Sliding Down the Slippery Slope

In the 90’s, nobody was arguing for smoking bans across college campuses. Nobody was publicly, anyway. The net gains and justifications for banning smoking from family restaurants was pretty strong. Kids who don’t have any choice about where to eat dinner would be going to these places, and inhaling second hand smoke. People who don’t smoke had severely limited options without being in closed rooms filled with smoke. Some pretty significant stuff. And could be viewed as completely different from bars (no kids), smoking lounges (a small subset of establishments), and public parks (outdoors). So there’s no continuum. There’s no slippery slope. These are fallacious.

And yet, here we are.

-- Will Truman, Hit Coffee

Ain'y no slippery slope here

The Slippery Slope Argument is often called the Slippery Slope Fallacy, usually by those favorably disposed toward the bottom of the slope and anxious to get there as quickly as possible with a minimum of tumbling and bruising along the way. But it is really neither a fallacy nor an argument.

On the One Hand

History is replete with examples of "give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile." The pre-war course of Hitler's micro-aggressions provides a nicely Godwinesque illustration of a slippery slope. Give 'em a Saarland, and they'll take a Bohemia. Recall also that Griswold v. Conn. legitimized the sale of contraceptives to married couples only, precisely on the grounds of the privacy of the marriage bond, and the thought that this might lead to unmarried couples using contraceptives was dismissed as slippery slopitude. Ho-ho, that will never happen! Likewise the forecast was poo-poohed that such availability would eventually weaken the whole concept of marriage and turn women into sex objects. And yet, here we are. So too the late Daniel Pat Moynihan's "defining deviancy down."¹

Hence, as Will Truman contends in "It’s 1987, And That’s a Slippery Slope Fallacy," a slippery slope is not ipso facto fallacious.

Notes:
1. Defining deviancy down. "[O]ver the past generation, ...the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can "afford to recognize" and that, accordingly, we have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the "normal" level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard"

-- "Defining Deviancy Down," The American Scholar, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 17-30

On the telos of eating

Over on another forum, jmhenry has deftly explained the nature of a central Post Modern concern.

A dialogue...

A: Last night, I got together with some friends, had good conversations, laughed together, enjoyed one another's company, and then we ate sawdust. It was a pleasant evening. We had a great meal.

B: Well, no, you didn't. You ate sawdust. The nutritive end of the activity you were engaged in was completely missing. Therefore, properly speaking, you did not have a meal.

A: Nonsense. A meal is about more than just eating food. It's about good conversation, laughing together, enjoying each other's company. We had all of that. So why would you say we didn't have a meal?

B: All of the things you mention are indeed good, and they certainly enrich and fulfill what a good meal should be. But the nutritive end of eating is what unifies and makes them intelligible under the description of having a meal. You can't sever the nutritive end from the activity without fundamentally changing the nature of that activity.

A: So only nutrition counts as a meal, nothing more, nothing less?

B: No. I suppose science might someday invent a pill which you could take that would conceivably give you all the daily nutrients you require. But no one would seriously suggest that taking the pill constituted having a meal; or, to put it another way, engaging in that distinctive kind of activity which we call "having a meal." A true meal would necessarily include all the other essential goods you mentioned -- good conversation, enjoying one another's company, etc.

A: Okay, but what if we didn't eat just sawdust? What if, instead, we had barbecue ribs, mashed potatoes, a casserole, the whole nine yards? But then, later, we all got indigestion! Maybe we even got so sick that we had to, ahem, spend some time in the bathroom regurgitating our "meal" into the toilet. Then we wouldn't have had a meal, right? We ate real food, but the nutritive end was never served, since we just threw up the food.

B: Even if the nutritive end was never completed, you still had a meal, since "having a meal" as a distinctive kind of activity is always ordered towards the nutritive end, whether that end is fulfilled or not. It's still a meal, in that it still belongs to the species "meal," even if only deficient specimen of the species. However, activities that are not ordered towards the nutritive end at all never even rise to the level of being a deficient specimen of a meal. They are no specimen of a meal period.

A: I still think you're too obsessed with nutrition. Focusing on that seems to impoverish what a true meal is. We need to articulate a rich picture of the nature of a meal, instead of just pointing to eating food.

B: I agree. But, again, the nutritive end of eating is what unifies and makes intelligible all the other goods that define having a meal as a distinctive form of activity. So we must at least begin there... 

+++++

Faithful Reader may imagine another situation to which a parallel analysis might be applied. Perhaps regarding the other interactive power of the vegetative nature.

Odds and Ends

In the End, They Always Eat Their Young

This is just as funny as Richard Carrier outing himself as a polyamorous-American. (Hinting why atheist conventions are no-fly zones for women.) An organization calling itself Atheist Ireland dissociates themselves from one PZ Meyers because the latter is too intemperate. Meyers for his part attacks Dawkins, Hitchens, and others. There is blood in the water, amigos. Recall Kissinger's remark when Saddam Hussein and the ayatollahs went after each other. But to those of us who remember the 60s the faction-forming, fissioning, and infighting is all very familiar. "Atheism +" for those out of the loop who did not receive the memo, is "atheism plus feminism, environmentalism, [secular] social justice, etc." A fine illustration of the totalizing tendencies in that region of the spectrum. Diversity will not be tolerated. Orthodoxy will be enforced, even in so heterodox a place as "free" thinking.

300 Years of Philosophical Squid Ink

Philosopher John Searle (he of Chinese Room fame) slaps early modern philosophy across the chops with a dead fish. He's not quite there yet, but he does see the problem. Way too many people will post comments like "Hume proved that causation is not demonstrable" or "Kant proved that we only experience our sensations, not the outside world" -- or even that they "refuted" the Cosmnological arguments -- without any inquiry as to how they might have done these things. Fortunately, natural scientists gave only lip service to Hume and continued to be closet Aristotelians in most things.

Useful Road Signs

Caution: Science Ahead
h/t Dr Boli

The Nanotech Chronicles

In The Washer at the Ford and then again in one of the Firestar books, TOF featured in passing nanomachines that would disassemble harmful molecules or otherwise render them harmless. Now science is catching up with fiction. "Two years ago, [Professor Thalappil Pradeep and] his team developed ... a combination filter that kills microbes with silver and breaks down chemical toxins with other nanoparticles. It’s portable, works at room temperature, and doesn’t require electricity." This is a tremendous accomplishment in providing potable water in ill-watered regions. It is also why drinking vessels in ancient times were so often made of or lined with silver [or gold]. It was not so much a flaunting of wealth as a health measure!

Wasn't One Enough?

In an article breathlessly titled "The Man Who May One Up Darwin" we are told of Prof. Jeremy England who is explaining how life may emerge from non-life, despite-or-because he is a devout Orthodox Jew who prays three times a day.

"Under the right conditions, a random group of atoms will self-organize, unbidden, to more effectively use energy. Over time and with just the right amount of, say, sunlight, a cluster of atoms could come remarkably close to what we call life. In fact, here’s a thought: Some things we consider inanimate actually may already be 'alive.'" 

It's all models and equations right now, but who knows. The problem with any of these inevitable-outcome-of-natural-processes ideas is that by implication life ought to be starting up all the time, here, there, and in milady's chambers. Well, "under the right conditions," whatever they are. Yet it seems to have originated only once in the course of Earth's history. Howcum? Or maybe, as suggested by the dazzling novella "Where the Winds Are All Asleep," it has happened more than once!

VE Day

David Warren has a tribute to the Canadian troops who liberated Holland. Mark Shea salutes his father for winning the war single-handedly.

Super-Heroes Who Did Not Make the Cut

Dr. Boli provides a list, of which my two  favorites are:

• The Plant. Has awesome vegetative power that can crack sidewalks and split rocks. Moves very, very slowly, so evildoers never notice him until it’s too late.
• The Accountant. His preternatural ability to detect financial irregularities has stopped many a supervillain’s evil plan.

Clearing the Tabs

Deja Vu All Over Again

Check out the four video clips here. Plus ça change and all that. Clinton is especially interesting, though no one later accused him of lying.

How to Spot Bad Science

Homelessness and Freedom of the Will

One of the reasons why the freedom of the will is a manifest observation is that although the will is determined to the good, it is not always possible to know what the good it, and therefore not always possible to know what means are best to achieve it.

Consider the recent events in NYC in which a flamboyant Chinese philanthropist proposed to give a free luncheon to a passel of homeless people and give each one $300.

He [Chen] had announced the event in a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on June 16. “Leading Chinese philanthropist teams up with famous American charities to host charity luncheon for 1,000 poor and destitute Americans,” the ad said. “Each will receive 300 dollars.”
***
On Sunday he met with officials from the New York City Rescue Mission and asked them to supply the homeless people as guests. They said they would participate in the event as long as he did not hand out any cash, said Craig Mayes, the group’s executive director. Mr. Mayes said he was concerned that some of the clients might use the cash to buy alcohol and drugs. In return, Mr. Chen agreed to donate $90,000 to the organization, and the two parties signed a contract.
***
Mr. Chen addressed the audience and then uncorked the news the crowd had been waiting for: “I will give $300 for every participant today.”

The homeless men and women shot to their feet, whooping and applauding.

“No he won’t,” Michelle Tolson, the mission’s director of public relations, said. “The police will shut him down.”

Officials from the Rescue Mission quickly brokered a deal with Mr. Chen’s assistants, allowing him to hand $300 to several chosen homeless clients in a symbolic gesture. The clients, however, would have to return the money.              -- New York Times

So, it's not easy to give money to poor people, at least in NYC, although it is easy to give money to organizations that provide services to the poor.  TOF is unclear on the benefits to be gotten by giving "several chosen" homeless $300 if they have to immediately return it. They will remain agreeably dependent on the Mission for their well-being.

P.J. O'Rourke once pointed out that if you took all government spending on poverty programs and divided that by the total number of poor people, it would be enough to give everyone a handsome salary. Mathematically, there are no poor people. The problem is that most of that money goes to mid-level bureaucrats and to subcontractor NGOs.  Bad? 

But now the flip-side, as it were. Would it indeed be a good thing to hand them the $300?  On the face of it, obviously so. But the Mission people, who work every day with the homeless and perhaps know something of the reasons for their homelessness, may well be right. Most of the homeless are in that state because of mental illness and/or drug/alcohol addiction. That would be $300 of booze and crack.  The homeless individuals would be no better off -- indeed, in many cases, worse off -- whereas the Mission would spend the money on food, clothing, and such. So which course of action is for the good?

There's a Way

The series of posts on the hazards of model-building has proven to be goat barbecue. The more TOF chews it, the more it swells in size. The next episode, covering various uncertainties regarding the choice of Xs and the model structure will be along Real Soon Now. But today in a paroxysm of sheer will-power we will discuss....

Will Power

TOFs Faithful Reader, who already experiences free will, will consent to follow along. Those who deny free will cannot help but follow along, as they are driven by external forces as the wind doth blow the fallen leaves of a darkling wood.

Aside: a puckish notion occurs to TOF. What if the will-denialists are right and they really do lack the intellective appetite? That is, while we-uns are metaphysical humans, they-uns are philosophical zombies? Much would be thereby explained; especially behaviors like the frequent repetition of identically-worded cant phrases, as we would expect to hear from creatures that possess imagination but not intellect. But this supposition requires much reflection, as it is contrary to dogma. Also, it is really mean.

Today's meditation is motivated by a comment by a frequenter of this site who goes by the monofrydian name of OneBrow, who has written:

ISMism

Back in the Olde Days, when TOF was a practicing Quality Engineer, there was a popular three-step process for implementing the techniques known as "statistical process control" -- or better yet: SPC.  (The benefit of TLAs is that you don't have to think about what the words mean.)  The three steps were:

1. The massive training of everyone in sight
2. The great control chart race
3. Beating up the vendors

SPC, Science™, and other panaceae

Of special interest are the first two steps.  Statistical process control -- which meant only that one should take account of the variable nature of manufacturing processes and not make adjustments unless there are reasonably certain evidences that the process has actually shifted -- was seen by some as a panacea.  Convinced of the great value of this technique, they would go hog-wild and start hanging charts everywhere.  Management would mandate that everyone would have charts; departments vied to see how many charts they had hung.  Yee-haw! 

It was belief in magic.  It was "control chart-ism."  If only we hang these Shewhart charts, magic will happen.  Magic did happen.  Whoever hung the charts eventually disappeared.

The Allegory of the VCD Machine

Once upon a time, TOF had the occasion to visit a computer assembly plant.  He was proudly shown the Great Wall of Charts.  See how many charts we have!  It is only a matter of time before our problems go away.  Huzzah!

TOF examined one of the charts.  It was replete with signals of assignable causes: that is, causes not normally part of the cause-system.  What was the assignable cause of this pattern?  Blank looks.  Did you investigate to discover the causes?  Investigate?

These were not foolish people.  They were quite bright.  But they had forgotten that the operative word in "control chart" was "control," not "chart."  They had confused the instrument with the objective.

A visit was paid to the process, which was currently rejecting many circuit boards.  It was a VCD machine (variable-center distancing).  The jaws plucked a component off a paper strip, inserted the leads through the holes in the circuit board, and crimped them on the other side.  Then the circuit board re-centered two other holes under the jaws, ready for the next component off the tape.  Behold its majestic glory:

(Geez, you really can find everything on the intertubes.)

TOF noticed a peculiar thing.  As each board was stuffed, the operator would remove the board, place a yellow sticky arrow on it, then inspect the board.  Sometimes he saw a smashed component (or whatever) and he placed a second sticky-arrow pointing to this.  The number of defects was counted and plotted on a u-chart as defects per 100,000 insertions. 

A question formed in the brain of TOF.  Neurons crackled.  Why did the operator place the first arrow before he inspected the board?

I don't know, the Host of TOF replied.

Shall we ask the operator?  The Host was reluctant that he, an Engineer, should ask a lowly Machine Operator, but his curiosity eventually triumphed.  The Operator pointed to the first marked component.  That's the wrong component, he said.  Design Engineering revised the board layout and changed the component to a different rating.  But no one reprogrammed the Sequencer that tacks the components in order on the paper tape, so we're still inserting the old component here.

Every time they ran that board, 100% of them had to be reworked.  Reprogramming the Sequencer was boring, and so after the excitement of board re-design and Engineering Change Orders and all the rest of the foo-foo, it fell between the cracks.  The Solution?  Reprogram the freaking Sequencer so it plucks the right component out of the bins.  Duh?  Additional solution: prepare a checklist for board re-design to flag all equipments and documentation that are to be revised or adjusted or reprogrammed as a result of the change. 

Despite all the charts, they had not had statistical process control, but statistical wallpaper.

Yet their enthusiasm had been undoubted.  Like the person who worships the intellect instead of using it, they admired the control charts without using them for actual, you know, control.  Like cargo-cultists, they thought that by replicating the outward forms and rituals they could achieve the same results achieved by those who had mastered the substance. In effect, although the charts were crying out to them, things the chart did not show -- the specific defects involved, the lack of configuration control at the Sequencer, etc. -- had become invisible.  They thought the answers were statistical!  But a thermometer only tells you you're sick.  It doesn't cure the sickness.  Instruments do not act on their own.

For those who might want to noodle the substance of the SPC methodology, TOF recommends the classic work: The Western Electric Company SQC Handbook, by a writing committee headed by the revered Bonnie Small, who once received a standing ovation at a conference of the American Society for Quality Control, when a speaker noticed her in the audience and pointed her out.  SQC was what SPC was called in its early days, but that word "quality" kind of spooked the turkey herd. 

TOF also modestly notes that when he worked summers at Mack Printing Company, this was one of the many technical publications that were then printed there.  TOF's father was pressroom superintendent, but this was not, repeat not, of any benefit to TOF, who received what we might call "character-building" work assignments, many of them involving steel wool and kerosene. 

Which leads us to today's topic. 

If the Only Tool You Allow Yourself is a Hammer...

...you'll have a hard time painting your ceramics. 

Ed Feser, over on his philosophy blog, makes the following useful observation:

[T]he problem [of consciousness] is a problem in principle, and ...it isn’t going to be solved by further application of existing methods precisely because the problem is generated by the application of existing methods.  ... [T]he problem of consciousness is a result of the move Galileo, Descartes, and Co. made of taking color, sound, heat, cold, and other sensory qualities out of the material world and relocating them in the mind’s experience of that world.  Having thus made matter essentially devoid of qualia and qualia essentially immaterial, there is no way on this picture of things you are ever going to “naturalize” qualia.  You are stuck either with a Cartesian-style dualism ..., or with an incoherent eliminativism.  (Incoherent because the qualitative experience whose existence you will be denying in the name of science forms the evidential base of science -- a problem Democritus and Schrödinger saw but Dennett does not, pushing ... his usual line that consciousness is an “illusion.”)  The only true solution to the problem is to see that the post-Cartesian conception of matter does not capture the entirety of its real nature in the first place, but is merely a useful simplification.

Or to put it another way, materialism does not even completely account for matter. 

There's Another Cow Off the Ice

Final Remarks

No, no, not those kinds of final remarks; rather remarks about finality. 

You may either express relief or horror as the spirit moves you. 

Final Word

De Cart

One of the things that most confuses the modern (and therefore the post-modern) mind is the notion of finality in nature.  Ever since Descartes decreed that henceforth -- because they could not be used to produce useful products for industry -- formal and final causes did not exist, the backfill required to cover over the conceptual collapse has muddied up the picture considerably.  Today, few even understand what these meant. 

Part of the problem is the supposition that a philosophy of nature is in competition with natural science, as the term is used today.  Hence, the complaint that the pursuit of natural science is not facilitated by formal and final causation.  But this is simply due to a methodological choice.  It is like deciding a priori that the only thing worth knowing of a physical body is its weight and then declaring that a thermometer tells you nothing about how heavy the body is.  The choice made four centuries ago was that only metric and controllable efficient causes were worth knowing -- because only the metric and controllable causes would further the new goal of the new science; viz., the extension of Man's Dominion over the Universe.  Hence, all other efficient causes, as well as all formal and final causes, and even material causes, disappeared from the Weltanschauung.  But that the blinders worn by a race horse do not permit seeing certain things does not mean that those things do not exist in nature. 

What's the Matter With Matter

A reader at the Auld Blogge on LiveJournal who goes by the caligosian name haunterofmists has engaged in an extended conversation on form, spinning off the orthodox reaction to Nagel's Darwinian heresy, the gist of his questions, like the fogs he haunts, appeared inchoate. Suspecting that the disagreement -- if there even was one -- was due to terminological slippage over the centuries, TOF will here endeavor to lay out as best he can his understanding of the nature of natures.

The first thing to note is that "natural" has taken on a fuzzier meaning in the Late Modern ages, encompassing something like "it happens to to physical causes."  The Late or Post Modern thus is unable to grasp why a baseball thrown by a pitcher exhibits unnatural motion while one falling off a shelf exhibits purely natural motion.  It has to do with "natures" as opposed to Nature.

The Meaninglessness of Matter

Sometimes people are so wed to their beliefs that they cannot even read what others say to the contrary.  Consider this comment made by someone called Jeffrey Shallit (Recursivity) on a snippet by Ed Feser.  Shallit bills himself as a "professor," but does not say what he professes.  However, his blog is headlined "Recurrent thoughts about mathematics, science, politics, music, religion, and..."  Few enough are those posting on mathematics who are not themselves mathematicians, so we will suppose that to be the case here.

Now the Feser passage on which he preaches is:

"Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes."

which he found quoted on an Intelligent Design website.  His incisive critique ran as follows:

Only a creationist could be so utterly moronic. While Feser and his friends are declaring it impossible, real neuroscientists and neurophilosophers are busy figuring it out. 

The Odd Ends of Odds and Ends

Yes, it's that time again.  Clearing out bunch of ends and odds.

• The Little Ironies of Life
• Life Used to be So Much Simpler
• The Music of a Generation
• Hot Enough For Ya? 
• Return of the Quanta

Commemoration of Thomas Aquinas

Yeah, I know.  A day late and a thaler short.  But to make up for it, we have this link.

Whether St. Thomas is boring.

The Late Modern Age, which has substituted the locution "I feel that..." for "I think that..." undoubtedly finds the Dumb Ox boring.  Logic has that effect on the video-game mentality. 

Previously on the TOF Spot...

A Meditation Upon Reading in the Historia Francorum

In Tolkien's The Two Towers there is a scene in which Aragorn and the other defenders of the Hornburg, hard by Helm's Deep, are beseiged by an army of orcs.  The odds are overwhelming, and there seems nothing else than to go down fighting.

And indeed, after two days of searching the horizon in vain, on the third day Aragorn spied Gandalf astride a white horse cast in a pearly glow, leading the Riders of Rohan down upon the orcish rear, peeling them away from the seige and destroying them.

Now, Tolkien was a scholar of the era and so could not have been ignorant of a certain passage in Gregory of Tour's History of the Franks.

A blogger yclept

A blogger yclept Adam Gropnik at The New Yorker has averred, relative to that topic, that "It is conscious, thinking life that counts." It is not the lives of all members of the species radically endowed with the capacity for conscious, thinking life–it is all those actually presently enjoying the conscious life.  

Were I he, I should be wary of falling asleep and thereby not counting.  
+ + +

Getting Personal

A most peculiar book.
Highly recommended

On another site there is an on-going dialogue of the deaf regarding the nature of person and when this personhood comes into existence.  By this I mean not that various commentators are arguing with one another, or even arguing past one another; but that most commentators are content to post their own opinion and then ignore anything else that gets said.  This peculiar reluctance to engage is related I think to what John Lukacs once called the Philadelphia cult of safety. 

Just as the cult of Boston was respectability and that of New York was success, Late Modern Philadelphians were concerned with avoiding risk.  Thus, one simply did not chuck it all and head off to California but stayed with the tried-and-true.  There is much to recommend this attitude.  Cutting Edge fails far more often than State-of-the-Art, and one need only say the words "Experimental Literature" or "Progressive Education" to understand the risks involved.  But to be safe includes being safe in one's own opinions, and that makes contrary speech an intolerable threat to one's safety.  We can see that the wider Kulture today has been largely Philadelphianized.  Disagreement is treated as if it were aggression. 

But we digress.  My larger point, aside from the one under my hat, is that there are several common tropes in the discussion of person that bear examination. 

A Di-Lemma

A reader with the monometopian name of OneBrow wrote in comment to an earlier post: 

As traditionally presented, the argument from motion rarely lists all the assumptions at the beginning. Assumptions such as "motion must be externally activated from potential" and "motion can not be in an infinite chain" get worked into the argument, often by declaring them to be obvious (the very notion of being an assumption). By then end of the argument, there are a fairly good-sized number of assumptions (each distinct argument having its distinct subset).

Now, in mathematics, a lemma is a proven statement used as a step in the proof of a bigger theorem.  There is no formal difference between a lemma and a theorem -- both follow the same rules of proof -- but there is a material difference.  The main interest centers on the matter of the theorem, while the matter of the lemma is of little interest in itself at the moment.  In the same manner a carpenter may use a hammer in the construction of a cabinet without any imputation that the hammer is simply assumed, and not itself constructed.

Universes for Nothing

Columbia University philosopher David Albert reviewed the latest book by science popularizer Lawrence Krauss in the NYTimes Sunday Book Review, 23 March 2012.  He was not kind.

The book is entitled A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, and was described by well-known fellow science-popularizer Richard Dawkins with these words:

“Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to super­naturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is ­devastating.”

This encomium alone should be sufficient clue that there is less here than meets the eye. 

Humanism in Danger!

Tristan and Iseult

A Novel Idea

Among the gifts of the Middle Ages was the roman of the langue d'oil.  Stories like Tristan and Iseult were different from the chansons de geste of the langue d'oc.  Those had featured stereotypes -- brave hero, cowardly traitor, et al. -- performing iconic deeds symbolizing eternal verities.  Not only were the chansons symbolic; symbolism was very nearly the point of it all.

The knight pledges fealty to...
a woman?
The seal of Raymond de Mondragon
posted by Gilles Dubois

The roman was something different; something novel.  The central love intrigue of the roman leads to various invented episodes (which is why these were called "inventions" back in the day) and the characters evolve through interior conflicts, psychological situations, or invented circumstances, as did Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere, Parzifal, et al.  This kind of story had no roots in the fables and tales of the literature of antiquity.  For one thing, the subordination of the knight to his lady would have been unimaginable.  

All of literature as we know it -- we might even say all of humanism -- stems from this idea of the character-who-changes through a series of events and encounters.  But it all hinges on the notion that there actually are interior conflicts, psychological situations, and the like.  It hinges, in short, on the freedom of the will.

A Common Misperception

Creation is not a one-time event
but a continual holding in being

A correspondent in another venue, whom we will call Charles Cheese, writes:

[Scientific explanation] would be moot if Biblical creation were found to be true ... why bother to find out what makes people sick if it would only take prayer to cure you? Why bother to discover what cause earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or other natural disasters if it the just punishment of a displeased God?  There would be absolutley no need for any science if ... that's how God did it, is the answer to every question!


TOF is somewhat mystified by this contention, and for two reasons.