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Challenge: Explain Objectivism While Standing on One Foot
As the story goes, the great Rabbi Hillel, whose life spanned the birth of Christ, was asked by a Gentile to explain the Torah while he stood on one foot. In other words, “give me the condensed version.”
Hillel’s response has since been identified as the Golden Rule:
“What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and study.”
Ever since a pro-life activist friend of mine described the problem of trying to converse with “objectivists” on her campus missions, I’ve been trying to figure out what “Objectivism” is. I won’t pretend to have done a lot of study on the subject, because, frankly, it sounds like some sort of materialist Gnosticism to me, but recently my curiosity was piqued again by Robert Tracinski’s article on The Federalist: Confessions of a Reluctant Culture Warrior.
Let’s be honest. It’s kind of thrilling when one of your occasional allies seems to concede some of your most cherished arguments. So I’m reading Tracinski’s article with Sally’s (as in When Harry Met Sally) diner enthusiasm:
“…my concern that the left was using the issue to secure the imprimatur of the state for homosexual relationships so they could then use anti-discrimination laws as a bludgeon against religious holdouts.”
Yes!
“Once you gain social and political power, you hold on to it by making your preferred views mandatory, a catechism everyone must affirm, while suppressing all heretical views. In this case, to gain social acceptance of homosexuality, you make the affirmation of gay marriages mandatory while officially suppressing any dissenting religious views.”
Yes! Yes!
The left’s operational concept of freedom is that you are allowed to do and say what you like—so long as you stay within a certain proscribed window of socially acceptable deviation. The purpose of the gay marriage campaign is simply to change the parameters of that window, extending it to include the gay, the queer, the transgendered—and to exclude anyone who thinks that homosexuality is a sin or who wants to preserve the traditional concept of marriage.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
And then, after saying some equally interesting and counter-narrative things about ShirtStorm, GamerGate, MetalGate, gendered toys, and the UVA rape haox (by golly, I think he’s onto a trend!), he spoils the whole mood by offering up Randian Objectivism as the answer.
Ugh. Just give up your God and religion, and we shall overcome the totalitarian Left. Ri-ight.
In the brief reading I have done on the subject, the most succinct (and humorous) explanation of Objectivism is:
There is no God; man is made in His image. /Go read Atlas Shrugged.
Sorry, I can’t remember who gets the attribution, however that last bit is my addition. Obviously it’s someone who’s not a fan.
I’m opening the floor to all comers, though. Anyone have a Twitter-length explanation for Objectivism? And maybe your explanation would benefit by contrasting it with other, better known philosophies — worldviews?
Published in General
No, it doesn’t.
I’m Catholic. The Catholic Church at the First Vatican Council in 1870 declared:
The Catholic Church’s official teaching is that the existence of a creator can be known “with certainty… by the natural power of human reason.”
Faith involves believing God’s Word and trusting that the things he promised will come true. Even the pagans knew that he existed.
In Rabbi Judah HaLevi’s book The Kuzari, he explores a number of basic theological and philosphical questions. The book, written around 1140, is presented as a series of dialogues between the rabbi and a gentile (Khazar) king who is exploring different religious claims.
When asked about how he knows that God exists, the rabbi answers that he believes in the God that took Israel out of Egypt. Why not describe God as the Creator of heaven and Earth? Because Israel experienced the exodus as a historical fact, whereas the events of creation require a leap of faith. Similarly, why does the rabbi believe in the truth of Torah? Because all of the children of Israel stood at Sinai, together, and heard the voice of God — and then passed down what they heard in an unbroken tradition. The ability to validate objective reality is a key to Jewish faith.
Now, Rabbi Judah HaLevi was strongly influenced by Aristotelianism, as was Rand. Also, he is not the final word on Jewish theology, and other Jewish theologians have argued that God’s existence is either intuitively obvious through observation of nature, or able to be deduced logically. Just the same, God’s existence is a proposition that’s not obvious to all monotheists, much less all pagans.
Fair point. To clarify, I did not mean to assert that God’s existence is obvious.
St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa first asks “whether the existence of God is self-evident?” and answers no, before affirming that “it can be demonstrated that God exists” and proceeding to do so. So it can be demonstrated, but only with some difficultly, and a certain amount of advanced study of philosophy and theology. It is not simply obvious to all.
I’m curious, though: aren’t Genesis and Exodus part of the same unbroken tradition? Why does it require a leap of faith to believe the stories recounted in the first few chapters of Genesis, while the stories in Exodus are accepted as historical fact?
To believe in Genesis, you must first believe (a) that God exists, (b) that the account is God’s word, and (c) that God’s word is true.
The exodus, however, was experienced firsthand. To believe it, you do not need faith in God. Rather, you need only believe your parents when they tell you that they heard from their parents that it is an accurate account, and that your grandparents heard the same from their parents, etc. in an unbroken tradition. It is history rather than faith.
Once God’s existence (as redeemer) has been established, there is the question of revelation. A similar approach holds: My ancestors stood at Sinai — as a group of thousands, not one or two or three individuals — and heard God give the Torah. They subsequently passed it down from generation to generation. This is the objective evidence that the Torah is God’s word. Here the objective evidence ends: I have no evidence that God’s word is true. But I take its truth as an article of faith, which leads me to believe in Genesis without objective evidence.
Many modern scholars dispute the idea that the historical record is unbroken and accurate, and that it dates back to Egypt. They also dispute that the Torah text has been unchanged. But this is the logic of Rabbi Judah HaLevi.
I see, thanks, that makes sense.
I think Christians would say much the same thing about the Resurrection. After his death the risen Jesus appeared to his disciples, they were his chosen witnesses, and they have passed this account down in an unbroken tradition to modern Christians.
I thought Moses went up the mountain alone and came back down with the tablets. At least that’s what I remember from the Charlton Heston movie… or perhaps I’m thinking of Mel Brooks:
The fact that there are disputes even among Christian sects doesn’t help your case.
My grandfather once claimed that he was in a ‘mixed marriage’. I asked how that could be since my grandmother was a white Mennonite just like him. He said, “Yes, but she’s Mennonite Conference, and I’m Mennonite Brethren!”. I was raised in the Mennonite church, but I didn’t get the distinction. So I asked him. He replied, “Why, she believes that you can be baptized with just a few sprinkles of water! Clearly, the only valid baptism is to be fully immersed in the waters!”.
They actually fought about this, and my grandfather was honestly concerned for her mortal soul. To him, she hadn’t been baptized at all, and therefore might not find a path to heaven (despite being, if anything, more devout and well-read in the faith than he was).
Catholics have a whole series of rituals that must be performed if you wish to attain heaven. Baptists believe you must be baptized in Christ before God. Other Christian sects have other beliefs. Then there are the various other faiths who believe in completely different gods. Both Islam and Judaism follow the Torah, and both believe that the other side’s practices are heretical.
Most religious people do not just believe in ‘God’. They believe in a very particular God, and believe that their specific version of the faith is the ‘true’ path to righteousness. They can’t all be right. So which one is correct, and how would you use reason and logic to sort them out?
And yet I’ve never seen a logical proof for the existence of God. Can you provide a summary? And frankly, believing that God must exist because the Catholic church says so just changes the thing that you have faith in.
The Catholic church can say what it wants, but it’s still faith until they can actually provide evidence for God’s existence. It’s not ‘self-evident’, and believing in God is not the same as ‘knowing that he exists.’ I know people who are absolutely certain that they have psychic powers, and others who are not only certain that aliens have visited Earth, but claim that they’ve actually seen them. And yet, we have never been presented with hard evidence for any of these things.
When Rand says that there is an objective reality, she means one which is discoverable through scientific means and understandable using reason. Until we are given hard evidence for God’s existence, it is not rational to assume He exists.
I admire your grandfather for taking his beliefs so seriously, and for worrying about his wife’s soul.
However he needn’t have worried. Your grandmother was right, a few sprinkles of water will suffice.
You say that with authority, but my grandfather would have disagreed with you. How would you use reason and logic to convince him?
That wasn’t my point at all.
You said that my own religious beliefs required me to agree that the question of God’s existence was a matter of “faith” rather than reason. The Catholic Church in fact asserts the opposite, that the existence of God can be known by reason alone.
I did not cite Vatican I to prove that “the Church says it so it must be true.” I cited Vatican I to clarify what the Church actually teaches, just as I would hope that if I made a false claim about Objectivism someone here would correct me by quoting Ayn Rand.
Checkmate.
“Logical proof” implies a level of certainty that I think we can only achieve in mathematics. However as far as arguments go, the one I personally find most convincing again comes from St. Thomas:
I had a fascinating conversation with iWc at the Mackinac meetup about whether there exists an objective reality. He was against. I lack the wherewithal to do his position justice, you’ll have to ask him about it yourself.
I also lacked the wherewithal to defend the standard position actively, just so you know.
A little help here please?
Well… given the definition of fraud supplied “or otherwise been unimpeded in their rational decision-making” covers quite a few sales techniques. You think the “give 50 cents a day to a starving orphan in africa” charity has those big-eyed kids on screen to help you think through the cost benefit equation?
Also, quite a bit of sales involves telling people the truth, but from a perspective that puts the best possible light on your product. That might axe out the “had they known all relevant details” part.
I tried reading the Summa Theologica once. I put it down because it requires active study, which I wasn’t willing to put into it at that point. His conclusions don’t necessarily flow from his arguments, even when I don’t want to deny his conclusions. if I may try an absurd example:
It does not follow from the preceding logic that the one who is fattest is your mom, even if all men know her to be such. (I hope you’ll forgive the joke.)
Let’s leave the existence God out of this for a second and restrict ourselves to intuitive beliefs about physical reality. Even where physical reality is concerned, it’s often rational to assume X before you have hard evidence of X’s existence, and to continue assuming X unless and until you have overwhelming evidence against X.
For instance, we intuitively assume that time and space have certain invariance properties.* To give an example, we expect the results of experiments to be independent of their location in time and space unless there’s a very good, specific reason for them not to be.
Most people with any aptitude for physics don’t even need to see hard evidence of these assumptions in order to believe in them – indeed a strong belief in these invariance properties without needing to have them verified in the lab first is what makes for “good physical intuition”. (If you want to get good at basic physics fast, a deep-seated, intuitive belief in Newton’s laws is much more helpful than skeptically demanding that Newton’s laws be verified to your satisfaction by copious experimentation before you deign to believe in them.)
Now, you could say that, just from living everyday life, an observant person accumulates some evidence that these invariance properties exist, and you’d be right. But it’s hardly hard evidence. It’s just anecdata (as is much of religious experience).
* Of course, someone somewhere has verified those invariance properties in a lab, but you could go your entire life working as a scientist without feeling the need to even look at those lab results.
Nor do we start teaching kids physics by having them do some trivial experiment, then rotate the experimental apparatus 5 degrees to see if they get the same result, then rotate again, and once the circle is complete, move the apparatus 3 feet to the right, repeat, move to the right again and repeat, then wait an hour and repeat, wait some more and repeat, and so on, to empirically verify that they’ll get the same result each time.
Such an experiment to verify what we already “know” – that is, believe – would rightly be regarded as waste of educational time; moreover, due to sources of error that the kids may not be able to explain adequately, there’s a real risk that all the kids may get out of the experiment is evidence against the invariance properties they’re supposed to believe in, and that’s not pedagogically helpful.
I certainly haven’t read the whole thing, either. Most of what I know about it I learned from A Shorter Summa by Peter Kreeft. He condenses it from 4000+ pages down to 162, and adds extensive and very helpful footnotes.
It made me laugh, so I forgive it.
So summa the Summa?
This is false. See also basically all of Plantinga, but Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism is probably sufficient. NB: this only refutes the claim belief in God is irrational—Plantinga explicitly disavows the success of Gödel’s ontological proof as a proof of God’s existence. But the proof is sound, i.e. not irrational.
For a positive scientific proof of God’s probable existence, see The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. Amusingly, as Dr. Tipler has observed, this book tends to offend both theologians and physicists—the physicists don’t like his theology, and the theologians don’t like his physics.
The thing I’m always struck by in atheistic argumentation is not that it fails to account for theology—what could be more predictable than that?—but that it fails to account for science!
I have “The Physics of Immortality” – I’m staring at it on my bookshelf as I type this. I found it interesting from a speculative standpoint, but far from being a logical proof for the existence of God.
I haven’t read Plantinga, but I’ve studied Godel’s proof, and to me it looks like an exercise in choosing axioms that will allow the proof to be sound. The article you linked to, by the way, is not a validation of Godel – merely the description of attempts to formalize his proof such that it can be manipulated by computer. It wasn’t even an attempt to ‘prove’ Godel – his logic was just used as a test case for a more general method of using software to examine logical claims.
I had a quick look at one of Plantinga’s arguments, and found it less than compelling. He makes the argument that a neuron is a material thing, but when a collection of them are put together, informational content appears, and that this content can not be reducible down to the material elements of the brain. All true. This is an example of a complex system with emergent properties, perfectly acceptable in science. Plantinga seems to be not aware of complexity science – possibly because his writing is old enough that it wasn’t popular yet?
But it and Gödel’s proof exist, so “I’ve never seen a logical proof for the existence of God” would seem to be inaccurate. You might not think Tipler succeeds, but you’d need to show either an inconsistency in his reasoning or a flaw in his “Appendix for Scientists” to categorically say he’s wrong. FWIW, my own criticism of PoI is simply that he assumes—and to his credit, he’s entirely explicit about this—his Eternal Life Postulate, that the universe is such that “life,” defined as information processing, can exist for all subjective time. I found this stacking the deck too much for an argument from physics. He resolves this to my satisfaction in “The Physics of Christianity,” but the remainder of that work focuses on justifying the traditional Christian miracles in terms of physics, an entirely negative program of showing them to be “not impossible.” Even many scientists’ grasp of the point of such negative logical programs is so poor that I’ve given up referring people to this volume—it’s not worth the energy required to aid understanding.
In formal logic, that’s all any proof is. But again, that’s all that’s required not to be irrational. You can rationally reject the axioms, as, e.g. Neel Krishnaswami does. But you can’t insist that accepting the axioms is irrational, or that accepting the validity of the argument given those axioms is irrational. That’s Plantinga’s observation qua philosopher. Obviously, as a believer, he believes more, but being intellectually honest, he distinguishes between that belief and what’s warranted by the logic—indeed, the bulk of his career has been devoted to making the idea of “warrant” in analytic philosophy rigorous.
Of course. The point of that exercise, in turn, is to gain confidence that it is sound, as it’s a rather sophisticated proof and thus might hide subtle, unsound inference chains. For what it’s worth, type theory, in particular the dependent type theory the Coq proof assistant uses, is my own area of expertise. So I’m quite well aware that the success of that project doesn’t help us with the axioms, but at least we have higher confidence Gödel didn’t make any logical errors in his proof.
Incidentally, to me, the most trenchant criticism of Gödel’s proof is also very funny. From Krishnaswami:
Being a Lutheran constructivist, I can say Krishnaswami is exactly right. :-)
This is incorrect—the software involved (Isabelle, Coq…) is well over a decade old and has been used extensively. What’s new here is precisely the “computational theology” application.
Probably true of Plantinga’s earlier work, but I still recommend his more recent work. With respect to the specific example, I would also point out that it is a perfectly valid argument against reductionism, and remember, Plantinga’s brief is against naturalism, not science. Students of emergent behavior point out that emergent systems exhibit definitional characteristics not derivable from the fundamental reductionist description of the system, regardless of that description’s success in providing both explanatory and predictive power in a global sense. The best current example of this line of reasoning I’m aware of is David Wallace’s The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory according to the Everett Interpretation. Plantinga would agree, adding that reason does not preclude belief that this is due to divine will.
All of the logical machinery, then, is in service of the phrase “reason does not preclude belief.”