Wednesday, June 1, 2016

The Validity Of Rational Thought


I think if Einstein could envisage where rationality has taken people today- he would turn in his grave. He might have regretted the faithful servant analogy if in his wildest dreams he had intuited that it would lead us ultimately to irrationality. Of course, I don't believe that rationality has led us there, but rationalizing from false starting points always will.


The world today is full of polarized opinions. I find it incredible that a mother can agree with her two year old child, who expresses a desire to be the sex opposite to that in which they were born and even take affirmative action to support this desire. This is perceived by her to be "respecting her child's choice". But what does a two year old know about sex? An adult is prepared to defer to a child, who knows nothing about that which they are making life-altering decisions over- and a mother will go along with that? I think it is tantamount to child abuse of the worst sort, allowing them- even forcing them- to be responsible for choices that they have no idea of the lasting ramifications. A child cannot under a certain age be administered aspirin at school without the parents permission and yet they can have an abortion secretly while the parents are kept in ignorance. They cannot get to vote, or have a drivers licence or even legally drink alcohol under a certain age. But if they want gender-based surgery- whose to stop them? Who is to say they can't have what they want? Why can't they be children before they make choices that may affect them in ways they have no imagination of, and may well never recover from? This is but a symptom of the universal madness breaking out that Nietzsche wrote of. It is all in the name of the idol of our time: Human autonomy, free will. This is self determinism and self expression run amok. When not even biology is allowed to determine who I am, this is self adulation absolutized.

 I find it absolutely incredible that they will give their innocent child over to the surgeons knife to change their body, maybe irrevocably, instead of making attempts to change their mind. So you have in certain quarters this existentialist idol which pretty much agrees with the sentiment of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh who quoted Invictus: 

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul

So human freedom reaches it's depths in this statement of absolute autonomy. And yet on the other hand we have the determinists who will utterly destroy any idea of human freedom at all. Richard Tarnas provides some helpful insight into the dehumanizing effects of modern scientism, the view that science is the only source of knowledge:
"The more modern man strove to control nature by understanding its principles, to free himself from nature’s power, to separate himself from nature’s necessity and rise above it, the more completely his science metaphysically submerged man into nature, and thus into its mechanistic and impersonal character as well. For if man lived in an impersonal universe, and if his existence was entirely grounded in and subsumed by that universe, then man too was essentially impersonal, his private experience of personhood a psychological fiction. In such a light, man was becoming little more than a genetic strategy for the continuance of his species, and as the twentieth century progressed that strategy’s success was becoming yearly more uncertain. Thus it was the irony of modern intellectual progress that man’s genius discovered successive principles of determinism — Cartesian, Newtonian, Darwinian, Marxist, Freudian, behaviorist, genetic, neurophysiological, sociobiological — that steadily attenuated belief in his own rational and volitional freedom, while eliminating his sense of being anything more than a peripheral and transient accident of material evolution."

The idea of free choice requires that there be real alternatives. A fish has no choice, no ability to acknowledge the concepts of either "wetness", or what the word "dry" means.  A thinking fish, a fish with a will, cannot choose to think about the extrinsic qualities of wetness or dryness.They are concepts that would (given the ability to reason) be impossible to know, given the realm in which the fish exists. So the possibility of alternatives- extrinsic to ourselves- is a prerequisite of choice. Just as a mammal necessarily requires the freedom of an external atmosphere, an environment with the right proportion of oxygen and nitrogen in order to maintain breathing, and life itself, it also has to have the internal faculties we call lungs to breathe freely within that environment. We need the extrinsic environment of alternatives for us to make real choices, and the internal capacity to will. The capacity for choice. And it is impossible to choose what you cannot know. Sometimes knowledge is not certain and so choices are made on the basis of evidence. 
Is it a fully determined world? Is it a world in which it is possible to make a free choice? 
No one is denying the ability to choose, but what is happening is that the idea of true freedom is negated (emptied of its meaning) by undermining the circumstances that are necessary in existence to give the environment in which free choices are made possible. We are assured of the internal criteria, a mind and a will. But not the external conditions, not the external environment. Because the external is fully determined.

So- suppose I choose to believe that it is possible to make free choices in this world- but the determinists smile and nod at my "useful fiction" with their understanding that my decision to acknowledge true freedom is a fully determined action because of their perception of reality that they keep in the back of their minds. For all I know, (according to the fixed, mechanistic universe in which we supposedly dwell), the evidence may stack up much more in favour of determinism, but my mind is not free to be in subjection to the weight of evidence even though I think it is, even though every impression I have gives me the sense that at least in thought I am free to decide. But if my "free" choice was fully determined, because that is the nature of reality, (according to determinists) then I have no opportunity, no basis on which to trust my mind. Since the  weight of evidence has no real bearing on my choice. Then I have no reason to trust the conclusion about reality which my mind has come to. And if that is true of my mind, then it is also true of the minds of determinists, randomnicitists as well as people like myself. The determinists then, have not only robbed me and the world of free choice, they have robbed us of the meaning of truth, because we now have no reason to trust that our minds can bear a true relation to reality. We can no longer trust ourselves to objectively weigh the likely state of affairs. In fact they have robbed themselves at the same time, since we have no reason to trust their minds are relating to truth either.

"Perhaps this may be even more simply put in another way. Every particular thought (whether it is a judgement of fact or a judgement of value) is always and by all men discounted the moment they believe that it can be explained, without remainder, as the result of irrational causes. Whenever you know what the other man is saying is wholly due to his complexes or to a bit of bone pressing on his brain, you cease to attach any importance to it. But if naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. Therefore, all thoughts would be equally worthless. Therefore, naturalism is worthless. If it is true, then we can know no truths. It cuts its own throat."

“The validity of rational thought… is the necessary presupposition of all other theorizing.” C.S. Lewis. 
Lewis identifies there has to be true freedom at at least one level- the level of thought- otherwise there can be no rational thinking at all.  So then if there has to be some freedom at the level of thought, if we concede rationality is a reality, then, at that point, we can then ask how far does this freedom extend? To relinquish freedom at the level of thought is to give up rationality. If we surrender rationality to the determinists, they too have to suspend their rationality and embrace irrationality- they have no choice. This is the logical bind of naturalism and a purely mechanistic view of reality, which Lewis refers to. I think if they followed through the logical implications of their absolutist determinism, they would not willingly choose to pay such a high price. Surely if we are free in this fundamental way, then it follows that the evidence we see of the differences a life can make, the impact on what would otherwise have been, we are right to think there is real, though perhaps limited freedom.
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