Skip to main content

logocentrism, scientism, atheism, Chesterton, any stick will do to beat a dog

Fifteen years ago, deconstructionists attacked theism, I think for its daring to come up with a comprehensive account of reality.  Today, Sean Carroll and his like say that the very questions which lead to such comprehensive answers should be disallowed.  It seems that both groups of anti-theists have in common this opposition to wonder, as is classically conceived.  But they also disagree with each other: deconstructionsts would attack science's claim to be able to come up with objective answers (this may have to do with the term "logocentrism": I don't know); hence the famous "science wars."

Deconstructionism would make us all fideists of a sort, whereas the other brand of anti-theism advocates scientific rationalism.  If so, then theism has been attacked by one group (the quasi-fideists) for being too boldly rational; and later for its perceived opposition to reason.  This reminds me of Chesterton's remark (I think in Orthodoxy) that upon noting how the Church has been criticized for being both too sensate, too ascetic, etc., Chesterton began to suspect that it had perhaps gotten things just right--which is what he did discover once he investigated the mater.I need to review deconstruction in order to see if the Chestertonian come-back would be applicable to the last couple of decades of anti-theism.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...