Geoff's Miscellany

Rachel Held Evans noted that Dave Ramsey gets some things wrong about poverty. On my lights she's partially right about where he's wrong. She accused him twice in the article of the false cause fallacy. 

One need not be a student of logic to observe that Corley and Ramsey have confused correlation with causation here by suggesting that these habits make people rich or poor...

 

“This list simply says your choices cause results,” he said, again committing the false cause fallacy. “You reap what you sow.”

Till We Have Faces

A Review

C.S. Lewis' novel Till We Have Faces (TWHF) is retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. The original myth is of a woman whose beauty is so renown that Aphrodite grants her to marry her son Cupid or forces her to marry her son, Cupid. Psyche's sisters are so jealous of her husband that they plot to ruin the marriage (as Cupid is either so beautiful or hideous that he hides himself). The sisters tempt Psyche to use a lantern to catch a glimpse of Cupid, everything goes wrong from there. Lewis' version utterly inverts this. I cannot say too much without revealing key plot points, but in the original tale the gods are petty and in the wrong. In this tale, the main character sees her own face as she tries to reveal what the gods' faces are truly like.

I recently bought Mike Bird's Evangelical Theology. It has been a marvelous read so far, but when I read the section entitled “Traditional Proofs for the Existence of God (pp 180-183)” I was left a bit frustrated. Now, please take the following comments with the understanding that the book, over all, has been edifying. I especially appreciate Bird's attempt to make the gospel message itself (as described in the New Testament) the focal point of each traditional loci of theology. So it looks like this, "How does the gospel inform the doctrine of the church and how do traditional understandings of this doctrine illuminate the gospel." It's a very helpful approach. 

Something I’ve been saying for years has apparently also been said by Neil deGrasse Tyson:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbvDYyoAv9k&w=420&h=315]

This is important to me. When people have repeated the old canard that religious people are necessarily opposed to science and progress I usually point to the fact that I’m not opposed to science and I’m religious. That piece of hard, personally observable date usually never sufficed. I’d quote statistics. That also never seems to work. So I began trying pointing out how religious people, even profoundly religious people like Leonard Euler, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, Galileo, and others were scientists and mathematicians and logicians. Heck my landlord is a Christian and a Coral Reef biologist who is doing ground breaking work in preserving, observing, and cataloging rare specimens of coral in Hawaii. I also would try to explain how it was actually the rise of monotheistic religion on an empire wide scale that lead to advancements in scientific knowledge, method, and metaphysical assumptions about reality (like the nature of cause and effect). But it never worked. Hopefully this video will and does help. But since empirical, historical, and testimonial evidence from surveys of scientists didn’t work for me, maybe it won’t for Tyson.

A fiction author/videogame programmer who goes by Vox Day recently posted a blog wherein he notes the problems with trying to explain oneself in our current culture. First he quoted this guy, saying

Like the mistaking of kindness for weakness that plagues today’s nice guys, there is some element of the human mind that frames lengthy and incessant counter-argument as a position of weakness and insecurity. He who masters pithy, concise (and indirect and ambiguous, I might add) communication commands a stronger image of rhetorical confidence and state control than the bloviating firebrand whose logical appeals may indeed be without equal.

I think Christians often struggle with the word "meek." Jesus says, "Blessed are the meek." Paul says that the fruit of Spirit is 1/9th meekness flavoured. The word, in common English usage means "quiet, gentle, and submissive (Concise Oxford English Dictionary)." Christians certainly are to be those things in certain contexts. But, the issue of Christians learning meekness becomes particularly vexing when Jesus says, "Learn of me because (or that) I am meek and humble of heart (Matthew 11:29)." But Jesus is not usually very submissive to others, he's not always quiet, and sometimes he is not particularly gentle.

Pro 20:13 Love not sleep, lest you come to poverty; open your eyes, and you will have plenty of bread.

This passage of Scripture is important in our culture. We write more about sleep in news and science journals than pretty much any other culture and yet we seem to sleep less. I'm wondering if our love for sleep mixed with a love of not 'missing out' on what ever we're staying up to do has caused us to have less sleep than the compilers and authors of Proverbs assume we need while also causing us to love sleep/idleness to the point of the average individual being unproductive.

1. When a leader offers you delicacies, be careful what you eat. You can end up owing a rich man things you could never afford to repay.
2. When somebody claims to "love science" they almost always do not know what it is, how its done, or anything about its history. In fact if somebody uses the phrase, "My science sense is tingling," or talks about how they deny some religion, some ethical axiom, or refuse to utilize basic logic in their arguments because "science," the more likely they know nothing about science at all.
3. Insulting somebody after you dismantle their argument isn't ad-hominem it is just good old fashion insulting. Ad-hominem is insulting the person to discredit his ideas. Insulting somebody after demonstrating their ideas to be false is just icing on the rhetorical dessert.
4. The friends I have most in common with are a Coastie, an Army Ranger, some missionaries, a New Testament scholar, a harrier pilot, an Army Ranger, some engineering majors, nurse, a lawyer, and a couple of pastors. Our commonality is either our sarcasm or the gospel. I hope it is the latter.
5. My wife wrote a post for young women about refusing to date cads and misanthropes. In my spare time I've been studying social-psychology studies about human pair bonding. The science is telling. Women potentially tend to prefer cads and idiots if they do not try to use things like reason or obedience to Christian principles in their sexual/romantic decisions. I may make a post in the future summarizing the findings, but here are some. Please see the studies cited in the articles. The third link is to the study itself. As it turns out, some times women are attracted to men who exhibit appetitive aggression (read as violent tendencies). Note: I typically think that evolutionary psychology is simply silly, but these are studies of traits. You can accept the data without accepting what the authors think it means about ancient human history. Just-so stories are for fairy tales, not academic journals.

Most of my friends know that I really like comic books or at least that I used to. I don’t buy them often or collect them. So I’m not a “nerd” in the technical sense. I’m more a fan. Nevertheless I like them. I also like the band “Coheed and Cambria.” So when, about two years ago, they released a song titled, “Deranged” about the Batman’s conflict with the Joker from the Joker’s point of view I was excited. They did not disappoint. The song is excellent. Claudio Sanchez (the lead singer of Coheed) has a great capacity for singing in the voice of the characters beside himself because of the fact that his whole musical project is a fictional story of quite epic proportions (a novel, a series of comics, back story albums, and seven disks of albums in the main story).

Ever since the days of Bacon and Newton philosophers and scientists have bothered themselves with determining the material and efficient causes of various objects and events. They, as a matter of course neglected, ignored, and repudiated the use of the concepts of formal and final causality. That was a brief summary of a truncation of thinking about nature that occurred during the Enlightenment era. This truncation, because of its laser like focus on determining what things are made of (material causes) and what events precede others and lead to them (efficient causes). Edward Feser, in his excellent intro to Aquinas' thought notes a lame duck critique of final causes (the idea that something either has a function, tendency, or goal in its nature):