Faith + Reason = Truth

Did you ever notice that, in order to fulfill their dreams of governing their fellow Americans from Washington D.C., political candidates do their best to convince the masses that actually having done exactly that is a terrible trait to have as a candidate and that they would never descend to such a level themselves? Not until they are elected, of course. And once elected and having gone through the fire of experience, they tout their incumbent status, along with the assertion that nothing can substitute for on the job experience!  Love them politicians, don't you?

Well, truth be told, I am one of those in favor of candidates who haven't been there, haven't done that. The trick is to find a viable one that really and truly hasn't.  Democrat Obama is running as such an entity, even though he is a United States Senator in Washington D.C.  However, if one pays attention to some of the outlandish things he says and promises to do, it quickly becomes apparent that he really does intend to go about the business of governing in an unorthodox manner.  Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?  It's a little of both.  When reading his assertions and ideas, the first thought that often comes to my mind is "that won't work, because...," after which I proceed to wonder why he doesn't realize that.  But in fact, he MUST realize it, and he is still attempting to change the ways of the world in spite of that realization and in spite of the likelihood of failure.

That is what is commonly referred to as "revolutionary thinking," and it is exactly what people who present themselves as "Washington outsiders" should engage in.  When more "practical" or "experienced" players attack the idea or the stance, fine; that is exactly what experienced people should and will do. And it's exactly why those people will never drive any change to the status quo.  They know that it would likely be a wasted effort to attempt something other than what has always been done.  They know that the senior members won't support it, because the party leadership won't support it, because the lobbyists and money and other influences that truly direct the government won't support it.  Now these ideas may be naive, they may be unrealistic or idealistic - they may even be dangerous.  But that is what the entire apparatus of the 3-branched United States government is in place for, to cull the harmful and implement the useful, provided that individual rights and liberties are not harmed in the process.

I cannot comment on whether or not I would support Obama, because I don't know yet.  I don't know if he'll pull out a crazy platform that I can't get behind, and I don't know if a Republican will trumpet something I care about more deeply.  I believe the War will define the President and not the other way around, so it's not much of a factor for me either way - it will end when it ends, no matter who threatens to end it immediately or prolong it indefinitely.  I do know that I've always voted for Republicans, but that I've also had fires lit by outsiders of all parties, from Bill Clinton of Arkansas to Ross Perot of EDS to George Bush II with his MBA and business ownership experience instead of a law degree and lawmaking/special interest-beholden background.  Bill and George quickly succumbed to the machinery, and perhaps Obama or anyone else would, too.  I know I'll never lose hope though, and the more Obamas or Perots to choose from, the better.

Science makes blogging possible, while philosophy does not. This post of 8 days ago may imply that I don't believe or realize that fact, but I promise I do! The problem, as presented in that post, arises when scientists present science as philosophy, but it goes the other way too, with philosophy and religion sometimes presenting themselves as science.  One of the great singular intellectual achievements of humanity occurred, coincidentally enough, at the end of what Western civilization has dubbed the Dark Ages, the period where the light of (European) mankind's creativity, science, religion, and all manner of other accomplishments was supposedly extinguished for several hundred years between the fall of the Roman Empire to the barbarians up until the Renaissance.

Science and religion, both of which could have been considered as "philosophy" as far as the mid-first millennium B.C. Greeks were concerned, were two distinct and diverging paths by the onset of the Dark Ages, with science advancing as it did and still does by building upon discovery and insight after discovery and insight after discovery and insight.  Religion and philosophy, on the other hand, do not do that. Their advancements, or more accurately, their developments, rest on individual intellects thinking new thoughts in new ways about things that cannot be proven or disproven or even be directly observed. Thus it was for Thomas of Aquino, a Dominican friar of privileged Italian birth and upbringing who chose to exercise his quiet and contemplative manner and gifts in the confines of cold, damp French and German monasteries and medieval universities in order to attempt to reconcile "the Philosopher" Aristotle, whose style and overriding hallmark was to base knowledge on what can be observed or sensed and experienced in some way by the five senses (thereby making him as much a scientist as a philosopher) to his faith in his religion and Jesus the Christ.

Any attempt to pull this off by a lesser human being would most likely have led to that person being tortured and/or killed as a heretic - how (and, more importantly, why) would Christ possibly be reconciled to Aristotle, who came 300-400 years earlier? But Thomas had an uncanny ability to maintain the composure of himself and those around him while all arguments were made and debated and ultimately decided by the participants, and in these clashes he quite simply never lost a point. He was able to reconcile, not Christ to the Philosopher, but the Philosopher to Christ, and in so doing he accomplished the seemingly impossible feat of reconciling the religious faith and scientific observations of his day.

This was 750 years ago, and since then, bewildering and sometimes even terrifying advancements have been made in all fields of science.  Not true for philosophy and religion.  The reason for that is that, no matter what occurs in science, other scientists can build upon what happens.  If it's destructive, like mixing two chemicals that result in blowing up the lab, the results are recorded and the experiment likely not repeated.  If it's beneficial, it is used to build upon and progress even further.  With philosophy and religion, however, there are not "new developments" or "discoveries" to stand on.  There are only thoughts, since that is all that religion and philosophy are.  If the thoughts lead to something testable and provable or disprovable, then the realm of science is entered, leaving philosophy and religion behind.  Therefore, anything that can be thought by today's philosophers and/or religious thinkers could also have been thought by Thomas of Aquino (Saint Thomas Aquinas) or, for that matter, Aristotle, or someone who came before him.  Buddha and his inner peace? Christ and his love thy neighbor teachings? These ideas could have been, and probably were, thought by many people since the dawn of humanity, along with all of the not-so-loving impulses that sprang to mind and led to heinous actions carried out by people capable of acting in such ways.  Again, even today, these barbaric and seemingly inhuman thoughts and actions are occurring right this very moment in countries and cities and streets around the world, just as they were thousands of years ago.  They haven't stopped, nor will they, ever.

So we leave it to the philosophers to wonder why, to the religious people to believe their beliefs and pursue their paths to the peace and salvation of their souls, and the scientists to observe and create and test inventions that make us all more comfortable during our time on earth.  If you find yourself inclined to philosophize or wax Godly, as I am inclined to do, just don't expect or even attempt to "prove" your insights or feelings to anyone else, because it cannot be done.  They are yours and yours alone, though you may seek similarities and justification for your thoughts and feelings with other people of similar heart and soul past and present.  And if you are a scientist, don't tell us you have figured out how and why the universe began or where and why and how homo sapiens came to be mankind, because it likewise cannot be done. 

Just for fun, about a week and a half ago I went looking for earthquake statistics to see if quakes were getting stronger and/or more frequent than they have historically been.  While searching for that, I found a site that listed details for every quake around the globe going back a number of years (sorry for the vagueness here), and among the details listed were the number of fatalities, if any.  After downloading and analyzing data for each year going back to 2000 (I didn't spend much time on this at all), what jumped out was that every year, thousands of people die in earthquakes - and usually 10's, sometimes 100's, of thousands.  Every year - until this year.  Through Aug. 2, the most recent date available when I pulled my numbers a week or two ago, the globe officially had 138 deaths caused by earthquakes.  I wanted to post that day about my findings, that almost 2/3 of the way through the year we have a tiny fraction of the normal amount of annual earthquake fatalities, but I didn't want to call attention from the "earthquake gods" to humanity's good fortune this year regarding getting off lightly in the fatality department.

Now that the jig is up and Peru has been hit with at least several hundred deaths from their earthquake, I can freely point out that the normal culprits for high fatalities from earthquakes every year are those that strike Iran, Afghanistan, and generally that South-Central Asian region.  To date, it looks like all of this year's fatalities have come in the Ring of Fire surrounding the Pacific (Japan, Indonesia, Sumatra, Solomon Islands, and Peru).  None so far in Central Asia.  Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope it stays that way - the last thing that region needs is a devastating earthquake to make life even more desperate for the millions that already fight through it every day of their lives.

Edge.org cuts through the crap. It also adds to it.  Influential thinkers, both of the past and the future, contribute essays on whatever is moving them at the time, and although you won't agree with the viewpoints of everyone you read there, I would say that should be even greater motivation for some of the essays to be read.

Freeman Dyson has contributed an excerpt from a book of his, and it is alarming in its directness and common sense, anti-dogmatic perspective of the scientific establishment.  I say "alarming" because he is an 82-year old product of that very establishment; the reason he remains relevant is that he refuses to be a slave to it.  If you are a regular reader of Worth Reading, you will quickly see why I delighted in reading Dyson's thoughts at Edge.  Here's his intro to the excerpt:

"My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models."

Click here for the rest - please!

Aristotle used his 5 senses and his magnificent mind to become one of the earliest scientist-philosophers, a term I use to combine science, which is, or at least ought to be, wholly based on using our 5 senses for observation of "things" and making connections between what is observed, with philosophy, which is trying to figure out what our senses cannot reveal to us through direct observation.  I assert here that science is continually and acceleratingly shading into philosophy, and that that is a bad thing.  The difference between the scientist-philosopher, of which Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas are exemplary models, and some of today's "scientists" is that while Aristotle and Thomas clearly delineated the two and used scientific or sensory observation of "things" to form their philosophies to color that which could not be observed, today's scientists use their philosophy, their postulated explanations of that which has not been observed, to create what is presented to the world as science.  And when they are eventually proven wrong by new facts that have only just now been brought to light (whether "now" was yesterday, 50 years ago, or 500 years ago), do they see the error of their ways and admit that they do not have enough observations of relevant "things" to form the philosophy that they are attempting to force upon the world as "science"?  Of course not!  They only revise their theories, which are subsequently treated as newfound knowledge and celebrated by the masses as advances in human achievement, when in fact all they really are are usually nothing more than future disproved nonsense.

A recent case to illustrate this topic is what has come to be generally accepted by most people as the "theory of evolution," which portrays homo sapiens sapiens (yes, there are two sapiens, if you thought it was a typo) as the culmination of hundreds of millions of years of genetic variation and mutation until finally, voici!  Mankind in all his artistic and never-ending creative glory!  Skipping over the first several hundreds of millions of years of life on this planet and going right to the past 200,000-1,000,000 (this seems a rather large span of time, but bear with me), we have in the fossil record a sampling of old bones that resemble humans, or chimpanzees, or apes, in that their skulls or hands or legs or what have you are somewhat reminiscent of human skulls and so forth.  "Scientists" cannot even agree on the age of these bones; at one point, they may be declared as approximately 400,000 years old, but then after some other dating "advancement" or discovery of other relative "evidence" it may be re-trumpeted as 285,000 years old, or even 800,000 years old.  The point is, it cannot be known how old the bones are, because it never was and never can be a fact that was observed and recorded by anyone at any time.  Nor can it be observed what these creatures actually looked like, what they did, or how they did it.  What HAS been observed and recorded is the fact that humans are the only creatures, ever, to record their observations.  Be it cave art or notches of hunting kills on a stone axe, people are the only creatures to have ever bothered or been able to record their observations.  Was this "evolution?"  Did it just randomly occur to some heretofore unintelligent prehistoric beast after hundreds of millions of years to record an observation of something in some way?  And would this spark of brilliance be related to the same miraculous (just don't call it "God") flash that ignited life on this planet from lifelessness in the first place, or the "big bang" that supposedly started the universe from a massive (or was it massless) yet infinitesimally tiny ball of nothingness, or everythingness?  And why do these theories make perfect rational sense to "scientists" and people the world over, while they simultaneously refuse to entertain the possibility that God exists?  Finally, why again, exactly, do we trust everything these "scientists" tell us, when almost none of it has been observed by anyone, ever?  Where are Saint Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle when you need them?!

There are a couple of pop culture atheists that are in vogue now. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are their names.  They belong to a group of people that, for the most part, annoy me:  people that are famous for railing against and attacking good things which others hold dear. The following instances are only hearsay, as I was not there personally and have only read about them on websites, but they seem to agree with each other about Mr. Dawkins (Mr. Hitchens sounds more even-keeled and reasonable from the limited reading I've done about him).  One episode had Dawkins berating an airport employee about a necklace she was wearing because it had a religious symbol on it, which he claimed was an affront to his intelligence or something to that affect, and then demanding that she remove it immediately.  I won't bother to detail the other account of a different episode, but it contained a similar sentiment combatively expressed by the Darwinian disciple.

Why do Dawkins and Hitchens attempt to convince people of faith that their faith is unfounded? Is it any of their business?  And why do they display such gleeful enthusiasm (at least Dawkins does) when they come across statistics that show a potentially higher number of atheists among the general population than initially assumed by the people who measure such things, and talk about winning the battle?  I understand why religious people passionately attempt to convert non-believers to their way of thinking:  they believe they are saving souls from eternal damnation.  But what motivation would an atheist have of convincing people that there is no God?  If it's simply about educating the stupid masses, then why not engage in teaching something useful, say, literacy or mathematics?  If it's not about that, then what is it?  And why the verbally abusive reaction to a cross necklace, or Star of David, or something similar?  I'm struck by the zealous atheist, as I am used to see them hold their beliefs privately. It's just weird to me, and slightly unsettling for some reason.

Wednesday, July 18 - New York steampipe explosion
Wednesday, July 25 - Dallas gas explosion (shutting down I-35 for the rest of the day)
Wednesday, August 1 - Minneapolis bridge collapse into the Mississippi (shutting down I-35)

Anyone for staying off of the Freeway of Random Catastrophe, i.e. I-35, in major U.S. cities, which runs from Mexico up through Texas, Oklahoma, and all the way to Canada?  It's the only interstate that connects Mexico with Canada, by the way.  So who's out to get us, the Mexicans or the Canadians?  Or are they BOTH conspiring against us?!  Save yourselves and stay home next Wednesday, August 8, America.  Don't say you weren't warned...

You read it here 1st, my friends.  This morning, CNet picked up a story from physorg.com about the Russian submarine claiming North Pole energy resources that I posted about yesterday.  Physorg.com's story was published 4 hours ago, which was over 12 hours after I posted on it directly from Pravda.  Granted, PhysOrg has juicy maps and graphics as well as more insightful commentary than I did, but hey, there's nothing wrong with trolling foreign newspaper sites yourself just to be the first to know!

I've been listening to that old Sting song "Russians" on the iPod lately, and it's been reminding me of how far we've come over the past 20-25 years.  Then, we had Ronald Reagan calling the Soviets an "evil empire" while the major broadcast tv event of my junior high days was "The Day After," a depiction of life during and after a nuclear strike.  And as Sting so eloquently reminded us, Mr. Kruschev said they would bury us, followed years later by Mr. Reagan saying he would protect us.  Comparisons of the Soviet enemy to our modern nemesis al Qaeda may seem obvious or even appropriate, but they aren't at all, as far as I can read the situations.  Back then, the Soviets were driven by paranoia and fear of Westerners, as they have been since Napoleon tried to conquer them 200 years ago.  They were never a colonial power, they were never interested in projecting their power or influence; they have simply been interested in security, and in the Cold War, security entailed the establishment of a "barrier" of satellite countries to insulate them from ground assault.  Today, they are still interested in security above all else. But when pushed hard enough, they respond with belligerent tones and threatening postures, as Putin has been doing lately.  Al Qaeda, on the other hand, wants to project, to bring the fight to us, to influence non-Islamic fundamentalists to mend their ways or perish.

As a teenager, I really thought the world would end in nuclear holocaust, and that it would happen sooner rather than later.  How close to the truth that really was and how much of it was propaganda, we'll never know, because we didn't have the complete freedom and accessibility to foreign media and world events that now exists thanks to the internet, wireless communications, and digital media.  I couldn't make myself a sandwich, punch a few keys on a keyboard, and look at the front page of Pravda (or Tass - remember always hearing about "the Soviet news agency Tass?").  Still, I wouldn't say we're out of the woods just yet.

Hand it to the Russians:  only they could piece together 2 of their obvious strengths, submarines and laying claim to things that aren't theirs, to devise a way to secure rights to vast oil and gas fields under the Arctic Pole. In a breaking news item headlining the online edition of Pravda (this internet is awesome), the announcement of record diving depths and extending their dives deep into the Arctic Circle is combined with a short yet fascinating historical recap of geopolitical negotiating that cost them their claim to territory north of Siberia.  What they are attempting to do with the new subs is to prove that the continental shelf of Russia that lies deep under the Arctic waters does indeed extend all the way under the North Pole, which would (according to Russia's interpretation of international territory laws) extend their rights to the energy resources contained there.  Funny - I never would have thought of that, would you?