Many have been posting songs lyrics today as a show of solidarity in support of bringing American troops home alive and sparing many Iraqi lives by ending the debacle that is the war in Iraq. Being as that I don't like to be left out, I too support an end to the military action, and, as of yet, I do not have a monkitty to play with, I have decided to join in and post not only lyrics to my all-time favorite war related song, but the song itself set to images from the HBO mini-series "Band of Brothers".

Anyway, enough of me talking. Let's get to the music.



The Gunner's Dream by Pink Floyd

Floating down, through the clouds,
memories come rushing up to meet me now,
in the space between the heavens
and in the corner of some foreign field
I had a dream...
I had a dream.

Goodbye Max.
Goodbye Ma.
After the service, when you're walking slowly to the car,
and the silver in her hair shines in the cold november air,
you hear the tolling bell
and touch the silk in your lapel,
and as the tear drops rise to meet the comfort of the band
you take her frail hand,
and hold on to the dream.

A place to stay.
Enough to eat.
Somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street.
Where you can speak out loud
about your doubts and fears
and what's more, no-one ever disappears,
you never hear their standard issue, kicking in your door.
You can relax, on both sides of the tracks,
and maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control,
and everyone has recourse to the law,
and no-one kills the children anymore...
and no-one kills the children anymore.

Night after night,
going round and round my brain,
his dream is driving me insane.
In the corner of some foreign field
the gunner sleeps tonight.
What's done is done.
We cannot just write off his final scene.
Take heed of the dream...
Take heed......

Today our caravan is going to take a little trip to the Problem of Evil. You will have to excuse me for the lack of humor in this post as I think my funny bone may have come spewing from one of various outlets during my recent stint as a partially digested oyster fountain. Anyway, being as that I can't think of anything humorous to say, on to the evil.

The Problem of Evil is, basically, the completely reasonable claim that to consider there to be an all-loving, all-powerful god who exists as the cause of the world as we know it, where evil not only exists but often flourishes, leads to a contradiction. All loving (at least as we use the term loving, which is actually the only way it can be used if we are to understand it) would require that the creator god desire that evil not exist and all powerful would require that the creator god had the ability to create an existence without evil. Therefor the existence of evil leads to the reasonable conclusion that this creator god does not exist. Its a simplified version of the argument, but plenty good enough for our purposes.

When confronted with this sound reasoning, most believers I know attempt to take the easiest road to avoid the contradiction and put forth the claim that evil does not actually exist, but that what we call evil is merely the lack of good. Let's start by examining this claim.

To say that evil does not exist but is merely the absence of good is completely arbitrary. It is, in fact, no better supported than to state that good does not exist but that it is merely the absence of evil. There is no basis to consider one as an actual existence that should not be extended to the other. Aside from this, to say that there is no such thing as evil leads us nowhere in our attempt to pardon a creator god from his responsibility for what we term evil acts.

The fact is, without evil, all acts are simply different degrees of good. Raping and murdering infants is good, just not as good as saving a kitten from a burning house (or saving a house from a burning kitten, depending). Without the existence of evil as a separate classification for acts, then what we term evil is more appropriately called less good. Because of this, when we lay out a scale of possible goods, what we find is that when we consider the rape and murder of one infant as compared to the rape and murder of a million, or the destruction of the entire human race, we see that infanticide is actually much closer to the ultimate good end of the scale than the least good end.

Now, to counter this undesirable circumstance one may try and draw a distinction by saying that what we term evils are acts that are not less good but acts that are devoid of good. Of course, this leaves us with the above mentioned infanticide being equivalent to taking a penny from someone's car ashtray without asking. Neither act can be defined as good so without the existence of evil on which to judge the scale of the act, and without being able to say that one is less good than the other, all acts that are not good are equally reprehensible. Thus the atrocities of Hitler are on equal footing with the cookie your child pilfered from the cookie jar.

Even beyond all this the problem does not go away simply because we re-word it to the 'Problem of Lesser Good' or the 'Problem of the Absence of Good'. The creator god would still be responsible for creating beings that commit such acts.

Due to these unavoidable circumstances, which are clearly counter to what we as human beings understand as the nature of good and evil, many of the more 'intellectual' of theists have abandoned such an absurd objection to the existence of evil and have instead focused their energies on trying to defend the position that evil is a necessity if man is to be freewilled. This objection to the Problem of Evil, however, is equally fraught with inconsistencies. To illustrate this let's first examine freewill, as it would necessarily exist in a god created universe, and see how free we actually are in such an existence.

With the Problem of Evil, freewill is the theists stronghold. When faced with the absurdity of the existence of atrocities such as rape and child abuse and genocide in a universe created by an all-loving, all-powerful creator god, the believer quickly seeks shelter behind the seemingly indestructible walls of the desirability of man being free to choose. However, the stronghold is in reality a house of straw and it takes nothing more than a weak breeze to bring it crashing to the ground.

To illustrate the problem with the evil is a necessity for freewill excuse I like to pretend I am driving down a highway (the sound effects I make as I'm doing this aren't crucial to the concept so vroooom or don't vroooom, its up to you)... Anyway...

Let's look at our existence as a highway. The road surface is our range of possible choices and our traveling down the road is our traveling through time. On this road there exists several lanes, these are the possible choices we can make at any moment in time. We can freely change from one lane to another, this is what we call freewill. But, this road does not exist in a vacuum. On either side of this road lay open fields, however, our access to these fields is restricted by walls. Though we can change lanes on the road, or make choices from a selection of possible choices over time, we can not leave the road, or choose beyond our narrow selection of possibilities. I, for instance, can not choose to flap my arms and fly to Mexico for a margarita at sunset. A mentally challenged person can not choose to be a genius. I can not choose to eat the Empire state building. In reality, when compared to the environment of possible choices I could make were my freewill unrestricted, the lanes of choices I can make within my restricted freewill are already severely limited.

What we can see from this highway analogy is that to appeal to the ability to choose evil as a necessity if we are to be freewilled is, again, completely arbitrary. I am restricted from doing a nearly infinite amount of things but that does not, according to the theist, impose on my freewill. Yet, to restrict me from doing just one more thing, let's say removing a lane on the highway that allows me to choose to harm another human being, they claim would destroy freewill. Obviously this freewill requirement is not a reality but a excuse created to allow for belief in an all-loving, all-powerful god despite the existence of evil.

In actuality, even if we were to allow that the existence of evil is necessary to give man a free choice (and that freewill could actually exist in a created universe (two huge allowances)) this still does not help the theist in their quest to remove god from responsibility for evil. The insurmountable problem for the theist is that even if the existence of evil is necessary to give man a free choice this does not mean that a creator god is not directly responsible for creating beings which will choose to do evil. Just because I have the free ability to choose to commit murder does not mean that by not committing murder I forfeit my freewill.

There are people in existence who, when faced with a choice between doing what is 'right' and doing what is 'wrong', will always try and do the 'right' thing. Let's take one such person named Sam and use him as an example.

No matter the circumstance Sam finds himself in he will always attempt to do what he thinks is the 'good' thing to do. This is not to say that Sam never makes a mistake, there is always the possibility that what he thinks to be good is not actually good (we will save the discussion about the actual existence of an objective good for another day), but his lack of absolute understanding is not his fault as that is the type of being he is (one that has incomplete understanding of existence, whether by creation or evolution). So even though Sam may make mistakes from time to time his decision is always to do good and therefor his actions, whether good or not, are performed with good intent. Now, since Sam never chooses to intentionally do evil, does this mean that Sam has no freewill? Of course not.

You see, even if freewill could exist in a god created universe and man had to have a choice between doing good and evil to exercise his freewill, there is no necessity in creating beings that will choose evil. By creating beings that will choose to do evil, this creator god is directly responsible for the evil that is done. There is no reason that a god responsible for all that exists would not have the power to create men, like Sam, who will only choose to do good even though they have the ability to choose to do evil. It is not a matter of removing the beings freewill, but simply a matter of only creating good beings.

But, some may protest, what is being overlooked is that the creator god did create man perfect in the being of Adam, but because of his freewill Adam choose to do evil and thus condemned all future men, as if this removes their god's responsibility. The flaw here is obvious. Adam could only make the choices god created him with the ability to make.

Look at it this way. Let's go to our god perspective again. Now, here we are about to create some little peach, or red, or brown, or yellow, or black, or tan (Mmmmm, a Black and Tan), or fluorescent, beings. Now, we have no criteria by which we must create these beings. We be being an all powerful being, so pretty much whatever we want to create we can create. What we have decided to create is a being called Adam who will be the pace-setter, if you will, for a bazzillion future beings. Being (how many times can I use this word in one paragraph?) as that we have no blueprint to follow in creating Adam, we can look at this creation process as our having the ability to select one Adam from an infinite (hypothetically) number of Adams (the principle is the same, if you can't follow the reasoning there just trust me, and don't use cutlery unsupervised). Now, can you imagine an Adam that would have chosen freely to not do evil? If so, then for you to create an Adam who will choose freely to eat the proverbial apple is no one's fault but your own. So, do the math. Who is to blame for the evil?

Well, that about does it for our journey into the problem of evil. It was a little longer than I'd planned and sadly, almost completely devoid of funny. Sorry about that. Hopefully I will find my sense of humor soon (though I imagine it will require a good washing) and this blog will return to its previous joviality. Until then, feel free to comment on your understanding of the existence of evil. Though I might have lost my funny, my argumentative is solidly intact (its made of titanium, you know).

I have spent much of the last four days testing my bad oyster ejection system, which, as far as I can tell, is working splendidly. Nary a bit of bad oyster, nor other matter which has come anywhere near bad oyster, or even been in a room where the term bad oyster was used, has managed to gain a foothold within my biological systems. I could go into more detail, but thankfully, I won't. I'll suffice to say that I'm thankful for my ears as they are the sole means of pressure adjustment by which I did not implode.

Being as that this testing took up all of my time, and much of my energy, and most of my desire to sit atop a camel (not to mention the camel's desire to have me sit atop it) instead of continuing our caravan today, I've decided to offer another bit of video. Hopefully, by tomorrow, or perhaps the following day, I will be back in the saddle and ready to continue on the caravan. Until then please take a moment to watch this brief video of Ann Druyan (a woman I would do just for the stimulating 'after doing' conversation) as she discusses the methodologies of science as compared to religion during a discussion period at Beyond Belief 2006.

I thought I would start offering video clips from a wonderfully educational program (which can be found in its entirety here) that consists of some twenty hours of discussion on religious belief and science. The clip I am posting today is of one of my favorite scientists (yes, I have favorite scientists, go ahead, tape the "kick me note" to my back) Neil DeGrasse Tyson looking at the idea of intelligent design from another perspective. I will continue posting clips from this program (probably one or two a week) between my other posts. If, however, you are like me and find this stuff endlessly fascinating and can not wait for me to post more segments, you can follow the link provided and watch the entire program in easily digestable one and a half to two hour segments.

Anyway, here goes. A little on 'intelligent' design from Dr. Tyson. Enjoy.

Once upon a time, round about noon-ish, on a caravan far, far away, a young man who we will call Vhe Tessel found himself separated from his caravanin' comrades and engulfed in the worst sandstorm that people in The Desert had ever seen. It was, in fact, so bad that on televisions across The Desert a CNN correspondent could be seen interviewing a tall thin heavily bearded Osama Bin Laden looking man, beneath a bright red banner reading "Sandstorm 2007; The Worst Ever Seen?" and above a scroll reading "Britney shaves eyebrows then enters anti-follicular re-hab", who stated that it was indeed the worst sandstorm he had ever seen, regardless of what he may have said during the interview he had given during Fox's coverage of "Sandstorm 2006; Operation Gritty". Anyway, as far as Vhe Tessel was concerned (which is really what this story should be focusing on, voice in my head) it sucked.

Vhe Tessel, being the caravan efficianado he did be, knew that if he was going to survive the storm he would need to find the others in his caravan so that they could group together, behind their combined camels, for protection from the tiny elements, or he could perhaps shelter in a diner or motel or strip club if he happened to find one of those first. Several time units of undecided length later, unable to find the caravan and beginning to realize that all the strip clubs he saw were mirages, and that he now had a willie full of cactus needles and was fourty dollars poorer (due to having purchased two lap dances), Vhe Tessel came to realize that he was going to die. With a sigh of resignation Vhe Tessel dismounted his camel, thanked it for its loyal service, resisting the urge to add, under his breath, "Even though this is kind of your fault", lay down on The Desert floor and closed his eyes to await sweet sweet death.

After spending a brief moment staring in disbelief and shaking his head, as he so often did, at the man who he had just witnessed ordering a drink from a coyote, the camel (or Jimmy as he was known to his camel friends), positioned himself between his apparently mentally challenged cargo and the wind driven onslaught of minuscule projectiles, shrugged his hump, and lay down, sheltering Vhe Tessel from the storm. The sudden lack of stingingness startled Vhe Tessel who opened his eyes to find himself staring directly into the tightly puckered business end of his dromedary compadre, safe from the sandy siege. Realizing that he was going to live to see another day, and possibly have a chance to find that cactus again, Vhe Tessel gazed at his savior's sphincter and thought to himself, "I've never seen anything so beautiful".

The end?

(As it turns out, Jimmy later filed a restraining order and had a humpectomy in an attempt to disguise himself as an gigantic and unusually homely llama for the purpose of escaping Vhe Tesel's new found admiration for his most private of orifices, but that was probably further than this story needed to go. Anyway...)

The moral of this poorly constructed and vastly confusing tale is, of course, "Any sphincter is good sphincter"... No, wait, that's "Any love is good love" which is a similar sentiment but neither really pertains to this story.

Okay, I remember where I was going with this now. The moral of this beautifully crafted soon to be classic tale is, of course, "Its all about perspective, homeboy". Well, maybe that is a stretch, but that was the intended moral. Maybe I should just get to the point of the post.

Perspectivism




The character in the story you just read came to see camel sphincters, or at the least one camel's sphincter, as beautiful because of viewing it from a new perspective. Truth, that camel sphincters are ugly, was altered by the perspective from which it was viewed. The beauty or ugliness of a camel's sphincter is, of course, wholly (holey?) subjective so the example does not really fit (I should ,uh, quit... writing these silly stories), all that well as an illustration of perspectivism, but it was entertaining. Anyway...

Before I continue I would like to state that I rarely read philosophy as it seems to me a better way of determining truth is to come to a philosophical understanding on one's own. After all, the tools of philosophical discovery are as readily available to each of us as they are to those who write on the subject. This is not to say that philosophy as a course of study is unimportant in understanding philosophical concepts, just that I find reading other's philosophical views, before giving serious thought to the subject on one's own, is likely to poison the well. Because of this what I refer to as perspectivism below may not exactly coincide with what, I have come to learn, Nietzsche termed perspectivism. I arrived at perspectivism, as I use the term, without knowing of Nietzsche's philosophy so any similarities, of which, after a little reading on the matter I have come to think there might be many, are strictly coincidental.

Perspectivism is actually a philosophy which basically states that truth is perspective reliant. This is to say that truth, whether or not it might exist in some realm as absolute, can only ever be known as it is known from the perspective from which it is viewed, and thus whether or not there is a non-perspective reliant absolute truth is unknowable and thus irrelevant.

The reason I thought I'd take a post to give a definition of perspectivism and discuss it a bit is because I use the term perspective in this blog quite often and will most likely continue to do so. I think it is very important to try and attempt to understand things from other perspectives in order to test the reliability of our knowledge of what is true. Of course, any attempt at viewing other perspectives is completely reliant on the perspective through which it is viewed (in our case the unique data processor that is the human mind, and a step further, each individual's mind), but this type of thought process where we attempt to don another's perspective can still be beneficial. Though we may have no reason to think it a completely accurate view of another's perspective, we can see how our understanding of what that perspective might be coincides with our understanding from our own perspective. There does exist, after all, the perspectives of other existences, some of to which we belong (the human race, lifeforms, earth inhabitants, universe inhabitants) that afford us the ability to have an understanding of how our unique perspective and other perspectives might be similar. So, though we must view other perspectives through our individual perspective, this does not leave us without any ability to understand or contemplate other perspectives.

Now, the perspective experiments we have done so far only superficially draw from this philosophy. They were more about viewing what we as humans would consider rational or reasonable in given situations. We can also use perspective experiments to view what we as humans consider objective reality or objective truths from a non-human perspective to try and see how they conform to what we experience. This is going to come up in future posts dealing with subjects like morality and causality and I thought now would be as good a time as any to explain the foundation from which I address these subjects.

Anyway, I'm out of time for today. I hope you have a better understanding of the philosophical perspective (that word is everywhere, if I don't watch out I'll end up discussing perspective reliant perspectives of perspective) from which I operate and that you enjoyed what I have just decided to call "The Ballad of Vhe Tessel and Jimmy" as well. Thanks for stopping by again and when you have the opportunity, leave me a comment to tell me how vehemently you disagree with me and what a dolt I am (from you perspective) or how much you agree with my every word (if your rubber room has internet access).

And, to Jimmy, I'm sorry, I will never do that again. Please come home.