So You Think You've Got All The Answers?

That was a silly and deliberately provocative question. How many are "all the answers," anyway? I don't think very many people really think they have "all" of "the answers." Someone mentioned people ceasing to look once they felt they had all the answers. Let me try to tweak that proposition a bit and make it more precise: people stop looking once they have all the answers THEY WANT, ON A CERTAIN SUBJECT. Theologians and academics declined to look through Galileo's telescope because Aristotle and Church doctrine had already told them that either they wouldn't see what Galileo said they would see, or that Galileo was a trickster. Some Christian apologists today find it convenient to believe that critics of Christianity are ignorant of history, and so they claim that these critics have erroneously spread tales of Galileo being held for years by Church authorities in horrible dungeons, instead of a much more comfortable house arrest. I myself had never spread any such tales of Galileo confined in any dungeon, had never heard such a thing until very recently when I came across apologists refuting such tales, which they alleged were widespread. Of course, one need not be religious in order to be tempted to find convenient answers and then stop looking: I would be comfortable believing that the apologists are just as ignorant as the critics they denounce, and that those ignorant critics and the tales of Galileo confined in dungeons are figments of the apologists' imaginations. But I do not know for certain that no atheists have spread such tales. (Although I am still waiting for a reference to such an utterance by an atheist.)

If one is more comfortable with propagating the worst possible opinion of the Bible than with understanding it, then one tends to stop investigating things once one hears that the Biblical authors all thought of the Earth as flat, and that the Christian assertion that Jesus' virgin birth fulfilled Old Testament prophecy relies on the misunderstanding of an Old Testament text which refers not to a virgin, but simply a young woman giving birth. One may not want to hear that the passages in the Old and New Testaments which they say describe a flat Earth do not look like descriptions of a flat Earth to every single scholar who's read the bile in Hebrew and Greek; likewise, one may be quite uninterested in the argument that in many languages, one and the same term can mean either "young woman" or "virgin." In English, for example, there's the term "maiden."

I have to constantly remind myself that in such discussions, the overriding concern of very many disputants is actually not history or science or etymology at all, although those subjects may be the ostensible object of debate at a given moment. Rather, very often both the apologists and the atheists are concerned with theology, and not much else.

Well, I'm not concerned with theology, in the sense of wanting to debate theological subjects. As I've said before, I believe that debate was over long ago and the theologians lost. More than a few times some of my fellow atheists have mistaken me for a Bible-thumping Christian because I don't toe the entire party line: I'm not certain that the authors of the Bible believed the Earth was flat, I think that Isaiah probably was prophesying that a virgin would give birth to a savior, I'm absolutely certain that very few of the leading Christian scholars from late antiquity to the present believed that the Earth was flat. Such etymological and historical considerations do not shake my atheism in the slightest. I sometimes wonder whether some of those other atheists are quite shaky in their rejection of religious faith. Why else would they insist on bolstering their case for atheism with so many premature conclusions and flat-out mistakes? (Not to mention the very obvious consideration of how much such mistakes can weaken their case in the eyes of anyone who doesn't already agree with them.) They give the impression of being afraid of learning more about the history of religion, of considering information from outside of their (at best) half-educated echo chamber of approved sources.

Come to think of it, they resemble believers in some significant ways to me. Okay -- I hate to admit it, but some atheists really do resemble fundamentalists in the way in which they investigate things and process information. I hate to admit it because I really despise most of the people, mush-minded smirks with legs they are, and influential obstacles to learning and common sense, who use phrases like "fundamentalist atheists" most often, and of course because I object to the phrase being applied to me.

Of course, some Christian apologists are going to triumphantly point to my refusal to even debate the existence of God, and say that I am violating my own principal of not ceasing to investigate things once I've found an answer which I find convenient. They may be very impressed with themselves for making this point, but I will not be impressed until they've produced a convincing case that, say, Jesus' resurrection deserves more serious consideration and investigation and debate as a possible historical event than, say, the effect of disputes between Zeus and Hera on the course of the Trojan War, or the metallurgical composition of Thor's hammer. And of course pigs will be flying long before then. Not every silly proposition deserves serious debate.

Newton, Leibniz, Wolff, Mathematics, Leibniz' Reputation and Epistemology

I often think about epistemological subjects: What do we know? What can we know? Why do we think we know what we think we know? In particular, I wonder why some people seem so sure that they know the thoughts, feelings and motivations of others, without believing in telepathy, the notion of which I also reject, pending much stronger evidence than anything I've seen so far. I think about this when I hear about jury verdicts being overturned by things like DNA evidence. I think about it when I hear scientists talking about Newtonhaving invented calculus, and rarely mentioning Leibniz,who claimed that he had invented calculus independently of Newton. During his lifetime and since, this claim of Leibniz' has often been called a lie.

In this earlier Wrong Monkey post, as I waited for this volume of letters between Leibniz and Wolffto arrive from Amazon, I speculated on Christian von Wolff'spossible role in the decline of Latin as an academic vernacular. When the book arrived and I read its introduction by C.I. Gerhardt, it became plain that Gerhardt blamed Wolff for damaging Leibniz' reputation. Indeed, it seems Gerhardt may have gathered these particular letters and published this book for no other reason than to expose Wolff's bad behavior and rehabilitate Leibniz' reputation -- his unjustly tarnished reputation, in Gerhardt's opinion. It is Gerhardt's thesis that Wolff, early in his academic career, was weak in mathematics, too weak to justify the academic positions in mathematics and philosophy which he occupied, and that he basically used Leibniz during this period as an unpaid math tutor, and that after Leibniz' death he claimed many of Leibniz' mathematical achievements as his own and downplayed the help he had received from Leibniz. Gerhardt maintains that this misrepresentation of the facts not only helped Wolff acquire and hold academic posts for which he was gravely underqualified, but that it also gave ammunition to those who maintained that Newton alone had invented calculus and that Leibniz had been lying when he claimed otherwise. Gerhardt maintains that the letters between Wolff and Leibniz which he presents on this volume clearly demonstrate all of this.

Do they? I don't know, in large part because my knowledge of math is not extensive enough to allow me to follow all of the math contained in the letters written in Latin bewteen Wolff and Leibniz and collected in Gerhardt's book. My knowledge of math would've been nowhere near cutting-edge 300 years ago when those letters were new, much less is it cutting-edge now, when all these world-class mathematicians and physicists seem quite dismissive of any notion that anyone but Newton had any part in inventing calculus. Then again, those physicists and mathematicians have almost all been American or British. I haven't heard any present-day German experts weigh in on the Newton-Leibniz controversy. And Gerhardt, who published his volume in 1860 with a thesis of Leibniz having been wronged, by Wolff and also by those who praised Newton at his expense, was German. National sentiments were and are widespread, pervasive and often subtle, much more widespread than the obvious hatreds of extremists fringes. And Newton seems to me to have been the sort apt to fight a bitter feud with or without significant cause, like the one he fought against Leibniz until Leibniz died in 1716, and Leibniz seems like the sort who would not feud without cause, who would be reluctant to fight even with cause, and who would cheerfully admit it when and if some laurels had been bestowed upon him which he had not earned.

But how on Earth do I think I know so much about Newton's and Leibniz' personalities and motivations and about their respective characters? Could it not well be that I am predisposed to like Leibniz and dislike Newton because of some other things each of them wrote which have nothing to do with calculus, so that in this quarrel I am judging Newton too harshly and Leibniz too well? Could it not well be that I too am much too hasty to think that I know this or that? that for instance I am completely unjustified in claiming that national sentiment may have tipped the scales in favor of Newton in the judgment of all those expert mathematicians and physicists?

It could be. Of course I still think I'm right and that I am unusually free of prejudice and unusually attuned to the prejudices of others. But I know I haven't proven anything of the sort. I don't think this essay will change many minds about Newton or Leibniz, or Wolff, or Gerhardt, or math in general. But perhaps it will persuade some readers to ponder more often the nature of things like knowledge and certainty. I think that would be a good thing, although I don't think I can prove that either.