Thor's Day: What about miracles?

From An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, "Of Miracles"

By David Hume (1711-1776)

The authority, either of the scripture or of tradition, is founded merely in the testimony of the Apostles, who were [alleged to be] eyewitnesses to those miracles of our Saviour by which he proved his divine mission.

Temple Grandin's dilemma

Temple Grandin (born 1947) came to my attention only recently. I discovered the movie first, with Claire Danes in the title role. At the time, I thought that the name sounded familiar, and I finally remembered that a lecturer I'd heard at UNC (Dr. John Ratey, on exercise and the brain) had dedicated one of his books to her (A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain, 2002).
    And now I'm reading one of her books, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, 2005. Much more even than the books of Karen Pryor (e.g., Reaching the Animal Mind, 2009), Grandin's book thrills me on a subject that reaches to the very bottom of me.

It is a terrible irony for me, then, that Temple Grandin is a consultant to the livestock industry and well-known in those circles for her innovations in the design of slaughter systems. While I can approve taking steps to avoid alarming animals as they're herded to be killed, the whole enterprise is repugnant to me.
    I googled on "temple grandin moral dilemma" and found (on the Vegan Soapbox website) that

Temple Grandin’s reply to those who have identified the inherent contradiction in the statement “I design slaughter houses and I love animals,” is: “some people think death is the most terrible thing that can happen to an animal.” It follows according to Ms. Grandin that “the most important thing for an animal is the quality of its life.”

    Whoever's on the soapbox for the website immediately retorts:

Ms. Grandin’s argument is derived from an underlying ontological worldview that assumes a dualism between “human” and “animal.” This is a factual inaccuracy. Biological “animality” exists on a continuum: a human animal is a member of a species of bipedal primates in the family Hominidae—“higher primates.” It is from this invalid assumption that Ms. Grandin’s argument tries to follow. Her claim, then, is baseless and open to the challenge of blatant selective reasoning.

I'm not going to take a final position on Grandin's ethics, for I assume I don't know the whole story (yet). But I don't see how her reply quoted in the article could rectify her presumed cognitive dissonance. Just look at how she talks of "animals and humans" to see how closely related she acknowledges that they are:

It turns out that all animals and humans have what researchers call a built-in confirmation bias. Animals and humans are wired to believe that when two things happen closely together in time it's not an accident; instead the first event caused the second thing to happen.
    For example, if you put a pigeon in a case with a key that lights up right before a piece of food appears, pretty soon the pigeon will start pecking the lighted key to get food....
    The pigeon is acting like a person who thinks his team will win the baseball game if he's got his lucky rabbit's foot with him....
    Confirmation bias is built in to animal and human brains, and it helps us learn. We learn because our default assumption is that if Event 1 is followed by Event 2, then Event 1 caused Event 2. Our default assumption isn't that Events 1 and 2 happened at the same time by coincidence. Coincidence is actually a fairly advanced concept both for animals and for people. That's why in statistics courses you have to formally teach students that a correlation isn't automatically a cause. [David Hume argued for coincidence over causality in the eighteenth century.] Our brains are wired to see correlations as causes, period. Since in real life a lot of times Event 1 does cause Event 2, confirmation bias helps us make the connection.
    The downside of having a built-in confirmation bias is that you also make a lot of unfounded causal connections. That's what superstition is....
    ...The same part of the brain that lets us learn what we need to know and find the things we need to stay alive is also the part of the brain that produces delusional thinking and conspiracy theories. [pp. 98-100]

As a matter of fact, humans are animals. We have a common ancestor with every other animal [and life form¹] on the planet.
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1. Thanks to Carolyn for reminding me that I myself had realized this later, but without doing anything about it at the time.

Je n'accuse pas

About a third of the way through Ayaan Hirsi Ali's 2006 "emancipation proclamation for women and Islam," The Caged Virgin, I came upon her statement that she "denounces God." Earlier in the book she has said she is an atheist (which, by the way, in the context of her having formerly been a devout Muslim renders her subject to the death penalty). But denounces God? How are we to understand that?
    Perhaps she means, If God exists (which she has said she doesn't believe), then she would denounce him as evil (by virtue, for example—according to the Quran—of his having relegated women to the status of slaves of men?). If she doesn't mean to say it with some such qualification, then she seems to be contradicting herself.
    From her point of view (and from mine), the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers were superior morally to the God portrayed in the holy books of the Abrahamic religions. I think that's where her denouncement is probably coming from. It's a moral denouncement.
    I gather from reading Hirsi Ali's memoirs that she has directly experienced much, much more religious evil than I have (being forcibly circumcised, being subject to rote indoctrination in the Quran by a young teacher who refused to explain what the words meant but resorted to banging her head against a wall to force her to "learn," being given by her father in marriage to a man she disliked, being threatened with execution—in a handwritten note pinned with a knife to the chest of her murdered colleague...), but I haven't seen any reference in her writings to the food chain, which, to me, is a more fundamental evil for not requiring the complicity of human consciousness. After all, on my view, God had nothing to do with the penning of the Bible or the Quran; they're purely human (and essentially male) artifacts.

And yet, I am not ready to join Hirsi Ali in denouncing God if "he" exists. I think I may be more into accepting and suffering a world that simply is and only has a moral dimension because consciousness evolved from material chaos.

Before Darwin, and after

Christopher Hitchens's interesting collection of "essential readings for the non-believer" (published in 2007 under the catchy title, The Portable Atheist) includes an essay by George Eliot (1819-1880) ridiculing the evangelistic career of the Reverend John Cumming (1807-1881)—originally published in 1855, in the Westminster Review.
    It is tonic to realize how energetic the criticism of religion was even before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.  Readings in Hitchens's collection include essays by Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) (from his Theologico-Political Treatise), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) ("Of Religion," from his Leviathan), David Hume (1711-1776) ("Of Miracles," from his Natural History of Religion), and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) (from his treatise, The Necessity of Atheism). Reading Shelley's poetry hadn't prepared me for his biting, self-assured prose (written at age about nineteen).

    And these critics included at least one brave woman; "George Eliot" was Mary Anne Evans's pen name:

Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and a great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety?
    ...Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood...So long as a belief in propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth as such is not possible.

While finding that text from George Eliot on the web (since I no longer have the library's copy of Hitchens's book), I came upon this interesting bit on ethical arguments against religion in Victorian Britain:

As David J. DeLaura and a number of other historians of Victorian intellectual life have pointed out, many Victorian atheists and agnostics abandoned Christianity for a particularly Victorian reason: They found it immoral!

The loss of religious faith in such representative early Victorian aginostics as F. W. Newman (John Henry Newman's brother), J. A. Froude (brother of Newman's close friend, Hurrell Froude), and George Eliot was not due, in the first place, to the usually suggested reasons—the rise of evolutionary theory in geology and biology and the Higher Criticism of the Bible. Indeed, in each life the dominant factor was a growing repugnance toward the ethical implications of what each had been taught to believe as essential Christianity—especially the set of interrelated doctrines: Original Sin, Reprobation, Baptismal Regeneration, Vicarious Atonement, Eternal Punishment. [p. 13 of DeLaura's Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969]

    George MacDonald, for example, left his Congregationalist pulpit because he could not accept that God would damn for all eternity babies who had not been baptised before their death, and similar repugnance proved the straw that broke the camel's back for Ruskin. In St. Paul and Protestantism, Arnold "contemptuously rejects the 'monstrous' vision of a capricious God who deals in election and predestination and cruelly emphasizes the crass commercial quality of the Puritan catchwords, 'covenant,' 'ransom,' 'redeem,' 'purchase,' 'bargain.'"

Rev. Cumming seems not to have abandoned Christianity, but rather championed it, or at least some of its parts that weren't Roman Catholic.

    Cherry picking is alive and well. In Gainesville, Florida, evangelical pastor Terry Jones is all for religion and God and holy books, just not Islam and Allah and the Koran, copies of which he might yet decide to burn tomorrow.

In memoriam Professor Errol E. Harris

With somewhat of a shock, I discovered a few minutes ago that the man who said the most flattering thing that I can remember anyone's ever saying to me died only five months ago. Born the same month as my mother (February 1908), Professor Errol E. Harris died this past June, at age one hundred and one! (My mother died in 2005, not long before her ninety-seventh birthday.)
    Here's the opening paragraph of Wikipedia's entry on Errol Harris:

Errol Eustace Harris (February 19, 1908 – June 21, 2009) was a contemporary South African philosopher. His work focused on developing a systematic and coherent account of the logic, metaphysics, and epistemology implicit in contemporary understanding of the world. Harris held that, in conjunction with empirical science, the Western philosophical tradition, in its commitment to the ideal of reason, contains the resources necessary to accomplish this end. He celebrated his 100th birthday in 2008.

My reading this year has been curiously interconnected. In Frank Harris's memoir, My Life and Loves, I read a good deal of his dealings with Cecil Rhodes, whose money founded the university in South Africa from which Professor Harris earned his bachelor's degree. Then, in the course of reading Antonio Damasio's Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, I learned that Professor Harris had himself written books on Spinoza: Salvation from Despair, A Reappraisal of Spinoza's Philosophy (1973), Spinoza's Philosophy, an Outline (1992), and The Substance of Spinoza (1995). These books are of course now on my reading list.
    When I googled Harris, not remotely imagining that he could still survive, I was actually trying to find out how I might contact his son for information about his father. I talked with the son at Berkshire School in Massachusetts in 1964 or 1965. The chess team of which he was a member had come to Berkshire School for a match. This was before I ever heard of Errol Harris. His son told me that his father was a professor of philosophy (at the time at the University of Kansas).
    Anyway, after that year teaching (mainly geometry) at Berkshire School, a semester as a "divinity student" at New College in the University of Edinburgh (when I still believed that such studies had a subject matter), and a semester teaching (English and driver education) in the high school in California from which I'd graduated, I found myself (with my new wife) in Evanston, Illinois, me to begin a doctoral degree program in philosophy at Northwestern University and her to begin the arduous task of being a graduate student's wife.
    Professor Harris was new there too that fall semester of 1966, and I took his course in the philosophy of science. At the end of the semester, when we met to discuss a paper I'd submitted (I wonder whether it, too, is in that box in my garage?), he said to me, "Mr. Dean, like Hume, you don't clothe your thoughts in wool." I felt terrible; I had only a few minutes before told him of my and my wife's decision that I was dropping out of the doctoral program, and we were returning to California.

The proximate cause, or occasion, of my looking up Professor Harris today was that I had just mentioned someone else at Northwestern to yet another person in my philosophical past, namely Professor John E. Smith (now emeritus at Yale University), with whom I got in touch this week after seeing his letter to the editor of today's New York Times Book Review, "When Dusk Is Only Dusk." Professor Smith was the chairman of the philosophy department at Yale when I was there, and I was a bursary student in his office. He wrote a letter of recommendation for my application for admission to Northwestern.
    I "postscripted" him the paragraph from Wikipedia and asked whether he knew Harris. He answered that:

We were good friends for many years, he contributed to my Festschrift, The Recovery of Philosophy In America, and we took part together in numerous philosophical symposia, etc. He wrote an excellent book on Hegel's Logic. I lost touch with him after I retired and did not know where he was. I did not know that he had passed away; the 101 does not surprise me.

How extraordinary! And what a kind and distinguished man Professor Smith is too. I am delighted, honored to be in touch with him.