Raindrops on Roses...

Three bits of good news today.

Today, I moved into my new apartment. Or rather, I started to move into my new apartment. I’ve taken four carloads of stuff, and I’m still only about half done, and what’s worse is that I haven’t even had my friend Matt come by with his truck to help me take the furniture. How in the world could I have accumulated all of this stuff in so little time?

Of course, almost two complete carloads were just my library. Nothing in the world would make me want to trade out my library for convenience. I’m quite proud of my little set of bookshelves. Of course, they shouldn’t really be called a little set anymore. My how they grow up so quickly. I now have almost one thousand volumes.

The apartment is fantastic. There are a few small defects in the apartment, but none too drastic. The living room is much bigger than I had dared hope, and the kitchen will do just fine. I even have a separate dining area. I’m converting one of the bedrooms into a den where I can house my library and computer, and the other bedroom will become my Master bedroom.

Aside from moving boxes all day (and killing my knees and ankles which are screaming at me right now), I went shopping. I know I’m ruining my image with this revelation, but I love certain kinds of shopping. My mother decided that she should buy me some flat-warming gifts, and so took me shopping for accessories. Is it wrong that looking for the perfect set of pillow shams or a bed skirt to match the comforter makes me happy? If not, what about spending a half hour browsing through decorative pillows? In the end, I won out. The decorative pillows for the bedroom are in the same color as my accent color (found on the comforter), but in a different pattern. Interior decorating is so much fun.

Finally, my last bit of news concerns the New Year. Five years I spent at college (I wasn’t slow, I got two degrees), but every Winter break I got to come back to my parents’ house in Topeka. Every single year, I sat at home with the dogs while my parents went out and did fun things. This year is no different. I’m getting a new apartment. I’m finally growing up, despite all of my hardest efforts to the contrary, but I’m still at home with the dogs.

Funny how some things change while others remain the same.

The ball will drop in a few hours. As usual, since I am alone, I can let loose with the traditional "Auld Lang Syne" (the original version) in my tenor.

In case you don’t recall the words, here they are:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
Tho’ they return with scars?
These are the noble hero’s lot
Obtain’d in glorious wars.

Welcome my Varo to my breast,
Thy arms about me twine.
And make me once again as blest
As I was Auld Lang Syne.

O’er hill and Dale with your gay friends
You may pursue the chase.
And after a blithe bottle,
End all cares in my embrace.

And on a vacant rainy day,
You shall be wholly mine.
We’ll make the hours run smooth away
And laugh at Auld Lang Syne.

Should monarchy be quite forgot,
And no more of it heard?
Antiquity be razed about
And slav'ry put instead?

Is Scotland’s blood now grown so cold?
The valor of her mind?
That we may ne’er again reflect
On days of Auld Lang Syne.

Well, all, kiss someone special at midnight tonight. I’ll raise a glass to myself and then pack some boxes.

Don't bother reading this unless you love theology

While my Aunt (the one with all the cats) was over for Christmas, she said something to me that was deeply offensive and I’d like to relate some thoughts about it.

She bought me a Christmas ornament this year. I don’t know what it is about my Aunts, but each of them buys me a Christmas ornament every year. I don’t keep them, of course. They just go into the general ornaments boxes with the rest of the family’s decorations, but for some reason, they keep purchasing them.

When I made some side comment about my indecisiveness about decorating my own home (at some future date) for Christmas, my Aunt off-handedly responded with "Oh, I know. You’re just going through a phase where you don’t believe in God. When you come back, you’ll have all these ornaments for your home."

I found this deeply offensive. I am, both by nature and education, a philosopher. I am someone who thinks about difficult questions and plays with ideas instead of toys. You will be hard pressed to find a philosopher who holds ideas lightly, believes in unsupportable conclusions, or is unwilling to change his mind in the face of new arguments. It flies in the face of how we deal with the world. Most philosophers will even, as I do, accept conclusions that fly in the face of our cherished intuitions if the argument is persuasive enough.

As such, I do not come to my conclusions lightly. Her characterization of my beliefs as a simple ‘youthful indiscretion’ which I will overcome in time is quite hurtful. It is no less shocking to the conscience as if she had turned to a gay person and told them that they should just be gay when they are young and ‘get it out of their system.’ My belief that the existence question concerning deities is ultimately unanswerable is based in statements about the nature of knowledge, how humans come to know things, and how the world operates. All of these statements have been hard-fought, hard-won, and not the product of youthful whim or fancy. I’ve never gone through a phase where I had a desire to shock people or be unconventional just to be different.

Some of my arguments concerning the existence question are as follows. As a philosopher, I’ll try to present them logically so that they are rebuttable if one cares to argue them.

First, we must deal with the possibility that God does not exist. For the purposes of this particular argument, I will consider the Christian description of God to be correct. God is usually described as transcendent, which means that God is a supernatural entity, not bound by the rules of the universe. God is without time, without space, and wholly unconstrained by the natural laws which normally constrain immanent beings. ‘Existence’ is a predicate which I can apply to various objects in the world. The content of the predicate is what concerns me here, though. If I say that "snow exists," I have said that the object ‘snow’ exists. What do I mean by ‘exists’ though? What else could I mean but that ‘snow’ has some referent in the universe (or in layman’s terms, that the term ‘snow’ points to an object in the universe which is identifiable in terms of space and time)? To say that unicorns do not exist is to say that there are no objects in the universe such that ‘unicorn’ matches one of them.

But if this is what is meant by ‘exists,’ then what does it mean to say that God exists? It would mean that God must have a physical location, somewhere, and be located both in space and time. Christianity holds God to be transcendent, hence, God cannot exist within the normal meaning of the term.

While this argument makes a good amount of semantic sense, many will be unconvinced by semantics. They ought to be convinced by this, however, but most will not be.

My second argument is one for which I have never found any sufficient answer. I have never seen any version of this argument in a text, but it seems so obvious to me that I am forced to explain the argument even to those who trade in arguments over the existence of God.

This argument is based in epistemology. First, I tried to understand how it is that people learn of various things in the universe. This first step seemed easy. An infant does not come into the world possessing knowledge of dogs. An adult only knows about dogs because he or she has encountered dogs in the world previously in his or her life. To know of a dog, the person must have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched a dog at some point in their life. Let us imagine that there is an alien civilization on some distant planet. These aliens have in their world a substance called ‘blastiffir.’ Although we may now have the word, the meaning content of the term is empty, since we have never experienced this substance. We, as humans, do not know if it is a food, a plant, or even a rock. We have no idea what it is made of, what it is used for, or anything else about ‘blastiffir’ at all.

Experience of something gives us knowledge of this thing. This appears to hold true for all objects, like ‘snow,’ ‘dog,’ ‘cat,’ ‘man,’ or ‘Topeka, Kansas.’ Even abstracts can be created in this way.

What if, instead of referring to a particular dog, I refer to dog-ness? Such a concept is a composite of all the dogs which I have experienced in my lifetime. Let us imagine for a moment that a person lived in such a way that they never experienced dogs of any color other than black. The person had never seen a non-black dog, nor seen photographs of non-black dogs, nor heard tell of any dogs which were not black. Would there be any doubt that the person’s concept of dog-ness would include the predicate ‘black?’

Emotions can be found in this way as well. We know of love, hate, contentment, sorrow, jealousy, and pride because we have experienced them.

But there is one particular term for which I have no explanation. The term is ‘infinity.’ Infinity is not something for which man may have an experience. We cannot sense infinity in any manner. We do not emote infinity. We cannot cobble together an abstract of ‘infinity’ based on previous experiences with particular instances of infinity.

No matter what we experience, it can never be infinity. No person has ever seen an infinity of people. There has always been a finite amount. No person has ever found an infinite quantity of grains of sand on a beach. In theory, if we could cut the beach off from the introduction or loss of sand grains, they would ultimately be countable. Even when we gaze into the blackness of space, we cannot see infinity. The photons we see began their journey to our eyes from a discrete location within space-time, and traveled in their journey for a fixed amount of time over a discrete distance.

So ‘infinity’ much like ‘blastiffir’ is a word for which there is a vacuous meaning content. We may have a word, but we have no actual concepts which can be plugged into the word to provide us with meaning. Because of this, when an object (say ‘space’) is said to be infinite, we have predicated infinity to space. But without having any meaning for ‘infinity’ we have predicated nothing of space.

God is often described as having qualities which are infinite. God is omnipresent (having infinite presence), omnipotent (having infinite power), omniscient (having infinite sight and knowledge), and omnibenevolent (having infinite love). Yet, we have just seen that predicating infinity of something is an empty predication. Thus, none of the predications just listed have a cognitive meaning. None of them can be thought in a coherent way. If we think that something is infinite, and picture the infinite thing in our mind, then what we have thought cannot be the infinite thing, for we constructed the picture in our mind using non-vacuous concepts.

As it turns out, I have yet to come across a predication of God which does not incorporate infinity.

All objects must be predicated. Snow is cold. Dogs have ears and noses. Jon Stewart is hilarious. For an object to be thinkable, we must have non-vacuous predicates which we can ascribe to the object. But for God, there are no non-vacuous predicates. Absent non-vacuous predicates, God is actually unthinkable.

One of the Church fathers back in the early days of the Christian Church (it might have been Tertullian in the first few centuries CE, but I’m too lazy to look it up) actually had a similar thought. He said that if we can think of God, what we have thought is not God.

While Tertullian (I’ll just say it’s him for now and try to find out later) took this as evidence that God must be greater than the human mind’s possibility to know, to me it simply says that until we can come up with predicates which do not place God in the realm of the infinite, we must refrain from answering the question of God’s existence.

My blatant commercialism tarnishes religion, right?

I enjoy Christmas... It is the day when devout Christians all over America and most parts of the world celebrate the birth of their savior in the person of Jesus Christ. I’m never quite sure exactly how I should feel about Christmas, and I vacillate between embracing certain parts of it and rejecting it in its entirety.

I am a materialist. By that, I do not mean that I put high values on material objects, but simply that my epistemology demands that I have evidence for the things that I believe. When a Christian tells me of their God, the stories sound nice, the morals frequently good (though occasionally shockingly awful), and the mindset of love and peace a heart-warming concept. But at the same time, I have no idea of what they speak. I’ve never seen a god. I’ve never heard one, or reached out my hands and touched one. I have yet to smell or taste a deity.

I’ve prayed. I’ve been to dozens of churches of many different sects and varieties. I’ve read the Bible cover to cover a half dozen times, as well as the Qu’ran, the Book of Mormon, the Bhagavad Gita, and a host of other religious texts. I have done all of this and I have never felt anything. I’ve never been filled with a sense of love and justice. I’ve never been filled with a sense of belonging and peace. To my knowledge I have not been touched by a divine spirit (although I’m not sure I would know what such an experience would even feel like).

Because I am (by default, I suppose) not a religious person, celebrating Christmas seems somehow wrong on a very important level. To other people, the purpose of the holiday is to celebrate a profoundly important ritual in the church calendar, namely, the commemoration of the birth of the incarnation (probably the wrong word, but I’ve tried in vain to come up with a better one) of godhood on Earth. The very word ‘holiday’ etymologically stems from ‘holy day.’

The parts of celebrating Christmas which I enjoy and wish to embrace involve sharing my time with my family and friends (although I think I have yet to celebrate a Christmas with friends instead of or along with family). I enjoy purchasing presents for people in my life who mean a great deal to me, and search for gifts which I believe make a distinctive statement about my relationship with that person. I relish the time when I get to see the people I cherish be gladdened by thoughtful gifts they receive and delight in amassing my own little pile of holiday gifts on the living room floor.

But all of these things are a commercialization of Christmas, aren’t they? Christmas is Christ’s Mass (origin: Roman Catholicism), and should have a religious overtone rather than one of personal satisfaction at material gain. While celebrating the things that I value about Christmas seems good, I must confront the idea that they detract from the real purpose of the holiday for the people who invented the holiday in the first place.

I can value the people in my life on any day of the year. Why should I damage a very ritualistically important event in the church calendar to do so? I don’t know the answer to that question. As usual, my mind is asking questions and answering them in ways which refuse to synch up with my intuitions and socialization.

He bought me what?

Well, I’m back from my brief hiatus. Over the Christmas break, my brother who lives in the Pacific Northwest came down to Kansas for a visit. Since I only get to see my brother about once a year or so, I stopped most of my usual activities so that we could spend the entire holiday season doing things together.

Now that I’m back, I’ve some thoughts from over the holidays to relate. Sorry for the number of posts in a single day, loyal readers (I’m up to 2 confirmed readers now, as measured by comments). For all you loyal non-readers out there, the other 6.5 billion of you, let me extend my greetings and wish you a happy year to come.

I’ve begun to notice a few things about the way that gifts are given. When I was much younger, I simply bought strange items off the shelf for my few relatives or, if they had a Christmas list, bought them an item off of it. As I have gotten older, gift buying has become a much more intricate process. Most people can pull an adequate gift off a store shelf without much trouble, and even more can buy an item off of someone’s wish list, but to come up with a truly proper gift takes a lot of work.

I usually pride myself on my ability to get gifts which have at least some basis in my view of the relationship between the person and myself. For instance, when I was in college, a girl I was seeing loved the smell of lilacs. Of course, there weren’t any lilacs blooming when we did our holiday gift exchange right before finals. The lilacs wouldn’t be blooming for another four months or so. So for Christmas, I went out to Hobby Lobby and bought her some silk lilac branches (looked remarkably like the real thing), and a lilac scented spray. I sprayed the silk flowers, tied them up with a blue ribbon (her favorite colour), and told her that I hoped that these flowers would keep a smile on her face until the real ones could bloom up on campus.

My brother is much the same way. My brother’s soon-to-be wife is in the armed forces. Because of this, my brother doesn’t get to see her as often as he would like (big understatement). On his first date with her, they had dinner, saw a movie, and ate popcorn. For Christmas, since she would soon be leaving to go off to another state for a while, he got her a gift card to the restaurant they ate at, a video copy of the movie, and some microwave popcorn, so that she could relive the date in her mind while on base.

Another friend of mine in college had a rocking chair in which she loved to sit. She also had a gigantic teddy bear (won at a carnival or something) which was about 5 feet high. She shared her apartment with a black cat named ‘King.’ For a Christmas/birthday present, I managed to find her a blanket showing a large teddy bear sitting in a rocking chair and snuggling a cat on its lap. The words "Friends are Forever" was emblazoned across a banner over their heads. She liked the present so much that she cried and hugged me.

As a general rule, my brother and I tend to get thoughtful gifts for people that mean a lot to us. But what I’ve noticed is that you can tell a lot about how well someone knows you, or how much they care to get to know you, by the gifts they give you. If the person knows you well, the gift will be a thoughtful gift. If they do not know you well, or have not taken the time to know you, the gift will be something a little less thoughtful.

With that in mind, I’d like to run through some of my gifts. My brother got me a web-cam, which was one of the most thoughtful gifts I got. Now, even though we may be separated by a thousand miles or something (I’m too lazy to get an atlas and find out), we can not only talk on the phone every once in a while, but see each other as well. That was a really nice gift. My mother bought the presents which were from ‘both of my parents,’ and they ended up being very good. I got a new mattress and box springs for my bed, to be delivered to my new apartment. My mother’s personal gifts were generally things she knew I wanted or things off of my list. My Aunts and Uncle also got gifts which I would use or which were things off of my list.

My father, though, bought me tools.

Tools. I’m not a handy person. I don’t build things. I don’t paint things well. I don’t know how to fix a leaky pipe, change the oil in my car, or install a new electric garage door opener. What’s more important, I have absolutely no desire to do any of those things. That’s what I call a plumber for, go to Lube Stop for, or hire the good servicepeople at Sears for. I’m not belittling blue collar workers for the jobs that they hold. The world needs people to build things. But a smart person realizes that people tend to gravitate toward their talents. People who are really good at being poets tend to become poets. People who really love biology tend to become biologists. Those few people who get really excited about accounting become accountants. Me, I have absolutely no talent or enthusiasm for doing manual labour. It’s just not my thing. I’m a thinker, not a doer.

Even as a young child, this sort of thing wouldn’t have been my area. A lot of small boys love to take apart machines to see how they work. A friend of mine as a child loved to take apart appliances and did so to many of the machines in his house until his parents ordered him to stop and bought him a robotics set. Some men love to take apart their computers, or have a fascination with airplanes, trains, trucks, or ships. Others learn about guns and tanks. I never did any of these things. I will mow the entire lawn with my lawn mower without ever once wondering how it works. I will drive to my law classes without ever thinking about what goes on underneath the hood of my vehicle. Instead, I am likely to be thinking about distributive justice or some other equally arcane and esoteric topic.

The upsetting part was not that he bought me power tools, but that he thought that I would actually have some use for these items or desire to own them. As nice as it is to have a cordless drill with an extra battery pack, I can come up with absolutely no instances where I anticipate using a drill of any kind. I plan on buying furniture, not building it. I would hire workpeople to come to my house if I wanted them to put up a new wall or tear one down. I can’t picture myself ever doing any woodworking in a shop or something either.

As it is, I’ve put the tools in storage against the day when I might take some interest in manual labour, but I don’t hold out much hope.