IQ & Atheism

[alice wellintown]

Sounds like fun. Taking on Thomas, is like taking on Aristotle, two
powerful and influential thinkers;  both steer a course between a
Platonic and Democritian paradigm. Not read the novel, but I wonder if
Goldstein's or her protagonist's  "rejection" of  Thomas is really a
rejection. Does she quite understand Thomas?  Today we read all
"rejections" of Aristotle's Biology or Physics or slavery or Law or
Drama. Easy enough. Same goes for Thomas and his endeavors. But to
reject these philosophers,  on any one issue or idea such as the
existence of God seems entirely beside the point. Of course we can
reject Aristotle's view of how frogs spontaneously generate or his
idea that some men are born to be slaves. But to reject his or
Thomas's way of looking at the world, in its many disciplines,
Geometry, Physics, Biology, Law, and so on, and in the  theoretical,
practical, poetic is another matter.  Can we reject Maimonides? Maybe.
But the kind of "rejection" proffered by a fiction is, by design, not
a philosophical one. It's kinda like MalignD's rejection of religion.
Who cares about what is so obviously the case? Only a bellows full of
angry wind. Since God is dead, perhaps it makes a little more sense to
reject Aristotle or Thomas on the existence of Man. To do so, we would
need to reject the post-modern approach; we wold need to reject the
idea of rejecting Aristotle or Thomas. Both reject the personal so we
can not reject them as they have rejected themselves. Man, we learn
from Aristotle and Thomas, can be studied as a shape (mathematics), as
an animal (Biology), as substance (metaphysics), as citizen
(politics), as persuasive or persuadable (rhetoric), as subject to
illness and as curable (medicine), as agent (ethics), as imitable and
imitator (poetics), as fabricator (technic). We, not Aristotle or
Thomas  can study Man in these various disciplines. There are no
proofs in Nature. We can argue, within a discipline, and arrive at a
conclusion that, while it will never reflect or mirror Nature, may be
true of Nature. The same with God.
The novelist best equipped to "reject" Aristotle and Thomas is Joyce.
Joyce had an advantage; he was raised by Jesuits.

Pynchon is nearly Joyce's opposite in this respect. He steers his
flying prose up into the Platonic heavens only to plunge it straight
into the Democritian earth. Discipline? What's that?


On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 1:43 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
> Anyone but me read 36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca
> Goldstein?
>
>
> Though it's kind of a cutoff, unresolved, novel, Goldstein is a fine writer.
>
> She, or rather her protagonist, rejects all 36, including Thomas Aquinas'
> five.
>
> P.
>