We’ve been living in the lengthening shadow of postmodernism, relativism, subjectivism, and standpoint epistemology since at least the eighties, when I came of age. For the less philosophically inclined, I call it “mytruthism”. Transgenderism is the apotheosis of this spirit. Today I ran across a new term to add to the litany: “cognitive autonomy”. In response to a clever riposte by J.K. Rowling, X poster @zoverions makes the following case.
Some things are this, and others are that. Some things are not like the others. We learn this. We know this. We depend upon our ability to discriminate between this and that. In a chaotic world, all is undefined and undifferentiated. Skeptics, subjectivists, and other agents of chaos are wont to undo that fundamental childhood skill of discriminating between spheres and triangles, lions and tigers, and boys and girls. If we are able to measure and cut reality along its seams, the skeptic’s epistemological pessimism is defeated. The subjectivist’s world-making is constrained. Today, for those who want to transcend our innate sexes, fuzzying the lines between male and female is the order of the day. The strategy goes like this. Instead of working from clear cases to understanding edge cases, the chaos agent argues from edge cases to deny there is any order or categories at all. Science News offers a typical example: “Biological Sex Is Not as Simple as Male or Female”. Surveying a variety of developmental sexual disorders and anomalies, Nathan Lents provides the conclusion: “These are not hard categories with clear definitions.”
In a very provocative and dense TEDx talk, Rupert Sheldrake posits ten core tenets of current, “materialistic” science, and suggests they should be questioned. The subversive ideas in the talk were so upsetting that power brokers and repeat offenders PZ Meyers and Jerry Coyne organized an effort to pressure TED to censor the talk. The ensuing discussion on how to differentiate between science and pseudoscience is worth following. Two follow-up interviews are equally interesting, with Alex Tsakiris on Skeptico and at The Best Schools. Sheldrake’s most recent work is Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery. Sheldrake propounds a thesis he has dubbed “morphic resonance”, which has a distinct paranormal tint. Dissenters to current scientific orthodoxy often claim that science has devolved into an orthodoxy, a core set of fundamental belief which, to question, is heresy. This episode would seem to reflect that. Science and skepticism should be regarded, rather, as processes, as methods of inquiry, not as sets of beliefs, as they so often are by those who claim them as a label. Whatever the merits of Sheldrake’s particular ideas, that materialistic scientism is the reigning orthodoxy is clear. (Censored video after the jump.)
Reasonable Faith has released a very well crafted “infovideo” (as I’m choosing to call these video infographics) illustrating William Lane Craig’s moral argument for the existence of God. An excerpt: “Without some objective reference point, we have no way of saying that something is really up or down. God’s nature provides an objective reference point for moral values – it’s the standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. But if there’s no God, there’s no objective reference point. All we’re left with is one person’s viewpoint – which is no more valid than any one else’s viewpoint. ¶ This kind of morality is subjective, not objective. It’s like a preference for strawberry ice cream – the preference is in the subject, not the object. So it doesn’t apply to other people. In the same way, subjective morality applies only to the subject; it’s not valid or binding for anyone else.” (Video is after the jump.)
In a four part series, Francis Beckwith addresses the primary arguments offered on behalf of legal abortion: “The pro-life position is subject to somewhat varying formulations. The most widely accepted and representative of these can be defined in the following way: The unborn entity is fully human from the moment of conception. Abortion (narrowly defined) results in the intentional death of the unborn entity. Therefore, abortion entails the intentional killing of a human being. This killing is in most cases unjustified, since the unborn human being has a full right to life. If, however, there is a high probability that a woman’s pregnancy will result in her death (as in the case of a tubal pregnancy, for example), then abortion is justified. For it is a greater good that one human should live (the mother) rather than two die (the mother and her child). Or, to put it another way, in such cases the intent is not to kill the unborn (though that is an unfortunate effect) but to save the life of the mother. With the exception of such cases, abortion is an act in which an innocent human being is intentionally killed; therefore, abortion should be made illegal, as are all other such acts of killing. This is the pro-life position I will be defending in this series.” Parts: “The Appeal to Pity“, “Arguments from Pity, Tolerance, and Ad Hominem“, “Is The Unborn Human Less Than Human?“, and “When Does a Human Become a Person?“.
In “I Am Not Charlie Hebdo“, David Brooks challenges us to live up to our self-proclaimed commitment to freedom of speech: “The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down. ¶ Public reaction to the attack in Paris has revealed that there are a lot of people who are quick to lionize those who offend the views of Islamist terrorists in France but who are a lot less tolerant toward those who offend their own views at home.”
Gregory Alan Thornbury relates the crucial role for his faith of a responsible Christian thinker: [Carl F. H.] Henry helped secure my faith because he was doing more than responding tit-for-tat to higher critics of the Bible’s historical reliability. Henry did that, but he went one step further: He brought philosophical gravitas … His focus was broad. He addressed epistemology — how we can know the truth, which was my primary concern as an undergraduate philosophy student. I had come within a whisker of losing my faith. But because Henry was a philosopher defending biblical authority, I rallied. ¶ I had come within a whisker of losing my faith. But because Henry was a philosopher defending biblical authority, I rallied. ¶ Humanly speaking, had it not been for … the theologian with a titanic brain and a journalist’s pen, I could have gone the other way. Henry showed me how to be both a scholar and a follower of Jesus. From that moment in my undergraduate days, I covenanted with God to help people like the 18-year-old version of myself — people who are on the boundary of leaving the church, and are looking for just one good reason to stay.
Samuel Goldman writes: “Rod Dreher has summarized the “Benedict Option” as “communal withdrawal from the mainstream, for the sake of sheltering one’s faith and family from corrosive modernity and cultivating a more traditional way of life.” And small but vibrant communities around the country are already putting the Benedict Option into practice. Without being rigorously separatist, these communities do aim to be separate. Some merely avoid morally subversive cultural influences, while others seek physical distance from mainstream society in rural isolation. ¶ But a neo-Benedictine way of life involves risks. Communal withdrawal can construct a barrier against the worst facets of modern life — the intertwined commodification of personal relationships, loss of meaningful work to bureaucratic management, and pornographic popular culture — yet it can also lead to isolation from the stimulating opposition that all traditions need to avoid stagnation.”
Rod Dreher writes: “The decadence represented by Charlie Hebdo is probably a greater threat to Western civilization than anything the Islamists can dream up, and it’s important to keep that straight even as we defend the right to free expression and a free press. It destroys everything for the sake of … what, exactly? Charlie Hebdo was straightforward about its far-left agenda of driving all religion out of society. Houellebecq, who is not a religious believer, asks: what are people supposed to live by, then? Man cannot thrive without religion, he believes — and he believes this as a matter of sociology, not theology. … I don’t know what’s coming. Nobody wants to live under hard Islamism. The Islamists have nowhere built a society capable of thriving. But at the same time, the society the West has built and is building without God or any kind of sacred values other than the Self cannot be said to be thriving either. … We are morally compelled to defend artists and journalists against those who would kill them for what they draw or say. But we should be clear that we are defending one culture of death from another one.”