Trends Change, Truth Changes

Kenda Creasy Dean, author of Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church, recently appeared on Mars Hill Audio Journal and gave a great insight into our culture. I paraphrase:

Our consumer culture breeds attitudes of low commitment. This is because the consumer fix is a quick fix. When it runs out we go get something else.

Could this be why so many of our churches are revolving doors? What's even more alarming is when the gospel is packaged in the cheap gleam of top-ten lists, movie clips, trendy beats, and lousy drama. Whatever happened to the "permanent things:" preaching, sacraments, confessions, creeds, psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs? David Wells once quipped, "What you win them with, is what you win them to." Trends change but truth changes.

Thinking About Our Thoughts: The Mind-Brain Distinction

I've lately been reading James LeFanu's Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves. LeFanu is a British medical doctor and science journalist who doesn't buy the materialist line that we are merely biological machines programmed by our genes and running on chemical reactions in the brain. My college philosophy professor argued that the mind is an allusion. The brain is all. Thought is nothing more than biochemical reactions in the brain. He pointed out that scientists can see the brain lighting up as they process information from the sense. I was stumped or should I say my chemical reactions were curbed.

LeFanu points our that we don't experience the world like a machine, but as a self. We don't just process sense impressions, but we tell ourselves what to think and how to think. This is how we "take every thought captive" (2 Cor, 10:5) and overcome disorders like OCD. The brain doesn't work like a computer storing information and pulling it up out of digital files.

The brain constructs the world we experience from neurons bombarding our senses. That world of color, sound, smell, taste, and touch comes from the impact of colorless, mute, odorless, tasteless, and intangible neurons. Our brains translate the interaction into a lively world for the self to navigate. The self presides over all this by giving attention to certain impressions, thinking about them, and then "presumably" storing those thoughts somewhere in the brain.

Using brain scans, cognitive scientists have show that the brain memorizes in one part but recalls that memory from another part. So where was the memory stored and how can it be conjured up decades later from a part of the brain that was not lighting up during the act of memory creation? This has baffled researchers.

There is a qualitative difference between computation and consciousness. Ever increasing levels of programming and computation by ludicrous speed computers will only ever be able to simulate consciousness.

The optic nerve doesn't simply photograph an image from the outside world but creates the images of  world outside. Lefanu says, "The brain perceives the world 'out there' by fragmenting the visual image into thirty separate specialized 'maps' scattered throughout the visual cortex ... arranged in a hierarchy of fourteen different levels" (202-03). One map might clarify what it is, say a cat, by noting its color, shape, and size. Another map might tell where it is located, say in a tree. If the cat is moving, say from the limb above to the earth below, the brain has to repeat this process moment by moment. Since the cat is never the same as it twists through the air in order to land on its feet, the brain must continually be able to categorize it as a cat.

"Attributes such as form, colour, and movement" are "handled by separate structures of the brain" but how is it all assembled into the same image and categorized by the brain? One scientist says, "It obviously must be assembled, but where and how, we have no idea" (206). It must also associate the images of the cat with mewing or in this case screeching received by the auditory nerve. It seems the brain is hardwired to know the world. It must "be born with an innate knowledge of how the world works." It seems that Descartes was correct about us being born with innate ideas. The linguist Noam Chomsky asserted that children must be born with a "'language acquisition device', ... by which they could make sense of the babble of sounds around them" (189).

It turns out that the brain has billions of neurons and creates trillions of synapses and can do upwards of a quadrillion computations per second. We don't just have the equivalent of one supercomputer in our heads that will soon be surpassed in our cyborg future. Charles Jonscher, a computer scientist from Harvard says, "The true comparison would be a figure more like twenty billion computers" (187). Daniel Levitin, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music, has speculated that there are more states of mind possible than there are atoms in the known universe.

All this begs the question of how we know that the rich experience of the outside world of cats and trees and mountains and oceans is true. If it is subjectively created by the brain from interactions with subatomic particles, then how do we know it is a reliable representation of the objective world outside ourselves. How can we trust our senses? How can we believe our eyes and ears?

Lefanu doesn't go there, but the only basis for confidence in the senses is the Christian doctrine of creation. Our senses can reliably know the world we experience, if and only if they were created to know that world by a loving creator who made both to correspond. I suppose that one could say that we know it is true because it is successful. But that begs the question of why we would find success between two separately evolving systems? G. K. Chesterton wrote:

Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young skeptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old skeptic, the complete skeptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." There is a thought that stops thought (Orthodoxy, Chap. 3).

Materialism is self-defeating and cannot explain something as basic as self consciousness. The mind cannot be reduced to the brain without calling self consciousness an illusion. A brain thinks but the mind tells it how. With all of our intelligent design capabilities we can only mimic the self with our "artificial" intelligences. Even if we could create self-conscious beings like ourselves would it disprove intelligent design? Not unless we are sub-intelligent.

How the Pioneers Felt

My wife found one of the funniest things I've heard in awhile on Facebook. It was the status of one of friends Ruth Akers.

My cable is out so I can't watch TV on the big screen and I'm forced to use my iPhone as a tether to watch Netflix on my iPad. 

Now I know how the pioneers felt. 

This strikes us as funny because we think we have it hard sometimes. But when we compare our place in history to any other place in history, we realize that we have comforts and capabilities that nobody could've imagined fifty years ago. I only pray that we will use them wisely, even when the cable goes out.

Plot and Character

Poetics by Aristotle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Aristotle says that the exercise of any capacity brings pleasure. He defines poetry as language made pleasurable in verse form. Aristotle distinguishes the poetic genres of epic poetry (like Homer's Illiad and Odyssey) and tragedy (like the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles) and comedy (like the plays of Aristophanes). Aristotle only mentions lyric poetry, which is what we normally think of as poetry (like a sonnet). When Aristotle is talking about poetics, we should think of stories in verse form like Shakespeare's plays.

Aristotle explains that we enjoy poetics because of their imitation (mimesis) of reality. Thus Aristotle doesn't believe that our enjoyment of good poetry is purely subjective or only a matter of taste. The better the imitation of reality and the more pleasurable the language, the more our enjoyment will increase. I suppose that the subjective element is our own version of reality, which dictates whether we agree with the author's vision of reality. While Aristotle might have conceded this, he focuses on standards for imitation and pleasurable language.

Comedy is "an imitation of inferior people.... The laughable is an error or disgrace that does not involve pain or destruction" (3.4). When we laugh we recognize something ridiculous in others. Hopefully we can do this when we recognize our own silliness, but Aristotle doesn't "go there." Epic poetry, on the other hand, "is an imitation in verse of admirable people," like the hero Odysseus. "Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude ... effecting through pity and fear the purification (katharsis) of such emotion" (4.1). Thus we come to one of the main differences between Aristotle and Plato.

Plato criticized the poets in Book Ten of Republic, because he considered their work a mere representation of reality, which also stirred up the emotions. Plato considered reason the highest human faculty, whose job it was to tame the passions of the heart and discipline the appetites of the body. Thus poets were guilty of creating escapist fiction. Conversely, in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote:

For example, fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity and in general pleasure and distress can be experienced in greater or lesser degree, and in both cases wrongly. To feel them at the right time, in response to the right things, with regard to the right people, for the right reason and in the right way--that is the mean and optimum, which is the characteristic of virtue (1106b.18-23; cited in Introduction xxxviii).

According to Aristotle, the emotions weren't necessarily inferior to reason. They merely needed to be exercised and trained, just like reason. This happened during katharsis or "purification" by experiencing emotion through tragic stories. Thus if tragedies could release and train the emotions in a positive way, we need quality stories with good plots. A good plot imitates reality accurately and presents characters that we can recognize.

A defective plot was one in which "the sequence of episodes is neither necessary nor probable.... they draw out the plot beyond its potential" (5.6). We tend not to love books or movies whose plots or actions are not believable or inaccurate. But we must also take into account the genre of the story. We wouldn't expect the driver in "Driving Miss Daisy" to suddenly put on a wizard's hat and wave a staff to avoid a car accident, but such actions in a fantasy story would not be unrealistic.

Good plots, for Aristotle, create astonishment through reversal, recognition, and suffering. Aristotle cites Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex," as an example. At the end of the play, when understanding dawns and the great king falls, the reader is amazed. A modern example would be the movie "The Sixth Sense," in which a reversal occurs at the end of the action. We then “recognize” what’s really going on and are surprised to find that we have been watching the movie the wrong way from the beginning.

The goal of character is goodness, appropriateness, likeness, and consistency. This means that characters, once established, must not act out of character. Concerning goodness, Aristotle says, "The character is good if the choice is good" (8.1). In the movie “Shadowlands,” the following words are put into the mouth of C. S. Lewis: "Aristotle’s solution was simple and radical, plot is character. Forget psychology; forget the insides of men’s heads. Judge them by their actions." This insight into Aristotle is in sharp contrast to our post-modern movies, which often try to reconstruct villains by creating sympathy for them.

From a Christian point of view, sympathy for a bad character is sinister, unless it creates a desire to redeem the bad character. This happens in Lord of the Rings with Gollum, when we are given a peek into his background. As Frodo begins the "taming of Smeagol [Gollum]," we begin to feel pity for him Gollum and hope that he can change. There are examples in the Bible like Jacob's brothers, but the norm in Scripture is bad guys are bad guys, and they will be judged by their actions. God will call us all to account, and good plots do the same, rather than making excuses for badness or trying to create sympathy toward sin.

Also contrary to Hollywood is Aristotle's dictum "no unnecessary badness" (8.1). The gratuitous, the explicit, and the shocking pass for realism today instead of the true, the good, and the beautiful. There are endless examples of this in recent movies and books. Aristotle provides some from the ancient world, and they are quite tame in comparison to our own. An example of a terrible villain who isn't “unnecessarily badæ is Kevin Bacon's character in "The River Wild." I think he says about two cuss words in the whole movie and there is little to no sexual innuendo. Oh, to read and watch without feeling the need afterwards to take a bath!

Aristotle also discusses poetic style:

The most important quality in diction is clarity, provided there is no loss of dignity. The clearest diction is that based on current words; but that lacks dignity. By contrast, diction is distinguished and out of the ordinary when it makes use of exotic expressions -- by which I mean non-standard words, metaphors, lengthening, and anything contrary to current usage.... So what is needed is some kind of mixture of these two things: one of them will make the diction out of the ordinary and avoid a loss of dignity ... while current usage will contribute clarity (9.4).

Aristotle gives plenty of examples to illustrate his points and Homer is praised beyond the rest as "he excels everyone in diction and reasoning" (10.2). Constructing quality plots is not easy but Aristotle advises: "nature itself teaches people to choose what is appropriate to it" (10.3). Nature, not artifice, is the standard for Aristotle.

Aristotle also addressed strict imitation vs. poetic license: "Impossibilities should be referred to poetic effect, or idealization of the truth, or opinion. With regard to poetic effect, a plausible impossibility is preferable to what is implausible but possible.... It is probable that improbable things will happen" (11.3). When we think of or experience an improbability, we might have the basis for an interesting plot. I'm afraid that many moviemakers today start with special effects they want to create, and a screenplay is concocted artificially to present it. A return to Aristotle would mean a much needed return to plot and character.

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What We Should Already Know

G. K. Chesterton wrote:

The cinema boasts of being a substitute for the tavern, but I think it a very bad substitute. I think so quite apart from the question of fermented liquor. Nobody enjoys cinema more than I, but to enjoy them a man has only to look and not even to listen and in a tavern he has to talk. Occasionally, I admit, he has to fight; but he never need move at the movies (What I Saw in America, 102).

Current research supports the common sense notion that reading, learning languages, and social interaction improves memory function and prevents cognitive decline. It also shows that watching TV reduces memory function and contributes to decline in both the young and old ("Maintaing Your Mental Edge," Lecture 29 in "Lifelong Health: Achieving Optimum Well-Being at Any Age," The Great Courses [The Teaching Company, 2010]).

Why don't we make common sense a little more common? Then perhaps we won't spend millions funding research to demonstrate what we should already know. We can knock off early and go to the tavern. Maybe instead of a fist fight, a verbal brawl, in Christian love of course, might do us some good. Even taking in the occasional movie might prove a good field for battle.