More on Wittgenstein, the overrated Platonist

Via Massimo Pigliucci, I saw a new piece from a British magazine — it appears to be some sort of magazine of "ideas," but not philosophy-specific — about the overrated (yes, he's on my list of overrated philosophers) Ludwig Wittgenstein.

It reinforces my idea of a few years ago that part of Wittgenstein's problem is that he is a Platonist. Beyond that link, part of what "triggered" me into this was his work on Haus Wittgenstein. Click that link and Wittgenstein's fussiness seems to me to smack of Platonism.

It also seems to smack a small bit of bipolar disorder, and I wonder how much the two issues are connected. I do not think bipolar disorder causes a tendency toward Platonism in the philosophically minded, but, per genetics in general, might it be a "nudge" of some sort for those already leaning that way? I think so. I also think that the Haus Wittgenstein issues also hint at obsessive-compulsive disorder. On the psychology side, I think there probably some at-least tenuous ties between bipolar and OCD. On the philosophy side, as OCD is in part a quest for perfectionism, I certainly see how it would be a "nudge" for Platonist beliefs.

Now, beyond the non-philosophy issues?

First, look at the "early" Wittgenstein. Abstract logic, as in the Tractatus, is about as idealistic as you get. Imagine the consternation when he found "holes" in his system, and that he had no more shown an "end to philosophy" than Fukuyama had shown an "end to history."

Imagine even more, though I've never read about his reactions, what consternation he might have had when he read Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorums, then Alfred Tarski's expansions of them with his undefinability theorum. (I certainly would appreciate comment from anybody who knows what sort of reactions he had, if any that have been recorded.)

Imagine more yet, if the flood of late 20th century work in things such as multi-valued logic had hit a century earlier. Wittgenstein might have had yet another nervous breakdown.

Now, the "late" Wittgenstein. (It's a British mag, so it wouldn't pick up on this, but I think now of "early" versus, or allegedly versus, "late" Nixon.)

Note that the late Witty's work on linguistic analysis, to pick up his criticizing Moore's "hand" illustration, was ultimately about language in the abstract, not everyday linguistic claims. Again, that's ... Platonic.

It's also part of why modern linguistic philosophy has largely passed him by.

In addition, to also tie this back to the top link, rather than wanting to improve linguistic clarity and related issues, I think that, vis a vis his peers, he wanted to shut down discourse. He was trying to have an ordinary language end to philosophy, or at least to philosophy of the past.

More problems for reincarnationists

Stimulated by reading a book Michael Shermer wrote last year, I've identified two more explanatory problems for the people who tout reincarnation.

I'm talking primarily about those who tout traditional religion-based reincarnation, whether the personal soul version of much of Hinduism and Jainism, or the impersonal life force version of Buddhism.

I'm not talking about the New Ager distortionists who believe all their past lives were as the king, queen, or mighty warrior, because they're wrong even within the world of reincarnation.

Anyway, the actual reincarnation world of Hindus, Jains and Buddhists says you may come back not as the  king or queen, but as the peasant shoveling shit out of the king's stables, or, much more importantly for this, a dung beetle in that shit in the stable.

We have, a la ideas explored by and generated from Thomas Nagel's famous, or infamous, "What Is It Like to be a Bat," (text here) a mind-mapping problem. This is more a problem for the personal soul type of reincarnation; obviously, an impersonal life force doesn't have human personal soul characteristics. Whether early Buddhists thought of this as a way to explain, or explain away, this issue, I don't know.

Anyway, Nagel argued that we can't understand bat consciousness because of its subjectivity and its different sensory basis, and went from there.

Well, except for Hindus and Jains, many people, whether of professional biological bent or not, would have difficulty extending consciousness at all to a beetle. Plus, the difference between its sensory interactions with the world and ours is orders of magnitude different from the human-bat difference.

So, if karma is an iron law of rewards and punishments, beyond the well known difficulties with people (if we're all being reincarnated) not remembering past lives, how can it even be a punishment to be reincarnated as a beetle? How can the "beetle-self" feel punished? Since as far as we know, beetles don't have emotions, period, along with not having consciousness, how can they feel anything, as in feeling as emotional affect and not sensory input?

This has a flip side. If, especially if you're a Jain who takes consciousness of some sort down to what most of us would call inanimate objects, what if a, say, an ameba is being rewarded by getting promoted UP to being a beetle for being an incredible ethical and altruistic ameba?

Does that sound as silly to you reading it as it did to me, typing it?

That leads to what I see as the even larger problem. (Yep, the above is the lesser problem.) And this one hits the Buddhist types as well.

While Charles Darwin wasn't around 2,500 or more years ago, nonetheless, these ideas of reincarnation and the karma behind them seem based on a "progress" misunderstanding of evolution, and of biology in general.

Who says it's "worse"being a beetle than a shoveler of the king's shit or even the king? I suppose a "good Buddhist" might use this as a wedge to claim that the whole idea of karma is itself maybe maya, but in that case, he or she is already lighting the fuse on their own petard. From that, they're making themselves even more irrelevant to the discussion.

So, we move forward. Given that the planet would soon be run over with shit, if we had no dung beetles, whereas the world might be quite good had we no more Homo sapiens, if I were to engage a progress-based version of zoology, I'd argue the dung beetle is superior. (And, we haven't even talked about the myth of cockroaches surviving nuclear war.)

That's bad enough. Let's take it inside the human world.

Here, of course, the claim is that being the shoveler of the king's shit is worse than being the king.

Says who? Per the French Revolution, we could stand to get rid of yet more kings. Per the labor theory of value, the shoveler of the king's shit is more important whether the king is alive or shat mat.

In other words, karma and reincarnation, taken as a unit, are ultimately part of the classism of the Hindu caste system. And, as I see it, here, Buddhism talking about only an impersonal life force being reincarnated is still a Social Darwinist failure too. It still based karmic reincarnation cycles on the idea that some humans are, by group sociological observations, superior to others.

On the third hand, the British Raj intensified and codified the caste system, as part of the old divida et impera.

Benjamin Libet dethroned; what replaces him?

I had never before known what the backstory was of the Libet experiments, what inspired Benjamin Libet.

And now I do.

It would seem indeed, per the author of an interesting pieceat The Atlantic, that the decade-earlier German research, now understood better today, undermines Libet's experimental angle.

But also reinforces his philosophical scrivening.

Here’s the backstory:

 In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people’s brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists’ lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit. 

The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants’ brains that preceded each finger tap. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world—when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph—but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone’s brain actually initiating an action. 

The experiment’s results came in squiggly, dotted lines, a representation of changing brain waves. In the milliseconds leading up to the finger taps, the lines showed an almost undetectably faint uptick: a wave that rose for about a second, like a drumroll of firing neurons, then ended in an abrupt crash. This flurry of neuronal activity, which the scientists called the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential, was like a gift of infinitesimal time travel. For the first time, they could see the brain readying itself to create a voluntary movement.

Twenty years later, Libet used this to argue for what he then sought to show by his own experiments — that “we” act before any of “us” makes a conscious decision to act.

But Bahar Gholipour says Libet got it wrong, and wrong from the start:

The Bereitschaftspotential was never meant to get entangled in free-will debates. If anything, it was pursued to show that the brain has a will of sorts. The two German scientists who discovered it, a young neurologist named Hans Helmut Kornhuber and his doctoral student Lüder Deecke, had grown frustrated with their era’s scientific approach to the brain as a passive machine that merely produces thoughts and actions in response to the outside world. Over lunch in 1964, the pair decided that they would figure out how the brain works to spontaneously generate an action.

Well, there you go.

Problem was, this was 1964. MRIs, CAT scans, none of that existed. What’s an early neuroscientist to do? This:

They had a state-of-the-art computer to measure their participants’ brain waves, but it worked only after it detected a finger tap. So to collect data on what happened in the brain beforehand, the two researchers realized that they could record their participants’ brain activity separately on tape, then play the reels backwards into the computer. This inventive technique, dubbed “reverse-averaging,” revealed the Bereitschaftspotential. 

But, what did it mean? Gholipour said that was anybody’s guess. One possibility? 

Scientists explained the Bereitschaftspotential as the electrophysiological sign of planning and initiating an action. Baked into that idea was the implicit assumption that the Bereitschaftspotential causes that action. The assumption was so natural, in fact, no one second-guessed it—or tested it.

Enter Libet:

He repeated Kornhuber and Deecke’s experiment, but asked his participants to watch a clocklike apparatus so that they could remember the moment they made a decision. The results showed that while the Bereitschaftspotential started to rise about 500 milliseconds before the participants performed an action, they reported their decision to take that action only about 150 milliseconds beforehand. “The brain evidently ‘decides’ to initiate the act” before a person is even aware that decision has taken place, Libet concluded.

Argument has been fast and furious ever since. The original attack angle was to accuse Libet of mismeasurement, especially since 150 milliseconds is pretty thin slicing.

And, Libet has had his defenders, including to fair degree, yours truly. That said, I took the findings in other directions, namely that selfhood isn’t so unitary; I didn’t see this as a proof of “determinism” at all.

Anyway, more and more neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind have accepted that Libet got it all measured correctly. It was just the interpretation was wrong for many of them.

Move to 2010, as Gholipour does:

In 2010, Aaron Schurger had an epiphany. As a researcher at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris, Schurger studied fluctuations in neuronal activity, the churning hum in the brain that emerges from the spontaneous flickering of hundreds of thousands of interconnected neurons. This ongoing electrophysiological noise rises and falls in slow tides, like the surface of the ocean—or, for that matter, like anything that results from many moving parts. “Just about every natural phenomenon that I can think of behaves this way. For example, the stock market’s financial time series or the weather,” Schurger says.

“Static.” “Noise.” “Snow.” We all know this.

Surely that type of noise is random, though, and can’t be what Libet, or his German predecessors found, can it? Welll …

But it occurred to Schurger that if someone lined them up by their peaks (thunderstorms, market records) and reverse-averaged them in the manner of Kornhuber and Deecke’s innovative approach, the results’ visual representations would look like climbing trends (intensifying weather, rising stocks). There would be no purpose behind these apparent trends—no prior plan to cause a storm or bolster the market. Really, the pattern would simply reflect how various factors had happened to coincide. 

“I thought, Wait a minute,” Schurger says. If he applied the same method to the spontaneous brain noise he studied, what shape would he get?  “I looked at my screen, and I saw something that looked like the Bereitschaftspotential.” Perhaps, Schurger realized, the Bereitschaftspotential’s rising pattern wasn’t a mark of a brain’s brewing intention at all, but something much more circumstantial.

And from there, a new interpretation.

Two years later, Schurger and his colleagues Jacobo Sitt and Stanislas Dehaene proposed an explanation. Neuroscientists know that for people to make any type of decision, our neurons need to gather evidence for each option. The decision is reached when one group of neurons accumulates evidence past a certain threshold. Sometimes, this evidence comes from sensory information from the outside world: If you’re watching snow fall, your brain will weigh the number of falling snowflakes against the few caught in the wind, and quickly settle on the fact that the snow is moving downward. 

But Libet’s experiment, Schurger pointed out, provided its subjects with no such external cues. To decide when to tap their fingers, the participants simply acted whenever the moment struck them. Those spontaneous moments, Schurger reasoned, must have coincided with the haphazard ebb and flow of the participants’ brain activity. They would have been more likely to tap their fingers when their motor system happened to be closer to a threshold for movement initiation. 

This would not imply, as Libet had thought, that people’s brains “decide” to move their fingers before they know it. Hardly. Rather, it would mean that the noisy activity in people’s brains sometimes happens to tip the scale if there’s nothing else to base a choice on, saving us from endless indecision when faced with an arbitrary task. The Bereitschaftspotential would be the rising part of the brain fluctuations that tend to coincide with the decisions. This is a highly specific situation, not a general case for all, or even many, choices. 

Other recent studies support the idea of the Bereitschaftspotential as a symmetry-breaking signal.

Symmetry breaking. Like the weak nuclear force and certain particle symmetry being broken once cosmic inflation expanded enough, according to the “Standard Model”?

Why not?

It’s still possible that Schurger is wrong. Researchers broadly accept that he has deflated Libet’s model of Bereitschaftspotential, but the inferential nature of brain modeling leaves the door cracked for an entirely different explanation in the future.

So, I’ll expound my idea.

As I see it, this is similar to "virtual particles" popping up out of a "quantum foam," per an idea in quantum mechanics.

Put another way, this takes Dan Dennett's idea on how "subselves" pop up another step further, while also refuting part of it.

Those subselves, or specific actions by bigger ones of them, at least, aren't a matter of Darwinian competition. Rather, they're ultimately that mental substrate version of quantum foam.

Of course, I have long rejected Dennett's ideas that Darwinian-type evolution drives much of life outside of biological evolution. I have even more rejected the idea that algorithms are the driver. Quantum mechanics, when it comes to individual events, no matter what quantum interpretation one stakes one's life on, is not algorithmic. 

With Dennett, more than the greedy reductionism he decries in others but seems to practice all too much himself, often, I now think, it's lazy reductionism.

I've argued with Massimo Pigliucci about Libet before, as here. (Polite, not normal Internet arguing, but in the more professional sense, and we don't totally disagree on some things; in fact, we semi-agree on a fair amount of free will and volition ideas.) I could partially reconcile on Libet's interpretation of his experiments being wrong, but I've never fully bought into his interpretation in the first place. I've always interpreted them in the vein of subselves, and now, this new take on what Libet was actually finding only moves me more that way.

==

Update, Nov. 5: Bill Bryson, in his excellent new book "The Body," talks about the one-fifth second delay in optic nerve transmission speed and how the brain confabulates that to try to give a "real time" appearance of what we see. While there's no choice nor veto there, that confabulation also calls into account traditional ideas of free will, while also not at all supporting traditional ideas of determinism, either.

Conspiracy theories: the new Gnosticism

The psychology of conspiracy thinkers appears complex.

On the surface, it might seem simple. More and more social psychology research ties acceptance of conspiracy thinking to perceived loss of control over life.

But that itself can’t be the sum of it. Many people who lose a greater amount of control over life than they previously had do not buy into conspiracy thinking. For example, 95 percent of people who have strokes (very conservative estimate, surely more like 99.5 percent) don’t claim their stroke (if they even use that word) was caused by chemtrails.

Per the medieval Western Church pondering the mystery of salvation, “Cur alii, non alii”?

So, the psychology is more complex than “loss of control.”

But, acceptance of conspiracy theories is also about more than psychology. Trying to reduce the likelihood of acceptance of conspiracy theories to loss of control is like Orwell’s tale from India about the blind men describing an elephant. Even outside of that, limiting the discussion to psychology would be like men with severe astigmatism trying to describe it or something.

Movement skeptics or Skeptics™ folks might say that conspiracy thinking is anti-scientific. Well, partially true with anti-science conspiracy theories such as the chemtrails above or faked moon landings, but not even fully true there. And science, other than social sciences, isn’t involved at all with politics or history conspiracy theories.

But philosophy is.

Logic, basically classic informal logic and the classical logical fallacies, are obviously in play, even if Massimo Pigliucci says we should stop calling people on fallacies, even when they’re committing what would be considered classical fallacies by any disinterested observer.

But, other areas of philosophy are involved, too. One is epistemology. Another is philosophy of language, specifically on agreeing on language used to describe and to “frame” an event. And, in some cases, it and epistemology may overlap here.

Then there’s the role of the Internet.

The ramp-up of misinformation in general, and conspiracy thinking in particular, has been fueled by the Net in general and social media in particular. That's even more the case, I think, with disinformation, which is deliberate, per the distinctions the author has at the link. The question is, is this something desired by conspiracy theory promoters? Are a higher percentage of them, than of the general public, anarchists in some way? If so, which came first, believing conspiracy theories or anarchist tendencies?

And, is conspiracy thinking, or at least promotion of it, an addictive behavior inside the addictive behavior of being online in general and being online with devices and/or social media in particular? (There's ironies here. I'm including this in a blog post that could be just for "the machine," and the author wrote this piece which could also just be for "the machine.")

Beyond THAT, though, those theories still get no closer to the cur alii, non alii than we have been so far.

One author at Psychology Today postulates a second reason. (I’m taking understanding and certainly as ultimately a subset of control and thus nut a second reason.)

And that is the positive self-image angle.

David Ludden doesn’t use the word, but … I just thought of it.

Conspiracy theorists are Gnostics. They believe they have secret, esoteric knowledge. And that does help their self image.

Beyond that, the rise of the social media has made it much easier for people to self-sort. For instance, there’s several sub-conspiracy theories within the JFK assassination conspiracy theory world, as in, LBJ did it, or the Mob did it, or Castro did it, or the “deep state” did it, etc. Facebook groups, and probably even more, sub-Reddits, are among leading avenues for allowing these to grow.

Not to underestimate the power of the spoken word, and the ease of making videos now, YouTube is probably No. 3. Especially now that it’s becoming easy to fake videos.

Now, the parallelism with Gnosticism may not seem complete. For example, where is the difference between “adepts” and “learners” or “auditors”?

Well, with things like “closed” or “secret” Facebook groups, sub-Reddits, it’s right there. You may have to have demonstrated a certain amount of knowledge on “open” Facebook, Twitter, Reddit larger groups, etc., before you gain admission to one of these groups. And, since it’s a group run by a leader, you’re always at danger of expulsion.

The psycho-history angle also has parallels.

This, then, actually ties back to real live Gnosticism. Gnosticism arose in the late Hellenistic era, but took off when? Under the Roman Empire, certainly the most powerful nation state west of China both in external power and in internal control of its citizenry before modern times. And, east of its borderlands, the Parthians semi-organized, and then the Sassanids more organized, an empire of sorts of their own An America where, ostensibly democratic fronts, people worry about the big brother of big government, big business or both, is very real.

The loss of control ties with an attempt to regain control, even if the area of control has to be massively circumscribed.

That said, to the degree we do take knowledge and certainty itself as a third issue, that links back to philosophy, namely, epistemology.

That’s more insight, but still not total insight on the cur alii, non alii.

And Undark seems to have another piece of the puzzle, from neuroscience. 

People who understand much about our hominid ancestors know that they are believed to have had a penchant for two things: agency imputation and pattern detection. It’s also believed that the most evolutionarily successful hominids were those that overdid it to some degree, because the price of a false positive was far less than that of a false negative.

According to two researchers, one Dutch, one American, Elizabeth Preston says that conspiracy theorists are likely to have a high level of false positives on pattern detection. The Dutch researcher, with a Dutch colleague, adds that many conspiracy theorists may also imbibe in another early hominid issue: xenophobia toward outgroups. Given that issues like that are how more conservative people allegedly differ from more liberal people, per the Big Five personality scale (I think the claims are overblown), this could be seen as a partial additional explainer of some politically conservative conspiracy thinking.

Finally, per David Hume reminding us that the reason need always follow the passions, conspiracy theories are always emotionally driven. That's even more the case than with traditional motivated reasoning.

Science and greed, Morozov and Horgan,Brockman and Edge and ethical cold takes

The Edge Foundation is well known to science and philosophy fanbois and fangrrlz, including myself, with its big "annual question" that founder and proprietor John Brockman asks leading philosophers and scientists.

But, there's also a private version.

Evgeny Morozov calls it "an elaborate massage of the ego (and apparently much else) for the rich, the smart, and the powerful."

Turns out there's a horrible pun of sorts in that material in parentheses.

In the article, Morozov drops the reveal on just how much of a "FOJ" Brockman is. That would be as in "Friend of Jeffrey," with the Jeffrey being Jeffrey Epstein. And there's your horrible, and horribly true, in all likelihood, pun.

Brockman is also a heavy hitter in the book agency world for science authors. THAT now explains, I think, the Lawrence Krauss connection with Epstein.

Morozov explains:

Epstein participated in the Edge Foundation’s annual questions, and attended its “billionaires’ dinners.” Brockman may also be the reason why so many prominent academics—from Steven Pinker to Daniel Dennett—have found themselves answering awkward questions about their associations with Epstein; they are clients of Brockman. Marvin Minsky, the prominent MIT scientist who surfaced as one of Epstein’s island buddies? A client of Brockman’s. Joi Ito, the director of the elite research facility MIT Media Lab, who has recently acknowledged extensive ties to Epstein? Also, a client of Brockman’s.

So, Krauss, infamous for his own Epstein connections, was either an imperial playtoy at one of these dinners, a Brockman agency client, or both. (That "prominent academics" link makes clear Krauss was invited to one of the shindigs, if nothing else.)

So? Which is exactly where Morozov goes next:

Should we just write it off as natural collateral damage for someone with a network as extensive as Brockman’s?

And his answer to his rhetorical question is no:

In Brockman’s world, billionaires, scientists, artists, novelists, journalists, and musicians all blend together to produce enormous value — for each other and, of course, for Brockman. This mingling of clients doesn’t happen in other literary agencies, at least not to this extent. Nor does this happen at Brockman Inc., as all such interactions that we know of took place under the umbrella of the Edge Foundation, a sibling organization, with Brockman as its president. Would Brockman Inc. exist without the Edge Foundation? Possibly—and it did, at the outset. Would it be as powerful, trading on Brockman’s ability to rub shoulders with academics and billionaires alike? Probably not. Still, I can attest that Brockman’s authors face no pressure to get involved with Edge: I, for example, diligently responded to their annual questions between 2010 and 2013—and then stopped, as I was put off by Brockman’s insistence that people responding to the annual question should keep away from politics.

So ... Dennett, Pinker and many others, even if, unlike Krauss, they have never had anything besides their egos massaged, have been at least partial accomplices in having Brockman's ego massaged through silence. That's Morozov's take. 

He continues in that vein:

When the Epstein-Brockman connection first surfaced in the news, I wanted to give Brockman the benefit of the doubt. ... In the last few weeks, such a charitable interpretation has become very hard to sustain, especially as other details ... became public. John Brockman has not said a word publicly about his connection to Epstein since the latest scandal broke, preferring to maintain silence on the matter. That I have found quite infuriating.

Morozov then personalizes why he finds this infuriating. He said he got an email from Brockman in 2013, intended for somebody else. They had a back and forth and Morozov makes this observation, aided to some degree by hindsight, as he says that, years ago, he didn't know who Epstein was (born in Belarus, I have no doubt on that):

In that old email, it seems clear that Brockman was acting as Epstein’s PR man.

There you go. And, 2013 was after Epstein's original conviction, of course. He expands:

(N)ow that I’ve found that old email he sent me, I cannot believe that he knew absolutely nothing of Epstein’s wild sexual escapades—in fact, his email suggests he was trying to capitalize on them to recruit yet another useful idiot into Epstein’s network.

OK, that's that.

Morozov has decided to act.

I’m just one of the many authors in Brockman’s agency; my departure wouldn’t affect anything. I am also the last one to complain: His agency sold two of my books, and I have two more underway, also sold by them. 

Yet, I am ready to pull the plug on my association with Brockman’s agency—and would encourage other authors to consider doing the same—until and unless he clarifies the relationship between him, the Edge Foundation, and Epstein. If such an explanation is not forthcoming, many of us will have to decide whether we would like to be part of this odd intellectual club located on the dubious continuum between the seminar room and a sex-trafficking ring.

Sounds reasonable enough and straightforward enough.

So, after reading this, I Tweeted the link to two online friends of mine, philosopher and philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci, and science journalism professor John Horgan.

Let's just say I found Horgan's response "interesting":

Brockman ceased being my agent a decade ago, but I'm not going to speak ill of him. And Morozov is a rat jumping off a ship he thinks is sinking.

— John Horgan (@Horganism) August 22, 2019

I don't think I'm at "infuriating," but beyond the scare-quoted, not reference-quoted, "interesting," I find his response more than "interesting." 

That said, the Slate piece that Morozov links in my first pull-quote points up more of the Epstein problem. He has almost exclusively courted male scientists with his grant funding. That, in turn, beyond its relationship to sexual procurement, is a clear promotion of sexism in science. That may not be on Brockman, but even it kind of is, even if he didn't know about Epstein's hideous sexual abuse. That said, people whom Brockman invited to participate on the public version of The Edge were almost all men, too.

Beyond that, I thought the "great question" on the public version of The Edge often bordered on pretentiousness. Many of them recycled themselves.

It seems that John Brockman's greatest sales job has been selling himself.

Also, as I've said elsewhere about movement skepticism and atheism, science, especially when carried out to scientism, is no guarantor of moral (or well-rounded intellectual) superiority.

Luther vs Eck, 1519

I just got to thinking the other day that, with the 95 Theses (and legendary claims about them) two years ago, I probably "should" do some semi-regular blogging about 500th anniversary Luther events at least through the 1521 original date if not through 1530.

And I am reminded that his debate with Johann Eck, which really put him in the road map, happened in July 1519.

Wikipedia has a good basic overview of the Leipzig Debate. (Note: At one time, overall, in defense of critics, I would have rated Wiki a B-plus if not even an A-minus. Now, based in part on how many entries it lacks — and in the case of current affairs, seemingly refuses to add — it's a flat B.)

So, first, not quite a legend, but, close. Remember that Luther was not alone. Karlstadt actually went first, and was considered the heavier hitter. From a Lutheran POV, he was written out because of later bumbling and intransigence. But, given that much of that intransigence was actually simply being more "Reformed," why hasn't the Reformed tradition picked up on him at least a small bit more?

Eck did win one big point, that in essence is a ticking time bomb for Catholicism AND for any version of Protestantism that claims any sort of hierarchical power. If both popes AND councils can err, as Eck stated and Luther conceded, than how can any church claim any authority over any individual, or any individual's interpretation?

To put it another way, to Luther's own time and to pending future events, Luther vs. the Schwármer was hoist on his own petard by Johann Eck. Or Luther vs. Karlstadt, for that matter.

The bigger issue yet is that, other than calling on secular government to uphold his interpretation of the bible by military force, Luther never wrestled with that.

Eck? "Tradition" of the Holy Roman Church remained in place. This was also true, of course, in the Orthodox world. It remained true in the Church of England and, to a lesser degree, in the Wesleyan / Methodist world.

This same issue extends to the canon of Scripture. Luther claimed that Purgatory exists nowhere in the Bible. Praying for the dead, tis true is found only in 2 Maccabees, which Luther was soon enough to reject. That said Protestant grounds for rejecting deuterocanonical books are themselves unstable, as pre-Masoretic Texas Tanakhs didn't have Esther, among other things — as In addition, as Wiki notes, Hebrews clearly, and Paul seemingly, reference deuterocanonical works.

Here, as with his "epistle of straw" on James and his thinking that Revelation should also "come out," Luther was adopting an individualist stance, while expecting others to follow him. Had he looked at New Testament canons from some of the smaller churches in the Orthodox tradition, and their omitting it, he might have followed through on the impulse to declare Revelation non-canonical.

Of course, this reaches its acme in 19th century America. Short of proving fraud against Joseph Smith or Mary Baker Eddy (seemingly easy with the former, though), how can you say these aren't legitimate new revelations? It's like a "marketplace of ideas" for Christian religion, but Luther wanting a thumb on the scales.

However, baptisms for the dead — and without any condemnation of the practice — appears in 1 Corinthians. Yes, it's in the form of a rhetorical question, but Paul makes it look common — and acceptable. Luther, as was his wont elsewhere, seems to simply ignore this. (He later ignores that this might just undercut Lutheran and old Catholic ideas about baptism.)

And, in turn, this too sets a track for followers. Fundamentalists of today ignore the call to stone people to death for tattoos, to shun them or whatever for wearing wool-polyester blends on clothing and many other things. Luther himself and his catechisms of a decade later try to claim a separation in the Torah between moral, civil and ceremonial uses of the law.

In all of this, though Eric Metaxas is wrong in spades to make Luther into an anachronistic modern evangelical preacher, in some ways, contra horrified Lutherans, a thread is there.

Personal critical theology on Daniel 7-9

This is derived from answers to three Quora questions, separately on Daniel 7, 8, and 9, requested by a John Bonham. (No, I didn't meet him down at the levee.)

Just above every other answer to the Daniel 7 question, which I was directly asked by him, were Religious Right nutters, with the same variety of answers to the fourth empire. Rome. European Union. USSR. UN. Et cetera. There were a couple of non-Religious Right nutters more nutters yet. I am adapting that answer and combining it with the other two.

First, critical theology has Daniel written sometime shortly after 164 BCE. The increasing inaccuracy of his "prophecy" about the fate of Antiochus IV is a lead-pipe cinch on that. Fundamentalists often dodge that by saying it's not about him, hence we can't say it's right or wrong.

The ten horns? Likely a reference to the Seleucid dynasty. If one counts Alexander the Great and the unnumbered Antiochus, nephew of Antiochus IV and son of Seleucus IV, one gets to 10.

Other descriptors in visions in both chapters 7 and 8 make clear it's the Selucids. The seventy "sevens" in Chapter 9 make this even more clear.

Since it's the Selucids, and we have a "vaticinium ex eventu," or prophecy after the fact, we can thus date the approximate writing of the book.

Why four kingdoms here and only two in Chapter 8? Why is the one animal Media-Persia combined in Chapter 8, but Media is kingdom two and Persia kingdom three in Chapter 7?

Simple.

Daniel actually has a kind of complex compositional history. Chapters 2-7 are in Aramaic and chapters 1 and 8-12 are in Hebrew. Wikipedia's piece on Daniel has more. WHY this is that way is still a riddle in critical theology. But, it seems likely that the author was borrowing from older sources in spots and there was an editing and redacting process involved.

Now, Daniel 7.

As Daniel was written during the Maccabean Revolt, that’s what the end of Chapter 7 was about — Maccabean-leaning Jews throwing off the yoke of the Seleucids. Not all Palestinian Jews were anti-Hellenization. There were ardent Hellenophiles, and people with various middle grounds. Per Wikipedia, it must be remembered this was a civil war as much as a revolt. More on that here.

It wasn't a prophecy about an unknown Jew coming along about 200 years later to be a spiritual Messiah rather than a princely leader, just as Isaiah 7 was not about an unknown Jew being born 740 years later. Prophecy meant FORTHtelling first, foretelling second. And, it had to be relevant to the people at hand. (Isaiah 7 is actually predicting the birth of Hezekiah in a couple years from the time of speaking.)

Now, Daniel 8.

The language about the end of the time and rebels against this last king matches well with fighting the fourth beast in Chapter 7, another indication that beast is NOT Rome, let alone anything later.

Finally, Daniel 9.

I referenced this article from Infidels on Quora in my Chapter 7 answer. It talks a lot about the 70 "weeks" so I link it here. But, I don't totally agree with it on the weeks. Here's my take, which requires more depth.

The seventy “sevens” have traditionally been understood as seventy seven-year periods. So, when exactly do they start? What about the different subgroupings? This is an issue still of some debate in scholarship.

If one notes the 62 sevens in the first group are 434 years, that may help. Nebuchadnezzar first took some Judahites into captivity in 605 BCE. And, 434 years later, 171 BCE, is when Onias III as high priest is killed, and when Antiochus IV Epiphanes consolidates his reign as Seleucid emperor, killing his nephew, also Antiochus, after letting him rule as co-emperor since 175, and yet another clue that this book is about the Maccabean revolt and no, not about Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, the Papacy, the UN or anything else.

So, that’s how I see the 62 “sevens.”

Then, the one “seven” gets you to 164 BCE and the seeming success of the Maccabean Revolt with the death of Antiochus IV.

Now, the seven “sevens.”

Why they’re listed after the seven sevens, I’m not sure.

They don’t fit going backward from 605; nothing earthshaking happened in 654. They don’t make sense coming after the single 7.

One solution, given the chiastic structure of much of Daniel, is to take them as a period within the 62 sevens. The full Babylonian captivity starts in 586. From there, it’s approximately 49 years to Cyrus’ edict of return. Infidels disagrees with me somewhat on this part of the issue in particular.

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Now, should these be taken as literal weeks, first of all, rather than totally symbolic, since they're called 70 "sevens"? And how much does this connect to the historical accuracy or lack thereof of where Daniel makes historic statements, like "Darius the Mede"?

These are separate but intertwining issues.

First, on the overall historical accuracy of Daniel? It's not high, but why? Many people want to take him as just an idiot, kind of like Mark being an idiot about Syro-Phoenician geography and more. But others, noting the apocalyptic-mythopoeic nature of the book, say that Daniel "salted" some of his inaccuracies into the book to let readers know to read it semi-novelistically. The Infidels link has more.

I'm inclined to think these are more goofs rather than wink-wink nudge-nudge efforts. That said, Mark was writing about geography and just apparently didn't bother to get facts straight that were in his lifetime. The actual Shah Darius, that is, Darius the Great, vs "Darius the Mede," lived almost 350 years before Daniel was written. Even if parts of Daniel have an earlier core, none of it was likely written out before 300 BCE, still 200 years after the fact or more.

This issue interlinks partially with whether the "sevens" are symbolic or literal, and if literal, how accurate.

That said, re a commenter to my Daniel 9 post on Quora, EVERYBODY in the Biblical interpretation world not a fundamentalist or evangelical takes the single seven as literal, precisely because it fits the timetable of the Maccabean revolt.

So why not the 62 "sevens" and the seven "sevens"? Well, as I show, the 62 fit perfectly. Of course, when you recognize that, you have to say that the author of Daniel was apparently not a historical idiot after all.

One presumes that, just as kingly reign dates were kept, and are shown (albeit with some inaccuracies and some possible father-son dual reigns) in Kings and Chronicles, that a high priestly reign sheet would have been kept after the end of the monarchy. So, this wouldn't be that hard, and you say "Daniel" wasn't an idiot on all matters historical.

That still leaves the problem of that last seven "sevens." My answer is the best I can think of. Nobody claims Daniel was written 115 BCE, which would be required by placing them later — unless they're considered a stab at actual prophecy. The third alternative is taking them, and them only, as symbolic, a la a Jubilee cycle like in Leviticus.

Whether Daniel gets everything else historically correct or not, he portrays all his visions and all his folklore stories alike as being set within history. So, I think we need to take the 70 "sevens" that way and keep wrestling with the seven "sevens."

(Update: See LOTS more at this longform for just what Daniel, First Maccabees and to some extent Second Maccabees, presumably willfully and polemically, get wrong.)

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For people not regular readers of this blog, I have a graduate divinity degree from a top-rate seminary, not a fly-by-night bible college. I know biblical Hebrew, biblical and classical Greek, and ecclesiastical and classical Latin.

And, a couple of notes for the skeptic-minded of various types and the Religious Right.

First, others occupied today's Israel / Palestine / west side of the Fertile Crescent / south Syrian appendage before the first Israelites. Remember that in the context of Daniel, and First and Second Maccabees, being hortatory works and not history. More on that from me here, in my piece on the true meaning of Hanukkah.

Second, while Revelation feeds on Daniel's imagery, no, they're not writing about the same things. In fact, the core of Revelation is probably non-Christian.