"[Rodney] Stark, [author of The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success,] a professor of social sciences at Baylor University, is
absolutely correct in his rare identification that a commitment to
reason was the fundamental cause of the spectacular progress achieved in
the West and nowhere else. But he is profoundly mistaken in ascribing
the basis of that commitment to Christianity." The Objective Standard
Ayn Rand, when asked by Playboy Magazine, "Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?", answered
"Qua religion, no -- in the sense of blind belief, belief
unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions
of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it
is the negation of reason."
In ascribing the victory of reason to that which is inimical to reason is ludicrous. Even Thomas Aquinas, the most rational of Christian theologians, was led to some irrational conclusions as a result of his faith.
Some heroic thinkers have tried to reconcile them. "[John] Locke emphasizes the
reasonableness of faith to such an extent that a religious doctrine’s
irrationality—conflict with itself or with known facts—is a sign that
it is unsound." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
This alone would seem to indicate that reason wins out where faith is irrational; and where faith is rational, it must be reason, not faith, even when it involves matters traditionally ascribed to religion.
I just read something I've heard before, written by William Hamilton:
On earth there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind.
On earth there is nothing greater than man when man is at his greatest, and that is when he chooses to use his mind. But it is a choice. Our description as "the rational animal" doesn't mean we are infallibly rational. It means we have the capacity to reason unlimitedly. After all, by the rules of logic we know which deductions are fallacies, because they break the rules. But TV commercials use such fallacies to sell their wares and often they are upfront, blatant, about it, sometimes to prove a point, sometimes to make us laugh.
Shysters know the rules of logic and break every one they can get away with, so long as you believe them and don't know they have broken a rule of logic.
But even knowing all the rules we can sometimes make the mistake of missing one of them, or we become unwilling to do what is rational because it would hurt too bad. I think that most mothers who kill their children in post-partum depression know they are doing wrong; but the alternative of doing the rational thing, of giving up their kids, would hurt them unbearably so that they could not live with it.
Well, of course they could live with it if they were given immediate help, put on suicide watch, and coached back into the world of sanity. But moments of insanity are often only moments of refusing to live according to reason because it would cause insanity.
And yet, without mind, there is nothing greater in man than in any animal on earth. The mind helps others in their time of need, during earthquakes and typhoons and hurricanes; through the death of loved ones; with soup kitchens, food banks, and food stamps; and even going to war to save others from tyrants.
There is nothing on Earth that is worth having without mind, because to have known "mind" is to know all that is great in Man.
The Question: Why is man rational? What makes us different from other animals?
The Answer: In Greek philosophy of "natural law" (physics) there was a term no longer used: perfection. This doesn't have the same meaning as the word we use.
"The things of this world are or exist only so far as they participate in the being of the eternal ideas, or so far as man in his creative capacity of craftsman, artist, and especially lawmaker copies these ideas. Here teleological thinking enters the scene. In the concept which gropes after and apprehends the essence or the idea of the thing there is contained at the same time also its end, the completion or perfection of the idea of the thing.
"The essences of things, which are exemplifications of the ideas conceived by the divine intellect, constitute at the same time the end or goal of the things themselves. The perfection or fulfillment of the things is their essence: formal cause and end are one (causa finalis is ultimately identical with causa formalis)." http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_s…
So, in evolution (becoming) all things tend toward the perfection of the idea naturally inherent in the subject that has "being". What it evolves into (the act of "becoming") can be described as the acorn that can become nothing but an oak. It can't become a donkey or a pine tree. In the essence of the "being" of the thing called "mind", there is the evolution into what it can only become, like the acorn into an oak.
Other natural forces could have prevented it, as they prevented the dinosaurs from remaining on earth. Something natural could have wiped out all life on earth, or all life containing "mind". But that didn't happen. So the mind had to evolve from the simplest forms, to its "perfect" form. That would appear to be "rationality." The chimp is said to be closest to man in this respect but is 400,000 years behind us. Perhaps in another 400,000 years we will discover whether "rationality", in the act of "becoming", will find a new perfection.
The question was recently posed: Does Metaphysical Naturalism accept the epistemological premises of Plato's intuition of knowledge, or those of Aristotle's acquisition of knowledge?
The fact is that man acquires his knowledge from the time of birth, filling his tabula rasa from sensory experiences. This is an Aristotilean concept. Plato, on the other hand, believed there were "permanent objects of knowledge [Forms or Ideas] directly apprehended by intuition (Gk. nohsiV [nóêsis]), the fundamental capacity of human reason to comprehend the true nature of reality." http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/2h.htm
Plato held intuition to be the highest form of "knowing" because it demonstrated reason's ability to comprehend these Forms, which he defined as universals. The question then becomes, where does one acquire the concepts by which intuition is revealed?
They are acquired initially as simple sensory experiences, placed upon the tabula rasa where the faculty of reason then applies the hard-wired faculty of epistemological identification. Just as the faculty of sight and the other senses are hard wired and begin working immediately, so is the mind's faculty of epistemological operations.
Nothing is in the mind which was not first in the senses--"'Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.' All the materials, or content, of higher, intellectual cognition are derived from the activity of lower, sense cognition." http://www.ditext.com/runes/n.html
But intuition is not moot to the subject of epistemology. It merely does not work until there is sufficient material in the mind from which the subconscious can extract such "intuitions."
Plato believed intuitions to be direct, non-inferential awareness of abstractions or of concrete truths. Metaphysical Naturalism defines them as direct inferences, "that a subconscious entity of knowledge or of speculation integrates with conscious material to present to the consciousness both a comprehensive and immediate metaphysical analysis of the integration." Metaphysical Naturalist Glossary
In plain English, the subconscious is always on, always working, always analyzing. When a "light bulb comes on over your head" it is an intuition presented to your consciousness through its connection to the subconsious, which was working on the problem all the time.
If "something is on the end of your tongue" but you can't find the word that on the tip, it is because the word has not been culled from the subconscious. The conscious mind cannot be conscious at all times of all the things of which it was at one time previously conscious. We would be overwhelmed with images and words and music playing in our minds. What is not necessary to have in the "forward" consciousness is stored in the subconsciousness.
Aristotle is thus correct about the acquisition of knowledge. Plato is incorrect both about the nature of "intuition" and about the metaphysical nature of that which can be known.
But Aristotle thought knowledge of the essences and natural laws were objects of cognition which no intuition can reveal, but which science can prove to exist. When defined as in the Metaphysical Naturalist Glossary, intuition does not contradict the acquisition of knowledge through the senses, nor does it contradict abstract knowledge which necessarily is abstracted from sensory knowledge and only sensory knowledge; or from concepts, which are formulations made from previous abstractions.
Bill Wilson is responsible for writing the book "Alcoholics Anonymous," referred to as the Big Book. AA is a spiritual program, and a "God program," meaning it depends upon what AA terms a "higher power" to relieve the alcoholic of his/her need to get drunk.
In many places in the Big Book we read specifically that other things than God can be considered a higher power. The use of the AA group itself with people you come to rely on, friends, and other people with whom you can discuss your problems, are often suggested as a higher power. A man can think of his wife and children, and use them as his "higher power" because of the very real possibility that if he goes on another binge, or gets arrested one more time while drunk, he could lose them.
Anytime one of us who is alcoholic goes to a meeting and says anything like, "When I fought with my son over something stupid, I knew I had to get to a meeting"; or "I realized I was letting myself become hungry, angry, lonely, tired--I knew I had to get to a meeting," we are then using the group and our time there, away from the "outside world", as our higher power, to recoup a bit of our spirituality.
But in the end, AA members are expected, not by any membership requirement, but through the incessant urging of Wilson to "accept" that the higher power he expects us to discover is God. (Accepting God is not a requirement because there is only one membership requirement: the desire to stop drinking. But the constant urging to accept God has made many people see AA as a multi-denominational religious cult.)
"We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results, even though it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God." [emphasis added] The Big Book page 46
Naturalism, to Wilson, was unnatural. Naturalism was prejudicial. "To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face." For Wilson, his own prejudice made him believe that "to continue as he is [as an atheist or agnostic] means disaster, especially if he an alcoholic of the hopeless variety. page 44
An alcoholic of the hopeless variety can only be hopeless because he does not accept God; to accept God means he isn't hopeless. "There Is A Solution" touts the previous chapter's title, and that way is through God. "This is the great news this book carries to those who suffer." p 17
The expectancy is that eventually all AA members will have "made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the power of God as we understood him"; and it expected to come sooner than later; turning over one's will is the third of twelve "steps". AA dogma, gathered up from the first few years of attempting to find the steps and the means to make them work, was that you could not get to Step Four without "doing" steps one, two and three first. (Step Two is admitting that only "a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity"; Step One is "admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable.")
But Bill Wilson was an extremely prejudicial and biased man. Do you notice in that quote from page 46 how he deftly turned "a power greater than ourselves" into God Himself, without even the pretext of qualifying "God" with "as we understood him"?
The phrase "as we understood (or understand) him" is always italicized in the Steps, in an effort to be inclusive of all religions. But Wilson had to be talked into accepting that phrase, and then only grudgingly. Yet whenever he wrote of his own experience and how it ought to be used by others, God stood alone and every member was expected by Wilson to "graduate" from using the group or other people or a hope as his/her higher power, to using God Himself--who in Wilson's mind stood alone without need of "understanding." After all, he wrote, "it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God." How could He be a God of anyone's understanding when Wilson admits that it was impossible for "any of us" (the original members) to understand Him?
Naturalism, which is necessarily an atheistic doctrine, and agnosticism, were, to Wilson, biases which the new members had to let go of.
"We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results..." [emphasis added] page 46
Page 46 is in the chapter of the Big Book entitled "We Agnostics." Wilson was never an agnostic, and he wrote no chapter for atheists, though he mentions them there. He speaks to the agnostics as though he had once been there himself, putting his brotherly arm around them in words, comforting them in the knowledge that things will be alright if they just let go and let God.
He writes in the first paragraph that "you may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience can conquer." Many naturalists and others don't believe in the "spirit" because they have always been told it is linked to God, and God is what they are trying to discard by using an epistemology that admits of nothing supernatural. But this is not a problem for all naturalists.
The Deists were theistic naturalists. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."
In Metaphysical Naturalism (MN) the spirit, the soul, is a naturally occurring non-supernatural physiologicalphenomenon of the fact of being human. When someone says he could not do something or was compelled to do something because his "conscience was being affected," it is the naturally occurring physiologically emotive phenomenon we perceive as our soul, that he is referring to.
MN understands existence to be natural and only natural, with nothing supernatural existing within existence. And of course, there is no existence outside of existence. Not even a God can be outside existence, though many believe a God could.
God could not--not without causing an irreparable contradiction within human language. If you believe in God and believe, as did America's Deist Founders, that it was God who gave us Reason in order to be able to solve our own problems without His intereference or help, then such a God would not also have allowed us to conceive acceptable contradictions; they break all the rules of the logic of linquistics. Allow one, you must allow them all. Then "nothing" will be "something," "yes" will be "no", and Reason will be worthless. We will return to the growling animalistic expressions of Man before he gained language, because without Reason language has no expression.
Boethius told us to join faith to reason, "insofar as is possible." Thomas Aquinas and others did that, and the juxtaposition led us to the scientific and then to the industrial revolutions. But at the same time, it did not banish faith by elevating Reason, and the Founders were forced to conceive a nation with a Constitution which assumed the separation of church and state. The assumption was common, was therefore not included in the Constitution in those words, and that common assumption allowed the Supreme Court to declare it a de facto part of the Constitution. The Deists would say it was Reason that dictated the Constitution.
Yet, Wilson tells us we must abandon Reason, for the blindness that comes with "accepting a power greater than ourselves" in the realm of the spirit while upholding Reason in the realm of all other things.
"Instead of regarding ourselves as intelligent agents, spearheads of God's ever advancing Creation, we agnostics and atheists [There he goes again!] chose to believe that our human intelligence was the last word... Rather vain of us, wasn't it?" page 49
But Thomas Paine, in "The Age of Reason", wrote: "The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall. [ ] I know, by positive conclusion resulting from [my] search, that there is a power superior to all [ ] things, and that power is God."
Paine was one of the most outspoken Deists, even fleeing to France for his life because his devotion to God would not allow him to have faith in anything but a Reasonable God, and no organized religion is Reasonable to a Deist.
"The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists," wrote Paine, "accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud."[emphasis added]
"If a mere code of morals or a better philosophy of life were sufficient to overcome alcoholism, many of us would have recovered long ago," Wilson wrote. [p. 44/45] Yet, isn't that what blind acceptance of a higher power is--a supposed better "code of morals" or "a better philosophy of life"?
Actually, Wilson must have realized they were not the same, or he would have said so. Instead he said, "We could wish to be moral, we could wish to be philosophically comforted, but the needed power wasn't there.
"Lack of power, that was our dilemma," he wrote, instead.
Their lack of power was from the desire to turn a wish into reality, without the "mere code of morals" or the "better philosophy." Philosophy is nothing without epistemology. Faith in God is the epistemology of disavowing Reason; faith is the only thing that Wilson serves up.
"Besides a seeming inablility to accept much on faith," Wilson wrote, about the problem of human intelligence as the last word, "we often found ourselves handicapped by obstinancy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice. [ ] This sort of thinking had to be abandoned. [ ! ]
"Some of us had already walked far over the Bridge of Reason toward the desired shore of faith. [ ] We were grateful that Reason had brought us so far. But somehow we couldn't step ashore. Perhaps we had been leaning on Reason that last mile and we did not like to lose our support.[ ]
"Did we not have confidence in our ability to think? What was that but a sort of faith? Yes, we had been faithful, abjectly faithful to the God of Reason. So, in one way or another, we discovered that faith had been involved all the time! [ ! ]
"[A religious doubter] recounts that he fell out of bed to his knees. In a few seconds he was overwhelmed by the conviction of the Presence of God. He had stepped from bridge to shore. [ ]
"His alcoholic problem was taken away."
I sit here and copy and paste and write these things, in order to tell the reader that I had my own spiritual experience, and my "alcoholic problem was taken away."
But my spiritual experience was not what faith would have me believe it to be; it is what Reason tells me it was.
The mind is the most powerful force in human life. My experience was one of a comgination of mind and that natural phenomenon, the human soul, because they are irrevocably connected even in death; the soul follows the mind into the grave. If I could bottle my experience and release it in a room with someone who was looking for God, he would claim his experience that came from my bottle was God, and then try to convince me of it.
Humility seems to be the greatest virtue in AA. It is mentioned specifically on nine pages of the Big Book and those mentions carry various descriptions of how it works and why it works and why we need it. There are many more references to humility in the other AA "approved literature," such as the "Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions". Honesty is mentioned on twelve pages, but we all know a man cannot be humble if he is not first honest.
Men whose humility does not extend to allowing the possibility that an atheist such as myself can have a spiritual experience and become sober by it, despite "the choicest gift of God to man, the GIFT OF REASON;" wrote Paine, "and having endeavored to force upon himself the belief of a system against which reason revolts, he ungratefully calls it human reason, as if man could give reason to himself."
Bill Wilson believed in the elevation of faith over Reason. Rather vain of him, wasn't it, to despise the "choisest gift of God to man," Yet, with all this strange appearance of humility and this contempt for human reason, he ventures into the boldest presumptions;" wrote Paine, "he prays dictatorially; [ ] he follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say: Thou knowest not so well as I."
Wilson's prayers were like that: "Relieve me of the bondage of self," goes his Third Step Prayer, "that I may better do thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power..."
The strictest adherence to Reason is the act of binding one's self to one's self; altruism was conceived as the act of giving one's self completely over to God, without asking for such things as the removal of one's difficulties: one took what God met out. And what kind of humility is it to ask God to remove one's difficulties, then turn and call that "victory over them"?
"It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything; and, in this case, it would be just as consistent to read even the book called the Bible to a horse as to a man. How, then, is it that those people pretend to reject reason?" Paine
The rejection of Reason was not all Wilson's. It was, and is, endemic of the kind of organization that AA is. The co-founder of AA, "Dr. Bob," wrote in his own chapter of the Big Book, that atheists, agnostics, and skeptics have a form of "intellectual pride which keeps [them] from accepting what is in this book, [and] I feelsorry for you."
[emphasis added]
He also ended his chapter saying, "Your Heavenly Father will never let you down!"
Rather prejudiced of him, wouldn't you say?
Note: I get my 3 year token in January. That spiritual experience that I had in my soul didn't put the fear of God in me; it put in me the fear of being drunk--and of dying that way or of killing someone else. That is a stronger deterrent, apparently, than God who I do not accept as an existant. But I am grateful to have found an AA community in which my outspoken atheism is not rejected. I am fully accepted by my home group and other groups, and I currently hold two "service positions" with my home group.
AA works if you find the higher power of your understanding. Mine, "the most formidable weapon against errors of every kind," is Reason. I trust I will never use any other weapon, a weapon which leads me to the positive conclusion that it is a power superior to all things available to man including the irrational prejudice of belief in God.
Happy New Year to all my readers, to all sober members of AA, and to all those who have not found the means to conquer their alcoholism. Don't let your prejudices against Alcoholics Anonymous keep you from using it to find serenity in sobriety. Accept the things you cannot change and change the things you can, and may you all have the wisdom, as I am grateful myself to have had, to know the difference between them.
Why are People Driven to Ask Atheists About Revelations?
After taking three holi-days of breaks from blogging, (I don't blog on Sunday,) and working exclusively on my brickfront retail operation Meta Candles and Gifts*, I would like to say that I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving weekend. Even the smallest turkey was too large for the two people in my home; I'm going to freeze one of the breasts, but we managed without too much difficulty to finish off the pumpkin pie! I know at Christmas I will be forced to eat what ever pie we decide on, and freeze half the Honeybaked Ham.
[*Click on one of the pretty images if you want to order online America's best-made candles or fabulous gift baskets! Hint: Join the Candle of the Month for a near-50% discount! Or contact me through that online site if you have questions about the products and services. Blatant capitalistic promotion is naturalistic, don't you think?]
I hada casual, workplace conversation with the owner of the brickfront, who deals in rare, unusual and expensive antiques. He is religious, and has talked about his work in the church as organist; he keeps a piano (for sale) in the antiques store and sometimes sits down to play it. But until yesterday he never brought up the subject of religion in any way that required an answer or reaction from me, except to listen.
Yesterday he asked if I "believed." I told him I did not. What came next is not unusual in such a situation; it has happened to me many times, so many over the course of four decades of discussing it that I try never to discuss it, because what I hear, and what I am forced to repeat, is simply too pedestrian, and lame at that, to allow myself to be forced into discussing my beliefs--because no one ever lets it go at what I answer.
I cannot recall one incident in all those many years when someone simply said, "Wow. I never would have guessed!" or "Each to his own," or anything that resembled the conversational equivalent of "I have no intention of impressing on you what I think is wrong in your way of thinking." That would be a blessing to hear.
Everyone has an opinion. Everyone wants to show what he/she thinks is the error of my logic. Or it goes the direction it went yesterday, when the antiques dealer brought up the subject we can call, "What if you're wrong?"
The "what if you're wrong" debate takes two forms. The first is about the idea that when we die we discover we were wrong, by discovering ourselves in the "afterworld." What will we do, then? we are asked.
The second form of the debate takes the position of, "What if something happens while you're fully alive to change your mind?" The implication here is that if we atheists were faced with some sort of revelation, either a revealedrevelation, or one of observation and logic resulting in a possible change of mind, would I be able and/or willing to change my mind? see Horvath and Revelationand On Revelations; Thomas Paine
Why do people need to know this? Why are they driven to inquire? Are they convinced we may say we would be "forced by the circumstances" to believe? Are they convinced, perhaps, that some argument on their part could makes us see the "error" of having a "closed mind"? Are they looking for an opportunity to make the case that "no one can be certain that no god exists"?
It seems my friend was of the mind that he could get me to admit that I could not be certain. I've been drawn in to this argument before, and I knew that it was he who did not have the "open" mind to listen objectively to me, and to objectively ask about my logic. People like him, who are otherwise fine as friends, would rather impress upon us the logic they believe will show we are the ones with "closed" minds.
And by the way, this is behavior in which I never engage, that is, trying to convince someone who doesn't want to listen to the logic of naturalism. It is improper etiquette--and rude.
I did not take the bait. I merely got up from my chair, walked to my computer, pulled up the Academy's "Strong" Position on Naturalism--which I then read to him. I thought that if I presented my argument in its written form, rather than trying to speak from the mind and heart--a situation where I knew he would not be able to resist interrupting me, repeatedly, to argue this point or that--that he would understand I had given the subject considerable scrutiny to publish it in a blog that is readable world-wide.
Instead of being objective, or at the least considerate of my well-thought out argument, his reaction surprised me.
"Do all those big words impress you?" he asked? Believe me when I tell you there was no sarcasm ringing in his words. He wasn't trying to be rude either, though of course it was one of the rudest things he could have thought to ask.
No, he wanted an objective answer: Was I impressed by the words?
I said no, of course not. I said I understood each and every word, that to me each of the words were not "big" words; they were the properly definitive words for the concept expressed by the word in that context. "Do not use two words when one will do," said Thomas Jefferson, though I must admit you must also take into account who will be doing the reading, and choose your words carefully for the purpose.
He was not someone who understood the words of the Academy's Position.
He told me about his cousin, his best friend, who for one of his university degrees was forced to read some difficult books with similarly "big," difficult-to-understand words, and how his cousin had read some of it out loud to him and tried to impress on him the meaning of what he was being forced to read. He had no more understood what his cousin was explaining than what I was explaining.
My friend had successfully changed the subject from my concrete, written logic (and his beliefs, for that matter,) to something else entirely: how he was not impressed by big words that meant nothing to him.
What it came down to for my friend was that he was not prepared to overcome my concrete logic with his faith. Faith, in the end, has no words, and that is the meaning of faith: that it is a matter of faulty epistemology that results in a metaphysical world-view that the supernatural must exist.
When confronted by logic that declares all things to be natural and that nothing is supernatural, this faulty epistemology is frustrated. It cannot make the leap from faith-based beliefs to objective, i.e., non-faith-based, arguments. It must stick to what it knows and that is implicit, unconscious knowlege that if a believer enters into the area of objective language, he will be forced to admit that his belief is not objective. That must be a very difficult thing to be forced to accept.
And attempting to accept, to argue, the position that naturalism and not supernaturalism is the "default position," [see The Big Question of Existence] of objective discurse, it may open a door to the other side of faith that he is not prepared to face. That door is precisely the fact that supernaturalism was the skeptical position for two thousand years, until the faulty Platonic epistemology of St. Augustine reversed the logic, making naturalism the skeptical position against supernaturalism.
But what, the frustrated believer would ask by taking Augustine's position, about the door that opens to faith, the door he would say we naturalists are keeping closed?
The answer is that Reason permanently closes that door, and the only way it can be opened is if Reason fails--if a person of Reason has what is defined as a "revelation" and his Reason cannot overcome the neuropathological or psychological causes.
The epistemology, the logic, of naturalism challenges the seemingly-convincing appeal of the cosmological, mechanical, and moral arguments for the existence of existence itself, and holds that the universe requires no supernatural cause and government. If someone who maintains this logic suddenly has a neuropathological or a psychological experience that causes him to abandon Reason for faith, or at the very least question his Reason in an episode of skeptical vulnerablility to faith, then he as abandonded what makes Man sui generis from all other creatures, and that is the faculty of Reason.
Faith is understandable. Our animal brains are succeptible to latching on to any argument that seems reasonable. When Man gained enough brain neuropathy to be able to add philosophy to his mental tools, it quickly became apparent--within a few hundreds of years--through the Atomists and others, that the universe was natural and that it had natural laws.
Natural laws do not admit of the existence of things which are not natural; it would be contradictory, and supernaturalism is by definition not natural. Supernaturalism is what man clung to before he discovered the discipline and science of philosophy.
There is no longer any Reason to continue thinking, as I'm certain many of our other animal relatives do, that a clap of thunder and a bolt of lightening, or the shaking of the earth, is anything beyond our understanding.
But the religiously faithful still ask "what if we naturalists are wrong, what if the supernatural exists and what if we find reason to regret our earthly logic when we die and meet our maker"?
If God exists, He will not ask us to regret using the Reason He blessed Mankind with; but He will pity the fool who believed that faith and the abandonment of Reason was what He blessed them with.
He would say that the pre-philosophical belief in the supernatural is not the default position, and therefore supernaturalism is contradictory to naturalism.
Of course, that being so, He would never exist in the first place, to tell us such a thing.
Yesterday and Monday I quoted the Catholic Encyclopedia (CE) on the subject of soul. Catholics insist the soul is given to man by "Supernatural Order, by God, for the purpose of raising the rational creature above its native sphere to a God-like life and destiny."
Today, that same quote can be used as a refutation of the denial that faith negates reason.
"Some have held that there can be no conflict between the two—that reason properly employed and faith properly understood will never produce contradictory or competing claims—whereas others have maintained that faith and reason can (or even must) be in genuine contention over certain propositions or methodologies." http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/faith-re.htm
"In the Old Testament, the Hebrew [word for faith] means essentially steadfastness, [ ] hence it comes to mean faithfulness, whether of God towards man or of man towards God. It would, however, be illogical to conclude that the word cannot, and does not, mean belief or faith in the Old Testament for it is clear that we cannot put trust in a person's promises without previously assenting to or believing in that person's claim to such confidence. Hence even if it could be proved that the Hebrew does not in itself contain the notion of belief, it must necessarily presuppose it." (CE) [italics added]
The 6th century theologian (and government leader) Boethius made the dictum, "Insofar as is possible, join faith to reason." This was because Christianity had been running almost entirely on faith, in the belief in miracles as the basis for their religion. The Virgin Birth and the Ressurection were the two upon which Christianity was built; but there were those from the Old Testament which could not be disbelieved, assented to as in confidence that revealed revelations deserved their faith.
He knew this unconditional faith could not last much longer. Joining them would seem to defy the notion that one negates the other. Modern Christianity is build on that dictum, in the attempt to separate reasoned theology from unsubstantiated faith.
"Logic became important in the Middle Ages because it provided the epistemological foundation of scholasticism: 'Through reason and the powerful tool of Aristotelian logic, men could resolve the seeming contradictions between faith and reason, Christian truth and Greek science, and attain insights into the nature of the world, of man and of God.' (Overfield 1984, p. ix)" http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/westbury/textcol/HAMILTO1.html
But the contrary is true; the unconditional faith, necessarily presupposing unsubstantiated belief, negates the substantiations made by reason. The attempt to join faith to reason is the attempt to short-circuit the faculty of mind that automatically identifies, ontologically, the material provided by man’s senses.
This automatic identification is not fool-proof-perfect. It is, after all, the result of non-omniscient thought. But to the degree that such thought bears the characteristics and integrity of non-contradictory logic, it is substantiated enough to be separable from faith.
Faith in supernatural deities and acts begins as assention to miracles and to the claims of the recipients of such miracles. As assention to these things faith is faith in the superiority of others begining with a God substantiated only by the word of others that miracles have occured.
"Faith and reason cannot be joined in the extreme because they are diametrically antithetical. No form of creationism can argue for faith without using the principles of deductive reasoning. Such reasoning can only go so far in explaining faith and the moral principle of God; then it comes up short because faith and reason can be joined only as far as is possible, and that possibility comes up short. The argument for faith always relies, in the end, on the belief in faith to explain faith." http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/09/non-reductive-monism.html
What is "the purpose of raising the rational creature above its native sphere to a God-like life and destiny," if not a claim to some form of gaining knowledge that is above reason?
And what is this form of knowledge that is greater than reason, if not the antithesis of reason, i.e., of faith in the reality of omniscient, omnipotent intelligence, for the purpose of somehow being raised above reason, and this in order to submit one's self to the superiority of others.
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Yesterday, I quoted the Catholic Encyclopedia on the subject of soul. Catholics insist the soul is given to man by "Supernatural Order, by God, for the purpose of raising the rational creature above its native sphere to a God-like life and destiny."
Today, that same quote can be used against the scientific naturalists' strawman argument of "contra-causal-and-libertarian free will".http://www.centerfornaturalism.org/
"5. On her part, the Church cannot but set great value upon reason's drive to attain goals which render people's lives ever more worthy," wrote John Paul II. "Yet the positive results achieved must not obscure the fact that reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth which transcends them." ENCYCLICAL LETTER FIDES ET RATIO OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF JOHN PAUL II
John Paul made an astute observation, that, "Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned."
This concentration is in scientific naturalism, which says that determinism is the fate of men but that if science someday proves otherwise, that which is proved otherwise will then be believed by science.
It is always correct to believe what science proclaims, but it is not science that proclaims determinism or the lack of it is; it is metaphysics--"the investigation of being"--that is denied by scientific naturalists, yet used by them, because all things are judged by metaphysics. And it is here that John Paul's criticism becomes important.
Scientific naturalism denies the existence of man’s volition, proclaiming the doctrine that man does not have contra-causal freedom. This is a straw-man argument. Neither the mystic Church nor any rational source ever claimed man had such powers. It is only supernaturalists on the order of those who claim such powers as sorcery who think contra-causal power exists or ought to exist.
Why, then, do the proponents of scientific determinism argue that free will and the soul do not exist based on the argument that contra-causal agency does not exist? It is because, having abandoned the investigation of "being" and concentrating instead on the physiological means of knowing, determinism is the only argument they have to support their arguments against the "supernatural."
Since the power of the soul is proclaimed by religion to be "supernaturally given to man by God to raise him up from the limitations of reason," then the only way to keep the millenial argument of the existence of God in play is to use science to prove the soul is nothing but the workings of physiology.
To support the argument that the soul is only physiology, the soul must be proclaimed to be "fully caused" by all things "natural," not "supernatural." Religion holds that the soul is supernatural; therefore, scientific naturalism must hold that it is not, and that because it is "fully caused" it cannot be "contra-causal", i.e., able to be the cause of itself.
Determinism is the doctrine of preferring to accentuate the ways in which man's will is limited and conditioned, for the purpose of denying supernaturalism.
But it is not supernaturalism that leaves metaphysical naturalists free to acknowledge that free will does not need to be contra-causal. As a matter of fact, to expect it to be contra-causal would be to defy the laws of nature, the very same laws used by the sci-naturalists.
This is the truth that transcends man's knowledge: that he is fully-caused by his actions and reactions to the reality of being, i.e., having life. It is the nature of man's being that empiricism is the cause of his consciousness. Let him conform to the things he cannot change, change the things he can, and unlike the sci-naturalists, comprehend the differences between what can and what cannot be changed.
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The Christian right-wing-ness in President Bush caused him to put Judeo/Christian religion ahead of science and the cures for many diseases and biological defects, by banning the use of the reproduction of stem cells.
There may be no science that proves the human soul begins when life begins at conception, and there are epistemic arguments for saying the soul begins at birth. But the religious limitations placed on stem cell reproduction is being thwarted by men's testicles. That is something Mr. Bush can do nothing about, unless Christians wish to being arguing that the soul exists in each half of the human connection, i.e., in the sperm and in the egg.
Studies showed scientific potential using "spermatogonial cells" from the testicles of mice. "The new study used cells taken from biopsied tissue from 22 different men undergoing various medical treatments. The men ranged in age from 17 to 81. Researchers found that after a few weeks of growth, the cells could differentiate into various types of cells just like those taken from embryos," said the Associated Press.
However, some scientists, saying the idea is promising, also said testicle cells are not a reason to give up on research on embryonic stem cells.
"It's exciting. We could do it for males; that leaves women without as easy a method," said stem cell scientist George Daley of Children's Hospital in Boston and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He was not part of the new research, said the AP.
This is great news for disease and genetic researchers all over the globe. But I have a problem when religion outweighs the secularity of our laws. Our Founders may have been superb theologians and great believers in the Deist God; but they knew the danger of allowing religion to dictate the terms of our laws.
The Deists were Naturalists, which is why Thomas Jefferson got away with writing that "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" were the basis for human equality; they allow us to assume among the powers of the earth our separateness from each other and our equal stations in life. He did not write "God" alone, and indeed there is anecdotal evidence that Benjamin Franklin might have had a hand in encouraging that turn of words.
The use of the words "Nature's God" allows each man and woman his/her own understanding of the nature of existence, including the total non-belief in the supernatural, if that is the decision one comes to; but invoking the "Laws of Nature" gets right to the heart of the naturalism of the Deists, indeed, right to the heart of any naturalist.
Christians and all religions of supernaturalism deny that only the the laws of nature exist devoid of a supreme being. Deists as supernaturalists believe, in the same moment as they believe there is a God, that that same God endowed Man with Reason and endowed the world with immutable laws, and that together those laws and Man's reason are all that can be counted on. God may have created the world, but after that he was strictly a hands-off kind of Creator. All the answers to the questions of the world are to be found in Reason, including the questions and answers on the meditations of faith. Faith itself, however, is a matter for the soul.
It is not of that reason, in other word it is not reasonable, to assume that a soul can exist before the tabula rasa has any empirically-generated material ofmind by which such a thing as the soul can exist. The soul is not supernatural; it is part of the nature of Man's being, as much as his toenails or his liver--or his mind.
But mind is the product of sensory impressions retained by the brain; and soul is the emotional content, the structure of the metaphysical meaning of those retained impressions. "Nature's God" is to the description of the contents of each human's individualistic beliefs regarding the questions and the rational answers of existence, what "soul" is to the emotional content regarding the nature of existence.
"Every time we walk along a beach," wrote the naturalist Loren Eiseley, "some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.”
"Ancient urge" is not what I would call the emotional content of man's soul, but the soul is as old as man himself, so it is indeed ancient. But this emotional content is ostensive in its nature; in other words, it is the description in emotional terms that only that which we call a soul can point at using our volition of the faculty of consciousness.
How many times have you heard it said, "What I felt can't be described in words?" What was felt and indescribably in words was ostensive. My Webster's defines "ostensive" as "directly pointing out," as one can only point to the sky or the ocean to "point out" what is the color blue. Without pointing, the color comes down to the scientific description of the wavelength of the color. Without feeling the soul, its nature comes down, like the description of a wavelength, to the reductive, deterministic science that declares all things in consciousness to be merely the firing of neurons, and chemical and electrical operations of the physiology of the body.
The soul is much more than reductive descriptions of the scientific evidence of how the body works. In order for the "ancient urge" to awaken, it must be struck by empirical impressions. A human born without sensory awareness can never gain consciousness, because without things about which to be conscious, it cannot exist. To exist without things to be conscious of is contradictory of the definition of the word. That much does not not contradict reductionism.
The soul is the emotional content of consciousness, and as such it cannot exist until the mind has gained enough sensory impressions to create one. This can only begin at birth, and it may be almost immediate. It would not contain much at that point, but the volition of the soul cannot begin begin before birth, before the trauma of birth awakens the brain to the content of sensory knowledge. It is the volition of the soul that upsets the apple cart of reductionism.
Right-wing fundamental Judeo/Christians are fighting the wrong enemy when they fight science as a whole. It is only this idea of reductionism, of the idea that man is nothing but the contents of his physiology producing a "belief" in the existence of the soul, that the fundamentalists must fight. Many scientists who believe the soul begins at birth, not at conception, believe in God and the soul, not in reductionism. These scientists are not the enemy of Christians; many of them are Christians.
To believe that such an object as the soul, created by sensory impressions and emotionally judged by the nature of each man's metaphysics, is immutable while believing the physical body that created it is not, (Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,) to believe that the soul is transcendental and that it is placed or created or somehow infused into the fertilized egg at the very moment the sperm enters it, is the stuff of religion. And that stuff of religion contradicts the non-deterministic, non-reductionistic laws of nature that define the means of the creation of the soul.
If there be a God, He caused its creation in birth, not in conception.
To post Comments click hereTesticular Stem Cells Thwart Religion to Determine Law Note:I will be the featured speaker at the Center For Inquiry (CFI) meeting, October 16, 2008, in Portage, Michigan. The topic is "Atheism as a 'Religion' Protected by Courts According to the Establishment Clause" CEC
"Okay," someone wrote, "I already know who John Galt is. I read the book 'Atlas Shrugged' and want to know if anyone agrees with Galt's god-awful long speech about how people's intellectual properties should only belong to the intellectuals..."
Dear Critic: Galt spoke these words in that speech:
"We're on strike against your creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. If you want to know how I made [the strikers] quit, I told them exactly what I'm telling you tonight. I taught them the morality of Reason -- that it was right to pursue one's own happiness as one's principal goal in life. I don't consider the pleasure of others my goal in life, nor do I consider my pleasure the goal of anyone else's life.
"I am a trader. I earn what I get in trade for what I produce. I ask for nothing more or nothing less than what I earn. That is justice. I don't force anyone to trade with me; I only trade for mutual benefit. Force is the great evil that has no place in a rational world. One may never force another human to act against his/her judgment. If you deny a man's right to Reason, you must also deny your right to your own judgment. Yet you have allowed your world to be run by means of force, by men who claim that fear and joy are equal incentives, but that fear and force are more practical. " http://www.working-minds.com/galtmini.htm
These are the tenets of a man who recognized the natural, unalienable rights of every individual human to own what is his or hers, not just of "intellectuals." Through out the book Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon are driving through the countryside looking at the dilapidated houses and the starving people, and wondering how America and the entire world could have been brought to this situation by their leaders, whom the people trusted. When they are not driving, they see in their minds the poor, the starving, the destitute of soul. In a world governed by the recognition of naturalistic philosphy, such as the Unites States once was, such poor, starving, and destitute people were being lifted out of the mud, not put back into it.
It is against the elite leaders, who believe they know what's best for the people, that Galt deplores. Under author AynRand's system of laissez faire capitalism, every man and woman would be enabled of their birthright, as opposed to "being allowed by government," to do whatever--repeat whatever--he/she wanted to do with their lives, their minds, their property, so long as they did not use the initiation of force to overwhelm the same birth-given rights of another person. "Unalienable" does not mean the government cannot, with enough power and coercion, prevent you from using your rights; it can, illegally and with tyranny. "Unalienable" means birth-given.
Equality comes from the freedom from that force and coercion of government, but government ideas come from the elite who gain power and twist the Constitution to mean what they want it to mean. Did you ever stop to wonder why our government has such power over us, when the Founders clearly meant to limit such power? The elite at one time were our saviors; now they are the ones who would betray us for a handful of gold, or for that power to decide "the common good."
There is a difference between "the common good," which on its face sounds like equality, and "the common defence and general Welfare" used in the Constitution as the purposes of that document. The "common good" is a concept to either run from, or better yet, to destroy, because there is no "common good" but what is good for each individual as individuals. The "general Welfare" means the protection of the rights of individuals, not the collection of power to be used over individuals to provide for some undefined "higher value" than the rights of single human being to exist in the state that nature provided for him, the state of being a rational animal so that he would know how to provide for his own good.
In the Fourteenth Amendment was created the new concept of "citizens of the United States," a class of citizen which until then did not exist. That class of citizen is directly under the control of the Federal Government, which was the intended purpose of that clause of the Amendment, but not for the purposes of a more powerful government in general. The newly-minted power of the Federal Government that came with control of this new class of citizen was intended by the Radical Republicans to be used to immediately stop the abuses of the "Freedmen" that were not stopped by the Thirteenth Amendment. But since then, it has been used for every thing under the sun, by the newly-minted class of elites created by that clause. Anyone who dares use that clause for anything but the protection of individuals is an elitist who would take your birth-given rights because they don't see individuals; they see "classes." The Freedmen were seen as a class of men, not as individuals who merely fit the profile of those whose protection the Fourteenth was intended to protect.
That is what Rand's book is about--the loss of reason and sanity to be found in the tyrannical control of classes of people. It is universally recognized in our nation that laws may not be written to target any individual, nor to be used against only one individual; but it is as equally recognized that laws may be targeted against classes of citizens. No, today's America is hardly a "tyranny" in the classical sense. But then, today's political situation would be a very intolerable "classical" tyranny to the Founders and they would decry the creation of such a political entity as a "citizen of the United States," controlled by the Federal Government. Their intended plan for freedom was exactly the opposite, that the "control" was in the consent of those being controlled, and that could only come from the rights of the States to protect its citizens from the tyranny of a Federal Government out of control with power.
"Your acceptance of the code of selflessness," Galt spoke, referring to this fictional time in the world when the morality of absolute altrusim, "has made you fear the man who has a dollar less than you because it makes you feel that that dollar is rightfully his. You hate the man with a dollar more than you because the dollar he's keeping is rightfully yours. Your code has made it impossible to know when to give and when to grab."
Such altruism comes from the propaganda of a thing the elites call the "common good." What they define as "good" is less individual power over one's own life, so that the masses have the power over individuals. This is nothing less than the mentality of gangs.
But Galt is also speaking to the altruist in all of us right now, because the world in "Atlas Shrugged" is Rand's vision of the logical-extremist ends of the domestic and international policies our government has been following for 60 decades or more. Both of our current Presidential candidates have admitted that the $700,000,000,000 a year we pay for foreign oil and foreign aid is often spent in nations that hate us and who would use that capital to do us harm. That is the altruism of a nation only wishes in good faith to help spread the good fortune of America's wealth. Both candidates agree this altruism must stop. But only one of them says the intellectual rights of oil producers in this country should be given back, and then only to alleviate a problem for consumers (the common good), not because it is the right thing to do for the producers.
Galt is also giving confirmation to the rational humans who understand the purpose of the strikers in the novel, and to the common man both in the novel and in the reality of today who understands why the leaders of industry have disappeared, gone on strike, to leave the economy to distintigrate further and faster, like a train out of control.
The common man who understands the purpose of the strikers cheers for them, he does not condemn them. He wishes he could go on strike and join them. Those common people understand, and part of the purpose of Galt's speech is to vindicate them. In parts of the speech he speaks directly to them, telling them they are not morally wrong, that they are right, and that when the elites get their heads out of their as*es, the leaders of industry will return.
You need to read the book, not just take the speech out of context without seeing the miserable way in which the common people are living, and the compassion the book's heros have for those people. The character of Eddie Willers was purposefully meant to represent them--you, me us, and anyone who is not a Bill Gates, Suze Orman, Warren Buffet, Martha Stewart, or a T. Boone Pickens, the very people who would go on strike in a real "Atlas Shrugged" world--with dignity and grace.
Let's hope you get some common sense of your own and wake up to the freedoms Rand was trying to instill in you. She was Jefferson, she was Thomas Paine, she was Madison, she was the Federalist Papers, she was the Constitution, as they were intended to be remembered and used.
"Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.
"A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to make a society free and to keep it free—a system that does not depend on the motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.
"The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the government." from “The Nature of Government,” in "The Virtue of Selfishness"; Rand.
"Ours was the first government based on and strictly limited by a written document—the Constitution—which specifically forbids it to violate individual rights or to act on whim. The history of the atrocities perpetrated by all the other kinds of governments—unrestricted governments acting on unprovable assumptions—demonstrates the value and validity of the original political theory on which this country was built.
"The clause giving Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce is one of the major errors in the Constitution. That clause, more than any other, was the crack in the Constitution’s foundation, the entering wedge of statism, which permitted the gradual establishment of the welfare state. But I would venture to say that the framers of the Constitution could not have conceived of what that clause has now become. If, in writing it, one of their goals was to facilitate the flow of trade and prevent the establishment of trade barriers among the states, that clause has reached the opposite destination." from“Censorship: Local and Express,” in "Philosophy: Who Needs It"; Rand
"This country," Galt said, "wasn't built by men who sought handouts. In its brilliant youth, this country showed the rest of the world what greatness was possible to Man and what happiness is possible on Earth."
Do you think it was the "intellectuals" who put their backs and brawn into building railroads, bridges, dams, and skyscrapers? Do you think it was "intellectuals" who were the first to be told they were valuable enough to earn $5 a day in HenryFord's car factories? Ford was the "intellectual" in that situation, and he knew that their worth to him was to reward them by making them the best-paid employees on the planet in their day.
It was to those types of people that Galt was speaking when he said, "[T]hose of you who retain some remnant of dignity and the will to live your lives for yourselves" will quit living "with undeserved, irrational guilt," guilt born of accusations of "selfishness" that we use more resources per capita than other nations; in effect, what has come to be called "conspicuous consumption." If Americans quit consuming as much as they did, the rest of the world would go broke. As soon as other nations' peoples can afford to consume as much as we do, they will do so.
So long as what we consume is paid for, the people of the nations we buy the raw material or the finished goods from make out like bandits--as well they should. But in the world of "Atlas Shrugged," it is those other nations that fall first--because America has come to believe in its own guilt, and in an attempt to attone in the only way such guilt allows atonement, lets down the rest of the world. One by one, the destitute nations who accepted altruism much quicker and easier than America are taken over by the same tyrannical despots who have come to control the United States.
In a comparison of the Ten Planks of Marx's "Communist Manifesto" along with the American adopted counterpart of each of the planks, Marx stated in the "Manifesto" that these planks will test whether a country has become commmunist or not.
Plank #1 was: Abolition of private property and the application of all rent to public purpose. In the U.S. this is becoming implemented through the 14th Amendment, and various zoning, school & property taxes, as well as the Bureau of Land Management. (For a comparrison of all 10 Planks against America's implementation of them, see http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/10planks.htm . Some of them are arguable; some of them could contain many more breaches by the Government than are listed.)
Galt knew that we commoners needed the intellectuals, and it was intellectuals he talked into striking with him. How did he get these self-made, wealthy business and industry leaders walk away from their businesses to leave them to rot or to go to the "looters"?
He told them they did not deserve the way their government treated them. He told them that if they treated their own workers that way, the workers would strike against him. He told them they were the only thing, the only people, propping up the tyrrany of the government that made slaves of them by controlling their industries for their own purposes.
Today we have laws governing virtually every industry from automobiles to drugs to bread manufacture. At one time there was a law that prevented anything that resembed today's nutritious whole grain breads from being called "bread." Bread was defined by its ingredients and were bland, bleached, or robbed of all nutrition. There was a law that prevented 2% milk from being called "milk." The inventor of 2% is still alive (as far as I know), so that law was not so long ago. Neither was law against calling "nutritous baked wheat loaves" by name of "bread."
The right to control such things as new foods, new accessories on cars, new methods of fueling those cars, and especially drugs because they are so large in our culture and our news the right to much longer property rights on drugs that cost hundred of millions of dollars to invent, test and market--the rights of control are "intellectual" property rights, and they properly belong to those who invent them. The rights to control them do not belong to the people except under tightly defined parameters, such as the length of time a patent shall be held before its expiration.
But such things have been shortened for "the common good," to make generics available. "Generics" are the elites' code word for stolen property, because they had to shorten the patent rights in order to get "generics." Now is it any wonder that drug companies must charge exhoribant prices to get a return that will allow them to continue to operate?
So yes, Dear Critic, intellectual property rights do belong to the intellectuals, not to the "people." Patent rights on drugs are no different than those on toys. After a certain period of time, should every toy manufacturer have the "right" to produce their own Barbie Doll, or their own Madden Football, or their own competing Chicago Bears team or their own competing IPods? Those are products that belong to the intellectual who created them when "intellectual" is defined as a branded product created by a human mind.
It is one thing to start a competing football team; it is a completely different thing to steal a trademarked name, which is a branded product created by human minds, and give the right to manufacture it to every Dick and Mary who has enough money to do so. If Dick and Mary cannot create their own Prozac, Dick and Mary have no business, legal, moral, or otherwise to use the intellectual possessions of other individuals, any more than you or I should have the right to start a team and call them the Detroit Tigers.
Intellectual property is the property of an intellect; intellect belongs to individuals, not mobs, gangs, or elites who represent the common good. Naturalism is about the place of individuals in the society of men, in the conditions created by living on earth, and those conditions create not only birth-given rights to freedom from physical force and coercion, but intellectual birth-given rights, without which no mind would be free to conceive of new ideas, and without which all intellectuals should go on strike.
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