“The Infidel and the Professor” by Dennis Rasmussen. Introduction, Chapters 1, 2, Appendix
My Brother Thomas and I, based on Thomas’ suggestion, have decided to read “The Infidel and the Professor” by Dennis Rasmussen about the friendship between David Hume and Adam Smith. So, we have taken a break from our discussion on Atheism and Theism to have a discussion about this book.
We will use the following few posts for this.
I propose we cover this in the following sections to focus our discussions.
Introduction, Appendix, Chapters 1 & 2 – Instigator: John
Chapters 3, 4, 5 – Instigator: Thomas
Chapters 6, 7, 8, 9 – Instigator: John
Chapters 10, 11, 12, Epilogue – Instigator Thomas
I will start here by commenting on…
Introduction, Appendix, Chapters 1 & 2
19 comments:
I will start here by commenting on…
Introduction, Appendix, Chapters 1 & 2
I found the introduction a little blasé. Rasmussen did get some important factoids out there which are helpful like what books and papers they published but generally it was kind of boring and just based on the introduction I might have put the book down. Thankfully, I did not follow through with that notion as I found chapters 1 and 2 quite interesting.
I did find a couple things of interest in the introduction which I thought I would comment on before moving on to the appendix and chapters 1 and 2.
Rasmussen mentions on bottom of page 5 that Aristotle claimed “that friendship is the one good without which no one would choose to live even if he possessed all other goods, and Hume and Smith clearly concurred.” I think I would have to disagree with the 3 of them on this. For me anyway, one thing more valuable than friends I have experienced is having and raising and remaining in relationship with my children. Don’t get me wrong, I greatly value my friends, among that group I include Thomas and many others, but at the end of the day having and raising my kids has been transformational and definitely one of the most valuable things in my life. I would do life again if for no other reason than to have that experience. Also, I feel that my relationship with my wife (which I guess might fall into the friendship category) is up there in important experiences too. Neither Hume nor Smith had wives or children. So, I don’t think they could have much to say on the subject. As for Aristotle, he had two children and two wives (not at the same time :-)). So, he had personal experience to rely on but I would tend to think that his comments on this subject say more about himself than the universal value of friendship. If the category was broadened to human relationships in general then I would tend to agree with Aristotle on this.
I got a kick out of Aristotle’s categorization of friendships into utilitarian, pleasure, and virtue / excellence. I wonder what type of friendship we have Thomas? It must be of the virtue / excellence type. :-)
I enjoyed his thoughts on the history of the Scottish Enlightenment. It makes me feel like the next great set of new ideas could come from anywhere. Or perhaps thought is moving so fast and is so diverse now that perhaps we will never see a situation again like we had in the Scottish Enlightenment where a fairly localized flourishing of thought ends up having profound impacts on the entire world.
I found the phrase “judicial murder” used by the author the middle of page 10 to be latent with controversy. It was used in the context of burning a woman at the stake for allegedly being found guilty of being a witch. Let me first say that I am personally against burning anyone at the stake for anything. I am supportive of capital punishment in a humane manner and with robust due process but I feel like even that is really risky because once you put someone to death, if you find out later they were wrongfully convicted (which has happened too often in America) it is irrevocable. That serious side note out of the way and with no other knowledge of what the phrase “judicial murder” means I just want to say that a term like “judicial murder” at first blush drives me crazy. It feels like verbal trickeration. It feels like a dishonest use of language designed to prejudice a conversation and intended to obfuscate thinking.
Let’s start with the language perspective of this. Without looking any of these terms up and with the intent of just taking this as a casual layman’s reading here are some observations. As a layman, if you ask me, what is “murder” I am likely to say, the illegal killing of someone. Killing someone in a war is not murder (although it is awful that this happens). For the most part peoples / societies have agreed that at times nations / peoples / tribes go to war and take up arms against one another and if an individual kills another person in that context it is not “murder” it is not “illegal killing.” Same for self-defense, if someone breaks into your house and you kill them to protect yourself and your family it is not “murder” it is “legally killing” someone one in self-defense. To the laymen the term “judicial” sounds like something that has been decided by our judicial system which is to say our legal system. Something that is judicial is something that pertains to our laws. If someone says that something is “judicial” to me the laymen it is essentially saying that it is something that is “legal.” So, when I read a phrase like “judicial murder” to me it is really saying “legal illegal killing.” It’s basically nonsensical but designed to sound super thoughtful and perhaps to trick the reader to accepting ideas that have not truly been defended and explained. There is more that could be said on this topic and it could perhaps become a whole new thread which would take us way way off our topic which I don’t want to do. Thomas you can comment if you would like. For now I will beat my internal (or perhaps not so internal) “grumpy old man” back into submission and continue with the main gist of the topic of the book and end this particular rant on this thought. When I see the use of a term like “judicial murder” it is a red flag for me that I need to be on the watch with this author as he or she may have a hidden agenda that might pop up again in the book. Why would an intelligent and capable author, whom I take Rasmussen to be, use non-sensical langue unless he was trying to hide something? Don’t know. We’ll see. And another thing, why does the amazon driver put the boxes right out on the stoop when he/she could easily hid them right behind the arches next to our door?!?!?
I really like this from the introduction. I feel like I could almost 100% agree with this. So, I will repeat it here from page 13. “[B]oth…embraced…core ideals…stressing the benefits of the rule of law, limited government, religious toleration, freedom of expression, private property, and commerce,…distrusted large and sudden innovations in politics…” They held to “the fallibility of human reason and the complicated, variable nature of the political world…” And that “we should be wary of grand schemes for radically restructuring society… [C]hanges should be implemented in a gradual, measured way.”
Hear hear!!! I really agree with this perspective! This generates a lot of lines of inquiry. One big question in many cases is how fast to accept change. It seems like the speed of the adoption of guy marriage in America happened at about the correct speed. It happened pretty quickly. Some might feel it should have happened sooner. Others that it should not have happened at all. If it had happened sooner many might have benefited and lived a more rich life with a more rewarding relationship. Of course (and some people will scoff at this) we may find that there are unintended negative consequences to this change that we only discover decades down the road and folks then will conclude that we should have transitioned more slowly. But we’ll see. Back to the quotes above articulating the modernish / liberalish perspective, I have a theory that if all humans had adopted these principles in ancient times we may have made some of the great scientific discoveries millennia earlier. I can make arguments for and against this but I like to think it is true. The main thing that held back our species was our own bad ideas.
Sounds like Hume was a lot more negative on religion than Smith. The author indicates on page 15 that both felt “…that morality comes from human beings themselves rather than from the word or will of God…religion is not a precondition of virtue.” That is provocative and I assume he will expand on that in subsequent chapters. Really looking forward to hearing more on that.
At the end of the introduction the author mentions that Hume was dubbed “the Great Infidel” which is obviously where the book gets its title from. I’m glad there was enough toleration that Hume was allowed to publish and profit from his ideas and works. That is a good sign of some religious tolerance in that time. It might not have gone so well for him if he had been born just a few decades earlier given earlier in the 18th century they were still burning alleged witches at the stake. It doesn’t bother me that much that he was not able to get a teaching post. I feel it would be wrong / bad had his writings been censored or banned from publishing. That would have been bad. Would love to hear Thomas’ thoughts on that.
Since I thought the intro was kind of a drag and he mentioned Hume’s miniature autobiography and the letter Smith wrote about Hume were in the appendix I thought I would take a quick look at those to see if they peaked my interest more than the intro. Plus I wanted to get a sample of the subjects in their own words. So, here are some thoughts on that…
I have heard people say that David Hume is the most entertaining of the philosophical writers. In the appendix in “David Hume: My Own Life” I found that to be the case. I was only 2 pages in and already getting a chuckle. He is quite entertaining in a kind of a self-deprecating way even when talking about dire health conditions. It’s almost impossible to not like the guy. He’s like an eternal optimist in ways. Regarding the humor; First of all he claims that the work is essentially a “funeral oration” written on his own behalf which in itself kind of funny. As an example of the writing itself, he talks about his work on the topic of the history of England and remarks regarding the reception of his work, “I was, I own, sanguine in my expectations of the success of this work. I thought that I was the only historian, that had at once neglected the present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices; and as the subject was suited to every capacity, I expected proportional applause. But miserable was my disappointment: I was assailed by one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestations; English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, freethinker and religionist, patriot and courtier, united in their rage against the man, who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I.” Bwahahahaha ahahahaha hahahahahahaha - whew. Funny stuff.
As far as the content of his life’s work which is the topic of this mini-autobiography: It sounds like Hume worked and re-worked ideas and it took a while to gain financial success.
Adam Smith’s letter about Hume reinforced the idea the Hume was a perpetually good natured, generous, and funny person and provided some excerpts to back it up. The bit on being ready to meet Charon, the mythological transporter of humans to the other side as case in point. As a Christian, for me Hume’s legacy is a bit of a challenge. As Christians we believe God is at work in the world and in our personal lives for a grand purpose of redemption and we have a hope that in our resurrection to eternal life all things will be made new and right. The challenges we experience in the here and now are challenges to mature us and make us more like Christ and the more perfect beings we will be in the next epoch. And yet I find myself forever getting upset, lashing out, worrying, and being overcome with anxiety. Christians should be the most pleasant and reflective folks, the calm ones amid the storm, least likely to be angry, least worried about grievances as they are just passing irritations not to even be compared to our future wondrous life. Here is Hume, an atheist, without any hope living, according to Smith’s account, the calm, industrious, and charitable life that we Christians should exemplify. I / we have a ways to go.
Smith’s final tribute at the end of the letter says a lot about Hume and about this friendship we will be reading about. It was a wonderful friendship. “…I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature human frailty will permit.”
Chapter 1 – The Cheerful Skeptic
Chapter 1 seems to be a bit of a summary of Hume’s ideas. I really enjoyed reading this chapter. Some of it was a review but much was somewhat new info for me on Hume’s thought and it was nice to really dig into it.
Page 20 – I thought it was interesting that his readings of Locke and Clarke’s defenses of theism made him more skeptical.
I felt that starting on page 22 the author really digs in and starts to talk about the nitty gritty of Hume’s ideas. I’ll riff on that a little.
Page 22 – Interesting contrast between Descartes who “…aimed to base his conclusions as much as possible on pure, abstract reason,” whereas Hume felt it our best understanding would “…be found in ‘experience and observations.’”
I remember when I was probably 24 or 25 and reading a lot of different things that I became aware of this idea from Hume that the author relays in the following words “…we cannot even know that there is an external world, beyond our immediate senses, or that we are selves, meaning discrete individuals who persist stably over time.” At some fundamental level I find this very compelling and hard to deny outright. As I recall Kant lays some things over this idea which I feel are more compelling but Hume’s assessment is a very honest and compelling perspective.
The author goes on to note that Hume recognized that “…universal doubt is simply unsustainable in the course of everyday life.” True dat. The author goes on to indicate that Hume suggests that we can use experience and probabilities based on that experience and “…that it would be foolish to disregard the guidance that experience provides.” He goes on to note a resulting “… great expansion of the roles played by custom, habit, the passions, and the imagination.” I don’t remember learning about these last aspects of Hume’s thoughts. So, will take the authors word for it.
What is perhaps most interesting about the above is that Hume presents a very radical epistemology that for the average person even today feels shocking and radical but when it is all said and done we still have the same basic tactical issues to work through. We can have some reliance on custom and habit as beneficial things that have been learned practically over time and generations. However, we also have internal / emerging “passions and imagination” that also do and should impact our decision making and inform our experience. These seem to be age old conflicts for people to sort out. Indeed, it seems to be a large part a debate I was watching with Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. Jordan Peterson was saying we really need to rely on the old traditions to guide us and Sam Harris arguing that they are completely wrong and should be thrown out in favor of new “scientific” learning (e. g. “passions and imagination”). I think Hume would say yep, we have the age old task of sorting out which traditions we should keep verses which beliefs and perspectives should be informed by our new emerging passions and imagination. In some ways a fairly conservative notion growing out of a radical notion. (SIDE NOTE: I wasn’t as enamored with this take of mine upon second and third reading but what the heck. Leaving it in here.)
On page 23 Rasmussen talks about Hume’s implicit atheism and discusses Hume’s program to analyze human nature “…without appealing to any kind of higher power…” On the face of it I actually like the idea of rigorously investigating human nature without pulling priors into it. We should do that. There is a risk, however. Human nature, like all nature, is amazingly complex. Perhaps we don’t even know how complex. Perhaps it is so complex that it is beyond the capacity for humans to fully understand it. I would argue that to date, that has been the case. Now perhaps someday we will have the ability to understand properly all that complexity and perhaps not, but the risk comes when having done some “rigorous investigation” we decide that is enough “rigorous investigation” and we can start changing policies and directing individuals based on what we later discover are partial understandings and the actions taken based on these new learnings turn out to be disastrous and we learn the hard way that our “rigorous investigation” hadn’t given us the whole story. Case in point, communism, based on the shiny new ideas of Marx and Engels that they had derived from “rigorous investigation.” When applied in the Soviet Union and China the results were disastrous. In other places when applied, if not disastrous, at a minimum stultifying.
In fairness, the risk is not really mitigated when we pull the appeal to the Divine back into the analysis as an additional consideration. Even with Divine revelation in the picture there are at least two problems. One, the revelation ends up being very complex (because the nature it is describing is complex) to the point that it also struggles to present a unified understanding / approach to human nature. For example, Proverbs 26: 4 “Do not answer a fool according to his foolishness, or you will also be like him.” Followed by Proverbs 26:5 “Answer a fool as his foolishness deserves, So that he will not be wise in his own eyes.” You end up in human terms struggling to simply and plainly provide direction as the above verses imply. Secondly, even when / if accurate and understandable divine communication is provided, we humans have to interpret and properly act on it and our track record is sketchy at best. Consider pedophilia problems in the Catholic clergy and the much less awful legalism that we experienced in our own tradition.
There is a lot to think about here but these comments will need to suffice for now.
Regarding the notes on Hume’s ideas on morals, “Hume argues that morality derives…from common human sentiments, specifically our feelings of approval and disapproval.” I believe Smith will have a lot to say about this and we will likely have a lot to chat about further on in the book.
On the bottom of page 24 Rasmussen says of Hume’s ethics, their “…purpose is to make people’s lives go better. The virtues are the qualities that we collectively find to be either useful or agreeable, either for ourselves or for others…” A lot to be said for this perspective. Not bad principles to structure society around.
On page 27 I liked the author’s comments on Hume’s essay “The Sceptic,” “…while skepticism is often associated with nihilism and paralysis, Hume suggests that it actually tends to lead to inner tranquility, intellectual humility, and a passion for ever-further inquiry.” He also notes that “[t]he essay also explores how one might attain the moderate, balanced, humane disposition of the skeptic, and to that end it recommends “a serious attention to the sciences and liberal arts.”” At a personal level there is a part of this I like but I also would say that being a skeptic at least for me has been a mixed blessing. I feel taking a skeptical perspective has helped me explore and understand some things I might not have otherwise understood or considered. On the other hand I have found it to also have many of the deleterious effects of nihilism and even some of the intellectual paralysis suggested. I feel that the perspective described says more about Hume here than anything. A person with a naturally pleasant disposition with an expansive intellect, not married and therefore with no real obligations financially save for himself with a moderate but comfortable income, for that type of person, sure, skepticism could be a psychologically pleasant perspective to take. For many of us mere mortals it is a lot dicier.
His discussion on Hume’s view on miracles that kind of led into Hume’s critique of the argument for God from design I found to be the most intriguing part of the chapter. Let’s start with a couple quotes. On page 30 the author says, “Hume defines a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature, by which he means our uniform experience of how nature works.” 100% agree. Makes sense. Next, “Since the purported miracle (by definition) violates all of our past experience, the evidence in its favor would have to be incredibly strong in order to establish its credibility.” Agree with this also. Then the author goes on to say “Hume suggests, the evidence in favor of a purported miracle will always be dwarfed by that against it, namely our uniform experience of how nature works” and “…argues that it is never reasonable to believe a report of a miracle having occurred.” Since we are not reading Hume directly we’ll have to assume that the author is fairly representing him and I have no reason to think he is not. So, will go with that.
I find this reasoning if not circular at least problematic. Based on Hume’s perspective, if I experience one actual miracle a year for five years, the first year I would reject the phenomena as a miracle based on Hume’s reasoning. The second year I would again reject it as a miracle because it would be like I was experiencing a miracle for the first time because I had rejected the first one, then the third year ditto and so forth. It seems to me that he is using an assumption of a totally naturalistic cosmos as a reason to reject the alternative. If there was the experience of a miracle or the report of a miraculous experiences why should there be a special criteria for judging its veracity? I don’t see a good reason for that to be the case. If a bunch of credible people say we saw a car wreck I don’t know why we should believe that group of people any less than if they said they saw miracle?
I feel like Hume is really just taking a very subjective position here. “I personally don’t believe that miracles are possible. I believe this so strongly that even if you tell me you saw a miracle I won’t believe you no matter how much evidence you provide me, it won’t change my mind.” Okay, suit yourself. Not sure why the rest of us should take that position.
If he is going to say based on this line of reasoning that there can be no miracles He is really saying there is no metaphysical world. It seems like he should really just defend that rather than coming around to it in kind of this backwards way of discussing whether it makes sense to believe in miracles. Lot to think about here.
One last thought about miracles is I think one of the reasons Hume is a big deal and we should pay attention to him now is he is probably the person who introduced this idea broadly in western thinking and frankly his idea of the impossibility of miracles is pervasive in the mind of most westerners. It is in the intellectual air we breathe, pervasive in each of us as we move about our day to day business. It is definitely true of me. It is my natural proclivity to disregard anything that smacks of the miraculous. To accept a miracle demands evidence. Putting aside the perspective that for Hume copious evidence is not even enough to demonstrate that a miracle has happened I think it is prescient that the apostle Paul was compelled to catalog and publish evidence for the seminal miracle of the Christian faith in I Corinthians chapter 15 where he says, “…that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that He appeared to [c]Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 After that He appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep; 7 then He appeared to [d]James, then to all the apostles; 8 and last of all, as [e]to one untimely born, He appeared to me also.” (NASB)
On that note (ha, pun intended, just keep reading), no discussion on the human experience in general or our human experience with the God who created us can be compete without a song or a poem or something like that as God made us with this built in capacity and need for art and any exposition on the nature of man or God that does not involve a song or some type of artistic expression cannot possibly be complete or accurate. (Perhaps another reason to distrust Hume.) So, a song about miracles for which Paul provided us evidence that Hume rejects. I think I may have shared this before Thomas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf9ed6qwlaI
On that day I hope I find Hume there and I’ll give him a big hug and tell him, “It’s alright. None of us got it totally right.”
Regarding the discussion about Hume’s critique of the argument from design. Not sure I would argue that Christian Theology would, nor would I, say that an understanding of all the attributes of God can be derived by humans simply by inferring them based on what we see around us. I believe, and I believe traditional Christian theology concurs, that some things about God’s nature, for example his/her/its benevolence can only be discovered through revelation. So, I am inclined to agree with Hume based on the author’s assessment “… he does not claim that there is not God, or that the world has no Designer.” That is, looking at nature you certainly cannot rule out the possibility of a designer. I would take it a step further though and say that you can reasonably infer there is a Designer but there is a limit to what you can learn from nature about said Designer. Now, this is kind of how Hume’s system ties together his critique on miracles with his critique of the argument from design. As noted, you can’t infer a whole lot about the Designer by looking at nature. For Hume, you may not even be able to infer a designer. Additionally, you can’t augment any knowledge you might get about God from observing the world around you with revelation because Hume’s arguments against miracles has disposed of the possibility of revelation. Putting these two ideas together shuts the door on man relating to or experiencing God. For me it all kind of falls apart as I reject the first premise on miracles. NOTE: I haven’t always accepted the possibility of miracles but I do now.
One last thought on chapter 1. At the end of the chapter the author notes some racist tendencies on the part of Hume. I was happy to read quotes that re-enforced what I had understood of Smith, namely that he was explicitly anti-racist. Very appropriate for the seminal figure in understanding laissez-faire market economies. This perspective by Smith is consistent with his teachings. Should Hume’s racism make us think twice about his teaching?
That term tripped me up too. I had to think about it a second. I think it’s a little editorializing and not necessary. I think we can all agree that burning people for supposedly being witches was not a good idea. A lot of things we did in the past were bad ideas. No need to comment in book about two smart guys friendship. Lol on amazon driver.
Hey John! Thanks for referring to our friendship. It is not something we speak of out loud, but it’s very important to me. Although I have fallen down on the job, lately. :( Anyway, I agree that in Aristotle’s terms, we most be in the virtuous and excellent category.
I’ve been reading a lot about friendship lately in the scientific and evolutionary realm. Even wrote an article about on my blog which got picked up for distribution. https://link.medium.com/jFiIjnH0Rdb
Anyway, I’m going to take a slightly different angle on friendship. I’m going to agree that friendship might be the most important thing. My blog post and several scientists, including Darwin, have posited that friendliness in Homo sapiens may be the critical adaptation that led to our success as a species. Of course friendliness is different from friendship. One is simply being nice and kind to others, particularly strangers and including them in our in-group. This has allowed us too make bigger and bigger in-groups. Our friendliness has helped us grow from small groups roaming Africa to groups of millions and millions. That’s not possible if we can’t be nice to each other and get along in a generally nice way. Friendship is of course much deeper. It involves much more of a connection and intimacy and love. I would argue that romantic relationships don’t last without some kind of level of friendship. They just have extra spice to them. Haha. Without our species ability to be friendly and kind in the first place (an ability that out-distances other mammals by miles), what we think of as romantic relationships wouldn’t even be possible.
I do agree with your statement about one’s children. I believe it is transformational as well. It is strange. I have lived most of my life without them, but now I can’t imagine my life without them. It’s as if they have always been there. There was no before them. Very strange. They may be the most significant relationship one has. I also might be overstating that since I am a single dad. I don’t know. But I would include them in the friendship category. Hopefully as the boys get older we can continue to be friends and have a friendship. It’s a little different I guess in that you are a parent and that has different responsibilities and different boundaries. And not all parents are friends with their adult children. Some of them don’t even like each other. They have a relationship because they are family but not a friendship. They tolerate each because they have to because of obligation. But even that can breakdown. Witness Jessica’s father. Anyway, I got way down a rabbit hole there. But only because it is something I am researching.
Not sure why it posted three times. oops. deleted the other two
Chapter 2
Encountering Hume (1723-1749)
So far I feel like have been basically incapable of editing myself. So, I am resolved to fix that problem with my notes on chapter 2. Wish me luck!
On page 37 the author mentions the term “canonical philosopher.” I pretty sure that if I hadn’t gotten married and become a computer programmer I would have become a canonical philosopher. I feel like I made the correct choice.
I got a kick out of the quote on the top of 38 where the author notes Smith’s reflection on Oxford Universities as “sanctuaries in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices found shelter and protection, after they had been hunted out of every other corner of the world.” Ha. Some things don’t change. Example: Marxism on U. S. campuses.
Around page 41 and running through page 44 my mind started popping and snapping like a popcorn popper at a movie theatre (remember movie theatres). This author does a nice job of summarizing succinctly the ideas in these pages and in the whole book for that matter. That is quite impressive because frankly I don’t feel they are all that simple. Let me try to convey my take on this section.
In general the ideas he conveys in this section are shared by Hume and Smith, but according to Rasmussen, Smith takes it further.
I felt the big ideas in this section are as follows and I will try to discuss them in this order…
1) From a human experience perspective, science and religion are trying to accomplish the same things.
2) The world / cosmos may or may not be orderly but humans have a need for order and so, therefore try to ascribe order to it.
3) Reason by itself is not sufficient to understand the world around us.
1) From a human experience perspective, science and religion are trying to accomplish the same things.
This one creates the most internal conflict for me. So, I will start here.
On page 43 the author says, “In Smith’s view…the first religions were, like the later scientific theories, inventions of the imagination designed to explain the inexplicable and thereby satisfy the human mind.” Earlier on page 43 he notes, “…Smith suggests that while religion predates science, it arose in a similar way and for similar reasons.”
This sounds very familiar to some of the ideas that Thomas has been pushing for in our posts on Atheism and Theism. That human religion is just a progressive development moving through stages of understanding the world from Spiritism, to Polytheism, to Monotheism, and to Science / Notheism. Some things about this naturalistic explanation do not sit well with me. Others are compelling.
I do feel at some level religion and science are trying to solve the same problems or perhaps in ways at least their goals overlap. They are trying to explain and help us understand the world around us and our place in it. That sounds correct to me.
The part that I struggle with is the implication that this is all there is to it. To restate: humans have been struggling to understand the world for generations and part of those attempts involved was describing what they saw / learned in terms of unseen meta actors and as we humans progressed we came to the conclusion that there are no unseen meta actors.
Okay, I’m going to leave this thought hanging out there in the ether a little and move on to the next point at the end of which I hope to bring a little resolution to this dangling idea.
2) The world / cosmos may or may not be orderly but humans have a need for order and so, therefore try to ascribe order to it
Top of 44, “…order is not so much observed in the world as imposed on it, by us and for the sake of our own mental comfort.” I think there is a lot to agree with here. I personally believe that ultimately much of the world we experience is orderly but at some level it is impossible to really know for sure. Based on what I have learned about what we think we know about how the eye and seeing works, there is a lot the brain does to take the inputs from the eye and make them useful. We definitely impose order on what comes in through our senses. I don’t have a lot else to say on this specifically but I think it is a concept that is helpful to keep in mind.
The above kind of speaks to the limits of what we can really know and I feel it affords a segue to another of Smith’s ideas in the book. The author also says on the bottom of 41 that the ideas that “…Smith espouses here, of course, casts doubt on the notion that any scientific finding will ever constitute that last word on its subject. Every theory must remain forever subject to revision…” So reflecting on the possible narrative mentioned above that the history of human thought has lead us on a trek from Spiritism to Scientific Notheism we have to recognize based on Smith’s assertion that everything is “subject to revision” that the view that human thinking has evolved from to Spiritism to Notheism may ultimately give way to something else. Who knows, it may lead us back to Spiritism. Regardless, I heartily agree with the notion that scientific discoveries should be taken with a grain of salt as tomorrow they may give way to a new more robust understanding.
Assuming the author is correct on Smith’s view above I tend to agree with it and the potential conclusion that we should approach scientific facts with a degree of skepticism. And perhaps we should be a little more open to some of the spiritual ideas of old we now completely write off.
3) Reason by itself is not sufficient to understand the world around us.
Page 42, “Smith’s and Hume’s first works both convey deeply skeptical assessments of the power and scope do human reason.”
We will forever have gaps in our understanding of the world. We can never fully understand it and therefore should never be too dogmatic about anything. This should instill deep humility in all of us about what we think we know and create in us a willingness to throw away old ideas for new discoveries.
Perhaps an example of a gap is gravity. Newton discovered that you could accurately predict the movement of bodies in space by a set of calculations that perhaps can metaphorically be described as a force or forces exerted by the bodies on each other. Einstein came along and further expanded our understanding of gravity by describing it “…not as a force, but as a consequence of masses moving along geodesic lines in a curved spacetime caused by the uneven distribution of mass.” (From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity) I think this is more of a metaphor and I’m not even sure there is a specific formula for it but I’m starting to digress. The point is that we are confident we have a deeper understanding of the world through these discoveries, BUT, with all of this new, historically speaking, knowledge, do we really even know what gravity is or where it comes from and why it acts the way it does. We can predict and describe it but do we really understand it. I’m not sure at the end of the day we know why we have gravity. Why it is there. That seems like a healthy gap.
A theist positon would hold that God created us with a purpose and a capacity to understand the world but because our capacity goes way beyond reason and includes the senses, emotion, consciousness, and perhaps more we should expect that the fullest understanding of the Cosmos and the Metacosmos (aka God) will require the use of more than just our reason. It will take all of us.
The healthy gaps I noted may eventually be understood through the exercise of the intellect but perhaps not. We may be able to predict them but do we really understand them. Perhaps a truly deep understanding of the things we find at the boundary of our intellect can only be fully understood emotionally or spiritually. I can’t say that I know this but I wonder.
I know took this in a direction that Rasmussen, Smith, and Hume weren’t going and doesn’t fully follow but thinking about the limits our reason kind of makes me naturally think, “Well what else do we have at our disposal?”
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