Things Invisible

 I have a secret superpower: I can make myself invisible.

I'm not joking, this is serious. It's not like saying, "Want to be invisible? Just tell all your friends you need to borrow money." Being unseen isn't being invisible. This isn't about being unseen, it's about being unseeable.

Here's how it works: All seeing is seeing light. All we ever see, all we can ever see, is light. When you look at, say, a tree, you don't see the tree itself, you see light that has bounced off the surface of the tree. You don't see the tree, you see the light reflected by the tree. That light enters your eyes and touches your retinas, where it's converted into electrochemical impulses (so "science" says). Those impulses travel up the optic nerve to your brain, which then – "somehow" – converts them into what you believe is a tree, but what is really an inner image of a tree. The tree is not "out there," it is "in here" that you experience it. All seeing, all sense-perception, all experience – happens "in here."

All experience is inner experience.

If all seeing is seeing light, then to make something visible become invisible – not just unseen, but unseeable – means removing it from all light. It isn't difficult to do that – in fact, people do it all the time. All you have to do is go into an enclosed space where light cannot enter. You will thus be rendered not only unseen – because you've gone into a dark box no one can see inside – but unseeable, because even if someone were to get inside your box, there's no light, so they couldn't see anything, if there were anything to see.

A closet, for example.

Okay, making myself invisible isn't really a superpower, anyone can do it. And in fact a lot of people do it – they regularly, and some of them constantly, and one way or another, conceal themselves, or some part of themselves – becoming unseen though perhaps not unseeable.

What's to conceal? Why would you or I want to make sure that something about ourselves never, as people say, "sees the light of day"? Because we fear that there will be unpleasant consequences if other people see what we're doing or what we really are in our true "disconcealed" state. People are, we know, widely inclined to pass judgment on others and to inflict punishment on anyone they judge negatively. Those judgments are as often based on ignorance or prejudice as on knowledge and intelligence. To avoid being subjected to them, we are often driven to hide things that we know are harmless or even beneficial, because we know there are other people who insist on seeing them as harmful and wrong and requiring eradication.

Thus is created a twilight world, a shadow world, an underground, where everything lives that society disapproves, everything rejected, neglected or viewed as infected – the "immoral," the misfit, the unruly and untamed – things good thrown in with things bad, the sweet and lovely next to the foul and ugly, the natural saint keeping company with the thief and cutthroat in the foggy cellars of Shadowland.

Here's another secret: The universe is full of light, the darkest-seeming expanses of space are filled with light – light we can't see and will never see unless someone or something enters the darkness and reveals the light hidden there.

What do we see when we look at the sky on a clear night? Points of light scattered across a field of darkness: stars, planets, the Moon. The stars emit their own light, and we see them because some tiny fraction of their light enters our eyes and becomes an image in our mind. But the Moon and planets are different. Remember, all seeing is seeing light, but the Moon emits no light of its own. Its glow reveals to us that the dark-seeming space surrounding our planet is filled – flooded – with sunlight at all times. In daytime, some of that light streams straight at us or strikes the objects around us, bounces off, and enters our eyes, and so forth. But at night the mass of the Earth blocks the Sun's direct light and we find ourselves in the Earth's shadow. So although the Sun never ceases radiating light in all directions, we see only the tiny fraction of that light that enters our eyes. At night, the light streams past us unseen though it fills the space around us – invisible and absolutely dark to us.

But when the Moon rises and passes across the sky, the flood of invisible light washes over it, and some of that light reflects toward us, so that now we can see the light, the light that was pure darkness to us until the Moon revealed it.

Like the secret of invisibility, this secret of dark light is no secret, but just something rarely given any thought. To give thought to what is unknown or ignored is to enter the shadows in search of unseen light, to rise above the dark horizon and become a mirror for the invisible. Fearing and hating the darkness only deepens it. Enter the night with open eyes, look for the light that's always there, and let it shine on you and in you for all the world to see.

Thinking Globally, Freaking Out Locally

I spent the last few years of my journalism career working as a general-assignment reporter for the local newspaper in the small town where I grew up. Those in the know, know that’s basically the bottom rung of the journalism ladder. I had previously scaled the heights and held positions of authority with some medium-sized dailies, highly regarded weeklies, and world-renowned wire services. I took the long fall (and the two-thirds cut in pay) voluntarily, as my late wife and I saw a need to return to our home turf for family-related reasons. Little did I know what a hot mess I was parachuting into.

Most of my job consisted in covering local government, at a time when the local government in my hometown was on the verge of total implosion. The latest independent audit of the city’s finances had found that the city was in a deep hole, with millions of dollars less at its disposal than leaders had thought. Indeed, millions of dollars less than they needed to pay for things they had already bought. In other words, on the verge of bankruptcy.

The causes were obvious: city officials had consistently overestimated the amount of money the city would receive in taxes and fees, and had written the city budget to allow officials to spend the inflated amount. So at the end of the year, there was a gap between revenue and spending – the city had spent more than it earned. And this was happening year after year, so the cumulative deficit had gotten pretty big.

The citizenry were pretty outraged, but for the wrong reasons. Officials had been incompetent and a bit negligent in performing their role as fiscal agents, but there was no evidence of actual corruption. But you couldn’t convince the taxpayers of that, though I tried to explain it in my news stories (for which I  won a Virginia Press Association first-place award, by the way). All they could see was that there were millions of dollars “missing,” and someone must have embezzled them. People wanted heads to roll, they wanted arrests and prison sentences. Torches and pitchforks, baby.

This was the background, then, when I covered a certain meeting of City Council, around ten years ago. The tide of outrage was finally ebbing, as the city had been able to avoid defaulting on its debts, and there was hope that the steps that had been taken would produce long-term stability. But not everyone was willing to let go of the witch-hunt mentality. Some had agendas that they hoped the upheavals would help them advance.

City Council has just gone into a closed “executive session,” so I’m sitting with the other audience members just killing time. A woman I’ve never seen before comes over and sits beside me. She’s elderly but spry, and a bit eccentric-looking: hair in a pigtail, vaguely Native American clothing, smiling at everyone like she’s really enjoying this gathering. I’ve noticed her husband or significant other, who’s now sitting on the other side of the room: dressed like a laborer, long white Duck Dynasty beard. They’re both in their 70s, I guess.

“You’re a reporter?” she asks, as if she’s never met one before and wasn’t quite sure such creatures really existed.

“Yes ma’am, I’m afraid so,” I reply in my usual whimsical, self-deprecating way.

She asks where I think the “missing” money went, and I tell her. She listens attentively and nods frequently, and it all seems to be going well. I wrap up my little presentation and look for her reaction.

“You know about the base they’re building in Chesterfield?” she inquires, naming a nearby county. “I think that’s where the money went, I think they’re taking our money and putting it into that base, stealing it so they won’t have to tell anyone what they’re doing.”

“What base?” I ask, confusedly, my alarm signal not yet sounding.

“You know,” she says, smiling like she knows I’m kidding her. “The UN base.”

Beeeeeeeeep goes my alarm.

She starts elaborating, and I don’t try to stop her, I’m more focused on deciding whether I'll need to yell for help. It's a base for the UN to position its black helicopters and its black-uniformed troop to prepare for the attack on Washington. Because Washington is only a hundred miles from here. Not that the people in Washington are any better, they’re really in cahoots with the globalists. Because that’s what it’s all about, you know – creating a One World socialist dictatorship that will destroy our nation’s sovereignty, take away our guns, and put all right-thinking people in concentration camps.

I finally interrupt. “No offense,” I say, “but I don’t believe any of that.”

She stares at me for a moment with her eyes widening a little. Then a knowing look comes over her.

“Are you Jewish?” she asks.

I’m not going to say what my answer was – oh all right, no, I’m not Jewish, but that’s really beside the point – I just want you to contemplate the question and the context for a moment. If you don’t get it, visit the ADL website and search for “protocols.” This is what was turned loose, empowered, by the “Tea Party,” and in the past decade it has done nothing but grow in power.

Rita and Elmo: An Allegorical Folk Tale – From Presence

 

(Mira:)

I finish reading the paper and I notice you writing. “What are you working on, sweetie?” I ask.

“An idea for a novel,” you tell me. “Nothing good, just a sort of political thriller, something to try to make money.”

“Nothing wrong with that, darling. People do worse things than that for money.”

“I know.”

“Sometime if you want to, maybe you could make up a bedtime story to tell me. No one ever did that for me when I was little. I used to read things for myself until they made me put out the light: fairy tales from a book my favorite aunt gave me one year for my birthday. Cinderella and Snow White, Beauty and the Beast and Red Riding Hood, all the famous ones. It would have been nicer if someone had read them to me.”

(Jason:)

I close my notebook and put my arm around you. “You wouldn’t happen to be dropping a hint for me, darling, would you?” I ask.

You give me a guilty little smile. “I don’t know, sweetie. Is that something you might like to do for me sometime?”

“I could give it a try, I guess. I don’t know if it would be any good. I’m better at writing than I am at talking, you know. You’re the only one I’d even think of trying it with.”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’ll love it whatever it is.”

“Okay then. Let’s see, how should I start? Oh, right.”

 

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Rita who lived with her evil parents at the edge of a forest called Midnight Woods. Rita’s parents were stooges of the evil Sheriff of Nothingham, who liked to keep children locked up in his dungeon and commit unspeakable acts out of everyone’s sight. One day it was Rita’s turn to go there, and her parents locked her out of their house so the Sheriff could find her and carry her away. But Rita knew what they were planning, and she ran into the Midnight Woods to escape.

The woods were scary, dark and deep, and Rita wandered alone for a long time without knowing where she was, getting tireder and hungrier with each step she took. After a long time, she just sat down where she was, unable to take another step. Immediately a pack of wild dogs surrounded her and started to fight among themselves over which one would get to take the first bite from her lovely neck. But thinking quickly, Rita told them, “If you eat me up, I’ll be gone and I won’t be able to do anything else for you. But if you let me live and bring me food now and then, I’ll scratch your necks and your ears and rub your bellies whenever you want. And I’ll sing you sad songs so you can howl along.” The wild dogs thought about this a little while and decided it would make sense to do what she suggested.

And so it was that Rita was able to survive in the depths of Midnight Woods. And besides the food they brought her, the wild dogs gave her knowledge of the forest and showed her the hidden pathways that crisscrossed all over the place.

Thus it happened one day as she was walking along, she came to a place where two paths crossed. And sitting at the crossroads was a boy her own age, surrounded by wild dogs and wolves who were fighting over who would get to eat him.

But Rita commanded the animals to leave him alone. “Let’s hear what he has to say for himself before you rip out his neck,” she told them. “If he has nothing good to offer, then bon appétit.”

Then she asked the boy, “What is your name, handsome stranger, and why are you here in this desolate place?”

The boy replied, “Thank you, oh kind and beautiful lady, for saving my life, I’m forever in your debt. My name is Elmo of Dismalia and I’m an exile from that dreary slough of despond. How I came to be exiled and why I’m here is a tale that will take some time to tell, but I think you’ll find it’s worth your time to hear it.”

“Very well,” said Rita. “We’ll hear your story, but keep in mind, if you value your neck, don’t try to feed us any bullshit.” Then she and the animals sat down and waited for Elmo to start.

“I come from a land on the far side of Midnight Woods, a place so drab and dull that even the pigeons fly over without stopping. And the reason for this dullness is simple: the people there have forgotten how to dream. They spend all day making drab things for themselves, the same things day in and day out, never dreaming they might try to make something different. And they spend all night snoring, the same snores each night as the last one.

“The children are taught from an early age to keep doing the same pointless things as their parents, and never to ask any questions. But from the time I was born, an invisible angel went with me wherever I went and joined me in everything I did. And wherever I was, whatever I did, whatever I heard, this angel would always whisper one word secretly in my ear. And the word was: ‘Why?’

“When I was too young to know better, I would repeat this word out loud to my parents and teachers and friends, whenever they told me what I should be doing, whenever they told me to stop doing something else. ‘Why?’ I would say, and they’d all get angry and yell at me. ‘Because it’s what we always do!’ ‘Because it’s what we know how to do!’ ‘Because I say so! Now just shut up and do it!’

“But even worse, at night when everyone else was snoring at full blast, this angel would whisper more things in my ear: stories of places I’d never seen, of people I’d never met. And I’d see them before me as real as life, and I’d go everywhere and do everything just as the angel’s story said. And somehow I knew this was what people call dreaming.

“I didn’t dare tell anyone about my dreams – I knew if I did they’d cut off my head. But knowing about it was driving me mad, watching the others go through their repetitious routines was driving me mad – everything around me was driving me mad.

“Then one night I had a particular dream that I knew right away was the answer to all my questions. In this dream I’m walking alone in the woods, not knowing where I am or where I’m going. But I’m on a trail, and the angel’s voice is telling me to keep going this way. And before long I come to a huge clearing, and there in front of me is a gigantic palace, glowing like sunlit gold, its highest towers touching the clouds, and a sound like a massive choir singing mournfully echoing from the walls.

“I find the great gateway unguarded and I walk right in, and the angel leads me to a great hall full of statues of gods and heroes, all smiling as if they’re welcoming me.

“At the end of this majestic space I see two golden thrones speckled with jewels sitting on a raised platform. But the thrones are empty, and somehow I know this is bad: it means there’s some kind of curse on this kingdom lost in the forest. And I ask, ‘Why are the king and queen not here?’

“My angel answers, ‘The young prince and princess have never been crowned, they were carried away in the night by dark jealous powers who surrounded this palace with the Midnight Woods so the rightful rulers could never find their way here. And outside all is chaos now and endless night, and so it will stay until someone with a pure heart finds the princess and prince and helps guide them home.’

“Then in a flash I’m transported away from the palace and out into the darkest and most trackless waste in all of the Midnight Woods – deserted by my inquisitive angel and as lost as anyone can be. Since then I’ve been searching for a way out, and it was only today, just a short time ago, that I finally found a path – this path that led me to this crossroads where you and I just met a moment ago.”

Rita and the animals considered this strange story for a while. At last she told Elmo, “Your story is very strange and hard to believe, but considering that we’re sitting in Midnight Woods and surrounded by talking animals, I’m not going to dismiss it out of hand. What I’d really like to know right now is what you think our meeting here might mean.”

At that Elmo smiled. “I believe with all my heart, lovely Rita, that you are the princess whose coming the kingdom awaits with such longing. Yes, I have guessed your name, for my angel has returned and stands ready to guide us to the lost palace where you can now take your rightful place.”

All of a sudden Rita and Elmo were swept up and carried away as if by magic, and in an instant they found themselves in the grand throne room. Then Elmo offered his elbow to Rita and conducted her to her queenly throne. She took her seat and at once was adorned with a fine dress of gold and silver threads and a golden crown studded with emeralds of the deepest green.

“But where is my prince to take his seat beside me and be the long-sought king of this land?” asked Rita, looking forlorn.

At that moment a bright light flashed, and in an instant Elmo found himself sitting on the other throne, regally dressed to match Rita and bearing a crown of gold like hers. They reached out and joined their hands.

Then a marvelous power surrounded the palace and swirled like a whirlwind around it, sweeping away the chaos and darkness and shadows. In drab Dismalia everyone suddenly threw away their tools and started dancing just because it was something they’d never done before. And in Nothingham, the Sheriff and his helpers melted into puddles of piss and the dungeon doors sprang open and all the hurt children came out into the light, where they were comforted and loved as never before.

And the young king and queen were wed and together ruled wisely and lovingly over the land from that day on. And they all lived happily ever after.

 

Cosmic Comment – The Return

 I've been thinking for a while now about starting a new blog, but frankly I just don't have the drive to start from scratch. So I'm reactivating a blog I kept for a couple of years, about a dozen years ago. I don't think I can wholeheartedly endorse everything I wrote back then – the world and my life have changed pretty drastically since then – but I'm not going to do any rewriting. Let's look forward.

Masters of Atlantis

That faint, muffled, oh-so-distant sound you hear is the Eternal Form of Plato having a hearty laugh.

Plato was, of course, a big kidder. That’s something the majority of his modern interpreters don’t seem to understand, but it’s undeniable. Some scholars acknowledge it in a sort of humorless way by talking about “Socratic irony,” but that concept does little justice to Plato’s true jocularity.

Some of the modern thinking about his ideas could only cause Plato frustration and exasperation, of course. The way people want to reduce the Republic, for example, to a treatise on political systems must be truly infuriating. Expostulations on politics were a dime a dozen in Plato’s day, and what is totally missed by modern interpreters is the extent to which the Republic satirizes those polemics. Children taken from their parents and raised by the state, men and women exercising together (naked!) in the Gymnasium? Bada bing, but seriously folks.

OK, here’s another one: In two dialogues, Republic and Laws, Plato apparently proposes that legislators who want to make new laws must write them in verse and then sing (and dance!) them before the assembly.

One could come up with all sorts of theories about why Plato would recommend such a thing – for example, maybe if they had to put them in verse, lawmakers would think harder about the laws they impose on the rest of us – but there’s actually a really simple explanation: The Greek word for “law,” nome, also means “melody.” It’s a pun, the purpose of which – it seems to me – is to point up the absurdity of the whole legislative process. (Not that our modern legislators need any help in making their absurdity obvious.)

But what I’m thinking Plato must be laughing about now is the latest claim that someone has found the “Real Atlantis.” There have been stories about it in the media for a week or so, part of the drumbeat of publicity for a documentary about the “discovery” that’s being broadcast on TV tonight.

And while I have no doubt that the team of archeologists who made this discovery have in fact discovered something, and perhaps something significant, I am certain that they have not discovered the Real Atlantis, though claiming to have done so might boost their TV ratings and, perhaps, their funding.

It’s one thing to go into Plato’s dialogues looking for the passages in which Atlantis is mentioned and to try to connect those mentions to places or events in the actual, historical world. It’s quite another thing to study Plato in some real sense, to read at least, say, a half-dozen of the dialogues all the way through and give serious thought to what they might mean.

The most common mistake people make in reading Plato’s dialogues is to assume that some statement or line of argument within a dialogue is Plato’s statement of what he’s trying to say. Most often, people want to select something said by the character of Socrates as the articulation of Plato’s position. But in fact, it’s the dialogue as a whole that expresses Plato’s position.

With that in mind, I’m convinced that to anyone who has seriously studied Plato, it’s blindingly obvious, crystal-clear, transparently apparent – in short, very easy to see – that the whole Atlantis story is something Plato just made up to make a philosophical point.

Consider, first, that the two dialogues in which Plato discusses Atlantis, Timaeus and Critias, are the second and third installments in a trilogy of dialogues that begins with Republic.

In Republic, the participants have agreed to construct in words a perfectly ordered society. As I suggested above, there are pitfalls in taking anything about this dialogue literally.

In Timaeus, the discussion on the morning after the conversation recorded in Republic begins with Socrates’ wish that he and his companions could set their ideal society in motion and watch its unfolding in real time and space. The notion of Atlantis is introduced (but not in isoloation, as will be discussed further below) as a story that can be told that would, perhaps, satisfy Socrates’ wish. But to tell the story properly, we must first go all the way back in the unfolding of events to explain the origin of the universe itself. That explanation then occupies the remainder of the dialogue, and is remarkable for its opacity to the modern mind.

In Critias, finally, we are to expect the full unfolding of the story of Atlantis. But it is not just the story of Atlantis; rather, it is the story of a war between Atlantis and a long-ago version of Athens, an Athens that once flourished as brilliantly as Atlantis did, though for different reasons, but which vanished so completely that the Athenians of Plato’s time had no idea it had ever existed – just as no one then living was familiar with the existence of Atlantis.

Plato tells us that his ancestor, Solon, one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece, learned of these matters on a journey to Egypt, the only society where knowledge reached back into such remote times, something on the order of 10,000 years before. The priests of Egypt told Solon the story that Plato is proposing to relate about the war between this long-forgotten, primal Athens and the equally forgotten Atlantis.

The dialogue then goes on to tell us something about each of these societies and the reasons for their flourishing – and then stops. The dialogue Critias was never finished. The promised account of the war between Athens and Atlantis was never set down in writing.

From what was set down, it seems clear that Plato planned to tell a tale that would contrast the two civilizations in a way that would help illuminate the point(s) he was making in Republic and Timaeus. Based on my own interpretation of those dialogues and Plato’s teachings in general, my guess is that the story would tell us that it didn’t ultimately matter which country won the war, both were going to vanish: Atlantis suddenly, the primordial Athens gradually. Maybe.

As far as the modern search for the Real Atlantis goes, my main point is this: If you believe Plato was talking about a real place in reference to Atlantis, then why aren’t you also digging deep, deep down under present-day Athens to find the 10,000-year-old city that Plato also described? I’m not talking, obviously, about some Neolithic village where people at most had learned to make pottery and not to eat each other; I’m talking about a city that was advanced enough to make serious war against the putatively oh-so-advanced Atlanteans.

Plato made up a lot of stuff in his dialogues that philosophers and historians of philosophy happily admit was always intended to be myth. Indeed, the French philosopher Luc Brisson has written a book on the subject, Plato the Myth Maker, which notes among other things that Plato was the first writer to distinguish between myth and history. And Atlantis clearly is not the latter.

The myth of Er that concludes the Republic and the stories of winged souls and two-horsed chariots in Phaedrus are perhaps the best-known examples of Plato’s talent for describing more-or-less concrete images to illustrate metaphysical concepts. It’s a fault of our modern attitudes, not of Plato’s insights and skills as a philosopher and writer, that we want to take the concrete image as the reality and miss the real point.

A-Theism

Readers of these posts will have noticed that I’m no fan of atheism, and likely will have inferred that I’m what people are prone to call a “theist.” It’s interesting to note that no one in the world, as far as I’ve heard, goes around proclaiming, “I’m a Theist!” The term, or whatever it represents, exists purely to stake out a position in debate: If there are atheists, there also must be the opposite, theists. In fact, “theism” exists purely as a sort of placeholder, filling a necessary position in a presumptive logical relationship. That relationship turns out to be a false dilemma.

The basis of the atheism-vs.-theism polarity is presumed to be the nonbelief or belief in God, a god, gods, etc. An atheist, by this standard, is someone who denies the existence of any such thing, and a “theist” is someone who affirms the existence of some such thing.

It’s worth noting in connection with this that the Greek word at the center of the discussion, θεος (theos), was never to the ancient Greeks a proper noun. Rather, it was a quality or category shared by certain beings: Zeus was θεος, Apollo was θεος, etc. In short, the “theo” in theology, the “the” in “theism” and “atheism,” doesn’t refer to a specific being or personification, it refers to whatever might be shared by gods and goddesses: “divinity” would be a likely translation.

But the real problem with suggesting that atheism and “theism” are equivalent but opposite positions is that it lumps together a very large number of very different belief-systems and gives them a single label based on what is really just one characteristic of each system, and not necessarily the most important. It then posits the so-labelled “theistic” systems as one monolithic mass in opposition to what is really just another belief-system, albeit one in which the salient belief is in disbelief.

This is actually the great error that Plato warned against in the practice of dialectic: When you divide things, make sure you’re dividing them where they truly differ and where the difference truly matters. For example, if you want to categorize "living things," you probably won’t get useful results if you start by dividing them into “things that call me by my nickname Mongo” and “things that don’t call me by my nickname Mongo.”

This is exactly what is going on when we divide people into “those who don’t believe in God, a god, gods, goddesses, spirits, angels, etc. etc. etc.” and “those who believe in any of the above.” The don’t-believe/do-believe dilemma forces us to suppose that one of those two positions is the only true one, instead of allowing us to scope out the full range of possibilities.

Another way of trying to say what I’m trying to say is that the differences among the putatively “theistic” belief-systems are as real and important as the difference between this theoretical “theism” and atheism. For example, fundamentalist Christianity and Taoism – is there a significant difference? Only someone totally ignorant of one or both would say no. Yet both must fall into the “theist” category, enabling the atheist to claim victory over both if he can refute either one.

This is one reason for my conviction that, as I asserted in my last post, the argument really is “not between science and religion but between naturalism and supernaturalism or between physicalism and metaphysicalism.” Because, of course, atheists aren’t only atheists, they’re holders of a worldview that includes (or perhaps requires) a denial of anything supernatural or metaphysical, but which embraces a lot of do-believes in addition to the one don’t-believe, and the unspoken do-believes would require a lot more intellectual firepower to defend.

Let’s suppose that instead of a God/no-God dichotomy, we’re actually talking about a spectrum or continuum of belief. Belief in what? must be our first question, and the answer is crucial. It seems to me that what we’re really talking about is how we explain the source(s) or cause(s) of the cosmos in which we live (and ask these questions).

The physicalist/materialist position gives us a starting point at one extreme: Everything in the universe can be explained in terms of physical cause and effect, and there is no need to believe in any transcendent cause for anything in the universe or, indeed, the universe itself.

If that’s our anchor on one end of our spectrum or continuum of belief, the opposite extreme clearly must be the fundamentalist claim that the universe exists because of a one-time act of miraculous creativity by a deity who happily violated all the laws of time, space, matter and energy to create an illusory cosmos. By this reckoning, the physical facts, the seeming relationships of physical cause and effect, are traps for the intellectually arrogant, and the true laws of existence can be known only by study of one miraculously perfect book.

What’s in between these extremes? Basically, everything that makes sense. Take your pick, study Taoism, Buddhism, classical Philosophy, “higher theology” in Christianity, mysticism in all its forms in all traditions, and even the perhaps-boring but not destructive teachings of the mainline Christian denominations and their equivalents in Judaism and Islam.

All of these traditions have value, which makes it all the more saddening when some evangelists of atheism caricature all belief as something like the “flying spaghetti monster,” which obviously was invented by someone who had been smoking copious amounts of pot and had no knowledge of religion, philosophy or much else besides his own ego.

As I said in my last post, “It’s blindingly obvious that the people who are participating the most energetically in the science-vs.-religion debate are woefully unequipped for a real philosophical discussion.” Some of the participants just want to show off their smartest-guy-in-the-room status, and truth be damned.

Let’s stop asking, “Do you believe in God?” and start asking instead, “What do you believe?”

Argumentum ad Nauseam

Looking back over my posts here the past few years, I see I’ve devoted what some people might view as an inordinate amount of verbiage to what is popularly (and inaccurately) referred to as the “conflict between science and religion” (or vice versa).

One reason I’ve focused (or maybe obsessed) on this “debate” is because, as a student of Philosophy, I’m looking at the discussion from somewhere in the middle, seeing merits and demerits on both sides. Another is that from my perspective, the debate appears to be defined – in the popular media at least – by the extremists on both sides: Christian fundamentalists on the one hand and hard-core atheist-materialists on the other.

As is the case any time extremists get involved in a discussion, sober and rational examination of the issues gets shouted down by sophistry and propaganda and the basest kind of appeals to emotion. We are all invited to choose sides, but then we’re presented with loads of overheated rhetoric and logical fallacies as a basis for making that choice.

Much of the problem, as I’m sure I’ve said before, is that the current debate or conflict is not between Science as such and Religion as such but between certain narrow, and to some degree disingenuous, constructions of the two. The atheist-materialists represent that their worldview is synonymous with science, though it is not, and attack Fundamentalism as a straw-man proxy for all religion. And the fundamentalists are all too happy to concur that their own idiosyncratic approach to religion is, indeed, the only valid one.

It’s important to keep in mind when evaluating the claims of the self-styled advocates of Science that what they’re advocating is never science alone. Science is not, in itself, a comprehensive understanding of reality; it is simply a tool, a way of investigating reality, and nowadays of investigating only one aspect of reality, the physical/material. The claim that physical/material reality is the only reality is, of course, not a scientific statement, but a philosophical assumption. In other words, the promoters of Science over Religion are in fact promoting Science plus an unacknowledged and largely unargued philosophical stance.

Recognizing this, we ought really to regard the debate as not between science and religion but between naturalism and supernaturalism or between physicalism and metaphysicalism (if there is such a word). But of course that would put the debate into the realm of philosophy, and it’s blindingly obvious that the people who are participating the most energetically in the science-vs.-religion debate are woefully unequipped for a real philosophical discussion.

It’s all very unfortunate indeed, I think, because I’m convinced that a wholesale rejection of either science or religion is a serious mistake, with serious consequences not only for each individual but for society and the world at large.

In my day job as a journalist, I regularly see what I firmly believe are the destructive consequences in individual lives and in society of the absence of a middle ground on these issues. On the one hand, we have an ethical vacuum in which materialism encourages us to believe that physical security, well-being and especially pleasure are the only goods toward which we can realistically aspire. On the other hand, we have a chorus of doubtfully trustworthy men and women (but mostly men) hectoring us to believe that if we don’t adhere to an archaic and fossilized set of externally imposed laws, of which they are the sole reliable interpreters, we will be consigned to eternal torture.

As a result, I see people almost daily who have made astonishingly bad choices because on the one hand they are driven to satisfy their physical desires – whether for money, pleasure, command of other people, social success, adulation, etc. etc. etc. – and on the other, they affiliate with a form of religion that encourages them to make a verbal profession of faith without supplying them any means of making that faith a real part of their lives, or, indeed, of suggesting that they really need to.

To put it bluntly, every day of the week, “good Christians” are being put on trial for crimes of all sorts, not to exclude rape and murder. I’m not suggesting that they commit these crimes because they are Christians (even fundamentalist Christians) but rather that the readily available forms of Christianity in many communities don’t give them sufficient reason not to commit them.

And nor does the prevailing “intellectual” paradigm, as is evident from the ease with which, for example, the titans of Wall Street justify to themselves, and to our lawmakers, the plunder of their clients and the pillage of the national treasury. In fact, prevailing economic theories based on “rational agents seeking to maximize their personal good” are nothing more than a pretext for financial predators to excuse their predations.

It may be arguable whether the polarized and largely fraudulent debate over “science vs. religion” is a cause or an effect relative to our increasingly fragmented and angry society. But it certainly isn’t helping. A reframed, more realistic, more sincere discussion of these issues might draw us together as humans instead of dividing us, and help heal some of our social and personal ills. I won’t be holding my breath waiting for that to happen.