The Scandalous Success of Atheistic Intellectual Projects

Any number of post-enlightenment intellectual projects have started in error and achieved tremendous success: modern biblical studies began as an attack on Scripture and ended by contributing mightily to our understanding of Scripture; the theory of evolution seemed to its original audience to remove God from the equation, and yet has explained all manner of conundrums of zoology; modern science in general began with the rejection of formal and final causality and gained an almost unimaginable power over the material world.

A quick and general account of this phenomenon is that man is an imperfect knower. Sometimes what is in itself an error actually counterbalances one of our flaws and leads to truth, like a man who aims away from the target because his gun doesn't shoot straight.

One example of this has been on my mind lately. Only after philosophers denied the "Cat First" principle did technology achieve its modern miracles. First they said that cats are machines, then they undertook to build machines like the cat, then they thought to build machines better than the cat, and finally they flew to the moon. Why would mechanical mastery depend on philosophical loss?

Basically, it is because all men at all times and in all places are tempted to substitute imagining for reasoning.

When men could not see the tiny, tiny parts that make up the mechanical aspect of a cat, they imagined the tissues of the cat as continuous; when they tried to imagine how the cat's tissues achieved their various functions, the result was rather blurrily attributed to the "powers" due to the "nature" of the cat and its tissues. In other words, imagination favored thinking of cats as one thing.

But once men discovered the tiny parts that make up the mechanical aspect of a cat, they could imagine the mechanical processes leading to the various operations of the cat. More importantly, they inevitably imagined the cat as made up of billions of little wholes, because substantial unity is in fact extrasensory and so unimaginable. So then imagination favored thinking of cats as many things.

In an odd way, then, the belief that a cat is one thing prevented men from achieving a mechanical mastery of the world by encouraging an imaginative error, just as mechanical mastery of the world now prevents men from seeing a cat as one thing by encouraging another imaginative error.

This is the way of the Moose: imagine, don't think. He loves pictures and hates words. But our universal tendency to go with the more sensible and vivid--with the imaginable--makes it difficult indeed to ignore Ray Moose.

Hot blog with mustard

The process of moving is eating my blog. First it chowed my extra reading, then it gobbled up my evening relaxation, then it swallowed my sleeping hours, and now it is eating my blog.

Perhaps this blog is of no account in the face of Ray Moose's mega-corp hippy big-brother free-thinking organization, but I still feel bad about missing a week at a time.

Star lichen

What a week! Between work and packing I’ve barely been able to post, and even when I get to the computer I never have time to put on my special Ignoramus mask and cape.

And the figure I was stuck with is as boring as they come: asterismos, adding an unnecessary word to emphasize or draw attention to what follows:

…and it does look and smell like a Catholic Mass, but stop: the priest begins every prayer by lifting his hands and intoning, "Oh Ray Moose!"

Hey, our nearest other option is the Mass with four movie screens in the sanctuary and synthesized, soft rock moose ick.

But the disturbing part of the survey was this, the attempt to define "fundamentalists".

So unobtrusive is this figure—and I begin to wonder whether it is a figure at all—that I simply couldn’t make it the most striking sentence in a long post. The only way to catch it would have been to focus on the short post with just a few lines.

Boring or not, useful or not, I must memorize the figure, so: Picture a gentle hill on which has been placed a completely unnecessary stone staircase; in fact, it was only put there to emphasize the fact that there is a hill. So unnecessary is this staircase on such a gentle hill that no one ever uses it, so it is so covered with moss that you can’t see the stone at all. In fact, on closer examination, it turns out that “a stair IS moss.”

Lucky me

While the Moose has confined all matters religious and moral to gushy emotionalism, he has somehow managed to persuade the world that we need a scientific study to tell us that we have noses on our faces. When the Moose Media try to be objective about things that really matter, the result is a poll:

Survey indicates Bible hard to understand

...A survey commissioned by the Catholic Biblical Federation found that even those who reported reading the Bible said it was not easy to understand.

Well now that's a relief. I make my living teaching Scripture, and if it were a breeze then my children would have no bread on the table. Having spent several years trying to explain Scripture to college freshman, I'm glad to know at last that the Bible is not easy to understand. My students will be glad to hear that, too.

But the disturbing part of the survey was this, the attempt to define "fundamentalists":

Diotallevi described as fundamentalist those who chose the response: "The Bible is the actual word of God, which must be taken literally, word for word."

Would the Catholic position be that Scripture is the potential word of God? Virtually the word of God? Metaphorically the word of God? Not really the word of God?

But a Catholic who had read 1Thess 2:13, or even his Catechism, and wanted to respond that Scripture is actually the word of God, would probably not want to say it "must be taken literally" as a blanket statement. Surely everyone knows there are metaphors in Scripture!

On the other hand, what does it mean to take a text "word for word"? Is the alternative to skip some words? Surely a Catholic would not endorse snipping up the Scriptures.

Wrap these stumpers into one sudden polster's puzzle, undoubtedly sprung in an Italian accent over the telephone during dinner, and what you get is literally this: con-fusion.

The Shrine of the Moose

I'm a bit worried about the Mass we attend. We were told it would be an extraordinary experience, and it does look and smell like a Catholic Mass, but stop: the priest begins every prayer by lifting his hands and intoning, "Oh Ray Moose!"

The subliminal effect on my children could be devastating.

But what to do? Hey, our nearest other option is the Mass with four movie screens in the sanctuary and synthesized, soft rock moose ick. Subliminal effects are bad, but conscious and over effects are worse.

A brief respite from words

I sinned = debt on

As usual, the Duck nailed it: Asyndeton, the ommision of a conjunction, was the featured figure of the past few posts. And the way he can rattle off other figures I didn't even know I was using is frightening.... But in reply to Fr. Barry, I did mean "deadly" in the sense you took it.

For the mnemonic image, picture a donkey selling the word "AND" to a pawn shop. That should link "Ass in debt" on to the omission of a conjunction in your memory.

Starship Capitalism

My father-in-law still has a ticket, given him some thirty years ago I think, to the moon. While the technology did not exist for private space travel when the ticket was sold, nonetheless it guarantees that whenever such technology becomes available the holder of the ticket will get a ride.

Well, Dad, it's almost time to claim your seat. Private space flight is real, and the galaxy's first spaceline, Virgin Galactic, is building ships and selling tickets. The company's founder is deadly serious.

Why does anyone want to go to outer space? I can think of three reasons.

First, everyone loves a good adventure. We all like to read about voyages to the end of the world, to the center of the earth, past the cave of the Cyclops, through the valley of Shangri La. Now a company with offices and brochures offers a guaranteed romantic trip for a preset price, and anyway if anything goes wrong you can sue them, so there we have it: adventure for the average man!

Second, it resonates with the evolutionary mythology of our day. At least since the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, popular imagination has connected space travel with evolving on, becoming the superman, achieving wisdom. While science and popular science are equally steadfast in denying that nature acts for an end--that plants grow leaves for the purpose of imbibing the sun, that spiders spin webs for the purpose of catching flies--popular science at least has endowed the cosmos as a whole with a purposeful striving towards its destiny. The same purpose impossible in the parts is the point of the whole: the whole universe has been groaning in travail until now, awaiting the revealing of the Ubermensch--and beyond. While the scientific proponents of an evolutionary world view may honestly intend to exclude all purpose, by making it a world view they make it a popular mythology, and by making it a mythology they cast it in the role of giving purpose and direction to life. Space travel offers hope to modern man.

Third, generalizing a little from that last point, we all want to find the ultimate realities of life. Since modern man is trained to think of all things, including himself, as a machine, he finds no depth in the world immediately around him. No use probing further in, so all he can do is probe further out: he travels around the world, explores the forests, climbs the mountains; when that is old he goes around the world faster, makes satellite maps of the forests, computer generates the mountains; when that is old, he either retreats into the imaginary world of television or probes further out to the real domain of outer space. Not coincidentally, his imaginary world of television feeds him a regular diet of imaginary space travel.

But to be honest, I don't think the average man today would go to space if television signals didn't reach that far. To hope for space travel in the future may give hope to life, but actually to have been there might be a desolating experience. The earth seen through the pressurized windows would look like the photographs we have already seen; weightlessness would be neat for a while, but would hardly feel like evolving to the next level; in general, space is an environment reduced rather than enlarged, unfit for man not because it is beyond him but because it is beneath him, unable to support life because of its poverty rather than because of its greatness.

When the first manned space flight broke through the atmosphere in 1961, the Russian communist astronaut looked around briefly and radioed triumphantly to the home base that he had not seen God. Atheism demonstrated--and a telling symbol of what awaits the average man in outer space.

The most thrilling adventures are in the rich world around us. When we have traveled the world, mapped the world, computer generated the world, made a video game of the world, there remains yet the return to real natures. Grant that a cat is a cat, not a machine, and untold vistas of discovery await us.

"Further up and further in!"

Frigidum!

Two days ago, I learned that I will teach Latin this fall. I read Latin easily enough, but they want me to teach Latin in Latin to students who respond in Latin: I have to speak, write, think Latin! My wife and I have undertaken an immersion process together, and I have begun leaving Latin comments on my friend's Latin blog.

So I was happy to find this.

A change of rules and one clarification

"Find the figure" has been fun, but I need to change the pattern somewhat. To give myself more scope for rapid posting and more time to practice each figure, I am going to start posting several times using the same figure. Once I set out the definition and mnemonic image for the figure I have been using, the subsequent posts will start the next figure.

I think multiple posts will also help readers (oh, that hopeful plural!) spot the figure, but brings up a needed clarification.

When I originally proposed the game, my idea was that readers would look for the line that stood out, that seemed most fresh, most zingy. If that line turned out to be the figure of the day, they win for finding it and I win for successfully pulling off the figure. In other words, you don't have to name the figure: you can just say, "This line seems like it."

OK, now to get some actual posts up!

This figure is so poignant, it just--

The figure for the last post was Aposiopesis, breaking off as though unable or unwilling to continue:

When it's full, you move on to the next prairie or wood, and you plow and dig and trash--

For the mnemonic image, picture yourself holding a giant sledge hammer dashing the end of a large-print sentence to smithereens. Directly in front of you, a giant apple with a face stares at the flying pieces in astonishment. The verb "dashing" reminds you that this figure often uses a dash at the end, but the key phrase is: "Apple see yo' pieces."

I'm trying to give up coffee, OK? It's the best I can do.

Living in the dump

My friend JB and I got to talking about environmentalism the other day. He knows a lot of the Green people are nuts, although of course he doesn't know about Ray Moose and the prehistory of the sixties, so he is generally down on "save the Earth" movements. He doesn't like the fact that the Vatican went carbon-neutral, for example, even though he sees nothing wrong with being carbon neutral. In his view, it symbolically aligns the Catholic Church with an anti-Catholic crowd.

Now he has a point. In fact, JB may have caught onto one of Moose's schemes: just like the Nazi's needed an emergency to get folks to hand power over to Hitler, so today global warming is the Big Crisis demanding that something be done so fast and so effectively that we need to hand over all our power to the government. Sound crazy?

Yeah. Crazy like a Moose.

But then JB brought up an argument against recycling. Of all the resources in the world, he said, surely we have a lot of sand and a lot of trees. So why are we recycling glass and paper? The recycling process loses money, as you can see from the fact that no private agencies undertake to do it: it's always government run. And we are nowhere close to running out of room for dumps and landfills. We recycle, he argued, to make ourselves feel better.

Now let me focus the conversation. I don't know whether his premises are all true: Does glass actually degrade when buried? Do we have that many trees? He could not verify the premises either; he just read the argument somewhere and liked it. At the moment, I am not worried about whether the premises are true, but about whether the argument follows.

JB is an economist, and he has acquired what I call a quantitative mind. He tends to focus on amounts, credits and deficits, formulas, limits, mechanical possibilities. Mathematical thinking has become not just second nature for him but a way of seeing the world. But I have what I would call a qualitative mind, so I tend to focus on form, nature, beauty, goodness or badness. This makes communication difficult.

At the time, I didn't say much of anything. But my reaction to his argument was that I would be willing to pay more for glass and paper to prevent another landfill from happening. The landfill itself is inherently displeasing to me. You start with a prairie or a wood, then you plow down the trees and grass, then you dig up not just the topsoil but all the layers below, then you fill it with trash, refuse, broken bottles, disposable diapers, plastic bags. When it's full, you move on to the next prairie or wood, and you plow and dig and trash--

The thought depresses me. This is not an argument, I know, but could it be a perception of something true? A sure sign of a bad neighborhood, a neighborhood of crime and desperation, is trash in the yards. A sure sign of depression is when a person stops cleaning his house and just lets it go. There is something inherently disordered about just trashing because it's easier and cheaper.

I think that is why the Vatican went green, and why Popes have spoken in favor of environmental stewardship. It's not because pollution is causing an immediate crisis; maybe it is, but that is not the ultimate point. It's not because the Vatican wants to curry the favor of the left; maybe the left likes what the Vatican says about environmentalism, but that is not even the proximate point. The point is that healthy human beings clean up after themselves. When we are right with God and right the world, we atone for sin and pick up trash.

We can ignore Ray Moose. This is not his issue.

I can't tell you how bad I have been....

I am afraid I owe my honest readership an apology. Oh, what a bad boy I have been! For two days I puzzled over how to use Aporia, which is talking about not being able to talk about something. Then suddenly I realized that my problem was its own answer.

Now it puzzles me that an online source defines Aporia otherwise. More thought needed on that one.

Meanwhile, the mnemonic image is simple enough. An enormous limestone letter A, riddled with pores, stands erect as a man tries unsuccessfully to scale it. Part of his problem is that a huge pitcher is pouring water over the top. So the figure that expresses your unsuccessful effort to express your thought is the porous A, or "A porous", or the "A pouring"--any of these should bring Aporia to mind.

It came to me like a flash under a bushel

After some days of no blogging impulse, an idea came to me suddenly in the shower. It is a splendid idea, creative and subtle, the kind of idea a blogger blogs for.

But it is too good.

It is so good that I can't even begin to describe it, much less to type it. The idea is so perfect and radiant that I find myself unable even to hum about it.

I wish I could express my disappointment at my inability to blog down this inspiration. I can't apologize enough.

But I'll take your guesses in the combox....

A Figure of Splendor

As the semester winds down (or up--take your pick), the blog suffers. But I do want to point out quickly that the featured figure in my last post was Antiptosis, the substitution of a prepositional phrase for an adjective. For example, I wrote "presence of massiveness" instead of "massive presence", and "admiring words of sincerity" instead of "sincere words of admiration", and "America of the mainstream" instead of "mainstream America".

The example of this figure that always sticks in my mind is "tower of strength" for "strong tower." So picture your sister standing on tip toe and holding a rather formidable looking tower in her hands. "On tip toe sis" will forever bring this figure to mind.

If you don't have a sister, you could imagine a nun or perhaps the sister of a friend.

OK, I'm in a hurry of greatness here--more later.

"Awesome speech...."

It has been funny to watch the media of secularity deal with Benedict XVI's presence of massiveness. Garrison Keeler spoofed the Pope, a blogger posted goofy inanities under the Pope's name, and the headlines proclaimed "Us readies rock star welcome for Benedict XVI." In a culture where news is entertainment and entertainment is the biggest news, no one knows what to do with the man whose message is the gravity of truth.

But it could have been worse. Had this visit been delayed, the president greeting (or refusing to greet) the Pope could have been Obama or Clinton. Bush's unprecedented move to greet Benedict at the airport and his admiring words of sincerity were the highlight of when America of the mainstream encountered the vicar of Christ. "Awesome speech", the President said in his American way, and I think he meant it.

The thought of Hilary Clinton camera smiling toward the pope reminds me of the time Bill Clinton did meet John Paul II at the stadium in St. Louis. Bill was good enough to bring the great Msgr. George Tribou to meet John Paul II personally. (Tribou was principal at the high school I attended.) When the moment came, Bill motioned Msgr. Tribou forward and said, "Your holiness, this is Msgr. Tribou--he never votes for me."

Whatever else you might say about Bill Clinton, he knew how to compliment a priest in front of the Pope.

A hand where the head should be

The line that I hoped would stand out in the last post was this:

He bombed the didn'ts and sneered at the dids and noised his noise the globe over.

It is an example of Anthimeria, the use of one part of speech in place of another. In this case, "did" is a verb used in place of a noun, while "noised" is a noun used as a verb. It was hard to find a striking instance of this because, as I soon realized, we do this all the time in English. A persevering worker "soldiers on", we "text" our friends on the cell phone, and we bed down in our beds, are housed in our houses, and on and on and on.

Once again, the line between figure and plain English is hard to find. It's a "figure" when it's "unusual", but usual English is highly figured....

But the mnemonic image is simple. Picture a woman named Maria, but picture with one body part where another should be--a hand switched with the head, for example. (If you don't know anyone named Maria, attend the nearest Catholic Mass and you'll meet two or three.) If the Maria in question happens to be your father's sister or mother's sister, you're in luck: "Auntie Maria". If not, then picture her covered with ants and you have "Anty Maria".

Plant your bombs to bomb the plants

Nature lover that I am, I receive no less than two nature magazines. These excellent and thought-provoking journals, My Big Backyard and Ranger Rick, not only provide my children with endless fodder for paper snippings but also introduce them to such backyard friends as the humpback whale and the harp seal.

Today's mail brought letters from both magazines urging us to renew. Most pointedly, they argued,

"Renewing promptly saves you further notices and conserves paper."

The threat that, should I fail to renew, I will be harassed by further notices and thereby guilty of killing trees gains its full irony when you consider that they would have me subscribe to a paper magazine. Seems to me I saw a moose on one of those magazines recently.

But the incident reminded me that I have intended to mention a bizarre spin-off of Ray Moose's early radical years, ecoterrorism: terrorism to save the environment. There is even a non-organization to support this movement, the Earth Liberation Front, whose thesis is that we must fight to free planet earth from her human invaders. While they have no power structure or leader, they provide a cover name for Moose-alikes:

Any individuals who committed arson or any other illegal acts under the ELF name are individuals who choose to do so under the banner of ELF and do so only driven by their personal conscience.

(If you choose to visit their site, I should warn you that they also peddle viagra. Get the connection? I don't, either.)

Long ago, when Ray Moose first saw that the sober notion that we do not live in a trash bin could be transmogrified into the engine of a rock'n'roll, drug-promoting, counter-culture hippy movement, he tried the rebel alliance look. He bombed the didn'ts and sneered at the dids and noised his noise the globe over. It didn't take, and neither did his slogan, "ELF-help", so now he plays the other side by enforcing environmentalism through Big Brother government.

Thus Ray forged the last link in a chain well described by a priest here at the university: we have gone from "Yes to Christ and no to Church" to "Yes to man and no to God" to "Yes to the whales and trees and no to man."

A post as dead as a post

That last post was a puzzler, and I apologize. For some reason I felt compelled to blog on the distinction between substance and accident, even though it hasn't appeared in the news for quite some time. And I have a feeling that I will have more than one occasion to reference the "cat first" principle.

The figure was an obscure one: Antanaclasis, the repetition of a word in the same grammatical form but with a different meaning.

The title of this post is a good example. Jesus' saying, "Let the dead bury their dead", is a good example. Ben Franklin used Antanaclasis well when he said, "Your argument is sound...all sound." But my attempt at Antanaclasis in the last post may not have been all that good:

On this theory, my cat is not a cat, but the appearance of a cat; or to put it more precisely, “cat” is the name of an appearance.
...
On this theory, my cat is a cat, not a “cat.”

I'll have to make another go at it later, on the side. Meanwhile, the mnemonic image is simply a line of identical ants marching over a closet door: "Ant-on-a-closet." This does not quite distinguish Antanaclasis from Polyptoton, but as a figure of a figure it comes close enough.

The Atoms or the Moose

It would take a great mind many years to untangle the tangle Ray Moose has unleashed. Mine is not a great mind and I do not have many years, so I'll keep to simpler points. I don't know where the root is, but maybe I can expose a main branch of Ray's system.

Consider my cat as an example. If I glance up and see him, without reflection I think: “A cat!” He seems to be one animal with various parts, including legs, tail, and teeth, that serve his purposes.

But if I look at him more analytically, and especially if I recall my high school biology courses, I recall that he is composed of many systems: muscular system, skeletal system, nervous system, digestive system, and so on and so forth. These systems themselves are composed of a multitude of cells, and the cells in turn are composed of some unimaginable number of atoms, which in turn are composed of something smaller whose name I forget, which in turn is composed of something even smaller whose name maybe nobody knows—but let’s just stop at the level of atoms. My cat is composed of some unimaginable and incomprehensible number of atoms.

The key question is: Which comes first, the atoms or the cat?

In high school, we were taught to think that the atoms come first. On this model, a cat is like a car, a complex system of parts that work so well together as to achieve an appearance of unity. What really exists are nuts and bolts and belts and so on; “car” names the cumulative effect of these parts in relation to each other. Similarly, what really exists are atoms; “cat” names the cumulative effect of the atoms. The atoms are first, and cause the cat. On this theory, my cat is not a cat, but the appearance of a cat; or to put it more precisely, “cat” is the name of an appearance. This is the first and original atom bomb: the one that blew up my cat.

But suppose we turn it around, and say that the cat comes first and the atoms second. On this model, what really exists is one thing, namely a cat, and the atoms are effects arising from that one thing. In this case, the atoms are the sensible radiation or working out of one thing, like the visible glow that testifies to an electric charge in the air. However comprehensible as mechanisms, the various systems in the cat are nothing other than the cat itself working itself out in the mechanical arena. On this theory, my cat is a cat, not a “cat.”

How can we decide which is true? A change in theory would make no difference in the arrangement of atoms, so we can’t leave it to scientific studies or super-duper microscopes or any other version of seeing, touching, feeling, hearing, or smelling. Ray Moose relentlessly (and unknowingly) advocates that the atoms are first. But how can we decide?

Of all the animals in the world, we have an “insider perspective” on one only: ourselves. Hold up your hands; clap them together. Look with your eyes, and realize that you are looking with two eyes rather than one. You experience yourself as one thing, no matter how many parts you may have; if anyone pokes your hand or your eye, you will say, “You poked me!”

It may seem unscientific or even mystical, but it’s an immediate experience that trumps any later argument: I am first, and my atoms are second.

Does this seem arcane? This one question—which is first, the atoms or the cat?—decides whether moral evil exists, whether we live in our houses, whether we know anything at all. The Moose has no idea.