Nature

Sometimes the journal Nature seems like a sort of New York Times for scientists, with everything that entails. So when they say a book is dangerous, I seek it out. This one seems like it may be good:

In case anyone missed it, there was a little row in the realm of science last year. In the spring of 1992, Bryan Appleyard, the science and philosophy columnist for the Sunday Times in London, published a work that set off a flurry of debates over the place of science in today’s world. Even before its publication, Nature, the bellwether of opinion in the British scientific community, denounced Understanding the Present:
Science and the Soul of Modern Man as an extremely dangerous book. The problem was not just that Appleyard had renewed ‘the old assertion that science affronts human dignity,” it was that he did it in a way that was ‘likely to be persuasive,” especially among those who control the flow of resources to scientists.

(Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man
by Bryan Appleyard
Review author: Daniel C. Johnson
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 32, No. 4. (Dec., 1993) :406) (Emphasis added)

It's that last bit about funding that will set the Herd to running because these days a successful "scientist" is not necessarily the one who is the most successful in science but the one who is most successful at getting funding. The two can coincide but they usually do not because the meek/geek that inherit the earth usually do so because they turn inward to the conceptual world of words in their own heads and then apply what they learn from language and Logos to the earth. I.e., the meek tend not to have so-called "social skills" at first and if they did then they would tend not to inherit the earth later. I've never much cared for so-called "social skills" myself and would rather talk to a person I know has to be communicating in authentic ways rather than one who is skilled at mixing the authentic and the inauthentic. There again, games can be fun.

It is humorous that when the meek are attacking the meek things like this: "Well, there's a possibility about a missing variable over here." are basically the emotional equivalent of a vicious personal attack. So this fellow who is one of them who seems to be telling the truth about science will be attacked, apparently they've even gone so far as to call his book "dangerous." Dangerous to their funding perhaps. Note that there is one thing that Left and Right, Democrat and Republican will just keep throwing vast amounts of money at: "Science." It seems that Republicans are marginally on the right side of a reformation among the geeks given that some feel the need to write books such as this: The Republican War on Science. The Left has always abused science while claiming that everything they do or say is "scientific," so it is not surprising that the Right would answer some. It is not suprising that the Left would continue to do what it always has done. What is telling is that the Right is also taken in by some of the myths of modern science these days.

An interesting view, note the supposed fact/value split:

The equation of liberalism and science is neatly set up in Appleyards glossary:
“Liberalism is the precise correlative of the scientific view that we must remove ourselves from the world in order to understand it — in liberalism the equivalent concept is that we must remove ourselves from values in order to understand them.’ Thus, all that is characteristic of the soul of modern man — the absence of conviction, the hypertrophied notion of tolerance, the narcissistic devotion to self-cultivation — can be traced back to the influence of science. For there is no question that Appleyard regards the spirit of science as the primary mover in the development of “liberal scientific culture.” As much as he fancies himself a disciple of Max Weber, his understanding of the present is more reminiscent of Jaques Ellul’s The Technological Society than of anything Weber put out. Far from pursuing Weber’s more nuanced analyses of the dialectical development of culture, Appleyard relentlessly identifies science as the ultimate causal factor in the rise of modernity.
This is evident in his sweeping appraisal of the history of science and philosophy from Galileo to the present. Once the principle of efficient causality was enshrined, once it was agreed that we must place ourselves outside the cosmos in order to gain a proper perspective on the nature of the cosmos, science was free to overwhelm and transform the inherited culture. Why? “Because it worked,” Appleyard replies. A few heroic thinkers — notably Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Ludwig Wittgenstein — did dare to expose the perils inherent in the advancing system of thought. The vast majority, however, capitulated, providing a rationale for the dominance of science and championing its cause. Inexorably, science pushed on to its unsettling conclusion: With the work of Darwin and Freud, the formerly inviolable human self finally became just another component in the mechanistic world of the scientific imagination.

That science met little resistance from the congregation it had systematically stripped of meaning is to Appleyard a tribute to its devastating effectiveness. Even when the horrors of modern warfare and environmental devastation demonstrated the capacity of science to do evil, the progress of scientific understanding was not checked. If anything, such specters as the A-bomb...gave science yet one more area in which to assert its expertise: in the oversight of science itself.* Scientists could shield themselves from blame by invoking the conventional distinction between value-free research and the ethical issues surrounding the use of that research. In the meantime, who better to assess the implications of global warming or nuclear winter than scientists themselves? After all, science works.

Given the absolute authority accorded science, the only ones who can truly question it anymore are the scientists themselves. What makes this point especially interesting is the fact that developments within science over the course of this century have in fact given rise to a number of questions.

(Ib. :407) (Emphasis added)

That last is part of where something like ID enters in on the basis of a wedge that is very thin along the edge, so thin that many Darwinists will impale themselves on it.

Note that there is no such thing as a fact/value distinction. All that could possibly be argued about such a distinction is that it might be a useful heuristic to pretend or "imagine" that there is one.

An interesting phrase: "...just another component in the mechanistic world of the scientific imagination." It's not just Darwinists who include their own imaginations as evidence, yet their radical and extreme example is helpful in recognizing such "reasoning"/imagining throughout science. It would seem that Darwinists (i.e. many biologists) are not scientists in any conceptual sense no matter how low the epistemic bar is set.

Down with Absolutes?

It seems that Mike thinks that he finally has a place for judgment, such as it is for one who often wallows in his own "filth" and the like. It seems that moral judgment has been turned into a sensationalistic public relations stunt for those who generally lack it. It is odd that a supposed "preacher" like Phelps would so often use filth and obscenities in his sermons, isn’t it Mike?

I would argue that some of the most important knowledge that you can know of a man is his family life:

For example, as a means of encouraging the wives and children to "submit to the father's authority in the home," Phelps began encouraging his congregants to beat them if necessary; he was once forced to bail one of his parishioners out of jail after counseling the man to punch his wife in the face until she became "subjugated."
[...]
One of his sons claims that his first memory in life was that of the drunk, stoned Phelps shooting a dog for defecating on the lawn, the incident which led to the majority of Phelps' supporters leaving him and returning to Eastside.
[...]
Phelps continued to take drugs, consume alcohol, and binge eat for six years...

(Wikpedia*)

He's like Hitler in falling into such patterns, then come attempts at "purification." That pattern would not be surprising given that he seems to have the elements of an anti-Christ type figure. E.g.:

Two of his sons, Mark and Nate, claim that the church is actually a carefully planned cult that allows Phelps to see himself as a demigod, wielding absolute control over the lives of his family and congregants, essentially turning them into slaves that he can use for the sole purpose of gratifying his every whim and acting as the structure for his delusion that he is the only righteous man on Earth. In 1995, Mark Phelps wrote a letter to the people of Topeka to this effect; it was run in the Topeka Capital-Journal. The children's claim is partially backed up by B.H. McAllister, the Baptist minister who ordained Phelps. McAllister said in a 1993 interview that Phelps developed a delusion wherein he was one of the only people on Earth worthy of God's grace and that everyone else in the world was going to Hell, and that salvation or damnation could be directly obtained by either aligning with or opposing Phelps. Phelps maintains this belief to this day.

(Ib.) (Emphasis added)

It is hard to believe that any could be confused in their moral reasoning by men such as these:

Hitler very seriously compar[ed] himself to Jesus. He said on one occasion, as he lashed about him with a whip, "In driving out the Jews I remind myself of Jesus in the temple"; and on another, "Like Christ, I have a duty to my own people..." He considered himself betrayed by Ernst Röhm in 1934 and drew the analogy to the betrayal of Jesus, saying, "Among the twelve apostles, there was also a Judas. . . ."
[...]
Hitler substituted Nazi high holy days for traditional religious holidays. They included January 30, the day Hitler came to power in the year he referred to as “the Holy Year of our Lord, 1933,”...
[...]
The close parallel between Christian commitment to God and the sacred oath of allegiance to Hitler is best seen in a description of public oath-taking recorded in the Nazi newspaper, Westdeutscher Beobachter: “Yesterday witnessed the profession of the Religion of the Blood in all its imposing reality.. . . Whoever has sworn his oath of allegiance to Hitler has pledged himself unto death to this sublime idea.”
... [Hitler] directly approved the patent paganism and Führer worship of the Warthegau church as a model for the church he planned after the war. And he did not object to the following version of the Lord’s Prayer which was recited by the League of German Girls:

Adolf Hitler, you are our great leader Thy name makes the enemy tremble.
Thy Third Reich comes, thy will alone is law upon earth. Let us hear daily thy voice and order us by thy leadership, for we will obey to the end, even with our lives.
We praise thee! Heil Hitler!

It is to be noted that prayers were given not only for the Führer, but to him as a deity.

In speeches and soliloquies, and in ways he may not have been aware, Hitler himself spoke in the very words of Christ and the scriptures—thereby revealing a considerable knowledge of the Bible. A few examples will suffice here: In dedicating the House of German Art in Munich he observed, “Man does not live by bread alone.” In talking to the Brown Shirts on January 30, 1936, he echoed the words of Jesus to his disciples as recorded in St. John’s Gospel, saying, “I have come to know thee. Who thou art, thou art through me, and all I am, I am through thee.” He reminded one of his disciples that “I have not come to Germany to bring peace but a sword.” In a public speech in Graz in 1938 he announced, “God Almighty has created the Nation. And what the Lord has joined together let not Man set asunder.”

He was particularly prone to Biblical quotations when talking to the Hitler Youth. On September 5, 1934, he told them, “You are flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood.” In 1932 he advised them either to be “hot or cold, but the lukewarm should be damned and spewed from your mouth.” The phrasing is too close to the New Testament to be coincidental. The Revelation of St. John reads: “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot; I would thou wert cold or hot. So then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.”

During one of the last suppers with his followers, Hitler invited them to eat of their Leader’s body, asking them if they would like some blood sausage made from his own blood. In effect he was saying, “Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you.. . .“

(Adolf Hitler's Guilt Feelings: A Problem
in History and Psychology
by R. G. L. Waite
Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
Vol. 1, No. 2. (Winter, 1971), pp. 229-249)

I don't really believe that people are confused by anti-Christ type figures, instead they are looking out for their own interests.

*I don't usually use Wikpedia but they seem to have their sources in order.

He might be gone.

So a note on reasoning of this form: "Who is to decide what is the metaphoric Light, if "common sense" is subject to any doubt?"

Who is to decide to question if there are any doubts about doubt itself?

This fellow's form of reasoning seems to be a form of logic or pseudo-logos that is eating itself up to the point that it eats its own tale, as represented with this parable.

The supposed benefits of doubt:

Why sacrifice a transcendental truth for immanent certainty? This is the fallacy inherent in scientism.
In settling for certainty, you cut out part of the dialectic, and hamstring the everlasting approach to transcendental truth, and to God.

I would answer that with the words of Max Planck, father of Quantum Physics: “Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition... [therefore] ‘On to God!”

Or to add some lines to the parable: "I, uh, eh....what? Woman! Why don't you come away with me to this cliff and throw yourself off of it? Won't God have to come near to you to save you the farther away that you try to get? I've tested this by trying to kill myself many times already, yet I am not dead yet. Try it and see, for how else can you know for certain that God loves you unless you are uncertain of it?"

To which she says with a laugh, "Was I supposed to be certain or uncertain? I forget."

And so on. As for me, I seldom settle for certainty. So I'm not as certain as this fellow seems to be that it is doubt that results in an everlasting approach to transcendental truth and so on. No, it seems to me that there must be something else causing people to pursue the truth against their doubt, since that is what they are doing.

Common sense

The interesting thing about common senses are that they can come out in many forms, including a perverted form. E.g., an insult of this type seems to reveal a common sense being perverted: "You're secretly just like me!"

This fellow in my comments seems to lack some common sense, yet I suspect that if he is not careful then his own common senses will come out. He's intelligent, so it probably will not be as obvious as the example above. (Good judgment on the difference between secretion and excretion but it still does nothing for arguments against seeking a sound knowledge of Natural Law.)

Anna Venger on the same sort of topic, read her because she'll probably write about it in politically relevant ways in terms that most people can understand. That can be better than meandering off onto various issues of philosophy, psychology, history and what have you in the way a person more interested in seeking knowledge than in writing a good, relevant and timely blog post might.

Speaking of "biological thinking," censorship and book burning...

...such things seem typical to a mind of the synaptic gaps that has sought to fold in on itself, supposedly encompassing all knowledge. We can use the buzzwords of "science" and "religion" when it comes to knowledge, yet in actuality much of it is the same knowledge stated in different cultural forms. The priest or charlatan of old would have told you that the world was pooped from a cosmic turtle and perhaps ten percent of the population believed in this imaginary history enough to regard it as a truth worth promulgating, seeking to establish or live by, just as about ten percent fully believe in the imaginary mythological narratives of naturalism typical to the Darwinian creation myth these days. For the most part it seems that the majority of people do not care about origins even as they live in cultures fundamentally shaped by beliefs about origins.

But when we do think about it we seem to have a hard time admitting that we do not know something, whether the form of knowledge is called religion or science the same issues come up. E.g.

In September 1981 the prestigious scientific journal Nature carried an unsigned editorial (subsequently acknowledged to be by the journal’s senior editor, John Maddox) titled ‘A book for burning?’ (Maddox, 1981). It reviewed and damned Rupert Sheidrake’s then recently published book A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Causative Formation (Sheidrake, 1981) and raised a storm of controversy whose fall-out is still very much with us.
Up to this time Sheldrake was a well-respected up-and-coming plant physiologist and the recipient of academic honours including a fellowship at his Cambridge college. The furore that grew out of the assault in Nature put an end to his academic career and made him persona non grata in the scientific community. Over twenty years later this journal still runs the risk of ostracism by publishing his work. What can explain this deep and lasting antagonism?

The Origins of the Controversy

The saga began a week ahead of the book’s publication, when Sheldrake had trailed his hypothesis of formative causation in an article in the New Scientist magazine. The piece was provocatively headlined: ‘Scientific proof that science has got it all wrong’. An editorial introduction admitted that, to modern science, an idea such as Sheldrake’s was ‘completely scatty’, but justified its publication on the grounds that first, ‘Sheldrake is an excellent scientist; the proper, imaginative kind that in an earlier age discovered continents and mirrored the world in sonnets,’ and secondly, ‘the science in his ideas is good. ... This does not mean that it is right but that it is testable’.
This was mid-June, and over the summer Sheldrake’s ideas were subjected to much discussion in journals and newspapers, and his book was reviewed in a variety of scientific and religious publications. Attitudes were predictably mixed and by no means all negative. Then came the bombshell in Nature.
Nowhere did the editorial actually say the book under review ought to be burned. Indeed, it said the exact opposite: ‘Books rightly command respect ... even bad books should not be burned; ... [Dr Sheldrake’sl book should not be burned.’ But it also contained the comment ‘[Sheldrake’sl book is the best candidate for burning there has been for many years’ and — probably the real clincher— there was that headline: ‘A book for burning?’ Dozens will read a headline who never read the text, and how many of those troubled to note the question mark at the end of the heading? Thus the myth was born: Nature says Sheidrake’s book should be burned.
What concerns us in this editorial is not Sheldrake’s hypothesis, but Maddox’s ‘hysterical attack’ (as a writer to his own letters page called it a week or two later). Why did the editor of Nature, himself a noted secularist, deliberately invoke the language of book-burning, an activity inevitably associated not only with religion, but with forcibly imposed dogmatic teaching? What caused him — in the words of another correspondent — to treat his editorial column as ‘a pulpit from which to denounce scientific heresies’? The answer came most clearly in an interview on BBC television many years later, in 1994, when Maddox said:

Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned in exactly the language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy.

This quotation makes absolutely explicit a charge that appeared in more muted form in the original editorial. Here Maddox had written that,

Sheldrake’ s argument is an exercise in pseudo-science. ... Many readers will be left with the impression that Sheldrake has succeeded in finding a place for magic within scientific discussion — and this, indeed, may have been a part of the objective of writing such a book.

The image of Sheldrake as the opponent of science was also presented in a radio discussion between the two protagonists in the autumn of 1981. In his closing speech, Maddox first spelled out his very conservative approach to new theories:

The conventional scientific view, which I think is entirely proper, is that there is no particular point in inventing theories which in themselves require a tremendous feat of imagination* and constitute an assault on what we know about the physical world as it stands, when there is at least a chance, and in this case a good chance, in my opinion, that conventional theories will in due course provide an explanation.

[...]
Several things in these quotations point to why Maddox found religious terminology so appealing in his own defence of science, and they indicate how similar in some respects are the scientific and religious establishments. These similarities throw light on the nature of the hostility most mainstream scientists and philosophers continue to show toward Rupert Sheldrake and his research programme.

Heresy in Religion and Science

Sheldrake is accused both of ‘putting forward magic instead of science’ and of ‘finding a place for magic within scientific discussion’. This is noteworthy because the only reference to book-burning in the New Testament is when the magicians of Ephesus, under the influence of St Paul’s preaching, came out on to the streets and publicly burned their books of spells (Acts 19.19). There is an implied contrast here between the openly proclaimed teachings of Christianity and the secret arts of the magicians, and much early Christian polemic praised the transparency of the public orthodox tradition over against the secret knowledge claimed by the Gnostics. Orthodox science is orthodox religion’s true heir in this respect, putting its trust in public replicable experiments rather than spooky unpredictable effects.
Another motif in the Ephesus incident is the idea that written words have an inherent power, so that false words need to be physically destroyed (burned).

(Sheldrake and His Critics: the sense of being glared at
by Anthony Freeman
Journal of Consciousness Studies
Volume 12, No. 6 (2005) :5-6)

I'll finish this later. Some meanderings which I may reformulate later.

Part of the little things that Sheldrake goes into is the sense of being stared at, as apparently there is data similar to the placebo effect that people can tell if someone is staring at the back of their head. That's the sort of "magic" that sends scientists running for their lives and so on. The thing about the "magic" of the placebo effect and other things of this nature is that they have been observed empirically, magic or no. It seems that sometimes the empirical facts do not matter to scientists whose make a god of what they imagine matter to be. What they seem to be imagining are little billiard balls governed by Newtonian physics, one bumping into another and so on and on. In all of it each cause and effect can be traced to another, all else is of the "magic" that shuts down the pursuit of knowledge and so on. Why, it may as well be a Flying Spaghetti Monster and this sort of thing if it doesn't fit in with their little imaginings about one billiard ball hitting another and causing it to move, then another, another, another and so on to a mystical infinity hidden away in millions of years.

That's interesting.

The post below this one seems to have been censored off of the blog of a little fellow waging a Kulture Kampf based on the scientism of his day. I thought it might be, which is part of the reason I saved it here. I didn't actually make the connection to him but the reasoning that he engages in and the scientism of the day that he believes in seems to be similar enough that the sweaty little hands of the censor come out when the form of proto-Nazi reasoning is pointed out. The irony of the common move toward censorship is that censorship of the truth about Nazi attempts to engage in "biological thinking" is typical to Nazism.

Those who want to engage in proto-Nazi forms of scientism tend to burn books and censor because history is their natural enemy.