02.15.06
Religious violence: a study
From Prometheus Books, an interesting ‘secular humanist’ study of religion and violence.
Fighting Words: The Origins Of Religious Violence, Hector Avalos (Prometheus, 2005). Read the rest of this entry »
02.14.06
Wilson’s dilemma
Luke Rondinaro from Consilience Projects provides this passage from E. O. Wilson’s Consilience, RFC. Read the rest of this entry »
02.12.06
Lovejoy on Schopenhauer
There is an older text from the fifties, Forerunners of Darwin, with an essay by Lovejoy on Schopenhauer and evolution. Unfortunately I fear Lovejoy doesn’t do justice to Schopenhauer (although the history of his views on evolution is important and interesting: Schopenhauer was pretty hot on the trail of evolution himself), and I doubt if any Darwinian could even grasp what that philosopher was up to. That’s a pity, because the ID debate gives Darwinists an excuse for ostrich behavior, failing to realize the nature of their metaphysical limits, something Schopenhauer (and Kant) made clear even before Darwin left his mess in the public domain. A theory like Darwin’s is doomed to fail, and the reason can be seen indirectly by considering Schopenhauer’s apt exploration of the limits of our representations.
Biblical Archaeology
Here’s the sort of material Dennett’s book should have included. I have been looking at Dever’s Who are the Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (Eerdmans, 2003), alerted to it by his more recent Did God Have A Wife?
The history of ancient Israel is dissolving but leaving in its wake an almost perfect match to the eonic model, which explicates its confusing complexity almost perfectly:
on Israel and the eonic effect
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02.10.06
Darwin Day: The Grubby Whigs Award
As a contribution to Darwin day and the iconic ritual of the founder we can instead begin to hand out the ‘Grubby Whigs Award’ for those whobest manage to peddle Darwinian ideology concealed in the name of science, and get away with.
Darwin of course gets it first, and it might be good idea to give the award once a week instead of once a year: there are many deserving candidates (like all those liberal/left Darwinists out there making Darwin out to be the man he wasn’t).
To set the record straight here is a passage from WH&EE with a quote from Desmond’s bio of Darwin:
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Will Dennett solve his ghost problem?
Poor old Dennett, plugging away on his science of religion. It all started with ghosts, he thinks.
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02.09.06
Does Old Testament history show design?
ID the Future has a link to Fractals and art: In the hands of a master.
Fractal analysis has been used to assess the authenticity of paintings purporting to be the work of Jackson Pollock. Alison Abbott reports.
This is taken as an example of ‘design inference’. Interesting thought!
However,….
One problem proponents of ID have is the Old Testament. Can we make a design inference about this history?
Of course, secularists will say that it is all superstitious gibberish. But a student of my eonic effect will see that emergent religions in the Axial Age (along with a lot of other things having nothing to do with religion), theist or atheist, have a complex non-random signature.
Shall we conclude design? Surely not. There are clear cases of specified complexity (sort of, in this case) where the design inference is misleading.
02.08.06
Right to be offended?
Is there a right to be offended?.
There seems to be almost universal agreement that these cartoons are offensive. There should also be universal agreement that the paper has a right to publish them without fear of violent reprisal. When it comes to freedom of speech, the liberal/left should not sacrifice its values one inch to those who seek censorship on religious grounds. But the right to freedom of speech equates to neither an obligation to offend nor a duty to be insensitive. If our commitment to free speech is important, our belief in antiracism should be no less so.
Huntington’s ‘social hypothesis’ about the clash of civilizations, in reality a pseudo-scientific justification for imperial designs along those very lines, seems to have reached sudden apothesis. Shadowy figures in their thinktanks should be wary of what they wish for.
There is a resemblance to the attempt to democratize Iraq. Who can doubt the nobility of this hope, or wonder at the ineptitude, or else cunning, of those in the Bush gang who spoiled a great chance? So the question of the cartoons, with their suspicious rightist overtones, is more than the issue of free speech, it is the issue, then, of the other’s democracy of free speech, and the covert domination willing to subvert that by the indirect exploitations of globalization.
I think it hard to believe a democracy of free speech is so foreign to the Islamic world. All that is needed is some let up in the Western ploys to prevent it, behind the pretense they would create it.
The problem creates cognitive dissonance in Moslem thinking, perhaps. You want globalization, what’s wrong with our version? We have been globalizing for a thousand plus years, you are johnny come lately with a cheap skate’s version of our version, the Real Thing.
So it’s about on a par with Halliburton democratization. Howabout the real thing?
Saint or Grubby Whig?
The Stanford Daily ponders Darwin’s secular sainthood. How is it that a grubby Whig like Darwin is the mythical sage of modernity? It is a distortion of history and culture, and will end badly. Hordes of groups across the globe are calling for a postmodern destruction of modernity, and yet the troopers remain oblivious to what is happening.
That this phenomenon is grossly unfair to Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and the many others who founded the science that Charles Darwin appropriated so unjustly to his iconic legacy is bad enough, but what’s is worse is the cultic tenacity of this belief formation and the damage it is doing to science, unable to progress beyond its stuck paradigm. It is incredible that entire university systems, with immense resources of scholarship and research, are unable to correct this phenomenon, and that outside forces from the religious right are attempting to seize the initiative.
02.06.06
Nietzsche: genius or idiot?
A review of Friedrich Nietzsche by Curtis Cate by Lawrence Klepp takes on the Nietzsche myth, quote at end of post. I read half way through the book, quite long, and stopped, if only due to lack of time, and turned to R. J. Hollingdale’s Nietzsche (now in paperback, and it contains the claim that Nietzsche plagiarized his early prize essay in school!?).
Isn’t Nietzsche overrated?
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AMNH’ s racist history
Since I am not subscribed to WSJ I will quote Evolution News: How Pygmy Ota Benga Ended Up in Bronx Zoo as Darwinism Dawned as a reminder of just how much Darwinists get away with in the sheer drivel and hype of the Darwin paradigm.
Let me also ask where the left is in all this?
Darwinism helped perpetuate and justify racism, as the Ota Benga story makes clear. It also produced the eugenics movement, where Darwinists (including, please note, the American Museum of Natural History) were the leaders. Eugenics was “science” and anyone who dissented was considered benighted. (See Richard Weikart’s “From Darwin to Hitler” for the eugenics story in detail.)
The Journal article draws no parallels, but what the treatment of Ota Benga, the eugenics movement and today’s AMNH exhibit have in common is the persistent thread of Darwinist arrogance.
Berlinski: Origins of Life
David Berlinski has a new essay On the Origins of Life and the collapse of the collapse of the RNA model:
At the conclusion of a long essay, it is customary to summarize what has been learned. In the present case, I suspect it would be more prudent to recall how much has been assumed:
First, that the pre-biotic atmosphere was chemically reductive; second, that nature found a way to synthesize cytosine; third, that nature also found a way to synthesize ribose; fourth, that nature found the means to assemble nucleotides into polynucleotides; fifth, that nature discovered a self-replicating molecule; and sixth, that having done all that, nature promoted a self-replicating molecule into a full system of coded chemistry.
These assumptions are not only vexing but progressively so, ending in a serious impediment to thought. That, indeed, may be why a number of biologists have lately reported a weakening of their commitment to the RNA world altogether, and a desire to look elsewhere for an explanation of the emergence of life on earth. “It’s part of a quiet paradigm revolution going on in biology,†the biophysicist Harold Morowitz put it in an interview in New Scientist, “in which the radical randomness of Darwinism is being replaced by a much more scientific law-regulated emergence of life.â€
Morowitz is not a man inclined to wait for the details to accumulate before reorganizing the vista of modern biology. In a series of articles, he has argued for a global vision based on the biochemistry of living systems rather than on their molecular biology or on Darwinian adaptations. His vision treats the living system as more fundamental than its particular species, claiming to represent the “universal and deterministic features of any system of chemical interactions based on a water-covered but rocky planet such as ours.â€
02.05.06
Yali’s Question
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel has a charming reference to Yali’s question, so-called, which is really about the question of the rise of modernity against the backdrop of world history. I came across a useful discussion of this in Stephen Oppenheimer’s The Real Eve (Carroll & Graff, 2003). Diamond’s book is a fascinating, but to claim that the rise of western modernity is the result of geographical influences is almost complete nonsense, almost.
Diamond’s answer to the question in his book is one of the naivest, ironically, though one that seems to appeal to many because it plays ostrich on the tough questions of the rise of the west, a term that should be cashiered. The eonic model has a lot to say about this, especially at
Transition and Divide, although start at the beginning of Chapter Three, perhaps.
It is time to challenge the postmodern confusion created here, without rejecting all their critical insights.
The problem is that Darwin idiocy has seized the helm here, and that is going to be a problem. Moslem reactionaries are chuckling that Western modernists are so stupid as to bet the ballpark on Darwin and are amazed that modernists can’t even defend their own modernity, post-Nietzche.
Thus, the question of the rise of the modern has gone critical in a so-called postmodern period, and none of the standard models can handle the question. Moslems, Buddhists, New Agers of all kinds are getting ready to wipe modernity off the map, so it would be good to consider non-idiotic versions of answers to Yali’s question, without Eurocentrism, tripe about Western Civilization, etc…
There is even a book written about Yali, reference below, at end.
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02.04.06
1848+ : ultra far left
I added still one more category, a subcategory, ‘ultra far left’, to the 1848+. ultra far right conservatives should be alarmed.
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02.03.06
Breaking Dennett’s Spell
I broke down and got my copy of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and almost immediately regretted not buying instead Dever’s Did God Have A Wife? on a nearby shelf.
Dennett’s book is almost dreadfully bad, devoid of content, just a rehash of the kind of Darwinian-secularist jargon rehashed into what appears to be an account of the evolution of religion, although that never really happens in the book.
The book just spins out a set of abstractions and never even bothers to examine the history of religions as we know them. Obviously Dennett is afraid to look at that history, and finds it safer to spin just so stories about how religion might have ‘evolved’ in the Paleolithic.
This book wouldn’t even be worth commenting one save that it will have a considerable influence, no doubt.
1848+ : In the News…
The creature called a ‘blogger’ generally googles a news item then comments thereupon. So to initiate the 1848+ category on this blog
I followed the definition and….
googled ‘Neue Rheinische Zeitung 1848′ and was surprised to find all the back issues on the Internet. One of the seminal moments of the modern period.
Such a sentiment is neither left, nor right, factual.
In politics, nothing basic has since changed since that period.
So I cite here one of the last articles of Marx and Engels written for that paper as the revolutionary tide petered out, and the System as we now know it came into existence:The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution
Oscar Hammen’s The Red’48ers gives a good history of that year.
Marx in Neue Rheinische Zeitung December 1848:
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02.02.06
New Category: 1848+
I have added several new categories: The Axial Age, Science & Religion, New Age, and 1848+ (??).
The latter category springs from wish to extend discussion to formally off topic issues. But nothing is off topic in the context of the eonic effect. That is a nice thing about the way the eonic model difines history/evolution to overlap. Everything is relevant, even the latest headlines. But the year 1848 and its aftermath is given a symbolic meaning in World History and The Eonic Effect: it is the point at which (to within a half-century) the eonic sequence comes to an end. Check out 1848: End of Eonic Sequence?,
Anyway, this category will allow bringing in everything from paper airplanes launched against Washington to the evolution of culture/politics since the nineteenth century.