A beast or a god

Currently at UW: 10.9. High today: 22.8.

The pond is as low as I've seen it, and also relatively clear--maybe because there are big blobs of bright green algae floating around, so the carp don't have to muck around in the bottom for food. So I was able to see lots of sunfish today. Pumpkinseeds. New historical signs have appeared around the pond, in honour of the 150th anniversary of Waterloo. (I've yet to see the word "sesquicentennial", which Toronto adored during its sesquicentennial.) They all tell disconcertingly of things being built and torn down. Including the pond. Apparently there were carp in the pond already, and speckled trout in the pond still, in the late 19th century, and around 1910 they drained the pond and people hauled the carp away in wheelbarrows. Then they stocked the pond with "black bass" (which will mean largemouth bass, because there's no way smallmouth could live in the pond--I wonder how "black bass" got on there) for a while, ending in the '40s.

The tortoise is back with the rabbits. Its sign is back, too. Same sign, saying it's only four years old. I wonder how long it's been four years old. I wonder if it's the same tortoise. Last year there were two sets of piglets named Bacon and Eggs. A new Bacon and Eggs arrived while I was in Saskatoon.

Peter Erb's book about murder mysteries is actually about the death of God, except it's not about the death of God; it's about the silence of God, because God is not dead, but silent. Or dead and silent. Jesus is dead, and God is silent. I wonder if Erb has ever seen Homicide. On Homicide, they like to say--at least, for the first couple of years they liked to say--that they speak for the dead. I think that's actually more the kind of thing that Erb wants out of his murder mysteries than the murder mysteries actually give him. (What the murder mysteries do give him is a lot--I mean, a lot; I did not know there was so much in murder mysteries--of religious chatter to quote. Of course, Homicide would give him Pembleton to quote.) A murder mystery is solving a puzzle; it's all about the detective's detection. Homicide is not a murdery mystery show; CSI may be the only North American murder mystery show. (Erb says that there's a common schtick that says people who see the world in black and white go for murder mysteries while people who see the world in shades of grey go for spy stories. Put that together with the fact that the Brits go for murder mysteries so much more than North Americans, and whaddaya got? But then, CSI is now tremendously successful, so now whaddaya got?)

Anyway, the point is, Jesus is dead, and The Tradition spoke for him, and now The Tradition has been silenced. I think that's the point. Erb's book, we were told at the book launch, is a murder mystery, and at the end I wasn't sure whether it was God or The Tradition who was the victim (and this is kind of an odd murder mystery, where you don't really know who the victim is until the end and not even then), but really the point is that God is The Tradition (the word) and the murderer is, of course, Us Moderns with our eighteenth-century mindsets according to which God either exists or not and belief in the existence of God is either warranted by the evidence or not.

Erb affirms that God is good. Erb brackets the question whether God exists.

I wistfully half-wish I could kneel in a High Anglican church and say figuratively that I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth ... but I do think that even once you're saying it figuratively the game's already over. Once you've got the idea of literalness, the game's already over. I believe in God, but not literally. Only figuratively.

There's a guy who has given me a hard time after a couple of papers now about the divinities in Heidegger--the gods, the god-like ones. What do we need gods for? Can't we get all this stuff without gods? Well, I guess we can. I don't have any gods myself, and I guess I'm getting it. I guess I'm even getting it more than a lot of people who do have gods. But I dunno. What you need to get is a sense of givenness, givingness ... but it's a self-giving gift, being, not given by a god. The god who gives the mountain in its creation doesn't give the being of the mountain. The being of the mountain is more divine and mysterious than a god. But, maybe, only more divine and mysterious than a god conceived in a seventeenth-century mindset....

Here's that idea that I was trying to remember a few months ago. As it turns out, it's not an idea I could've forgotten, because it was an idea that was prompted by something upcoming, so the upcoming thing would've prompted it again. The thing was Saskatoon, and the thought that I would see my friend D.D. there, and that maybe I would be eating a hamburger when I did and that I would feel guilty if I was. (Because D.D. thinks that eating meat is very badly wrong.) So, I thought, the fact that I would feel guilty seems to mean that I actually think that eating meat is wrong ... and, of course, I do--sort of, to a certain extent. So, I thought, how much would I have to think eating meat was wrong before I stopped eating meat? And it occurred to me that there's an analogous religious question: how much do I have to believe in God before I believe in God? I mean, you know, I guess, within my seventeenth-century mindset, I'm more or less agnostic about "God" (broadly speaking--the Master Designer, essentially). I'm, say, 70% convinced that the whole she-bang actually can just get going and get where it's gotten on its own, and 30% suspicious that it can't. (I'm also 100% bewildered by the fact that being lights up to consciousness, but, like I say, I can't figure how to square that with gods. But if gods don't have something to do with it, what does?) And that's been pretty stable for a while ... but how about if it gets up to 50%? 50% + 1? If I think it's a bit more likely than not that there's God, do I believe in God? I mean, 40% doubt is pretty strong doubt! Depending on what you're doubting, of course. If, say, you're 60% confident that I don't lie for my own advantage at every opportunity, then that's pretty strong doubt about my truthfulness--too strong to say you believe in it, it seems like.

Ah, well, probabilities--can't get those without a seventeenth-century midset. It doesn't really work that way, anyway. Strength of conviction, I mean. I believe, 100%, that it would be better if I didn't eat meat (given a whole set of qualifiers about the conditions under which it's produced and consumed)--I just don't believe it very strongly. It doesn't motivate me. I don't feel it. (Mostly.)

So this all is in the area of that article I read in APQ a few months ago about "following your conscience". It seems like, if it's wrong for me to eat meat, it's even more wrong for me to eat meat if I think it's wrong to eat meat--there's at least something at least somewhat exculpatory about not believing that what you're doing is wrong. So it seems like, if I think it's wrong to eat meat, then I'd better not eat meat, just in case it really is wrong to eat meat. (That sounds awful. A typical analytic-philosophy hack-job.)

Anyway, my next half-baked idea has to do with dogs and virtue ethics. Not because I've just gotten around, finally, to starting to read Martha Nussbaum's Fragility of Goodness, but that certainly will help. Read the second chapter today, about "Agamemnon" and "Seven Against Thebes" and tragic dilemmas. Nussbaum's thesis is that these plays, which condemn their, what, anti-heroes for failing to feel properly remorseful for the wrong they've done in choosing the lesser of two evils speak better to our moral intuitions than modern moral philosophy does. And more on that to come, as it comes.