QUOTESAristotle, Baierlein, Barfield, Bevan, Mary J. Blige, Craig F. Bohren, Darwin, Eddington, Fisher, Gamow, Goethe, Greenfield, Hall’s Ireland, Oliver Heaviside, Malcolm Jeeves, C.S.Lewis, Martin Luther, Rose Macaulay, Plato, Snippets |
AristotleIf water itself sticks in a man’s throat, what will you give him to wash it down with? |
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Owen BarfieldOn the whole it is a safe rule to assume that those who speak most contemptuously of such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus are the nearest modern representatives of their own idea of what these Schoolmen were; that is to say, they are those whose imaginations are most completely imprisoned within the intellectual horizon of the passing age. ... Nobody who understands the amount of pain and energy which go to the creation of new instruments of thought can feel anything but respect for the philosophy of the middle ages. History in English Words, Chap The influences which go to make up the outlook of an age are sometimes seen working most powerfully – though beneath the surface – in the very minds which believe them selves to be combating that outlook most stubbornly. The closing years of the eighteenth century produced Paley’s famous watch, a popular cosmic allegory which, in proving the existence of a Creator, at the same time relegates all His activities to the remote past. History in English Words, Chap IX (nr. end) |
Edwyn BevanSymbolism and BeliefThe Stoics only took the step of bringing God into the world from outside it, of identifying him with the element composing the outermost sphere. They did not commonly distinguish this element as a fifth from the ordinary four; they called it fire; but they explained that it was a fire of a finer sort than the earthly fire we know, which burns; so that their view practically differed little from that which called it a fifth element, ether. We can call the attempt to refute Theism by displaying the continuity of the belief in God with primitive delusion the method of anthropological intimidation. . . . Rashdall used to remind us that the mathematical conceptions of the most advanced mathematicians at the present day were connected with rudimentary ideas of primitive men about numbers by a process of gradual correction and expansion. That does not cause us to regard the conceptions of mathematicians to-day as a survival of primitive fancy. There is indeed a conception of revelation which it is hard for a modern man to accept. We cannot think of any apprehension of the truth which primitive man had as a miraculous putting into his mind of a belief about the universe framed in the logical and metaphysical conceptions at which man in his later progress arrived. Such a bit of advanced thought thrust into a primitive mentality would be a monstrosity not at all corresponding with the mode of God’s working which human history leads us to expect. Lecture 2 – Height Most people, I suppose, would now recognize that the beautiful was something ultimate which could not be resolved into anything else. An attempt was made by Grant Allen, forty years ago, to find the origin of beauty in sexual attraction. Certain colours and shapes had come to have a particular kind of appeal because they once served in animal evolution to attract the female to the male, or vice versa. A little thought shows that such a theory is a ridiculous putting of the cart before the horse. The tail of the peacock could not impress the peahen unless the peahen had already found such colours impressive independently. It is only with creatures who have already a sense of the beauty of bright colours that bright colours could be used as a means of sexual attraction. No doubt, different species of creatures, even different individual men, may differ very much in what they think beautiful: the huge red beak of the toucan looks to us grotesque, perhaps even repulsive; but the toucan of the opposite sex evidently admires it. This variation of judgment, however, in regard to the question: What particular things are beautiful? does not show that beauty does not mean something definite which is fundamentally the same for all. Lecture 6 – Light If religion means a relation between each individual spirit and other spirits it can no more be enough for religion to apprehend values in general than it is enough for a man to apprehend the general value of parenthood and have unsatisfactory relations with his own individual father and mother.
In a great deal of modern architecture, which discards classical or medieval traditions, there is plainly the suggestion of primitive strength shown in piling great block upon great block, careless of adornment, or you seem to be getting back to something older than Greek elegance, to something Babylonian or Egyptian, in its bare geometrically-ruled extension, the kind of building which the children of men might have put up when they first built great cities upon the earth in the land of Shinar. The question whether, or how far, any religious conceptions are true raises the more fundamental question, what is meant by Truth. The plain man understands by truth the correspondence between the belief in someone's mind and a fact outside his mind, existing or happening independent of his belief. This is called the correspondence theory of truth, and it has been strongly attacked by certain idealist philosophers . . The theory set up in opposition to the correspondence theory is the coherence theory. A belief is true when it coheres logically with the whole system of experience which constitutes the universe. When we strive for truth, we strive to make all our beliefs a logical harmony. Another theory of truth is offered by the Pragmatist school. “Truth is what works.” If, in practice, to act on a belief is found to give the results desired, that belief is so far true. If another belief is found to work better, the former belief is pronounced to be so far untrue.
But religion is concerned with Spirit, conceived as extending beyond the world we feel and see, extending, according to Christian theology, infinitely beyond it; it is concerned with the relation of my individual spirit to that all-encompassing Spirit and to the other human spirits included, with me, in His embrace. And perhaps one ought not to limit the other finite spirits with whom religion brings us into right relations to human spirits. Even if the established philosophy of the Roman communion teaches that the animals inferior to men have no rights, it seems incredible that, if God is at all what Christian theology believes Him to be, the infliction of unnecessary pain upon any of His sentient creatures is not an offence to Him. Lecture 13 – Pragmatism and Analogy A religious apprehension of God may owe little of its positive content to the critical intellect, but unless critical thought has played upon it and searched what weak elements there may be in it, it is not likely to be strong and healthy. Reason alone can never tell us whether anything exists. If we ask someone to give us a rational ground for his belief that something unseen exists, all he can do is to lay hold of some concrete bit of reality which we know already by direct experience, or in whose existence we believe already on rational grounds, and show us that if the world has a pattern, as reason affirms, and if our view of the pattern, as at present advised, is correct, then that bit of reality which we see or believe to exist implies the existence of another bit of reality of a particular character which we do not see. The man who finds the watch in the lonely place recognizes that, according to the pattern of the universe as he has come to read it by previous experience, the kind of order exhibited by a watch goes with a constructing mind. This is to say, all rational inference of the existence of anything unseen is inference from one part of the world-pattern to another part of the world-pattern. But when you ask for rational proof that God exists, or that the world-pattern as a whole is due to Mind, you are asking to be shown the relation of the pattern to something other than itself, something outside it, extending beyond it, prior to it. You can argue from the watch to the human craftsman because both watch and craftsman are parts of the pattern, but you cannot argue from the order found in the pattern as a whole to a constituting Mind, unless you make that Mind itself part of the pattern it is supposed to constitute. If you say: “Order always implies Mind,” your assertion is drawn from experience within the pattern. That cannot give you rational ground for an inference from the pattern as a whole to what is outside it. You can say, of course: Supposing the world-pattern as a whole is constituted by an ordering Mind, then the relation between the world and the Reality outside it is analogous to the relations found to obtain within the world-pattern; and since it is reason which tells us “The world has a pattern,” it would be a gratification to us, as rational beings, to discover that the principle which holds good for the world extends beyond the world to the relation between the world and the Supreme Reality. That might be a gratification to us as rational beings, but the inference from the order of the world to the supreme ordering Mind can hardly be logically cogent, since it is based on the postulate: “The world has a pattern,” which applies in reason only to the world. No cogent rational inference can be made from the world to what is outside it. If this is so, when the Rationalist asks for a rational proof of the existence of God, he is asking for something which in the nature of the case it is impossible to have. A rational proof would draw God into the world and make Him a part of the pattern He is alleged to create. Lecture 15 – Rationalism and Mysticism It is highly improbable that anyone who had no belief in God was ever led to believe in God by any of the standard “proofs” of God's existence-the ontological, cosmological, teleological proof. They were thought of by men who already believed in God as considerations harmonizing their belief, for themselves, and for others, with a general view of the universe. . . . What actually causes anyone to believe in God is direct perception of the Divine. Lecture 16 – The Justification of Belief |
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Craig F. BohrenThe world was not designed for the convenience of those who frame multiple-choice examinations. I must say, however, that I am not opposed to scientific conservatism. Indeed, it is necessary (although when faced with it myself I chafe and writhe and say bad words). We forget that many cockeyed ideas that were resisted by the savants of the day – the Establishment is the pejorative term used – are often shown to have been – cockeyed. Every now and then a rare genius turns out to have had a good idea despite initial resistance to it. And subsequently, hordes of crackpots try to make capital out of this: Arrhenius was ridiculed, he was right; I am ridiculed, therefore, I, too, am right. A manifestly faulty syllogism, but one widely appealed to nevertheless. To answer this question (about boiling) I begin with the kind of thought experiment found in textbooks of thermodynamics, a field that has never completely lost the smell of engines. |
Charles DarwinDescent of ManThis sense ... has a rightful supremacy over every other principle of human action; it is summed up in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance. Ch.IV. beginning. A man who was not impelled by any deep, instinctive feeling, to sacrifice his life for the good of others, yet was roused to such actions by a sense of glory, would by his example excite the same wish for glory in other men, and would strengthen by exercise the noble feeling of admiration. He might thus do far more good to his tribe than by begetting offspring with a tendency to inherit his own high character. Ch.V, 5/18 |
A. S. EddingtonThe Nature of the Physical World(based on a series of lectures
given in Leading up to relativity: “We have certain preconceived ideas about location in space which have come down to us from ape-like ancestors” On relativity and our inability to visualize hyperspace: “You are using a conception of space which must have originated many years ago and has become rather embedded in human thought. But the space of physics ought not to be dominated by this creation of the dawning mind of an enterprising ape” Post quantum mechanics and general relativity: “One of our ancestors, taking arboreal exercise in the forest, failed to reach the bough intended and his hand closed on nothingness. The accident might well occasion philosophical reflections on the distinctions of substance and void – to say nothing of the phenomenon of gravity. However that may be, his descendants to this day have come to be endowed with an immense respect for substance arising we know not how or why”. |
R. A. Fisher… the Natural Sciences can only be successfully conducted by responsible and independent thinkers applying their minds and their imaginations to the detailed interpretations of verifiable observations. The idea that this responsibility can be delegated to a vast computer programmed with Decision Functions belongs to the phantasy of circles rather remote from scientific research. Statistical Methods and Scientific Inferences |
George Gamow
A Star Called the Sun (1964)One
cubic centimetre of this condensed plasma or
nuclear fluid would weight one hundred million tons, but there is no evidence
that nuclear fluid exists anywhere in the universe today.
(note: The first pulsar was observed in July
1967 by Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Anthony Hewish.)
The author cannot help relating here an amusing story –
changing, for the purpose, to the first person. Soon after the end of World
War II I took my family to a ranch near |
Goethe
Mein Kind, ich hab’es klug gemacht, Ich hab’ nie über das Denken gedacht |
Susan A. GreenfieldPerhaps the modern lifestyle, emphasizing as it does the immediate multicoloured universe of the CD, the in-your-face technology that requires little conceptualization and still less imagination, is breeding a generation that cannot use their minds sufficiently to get engrossed in a book. Instead, the new generation more readily ricochets from one moment to the next as outgrown and misplaced prisoners of the here and now, a here and now so heavily overexperienced that it is easily bankrupt of sensual novelty and impact: a gloomy prospect indeed. The Private Life of the Brain, near end Chap. 3 |
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Hall’s IrelandQueen Elizabeth, with a good sense not participated in by
her chief minister, although that minister was the great Burleigh, saw that
giving that education to the [Irish] people, which she intended when she
founded Dibh dubh damh obh amh — pronounced div duv dav ov av, i.e. “a black steer drank a raw egg.” The unhappy phrase lost to the University the intended professorship, and to literature such benefit as might have resulted from it. But against a weapon of this description no language would be invulnerable. The English town [?] itself should be doomed, for giving utterance to such a Pierian gargle as “strange struggling steers struggled in strenuous strife.” Hall’s Ireland, ca. 1842, chap. “Cavan” |
Malcolm A. JeevesIn some of this there is, perhaps, a lesson for those of us who, as Christians, wish to emphasize, assert, and defend the uniqueness of humankind. Ws should start from the biblical teaching . . . rather than following a late-twentieth-century version of Richard Owen’s late 1858 claim that “the great ape does not possess a hippocampus minor.” . . . We have no religious stakes in the outcome any more than we should have had any religious stakes in 1963 of claiming the uniqueness of cerebral asymmetries in humans (which, by 1983, had been revealed in monkeys). Human Nature at the Millennium, Chap. 7 |
C. S. LewisThe Screwtape LettersYou are much more likely to make your man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary than by encouraging him to use it as a means of merriment among his friends when he is happy and expansive. Chap IX, 25% The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off. Chap XII, 90% Letters to Malcolm… what Pascal, if I remember rightly, calls ‘Error of Stoicism’: thinking we can do always what we can do sometimes. Chapter II, middle This talk of ‘meeting’ is, no doubt, anthropomorphic; as if God and I could be face to face, like two fellow creatures, … … But never … let is think that while anthropomorphic images are a concession to our weakness, the abstractions are the literal truth. Both are equally concessions; each singly misleading, the two together mutually corrective. Unless you sit to it very lightly … the abstraction is fatal. It will make the life of lives inanimate and the love of loves impersonal. The naïf image is mischievous chiefly in that it holds unbelievers back from conversion. It does believers, even at its crudest, no harm. What soul ever perished from believing that God the Father really has a beard? Chapter IV, middle I suggest two rules for exegetics. (1) Never take the images literally. (2) When the purport of the images — what they say to our fear and hope and will and affections — seems to conflict with the theological abstractions, trust the purport of the images every time. For our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modelling of spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of scripture — light and darkness, river and well, seed and harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens, father and child? The footprints of the Divine are more visible in that rich soil than across rocks or slag-heaps. Hence what they call ‘de-mythologising’ Christianity can easily be re-mythologising it — and substituting a poorer mythology for a richer. Chapter X, para 2 If we are free to delete all inconvenient data we shall certainly have no theological difficulties; but for the same reason no solutions and no progress. The very writers of the ‘Tekkies’, not to mention the scientists, know better. The troublesome fact, the apparent absurdity which can’t be fitted into any synthesis we have yet made, is precisely the one we must not ignore. Ten to one, it’s in that covert that the fox is lurking. There is always hope if we keep an unsolved problem fairly in view; there’s none if we pretend it’s not there. Chapter XI, middle The Problem of PainOn the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgement must differ from ours on so many things, and not least on good and evil. … On the other hand, if God’s moral judgement differs from ours so that our “black” may be his “white”, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; … if He is not (in our sense) “good” we shall obey, if at all, only through fear — and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity — when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing — may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship. Chapter Brute and savage both belong to that unfortunate class of words which are sometimes used rhetorically, as terms of reproach, and sometime scientifically, as terms of description; and the pseudo-scientific argument against the Fall depends on a confusion between the usages. If by saying that man rose from brutality you mean simply that man is physically descended from animals, I have no objection. But it does not follow that the further back the more brutal – in the sense of wicked or wretched – you will find man to be. . . . The whole modern [1940!] estimate of primitive man is based on that idolatry of artefacts which is a great corporate sin of our own civilisation. We forget that our prehistoric ancestors made all the most useful discoveries, except that of chloroform, which have ever been made. To them we owe language, the family, clothing, the use of fire, the domestication of animals, the wheel, the ship, poetry and agriculture. Chapter V, middle All popular opinion is, indeed, on Kant's side. The people never admire a man for doing something he likes: the very words “But he likes it” imply the corollary “And therefore it has no merit”. Yet against Kant stands the obvious truth, noted by Aristotle, that the more virtuous a man becomes the more he enjoys virtuous actions. . . It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them. …With Hooker, and against Dr. Johnson, I emphatically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion (reached, I think, by Paley) that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it — that he might equally have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right. Chapter VI, middle And I certainly think that Christ, in the flesh, was not omniscient — if only because a human brain could not, presumably, be the vehicle of omniscient consciousness, and to say that Our Lord’s thinking was not really conditioned by the size and shape of His brain might be to deny the real incarnation and become a Docetist. Chap. IX, middle Reflections on the PsalmsThe man who says “Damn that chair!” does not really wish that it first be endowed with an immortal soul and then sent to eternal perdition. Chapter And of course [classical] poets may write fantasies about the world of the dead. These have no more to do with the real Pagan religion than the fantasies we may write about other planets have to do with real astronomy. Chap IV (Death in the Psalms), 30% It is, surely, very possible that when God began to reveal Himself to men, to show them that he and nothing else is their true goal and the satisfaction of their needs, and that He has a claim upon them simply by being what He is, quite apart from anything He can bestow or deny, it may have absolutely necessary that this revelation should not begin with any hint of future Beatitude or Perdition. These are not the right point to begin at. … It is even arguable that the moment “Heaven” ceases to mean union with God and “Hell” separation from Him, the belief in either is a mischievous superstition; for then we have, on the one hand, a merely “compensatory” belief (a “sequel” to life’s sad story, which everything will “come all right”) and, on the other hand, a nightmare which drives men into asylums of makes them persecutors. Chap IV (Death in the Psalms), 80% For we are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. “How he’s grown!”, we exclaim “How time flies!” as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is a strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined one day to become, one day, a land animal. Chapter XII (Second Meanings …), fin. MiraclesThe moral ideas of the individual are equally related to his general situation: it is no accident that parents and schoolmasters so often tell us that they can stand any vice rather than lying, the lie being the only defensive weapon of the child. Chap VI (Answers to Misgivings), 10% . . . plain men are being forced to bear burdens which plain men were never expected to bear before. There may be two explanations for this. It may be that humanity, in rebelling against tradition and authority, have made a ghastly mistake; a mistake which will not be the less fatal because the corruptions of those in authority rendered it very excusable. On the other hand, it may be that the Power which rules our species is at the moment carrying out a daring experiment. Could it be intended that the whole mass of people should now move forward and occupy for themselves those heights which were once reserved only for the sages? Is the distinction between wise and simple to disappear because all are now expected to become wise? If so, our present blunderings would be but growing pains. But let us make no mistake about our necessities. If we are content to go back and become humble plain men obeying a tradition, well. If we are ready to climb and struggle on till we become sages ourselves, better still. But the man who will neither obey wisdom in others nor adventure for her himself is fatal. A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live: a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go; to stay here is death. Chap VI (Answers to Misgivings), 70% For of course science actually proceeds by concentrating not on the regularities of Nature but on her apparent irregularities. It is the apparent irregularity that prompts each new hypothesis. It does so because we refuse to acquiesce in irregularities: we never rest till we have formed and verified a hypothesis which enables us to say that they were not really irregularities at all. Nature as it comes to us looks at first like a mass of irregularities. The stove which lit all right yesterday won’t light today; the water which was wholesome last year is poisonous this year. The whole mass of seemingly irregular experience could never have been turned into scientific knowledge at all unless from the very start we had brought to it a faith in uniformity which almost no number of disappointments can shake. Chap XIII (On Probability), 55% Christian ReflectionsThere is something holier about the atheism of a Shelley than about the theism of a Paley. That is the lesson of the Book of Job. from “De Futilitate”, near the end Fern-seed and ElephantsBy leading that [learned] life to the glory of God I do not, of course, mean any attempt to make our intellectual enquiries work out to edifying conclusions. That would be, as Bacon says, to offer to the author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie. from “Learning in War-time” A Preface to
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Martin Luther“Tell thine iniquities that thou mayest be justified,” and again: “Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth, and a barrier to fence my lips, That mine heart incline not to words of evil to cover over sins by excuses” (Ps. 141:3-4). Heidelberg disputation, XII Oh, it would be a presumption for anybody to call himself
holy and fit; and yet they teach that man of himself has a “certain
preparation” for prayer. Sermon in Castle
Pleissenberg, Leipzig, 1539 For there are very few princes who are not reckoned fools or knaves. That is because they show themselves to be such; the common man is learning to think, and the prince’s scourge, which God calls contemptum, is gathering force among the mob and with the common man. Secular Authority: to what Extent it should be Obeyed, 1523 “We know that music is hateful and intolerable to devils. I really believe, and am not ashamed to assert, that next to theology there is no art equal to music, for it is the only one, except theology, which can give a quiet and happy mind, a manifest proof that the devil, the author of racking care and perturbation, flees from the sound of music as he does from the exhortation of religion.” to Lewis Senfel at |
Rose MacaulayFathers, of course, are less frequent than mothers; they are often, on the other hand, more prolific. Their importance in the joint enterprise is equal, their responsibility for it usually greater, their retribution considerably less. Yes! fathers on the whole deserve more attention than they have received. Staying with Relations |
Plato’Tis the common belief that men who busy themselves with such schemes are made infidels by their astronomy and its sister sciences, with their disclosure of a realm where events happen by stringent necessity, not by the purpose of a will bent on the achievement of good. Laws, Book XII. 967 (A. E. Taylor's translation). |
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VARIOUS SNIPPETS
on Gossip There is no denying that gossip has destroyed lives, broken hearts, wrecked homes, relations, friends and communities. So while you can enjoy the endorphins of a gossip session, it can curl its ugly head and bite. Remember the transference theory and the boomerang effect. If you can't think of anything nice to say, say nothing at all, for words can kill and so can gossip. The tongue can manufacture poison for which there is no antidote. Lubna
Abdel Aziz, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 28 Nov. - |
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on Mathematics Too often, boys at school fail to realize how much mathematics there is to know. Talented boys find themselves ahead of their fellows, and begin to think they have a mastery of mathematics. As a result, they waste their last year at school. The first year at college (for those who are able to go there) they meet the best boys from other schools, and experience a tremendous shock. W.W. Sawyer, Mathematician’s Delight, Pelican 1943 |
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