The importance of unbelief
I just watched this video interview of Stephen Fry. He’s a British actor whom I first watched as the butler “Jeeves” to Hugh Laurie’s “Bertie Wooster”. (A still photo of the pair is here.)
The video is about 15 minutes and delves into non-belief in “God”, especially any monotheistic deity, morality without religion, and more. There’s even a whiff of Schleiermacher in there.
Where’s the gardener?
Anthony Gottlieb
The parable went like this. “Two people return to their long neglected garden and find, among the weeds, that a few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, ‘It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these weeds.’ The other disagrees…They pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. The believer wonders if there is an invisible gardener, so they patrol with bloodhounds but the bloodhounds never give a cry. Yet the believer…insists that the gardener is invisible, has no scent and gives no sound. The sceptic doesn’t agree, and asks how a so-called invisible, intangible, elusive gardener differs from an imaginary gardener, or even no gardener at all.”
Gottleib does a smashing job surveying the battleground: we’ve got the “New Atheists”, e.g., Richard Dawkins
One trenchant critic of the New Atheists is Terry Eagleton, a leading literary critic (and Catholic), who defines God as “what sustains all things in being by his love, and…is the reason why there is something instead of nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever.” Some find it comforting or inspiring to utter such statements. But unless they can explain what those ideas mean and how one might tell whether they are right (which Eagleton never does), this is a self-deluding comfort. A wiser response to the apparent inexpressibility of statements about God may be simply not to express them, and just get on with the gardening.
New natural law and Robert George
I’ve just finished reading David Kirkpatrick’s profile of Robert George in the NY Times Sunday. It’s probably no shock that I’m not screeching, screaming conservative. But neither am I a liberal frothing at the mouth. This goes back to my describing myself as a “thinking theist”. I want to avoid getting political here. Rather, I’m just going to share some views about the intersection of religion and philosophy.
What caught my eye, of course, was the reference to Aristotle and Thomistic thought. (Disclaimer: When I first studied Aristotle it was in conjunction with Thomistic thought. I’m in no way an enemy of Thomist thought, per se.) But as I continued to read, I saw the challenge emerge: do we rest on reason and our intellect? Or do we depend on our moral inclinations? It’s my old “faith versus reason” thing. Read more
Stoicism and emotions
Stoicism is experiencing a resurgence. I’m not sure why, but it is. This interview with Margaret Graver present a look at some misconceptions of stoicism. Here’s a quote from A.A. Long (Classics, UC Berkeley) about Graver’s book, Stoicism and Emotion
A.A. Long wrote, “Margaret Graver’s book [‘Stoicism and Emotion’] expertly demolishes the widespread belief that ancient Stoicism was a philosophy that advocated repression of every feeling we call an emotion. With admirable clarity she gives an in-depth analysis of how the Stoics assessed emotional health and pathology, and of why, while taking such emotions as anger and fear to be always irrational and culpable, they held that human perfection requires joy and love.” How would you introduce the actual Stoic view of emotions, versus the “widespread belief” about them, to undergraduate students?
The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization
Timesonline article on Arab intellectual and religious influences on western civilization.
When Baghdad opened its gates as the new capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, the prime site in the city was occupied by the royal library. Both the city and the library, completed around 765, were built by Caliph al-Mansur, who devised a method for measuring the circumference of the Earth and was second in a long line of Abbasid caliphs who valued thought and learning above all else. The Abbasids created, shaped and developed one of the most rich and fertile periods of science in human history.
The library was officially called “the House of Wisdom”. It was a monumental structure, accommodating translators, copyists, scholars, scientists, librarians and the swelling volumes of Persian, Sanskrit and Greek texts that flooded into Baghdad. Not surprisingly, it became a magnet for seekers of knowledge from across the Muslim empire.