Ludicrous

Humans play games. The necessity for that seems built-in, since games of all kinds offer various proportions of expected and unexpected outcomes. The former provides the cognitive triumph of an outcome that one has judged correctly and/or well; the latter provides excitement and a break from routine. The problem with homo ludens, or 'game-playing man', is that he too often stumbles into the Ludic fallacy by either thinking that life mirrors games, or that games don't mirror life enough.

Recently (and still ongoing), I have been interlocuting with a gentleman who asserts that logic is important. I agree. However, I added the caveat that logic is not always the best tool. This, he violently disagrees with.

Here are the arguments he's tried so far:

1. Logic is the best tool because nothing else is a tool.

2. If logic does not succeed, you must be using a simplistic form of it.

Here is what I've said:

1. Some areas of human endeavour are not susceptible to logic.

2. Logic itself will tell you that it fails to provide an answer sometimes.

To me, it is a game, these acts of provocation. I don't know if I will ever convince the rationalists, atheists, or rational atheists. But I feel compelled to answer them at times. Oddly enough, I too am using logic. I am also aware that I am using logic in realms where it was not meant to go. But the paradox is that my interlocutors believe that logic can be taken anywhere, and that if the outcomes do not favour them, I must be misusing logic.

We all agree I am misusing logic; that much is clear. I believe I shouldn't be using it, they believe I am using it badly. But the point is equally clear, either way: there are things you can't use logic for. One of those things is justifying the use of logic using logic. Ho ho.

Logic and Reason

It should not be a surprise to anybody that a logical position is not the same as a rational position. Both are positions derived from rules, but both have weaknesses arising from the kind of rules they use.

A logical position arises from consideration of what is valid and what is not; that is, after rules are established, it becomes possible to evaluate whether a position is allowable by the rules or not.

A rational position arises from consideration of what is likely or possible, and what is not; that is, after evaluating a position as possible, rules are generated to validate or invalidate the position.

The strength of any particular logic is that things are either consistent or not. If things cannot be determined to be consistent or not, then the logic is insufficient or the thing is not amenable to that particular logic. This makes everything simple. The weakness of logic is that if the system has false or inappropriate axioms, analysis will fail.

The strength of reason is that it can draw on any prior semi-stable (or better) position as a basis of explanation; it casts a very wide net that includes the use of logic without precluding voices of authority, magic, philosophy, religion, intuition, faith and inspiration. This makes it both reasonable and not — and this is reason's weakness as well.

Logic and reason are not the same thing at all. A reasonable person is not necessarily a logical person. A purely logical person cannot deal with most human constructs simply because the axioms behind such things are mostly unknown — and where axioms are unknown, logic cannot be applied.

The reasonable man may also be an unreasonable man, although George Bernard Shaw, who famously said that all progress depends on the unreasonable man, would ram the difference down your throat. The logical man, however, is also the incomplete man, as Kurt Gödel would have pointed out.

On the balance of things, I would prefer to be reasonable than logical. Most humans would agree.

Probe-lemmatic

After probing a problem, one might realise that after nailing the main premises, one then has a choice of contentions that can be derived from the premises. The choice of contentions is itself a problem.

And so it is that after having left the premises alone for more than two and a half years, I am frequently being asked to look at them, make a choice of contentions, and come up with even more contentions from the choices I have made. As someone once said, a lemma is simultaneously a contention from premises and a premise leading to more contentions. And two lemmas (or lemmata, to be pedantic, but not 'lemmings') form a...

What to choose is itself determined by how to choose, or what criteria we could use to choose whatever has to be chosen. And who to choose is likewise determined by what we think we should look for in choosing.

The interrogators often pose the problem this way, "You cannot choose from existing choices; rather, do away with all such entities of privileged status, treat them all as heads at the same level, and then choose again." What then can you choose? What should you choose? And if you contend that you have no right to choose, there is no defence against being assured that you have such a right.

To me, I must simplify. I will look for competencies and the character to wield those competencies. And if there is culture, I will think of it as a plus. And if there is not, that will be sad. But I have many many many stepping stones to look at before a solution is reached.

And what if I am part of the problem?

Paranoia. Theology.

Those two words are taken from a conversation in China Miéville's latest book, Kraken. They constitute one character's response to the question, "What is it you're doing?"

That question, in turn, is asked based on what the character appears to be doing, which is the application of a rather recondite 'reconstitutive intelligence', splicing together bits of information and memes into some sort of sensible structure. It sounds rather confusing, doesn't it?

But that is exactly what we do when we apply hermeneutic skills to a religious text. It is a kind of paranoia-driven desire to find meaning, under the assumption that there is a meaning to be found. We bend our apparently considerable intelligence (think of the thousands of scholars in many venerable religious traditions, obviously somewhat talented in the cognitive department, many of whom also with talents outside and apart from theology) to the manufacture of sense from what ought not, by the terms of the world, to make sense.

The texts themselves contain lines about how the supernatural authority or enlightened person behind them is impossible to comprehend for most (or all) mortals, and yet also that the text is from this being's deepest thoughts. Logically, then, most if not all of the text should be incomprehensible to the rest of us.

And yet, our fundamental assumption is that meaning can be gleaned through the simple application of some commonsensical skills and heuristics. Why is that so? Why should we assume this?

If the supernatural source supposedly has made the incomprehensible comprehensible, then it has diminished its own authority; it has 'dumbed down' the ineffable and unknowable. Most texts therefore strike a balance between what is obvious and what is mysterious.

It is a balance, however, that most people don't seem to think about very much. Either blood is symbolic or it is actual; it cannot be both and it cannot be neither and it cannot be part one and part the other. Either birds are birds or they represent the devil or the temptation of mankind or the salvation thereof. And so on.

We twist ourselves up in knots by attempting to fix meaning in things which shouldn't be fixed in meaning or cannot be fixed in meaning. When Jesus explains a parable, that's fine — it's his right, since he is divine. When we explain a parable that has no stated meaning, how do we know we are right?

Hamartia

I had a very funny conversation just yesterday on that ubiquitous vehicle of social communication, FacePalm (well, that's what it might be called when books are dead). A certain fellow made the statement, "Apparently fatness is a worse sin than embezzlement." I replied, "...fatness is normally judged to be a minor flaw... ."

And then, the unhappy fellow decided to have an argument. He does that a lot, this young man. He told me, "Fatness is not a flaw. Of any kind."

For those of you who don't quite see the contradiction, it is one Aristotle would have spotted at once. For that old Greek used the word hamartia (ἁμαρτία) to denote a flaw. That same word was translated 'sin' in the New Testament.

Someone who says that fatness is apparently a sin of any sort must a) hold that opinion, b) believe that someone else holds that opinion, c) imagine that such an opinion exists, or d) be putting words together without reason and coming up with a line that implies one of the first three without him knowing it.

I was therefore very amused when this fellow then told me that I was equivocating or dodging his point when I justified my use of 'flaw'. He hadn't actually advanced any point except that he seemed to be upset with my use of 'flaw' with regard to his own use of 'sin'.

Sometimes, because of the way FacePalm hides earlier comments, it is genuinely possible to lose self-awareness and talk rubbish. This is a serious flaw, and I blame FacePalm and its ilk for making people like me and that poor fellow vulnerable to it.

Old Thoughts

Donne's famous Meditation XVII tends to eclipse his other works in the mind of modern man, perhaps because the phrase 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' was etched by Hemingway on the modern literary consciousness. But Donne wrote profusely and entertainingly, and what he wrote is good basis material for people professing to know anything about 'Knowledge and Inquiry', as some in Atlantis do these days.

For example, in Meditation XX, he writes:

The arts and sciences are most properly referred to the head; that is their proper element and sphere; but yet the art of proving, Logic, and the art of persuading, Rhetoric, are deduced to the hand, and that expressed by a hand contracted into a fist, and this by a hand enlarged, and expanded; and evermore the power of man, and the power of God himself is expressed so, 'All things are in his hand'. Neither is God so often presented to us, by names that carry our consideration upon counsel, as upon execution of counsel; he is oftener called the Lord of Hosts, than by all other names, that may be referred to the other signification.

Such thoughts are interesting. They dig deep into the heart of language and the hidden assumptions we make in the use of metaphor and image. It would be valuable even for those who care nothing for Christianity and its range of cultures and cultural history, to undertake the equivalent exercise into their own ideas, models, tropes and schemata.

Logicality

Sometimes I listen idly to the flow of words around me, more often truncated than not. As an educator, I realise that subjects get abbreviated — biology is 'bio', 'geography' is 'geog', chemistry is 'chem', and so on.

But sometimes, this truncation is a state of mind. Some of these young people are actually studying bio, not biology. What is in their heads is more akin to bios, just the things of life itself, without the accompanying logos or conceptual structure.

Sometimes, this happens with the best of intentions. Modern history is taught in part through skill-based learning. Sources are given, the task is to evaluate them and determine their relative credibility and come to some conclusions — acts of an historian. Yet, at the same time, we mustn't neglect the big sweep of things, the river within which these are molecules and droplets.

We all know stuff in different ways. There are things like functional knowledge, technical knowledge, academic knowledge — they serve different needs and fill different cognitive niches. You can know 'how to' (in theory or practice), you can know 'what is' (in the affirmative or negative) — knowledge is an answer to something that needs an answer.

And how to obtain knowledge is one of the knowledge-handling skills, just as 'how to disseminate it', 'how to construct it', an 'how to validate it' also are. We need the knowledge of things we can do with knowledge, and things we can do to knowledge, as well as the knowledge itself.

This whole matrix is joined together by the art of the connection, the weaving of tight connections between parts of knowledge. To make bigger areas of knowledge, something called a logic must be used to connect smaller bits up. When you have connected enough parts up, 'bio' becomes biology.

It's a pity about 'astrology' though. Haha.

Logical Holes

It's also known as Bertrand Russell's big problem, the idea that after reducing everything to logical truths that can be manipulated by operators, you still don't know anything. The problem is that no matter what symbols you use, you still can't reduce everything to symbols.

A professor in science and cognition once told me that there isn't such a thing as qualitative research — only badly quantified research. The thing is that even if in theory it were possible to quantify all interactions, the number of possible interactions and consequents and possible antecedents would exceed the computing potential of the universe. It is a a variant of the old 'best map is 1:1' problem, in which the best map of the world is the world itself.

This leaves us with a simplistic set of solutions: basically, we guess, approximate, reify — we create rules of thumb and assert that there are laws even as the universe laughs and shows us that not all constants are constant. We want to understand, which is itself a mystery. That we reflect on this desire, knowing that it may be nothing but an advanced version of a primordial survival instinct, a flash of neuron-net hyperactivity that has no value in this universe, is a greater mystery.

For logic has huge holes — it does not address itself, and it does not address meaning. It does not tell us why it should be, only that it is. It is a tool that some of us have made into a master — it is like a screwdriver that has been made into an engineer.

I use a screwdriver for screwdriving and screw removal. I try not to use it inappropriately, and I don't trumpet my proficiency when I do.

Consistency and Logic

Ah well, here I go rehashing old points again...

The thing about logic is that it doesn't indicate what's right or wrong. Rather, a body of logic is consistent or inconsistent; if inconsistent, it leads to contradiction or paradox. A body of knowledge is information held together by logic; if the knowledge is inconsistent with itself, it will likewise be self-contradictory or paradoxical.

However, as in all human domains of knowledge, there are areas which can be flagged as 'unknown' or 'insufficient data'. In some domains, such as those called 'science', we build an edifice that is consistent with everything we think we know, and if that doesn't work, we change the edifice to fit. (Note that 'edifice' roughly means 'thing used to edify', just as 'sacrifice' roughly means 'thing used to make sacred'.)

The only difference between good theology and good science is that theology makes axiomatic the idea of a non-human superior intelligence that is dominant in the universe. This intelligence is not provable within the logic of science, and hence not testable.

A scientist who says he doesn't accept theology is in roughly the same position as a physicist who doesn't accept that life exists — physics doesn't 'do' life and there is no way to use physics to define life or prove it exists because life-proving stuff is not built into physics just as theology isn't built into modern science. It's as simple as that.

Faith is Weak

It was not always that way. As Matthew Arnold once wrote, the Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full. But since then has come the Enlightenment and the rewriting of the histories and lives of men.

In the past, you could believe. These days, belief is so weak that you need proof, without which you cannot believe. These days, faith is so weak that you need signs. I watch my fellow journeymen, my fellow Christians, and I realise that our common danger is that we are either Judaists or Graeco-Roman philosophers, just as is implied in this passage.

The key verses from the first epistle to the Corinthians read:

For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom — but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

This is it. The Judaists require signs to establish faith; the Greeks require philosophy (sophia means 'wisdom') — but the Christian faith in its strength needs neither. There is no need for proof; only defence of belief and reliability of witness.

To the material world, which I sometimes spend time debating, I have one main argument: how do you know what you know? The answer normally is either given in terms of signs (sensory perception, data) or by sophistry and logic. But none of these is reliable except by itself; it is reason that makes us trust reason, and our senses that lead us to trust our senses. All these things are circular in nature.

But I assert that which I believe: that though I am doomed in my sins, I am saved by God through no inherent virtue of my own. At which point, the materialist says, "You make this assertion, you have to prove it." And I reply, "No, I need not prove it except to convince you. And only the Spirit of God can do that. I need not prove it to myself, because flawed as I am, I believe."

The materialist says, "Your God is inconsistent, he defies logic." My answer is, "If He were consistent, then He could not be God." But isn't consistency a virtue? Isn't it true that God says He is the same always? No, He never says He is logically consistent; He is always the same but He is never quite perceivable as the same, being infinite.

How else would an infinite deity behave? Any of the proofs a materialist might demand would immediately make a not-God. Any limitation on His morality, His powers, His behaviour, His reason, this would make Him the slave of the material.

And so, I rest in a faith that is stronger than I. My own faith does not avail, for I am a scientist, a teacher, a philosopher, a person who must learn to put all that aside for this most important single matter. Then only, can I believe.

The Bible — Conservative or Liberal?

The United States of America is the largest and most influential state in the world in terms of meme-propagation and economic impact. It is that which makes us look on in awe, fascination, horror or incomprehension (in alphabetical order) as we look at the clashes of ideas that take place there.

One of them is the idea that somehow the Bible has been translated badly and no longer serves the people well. It must therefore be made more conservative, say some people. The odd thing is that the methods used seem to be the kind that conservatives often attribute to liberals (and vice versa) — a deliberate use of biased terms, an agenda that shapes the interpretation (see point 7 on making sure that the Bible expresses free-market ideas properly, for example!), and the idea that such interpretation will make people more open-minded.

This propagandism, witting or unwitting, is true of any two sides in an argument. Bound by our words, we have no choice but to be biased. Purely rational languages are stilted and inadequate; Wittgenstein and Russell both surrendered in the end, defeated by the fact that in the end, humans must communicate, whether or not language is used rationally.

And so, to the Bible. Is it conservative or liberal? I think the Bible mocks both sides just by existing. Abraham is a free-market warlord who liberally distributes wealth and lies about his wife; Jesus is an arch-conservative who says that not an iota of the Law will pass away, while the book of Acts notes that early Christians (following Jesus in Matthew 10) sold all they had, pooled their wealth and shared it out according to each one's need (proto-Marxism?).

A close reading of the Bible, attempting to apply the same rules throughout to everything it says, will result in a kind of revelation. The Bible is not about ideal humans, but about fallen humans. Noah is a drunk, Abraham a deceiver, Israel a liar, Moses a murderer, David a philanderer, Solomon a cynic.

It is not the rise of the Republican-styled elite (read Plato to understand what this means) nor the rise of the Democratic-styled masses that is the concern of this book. Rather, it is all about making your aim to lead a quiet and peaceable life, to pursue with excellence the work of your hands, and to live in moderation. The Bible asserts that this is only possible through a right relationship with God. Given any effective definition of God, this is self-evident.

The Bible transcends ideas like conservatism or liberalism simply because it is (in a sense) statistically honest. It makes both mundane and extraordinary claims, dishes the dirt out equally on saints and sinners, and is wise enough to deal in ambiguity and apparent contradiction. A book claiming to have the divine imprimatur but which didn't take into account the mutability of our world would be suspicious indeed.

What I believe, personally, about the Bible is that it is the inerrant word of God. I believe not that it (as a text) doesn't contain errors of some sort (since manifestly anything in language must err by inaccuracy, imprecision, omission or false impression), but that it is inerrant just as an arrow that slays a man is inerrant. It doesn't matter how crude that arrow is as long as it fulfils its deadly task. No mere text can encompass reality or be the entire word of God.

What I believe, personally, about the Bible is that it is the sufficient word of God. It is enough for anyone who reads it to come to any conclusion God might want that person to reach. This is why it is such a complex text. Imagine a textbook designed to teach any student anything that a teacher might want to teach. It would vary in style, form, content, terminology, approach, and many other ways as well.

What I believe, personally, about the Bible is that it is the efficient word of God. I don't mean that it has a high output-over-input ratio, but that it has efficacy, that it has a high signal-to-noise ratio for what it is intended to do. True, many will say it is all noise and no signal, but that is true too of many things that are efficient, simply because what they are efficient at does not meet the specific need of the critic concerned.

I am aware that logic is often seen as the enemy of faith. I believe, however, that faith has a definite logic. In fact, faith is necessary for belief in any system that serves us rationally and/or reasonably. You can't do science, for example, without the belief that your intellectual cognition is related to perception is related to reality; you have to believe that the noumenon (the thing-of-the-mind) and the phenomenon (the thing-of-the-world) have some connection, even though there is no necessary link between them.

The Bible, for me, is a bridge of faith. As a rational being, I recognize that it doesn't contain specific answers to everything — what book could? But as an epistemological being, I recognize that there is truth in it, of a rather penetrating, definitive and assiduous kind.

Algorithmic

At some stage in my life, I was trained to convert processes into algorithms. The great thing about this training is that it is of great utility in many other disciplines besides the one in which I learnt this.

Take for example the definition of a natural number. It is easy (although it might be tedious) to prove if a number is a natural number by using this algorithm (which is something I just came up with, but which I'm sure anyone can do likewise):

1. Accept a given real number, x.
2. Is the number zero? If so, the number is/was a natural number and you terminate.
3. Subtract 1. Is the number less than zero? If so, the number was not a natural number and you terminate.
4. Repeat step 3.

Of course, there are possibly more efficient ways of doing this, but this way is 100% effective. Note: some mathematicians don't treat zero as a natural number; if you're one of them, just change 'zero' in steps 2 and 3 to read '1' instead.

You can do this with all kinds of things for the sake of fun, profit, indulgence, curiosity or perversity. It helps you do things like mentally convert any kind of distribution to one that can be compared to a normal distribution, for example. It can even help you write the minutes of meetings before the meeting is carried out. Seriously. Used to do that all the time, they were that predictable...

Radiology

I was listening to the car radio as usual with my 'peripheral hearing'. To my amusement, it was a Mandarin-language broadcast of rather soppy (and clichéd) content.

There was a woman who was obviously telling a man some home truths: "If I love you, I love you because I love you and not because you're wealthy; if I don't love you, I don't love you because I don't love you, even if you're wealthy. But I don't love you because in the depths of your heart all you care about is money and not love."

It's this kind of thing which leads me to believe that humans are basically irrational, and therefore when we invent things like science and mathematics and logic and so on, it's a sort of attempt to deny that fact. When we say 'human' we imply subjective and irrational; when we say 'mathematical' or 'scientific', we imply objective and rational.

A moment's reflection should disabuse you of these pretensions to rationality. Mathematics is only objective within the terms it has defined for itself; basically it says, "Here are my rules, and if we all play by my rules, I will always win." Science is less than that, because it says, "I assert the universe can make sense, now let's observe it and figure out what that sense is; I don't know what the rules are, but I am going to assume that all the games in the universe follow the same basic rules."

When humans attempt to use mathematics and science to solve problems, they can only solve the simple ones. That's OK, because if you build complex-looking problems out of simple ones, you can solve pretty complex-looking ones. It's like saying proteins are very complex molecules, and then asking someone to compare the molecular structure of haemoglobin to that of DNA, and then to that of a champagne diamond.

Then you take all that knowledge about molecular entities and say, "Yes, here is a cure for human stupidity, venality, and intransigence." Haha, so funny.

That's what I like about random radio shows. They have their own logic and it's not a very consistent one, but it shows human thinking. It's kind of radio-logical; you can use it to look into the human condition. In that sense, I suppose I can call myself a diagnostic radiologist...

Causation

It always amuses me when people reason from cause-and-effect as if it is the only reasonable paradigm. It's not that I mind, since part of my livelihood stems from teaching that cause-and-effect can be the basis of knowledge. But I'd like people to think about it a bit more.

Just imagine, if you will, that X is a character in a novel. Now look at X and ask the usual questions:

• Does X have free will?
• Does cause-and-effect apply to X and X's actions?
• Does reading the novel backwards have any effect on X's reality?

and so on.

You might have the illusion that 'cause-and-effect' works because the author of your novel is extremely meticulous about internal consistency. Perhaps he is infinitely meticulous, but is not averse to breaking the rules for the sake of the plot.

Think about it.

There's No Logical Proof of God

There are a few ways we can show this. Here's the most basic:

If a system of logic is created that does not have the existence of God as an axiom, it cannot show that God exists. This is because by definition, God is of an order of complexity beyond other axioms (else He would be subject to, and limited by, such axioms). If a system of logic is created that has the existence of God as an axiom, it cannot show that God exists either, since that existence is treated as axiomatic and hence not to be proven. If we use any kind of reasoning in which X and not-X covers all the possibilities (principle of bivalence), then God cannot be shown to exist by logic.

Here's a theological proof:

If God requires belief, then that belief must be volitional (free-willed). Otherwise, it has no significance. Therefore God cannot present a complete proof of His existence, because if such were to exist, then the option to not believe would be irrational. That would mean that belief would be the only rational choice, thus removing the option of free-willed rational belief. This also means that if anyone tells you that they can prove the existence of God, they are either lying, or they are advancing an argument that is sufficient for them to believe but does not necessarily compel belief in anyone else.

That said, I believe I have good grounds for belief in God, and I am not ashamed to say that I can give a good account of my faith.

Counterclaims and the Theory of Knowledge

Recently, I've had a lot of people asking me whether when propounding an argument, one should create a counterclaim. This, to me, is a rather odd question to ask. When you create an argument, a counterclaim automatically arises. This is because of the asymmetry between positive and negative, in terms of burden of proof and other aspects of knowledge.

But let's look at a concrete example. Let's say that a student argues that there is no such thing as absolute truth. Obviously then, whether this student says it or not, the counterclaim is that there is. How do we evaluate these two statements?

The answer in this case is appallingly simple and comes from the fact that positive assertions and negative assertions are not symmetrical. Let's assume that the student is right. If so, then it is an absolute truth that there is no such thing as absolute truth. The statement is then false, because there is at least (now) one such thing that is absolutely true.

If we assume the student is wrong, there is no contradiction. Therefore it is easier to say that there is such a thing as absolute truth, whether we can prove it or not — after all, we can prove that the counterclaim to the existence of absolute truth must be wrong.

When a student asks me about 'creating' a counterclaim, what they often mean is, "Can we set up a straw man argument so that we can knock it down?" A proper counterclaim doesn't need creation; it is the negation of the original claim. In conventional logic, either the claim or counterclaim is true (in principle or theory) but not both. The problem lies in establishing which one is true.

In some case, it is hard or impossible to do this for either case. Sometimes the key difficulty is definition, and sometimes the key difficulty is replicability. This leads to problems with validity of evidence (are we talking about the right thing?) and reliability of evidence (does the same phenomenon occur under the same circumstances?) — which is why people ought to avoid such arguments.

One such problem is the, "Is there a God?" argument. If you could definitively describe 'God', then you could establish that the points describing 'God' could be said to exist for a particular entity, and thus say that this entity was 'God' or that at least one entity had the properties of 'God'. If you could duplicate a signature 'God phenomenon' exactly, then you'd have reliability too. But you can't do either. In fact, if you could, it would be evidence that a certain kind of God did not exist, since this 'God' you would have found would be subject to (or at least, behaves as if subject to) the logic of natural laws.

That's why I don't believe you can prove (in the modern sense) the existence of God. In the original sense, of course, the sense of the Latin probare, you can (in theory) attempt to test God with your own probing as much as you want. It is unlikely you will get definitive answers, but you may get personally satisfactory answers — which may be unpleasant, but at least sufficient for you.

Again, the asymmetry between positive and negative surfaces. It is possible in most cases to prove that you can't logically be an atheist, although you cannot in most cases prove that you can logically be a theist (except that it can be reasonable to be one because it is not unreasonable).

If all this stuff is something you can easily understand, then it should not be a problem to write a tiny (1200-1600 words, perhaps?) piece on some knowledge claim and its counterclaim. Right?

EEKS

It's been some time since I first started putting together my observations on the State of the Old Place. Fifteen years since my first observation, in fact. In the latest iteration, I've observed an interesting phenomenon with a huge amount of supporting data. I call it EEKS.

In brief, the phenomenon originates in two subprocesses, a kind of cherry-picking and a kind of 'no true Scotsman' thinking. The logical outcome of applying these two subprocesses is EEKS, a rather odd and educationally distasteful phenomenon.

What happens is that a bunch of presumably professional educators (PPEs) start the first process by setting a difficulty bar for admission to a certain course of study or the right to be assigned a supervisor for some form of assessment. So, for a cohort of say 400 students, 280 of them are cherry-picked to be in what is perceived (but may not be) an elite course. Of these 280, a second cherry-picking occurs in which (for example) 20 of them are assigned to do Subject XYZ (or any other area of knowledge in which an extended essay may be written). At this point, the 400 (initially cherry-picked from the top 10% of a cohort which is already in the top 50% of the world's population and thus nominally in the top 5% worldwide) have become 20. These 20 are a chosen 7.14% of the top 3.5% in the world, or a selective top 0.25% elite.

At this point, some of them fail to meet expectations. The PPEs, who in some cases have been neglecting the students all along (after all, they are the top 0.25% of population worldwide, aren't they?), then tell the not-so-good ones that they are not truly elite and it is all their fault. Since they have been cherry(cherry(cherry(cherry(picked)))), they can't be failures. So they must have faked their way into the system and should rectify their own shortcomings. A true cherry would not be underperforming. Hence they must be 'no true cherries'.

The typical 'no true Scotsman' fallacy is one in which a person sets up a definition. He is later exposed to a case outside his control which falsifies his definition. But rather than blame his defining process, he shifts his evaluative process and says that the case is true but not a case within the original definition. At no point does he consider the fact that he might be wrong.

This situation, the EEKS phenomenon, is even more egregious. Not only is the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy applied, but it is applied to cases that the defining agency has had many years to work on, and in fact, has a duty to do so. The cases, in short, are the outcome of a PPE agency working towards a definition that is well-publicised. Yet, the PPE agency has not been able to make the case meet the definition. In this situation, the cherries who fall short are re-labelled 'pomegranates' or something, despite them obviously being cherries which have been abused, misused or 'benignly' neglected by the system.

In one particular case, after a long period of benign neglect, in which a cherry had been allowed to turn into something approximating a cherry tomato, the supervisor said, "Well, I don't know what to do with you, so I'm giving you a 'D'." Fortunately, a Certifiably Professional Educator (CPE) was found who was able to rectify the situation somewhat. Actually, a lot of the agency's success can be plausibly attributed to CPEs — some of these are actually PPEs with genuine talent, and some of these are freelancing agents.

EEKS.

Why I Am Not An Atheist

As Trivandrum proposes, I should set forth Terms and Definitions, and Argument related thereto, and thus develop a Position on which I take my Stand. So here is that Stand, and may You who read enjoy It.

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Terms and Definitions

• A God is a Thing which exercises Powers which are beyond Human Analysis, practically, theoretically, or rationally, with respect to the Limits of those Powers in Terms of Origin, Manifestation, Aspect, Occasion, Quantity, Quality or Perceptibility, and with no Likelihood or Chance of Human Analysis.
  
• An Atheist, in simple Form, is One who does not believe in Gods, in any Kind, Quantity, or Equivalent.
  
• An Atheist, in active Form, is One who explicitly rejects the Belief that there are Gods, in any Kind, Quantity or Equivalent.
  

I am not an Atheist in either simple or active Sense. If the Reader wishes to take Issue with any other Term defined in this Section or other Sections in this Post, please do so Elsewhere.

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Argument

• Let Us assume that Humans are Moral Animals, which I am personally inclined to believe. If this is a Failing on My Part, so be It.
  
• This Morality has a Nature that is either relative or absolute. If the Nature is relative, It can only be seen to exist if measured by a Yardstick. If It is Absolute, then It has no Exceptions and hence partakes of the Quality of Natural Law.
  
• If the Nature of Morality is relative, the Yardstick (or at least the System of Measurement) must be Absolute if the Analysis of Morality is to have Meaning. Without Yardstick, or Benchmark, or Touchstone, the Idea of Morality is defunct as We cannot then say, "This is a Good Thing," or, "This is a Bad Thing."
  
• If the Nature of Morality is an Absolute, then We need no Yardstick, or Benchmark, or Touchstone, but merely Observation and Hypothesis Testing as is the Way of Natural Law. We need but create a Scale of Units such as proposed in the Philosophy of Utilitarianism.
  
• From Evidence of the Empirical Kind, that is, from History and hence the Observations of Humanity, We can see that the Nature of Morality is not yet to be claimed an Absolute, for It has heretofore not been resolved by any Human Agency into a System adherent to a Scale of Units.
  
• Hence Morality is likely relative and requires a Yardstick.
  
• The Yardstick cannot be Human, for this is an Empirical Finding that Humans disagree on Morality.
  
• The Yardstick cannot be a Natural Law or Anything that proceeds from Natural Law, as this is Our Observation as well.
  
• Hence the Yardstick must be beyond Human Analysis.
  
• Hence It is a God (at least one). (Alternatively, Humans are not Moral Animals.)
  
• In Fact, the Only Plausible Alternative to the Existence of Godhood is to apply This Reasoning to all such Qualities. Then the Universe must be purely quantitative and subject to Rational Laws alone.
  
• If the Universe is so, then It is a Deterministic Universe.
  
• Hence all Human Actions have no Attached Moral Responsibility or Choice or any Such.
  
• Hence it is a Meaningless Thing for Me to have done This Post. (Or for You to be reading It.)
  

And yet, to paraphrase Galileo Galilei, still I have posted.

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Conclusion

• This Post has Meaning, or It has not. (Unless Meaning has no Meaning.)
  
• If It has Meaning, then at least one God exists.
  
• If It has no Meaning, then We do not know from It whether God exists or not.
  
• But We do know that if It has no Meaning, and You have been reading It, then You have either been conned, or there is no God and the Act of Reading does not matter.
  
• Regardless then, it leads Us to conclude that reading Richard Dawkins (or any Explicitly Atheist Statement of Unbelief in Gods) is meaningless.
  

I would rather believe that this Post has Meaning. If You disagree, then for Your Disagreement to be meaningful, at least one God must also exist.

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I rest my Case. And drink my Coffee.

Cold Logic

Well, at some point one has to give up on concepts like 'holism' and fall back on nostalgia, which always seems like a good idea. Hence my dredging up of this song, which always reminds me of one of my students. Heh. Bonus points if anyone guesses whom. Not so many points if that person guesses it...

This is the Supertramp hit from Breakfast in America (c. 1979, I think): The Logical Song.

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The Logical Song

When I was young
It seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical...
And all the birds in the trees
Well they'd be singing so happily,
Oh joyfully, oh playfully watching me.
But then they sent me away
To teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh responsible, practical –
And they showed me a world
Where I could be so dependable,
Oh clinical, intellectu-al, cynical...

There are times when all the world's asleep,
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man.
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who I am...

Now watch what you say
Or they'll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh fanatical, criminal
Oh won't you sign up your name
We'd like to feel you're acceptable,
Respectable, oh presentable, a vegetable!

At night when all the world's asleep,
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man.
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who I am, who I am , who I am...

In Nomine

For it is all His in the end;
What need for logic or for fact
To hold that gaze or to defend
Against the source of intellect?
Decry the logic, fail the tools
With which we probed the universe;
We forged the instruments, and fools
We argue now in blithe reverse.

Responding leaves before the sun
Each curling upward one by one,
Once joyous in their glad array –
Imagine now if they should say:
That globe of ultraviolet light,
Take it away and give us night!