Posted on 09/24/2009 6:08:52 AM PDT by xcamel
I agree with your observation here, tacticalogic. But the question remains: Is it legitimate to classify a scientific theory in terms of political categories to begin with? When we see that sort of thing happening, it seems to me we have left the precincts of science altogether. Probably few people nowadays would recognize that; for the fact seems to be that many people today do not have a good grip on what science is, and especially what its limitations are.
Yet the claim is famously made nowadays, in certain precincts at least, that if science can't explain a phenomenon, then that phenomenon either (1) doesn't exist (in principle); or (2) science hasn't figured it out yet, but given enough time, it will — which of course is a statement of faith. I don't know where/how this type of thinker rationally draws the line between the recognition of a phenomenon which does not exist, and a phenomenon which eventually will turn out to be explainable by science. But evidently a thinker like Richard Dawkins has no trouble discriminating between the two — but I still don't know what criterion he uses to do that, unless it be a perfectly subjective one....
It is a pity that TToE is less discussed as science today than as a sort of Trojan Horse smuggling in "atheist" troops set on undermining and destroying the core culture of the American people. Whether you personally feel that way, tacticalogic, I don't know. But clearly, a whole lot of folks today do. And arguably, such people have good reasons for thinking the way they do. That is, they are not irrational or insane.
In other words, most of the evo/crevo noise that I hear around here is devoted to arguments about the cultural legacy and social implications of the TToE — i.e., not the theory as science per se, but only in terms of its cultural impact on society — in the eyes of people who may or may not be Christians, but who are concerned that a model built on (undisclosed) presuppositions of materialism/reductionism/determinism + random chance may not fully comprehend the reality of what it is to be human, individually and socially.
I honestly believe that this is what the FR evo/crevo wars are really all about. I don't think there'd be so much contentious disputation if TToE were simply being discussed as a scientific theory as such. But the fact is, certain of its boosters have elevated it into a full-blown cosmology; and it's the cosmology to which such detractors of TToE object.
And with regard to the "standard cosmology" abstracted from TToE, I happen to be one of those objecters, on both Christian and classical grounds. FWIW.
BTW, that cosmology definitely accords more with liberal and progressive attitudes than conservative ones. It is not only a good model of the Zietgeist (i.e., "the spirit of the age" (so to speak), but also a major driver of it.
But we need (I think) to distinguish the science from the preferred cosmologies of its boosters. They are, after all, not the same things at all.
This probably will not happen anytime soon. It looks to me like we live in an age that is akin to "an insane asylum bursting with energy," as Eric Voëgelin put it.
In the words of Pope Paul VI, back in the '70s: The problem with modern man is that he has simply stopped thinking.... He lets his doctrines do his thinking for him, as it were.
I think what Nietzsche meant by "the death of God" is that the supreme doctrine that had guided men for centuries in the West became a de-spirited, empty shell.... For although men could still read about it, and grasp it intellectually, they ceased to resonate to it in their personal lives; they ceased to refer to it as a guide to practical, actual, daily experience.... Doctrine absent renewal by active reflection and experience is effectively a dead doctrine. But its "skeleton" can remain for quite some time after its death — as a sort of fossil....
Thanks, dear tacticalogic, for writing, and for hearing out my "rant" in reply.
Creationists Given Academic Credit for Trolling
...G-G-G-oodness gracious, that sort of "teaching" might shed some light on instances of otherwise seemingly compulsive FR posting behavior...
But clearly, a whole lot of folks today do. And arguably, such people have good reasons for thinking the way they do. That is, they are not irrational or insane.
There we get into some subjective discussion about what "good" reasons are.
To me, the measure of "good reasons" is that they are the product of "good reasoning", and I'd like to think we can meet that standard a little better than simply not being outright insane.
Plenty of arguably quite insane people give every indication of being "reasonable." On the other hand, plenty of ostensibly reasonable people might be certifiably insane — if anything can be called "insane" these days. In our "go along to get along" culture, where questions of "good" and "bad" as they relate to the genuine welfare of the human person, his existence, and his fate, are just so many relative opinions. Thus nobody can say (has the courage to say?) what "insane" means anymore.
To say that a person might be clinically insane (according to standards of maybe 20 or 30 years ago) is just too "judgmental" these days, and not to be tolerated by "right-thinking" people who have been trained to admire the "diversity" of human expression (of whatever form it takes) above all other civilizational values.... Which essentially obliterates any distinction between "sane" and "insane." Rather, we must deal with the phenomenon of "different strokes for different folks." How this attitude could fit into a system of individual liberty under equal laws, with equal justice, I just can't figure....
I confess I'm in a tad of a bleak mood lately. If you're an American conservative, I shouldn't have to explain the reasons why.
A good part of the recent gloom is attributable to my current project of catching up with certain great German literary artists of the last century: Elias Canetti (Auto-da-Fé), Robert Musil (The Man without Qualities), and Heimito von Doderer (The Demons). I've finished the Canetti, am about 400 pages (of a 1400+-page work) into the Musil; and von Doderer is "next on deck."
It was Eric Voëgelin who pointed me to these great authors (Canetti was Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1982). Voëgelin — who barely managed to escape with his life from Nazi Germany in 1937 — complained bitterly about the failure of the "German academy" — by which I expect he meant the the great German universities in general, and their academic philosophy departments in particular — to see "what was coming" vis-a-vis the entire Hitler phenomenon, and to raise a warning.
He chastises the German professoriat for not warning the German people about what was coming; rather it turned out in that in many cases the great names in the universities were either co-opted by the Hitler phenomenon, or became enablers and co-dependents of it.
But according to Voëgelin, not so these great German novelists. They sniffed out all this stuff, figured out its likely denouement in terms of mass human suffering, and traced it to its sources in a culture that was degenerating and disintegrating before their very eyes.
All the characters I've encountered so far — the utterly tragic Peter Wien (Canetti), and Musil's fascinating Ulrich (haven't dipped into von Doderer yet) — are men captured in an age of profound cultural disintegration/revolution, men who (just in order to live a "rational" life in an insane world) ended up constructing "second realities." Wien's second reality ended up literally killing him (via suicide). I don't know what will happen to Ulrich. But oh my, I can't wait to find out....
Then it will be on to The Demons....
Based on how far as I've gotten into The Man without Qualities by now, I'd have to say Musil is an even more penetrating analyst of the human psyche than Dostoyevsky.... And man, for me that's saying a lot.
You want to understand your own cultural age??? And what is likely to happen from HERE, in our own time — if history predicts future? If so, read these novels!!!!
Of course, they're all out of print now. But you can find them on the aftermarket.
Oh, thank you dearest sister in Christ, for your very kind words of support!
Mind you, I wrote my last as a person whose "clinical experience" with bona fide, "certifiable" psychiatric patients consists of two summers spent during my college years as a nursing assistant at a Massachusetts State psychiatric hospital. My first summer was on the "chronic" ward. My second, on the "rehab" ward. [Whatta joke "Rehab" was. "Chronic" was a model of sanity in comparison, but only just barely.]
It was especially on my tour on the Rehab ward when I began to appreciate two things in particular. (1) The patients could be perfectly "reasonable" when the purpose suited them. [E.g., to earn "step privileges" for their defined "good behavior," which would allow them greater freedom to, among other things, go to the canteen at will to buy chocolate and other goodies.] (2) I began to wonder who was "more crazy" — the patients themselves or the professional staff, their supposed guardians and healers. [I can give examples of this; but I'm trying to keep this communication as short as possible, at least here. Ask questions, anyone who wants to.]
Anyhoot, this questionable status quo — keeping people who really were a potential danger to themselves and others, one way or another (from, for instance, drowning in a ditch, or freezing to death as the prize of a successful escape) on such an idiotic treadmill of futility did not seem to me at all "reasonable."
The Rehab patients had no concept, for all their skills at cunning yet self-serving reasoning whenever it helped them — of how to be "safe" from themselves.
And whenever "reason" didn't serve their purpose, as when they had accumulated so many "steps" (for "good behavior") that they became candidates for release into the larger community (which no one wanted!!!), thereby to lose all the institutional protections on which they had come to depend — they'd end up "acting out," soon to be in straightjacket and confined to the isolation room. And from there, upon release from IR, back to the status of zero steps, thus to begin moving upward again from there in the step-earning game — to the chocolate, but not ever so far as to risk release into the community — to a self-responsibility of which they were clearly incapable.
I still have not answered the question for myself, to this day, as to whom was "crazier": the patients, or the professional staff of psychiatrists and nurses, who believed the "rehab system" had any potentiality of success in the first place.
I just figure them folks were way too "Skinnerian" in their psychiatric ideology, and thus were totally out of touch with the realities of real human nature, disturbed or otherwise.
Anyhoot, mainly the patients "won" under this configuration of the psychiatric practice in effect at the time.
Governor Dukakis eventually took care of all that, as it turned out, with his "deinstitutionalization" program. He said: "Hey, these patients are perfectly fine in society as long as they take their meds." So he released most of them, into the wider community into which very, very few of them wanted to go. Then there were "problems": the releasees were not taking their meds. And THEN the state courts weighed in, and said: We cannot force these people to take their meds.
And so, if you ever come to Boston, and wonder who these people are who go about night and day with shopping carts loaded with whatever motley contents that the cart-pushers associate with their life, by which they in fact identify their current state of being — you are looking at the "street people" that Governor Dukakis created. The Pine Street Inn [May God ever bless them!] combs the streets for these people summer and winter, just to keep them from starving or freezing themselves to death....
Don't we just love the "tender mercies" of the Democrat party for the "downtrodden," the "disadvantaged?"
But I see I'm digressing here. Time to stop.
I'm wishing you a blessed "good night!" dearest sister in Christ!
Nothing sheds light on closed, and damaged minds.
[[Governor Dukakis eventually took care of all that, as it turned out, with his “deinstitutionalization” program. He said: “Hey, these patients are perfectly fine in society as long as they take their meds.”]]
And we all know just how much paranoid skitzophrenics love takign their medications by themselves (they’re tryign to poison me- I’ma no take my meds)- but a good ‘promise’ fro mthe soon to be released paranoid patient to take hteir meds is evidently ‘good enough’ for the release board.
[[And THEN the state courts weighed in, and said: We cannot force these people to take their meds.]]
And then the lawyers go after the victims families who were killed by the paranoid person, stating that the victim must have somehow triggered the poor paranoid fella to violence.
A family friend psych nurse working in the state rehab facility in San Antonio once told us that she got so fed up with patients gaming the system that she told a patient who had repeatedly slit her wrists - evidently for the attention and to keep herself institutionalized - that she was doing it all wrong. She said if you slit them left to right you won't actually bleed out and die before you're found. Slit them parallel with the bone and then you'll probably die before the nurses find you. After that the patient quit staging the regular suicide drama and went to other kinds of acting out.
Psych nursing must be an extremely tough job. She was way out of line with her advice to the patient, but the doctors weren't doing a thing to adjust her behavior and the drama was a super pain in the neck to the staff.
Moreover, few professionals known to me actually approach mental illness as a disease of the spirit and attempt to witness the patient. Mostly they treat it like a medical problem.
And no doubt some of it is medical - physiological imbalances and physical impairments. But surely not all.
May God bless you dearest sister in Christ. And thank you for you testimony.
Truly I believe that mental illness is mainly a disease of the spirit, but is almost never treated as such. Indeed, it's so ironic that the word "psychology" is based on the Greek word for soul or spirit; yet nowadays many practitioners in the field, being "hard-nosed scientists," deny that such a thing as psyche even exists....
And yes, the wrist-slitting strategy to get attention and stay institutionalized is something I've seen, too. Sigh. It was one of "Rosa's" favorite strategies; that, and stripping naked and running, screaming, all over the place.... She was one of the most manipulative persons I've ever known, very shrewd, clever, and calculating. And thoroughly pitiable. [She recalls to my mind the character Fischerle in Canetti's Auto-da-Fé....]
Funny thing is, I much preferred the "seriously disturbed" patients on the Chronic ward (some of these cases were truly heart breaking), to the grifters on Rehab....
The hardest part of that job, for me, was the constant, unanswered question: Who are the really crazy people around here — the patients, or the staff? LOLOL!
Anyhoot, FWIW, increasingly I think America has a very serious spiritual disease.... The public square seems a madhouse these days. It was this thought that recalled my summer job of long ago to mind....
May God ever bless you, dearest sister in Christ! Let us pray that our nation may be healed.
May God bless America.
I join in your earnest prayer for our country!
Real America as intended, as nourished, as given and inherited from our fathers and mothers. Thank you Jim.
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