3.22.27 ~ The Problem of Invention

The problem of invention is how a partially realized goal gets what it needs to extend itself or complete itself in some sense. How does a goal conquer the waves of irrelevant impluse and association and reclaim a further domain of the sea? Invention is purpose assuming authority over ideas. Implications from it are no accident. There is thought in the goal itself. The purpose takes what it needs from what is given, and discards the rest. And it doesn't just select from passively received matter. The purpose makes the matter an object of thought. The spirit of logic makes distinctions in the unformed matter, and the spirit of beauty supplies the goals and the means of reaching them. The tendency toward a completed unity is the source of all thought. But what are the devices the fragments already in the mind use to extend and complete themselves?

3.23.1 ~ A New Thought

Reflection begins with a collision between a system or order already in the mind, and some fragment that ought to be included in this system, but remains outside it. A detective begins to reflect on someone's death because there is a conflict between the fact of the person's death and something already in the mind. The detective orders their experience on the principle that events have causes. This event challenges inclusion in that order. The detective makes it fit by first learning the details of the problem by reflecting and observing. Observation is guided by what experience has taught about which details are relevant.Consequently, the detective pays more attention to bruises apparently made by some blunt instrument.The details are not obtained by focusing on a single point. The basis of a new thought must be broad. If the question was merely who might have used the blunt instrument, their would be an indefinitely large number of answers. The question is who must have done this in view of unemptied pockets, signs of a struggle, the butler's loyalty, and perhaps a hundred other things---all relevant details. A successful conclusion from a single factor alone would be an accident. The conclusion come from all of them taken together.The problem is to fit a detached fact into the entire surrounding system.

3.27.x

Two minds think about the same problem with the same data. One catches the essential key to solution and the other does not. Why? Because one is more intelligent than the other? Some perverse cleverness or fertility that goes off in dazzling disregard of fact? No. Thought controlled by the necessities of the case. Random and heterogeneous analogies cause thought to drift through various associations. The less random and heterogenous they are, the more necessary they become.The universal connection discovered should be the right one. Newton, in contemplating planets and apples, must light on the concept of falling as leading to the force he seeks. Darwin must select from people and racehorses the feature that is essential to improvement of the type. The suggestion of an undiscovered star must come to Leverrier. Shakespeare must be carried, with or without analogies, to the last speech of Othello. All of these things are explainable in only one way. The ideal order which their thinking tries to realize has produced something new in them.The issue begins to form in their minds, parts or aspects are connected, hidden affinities come to light, not because they wanted it, but because they went beyond more people in recognizing a necessity that is within us and also beyond us.The ability to use analogies to pass quickly from one topic to another is an expression of logic itself. The eye that can trace the lines of necessity and single out the relevant from the more common irrelevant associations is guided by the invisible purpose of ideal rationality. The influence of ideal rationality is felt stronger in some minds rather than others. Ideal rationality organizes the chaos of experience into fixed categories. In inquiring minds these categories form themselves more readily and in closer alignment, as logic gains control and prepares to create a new synthesis.

If You Can't Beat'em, Undermine'm

Not everyone in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had the capacity to defeat the church in war or even in politics. An increasinly important alternative strategy now emerged---attacking the ideas on which the church was based.

For an increasingly numerous and articulate group within Western culture, the best way to reduce the excessive influence of the church was to undermine the credibility of its teachings. While some saw the attraction of atheism as lying in what it proposed, most saw its appeal in its ability to weaken, perhaps even destroy, the institution of the church.

Paradoxically, the historical origins of modern atheism lie primarily in an extended criticism of the power and status of the church, rather than any asserted attractions of a godless world.

Adapted from Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism, p. 11.

Classical Greek Atheism

"Yet atheism failed to have the impact on the late classical world that some feared and others secretly longed for. Roman writers such as Lucretius (c. 94-c. 50 B.C.) argued that religion merely evoked terror---as, for example, in the case of Agamemnon, whose fear of the goddess Artemis led him needlessly to sacrifice his only daughter. Atheism, Lucretius declared, eliminates such terror and allows us to focus on the natural forces and processes at work around us.

These ideas had relatively little impact on their own era. They would, however, find a new and highly receptive audience centuries later. Perhaps the world was not yet ready for the announcement of the death of the gods.

That day would come---with a vengeance."

Alister McGrath
The Twilight of Atheism

Prior Mind Structures

Probing the underlying structures of our own reasoning, assumptions, values, and beliefs is no different from anything else we can think about.

This is not just standard procedure in many other areas of thought. It is considered matter-of-factly necessary in relation to any area in which truth-claims must be adjudicated because of the implications of the possibility of error.

Design and verification issues always come up when something goes wrong.

The design and structure of the World Trade Center towers have been the subject of extremely focused, detailed, and complex analysis since 9-11, including retracing the reasoning for various design and construction decisions in that project.

So why then is straightforward analysis claimed to be unable to arrive at a reliably true position concerning God or even operational values common to believers and atheists?

More importantly, why is the unknowability claim considered true?

And the issue of God is by no means the only area that can be questioned in this way, as we shall see.

Finding Water

Religion uses a divining rod.

Philosophy uses a pick and shovel.