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October 30, 2006

Lee Harris on Reason and Belief...

This is a brilliant essay from Lee Harris. I've got no time but here is the link. Here are two highlights:

The typical solution to the problem of ethics and religion offered by modern reason is quite simple: Let the individual decide such matters himself, by whatever means he wishes. If a person prefers Islam over Christianity, or Jainism over Methodism, that is entirely up to him. All such choices, from the perspective of modern reason, are equally leaps of faith, or simply matters of taste; hence all are equally irrational...

If the individual is free to choose between violence and reason, it will become impossible to create a community in which all the members restrict themselves to using reason alone to obtain their objectives. If it is left up to the individual to use violence or reason, then those whose subjective choice is for violence will inevitably destroy the community of those whose subjective choice is for reason. Worse still, those whose subjective choice is for violence do not need to constitute more than a small percentage of the community in order to destroy the very possibility of a community of reasonable men: Brute force and terror quickly extinguish rational dialogue and debate.

Modern reason, to be sure, cannot prove scientifically that a community of reasonable men is ethically superior to a community governed by violent men. But a critique of modern reason from within must recognize that a community of reasonable men is a necessary precondition of the very existence of modern reason. He who wills to preserve and maintain the achievements of modern reason must also will to live in a community made up of reasonable men who abstain from the use of violence to enforce their own values and ideas. Such a community is the a priori ethical foundation of modern reason. Thus, modern reason, despite its claim that it can give no scientific advice about ethics and religion, must recognize that its own existence and survival demand both an ethical postulate and a religious postulate. The ethical postulate is: Do whatever is possible to create a community of reasonable men who abstain from violence, and who prefer to use reason. The religious postulate is: If you are given a choice between religions, always prefer the religion that is most conducive to creating a community of reasonable men, even if you don't believe in it yourself.

And this section:

Modern scientific reason says that the universe is governed by rules through and through; indeed, it is the aim of modern reason to disclose and reveal these laws through scientific inquiry. Yet, as Schopenhauer asks, where did this notion of a law-governed universe come from? No scientist can possibly argue that science has proven the universe to be rule-governed throughout all of space and all of time. As Kant argued in his Critique of Judgment, scientists must begin by assuming that nature is rational through and through: It is a necessary hypothesis for doing science at all. But where did this hypothesis, so vital to science, come from?

The answer, according to Schopenhauer, was that modern scientific reason derived its model of the universe from the Christian concept of God as a rational Creator who has intelligently designed every last detail of the universe ex nihilo. It was this Christian idea of God that permitted Europeans to believe that the universe was a rational cosmos. Because Europeans had been brought up to imagine the universe as the creation of a rational intelligence, they naturally came to expect to find evidence of this intelligence wherever they looked--and, strangely enough, they did...

Human beings will have their gods--and modern reason cannot alter this. Indeed, modern reason has produced its own ersatz god--a blind and capricious universe into which accidental man has found himself inexplicably thrown. It is a universe in which all human freedom is an illusion, because everything we do or think was determined from the moment of the Big Bang. It is a universe in which there is no mind at all, but only matter. Yet without mind, how can there be reason? Without free will, how can there be reasonable choices? Without reasonable choices, how can there be reasonable men? Without reasonable men, how can there be communities in which human dignity is defended from the indignity of violence and brute force?

Remarkable reasoning. I see he has a new book soon. I look forward to it.

Posted by rakhier at 12:07 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2006

Reason and Islam - A Problem

This essay by Spengler (published in the Asia Times) is a very well reasoned analysis of the problem which reason has for serious Islamic scholars. This is the link but, on the off chance the link goes dead, here is the text of the essay.

Pope Benedict XVI has drawn a collective response from the Muslim world, in the form of an open letter from 38 Islamic leaders regarding his September 12 address in Regensburg. "All the eight schools of thought and jurisprudence in Islam are represented by the signatories," according to a press release hailing the letter as "unique in the history of interfaith relations". [1] The pope provoked outrage by suggesting that Islam rejects reason: the open letter proves him right. They argue that there is no dichotomy in Islam between reason and faith, which turns out to mean that there is no role for reason.

Some of the issues raised in the Muslim response are bit abstract, but the practical implications are quite stark. Theology, as Benedict stated on September 12, is "inquiry into the rationality of faith". Its most important function is to reject purported revelation that cannot possibly be true, such that faith may acknowledge revelation that might be true. Christianity and Judaism have endured two centuries of withering criticism from scientific study of their sacred texts. To perform the same function in the case of the Koran puts a scholar's life at risk. I do not know whether the scholars who question the Koran's authenticity are correct - I am not a specialist in such matters - but I am quite sure that their conclusions are reasoned. If reason might demonstrate the founding premises of a religion to be false, it is nonsense to argue, as the clerics do, that reason itself can be subsumed into a system of religious belief.

Reason and faith need each other, the pope argued in Regensburg. At the same time, modern science requires philosophical, and even theological premises which it cannot itself provide. Kurt Goedel, the 20th century's greatest mathematician, proved that no mathematical system can prove its own axioms, which must be accepted as if it were a matter of faith. As Benedict said: "Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought - to philosophy and theology."

But the pope added, "For Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality ... God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry." Conversion by force through jihad is the consequence of irrationality.

Here is the response of the 38 Muslim clerics in the open letter:

[T]he dichotomy between "reason" on one hand and "faith" on the other does not exist in precisely the same form in Islamic thought. Rather, Muslims have come to terms with the power and limits of human intelligence in their own way [emphasis added], acknowledging a hierarchy of knowledge of which reason is a crucial part ... [I]n their most mature and mainstream forms the intellectual explorations of Muslims through the ages have maintained a consonance between the truths of the Koranic revelation and the demands of human intelligence, without sacrificing one for the other. God says, We shall show them Our signs in the horizons and in themselves until it is clear to them that it is the truth (Fussilat 41:53). Reason itself is one of the many signs within us, which God invites us to contemplate, and to contemplate with, as a way of knowing the truth.

Reason, the Muslim clerics aver, is one more of the "signs in the horizon" that God sets before us to reveal His presence, like sunsets and rainbows. Now, I suppose that sunsets, rainbows, cellular mitosis and one's capacity to bisect an angle all might serve as inspiration. Reason in the West, though, is something quite different. Reason first of all is the capacity to doubt, to subject belief to the sort of merciless questioning that made Socrates so unpopular in Athens. Benedict drew a parallel between Socratic reasoning and Hebrew revelation to which I objected (Not what it was, but what it does, October 3, 2006). Socratic reasoning is ironic and destructive in Kierkegaard's reading, not affirmative of faith. [2] But that is a secondary matter here.

Reason, in the Muslim clerics' view, is a sign from God, an object that God has created and planted in our brains to show us God's presence. For example, if I say that as a reasoning fellow I don't believe in Allah, the answer must be, "Aha! You are using your reason to doubt the existence of Allah, and the fact that you have reason demonstrates the existence of Allah, because if you have reason, someone must have given it to you, and that only could be Allah."

To state that the dichotomy between faith and reason simply doesn't exist in Islam is another way of saying that Islam does not admit reason. The modern concept of reason, Benedict observed in his September 12 address, begins with Rene Descartes in the 17th century, who shifts the subject to the individual man away from God.

Descartes' most famous dictum, "I think, therefore I am," changes the subject from the Scholastic question, that is, the existence of God. Rather than ask, "How do I know whether God exists?", Descartes asks, "How do I know that I exist?" To which the simple answer is: if I don't exist, then who's asking the question? Following our 38 Muslim clerics, the Muslim reply must be: "Aha - you believe that you have thoughts, but those thoughts must come from somewhere, and where could those thoughts come from, except for Allah? It is not 'I think, therefore I am', but rather, 'I think, therefore Allah is'."

If God simply has planted reason in our brain the better to demonstrate to us His presence, then we have no thoughts that God does not send us. God as it were has placed a radio transmitter in our brain and is sending us signals.

The trouble is that not only Allah can plant a radio transmitter in our brain, but also Satan. Suppose I employ reason to conduct the most elementary sort of consistency check on the Koran. I will have trouble reconciling Sura 47:4 ("When you meet the unbelievers, strike off their heads," etc) with 50:45 ("We well know what the infidels say, but you are not to compel them"), and hundreds of other verses on other subjects. Reason shows only a contradiction; reconciliation of such statements requires recourse to a tradition of "abrogation" of supposedly early verses by later verses for which no empirical demonstration exists.

Men of reason have argued for centuries that Judeo-Christian revelation must be a hoax, on the strength of such observations as:


1. The repetition of numerous stories in the Bible (for example, the two Creation stories in Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:7) suggests multiple authorship and the redaction of conflicting stories;
   
2. Unmistakable differences in style within books attributed to a single author (for example, the two or three Isaiahs);
   
3. Evident corruption of certain texts; [3]
   
4. Glaring differences among the four Christian Gospels (eg, two different lineages for the Virgin Mary), not to mention the existence of variant Gospels; [4]
   
5. Suspicious similarities between the Christian Eucharist and the pagan cult of Dionysus

And so forth. Christians and Jews have had to come to terms with these and countless other quite reasonable objections, with the understanding that reason is a different function than faith.

Muslims have yet to come to terms with similar objections, including such scholarly arguments as the following:

1. There are numerous variant versions of the Koran, making it quite unlikely that the Archangel Gabriel dictated the entire document to the Prophet Mohammed;
   
2. Approximately a fifth of the Koranic text is "just incomprehensible" according to Professor Gerd R Puin of the University of Saarbruecken;
   
3. Much of what is incomprehensible in Arabic makes good sense if one reads the text instead in Syriac, the liturgical language of pre-existing Christian communities in the Middle East, according to "Christoph Luxenburg";
   
4. The archeological evidence (assembled by Yehuda Nevo) from the Koranic period strongly contradicts the notion that a finished text of any sort existed within a century of Mohammed's death.

The scholarly arguments that the Koran had nothing to do with the Archangel Gabriel, but rather consists of a much later hodge-podge of poorly edited and contradictory material, much of it cribbed from easily-identified Jewish and Christian sources, are vast, and easily available. [5] They are matters for specialists, and I do not need to adopt a stance toward them. It is quite clear, though, that if the Koran is a 9th-century redaction rather than a 7th-century revelation, of course, Islam has a serious problem.

If the Pentateuch of the Old Testament was revealed to a handful of individuals, not just to Moses as tradition has it, Christians and Jews can absorb the damage. Not so Muslims if the Koran was revealed to (or redacted by) someone else than Mohammed. That is why some prominent text critics of the Koran publish under pseudonyms ("Christoph Luxenburg", "Ibn Warraq"), or not at all.

In the Western tradition, Descartes' man - rather than God-centered metaphysics - led first to a revolt against faith. But science, as Benedict argued on September 12, had to learn its own limitations. Creation ex nihilo, once derided as the most unreasonable of Biblical doctrines, does not seem so unreasonable now that the physicists concede that all the laws of nature cease to have meaning prior to the origin of the universe in the Big Bang. Mathematics, thanks to Kurt Goedel, now must admit its axioms depend on faith rather than proof. Modern reason began as the antagonist of faith, but in its best manifestation has been housebroken into its proper role as the Accusing Angel in the heavenly court.

The core of the issue is human freedom. Reason is a gift from God, to be sure, but it is a parent's gift of love to a child: the capacity to doubt and even to rebel, in the hope that grace will overcome man's obstinacy. The 38 clerics, by contrast, consider reason no more than another feature of nature to be contemplated on the horizon. That is what Benedict means when he characterizes Allah as "absolutely transcendental". As Franz Rosenzweig explained, mainstream Muslim theology

... presumes that Allah creates every isolated thing at every moment. Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the God's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism. [6]

Doubt, that is, reason, will not find a place in Islam, if the 38 clerics are a fair representation of Muslim thinking.

Notes
[1] Click here for the press release. Scroll down to find a link to the full text of the letter.
[2] Socrates the destroyer, May 25, 2004.
[3] See the entry on the "Book of Job" in the Encyclopedia Judaica, for example.
[4] See for example Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, New York, 2004).
[5] See Ibn Warraq, What the Koran Really Says (Prometheus Books: Amherst NY, 2002). Warraq, an apostate from Islam, republishes the most important scholarly arguments for the inauthenticity of the Koran.
[6] Oil on the flames of civilizational war, December 2, 2003.

Update: the Author (in this essay) quotes Franz Rosenzweig (a German-Jewish philosopher from the early 1900s) who attacks Islam on a number of intellectual fronts:

Rosenzweig altogether repudiates the notion of Islamic culture. As a caricature, Islam is entirely sterile: "Islam never created an Islamic art, but rather took into its service pre-Islamic art ... The pre-Islamic state, namely the Oriental state in its Byzantine form, made Islam into its state religion; the pre-Islamic spirit of the Koran adopted either pre-Islamic rationalism or mysticism and orthodoxy. In Europe, by contrast, in Christian Europe, there arose something new: Christian art, and a Christian state."

Love requires the Judeo-Christian God to create the world. By contrast, "the God of Mohammed is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily. By contrast, it is most characteristic of rabbinic theology that it formulates our concept of the divine power to create in the question as to whether God created the world out of love or out of righteousness."

Allah's creation for Rosenzweig is a mere act of "magic". Muslim theology "presumes that Allah creates every isolated thing at every moment. Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the God's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism."

By paganism Rosenzweig refers to a specific mindset as well as a political system which crushes individual identity into the whole. In the pagan state, he wrote in the Star, "The individual does not stand in relation to the state in the way that a part stands in relation to the whole. On the contrary, the state is all, and its electricity pulses through the veins of every individual."

Personally I'm not sure why Rosenzweig is the ultimate authority on this topic. Could be the author of the essay is simply showing off that he has read an obscure German philosopher.

Posted by rakhier at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)

October 05, 2006

The Reasons for Marriage

This essay from 2004 by Maggie Gallagher (see here for the PDF) is a brilliant statement of why society recognizes marriage as a union of a man and a woman. I've put together some sections from her paper (roughly starting around page 45) into a brief summary.

[T]he general rule in law is: the closer, more intimate, more intrinsically valued the relationship, the less likely it is to be regulated by law. This is true even of personal relationships that give rise to considerable dependency, like the relationship between adult children and aging parents. If my mother is old and sick and in need of my care, I can choose to walk away from her completely and the law cannot touch me; the law will not try to transform filial obligations into legal ones. It is impersonal relationships - especially commercial ones - that typically give rise to legal regulation, not personal, intimate ones. The great exception to this general rule in adult relationships is marriage. Why?

Most of what are now routinely described as marriage benefits are more accurately described as legal incidents of marriage. Generally speaking, the law treats you differently if you are married, because the law presumes that marriage makes you and your spouse three things: (a) next of kin, (b) financial partners, and (c) exclusive sexual partners.

Why does marriage exist as a legal institution?

The reason marriage was singled out for special legal attention is that it is the only human relationship that can both (a) produce the next generation of babies and (b) connect those babies to both their mother and father.

Marriage exists in virtually every known human society. Since the begining of recorded history, in all the flourishing varieties of human cultures documented by anthropologists, marriage has been a universal human institution. As a virtually universal human idea, marriage is about regulating the reproduction of children, families, and society.

What is it about human nature that leads culturally separate and distinct societies to independently come up with the same basic idea?

Here is what I think the answer is: Marriage as a universal social institution is grounded in certain universal features of human nature. When men and women have sex, they make babies. Reproduction may be optional for individuals but it is not for societies. Societies that fail to have "enough" babies fail to survive. And babies most likely grow to functioning adulthood when they have the care and attention of both their mother and father.

Marriage arises again and again in some form out of the basic human need for a social institution to manage these basic human sexual realities. Societies that fail to manage these realities fail to survive long enough to be recorded by anthropologists among the human alternatives.

Sex makes babies. Society needs babies. Babies deserve mothers and fathers. Together these three ideas explain the public purposes of marriage, its shape and form.

By making marriage a permanent sexual union based on the fidelity of both spouses, the state seeks to increase the likelihood that children will be raised in "intact" families, cared for by their mother and father. State preferences for marriage over other kinds of unions transmit a clear message to the next generation: the man and woman who make the baby are supposed to stick around, take care of each other and their baby too.

Research clearly demonstrats that family structure matters for children, and the family structure that helps children the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low conflict marriage.

To summarize the arguement so far: Marriage law is important not because it distributes administrative benefits that help people live their private lives... The reason the state is justified in "imposing" such norms on people's intimate lives is that sex makes babies, societies need babies, and children deserve their own mothers and fathers. Managing the sexually based phenomenon known as "procreativity" is not optional, but essential if a civilization is the perpetuate itself over the long term.

Ms. Gallagher then goes on to list some very compelling reasons as to why allowing gays to marry would be bad for the idea of marriage.

She lists several problems:

1. the meaning of marriage, which has a long and deep meaning in history, culture, and literature, will have to change. In fact it will have to change so much that we might well want to come up with a new word to mean "a union between a man and a woman who are raising their own children together". In other words: if you redefine marriage we will have to create, in short order, a brand new word which means exactly what the old word used to mean.

2. Long standing legal rules relating to marriage would be thrown into confusion. For example, the concept of adultery would no longer make much sense. For another, the concept of the "presumption of paternity", the legal presumption that the husband is the father of the wife's children. This concept is rooted in biological and social reality, reality which is thrown out the window when gay men and women can marry other men and women. If they have children, who is the father or mother? What legal rights have been assumed by the partner in the marriage?

3. It is dangerous of societies to attack such a fundemental element of their society. The risk of unintended consequences are huge. Potentially they could destroy the civilization itself.

   If marriage is redefined then a sure consequence of this redefinition is that the original meaning of marriage will become stigmatized and those who argue in favor of the old meaning of marriage will be attacked publically by the courts and by law. "People who believe that children need both mothers and fathers will be treated like bigots in the public square".

Her conclusion is:

Court-created same-sex marriage will transform our shared, public meaning of the word "marriage". It will disconnect marriage from any futher relationship with its great historic task of making the next generation, and connecting those children to both their mothers and fathers. A new unisex language of parenting in the public square will demote the idea that "children need mothers and fathers" to a form of rudeness or bigotry. Organizations that try to transmit in any strong way to the next generation the idea that marriage is about creating and connecting children to their mothers and fathers will be increasing treated the way bigots who oppose interratial marriages are treated in the public square.

I'm convinced. Redefine marriage = stupid idea. Gays have the right to marry: another man (or woman) of the opposite sex. What they are asking for is the brand new right to redefine marriage to include two people of the same sex. As an idea, this needs to be fought.

Posted by rakhier at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)