Why We Need a Renaissance of Medieval (and Ancient) Logic

Imagine you are doing some research and you decide to use the flawed, but sometimes helpful tool called the Internet. You are searching for popular and scholarly articles on Intelligent Design and come across the following title, "Is Intelligent Design a Bad Scientific Theory or a Non-Scientific Theory?"

If you have had even Logic 101 you immediately recognize the fallacy committed. It is indeed the oldie but still frequently deceptive--either/or fallacy. Suppose I were to ask the author of this article, "are you stupid or just unintelligent?" you get a sense of how problematic the either/or fallacy can be. He would certainly feel offended at the words I used and his narrow options of self description.

What would you think if you saw the title, "Evolution: A Theory for Retards or Darwin's Greatest Fiction" or maybe an article with the title, "Evolution: Faith of the Atheist or Idiocy of the Mindless". These titles would certainly betray a bias and would be manifestations of the either/or fallacy.

Some may wonder why it is a fallacy and not just an astute title. Look at the title again--Is Intelligent Design a Bad Scientific Theory or a Non-Scientific Theory? Now consider all the missing options. Fill in the blanks below with several possibilities--Is Intelligent Design _______ or a _____________? How about--Is Intelligent Design True Scientific Thinking or The Long Needed Scientific Revolution? Or maybe--Is Intelligent Design Merely True Science or the Truest Science?

If you want to read the entire article and find the logical fallacies for yourself (I counted eighteen before I lost interest and this does not include the rhetorical acrobats the author demonstrated) read the entire piece.

Please, so you don't lose your mind in a mindless age, study your formal logic.

Do the liberal arts pay?

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/departments/elearning/?article=liberalarts

Here is a website article that advocates the value of studying the liberal arts. Perhaps our (we three professors - RMW, JJ, and MRY) citation of an article from the web will carry more weight than our enthusiastic, exuberant, insider-biased, over-the-top voices can muster.

What we are espousing folks is the highest form of education, that is sophia over against techne, wisdom over against skills or technique (see Aristotle's distinction of these two types of knoweldge in his Nicomachean Ethics). While some skills are eminently valuable, we are calling upon students to reach higher (deeper?) toward wisdom; a wisdom that certainly relies upon certain skills but also transcends technique. So we do not disparage techne we want something more for you!

Debunking the Pilgrims

Some malcontent has decided to rain on everyone's Thanksgiving parade by exposing THE TRUTH about the Pilgrims. Among the horrors that are revealed are that the Pilgrims believed the Indian depopulation of the area preceding their arrival was providential and that the Pilgrims insisted on church membership as a prerequisite for a seat on the General Court that governed the colony.

The scales have fallen from my eyes! I repent of ever having had the slightest shred of respect for these people. From now on, I will condemn anyone having the nerve to celebrate Thanksgiving who has not first ritually secularized the holiday and denounced the Pilgrims as evil, genocidal maniacs. Singing a hymn to nature on behalf of the Indian victims could even make the celebration a virtuous act.

Oh, and apparently the transatlantic crossing took eighteen years, since we're told that the Pilgrims boarded the Mayflower in 1602 and arrived in America in 1620. That's some voyage!

A Loss of Some Good Company...

Until the Kingdom offers a "Divine Poetics" those of us working in the literary trenches can still borrow from Egypt.

One of the truly great literary critics of this generation passed away last month. I know he's great for at least two reasons (1) His work, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction has been established as one of the truly important works of literary theory of the past thirty years
(2) A friend of mine (a prof. of Lit Crit and great admirer of Reader Response and Marxist Criticism) once in my presence, referred to Booth as "the fundamentalist" of literary theorists--in light of modern literary, this was high praise in my view!

In honor of his life and contribution one should read his obituary and his The Company We Keep.

Our Offerings at the Altar of the Self...

As a college student, I was blessed to have some professors who encouraged us to be well read and to read widely. I can recall when I was introduced to the writings of Christopher Lasch. The book, Culture of Narcissism, was my introduction to genuine cultural interpretation and criticism. After that I read all that I could by Lasch, including some of his insightful articles about Christianity in America. As a keen observer of the times that he lived within, Lasch, had few rivals. For the weak of heart (aka--"everything is great!!!") you will not want to read Lasch. For those who occasionally muster up enough courage to glance into the dark, black, abyss we call the modern world, you may want to start with an insightful rethinking of Lasch's Culture of Narcissism by Christine Rosen (Read whole article here). She is asking where Lasch got it right, where he may have missed it, and a few ways in which he seems prophet like in anticipating what was on the horizon of the wasteland.

I often meet folks in the academy and even in the church who think they have their finger on the pulse of contemporary culture. Lasch, Berger, Guinness, Kirk and others in their observations (of those religious folks who are giddy about relevance and following every new trend) have tried to get us to see that there is no pulse! We are clinging to a corpse. It would be better to grab hold of the wrist that was pierced and to listen carefully to the one who offers a deeper reality past the one's created in our own image.

Rosen notes of the current religious landscape in America, "If anecdotal evidence is any guide, the cult of therapy observed by Lasch also continues to exert its influence over religion. The "soft-core spirituality" Lasch saw as a sign of cultural narcissism thrives in offerings such as Mitch Albom's best-selling bit of pop spirituality, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, and similar books. "The heaven that is apparently popular with readers these days is nothing more than an excellent therapy session," New York Times columnist David Brooks noted in 2004. "When you go to [Albom's] heaven, friends and helpers come and tell you how innately wonderful you are. They help you reach closure. In this heaven, God and his glory are not the center of attention. It's all about you." (emphasis added)

I think Rosen is kind when she calls it "soft-core spirituality". In truth, it would be better described as "soft-porn spirituality". We really don't have to wait till we get to heaven. One could easily replace the word church with heaven in the above sentence and you would be close to describing the way that it has become. Many Christians in America speak about the "faith once delivered" in terms similar to shopping, management, and therapy. It really is about how good it makes me feel. It really is all about me.

Be warned that Lasch is not for the faint of heart. If he was even partly right, then we in the church have really gotten it wrong. We should have listened to G. K. Chesteton, when he urged us to "hate ourselves and love our souls." But that just won't preach with the "dawning of the age of Oprah".

Yankee Secessionists

The decentralist paradigm has spread beyond the old Confederacy, it seems. Here's an article about the Second Vermont Republic, an organization trying to get Vermont to secede from the United States. God bless 'em; at least they can't be smeared as being simply apologists for slavery and/or racial segregation. The article cites Don Livingston of Emory at length. Livingston argues for "the politics of the human scale," a localism derived primarily from Aristotle and classical republican theory.

Ethics and Natural Law

"I conclude that . . . the answer to our question is no; ethics cannot be derived from nature." So says an ethics professor at George Washington University. He's thrown down the gauntlet; are you Aristotelians up to the challenge?

Lisbon and Voltaire

Today is the 250th anniversary of the famous Lisbon earthquake, which is thought to have killed tens of thousands of people and left many thousands more homeless. Coming as it did in the context of rising skepticism among the "Enlightened" elites of Europe, the earthquake became a rhetorical weapon in the arsenal of deists, agnostics, and atheists.

Voltaire made use of the earthquake in Candide and also referred to it in several of his letters. Here's one from just a few weeks after the quake.

It's interesting, although not surprising, to see the unbelievers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina trot out the same arguments as Voltaire and the other philosophes: "If there is a God, how could he allow such a catastrophe to take place?" It's just another example of how the study of the past sheds more light on the present.