Ard Louis | Symmetry, Function & Predictability

Faith & Science Conversation
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Yes. And the transcript is even worse. I’ve read and listened and read-and-listened 3 or 4 times or more, trying to find my mistake in understanding. I think some things are clearer hearing it.
I think all of the relevant materials is from 45:00 to 51.50. Almost 7 minutes. Unless you listen twice. THen it’s a whole less than 14.

For some things I would also prefer a cleanly written piece of straight-forward reportage. Podcasts just can’t achieve that, unless the person is reading an article out loud, I guess.

If you listen to the section I suggested, I’m interested in knowing, if you think Louis’s comments carry different meaing. I think they do. I’m interested in your take. Then I’d be glad to get back to whatever it was that was still unresolved……

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Not my counter mate.

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In the meaningless equality of narratives.

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I realized I’d lost track of where your quotes ended and comments began in that longer post. I’m still confused … and actually listening to those seven minutes didn’t help me either.

But if I’m right that you’re saying intuition and imagination are false equivalents or inferior narratives to science then you’re not countering me either. Between science, intuition, imagination and rationality none can replace the other but neither is any of them dispensable to human functioning. Your two favorites are on the “doing” side of the ledger while intuition and imagination are on the “being” side.

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What two favourites? Nature has endowed us with all we have. Which isn’t enough to save us from ourselves.

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Well I assumed science and rationality would be your faves but surprise me. I think nature comes in with being and makes doing possible. Being is first.

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You’ve been editing…
I’ll just read you and Mark for now.

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For many years I’d come to the conclusion that the Greeks, as ever (they were two thousand years and an nth away from calculus), got it right. As in the four Pavlovian humours of personality. Then rhetoric; logos, ethos, pathos (all driven by Humean phobos and eros - our disordered passions, whence our friend Haidt), according to kairos. Now that’s hard wired nature. Distilled by pre-scientific genius. Confirmed by science.

So, our feelings aren’t our friends, but they are our elephant. And our mahout needs to know their elephant to be able to hang on and not fall off and be trampled. With all intuition, all wisdom, every art. And science. To be kind.

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I’m sorry it was such a disappointment.

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  1. Which Greeks were those? The ancient Greek philosophers were a great variety of thinkers proposing a great variety of ideas.
  2. Certainly some of those Greeks got things terribly wrong, even the best of them. Xeno’s paradoxes were wrong precisely because of the lack of calculus – but maybe so obviously wrong they ended up inspiring the development of calculus. And then there is Aristotle’s infamous error regarding gravity. But again perhaps it only served to underline the importance of basing conclusions on meticulous observations. Perhaps you can argue that they asked the right questions. But even that I think is dubious. All questions lead somewhere even if it is to the conclusion that you have asked the wrong question – and I think many of the questions asked by the ancient Greeks are in that category.
  3. Even those things they got right, it seems likely to me, it is just because they created the language and the game. So of course they are right about the rules of the game they invented. LOL

As for the podcast, this is very much in line with my own thinking. It has always been my counter to Dawkins “selfish genes” that DNA is a device for the accumulation of learned information, and not any kind of blueprint or controller. Furthermore this learned information is highly contextual to a process of chemical cycles which interpret it, hopefully in an environment somewhat similar to those where the information was accumulated.

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I’ve wanted to get back to this discussion for days and haven’t had time, when I’ve had energy, to work on it. And I never answered your question to me that I quoted (and then deleted) below. I’ve wanted to try to pull a number of things together, concerns of you mentioned; I’ll try do it neatly.
[A LOT of writing has been stripped back to just this.]

Maybe this is the part to work with.

Do you mean: the closed narrative of nature, which includes no perceptible evidence of God weighed (by both Louis and Stump) against belief in God (for which there is also no natural evidence, except perhaps in Jesus)?

The crux every time, isn’t it?

I’m sorry, @Klax, that I didn’t see your point earlier.

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I haven’t responded to this because I haven’t any clue what to say. It strikes me as a carefully crafted rationalization of why it is rational to question and hold in low regard everything we are except what can be formulated as explicit propositions which can be rationally defended. I do not regard myself as you seem to regard yourself. Indeed I find the prospect horrifyingly dehumanizing. But being human is not a simple thing. So many ways to go wrong and so little certainty regarding what makes any choice right.

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I enjoyed the podcast. He was a bit loose lipped perhaps but he’s having a conversation, not writing out a theory or doctrine.

I don’t think they were implying anything exceptional by mentioning it’s ordered more than we thought and by we most people who are not very familiar with things like convergent evolution and epigenetic to even things like transferable elements and horizontal gene flow.

It’s sort of like the question about if we started over would everything be the same and the answer is mostly. I mean sharks and dolphins started off at different spots and are externally similar. The basic forms would probably show back up. Like even if we found another earth like planet we would expect to find fish like things in water. We would expect to find bird like things flying. We would not expect to find a flying buffalo type creature with wings on its feet that was if enough to lift them.

But I also think that naturalism is typically the best explanation for most things.

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Why on Earth should you be sorry? I’m a very privileged man. I have pearls of great price. The most relevant one here is that there is no apologetic. All apologetics are dependent on faith first and then cognitive bias second. Faith alone is fine. Ard and Keith are in the tradition of Anselm and Aquinas, the latter whom I love because he wrote, what, eight million words and then shut up.

Your inference is perfect, but not actually to what I meant in my critique. In extreme postmodernism all narratives are equally meaningless. Extreme postmodernists cannot do eternity as a prime example. It’s just a narrative in a single term and no more valid than any other. Whereas it’s an absolute fact. The absolute fact, corollary of existence. Unchangeable nature is eternal. There is no rationally apprehendable alternative, but the extreme postmodernist is quite happy with all rationally unapprehendable alternatives, like those who invoke the multiverse to explain away the illusion of fine tuning. Rather than having to deal with the meaningless order of the ineffable strangeness of nature.

I see a spectrum of apologetics here, covering seeing God in nature, seeing nature as disordered, and seeing mere yearning as actual transcendence (q.v. @MarkD’s reaction below), morality as something complicated, difficult.

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Thanks, Martin.

I think you’ve paid a handsome sum for

 

I don’t know:

You surely don’t mean my old classmate.
 

I’m not familiar with this invocation or have simply missed it.
 

In spite of your alteration of the reference, I always hear: Die Unerträgliche Leichtigkeit des Seins, the title of which I first learned overseas. Although the aftertaste is bitter, the title is beautiful pronounced (well) in German.
However, I prefer the concept of strangeness.

 

I think you always will, one place or another. Really most places. The yearning for transcendence and revulsion against meaninglessness are powerful, as you know.
At this point I have to turn away from what feels like the abyss and focus on questions whose answers I find more survivable:

How to live appropriately.
When and how to guide two young women, whose life-experiences have molded them into people quite different from me into a world that has shifted drastically recently from the already estranging course it was on.
How to work productively with those who think very differently from me to achieve good ends.
How to find community, before I feel I can’t survive without it.
How to most effectively swim against which stream without drowning from exhaustion.

These are big enough for now.

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Keith Stump above. Yer quoted him woman!

Invocation: sorry for the ambiguity. No postmodernists don’t do that one, my ‘those’ are those scientists who won’t see nature’s meaningless order, by analogy.

That is at least as beautiful as Uber alle Gipfeln ist ruh.

As for eudaimonism, one of my blessings is that I’m a bloke. I have a shrivelled corpus collosum and therefore cannot think and feel with my whole brain. What you need is to think and say the unthinkable, the unsayable. The sardonic. The ‘selfish’, brutal alternatives to being compassionate. Jesus was always off by Himself… You need you time. Distraction. Superficiality.

I came out of church in the dark last night and a homeless guy obsequiously approached me to buy food and water for him. I filled his bottle back in the office, he didn’t try and follow me in, of which my back was tinglingly aware, gave him a packet of digestive biscuits (D*mn, I’ll have to stop off to get more now!) and the change in my pocket. I’d already had a pleasant interaction with Martin, Holly and Alesia and her baby in the church grounds, where doubtless at least two of them would have an intensely more pleasant interaction later as I have to clean up the evidence of every human expression, as it were. With my grabber. Things that can go in my sack do. The rest I bury in leaves, tread into compost to be scraped up from the path later. At least they don’t do heroin. I encourage them, bless them, express regret for their troubles, give them free reign in our bastion of privilege to use the secluded memorial garden and always make my presence in the grounds noisily felt. At least the women and child are in a women’s shelter across the street. After I gave Billy what I could (which is a lie, as I had my credit card and could have walked 300m to a shop with him. In the dark. In a big, empty, leafy street), he asked for more. He had an eye tic which I correlated with… covetousness and repressed rage. He downloaded his ‘immediate’ story. I took his dead phone number, so I could text feed time locations, and was acutely aware again of the risk to my privileged property and person. When he gave his name I remembered him, from two sightings over the past three years. First living deep in the woods by the river miles away and second by a park a couple of streets the other direction from my home than where I was with him last night. He gets around. His story remains the same, I’m sure there’s truth in it, but it’s not the truth. I discussed him last year with my superb neighbour, Gaz, the Gazarene as I call him, the fourth emergency service (the fire truck pulsing blue outside his house late last night was for his leaking oxygen bottle…), the Baptist minister we volunteer for says he’s the most Christlike person she knows. He’s big, tough, gay and an atheist. He knew Billy. So Billy and the final safety net are well aware of each other. The city has an excellent homeless centre. Rooms, food, showers, washing machines. I’d mentioned it to him back in the woods. We parted and I took a block detour.

You are doing the best you possibly can too.

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Hmmmm. Sorry…Not ringing a bell in this context.
Keith Stump….he was a nice guy from a family from our old church. I didn’t know him well enough to quote him, however. I’m sure I’ve never quoted anyone named Keith, except maybe the Richards one.

Goethe and the German Romantics had incredible ears for the beauty of the sound of their own language. Tolkien surely had them in mind, when he developed Elvish. I’ve not heard much of this sound awareness in English works.

That has never gone well for me. Speaking truth is dangerous enough.

 

As for brutal alternatives to being copassionate, …

I’m a better human, if I work with the needs of the equipment in which I reside. I am better able to carry out what I understand I should be doing, if I bother to do some of the basic maintenance. (So many people last week. I wanted a cave!)
I don’t find using my Self differently necessarily equivalent to distraction or superficiality. Some insights and processes simply won’t come about by brute force, and the brain and body don’t work best when always in the same mode. This is part of being human as well as being animal.
Framing the reality of how the brain works in moralistic terms like “distraction” and “superficiality” is unhelpful, in spite of your apparent desire to be encouraging. It’s unhelpful to you as well.
“Leaving it all on the field” is for short-termers and romantics.

Gaz sounds like a wonderful neighbor, and I’m glad you found your way home safely. I have never had to worry about our delusional patrons following me home from work, although I am careful as I leave work. It’s a fabulous building, but part of the charm are all the nooks and crannies that make the landscape hard to survey.
Getting jumped half-way between the door and the car makes those blue-light phones really non-existent.

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Er… don’t you quote Keith here?

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No Keith there, either. ; )

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OKayyyyy. Only a Stump…