The early church's choice

Axiologist. As it happens, I am also waiting for a book I should receive from Amazon in a few days. It is a big tome on the Vienna Circle and is supposed to contain some material on M. Schlick's murder. And, so I hope, on Nelböck's paper and the reasons it was rejected by Schlick. Also, I have found a site that contains the full text of the Austriacus article. But it is in German. So if you know somone who would like to translate it for us...

Regarding the choices made by the early church, I think they need to be put in context. Church fathers were learned men and they had probably more than 100 times more philosophical material than what has survived to reach our time. Virtually all possible combination of faith and reason had been tried by the countless schools that freely mixed greek traditions with semitic, egyptian, or persian thought. So all they had to do was to pick the right combination. But they had to do it quick and make the right choice. The barbarians were at the gates and the empire badly shaken. Around 250 CE, Goth made raids in the west and in Asia Minor and Greece while the imperial troops were thoroughly routed by the Persians in the east (an emperor was even captured and taken captive to the Parthian capital, something absolutely unheard of). For several decades, insecurity mounted and terrible epidemics ravaged the whole eastern half of the empire. Estimates based on fiscal documents seem to show that Alexandria, a city not directly impacted by military events, lost up to a third of its population in 25 years. To top it all, this was also the time where the persecutions were at their highest and bloodiest.

So the minds of the church Fathers were probably quite concentrated and my impression is that they did a pretty good job given the circumstances. The image of God they chose was not a Nazi thug. It was just the mirror image of the people they were facing. They thought they were not going to convince visigothic chieftains, or bloodthirsty centurions about to boil them alive, with kind words. So they built on the jewish God (quite strong already) to create a mighty creature capable to impress even these hardened men. And they succeeded. While Rome had been unable to tame the barbarians on its borders by force, the church managed to convert most of them in a few centuries.

And what is amazing is that, while doing this extremely tough job in the most difficult of times (the war in Irak is a piece of cake in comparison), they managed not to lose track of the more subtle philosophical issues. In turning down the Gnostic, and later Arian or Nestorian, vision of God, I believe they preserved christianity's potential as a healthy civilization-building ideology for after the difficult period would have been seen through. Indeed, the history of the middle ages seems to support this. The west was rebuilt in five centuries, to the level it reached in the Renaissance, largely by the church. I do not say that the church Fathers forsaw the disasters that befell us because of our modern rationalist and scientist excesses. But I believe they were witnesses to what happened in the various Gnostic and other sects that were common in their time and did not like what they saw. An interesting job could be done in that direction, I believe : decrypt such great Gnostic-bashing Fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyons or Augustine and see what we could apply to LP or even the Unabomber.

So God is not a Nazi thug, it is just something strong enough to impress a IIIrd century thug. Not that I think it is any better. And this is indeed the biggest problem the church has faced for the last few centuries. The church Fathers made practical choices and the church, and everyone else, had only to thank them for that during the first 1500 years of its existence. Now, in the very mild and refined atmosphere of our present time, the result of these choices has become an increasingly crushing embarrassment for christianity. So be it. Either christians manange to purge their faith of what has become unacceptable to us (I doubt they can), or we have to get to work ourselves, just as te church Fathers did. But, in that case, we have to be conscious that being less good at it than they were would be impardonable. We have far more material at our disposal and, above all, we have their example to learn from. In that perspective, I doubt that just replacing the Apocalypse by a milder text (and a Gnostic one, of all things) will be nearly enough. Building a TOE for the next 1500 years requires more than that.

Regarding what books to burn, I basically agree with what you mean. Except that buring a book is probably a bad move because it is only too easy to "rediscover" the contents of a banned text. It is probably more effective to keep it in full but tightly laced in a straightjacket of counter arguments and eye-witness reports on its consequences. If the church had preserved the contents of the Nag-Hamadi library together with its own refutations of it and added reports on what was going on within Gnostic sects, it might have saved us from some of the tedium of having to reexperiment the effects of rationalism for ourselves. I am trying not to repeat this mistake with LP here. Count on me to leave for future generations a big fat CD-ROM of material on LP : their complete works, what their oponents have said, what we say here and as much information on the Unabomber, Nelböck, Gödel and other such cases.

To finish with a note on the Unabomber, and to make a connection to what you say on emotivism, I found the following excerpt on page 40 of Harvard and the Unabomber :

Somewhat paradoxically, he thought of himself as a scientist, embracing what philosophers call Logical Positivism [...] Further, he believed in positivism's parallel theory of ethics, sometimes called "emotivism", which holds that moral and spiritual judgements, being scientifically untestable, are mere "cognitively meaningless" expressions of emotion. To him, ethical and religious scrupules are [...] what he called "brainwashing". [...] Like the Nazi doctors who performed sadistic tests on concentration camp victims, Kaczynski called each of his bombings of human targets an "experiment".

Let us see what Wilks can do to salvage emotivism.