this time in Ohio rather than Florida. A University of Pennsylvania statistician found that based on the data, it was virtually impossible for Bush to have won the 2004 election. But the ever-subservient news media ignored the evidence of massive vote fraud when it benefitted the Bush-Cheney regime.

At the retail level, however — that of individuals or small groups of people conspiring to vote fraudulently — very few cases have been documented. Republican cries of “vote fraud” are simply a pretext to prevent voting by groups likely to vote Democratic: minorities, young people, the poor, and the elderly.

In the eyes of Republicans and their super-rich corporate paymasters, such people have no business voting in the first place. They’re not “the right kind of people.” If they were good enough to vote, they’d be rich. And corrupt. And white.

The Republican agenda is simple: Government should be of, by, and for the rich and the politically connected. Voting by the common people is a nuisance that should be minimized as much as possible.

Democrats want more people to vote for the same reason that Republicans want fewer people to vote: The majority favors ideas, programs, and policies that Democrats say they support, even if their actions often contradict their promises.

Progressives believe that for democracy to be legitimate, voting should be extended as widely as possible. No group should be deprived of the vote, either directly or through subterfuge.

But It’s Not That Simple

But the issue isn’t quite as simple as either side pretends. Democracy as an institution was not handed down to us on tablets from Mount Sinai. It has taken many forms in many different times and places.

In the South prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, literacy tests were used to prevent black citizens from voting. That’s an unsavory purpose. The law was also used to harass and humiliate black citizens. That’s despicable.

On the other hand, consider the official justification for the law: In order to be properly informed about the issues, voters had to be able to read. If they couldn’t read, then they couldn’t be properly informed. If they weren’t informed, then they couldn’t vote intelligently. Society has a legitimate interest in limiting the vote to people who can vote intelligently. You can say that the argument was abused, and it was, but it’s not a crazy argument. It makes sense.

In the early days of the American republic, voting was limited to white male property owners. Women couldn’t vote. Even if they were free and not slaves, blacks couldn’t vote. That limitation of voting rights led to a particular kind of government and political system. It was worse in some respects than our system, and better in other respects.

Even in the birthplace of democracy, ancient Athens, only white male Athenians could vote. Women couldn’t vote, and were considered about equal in status to horses. Foreigners couldn’t vote, and were considered fit for enslavement. That limitation of voting rights led to a government and society that was pretty good for white male Athenians. Its results were pretty good for all of Western civilization that came afterward, giving us foundations in science, philosophy, art, and politics. The cost was what we’d call injustice. Athenian males disagreed.

The Real Issues in Voting Rights

The real issues in voting rights are:

• What values do we consider most important?
• What kind of society and government do we want?
• And who counts as part of “we”?

From a political-science standpoint, democracy only works in small political units up to populations of about 500,000. When a political unit is bigger than that, democracy breaks down because (1) it’s impossible for the majority to know what’s going on, and (2) each individual’s vote is so diluted that it has almost no chance of making a difference. Ancient Athens had a population of about 250,000 — of whom only about 30,000 could vote.

With larger populations, democracy degenerates into oligarchy, just as it has in the United States. Democracy is no longer about rule by the majority, because that’s practically impossible. Instead, it becomes a device by which the ruling oligarchy deceives the majority into consenting to whatever the oligarchy does for its own benefit. It’s a way to give the majority of people the illusion that they have some control without actually giving them control. In essence, voting is transformed from an exercise in governance into an act of consent to be ruled and exploited by the oligarchy.

That said, there is some wider benefit in having people feel that they are part of the society. That applies even if the political system is corrupt. Voting rights are a way to recognize people as full citizens, giving them status and respect. People who feel that they are part of the society are more inclined to cooperate with others, help the needy, and contribute in other ways that the ruling oligarchy neglects because it’s too busy stuffing its bank accounts and starting wars.

For those reasons, I think that voting rights should be extended as widely as possible, even though the people voting are unlikely to have any power. It’s not a political but a social exercise: People who can vote are part of our society. We, as their peers, show them respect and acceptance.

Copyright 2012 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Technorati Tags: voting, elections, Republicans, vote fraud, democracy, Jim Crow

A friend asked, “what is the soul?”

It’s a worthwhile question. My answer is that you can’t have a mundane answer to a question about a reality that is wholly or partly transcendent. It’s the same reason that no one can come up with a conclusive proof for the existence or non-existence of God.

We know that some things are mental and others are physical, but we can’t define the terms very well and we aren’t sure how they are related to each other. Materialist attempts to reduce everything to physical phenomena tend to be just as tautological and arbitrary as early 20th-century idealist attempts to reduce everything to phenomena of consciousness.

G.E. Moore pointed out that however we explain reality, “mental” and “physical” are categories that we use to organize our experience. In a discussion with an idealist (a person who thinks that only consciousness is real and that physical objects don’t exist), Moore once held up his right hand, pointed to it, and said “This is a physical object.”

Many people have regarded that argument as simpler than it really was. Moore, who was one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, did not believe that he could refute a metaphysical theory simply by holding up his hand. No, his point was twofold, and much more interesting.

First, regardless of their metaphysical views, people deal with physical objects all the time. No matter how we explain the nature of physical objects, they are part of our daily lives. “Physical object” is the name we give to certain types of phenomena. Talk to an idealist on the street, outside of a philosophy seminar, and ask “What’s the difference between a rock and a mathematical theorem?” The answer will be that one is a physical object and the other is an idea.

Second, Moore was making an epistemological point. Idealism is a theory about the nature of reality, and it denies the existence of physical objects.* This part of his argument was simplicity itself: “Which is more certain: that idealism is true, or that my hand exists and it’s a physical object?”

The same applies to materialist arguments that the soul does not exist. Neuroscientists often breathlessly announce that changes in mental states can be caused by changes in the brain and vice versa. They act as if it were a new insight provided by modern science. But the correlation between mental states and brain states was old news when Plato and Aristotle were alive. Back then, it didn’t prove that mind was reducible to brain activity, and it still doesn’t.

So, which is more certain: that materialism is true, or that you are conscious and reading this sentence?

What the question about the soul really amounts to is not, “Do I exist as something distinct from the physical aspects of my body,” but:

“Do I exist as something independent of the physical aspects of my body, and which will continue to exist when my body dies?”

The answer to the first question is obviously “yes,” for as Descartes observed, “cogito ergo sum.” The answer to the second question is unknown and probably cannot be known in terms of this frame of reference.

As St. Augustine said, “In this world, we live by faith, not by sight.”
______________________________________________
*Meaning, as objects that can exist independently of consciousness.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

By N.S. Palmer

In today’s New York Times, its column “The Stone” asks what The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy called “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything:”

What is the meaning of life?

The British comedy troupe Monty Python devoted an entire movie to that topic. At the end of the movie, John Cleese summarized the meaning of life as follows:

• Be nice to people.
• Don’t eat too much fat.
• Try to get some walking in.
• Read a good book every now and then.
• Live in peace and harmony with people of all races, creeds, and nationalities.

That’s a good answer, considering that the question itself is badly stated. As the supercomputer Deep Thought observed in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you can’t understand the answer unless you understand the question.

So you can’t answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” unless you can answer “What is the meaning of the question?”

The New York Times column has some good ideas in it, but largely misses the point. It approvingly quotes Jean-Paul Sartre‘s remark that without God, life has no meaning. But then it disputes the idea that life has meaning with God, either.

The Meaning of Meaning

In logic and linguistics, meaning typically refers to intentionality, the property by which an object refers to something other than itself.

If I say “there is an elephant in the living room,” my statement is not self-contained. It refers to something beyond itself, that is, to the presence of an elephant in the living room.

In fact, intentionality is one of the defining characteristics of consciousness, and therefore of us. To be conscious is to be conscious of something.

That isn’t too far removed from people’s vague sense of what it means for their lives to have meaning. We want our lives to be about more than just themselves. We want them to be in relation to something else.

Most people want to live for something beyond themselves: for God, for their spouse, for their children, for their political ideals, for music, and so forth. They want their lives to be in accordance with their objects (God’s wishes), pleasing to those objects (God’s approval), or beneficial to those objects (the welfare of their children, the success of their political ideals, and so forth).

In that sense, God does give meaning to people’s lives, both:

• In an absolute, metaphysical sense (whether people believe in God or not), and
• In a psychological, moral sense (if people choose to devote their lives to following God’s directions as they understand them).

But you can’t make sense of the answer unless you can make sense of the question. That’s how I make sense of it.

Your answer might differ: but if it makes sense to you, that’s what counts.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

“Old wine in new bottles” is a common phrase in English. It refers to the practice of taking something old, dressing it up a little, and then pretending that it’s new.

Like so many phrases and proverbs in Western civilization, this one comes from the Bible. In this case, however, it reverses Jesus’ statement from Matthew 9:17:

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.

In our time, we get a lot of old wine in new bottles. At the grocery store, we get “New! Improved!” laundry detergents whose only change is a “new! improved!” price. In politics, we get the “unitary executive” theory, which recycles the medieval doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, and “privatization,” an updated version of the 18th-century enclosure movement. In literature, we get dumbed-down re-workings of Shakespeare, made suitable for our thuggish and illiterate popular culture.

And then there’s science. We’ve been conditioned to believe that science is always new and shiny. But contemporary scientific research often just re-states, in modern terms, truths that have been known for centuries or millennia.

The latest case of old science in new bottles is reported in the June 18, 2011 issue of Science News:

Villagers from an Amazonian group called the Mundurucu intuitively grasp abstract geometric principles despite having no formal maths education, say psychologist Veronique Izard of the Universite Paris Descartes and her colleagues …

Study co-author and Harvard University psychologist Elizabeth Spelke argues that evolution has endowed people with “core knowledge” about several domains, including physical space.”

(“Geometry Comes Naturally to the Unschooled Mind”)

None of that would be a shock to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (424 – 348 BCE). Over 2,000 years ago, he told in his dialogue “Meno” about an encounter between his teacher Socrates and an uneducated slave boy:

SOCRATES: He is Greek, and speaks Greek, does he not?

MENO: Yes, indeed; he was born in the house.

SOCRATES: Attend now to the questions which I ask him, and observe whether he learns of me or only remembers.

MENO: I will.

SOCRATES: Tell me, boy, do you know that a figure like this is a square?

BOY: I do.

SOCRATES: And you know that a square figure has these four lines equal?

BOY: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And these lines which I have drawn through the middle of the square are also equal?

BOY: Yes.

SOCRATES: A square may be of any size?

BOY: Certainly.

SOCRATES: And if one side of the figure be of two feet, and the other side be of two feet, how much will the whole be? Let me explain: if in one direction the space was of two feet, and in the other direction of one foot, the whole would be of two feet taken once?

BOY: Yes.

SOCRATES: But since this side is also of two feet, there are twice two feet?

BOY: There are.

SOCRATES: Then the square is of twice two feet?

BOY: Yes.

SOCRATES: And how many are twice two feet? count and tell me.

BOY: Four, Socrates.

SOCRATES: And might there not be another square twice as large as this, and having like this the lines equal?

BOY: Yes.

SOCRATES: And of how many feet will that be?

BOY: Of eight feet.

SOCRATES: And now try and tell me the length of the line which forms the side of that double square: this is two feet—what will that be?

BOY: Clearly, Socrates, it will be double.

SOCRATES: Do you observe, Meno, that I am not teaching the boy anything, but only asking him questions; and now he fancies that he knows how long a line is necessary in order to produce a figure of eight square feet; does he not?

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Harold supposedly didn’t know jack. Poor Harold.

Based on his interpretation of the Bible, radio evangelist Harold Camping predicted that “the Rapture” would occur on May 21, 2011.

He was wrong. But in today’s New York Times, Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting argues that Camping didn’t know the Rapture was coming even if he had turned out to be right.

The Rapture is an evangelical Christian idea based on a few passages in New Testament. It asserts that when Jesus returns, believers will be snatched off the earth’s surface to “meet Jesus in the air.” They will then be taken to Heaven to sit out the Tribulation, during which all hell will break loose on earth. Meanwhile, the unsaved people left on earth will have to struggle against the Antichrist (either Michael York or Sam Neill, depending on which movie you watch).

One could say a lot of things about Camping and the idea of the Rapture.

Camping seems to make money on his predictions. Hmm. It doesn’t mean he’s insincere, but hmm.

As for the Rapture, the Catholic Church historically didn’t want the Bible to be available in common languages for everyone to read. Interpreting Biblical passages requires a certain amount of knowledge and context. As long as it was only available in Latin and Hebrew, only priests, rabbis, and other clergy could read it. The Church feared that if just anyone could read and interpret the Bible, then some people were likely to come up with uninformed and dubious ideas.

But that’s not why Gutting claims that Camping didn’t know about the Rapture.

Gutting’s argument is based on the definition of knowledge. Traditionally, knowledge has been defined as justified true belief. Suppose I say that there is an elephant in the living room. Do I know it? That amounts to asking:

• Can I justify my statement by giving reasons and evidence to support it?
• Is it true? Is there really an elephant in the living room?
• Do I in fact believe it?

If all those conditions are fulfilled, then I know it.

Gutting argues that Camping’s belief, even if true, would not have been knowledge because it was not justified. He bases his argument on the unstated premise that support from Bible passages cannot justify beliefs. If beliefs aren’t justified, then they aren’t knowledge (justified true belief).

However, the notion of “justifying a belief” can include many kinds of evidence: scientific, logical, mathematical, and, of course, Biblical. That’s where Gutting goes wrong.

In the early part of the 20th century, physicist Paul Dirac predicted the existence of positrons based solely on the results of some mathematics he had done to describe electrons. No one had ever seen a positron. Fifteen years later, they were detected. Was Dirac’s belief unjustified? It wasn’t based on observation. The same applies to some of Einstein’s theories, and even to string theory, which is the current darling of subatomic physics. It’s not based on observation. Is it not knowledge? (Physicist Lee Smolin thinks it’s not knowledge, but he’s in a tiny minority.)

Likewise, it’s arbitrary to say that Camping’s beliefs were unjustified merely because they were based on his idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible. That applies whether or not we think it’s okay to base knowledge claims on the Bible.

Gutting applies a different argument to other evangelical Christians who believe in the Rapture but don’t try to predict when it will occur. In their case, he argues that without a date attached, predictions of the Rapture are not “falsifiable” and are therefore not knowledge.

That’s an idea popularized by the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper argued that statements about the world qualified as “knowledge” only if they could be proven false. But consider the following statement:

On the evening of October 25, 1946, at the meeting of the Cambridge Moral Science Club, Karl Popper had precisely three shillings in his pocket.

Or:

Whatever is coloured is extended.

Those are both statements about the world that cannot be proven false. Even so, it is possible for someone to know the first, and impossible for anyone (who understands it) not to know the second.

So it’s just as arbitrary for Gutting to claim that other evangelical Christians’ beliefs about the Rapture (and by implication, Orthodox Jews’ beliefs about the Messiah) aren’t knowledge.

To justify a belief means simply to give reasons for it. The reasons might be good or bad, adequate or inadequate. Some justifications are better than others. But if you can cite supporting reasons for a belief, and you can answer objections to the belief, then you’ve justified it.

Notice, of course, that justifying a belief isn’t the same as proving it. When you justify a belief, you show that you can reasonably hold the belief. It might still be false, and future evidence could prove that.

But let’s breathe a sigh of relief that, at least for the moment, we don’t have to contend with the Rapture.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Two basic forces shape the universe: Law and Love, or if you prefer, Rules and Results.

Those forces also generate the two basic viewpoints about human and Constitutional rights. Both are currently on display in a dispute over gun control laws.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, part of the “Bill of Rights,” states:

A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Opponents of gun control laws latch onto the part that says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Supporters of gun control laws argue that “the people” refers to Americans collectively rather than as individuals, so the right to keep and bear arms applies only to people in government-organized military organizations.

Frankly, I think that opponents of gun control laws have the better Constitutional argument. The text says what it says. And via the Fourteenth Amendment and later court decisions, the Constitution applies to states as well as to the federal government. Therefore, one can make a good case for an individual right to own guns.

But that’s not the only question involved. The larger question is whether rights are an end in themselves, or are justified because they produce good results.

Consider Timothy Egan’s recent column about the January 2011 shootings in Tucson. After avowing that he grew up around gun owners and supports private gun ownership, he starts talking about results. He cites statistics showing that more gun ownership leads to more gun deaths, more often of the innocent than the guilty.

Conservatives and libertarians argue that gun ownership makes everyone safer, but they really see that point as irrelevant. Their main response to Egan’s argument is to say that results don’t matter. Only rules matter. And according to what they say are the rules of the U.S. Constitution and “Natural Law,” the government has no business restricting or discouraging gun ownership of any kind. You can probably even find a conservative or two who thinks it’s in the Ten Commandments.

As usual, the dispute between rules and results leads to further questions:

• If rights are an end in themselves, how do we know that? How do we know what rights we have? And if respecting rights in a particular case would lead to terrible consequences, should we still respect them in that case?

• If rights are justified because they produce good results, then results for whom? “The greatest good for the greatest number?” Or just for the Wall Street sharks and corporate billionaires who bankroll libertarian think tanks and publications? How much good does a right have to produce, and with what degree of reliability, in order to qualify as a right?

Because the choice between emphasizing rules and results is so fundamental, there’s no way to prove that one choice is right and the other is wrong. Different people make the choice based on their personal history, psychology, and the dominant viewpoint of their society. And the choice itself is a false dilemma: you need both law and love, rules and results. Having only one of them would be like trying to do mathematics with only odd numbers.

It’s peculiar that many evangelical Christians, as conservatives, think that rules are more important than results, because Jesus taught that rules should be guided by love.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

This isn't Nazi Donut, but it looks similar. I liked to sit at the counter.

Intellectual humility can come to us in surprising ways. Sometimes, it’s served up in a donut shop, along with darned good coffee and the best chocolate donuts in town.

Mine came garnished with ignorance and bigotry, but it was helpful anyway.

Years ago, I went each morning to the local gym to work out with a trainer. After the gym, on my way to work, I stopped at Busy Donut, where I sat at the counter to read the morning newspaper, drink coffee, and eat two chocolate donuts.

The news was idiotic then, just as it is now, but at a lower volume. The coffee was outstanding. The chocolate donuts were to die for.

Busy Donut was definitely a working-class establishment. At the counter, I sat beside truck drivers, sales clerks, gas station attendants, and of course policemen. If there’s one thing that cops know in any city, it’s where to get the best donuts.

Unlike most people with too many university degrees, I know all those people quite well. I worked in a factory where I was the only person who didn’t speak Polish; an elderly lady in the factory office taught me enough to get by. I was a drugstore delivery boy: one of my customers was nicknamed “Maalox” because she ordered a case of it every week, but she tipped well. I drove a taxicab part-time for a couple of years. As a paralegal (which isn’t hard and requires no law license), I helped lower-income people handle their debts. And like most students, I did my share of delivering pizzas, busing tables, and working in bookstores.

I found that on average, blue-collar workers weren’t significantly less intelligent than university professors or other members of the more affluent and respected classes of society. The main difference was that they lacked educational opportunities. As a result, their views of the world were based on common sense but were sometimes uninformed or misinformed.

But let’s get back to the counter at Busy Donut, which on that morning had not yet earned its unofficial name of “Nazi Donut.”

I was sitting a few seats down the counter from several gas-station attendants who were in a heated conversation. Because I was reading the newspaper, I didn’t listen until this line grabbed my attention:

“… This police officer was a Jew-boy, and he admitted it!”

Yes, I know that anti-Semitism is supposed to be scary. But it was so ludicrous that I choked on my coffee and almost burst out laughing. The police officer “admitted that he was a Jew-boy?” My gosh, had he no shame?

Those gas-station attendants weren’t jackbooted storm troopers filled with hate. They were just ordinary people who had been misinformed and misled. They trusted their favorite magazines and radio shows to tell them the truth: instead, they were fed a steady diet of fantasies, lies, and stereotypes. That misinformation distorted their view of the world and of other people.

And I don’t even want to beat up too harshly on the sources of their misinformation. The human mind is a frail and fickle thing. It leaps very quickly from the premise “I don’t like him” to the conclusion “He must be evil.” And since it’s established that he’s evil, “He must be doing evil things.”

The latest example is a story in right-wing circles about the recent shootings in Arizona of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), Judge John M. Roll, and several others.

It goes like this: That dirty Kenyan Muslim Socialist Obama (they call him a “Kenyan Muslim Socialist” because they can’t use the n-word) wants to seize our retirement savings — presumably to give the money to undeserving black people. Judge Roll said that Obama couldn’t do it, so Obama had him assassinated. All the other shootings were just a smokescreen. Never mind that Judge Roll wasn’t even scheduled to be there. Don’t confuse us with the facts.

Let’s follow the chain of reasoning, shall we? Obama is black. And he’s uppity, and he uses big words, like he thinks he’s better’n us white folks. And he somehow got to be president. So he must be lying about being an American, or about being a Christian, or something. And that means he’s evil. Because he’s evil, he does evil things. Killing a judge is an evil thing, therefore Obama must have done it. Is that about right?

It reminds me of Woody Allen‘s example of the syllogism:

• All men are mortal.
• Socrates is a man.
• But Socrates is a homosexual.
• Therefore, all men are homosexual.

These kinds of beliefs are ludicrous, of course. But people who hold such beliefs quite honestly think that they’re true. They’ve been fed information that is at least mistaken and sometimes deliberately false. And based on that information, they’ve arrived at conclusions that are false and could lead to violence.

Have any of us ever accepted false information and thereby reached false conclusions? Of course we have.

Sometimes, we know a lot. But we usually know far less than we think we do. And at least half of what we think we know is probably wrong. So it behooves us to be a little careful about what we think we know: whether in politics, science, religion, or personal relationships.

Otherwise, we risk becoming like the benighted anti-Semites at Nazi Donut. And that’s not worth it, even for the best chocolate donuts in town.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

“Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.”
–F.H. Bradley

Theists and atheists argue about a lot of things, but most of the issues that divide them are derivative. They almost never* address the fundamental point of disagreement:

Is this universe a manifestation of something else, or is this universe all that exists?

The “something else” can be imagined in different ways, such as:

• The will of God.
• A cosmological multiverse of which our universe is one of an infinite number of variants.
• The virtual reality depicted in the “Matrix” movies.
• The surface world described by Plato in his book The Republic.

Based largely on the spiritual insights of great men and women as recorded in religion, theists (a group that includes me) argue that this world is just a temporary residence where we live until we’re ready to go someplace else, variously defined.

Based largely on the undisputed usefulness of science and a considerable amount of hubris, atheists argue that Goddammit – excuse me, that should be only “dammit” — this world is all that exists, and that anyone who disagrees with them is an idiot.

Neither side has proof. Theists usually cite their sacred books, which they believe without evidence to have been written by God, a being they cannot define. Atheists cite the ability of physical science to explain processes within the physical world, which they fail to see is irrelevant to explaining the existence of that world in the first place.

It occurs to me that there’s a reason for all that fruitless disagreement.

I tend to think of this world as being like a metaphor: a poetic use of words that is related to their literal use.

When Homer says in The Iliad that the goddess Athena seized Achilles‘s arm to prevent him from killing Agamemnon, we understand that it means Achilles restrained his murderous rage. We’ve seen people go into a rage and restrain themselves, so we’re familiar with the situation to which the metaphor refers. We don’t believe that the gray-eyed goddess flew down from Mount Olympus and grabbed someone’s arm.

When Alfred Noyes says in his poem “The Highwayman” that “The moon was a ghostly galleon,” we understand the imagery he is using and the emotional mood he is trying to create. We’ve seen the moon look spooky at night, so we know the situation to which the metaphor refers. We don’t believe that a sailing ship was flying around in the sky.

But suppose that we didn’t know who Athena was, and that we didn’t know what “galleon” meant? Suppose that we’d never seen someone go into a rage and we’d never seen the moon at night. Would we be able to start from the metaphorical use of those words and deduce their literal meaning?

No. We could guess. We could cite evidence and reasoning. We could argue. We could exhort. And we might be right, but we couldn’t prove it.

The same thing applies in other areas.

In mathematics, if one thing is a projection of something else, we can identify precisely what the “something else” is — but only if we know the values and system of equations that generated the projection. In physics (except for quantum physics), if one event is caused by another event that is unknown, we can work backwards to the cause if we know the exact forces, masses, and physical processes that led to the effect.

If we lack the relevant knowledge to connect the original element of a mathematical system with its projection, or to connect a physical event with its cause, then we can guess, argue, and exhort. We might even be right. But we can’t prove it.

The same thing applies to our universe. Whether you think of it as a metaphor, or as a mathematical projection, or as a metaphysical effect of an unknown cause, all we see is the result. We not only don’t see the cause, we also have no experience or knowledge of what the cause might be like. And we have no discursive knowledge of the nature of the poetic imagery, the equations, or the processes that might lead from something to end up with our universe.

As a result, we latch onto hypotheses, clues, and intuitions. Then all of us — theists and atheists alike –  decide what we’re going to believe about our world and about ourselves. As a matter of ego, we don’t like to be “wrong,” so we defend our beliefs against all comers. But ultimately, all we have is the metaphor and what we make of it.

What are you going to make of it?

If I may invoke my own version of the metaphor, don’t worry too much about your verbal answer: God loves you no matter what you believe about Him. Answer with a life of love, truth, generosity, and forgiveness. The rest will take care of itself.

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* An outstanding exception is John F. Haught’s book Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science.

Copyright 2011 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it — good and hard.”
– H.L. Mencken

America’s current election campaigns by the two major political parties remind us yet again of the stupidity, foolishness, and gullibility of the electorate.

In California, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate is  Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of computer maker Hewlett-Packard. So far, she has not promised in her campaign to do for California what she did for Hewlett-Packard: throw people out of work, run the state into the ground financially, and walk away with a Golden Parachute severance package.

In Nevada, Lunatic Republican Sharron Angle, who can’t tell the difference between the border of Mexico and the border of Canada, is running for the Senate seat held by Gutless Democrat Harry Reid, who can’t tell the difference between caving in to Republicans on every issue and fulfilling Democratic campaign promises.

In Delaware, anti-masturbation scold Christine O’Donnell is running as the Republican Senate candidate on the platform that she is just as ignorant as the most ignorant people still capable of signing their names on a voting register. One wonders if she really cares about winning, or if she just wants to raise some cash and get people to pay attention to her.

What gets lost in all the hoopla, gets lost on purpose. If you bog everyone down in nonsense about who’s a witch and who supports death panels, they don’t have time to discuss substantive issues. Like unemployment. And ruinously expensive, unjustified wars. And an increasingly  oppressive police state. And the fact that government should promote the greatest good for the greatest number, not just enact policies to benefit Wall Street, giant corporations, and the super-rich.

The truth is that democracy is a sacred cow but it really doesn’t matter that much. It’s just a means to a goal. The goal is to promote a just, free, humane, and prosperous society.

Whether the government is chosen by voting, by hereditary titles, or by a lottery isn’t important. If it does the right things, then it’s a good government. If it does the wrong things, then it doesn’t matter how many votes it gets: it’s a bad government.

We have a middling government that’s trending toward bad. Voting doesn’t seem to help much. I wonder what will.

In Douglas Adams’s brilliant novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything was ’42′.”

The novel’s characters who asked the question found that answer a little obscure. Therefore, in my capacity as a philosopher, I’m going to give you a clearer statement.

But I can only state the question and describe what the answer is like. The answer itself is different for everyone, though “42″ isn’t a bad approximation.

The simple fact is that we can never know for sure what the universe and life are about, if anything. We don’t have certain knowledge of their purpose or even if they have a purpose.

We don’t know for certain why we live, or even if there is a reason. We don’t know why things happen to us, or even if there is a reason. We don’t know why we die, or what happens to us when that occurs.

We don’t have certain knowledge, in the scientific sense, that God exists and even less do we have any certain knowledge of what He is like.

We don’t have certain knowledge of right and wrong. We can’t prove our moral beliefs to anyone who doesn’t already partly agree with us: which means that we can’t prove them logically to ourselves, either. All our moral arguments are either:

• Emotional persuasion, or

• Attempts to show people that their moral beliefs are inconsistent, and that adopting the belief we recommend would make their beliefs consistent.

Evidence exists about all of those issues, but is insufficient to prove things one way or another. We can speculate, we can hypothesize, we can interpret the evidence in this way or that, but we can’t prove any of it.

Religion Gives Equivocal Answers

We can look to the Bible, or the Qur’an, or our religious traditions for guidance, but they don’t give us unequivocal answers. Some passages seem to command love and forgiveness; others seem to command hatred and mayhem. That’s why believers in the same faith often disagree about what their faith means. They latch onto different parts of the tradition to justify different world-views and different moral beliefs.

None of this is news. Sixteen centuries ago, St. Augustine said that in this world, “we walk by faith, not by sight.” In the 20th century, Rebbe Menachem Schneerson said, “G-d created the universe in a manner in which we perceive our own existence as the intrinsic reality.”

Science Gives Equivocal Answers

We can look to science for guidance, but that’s no help, either. Science studies the physical universe and how it works, so scientists are experts about that subject. As human beings, scientists also have opinions about God, the purpose of life, and why the universe exists.

Because they think in scientific terms, that’s how scientists express their religious and moral beliefs. But it’s important to understand that their religious and moral beliefs are not based on scientific evidence and are not supported by science. Atheism is a belief held by some scientists, but it is not a scientific conclusion. It’s a personal belief.

That’s why some eminent scientists don’t believe in God while other eminent scientists do believe in God. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, denies God’s existence and wrote a book to argue for his viewpoint. Francis Collins, a physician-geneticist who directs the Human Genome Project, believes in God and wrote a book to argue for his viewpoint. Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest physicists of our time, denies the existence of God. Isaac Newton, one of the greatest physicists of all time, spent much of his life trying to understand the Bible and what it revealed about God’s plan.*

All those scientists look at the same evidence. The atheists interpret the evidence as denying God’s existence. The theists interpret it as supporting God’s existence. If the evidence can be interpreted equally well to support contradictory conclusions, then it doesn’t prove anything about those conclusions.

What I Believe

Here’s my faith. I have reasons for believing these things, but the reasons are not logically conclusive. I can’t prove any of these beliefs to people who disagree with them:

• God exists. He is the infinitely good, infinitely loving, infinitely intelligent, infinitely powerful creator and sustainer of the universe.

• Our intelligence is so feeble compared to God’s that it’s not even comparable to His. We cannot understand God’s plan, nor should we expect to understand it beyond the baby-talk version He gives us in the Bible and other sacred texts.

• Our identities as people transcend our physical existence in a manner of which we cannot be certain and probably can’t understand.

• God put us into this world where we can experience and share love, joy, kindness, and even physical pleasure. But it’s also a world where we are exposed to hatred, sorrow, cruelty, pain, and death.

• And it’s also a world where we can’t know for sure that God exists, what He wants us to be, or how He wants us to live.

• Those are the basic facts of our lives, and they’re not going to change as long as we are in this world.

Those facts put us in a situation of radical freedom. If we knew for sure that God was looking over our shoulders and that He wanted us to live in a certain way, then we’d pretty much have to do it. What sane person would pick a fight with the creator and sustainer of the universe?

But we don’t know for sure. In the vernacular, “we don’t know jack.”

And Now: The Ultimate Question

Nobody with real authority will tell us how to live. We have to choose what kind of people we’re going to be and how we’re going to treat other people. We have to choose what moral and spiritual values we’re going to follow, if any.

And that leads to the ultimate question:

How do you choose to live?

Will you lay up treasures on earth? Will you treat other people just as things to satisfy your own selfish desires? Or will you thirst for righteousness more than riches, treating other people with love and kindness?

Will you see the world as meaningless, or meaningful?

Will you see each person, including yourself, as nothing more than an intelligent animal? Or will you see each person as an infinitely important child of an infinitely good and loving God?

Will you treat each encounter with another person as a chance to get something for yourself at his or her expense? Or will you treat it as an opportunity to share love and joy with that person?

I can’t give you the answer, because the answer has to come from within you. It has to be your own free and authentic choice.

What will you choose? For you, that is the answer to the ultimate question.

I can’t prove that you should, but I hope that you will choose the path of love, joy, kindness, and faith in God.

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* Interestingly, Hawking held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge University: a position established in 1663 for, and first held by, Isaac Newton.