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Orthodox After the Way they Call Heresy

“When the word ‘orthodoxy’ is used here it means the Apostles’ Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself a Christian until a very short time ago, and the general historical conduct of those who held such a creed.”

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1909)

“But this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets.”

Acts 24:14.

Readers have from time to time complained that it is false advertising for me to publish my posts at a website that calls itself the Orthosphere.  What these lovers of the tried-and-true hope to find in the gaudy bazaar of the internet I cannot say, but I readily confess that some of my posts may surprise a reader who infers too much from the name Orthosphere.  And some  of my posts will certainly shock a reader who equates the word orthodoxy with one definite system of eternal truth.

As I have written more than once, I was not one of the happy band who founded the Orthosphere fourteen years ago, but I understand that the name was proposed by Bruce Charlton as a means to advertise the fact that the Orthosphere was a group blog (hence “sphere”) that combined writers who were in some sense traditional (hence the “ortho”).  The tradition from which this group wrote was, very broadly. orthodox Christianity, but it was always a latitudinarian orthodoxy and by no means exclusively the orthodoxy of Rome.

“Latitudinarian orthodoxy” may strike you as an oxymoron, but there are equally serious problems with a strict definition of orthodoxy as one particular and eternal truth.  In my first epigraph, Chesterton defines orthodoxy as the creed and conduct of “everybody calling himself a Christian until a very short time ago,” and thereby owns the paradox that the men he calls “orthodox” had become heretics with respect to the authorized truth, the conventional wisdom, the respectable morality of Chesterton’s age..

They had in fact become heretics in opposition to the teaching authorities that by 1900 ruled the public mind.

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Many Truths are Fictional

“Truth is that kind of error without which a certain species of living being cannot exist.  The value for Life is ultimately decisive.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1901)*

“‘What is history,’ said Napoleon, ‘but a fiction agreed upon.’”

James Anthony Froude, “The Science of History” (1864)**

We are told that God accosted Moses with the emphatic declaration, “I AM.”  We may infer from this salutation that God lays great weight on the importance of his being.  God did not, for instance, anticipate Descartes and introduce himself to Moses by saying, “I think” (and therefore am).

He instead effectively reversed Descartes formula and said, “I AM” (and therefore think).

A similar reversal should be made when speaking of a member of our species, assuming we are indeed made, as we are told, in the image of God.  Existence is our independent variable, or as the old Romans said, our sine qua non.  Many men exist without thinking, but history furnishes no instance of a man who thought yet did not exist.

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An Epitome of Scientism

From the introduction by Father William Lockhart, RI, to his English translation of A Short Sketch of Modern Philosophies & of His Own System, by Father Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, RI:

Now the preliminary difficulty in understanding the Rosminian philosophy is that it goes deeper than what are popularly assumed to be the first principles of human thought. It undertakes to account for ideas. But to many people it has never occurred that there is any difficulty in this matter requiring explanation. They have been used to assume with Locke and others, more or less of the same school, that the formation of ideas is so simple that it does not require to be accounted for. It is assumed to be a simple fact like sensation. They say, “We have sensations, and we have ideas; the sensations come first, and they are transformed into ideas by the faculty of reflection.”

Those who talk thus are not aware that between sensations and ideas they have jumped a gulph which is not less than infinite!

This mental condition reminds me of a conversation once overheard in a railway carriage between two countrymen. “John,” said the one, “how about this railway telegraph; how do they send messages by it?” “Oh,” said the other, “it is very simple. You see them wires along the line? They runs from Lunnon to York. They are fastened to a thing at each end with a dial plate and hands to it like a clock, with letters all round, and when they turns the hands in Lunnon this ‘n and that ‘n, the hands in York goes that ‘n and this ‘n.” “Ah,” said the other, “it seems very simple when you have it explained.”

Dormitive virtue alert! “Sensations come first, and they are transformed into ideas by the faculty of reflection;” this of course is no more than a way of saying that sensations are transformed into ideas by the faculty that transforms sensations into ideas.

Chuckling at that story of Lockhart’s, I remembered a similar tale of two rural Hoosiers of Norwegian extraction, learnt in my childhood.

Ole says, “Hey Sven, what do you think is the greatest human invention?” “Well, Ole,” says Sven, “That’s a hard question to answer. There’s fire, of course, if that counts, and the wheel; and then also the aeroplane, of course, and the telephone, and now the television. But I think it must be the Thermos bottle.” Astonished, Ole replied, “The Thermos bottle! How do you figure?” Says Sven, “Well, Ole, just think about it. The Thermos bottle keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold.” Ole answered, “Yah, so what?” Patiently, as if to a slow child, Sven settled it: “Well, Ole, here’s the thing: how do it know?”

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The Son of the Bondswoman Shall Not be Heir with the Son of the Freewoman

“Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman.”

Galatians 4: 30

Commenter C. A. Peterson cautions me to eschew “replacement theology,” which is essentially the doctrine that the Christian Church has replaced Jews in God’s providential plan.  The inheritance of father Abraham has passed to his heirs “in spirit and truth,” and not to his heirs in the flesh, be they spurious or real.  I will not here wrangle with C. A. Peterson or plunge into the briar patch of Old Testament prophesy, since I do not wish make an enemy the former or to let the later drive me mad.

Old Testament prophesies have for me only historical interest because, where not superseded, I presume they are adequately summarized in the life, teaching and living spirit of Christ.  I do not understand those who scour the Old Testament for scraps that Christ somehow failed to epitomize.  I am, to state the matter briefly, in the whole-hog Church of St. Paul and not the half-way Church of St. James.

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Our Apocalypse (viz. Revelation) of the Tribes

“The concept of the Chosen People is a symptom of national narcissism . . . . Every people, in its own eyes, is the Chosen People . . . . although it achieves under some a more tactful utterance.” 

Abraham Myerson and Isaac Goldberg, The German Jew (1933)*

“A relic of Tribalism, however vast and interesting, is no more hallowed than any other boulder of the primeval world.  Every tribe was the chosen people of its own God . . ..”

Goldwin Smith, “The Jewish Question” (Oct. 1881)**

Most honest men do not favor meritocracy because honesty compels them to admit that they are not especially meritorious.  They instead favor a system of favoritism in which they are the favorites. They wish to inhabit a world in which they are the beneficiaries of a large and gratuitous bias, whether of themselves individually or of their sect, clique or tribe.

This is partly an expression of their natural narcissism, the fond fancy that they are loved by God and the world as much as they are loved by themselves.  And narcissism takes, as I said, individual and collective forms.  Both forms involve the curious conceit that true justice would recognize the exceptional specialness of me and my tribe.

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Fools and Knaves Who Pull You Down to Worship in the Flesh and Untruth (or, Unbewitching Galatians 3:28)

A “proof text” is a scripture passage that is presented as decisive and incontrovertible proof of a doctrinal proposition.  Timothy 3:15 is, for example, said to be a “text in proof” of the doctrine of Sola Scriptura (“from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation”); while Titus 3:10 is said to be a “text in proof” of the doctrine of ecclesiastical authority (“a man that is an heretic after the first and second admonition reject”). 

The objection to a “proof text” is that the overbearing man who waves it in your face has torn the passage “out of context.” Continue reading →

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LLMs – Sabine Hossenfelder

Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist*

LLMs are good at summarizing. [Or perhaps, they are good at summarizing things that resemble the kinds of writing and the kinds of summaries used in their training data. They don’t directly draw on those summaries, however.]

But, they struggle with anything new.

  • LLMs cannot do abstract reasoning.
  • LLMs will always suffer from prompt injection – they cannot tell the difference between a prompt and instructions intended to guide its functioning.
  • LLMs cannot generalize.

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If a man lives a good and honest life, he’s going to come out OK

“If a man lives a good and honest life, he’s going to come out OK. Even if his career gets destroyed, if he loses his children, if he loses his wife, he’ll come out OK because he’s written the right script for himself. And that’s what McMurphy has done and [Chief] Bromden recognizes that. And he frees him.”

Bo Goldman, screenwriter for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.