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Apologia Report 18:18 (1,154)
May 15, 2013
Subject: "Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy contradicts common sense"
In this issue:
BUDDHISM - how "the history of Buddhism was rewritten by the Church"
+ "Theravada is in fact a twentieth-century invention"
ORIGINS - why "the most famous philosopher in the United States" is now among the most despised for arguing that "neo-Darwinian orthodoxy contradicts common sense"
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BUDDHISM
The Cult of Emptiness: The Western Discovery of Buddhist Thought and the Invention of Oriental Philosophy, by Urs App [1] -- in his first "Book Briefs" column entry, Michael Sheehy writes: "How we have received and continue to interpret Buddhism through European lenses is the subject of The Cult of Emptiness, which presents us with a glimpse into the European discovery of Buddhism. The author, [Swiss historian] Urs App, explores and narrates this history, beginning with sixteenth-century Jesuit and Christian missionaries who encountered Zen Buddhists in Japan. App looks at how these encounters shaped the invention of a unified 'Oriental philosophy,' an atheistic doctrine of nothingness that was attributed to the Buddha and thought to originate in Egypt. Bringing to light new sources for the study of these encounters, we see how the history of Buddhism was rewritten by the Church. The story of what was known about Buddhism and how that knowledge was manipulated, not to mention how it informs our perceptions of Buddhism today, makes for a fascinating read." Buddhadharma, Spr '13, p80. <www.ow.ly/kZbXp>
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In the same column Sheehy introduces another interesting title: "What is Theravada? Seeking to address over-simplified and cliche responses to that question, the collection of articles in How Theravada Is Theravada? [2] challenges our conventional view of the Theravada in some pretty radical ways. Each chapter focuses on unpacking what Theravada is (or isn't). Beginning with the premise that Theravada is a longstanding form of Buddhism, the authors boldly debunk this widely held belief and suggest instead that Theravada is in fact a twentieth-century invention. This is a pretty strong and unusual statement, especially since Thereavada has become a cover term not only for the traditions of Southeast Asia but also for early Buddhism. Examining the teachings of rival Buddhist schools, Asian ideas about Hinayana and Mahayana, and how Theravada come into existence in conversation with Japanese and Europeans, this book asks us to reevaluate what we think we know about Theravada Buddhism." Buddhadharma,
Spr '13, p80-81.
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ORIGINS
"The Heretic: Who is Thomas Nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him?" by Andrew Ferguson -- first some groundwork from Ferguson, who describes the current neo-Darwinian scientific majority worldview: "Everything about human beings, by definition, is an evolutionary adaptation. Our sense that the colors and sounds exist 'out there' and not merely in our brain is a convenient illusion that long ago increased the survival chances of our species. ... All in reality are just 'molecules in motion.'
"The most famous, most succinct, and most pitiless summary of the manifest image's fraudulence was written nearly 20 years ago by the geneticist Francis Crick [3]: 'You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.'"
However, Ferguson notes that Daniel Dennett argues: "While it is true that materialism tells us a human being is nothing more than a 'moist robot' - a phrase Dennett took from a Dilbert comic - we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that 'for general purposes' the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist - that colors and sounds exist, too - 'just not in the way they think.' They 'exist in a special way,' which is to say, ultimately, not at all."
Dennett complains that "a few - but only a few! - contemporary philosophers have stubbornly refused to incorporate the naturalistic conclusions of science into their philosophizing, continuing to play around with outmoded ideas like morality and sometimes even the soul."
Scientific enemy No.1? Thomas Nagel, who is "causing a derangement among philosophers in England and America." His crime? To question scientific orthodoxy.
Ferguson explains that "Thomas Nagel may be the most famous philosopher in the United States. ...
"Nagel occupies an endowed chair at NYU as a University Professor, a rare and exalted position that frees him to teach whatever course he wants. Before coming to NYU he taught at Princeton for 15 years. He dabbles in the higher journalism, contributing articles frequently to the New York Review of Books and now and then to the New Republic. ...
"For all this and more, Thomas Nagel is a prominent and heretofore respected member of the country's intellectual elite. And such men are not supposed to write books with subtitles like the one he tacked onto Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False [4]. ...
"The Guardian awarded Mind and Cosmos its prize for the Most Despised Science Book of 2012" <www.ow.ly/l2pHE>. UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong "was particularly offended by Nagel's conviction that reason allows us to 'grasp objective reality.' A good materialist doesn't believe in objective reality, certainly not in the traditional sense."
Ferguson reviews some of the hatred Nagel has received lately. Then he adds: "You don't have to be a biblical fundamentalist or a young-earth creationist or an intelligent design enthusiast - I'm none of the above, for what it's worth - to find Mind and Cosmos exhilarating. 'For a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe,' Nagel writes. 'I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life.' ...
"'It flies in the face of common sense,' he says. Materialism is an explanation for a world we don't live in. ...
"What's exhilarating is that the source of Nagel's exasperation is, so to speak, his own tribe: the 'secular theoretical establishment and the contemporary enlightened culture which it dominates.' The establishment today, he says, is devoted beyond all reason to a 'dominant scientific naturalism, heavily dependent on Darwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against attacks from religion.' ... His working assumption is, in today's intellectual climate, radical: If the materialist, neo-Darwinian orthodoxy contradicts common sense, then this is a mark against the orthodoxy, not against common sense. ...
Though he does praise intelligent design advocates for having the nerve to annoy the secular establishment, he's no creationist himself. He has no doubt that 'we are products of the long history of the universe since the big bang, descended from bacteria through millions of years of natural selection.'"
The problem? "Materialism, then, is fine as far as it goes. It just doesn't go as far as materialists want it to. ...
"In a dazzling six-part tour-de-force rebutting Nagel's critics <www.ow.ly/l2pPL>, the philosopher Edward Feser provided a good analogy to describe the basic materialist error - the attempt to stretch materialism from a working assumption into a comprehensive explanation of the world. Feser suggests a parody of materialist reasoning: '1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has. 2. Therefore we have good reason to think that metal detectors can reveal to us everything that can be revealed' about metallic objects. ...
"Neo-Darwinism insists that every phenomenon, every species, every trait of every species, is the consequence of random chance, as natural selection requires. And yet, Nagel says, 'certain things are so remarkable that they have to be explained as non-accidental if we are to pretend to a real understanding of the world.' ...
"You can't explain consciousness in evolutionary terms, Nagel says, without undermining the explanation itself. ...
"On its own terms, the scheme of neo-Darwinism gives us no standard by which we should choose one adaptive capacity over the other. And yet neo-Darwinists insist we embrace neo-Darwinism because it conforms to our reason, even though it runs against our intuition. Their defense of reason is unreasonable. ...
"Nagel's reliance on 'common sense' has roused in his critics a special contempt. ...
"[M]ost of his ... critics, were ... agog that Nagel has the nerve to pronounce on matters that they consider purely scientific, far beyond his professional range. A philosopher doubting a scientist is a rare sight nowadays. With the general decline of the humanities and the success of the physical sciences, the relationship of scientists to philosophers of science has been reversed. As recently as the middle of the last century, philosophers like Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer might feel free to explain to scientists the philosophical implications of what they were doing. Today the power is all on the side of the scientists: One false move and it's back to your sandbox, philosophy boy. ...
"In a recent review in the New York Review of Books <www.ow.ly/l2q0v> ... Nagel told how instinctively he recoils from theism, and how hungry he is for a reasonable alternative. 'If I ever found myself flooded with the conviction that what the Nicene Creed says is true,' he wrote, 'the most likely explanation would be that I was losing my mind, not that I was being granted the gift of faith.' He admits that he finds the evident failure of materialism as a worldview alarming - precisely because the alternative is, for a secular intellectual, unthinkable. He calls this intellectual tic 'fear of religion.'
"'I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear,' he wrote not long ago in an essay called 'Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion' <www.ow.ly/l2q7d>. 'I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.'
"Nagel believes this 'cosmic authority problem' is widely shared among intellectuals, and I believe him. It accounts for the stubbornness with which they cling to materialism - and for the hostility that greets an intellectual who starts to wander off from the herd. Materialism must be true because it 'liberates us from religion.' The positive mission Nagel undertakes in Mind and Cosmos is to outline, cautiously, a possible Third Way between theism and materialism, given that the first is unacceptable - emotionally, if not intellectually - and the second is untenable." Weekly Standard, Mar 25 '13, n.p. <www.ow.ly/kZJcA>
Also see <www.ow.ly/l2oDR>
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - The Cult of Emptiness: The Western Discovery of Buddhist Thought and the Invention of Oriental Philosophy, by Urs App (UniversityMedia, 2012, hardcover, 304 pages) <www.ow.ly/kZaaQ>
2 - How Theravada Is Theravada?: Exploring Buddhist Identities by Peter Skilling, Jason A. Carbine, Claudio Cicuzza and Santi Pakdeekham (Silkworm, 2012, paperback, 640 pages) <www.ow.ly/kZJwp>
3 - The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, by Francis Crick (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994, hardcover, 217 pages) <www.ow.ly/l2pA3>
4 - Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel (Oxford Univ Prs, 2012, hardcover, 144 pages) <www.ow.ly/kZGPJ>
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