Within Dr. William Lane Craig’s presentation of the Argument from the Historical Resurrection, there is often invoked a quote from John A.T. Robinson, the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, as here:

Fact #1: After his crucifixion, Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in the tomb. This fact is highly significant because it means that the location of Jesus’s tomb was known to Jew and Christian alike. In that case it becomes inexplicable how belief in his resurrection could arise and flourish in the face of a tomb containing his corpse. According to the late John A. T. Robinson of Cambridge University, the honorable burial of Jesus is one of “the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus.”

“The Evidence for Jesus.”

Or here:

Most New Testament critics concur that Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in a tomb. According to the late John A.T. Robinson of Cambridge University, the burial of Jesus in the tomb is “one of the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus.” But if this conclusion is correct, then, as I have explained, it is very difficult to deny the historicity of the empty tomb.

Reasonable Faith. 364.

As I have suggested in the past, it is fairly easy to trace any of the many quotations which Dr. Craig employs back to its source and discover that Dr. Craig has either misquoted, misinterpreted, or misused the original source. This case is no different. Indeed, what Robinson says about the empty tomb is considerably more complex than Dr. Craig appreciates and ultimately, Robinson will take a position that is almost contradictory to Craig’s.

It is important, therefore, to begin by understanding the epistemic and methodological foundation upon which the Argument rests. Simply put, it is an inference to the best explanation of a series of “facts.” The facts are presented and then the Apologist works through a variety of explanations, concluding that God and the divinity of Jesus are the best explanation. Craig writes:

I want to emphasize that these four facts represent, not the conclusions of conservative scholars, nor have I quoted conservative scholars, but represent rather the majority view of New Testament scholarship today. The question is: how do you best explain these facts?

“The Evidence for Jesus.”

It’s worth noting that the “historicity of the empty tomb” is itself an inference to the best explanation of the fact (in addition to other facts which we will not speak here) that Jesus was buried in a tomb is “one of the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus.” That is to say: historians universally or near-to-universally agree that the burial in a tomb is, in fact, part of the early Christian tradition. We can challenge the idea that a consensus exists, as I have elsewhere. Nevertheless, that the burial is, in fact, part of the early Christian tradition isn’t hard discover and one needn’t devote much energy to substantiating it. Robinson references 1 Cor 15:14, Matt 27:57-61, Mark 15:42-47, Luke 23:50-56, John 19:38-42, and Acts 13:29. Dr. Craig’s evidence is the same, although he oddly adds the Gospel of Peter. But this data amounts properly to the idea that the burial was attested to in the early tradition. The immediately following, but secondary question of “why was burial attested to in the early tradition?’ must be held as a separate investigation. The historicity of the burial (somewhat obviously implied in the “historicity of the empty tomb”) is only one potential explanation for the literary evidence.

Where Dr. Craig and Robinson depart, of course, is on this final point. Craig’s argument is that it is attested to because it actually happened. This he supports by swatting back other potential explanations. Perhaps, for example, the early Christians integrated the story of burial and then empty tomb into their preaching out of deep conviction in the risen Christ. Craig responds, “even if the disciples had preached Jesus’ resurrection despite his occupied tomb, scarcely anybody else would have believed them. [...] So long as the people of Jerusalem thought that Jesus’ body was in the tomb, few would have been prepared to beleive such nonsense as that Jesus had been raised from the dead. And [...], Jewish authorities would have exposed the whole affair simply by pointing to Jesus’ tomb or perhaps even exhuming the body as decisive proof that Jesus had not be raised” (Reasonable Faith. 161.) And so on. One quickly glimpses how deep the rabbit hole is. Imagine the wealth of historical information one must have at their disposal in order to speak competently about what the Jewish authorities not only did do, but would have done.

To my mind, it is endless quagmire of speculation. Supposing the real divinity of Christ and his bodily resurrection, it is still entirely possible that Jesus was buried in a tomb, but not Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb. It is possible that some small mishaps occurred along the way and entirely different series of events occurred (perhaps theologically rich events that are lost to us today). And it is entirely possible that the story was somewhat ironed out in the oral tradition before being preserved in the early writings. Who knows what was jettisoned? Or disregarded for having thought to be trivial? Or included for the sake of story-telling and thought to be trivial? Such is always the historical problem: we have a record and beyond it, there is always uncertainty. Craig can navigate this uncertainty, but with each step, it all becomes less convincing.

In quoting Robinson, Craig makes this serious misstep. While Robinson was indeed describing the historical record and its abundant indication that the burial emerged early in the Christian tradition, Robinson is far more tentative when speaking about the historicity of the burial beyond the record itself. And, in fact, Robinson cautions those, like Craig, who do. “We must be careful not to jump to conclusions,” he writes (The Human Face of God. 133). He adds:

The evidence, therefore, would suggest that, while the finding of the grave empty was not invented by the early church, it was simply prt of what was indelibly remembered to have happened. Why it was empty admits historically of no certain explanation, whether natural or supernatural. We must be content to suspend judgment.

The Human Face of God. 135.

And:

Every reconstruction of the history is a matter of weighing probabilities. Others will assess the credibility gap differently. But I believe we must be free to say that the bones of Jesus may still be lying around somewhere in Palestine.

The Human Face of God. 137.

This is a considerably significant disagreement, though. And a disagreement which I think Craig ought to acknowledge (certainly, his readers cannot imagine it based on Craig’s report alone). Craig suggests that the undisputed historical record leads inevitably to historicity. Robinson thinks that historicity is precisely one step too far. In explaining his own view, Robinson quotes (the emphasis on “probably” is my own) von Campenhausen:

If we test what is capable of being tested, we cannot, in my opinion, shake the story of the empty tomb and its early discovery. There is much that tells in its favour, and nothing definite or significant against it. It is, therefore, probably historical.

Tradition and Life in the Church. 76-77.

And, Ronald Gregor Smith:

If man would rest his belief upon the factuality of the Empty Tomb, then to such a man it must be answered that it is ultimately a matter of indifference as to whether or not the bones of Jesus lie somewhere in Palestine. [...] But if a man rests his faith where the New Testament rests it, to him there is a given a signpost that points towards the Empty Tomb. What he will find there is neither a foundation for his faith nor a confirmation of it, but an irreplaceable indication of what it means.

Secular Christianity. 98.

I hope, by now, the chasm between Craig’s apologetic and Robinson’s Christology is more clear. This dispute is not one that should interest the historian (the history isn’t disputed) but believers (those who see something unChristian in Craig’s apologetics) and non-believers — we are talking about apologetics, after all. It is a dispute which is present in and emanates, I believe, from Craig’s entire apologetic project. At its essence, it is a perversion of apologetics itself.

The Christian faith, of course, involves history. Suppose that someone were to cast doubt upon the entire religion on the grounds, in part, that the tomb had not been empty, or that the burial had not occurred. Craig and Robinson (and I) would stand shoulder-to-shoulder and explain what the historical record really says. Such is apologetics. It is a defense of the faith. And, indeed, the discipline of history offers no serious obstacle to that which is history within Christianity — at least insofar as our attention has been cast today. But, now suppose that someone were to withdraw their doubt of the entire religion but still be disinclined to join its ranks. They, with Craig, Robinson, and I, agree with the historical record. The discourse should fall silent, therefore, because that which is history within Christianity is not under attack and neither is Christianity. To defend that portion of Christianity which is not history, a separate apologetic may ultimately be summoned, pending some future attack, but such an apologetic will not be itself a matter of history. Until then, we have a détente of silence. But, Craig pushes on. In his hands, that which is history within Christianity is not only defensible, but becomes the stuff of an attack. The nonbeliever himself becomes irrational, standing in opposition history itself. Whatever portion of Christianity wasn’t history has now become an immediate implication of history; the only escape is irrationality. And such is not apologetics — it is a step beyond even evangelism for it does not invite one into the Faith; it condemns those apart from it.

Robinson, I think, although he was writing before Craig, anticipates Craig. He seems to have gone out of his way to draw the line beyond which he would not go, a line which Craig would not only fail to acknowledge, but argues is itself a mistake. And yet, this is the same Robinson who Craig cites as an historian in support of Craig’s history.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Republicans were reasonable people, Noah and I used Tuesday Afternoon as a forum to publicize an ongoing conversation about the Kalam Cosmological Argument, causality, intuition and empiricism. It was lovely, until I dropped off the face of the planet. Noah’s first article on the subject was a response to an essay I had written about William Lane Craig and his affection for straw men. I then responded to Noah’s response, and he replied once again. The following is what my next article would have looked like, if I were a timely and responsible blogger:

Nitpicking Material Causality

Noah began his response with what he humbly referred to as “quibbling” that “has little relevance to our larger conversation”, but I believe he sold himself short. While it is really only a matter of semantical preference whether the material constituents from which a thing was created should be called a “cause”, Noah makes it clear in no uncertain terms that material causes are a “necessary” piece of the causal puzzle, and that without them, an “essential component” to understanding how a thing comes into existence is missing:

“The material cause described by Aristotle, while not describing why (the job of a final cause) or by whom (the job of the efficient cause) does provide a necessary piece of the puzzle as to the cause of a thing. Though they are not identical concepts by definition’, a material cause is still in fact a cause. A necessary cause of a water molecule is two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Without this information, an essential component to understanding the cause of a water molecule coming into existence is missing. Thus material causes are in fact causes; they just also happen to describe what the thing in question is composed of.”

This was a head-scratcher for me. Though I couldn’t agree more, I don’t know how to interpret this as anything less than a concession of my entire thesis. To defend the plausibility of Creatio ex Nihilo is to argue, as William Lane Craig puts it, that not every instance of efficient causation must be coincident with material causation. But to treat material causes (the stuff out of which something is created) as a “necessary” and “essential” ingredient for any causal explanation, and then to turn around and claim that the universe itself came into being without such a material cause seems patently self-defeating.

What am I missing? It is possible that Noah has misconceived the material cause of a thing as whatever its components happen to be after it has come into being, without deference to whether any such components existed previously. This is of course wrong–Aristotle refers to the material cause as that “out of which” a thing was created; that which “undergoes change” to become the thing. But Noah’s own words from earlier responses have given us good reason to think he knows this already:

“What ex nihilo causality potentially lacks is a material component, something affected to bring about an effect (I say potentially because I just put forth a model of ex nihilo causality that consists of a material cause). So with “begins to exist ex nihilo”, you still have a cause; you just lack perhaps a material constituent that is being affected.”

And so, I find myself at a loss. (Or perhaps, “at a win”?) Of course these things are never as clear-cut as they seem, and so I await Noah’s advisement.

God’s Will and Its Content

Tentatively, Noah has granted my contention that any causal relationship is a puzzle that cannot be completed without each of the following pieces:

▪ (a), something exerting influence (that which is doing the causing; the “affecter”),
▪ (b), something being influenced (that which the “affecter” is acting upon; the “affected”), and…
▪ (c), the effect (that which results from the interaction of a and b).

However while it is clear that on Noah’s view (a) is God and (c) the universe, Noah contends that “God’s will” alone is a perfectly adequate plug-in for (b). In my last post (sometime last century–I forget when), I argued that for all intents and purposes, this position ultimately renders the creation of the universe an accident, insofar as it entails that God’s will–a distinct entity from God, according to Noah–be affected by God un-willfully. Noah responds:

“To me, this is a problem of language. Scott is confusing the statement ‘God does not will that His will be actualized’ with ‘God wills not that His will be actualized’. The absence of God’s previous willing that His will be actualized is not the same thing as willing not an actualization of His will. The former denotes a lack of an antecedent push whereas the latter is the more larger and problematic claim that God is willing not to will. It is my contention that Scott is implicitly conflating these two concepts.”

Here I believe Noah mischaracterizes the problem I find with his position, leading him to defend against a charge I never made. While it is true that a certain state of affairs obtaining despite God willing its negation would be a fatal problem with Noah’s account, the mere “lack of antecedent push,” is no small liability. I’ll quote my original argument, with added emphasis:

“God [must] not will that His will be affected. For if God does will that His will be affected, it is not God affecting His will, but His will affecting itself! But then if God does not will that His will be affected, how is God’s will affected? This paves the way for assumption number three; that certain states of affairs may be altered by God without Him willing that they be altered. The problem of course is that this is the very definition of an ‘accident’, which no apologist would entertain.”

I hope it is clear that I am not confusing two different concepts, but that Noah has mistaken the criticism I made for a different criticism I haven’t made. Further, to see Noah equate the absence of “God’s previous willing” to the absence of an “antecedent push” raises my eyebrows even higher. Pair this with the following clarification from Noah:

“[O]n the view I put forth, God’s will is affected not by some previous will but by His ability to actualize its content.”

But how can God exercise such an ability without supplying any sort of “antecedent push”? On its face, this would seem to be an admission that Noah’s position is indeed self-contradictory. To say that a state of affairs–any state of affairs–has been actualized without anything (including God) having antecedently “pushed” it to become actualized is a clear denial of the causal principle Noah means to defend! If this holds up, we may as well say that the universe’s existence is a state of affairs that became actualized without any sort of antecedent push, and that’s that.

However, this is not the only issue that arises from Noah’s contention above. To say that God’s will is affected by God’s ability to “actualize its content” implies that what God acts upon (b) is not actually an entity or object (as has been the assumption thus far), but rather something propositional. Because it makes no sense to speak of “actualizing” entities or objects which already exist, it is obvious that what Noah has posited as (b) is not God’s will itself, but the propositional content thereof. Clearly, “God’s will” requires no “actualizing” since it would already be “actual” insofar as God’s will exists. Now to say that God caused the universe’s existence by actualizing the content of His will means that the content of His will is ‘the existence of the universe’. So saying that the universe is the causal result of God actualizing the content of a proposition about the universe’s existence is just a more circuitous way of saying that God caused the universe to exist by actualizing the universe’s existence. Of course the problem is that this sheds no more light on the matter than claiming to have caused a table to exist by “actualizing” the existence of the table. Well of course, but the question is how?

Here we have arrived at the most fundamental problem with Noah’s account of God creating the universe ex nihilo: it cannot lead us anywhere but right back to where we started, and is thus no account at all.

Description and Prescription

In response to the objection that nothing stops objects within spacetime from beginning to exist uncaused so long as the spacetime universe itself began to exist uncaused, I argued that the physical laws of the universe (once it exists) are all we require. But Noah finds this dissatisfying, for the following reason:

“[The laws of spacetime] aren’t prescriptions about what must be the case, rather they are descriptions about what is the case – they are descriptions of our collective observations about the spacetime universe. But of course that in no way means they are necessary, prescriptive or have the sort of force that can ‘stop objects within spacetime from popping into existence uncaused.’”

However I think Noah betrays a poor assumption here; namely that a fact about reality doesn’t “have the sort of force” that can stop other facts from being true, so long as that fact is not itself true by necessity. But this is clearly false! It is not necessarily true that a Toyota is parked in my one-car garage. But the fact that this is actually true necessitates that other facts cannot be actually true (i.e., other cars being able to park in my garage).¹

But even if Noah’s contention held up, it would do nothing to sustain this argument for Kalam’s first premise. This is because the prevention of uncaused objects within the universe is not something I have the burden to demonstrate, as I’ll explain.

See if you can spot the difference between the following two arguments, one of which I suspect Noah set out to defend (A), and the other a distraction he’s now settled for (B):

A1. If the universe began to exist uncaused, then objects within the universe would begin to exist uncaused.
A2. Objects within the universe do not begin to exist uncaused.
AC. Therefor, the universe did not begin to exist uncaused.

B1. If the universe began to exist uncaused, then it is possible that objects within the universe would begin to exist uncaused.
B2. It is not possible that objects within the universe begin to exist uncaused.
BC. Therefor, the universe did not begin to exist uncaused.

(A1) is false, since even in principle, one object beginning to exist uncaused does not necessitate that any other object follow suit.² It may entail the possibility of other uncaused objects, but hardly their necessity or actuality. Kalam’s first premise would be negated–not entailed–by the possibility of uncaused objects in the universe, even if no such objects ever obtain. And while said premise would be outright falsified if we did observe objects within the universe coming into existence uncaused (and indeed many science-minded critics of Kalam would cite quantum mechanics to argue that events like this occur regularly on an astoundingly small scale), it can only weaken Noah’s position to argue that such a state of affairs is at least logically possible on my view. Clearly, it is not inconsistent with my position to leave open the possibility of an uncaused object within the universe. After all, it is Noah who shoulders the burden to demonstrate that whatever begins to exist must have a cause.

But what about the second version, (B)? Even if I grant (B1), the burden is still upon Noah to demonstrate (B2), a difficult task without begging the question in favor of his conclusion.

To be fair, Noah seems to have predicted some version of my response above:

“I want to underscore that I am not trying to justify P1. of Kalam on inductive grounds here (as I already argued, on my view this is an a priori truth). Rather, I am taking Scott’s perspective concerning the function of the laws of spacetime and simply cashing it out.”

However, there are several problems with Noah taking this stance. The first is that, as I’ve pointed out already, Noah has not cashed out my view in a way that presents any sort of problem for me. Secondly, while it is true that Noah’s reasoning here is not inductive, it is certainly deductive, and it is indeed an argument for Kalam’s first premise (it is actually the second of Bill Craig’s “three arguments” for P1). And this raises the question of why an argument must be made for a proposition that is presumed true a priori, since as Noah puts it, “Any attempt at [arguing for an a priori truth] is going to rely on premises less obvious and farther up on the chain than the one under scrutiny.” Of course, I reject the idea of an a priori truth as Noah understands it, and now is as good a time as any to explain why.

A Priori Truth and Intuition

With respect to the role played by intuition in erecting metaphysical principles, Noah sums up our disagreement with clarity and eloquence:

“By rooting [Kalam's first premise] in intuition, I have skirted my way around the issue of equivocation that was addressed in the conversation between Scott and William Lane Craig. That is, stealing ex material capital in order to pay for an ex nihilo product. However, Scott’s latest response is an attempt to root the very idea of intuition itself into what he refers to as ‘subconscious inferences we derive from other propositions we accept as true.’ Thus, if I am unable to pull out the purported inductive roots of intuition, I fall to the same end as Dr. Craig.  Induction is king to Scott and he has effectively handed me a sword and asked me to dethrone it.”

Put simply, I believe “intuition” is how we tend to label the conclusions we come to by making inferences sub-consciously (rather than consciously), even if we aren’t aware that we do this, and don’t want to believe that we do. However, Noah goes on to suggest that I may have simply misunderstood what he means by intuition:

“I want to begin by discussing the possibility that Scott and I are taking the term ‘intuition’ to mean something different. ‘Subconscious inference’ is certainly not what I mean by intuition. Rather, what I am after is an a priori knowledge that is wholly independent of experience.”

But this is not news to me. My criticism not only acknowledges, but is predicated upon, Noah’s belief that his metaphysical intuitions are a priori knowledge. My problem is, I don’t buy into the idea that any proposition about the behavior of reality can be known a priori, unless, of course, the truth of that proposition is logically necessary (i.e., true by definition). How is it possible that something like this is knowable in the absence of all experience?

Just try that on, for a moment, and imagine what it would be like never to have had any sensory experience. Imagine never having seen anything, heard anything, tasted, smelled or touched anything from the moment you were conceived. Let the reality of that sink in. What would it mean to be conscious? How would it be different to think, not only without a single instance of exposure to the external world, but without any language to represent it (which we also learn from experience)? Now imagine how strange a notion it is–how utterly bewildering it would be–to feel, despite all of this, an infallible certainty that whatever begins to exist has a cause.

How is it possible that true propositions about the ultimate nature of reality would just “pop” into the minds of our primate brains, uncaused? How is this not purely a human delusion of grandeur? On a theistic view, we may suppose that such propositional knowledge comes factory installed in each human being by an all-knowing and all-powerful Creator, but that’s the rub, isn’t it? To assume this is to assume the very conclusion in need of support. So how is it sensical, or even possible, to treat this causal principle as anything other than an inference–conscious or subconscious–that has been derived from our empirical experiences of ex materia causality in the physical world?

This is not a question Noah ignores, but the way he chose to answer it was not to demonstrate “how” this could be the case, but simply to point out that I already recognize certain propositions as being true, a priori, and to suggest that Kalam’s first premise falls into this same category:

“What I am putting forth is the idea that ‘nothing comes into existence uncaused’ is an a priori, necessary truth that simply could not be false. It is true in all possible worlds as is the statement ‘all sisters are female’ or 2+2 = 4. The nature of these truths are not based on empirical methods, perception, memory, or introspection. They are not a posteriori. They are a priori types of knowledge based solely on reason and the statements themselves.”

The examples given by Noah above are indeed necessarily true and knowable a priori. As I stated previously, I do grant that certain claims can be knowable a priori, if and only if they are logically necessary–true by definition. All sisters are female, because of what it means to be a “sister” (i.e., a female sibling). The proposition that a sister is not female is incoherent and self-contradictory. Likewise, 2+2=4 is true because the integer “4″ is by definition double the quantity of “2″. To say that half the quantity of 4 is not 2 would be incoherent and self-contradictory, once again. We know that a statement is logically necessary when its negation entails incoherence, and we know that these statements are true a priori only because they are logically necessary (at least, Noah has provided no other reason to accept them as true, a priori).

So what’s the problem, exactly?

The problem is that Kalam’s first premise clearly doesn’t fall into this category. Our knowledge that 2+2=4 and that all sisters are female is not a matter of intuition. Conversely, Noah’s contention that whatever begins to exist has a cause is neither due to the logical necessity of this statement nor the incoherence of its negation. Noah has made this much clear all on his own:

“Something beginning to exist uncaused is not in my view illogical or incoherent per se but I do think it’s absurd.”

I am left, thusly, without an answer to my question. What good reason do we have for attributing to our brains such epistemic super powers? Why should we conclude that the mental phenomenon we subjectively experience as an “intuition” is anything other than an inference our brain has derived from our experience, even if we are unconscious of it?

On Ad Hoc Reasoning

In my previous article, I defended a metaphysical principle (“Where nothing is affected, no effect shall obtain.”) which I hold to be stronger and more parsimonious than the one Noah defends, on the basis that it requires us to do less “damage control” by redefining features of causality, ad hoc, into something totally foreign to our experience or understanding. Noah believes my contention here is a matter of conflating efficient causality with material causality:

“I think the problem here is that the ’cause’ in ‘Whatever begins to exist has a cause’ is only ever meant to mean efficient cause. With that in mind, I think Scott’s statement is simply unjustified… the proponent of Kalam need only understand ’cause’ to mean efficient cause. Thus there is no ad hoc redefining of terms insofar as I can tell.”

Narrowing the scope of “cause” to mean efficient causes is not what strikes me as ad hoc. In fact, the narrower our understanding of these terms, the better. The ultimate question is, what role does an efficient cause play in causality? So far as we’ve ever observed, efficient causes are what rearrange existing material into new forms. We’ve seen no exception to this. So to posit that the universe had an efficient cause should entail that something rearranged existing material into the universe. But this clearly isn’t what Noah means.

To be precise, it is not that proponents of the Kalam argument must redefine what an efficient cause is, per se, but what it does. After all, it is what the efficient cause does–not what it is–that carries any true explanatory power in the first place. Aristotle made quite a stink of this when introducing his Four Causes. In fact, in the instance of a wooden table, Aristotle would specify that (despite Noah’s and my adopted usage) it is not actually “the carpenter” that would most accurately be described as the efficient cause, but “carpentry”. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“[A]n adequate explanation of the production of a statue requires also a reference to the efficient cause or the principle that produces the statue. For Aristotle, this principle is the art of bronze-casting the statue (Phys. 195 a 6-8. Cf. Metaph. 1013 b 6–9). This is mildly surprising and requires a few words of elaboration. There is no doubt that the art of bronze-casting resides in an individual artisan who is responsible for the production of the statue. But, according to Aristotle, all the artisan does in the production of the statue is the manifestation of specific knowledge. This knowledge, not the artisan who has mastered it, is the salient explanatory factor that one should pick as the most accurate specification of the efficient cause (Phys. 195 b 21–25). By picking the art, not the artisan, Aristotle is not just trying to provide an explanation of the production of the statue that is not dependent upon the desires, beliefs and intentions of the individual artisan… More directly, the art of bronze-casting the statue enters in the explanation as the efficient cause because it helps us to understand what it takes to produce the statue; that is to say, what steps are required to produce the statue.”

In other words, if we are genuinely interested in an explanatory account, it really does miss the point to posit “God” as the efficient cause of the universe, because “God did it” does not in itself help us understand “what it takes to produce” the universe. (This is especially true if we are likewise expected to believe that the universe had no material cause, having been produced without God affecting anything, anywhere!) Kalam proponents are relegated to assigning God an entirely mysterious and unrecognizable role in causing something to exist. “God” simply fails to meet any of the criteria that satisfy Aristotle’s elucidation of an efficient cause. This is what I mean when I say that the Kalam Cosmological argument hinges upon a redefinition of efficient causality, ad hoc: though Noah borrows the phrase “efficient cause” to describe God’s relationship with the universe, he has no choice but to divorce the concept from its philosophical history, as well as its implications anywhere in the observable world. A rose by any other name is still a rose, but not everything named for a rose smells sweetly.

Thanks go to Noah, once again, for his Zen-master patience and dedication to an honest exchange.

What is the first line of Love’s Labours Won?  We have evidence that this lost labor of Shakespeare’s once existed, but we have little idea of what it said.  So, is there even an answer to my question?  Does the question even make sense?

Asking such things raises the specter of “objectivity.”   Usually defined as a state of affairs which holds true regardless of human knowledge or opinion, objectivity is an oddly shadowy concept.  But no one seems to agree on whether it is the shad of reality, oppression, or idiocy.

Some see “objectivity” as a tale told only by idiots.  It is, by definition, something beyond our knowledge.  If we unearth a lost manuscript, we may get an answer to our question.  But whatever answer we get will be the result of investigation by our decidedly fallible minds.  We would never be able to completely rule out that the manuscript was a forgery, for instance.  What good does talking about “objectivity” do here?  Since we can’t know except through our minds, our knowledge itself will never attain the pure heights of unadulterated Objective Reality.  The best we can do is to decrease the subjectivity of our acts of investigation.  Windows shuttered against the outside, my mind spins all manner of fantasies that vanish when opened to the light of day.  We develop strict methodologies like science or history to ensure that we leave as many of these windows open as possible.  But any talk of “objectivity” that goes beyond these limits is a senseless search for what, by definition, can’t be found.  Talk of the “objective” answers to questions about lost Shakespearica is a idiotic waste of breath that could be used to discuss principled historical and archeological research.

Others think “idiotic” is too kind of a word.  “Objectivity” is, rather, merely a sound masking fury.  Claims to be “objectively right” are power plays over those who are “objectively wrong.”  If I have the “objectively correct” answers to questions about Love’s Labours Won, I can take up more space in the academic journals, silence my opposition, and attain the most lucrative departmental chairs.  But that’s the least damage “objectivity” can do: lives and cultures have been ruined by the imperialism of “objective” worldviews.  Witness the discrimination and death wreaked by “objective” racialist scientists whose 19^th century seeds blossomed into a 20^th century Holocaust.  Or, less dramatically, the normalization of homophobia by appeals to “objective human nature” in our own time.  “Objectivity” is not an idea.  It is a weapon wielded without mercy.

Still others protest that “objectivity” does, indeed, signify something important.  The statement “The first line of Love’s Labours Won is ‘That truth does lie that beauty’s claim denies’” is either true or false.  No amount of wishing or hoping or opining will alter its truth or falsity.  The first line is the first line regardless of whose mind inquires after it.  Similarly, gravity will not stop to ask whether one believes in it before dragging them to the ground.  Besides, anyone bothering to argue that objectivity is a phantom or a feint presumably thinks that believing in objectivity is wrong.  But if it’s wrong to believe in it, its nonexistence must not depend on human knowledge or opinion.  To deny objectivity is to assert it.

I must confess to being drawn in all three of these directions.  The loss of Love’s Labour’s Won fills me with regret.   I will never have the joy of having its first line surprise me with new insights about life.  I fear that all copies are gone forever but still hold out hope that an unearthed manuscript awaits discovery.  I would listen eagerly to any textual studies scholar who thought she had evidence of its contents and encourage her in her research.  All of these attitudes have in common the assumption that there is more to life than I can dream up.  There is something outside for the house of my mind to open up to.  The phenomenon of surprise is nothing other than the state of mind attendant on some unexpected break in.  Hope is just the desire for something that lies outside the control of my desire, fear the aversion of something that lies outside the control of my aversion.   And the hard work of research presumes that something exists which can be known but not just invented.  All of these experiences depend on the existence of some things that are not indebted to my own states of mind.  None of these experiences would be possible at all if “objectivity” were not, in some sense, a significant concept.

Likewise, however, none of these experiences would be possible if “objectivity” were not also beyond us.  Whatever things may exist “in themselves “out there,” I can only know them through less than perfect means.  There is never any guarantee that the thoughts in my head conform to the reality outside of it.  If there were, it would be impossible to get to know someone, to hope or fear for them, to be surprised by them.  In short, love itself would be lost.

Claims to objectivity can, indeed, easily become the instruments of hate.  Once I have made an argument, adding the claims of “objective truth” can add almost nothing.  Perhaps it can serve as a rhetorical tag designating the mode or strength of my assertion, such as “This conclusion is not just about a matter of taste” or “I really REALLY believe this conclusion.”  In this sense, “objectivity” serves to clarify a conversation.  But too often the word simply serves to bludgeon the interlocutor with an emotional appeal:  “If you don’t agree, you’re just out of touch with reality.  You don’t want to be irrational, do you?”  To claim objectivity in this sense is to seek to shut certain voices – and therefore certain people – out of a conversation.

How best, then, to use this dangerous but indispensible notion?  It is a concept perhaps best honored in silence.  Our surprise, hope, fear, research, and love are often honor enough.  “Objectivity” drives these experiences as a kind of limit concept, never attained through always approached.  It would be against the spirit of this limit to deny investigation into it itself, but one ought to do so with a great deal of caution.  For irreducibly subjective minds, objectivity is always beyond us – it is a concept pointing to no item resident in our feeble brains.  It is a tale told by idiots, too close to the sound of fury, best understood as signifying nothing.

Before Brock Lawley knit in his mind the abortion position paper he submitted for the debate with Theo Warner, he knew exactly what it should say. He knew it because he had already seen the essay knit in the mind of Rush Limbaugh, which we can tell by comparing his essay to a few passages in Limbaugh’s vapid 1992 book, The Way Things Ought to Be. One feels silly, in retrospect, when one realizes this, because if you just read Lawley’s essay in Limbaugh’s trademark self-satisfied bloviating style, the lineage is immediately apparent.

I admit that this one almost got past me. I suspect that the reason it got past me at first is the same reason that, as you’ll see in the table below, Lawley was so audacious in his plagiarism: Limbaugh’s work is not posted online in sufficient quantities to come up in a quick Google search. I forget which particular snippet of it did eventually turn up. I had been Googling various phrases from “Lawley’s” piece, variously tweaked, when a single line quote turned up. (Google Books gave me a peek inside, and then the sickening truth slowly dawned on me: I was going to own a copy of The Way Things Ought to Be!)

In the table below this article, you can see for yourself the extent of the plagiarized content. Well, at least the extent that I could find. Just as the pure of heart can’t read the Necronomicon, so am I repulsed from Limbaugh’s idiotic and sanctimonious prose; I quit searching when I’d had enough, satisfied that the remainder of “Lawley’s” essay was similar enough to his own eerily brainless style to be tentatively regarded as authentic. I’ve played with the colors and formatting a bit, and what I’ve come up with below seems to be the best we can do, given the enthusiasm with which Lawley borrows his ideas. His thin efforts at concealment through rearrangement serve less to conceal his theft than they do to confuse its analysis. The areas in gray are, in Lawley’s column, the evidence and, in Limbaugh’s column, the original prose. The numbers in red–to help them stand out amid adjacent (!) grayed sections–denote corresponding sections between the two documents. This is his most obscure source in this digital age, and he has shown concomitant degrees of shamelessness and voluminousness in his thievery.

I confess that I do not expect this series of revelations to be particularly revealing nor significant. Lawley is already known as a plagiarist, and his defense of his behavior, that he’s exposing a wider audience to the “great minds” whom he plagiarizes, is indefensible. Additionally, I find I can barely work up any surprise that Lawley faces difficulty coming up with original intellectual content, given how devoid of intellectual content his various YouTube channels are. I don’t mean this as (merely) a simple pejorative. Watch some of his videos, if you have the stomach for it. For a broad class that contains most of his videos, it’s nigh impossible to tease out anything other than imagination and insult, invective and innuendo. How completely expected that he can only serve as an incompetent conduit for other feeble minds.

I’m in between jobs. And women. And so on. Have been for a while. Also, I hate interviews, and being screened from jobs by people not qualified to tie my shoes. Oh, well. Life deals you lemons, sometimes.

But, still, it gets to you. Makes you feel a bit down. Other people have jobs. And significant others. And so on. Why not me? Why not me, now?

Some people, when the dog bites or the bee stings, like to think about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. I like to expose idiots. Like Brock Lawley.

Back in what might currently be termed the “heyday” of Tuesday Afternoon, before my serious involvement (coincidence?), Theo Warner and Brock Lawley agreed to debate right here in our hallowed halls. It was great spectacle. While there was nothing so trite as an official verdict, the outcome could be most charitably described as a rout. Lawley, true to form, spewed imbecilic ramblings in his every post. Warner, true to form, produced thoughtful and innovative essays on every subject. The juxtaposition of the ridiculous and sublime was somehow perfect, an ineffable sweet-and-sour rhetorical sauce.

I forget, now, how I cottoned on to the fact that many of Lawley’s essays were, true to form, unoriginal. It may have been that I was looking up some statistic of his. Or, I may have just had an inkling that lying cheaters will continue to lie and cheat. Or maybe one of his phrases struck me as somehow familiar. Or competently written. No matter how, I cottoned. And I researched. And I compiled. I even bought a used copy of Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought To Be, which contains nearly the entirety of his position paper on abortion. (Except, unbelievably, that it’s better written by Limbaugh.)

His first foray into plagiarism for the debate–I’m sorry, I have to stop here. The man plagiarized his positions and responses in a debate. In. A. Debate. What thinking person could, for a second, ever consider it a good idea, from even a technical standpoint, to plagiarize essays for a debate. I mean, the degree to which Lawley was faithful to the originals shows that, at the very least, he has no appreciation for the difference between the rhetorical modes used in a debate versus those used in, among others, political speeches, World Net Daily articles, and personal blogs of two-bit ministers. It’s so unbelievably stupid that I’m reduced to apoplexy every time I consider the fact of his plagiarism.

I’m better now. His first foray into plagiarism for the debate could not have come from a more perfectly ironic source: Margaret Thatcher’s The Moral Foundations of Society. The moral foundations of society. Let that sink in. Read that essay, and then read Lawley’s contribution to the second debate round. See? Apoplexy.

Consider just Lawley’s:

“The first American colonists embarked on that legendary voyage not in order to accumulate riches but to realize their faith. John Winthrop in the early 17th century declared, “We shall be as a city upon a hill.” The founders, deep-rooted by the colonists, acknowledged the same spirit; building a freedom experiment upon the same Biblical ethic. The result was a refuge of liberty upon the Earth.”

In relation to Thatcher’s:

“John Winthrop, who led the Great Migration to America in the early 17th century and who helped found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, declared, “We shall be as a City upon a Hill.” On the voyage to the New World, he told the members of his company that they must rise to their responsibilities and learn to live as God intended men should live: in charity, love, and cooperation with one another. Most of the early founders affirmed the colonists were infused with the same spirit, and they tried to live in accord with a Biblical ethic. They felt they weren’t able to do so in Great Britain or elsewhere in Europe. Some of them were Protestant, and some were Catholic; it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they did not feel they had the liberty to worship freely and, therefore, to live freely, at home. With enormous courage, the first American colonists set out on a perilous journey to an unknown land—without government subsidies and not in order to amass fortunes but to fulfill their faith.”

One can appreciate the effort spent in paraphrasing, even if one winces at the “founders” being “deep-rooted by the colonists…” It’s at times like this that I wonder if Lawley isn’t some kind of master troll. These sorts of plausibly homoerotic malapropisms just keep popping up in the work of a dim Christian cheerleader-apologist who describes himself as a former male model. That has to be a setup, right? Or are these the genuine Freudian slips of a sexually repressed moron? I apologize if this essay is somewhat in disarray; Lawley’s prose, even when cribbed, bursts at the seems with so much innuendo, stupidity, awkwardness, and so many non-sequiturs that I never know where to begin. Apoplexy seems to yield only to dumbfoundment. There’s deliciousness in every direction.

I mean, consider that Thatcher’s essay is obviously intended as simple-minded pablum for gullible audiences. It’s a regurgitation of simplistic platitudes of right-wing pedagogy. It’s pandering. Lawley, a moron, is cribbing Thatcher, another moron, who is knowingly aiming her rhetoric at yet other morons. My sixth-grade history teacher would have been embarrassed to spoon-feed us the tripe in Thatcher’s original, yet Lawley consumes and vomits it apparently not just without shame, but with a kind of inept pride.

I guess I can only offer my vast readership the pleasure of sleuthing a bit for themselves. Go ahead. Read the essays to which I linked and post the plagiarized bits you find in the comments below. Really, the thrill of exploration and discovery is all I can offer by way of recompense for this shambolic prose. Well, unless you’re into dirty shameful gay sex. I have a possible lead on just the YouTuber for you.

I’ve had a couple of pints on an empty stomach. I need to get some groceries so that breakfast is not some abysmal fiasco.

“Did you find everything you were looking for?,” came the rote question from the cashier, in full automaton mode.

“I didn’t find inner peace or life satisfaction, but it is just a grocery store.”

Came perfectly the ironic deadpan reply, “We get so little of that here, and we go through it so fast.”

Touché.

That is all.

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover — but films? Well, that’s what trailers are for. I watched the trailers and here’s what I think. Some of these movies I’ll go see, some I won’t. If I do, I’ll post a more complete review (mostly to see if my knee-jerk reactions were correct.) If you see them before I do, tell me what you think!

Albert Nobbs (2011, January 27)

I sometimes realize that the best performances in my mind are always given by women. Notes on a Scandal (2006) contained two. Whatever the reason, Glenn Close has always stood out in my mind as one of those bravely intelligent women who could pull off the sort of tortured protagonist that we find here in Albert Nobbs. It is the story of woman who spends her life dressed as a man, a waiter in 19th century Ireland. The struggle for self is universal, but all the more poignant when one has to rebel against one’s own biology (see also: Boys Don’t Cry (1999)). And, of course, we don’t know if this is merely a matter of costuming for the sake of access to a man’s world (see: Woopi Goldberg in The Associate (1996) if you must or Shakespeare in Love (1998) even if you musn’t). Or whether it’s lesbianism lacking a form of social expression in 19th century Ireland. Or, just utter transvestism. Perhaps we aren’t supposed to know because those ideas certainly didn’t do the same work then as they do now and Albert Nobbs wouldn’t have been benefited by them. All he can do is keep his down and do his work. But, the story does have its complications including handsome men changing their shirts and pretty young ladies, who seem both innocent and the only people clued into the mystery that is Albert Nobbs (even if they haven’t figured him out, yet). It looks like a stunning movie.

Declaration of War (2011, January 27)

The movie is French and if you know Jérémie Elkaïm, he is a reliably good actor in typically strong films. An American equivalent would be someone like James Franco or Joseph Gordon-Levitt. This movie he cowrote with its director Valérie Donzelli, who also costars in the movie, and she should be recognized as a strong, up-and-coming talent, too. The movie has been selected as France’s entry in the Foreign Films category to the Oscars. It isn’t easy to tell from the trailer, but the story involves a couple, named Romeo and Juliet, and their baby, who is diagnosed with cancer. The war which is declared is a war against cancer itself and war against despair in the broadest sense. The movie is supposed to be uplifting, which for cosmopolitan sensibilities, means that it will also be devastatingly sad (how can we build up what isn’t broken down?) The American version of this movie would, I suspect, change the baby to a teenage and the cancer to something more manageable. It would be sad. This movie will crush us.

Man on a Ledge (2011, January 27)

The movie is all premise. Like Speed (1994). A man holds the world hostage by threatening to kill himself by jumping off a building. But, his demands seem to have something to do with exonerating himself or getting revenge. Ed Harris is in the film, who is a very strong actor, but not always the best at picking projects. My feeling is, though, that the movie will have a very misable quality about it. Also, wouldn’t Man on the Edge be a better title?

One for the Money (2011, January 27)

I’m not sure who is supposed to enjoy this movie. It’s pretty sexist, frankly. A woman, down on her luck, takes on the job of bail bonds man. One way to spin this is that women can do the job of a man. The other way to spin it is that a person has to become a man in order to succeed. The former is enlightened, the latter is not. This movie seems to suggest the latter. Either way, it looks like a pretty stupid, pointless movie.

The Grey (2011, January 27)

Liam Neeson has this fascination with doing action/thriller type movies. Unknown (2011) and Taken (2008) were exciting and well-made. And The Grey seems in the same spirit: exciting and well-made. The premise involves a plane crash in the Arctic and fights with bears and wolves. Neeson is one of the few serious actors who can pull these sorts of movies off and not look like Nicholas Cage. So, I suppose that’s enough for me.

The Wicker Tree (2011, January 27)

Somewhere in our consciousness is the fact that England was once pagan before it was Christianized. Merlin reminds us. I’m not sure why this is such a terrifying idea, but it is. And The Wicker Man (1973) is part of that. The premise there is absolutely about the clash of two religions, one weak and modern (Christianity) and the other scary and powerful (a sort of Celtic paganism). Scares the willies of me! The most pivotal scene in the original movie was the sacrificial burning alive of a Christian. Awesome stuff, actually… and part of what made it a cult classic. There was remake in 2006 which didn’t do very much for anyone. One some level, I hope this sequel can be thought of as a sequel to the original and a continuation of its awesomeness. The original director returns, which is good. I look forward to it.

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover — but films? Well, that’s what trailers are for. I watched the trailers and here’s what I think. Some of these movies I’ll go see, some I won’t. If I do, I’ll post a more complete review (mostly to see if my knee-jerk reactions were correct.) If you see them before I do, tell me what you think!

Haywire (2011, January 20)

Steven Soderbergh is the most rewarding of the directors of this particular style. Let’s call them: action/drama for smart people. He did the four hour Che (2008) which is among my favorite movies of all time and Oceans Eleven (2001) which is hard to knock. Haywire is about a generic spy of some sort who is mysteriously turned against by the agency she works for (the CIA, I suppose). We get the feeling that she is a pawn in an intricate game, but because she doesn’t go quite so quietly, everyone’s plan gets screwed up. Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, and Antonio Banderas all have supporting roles and all three are the sort that make any picture better. Tatum Channing is also in the movie and he usually makes movies worse. So… what’s is that (?) … maybe a 70% chance that we have a good picture on hands. Probably not a classic, but certainly a very competent and exciting piece.

Red Tails (2011, January 20)

Let me be cynical for a moment: this movie is about watching planes doing tricks and that racism is wrong. That said, I think it will be a strong vehicle (excuse the pun). Both Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Terrence Howard are strong actors and they lead an impressive cast in a visually appealing story of courage (and planes doing tricks.) We have here, though, a very old story about adversity, about coming together in the face of insurmountable odds, and then, predictably, overcoming those insurmountable odds. It’s decidedly feel-good and can’t be blamed for that. But, we do need to watch for how realistically the movie sets up its tensions. Do the white army officers who don’t let black pilots fly their plans make outlandishly racist statements? Or is the racism more institutional and therefore, more insidious? Do the black pilots come together because of a love of country? Or is it a little more human? These stories have the potential to be cartoonish and thin and I do detect something a little simplistic in the trailer.

Underworld Awakening (2011, January 20)

If you like this genre, you probably can’t aesthetic judgments about any particular movie within it. In this, the fourth entry in the canonical Underworld series, we are given glimpses of an ongoing war between vampires, werewolves, and Lycans (werewolves who can do tricks) and even a really big werewolves (size being better in this genre). Again, if you find the prospect of two hours of karate, vampires, werewolves, and werewolves doing tricks to be exciting, then go ahead and watch it. You’re destroying America.

In a theological thread over at Reddit, I ran into the following:

A literal interpretation of Genesis has been warned against probably since the old Jewish scholars that wrote it…. You acknowledge this point, so why can’t you accept that the message of original sin is to be interpreted as well?

I think I basically agree with what this redditor is trying to say, but I’m not really interested in pursuing the question of creationism at the moment.  It’s that last sentence that interests me here, as it implies that some texts are to be “interpreted” and others are not.  It’s a usage of the word “interpret” that I’ve seen other places: “to interpret” means “to read in a non-literal way.” And it’s a usage that papers over the fact that all reading is interpretation.

Let’s start with an easy case.  Say you’re reading T.S. Eliot famously dense poem The Waste Land and are stopped in your tracks by the first sentence:

April is the cruelest month

Breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

What in the world does this mean?  Obviously, I’m going to have to interpret this sentence.  But does “interpret” mean “just make any old thing up?”  No – there are such things as better and worse interpretations.  A worse interpretation: “These lines are about how annoying my April-born sister is!”  A better interpretation:  “These lines are about the deep pain behind the deceptively cheerful treatment of spring in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.” Perhaps even that second reading is wrong, but if so, it’s wrong for the same reason it is better than the sibling-rivalry-reading.  The more grounded in and justified by the text, the better the interpretation.

The raw material of the interpreter is a collection of bare facts.  The fact that the poem consists in these words, the fact that they are strung together with these grammatical forms, the fact that they are in this order.  The task of the interpreter is to mine these facts for meaning or sense.

We needn’t scale the perplexing heights of modernist poetry to see interpretation at work.  Let’s take another, easier example.  I recently gave my high school students a copy of the lyrics of “Jesus of Suburbia” by Green Day, which tells the story of a character struggling to escape from his conformist suburban background.  T.S. Eliot it’s not.  And yet my students had a difficult time understanding it.  For most of them, it made no sense on a first reading.  It was only after we had struggled with the text, interrogating its word choices, that the students were able to begin piecing together the sense of the song.  While some of that included identifying themes, a great deal of the work was spent simply figuring out the plot.  They were still mining the raw data of the song for meaning, even if that meaning was what we might otherwise refer to as “the literal meaning.”

You don’t have to be a literature professor (neither I nor my students are, certainly) to find yourself resorting to interpretation.  You do it every time you read. (In fact, I think you do it every single time we make an inference of any sort, but that’s a somewhat different story).  You are doing it right now, piecing together this essay’s meaning from the words, sentences, and paragraphs that undeniably comprise it.  You do it when you watch a movie and try to piece together an overarching narrative out of the smaller units of acts, scenes, lines, and so on.  You do it when you read a newspaper article and move to an understanding of some event from looking at scribbles on a page.  Some of these acts of interpretation are easier than others, but they nonetheless remain acts of interpretation.

So what?  Why does this have my panties in such a twist?

Any “literal sense” is itself the result of interpretation.  What you think Genesis is “literally” about is the result of your having inferred meaning from a text.  Branding that interpretation as “literal” and then distancing “literal” from “interpretive” gives your interpretation an artificially privileged status that exempts it from argument.

Compare this with the natural law tradition in moral philosophy.  The worst strands of this tradition (most often from Catholics) take arguable positions and brand them with the concept of “nature” to place them beyond discussion.  My favorite example is the (perhaps apocryphal) account of a discussion between several Catholic bishops in the early 60s about how women ought to wear skirts rather than pants, and any argument otherwise simply ignores the dictates of “nature.”  Or when my bishop in graduate school argued that the Vagina Monologues were immoral because nature itself teaches us that the woman’s sexual organs are hidden, tucked away inside the body.

In both cases the rhetorical move is to mask your own inference with an appeal to some absolute, either “nature” or the “literal.”  Of course, the rhetorical trickery of “the literal” pops up in discussions about the Bible.  But it also rears its head quite often in politics.  It’s what happens both on left and right when someone claims their reading of one article of the Constitution is “obvious” or “literal”  in order to dismiss someone else’s.  Just think of the debates that swirl around the 2^nd and 14^th Amendments.  News stations do the same by branding themselves “fair and balanced” or by falsely affecting neutrality.  Or on the campaign trail.  I have often found myself and others defending our preferred candidate’s comments with interpretive intricacy while attacking other candidates for the “plain meaning” of their statements.  In the case of Ahmadinejad’s purported comment about wiping Israel off the map, your interpretive stance may very well affect your willingness to use military might against Iran.  And on and on.

So, yes, the original redditor’s comment was rather benign.  But it instantiates an illegitimate distinction between “literal” and “interpreted” that can be anything but.

A few years ago physicist Laurence Krauss gave a lecture on cosmology which went on to accumulate more than a million views on YouTube, and this week saw the release his book with the same title, A Universe from Nothing. “The purpose of this book is simple,” writes Krauss, “I want to show how modern science, in various guises, can address and is addressing the question of why there is something rather than nothing.” A bold claim to many, but can he back it up? I think so.

As you might expect, the bulk of the book is latticework for this thesis. In order to learn even a little bit about the cutting edge of theoretical physics, you have to learn something about The Big Bang Theory, Inflationary Theory, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics. This is a burden for every popular-level cosmology book, and Krauss manages to carry it well. Along the way Krauss points out various ways in which “nothing” is important in our universe. This, of course, all leads up to the main event wherein Krauss discusses, as the title suggests, how the universe could have come from nothing.

It is here that other authors have failed, specifically Stephen Hawking in the 2010 book The Grand Design which, on this point, was somewhat more confusing than enlightening. Krauss, however, makes a slam dunk. By clearly defining the word “universe” and by avoiding the philosophical idea of nothing, which he describes as “vague” and “ill-defined” (and I would  also add  “inconsistent” and “self-contradictory”), Krauss explains how “quantum gravity not only appears to allow universes to be created from nothing – meaning, in this case, I emphasize, the absence of space and time – it may require them.”

Here Krauss is referring to a 1982 paper by cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin. In the paper Vilenkin explains that Quantum Mechanics working within an empty geometry (no space, no time as described by General Relativity) could plausibly create an inflating universe. Of course this leaves the question, “where do Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity come from?” and Krauss is a bit more vague in answering this, referencing the possibility of a multiverse. But here he does a fair job at explaining why “God did it” doesn’t quite pass muster.

I suspect there will be quite a lot of comparison between this book and The Grand Design, as I have done above. But although there are many similarities, the main difference is that Krauss is much more careful – careful with his language and careful in his explanations. And if there’s one thing worth taking away from this book, it’s that, “The metaphysical ‘rule,’ which is held as an ironclad conviction by those with whom I have debated the issue of creation, namely that ‘out of nothing nothing comes,’ has no foundation in science. … All it represents is an unwillingness to recognize the simple fact that nature may be cleverer than philosophers or theologians.”

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover — but films? Well, that’s what trailers are for. I watched the trailers and here’s what I think. Some of these movies I’ll go see, some I won’t. If I do, I’ll post a more complete review (mostly to see if my knee-jerk reactions were correct.) If you see them before I do, tell me what you think!

Albatross (2011, January 13)

This will be a pretty good movie, I think. It is centrally a drama, comedy, romance, and coming-of-age story, and it seems to have an intricate plot. The protagonist Emelia, played by Jessica Brown Findlay, is suffering the ordinary angst of being a teenager: a little rebellious, a little alcohol, a little sexual experimentation. She seems to have issues with father and wants to be a novelist. Notice how simultaneously typical and rich this character is. Also, Julia Ormond, who takes a supporting role, can’t be missed.

Contraband (2011, January 13)

This movie looks like it took a lot of movie to make. Thus, there is almost no storyline. A man, played by the always credible Mark Wahlberg, who was a runner (crime-talk for courier of illegal stuff) is dragged back into the life (“the life” must be said with a sort of overly emotional resonance) when his innocent nephew accidentally botches a run of his own.  So, Wahlberg and his band of brothers (a typical group… how much do you want to bet that one of them just happens to be the world’s greatest hacker?) pay off his nephew’s debt by staging the greatest run in history. I really can’t hide my indignation.

Coriolanus (2011, January 13)

Well, of course, it’s going to be a great movie. Whenever Shakespeare is rendered with all the craft of modern film making, it’s great. We often skip these movies because… well, because we are lazy and aren’t really interested in being challenged by movies to think. This is how people can see Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and be really interested by it — because it doesn’t ask us to do anything. We don’t even have to follow the plot line. Coriolanus, of course, will demand more from us and therefore be more rewarding. Most people will skip.

Joyful Noise (2011, January 13)

I have a great deal of respect for Dolly Parton. Her gospel and spiritual music is remarkably sensitive. But, Queen Latifah does nothing for me. Her comedy isn’t funny and her music is largely dilettantish, much like this movie. It is an elaborate music video for a style of music made famous on Glee: you take two desperately dissimilar (but cool in their own right) songs, mash them together, do a little lipsyncing and a little choreography. It’s fun, but it’s stupid.

Newlyweds (2011, January 13)

Looks pretty good. There is an awkward period early in marriage when a couple is trying desperately to figure out what the Hell marriage is all about. Do you really share everything? And we know that a successful marriage is more than just a well-negotiated sharing of space. How do we get there? I don’t have good answers to these questions. Probably, no one does. But, this movie seems like a sensitive and well-intended meditation on those first two years or so. Added complications drive the plot forward, juxtaposing a few marriages side-by-side and few single people with their own chaos. Edward Burns stars and his chill bravado and understatement serve the theme well. Probably not the best movie for a first date or anyone who’s enjoying being single.

The Divide (2011, January 13)

So, the shit hits the fan and the bombs go off. Cities are destroyed and a small group of survivors huddle in a basement. This sort of apocalyptic staging has its advantages and disadvantages. With so many necessarily dramatic situations (they have to lock the door to the basement and keep someone people out) the audience will certainly be rewarded with some intense acting and panicky moments. Mostly, that’s what we want from movies. And the balance between character development and watching them get eat by monsters or burned to death in the incinerator can be perfectly tuned. However, these are all gambles. A few miscalculations can make the entire movie seem forced and ridiculous. I’m afraid that’s what I’m seeing here.

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover — but films? Well, that’s what trailers are for. I watched the trailers and here’s what I think. Some of these movies I’ll go see, some I won’t. If I do, I’ll post a more complete review (mostly to see if my knee-jerk reactions were correct.) If you see them before I do, tell me what you think! 

Northeast (2011, January 12)

We do seem to be developing a theme, here… Northeast is also about a wayward man who struggles to find meaning in the embrace of a woman (see: Roadies (2011) and Loosies (2011)). But, in the mode of the art house film, it promises to be, at least, more captivating. That waywardness, for example, is often depicted as ordinary boredom (“There’s nothing on TV.”) But, I think the reality of that sort of life is far more painful than that. And confusing. Because, as much as it is a quiet sort of torture, it also feels great: women and rock n’ roll everywhere. It’s almost hard to complain about. Capturing this odd anguish isn’t going to be easy, so I’m always more interested when directors with a little gumption (or maybe, not enough experience to know otherwise) step up to the plate. The plot of the movie, incidentally, is almost completely obscured by the trailer — a positive in itself because I’m left with someone to think about.

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover — but films? Well, that’s what trailers are for. I watched the trailers and here’s what I think. Some of these movies I’ll go see, some I won’t. If I do, I’ll post a more complete review (mostly to see if my knee-jerk reactions were correct.) If you see them before I do, tell me what you think!

Loosies (2011, January 11)

Peter Facinelli hasn’t really impressed me, yet. You might recall him from Can’t Hardly Wait (1998) and if you haven’t seen The Big Kahuna (1999), check it out (Danny DeVito is in rare dramatic form there, too.) Facinelli strikes me as someone who should settle for supporting roles and glad about it, but instead keeps trying for this bigger, leading roles. Be that as it may, Loosies does peak my interest. Its central premise is, much like Roadie (2011), that of a wayward man who finds a sense of purpose in the embrace of a woman. Already, this movie has more potential, though, because Loosie actually integrates its own vehicle (Facinelli’s character is a pickpocket as opposed to the Eldard’s roadie) into the plot of the movie itself (he picks the pocket of a woman and returns the wallet so he can get a date). We will see if the movie can deliver — it is a tired plot and theme.

This is a response to a video posted by ContraPoints regarding the movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The question that ContraPoints ask is whether The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a feminist movie and part of what ContraPoints considers is an extended rape scene. In this case, we might ask whether an extended rape scene enhances the audiences emotional commitment and therefore enriches the moral reality of the movie or whether the extended rape scene is merely gratuitous and therefore trivializes rape and is aesthetically offensive. ContraPoints seems to suggest the latter, saying: “I don’t think it was a feminist film, at all.”

My point is in contradiction to ContraPoints, I suppose, because I would like to affirm that scenes which exceed our aesthetic tolerance, such as extended rape scenes, do indeed have a place in cinema.

It’s worth noting that this conversation has occurred almost every time a similar scene appears in a movie. The same can be said about graphically sexual scenes, depictions of torture, depictions of medical procedures, depictions of executions, and so on.

The 1971 film Straw Dogs contained an extend rape scene. And it’s worth noting that while the rape scene depicted in the 2011 remake was far more acceptable, the movie as a whole was far less interesting or memorable. Other factors may have contributed to that, as well. The 1971 film raised moral questions and we may disagree on how these questions were answer. However, the 2011 remake raised almost no moral questions and retreats quickly into irrelevance and meaninglessness.

The 1993 film Schindler’s List contained scenes which were certainly difficult to watch, but none that were so unrelenting in the same way. I note this because I certainly don’t want to suggest that a movie about a certain subject ought to employ these sorts of unrelenting terrible scenes; movies can be very successful without them. On the other hand, if Schindler’s List can be criticised, it can be criticised for simplifying the moral experience of the Holocaust. Within the film, there are very few moments in which its moral comment isn’t clearly stated. Likewise, the audience’s moral interaction with the film isn’t demanding. Despite some scenes which are difficult to watch, on the whole, the movie is simplistically rewarding and oddly hollow in its moral triumph.

As strange as this may seem, I think one of the purposes of these sorts of extended violent scenes is nullify certain aspects of the movie-viewing experience and specifically those aspects which may moral messages lucid. That is to say, because we in part think about the film and not what the film is about, the experience of our moral outrage becomes more complicated — that complication is undeniably closer to the reality of our moral dilemmas than the moral simplicity within Schindler’s List. In moments in which we can point to the screen and say ‘this is bad,’ we must also say ‘I am watching this’ and ‘I paid to watch this.’

Returning to the original issue, which was whether The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a feminist movie, I suggest that part of the movie’s effectiveness is that it doesn’t entirely answer this question in a straight-forward, simplistic manner. To be clear, the beliefs that ‘rape is bad’ and that ‘women deserve full-spirited equality’ are indubitably virtuous, but having these beliefs reaffirmed by black-and-white morality tales seems almost to indulgently fail to acknowledge the complexity of actual moral dilemmas. Movies like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo succeed if they speak to and stimulate our resolve to understand, in this case, the feminist project itself. I would say, ContraPoints, that in your case, the movie was certainly successful.

Although he does not appreciate it as I do in my ultimate evaluation of the film, ContraPoints, in his video, seems to acknowledge this thesis, by the way, contrasting The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, a movie which was received with the questions that we are discussing today. ContraPoints suggesting is that there is moral progress since A Clockwork Orange makes the rapist a sympathetic character and, at least, by the time we get to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, we arrive at caricatures of rape as morally evil. As I have discussed, I think the word ‘caricature’ fails to appreciate the effect of these depictions. And, without delving too deeply into A Clockwork Orange, I think ContraPoints and I disagree sharply in our reading. In mine, we are not supposed to sympathize ultimately with the character of Alex, but to recognize the immutability of a character of like Alex. It is a moral success insofar as it is indeed not a happy story of sociopathy, but a morally haunting and therefore, accurate story of sociopathy. That said, the moral progress from A Clockwork Orange to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that we are indeed asking the same questions with all the more available viscerality or a viscerality which is made available to us and we encounter because of movies like these.

Some people look to art for meaningless pleasure and that seems to have a certain perversity about it. But, I think that we can do better than that. American can do better. I think we look to art to challenge our thinking and experience and even these sorts of shocking scenes can be part of moral progress.

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover — but films? Well, that’s what trailers are for. I watched the trailers and here’s what I think. Some of these movies I’ll go see, some I won’t. If I do, I’ll post a more complete review (mostly to see if my knee-jerk reactions were correct.) If you see them before I do, tell me what you think!

Roadie (2011, January 6)

I’m glad to see that Ron Eldard’s star is in ascent. I’ve long suspected that his dramatic ability was underutilized by his performances in, say, Deep Impact (1998) and all his TV appearances since then. He’s should be more of a movie star. He certainly has the charm and he ages well. And like most dramatic actors, he is capable to carrying several emotions at once, allowing each to separately articulate themselves. He can do sadness, wonder, and idealism in a single glance. This picture is almost certainly not about roadies (those fans of bands who are both zealous and wayward — if such a thing is possible.) That movie is probably Almost Famous (2000.) This movie is, instead, about a man’s somewhat wayward existence, his search for a sense of belonging (which is also what being a roadie is all about). That he will probably find it in the embrace of a woman isn’t novel and it means that this movie will probably end up as barely-memorable.

The Devil Inside (2011, January 6)

My favorite genre of movies is religious horror — movies where the supernatural comes alive and scares the shit out of everyone. And for some reason, it’s always scarier than some idiot in a mask — or mutants raised on the fallout of nuclear testing — or anything in Texas. End of Days (1999) almost ruined it for me. But, movies like The Devil Inside keep it alive. The premise is an interesting one. Not the young girl strapped to a bed and the fight for her soul, but the victim of a botched exorcism years later. And it is her daughter (raised with the stranger knowledge of her mother’s crimes) who must do the one-on-one combat with Satan. I like the idea of seeing what happens to these people after their exorcisms, even years later. And I like the idea of looking at the life of someone whose parent is locked away in an insane asylum. Rarely do we get to see them doing anything in movies. But, ultimately, these sorts of movies can only be praised for the slightest variations on a theme. In the end, it will be the same old story. But, it’s still a story I enjoy.

Ahh, the new year dawns! A chance for metaphorical new beginnings. An opportunity to elevate one’s discourse, forever leaving behind the tired cliches of the past. A chance for hope. A chance for peace between factions based on new-found mutual understanding.

A chance to eschew all those things by harping on an old bugaboo. A chance to fire a salvo off the bow of perennial adversaries. Why should sleeping dogs lie?

I’ve been pondering, off an on, this whole business about God being somehow necessary for morality. Not really pondering, per se. I’m not actually wondering whether or not it’s a wrongheaded idea. Because it is. I’m more pondering how we can be asked to accept it with such apparent exasperation on the part of its advocates. Why can’t we just see it!?, they ask.

Now, there are many possible answers to the question of why we can’t see it: Unbelievers are just blind to morality; Unbelievers are resisting true morality; And so on. It helps if you coat these and answers like them in the sugar of pitying condescension, apparently. And by “helps,” I don’t mean that it helps the other side see it your way, but rather that it helps others on your side see it your way, namely that the other side is pitiable, and worthy only of condescension. It’s a nonchalant and even subconscious tactic, which I can admire, in a way. Schmucks.

But, I digress. Perhaps an example will help refocus the attack. We have the strangely recurring case of jovial infanticide, incomprehensibly for its own sake. Somehow, the unbeliever is supposed to feel challenged and frustrated when the believer asks her, “How can you say that even this is wrong, since you have no objective moral code?” (I’ve left in the insipid ‘objective,’ since I find it amusing that people who want God to animate morality can’t tell the difference between ‘arbitrary,’ as in “by edict,” and ‘objective,’ which would probably rest on ideas like “physical necessity.”) I mean, the believer is right in one sense; The unbeliever is challenged and frustrated–often actually flummoxed!–by the question! But, fortunately or unfortunately, the basis of this exasperation is not the superior wit of the interrogator. Instead, there’s this inchoate feeling of nausea and uncertainty that really boils down to the sudden but suppressed realization that one is dealing with an idiot of the lowest calibre. It would be like discovering that the waitress at the local bar with whom you’d happily conversed so many times before was actually animatronic. Or neoconservative. The phrase we’re after here is “paralyzingly dumbfounded.”

Let me just put words to the question hidden from thinking person’s minds by their natural aversion, when ambushed by imbecility, to confronting this sort of distilled stupidity directly: How could God possibly change an act like that from either moral to immoral, or vice versa?

I mean, if I were to ask a Ufologist how UFOs can cover cosmic distances in reasonable time frames, I’d at least get nonsensical but self-serving answers like “advanced technology,” or “warping space,” or “inter-dimensional travel,” or the like. They’d at least try. They’d at least see that it’s a little odd to go around prattling about aliens diddling livestock when we don’t have any idea how they’d get here in the first place. (My favorites are the Ufologists who answer “demons.” Compound whackjobbery is the best kind of whackjobbery.) But, no, not so with deistic moral animists.

Well, almost not so. The only stab I’ve ever really seen in the wild is a sort of might-makes-right policy: Nazis wouldn’t be Nazis if they knew what Hell was awaiting them. Now, there’s sort of a principle, a kind of heuristic you can use to tell not only when someone is bluffing, but also how desperately. To first order, you look at the size of the bluff somebody makes, and then you can tell how big a whopper they’re trying to pass. Now, deistic moral animists have really bluffed big. Eternal punishment. Serious business!

But this at least helps us get right down to it. I can say, with an absolute moral certainty of a kind that would be the envy of even deistic moral animists, that no amount of Hellfire will alter the morality or immorality of any act ever undertaken by a believer or unbeliever. Ever. Even in mere earthly government, punishment attains its legitimacy from authority, and not the other way around. I will repeat for clarity and emphasis: Authority does not attain from the ability to harm. Full stop, as they say across the pond. Savagery often does. Moral bankruptcy often does. But not authority, and especially not the moral kind.

I would think that this would be fairly obvious. Actually, it is obvious. Just to let the cat out of the bag, I view the offering of such a clumsy casuistry as absolutely indicative of the intellectual bankruptcy of those who offer it. I view it as one of the last, desperate acts of a mind so jangled by the cacophony of dissonance that it will do anything to muffle the din by even a fraction of a decibel, yet is so addled that it doesn’t notice that it actually makes things worse.

So, I ask again, and I couch the question in the selfsame absurdist terminology of those to whom I address it: How exactly does the presence of God transmute the otherwise utterly neutral and eternally inconsequential act of jovial infanticide to an offense of immense and eternal moral magnitude?

The field of New Testament textual criticism isn’t easily popularized, and given Bart Ehrman’s literary success with Misquoting Jesus and Jesus,  Interrupted, I imagine that even the staunchest of conservative Christians would have a hard time denying his talent. His recent book Forged: Writing in the Name of God is no exception. Ehrman’s thesis in Forged, however, is not quite as radical as one might assume from looking at the cover alone. He is actually extremely careful in defining the word “forgery” to mean “books whose authors claim to be well-known authority figures, even though they were someone else” (Pg. 140).

In other words, he’s not referring anonymous writings where authorship was attributed by later scribes and church leaders, such as the four canonical gospels. Neither is he referring to simple mistaken authorships, such as the ambiguously named author of Revelation, “John.” Rather, Ehrman is specifically referring sections of the New Testament in which the author falsely claimed to be somebody else.  Ehrman argues that the New Testament books which fall into this category are 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, and Colossians.

Of course, a major portion of the book is dedicated to him arguing in favor of classifying these books as forgeries, with some of his arguments being more convincing than others. However, Ehrman does digress quite a bit. He discusses the motivation for forgery, as well as ancient views on the matter. He also writes about the other books of the New Testament and what we know about their authorship.

But perhaps the sections concerning the non-canonical gospels are the most interesting. The abundance of forged and fabricated gospel accounts and Pauline letters during the early church is quite amazing. It’s this information that seems to make the best case for Ehrman’s theis. After all, if deception through forgeries and fabrications were so abundant, isn’t it possible that some of them made it in to the canonized New testament? It seems plausible.

Stephen Hawking created a bit of controversy last year with his book The Grand Design, co-authored by Leonard Mlodinow, wherein he wrote, “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” Many Christian apologists were a bit outraged by this claim, including mathematician John Lennox who released a short book earlier this year titled God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design is it Anyway?.

Lennox makes quite a few apt criticisms of Hawking and Mlodinow’s book, their most infamous blunder being the quick dismissal of philosophy followed by its heavy use. Lennox also points out that the entire explanation that the universe creating itself from “nothing” due to “gravity” is both confusing and sloppy. But for each mistake Lennox points out, he makes a dozen of his own.

For example, Lennox is absolutely correct to say that Hawking gives too much credence to M-Theory because it has essentially no observational evidence to support it. Unfortunately this criticism rings hollow as soon as Lennox begins making statements such as, “God both created the universe and constantly sustains it in existence” – a bold claim for which there is little or no observational evidence. Worse yet are his claims that the resurrection of Jesus is a “fact of history” and that “the Big Bang resonates powerfully with the biblical narrative of creation.” Surely, any honest believer will admit that a historical view Genesis 1 (an account which describes the earth existing before stars, birds existing before land mammals, a physical firmament, etc., etc.) requires quite a lot of interpretation.

The oddest claim of all, however, is Lennox’s vehement denial that the Christian God is a “God of the Gaps.” If this is so, then why would it matter to Lennox whether there existed a natural explanation for the origin of the universe?  If science poses no threat to a belief in God, then those believers should have nothing to fear from a universe which is entirely explicable within the realm of nature. Lennox, however, takes the paradoxical approach of attempting to argue that his God is not a God of the Gaps because only his God can explain certain phenomena.

On a closer examination, the entire controversy surrounding Hawking’s claim seems to be nothing but a tempest in a teacup. There have been proposed naturalistic explanations for the origin of the universe for quite a long time. Alexander Vilenkin’s quantum gravity model, for instance, was published nearly 30 years ago and is still widely discussed today, yet nobody seems to be too worked up about it. If only Hawking’s proposal had been taken with similar grace.

No matter how you feel about religion and theology, it’s hard to deny God’s literary success. He’s probably best known as the author of The Bible, The Koran, and The Book of Mormon, but available now is his new book, The Last Testament.  Written in the style of a celebrity memoir, God recollects the events depicted in his various holy books in a new way.

As is expected, God reminisces about the creation of the universe and the invention of the three major monotheistic religions, but he also attempts to humanize himself by discussing his life among his family (he actually has three children!) and his friends (i.e. his angels an prophets). And as with any celebrity memoir, there’s a fully supply of name-dropping and gossip dishing.

Interspersed throughout the memoir are opinion pieces about prayer, sports, sex, and whatever else is on God’s infinite mind. For instance, here is a bit of God’s musings on Kosher laws: “[C]onsider the most famous dietary injunction of all: ‘Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.’ What kind of people would take such a specific rider – one forbidding only intergenerational culinary goat cruelty – and extend it into a ban against consuming all meat with all dairy, on the principle of ‘just to be safe’?”

But all kidding aside, the book is actually written (or transcribed?) by former head writer of The Daily Show, David Javerbaum, and as you might expect The Last Testament takes on a fairly liberal tone. For example, he gives the most creative interpretations of Leviticus 20:13 (i.e. admonishing of homosexuality) that I’ve ever read, and God’s overall portrayal comes across as somewhat megalomaniacal.

With that in mind, I imagine conservative religious readers would be horrified by this book, but general audiences will enjoy it. That isn’t to say there aren’t a few clunkers here and there, and the book contains plenty of filler (the day-by-day accounting of apocalyptic prophecies goes on much too long). But the Last Testament is certainly not an anti-religious screed or anything like to that affect; it’s light, humorous and a lot of fun. Anybody with a sense of humor will get some enjoyment out of the book.

One who intentionally lives a full life would be practically unwilling, with the calm assurance that it will either never actually happen or never matter if it does happen, to be proven incorrect.

Every time I imagine anyone condescending to respond to a statement like “atheism offers no hope,” I can’t imagine the slightest possibility of enjoying their company.

Nietzsche, for example, talked openly about the perverted influence of “Christ” in the lives of the crowd. He talks about the unchristlike and Pauline ways in which the hoi-polloi invent a realm above the Earthly in order to subdue authorities, mourners, professionals, each other, and the weakest among them, and he shows the debilitating impact it has had on life and morals. He dedicated his life to discovering a new way of pursuing life. To him, his ideas, as well as those of the hoi polloi, are not just factual or false. They were and are deeply wrapped up and entangled in their respective activities of living: For him, a life of value-creation and work worth doing; For them, lives dedicated to the vilification of those like him, dedicated to the vilification of the enviable.

Because of this, it seems impossible to bridge the gap between the truth-seekers and the life-livers. The able have the conviction to not be swayed by the appearance of mere factual error, the painting of a web of fallacies, the denial of the role of the able in the community of the living, or the covering up of the great deeds and struggles that the able undergo in order to define themselves. The hoi polloi, the faux Truth-seekers, see every offered fallacy, every callus where they’ve rubbed against others, every sickening memory of failures past, as incontrovertible and damnable evidence, forced upon them from without and above, that they are destined for meekness. As inevitably as the able would never condescend to defend themselves from the vagaries of Aristotle and Boole, so the hoi polloi defend themselves from every slight, even those merely imagined.

This is, of course, nothing new. It’s the beatiful nature of all existence, and it leads us to a principle that draws a great circle around all of humanity and all of life, and unites everything in a Great Unfolding. Even if you go through the folly of seeking truth with seeming cold dispassion, your nature as a living being compels you to the most important thing: to live and work out what you are and what you will be. While it is true that the moment you turn to mere non-contradiction and argumentation, you attempt to turn from life and perception, you can never really do it, never actually anesthetize nor hobble yourself completely. Your words are meaningless and your opinions are worthless, but you might still live happily, help others, and contribute to progress and prosperity because of your living and in spite of your attempt at dispassion.

There is little communion to be had with the people who “seek truth,” since they seek neither themselves nor, insultingly, you. The best you can do, if you decide to bother, if you decide you want someone to strive with, is to piss them off so that they might forget their logic and return to reason and life.