@farmerman,
Quote:YOU CANNOT REASON WITH ANYONE WHOS BELIEFS ARE NOT INITIALLY ARRIVED AT BY REASON.
Just wrap your heads around that dear readers. And it's a signature line, which is supposed to be some piece of wisdom chosen for its profundity and worthy of constant repitition.
And what superciliousness it betrays. The haughty, disdainful, contemptuous pride of the insecure, auto-didactic snob sitting, nose uptilted, alienated from human nature, and most especially the feminine aspect of it to which we all owe so much, in the ivory tower of its ignorant and stupid solipsism contemplating its own dick with unbounded admiration and blazoning its conclusion in capital letters
The siggy is even bad English.
As I am a mere amateur my words carry little weight so let us repair for a moment to the thoughts of a distinguished professional from Pembroke College, Cambridge in his essay on David Hume who wiped the concept of "reason" off the intellectual map of Europe for good and all many years ago: a fact which the silly sod quoted above, who wishes to influence your children's education with crass insults and blusterings, has, by dint of careful avoidance procedures of the type which our Ignore feature is but a crude example, managed to remain innocent despite having spent a significant part of his life in positions of responsibility within the higher learning establishments of America.
After comprehensively rubbishing the "cause/effect" sequence of entelechies so beloved of evolutionists, and which Prof. Gellner declares elsewhere to be illogical, immoral and in defiance of common sense appearences*, Prof Willey wrote-
Quote:Or take what we ordinary folk call 'the external world': Hume does not deny that there is a common belief in its existence, or that the belief might be true; what he does deny is that reason by itself can justify the belief. It is belief, not knowledge; and belief, he says, is 'more properly an act of the sensitive than of the cognitive part of our nature'. Our belief, for example, in the continuous existence of external things in between our perceptions of them--
That the sycamore tree
Should continue to be
When there's no-one about in the Quad--
this belief is not 'reasoning', but it does arise from the 'principles of human nature'. Hume is more interested in that than he is in the off-chance that the belief may be false. What he thinks unsafe and fictitious is any speculative structure purporting to discover or represent 'reality'. It would be unsafe to think of 'the soul' as a real existent; but regarded as a pattern of system of such observable events as 'ideas' or 'passions' it is real enough. Religion, again, rests upon human nature, not upon reason. 'Deism, with its insistence upon natural religion, is not capable of attaining by reason that certainty which its supporters believed. . . . [But] the difficulty which reason finds in establishing the nature of the attributes of the Deity does not affect the foundation of religion in human nature' (Laing, David Hume,1932, p 182). The assertions of faith may be false, or incapable of rational demonstration, but they may nevertheless be the expression of a psychological reality, and as such they cannot be ignored.
* Prof Gellner objects to evolutionist ideas in both nature and society thus--
1. They are illogical because to place things in a developmental sequence such as 'history as entelechy' or a Jacob's Ladder or a Tree of Life does
not explain them. ".... either a 'serial' explanation is also supported by a specification of the causal connection between the various stages along it, and then the Series as such is virtually redundant (for all we need is the causal connection, and the various states connected--and the grand Series as such then becomes no more than a list of successive conditions); or we do not possess any knowledge of how the successive stages generate each other, and then the grand Series is grossly insufficient. Hence it is either redundant or inadequate. Either way, it can hardly be placed at the centre of our explanatory and validating schema of things--which is precisely what Evolutionism does."
2. There is an objection to the
moral use of global entelechy doctrines as it is difficult to see how anyone subscribing to such doctrines without employing them as a moral premiss. And to attack the moral use of a doctrine is to attack the doctrine itself. In both world wars the evolutionist doctrine played a part and there is evidence that the US entered the 1914-18 war because evolution doctrines were in play in the German high command and that it was necessary to deal with that aspect of the matter with urgency.
But generally, is it morally acceptable to prostrate oneself before an alleged process or entelechy. Is it not, as Gellner suggests, both comic and contemptible. Karl Popper, who is quoted in wande's signature, attacked the attempt to base moral values on an asserted direction or destination of the historic process in his
Open Society and its Enemies. One gets to equating moral values with winners that way and in any period.
3. Known as the "Non Ancetres, les Gaulois" or "Our ancestors, the Gauls" fallacy. That the world doesn't look as if progress is either continuous or endogenous as the refined Victorian gentlemen were so affectionately fond of perceiving it and in which they were the nearest thing to perfection ever to appear on earth notwithstanding that most of them had to be helped to get on a horse for a walk around their estates.
Prof.Gellner concludes-
Quote: Evolutionism--the splendid vision of a one, all-embracing, ever-growing world, its meaning and justification contained within itself and its own growth, with our tasks, roles, duties all corollaries of the one grand story--is moribund. Invalid logically, invalid morally, and incompatible with the salient facts of the contemporary social world--need more be said?
