The hidden premise

Alvin Plantinga

In previous posts in this blog I have mentioned that atheists sometimes try to justify their beliefs by using hidden premises in their reasoning, the most important of which is this:

God does not exist

At the end of their line of thought, they usually conclude that God does not exist, or some equivalent statement. As the starting premise is hidden, they probably don’t notice that they have incurred in circularity, one of the best-known fallacies since ancient times, which tries to prove the truth of a statement, by assuming from the beginning that the same statement is true.

In the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx writes this:

One hundred years since The Decline of the West

Oswald Spengler

This year it will mark one century since the publication in 1918 of the first volume of the book The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler. The second volume was published five years later, in 1923. This book was the first to raise the idea that our famed Western civilization is in decline. What can we say about it, a hundred years later?

The great historian of the twentieth century, Arnold J. Toynbee, agreed with Spengler on his fundamental idea, although not in the details. For Toynbee, Western civilization collapsed in the twentieth century, when the two world wars proved its inability to face new challenges. Of course, for Toynbee, the collapse of a civilization does not mean its disappearance, it does not even prelude it. We still have ahead - according to him - a few centuries of what Toynbee calls the Universal Empire, linked, however, to a certain cultural stagnation.

The first thing we have to notice is: if Spengler actually managed to detect the decadence of our civilization, it means that the decline had begun much earlier. Evolutionary movements, both biological and cultural, are imperceptible at the beginning. When they become visible, they are quite advanced in their development.

The mystery of too many variables

Standard theory of particle physics

We have now two great physical theories:

·         On one side, quantum mechanics, which applies primarily to very small objects (those scarcely affected by gravity), and is the basic tool for the standard theory of particle physics.

·         On the other, general relativity, which applies to very large objects (from the planets to the whole universe, those for which almost nothing matters except gravity), and is the main tool for the standard cosmological (Big Bang) theory.

Unfortunately, the two theories are not mutually compatible, so that physics is far from having resolved its outstanding issues. Moreover, these two theories depend on about forty independent variables. Many physicists think that they are too many. If it were true, it would mean that the configuration space of nature has about forty dimensions. If it is difficult to imagine a four-dimensional space, what about forty!