Thursday, April 28, 2005
web hosting recommendations
Just in case anybody wants to set up websites of their own, here are three hosting companies I can recommend.
One host I used was Lunarpages. I have no complaints about the quality of service, but they get pricey if you need multiple domains, databases, and other add-ons not included in the standard plan.
I also liked Hummingbird Hosting. Like Lunarpages, I outgrew their plans in terms of domains and databases used.
Currently, I host my sites with Dathorn. Great and speedy service and a reseller setup that doesn’t impose a limit on domains or databases. Since it’s a reseller setup, I get all the features that are for-fee with the other hosts, as well as SSH access - an incredibly useful feature.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
I loves me some Funny Times.
News of the Weird
Least Competent People
Missing the Point—Richard Graybill, 42, pleaded guilty in Chester County, PA, to unauthorized use of a vehicle. He had taken a car that had been parked, awaiting repairs, at a shopping center, but he was later discovered by the car’s owner when he happened to pull up to the drive-through window at the Wendy’s restaurant where she worked. She confronted him and he sped away, but he returned a few minutes later and tried to persuade her to sign over the title to him, in that he had put a lot of effort into fixing the car after he took it…
Ironies
A large portion of the materials on plagiarism on the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh’s Writing Center website was revealed to have been taken verbatim from Purdue University’s website on plgiarism.
News That Sounds Like a Joke
An outfit called Rent-A-Priest supplies independent Catholic clergy to perform mass and communion on board of cruise ships, even though the reason they are independent is that they’re no longer in good standing. (The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said it has begun to screen out unqualified candidates for cruise line jobs.
Latest Religious Messages
In a Tampa Tribune feature, local Southern Baptist preacher Tom Rives was profiled in his part-time role as KoKoMo the Clown, enthusiastically delivering uplifting spiritual messages to kids and nontraditional church audiences. Said Rivers (who estimates he has trained about 400 eople for his clown troupes), “I don’t think (preachers) should be going around with a Bible tucked under their arms and a scowl on their face.” To his critics who say clowning is undignified, Rev. Rives said, “I tell them that all Baptist preachers are clowns. I just went to class and got certified.”
Cookie Monsters
Two Durango, CO, girls, ages 17 and 18, decided to bake cookies as a gesture of kindness to their neighbors, and then to deliver them right away (with notes reading “Have a great night!”). The town is small enough (population 14,000) that nighttime visits can sometimes be made without creating anxiety, but apparently not at Wanda Renae Young’s house. She was so traumatized by the 10:30 knocking at her door that she wound up in the hospital emergency room the next day, then sued the girls for that expense, and was awarded $900 by a judge, sending the girls into tears. (However, townspeople chipped in to pay the $900.)
Friday, April 22, 2005
Save the conservatives—put down the Bible.
Andrew Sullivan over at The New Republic has a very interesting essay on how he believes the conservative coalition is reaching a potential breaking point—caused by the differences between the two major factions: conservatives of faith and conservatives of doubt. (Free registration necessary to read the article.)
This may not be big news to some of us, but he casts it in a way that I hadn’t considered.
What other kind of conservatism is there? The alternative philosophical tradition begins in precise opposition to the new conservatives’ confidence in faith and reason as direct, accessible routes to universal truth. The conservatism of doubt asks how anyone can be sure that his view of what is moral or good is actually true. Conservatives of doubt note that even the most dogmatic of institutions, such as the Catholic or Mormon churches, have changed their views over many centuries, and that, even within such institutions, there is considerable debate about difficult moral issues. They understand that significant critiques of human reason—Nietzsche, anyone?—have rendered the philosophical quest for self-evident truth even more precarious in the modern world. Such conservatives are not nihilists or devotees of what Pope Benedict XVI has called “the dictatorship of relativism.” They merely believe that the purported choice between moral absolutism and complete relativism, between God and moral anarchy, is a phony one. Their alternative is a skeptical, careful, prudential approach to all moral questions—and suspicion of anyone claiming to hold the absolute truth. Since such an approach rarely provides a simple answer persuasive to everyone within a democratic society, we live with moral and cultural pluralism.
For conservatives of faith, such pluralism can allow error to flourish—and immorality to become government policy—and therefore must be limited. A conservative of doubt, however, does not regard the existence of such pluralism as a problem. He sees it as an unavoidable fact of modernity, an invitation to lives that are more challenging and autonomous than in more traditional societies. Even when conservatives of doubt disagree with others’ moral convictions, they recognize that, in a free, pluralist society, those other views deserve a hearing. So a conservative who believes abortion is always immoral can reconcile herself to a polity in which abortion is still legal, if regulated. Putting government power unequivocally on the side of one view of morality—especially in extremely controversial areas—must always be balanced against the rights and views of citizens who dissent. And, precisely because complete government neutrality may be impossible on these issues, government should tread as lightly as possible. The key in areas of doubt is to do as little harm as possible. Which often means, with respect to government power, doing as little as possible.
Doubt, in other words, means restraint. And restraint of government is the indispensable foundation of human freedom. The modern liberal European state was founded on such doubt. In the seventeenth century, men like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke looked at the consequences of various faiths battling for control of the moralizing state—and they balked. They saw civil war, religious extremism, torture, burnings at the stake, police states, and the Inquisition. They saw polities like Great Britain’s ravaged by sectarian squabbles over what the truth is, how it is discovered, and how to impose it on a society as a whole. And they made a fundamental break with ancient and medieval political thought by insisting that government retreat from such areas—that it leave the definition of the good life to private citizens, to churches uncontaminated by government, or to universities that would seek and discuss competing views of the truth.
(Emphasis mine.)
Indeed, by their very nature, conservatives of doubt are not particularly aggressive politicians. Fiscal conservatives have been coy in expressing their outrage at Bush’s massive spending and borrowing, easily silenced by the thought that Democrats would be even worse. Defenders of an independent judiciary are drowned out by the talk radio/Fox News/ blog-driven megaphone of loathing for unaccountable judges. Many moderate conservatives voted for the law to protect Schiavo. Republican defenders of gay marriage are few and far between. Those few voices of dissent are increasingly portrayed as mavericks or has-beens. You will find precious little time for people like Christie Todd Whitman on talk radio or in the conservative blogosphere.
But that doesn’t mean that the arguments of doubt-conservatism are flimsy or unnecessary. In fact, they may be increasingly critical to conservatism’s survival. An ideologically polarized country, in which one party uses big government for its own moral purposes and the other wields it for its own, is not one that can long maintain a civil discourse. Politics becomes war, letting a key Republican leader like DeLay can genially boast that his supporters are armed. What conservatism has long offered is a messy defense of procedure and moderation, doubt and limits, attributes that make civilized politics possible and are often appreciated only when they are lost. But, by then, it is sometimes too late.
There may come a reckoning for this political moment—and it may soon peak or deflate or be undone by its own hubris. Or it may not. What has to endure is not merely a reformed liberalism that can one day take government away from its current masters, but rather a conservatism that does not assent to its own corruption at the hands of zealots. This doesn’t mean hostility to religion. It means keeping religion in its safest place—away from the trappings of power. And it means keeping politics in its safest place—as the proper arrangement of our common obligations, and not as a means to save or transform our lives and souls. If we are fighting such a conservatism of faith abroad—and that is the core of the war on Islamist terrorism—then why should it be so hard to confront it in much milder forms at home? This was, once upon a time, the central conservative calling. Why not again?
It’s a long article, but worth the read.
Aquinas
I’ve seen enough butchered version of this argument that I finally bothered to track down the original (I hope). The stilted language makes it a bit hard to follow, but I don’t find the original version of the argument more compelling than any version I was previously aware of.
I won’t try to comment comprehensibly or to be give a deep analysis. Beyond a doubt, elaborate refutations can be found with the help of an Internet search engine. All I want to do is to limit myself to an initial reaction.
Whether God exists?
Objection 1. It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.
That’s one way to frame theodicy, the problem of evil.
Objection 2. Further, it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God’s existence.
In other words, parsimony demands that we remain indifferent to god’s existence unless there is sufficient cause to suppose god’s existence.
On the contrary, It is said in the person of God: “I am Who am.” (Exodus 3:14)
I answer that, The existence of God can be proved in five ways.
The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cold. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, i.e. that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.
This is an argument based on a medieval understanding of physics.
Similar to the remaining four “ways”, ignoring the factual veracity this argument is fallacious.
To begin with, the argument blatantly begs the question. There are two implicit assumptions: First, there cannot be an infinite regression of movers or causes. Second, the regression ends in exactly one initial mover/root cause. However, these two assumptions combined are the conclusion, therefore we have an example of petitio principii.
The implicit assumptions also constitute a false dichotomy, because the argument only considers an infinite regress or a single cause. If a single cause is justification for one god, the argument can be more plausibly expanded into a form that concludes a multitude of gods. For that matter, there is no good reason why god itself cannot be defined as an infinite regress. I find it odd that Christian theology is not shy about assigning infinite attributes to god, but stop short of that particular generalization.
The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.
Causation, i.e. every effect must be preceeded by a cause. The same fallacies apply as to the first argument. The same objections as to the “first way” apply here, too.
If we remain intellectually honest, we can but apply the principle of causation to the realm of observable universe. If it can be applied to the origin of the universe or beyond (whatever that may be) cannot be justified, therefore we cannot conclusively rule out that the universe is uncaused.
The third way is taken from possibility and necessity, and runs thus. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be. But it is impossible for these always to exist, for that which is possible not to be at some time is not. Therefore, if everything is possible not to be, then at one time there could have been nothing in existence. Now if this were true, even now there would be nothing in existence, because that which does not exist only begins to exist by something already existing. Therefore, if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence—which is absurd. Therefore, not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary. But every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not. Now it is impossible to go on to infinity in necessary things which have their necessity caused by another, as has been already proved in regard to efficient causes. Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men speak of as God.
Modern physics appears to be at odds with the “third way”. It seems like everything has always been, it just changed form one way or the other. If one requires ontological closure, it suffices to call the universe itself as the ultimate necessity of being. Otherwise, the obvious question to ask is what caused god? Or for that matter, how does it follow that the ontologically defined god is the same as the creator?
The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.
This fourth way comes across as a confused argument. “Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus” seems like a particularly ill-considered premise, because with the same justification, we can call god the creator as the maximum evil.
The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.
I’m not sure if the language confuses me (what does he mean with “best result”?!) or if this fifth way is plain wrong and begging the question in yet a different way. The fundamental implicit assumption of this argument is that there is a purpose to everything or that the order (natural laws) we observe are indicative of design instead of them just being what they are.
Reply to Objection 1. As Augustine says (Enchiridion xi): “Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.” This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.
I’m not sure how this reply follows from the arguments above, but it is a singularly unconvincing answer to the problem of evil. This reply can be seen in a many different lights. One of them is that the ends justify the means, another is this is indeed the “best” of all possible worlds. Either way, I find this reply impossible to reconcile with the attributes assigned to the Christian god - the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent creator that is also a personal god. It’s the religious equivalent of pounding a square peg into a round hole…
Reply to Objection 2. Since nature works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent, whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its first cause. So also whatever is done voluntarily must also be traced back to some higher cause other than human reason or will, since these can change or fail; for all things that are changeable and capable of defect must be traced back to an immovable and self-necessary first principle, as was shown in the body of the Article.
Aquinas starts out with “Since nature works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent,” but he hasn’t shown this to be the case. This reply is simple of the same question begging.
It is my understanding that Aquinas full work proceeds from trying to argue a first cause to an attempt to show that this first cause is none other than the Christian god. Since I already reject his arguments in support of a first cause, I will not expend the time to investigate more of his writing.
A question of morality
Consi inquired about the following scenario:
[list]
[*] Action X will kill thousands of innocent people.
[*] You believe that action X will also be of benefit to you, your family, your neighbor’s family and millions of people.
[*] You take action X. Immoral?
[/list]
Yes.
Now that I’ve said that, I wonder where the catch is.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Who’s next?
I’m not following the elections in the Vatican, but in the Catholic forums quite a few people root for Cardinal Ratzinger, who I would describe as an ultra-conservative.
I wonder what making him pope would do. My gut feeling is that the Catholic Church would have to write off Europe. If a liberal pope can’t stem the tide, a conservative that pushes the very thing that made people turn away to begin with does not bode well. Then again, I’ve been away for too long to know for sure.
In other parts of the world things may play out differently. The so-called Cafeteria Catholics in the US couldn’t care less, but the conservative crowd would swoon with delight. More polarization to come…
Elsewhere, I have no clue.
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