Yes Virginia, there are flat-earthers

There are some good essays online on the flat earth myth -- the belief that people thought the earth was flat prior to Columbus. I recently linked to this post by M&M, here's another, and here's one James wrote. Humphrey wrote a couple of excellent blogposts on it here and here. The go-to book for all of this is Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians by Jeffrey Burton Russell (you can read a short essay by Russell here) who traces the myth to about 1830 when Washington Irving wrote his "history" of Columbus.

Rather than add to what they wrote, I'd like to address a parallel issue. Once non-Christians started ridiculing Christianity as promoting a flat earth, some Christians sought to defend their faith by ... accepting a flat earth. The most prominent defender, in the mid-19th century, was Samuel Rowbotham, who wrote the book Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe. Rowbotham compiled dozens of evidences supporting his claim that the earth was flat and stationary, such as lighthouses that could be seen from further away than they should if the surface is curved, cannonballs fired straight up from moving platforms (demonstrating that the earth is not moving), etc. To this day there is a flat-earth society which defends this kind of thing. Here is a list of flat-earth literature available to read online. A list of resources by and about flat-earthers is here.

I collect flat-earth literature. It seems to me to be an extreme example of Christians reacting to the conflict myth by letting secularists tell them what to believe, another example being contemporary defenses of geocentrism, something which has gained support among young-earth creationists.

That leads me to my main point: I think young-earth creationism is another example of Christians letting secularists define Christian belief. I don't think it's on the same level as belief in a flat-earth for the simple reason that, throughout history, many of the holiest Christians believed the earth and universe to be young. Nevertheless, the history of young-earth creationism in the last 50 years reveals it to be a reaction rather than a reasoned response, in a very similar fashion as belief in a flat earth was a reaction against the forces of secularism. I submit that this is not an appropriate way for a Christian to act. You can't love the Lord with all your mind if your theology is based on knee-jerk reactions. Moreover, it leads to two deplorable situations: first, as I've already mentioned, where the dictates of one's faith are actually made up by people trying to mock it. I don't think it's wise to let those who deprecate our faith define it for us. Second, it creates a rather large stumbling block for belief in Christianity. If that's what you have to believe in order to be a Christian, then it just obviously fails the smell test.

There are plenty of parallels between young-earth and flat-earth literature. Both make their claim the linchpin to orthodoxy, so that disagreeing with them leads to the denial of central doctrines. Both locate the problems of contemporary society in the rejection of their claim. Both claim that the denial of their claim makes God into an incompetent Creator. Both claim that the denial of their claim is a purely recent phenomenon. Both explicate their claim via bluster and a feigned over-confidence. Etc.

To illustrate that last point, I have a flat-earth book entitled A Reparation: Universal Gravitation a Universal Fake by C. S. DeFord, originally published in 1931, that begins thus:

To me truth is precious. I love it. I embrace it at every opportunity. I do not stop to inquire, Is it popular? ere I embrace it. I inquire only, Is it truth? If my judgment is convinced my conscience approves and my will enforces my acceptance. I want truth for truth's sake, and not for the applaud or approval of men. I would not reject truth because it is unpopular, nor accept error because it is popular. I should rather be right and stand alone than to run with the multitude and be wrong.

Methinks he doth protest too much.

Size Doesn't Matter, addendum

Forgive me for coming back to this, but I just remembered a loose thread that I'd like to tie up. In part 2 of this series, I relied heavily on two books Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley by Albert Van Helden, and The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis. While these two books are generally in agreement, I stated that Van Helden disagreed with Lewis regarding Roger Bacon's Opus Maius. I didn't go into any detail about it because it's a minor point and this is really my only area of contention with Van Helden.

What he takes issue with is the following quote from Lewis:

The reader of this book will already know that Earth was, by cosmic standards, a point -- it had no appreciable magnitude. The stars, as the Somnium Scipionis had taught, were larger than it. Isidore in the sixth century knows that the Sun is larger, and the Moon smaller than the Earth (Etymologies, III, xlvii-xlviii), Maimonides in the twelfth maintains that every star is ninety times as big, Roger Bacon in the thirteenth simply that the least star is 'bigger' than she. (Discarded Image, 97)

Van Helden uses this quote to claim that Lewis was "curiously uninformed" about the dimensions of the medieval model of the universe, and states, "Had Lewis actually looked at Roger Bacon's Opus Maius instead of using a secondary source, he would have found the Ptolemaic System in all its detail laid out before him" (Measuring the Universe, 28).

There are a few points to make about this. First, to claim this one quote somehow demonstrates a general unfamiliarity with medieval cosmology on Lewis's part is simply unjustified. We would need more evidence, much more evidence, to warrant such a conclusion. Second, Lewis directly quoted Bacon only a few pages earlier (Discarded Image, 93), so he was obviously familiar with his writings firsthand. Third, the quote in question is only referring to the size of the stars, not to their distances; something made evident by the fact that immediately following the quote, Lewis clearly changes the subject to their distances, writing, "As to estimates of distance..."

With this, I am unable to see that Van Helden's criticism has any merit. Lewis's statement that "Roger Bacon in the thirteenth [century maintains] simply that the least star is 'bigger' than she [i.e. the Earth]", seems relatively innocuous. Perhaps Bacon wrote extensively about the size of the stars, and so Lewis should not have written the word "simply". However Van Helden does not cite any such estimations on Bacon's part, and I don't have a copy readily available to check. At any rate, Lewis's statement does not appear to be a significant misrepresentation. Bacon certainly affirms his main thesis when he writes that "the Earth does not possess any sensible size with respect to the heavens" (Opus Maius, 1:258), something Van Helden himself notes (Measuring the Universe, 36).

Thus Spoke Cratylus

Below is a paper I wrote several years ago on Nietzsche’s essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’. The title, a takeoff on Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, refers to the ancient Greek philosopher Cratylus, a disciple of Heraclitus, and one of Socrates’ interlocuters. In Metaphysics 4.5 Aristotle wrote,

But the reason why these thinkers held this opinion is that while they were inquiring into the truth of that which is, they thought, ‘that which is’ was identical with the sensible world; in this, however, there is largely present the nature of the indeterminate—of that which exists in the peculiar sense which we have explained; and therefore, while they speak plausibly, they do not say what is true (for it is fitting to put the matter so rather than as Epicharmus put it against Xenophanes). And again, because they saw that all this world of nature is in movement and that about that which changes no true statement can be made, they said that of course, regarding that which everywhere in every respect is changing, nothing could truly be affirmed. It was this belief that blossomed into the most extreme of the views above mentioned, that of the professed Heracliteans, such as was held by Cratylus, who finally did not think it right to say anything but only moved his finger, and criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river; for he thought one could not do it even once.

I think if Cratylus, in a fit of inconsistency, tried to write down the philosophy that led him to forsake communication, it would be something very close to Nietzsche’s.
__________

The acumen of Nietzsche’s parable with which he begins his essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ rests in its definition of humanity as ‘clever beasts [which] invented knowing.’ One might first think that Nietzsche is stating that the clever beasts tricked themselves into thinking they knew something when they really did not; that their ‘knowledge’ about reality was incorrect. But this is not the case. Knowledge refers to some kind of objective information; even if it is information about the subject, it is about the subject qua object. If man’s ‘knowledge’ is false, it would imply that there might be correct knowledge, ‘truth,’ to be had, even if merely theoretic truth. But there is no such information. This does not mean that Nietzsche is a solipsist, but that what does exist is so radically different and discontinuous with man, that there is no way for him to ever come into contact with it. By saying that humanity invented knowing, Nietzsche is saying that there is no such thing as knowledge; that the dichotomy of true and false is illusory. The beliefs that plague humanity exactly parallel those that any other animal has: they have no corresponding object, and only reveal something about those who hold them.

The reason Nietzsche’s point is particularly brilliant is that he is taking Kant’s claim that man cannot know the noumena, the thing in itself, and then takes a step further back by applying this to the concept of knowledge itself. While claiming that man cannot know the object qua object does not necessarily mean that there is no object, when man looks for knowledge qua knowledge, the whole epistemological pursuit necessarily self-destructs, since it is by knowledge that he seeks it. Since he cannot know knowledge qua knowledge, Nietzsche necessarily concludes that there is no such thing.

Nietzsche then goes on to wonder how this belief in knowledge could have arisen from the intellect, an evolutionary adaptation, the only purpose of which is to help the individual survive and produce progeny. The answer is that the individual protects himself from others and the world by means of deception, since he does not have the capacity to do so by physical means. However it is not merely the deception of others, but his own deception as well. His dreams deceive him, but he does not object. He tricks himself into thinking he knows about the external world, when there is not anything to know. He thinks he knows himself, while nature is preventing him from having even the most rudimentary knowledge thereof.

One major point Nietzsche makes here is that man only employs his senses (which, themselves, are entirely untrustworthy) superficially to try to understand reality. Such exercises are only a ‘groping game on the backs of things,’ and man’s ‘eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see "forms."’ This is the beginning of Nietzsche’s direct assault on Plato’s doctrine that the sensible world is merely a shadow of the world of forms or ideas. Humankind has immersed itself in deception—man can never know things as they are, because there is nothing to know, so he only superficially looks at the information presented to him by his senses, and then tricks himself into believing that he has encountered reality; and in so doing, becomes completely enamored with his own excellence.

This gives rise to a very important conundrum: humanity finds itself in a state of constant deception and dissimulation. But given this state, how could man have a genuine desire for truth? Nietzsche’s answer is that humanity does not merely want survival, but fellowship with each other. Man is a social animal. Therefore, as Hobbes declared in Leviathan, the individual must make a kind of peace treaty with others in exchange for such fellowship—and such a treaty necessarily involves the establishing of ‘uniformly valid and binding designation(s),’ in order to achieve some kind of rapport with each other. Hence, the ‘truth’ is now what the herd has established, and the ‘liar’ is one who uses these appellations contrarily to their designations.

However, this is only a first step towards the desire for truth. Nietzsche shrewdly points out that one who behaves as a ‘liar’ will be excluded from the herd—not for lying, but for causing harm by means of lying. The point being that it is not the deception itself that is offensive, just the consequences. Similarly, man wants the truth as long as it is comfortable and safe, but if it is inconsequential or harmful he is apathetic or hostile towards it.

This is precisely where Nietzsche’s view of the nature of language comes in: he argues that language must have subjective reference in order for it to have any meaning to man. The phrase ‘the stone is hard,’ does not say anything about the stone itself, but about man’s subjective experience of the stone, since ‘hard’ does not refer to something in the external world, but to man’s encounter with an object. Here, Nietzsche seems to be saying that if language had no subjective reference, it would not make sense to man as subject, because it would not have any connection to him; but insofar as language has a subjective reference, it cannot be considered to be describing objective reality, and hence, cannot be considered to be truth. Truth would be for language to describe the noumena, the ‘thing in itself.’ But this is simply impossible. Man can only describe things as they come into contact with him, and the consequent relationship determines his understanding thereupon. Language does not describe things: it describes man’s relationship with and perception of things.

Nietzsche goes on to further remove language from objective reality, by arguing that it is even discontinuous with man’s perception itself. He points out the fact that most, if not all, words are totally arbitrary designations. Even in the case where they are not, they simply take their cue from another designation, and this process itself is entirely arbitrary.[1] Many languages assign gender to objects, but it is difficult to see this as reflecting any objective reality. The fact that there are different languages makes this point evident. Nietzsche is once again arguing against Platonism here, particularly the position Plato takes in Cratylus. The only way to avoid this is through rigid application of the laws of logic, which Nietzsche dismisses as ‘tautologies’ and ‘empty husks’; that is, these laws do not reveal anything that is not already contained within the concept.

He further illustrates this by pointing out that the spoken word is merely ‘the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus,’ and any inference to an external cause is an invalid application of the principle of sufficient reason (contra Schopenhauer, whom he more often agrees with). He states that there are two unjustifiable inferences made in the process of language: first, a nerve stimulus is translated into an image; second, the image is translated into a sound. But there can be no connection between these three spheres. To ‘translate’ a nerve stimulus into an image, or an image into a sound, means to make one thing into something entirely different and other than what it is. He illustrates this by asking if someone who is deaf can understand the experience of hearing when sound is ‘translated’ into touch (vibrations) or sight. The obvious answer is: no. When translated thus, it ceases to be sound. Similarly, when man translates an image into a sound, it ceases to be an image, and consequently has no relationship to the image. Thus, Nietzsche calls these translations ‘metaphors’ and ‘illusions,’ and elsewhere in this essay, he refers to them as ‘lies.’ The word-symbol used to designate an object has no logical relation with the thing in itself, not being derived from its essence; and hence, everything the scientist and philosopher build on the content of language, i.e., concepts, is straw.

Nietzsche thus broadens his assault to include concepts themselves. He argues that conceptualizing necessarily involves classification: making the commonalities shared between individual entities preeminent and definitive, while disregarding the differences as trivial. But, Nietzsche points out, the differences are the only thing man actually experiences. He does not encounter ‘the’ leaf, he encounters countless individual leaves, not one being exactly the same as another. He then disregards all the unique properties of all of these experiences, and classifies them according to their commonalities. But, in this process, man has done two things: first, he has equated things which are not equal. He has chosen to ignore those aspects which made them unique, which simply means that he has made them what they are not. He sees two leaves, and calls them such; but in so doing, he has taken two things which are not the same and claimed that they are. Second, he has created a concept that does not resemble any particular example of which it is supposed to be the archetype. Once again, he is arguing against Plato’s doctrine of the Forms. He uses this to not only mock Plato, but ‘Platonism for the masses,’ by suggesting that if all of the individual leaves are copied from an original, it would imply that the ‘counterfeiter’ is incompetent, since none of them are accurate representations.

While the example of the leaf is perfectly in line with Plato’s philosophy, it is not the most evident example. When an individual sees a leaf, he does not tend to instinctively infer a larger reality of which it is merely a representation. Thus, in order to attack Plato head on, Nietzsche further illustrates his critique with a clearer example: honesty. This is a more lucid example than the leaf because when man encounters someone behaving honestly, he tends to see this as representative of something about that individual; that is, he believes the particular act of honesty he witnesses is a manifestation of a larger reality, namely, a character trait. But, Nietzsche says, this is precisely the lie that man tells himself. He has individual encounters of people behaving honestly, none of which are the same, and then invents a trait called ‘honesty’ which he then claims is not only the commonality between these encounters, but is actually the cause of this behavior in the first place. He has invented an unseen and obscure property, and claimed that it is the reality, instead of the actual experience.

Nietzsche even applies this to the distinction between individual and species, that is, the difference between experience and the categories under which man classifies them. However, he quickly qualifies this: to say this distinction is not part of the world itself would be just as dogmatic as saying in fact that it is. This, I think, shows the primary weakness in his argument: his claim is that our concepts (the species) do not reflect the real world at all, and the linchpin is that by inferring the species via the observation of the individual, man leaves behind his actual observations for a hidden concept. But Nietzsche recognizes that he would be contradicting himself to say that the distinction between species and individual itself actually reflects the essence of the way things are: not only because he has already argued that man cannot approach the way things really are, but because this distinction is itself a concept. Thus, he finds himself, for consistency’s sake, having to point out that this distinction cannot be said to represent reality. But since his whole argument depends on this distinction—that by focusing on the species, man misses the individual, and exchanges his experience for an imaginary world—he also points out that it cannot be said to not do so. However, to make this point at this juncture is arbitrary, since the same thing could have been said of any step in the argument. This inconsistency parallels how Nietzsche’s denial of metaphysics led him to affirm the doctrine of the eternal return—which is itself profoundly metaphysical.

Truth, therefore, is ‘a sum of human relations, … illusions which we have forgotten are illusions … the duty to lie according to a fixed convention.’ But, this still does not explain how man could ever desire ‘truth’ in sincerity. In order to do so, Nietzsche must couple what has been said thus far with what is, essentially, a case of collective amnesia. Man has grown so accustomed to this scenario, that he participates therein unconsciously. A subjective standpoint is established in order for people to coexist, and it is soon mistakenly thought to represent an objective standpoint. This is precisely how these clever beasts obtain a drive for ‘truth’: man feels morally obligated to acknowledge the traditional arbitrary designations. But, as has already been noted, these designations are removed from the individual and unique experiences that the individual has actually had. Hence, he governs his life according to abstractions, rather than experiences. He is supposed to let these abstractions guide him, rather than be ‘carried away’ by sudden impressions—that is, actual experiences—and thinks, in so doing, that he is being ‘rational.’ This is the first step toward the creation of an entirely different world than the one in which man really lives, a project that is distinctively human. Man is trying to impose an order on the world that does not exist in order to make it easier for him to endure. He does not realize that he is just using the agreed-upon symbols in order to avoid exclusion from the herd.

Now that man has these abstractions, Nietzsche says, he can arrange them into whatever order he wants; subordinating one to another or vice versa. He can then use this invented schematization to create laws and systems and castes to further itself, and further remove himself from his actual experiences. In fact make itself seem ‘more solid, more universal, better known, and more human’ than the latter, or in other words, make itself seem more real. But of course, this is a complete illusion; it is a ‘crap game.’[2] Nevertheless, Nietzsche points out, it is a particularly brilliant maneuver: men are geniuses of construction who have built ‘an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water.’ Such construction requires great ingenuity. It is like a spider’s web in that its parts are simultaneously malleable and strong. And yet, the spider builds his web out of given material; the bee builds his hive with that which he collects from nature. Man, however, does not merely construct his edifice, but actually invents the material he uses in the construction itself.

However, Nietzsche takes away with one hand what he has offered with the other. The ‘material’ with which man constructs his tower of Babel is simply the result of anthropomorphic thinking, which, of course, has nothing to do with reality. Concepts have no reference beyond man, they are merely the ‘residue of a metaphor.’ Man is classifying and constructing a world out of human interests. He is trying to make the world seem more like himself, because he has a powerful need to feel as if he belongs in it. He wants to be a part of the world, so it would only seem reasonable that he can apply the terms of his own existence thereupon. Man sees the universe either as a person par excellence, or as having such a person behind it. This leads to an interesting twist: the traditionalists, with their attempts to know objective reality as it is in itself, independent of themselves, are the ones who have made man the measure of all things. But they err in that they have mistaken their experience with actual objects, with things in themselves, and have forgotten that they are merely metaphors.

Thus far, Nietzsche has engaged in criticism or deconstruction. At this point, he begins to propound his own view of these matters. Man’s forgetfulness that the world is a metaphor is the forgetfulness that he is the one who created the metaphor in the first place. The fact that man has crafted the world as an artist according to his instincts of survival and community implies that he can craft it according to more appropriate ends: he must take into account aesthetics. This is a point which forms the basis for much of Nietzche’s later philosophy. Man is to create the world he wants, while holding before his mind all the while that it is his creation. As soon as he forgets this, he has slipped back into the lie of believing that his creations actually correspond to things in themselves, and hence, are true. The Übermensch is the one who can accept this scenario, and thus live life on its own terms. After the lion destroys the world that has been deeded to him, he is free to metamorphosize into the child who simply plays, by creating and then destroying for no external purpose.[3] It does not take anything into account other than aesthetics.

By contrast, the man who is unable to accept this scenario is the philosopher who has effected his own survival ‘only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid.’ This was not done primarily for aesthetic purposes, but in order to survive and commune with others. He refuses to live life on its own terms, and instead tries to tame it. Precisely by creating the world of concepts in order to sustain his own life, he denies life. The phraseology in Nietzsche’s quote above illustrates the contempt he has for this process, a contempt which is further demonstrated by his referring to this process as the ‘dissolv[ing of] an image into a concept’ which itself is ‘less colorful’ and ‘cooler’ than that of which it is supposedly the archetype.

However, this is not meant to imply that Nietzsche does not understand how this situation came about. It is the desire to live with ‘repose, security, and consistency.’ To deny the world of concepts requires one to not only give up all security and constancy, but to destroy their self-consciousness.

Nietzsche then builds on a claim he made at the beginning of his essay: since all animals perceive that the universe revolves around them, perceptions only reveal something about the one who experiences them, and thus, these perceptions have no corresponding object. Even if humankind had the strength to admit this fact, it would only lead man to ask which animal has the correct perspective. Nietzsche destroys this from both sides: first of all, in order to determine the correct perspective, one would have to have some kind of independent perspective by which he could judge them all. But this is unintelligible. How can one have a perspective independent of perspectives? Such a vantage point is simply unavailable. Thus, when man tries to move from himself to the world, he fails.

Second, when he tries to move from the world to himself, he fails again, since these are two different universes. The world is an entirely different realm than man, and between the two no information can flow. It is not that humankind has not yet discovered a way to move from one to the other, but that such movement is nonsensical. The question Nietzsche has been implicitly asking throughout this essay is, what would it mean to know the thing in itself, apart from experience? This question makes no sense. In order for man to know something, he has to experience it. Knowledge presupposes experience. It is basically asking, what would the experience of something which man does not (and cannot) experience be like? The only way for man to have ‘knowledge’ is by experiencing something—and this means that such knowledge is not of the thing itself, but of man’s experience of and relationship with it. Since man’s knowledge is based on his subjectivity, it cannot be said to have anything in common with the object he is supposedly encountering. ‘Truth’ would be knowledge of the noumena, the thing in itself, knowing it in its objectivity. But this is simply a contradiction in terms. There is no causal link between these two domains. One cannot express itself in the other.

Where does this leave man? There is still ‘a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue—for which there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force.’ There is, in other words, an aesthetic relationship between these two spheres. ‘Aesthetic’ because it involves free invention or creation, which is precisely the role Nietzsche sees for the superman: the ability to live life on its own terms. Man creates his own sphere and forces it to mediate between himself and the world. However, it would be a mistake to think that this mediation actually enables him to make contact with the world. Man has created this sphere; it is not an invention, it is a work of art, the purpose of which is to please, not to accomplish an external goal. The lie is that man has forgotten this is the way things stand with him. He has spent so much time looking at the same work of art, that it has hardened and congealed in place. The lie has been repeated so often that it has the same status as if it actually established a causal relation between ourselves and the world. Man has mistaken his creation for something it is not, in much the same way that a dream can be mistaken for reality.

At this point, Nietzsche changes his focus to another audience. He recognizes that the last step before one achieves his philosophy is the positivism which the natural sciences promulgate.[4] So he addresses those who hold this view, by broadening his assault to include the scientist as well as the philosopher. He begins by stating that those who are familiar with the objections he has made thus far obviously reject any sort of idealism, and instead embrace what they perhaps consider to be the only alternative: ‘the eternal consistency, omnipresence, and infallibility of the laws of nature.’ This is the view that science (or, perhaps, ‘Science’) will continue excavating a reality which is completely consistent with itself, and shows forth no hint of the anthropomorphic thinking Nietzsche has thus far condemned. Such faith is reasonable, for, unlike idealism, it is strikingly discontinuous with man’s imagination, and therefore is unlikely to be a product thereof.

Nietzsche’s response is to ask what the positivist means by the ‘laws’ or ‘regularity’ of nature. He has no experience of such laws; he only has experiences of their (alleged) effects, and infers a larger reality of laws behind them. Nor can he infer any particular law in isolation, since he only experiences the supposed effects of such a law in its relation to other laws, and thus as a collection of relations, which only refer back to each other. Such a construction is particularly reminiscent of the edifice of concepts, although, in this case, it is more closely based on experience. These laws are simply the medium through which humanity perceives things. What if, Nietzsche asks, each individual experienced things differently? Would this not render the community impossible? What would it mean to ‘lie with the herd’ if each man did not even have the same experience to lie about? At the very least, he would not perceive the world as regular or law-like; rather, ‘nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree.’

Obviously, man does not experience nature in such a way; he experiences it in ways common to all, and this is precisely what allows humankind to be communal animals. But the positivist has mistaken these common paths of experience with reality itself, instead of recognizing it as just a part of humanity’s collective makeup. These paths allow him to unify that which is divergent. All of these laws are based on the imposition of mathematical precision on the world via the representations of time and space. But, as Kant pointed out a century earlier, time and space are simply the nets which man cannot help but throw over the world in order to comprehend it. Man is unable to understand anything divorced from these media, so it is not particular impressive that he perceives everything in accordance with them. ‘All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical process, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things.’ Through science, man tries to investigate the world mathematically; but the concept of number is not something in the world, but is merely in man’s experience. Thus, man’s amazement with the laws and regularity of nature is simply amazement with himself. The edifice of concepts is only made possible because of the edifice already constructed ‘by the firm persistence of these original forms.’ Idealism, in other words, is an imitation of positivism, in that it copies the latter’s use of metaphors (in this case, time, space, and number) in order to construct a world.

However, in another sense, it is positivism which copies idealism, since it is simply ‘filling in’ the cells of the great edifice composed of concepts, just as the bee fills the cells of his hive with honey. To be sure, it does not accept this edifice on its own terms. It certainly renovates. But to renovate a building is not to create a new one in its place. The positivist/scientist thus modifies the structure, remodels the schematization, and reforms the caste system, in order to bring it up to code; that is, in order to bring it into agreement with the empirical—the anthropomorphic—world. The scientist works with concepts, derived from language, just as the philosopher does. Both seek to remove themselves from life by constructing a shelter from the continuous hail of powers that oppose the ‘truth’ they have created.

Thus far, Nietzsche has explicated the human condition, and scorned those who would seek to escape it. Rather, humankind should embrace the creative nature of life, and live in consonance with it. In the past man has created metaphors and mistaken them for reality. The solution is not and cannot be to stop creating such metaphors, since this is the ‘fundamental human drive.’ The tyranny of concepts, which has forbidden man from creating new metaphors, does not in any way lessen this drive. Man must instead find a new way to express this drive, and this is done, Nietzsche says, in myth and art. The reason these channels are better suited to the formation of metaphors than concepts, is because they have no pretense to constancy. Instead of capturing experiences and subordinating them under abstract rubrics—where they sit and grow stale, tasteless, and tepid—myth and art focus on the exhilaration, the color, the sharpness of the experiences themselves; and as soon as the focus begins to dull and the colors become less bright, they immediately change the view.

Of course, this also entails leaving behind the constancy, regularity, and reliability which the conceptual framework has afforded. The metaphors of myth and art do not allow coherence or results, since there is no regularity upon which one can rely in order to achieve them. Instead, the world will be like a dream. Not a fulfilled wish, but a dream, where there is no assurance from one moment to the next of any kind of stability. In a sense, preferring myth and art to reason and concepts is a matter of preferring the dreaming life to the waking life. Art awakes this possibility, and this is why the positivist sees value elsewhere (in scientific inquiry). Myth captures it even more beautifully, since it creates a world where anything can happen. Nietzsche mentions some of the incredible motifs of Greek mythology, and one hardly need catalogue the tales of the gods’ deceptions in order to see how the waking life of one who lives in such a world would be like a dream: chaotic, unpredictable, untamable, colorful, intense, and brilliant. ‘All of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving men in all these shapes.’

There are, essentially, two conflicting and irreconcilable drives waging battle within man. One is to create, to accept life as it comes and glory in it. The other is to effect one’s own safety, to run away from life; or at the very least, tame it so that it can no longer cause harm. The bravery of the former contrasts with the cowardice of the latter, which is based on the fear of misfortune, and seeks to minimize the experience thereof. To this end, it dulls life, by denying experience and upholding concepts as ‘reality.’ Of course, the same medium which makes possible this experience of misfortune which the philosopher and scientist so desperately seek to avoid, also makes possible the experience of overwhelming elation. ‘The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions.’ Man cannot cancel out one without simultaneously canceling out the other. By neutralizing misfortune, he has neutralized elation, and neutered life. The fear of misfortune holds the pursuit of elation hostage.

Nietzsche ends his essay with another parable which sets these two drives against each other in the form of two men. As the rational man lacks artistry and fears the intuitive man, so the intuitive man lacks rationality and has nothing but contempt for the rational man. One cannot choose both reason and art; they are mutually exclusive. One must choose whether to govern his life by abstractions or by experiences; he must choose between concepts and creating. Both men seek to conquer life, but by different means; the rational man by seeking to minimize its effect, the intuitive man by embracing it, by living it. He glories in the dissimulation, the deception which art and myth make possible. While one cowers in the face of life, the other ‘play(s) with seriousness.’

Both also seek to avoid misfortune, but again, by different means. The intuitive man ‘reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption’; in other words, he seeks to avoid misfortune positively, by pursuing elation. Of course, this means that he experiences misfortune more often, and that when he does, it is more intense, since he lacks any method for avoiding or minimizing it. ‘He does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch. He is then just as irrational in sorrow as he is in happiness: he cries aloud and will not be consoled.’ The rational man, on the other hand, seeks to avoid misfortune negatively, by running away from it. Instead of a human face, subject to the distortions which misfortune wreaks, he wears a mask, unaffected by circumstances.

Thus, both employ deception. However, the intuitive man does so in his elation, the rational man in his misfortune.

Notes:
[1] Nietzsche’s example of this is how the German word Schlange (snake) is derived from the verb schlingen (to wind or twist), a connection which could have been made to many other things, and which only arbitrarily selects one aspect of the object in question.
[2] I have to believe that Nietzsche would fully appreciate the double entendre this phrase captures in modern English.
[3] ‘Of the Three Metamorphoses’, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
[4] ‘How the "True World" Finally Became a Fable’, in Twilight of the Idols.

But who made God?

Many cosmological arguments (not all) argue that everything that begins to exist must have a cause -- this is basically the principle of causality. But this chain of causality cannot be extended infinitely into the past for two reasons: 1) an infinite amount cannot exist in reality; therefore there must be a first cause that by definition is not the effect of a previous cause itself. 2) We have empirical evidence that the universe itself began to exist (Big Bang cosmology) and is therefore finite; therefore there must be something that exists independently of the universe that brought it into existence. In both cases we end up with something that sounds an awful lot like God.

The objection of some atheists is to ask, "Well then who created God? If everything requires a cause, then God would require a cause too right?"

The response to this should be obvious. Cosmological arguments do not claim that everything that exists requires a cause because there's simply nothing about sheer existence that would require a cause. What philosophers have claimed is that everything that begins to exist requires a cause. It's the "beginning" part that brings causality into play, not the "existing" part. So when we say that "Being does not arise from non-being," the focus is not on the "being" but on the "arising"; it's the latter that necessitates a cause, not the former.

The objection may then be put the other way around: "If God doesn't require a cause, why does the universe? Why couldn't the universe be this first cause?" Again, the response should be obvious: because it began to exist. That's the argument. Of course, you could claim that the argument fails or present an argument of your own that the universe didn't really begin to exist. But to simply say, "Well if God doesn't require a cause, why does the universe?" just ignores the argument that has been presented. It certainly doesn't answer it.

Thus, this objection is a complete straw man. It's a misstatement of the claims being made, a misstatement made in order to raise a bogus objection to certain cosmological arguments. The fact that otherwise brilliant people (such as Bertrand Russell) think this is a good objection only demonstrates that they didn't even hear the argument in the first place.

The reason "Who then created God?" is not a good objection is because the cosmological argument already addresses that issue. The whole point of these arguments is that there must be a cause that is not an effect of a previous cause itself. To ask why this first cause is this way is to ignore the argument that has just been made that this first cause is this way. Of course, showing that something is the case is not the same thing as showing why it is the case. (I would argue that one can answer the "why" question, but that's another issue.) But the atheist is claiming -- at least with this objection -- that unless the argument proves why something is the case, it doesn't prove that it's the case. This is obviously false.

So, for example, I could say that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter equals pi (in Euclidean space). I could then prove this mathematically. The atheist objection would be "Why should this ratio equal pi?" The answer would be, "It does. Here's the proof again." The atheist would then object "Your mathematical proof doesn't explain why this ratio equals pi." And again, the answer would be, "It does equal pi. Here's the proof again." "But why should it be this way?" "It is this way. Here's the proof again." Etc. It reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin balks at his math homework. You put two numbers together and they magically become some third number. No one can say how or why it happens, you just have to accept it on faith. "As a math atheist, I should be excused from this."

So when an atheist asks why God should be excused from having to have a cause, the answer is simply to repeat the argument, which (allegedly) demonstrates that there must be a first cause that does not have a cause itself. Perhaps the argument fails to demonstrate this, but the objection that God would then require a cause doesn't even address it.

Pre-Darwinian Evolution

Humphrey has a great post up on creationism and evolution. One of his points is something that I've mentioned on this blog before: the doctrine of rationes seminales. This was a position that apparently originated with the ancient Stoics and was picked up by many Christian writers. The idea, at least as the Christians understood it, is that God created the world in seed-form, or with certain potentialities, which then developed or unfolded accordingly. Obviously this is very similar to evolution. Rationes seminales was accepted by such ancient and medieval Christian writers as Athenagoras, Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon. Since such Christian luminaries accepted that the world and its elements developed over time, it becomes obvious that evolution is not at all incompatible with Christianity.

Another point I've made before is something C. S. Lewis brings up in his book The Discarded Image and some essays like "The Funeral of a Great Myth." Lewis argues that, prior to Darwin, there was widespread belief in a sort of developmentalism, according to which the universe and life in particular were progressively becoming "better." Wagner's Ring Cycle is an example of this. This view permeated 18th and 19th century culture, so that when the theory of evolution came along, it was perceived by many as proof of it (although, obviously, this view -- as well as that of rationes seminales -- is teleological whereas Darwinian evolution is not). This developmentalism didn't have a specifically Christian connotation to it, as it tended to disparage the ancients and medievals as intellectually inferior. Lewis's point is that evolution wasn't accepted in Western society purely because of the scientific evidence for it, but because it accorded with the already accepted view of progress or improvement. He doesn't intend this to challenge the validity of evolution, but simply to point out that there was more in play than scientific evidence.

Infinite Amounts

Many cosmological arguments, in trying to show that the universe is contingent, argue that an actual infinite amount of something is metaphysically impossible, and so could not occur in reality. As such, there could not have been an infinite regress of events or an infinite chain of cause and effect. There must be a stopping point where a cause is not an effect of a cause itself, but is pure cause, not contingent on anything else. "And this all men call God."

The impossibility of an actual infinite has been defended in the last few decades by William Lane Craig, in his book The Kalām Cosmological Argument, his general apologetics book Reasonable Faith, and numerous philosophical articles, some of which were republished in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, a book he co-wrote with atheist philosopher Quentin Smith. Most of this post is just paraphrases of Craig’s writings. In Reasonable Faith, Craig points out that there is a distinction between an actual infinite and a potential infinite.

A potential infinite is a collection that is increasing toward infinity as a limit but never gets there. Such a collection is really indefinite, not infinite. For example, any finite distance can be subdivided into potentially infinitely many parts. You can just keep on dividing parts in half forever, but you will never arrive at an actual ‘infinitieth’ division or come up with an actually infinite number of parts. By contrast, an actual infinite is a collection in which the number of members really is infinite. The collection is not growing toward infinity; it is infinite, it is ‘complete.’

In other words, an infinite amount of defined units is an actual infinite. An “infinitieth” of something is not a defined unit, so this is a potential infinite. An actual infinite is usually signified by aleph-null, but I can’t figure out how to type that in blogger, so I’ll just use ∞ instead, even though it usually represents indefiniteness rather than infinitude.

While actual infinites are used in conceptual mathematics they do not have any corresponding reality.

1. The most famous illustration of this is Hilbert’s Hotel (named after mathematician David Hilbert). Imagine a hotel with two wings that stretch out infinitely in opposite directions and which therefore contain an infinite number of rooms, and imagine that they are all occupied, that is, the hotel is completely full. Somebody shows up and asks for a room. In a finite hotel the proprietor would have to turn him away, but in an infinite hotel the proprietor could just move the person in room 1 to room 2, the person in room 2 to room 3, the person in room 3 to room 4, etc. Now room 1 is open and the person can check in. But the hotel was already full. Each room was occupied. Moreover, the same number of people are in the hotel even though no one has left and there is one more person than before. This is true for any finite number: if a million new people checked in, you could just move the person in room 1 to room 1,000,001, etc.

A friend of mine once suggested that if the hotel is infinite, then there would be no outside for someone to come in from. This is incorrect. We can easily imagine that the hotel extends infinitely in two directions along a street or something. Someone on the other side of the street (perhaps in the infinite restaurant) could then cross the street and check in.

2. But what if an infinite amount of people come to check in? Does the proprietor tell them that the hotel is full and turn them away? No, he just moves the person in room 1 to room 2, the person in room 2 to room 4, the person in room 3 to room 6, etc., moving each person to the room number double their previous number. He thus empties all the odd numbered rooms and the infinite number of new guests can check in. But before they came, each room was occupied. And again, there are the same number of guests as before, even though the proprietor just increased his occupancy by an infinite amount. And he can do this again and again, in fact infinitely many times, and there would never be one more person in the hotel.

3. Another illustration would be a bookcase with an infinite number of books. If you took seven books off the shelf there would be an empty space where they had been. But there’s still an infinite amount of books left, so therefore the bookshelf is still completely full with no empty spaces.

4. Conversely, if you took out all of the books but seven, you would have taken an infinite amount of books off the shelf. However, if you took an infinite amount of books off the shelf, it would be completely empty; but it’s not, there are seven left.

5. Now what if you took out every other book? That would leave a space between each remaining book. Although you took away an infinite number of books, there’s still an infinite number of books remaining, since there’s an infinite amount of odd numbers and an infinite amount of even numbers. The absurdity of this last example can be realized by imagining that you take the first book and push it up against the third book, so there isn’t a space between them any more. Then push these two books up against the fifth, and all of these against the next one, etc. Then there will be an infinite amount of empty space on the bookshelf (from the infinite number of books taken off it), so it’s necessarily empty. But there are still an infinite number of books left on the shelf. As such, it’s necessarily full. But if the bookshelf is full, the first book would be where it’s always been, even though you just moved it. The bookcase is simultaneously completely empty and completely full. When you look at this bookcase, what would you see?

Obviously, Hilbert’s Hotel and a bookcase like this could not exist in reality. Yet, if an actual infinite amount could exist, they could exist as well. Arguments 1-5 can be reduced to the following mathematical equations (where X and Y are actual amounts, that is, any number greater than zero):

1. X + Y ≠ X but ∞ + Y = ∞
2. X + X ≠ X but ∞ + ∞ = ∞
3. X - Y ≠ X but ∞ - Y = ∞
4. X - X = 0 but ∞ - ∞ = Y
5. X - X ≠ X but ∞ - ∞ = ∞

Note also that 4 and 5 contradict each other: infinity minus itself equals both infinity and an actual amount.

A friend of mine once complained about these arguments by saying that when I add to or subtract from infinity I was treating it like an amount, and this is invalid. That is precisely the point: an amount, by definition, can be added to or subtracted from. Since we cannot do this with infinity, there cannot be an actual infinite amount of defined units. These arguments simply demonstrate this. As Craig writes,

There is simply no way to avoid these absurdities once we admit the possibility of the existence of an actual infinite. Students sometimes react to such absurdities as Hilbert’s Hotel by saying that we really don’t understand the nature of infinity and, hence, these absurdities result. But this attitude is simply mistaken. Infinite set theory is a highly developed and well-understood branch of mathematics, so that these absurdities result precisely because we do understand the notion of a collection with an actually infinite number of members.

Some might object that God is often referred to as infinite. Doesn’t this disprove God’s existence since an actual infinite can’t exist? It does not for the following reason: what makes an actual infinite impossible is that it consists of an infinite amount of units or members (like books or hotel rooms). God is not “made up” of any amount of units. In saying that God is infinite, we are saying he is unlimited by anything. Since God does not consist of a bunch of units, the argument against an actual infinite amount of units existing does not apply to him.

Size Doesn't Matter (thank God), part 3

(See also part 1 and part 2)

In this series I am contesting the claim that the unimaginable vastness of the universe, revealed to us in modern astronomy, makes it absurd to ascribe any significance to the earth and its inhabitants. In part 1 I addressed the science side of this claim and in part 2 I addressed the historical side. Ignoring the issues already discussed, this claim assumes that the relative sizes of the earth and the universe demonstrate that the former must be, somehow, insignificant or unimportant. Apparently, on some level, we instinctively equate size with value or significance. The original meaning of the word "great" is "very large", a phenomenon that occurs in many languages. "Bigger" just means "better."

But to take this as an ontological statement about something's actual importance is incredibly naïve. Just because bigger sometimes seems better, it's absurd to think that there is a significant correlation between size and value. What exactly is it about size that would bestow value anyway? Why would a smaller thing automatically be less important than a bigger thing? While it's true that the immense size of the universe can make us feel insignificant, this is a psychological fact about us, not a scientific fact about the universe. For people who accuse others of simple-mindedness, those who argue that the universe's size demonstrates our unimportance are remarkably simple minded themselves.

C. S. Lewis puts this so much better than I ever could that I'll just refer you to the 7th chapter of Miracles:

There is no doubt that we all feel the incongruity of supposing, say, that the planet Earth might be more important than the Great Nebula in Andromeda. On the other hand, we are all equally certain that only a lunatic would think a man six-feet high necessarily more important than a man five-feet high, or a horse necessarily more important than a man, or a man's legs than his brain. In other words this supposed ratio of size to importance feels plausible only when one of the sizes involved is very great. And that betrays the true basis of this type of thought. When a relation is perceived by Reason, it is perceived to hold good universally. If our Reason told us that size was proportional to importance, the small differences in size would be accompanied by small differences in importance just as surely as great differences in size were accompanied by great differences in importance. Your six-foot man would have to be slightly more valuable than the man of five feet, and your leg slightly more important than your brain -- which everyone knows to be nonsense. The conclusion is inevitable: the importance we attach to great differences of size is an affair not of reason but of emotion -- of that peculiar emotion which superiorities in size begin to produce in us only after a certain point of absolute size has been reached.

We are inveterate poets. When a quantity is very great we cease to regard it as a mere quantity. Our imaginations awake. Instead of mere quantity, we now have a quality -- the Sublime. But for this, the merely arithmetical greatness of the Galaxy would be no more impressive than the figures in an account book. To a mind which did not share our emotions and lacked our imaginative energies, the argument against Christianity from the size of the universe would be simply unintelligible. It is therefore from ourselves that the material universe derives its power to overawe us. Men of sensibility look up on the night sky with awe: brutal and stupid men do not. When the silence of the eternal spaces terrified Pascal, it was Pascal's own greatness that enabled them to do so; to be frightened by the bigness of the nebulæ is, almost literally, to be frightened at our own shadow. For light years and geological periods are mere arithmetic until the shadow of man, the poet, the maker of myths, falls upon them. As a Christian I do not say we are wrong to tremble at that shadow, for I believe it to be the shadow of an image of God. But if the vastness of Nature ever threatens to overcrow our spirits, we must remember that it is only Nature spiritualised by human imagination which does so. This suggests a possible answer to the question raised a few pages ago -- why the size of the universe, known for centuries, should first in modern times become an argument against Christianity. Has it perhaps done so because in modern times the imagination has become more sensitive to bigness? From this point of view the argument from size might almost be regarded as a by-product of the Romantic Movement in poetry. In addition to the absolute increase of imaginative vitality on this topic, there has pretty certainly been a decline on others. Any reader of old poetry can see that brightness appealed to ancient and medieval man more than bigness, and more than it does to us. Medieval thinkers believed that the stars must be somehow superior to the Earth because they looked bright and it did not. Moderns think that the Galaxy ought to be more important than the Earth because it is bigger. Both states of mind can produce good poetry. Both can supply mental pictures which rouse very respectable emotions -- emotions of awe, humility, or exhiliration. But taken as serious philosophical argument both are ridiculous.

It reminds me of Jodie Foster's comment at the end of Contact (I don't know if it's present in the novel by Carl Sagan): if we're the only living creatures in the universe, it seems like an awful waste of space. But as Victor Reppert writes, "It is not as if energy or time [or space] is a scarce resource for God and we have to ask him, if he seems to be ‘wasting’ it, why he isn't putting it to better use. ‘Waste’ is an issue only where there is scarcity."

A similar objection that I mentioned in part 1 needs further comment. I pointed out that the universe's mass density -- the amount of matter in the universe -- must be extremely fine-tuned. Otherwise, the universe's expansion would have precluded the possibility of life existing anywhere at any time in the universe's history. In other words, the universe must be the particular size it is in order for us to exist. However, one could point out that while this matter may have been necessary at the universe's inception, it seems gratuitous for it to still be here. To insist that this vast universe is all there for our sake seems absurd. Every piece of matter may have had some relevance to the universe's initial expansion billions of years ago, but there is no obvious connection between distant pieces of matter and the human race's present existence. There are plenty of galaxies billions of light years away, which have plenty of planets orbiting plenty of suns. What does a particular rock on one of these planets have to do with life on earth now? The absence of such a connection makes humanity appear irrelevant to the universe.

Ignoring my previous response, this objection assumes that life or the human race is the only possible reason why the Judeo-Christian God would have created the universe. But just because all this matter has no relevance to humanity's existence today, it does not mean that God does not delight in it for some other reason, and so sustains it in existence. Again, this point is made best by C. S. Lewis:

There is no question of religious people fancying that all exists for man and scientific people discovering that it does not. Whether the ultimate and inexplicable being -- that which simply is -- turns out to be God or "the whole show," of course it does not exist for us. On either view we are faced with something which existed before the human race appeared and will exist after the Earth has become uninhabitable; which is utterly independent of us though we are totally dependent on it; and which, through vast ranges of its being, has no relevance to our own hopes and fears. For no man was, I suppose, ever so mad as to think that man, or all creation, filled the Divine Mind; if we are a small thing to space and time, space and time are a much smaller thing to God. It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion.

A final point: in order to assert that the premoderns thought that the earth's size somehow rendered its inhabitants significant, it would require us to believe (at least) that they thought the earth and its inhabitants significant. In order for the statement, "they believed X because of Y" to be true, it has to be true that "they believed X." The argument that they thought the earth's size bequeathed significance on humanity can't even get off the ground unless they thought humanity had significance.

But this is not the case. We've already mentioned one criterion: brightness. The earth was thought to be less important and valuable than the celestial objects because they were bright while the earth was not. Another criterion that's often misunderstood is the earth's location at the center of the universe. This is usually twisted to imply that the center was the place of prestige, but the exact opposite is the case. They thought Earth was located at the bottom of the universe, which, in their view, was the least prestigious place therein. And the further down you went, the worse it was; this is why hell was thought to be at the center of the earth, and Satan at the center of hell. Arthur Lovejoy, in The Great Chain of Being, wrote that the medieval model is better described as "diabolocentric" than "geocentric." See the essays by Dennis Danielson on this.

However, one might object that Christianity conceives human beings as being so significant that God chose to be incarnated as one to die on their behalf. But this misunderstands exactly what the Christian claim is.

Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. It does involve the belief that God loves man and for his sake became man and died. I have not yet succeeded in seeing how what we know (and have known since the days of Ptolemy) about the size of the universe affects the credibility of this doctrine one way or the other. ... If it is maintained that anything so small as the Earth must, in any event, be too unimportant to merit the love of the Creator, we reply that no Christian ever supposed we did merit it. Christ did not die for men because they were intrinsically worth dying for, but because He is intrinsically love, and therefore loves infinitely.

In other words, whatever significance or value human beings have is derivative. The moral law tells us that people do have an inherent value; the reason murder is wrong, for example, is because each individual is of infinite worth. But the reason each individual is of infinite worth is because he/she is created in God's image. And the reason God loves us is not because we are lovely or lovable, but because he is loving; indeed, the claim is that God is love itself.

Neo-geocentrism

A big part of the claim that Christianity is at war with science is geocentrism, the belief that the earth is at the center of the universe. As readers of this blog are aware, this issue is almost entirely misunderstood: in the ancient/medieval cosmology, the closer you were to the center of the universe, the less privileged and esteemed you were. This is precisely why hell is even closer to the center of the universe than the surface of the earth, and why Dante placed Satan at the exact center of hell (and thus of the entire universe), immobilized in a field of ice.

The misunderstanding is that since the premoderns thought the earth was at the literal center of the universe, they must also have thought it was the metaphorical center as well. It confuses geocentrism with anthropocentrism. But this can only be maintained by completely ignoring their Aristotelian cosmology, according to which the universe was arranged in concentric spheres, with God on the outside as the prime mover. The furthest place in the universe from God, therefore -- the furthest place in a sphere from what is outside the sphere --, is at its center. Of course, this ignores the fact that in Christian theology God is not merely transcendent to the universe but omnipresent within it as well; nevertheless, the premoderns maintained that the closer you were to the center, the less valuable you were. This has been amply demonstrated by Dennis Danielson in his essays "Copernicus and the Tale of the Pale Blue Dot", "The Great Copernican Cliché", and chapter 6 in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion; Humphrey wrote an enlightening post on this issue as well.

But I find it interesting that when Christians are told that their worldview requires a belief that conflicts with science, some respond by embracing the belief in question. Thus, there are geocentric ministries today which argue that being a Christian requires belief in a geocentric universe -- although they prefer the term "geocentricity" as it doesn't have as much historical baggage. The Geocentricity website is the official site of the Association for Biblical Astronomy, "biblical astronomy" meaning Aristotelian/Ptolemaic astronomy. The second link takes you to a collection of the publications of their journal.

There's another site that bothers me more. When I was in (Protestant) seminary, my favorite theology professor used a book for one of his classes written by a Protestant-turned-Catholic entitled, Not by Faith Alone. I didn't take that class, but I did plan to someday study this book, maybe together with Alister McGrath's Iustitia Dei, and see where I came out. However, the author of Not by Faith Alone has also published a two volume work entitled Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right, volume 1 of which deals with "the scientific case for geocentrism", thus absolving me of any requirement to take him seriously. (Update: Just to be clear, I'm not tying the Catholic doctrine of justification to geocentrism. I'm only saying that particular author is not credible.)

The Geocentric Bible is essentially an online book arguing for geocentrism; he says he first heard of this view from a young-earth creationist ministry. This leads to another point: most young-earth ministries have embraced a neo-geocentrism in order to account for the problem of starlight travel time. They argue that the universe we know is actually a white hole -- a black hole so crunched that light begins to escape via quantum tunnelling -- with our galaxy (the Milky Way) at its center. They call it "galacto-centrism" since the earth is only approximately at the universe's center. For now I'd just like to point out that in arguing for this view, they appeal to the idea that if we're important to God, we should expect to find ourselves at the center of the universe. In other words, they accept the conflation of geocentrism with anthropocentrism, a conflation which is not only unhistorical, but which was invented in order to mock and ridicule Christianity. This strikes me as an extremely unwise concession: when fighting the spirit of the age, you shouldn't let it define the terms of the debate. Moreover, the fact that they have to appeal to geocentrism in order to defend their belief in a young earth makes the latter even less plausible than it already was.

Size Doesn't Matter (thank God), part 2

July 13, 2013: I have temporarily removed the content of this post because it has some similarities with an article I wrote that is being published in an academic journal. Even though a blogpost probably doesn't count as having previously published the material, I'm taking the content of this post offline in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety. I'll put it back online in a year or so.

Size Doesn't Matter (thank God), part 1

Contemporary western culture is dominated by the "conflict thesis", the claim that science and religion are at war, and that religion (or at least Christianity) is losing. The latter claims that human beings are the pinnacle of creation, but science has revealed that we are merely animals evolved from simpler forms of life, which in turn were just the product of matter and energy acting upon each other, all of which occupies an insignificant dot in an insignificant location in an infinite universe. Nietzsche illustrates this perspective well with the parable with which he opens his brilliant essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense":

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.

To think we have any significance or value in light of this is essentially to stick your fingers in your ears, shake your head, and say, "La la la la, I can't hear you!"

One of the elements in this metanarrative is the incomprehensible vastness of the universe, only discovered in the modern scientific era, and the infinitesimal size of the earth in comparison. This renders absurd any suggestion that human beings, occupying only a speck of dust in a cosmic sandstorm, are special, showing (once again) that contemporary science has refuted Christianity. Or so the story goes.

This view is expressed well by Douglas Adams' Total Perspective Vortex and Monty Python's Galaxy Song. I was going to embed the latter, but since there are some, shall we say, improprieties therein, I decided to go with a different song that expresses this sentiment in a more family-friendly fashion.



Unfortunately (at least for some), there are multiple problems with the conflict thesis in general, and with the claim regarding the spatial insignificance of the earth in particular. Regarding the latter, everyone, of course, feels a sense of insignificance when faced with the vastness of the cosmos. This is universal, although some ages and cultures feel it more intensely than others. But before it can made into an argument against Christianity, several further questions must be answered. For example, why would something's value or importance be connected to its size? Does Christianity actually teach that humanity is the most important thing in the universe? If so, does it tie this to a belief that the universe is small and the earth the largest thing in it? Is it really only with modern science that we've discovered the universe's immensity, and thus the disparity between it and ourselves? In the remainder of this post I'll be addressing this last question from the side of science.

-- The impression that the universe dwarfs us is based on a sort of common sense view of measurement. But a couple of years ago James made a very important point about this issue. He compared human beings to the smallest and largest things in the universe; that is, he used the exponential scale which is precisely the standard of measurement which physicists employ. When this is done, it reveals that human beings are actually closer to the larger end of the scale than the smaller end. The smallest is the Planck length at 10^-35 meters, and the largest is the universe itself, at about 10²⁵ meters. "So comparing our absolute size to the smallest and biggest possible things in the universe, we are about three fifths of the way up the scale. In other words, we are of medium to large size using the exponential scale, the only scale that makes any sense in physics."

Of course, one could simply reject this standard of measurement as having any relevance to the issue. If one does, however, then one would have to reject the argument under discussion as well: for it depends on the claim that modern science has demonstrated our spatial insignificance. You cannot make this claim while rejecting the very method of measurement actually used by the sciences in question.

-- Another scientific point involves the Anthropic Principle. One of the characteristics I mentioned in this post is that the universe's mass density must be precisely what it is in order for life to be possible anywhere at any time in the universe's history. The mass density is the amount of matter in the universe. The velocity with which the matter and energy created in the Big Bang burst outward was precisely governed by the universe’s mass density, since the more mass there is, the more gravity would slow down the expansion, matter being what gravity acts upon. If the universe's mass density were different by one part in 10⁶⁰, life could never exist at any place and at any time in the universe's history. In other words, if the universe was just a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth smaller or larger than it is -- an amount equal to "about a tenth part of a dime" according to the link above -- the universe’s velocity would either have overpowered gravity, or it would have been overpowered by gravity. The first case would have prevented the matter from being collected into stars and galaxies. The second case would have resulted in the universe collapsing back in on itself. Either way, life would have been impossible anywhere at any time in the universe. So in order for life to be possible on our dust speck of a planet, the universe must be precisely the size that it is.

Of course, some people will insist that this is not enough. Just because every piece of matter had some relevance to the universe's initial expansion, it does not have any connection to our existence now -- and this calls into question any view that sets up the earth and humanity as significant. In other words, unless every rock, planet, star, and galaxy in the universe is always and only there for our benefit, Christianity (somehow) cannot be true.

But what exactly is being asked here? Given the necessary fine-tuning of the universe's mass density, the matter making up these rocks, planets, stars, and galaxies had to be there. To ask why they're still there is to ask why God didn't destroy them once they served their initial purpose. In other words, it is to expect God to destroy the evidence of what he has done. This is problematic on several levels, not least of which is that if God did do this, the same people who raise this objection would obviously be pointing to the lack of evidence for God. So it seems that no matter what he does -- whether he keeps the matter there as a testimony to his actions or whether he destroys it once it has served this purpose -- they will use it as an argument against his existence. I may come back to this in future installments.

-- Alexandre Koyré argues in From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe that there is an element to modern cosmology that is lacking in its ancient and medieval counterparts. Regardless of how big they thought the universe to be, they clearly believed it to be finite. But modern science has, according to Koyré, demonstrated that the universe is infinite. The reason this is significant is because moving from one finite size to another is not the same as moving from a finite size to an infinite one. Regardless of how large the ancients and medievals conceived the universe to be, there is a difference in kind involved here, and this is the significant aspect of modern cosmology that refutes the ancient and medieval cosmology. "Let us not forget, moreover, that, by comparison with the infinite, the world of Copernicus is by no means greater than that of mediaeval astronomy; they are both as nothing, because inter finitum et infinitum non est proportio. We do not approach the infinite universe by increasing the dimension of our world. We may make it as large as we want: that does not bring us any nearer to it."

I will not contest here Koyré's claim that an infinite universe is a different type of thing than a finite one, and as such, would represent a complete change of our view of the cosmos as well as ourselves. On this score, C. S. Lewis agrees: in The Discarded Image (a text to which I'll be returning) he argues that there is a radical difference between believing in a distant horizon and believing in no horizon at all.

Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest -- trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The 'space' of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.

This explains why all sense of the pathless, the baffling, and the utterly alien -- all agoraphobia -- is so markedly absent from medieval poetry when it leads us, as so often, into the sky. Dante, whose theme might have been expected to invite it, never strikes that note. The meanest modern writer of science-fiction can, in that department, do more for you than he. Pascal's terror at le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis never entered his mind. He is like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea.

Perhaps, then, one could argue that since an infinite universe presents us with an object in which the mind cannot rest, this sense of "agoraphobia" that it produces entails a greater sense of insignificance than any finite universe could convey; and hence a greater assault on humanity's dignity. However, Lewis argues to the contrary: an infinite universe would have no absolute standard of measurement, only relative standards. But a finite universe would have both absolute and relative standards of measurement.

The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt. In our [infinite] universe she is small, no doubt; but so are the galaxies, so is everything -- and so what? But in theirs there was an absolute standard of comparison. ... The word 'small' as applied to Earth thus takes on a far more absolute significance.

Koyré argues that modern science requires a complete overhaul of our view of the cosmos and our place in it because we have discovered that the universe is infinite. The irony is that, even before Koyré wrote this, Einstein's relativity equations and Edwin Hubble's observations of the expansion of the universe indicated something different. Today Big Bang cosmology has established that the universe is spatially and temporally finite. It began to exist a particular time ago, and has a finite size. In this sense at least, the ancient/medieval cosmology has been exonerated. Whether Lewis is right to describe it as "unimaginably large" will be the subject of the next installment.

Mathematical Monks and the Multiverse

I recently read a truly excellent SF novel by Neal Stephenson entitled Anathem. It's about an alternate universe that has monks whose interests are more on mathematics rather than theology; and they have an alternate philosophical history that parallels the real one. I highly recommend it to pretty much everyone (especially Elliot at CotC if he hasn't already read it).

Part of my motivation for bringing it up is that at one point the monks discuss the Anthropic Principle, and give an excellent account of it:

Paphlagon said, "The cosmogonic processes that lead to the creation of the stuff we are made of -- the creation of protons and other matter, their clumping together to make stars, and the resulting nucleosynthesis -- all seem to depend on the values of certain physical constants. The most familiar example is the speed of light, but there are several others -- about twenty in all. Theors used to spend a lot of time measuring their precise values, back when we were allowed to have the necessary equipment. If these numbers had different values, the cosmos as we know it would not have come into being; it would just be an infinite cloud of cold dark gas or one big black hole or something else quite simple and dull. If you think of these constants of nature as knobs on the control panel of a machine, well, the knobs all have to be set in just the right positions or --"

Again Paphlagon looked to Moyra, who seemed ready: "Suur Demula likened it to a safe with a combination lock, the combination being about twenty numbers long."

"That is right. If you dial twenty numbers at random you never get the safe open; it is nothing more to you than an inert cube of iron. Even if you dial nineteen numbers correctly and get the other one wrong -- nothing. You must get all of them correct. Then the door opens and out spills all of the complexity and beauty of the cosmos."

"Another analogy," Moyra continued, after a sip of water, "was developed by Saunt Conderline, who likened all of the sets of values of those twenty constants that don't produce complexity to an ocean a thousand miles wide and deep. The sets that do, are like an oil sheen, no wider than a leaf, floating on the top of that ocean: an exquisitely thin layer of possibilities that yield solid, stable matter suitable for making universes with living things in them."

However, to get around the theistic repercussions, Anathem appeals to the multiverse hypothesis. Stephenson does this very cleverly: any view that argues that the physical universe isn't all that exists is a sort of multiverse hypothesis. So the Platonic world of forms is positing a multiverse, in which one is a universe of pure forms (in the Anathem alt-history Plato = Protas and Platonist = Protist). Similarly, any theistic explanation of the Anthropic Principle is a multiverse hypothesis, since it holds that there is another world that has some effect in this one. Stephenson's monks conclude from this that, if we have to posit another world in order to account for this one, there can be no reason for limiting the number of other worlds to one.

"It is a legitimate move in metatheorics. You have to be continually asking yourself, 'why are things thus, and not some other way?' And if you apply that test to this diagram, you immediately run into a problem: there are exactly two worlds. Not one, not many, but two. One might draw such a diagram having only one world -- the Arbran Causal Domain -- and zero arrows. That would draw very few objections from metatheoricians (at least, those who are not Protists). One might, on the other hand, assert 'there are lots of worlds' and then set out to make a case for why that is plausible. But to say 'there are two worlds -- and only two!' seems no more supportable than to say 'there are exactly 173 worlds, and all those people who claim that there are only 172 of them are lunatics.'"

Of course, in this post I pointed out that there is a reason for limiting the number of worlds to two: Ockham's Razor. The more entities you have to posit, the less likely your theory is correct. The Anthropic Principle shows that we have to posit a world in addition to this one in order to account for the fact that this world has the very specific properties necessary for the existence of life. But unless we have a reason to posit a third or fourth or 173rd world, then to do so simply violates Ockham's Razor.

Ironically, part of Anathem's alternate history includes a parallel to Ockham's Razor, which is frequently referenced by the characters:

Gardan's Steelyard: A rule of thumb attributed to Fraa Gardan (-1110 to -1063), stating that, when one is comparing two hypotheses, they should be placed on the arms of a metaphorical steelyard (a kind of primitive scale, consisting of an arm free to pivot around a central fulcrum) and preference given to the one that "rises higher," presumably because it weighs less; the upshot being that simpler, more "lightweight" hypotheses are preferable to those that are "heavier," i.e., more complex. Also referred to as Saunt Gardan's Steelyard or simply the Steelyard.

So, basically, the multiverse hypothesis violates the Steelyard: the anthropic coincidences make it absurdly implausible that this world is the only one that exists; but unless it is absurdly implausible that only two worlds exist, it is invalid to think there are more than two. Anathem contains the refutation of one of its premises without realizing it.

However, I'm willing to give Stephenson some grace here, since such an acknowledgment would essentially destroy the premise of the entire book. Now go read it.