A Nation Born Blind

In the Gospels Our Lord is sometimes portrayed as healing the blind, as though that were a remarkable thing to do, as though restoring sight to the blind were an act of kindness, the relieving of a malady. Imagine how strange it would have seemed, both in antiquity and to our own ears, were one of these blind people to say to Our Lord, "What are you doing? I don't want my sight restored, I'm happy just the way I am!" Blindness has two vectors: one is either born blind, or one becomes blind after being born with sight. I find it very difficult to believe that a person who became blind after being born with sight would actually prefer to remain blind; but I also find it hard to believe that, if offered the capacity to see, someone who had been born blind would refuse the gift. Even without knowing what it is like to see, I think, a person born blind would be unable to think of any rationally compelling reason to remain blind if sight were in the offing.

Aristotle, famously, remarked that vision is the most precious of the sensory modalities:

All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things (Metaphysics 1.1 980a21-26)

This would appear to be a nearly universal human sentiment, and so it would seem strange, not only if a person born blind were to refuse a gift of restoration of sight, but also if we, who have sight, were to refuse to give such a gift, were it ours to give. Suppose you had the capacity to restore sight to a person born blind. Would you say to him, "You've never had sight, so you can't possibly know what you're missing, you can't possibly feel slighted by being sightless, and so you have no right to complain if I refuse to give sight to you."

What kind of a person would say such a thing?

And yet that is what we do say, all of us, and we have been saying it for thirty-five years now. Only we're not saying it about sight; we're saying it about life itself. We say to the unborn: "You're not fully developed, you're a mere potentiality. You have no commitments, no web of relationships, no similarity to the rest of us who can walk and talk and reason among ourselves. You are totally alien, you have no cognition, no sentience, and since you have no nervous system to speak of, you can't even feel pain as yet. And so you have no right to complain if we refuse to let all of these things develop in you."

What kind of a person would say such a thing?

A person who has other commitments. A person who already has as many children as she wants. A person who thinks that the economic burden of another child is too great. A person who thinks that the psychological burden of another child is too great. A person who thinks that there are already enough children in the world. Or, perhaps, a person who never wanted any children to begin with, who got pregnant by mistake. Or against her will.

All of which are perfectly reasonable worries. And yet, none of the people who offer such reasons as these for killing a child in the womb would think it reasonable to offer the very same reason as justification for terminating the life of a child outside of the womb. Why not? We comfort ourselves with the abject Otherness of the fetus. It is so very unlike us, after all, and it has none of the same capacities for social interaction that we have, it has none of the self-awareness, none of the "personhood" shared by those outside the womb. Very convenient for us, really, that the fetus is so very different.

Oh, sure, we learned a long time ago that it's not right to treat other persons differently if they seem to be different from us. We don't hold slaves anymore on the basis of racial differences, because that would be wrong. We don't discriminate against women in the workplace anymore (or we try not to) because that would be wrong. That person of the other race may appear to be very unlike me, but really he isn't all that unlike me, he has all the same capacities for walking, talking, and reasoning that I have. If I am a man, I may think that women are rather different from me, but they aren't, really, they have all the same capacities for walking, talking, and reasoning that I have. But a fetus--well, of course it does have all the same capacities that I have, but it cannot yet actualize them, and if I act quickly enough, it never will be able to actualize them, and that is enough to comfort me in the thought that it differs from me in a significant way: it is not a person, and I am. So I may treat it in any way that I desire: it has no duties, no rights--only persons can have those.

In this way do we lie to ourselves. Because we don't want to think about what kind of a person would kill a child for the reasons given above. It's better to pretend that what we're killing is not a child at all.

We prefer to say to the person born blind: "I don't want you to see what I see, it is inconvenient for me to share with you the faculty of vision, and so even though I have the capacity to give you sight, I am not going to do it."

What kind of people are we?

Science and Politics

Dan Graur, a molecular biologist at the University of Houston, wrote a tongue-in-cheek, hand-wringy letter to Nature recently (12/20/2007) in which he pretended to be worried that, if "the public were consulted and actively engaged in practical scientific matters" we would be faced with a (literally) nightmarish situation in the United States, where "73% believe in miracles, 68% in angels, 61% in the devil and 70% in the survival of the soul after death". What would be so nightmarish about letting these poor, benighted folks in on "practical scientific matters"? Well, you see, if they had any say in the matter, "the dos and don'ts of science and research" would be dictated by these simpletons, and they would force scientists to "deal with virgin birth, the thermodynamics of hell, the aerodynamics of angel wings, and the physiology and haematology of resurrection."

Although one must assume that Danny boy is just fooling around (though the editors of Nature appear to have taken his letter rather more seriously than he intended it), his letter does not prompt one to admire his intellectual depth or honesty. He surely isn't ignorant of the fact that what most serious religious intellectuals (including religious scientists, a category that appears to be outside Dan's imaginative capacity) worry about on the part of many scientists is not their research programs per se but the concomitant ethical dilemmas that impinge upon many scientific issues, especially in the life sciences. To pretend that the majority who believe in something as ludicrous as "the survival of the soul after death" are going to direct all their effort towards getting scientists to investigate "the aerodynamics of angel wings" is either sheer demagoguery, pure ignorance, or mere ad hominem. In either case it does not reflect well on Dan Graur. It may be mere name-calling, of course, but if so it is in rather spectacularly poor taste and makes the author look irredeemably puerile. On the other hand, if one were to suppose, per impossibile, that Dan Graur really does fear the bizarre scenarios he outlines in his letter, one can only pity the poor students and administration of the University of Houston who have been saddled with such a moron. A more eloquent case against the institution of academic tenure can hardly be imagined.

It is, of course, far more likely that the man intended his letter as a kind of bogey-man threat, intended to highlight his fears about letting non-scientists have anything to do with any kind of dialectic regarding "practical scientific matters" (whatever those are supposed to be--one shudders at the thought of asking such imaginative folks as Dan Graur for anything like a precise definition). On this reading he is acting as the demagogue, stirring up his fellow scientists in a manner that is ironically similar to the very thing that he is worried will happen on a larger scale if "practical scientific matters" were to be subjected to public scrutiny. Does he really think that his fellow scientists are such idiots that they will be swayed by this kind of rhetoric? If not, to whom is his letter really addressed? Surely he doesn't think that Bible-totin' Bubba reads the Correspondence section of Nature? I suspect that what we really have here is a rather embarrassing attempt at the sort of chest-thumping that is not really aimed at anybody in particular but designed instead only to draw attention to the dominant male ape, rather like the cat-calls and epithets one hears being shouted from the crowd when itinerant preachers stand on college campuses proclaiming that sinners are going to burn in hell. On this reading, his letter to Nature is like E. O. Wilson's pathetic letter, allegedly addressed to religious believers but really aimed at fellow atheists, that he published in The New Republic in August of 2006 (and that I assessed here).

The broader issue, though sadly handled in an amateurish and, indeed, anti-intellectual and deeply unhelpful way by folks like Dan Graur, is nevertheless one of serious political import. No thoughtful person really believes that science ought to take place in a political vacuum, because no genuinely intelligent person thinks that such a thing is possible. Fewer, perhaps, understand that scientists themselves are not, as a matter of fact, competent to decide such things for themselves (though their input is obviously necessary), but I suspect that justified worries about such genuine possibilities as the teaching of creationism in the public schools will always be exploited by some crackpots to subvert the scientific process itself by driving a wedge (or attempting to) between the "scientific community" and the "broader public", as though those things were two separate entities. There is no rationally compelling reason why a person with religious beliefs--even apparently wacky ones--ought to be prevented from having any say either in how public funding is distributed in the "scientific community" or in how public policy ought to deal with public issues created by the activities of the "scientific community". Indeed, if the "scientific community" were to repeat some of its past moral clarity and come to the aid of a government seeking reasons to exterminate the Jewish "race", I would hope that Jews everywhere would try to prevent such a thing, even if their only reason for doing so were their peculiar religious beliefs about being God's chosen people. The fear that such a thing may be possible in this day and age may be less warranted than it was in the 1930s, but given that it has, in fact, happened and may very well happen again, it is a far more rational fear than the ones outlined in Graur's letter, which represent things that have never happened anywhere and are not likely to happen any time. That it was the poor benighted religious ignoramuses that opposed Nazi eugenics is a rather delicious irony, though it hardly serves to lessen the contempt one must feel for mentalities such as the one on display in the Correspondence section of Nature this week.

Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

I've just returned from a trip to the American Philosophical Association's annual meeting in Baltimore, where I served as a member of a search committee. We interviewed candidates for a new faculty position in the philosophy department at Ohio University. It was exciting to get to talk to some of the best and brightest up-and-coming young philosophers, but the excitement was tempered by the fact that, in the end, there is only one job to offer and some people are going to go home still looking for work.

But that wasn't the only thought tempering the excitement. The other excitement-tempering thought is a moronic administrative decree that constrains all employment searches at Ohio University. Check it out:

For full-time presidential appointments, there must be at least one candidate from an underrepresented group in each interview pool or the search will not be approved by the Dean, Vice President or planning unit head.

The expression "full-time presidential appointment" is just administrativese for any job that the president of the university has to approve before the hire is finalized, and as such it includes all new faculty hires. So the policy defined above requires that any and every faculty search must include a minority candidate, regardless of said candidate's qualifications relative to other candidates in the pool.

To see how idiotic this policy is, just imagine a candidate pool that consists of, say, 20 applicants. Imagine that three or four of the applicants are from "underrepresented group[s]". Imagine that, of these 20 applicants, you can only bring three or four to your campus for detailed interviews. Now imagine that the top three or four candidates are all white men. Suppose that the three or four minority candidates are all at the bottom of the pool in terms of qualifications for the job. The policy requires that you bring at least one of them to campus anyway, even though you know full well that you have no intention of hiring any of them.

This is not only a remarkably stupid policy, it is a cruel and immoral one as well. When one brings a candidate to campus for an interview, one must treat them like any other candidate: taking them to dinner, talking to them about their work, listening to their lecture, inviting them to teach a class, introducing them to the whole department and to the dean, giving them a tour of the town, etc. All the while it is entirely possible that the candidate will assume that there is a reasonable possibility of obtaining the job, and some candidates may even begin to make provisional plans about the future. And yet the whole thing is a sham, one that the candidate can never be privy to, for if you told the candidate the truth, said candidate would never accept any invitation to campus. If the candidate knew that it was a complete and utter waste of time and effort (not to mention money--the candidates and the department both incur rather substantial monetary losses during this process), surely the candidate would seek employment elsewhere. Indeed, any sane candidate would avoid accepting employment in an institution with such misguided and unethical administrative procedures.

Now it is, of course, fully possible that some minority candidate will be among the top three or four candidates, in which case the minority candidate will be invited to campus without any compulsion or coercion being applied to the hiring unit. That administrators think otherwise is further evidence of the banality of the administrative mind, and its prejudice and bigotry as well, since to put in place a policy that requires people to do what they ordinarily would do as a matter of course is to assume that people will do the wrong thing unless required to do the right thing on pain of punishment. Such paternalism would ordinarily be rightly shunned in academia, but for some reason it is endemic among certain university administrations.

Pain Before Pleasure

There are two formative events having to do with color vision that I can remember from my childhood. The first is the fact that my family did not own a color TV until 1966, and so we would make an annual trek over to the house of my aunt and uncle who did own one so that I could watch The Wizard of Oz in color (at least those parts of it that are actually in color). Not that there's anything wrong with that! The other event was my reading, in the fall of 1968, a wonderful science fiction book for children called The Runaway Robot by Lester Del Rey. In this book the eponymous hero chronicles his journey of self-discovery as he runs away in search of the boy who had previously owned him. What struck me the most about the story when I was a kid, and the only part of it that I can still remember today, is the fact that this robot began the book with black-and-white vision, but at about the mid-point of the story he gets a color-vision camera installed in his head so that he can see in color. I'm not sure a book like this could be published today, for reasons that I will describe below.

Philosophically these two things have little in common. Indeed, they don't have much to do with philosophy either, really, but they put me in mind of the problem of qualia, particularly with respect to colors. When watching The Wizard of Oz I was always blown away when Dorothy got to Oz and everything was suddenly in beautiful, sickeningly over-saturated Technicolor. It was like walking out of the Shadowlands into Reality. And then, just two years after getting color TV myself, I read the story about the robot who finally got to see colors and I constantly tried to imagine what it must have been like to make that transition. (Shades of Frank Jackson [see Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986) 291-295].) Aristotle, famously, at the very beginning of his treatise on metaphysics, noted that vision is the most precious of our sensory modalities, and I have sometimes thought that color vision is a particularly delightful manifestation of that specific modality. I have no idea what it would be like to see, for example, the wavelengths of light that a bee can detect, but after my rather chromatically eventful childhood I think I can say with some confidence that I would rather see in color than in black and white. Perhaps it is really true, as some have averred, that one learns to appreciate something all the more when one comes to be familiar with the privation of the thing (more dreck from my childhood: "they've paved paradise, put up a parking lot...you don't know what you've got till it's gone", etc.). I have no particular reason to envy the bee her capacity to find flowers by detecting the ultraviolet light reflected from them; having never experienced such a thing I am unable to feel the privation. But if I were to wake up tomorrow morning seeing what Dorothy saw in Kansas in The Wizard of Oz, I would be heartbroken.

I have been put in mind of all this by two separate episodes. First, there is this marvelous post from Fr. Al Kimel at his quasi-moribund site, Pontifications. There he writes of the contrast that he feels between good and evil, and the intensity of that contrast leads him to reject the Augustinian predestination that has come to dominate Reformed theology in particular but certain elements of orthodox theology (though perhaps not Orthodox theology) as well. And he speaks directly to my heart of hearts when he writes:

There are many days, too many days, when I do not know if I believe in God, when I do not know if God exists. But I do know whom I struggle to believe. He is the God made known in Jesus Christ. He is the God who is a holy communion of absolute love and gladness. He is the God who searches for the one lost sheep and upon finding it hoists it upon his shoulder and restores it to the flock. He is the God who turns his house upside down until he finds the one silver coin he has lost. He is the God who was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our inquities; by his stripes we are healed. This is the only God worthy of our belief. This is the only God deserving of our faith and adoration.

When I read that, I nearly wept. I am so there with him. Some may worry that this will lead to the universalism von Balthasar is sometimes accused of endorsing. If God is so all-forgiving, why do Christians tremble? Fr. Kimel answers with gimlet clarity:

I do not fear the God who is Holy Trinity. I fear my own freedom to turn from this God, to hide myself in an impenetrable egotism and despair which will forever close me to the roar of his love. I fear that my self-will will ultimately triumph over my desire for the supreme and ultimate Good. I fear that I am becoming, have become, a person who declares to infinite Love, “My will, not thine, be done.” I fear also the purifying suffering that I must endure, both in this life and beyond, to free me from my bondage to self and the goods of this world. But I do not fear the God of Jesus Christ. I know that if God does truly exist, then at the moment of my death he will meet me as the Crucified, still bearing the marks of his sacrifice on his hands. Judge and Judged, Priest and Victim, absolver of sins and victor over death—to this Jesus I entrust my future; to his Father I commend my spirit.

To see how all of this is connected to how I began--to color vision, privation, and, of course, my title--I turn now to the second recent episode that got me to thinking along these lines.

I happened to remark recently to an old friend that I always put off getting a Christmas tree until 17 December. Sometimes this is just a matter of chance--sometimes I just don't get around to getting one until then. But even when I think of it earlier, I still put it off, and my friend asked why. I answered that I like to keep Advent and Christmas distinct. Her response: "Why do you like to keep Advent and Christmas distinct? Pain before pleasure?" I was struck by her question. I don't really think of Advent as a season of pain, though it is indeed a season of penitence. So my initial reaction was to reject the question as not well-formed. I thought of saying something along the lines of "come now, Advent is a season of preparation, not of pain, we make use of it to give ourselves time to ponder the great mystery of the Incarnation, and the reasons why the Incarnation was necessary." But as soon as I thought it, I realized I could not say it, because the word "necessary" reminded me that things could have been different had humankind made a different choice. Although Advent is not a time of "pain before pleasure", there is certainly a kind of mental anguish that is rightly associated with the regret we all ought to feel over the tendency, so eloquently described by Fr. Al, that humankind exhibits, to choose wrongly. This mental anguish is only just balanced by what we have gained in return: our "happy fault", the "necessary sin of Adam" has gained for us a Redeemer beyond our wildest expectations. But, as Galadriel warned the Fellowship, our "Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while all the Company is true."

We are in a rather wonderful position: we are fully aware of just what it means to be standing upon the edge of a knife. If we were not acquainted with sin at all--if humankind never chose wrongly--we would have no more sense of the value of staying true than we have of what it would be like to perceive ultraviolet light. Don't get me wrong--we might have some sense of it. Even though I do not possess any gold coins, I can certainly imagine the value of having some. I do not want to make a rather elementary mistake here, a mistake that my students often make. Some of my students insist that Good could not exist without Evil; when I ask them why, they always answer an ontological question with an epistemological answer--they always say that we would never be able to recognize the Good if there were no Evil with which to contrast it. I know that my own readers are far too sophisticated to make this mistake--it should be obvious that the Good can exist in the absence of any and all evil, since God existed before anything else did and he is perfect Goodness. Whether or not it is possible to comprehend what the Good is without first (or also) comprehending what Evil is is irrelevant to the ontological question, but it is an interesting question in its own right: if we had never experienced Evil, we may very well know what the Good is (since we would be experiencing it directly), but is it possible that we would fall short, somehow, of fully and completely understanding just how good the Good is? Is it at all possible that we have a more thorough appreciation for God's perfect Goodness just insofar as we ourselves fall short of it? Is our experience of God more like Dorothy's experience of Oz or more like Dorothy's experience of Kansas, and how would we ever be able to know the difference if we had not experienced both? If it is really true that I appreciate color vision more because I can imagine what it would be like to see only in black and white, then perhaps it is possible to appreciate God's loving kindness more if one has some idea of what it would be like to turn away from that loving kindness. My daughter, who was born in 2001, had never seen any black and white images until I showed her a DVD of The Wizard of Oz. She was startled and a little disturbed by the Kansas scenes at the beginning of the film and, interestingly, she didn't even know what to call them, how to describe them. She asked me "Why is it...it's all...why is it like that?" I'm not sure what she would make of The Runaway Robot, in which a reader must try to imagine the difference between black and white and color, but the author clearly expects his reader to be able to imagine just such a thing on the basis of some sort of experience of the two.

I have begun to suspect that we have an instance here of God's divine providence. I quoted from The Lord of the Rings above, but really the more appropriate text from that author here would be the Ainulindalë, in which Eru effects a transformation of the musical theme that results in Melkor's malicious interference having, in the end, an effect Melkor did not intend, an effect that was ultimately good. God knew, before we fell, that we would fall; but although the fall itself is not a good thing, a good thing came of it: we got to see God literally face to face in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and we got to experience God's love in more ways than we would have been able to experience it had we not fallen. If we had not fallen, we would never have experienced God's mercy, his compassion, his forgiveness, nor would we have witnessed his example of abandonment of self in the service of others. Though we are worse off, in one sense, for having fallen, we are better off, in another sense, for if we "remain true" we are blessed (makarioi hoi katharoi têi kardiai), and will see God.

So I do not say that Advent is "Pain before pleasure"; rather, I say that Advent is the pain that makes the pleasure more clear, more present. We sing, at the Easter Vigil, of the "necessary sin of Adam"; Adam's sin was not "necessary" in any deterministic, Predestinarian sense. It was necessary in a wonderful and good sense: necessary in the sense that, without it, we would not have needed the Incarnation. Just as Plato, in the Gorgias described pleasure as the process of satisfying a privation, I suggest that God's love is the more clearly seen and appreciated by the person who has turned away from it and experienced the sorrow and desolation of sin and then turned back to God in repentance. This is not to say that one ought to turn away from God in order to experience his love more intensely! Far from it! St. Paul was already warning against this idea in his letter to the Romans: it would be wrong to sin all the more that grace might abound. Rather, the intensity of spiritual feeling experienced by the penitent is the good that God can bring out of the evil that we do when we turn away from him, it is his transformation of our disharmonious themes into ever more beautiful music.

The No. 1 Lady Amazon Book Reviewer

That would be "Harriet Klausner", who has written (so Amazon.com claims) 15,358 book reviews for Amazon.com since 22 November 1999. That's an average of 5.2 book reviews per day, by the way, which makes Harriet Klausner either one of the most prolific readers on the planet or else one of the most thinly disguised marketing strategies ever designed by the pulp-fiction industry. And she's not just the No. 1 Lady Amazon Book Reviewer, she's the No. 1 Reviewer overall, her next closest competitor being "Lawrance M. Bernabo", with 6666 reviews written since 30 August 2000 (a mere 2.5 book reviews per day).

I'm shocked--shocked!--to find that some of the writers of comments to "Harriet Klausner's" reviews suspect that she is either not a real person, or not a single person, or just a bored librarian banally copying blurbs off the backs of third-rate detective novels as they come in to her library (the vast majority of her reviews are of detective novels, and her average rating is five stars). Imagine Amazon.com doing a thing like that, just to help publishers sell books. It's downright...commercial!

Full disclosure: "Harriet Klausner" did not actually review The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. Too bad: if she had, I'm sure she would have given it a well-deserved five stars.

Oh, and I am Reviewer number 45,693.

Ouch.

The Utter Collapse of American Civilization

From today's New York Times:

None of the leading presidential candidates majored in Latin. Hillary Clinton studied political science at Wellesley, as did Barack Obama at Columbia. Rudy Giuliani had a minor brush with the language during four years of theology at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn when he toyed with becoming a priest. But then he went on to major in guess what? Political science.

How things have changed since the founding fathers.

Of the 7,000 books originally in Thomas Jefferson’s library, only a couple of dozen are still at Monticello. The rest were sold off by his descendants, and eventually bought back by the Library of Congress. The best-thumbed of those remaining — on a glassed-in shelf in Jefferson’s study — is a copy of Virgil’s “Aeneid.”

Jefferson started learning Latin and Greek at age 9 at a school in Virginia run by a Scottish clergyman. When he was at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, a Greek grammar book was always by his side. Tacitus and Homer were his favorites.

Bringing Out the Big Guns

If you thought that the arguments of such intellectuals as Danniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins were the biggest threat to the rational status of religious belief, you've been reading the wrong books. Those guys are kindergarteners compared to this guy.

With brainiacs like him arrayed against us, what's there to worry about?

Lord, When Were You Needy and I Didn't Help You?

If, like me, you find yourself constantly strapped for cash and wondering how you're going to manage to get Christmas gifts for your children, you can perhaps console yourself by imagining how lucky you are that you're not wondering how you're going to manage to get to see your children at all for Christmas. The friends and admirers of Dr. Michael Liccione (in whose number I feel privileged to be able to count myself) can rejoice with him in the birth of his new granddaughter, but we must, at the same time, grieve with him that the vicissitudes of life have made it extremely unlikely that he will be able to see this new grandchild any time soon.

Unless....

Aspiciens autem Iesus dixit illis: "Apud homines hoc impossibile est, apud Deum autem omnia possibilia sunt."

If you go over to Sacramentum Vitae right now, and scroll down past the blogroll and past the referers list, past the picture of BXVI and the pictures of "relevant books", there is a widget that will allow you to "support this site today". Do it now.

Platonism and Christianity

Taylor Marshall of Canterbury Tales has an interesting post up about the "direction of causation", as it were, between Christianity and Neoplatonism. On any reading of the Church Fathers it is a relatively easy matter to point to various elements of their metaphysics and theology--especially terminological elements, but also some substantial ones--and draw parallels to similar elements in Neoplatonism. Taylor points out that Plotinus, who is often cited as the "founder" of Neoplatonism, was taught his Plato by the Christian Ammonius.

Although it is an interesting point, I think it's worth pointing out that Platonism, as such, was unavoidable in antiquity, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean, and talk of direction of influence will always be hopelessly underdetermined by the data. It is possible to find possible Platonic elements even in the writing of St. Paul, if one uses one's imagination, and of course, it is not only possible, but indeed quite likely, that a man who was educated in that area at the time that St. Paul was getting his education would be learning from men who had read some Plato, so....

The temptation by some Christians to dismiss the influence of Platonism is strange to me. I once knew a man, a very old-fashioned Catholic, who would condemn any view held by Protestants. I asked him, "What about the Trinity? Protestants believe in the Trinity, should we reject that view, too?" I was basically kidding, but the guy was thoroughly stumped. That's what happens when you wed yourself to a particular ideological view of history. The same man was not in the least bit disturbed by St. Thomas Aquinas's frequent allusions to "The Philosopher" (i.e., Aristotle). "That's different", he would say. "Aquinas was merely using Aristotle." The idea being, I guess, that there are certain kinds of cases where the idea isn't merely being "used".

To me, it doesn't matter where the idea came from, just so long as it's true (or, indeed, useful). Some of Plato's ideas were manifestly true, even from a Christian perspective (for example, the idea that the Good transcends being, or the idea that morality is not a matter of mere subjective experience). It is a mistake to maintain that truth began with Christianity, or that Christianity could never learn from Platonists. To what extent and in what specific ways Christianity learned from Platonism will, necessarily, remain somewhat mysterious, but that it did cannot rationally be denied.

Don't Say I Didn't Tell You

In a story in today's New York Times we learn what most rational folks suspected all along: you don't really need embryos to do stem-cell-like research anyway. As soon as the stem cell debate got under way in earnest a few years back, anyone who opposed it, even for principled reasons (or sometimes because of one's principled reasons), was seen as some sort of troglodytic moron living in the middle ages and benightedly ignorant of the aims and needs of science. Objections about doing unethical research on "human beings" were dismissed as quaintly unscientific and out of touch with modern reality.

Now it turns out that you can create stem-cell-like cells out of human skin cells just by adding four genes. To put it more bluntly, there is no need either to make or destroy human embryos in order to carry out this research.

Will there be any apologies from the Forces of Evil? Don't hold your breath, since they would approve of stem cell research even if it required killing everyone's grandmother to get the cells. But today's story certainly underlines a point that is often overlooked in the rush to judgment of the utilitarian crowd: in addition to the fact, which I have already noted in earlier posts on this subject, that some advances in science may not be worth the price we have to pay in order to gain them, we may add the fact that limited technology ought not to be used as an excuse to do the inexcusable. Some folks seemed to think that stem cell research was the silver bullet that was going to eradicate a whole host of nasty human ailments, and they thought this without any empirical evidence to support the idea; but more importantly, these folks were willing to toss any argument against them out the window without even considering pursuing alternative research strategies. In short, many early proponents of stem cell research were arrogant as well as short sighted and unethical.

Now we learn that any embryos that have been destroyed in this line of research were killed to no purpose whatsoever.

We live in debauched times, but at least some of us can now act all superior about it.

Ratzinger via Liccione

Dr. Mike Liccione remains the hardest working Catholic blogger in town. Today he has posted a wonderful meditation on some of BXVI's thoughts on the relationship betwenn Scripture and doctrine, with what is, to me, a particularly interesting note on Jewish readings of Scripture.

As usual, highly recommended reading.

Update: There's a rather lively debate going on in the combox to that post now, with particularly challenging and thoughtful responses from Owen the Ochlophobist, who also has a rather lengthy post of his own up on closely related matters.