The greatest thing ever, or only one of the greatest?

A computer simulation of evolving clocks, demonstrating that, starting from generic initial conditions, the evolutionary process of reproduction with variation coupled with even crude selective forces will produce complex, specialised organisms that perform well under the selective criteria.

Dinesh D'Souza, the crank whose new book I'm told pimps the Ontological Argument for the existence of God, has many stupid things to say about Immanuel Kant, whom I know at least one of you out there has appreciated in the past...

I'm curious as to how grotesquely D'Souza distorts Kant's views. It's got to be pretty severe, as I'm given to understand that Immanuel Kant was not in fact a moron, and D'Souza's argument appears to have been cribbed from the Underpants Gnomes:

1. Kant observed that it is impossible to gain knowledge of the exterior world directly, but only through the mediation of our senses and thus our understanding of the phenomenological world will of necessity always be incomplete.
2. ?
3. God

The title of his article is "Why Atheists are Not Very Bright". Further comment would be superfluous, but let that not stop you.

This...

I won't even quote it myself. Read it on Wikipedia. I will, however summarise. This version (there are, sadly, others) stems from a Mediaeval thinker called Anselm, and apparently right-wing fucktards are pimping it out again. It's an argument for the existence of God based not on any observations of the external world but just a priori reasoning, and as such it's sophistic wankery of the most pathetically worthless calibre. It's the sort of thing that really fills me with contempt for the whole practice of philosophy as it mangles and misuses the logical tools of real fields of study like maths.

The argument goes something like this:

1. Define God to be a maximally great thing, something so great that nothing greater can exist.
   
2. Even a foolish unbeliever must acknowledge that this idea of God can exist in our imaginations, since we just imagined it.
   
3. Suppose God does not exist in reality, but only in our imaginations.
   
4. Things that exist in reality are certainly greater than things that exist only in the imagination.
   
5. But then we can conceive of something greater than God, as a maximally great thing that actually exists in reality.
   
6. Contradiction! We supposed God was maximally great, yet now we've imagined something greater.
   
7. Therefore, God must actually exist in reality.
   

The gaping flaws in this argument are overwhelming. Apparently philosophers are, by and large, unconvinced by it, yet there is a widespread view that, while it's easy to see that the argument must be wrong somehow, it is not easy to pinpoint exactly how it is wrong. This strikes me as silly. It's very easy indeed to see why this argument is wrong.

It's because the argument doesn't bother to define its terms.

(A mistake, by the way, which even the lamest of mathematicians knows to avoid...)

Can we conceive of a maximally great being? Well, that depends on what greatness is supposed to mean. Physical size? Of course not, that would be silly, you might say. Goodness? Well, what does goodness entail? Benevolence? Well, how do we quantify benevolence in order to conceive of a maximally benevolent being? You see of course what the problem here is. It isn't the logic, it's the terms. Terms like greatness are vague and unspecific, and hence meaningless in the context of a formal logical argument. In order to really grapple with greatness we'd need to give it a solid definition, and then for the argument to work we'd have to prove that, by our definition of greatness, real things were greater than purely imaginary things with the same putative qualities.

There's another problem too, of course. Our imaginations are limited and fallible. We can only handle so much detail. When you hold the idea of a cup in your mind, you aren't grasping its cupness right down to the atomic level. Similarly, even if we can define greatness and even if we can quantify it sufficiently that the concept of a maximally great being even has content, the fact that we could try to imagine a maximally great being does not actually mean we'll end up imagining a maximally great being complete in every detail. Anything we imagine, we can improve upon. So there's really no contradiction at all.

So Anselm can pretty much go vacuum my balls.

From Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union address:

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth- is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis-recently emphasized the grave dangers of "rightist reaction" in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called "normalcy" of the 1920's—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.

An interesting editorial in the Boston Globe.

Did you know that twice as many rich white kids get into colleges without meeting the minimum entry requirements as black and Hispanic kids get in based on affirmative-action policies? I didn't. 15% of the freshmen at American colleges are rich white idiots who didn't make the grade and still got in because Daddy's a donor or was in a frat with the Dean. Which means, essentially, that anyone who raises a stink about affirmative action on college campuses is full of overpriviliged white folk crap and probably needs a good smacking-down.

Lots of those people out there...