Category: Philosophy

I was exposed to Ayn Rand decades ago by a fellow employee who chastised me when I mentioned an altruistic endeavor in which I was involved. Never before had I considered the possibility that giving to others might be immoral, and I was intrigued enough to read a few of Rand’s books, including her most famous, Atlas Shrugged. While I am not a Rand zealot (or even a fan), I have been interested ever since.

Rand is not considered a great philosopher, and most current philosophers do not hold her philosophy (objectivism) in high regard. Nevertheless, while Rand died three decades ago, her influence has probably never been greater, especially in the areas of economics and politics, and particularly with various stripes of libertarians and conservatives.

I often wonder if those currently jumping on the Ayn Rand bandwagon really know what she believed. For sure, the admiration would not be mutual in most cases. Rand would absolutely despise much of what her current followers believe. For example, while many Christians have embraced her economic teaching, she had no patience for Christianity.

The reasons for this uneasy alliance are interesting to me, so I want to take some time to discuss Rand over a few posts. To start, let’s give Rand some credit. While many today tend to focus on her political/economic ideas, Rand was somewhat unique in that she actually had a holistic philosophy that drove those ideas. By that, I mean that she spent the time developing a system of metaphysics (theory of reality) and epistemology (theory of knowledge) that led her to her beliefs about politics and economics.

Most of us simply do not have that kind of cerebral investment behind our beliefs, and by most, I mean 99.999% of us including me. The talking heads you see on cable news have not made that investment. Nor have the politicians you see on those same programs. Compared to Rand, these people are lightweights.

To be sure, the greatest economic minds in history such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx have always had a philosophy originating in epistemology and metaphysics that drove their conclusions. Marx for example had a materialist perspective that naturally led to his economic ideas. To what extent Rand deserves to be named on the same level as Marx is debatable, but she was certainly in a very small club of political/economic thinkers in that she had a solid philosophical foundation.

For that matter, very few thinkers of any kind through history have really developed a comprehensive systematic philosophy. I am not saying that Rand’s system is on the level of Hegel’s, but at least, she made a valiant effort and came up with a somewhat unique comprehensive philosophy that we now refer to as objectivism.

Understanding objectivism helps us understand Rand, and perhaps more importantly, helps us understand why people to this day gravitate toward Rand even when she would hold nothing but contempt for them in return. So, let’s talk about what Rand offered that was so attractive.

Rand was at war with a philosophy known as idealism which had been prevalent in western thought for the past few centuries. Idealism is the belief that the human mind creates/controls reality. While there are many different variations of idealism, some idealists actually believe that no reality exists outside of the brain at all.

Now, most of us mock the concept of idealism outright. It sounds strange to our ears and leads to all kinds of apparently absurd conclusions. For example, if a doctor tells me I have cancer, can I be healed simply by convincing myself I am healed? Almost all of us would emphatically deny that possibility.

However, while the idea of idealism is universally rejected by moderns, I am quite sure that the practice of idealism has infiltrated almost all of us. You see it everywhere, from self-help techniques to the current disturbing rise of conspiracy theories. People often do operate as though reality is relative to one’s state of mind and in fact, can be controlled by one’s mind. Today’s postmodernist that talks about his own “version of truth” sounds like an idealist to me.

Now, Rand saw idealism far more broadly than just a two-century phenomenon. She contrasted idealism with her own view of reality which I will summarize in this way:

What exists exists, and it exists whether a human wants to acknowledge its existence or not.

Reality simply is the sum of what exists.

The human senses are a reliable way to learn about reality, especially when combined with rational judgments about the data provided by those senses.

Humans that want to be successful do not try to add to or modify reality. They understand that success means conforming to reality and playing by its rules.

Reality self-controls. No other entity such as a deity or the human mind controls reality.

In other words, Rand was a common-sense philosopher. While modern philosophers were debating such questions as to whether a table is really a table and whether the physical senses are at all reliable, Rand took an opposite tack that discarded those thorny questions as absurd. In general, what appeared to be reality could be accepted as reality though she readily admitted that cognitive processes were needed to interpret the data provided by the senses.

To Rand, when a tree falls in the forest, it obviously does make a sound regardless of whether any humans are around.

Or, to take another old philosophical problem, while an ax handle stuck in a pool of water may suddenly appear bent, that does not mean that our senses are unreliable. It simply means that our cognition of what our senses tell us is flawed/incomplete. Humans that want to understand reality need to improve their cognition so that they better understand the rules of reality.

To put it mildly, Rand was the anti-idealist.

Now as I said, Rand painted with a broad brush when she was labeling people as idealists. For example, in Rand’s view, religion is anti-reality because religion represents a set of mind-based rules that add to reality. A religious person is trying to change reality through the mind by adding concepts that only exist in the mind, which to her, constituted a form of idealism.

Therefore, because premodernists were religious and believed in a God that controlled reality, Rand believed that they were idealists. St. Augustine was an idealist in her view.

In fact, Rand saw all 2,500 years of western thought as driven by idealism though she divided it into three sections. The pre-modernists were idealists because they believed in a God-controlled reality, the modernists were idealists because they believed in a culture-controlled reality, and today’s postmodernists are idealists because they believe that reality is unique to the individual and controlled by the individual.

In other words, she did not really approve of any major philosophical systems from the past or present. For her, humanity is always trying to control reality from outside reality, when in fact, reality cannot be controlled. Reality just is, independent of our minds.

A natural extension of this belief was that Rand strongly believed in absolutes, and she did so in a time where absolutes were under attack. To her, every argument against absolutes was fallacious. For example, a person could not argue that a statement was relative because to do so implied an absolute definition of the term “relative.”

Aside: Rand’s argument here is easy to counter, but you hear similar rhetoric from absolutists to this day. For example, if a relativist proclaims that one cannot know anything for sure, an absolutist will ask how that can be known for sure.

So was Rand’s philosophy unique? She would have said yes, but then, she clearly had a generous amount of hubris. In actuality, she was not the only common-sense philosopher, and much of her metaphysics and epistemology is reminiscent of Aristotle (the only philosopher she could bring herself to credit).

However, Rand was definitely countercultural at least during her time, and unique from Artistotle in one particular regard: while Aristotle believed in a chief designer of reality (creator/deity), Rand saw that as a fallacy. For Rand, what exists exists and only that exists. There was no room for a creator because only religion gives us the concept of a creator, and as already stated, religion exists only in the mind.

Overall, I think I would say that Rand’s objectivism was at least modestly unique in history and certainly a substantial counterweight to the postmodernism with which she was at war.

As mentioned, most modern philosophers find a lot of Rand’s philosophy to be nonsensical. But, weak or not, in an age where postmodernism must have been driving much of society crazy, Rand’s philosophy had to have seemed like a breath of fresh air. It is easy to see why she had followers and for that matter, still has followers.

In the next post, I want to talk about how her foundation of philosophy drove her contributions to how many view economics and politics. It would be a mistake to underestimate her influence. For example, Alan Greenspan was an early Rand disciple and many attribute much of Trump’s economic policy to Rand. And on a far bigger scale, many millions have read Atlas Shrugged and adopted her beliefs.

A few years ago, I was reading Plato’s Phaedo and I came to a passage that goes like this:

For whence come wars, and fightings, and factions? whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? For wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body. (Translation of Benjamin Jowett)

I was immediately struck by a parallel passage written some 400 years later in James 4 from the Bible.

From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? (KJV)

Now granted, both of these passages are English translations of two different versions of Greek. However, I very much doubt that this similarity is a coincidence. The phrasing is similar and the context is similar. My guess is that James was quoting Plato. I may be wrong, but I do not think so.

Whether James was flagrantly plagiarizing Plato is debatable and not my point. To give him the benefit of the doubt, it is quite possible he was quoting some text that he knew his readers would recognize as Plato and therefore felt no need to credit Plato. It would be like me repeating Patrick Henry’s famous quote “Give me liberty or give me death.” I would not necessarily credit Henry because everyone would already know I am quoting Henry.

Regardless of James’ intentions, I am merely pointing out how Greek philosophy started influencing Christianity very early and managed to make its way into the Bible itself (this is not the only example). That influence would continue to strongly shape Christian theology for as long as there has been Christianity.

Let me talk about two very critical intersections between these two pillars of western civilization. The first was the theology of St. Augustine in the early 5th century. Augustine was a convert to Christianity from Neoplatonism, a system of philosophy based on Platonism. There were many other Christian theologians who were also influenced by Neoplatonism during those early centuries (Origen is a famous example), but Augustine was the giant among them.

I recently read Augustine’s The City of God, an astounding book written in the sunset of the Roman empire. From a historical, philosophical, and theological perspective, it is a gold mine. If you are a Protestant and wade through the book, you will be surprised at how much of his theology you recognize. Even some of his phrasing (or at least the interpretation of his phrasing) of theological concepts has largely survived the last 1500 years effortlessly.

At some point, I will try to write an entire post about The City of God, but one of the most striking things about the book is Augustine’s obsession with Plato. He briefly mentions a few theologians of the day (Origen, Ambrose, Jerome, and a few others), but much of the book is both a refutation and appreciation for Plato. He clearly respected Plato as a worthwhile opponent, and he readily admitted the many similarities between Platonism and Christianity.

In fact, in one entertaining spot in the book, Augustine is trying to explain how the Christian/Judaism account of creation matches up so well with Plato’s creation account (the Timaeus). He actually proposes a somewhat ridiculous theory that Plato may have met the Jewish prophet Jeremiah on a trip and gotten the Jewish creation story from him.

So what is Platonic in Augustine’s view of Christianity? There are several things, but here are just a few more notable ones:

• a focus on beauty and ideals (reminiscent of Plato’s forms)
• an emphasis on personal relationships/communion with God
• an emphasis on heaven (as an eternal, perfect place)
• predestination (yes, the subject of predestination vs free will is a philosophical question that far predates Christianity)

I would have to write a long time about Plato’s view on these topics, and there are more qualified people than me that would do a better job. However, Augustine seemed to be heavily influenced by Plato in his positions on these theological questions.

Furthermore, it is important to understand that while Protestants take Augustine’s teaching for granted today, Christianity has often struggled with most of these doctrines. It took centuries after Jesus lived for this kind of theology to fully develop, and a lot of it really does seem to originate with Augustine. Again, when you read Augustine, you will note that he does not quote other theologians to bolster his theology.

While Augustine was influential during his era, western civilization was about to enter the Dark Ages and his theology would hibernate for centuries and then get replaced entirely by a very different approach.

Before I get to that big change in direction, let me talk briefly about the Dark Ages, a period in western civilization where among other things, Christianity took a back seat. During that time, Islam was far more dominant in culture and arts, science, and other disciplines. Very interestingly, it was Islam that preserved Greek philosophy through those years. In fact, Greek philosophy was almost forgotten in the Christian-dominant side of western civilization during that time.

After the Dark Ages ended, there was a second major intersection of Christianity and Greek philosophy. The Christian swing from Plato to Aristotle actually started with Scholasticism in around 1100 AD. It is very ironic that this was at least partly due to some Islam-preserved texts of Greek philosophy making their way back to Catholicism.

While Thomas Aquinas was hardly the first in the movement, he represented the pinnacle of Scholasticism. Aquinas revered Aristotle to the point where he simply referred to him as the philosopher.

Scholasticism was a logical approach to theology, using elaborate logical rules and proofs that originated with Aristotle. That should not be a surprise; to this day, rules of formal and informal logic trace back to Aristotle. In fact, the theologians of that time tried to answer theological questions in a similar way that a geometry student might try to prove a theorem.

As you can imagine, such a rigorous, cerebral approach to theology ruled out all but elite scholars from being capable of obtaining knowledge of God. It is no surprise that Catholicism moved away from the more Augustinian idea that a common person could know enough to have a personal relationship with God. This ill-fated change would of course become a major impetus to the spark of the Reformation.

Somewhat surprisingly, the Scholastic approach to theology is still the dominant approach in Catholic seminaries today. However, on the Protestant side of things, at the start of the Reformation, suddenly, a Platonic-tinged Christianity was in vogue again. Martin Luther loved Augustine. And to this day, Protestants love Augustinian teaching, even if they do not take the time to read Augustine himself.

If you are looking for it, you can see Platonism in many places in Protestantism. For example, when I read C. S. Lewis, I am struck by the not-subtle Platonic ideas. The picture of heaven in The Last Battle where there are worlds stacked in each other, each bigger and better than the last is very similar to Platonic metaphysics. It is an interesting example of how Platonism and the Bible itself sometimes get combined/confused in the teaching of Christianity.

What to make of all this overlap is a subject for another post. But for myself, while I am not quite sure about theological ramifications, I have a strong suspicion that they are enormous, especially in the realm of the sufficiency of the Bible. In other words, if the Bible is sufficient in itself for faith and practice, why has Christianity always been so tightly woven with and influenced by Greek philosophy?

These are the kinds of questions that I like to ask theologians. For the most part, I get politely rebuffed. But in my opinion, at a minimum, Christianity needs to meet these kinds of challenges head-on rather than ignoring them.

How is it that when I wake up in the morning, I know who I am?

With that question, I am getting at a particularly unknowable philosophical problem: the question of personal identity. How indeed do I come to identify myself not just as a human but as a particular human described by the name Greg Howlett?

Are modernist philosophers correct when they assert that personal identity is a mental container of sorts that holds and categorizes experiences? Or is identity connected to (maybe equal to) the soul concept found in most religions? Perhaps it is material in nature and related to DNA? Is identity found in the energy in the brain of which thoughts are composed?

Here is an associated line of thought: is my personal identity connected to this particular body? Could my identity be associated with another human body perhaps born in a different time and place to different parents? For that matter, could I have the same identity if I were born to the same parents but with slightly different DNA? If I were a female, could I still have the same personal identity (albeit with a different name)?

While I am not dogmatic, I tend to believe that personal identity is indeed connected to a particular body with a specific material/non-material makeup. In other words, you and I had exactly one shot each to exist. The stars had to align exactly right.

If I am right, it is a remarkable thing that you and I even exist. What if your parents had attended different schools and never met? What if they had just fallen asleep in front of the TV on the night you were conceived? What if your mother’s parents had not happened to live in the same town? What if distant relatives had never immigrated to America?

If you open that can of worms, my existence is tied to a miraculous chain of events that go back through history. For example, would I exist if Pope Clement had granted Henry VIII his annulment and England had stayed Catholic? Not a chance. That event affected innumerable events after it that led to the founding of the USA and the particular circumstances of my parents meeting each other.

Some events in history are even more mammoth in scale, affecting not just billions of personal identities but entire civilizations. I want to discuss one of those events today: consider what would have happened if things had gone differently when the Spartans fought the Persians at Thermopylae about 2,500 years ago.

Here is the story. Around 480 BC, Persia under King Xerxes was preparing to invade Greece.

Greece, as we all know, was a democracy, with flaws and warts similar to the ones we see in our democracy today. It was a loose coalition of cities similar to the states in the US, and sometimes there was little loyalty between them.

Persia’s general strategy was to buy these city-states off and they did it very successfully. By the time this event took place, very few Greek states were holding out against Persia.

One of those remaining states was Sparta.

Sparta was unquestionably a remarkable place by any standard or time period. The obsession of Sparta was war. Children were the property of the State from birth. Males were taken away from their parents and lived in dormitories, rigorously (and brutally) trained in the art of fighting, both psychologically and physically. Those that didn’t make the cut were ostracized if not eliminated. Those that survived the training became long-haired super-warriors; they were efficient and brutal killing machines that were fearless in battle and would not hesitate to lay down their lives for their city. Likewise, women were trained to be breeding machines and used to breed more warriors.

For these reasons and many more, Sparta was probably the earliest significant example of a communist state in history. In fact, the communistic aspects of Spartan life would influence Plato’s communist beliefs that he laid out in The Republic a century later. Plato’s communist views in turn helped lay a framework for Marx and modern communism.

Suffice it to say that most of us would find Spartan (and Platonic) communism quite abhorrent with its breeding programs and such. I am not focusing on this communism to defend it, but rather because it is an interesting part of the story.

When Persia came calling in 480 BC, they brought anywhere from a few hundred thousand to a few million soldiers with them. From the start, the Greek armies were far outnumbered, and even more so as its cities defected to the other side.

The Greeks found themselves in a desperate position and started looking for a place to make a stand. The place they chose to make this stand was a small mountain pass called Thermopylae.

The Greek navy was powerful, and they believed that if they could hold their own on water, they would force Persia to have to move through this tight pass on land if it wanted to invade the main part of Greece. They also knew that the pass could be somewhat defended with just a few soldiers.

When the Persians arrived at Thermopylae, they found it defended by three hundred elite Spartan warriors. Those Spartans knew they would never leave that mountain alive. In fact, following Spartan custom, they were chosen for that battle because they all were already fathers and their bloodlines would not end on that battlefield.

The Persians initially engaged with their normal strategy: they tried to buy the Spartans off. When that failed, they sent word to the king of Sparta (Leonidas) and demanded that he surrender his weapons.

His response? Molon Labe (come and take them).

Over the next three days, all three hundred Spartans died one by one. But as they did, they managed to kill 20,000 Persians. It is one of the most remarkable feats of battle in any period of history.

And while the Persians won that battle, the Greeks rallied at the bravery of the Spartans, and though hopelessly outmanned, drove Persia out of Greece for good within a few years.

I really like that story partly because I see those three hundred Spartans as defending more than a mountain pass or even Greece. No, they were actually defending the start of western civilization.

They did not know it, but they were defending Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, all of whom would soon be born and would function as pillars for western thought. Make no mistake about it; if Greece had lost the war, western civilization would be very different today (if it would even exist at all).

Of course, that is just the start of the impact of that battle. Those Spartans were also indirectly defending America because almost certainly, America would not exist, at least in the way we know it. American political philosophy traces back to those Greeks too.

And to take things further, if my theory of personal identity is true, you and I would not exist either.

In other words, those brave, communist Spartans were indirectly defending you and me.

That is an interesting thought.

What is the origin of morality, and what right does anyone have to make moral judgments?

Until fairly recently (a few centuries ago), the answers to these questions were generally settled in western civilization. From Aristotle to Cicero to Aquinas and to even modernist atheists like David Hume, most believed that moral law is universal, originating from a place outside of any person or experience. In other words, they believed in a version of natural law.

This by the way is quite shocking. It is not surprising that Aquinas believed in natural law. But Hume? Hume was a radical empiricist who believed that there was virtually nothing that could be known outside of experience. He would be radical even by postmodern standards. And yet, he believed in instinctive morality. That Hume was sort of a natural law guy is an indication of just how dominant the natural law theory has been for the past 2,500 years.

By the way, if you believe in natural law, you have an argument for a deity. If natural law exists, arguably, it has to come from somewhere. Or, to put it another way, someone or something had to create it. And if someone had to create it, that someone is God, because only a deity has the power to create a universal. This argument from morality is still widely used in debates between religious apologists and atheists today.

So what changed a few centuries ago? In short, natural law went out of fashion and new theories of morality were introduced. Here are perhaps the three most prevalent:

1. Moral code can be developed by reason alone. Kant was the major influence in this area, and his work was undeniably impressive. He, for example, developed a somewhat complicated form of the Golden Rule using just reason. I am not going to spend any time talking about this here, but it is worth studying. On the surface, living by the Kantian moral code would be admirable, but unfortunately, few can really understand it. (Put me in the group that really does not understand it, and I have spent a great deal of time trying.)
2. Moral code is based on a utilitarian formula. John Stuart Mill was probably the biggest influence in utilitarianism, a theory in which people should make moral judgments based on the predicted outcomes. In other words, the action that creates the best result for the most people is the most moral. Modern political libertarians in particular are heavily influenced by this kind of thought.
3. Morality is relative and developed through experience. This approach is postmodern and is based on the idea that a culture will develop its own moral rules based on whatever works. For example, a culture may decide that murder is wrong because a culture where people murder each other just does not work very well. So, in the end, moral rules are a result of the conditioning of a culture and applicable only to that culture.

So why does the dominant theory of natural law, once a settled idea, now have this kind of competition? Are there weaknesses in the idea of natural law? To me, clearly, the answer is yes. I believe in natural law myself, but here are two nagging problems that I see.

Problem 1: At best, natural law is non-specific and leads to relativistic applications.

If you take the position that a deity puts the capacity for making moral decisions inside humans at birth, you are forced to try to answer the question of why that real-life decision-making is far from easy and the right answers are often elusive (if even obtainable in the first place). What good is a natural law that is useless except in the most obvious situations?

By way of example, proponents of natural law say that murder is clearly wrong, but they cannot agree on what constitutes murder. How about killing in a war situation? Or turning off life support for a patient in a vegetative state? How about thorny self-defense situations? What about abortion when the mother’s life is at stake? You simply cannot answer these questions with natural law alone.

Of course, I could also bring up similar situations regarding lying or stealing. A big problem with natural law is that it just is not specific enough to provide help for a great deal of what constitutes real life.

Even worse, two different people with two different life experiences can come to two very different moral judgments about the exact same situation. In other words, while natural law may be universal, the application of natural law cannot escape relativism.

The common pragmatic solution to these kinds of problems is civic law (government and a court system). This solution is nothing new; Cicero was one of the first to discuss the distinction between civic and moral law. However, civic law is an admission that natural law is insufficient in itself.

Problem 2: Natural law changes over time. There are clear changes in the perception (at least) of natural law over time and across cultures.

Proponents of natural law have to deal with the reality that moral ideas have changed over time, sometimes for the worse, but very often for the better.

For example, it would be hard to argue that we have not progressed in a positive way in regard to the value of human life. The barbarism of the Bible’s Old Testament or Homer is distasteful to our modern sensibilities because we now know better.

Or, of course, we could point to slavery. Western civilization widely accepted slavery through the late 1600s until the Quakers began to mobilize against it. The Greeks loved slavery as did the Romans. The Bible condones slavery, even if it did attempt to make the practice a bit less barbaric. The early church fathers such as Augustine had their chance to speak against it but failed to do so.

I am not here to bash on the past or all the people that were wrong about slavery. But they were indeed wrong. Every religion including Christianity was wrong.

And that begs a question: was natural law itself wrong? Or, do we have a different version of natural law today?

It is easy to see why moral relativists like the example of slavery…

These are real and significant problems. However, I am not saying that the alternative theories about the origins of morality do not have problems; they all have them too.

It is interesting to me that natural law is making a sort of comeback. You are starting to hear more about it, especially within the realm of Christianity. I have a theory about that, but first want to talk about how Christianity deals with natural law.

First, I want to dispose of the Judeo-Christian term you often hear in regards to this topic. I intentionally do not use that term because it is just a political invention of the last century as the United States grappled with the atrocities that Jews suffered in WWII. Today, it has become a sort of trump card that represents a so-called superior moral ethic resulting from a combination of Jewish and Christian ethics. It is a loaded term and useless.

Original Judaism and Christianity moral laws may have heavily overlapped but do not really go together. Any objective observer has to come to the conclusion that the morality of the Bible’s OT and NT are quite different. As I have written before, the teaching of Jesus was radical in its scope in areas such as love, charity, and forgiveness, and that kind of teaching made a huge impact on ethics. So, what I am about to speak about is specific to Christianity and the NT, not Judaism and the OT.

Essentially, the Christian twist on natural law is sometimes referred to as common grace, which Christians believe is an inherited knowledge of morality that every human possesses. Obviously, in real life, both Christians and non-Christians have moral failures, and Christians believe this is due to the fact that we all have a sin nature which prevents us from doing what we know we should do.

When Christians talk about the influence of Christian ethics, things get complicated. In general, they are referring to natural law/common grace given to everyone, but in addition to that, the teachings of the Bible (particularly the NT). The latter is an additional moral code specific to Christianity, and in many cases, only possible for Christians to really understand and practice.

To me, it is fairly obvious that Christian ethics have improved civilization. That Christianity had moral blindspots both in teaching and practice from the very beginning is undeniable, but it is also hard to deny that early Christian ethics was at worst a significant improvement when compared to other cultures of that time. So, while I am not going to sweep the problems under the rug, I am not going to bash Christianity either.

However, Christianity is not exempt from the two problems of natural law I mentioned above. So, let’s touch on that a bit.

How do Christians deal with my first problem with natural law regarding its vagueness and relativistic application? For starters, they take the same pragmatic approach as everyone else: government and courts. In addition, they establish church authority to help individuals make difficult decisions and also believe in the concept of an indwelling Holy Spirit that guides Christians through everyday moral dilemmas.

As people say, the proof is in the pudding. Whether this approach has actually worked throughout history is debatable.

As far as the second problem goes (my assertion that natural law seems to change over time), Christianity really struggles in that it is forced to either defend the indefensible or try to explain why a natural law from an unchanging God is changing. That is true even if you ignore the enormous inconsistency between the ethics of the OT and NT.

For example, it is very hard to explain today how almost an entire religion could be wrong about slavery for 1,500 years, and especially hard to explain why the Bible itself condones slavery. The same can be said for the various brutalities that Christians have inflicted on each other and other religions throughout history. I certainly know and understand the Christian explanations for these kinds of things, but find them unconvincing. There is certainly a lot about Christianity that I have no interest in defending.

In closing, let me say that problems withstanding, I think the concept of natural law is beneficial. It is especially useful because it creates a common ground between people even of different religions. For example, I believe abortion is a moral judgment, or more specifically, I believe that at least some of the time, abortion is an immoral choice. It is quite easy to discuss the issue from a natural law rather than Christian perspective, and in fact, make more productive arguments from that perspective.

I mentioned that natural law is making a comeback, even in Christianity. In my opinion, the current Christianity morality crisis is driving Christians to fall back to the concept of natural law from the lofty ideal of a superior Christian ethic.

Perhaps it is sad that this retreat is necessary. On the other hand, perhaps this renewed focus on natural law is not a bad thing. Natural law has always been a common ground that crosses all religions and cultures. We could use more common ground these days.

Pardon me as I meader from one unfinished discussion to another. I know I have loose ends lying around that I need to tie up eventually.

Today is the start of a new series, and this will be a lengthy discussion too. The intersection of philosophy and Christianity is one of my little passions.

To kick this off, western civilization has essentially been built on three gigantic pillars:

• Greek culture from roughly 800 BCE (starting with Homer) and ending when the empire fell around 31 BCE.
• Judaism and its two more powerful stepchildren (Islam and Christianity).
• Science and related disciplines.

I included science on this list because it really does belong there, but it is important to recognize that it is a newcomer. While science certainly was important all the way back to ancient Greece, it did not become a powerful force in culture until just a few centuries ago with the arrival of modernism. For that reason, I want to put it aside for a while and focus on the other older two pillars.

It is really hard to put in words just how vast the influence of ancient Greece has been on the arc of humanity over the past 2,500 years. No other similar civilization over a similar time period has even come close to achieving what the Greeks achieved in fields such as mathematics, geometry, philosophy, theater, literature, music, science, and medicine.

Yes, the Greeks had some strange ideas. But it is jaw-dropping just how much they discovered that still is considered useful today. For example, Democritus somehow came up with the concept of atoms in the 5th century BCE. During the same time, Pythagoras used ratios to discover the modern western musical scale and the famous geometry formula that bears his name.

And without the use of the sophisticated tools we have today, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth to within just a few miles. Forget about the myth that all the world believed the earth to be flat until Galileo. The Greeks knew better than that 2,000 years before Galileo.

Indeed we could talk about Greek accomplishments for a long, long time.

The greatest contribution of the Greeks was in the realm of how to think, a discipline we call philosophy. But don’t get the idea that the Greeks were unified on philosophy. Greek philosophers cycled through an immense variety of ideas that have been debated ever since. Eventually, the culmination of Greek philosophy occurred between 300-500 BCE with Plato/Socrates and Aristotle, but those men did not agree among themselves as much as you would think either.

If you are like me, you probably know something of those three names from your high school or college education, but may need a refresher. It is important to understand a bit about these men if you want to follow where I am going, so let me give a bit of background.

First, you might wonder why I lump Plato and Socrates together. The simple reason is that it is virtually impossible to separate their teaching. Socrates was an older friend/mentor to Plato. He wrote nothing on his own, and in fact, almost everything we know of him was recorded by Plato. Supposedly, Socrates had long conversations (dialogues) with other influential philosophers and pupils, and Plato recorded them word for word at some point later on in what we now know as the Socratic dialogues.

In reality, of course, it is not possible to remember any conversation word for word even a week later, and that is doubly true for these kinds of complex and technical conversations. For that reason, it is sort of taken for granted that Plato was at least sometimes using these Socratic dialogues as a literary device to speak for himself. In fact, I rather doubt that some of those dialogues ever really happened at all. And while Plato probably initially largely agreed with Socrates, as he aged, his views diverged more and more.

Socrates was an interesting guy. He lived a fairly humble life, was generally respected in the community, and usually hung out with a small circle of pupils and philosophers. Over time, the leaders of Athens began to see him as a threat, and eventually, he was executed by hemlock. Plato presents him as a gentle soul, patient to a fault, humble, and unflinchingly moral. By the way, Socrates was also excruciatingly funny. To this day, you can read some of these dialogues and laugh hysterically. (I recommend Euthydemus in particular if you want to laugh.)

Plato and Socrates generally believed in a god of some sort and strove to live up to that god’s idealistic standards. To them, this present world is a poor mirage of a better world, an ideal world, and a more real world. Plato and Socrates largely focused on improving the inner person, a priori knowledge (knowledge of universals existing outside experience), and a somewhat mystical, supernatural world of ideals (which are often referred to as “forms” in Platonic philosophy).

Aristotle lived after Plato, and in many respects, saw the world quite differently. When you think of iron-clad logical/rational thinking (the kind of thinking that advances science and medicine), you probably have in mind many of the methods and tools that Aristotle gave us. Aristotle was not focused on some idealistic world; he was rather squarely focused on the world in which we live. He was more empirical in his epistemology, meaning that he valued the knowledge that comes from real experience.

While Aristotle was influential in science and medicine, he actually wrote extensively on ethics and morality. His writing on ethics for example is arguably more extensive and systemized than the ethics of the Bible. He also believed in a god; specifically, he believed that the world in which we live is full of things that are clearly designed, and a designed world requires a designer. To this day, Christian apologists regularly use Aristotle’s thinking in this area (often called the teleological argument) in debates with atheists.

A main point that I want you to take away from this discussion so far is that Plato/Socrates and Aristotle essentially staked out a battleground for philosophical debate that has never ended. Today’s debates such as rationalism vs empiricism, materialism vs idealism, and nominalism vs realism trace back to Plato and Aristotle. The tenets of virtually every philosopher since then can be traced back to one or the other. Their shadows are just immense.

And, as we shall see, this battleground over the same issues has existed within Christianity as well.

Now, let’s talk briefly about the origin of Christianity.

Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, which was a culture and religion that existed during the same period as ancient Greece. It is actually very easy to view the Old Testament Judaism of the Bible as a parallel culture to Greece, especially if you have spent time reading Greek literature. For example, the animal sacrifices you find in Leviticus are eerily similar to those Homer detailed in the Illiad.

The same is true for the wars and the recorded deeds of warriors. II Samuel 23, for example, contains an interesting discussion of warriors that is very reminiscent of Homer. There is, without doubt, a difference in style. Whoever he actually was, Homer was a master of style and far more talented than the OT authors. His writing was more dramatic and colorful, but the general content is quite similar in many ways.

In general, while Greeks were busy setting a stage for Western civilization to flourish, early Jewish culture contributed little in the arena of art, literature, science, and other such disciplines. It was a much smaller culture and population that in its best days controlled an empire a tiny fraction of the size of the Greeks.

However, the Jewish contribution would be in the area of religion, and it is hard to overstate just how significant that contribution would be. Judaism may have been small-time compared to the Greeks, but Jewish religion has had a remarkable run and has been extremely influential all the way through modern history. More significantly, it was the precursor of Christianity and Islam, two powerful forces that would eventually overshadow it and dominate western history every since.

I think we have now done enough setup to actually start talking about the intersections of Christianity and Greek philosophy.

To give you an idea of the ground we need to cover, I could start by saying that there are secularists who see Jesus as a copycat of Socrates, used by Greek-influenced Jews as a way to export Jewish culture to the world. In fact, there are many similarities between the two men. Both had a relatively humble station in life and both lived a modest life, surrounded by a small group of disciples. Neither wrote their wisdom down and what we know about their lives is limited to what their disciples recorded of them. Both used the dialectic method as a teaching tool. Both got into trouble with powerful politicians and both were unjustly executed. Both had the power to escape execution but willingly chose to submit to death. Both had an enormous influence that only grew exponentially after their time on earth.

I do not put much stock in this copycat claim because of a general lack of proof. Similarities do not prove much of anything, and furthermore, the general similarities shared by Socrates and Jesus probably were shared by many other religious leaders of that time. The Buddha for example lived a similar life.

But as we shall see, the Socrates/Jesus similarity is only the beginning of a broader question. It is worth examining what Greek philosophy made its way into what would become Christian theology and even into the Bible itself. Those are questions for next time.

I grew up in cancel culture. I know cancel culture.

My childhood was spent in a fundamental Baptist subculture. Fundamental Baptists represent a small, extreme corner of evangelicalism, which in turn is a significant portion of Protestantism.

If you are not familiar with that culture, the key thing you need to know is that it is hyper-exclusive. Christianity is, as we all know, an exclusive religion anyway. Unlike other religions, only one god is allowed and heaven is only available to those that go through that god. Fundamentalism is even more exclusive in that it thinks that it has a corner on the correct way to interact with that god. Fundamental Baptists do not just disagree with non-Christians; no, they condemn/shun the practices of other Christians including evangelicals. In many cases, they do not consider them authentic Christians at all.

My childhood was happily spent listening to various preachers screeching against the pet sins of the day: women in “britches,” going to the movie theater, skipping church, rock music, and being late for choir practice. The harder and more animated the preacher got, the more we liked it. We called that kind of preaching “convicting.” We were quite entertained by such attacks on sins of which we were not guilty.

Those preachers canceled everyone, including the Southern Baptists down the street where the women did not follow the approved dress code and some of the men were known to drink an occasional glass of wine. I sincerely did not think a Southern Baptist could even be a real Christian. I felt sorry for them on Sunday mornings when I passed their large churches undoubtedly filled with bands performing “worldly” music. They were, after all, just playing church. My church was a real church.

Remarkably, after leaving college, when I had my chance to escape, I chose to go right back into the same kind of situation. I moved far away from home but found another screeching pastor that reminded me of my youth. I remember proudly sending my dad cassette tapes of that pastor’s sermons, picking out the ones where the preaching was the “hardest” (most obnoxious). It took me decades to escape that kind of thinking. I still have not fully escaped if I am being honest.

And, thanks to my music career, I also know what it is like to be on the other side of that cancel culture, at least in a fairly modest way. I performed mostly within the evangelical orbit and sometimes, I was canceled for things I publically said or wrote. I am far from a victim, but I do know the pressure of trying to walk a tightrope of producing professional music within a culture that is quite capable of canceling you as soon as you misstep.

So yes, I know all about canceling people that don’t march in lockstep with my beliefs. My credentials are airtight.

When I look at what is happening with cancel culture in broader society today, I can’t help but think of my past. There are enormous similarities. Regardless of the issue, political leaning, or ideology, the same basic things happen. A group identifies a set of pet sins for which to hold another group accountable. Judgment is swift and brutal. Hypocrisy is rampant.

No, judgmentalism is not just limited to the fundamental Baptists or even broader Christianity. It is not a religion thing; it is a people thing. If you have not figured this out yet, you will eventually. (It took me over four decades.)

There is one big difference between the church culture I just described and today’s cancel culture though, and this is where the Christian worldview shines: Christianity has a mechanism for dealing with past transgressions. Embedded within it is a simple but ingenious system of forgiveness and repentance.

Forgiveness is a concept that we take for granted today, and in fact, it is hard to see how a society can survive without it. Yet, it is a relatively new thing, at least in western culture. Just two thousand years ago, it was Jesus that introduced the concept of forgiveness to the world in the way we know it.

You won’t find much in the way of relational forgiveness in Judaism as defined by the Bible’s Old Testament. There are no significant commands to forgive in the original Jewish law; instead, you find a bizarre, revenge-oriented vigilante system.

This notable omission is consistent with all other western religions up until that time. When Jesus discussed forgiveness, it was radical and probably came across as very idealistic. Today, we understand both the idealistic and pragmatic need for forgiveness, but likely, that was not the case then.

In Christianity, forgiveness is only half of the equation. Both sides have a responsibility. Yes, the offended party has the responsibility to forgive. But just as importantly, the transgressing party has the responsibility to repent (fix their thinking and not repeat errors of the past).

The beauty of a system of repentance and forgiveness is that it allows us to move on from the past. Relationships can be restored and people can move forward in acts of service. Society can progress.

Whether this system of forgiveness/repentance actually existed in the subculture I grew up in (or even broader Christianity) is admittedly debatable. I think it sometimes did and sometimes did not. I heard hundreds of sermons directed at people that needed to repent, while sermons directed at those that needed to forgive were scant. The scales were most definitely tipped more toward justice than mercy. But at least, lip service was paid to the idea of forgiveness.

Not so in today’s cancel culture. That culture is fixated on only half that equation–the repentance side. An offending party is severely punished, forced to grovel and search for magical words to prove that he/she is really sorry in order to retain some of their former status/career. I suppose you can sort of call this process a type of repentance.

But the offended parties? They form like packs of rabid dogs on social media, establish themselves as judge and jury, and blithely destroy lives, casting aside the sincerest of apologies as insufficient, and meting out punishment that is often not even remotely proportionate to the alleged offense. They feel no compulsion to forgive, and in fact, seem to find that concept a form of weakness. Even a suggestion that a bit of forgiveness might be in order is likely to put a poor soul next on their cancel list.

Normally, these “offenses” are in the past, sometimes long ago when the culture was very different. Thinkers understand that you have to apply cultural filters before judging people for what they did/said decades ago; however, no one has ever accused cancel culture of being composed of thinkers. They are simpletons, intellectual lightweights more than ready to blindly judge anyone with their own enlightened, modern yardsticks and brand their scarlet letters on the sinner-of-the-day.

If you have not picked up on it already, I have a lot of disdain for cancel culture…

So why is this important?

Here’s why: I mentioned earlier that the words of Jesus on forgiveness came across as idealistic rather than pragmatic. But as it turns out, forgiveness is not just idealistic, at least in the kind of society in which we want to live.

A modern society without forgiveness gums up. Nothing can get done because everyone has past transgressions, and without a mechanism to move beyond past transgressions, no one is qualified to act in a way that moves society forward. No one, no matter how worthy of contribution, can act, because he/she is paralyzed by the past.

Many decades ago, perhaps in anticipation of what she saw coming, Hannah Arendt said it this way:

Without being forgiven – released from the consequences of what we have done – our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to a single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.

Arendt always seemed to be writing for the future, but I wonder if she could have imagined today’s world where a reputation could be permanently destroyed because of a Civil War costume party back in college or a few words spoken decades ago to a friend. She may not have imagined how bad it would get, but her words definitely hit the mark in 2021.*

And that is the danger of cancel culture. A culture without forgiveness is not a good culture; in the long run, it probably will not be a culture at all.

---

*As an aside, Arendt herself had a brief affair with German philosopher Martin Heidegger. While the facts are controversial, it appears that Heidegger was at least somewhat sympathetic to Nazism and was even a member of the Nazi party for a while. By today’s standards, Arendt should be canceled. If, however, you dismiss her writing because of that, it is your loss. Read The Origins of Totalitarianism to learn what she thought of Nazism.

I was in high school when I first heard Descartes’ famous axiom I think, therefore I am. I remember laughing at the absurdity of it.

Of course, the reason I thought it was absurd was because I did not understand it. If I had understood it, I would not have laughed. I might not have agreed (I still don’t agree with it), but I would have appreciated it.

Descartes represented the very beginning of modern philosophy, and he was trying to do something novel for that time. He was intent on finding a way to determine truth solely deduced from absolutes or so-called universals.

“I think, therefore I am” was the anchoring statement that Descartes considered absolute and a launching point for proving many other things, including the existence of God. While he ultimately failed in that quest, he ended up helping to launch the modernist era, which was marked by a long-running war between faith and reason.

Let us do a bit of historical setup. Descartes, a devout Catholic, was heavily influenced by Catholic Scholasticism. Scholasticism was a rigorous coherence-based theological and philosophical system that looked to past writings (primarily the Christian Bible and Aristotle) and ancient traditions for truth propositions and then attempted to deduce further truth propositions from them.

In the 16th century, the Reformation began, partly as a reaction against Scholasticism, as early Protestants pushed for a return to more Augustinian theology. Soon after, Descartes would come on the scene, and while he was not a Reformer, he most certainly was also reacting to Scholasticism in his writing. Like the Reformers and key scientists/mathematicians of the time, he would help drastically change the world by helping to topple Scholasticism, and with it, Catholicism’s chokehold on society and culture. (This was a most welcome development for which we should all be grateful.)

The actual philosophy of Descartes was soon rejected. In fact, many philosophers have since pointed out the problem with Descartes’ anchoring statement. As it turns out, “I think, therefore I am” fails to achieve what Descartes hoped for because it erroneously assumes (rather than proves) a relationship between thinking and existence. This error would lead to a whole system of dubious conclusions about this unproven relationship.

In spite of some significant problems, there is much to appreciate about Descartes, and while his arguments are largely discarded today as invalid, he made a big contribution to modern thought. To explain one reason why that is true, I want to go back to the topic of the last post: coherence.

As you recall, coherence is a way of discerning truth in which statements are compared to an existing body of statements accepted as true. If the new statement is compatible with this body of statements, it is accepted as true. If not, it is discarded as untrue.

Coherence is fatally flawed in that it simply cannot be used to prove any truth. No truth. Ever.

At best, it can provide pragmatic frameworks to live by, and also can be used to predict the future with reasonable certainty. But you cannot get absolute truth from coherence.

In fact, let me go a step further. When you stop to think about it, coherence is nothing more than circular reasoning. One accepts things as true only because of something else that they believe to be true. There is never a connection to something solid outside of what one believes.

If you reduce coherence toward its lowest level, you would come up with this: I believe in X because I believe in Y which agrees with X. If you do a bit of algebra reduction, coherence gets even worse: I believe in X because I believe in X.

Now, let me return to Descartes and Catholic Scholasticism for a moment. Premodernism in general and Scholasticism in particular were dominated by Christian-faith-based coherence. Descartes was going to war against this thinking. Consequently, to this day, he is considered an enemy of Christianity even though he would not have seen himself that way at all.

His approach involved trying to deduce truth solely from absolute proven facts, or as we called it in the last post, CTF (correspondence to fact). His general strategy was to try to prove statements based solely on previously proven statements with the long-term goal of identifying a significant body of proven truth.

That Descartes failed in that task is sobering. That no one since has done any better is even more sobering. As it turns out, real CTF is hard. Quite possibly, it is just impossible in a lot of cases. Maybe all cases…

I am not giving excuses for the rampant coherence thinking we see today. As I am going to get into soon, premodern coherence was vastly superior to today’s wasteland of conspiracy theories and other incredibly undisciplined thinking. I have very little patience for the sloppiness I often hear that passes for thinking.

But I do get what is happening. The more you try to dig into what you believe, the more doubt tends to creep in. Today’s truth crisis is simply the postmodern realization that what is generally accepted as modernist truth is based on presuppositions that cannot be proven true themselves. It was not just Descartes, a key founder of modernism, who would end up failing in this regard. Modernism as a whole was simply not able to ever completely fix the same nagging problems.

At present, CTF and coherence are the only two ways to determine truth that we have. Unfortunately, as we have now seen, both have problems. CTF is concrete but virtually impossible, while coherence is much easier but does not prove anything.

That is the uncomfortable reality that we all face whether we understand it or not. If that sounds bleak, it is because it is bleak.

That is why I am not a dogmatist by nature and why I tend to look at dogmatists very suspiciously. Saying something forcefully does not make it true.

As someone wise said, “those that know all the answers do not even know the questions.” Show me a dogmatic person and I will show you a person who has not spent enough time thinking.

Now, that brings us to the uncomfortable crossroads: do we choose to determine truth by impossible CTF or erratic coherence?

I suspect that most modern thinkers would agree that the only workable answer to this unsolvable problem is some sort of pragmatic coherence-based compromise. I would love to choose a CTF-based compromise but CTF is too rigid for compromise. You are either using CTF or you are not. So, it has to be a coherence compromise.

In other words, we have to choose to base our truth determinations on an unproven foundation. The foundation we choose has to be as solid as possible, understanding that it is not perfect.

As an illustration of what I mean, I recently toured the NYC 911 Memorial. Part of the museum is in the foundation of the Twin Towers. I was fascinated by just how massive that foundation was. Almost every contingency was covered, including an underground seawall to keep the Hudson Bay away from the building.

Granted, that foundation could have been safer. It could have involved even more concrete and even deeper footers. Engineers made pragmatic decisions that balanced safety with cost.

But while the foundation could have been made safer, the reality is that a perfectly safe foundation was impossible. No foundation ever constructed on earth is 100% safe because, in the end, every foundation is ultimately connected to and dependent on something non-foundational (usually dirt). Consequently, there is always a disaster big enough to cause a foundation to fail.

Think of coherence the same way. Coherence can never truly prove anything because no matter how developed its system is, it is inevitably based on something non-foundational and hence unproven.

However, that is not to say that all coherence is created equal. Some coherence systems have a weak foundation, but some have a quite respectable foundation. The latter may not be perfect, but they still are pragmatically functional. A society can survive with such systems.

That brings me to a simple maxim: if CTF is not possible and coherence is our only viable way to determine truth, we have an obligation to pick our coherence systems carefully.

Because this post is already long, I am going to stop here. In a future post, I am going to discuss just how we go about identifying and choosing the best coherence systems. This is a pragmatic exercise in that we will be looking for systems that work rather than ones that we can guarantee are truthful. As I have already discussed, guaranteed truthfulness is not a legitimate possibility.

The world is composed of objects (physical and non-physical).

Descriptors of those objects and the relationships between them are called facts.

Examples: That Greg is male and Katelyn is female are facts about objects. That Greg is the father of Katelyn is a fact about a relationship between objects.

In a nutshell, that is your world. It is a collection of objects and facts about 1) objects and 2) the relationships between objects.

Facts are neither true nor untrue. They just are. It is not correct to use the phrase “true fact.” That is redundant, or to put it more accurately, “true” is not an appropriate descriptor for a fact.

There are zero untrue facts and zero un-facts in the world. Only facts.

On the other hand, statements about facts can be either true or untrue. Perceptions of facts can be either true or untrue as well.

We are all purveyors of statements, in that we are both constantly giving and receiving them. However, we are not all purveyors of truth.

From both a moral and pragmatic standpoint, we are obligated to weigh the truth of the statements we dispense and absorb.

The same is true of perceptions of facts. As Descartes famously pointed out, our perceptions are not necessarily reliable.

How do we know if a statement or perception is true? The best way is simply to see if it corresponds to a fact. If it does, it is true.

That is what is meant by the oft-used phrase “factually correct.” A factually correct statement is true because it corresponds to one or more facts.

In this article, I am going to refer to this way of discerning truth as CTF (correspondence to fact).

For centuries, rigorous thinkers have adopted CTF as the best way to define truth.

There is, however, another way that is commonly used to examine the truthfulness of a statement/perception. It is called coherence.

When using coherence to examine the truthfulness of a statement, the statement is compared to the examiner’s body of knowledge and view of the world. If it is compatible without contradiction, it is accepted as truth.

Most people tend to judge truthfulness by coherence rather than CTF even though that method is often fatally flawed. We will go into why that happens in a second, but it is not a good thing.

Let me give you an example of coherence in action. Over the years, I have had a business that sold certain health products. And many times, I have heard conversations with customers that go sort of like this:

I love product X. I had pneumonia and was in the hospital last month. My doctor told me that I was lucky to survive. And I know that product X is why I got better. I would never have gotten out of that hospital without it.

Take a minute and evaluate these statements. Is the speaker using CTF or coherence to determine truth? (Whether the statements are actually true or not is irrelevant to this exercise.)

You should come to the conclusion that the first three sentences represent CTF while the last two represent coherence. Not coincidentally, those last two sentences are where things go off the rails. This is clearly a situation where worldview (rather than facts) is heavily influencing how the speaker determines truth.

As an aside, one wonders how the person might respond if you asked them why they ended up with pneumonia in the first place if product X is so good. I have often wanted to ask that kind of question but always resisted.

I think you get the point. The use of coherence in this example actually attempts to bend truth to fit a viewpoint. The corresponding facts are non-existent and have been neatly replaced by a viewpoint (the superiority of alternative medicine).

While an extreme example, this kind of thinking is prevalent. It is sloppy and erratic and often makes smart people sound stupid, but you see it everywhere.

Before I get more into the coherence trap, it is important to mention that coherence is useful and has its place. While not ideal, but it is often perfectly acceptable because CTF is not always viable. Here are three major reasons why:

1. It is simply not practical or possible to examine the correlation between every single statement/perception and the associated facts.
2. Some questions are unknowable from a CTF perspective.
3. CTF by itself is inadequate for inductive reasoning (predicting the future).

As an example of the first reason, I believe that my employees are working as normal in my warehouse this morning even though I have not left the house to verify this belief. I am basing that belief on a set of assumptions that I trust because of how I view the world. To start, I assume I would have been notified if something was wrong at the warehouse this morning. Thus, my belief is not based on CTF but rather coherence.

My choice to choose to use coherence here is for practical reasons. (I have other things to do at home.)

As an example of the second reason, consider unknowable questions such as the nature of an afterlife. It is impossible to use CTF in such cases, which is where religions and similar structures come into play. Every religion is built on some form of special revelation about unknowable questions. Followers choose to adopt that worldview and then compare other statements against that worldview to determine their accuracy.

That every religious worldview is unverifiable at best and completely false at worst is not the point. People pragmatically choose to adopt such worldviews because they need to at least have a perception of an anchor to reality, and they need to know the unknowable. It turns out that people are not very happy with not knowing, even when knowledge is not possible. And once that foundation is in place, it gives them something to measure other statements against with coherence.

From purely an epistemological perspective, when considering that unknowable questions really are unknowable, adopting a worldview based on religion is probably no worse than a pragmatic choice, and using coherence based on a religious worldview is not necessarily a bad thing. (Many would disagree with me on that point, and for sure, a lot of harm has been done because of religious-based coherence.).

For the time being, I am going to skip an example of the third reason (inductive reasoning) because it is technical and will make this article too long. We will get back to inductive reasoning at some point down the road. For the moment, I will just say that our world would look drastically different if we did not use coherence to predict the future (even the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow).

Now, I want to talk about the dangers of coherence. I just gave three reasons why coherence is acceptable, though let me throw in the caveat that those three reasons can be (and often are) abused. I am not going to complain about those applications of coherence if used legitimately though.

However, where coherence gets dangerous and people start sounding stupid is when they allow a worldview to strengthen to the point where it overwhelms and replaces CTF. In other words, their worldview becomes more important to them than facts.

Rather than facts themselves being the yardstick against which to measure statements for truthfulness, one’s worldview becomes the yardstick.

As a rather obvious example, we are seeing this play out today with conspiracy theories. Because they flagrantly disregard facts, conspiracy theories can only survive when worldviews become more important than facts.

If you are like me, you are somewhat alarmed these days by people that you know to be smart but yet suddenly sound like idiots, spouting false statements and conspiracy theories with conviction. It is important to realize that those people are not idiots; they just have a gigantic flaw in their epistemology. They are in the coherence trap. Recognizing that does not make me feel enormously better, but maybe a bit better.

Here are three big risk factors for the coherence trap:

Getting old
Growing up, I was taught that older people are wise. As it turns out, the percentage of the elderly that are really wise is rather low. Because older people have had more time to develop a worldview, they are more susceptible to letting coherence to that worldview override CTF. The more developed the worldview, the greater the danger.

As you grow older, you will find that this fatal attraction with worldview will get stronger. We all eventually have to face a decision as we become mature adults: are we going to know everything or are we going to be able to identify what we don’t know and hold our theories loosely?

You cannot control your age, but you can do everything possible to avoid the coherence trap as you age.

A too-small world
Growing a dominant worldview is easy when your world is small and you do not know what you do not know. It is easy to know everything when there is not much to know.

If you enlarge your world, you will find it much harder to rely on coherence. In short, travel as widely as you can, read as widely as you can, experience as much as you can, and have a diverse set of friends.

The siloed echo chamber
Since I started this blog, I have been meandering toward a discussion of how social media and other internet forces have created a very dangerous situation where one can find friends, “facts,” and evidence to support any worldview. (I am using the word “facts” here even though those facts are often not facts at all. They are simply false statements about facts.)

Especially in a digital world, it is easy to enter a silo where one believes that their worldview is the only legitimate one and an acceptable replacement yardstick for facts.

It is very obvious that the longer you exist in such an echo chamber, the harder it is to differentiate between worldview and facts. Views get more and more and extreme, and dogmatism increases exponentially. If you look around, you see this phenomenon claiming people around you. It is not pretty and is not easy to escape.

Many people should reevaluate their social media, the sources they read, the entertainment they consume (such as cable news entertainment), and the friends they talk to. In a lot of cases, these things should just be pruned out of our lives. I will talk later on about how people are manipulated online toward silo thinking.

The first two dangers are common enough, but the third has become more prevalent in the last decade. We all have to be careful. If you think I am writing this warning about coherence to someone besides you, you are wrong. You already fall into the trap; I do too.

So how do you deal with those people who suddenly sound like idiots? Frankly, you probably cannot do much. I personally disengage as soon as possible to protect myself. The surest way to become that way yourself is getting in the mud and arguing with them. Only in my weakest moments do I react to untrue statements from people blinded by coherence. And every time I do, I regret it.

Arguing really is a waste of time. Let them be, keep things peaceful, and focus on fixing/protecting yourself from the same problem.

This post was a bit of a detour from my epistemology series but is sort of related. I will get back to normal in the next post.

If you have not read the first two articles of this series, I encourage you to. They are introductory to some of the concepts I am going to discuss here.

The Foundation: The Question of Universal Truth
The Band-aid: How Humans Survive Without Knowing

As a brief refresher, remember that Western epistemology falls into roughly three time periods/categories: premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism.

In premodernist espistemology, truth is objective and obtained from sources that are typically supernatural and Christian-influenced.

Modernism introduced the idea that truth can be ascertained by rationalism and science, and one should rely on experts in various disciplines to determine truth.

Postmodernism rejects objective truth in religion and also asserts that experts cannot be trusted (making all opinions relatively equal). The keystone belief of postmodernism is that truth may be relative to a culture. In postmodernism, various truths can coexist, and no truth is necessarily superior to others.

So where are we now? That is the question of the hour, and it is an important question. As I am writing, we are on the eve of the 2020 Presidential inauguration. It is a time where multiple perceptions of truth are clashing in a violent way, and our culture is highly stressed, if not on the verge of collapse.

There are two important questions I want to discuss:

1. Is this dark time just temporary or are we at a point where no recovery is possible and a spiral into destruction is inevitable?
2. Is what we are seeing simply postmodernism or have we graduated to something worse than postmodernism?

Remember that Western civilization has cycled through many, many cycles of violence and peace. Even in the United States, we have seen many such cycles. Violent protests are nothing new, and by historical standards, today’s violence is not even extreme. Even when you throw out all the wars including the Civil War, today’s violence is not extreme. For example, here is a brief history of labor disputes in the United States.

When in a troubled time, it is easy to get pessimistic and assume that the current situation is permanent and fatal to our society, but thankfully, it never has been. We have always recovered. Sometimes there has been a lot of pain, but we have always recovered.

I suspect we will recover this time as well. On the other hand, I suspect we are only at the beginning of this trouble, and only at the beginning of the pain. I actually think things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better, and I think we as a culture are going to come out very different on the other end.

To explain why I come to that conclusion for the first question, I want to talk about the second question. There are a lot of thinkers right now thinking about that second question.

Let us consider what seems to have changed.

The fact that people have different perspectives and worldviews is nothing new of course. Our country has had battles over ideas since its founding. In fact, our battles have always been pretty much about the same things: individualism vs pluralism, freedom vs security, populism vs elitism, and big government vs small government. Sometimes, those fights have been intense, but they are also healthy. There are two valid sides to all of those arguments.

However, what we see today is different in a very important way. Before I get into that, let me define a few concepts that I am going to borrow from philosopher Bertrand Russell. This is going to get a bit tedious and technical, but it is necessary to set up future discussions.

Russell differentiates between two different kinds of knowledge:

• Knowledge of things: the knowledge of objects that exist outside ourselves. We get knowledge of things either by personal acquaintance with those things OR by descriptions of those things that include objects with which we are acquainted.*
• Knowledge of truths: value judgments, convictions, and opinions that exist within ourselves.

Until recently, most of the fighting in the United States has been over the second category. We fight over ideas, but typically, we do not fight over facts and evidence of facts. To put it in Russell’s terms, our society has generally agreed on the knowledge of things but not the knowledge of truths.

Here is what that looks like:

Now, over the past few years, we have seen a big shift. Fairly suddenly, we no longer have consensus on the knowledge of things. While our differences used to be only in the realm of knowledge of truths, now we cannot even agree on facts or the evidence of facts. In other words, here is where we are today:

I am reminded of a quote: You have the right to have your own opinion but you don’t have the right to have your own facts.

I have heard that quote my entire life, but it no longer applies in 2020. It is more of a 1990s thing.

That in a nutshell is what is new and quite possibly a fatal problem for the society that we currently know. While it quite clear that a society can survive disagreement in the knowledge of truths, it is somewhat doubtful that it can survive an inability to agree in the realm of the knowledge of things.**

This is what has so many concerned. What we see today feels new, because while postmodernism has always accepted the possibility for relativity in the knowledge of things, it has been more focused on the knowledge of truths. To put it another way, postmodernism has generally not challenged underlying data, but rather focused its concern on the interpretation of data.

This relatively sudden shift in the battleground for truth is why you may have started hearing new terms being used to describe current epistemology. The two most prevalent ones I hear are post-truth and post-postmodernism.

So have we really exited postmodernism for something more sinister? I don’t know for sure, and I am not sure it matters what we call the current state of affairs. However, at the very least, we are in a dark place where postmodernism is off the rails, mostly untempered by pragmatic influences that historically balance it out and allow us to function as a society.

As I wrote in an earlier article, it is impossible for a person to function as a true postmodernist. A level of pragmatism is necessary just to get out of bed in the morning. Similarly, pragmatism is needed in a society in that people have to choose to generally agree on facts and evidence even when that truth is hard to ascertain.

Without that pragmatic choice to find agreement on knowledge of things, I am not sure how the society can agree on much of anything. It is simply impossible to find common ground on the knowledge of truths when there is no agreement on the underlying knowledge of things. If you have tried to argue with people that disagree with you lately, you have probably seen that futility. You probably felt like you lived in a different world than them. Their facts were different than your facts.

Sadly, not only is pragmatism in short supply these days, but there are forces working overtime to make things worse. Technology to postmodernism is like gas on a fire. In particular, social media and entertainment news are wreaking havoc. I am going to discuss these two things in detail in due time.

That being said, things are a bit more complicated than I portrayed them in the charts above. As it turns out, it is not so easy to disentangle the knowledge of truths from the knowledge of things. That has become a big problem that has been exploited remarkably well by bad actors. In the next article, I want to start talking about how the attacks are happening and why suddenly, facts and evidence of facts are under siege.

---

* It is not relevant to this article to know about the difference between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. However, in future articles, this distinction becomes very important. If you are curious and want to get ahead of where I currently am, here is a brief summary.

Let us use the example of a kitchen table. You almost certainly have knowledge of a particular table by acquaintance because you have personally experienced the table. You are personally acquainted with the table through sense data your body has collected about the table.

On the other hand, you probably have no experience with the table in the personal residence of the queen of England. However, even though you have no acquaintance of that table, you can still have knowledge by description of that table because a description can be provided to you using terms of which you are personally acquainted. For example, if someone tells you that the queen’s table is large, black, round, and six-legged, you can have knowledge of the table because you have personal acquaintance with the concepts of “large, black, round, six, and legs.”

The key takeaway is this. You can only know a fact if you have personal experience/acquaintance with the fact OR you have a description of the fact that only contains terms with which you have experience/acquaintance.

** Obviously, an inability to agree on the knowledge of things is not entirely new. People have always struggled to determine the truth at the factual level. Even when access to facts is readily available (and it often is not), perspective and bias have always made truth gathering hard. However, due to certain forces in society, this problem is getting much worse.

If you did not read my first article in this series, I encourage you to. You can find it here.

In that article, I discussed the difficulty of knowing things, and I developed the idea that there is a difference between an object and a perception of an object.

Side note: While the distinction between objects and the perception of objects is logical, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that there are other theories about reality (such as idealism). Over time, I will cover some of them but for right now, I am going to stick with this paradigm.

By the end of that last post, we were in a fairly bleak place. If you are a modernist, you may believe that objects are universal, but see all perceptions of objects as relative and thus unreliable. If you are a postmodernist, it is even worse. You may see both the perception of objects and the objects themselves as relative and unreliable.

If you live in this world of unknowing, there is an uncomfortable question you have to answer: how do you get out of bed in the morning?

In other words, when you swing your legs out of bed, how do you know there is going to be a floor under your feet? Why would you assume such a thing? Even the fact that you perceived a floor yesterday is irrelevant. What evidence do you have that your perception will not let you down today?

Obviously, no one lives that way. We all have to put trust in our perception of reality. Even David Hume, perhaps the most famous proponent of this kind of thinking, chose to live in opposition to what he claimed to believe. He actually admitted to that hypocrisy later in life.

This inconsistency between belief and practice is unavoidable if you accept the proposition that either perception of an object or the underlying object may be relative and untrustworthy. We can tout relativism all we want, but we cannot live that way. We have to have a band-aid.

That band-aid is sometimes called pragmatism.

Pragmatism has different meanings, but in a philosophical context, it simply means living in a way that you hope produces the best outcome. It acknowledges that 1) we may not know things for sure but 2) we often have to live as though we know things for sure nonetheless.

Or to put it another way, it is choosing to make unproven assumptions because you have no real choice. Living requires such assumptions. In our getting-out-of-bed example, pragmatism is what gets a relativist out of bed. Relativists choose to believe the floor is there and live as if the floor is there even if they cannot say for sure that the floor is there.

If you show me a postmodernist, I will show you a pragmatist. But if you consider yourself premodernist or modernist, do not turn up your nose at pragmatism, because you are almost certainly a pragmatist too. I am pretty sure that we are all pragmatists whether we want to admit it or not.

What I am about to say is something I have never heard anyone say and is probably controversial, but the best examples of pragmatism I know of exist in two major systems for understanding reality: science and religion.

Let me give another premise before I dive into this a bit. When you go back to our paradigm of objects and perception of objects, religion is a pragmatic solution for the uncertainty of objects in themselves while science generally provides pragmatic solutions for the uncertainty of the perception of objects.

Let us consider each for a bit.

The pragmatic nature of science

I am a huge fan of science, and we all are its beneficiaries in unmeasurable ways. I am typing this during the coronavirus pandemic, and just this month, multiple companies announced successful vaccines after only a few months of development.

However, science has a few problems. First of all, it is primarily based on observation, or in other words, the perception of objects. In spite of all scientists know about the observation of objects, they still cannot answer the deep metaphysical questions about the nature of the objects themselves.

Read that last sentence again. Science at best can provide laws about the perception of reality but not reality itself. Science can tell you how a table operates in the world we perceive but it knows nothing about the world in itself. For example, it cannot answer the question as to whether the world in itself exists in a physical way or simply in our imagination.

That makes science subservient to philosophy. Furthermore, because such questions about the nature of reality will always be unanswerable, science will always be in that subservient position.

Second, science starts with inductive reasoning, which is the process of observation and then trying to work backward towards scientific laws. In other words, if you drop a stone and it falls to the ground over and over, you begin to develop the law of gravity.

There is a problem however with inductive reasoning: it cannot lead to universal truth.

Here is a simple example to illustrate why that is true: let us say you have a bag that contains one hundred marbles and you ask someone to pull out the marbles one at a time and record the color. The first marble is white as is the second marble. In fact, 98 marbles are pulled out of the bag and each one is white.

So what color will the last two marbles be?

You might be tempted to say they will be white because every other marble has been white. You would be wrong however. A scientist can only say that there is a high likelihood that the last two marbles will be white. Even if there were a million marbles in the bag and the first 999,999 came out white, a scientist cannot say for sure what the color of the last marble will be.

That is the huge deficiency of inductive reasoning, and it is also a key reason why science works well in the realm of perception but not so well in the realm of objects of perception. While we can get hints about the nature of such an object, the truth of the object is always slightly hidden. To take the example of the marble, we may be able to say that there is a 99.9999% chance that the next marble out of the bag must be white but science can never guarantee us 100%.

So, for these two reasons, science fails to provide much in the way of universal truth. What science can do is develop highly-probable laws that can provide a way to live in a world of perception. In other words, science is pragmatic in nature.

The pragmatic nature of religion

I am religious, but on this blog, I choose to intentionally step back and look at religion critically and from a secular viewpoint. Some may find this uncomfortable and if that is you, I apologize in advance.

While science uses inductive reasoning, theology uses deductive reasoning. With deductive reasoning, you start with universal truth and develop conclusions from those premises. While this sounds promising, there is a big problem: you have to make assumptions about what universal truth is. There is simply no way around the reality that theological universals cannot be proven.

Let us consider an example. If you ask Christians if they know what will happen to them after death, they will likely say that they are going to heaven. If you ask them if they know that for sure, they will say yes. They will likely be very dogmatic that they know for sure.

Actually, they know no such thing for sure. In fact, they are using the word “know” in a different way than we are discussing here. When religious people say that they know things about God and the eternal, what they are really referring to is a faith paradigm. They are really saying that they are choosing to believe something that they cannot know.

This decision to believe something that cannot be proven and live according to that belief is foundational to religion, and I see no reason for a religious person to feel ashamed of that kind of pragmatism. In fact, in the Bible, Hebrews 11:13-16 acknowledges the pragmatic nature of such faith in a positive way.

¹³ All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. ¹⁴ People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. ¹⁵ If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. ¹⁶ Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. (NIV)

That being said, it is intellectually honest to note the deficiency of religion. Religion provides universal answers, but does so outside of logic, science, or any other rationalistic systems that we generally look to for proof (or at least strong evidence). Faith is the key ingredient of religion that helps create a successful pragmatic framework for living in an uncertain world. The problem with faith is it cannot prove universal truth any more than science can.

Throughout the history of humanity, we have looked primarily to religion and science for universal truth. As I have demonstrated, both can work in a pragmatic way but both have inherent flaws. That is why I argue that all of us (not just postmodernists) are pragmatists. Neither the deductive reasoning of religion nor the inductive reasoning of science can provide universal truth.

With this background behind us, I want to get into some modern applications in coming weeks.