A Note on Archbishop Burke

It was announced yesterday that Archbishop Burke would be leaving St. Louis to become what is in effect the chief justice of the Catholic Church’s supreme court.  I will miss Archbishop Burke for many reasons, and the Archdiocese of St. Louis is losing a great leader, no matter how the St. Louis Post Dispatch tries to demonize him. 

However, I want to put to sleep a myth concerning Archbishop Burke:  everyone seems to think that he is responsible for the vocation surge that we are having in St. Louis.  Undoubtedly he has done an outstanding job keeping the morale up among his seminarians.  Unlike many other bishops, he makes time to talk to each of his seminarians individually, listening to our concerns and keeping us happy.  So if anything, Archbishop Burke has done an outstanding job keeping seminarians in the seminary.

But with that said, he is not  the only reason for St. Louis’ surge in vocations.  A simple look at the number of men entering the seminary seems to prove my point.  Before 2002, St. Louis had about 15 men entering the seminary every year.  Some years, we were close to having classes of 20, but we were never quite able to reach that number.  Then in 2002, the priest scandals broke.  Morale among seminarians hit an all-time low, as one of our vocations directors was accused and later found guilty of six counts of sodomy.  A large number of seminarians dropped out, and only 5 men entered seminary that year.  In fact, one man–who later did enter the seminary–said that he was driving up to the seminary to turn in his application when he heard the news about this vocation director.  He immediately turned his car around and went home.

The Archdiocese had fewer vocations over the next few years.  But even in 2002, Fr. Michael Butler, the head vocations director in St. Louis, said that Americans have a short memory, and that on average people forget about such shocking scandals after approximately four years.  Sure enough, by 2006 the number of vocations for the Archdiocese had returned to the same levels that they were before the scandals broke.  We have been seeing high numbers of seminarians every year since then.  If Archbishop Burke is responsible for the surge in vocations in St. Louis, then how does everyone account for the large number of men entering seminary before Archbishop Burke even arrived?  No:  Archbishop Burke was icing on the cake, a more public symbol of the renaissance that was already occuring in St. Louis, a renaissance which he helped to augment. 

I study in Washington DC, and at least once a week I hear seminarians from other dioceses praising Archbishop Burke and lamenting the fact that their dioceses cannot have a bishop who is so good at recruiting men to the seminary, or offering him some other high praise.  What these seminarians fail to realize is that while St. Louis was indeed lucky to have such a great Archbishop, it was due to good fortune that we have so many vocations.  The secret to our success does not rest in our former Archbishop, but in less earth shattering ways.  In St. Louis, we stress Eucharistic adoration; we are beginning to form summer camps where teenagers feel comfortable and safe living out their faith, if only for a week.  We are seeing young, holy priests preaching the Gospel in truth and charity, and actively promoting priestly vocations among young men at the parish level. 

The recipe for success in St. Louis can easily be replicated elsewhere:  other diocese don’t have to wait to get an outstanding bishop in order to replicate St. Louis’ success.  As our vocation director reports, the recipe for success is very simple:  if you make the opportunities available for young men and women to come closer to God, the Holy Spirit will do the rest.

I will miss Archbishop Burke.  May he remember St. Louis as fondly as his seminarians remember him.

My Cussing Count

This website searches your blog for instances of various curse words and tells you how clean your mouth is.  This wasn’t surprising, given that my usually curse word replacement is “oh mittens!”

The Brave Clinton

Thank God Hillary was there to shield that poor kid from all that sniper fire.  All the people around her don’t even seem to realize that they are being fired at!

Political philosophers

When I say “political philosopher,” most people would think of Hobbes or Burke, not Kant and Nietzsche.  However, let us rectify that right now.

I don’t know how to get the youtube video to appear right in my blog entry, so you will all have to make due with just the link.

Evolution, Mind, and Truth

The common fad among philosophers nowadays is to apply evolutionary science to things to which it does not apply.  Sure, evolution may give a useful description of the world, but it cannot explain everything about man’s his nature and behaviors.  Many might find this offensive, just like many scientists probably found the denial of Laplace’s Demon to be offensive at the turn of the 20th century.  But as we later found out, even Newtonian physics has its limits.

I will here argue that evolutionary science cannot account for at least one fact about man:  man’s search for truth.  To see why, let us briefly examine what evolutionary theory states.

Evolutionary theory states that the species that are able to adapt to threats survive.  Through genetic mutations of some sort, certain species are better able to pass on their seed.  As far as science is concerned, evolution is a blind process:  there is no Big Hand acting as a primary cause upon things guided certain species to survive.   Certain traits are passed on only insofar as they give a species a means of surviving. 

Hence, everything we see in nature is “directed” towards survival, no matter how much it may not seem so at first.  It is not as if creatures actively acknowledge that every feature about them is merely for survival purposes, but that they survived due to those traits.  For example, if sex were not pleasurable, animals would engage in it less.  Those which do not find sex pleasurable will not pass on their genes, and so their genes will exit the gene pool while those who enjoy sex will continue to pass on their genes.  Hence, all design, all purposes, and all activities that seem like they defy explanation are really complex ways of passing on DNA that developed over billions of years. 

Take an example.  Let’s say a mouse is being stalked by a cat.  Common sense says that the mouse escapes the cat if he is able to sense him coming.  When he senses the cat, he realizes that he is in danger, and he runs away.  The Darwinist, on the other hand, says that we shouldn’t ask why the mouse runs from his enemy, but only that he actually does run from his enemy.  

But here’s the catch:  if every trait that we have is only apparently for a reason other than survival (with survival being the real reason for all of our activities), then the scientific enterprise is a farce.  It is one thing to say that the pursuit of truth just so happens to have survival value, and so when we pursue the truth as a goal we also survive.  But this is not an account that can be derived from evolutionary theory.  Our science and pursuit of truth must be treated in a parallel way to the mouse to maintain intellectual consistency:  it does not matter why we *think* we are doing science.  What doing science *really* is is a means for survival.  Thus, when we propose our latest, niftiest theories, what other reason can we give for proposing the theory other than that it will help us pass on our DNA?

But why should we give our apparent pursuits of truth the benefit of the doubt?  Why don’t we just acknowledge like all other things that it is fundamentally (and not secondarily) a means of survival?  In reality, we are only apparently seeking the truth (but actually seeking to pass on our DNA).  Everything about the pursuit of knowledge is suspect:  our desire to seek truth is merely helpful towards survival, our engaging in searching for truth is a means for survival, our arguing is merely a means of survival.  And when we reject a theory, we do it because we were “programmed” to do so in order to survive.  Our dispositions to find certain things about the world self-evident?  A product of evolution.  We have to be able to believe that evolution is consistent with the fact that we follow logical rules and procedures not merely because we were programmed to do so.  Anything less makes it unreasonable to follow our rational capacities.

“But this is absurd” some may say, “you can’t tell me that I am not actually pursuing truth.  I know exactly what I am doing!”  I know you do.  But that’s the point:  if the only genes that are passed on are those which allow the animal to pass on his genes, then the “science” gene was passed on because of its survival value.  But how, then, did this added feature of pursuing truth “for its own sake” come in?  Since science is a mere biological phenomenon of an organism facilitating interaction with its environment, then, just like every other biological phenomenon, it must be just another effective method of survival.  The consistent thing for the Darwinist to say is that our pursuit of science is no exception to the general rule.

Hume on Induction

When I was taking my historical philosophy classes, I did them out of chronological order.  I took modern philosophy an entire year before I had taken ancient philosophy.  So when I read Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, I had very knowledge of the preceding philosophical tradition.  When I first read Hume, I was thoroughly convinced that his arguments were foolproof, especially his argument concerning induction.   However, upon re-examining his arguments in preparation for my comprehensive exams, I’m not as sure that his arguments are as good as they once seemed.  Whereas I questioned very few of his premises in his argument against induction a couple of years back, this time I am not as comfortable with it. 

Preceding Hume’s argument is a discussion of cause and effect.  The relation between any cause and some effect cannot be learned through some rational process, but must be learned through experience.  With this said, Hume asserts that the conclusions of experience cannot be grounded in anything else.  Many philosophers at this point in time were foundationalists, following in the footsteps of Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes.  They wished to make philosophy into a science like geometry, where certain conclusions are deduced from self-evident first principles.  So Hume is arguing that experience cannot be rationally grounded by anything self evident.  Since he is an empiricist, all knowledge comes through the senses, and so he is claiming that none of our knowledge can be grounded in something more basic. 

With his assertion, he merely challenges his interlocutors to come up with a way to ground experience; however, he goes one step further and presents the argument that the conclusions of experience cannot be grounded in something rationally prior.  Due to our experience, we think that the world has a certain uniformity to it.  But how do we discover this uniformity?  Through induction:  for example, we see that one billiard ball will move another when the two collide.  After seeing this process several times, we make inductions about future events, and we begin to expect that one billiard ball will cause the other one to move when they collide.  However, if all of our knowledge of cause and effect comes through induction, and it is through induction that we form experience, and it is through experience that we arrive at the uniformity of the world, the justification of conclusions from experience is circular.  Induction is used to justify the uniformity principle, and the uniformity principle is used to justify induction.  Hume then asserts that only a fool would cease to trust his experience.  If he did, he would be unable to live in the world.  However, the utility of trusting our experience does not rationally justify using experience to justify philosophical conclusions. 

I’m going to think aloud for a while here.  First, why does experience need to be rationally justified?  Hume is probably responding to Descartes here, who thought that experience could not be trusted.  However, to my knowledge no philosopher prior to him thought that our experience itself was so unreliable that its reliability had to be justified in such an extreme way.

But what’s wrong with making this move?  Why do I have to agree with Descartes and assume that the reliability of experience needs to be justified?  Why do I have to play Hume’s game in the first place?  Hume is right that somewhere along the line there are going to be brute facts, facts that are fundamental to any philosophical justification.   The fact remains that even if we never made inductions about future events or asserted some uniformity principle, each of us could cite countless instances of similarity between events we have witnessed, and those similarities demand an explanation.  Am I supposed to believe that the similarities are just a cosmic coincidence and that these similarities are just chance occurrences? 

I’ll heed Hume’s advice:  yes, there is a possibility that I am wrong.  Yes, he is right that not everything can be rationally demonstrated (Aristotle seemed to take this for granted).  But if his only advice is that I could be wrong on this particular point and that I should proceed with meticulous caution when doing philosophy, always questioning my conclusions, I can confidently say that I didn’t need Hume’s argument to tell me that. 

It’s hard to take Hume seriously when he says that we shouldn’t give up looking for a justification for conclusions of sense experience (and by extension, all other philosophical problems) just because an answer isn’t readily available or simply demonstrated, especially after he later states that books on metaphysics should be consigned to the flames.  Such philosophical curiosity has not been witnessed since the cave dwellers in Plato’s cave. 

The California Homeschooling Fiasco

I have been following the homeschooling fiascos in Germany for about a year now.  I have only been following the California homeschooling fiasco for the past month.  I think the scariest part of the whole thing is not the fact that it is happening (which is pretty frightening), but the fact that people in the comments section of that article that I linked to actually think that banning homeschooling is a good idea. 

 A few things to consider:

Many people commented one way or the other, universalizing their particular experience of homeschooled children.  Some commented about child x who was homeschooled and received a marvelous education; others commented about child y who was homeschooled and received an awful education.  Of course we can all point to particular children and demonstrate that no system of education is perfect.  Nevermind the fact that homeschooled children score significantly higher on standardized tests than their public school peers. 

Secondly, yes, there are some bad parents teaching their kids at home.  But there are also some bad parents who send their kids to public schools all day so that they can stay home and watch their ”soaps”.  So what?  All we have proven by this example is that there are bad parents in the world. 

Thirdly, I am told that homeschooling is essentially racist because it does not give homeschooled children exposure to other races of people.  However, this simply does not follow.  Everyone would agree that, morally speaking, the Union was right to wish to end slavery in the Civil War; and yet I’ll bet that they had seen fewer black people than people in the South had.  And yet, was it not the South–which had a greater exposure to blacks than the North–which enslaved blacks?  It just does not follow that a lack of exposure to different races will make you racist.  The key to eliminating racism is not primarily an exposure to other races.  A Klan member can be exposed to blacks all day long and not change his opinions about them.   Hence, good socialization is not sufficient to bring about an end to social problems, with racism being an example.  

However, we can also easily see that socialization is not necessary to end racism or other social problems, either.  Take for example a person who has never been exposed to black people, but a) has a good education that allows people to ponder the natural law and arrive at the conclusion that racism is not rationally tenable, and b) has a good, moral upbringing which teaches children the difference between right and wrong.  A person can have both of these things without ever being exposed to people of different races and still not be a racist.  All socialization in schools will do in this regard is perpetuate both the good and bad traits of our society:  children will learn to behave as their peers behave.  But since the education is lacking in the public schools by and large, those well-socialized kids will be unable to identify other social filth and disentangle themselves from it.   Socialization alone obviously did not do much to end racism in the South, after all.  Of course, all this “socialization” argument tells me is that this left-wing loonies are only in favor of multi-culturalism over assimilating everyone into a giant melting pot when it supports the position they defend.  I thought we wanted to give bilingual education in California so that these different cultures *wouldn’t* be assimilated?            

Fourthly, accreditation does not guarantee a quality education of any sort.  Nor, for that matter, does a lack of accreditation imply a lack of a good education.  If homeschooled children score higher on all of these tests (this despite the fact that the public schools give an undue emphasis on getting higher test scores), then the argument that teachers must be accredited is a non-starter.  Of course, this argument also fails to make the distinction between getting a good education and scoring well on tests.  I can tell you that many professionals in academia have received degrees and scored well on tests and have no idea of what they are talking about.  Public schools focus so much on testing that they fail to teach their children how to teach themselves.  While I have little experience with homeschooling myself, I have a hunch that mom does not sit down with her kids and lecture all day.  The kids probably have to learn how to learn on their own.  If this is the case, then they are at an advantage over their public school peers more than the test scores indicate.  If it isn’t the case, then all we have proven is that homeschoolers are just as bad in this regard as the public schools.  I say this because I don’t think one can get much worse than our public school system taken as a whole.

I’ve ranted on it before:  the Washington DC school district does not require that math be a graded course.  Kids can take algebra for all four years of high school and never have to learn it.  All of this talk about diversity of thought and eliminating the influence of religious fundamentalist parents is just a smoke screen for placing the government in charge of yet another aspect of people’s lives.  But of course, this little fact touches on the primary question:  is it the government’s job to systematically eliminate racism or any other moral or intellectual idea from among its people?  What if creation science were ever taught in schools with a government mandate?  How would people react then?

Perhaps the response would be that the goverment cannot dictate that schools teach what is false.  I would agree:  but by what secular standard are *ethical* questions to be judged true or false?  I’ll deal with that question in a separate post.  

Temptation in the Desert

One of my biggest temptations is to become cynical, although the temptation has not been as great as of late.  When people fail to meet our high expectations, there is a tendency to become cynical.   When a person tries to love with all his heart, and that love is rejected, the pain is tremendous.  I once heard it said that loving another person is like taking a part of yourself and giving it to another to do with it what they will.  When that love is betrayed, little else hurts more.  The tendency for seminarians is to enter seminary very excited; but once the honeymoon ends, they realize that seminarians are no holier than the general population, and they are just as capable of evil as anyone else.  Many guys stop trying to love as Christ asks because it is difficult to love something so ugly.

As I was flipping through my Bible this past Sunday, Luke chapter 4 caught my eye, and something struck me that hadn’t struck me before.  Jesus is tempted in the desert, and Luke says that the devil left him for a time (Matthew writes that the devil left him until an opportune time).  But I never noticed that the subsequent story is the one of Jesus being rejected by his friends and family at Nazareth.  The transition between the two passages is that Jesus left the desert filled with the power of the Spirit.  From there, he begins his public ministry.

Since we know Jesus is human, and we know He was tempted, it is a safe bet that He was tempted to despair or to become cynical.  After all, his first attempt at proclaiming the Gospel ended with a lynch mob.  Things didn’t get much better for Him after that:  people tried to kill him several more times, His message was rejected by many, and even His closest disciples did more things wrong than they did right. 

Jesus neither despaired nor became cynical.  Even as He recited psalm 22, on the cross, He was not despairing, but rather praising God (as the rest of the psalm indicates).  In fact, He never gave up on His disciples, exhorting them to love each other as He loves them, even though He knew how badly they would all fail Him the next day.  Although Jesus was probably tempted to despair and cynicism, He knew that there is no room for either of these things in a person who loves as God loves.  He forgave those who hurt Him, made excuses for those who crucified Him, and entrusted His Church to the same sinners who betrayed His trust.

While we travel through this Lenten desert towards Easter, may we love as Christ loves. 

The Semester is Over

Well, the semester is finally over.  It was probably the hardest semester of my academic life.  The Greek and Latin (which I’ll have to do again next semester) took up much of my time, as well as two philosophy classes.  However, the semester was great.  I love philosophy, so I didn’t mind the work load.  I passed my Latin comprehensives, which means that I won’t have to spend the ridiculous amount of time on it that I did this semester.  I also loved my Greek class, and the Chaucer class may have been my favorite non-philosophy class that I have taken in college.

Next semester will be just as difficult, despite taking fewer credit hours.  I have my first round of philosophy comps next semester, as well as the Greek and Latin duo.  I am taking a mathematical logic course for the heck of it, and I have Senior Seminar II with an excellent philosophy professor, and I am auditing Msgr. Wippel’s class on the Divine Nature in Thomas Aquinas.  But for the moment, I am not concerned about any of that, and I am merely enjoying the free time I have to re-read Plato’s Republic.

I was thinking about taking time off of this blog for the duration of Advent, but then I realized that if I did that I would hardly have any time to write at all, given the business of the next few months.  I consider it a way to relax after a grueling semester.  Several philosophical issues have been swirling through my head, and I’d like to take some time to work through some of them on paper.  So stay tuned.

Watch Something Else!

Have you ever found yourself complaining about how bad the culture has gotten–let’s use the example of some smutty television show– only to have someone say “if you don’t like such and such then don’t watch it!).  How does one go about responding to such a reply?

I think I found a possible answer from Geoffrey Chaucer.  In the Prologue to the Miller’s Tale, Chaucer warns that the content of the Miller’s Tale may be considered objectionable by some people.  He tells those people not to fear:  if they don’t want to be offended by this tale, he can “turne over the leef” to a different tale.  In other words, if you don’t like the material, then pick another tale.

Several stories later, Chaucer has the Wife of Bath explain how she became deaf in one ear.  Her fifth husband is a clerk (a university student), and in his spare moments before bed he would read aloud a book entitled, “The Book of Wikked Wyves” in which every story that ever depicted a wicked wife was contained.  The Wife of Bath listens to these stories, and she cannot stand them.  She complains that if women had the ability to write books, they would write books about all the wicked husbands throughout history.  But in this culture, women can neither read or write, and so the Wife of Bath has no choice but to listen to her husband’s stories every night.  She eventually becomes so frustrated that she rips three pages out of his book as he’s reading, and he strikes her in the ear, causing her to go deaf.

The Wife of Bath seems to have a point, probably the one of any lasting worth from her Prologue.  Sure:  if it is possible to turn the page and encounter a story we like better, then we should do it.  But what if all of the stories in the book are offensive?  What if it’s not possible to turn the page to a different story? 

Let’s say that I am driving down the highway, and I realize that I am hungry.  So I pull off the road and look for a place to eat.  I see a McDonald’s, but I decide to pass it up.  I once read a book called “Fast Food Nation” which pointed out some of the disgusting things that McDonald’s does to produce its beef.  Let’s say I’m also opposed to their chopping down the Rain Forest in order to create cheap grazing land for the cattle they slaughter for their beef.  If I ever complained about this type of thing to the owner of a McDonald’s, he might tell me to go somewhere else.  So I try to go somewhere else.  I see a Burger King, a Taco Bell, and several other chain restaurants.  Sure, I can “go somewhere else,” but are the options all that different? 

The same things goes for clothes:  how hard is it to find alternatives to the giant chains which use near-slave labor in awful working conditions to make their merchandise?  How easy is it to find a chain that doesn’t use such practices?  Or how about television, where now even shows on stations like “Fox Family” have numerous sexually explicit situations and shows?  Is it possible just to “turn the page” when no other pages are worthwhile?  Interestingly enough, the Canterbury Tales are the same way.  There may be a few good tales in them, but most of them are pretty promiscuous. 

Many Christians have reached the point where it is no longer possible to turn the page.  Where ever we look, we see something morally objectionable.  Therefore, if someone tells me that I should stop complaining whenever I see something objectionable, hear something offensive, etc, I will tell them that I did go somewhere else:  I came here after trying everywhere else.  Hence, if they don’t like my complaining, they can just go somewhere else.