IQ & Atheism

[alice wellintown]

Well, my remembrancer may be in need of a tune-up or something but I
think that you've got that twisted about. In any event, a poor phrase,
mine, here ---that Thomas favored Plato's world. It's not quite what I
menat to say. Try yto avoid Kant and we should get this fixed ;-)


>> 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.
>>>>>
>>>
>