Wally Weet

Dear Wally,

Very poetic.Very inspiring, or humbling. As you wish. Then after such a good polemical and poetic introduction, you go on to base a religion, or some spiritual huggermugger, on good old planet earth: On this rock, I will build my church, as one of your predecessors (or maybe not) said, referring to a different rock. "These answers are fact...", you write, and then you are off to the spiritual races. Etc. Etc. and so forth. There, back at the "facts", I beg, as a humble citizen of Mt. Etna, Planet Earth, to differ with you slightly. These answers, which we, or, rather, you human beings, have constructed by a plausible chain of reasoning, from various measures with meter sticks, discolorations on photographic plates, readings on the faces of old ammeters, simulations, and I repeat that term for emphasis, simulations!, on supercomputers,those new oracles of Delphi, and so on, and on. All these meter readings, which have all been repeated successfully, one way or another, by other human beings, and then hopefully (and I use that word literally) logical constructions are based on them. These are the "facts" of today, so confidently relied upon by you on which to base your new pantheism. There does seem to be nothing new, spiritually, under the sun.

Most scientists, and all engineers, look on such "facts" as pretty solid, and most of the constructions made from them,like classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, are pretty solid, too. But some of those stories,such as the detailed history of the formation of our planet and its age, how its biological machines, and even geological machines, work as provisional facts,are a little shakier (if you humans are so smart, why can't you predict the occurrence of earthquakes any better than the oracle of Delphi?). All of these "facts", solid or shay, are subject to reassessment at any time, subject to new readings on the meters and scrutiny of new charge-coupled devices, subject to new logical constructions and theoretical paradigms. That last sentence is the bedrock of the scientific holy writ. All those "facts" are solid enough to make calculations for the trajectories of spacecraft or for the strength of airplane wings, with a pretty high probability that they will prove to be good enough. Do I not know these things, as he who fashioned the shield of Achilles and even he who helped Zeus to fashion the the first woman, we were the first bioengineers, after all. Maybe we made her from the dust and maybe from someones's rib, I don't exactly remember; it was so long ago. All these "facts" we know so provisionally, but which we, or at least you mortals, stake our lives and our reputations on every day. That's the way to do it,alright, but to believe that in such a way you can establish the reality of things! Well, that great, old fundamentalist Ernst Mach would beg to differ with you if he had not been recycled into a more primitive aggregation of starstuff, and tossed on the ash heap of history by the fashionable. Those scientists whose stories you put so much stock in, sufficient as a basis to establish a new religion, are apt to change their story on you from time to time. Be careful.

Well, feel free to call on me at anytime for advice in such matters, but right now there is someone named Osama on the line who wants to put in an order for an updated shield, more glorious than the one I made for Achilles, so I must sign off. You can contact me at the Hephaestium in Athens, or just leave a message on your blog.

Your Humble Servant,
Hephaestus

Mt. Etna
(Take the express elevator down)
 

A Hephaestian Addendum:

Just in case you might be tempted to write me off as an obsolete old has been, even though immortal, I will remind you that I have modern followers, albeit the number may be small. I am said to have a daughter, Thermotica, whom a small, but fanatical, group are said to follow. I shall quote for you below a modern hymn which has been brought to my attention by a crypto-Hephaestian correspondent of yours who goes by the initials DOW:

INVOCATION

Thermotica, goddess of Thermodynamics,
Daughter of Hephaestus, god of fire and metal working,
Hear my prayer:

May my work be free of logical or mathematical blunders,
And may it be of consequence,
I.e. may it be widely read and commented on.

Ralph J. Tykodi,
"Thermodynamics of Systems in Nonequilibrium States"
Thinkers' Press, Inc. (2002)

So, poetic though your neopantheistic view may be, just remember that you can't repeal the 2nd law.

Yours with fire and brimstone,

Hephaestus
(or Vulcan if you are of the Roman persuasion)
 

Faith, Belief, and Knowledge

Fertile ground for a joint conference of philosophers of science and philosophers of religion. Or, perhaps a rugby game between the two could be even better.

Here is a wonderful excerpt from the forward of a book of some of the papers of A. A. Michelson. This quote is illuminating, because Michelson was without peer as an experimentalist but a man of modest opinions.

[Again at the request of certain of the relativists, he spent many thousands of dollars building an apparatus along lines which he had himself proposed in 1904 and at that time rejected as showing positive evidence only of the earth's rotation in the ether...Michelson engaged upon this expensive enterprise only out of deference to the desires of some advocates of the theory of relativity, whose mathematical arguments he modestly professed he was unable to refute. After his assent to the project had been obtained, he remarked, "Well, gentlemen, we will undertake this, although my conviction is strong that we shall prove only that the earth rotates on its axis, a conclusion which I think we may be said to be sure of already." The result, published in collaboration with H.G. Gale in 1925, turned out precisely as he had prophesied.]

I follow that gem of belief and knowledge with another, to which I have already drawn your attention in an email regarding the highly regarded documentary film "The Mystery of Chaco Canyon," a film built upon, and about, belief and knowledge. The subject of the film depicts extraordinary knowledge of the astronomy of the solar and lunar cycles acquired in the 10th and 11th centuries by a people of the American Southwest (most likely the Anasazi people). The belief of the filmmakers appears to be that the Chacoans (the evidence without doubt showing that they knew of the long and intricate 19 year cycle of the moon) regarded this knowledge in a ceremonial if not religious way. There are people in the film coming from various of the clans of Zuni, Laguna, and Hopi who comment. These clans share a tradition that their ancestors migrated from Chaco after the buildings were sealed and abandoned in the 13th century. A very revealing conjecture by a Zuni (if I recall correctly) tribal elder runs as follows: these people by acquiring this knowledge through their sensitive awareness of their environment may have gained power over the forces of their environment. Stop and consider. The validity of the belief expressed by the tribal elder is not the important issue. Rather, that the belief of the elder was drawn from the evident knowledge is important. This not so evident belief is a thought process that the knowledge itself did not warrant. It is, however, an easy and commonplace psychological mistake. If the Anasazi themselves made the same mistake, and, if there beset them a killing drought, not as a consequence of their belief (as they may have surmised!) but as a coincidence, then it becomes clear why their knowledge of astronomy might have been considered dark, but possibly incorrectly so.

Michelson's knowledge of the velocity of light through his careful experiments does not imply or even suggest we can control the velocity of light. Of greater moment, the well known experiment of Michelson and Morley confirmed that there was no luminiferous ether in the vacuum of space and implied that the velocity of light was constant in all directions regardless of motion. These two experimental results become the cornerstones of Einstein's "Special Theory of Relativity" (regarding the electrodynamics of moving bodies - I think that was his title). A philosphical change in the direction of thinking in science and in common knowledge (belief) then occurs by the 1920s. Some might think that General Relativity has become a religion! In short: knowledge and belief are intricately connected. How belief and knowledge create or destroy, reinforce or undermine faith, and, in fact what faith is... No easy answers here.

Pylos of Nestorville
 

A Message to Wally:
Regarding Religion and the Culture Wars
(November 12, 2005)


“For as each sect is positive that its own faith and worship are entirely acceptable to the deity, the several sects fall naturally into animosity and mutually discharge on each other that sacred zeal and rancour, the most furious of and implacable of all human passions”…David Hume

So, Wally, I recently looked over your blogs to see how many of them were primarily or secondarily concerned with religion, in one form or another. Without having made too careful a scrutiny, it appears that the entries for 09/30 10/01, 10/09, 10/13, 10/15, 10/30 (to a lesser degree), and 11/05 were about religion or the religious culture wars.

The tenor of your references to religion seemed to be of two basic types: (1) the iniquity and danger of fundamentalists, especially Christian fundamentalists; and (2) the value, especially in regard to environmentalism, of a kind of neopantheistic world view, or, dare I say it’ an alternative religion. Aside from its supposed efficacious side effects regarding the environment, the main arguments in favor of the neopantheist religion seem to be, first of all, that it is solidly based on reason and scientific truth and, second, that it is not the Jewish-Christian world view.

Concerning the first pillar of faith, did not Descartes claim to have proved the existence of God mathematically, and are not mathematics and mathematical philosophy the acme of reason? I suppose that the concensus now is that Descartes’ proof had flaws. However, as a man with educational roots among the Catholics, you are aware, of course, that Pascal covered the bases by saying that you should place your faith in mathematical probability. If you believed in the truth of mathematical probability theory, then you would compute the expectation (the product of the probability times the pay off) and base your belief or disbelief in God upon the outcome of that calculation. You would, therefore, bet on the existence of God, since if you are wrong, you’ve lost nothing, and if you are right you are on your way to paradise. {I presume that the Islamist suicide bombers have already made such a calculation.} It seems to me that one should base acceptance or not of your neopantheistic world view on Pascal’s argument, not on the correctness or not of our views of astronomy and cosmology at this moment in time. The payoffs of neopantheism, both good and bad, have yet to be explored well enough to make Pascal’s wager at this time, so more debate on Wally Weet’s blogspot is called for.

Nowadays, the philosophers have returned to the fray, but their names are more redolent of postmodernism and deconstructionism than of religion; the usual suspects: Jacques Derrida (who must know by now first-hand whether or not there is a heaven or hell) and Juergen Habermas, and others too obscure to yours truly to name. There is no god and they are his prophets. There is, however a devil, or, at least his hellish works, and they are to be found, guess where! That’s right, the good, old USA.

“The idea of the West as an entity no longer exists. It has been superceded by the more basic division between fundamentalists and nonfundamentalists, a distinction that places America in one camp along with al Qaeda and Europe in the other camp with certain so-called “moderates.” America’s essence of religious fundamentalism is often captured by the term “Bush,” whose name now designates not so much a person as a worldview alien to Europe. Only this metaphysical use can explain why the American president has become so despised.”… “Meanwhile, European culture and politics have moved on to embrace a post-religious ethos, in which even the slightest mention of the Almighty in an official public address is seen as fatally compromising the practice of true democratic politics. Modern philosophers see this post-religious ethos as the core of a new third force in the world, which alone is consistent with promoting democracy. This time, Europe has much more confidence that it is leading the way to the future.”** So, writes James W. Ceaser, professor of politics at the University of Virginia, explaining the post-modern, post-religious views of our one time allies, in a very interesting article: “Faith in Democracy: How the debate over religion in the West distorts our understanding of freedom in the Middle East”, in the Weekly Standard, November 7, 2005. (Gasp!!! Get thee behind me Rupert Murdoch.)
{**I wonder if this confidence has been shaken by the burning automobiles in France in the last week.}

Prof. Ceaser continues “In a more recent version of this position, the Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson noted that opposition to liberalism today ‘extends well beyond the backwaters of Islam. It includes the church that the pope [John Paul II] bequeaths us [and] the Protestant Christian Right.’ In the great worldwide divide Meyerson describes, the ‘red state’ label has taken on added significance, with Kansas being grouped with Iran. All fundamentalists—meaning the set of religious believers that does not share liberal views on abortion, family issues, and stem cell research—are place in the same global party of obscurantism.”

Now for some of Professor Ceaser’s views as a professor of politics: “No one denies that a rough division now exists in the West between the more faitful on the one hand and the advocatesa of a post-religious ethos on the other. The conflict between these two views accounts for much of the ongoing controversy between Europe and America and, within American, between elements of the Republican and Democratic parties. But the issue for our foreign policy is not whether such a domestic division exists, but whether it supplies and analytic framework for understanding international conflict. It is difficult to imagine an idea that is more fanciful—or more dangerous, not only to our national interest but to the interests of the democratic world. Construing the international situation on this basis is a strategy calculated more to promote the domestic project of Western opponents of religion than to assist in understanding the problems we confront.” {Emphasis mine} To learn more about Prof. Ceaser’s views, consult the November 7 issue of the Weekly Standard. I imagine that your local library has a copy.

So, Wally, I guess this all means that with your post-religious neopantheistic creed of starstuff, you will be okay with the European intellectuals, but I guess that you’d better lay low in South Carolina.

Keep the faith (one way or another)

Hephaestus