Don’t misunderstand me when I say that Plato had a few worthwhile comments to make about epistemology. Not for one moment am I attributing half as much significance to him as the professional teachers of wisdom in the contemporary academy do. Yet, despite his now overused maxim that philosophy is nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato, Whitehead had a point: Plato managed to tackle questions of knowledge in some ways quite differently from others before him. Sure, he emphasised the ubiquity of change in the mundane world, as did the Pluralists that had preceded him, but his cogency lay in how he used this to build a philosophical fortress.
Note I didn’t say his worldview was incontrovertible. Far from it. Who could imagine that a man who thought, inter alia, that the highest form of love was pederasty, that the perfect city can only begin when those aged over 10 years were forcibly evicted, eugenics and euthanasia ought to be imposed by state authorities, and that having children participate in war was a practical and valuable training ground, could manage to cobble together a perfect knowledge of what truly is. However, Plato did make a spectacular and formal distinction between episteme, or knowledge, and doxa, that is to say, opinion. These ideas are set out in typical Platonic fashion involving Socrates and one or two other interlocutors bouncing argument and counter-argument off each other in dialectical frenzy.
At the end of Book 6 in his The Republic, Plato – I suppose I should say, Socrates – explains, by way of analogy, that ordinary people confuse mere belief and illusion with truth or sure knowledge. And then continuing with this theme of what constitutes accurate knowledge of reality, right at the commencement of the 7th Book, comes arguably Plato’s most famous analogy, The Simile of the Cave. If you’ve seen The Matrix, you’ve grasped something of what Plato’s speculation involved: prisoners tied up and made to live out their existence facing a wall of flickering and indistinct shadows they imagine to be the real and only true world; but in fact the genuinely real takes place from outside the cave, behind the prisoners’ heads, entirely out of their sight and ken.
As a creationist, I am not for one moment countenancing such an epistemological outlook or its attendant disparagement of the created and material order; but there is in his epistemic doctrine an aspect which I can’t help but notice precisely resembles the invidious and sequacious contrecoup the Sydney Diocese expectorates every time anything faintly resembling an orthodox vision of creation is espoused within their molecular circle. In order to understand my accusation let me return to Plato’s Cave.
One of the prisoners is untied and is dragged out of the cave into the light of the day and begins to see for the first time the real objects of which the shadows in the cave were their mere images. Eventually, “feeling sorry for them”, the emancipated prisoner would return to his former home and take up his old seat again and,
"go back to distinguishing the shadows, in competition with those who had never stopped being prisoners. Before his eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, while he couldn’t see properly…wouldn’t he be a laughing-stock? Wouldn’t it be said of him that he had come back from his journey to the upper world with his eyesight destroyed, and that it wasn’t worth even trying to go up there? As for anyone who tried to set them free, and take them up there, if they could somehow get their hands on him and kill him, wouldn’t they do just that?" (The Republic, Bk. 7, 517a.)
If one were to corporately reinterpret Plato’s prisoners’ epistemic it wouldn’t be egregiously misrepresentative to say that they were solipsistic. That is to say, they ignored the objective reality that would be there regardless if they themselves were or weren’t around, and manufactured a reality based upon what they perceived as real and true, entirely antagonistic toward anything that was in opposition to their own.
On the Anglican forum, in arguing against Danni Willis’ well-thought out point that evolution puts an end to any concept of objective truth, be it ethical statements or ones relying on correspondence theories of truth, Lee Herridge not only self-referentially believes that his own experience is the golden rule-of-thumb to assess an epistemological proposition by, but he continues with another intellectual faux pas when he ends his case on a solipsistic commission of the fallacy of composition: It happened to me, then it must have happened for everyone:
"I heard the gospel in its entirety and did not hear one argument against evolution and I became a Christian, and I would say that would be an experience shared by the vast majority of Christians. What people need is to hear the gospel, not a refutement[sic.] of evolution."
Lee also doesn’t see his solipsismal non-sequitur: If he were to ask “any of [his] non-Christian mates or family who Richard Dawkins was, [he] would get a blank look” and that therefore talking about evolution and the origin of life is a “stupendous [waste] of time, money and energy.” No, Lee, that just doesn’t follow. What does logically follow is that your friends and family are unread. Can you understand that just because your circle of friends and relatives don’t know who the world’s most quoted and interviewed atheist and evolutionist is, then that doesn’t deliver a knock-down argument against the importance of discussing the subject of origin with people?
Lee, if your expressed epistemic rule-of-thumb has any merit then it should be able to be cashed out in situations other than our minor difference of opinion over origins. So, let’s start off with a measure of importance. I’m now googling Richard Dawkins. How many hits? 1,810,000. Fair chunk, I’d say!
Hmm, what, or better still, who, could I put up against the Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford? I know. Peter Jensen.
Now I want to be both fair and objective. If I google just Peter Jensen, London to a brick I’ll get every other PJ on the web. So…maybe I’ll try his name combined with Sydney. Let’s see…..70,500. Well, maybe there are other Sydney PJs. I’ll try PJ + Anglican. Even worse: 46,900.
OK. Fair enough, Lee. I hear your response: A measure of some guy’s organ is not a guide to how well he makes love to his wife; but Sydney Anglicans continually link truth with how popular (read, ‘big’) something is: evolution must be true because the majority of scientists believe it, or, young earth creationists are a minority and so…..let me build more appropriately upon Lee’s comment.
I was having a rather in-depth discussion about evolution and origins with a pagan guy at my work the other day. Midway through my argument I mention Peter Jensen and my work colleague immediately interrupts with a “Who?” “Peter Jensen, the archbishop of Sydney,” I spit out. Again, “Who?” “Ahhh,” I incredulously stammer. “Don’t worry about it. He ain’t important in any case.”
I’ll leave you Anglican blokes to work through the syllogistic enthymeme!
Well, despite the Sydney Anglicans love of, and predisposition for, navel-gazing, just how important a subject is evolution and origins?
The 19th January 2007 edition of The Financial Review carried 2 articles totalling 4 pages on the importance of evolutionary theory in understanding our place in the cosmos. (BTW, for someone whose immediate family and acquaintances are unfamiliar with Dawkins, I should explain that the Fin Review is a political and economics publication, certainly not one given to majoring in scientific or philosophical polemics!) Among the more tantalising pieces the author David Quammen delivered up were,
‘We take [Darwin] to be a lawgiver’
‘Darwin continued the cosmological reordering begun by Copernicus; Darwin presented a view of humanity that – despite what some scientists and religious leaders want to believe - is irreconcilable with religious dogma.’ [Read that one and weep, guys!!]
‘[As] Dobzhansky said…“nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution.”’
‘Evolution, Watson affirms, is indeed “the great unifying principle of all life, a law that underlies the history and the future of every species.”’
“Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly [ape] origin.”
“[Darwin] was our greatest citizen.”
‘Carroll makes a compelling case that opposition to evolution can do real harm.’
Back to the Anglican Forum.
Then there’s Kevin Goddard who less than adroitly manages to equate the fact that he doesn’t know all the details of how God created, but, heck, even if they were available, “I don’t need to [know].” Kevin, tacitly, condemns the God of Young Earth Creationism (BTW, the only type of creationism there logically can be!) as being “too small” because that God can’t create by evolution because Kevin believes that his God can do anything and everything He wanted. Could He, Kevin? Really? For someone “who doesn’t know all the details”, you sure seem to know an AWFUL lot about God. Furthermore, for someone who quite obviously has never bothered to find out what creationists scientifically and theologically hold about fossils (Kevin believes that the only logical deduction one can draw about fossils even within a Young Earth view is that they still appear “old” and so must have been put in the rock strata by God to deceive mankind because fossils take a very long time to form.) it may be that every other explanation of reality that runs contrary to yours is a self-constructed strawman.
Kevin, you’ve never heard of Noah’s Flood? Do you know that in the ancient Chinese language found inscribed on their pottery and bronze from about 3,500 years ago there is a written character for large boat which is made up of two other characters which mean ‘mouths’ and ‘eight’. So, let’s count up the number of people on Noah’s boat. There were Noah and Mrs Noah, Ham, Shem and Japeth and their wives. That’s eight all up. What a coincidence!
What about the Hottentots of Africa. In their mythology they have a guy called Nu who took his family on a boat with animals and saved the world from a flood. The first missionaries noted this.
But they must be all wrong because there was no universal flood!
What does the Bible say? From Genesis 7 we read:
"For after seven more days I will cause it to rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will destroy from the face of the earth all living things that I have made."
'And the waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth, and all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered. The waters prevailed fifteen cubits upward, and the mountains were covered.'
'And all flesh died that moved on the earth: birds and cattle and beasts and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every man. All in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, all that was on the dry land, died. So He destroyed all living things which were on the face of the ground: both man and cattle, creeping thing and bird of the air. They were destroyed from the earth. Only Noah and those who were with him in the ark remained alive.'
'Then Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the LORD smelled a soothing aroma. Then the LORD said in His heart, “I will never again curse the ground for man’s sake, although the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again destroy every living thing as I have done."'
I guess, just as 6 days can’t mean 6 days, ‘all living things’ can’t mean ‘all’, ‘all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered’ can’t mean ‘all’, and God just couldn’t have meant “every living thing” because we have to take account of the postmodernist epistemology that decrees, as Martin Shields so “patiently” over and over again likes to “eruditely” remind us, it’s all about genre, genre and more genre. (Interestingly, Martin never really provides us with an exposition of what he means and how the mere presence of…well…I guess he means…literary devices…can change what at least ostensibly signifies historiography into myth, metaphorical tale, poetry or plain non-history. Yes, Martin, how does the presence of chiasmus or repetition or parallelism or whatever device you care to name indicate that a passage is non-history? Or are you so tired of endlessly presenting your well-honed argument?)
All of this would be extremely amusing if they weren’t actually taking themselves seriously…but they are. And that’s the point of solipsism: they take themselves as the only serious competitors. It’s a one horse race: Sydney Anglicans have got it alllllllll right. Never for a moment do they ever consider they have one thing wrong.
Solipsism is very much intertwined with Gnosticism. Sydney Anglicans – one only has to scroll through their threads on evolution and origins to realise how true this is – are very keen to, as has been pointed out, ignore or minimise God’s creative history by prefacing all comments with “I think”, “For me”, “I personally take the Biblical account as a type of myth”, “What am I missing in my walk with god to be a touch agnostic on this point [of Genesis 1 not being a real 6 days]?”, “My claim is merely that Genesis1 does not, in my mind, mandate the young Earth claims of Creation Science.”
But this is not new. Early Gnosticism did exactly the same thing: ignored creation and began with self reference. As P.J. Lee points out in his Against the Protestant Gnostics,
"Knowledge of God involves the knower not in a further or more profound relationship with the world – nature and other persons – but rather in a disengagement from the world and a concentration on the self and the self’s concerns." (p. 26.)
And,
"When we discuss the journey to self, we are very close to the heart of gnostic thought…The turning to oneself in gnosis is always in the order. Often the first experiences is so fulfilling that the second can be discarded.
"As the Gnostic teacher Monoimus told his disciples, “Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort.”" (pp. 140-41)
If one were to corporately reinterpret Plato’s prisoners’ epistemic it wouldn’t be egregiously misrepresentative to say that they were solipsistic. That is to say, they ignored the objective reality that would be there regardless if they themselves were or weren’t around, and manufactured a reality based upon what they perceived as real and true, entirely antagonistic toward anything that was in opposition to their own.
On the Anglican forum, in arguing against Danni Willis’ well-thought out point that evolution puts an end to any concept of objective truth, be it ethical statements or ones relying on correspondence theories of truth, Lee Herridge not only self-referentially believes that his own experience is the golden rule-of-thumb to assess an epistemological proposition by, but he continues with another intellectual faux pas when he ends his case on a solipsistic commission of the fallacy of composition: It happened to me, then it must have happened for everyone:
"I heard the gospel in its entirety and did not hear one argument against evolution and I became a Christian, and I would say that would be an experience shared by the vast majority of Christians. What people need is to hear the gospel, not a refutement[sic.] of evolution."
Lee also doesn’t see his solipsismal non-sequitur: If he were to ask “any of [his] non-Christian mates or family who Richard Dawkins was, [he] would get a blank look” and that therefore talking about evolution and the origin of life is a “stupendous [waste] of time, money and energy.” No, Lee, that just doesn’t follow. What does logically follow is that your friends and family are unread. Can you understand that just because your circle of friends and relatives don’t know who the world’s most quoted and interviewed atheist and evolutionist is, then that doesn’t deliver a knock-down argument against the importance of discussing the subject of origin with people?
Lee, if your expressed epistemic rule-of-thumb has any merit then it should be able to be cashed out in situations other than our minor difference of opinion over origins. So, let’s start off with a measure of importance. I’m now googling Richard Dawkins. How many hits? 1,810,000. Fair chunk, I’d say!
Hmm, what, or better still, who, could I put up against the Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford? I know. Peter Jensen.
Now I want to be both fair and objective. If I google just Peter Jensen, London to a brick I’ll get every other PJ on the web. So…maybe I’ll try his name combined with Sydney. Let’s see…..70,500. Well, maybe there are other Sydney PJs. I’ll try PJ + Anglican. Even worse: 46,900.
OK. Fair enough, Lee. I hear your response: A measure of some guy’s organ is not a guide to how well he makes love to his wife; but Sydney Anglicans continually link truth with how popular (read, ‘big’) something is: evolution must be true because the majority of scientists believe it, or, young earth creationists are a minority and so…..let me build more appropriately upon Lee’s comment.
I was having a rather in-depth discussion about evolution and origins with a pagan guy at my work the other day. Midway through my argument I mention Peter Jensen and my work colleague immediately interrupts with a “Who?” “Peter Jensen, the archbishop of Sydney,” I spit out. Again, “Who?” “Ahhh,” I incredulously stammer. “Don’t worry about it. He ain’t important in any case.”
I’ll leave you Anglican blokes to work through the syllogistic enthymeme!
Well, despite the Sydney Anglicans love of, and predisposition for, navel-gazing, just how important a subject is evolution and origins?
The 19th January 2007 edition of The Financial Review carried 2 articles totalling 4 pages on the importance of evolutionary theory in understanding our place in the cosmos. (BTW, for someone whose immediate family and acquaintances are unfamiliar with Dawkins, I should explain that the Fin Review is a political and economics publication, certainly not one given to majoring in scientific or philosophical polemics!) Among the more tantalising pieces the author David Quammen delivered up were,
‘We take [Darwin] to be a lawgiver’
‘Darwin continued the cosmological reordering begun by Copernicus; Darwin presented a view of humanity that – despite what some scientists and religious leaders want to believe - is irreconcilable with religious dogma.’ [Read that one and weep, guys!!]
‘[As] Dobzhansky said…“nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution.”’
‘Evolution, Watson affirms, is indeed “the great unifying principle of all life, a law that underlies the history and the future of every species.”’
“Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly [ape] origin.”
“[Darwin] was our greatest citizen.”
‘Carroll makes a compelling case that opposition to evolution can do real harm.’
Back to the Anglican Forum.
Then there’s Kevin Goddard who less than adroitly manages to equate the fact that he doesn’t know all the details of how God created, but, heck, even if they were available, “I don’t need to [know].” Kevin, tacitly, condemns the God of Young Earth Creationism (BTW, the only type of creationism there logically can be!) as being “too small” because that God can’t create by evolution because Kevin believes that his God can do anything and everything He wanted. Could He, Kevin? Really? For someone “who doesn’t know all the details”, you sure seem to know an AWFUL lot about God. Furthermore, for someone who quite obviously has never bothered to find out what creationists scientifically and theologically hold about fossils (Kevin believes that the only logical deduction one can draw about fossils even within a Young Earth view is that they still appear “old” and so must have been put in the rock strata by God to deceive mankind because fossils take a very long time to form.) it may be that every other explanation of reality that runs contrary to yours is a self-constructed strawman.
Kevin, you’ve never heard of Noah’s Flood? Do you know that in the ancient Chinese language found inscribed on their pottery and bronze from about 3,500 years ago there is a written character for large boat which is made up of two other characters which mean ‘mouths’ and ‘eight’. So, let’s count up the number of people on Noah’s boat. There were Noah and Mrs Noah, Ham, Shem and Japeth and their wives. That’s eight all up. What a coincidence!
What about the Hottentots of Africa. In their mythology they have a guy called Nu who took his family on a boat with animals and saved the world from a flood. The first missionaries noted this.
But they must be all wrong because there was no universal flood!
What does the Bible say? From Genesis 7 we read:
"For after seven more days I will cause it to rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will destroy from the face of the earth all living things that I have made."
'And the waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth, and all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered. The waters prevailed fifteen cubits upward, and the mountains were covered.'
'And all flesh died that moved on the earth: birds and cattle and beasts and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every man. All in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, all that was on the dry land, died. So He destroyed all living things which were on the face of the ground: both man and cattle, creeping thing and bird of the air. They were destroyed from the earth. Only Noah and those who were with him in the ark remained alive.'
'Then Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the LORD smelled a soothing aroma. Then the LORD said in His heart, “I will never again curse the ground for man’s sake, although the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again destroy every living thing as I have done."'
I guess, just as 6 days can’t mean 6 days, ‘all living things’ can’t mean ‘all’, ‘all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered’ can’t mean ‘all’, and God just couldn’t have meant “every living thing” because we have to take account of the postmodernist epistemology that decrees, as Martin Shields so “patiently” over and over again likes to “eruditely” remind us, it’s all about genre, genre and more genre. (Interestingly, Martin never really provides us with an exposition of what he means and how the mere presence of…well…I guess he means…literary devices…can change what at least ostensibly signifies historiography into myth, metaphorical tale, poetry or plain non-history. Yes, Martin, how does the presence of chiasmus or repetition or parallelism or whatever device you care to name indicate that a passage is non-history? Or are you so tired of endlessly presenting your well-honed argument?)
All of this would be extremely amusing if they weren’t actually taking themselves seriously…but they are. And that’s the point of solipsism: they take themselves as the only serious competitors. It’s a one horse race: Sydney Anglicans have got it alllllllll right. Never for a moment do they ever consider they have one thing wrong.
Solipsism is very much intertwined with Gnosticism. Sydney Anglicans – one only has to scroll through their threads on evolution and origins to realise how true this is – are very keen to, as has been pointed out, ignore or minimise God’s creative history by prefacing all comments with “I think”, “For me”, “I personally take the Biblical account as a type of myth”, “What am I missing in my walk with god to be a touch agnostic on this point [of Genesis 1 not being a real 6 days]?”, “My claim is merely that Genesis1 does not, in my mind, mandate the young Earth claims of Creation Science.”
But this is not new. Early Gnosticism did exactly the same thing: ignored creation and began with self reference. As P.J. Lee points out in his Against the Protestant Gnostics,
"Knowledge of God involves the knower not in a further or more profound relationship with the world – nature and other persons – but rather in a disengagement from the world and a concentration on the self and the self’s concerns." (p. 26.)
And,
"When we discuss the journey to self, we are very close to the heart of gnostic thought…The turning to oneself in gnosis is always in the order. Often the first experiences is so fulfilling that the second can be discarded.
"As the Gnostic teacher Monoimus told his disciples, “Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort.”" (pp. 140-41)
Well instructive are Jeremiah's words regarding the state of the clergy, and well apposite are they today:
"For the ministers have become dull-minded,
And have not sought after the Lord.” (Jeremiah 10:21)
And have not sought after the Lord.” (Jeremiah 10:21)
Posts
2 comments:
Some questions:
If Richard Dawkin's atheistic drive is so powerful and significant, then why do three quarters of Australians identify themselves with having a religion, since Dawkin's goal is the eradication of religion?
Do you deny that postmodernism is the philosophy that underpins our society rather than atheism (which was the point of my comments to Danni Willis about the importance of evolution)?
Would you say that you have to be YECSer to be a Christian? Is there no room for respectful disagreement (even if you think it is philosophically inconsistent)?
Were you aware that postmodernism gets 4 million more hits on Google than Richard Dawkins?
And BTW the crack about my family and friends being unread is unfair and I would appreciate if you would remove that sentence from your blog. I find it offensive.
BTW the reference for three quarters of Australians having a religious affiliation is the Australian Bureau of Statistics website. The URL is http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/94713ad445ff1425ca25682000192af2/fa58e975c470b73cca256e9e00296645!OpenDocument and it states that in 2001, 74% of Austalians had some religious affiliation.
That is an example of something called evidence, something this blog has lacked. Big on tough words, little on the evidence to back it. I would suggest you rectify that.
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