IQ & Atheism

[Paul Mackin]

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From: "alice wellintown" <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2010 1:10 PM
To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Re: IQ & Atheism

> For Aristotle some subject matters do not permit much clarity.
> Moreover, the same precision is not sought  in all discussions or in
> all disciplines, any more than the same precision is sought in the
> crafts. So we don't look for as much precision in chainsaw sculpture
> as we do in watch making. Political Science or Law may investigate
> just action, but will allow for a variety and fluctuation of opinion.
> The Law and Political systems are thought to exist in convention and
> not by Nature. Even Goods, like Courage and Wealth, are not fixed by
> Nature; Goods may cause men great harm. A man may lose is life because
> of his wealth or his courage.
>
> But what of God(s)? Should educated men believe in God(s)? Reject
> God(s)? Clearly God is not a subject matter that permits much clarity
> or precision. Moreover, "It is the mark of an educated man to look for
> precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the
> subject matter admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept
> probable reasoning from a mathematicians and to demand from a
> rhetorician scientific proof." So why aren't most academics with high
> IQ scores agnostic?
>
> What Thomas did, in short, is accept Aristotle but for his existenial
> world; he favored  Plato's because it kinda came with the territory.
>.

However my recollection is that Thomas was quite Aristotelian when it came 
to existence, holding that existence is not part of a thing's nature or 
essence.  Thus Thomas did not include Anselm's existential proof among the 
five he considered valid.  Following medieval chronology, Goldstein chooses 
the existential proof as the first to be refuted.

Most of Goldstein's 36 are modern arguments (nor are the medieval argument 
necessarily in quite the same form as St. Thomas set them down).  At one 
point in discussing the argument from mathematical reality she gets into the 
underlying question of whether mathematics is man made (developed through 
human evolution) or somehow implicit in the universe.

One gets the feeling this author knows about everything there is to know on 
the subject.

P



P.
>
> On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 12:11 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> 
> wrote:
>> 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.
>>>>
>>