V: More notes on Bryan’s posts

Following my last, I continue to work backwards through your posts and extract what I can from them with appreciation, rather than as red rags to my ill-considered bull-nature. In this post, I got back as far as “The Human Variable” before being carried away to the vast skies by some lyrical updraught that happened along; leaving your two earliest posts still to cover: “Investigation” and “A Reasonable Argument”. Oh, the joy of backtracking!

The painting above is by Caspar David Friedrich of a mountain in Germany, the Watzmann.

Notes on “Some Preliminary Notes II”
I am glad now to have your definition of objective reality as that which exists independent of the mind. (I had quibbles when I was being argumentative, but they are not important.) So far so good.

In your second paragraph, you raise the more ticklish question of how to separate that objective reality from what goes on in the mind (which we might agree to call subjective reality). You mention empiricism, which only admits the physical world as reality. Then later you paraphrase some philosophers (Hume, Kant?) as saying “Hey, time and space aren’t physical things.” Well, I’m not well up on this stuff, but it seems to me that time and space are essential attributes of physical things. Show me a physical thing that doesn’t occupy space, or isn’t limited by time—isn’t subject to a beginning and an end. But your idea of putting things in the bubble is vivid. It’s a fun thing to say, that empiricism is devoured by its own internal logic> But the vividness of this image may confuse as much as it clarifies. It leaves me wondering why empiricism, and those philosophers, needed to be mentioned in the first place.

You set it straight in the following paragraph (“So naturally, I don’t want to make that mistake …”) but it just feels like a bit of padding. The tourist wants to go from A to B, but the taxi-driver can’t resist taking the scenic route (for the tourist’s benefit, obviously): it only takes a little longer. The purpose of the short journey, as set out in your second set of preliminary notes, is to define objective reality. I’d prefer it you could use the bubble image to separate what you think isn’t objective reality from that which is.

Notes on “Some Preliminary Notes I”

Here you announce a fresh start, and commence with two problems which your fresh start is to solve, viz. 1) You dispense with the adversarial approach, in essence doing away with the necessity of proving the wrongness of someone possibly made of straw; 2) you bypass the problem of trying to demonstrate the efficacy and sufficiency of reason by means of reason alone. A good idea to avoid the same trap which some Christians love to fall in, of demonstrating that the Bible must be the Word of God, because it says so itself.

Then you confess “Needless to say, I'm not thrilled about this approach”, but I’m not sure whether you are talking about the approach you will adopt in the fresh start, or the old approach weighed down by the two problems.

So I am still not quite clear what you are saying. Your new approach is to choose to take the world as you find it? I suppose it may be that your preliminary notes, both I & II, are exactly what they claim to be,: notes for the piece called “The World”. In which case, fine!

Blogger wouldn’t let me put this note under your Reality Post ...

I’ve already expressed my appreciation for the humour of this post. Its serious function is to blow the whistle on a set of mutual misunderstandings, or failures to hear what the other is saying. I’ve said it should go into the book as a kind of centre-piece, and yet we don’t want the reader to be confused by its arguments. Never mind, I’m confident that we can deal with this by cunning editing—just as a film director can indicate that a given scene is a flashback, a dream, or a fantasy: by various post-production tricks, if necessary.

The human variable

Reading this piece again, especially in the backward sequence adopted for this lightning review, I find that it shines with lucidity. It no longer bothers me that I don’t personally encounter the religious believer’s antagonism to science that you describe. To paraphrase that attitude, as you have depicted it, a religious person attacks science for not being filled with awe for almighty God. Science stabs the religious sense in the guts, for the way it denies infinite possibility and insists that everything is ruled by necessity, with no room for such notions as love; miracles; Man at the slap-bang middle of the universe. In attacking science and reason, the religious person can appear like a spoilt child attacking a stage play for being contrived. Oh, the actors wear make-up? How fake! Their lines aren’t spoken spontaneously? They are written by a playwright? How cynical! The puppets have strings? How manipulated! In his naivety, the believer feels his belief being wrested from him, as if it’s his own soul. It feels like a particularly hateful murder, with him as the victim. (I think we need to cut him some slack. There is more to a wasp than its sting. Leave it alone and it goes about its business.)

Then you have to say to this spoilt child, “Sh! This is just how it works. Sit still, keep quiet. It’s OK to know there’s a script, and puppet-strings, and make-up. You can suspend your disbelief, just like the others in the audience. The magic is not even diminished. On the contrary, everything makes more sense than before. But it’s up to you.”

So saying, I can watch the same puppet-play as you and everyone, the same Punch-and-Judy knockabout of the world; feeling that I am both Punch and Judy. I can be an existential Christian and an existential atheist, while I watch the characters knock hell out of one another. All the world’s a stage.

Fortuitously, as I was writing this, some comments came in by email to your January post on “The existence of God”, and I saw this, among your comments afterwards:

“However, all that being said, there are certain things in life that once your eyes are open to them, it becomes impossible to close them again. Blind faith is no longer an option, even if I wanted it to be.”

This fits with what I’ve just said! But you and I may see it as pointing to different conclusions. Yes, the opening of the eyes makes the former blind faith impossible.

To me, the former attempts of religion to explain everything and occupy the territory now claimed by science are unarguably superseded. In the new lucidity, we see that the puppet was not animated by a divine spirit which made it speak and move, not directly, anyhow, for there are strings involved, and ventriloquism. But we can still enjoy the show. Especially when we don’t have to pay a membership fee to the religious organization.

Sure, religion is guilty of deception, but the whole world does that. (Deception is the great engine of wealth distribution: to wear yourself out in the production of things that no one really needs so that you too can afford to buy things, and principally to avoid the lurking nightmare of destitution.) Still, everything that’s peddled, however deceptively, reflects some shadow of a genuine desire, want or need. For every successful deceiver there’s someone ready to be deceived.

Religion is a salesperson peddling magic that’s available free. She stands in the city slums selling fresh air in cans. And the “believers” we take so many pains to refute are the poor dolts who are so desperate to believe that they write the copy that appears on the can-labels; or failing that, they memorise what they find written there already, to shout to people. They call it evangelism. But the thing itself has nothing to do with cans or labels, or marketing; even though, as you have suggested somewhere, or promised to suggest, religion can be a substitute for living.

The true witnesses are silent. They know that the fetid air in the slums keeps you alive just as well as the air collected on wind-swept mountain-tops and processed in a dirty canning factory.