Category Archives: Culture

Atheism, Culture, Ethics, History, Philosophy, Postmodernism, Rant, theology

Is it really beautiful?

One of the problems I’ve tended to have with materialism is how it seems to place into my own (subjective) mind (actually brain… and hence render them largely delusional as it relate to the universe itself). This isn’t only the case with my religious ideas, but also the ideas I have of good and evil, and even the idea of me.

How do I get there? After all, I don’t doubt that some materialists have every bit as high a moral code that they live by as I do, and even arch-materialists can work to do great things in the social sphere based on what they seem to think is a call to justice that is demanded of all of us. Heck, when Christopher Hitchens subtitles his book “How Religion Poisons Everything”, I think he is claiming that religion is, objectively and independent of subjective opinions on the matter, a bad thing.

The problem is, ironically, best exemplified by the use of Occam’s razor in materialism to deny the supernatural. Occam’s razor (which nicely trims Plato’s beard) is the principle that, all things being equal, the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is most likely the correct one. The result is that since science is more than capable of coming up with material explanations for most things, that it is rational to assume that science will come up with material explanations for all things.

What then of ideas and concepts that do not seem to be solely material, such as the existence of subjects other than me, or transcendent morality, aesthetics, or even the idea of “me”? Materialism would claim that all of these are simply the result of material processes in the brain reacting to external stimuli. ie. whatever these things are, they exist only in brains, and any seeming transcendence is simply the commonality of human experience.

This means that a painting is not itself beautiful, but instead makes me feel good (whatever “me” is). It means that torture is not independently wrong, but simply something that I find abhorrent. It also means that my most directly experienced object, since it cannot be materially experienced (namely the “I”), is simply something “I” mistake for a person when in fact it is noting more than the collocation of atoms. (at this point, if “you’re” following me, you might be giggling, as “I” am…”I”‘m guessing most people rightly find this silly).

In any case, not taking it all the way, and assuming “I” exist, which is a properly basic idea if ever there was one. The

materialist conception seems to eliminate transcendent morality and beauty because those concepts exist only in human brains.

and were human minds to cease to be, so would those concepts. The result is that nothing is evil in itself, and nothing is in itself beautiful. There is no contrast in reality between the beautiful and the ugly (just personal psychology) or between the good and the evil (just personal taste).

Thus we come to a statement someone recently used on me to try to claim the rationality of his belief structure:

“Can’t we just say the garden is beautiful, without attributing faeries to it?”

He apparently wanted to mean that there was no need to credit a ground to the beauty of the garden, just the bare fact of it. But my response is that he has already appealed to “faeries” in claiming that beauty is a proper descriptor of the garden rather than simply his experiences of the garden. That I choose to think about that ground, and indeed have a name for it (God), has already been assumed in the statement.

Of course, no one needs to take my route. Maybe morality, beauty, subjectivity (and if you think about it, logic, mathematics, reason and even knowledge itself) really are just modes of human thought that are not true of the universe itself, but only categories we humans find useful. Maybe Occam’s razor really should be used as a law of reason, rather

than simply a priciple. Humanity has had large groups already in that camp (many forms of Zen Budddhism for example).

Such a route seems unlikely to further science or society, however, since the simplest explanation of the universe is still (as it was in first year philosophy) solipsism. In this case Occam’s razor seems to be instead a guillotine.

In the end, I think that our experiences should only be attributed wholly to delusion with evidence that it is, in fact, delusional.

It is for that reason that I would say that Handel’s “Messiah” really is beautiful, that evil really is fundamentally wrong, that reason really talks about the universe and not simply the categories of data that enters my sense receptors, and that there is real good in the world (not just things that are good on opinion).

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Culture, discernment, Economics, Philosophy, Politics, Postmodernism, Rant

Humility and the Triumph of (Over)Confidence

So this morning I again ran into the issue of fan death in Korea through a facebook comment, and I had a chance to reflect on my experience…

A quick explanation: Fan death is the belief that if a person on a hot day closes off their room and falls asleep with a fan pointed at him, there is a chance that he will die.

Sounds kinda strange, especially coming from a country with an extremely high level of scientific education. There is no shortage of people who think this is a very stupid belief, and to be honest, I used to be one of them. But then, I actually got past my immediate dismissiveness and looked into it a bit. Now, I’m still not sure I’m fully convinced of the need for timers on fans (which are standard in Korea), but I do have to agree with some climatologists and the American EPA (see appendix B)  that there is at least something to this.

So what happened here? Why was I so convinced that people who believed something that was easily checkable were wrong simply because their belief did not fit into my preconceived ideas. I had forgotten the fact that it is best to not just know THAT something is incorrect, but do the work of finding out why it is incorrect. I think this is one of the reasons

behind the Biblical statement that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. (Ps 111:10, Pr 1:7; 9:10) That is to say, you will be strikingly unable to learn if you believe yourself to be the apex of knowledge and truth (thus have no fear of God).

I think this is common in society at large as well. Reading opinion pieces in the world’s newspapers, you will often find them full of confident assertions (some true, some less so) with little basis in either argumentation or reference to some place where I can go check myself. It seems to be part of almost all debates (climate change, capitalism/socialism, religion, politics, and on and on).

The upshot is that I wonder if the dominant culture has trained people to be so confident of their own beliefs, that very few people are even listening to opposing positions anymore, and even fewer are learning anything.

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Beauty, Culture, scripture, theology

The Results of a Simple Theological Truth

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. (Psalm 139:13-14)

Dad: We made a beautiful daughter

(4 year old) Daughter: God made me, and you are not God.

As I was walking out of Church on Sunday, the above-mentioned father related the above exchange with his precocious daughter. While it was an amusing exchange, it also reflects a correct, and I would say, very useful understanding of theology.

I can only pray that both father and daughter remember it.

I pray that dad remembers it when in a few years his daughter begins to show her intelligence and beauty to the world, and he thanks God for her, instead of pegging his own value on how well she performs in the world.

I pray he remembers it when this same daughter cries at some failure, which will seem huge to her. That he then avoids piling on to her disappointment, and instead reminds her that the good and wise creator of the universe made her, and he does not make mistakes.

I pray he remembers it as she rejects him at different times. First as she leaves him for her new friends, and later as she rejects him for being embarrassing in her teenage years, and finally if she walks down the aisle to begin a life together with another man.. He will need to remember the gift of God that she is, and that she was his gift only for a time.

I pray she remembers the truth at the same time, when she realizes that her dad is not perfect, and he will let her down, but she is made for greater things than simply her father’s decision or desire, and while her genes are a mix of her dad and her mom, they are not simply random ones.

I pray she remembers it as she gives birth to her first child, who will be beautiful, and full of potential, and yet blemished and imperfect in some eyes in the world. God will have made her child too.

I pray also that she remembers it (by God’s grace) many decades hence, when with tears in her eyes she buries the earthly father who loved her well, confident that the God who made her and him, and brought them together for a time by his grace, is trustworthy to take care of him until time ends and all tears are wiped away.

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Culture, Ethics, Nature, Rant

Theories, Facts, and Truth

“Yeah, well, evolution is only a theory”

“Yeah, well, so is gravity”

I’m sure many people have heard an exchange similar to this one at some point in the past. It is one of the most common, and most misleading exchanges possible in debates about scientific ideas.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t have a dog in this fight. There are conservative Christians I agree with on many things who also support some form of evolutionary theory, and Christians who I agree with on many other issues who are opposed to any form of evolutionary theory. To be honest, my background is not in the biological sciences, so I simply do not have enough understanding of the raw data.

My problem with the above exchange is that it is at best misleading, and at worst betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about the role of theories.

Both statements are, however, true (as far as they go).

A theory (at least as I understand it), is a useful (often predictive) reasoned explanation for the factual data which can be observed in the world. That is to say, the theory is a method of interpretation of experience. While such things ARE open to debate, the way to disabuse a theory is to provide a competing theory that deals with observable data (facts) in a better way.

An example is the copernican model of the universe. Some said that the earth was the centre of the universe, Copernicus said the sun was. Copernicus had a simpler theoretical model to deal with the data, and so his theory was seen to be closer to the truth. Unfortunately, neither theory is true, as thanks to further observation, we now believe that our entire solar system (including both sun and earth) to be on the outer edge of a galaxy speeding away from a central point that was “the big bang”. The facts that were observed at the time, though, led to the conclusions Copernicus made.

The problem with the statement “well, it’s only a theory” is that it is often used to say that it’s okay to attack the theory in its entirety simply because it’s a theory. It’s as if the speaker believes that a theory is nothing more than an opinion, rather like the preference for classical music over jazz. That is not what any scientific theory is, and so the statement that it is “just a theory” is misleading.

One would think that the main question is to get to truth. We want to know if the theory accords to reality; we want to know if the theory is true.

So the best response would be something akin to “yeah, it is. So what? Is it true?”

However, misunderstanding in the popular imagination is often compounded by the response, “yeah, so is gravity.” The intended implication here being that disagreeing with evolutionary theory is somehow akin to denying that things fall down.  In case I miss the point, one person I was speaking to added the phrase “things still fall down”.

We would all say, “of course”. The problem is that the fact that things fall down is not technically the theory of gravity. Stuff falling down(or rather, bodies of mass tending towards one another) is a FACT . Gravity is the theory used to explain that fact.

When applied to evolution, we see how this parallel is misleading. Evolutionary theory is a theory designed to deal with the fact that we presently have many species of life that to greater or lesser extents, resemble one another. Given that that resemblance is aided by similar evidences in the fossil record of species of apparently increasing complexity over time, and that extinctions seem to follow a pattern, the theory (or theories) of evolution get proposed to account for the facts we have. Evolution is, I am told, a very good theory that has a mass of predictive power. That said, the theory of common descent of species diversified mainly through the engine of natural selection is a theory, it is not a fact. It is an interpretation of the observed data, not the observation itself.

Again the question is one of truth, not of fact. Does the theory resemble reality? Does the theory make sense of the facts?

The person who advocates for evolution is not necessarily claiming a simple opinion, nor is the person questioning evolution necessarily questioning facts.

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Culture, Economics

Why Increasing Minimum Wage is a Bad Idea for Business

This week I read a story about how the Newfoundland minimum wage was going up to $9.50 an hour, and how a local business leader thinks that this is a mistake.

In the interest of inflaming people, I think the guy is right.

For some reason, people think that price controls on things are a good idea, even though there are very few instances where a price control has actually benefitted people.

why do I refer to price controls? Because minimum wage is a price control. It is a minimum price set on a particular resource that businesses must have in order to function. Without employees, most businesses cease to exist, so an increase in the price of labour will increase the costs for all businesses that must have labour.

Like all price controls, this one seems like a good idea on the face of it. After all, who doesn’t want to have more money? The problem is that it is only a good idea in the short term, as there are effects to such a decision.

Businesses make profits by charging customers a slightly higher price than they pay out in costs. Costs include things like the place the business is (rent), the raw materials needed to produce the product, and labour. when the costs increase, the business must make decisions to continue making a profit or go out of business.

The business could charge more to the consumer. This could be possible since consumers have more money now, due to the increased minimum wage (resulting in inflation, and eliminating the benefit to people who got the raise in the first place so that they could afford more). This will not always happen, though, since most businesses have competition. The competition would use a price increase to (if possible) undercut their competition, and so make more money off of increased sales.

This leads to the businesses other option in maintaining profits. The business can cut costs. It can do this in a number of ways, but with an increased minimum wage (which only affects businesses that hire minimum wage, and hence low-skilled, workers), the most obvious ways to lower price is to either hire fewer people or relocate to a place in which there is a lower minimum wage. This increases unemployment.

If the company cannot cut costs or raise prices, they will go bankrupt, also adding to unemployment.

With increased unemployment, the government is forced to pay out more in unemployment benefits, meaning that the government will need to increase the amount they take in from workers, or lower the benefits they get (or borrow more money, putting the problem off on future generations).

The end result is thus simple. An increased minimum wage is simply bad for business.

Of course, it’s also bad for workers, and is simply a bad way of getting to the goal of better wages for people, but I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

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