Embedded Files
By Lee Bright
Page Version 0.9
AGB = Asimov, Isaac and Palacios, Rafael (1981) Asimov's Guide to the Bible. Wings Books: NY.
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) is considered among the greatest and most prolific science fiction writers of all time. He wrote several hundred novels and short stories which featured explanations of philology and modern science. He also wrote a number of well-received non-fiction titles covering a wide range of topics such as Understanding Physics, Asimov's Chronology of the World, and the text commented on here - Asimov's Guide to the Bible.
I came across Asimov's Guide to the Bible (AGB) a few years after the author passed away. An old book review (probably in First Things or perhaps National Review) considered the newest edition of the two-volume set a waste of talent on a good summary of liberal scholarship. Asimov's focus is the connection between the Bible and secular history, geography, and language. I acquired this book (two volumes in one) as a readable counterbalance to the often simplistic, literalistic, optimistic, and scholastic Christian scholarship on my shelf.
Not so naïve as to believe the AGB unbiased, I knew I would disagree with much of what was inside. What surprised me in my first reading was how much was agreeable, especially in the Old Testament. Asimov’s writing style is elegant and engaging. Little prior knowledge is required to read AGB. His mastery of the material is impressive. His speculations are usually labeled as such and contain at least a veneer of reasoning. Only on occasion does he turn polemical against the faithful - indeed, both volumes are dedicated to one "who has faith." Several simple maps produced by Rafael Palacios give context to the text. What one is left with does not come across as so much empty propaganda, like many of his ilk, but an honestly written intersection of the Bible and modern secular scholarship. The result is the single most readable guide to the Bible I have ever read. Other guides, notes, and commentaries – liberal and conservative - are no match in this regard.
Asimov gained some of his understanding of the Bible as the son of an Orthodox Jewish father. His family migrated to the United States from Russia when he was two years old - before he could properly learn Russian. Growing up in New York, he spoke English natively and learned the basics of Hebrew and Yiddish. As a rationalist growing up in contact with a culture of religion, I suspect the erudite Asimov wanted a nuanced popular work that puts the biblical text in its place as mythological literature against the over-enthusiastic extremes of both atheist and believer.
I could have titled this Bright’s Guide to Asimov’s Guide to the Bible. That title is far too ponderous, and my name is neither known nor respected, but it describes much of the intent of this work. There are three main goals for this commentary on AGB. The first is simply to update AGB with some of the recent facts, ideas, and scholarship. First published in 1967, Asimov’s last edition of the book was in 1988 and that barely updated from the 1981 edition. The 1981 edition seems to be the most widely accessible and an online copy is available as well, so I will lean more toward commenting on that edition.
From the outset, Asimov was content to use standard encyclopedias and commentaries for his work. Quite a lot has happened since then, including more than a few “now we know” admissions of academic arrogance. Despite the penchant of academia to declare consensus, much of 20th-century critical thought has churned and suspended, yet to settle enough to reach the layman. For instance, the Documentary Hypothesis - a central pillar of secular and so-called "critical" biblical scholarship standing for over a century - has cracked and crumbled into a "collapsed consensus" amongst those scoring consensuses. While there might be some relevance here and there, as an all-encompassing description of sources, the Documentary Hypothesis may safely be committed to the flames.
Consequently, source and depth material will be cited more often in this text. Links should appear in the text, after paragraphs, and also topically in one of the Sources & Links pages. Relevant source texts will be quoted with free use of bold font emphasizing and brackets [ ] contextualizing the text. The use of bold or brackets will contain a special note only when they were originally found in the quoted text. Spacing and paragraph placement will also be freely modified without special note to aid in seeing real and hypothesized literary features. Most of the sources used have a hyperlink with the in-text citation for easy comparison to the original.
Asimov was thoughtful, knowledgeable, and often empathetic - rarely ranting or overconfident. His work is an almost ideal baseline for comparison with a rational Christian author. The second goal of this commentary is to compare what a rational Christian perspective would see when treating the same topics in the same manner. To be gained is an understanding of just how reliable modern studies and the hyper-critical approach to the Bible have been. I do not intend to go far outside the scope of the subjects he covers. The genius of his book was a focus on a secular understanding. The genius of this commentary will be to focus on his focus with only a few needed additions.
A note on the word ‘secular’: Over the centuries, and especially recently, the meaning of 'secular' has changed quite a bit. In normal usage, 'secular' has turned into a synonym for ‘atheistic’ or ‘scientific’ (as in Scientism) with a hint of responsibility thrown in (as in humanism). This meaning solidified with the first Humanist Manifesto, which posited secular humanism as a religion in competition with theism, even referring to it as “religious humanism.” But there remain clergy within the Catholic Church who can be called secular priests who contradict these meanings. There has always been a time when some things are regarded as more holy than others, but as the fields of ancient history and anthropology know, the sacred-secular and natural-supernatural dichotomies are modern inventions.
The Sacred and the Secular (2003) by Roger Scruton - Princeton.edu (pdf)
I will adhere, as I think Asimov often did (eg. AGB pg. 531), to the two somewhat paradoxical meanings for ‘secular’ from Webster’s Dictionary of being ‘temporal’ or “continuing through ages”. Both definitions join together in “being of this world.” When the more atheistic version is intended, I will surround it in sneer quotes - ‘secular’ - to highlight this variance. For example, a secular society (without quotes) might mean no more than a republic based on the rule of law instead of the whims of powerful persons. However, a ‘secular’ society would denote a view of progress that seeks to somehow diminish religious persons and sentiment. The 'secular' person harbors an antireligious prejudice. Like many religionists, their thumbs are too often on the scales to be trusted without critique.
One area that is largely missing from Asimov’s ‘secular’ outlook that I will seek to remedy is philosophy - the only category of the Dewey Decimal System he did not publish a book. In this vein, I wish to bracket, if not soundly address, five issues that underlie religious skepticism:
Order in the Universe - A true religion must account for an orderly universe, especially for the kind of order leveraged to produce reliable predictions in the hard sciences.
Problem of Nature - I have witnessed a brown bear skin a salmon alive, throw the fish back in the river, and watch what was left swim away. By any account, God created a world “red in tooth and claw.” How then to consider suffering? In that same stream, I have watched tens of thousands of salmon die a slow natural death in late summer and fall after spawning. Everywhere they littered the stream with their carcasses, creating what in any human-caused context would be an ecological disaster. How then to consider moral categories? I submit the Problem of Pain and the Problem of Evil are varieties of the Problem of Nature.
Problem of Novelty - Religion springing from history without forebearer is false religion. Christianity must claim that Judaism is proto-Christian. Judaism must claim some movement of Mesopotamian religion as proto-Abrahamic. Identifying those movements shows the Christian claims to be both wider and deeper than both 'secularism' and many religionists will allow.
Cogency of the Text - I have more or less the same basic beliefs about the sciences as Asimov - at least, the disagreements would not be religious in nature. And yet, I can read most and increasingly more of the Bible without a sense of dissonance.
Modern Relevance - Although most of the Bible is not lawlike, some things in it were only applicable to the age they were experienced or written. If they can be said to still apply, it is only in a roundabout way. In the ever-changing age in which we live, it is often not clear what has been deprecated and what should be defended.
Of the five categories above, four of them are knowledge-based. The real concern for relational faith with God, proper religious faith, is the Problem of Nature. Regardless of any individual intelligence or wisdom, we are all subject to pain and we will all die. Although the Problem of Nature can be whittled down, when it is all said and done, the subjective Problem of Pain will remain. My thesis is that the feeling that God is indifferent or does not care for us is the only enduring problem - the razor's edge of faith.
Due to the addition of philosophy, and because a rational Christian worldview is not familiar to many, this Introduction and the commentary concerning the book of Genesis must be quite a bit longer than the comparable material in the AGB. To help the reader, certain chapters have been designated as anchors that encapsulate the main ideas: this Introduction, 1. Genesis, 2. Exodus, 18. Job, 38. Zechariah, and 5. Matthew. I would welcome any discussion that has at least read these chapters.
The final goal is to keep writing. To write is to think. Before this, I had an off-and-on philosophical and theological project started in my college years (some of which is in this Introduction). It had a grand vision of putting my visual thinking into writing by directly confronting some of the significant 'secular' papers written in the 20th century. Most of the larger themes were worked out, but writing has always been a tough slog for me - at least for making something readable. Sure, I could whip through it easily enough if I would settle for a postmoderny impressionistic stream-of-consciousness prose, but my latent perfectionism emerges, and that style of writing is so superficial and unconvincing. This commentary will be much easier as sections can be worked on piecemeal and the website is relatively easy to update and maintain.
So much of what is encountered in modern popular thought is dubious. As tortured as my writing may be, I have often found I don't have the verbal acuity to properly discuss or fruitfully navigate debate without a scorched earth tearing down of those in opposition. Long ago I saw this as a character flaw. I have avoided critical conflict since then and sought to have a life that builds people up. My prayer is that I may someday be able to talk about the deeper things on the level with respect and love, with text and charts at my back to do the heavy lifting. This is the big-picture motivation.
I am a non-linear generalist with a broad knowledge of science, history, and philosophy - a low-level polymath - about the opposite of a specialist. Covering such a range of topics to a potentially broad audience, my citations on a point in the secondary literature may have big disagreements with my overall worldview. In some cases, I have sought out sources that emphatically disagree to emphasize the saliency of a particular point.
Like Asimov, I am a layman. Unlike Asimov, I may never finish this. Therefore readers should not be surprised to see rough draft and place-holding material on the site. A version number will appear at the top of each page relating to that page’s relative completeness. This is my Pilgrim’s Progress.
Presuppositions
Presuppositions
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
- Isaac Asimov
Asimov was an atheist. He preferred the terms 'rationalist' and 'humanist', with much of his life devoted to those ends. One of the many notable cosigners of “an expression of a living and growing faith” called the Humanist Manifesto II, Asimov was the 1984 Humanist of the Year. Asimov spent the last seven years of his life as the president of the American Humanist Association. Leon Wieseltier helps lay out the ground of humanism in his 2015 essay “Among the Disrupted”:
For a start, humanism is not the antithesis of religion, as Pope Francis is exquisitely demonstrating. The most common understanding of humanism is that it denotes a pedagogy and a worldview. The pedagogy consists in the traditional Western curriculum of literary and philosophical classics, beginning in Greek and Roman antiquity and — after an unfortunate banishment of medieval culture from any pertinence to our own — erupting in the rediscovery of that antiquity in Europe in the early modern centuries, and in the ideals of personal cultivation by means of textual study and aesthetic experience that it bequeathed, or that were developed under its inspiration, in the “enlightened” 18th and 19th centuries, and eventually culminated in programs of education in the humanities in modern universities. The worldview takes many forms: a philosophical claim about the centrality of humankind to the universe, and about the irreducibility of the human difference to any aspect of our animality; a methodological claim about the most illuminating way to explain history and human affairs, and about the essential inability of the natural sciences to offer a satisfactory explanation; a moral claim about the priority, and the universal nature, of certain values, not least tolerance and compassion. It is all a little inchoate — human, humane, humanities, humanism, humanitarianism; but there is nothing shameful or demeaning about any of it.
Asimov’s humanism was "the antithesis of religion" and deserves the sneer quotes - ‘secular’. Asimov has many nuggets to quote in this regard. The following elegantly encapsulates his mature opinions:
I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
- Free Inquiry, Spring 1982
On religious sentiment:
I am sometimes suspected of being nonreligious as an act of rebellion against Orthodox parents. That may have been true of my father, but I have rebelled against nothing. I have been left free and I have loved the freedom. The same is true of my brother and sister and our children.
I have never, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so.
- Jeppson & Asimov 2002, p. 20
On religious life:
I would not be satisfied to have my kids choose to be religious without trying to argue them out of it, just as I would not be satisfied to have them decide to smoke regularly or engage in any other practice I consider detrimental to mind or body.
- Corvallis Secular Society 1997 via Brummond
On the Bible:
If you suspect that my interest in the Bible is going to inspire me with sudden enthusiasm for Judaism and make me a convert of mountain‐moving fervor and that I shall suddenly grow long earlocks and learn Hebrew and go about denouncing the heathen — you little know the effect of the Bible on me. Properly read, it is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
- Jeppson 2006, p. 58
On Heaven:
What human being with a modicum of intelligence could stand any of such Heavens, or the other that people have invented, for very long? Where is there a Heaven with an opportunity for reading, for writing, for exploring, for interesting conversation, for scientific investigation? I never heard of one.
- Asimov 1994, p. 333
While these quotes more than suggest his prejudices, Asimov’s widely acclaimed short story “Nightfall” shows that he is not so transfixed on 'secularism' as to be incapable of criticism of its pillars of modern science and humanism. Four groups of characters emerge in this story: The Scientists are testing hypotheses with evidence or at least making reasonable speculations. They feel their slow, deliberate progress toward knowledge is far superior to the Cultists in both methods and results. The Cultists represent an Abrahamic-like religion whose sources are all couched in the language and practice of mysticism. By the end of the story, the Cultists are shown to be technically correct about nearly everything, much to the dismay of the underestimating Scientists.
Isaac Asimov - "Nightfall" (1941) - uni.edu
A third character, Theremon 762, is a self-confident and critical newspaper reporter who regards both the Scientists and Cultists as cranks and expects both groups to be embarrassed by the failure of their predictions. His motivation is to make personal gains by siding with the Scientists to improve their situation after their embarrassment. The last character is the hoi polloi, who merely react to the events and instigation of the other three character groups. To say the cultists "win" in this story would be incorrect, as the story ends with the group’s ultimate belief unsupported and most likely wrong.
The cultists are dealt with in a very one-dimensional way. While the Scientists are shown to be both arrogant and wrong (although progressively less wrong over time), Latimer - the only cultist character in the story with a speaking part - contrasts himself as a fideist Bible thumper. When asked to justify his belief, he responds with an emphatic “I know!” instead of citing the rather substantial body of attending evidence and his own experience.
This pitiful response from Latimer highlights one of the weaknesses of Asimov’s view of religion, albeit a weakness supported by millions of fideist Bible thumpers! The hypothesis testing of science and the facts attending the experience of God are both forms of induction. Induction is the gaining of general knowledge from particular instances. In short, determining causes from effects. In a word, science.
However, as the English empiricist philosopher David Hume famously showed, causes do not logically (ie. a priori) lead us to effects:
When I see, for instance, a Billiard-ball moving in a straight line towards another; even suppose motion in the second ball should by accident be suggested to me, as the result of their contact or impulse; may I not conceive, that a hundred different events might as well follow from that cause? May not both these balls remain at absolute rest? May not the first ball return in a straight line, or leap off from the second in any line or direction? All these suppositions are consistent and conceivable. Why then should we give the preference to one, which is no more consistent or conceivable than the rest? All our reasonings a priori will never be able to show us any foundation for this preference.
There is no law of logical deduction where a cause leads to a particular effect. It is only out of habit or construction from outside principles that causes are matched to effects. Our typical habit is built upon hypothesizing causes or perceiving patterns after observing some repetition of effects. We then invent falsifying or affirming tests for our hypotheses and establish knowledge upon the results. And we call this science.
Oxford Lectures on David Hume, 2021-22 (2021) PDF by David Milliken - davidhume.org
With continued repetition of this habit, that may seem well and good - we might even be so confident as to construct a "law of nature" such as "all swans are white." But just because all our observations have produced white swans, how do we know the very next observation won’t produce a black swan? How do we know that our observations can even be generalized to "almost all swans are white?" How do we know it's not black swans from here on out? If we move to Australia, how do we know that white swans won't be the exception rather than the rule? Finally, how do we avoid self-deception in explaining away outlier and edge cases, such as mottled swans?
Oliver Scott Curry - 2014 : WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? Associationism. - edge.org
Since induction deals in probabilities, induction can never definitively prove itself, which leads to the statistician's mantra, “Correlation does not imply causation.” ‘Proof’ is for alcohol and ideal axiomatic systems, not science. All of us must take with a measure of faith that the sun will rise again or, as in Asimov’s Nightfall, that a sun will remain risen.
Keith Devlin - 2005 : WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT? - edge.org
The Logos
The Logos
“We know more than we can tell.” - Michael Polanyi
The bedrock assumption to any relation between cause and effect - even habit - is that the same order applies from one time to another and from place to place. Science has expanded and conjoined time and space to an entire universe of stars and galaxies by this principle. To be clear, this principle is not a finding of science, but the presupposition by which we come to know anything. The entire universe must everywhere follow the same order at every instance for us to know anything at all about it. To even ask the question, "Is the universe orderly?" presupposes that it is. The word ‘universe’ itself seems to encapsulate the principle (Latin: uni- = one, -versum = turned toward).
Janna Levin - 2005 : WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT? - edge.org
Physicists and astronomers have posited the idea of ‘universes’ not connected to our own, each having different histories of creation. This could lead to different laws of physics, at least at low energy levels, but still, the multiverse must follow the same underlying order for any conception of reality to be possible. There must remain a common multiversal order for any hope of our hypotheses and speculations to possibly hit their mark. Much of this order must be left unstated - it is tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1958), which in part is another way of saying that it must be presupposed.
Can a Multiverse ever be "real"? - Sixty Symbols - youtube.com
That which is explicit in the sciences is not so much written in the fabric of the universe as in our imaginations. As effective as they are, what we call the Laws of Physics, Laws of Logic, and Mathematics are merely human tools invented to access and predict the more obvious patterns of universal order. The 20th century demonstrated many places where these tools cannot reach, such as the limited applicability of binary logic, logical paradoxes, the Halting Problem, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, identification of Kantian Wholes, and Schrödinger's cat, to name a few.
Platonic and Apophatic Truths
Platonic and Apophatic Truths
Thoughtful modern mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers have long admitted that the deepest truths of math and science can only go so far. Somewhat ironically they call these deep truths Platonic Truths, named after Plato who posited that objective truths and forms can be discovered and known. The implication is that even though math and the sciences strive for unimpeachable objective kinds of knowledge, the foundations of that knowledge are ultimately based on subjective human perspectives and measurements. Few still follow David Hume basing all of this perspective on "sense impressions," however, the history of thought, our location in the universe, and a myriad of other considerations do play into our epistemology - how we know what we know.
One can see where the label of "Platonic Truth" comes from with the example of Platonic Solids - the only five shapes made of regular polygons. From early mathematics, it was proven there were only five. These solids became associated with the primal elements of earth, water, air, fire, and the stars.
Such was the influence of the objectivity of these shapes that Johannes Kepler originally pursued a theory of the orbit of the planets around the sun with each planet related to one of the shapes. The corners of each shape defined points on a sphere that contained the circular orbit of that planet. The shape-sphere pairs were nested in each other to achieve the correct spacing of orbits out from the sun. Planetary orbits happen to be spaced such that it almost worked!
Eventually, Kepler abandoned Platonic solids, instead defining orbits as ellipses. In his seminal Three Laws of Planetary Motion, planetary positions were precisely predicted over prolonged periods providing parsimonious impetus to abandon the Earth as the center of the universe.
Kepler's Platonic solid model of the Solar system from Mysterium Cosmographicum (1600)
In modern thought, there are no perfect triangles in the universe, much less perfect Platonic solids. Although we often apply these shapes to model things that are close enough for the precision we require, a perfect equilateral triangle only exists hypothetically in our imagination. It is an ideal never achieved, but often a precise enough human construct that it can be applied usefully to the world. However, it was not thought to be a construct until alternative geometries were thought up in the 1800s. Before that what we now know as Euclidean Geometry was just the objective reality called 'Geometry'. Non-Euclidean geometries were not generally accepted until Einstein's Theory of General Relativity showed that space and time, now dubbed spacetime, are not Euclidean.
Veritasium: How One Line in the Oldest Math Text Hinted at Hidden Universes (2023) - youtube.com
While incredibly precise, few scientists believe General Relativity is perfect -- that there will never be an exception or modification to the theory. Even if it were perfect, there is no way we could ever know that with certainty, as shown by the Halting Problem and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. General Relativity then is also a human construct - at best a Platonic Truth.
Closer to Truth: Can Science Provide Ultimate Answers? - closertotruth.com
Highlights: Martin Rees, Deepak Chopra, Raymond Tallis, David Deutsch & Stuart Kauffman
It is believed by the modern that Platonic truths and the models of reality that use them will never be quite right. At best, they are no more than highly precise estimations and scaffolding. One of the main purposes of modern science, perhaps the defining purpose, is to progressively become less wrong - to ever increase verisimilitude. Isaac Asimov's essay The Relativity of Wrong (1988) shows this is very much how he thought of things. A strength in Asimov's thought, this may account for the relative humility with which he could approach even that which he didn't believe, and perhaps guarded against some of the Presentism and Whigism that 'secularists' and other partisans so easily fall into. However, we will see the overwhelming success of the hard sciences in increasing verisimilitude had given him unfounded confidence that the soft sciences have done the same.
The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov - hermiene.net
The interesting conclusion is that the universal order is only without error when it is not specified. Any specification of the universal order introduces error, however small, at which point it must be considered at best a Platonic truth. We know about universal order only because it is the presupposition of all truth seekers, knowledge makers, and their rational critics. All of our objective-like knowledge - ancient and modern - points to order as the ultimate reality.
While not unknown in the more prescriptive Western civilization, the way of not specifying - the Negative Way - has long been known explicitly from (Eastern) Orthodox Christianity and Greek philosophy, and implicitly in a host of other philosophies and religions. Also known as the via negativa, negative theology, and Apophatic theology, the way is just what it says - putting a negative in front of an attributive word to avoid over-specifying ultimate reality.
The word 'infinite' is a fine example meaning to be "not finite" - without limit, bound, or end. Infinite was first a negative way to describe God or the One in ancient times. It has proven to be an indispensable concept in mathematics, the infinitesimal (1 ÷ ∞ → 0) forming the foundation of Calculus and therefore all the hard sciences that depend on Calculus. While some people might imagine infinite to mean "the largest number you can think of plus one," the word's real meaning goes outside of the mind and beyond the box of numbers. Thus:
∞ + 1 = ∞
∞ + 1000 = ∞
∞ + ∞ = ∞
∞ - 1 = ∞
∞ - 1000 = ∞
∞ - 1,000,000 = ∞
∞ - ∞ = undefined
∞ x 1 = ∞
∞ x 1000 = ∞
∞ x 1,000,000 = ∞
∞ x ∞ = ∞
∞ ÷ 0 = undefined
∞ ÷ 1000 = ∞
∞ ÷ 1,000,000 = ∞
∞ ÷ ∞ = undefined
What is God minus 8 billion humans? Infinite.
What is God minus 999 trillion angels? Infinite.
It is often said in jest, "There are two types of people in the world - those who divide people into two types and those who don't." While this recursive tautology appears to capture a trivial truth, it conceals a pervasively unexamined prejudice of the positivists. Those who divide are a type because they are constraining and constrained. Those who don't are undefined and unconstrained, possibly infinitely so. Therefore, they cannot be a "type" by any positivist definition of that word without contradiction. This contradiction descends deeply into the untyped types of Russell's Paradox, which still haunts the field of formal logic.
Russell's Paradox - A Simple Explanation of a Profound Problem (2022) by Jeffry Kaplan - youtube.com
The practical result that pops up again and again as a failing in positivist reasoning is that for every large population or range of possibility, there will exist the categories (ie. types, classes, etc.) and the undefined other whose only constraint is to be negatively defined against the categories. For instance, an elegant categorization of galaxies is by shape: spiral, elliptical, and irregular. Irregular galaxies are an unconstrained collection of galaxies that don't easily fit within the spiral or elliptical categories. Even irregular galaxies are usefully processed into subtypes, but if we see a galaxy that doesn't look like anything we have ever seen before, into the unbounded irregular box it goes.
If, instead, we were to force-fit every observation into tightly constrained finite categories, the result would be scientific stagnation and falsehood. To avoid using intuition, each galaxy would have to be its own category, at which point no generalizations could be made about any of them. No science could be done. No knowledge could be gained.
Types of Galaxies - spaceplace.nasa.gov
Galaxy Zoo > Field Guide - Zooniverse.org
In summary, any discussion of metaphysical realities that are not apophatic and/or recursive should not be taken seriously. As a Westerner of Western European descent, growing up in the American West and now living near the West Coast, I often use positive language, but I fully concede its problems regarding math, logic, and ultimate truths.
Religion ⇔ Philosophy
Religion ⇔ Philosophy
The first secular source for the principle of universality is thought to be the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (ca. 535 - 475 BC), most famous for believing that fire was the primal element all could be reduced to. Like a fire’s flame, he regarded everything to be in a state of flux:
You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.
Even though all is in a state of flux, all flux is orderly. He called this principle of universal order the Logos (Greek: Λογος), which is often translated into English in its most literal form as ‘Word’ or ‘The Word’. This appears to be a term already in general use during his time, but Heraclitus is supposed to be the first to use the word outside of a religious context.
We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Word [Logos] is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own.
- Heraclitus (Wheelwright, 1959, ch. 1)
Heraclitus quotes related to Logos - heraclitusfragments.com
The Logos subsequently provided the foundation for Platonic, Stoic, and Neoplatonic thought, which is to say, most thought before the Renaissance that has been regarded as rational by Western Civilization. Its supersized philosophical import has seen "The Word" live on in Western languages as a root or suffix in a variety of modern words, such as logic, biology, and logistics.
We still find the Logos underneath all of our philosophical questions. An example is found in one of the most basic questions, "Why is there ‘something’ rather than ‘nothing’?" The most obvious question to follow should be - “What are the properties of no-thing?” First, we would have to remove all things to make empty space: planets, stars, dust, matter, and anything else that might be detected as a mass or impart a force of gravity. Cosmologists and quantum physicists know that even this kind of empty space is teeming with particles popping in and out of existence. So we must go further by eliminating all quantum fields and space-time itself. But even that is not the most nothing of nothingness, because we have still left the potentiality of order - the Logos - that would be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent over any ‘thinginess’ that it spontaneously produced.
The Logos is what allows us to ask the question in the first place. Without the Logos, we have reached the most nothing of nothing, but our question then is not even conceivable. We must presuppose the Logos to even construct the question let alone possible answers. If we leave the Logos in our ‘nothing’, we have a clear answer - the Logos, God. The Logos then is a brute fact - a necessary presupposition - the ground of all being - the absolute minimum and foundational conception of order - God!
Why is There 'Something' Rather Than 'Nothing'? (Part 1) - closertotruth.com
Highlights: John Leslie, Peter van Inwagen & Richard Swinburne
Why There is 'Something' Rather Than 'Nothing'? (Part 2) - closertotruth.com
Highlights: Paul Davies, Alexander Vilenkin & Anthony Aguirre
Apart from being a necessary presupposition for any knowledge claim, the properties of the Logos are the cosmic attributes of God - omnipresent, omnipotent, eternal, infinite, immutable, imperishable, and, as the case of the multiverse shows, ineffable. This shows us the minimum conception of God. If knowledge is at all efficacious, then God must at least be the Logos. That makes the Logos God even for atheists, although, by some of the arguments advanced, it seems many don’t realize this. For instance, the physically obsolete conundrum, “Can God make a rock so large that He can’t lift it?” - which has long been a staple of the dialogue of doubt - is obviated by the reality of the Logos. Consequently, similar lines of criticism from these naïve atheists can be dismissed out of hand.
Intent being the kernel of cause (see Responsible Knowledge), a new question arises: How is order not intended? The universe brought back to no-thing, anything that order spontaneously produces has been intended by any simple definition of those words. There can be no talk of randomness or probability at this state - the Logos just is. What is it? The Logos just is order. It either intends the particularity of whatever it produces or it is not orderly. To claim that Logos does not intend order is to tumble into the vacillating contradictions of Russell's Paradox. If we are to speak of Cause and Effect anywhere with anything, then we must speak of Logos as intentional. Of course, if we allow the slightest bit of intentionality to the Logos, the answer becomes a theism easily compatible with much monotheistic and pantheistic religion.
Significance & Memory
Significance & Memory
Night falls on all of our decisions
All our plans and all ambitions
Endless darkness comes to define us
Comes to take us and remind us
Find our way from this side of thinking
Unafraid and under your wing
Night falls on us either way
- Daybreaks, Jack Johnson
Mortality is eventually 100%. We will all die. The species will eventually go extinct - quickening the day as we further take control of our own destiny. Suffering will be involved all along the way - more often than not, at our own hand. Consequently, everyone has asked, will continue to ask, and must practically answer some variation of the question, “Is there permanent significance?” Or is life…
...but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
If the Logos, or reality beyond the Logos, intends to communicate, the answer to significance is a quite rational ‘yes’, for two reasons. First, the cosmic God cares enough to communicate with an otherwise insignificant human. Our closest human analogy to this relationship is of the greatest king acknowledging the concerns of his lowliest subject, thereby imbuing that subject with the significance of a caring relationship.
Second, any exchange of information requires some analog to memory. Communication from an infinite eternal God implies infinite eternal memory. God communicating to an individual confirms a hopefully positive place in God’s memory for that individual. Eternal memory is one of the great analogies to eternal life (ie. heaven), most explicit today in the theology and practice of the (Eastern) Orthodox Church, which ends every funeral with a chant of "Memory Eternal." At the very minimum, a communicating God will eternally "recall" life with extreme, but perfect prejudice. Even if God wished to forget about the evil and the bland, they are recalled with perfect prejudice wherever their stories intersect the saints. Death, then, is only evil to the evil and the bland.
Memory Eternal · St. Symeon Orthodox Church Trio "Antiphony" - youtube.com
Notice that the mere fact of God’s communication provides us with significance. The content or effect of that communication further spells out the concern and character of God. If mankind would submit to a simple existence, this theology would be enough. However, mankind long ago embarked on the project of knowledge and ideals that we call civilization, creating evil to be experienced in opposition to wisdom and complicating everything. Revelation became necessary to steer this haughty, unstable species away from its self-inflicted destruction and back toward life. Ultimately, that is the purpose of the Bible—a cohesive collection of texts highlighting God’s communication with a people set apart—holy, chosen—to be an example and an idiom of redemption for the rest of mankind.
Some Heaven Texts
Some Heaven Texts
Memory Analogue
Exodus 32:30-35 - “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book.”
Psalm 25:6-7 - “...remember me”
Psalm 69:22-28 - “May they be blotted out of the book of life and not be listed with the righteous.”
Psalm 112:6 - “they will be remembered forever.”
Psalm 136 - “For His lovingkindness is everlasting.”
Nehemiah 13:14, 22 - "remember me for this"
Nehemiah 13:29-31 - “Remember me with favor, my God.”
Job 14:13-17 - “If only you would set me a time and then remember me!”
_ _ _
Revelations 16:19 - "God remembered Babylon the Great and gave her the cup filled with the wine of the fury of his wrath."
Both
1 Samuel 2:6-9 - “He brings down to Sheol and raises up… He keeps the feet of His godly ones, / But the wicked ones are silenced in darkness”
Psalm 49:5-15 - “But God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol, for He will receive me.”
Job 19:23-27 - “Even after my skin is destroyed, Yet from my flesh I will see God.”
Isaiah 65:17-25 - “...new heavens and a new earth, the former things will not be remembered…”
Isaiah 66 - “As the new heavens and the new earth that I make will endure before me,” declares the Lord, “so will your name and descendants endure.”
_ _ _
Matthew 7:21-23 - ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’
Matthew 18:10 - "their angels do always behold the face of my Father in heaven."
Matthew 25:14-30 - “whoever has will be given more”
Matthew 25:31-46 - righteous to eternal life.
Luke 10:17-20 - “rejoice that your names are written in heaven”
Revelation 20:11-15 - "great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life."
Place Analogue
Psalm 86:11-13 - “You have delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol.”
_ _ _
Matthew 6:19-21 - "treasures in heaven"
Matthew 25:1-13 - "the wedding banquet"
Mark 9:35-37, 42-48 - “it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than, having two eyes, to be cast into gehenna”
Luke 12:33-34 - "treasure in heaven"
Luke 13:29-33 - "places at the feast"
Luke 16:19-31 - “Now the poor man.. was carried away by the angels to Abraham’s bosom“
John 14:2-4 - "My Father's house has many rooms"
2 Corinthians 5 - "we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven"
Philippians 3:14, 20-21 - "...citizenship is in heaven..."
Hebrews 11:10-16 - "country of their own"
Hebrews 13:14 - "the city that is to come."
Revelation 5:9-13 - "...every creature in heaven..."
Revelation 7:13-17 - "before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple"
Revelation 21 - "new heaven and a new earth...new Jerusalem"
Revelation 22:1-5 - "river of the water of life...flowing...down the middle of the great street of the city."
In the history of ideas, the Logos is not news to Asimov. He does an admirable job explaining the Logos in the section called ‘The Word’ when covering the New Testament book of John (AGB pgs. 960 to 965). He even recognizes the Logos as the foundational presupposition of science. It would be hard then to call Asimov a naïve atheist. However, in his zeal to describe the Logos as a random development of religion (a common issue in the AGB), he insulated himself from what could have compelled him towards theism.
This is made clear in a debate billed as The Great Debate: Does God Exist? (audio). The Reformed apologist Greg Bahnsen - a protégé of the theologian Cornelius Van Til, one of the last of the Old Princeton professors - presses the importance of the Logos home debating the naïve atheist Gordon Stein. Bahnsen’s argument is interesting as it conceptually contains the Logos without ever directly referencing it. Most debates of this nature are fruitless, with people talking past each other, using debating tricks, or merely scoring points with their side of the audience. In this case, Bahnsen dominates on the point by arguing that the presuppositions of knowledge do not fit within an atheistic worldview. He asserts they only fit within the worldview of Christian theism. Afterward, he had a hard time booking debates with atheists!
The Great Debate: Does God Exist? - bellevuechristian.org archived (Audio - youtube.com)
All along Bahnsen showed that there is no “neutral rationality” to which one can appeal. This is one of the great fallacies posited by ‘secularism’. Everybody comes to the table with prejudices. Nobody is neutral. The better of us admit as much and make efforts to mitigate those prejudices - this is a form of epistemic humility. A prejudice that all of us must have - whether we want to acknowledge it or not - is that the universe is orderly. The Christian God accounts for this order. Atheism in the most hand-waving way cannot.
However, Bahnsen’s assertion for Christianity purely from worldview is a bit too bold. One cannot get all the way to Christianity without immersing in the actual products of knowledge and revelation. The more recent debates featuring the mathematician John Lennox arguing more explicitly for the Logos are as convincing without as much over-assertion.
John Lennox addresses his debate with Richard Dawkins - Grasping the Nettle 2018 - youtube.com
Although I have been somewhat careful with my words about the Word to highlight its place within orthodox (and Orthodox) Christianity, I needn’t be. Anyone who asks of the ineffable and receives an answer beyond that required by law has heaven and a stark and durable religion. Because this rational mysticism rhymes so well with the Bible, the tradition of Christianity coming down from the Church Fathers, through the Nicene-Constantinople Creed, and my own experience, I do not feel required to defend every nook and cranny of the biblical text. Nor do I need to approach it with overly rigid principles such as inerrancy or literalism. If someone could convince me that the Bible was a fraud - as Asimov and his cadre of modern scholars seem to want to do - I would have to find religion just like the Christian one to take its place. This experience of God affords a measure of critical distance that some others do not have. I can ask questions, support what is good, constructively criticize what seems in error, and occasionally be wrong without a strong concern for upholding my faith. My faith is challenged elsewhere.
Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.
- Erwin Schrödinger
There is one more potential fundamental presupposition to deal with borne in Quantum Mechanics. It all depends on whether one believes that quantum superposition, quantum entanglement, and "collapse of the wave function" are features or failures of Physics...
The LORD by wisdom founded the earth;
by understanding he established the heavens;
by his knowledge the deeps broke open,
and the clouds drop down the dew.
With such a powerful conception of reality and existence, it should not be surprising that something very like the Logos is present in most monotheistic and pantheistic theologies, albeit under different names and emphasis - Tao, Brahman, and Wisdom of God, to name a few. Aristotle managed to mangle the Logos into the First Cause or Prime Mover, which is where Thomas Aquinas and associated scholastic philosophers (including Spinoza) seem to have been derailed...
“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” - George Orwell
One can certainly be a humanist of an atheistic stripe, but not as a result of a consistent unbroken line of reasoning or scientific discovery. Where then does the ‘secular’ get credibility? The only sound claim to reason is the ignorance, irrationality, and anti-intellectualism of its adversaries....
Responsible Knowledge
Responsible Knowledge
“Induction is the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy.” - C. D. Broad
"All models are wrong... some models are useful." - George E.P. Box
Many religions have never been strongly coupled to reality. The orthodox and traditional Abrahamic Faiths - Judaism, Islam, and Christianity - most definitely are. They are grounded in the creator God revealed in history through and to mankind. This means there should be millions of points of contact with history and science...
Responsible Time
Responsible Time
“Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the bastard Time” - John Steinbeck
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse