Archive for ‘Renaissance/Premodern (Part II)’

While some views that Locke held were way off the mark (such as having your children sleep on hard beds, rather than soft to toughen them up) many seem like common sense to me. I find it interesting that he was actually introducing a new way of thinking concerning education. Locke believes that learning should be enjoyable and if this is so, children will want to learn outside of the classroom. Children only dislike school and like playing because they are not forced to play, and they are forced to go to school. Again, common sense. When I was young, my parents always made reading seem like so much fun. I picked out books and we read as a family. This was always a favorite activity of mine. It was only later when I was required to read for Accelerated Reader that I began to think of reading as a chore.

While I agree that making learning enjoyable is the ideal when teaching students, I also can see how this could be counterproductive. Part of Locke’s idea is that you should never force a child to learn. What do you do when a child gets frustrated because he cannot master a task? Without my parents encouragement to keep on trying even when I was frustrated, I would have never mastered fractions, spelling, etc. It is my belief that if you do not force (I think a better word is encourage) some children to learn, they may never develop to their potential.

I was searching for videos and thought this guy was funny. What a singer!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpCK0V48tCc

Free will versus determinism is one of the biggest topics of this section, and I believe it to be of limited practical importance becasue iether way we are going to follow whichever view is correct. If we truly have free will, then we can just continue arguing for all time if we so desire, but that would accomplish nothing. On the other hand, if we all operate under pre determined circumstances, then we are supposed to argue over the topic for however long each one of us argues over the topic and whatever happens in the end was alwasy going to happen so it still doesnt really matter. It is easy to see how the debate itself serves no real purpose in advancing the Kingdom of God or serving any other purpose except personal gratification. However, concerning the topic of personal gratification, I have come to a conclusion on the matter. My belief is that we all have free will to operate our lives in whatever way we see fit, but because God is omniscient, he already knows everything that we will ever do, therefore making an illusion of determinism. Another way to look at the situation is with the analogy of flipping a coin. What side lands face up on a coin is in no way a random occurance; if all influencing factors are known in exacting detail it can easily be determined prior to its landing. An example of how much you would have to know would be like what follows: force applied to the coin, speed of rotation, terminal velocity, distance dropped, weight distribution, wind resistance, and many more on an almost interminable list. All of these things are far too miniscule for us to be able to determine, but due to God's omniscience, He can know the end result of anything. God knows everything about our biology, everyhting about how we think, and everything about everything around us; it stands to reason that he could then know everything about how we would react to any given situation. In this sense it can be said that our actions are determined, but I arue that they are not determined, just known. That knowledge in no way limits our choice, but rather incorporates it. No qualm can be held with this for of determinism in regards to a violation of free will, because free will is fully functional.

Last Friday Dr. McAnulty brought up Skinner and an interview he gave about free will.  I actually ended up finding it because we had watched it in Dr. Shewmaker’s Child Psychology class.  Operant Conditioning   So go ahead and click the link to watch it.

I was once asked by a very close friend of mine why I felt like I needed God in my life. Indeed, why does the vast majority of the earth claim to believe in a “higher power” of some type? He asked me to contemplate an existence where it was universally accepted that there never was and never will be a god. After I thought for awhile in silence he said something to the extent of, “That’s right, you can’t even contemplate it. Our world has been so shaped by the various gods we have created, that a world without them is incomprehensible to our minds. Our need for a god or gods is instinctual to our very core.” He then went on to explain how he thought the world would look if humans had never had that seemingly universal need for God. It was one of the most thought-provoking, if not entirely mind-blowing, discussions I have ever had.
Anyways, talking about Descartes in class lately really brought this memory to the surface of my mind, particularly his thoughts on innate and derived ideas. Is the need for a God in our lives an innate idea that is programmed into our minds? Or, could it be a derived idea from different experiences we have had that have led us to believe in the existence of a higher power?

Descartes is a very fascinating individual for me in the sense that he is trying to view the world totally from the point of view of Thought. He gets a lot of bad rep because of this, because most people then just assume that Descartes is out to show that faith is then uneeded because of a lack of physical proof, however it is actually quite the opposite. Rene Descartes does believe in Cogito Ergo Sum or, “I think, therefore I am,” but it is because of this manner that he proves the existence of an almighty, perfect creator, or God. This can be reference, by the way, in his works titled, “Meditations,” which takes some digging to get the full argument, however I feel it is well worth both the research and read.
He first starts with what he considers the Formal Argument, in which he states the world and the ideals behind it involving the perfection, worth, and judgment of an object and it’s purpose and flaws. in this argument there are two realities,; a formal reality and an objective reality. In the formal reality, it is what we as the thinkers perceive and judge something into a finite summary of how useful it is, skillled, some of it’s flaws, etc.. The Objective view is then the actual usefulness, flaws, skills, and all the rest. All this comes together to judging people, places, and things. However, you can’t put God into this category. In fact, God in all aspects is infinite, therefore there cannot be a finite view of God. Then in the objective reality, God is perfection, so there is nothing that God can be compared to that would show any of this that we could possibly understand. I personally feel this goes back to something I heard a couple years back, “imagine how God really is to you. Put him in that box of what you think he is. Do you have it? I bet it’s wrong. In fact, all of our thoughts are wrong, and way off. God is so wonderous, poweful, loving, and father. He’s not just that, he is THE wonder, THE power, THE love, and THE father. He is what all these terms are compared to.” It even deepens God’s roots by asking, “How do we know what perfection is? This idea cannot have just popped in our head if only by experience?” God had to have imbdued our souls and minds with what IS perfect, and the only way to do that is to have experienced something perfect to know that perfect existed, and thus God was our experience. A Perfect God created us.
Descartes then goes into a Cosmological Argument, which takes on the question, “How do I exist?” he states that it is safe to assume that we have not existed the whole time, we had to have been born, therefore we had to be created. We can also say that we did not create ourselves, at least not physically, because if we had then we would have worked out all the imperfections we feel we have, and therefore make a perfect being to our liking. Our parents certainly did not directy make us, because they would have, in turn, created us in their thought of perfection. However, God created us, because he is perfect and he created us as lesser, imperfect being in our thoughts because to him we are perfectly made. This is further supported when you think about when we create something. It is never perfect, especially nowadays when we try to create artificial beings who can work and perform tasks and give off theimpression of adaptive and sentient thought. They still lack emotions and vital organs that we have, so we can never fully create something, only something in our IMAGE, which is what God did.
These two arguments not only validate the perfection and existance of God to me, but also validate Reason. Descartes may not have had the most accurate thoughts, or the most practical, however he did have some of the more inspirational ones.

How far does free will go? I was talking to my roommate about this the night before we talked about it in class. We discussed how people often say that they are looking for The One. Did God make one person for each of us? If so then do we really have power over our life if God will make us choose this one person? Maybe God knows what choices we will make with our lives and based off of that he knows who we will ultimately chose and makes a person that will fit the choices that we make in our lives. My roomie talked about how when you say that God meant for you to be with a specific person that she thinks it is like saying that all of the events in your life happened in order for you to meet this one person. But is this really the case? What if the person who is made for you goes against God’s will (because I would assume that if I have free will that the other person would too)? Personally, I would not agree that all of the events in my life have led up to me meeting one particular person.

If our free will is limited then is it still free will? I feel like the answer to that would be no because we are not given full control of our own lives. And why would God make so many other people available to us if he had already chosen the one? Why would he not just create us to have some overwhelming feeling of finding the one when it happens. (Now I am not married and may not have found the person so I am not one hundred percent true that I would not know when I had found the one.) I feel like this is just another one of those small details that make our life what it is. If God is not concerned in the minor details of our lives but instead is interested in how we use our talents to help other people, then I feel like something like choosing a mate would not be on his top priorities. Unless perhaps, our mate is suppose to somehow influence the rest of our life and possibly change the course of where we are headed.

For many years I have heard countless quips, ideas, suppositions, and biases concerning Luther. It was only until I actually sat down and read a bit about him that I feel I can finally make some kind of opinion about him. As I typically do, I neither fully commend nor fully despise a man’s work.

On the one hand, Luther made great reformations upon a dire church scene. Though Germany is not Spain, St John of the Cross and St. Teresa d’Avila made many comments of how poorly the regulations of the Catholic church were. Nunneries were essentially brothels with no restrictions on who came in and who went out. Indulgences were created to collect money for a corrupt system of monasteries and nunneries. Teresa herself tried to make reformations on this corrupted institution (and she did with great success). In Germany,  Luther saw how confession was spreading the towns gossip and church events could easily be drunken parties. As a result, he swung in the opposite direction. Though it is good to flee from the very presence of evil, there is a way that one can swing too far and become a Pharisee.

Luther ran, but like any individual at times he ran too little, too far, and just right. Concerning marriage he ran far too little. Adultery and “secret marriages” were alright to him if a party was not sexual pleased. Concerning flippancy, he ran too far. One does not have to be drunk or stern to have an appropriate attitude towards God. There is a balance to be reached. Concerning Aristotle, I have said before that I have a distaste for the mixing of Greek philosophy and Eastern religion, so I may be biased. However, I think it is appropriate to say Aristotle’s works do not belong in the canon. For that matter, I think some of his viewpoints are down right un-Christian (which is fine for philosophy but problematic when people can no longer distinguish Aristotle’s words from Jesus’,Paul’s, or Moses’ words). Finally, concerning free will, I must disagree with Luther without crediting this disagreement to how he approached the situation. We simply disagree on a point that (at least to me) doesn’t seem very important in how I live my life. It seems to be a good scholarly question to wrestle with, but the wrestling is more important than being right. I have so much to learn and “be” in simply being a good follower of Jesus that I am not going to loose sleep over free will vs predestination.

Overall, I feel mixed about this Luther. I’m glad he stood up against corrupt churches (and it takes a strong personality to do that kind of thing), but was his solution better? In the end, I am glad that people could read their Bibles in their own language and thus reconsider their viewpoints about faith and God. This was a good time to wrestle with what you really believed in.

Infectious Ideas

“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed – fully understood – that sticks; right in there somewhere.”

Dom Cobb – Inception

I am a little behind the times.  I saw the movie, Inception, this weekend.  Besides being a brilliant story, the above quote struck me as extremely compelling, particularly in regard to some of the thinkers from the Renaissance and Reformation eras.  These men were infected with ideas that changed their lives (and ultimately ours).  One early thinker, Galileo, specifically, changed the universe we live in (at least figuratively).  Galileo once said “UI do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”  Those contagious ideas.

What would possess a religious man (Galileo at one time wanted to be a monk) to denounce the church’s teachings?  Those pesky ideas again.  Initially, Galileo wanted to prove that objects fell at the same rate regardless of their weight.  He noticed that hail hit the ground at the same time regardless of its size (another of those parasitic ideas).  Aristotelian’s believed that the heavier hail just started higher up in the clouds so that was why they appeared to hit the ground at the same time.

After improving on the existing telescope, Galileo’s brain was infected by the preposterousness of Aristotle’s claims that the earth was the center of the universe and that everything in the universe was perfectly spherical and rotated around the earth in perfect circles.  Galileo saw mountains and craters on the moon, he saw spots on the sun, he saw changes in Venus that indicated to him that Venus rotated around the sun.  More parasitic ideas.

It is hard to imagine not living in a world that KNOWS that the earth revolves around the sun!  But this was almost literally an earth shattering idea for people of Galileo’s time.  People did not want to be infected by this idea.  Their previous notions of world order had already contaminated and taken hold of their brains and minds.  Fortunately, Galileo persisted in this propagation of ideas.  I want to be open to new ideas, but be able to separate the truth from nonsense.  I do not want to be stuck in a world where the sun revolves around the earth—but only in my head.

The following is a link to an Indigo Girls (Amy and Emily) song that gives tribute to Galileo.  The main theme of the song is about reincarnation and righting past lives wrongs which is more Platonic that Galileo-ian, but it is a good song anyway.

Galileo – Indigo Girls

I certainly find it to be true that once ideas get stuck in the “craw” of your brain, it is hard to eradicate them.  Who hasn’t had trouble falling to sleep because their brain will not turn off?  Some idea keeps bouncing off the walls of your mind.  I know that since I started contemplating writing on Galileo for the blog, I could not get the Indigo Girls song out of my head (which I haven’t heard for years)! Then I found a book on Galileo at the dollar store.  Some of this, I think, is our subconscious searching out “confirmation” for our ideas.  But Galileo was so possessed with his ideas and so wanted other people to hear and see his ideas that he got in trouble for them.

Inception was a movie that completely blew my bind. It was incredibly deep and something I thought about for days after the ending credits. I mean literally a day or two later I was thinking, “Is the top still spinning?!” The concept of inception was unique to anything I had ever considered before. After reading about Descartes and his belief in innate ideas, I started thinking about the movie Inception again and the correlation in those concepts.

Descartes believed that if he had a “perfect” idea, then it was not his original idea because he was imperfect. He concluded that the ideas of perfection could be considered true. I began thinking about “perfect ideas” and the whole concept Descartes discusses about how they originated from “a nature that was really more perfect” (p. 119). The whole idea of inception is to take an idea that was created by someone else and plant it so deep within the subconscious of another human being that they believe the idea originated from them. This concept made me begin to question the originality of ideas. I feel that Descartes’ theory on innate ideas provided me with similar questions. He too believed in a concept that some ideas are innate or come from something bigger than ourselves. It made me start thinking which ideas and beliefs I could 100% call my own. I went even deeper and began wondering where exactly my thoughts or ideas actually came from. I am sure most people who read this are thinking that I am way over-analyzing this concept in which case I would agree with you. I do believe that we have ideas that come from others, but I also believe that we are all different. Even if we have the same overall beliefs, we will still have a little bit unique idea on such beliefs because we are so different. I also believe that there are innate ideas especially in realm of Christianity. I believe that because we are created in the perfect image of God that there are instinctual concepts that he places inside us like the need to be loved. Anyways, that was just something I had thought about and I hope I have not been too over-analytical with this whole concept.

\”Tabula Rasa\” LOST

This summer I had the opportunity to watch all six seasons of LOST and while it was entertaining, it was thoroughly confusing. It is interesting to look at the characters from LOST and how they compare and contrast to the philosophers they are named after. I thought it was just Locke who was named after someone, but after looking into it I realized that the writers had a purpose behind the names of their characters.

John Locke the empiricist rejected innate ideas and believed that everything was learned from experience. He believed in tabula rasa, the idea that the mind is a blank slate to be written on. Tabula Rasa is the title of the third episode of the first season. The theme of the episode is that everyone is starting new on the island and therefore is a blank slate; they can be who they want to be. The youtube clip shows the end of this episode where Jack tells Kate that they can start over and forget about the past. Locke the character is not a believer in the ideas of tabula rasa because he believes in destiny and that he was put on the island for a reason.  One similarity the writers added was the character of Anthony Cooper. On the show, Cooper was John’s father and John saved his life by giving him a kidney transplant. In history, Cooper was John’s patron and John saved his life when he persuaded him to have surgery.

Desmond Hume reflects the ideas and characteristics of David Hume in a few ways. David Hume believed that emotions and passions caused their behavior. In the show, Desmond’s behavior is greatly influenced by his emotions. For example, his love for Penny causes him to sail around the world and end up on the island, and his fear of blowing up causes him to push the button in the hatch repeatedly for 2 years. Furthermore, both David and Desmond are Scottish.

After realizing that Locke was named after someone, I wanted to learn what other references were made. It intrigued me to research the characters and ideas behind them. Other characters that are named after philosophers include Jeremy Bentham, Mikhail Bakunin, Danielle Rousseau (Jean-Jacque Rousseau), and Charlotte Staples Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis). I appreciate when writers and artists tie in history and important figures into pop culture. I think it helps keep the past alive and in our minds.

Different philosophical questions also arise from LOST. For example, do people really have a destiny or is there free will? Is there life after death? Does good triumph over evil? Is there redemption? These are just a few tough questions that LOST has made me think about.