IQ & Atheism

[Paul Mackin]

Goldstein's arguing is far too complex for my tired old brain to follow with 
any degree of completeness. She relies a lot on logic (a field I believe she 
holds advanced degrees in) for example in the argument from efficient 
cause--everything having a cause, yet with  one exception. Or she will bring 
in advanced knowledge such as evolutionary theory that the ancients and 
Thomas had no access to.  The really weird thing about this novel is that 
all this argumentation is tacked on at the end after the narration is 
finished.  The novel seems to be a satire on the current popularity of the 
so called god-question a la Dawkins and Hitchings.  The protagonist writes a 
best seller on that subject. The appendix to his book contains the formal 
arguments.  The formal proofs or rather disproofs are of course also 
satiric, because in the ultimate scheme of things, logic and high IQs and 
advanced learning have little of no bearing on what people are going to 
believe or not believe.   The thing I learned most about in reading this 
book was culture and mores of the Hasidim of Brooklyn and a community they 
have in upstate New York.  An additional interesting thing is that ultra 
cerebral Goldstein herself has an ultra conservative Jewish background.

I guess I would recommend the novel as a curiosity.

P

--------------------------------------------------
From: "alice wellintown" <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 27, 2010 11:25 PM
To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Re: IQ & Atheism

> 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.
>>