More on the problem of democracy

 I'm going to defer the Bible study for a bit, because we have some important matters to discuss.

UPDATE: Apparently, they realized they'd gone too far, and rescinded the funding freeze. I'm not sure what this means for the longer term, but it does appear there are some limits still. We'll see.

UPDATE OF THE UPDATE: Apparently they rescinded the memo, but they didn't rescind the action, whatever that means.

First, please look at the commenting rules in the sidebar -- you can't comment as anonymous or unknown, you need to choose a handle and stick to it. Even if your comment is astute, amusing or even brilliant I won't publish it unless you put forth an identity. Rules are rules.

I obviously can't get inside the minds of people who voted for Cheeto Benito. The various anecdotes we've seen of people explaining themselves basically say they're ignorant idiots. I know that telling them that is not a good strategy for persuasion, so I'm not proposing that Democratic politicians say that. What is relevant is that those reasons, however misinformed and misguided, very likely did not include the expectation of what has happened in the past week. People have a tremendous capacity for retrospective self-justification, so likely most MAGA voters will give you an argument why they're in favor of it. They won't notice that the price of eggs has actually gone up.

I don't know, as of January 29, where this is all going, but let me tell you the immediate effect on my workplace. Actually I'm semi-retired, and the funding I do have is private, so I'm not directly affected. However, in case you didn't know it, the entire university-based  biomedical and public health research enterprise is at least 90% dependent on federal funding. The bulk comes from NIH, but there is also the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the National Science Foundation, Advanced Research Projects agency, CDC which funds some extramural research and demonstration projects, and other pockets -- even NASA and the military. 

This doesn't just pay for the conduct of research, but for the training of students, post-doctoral fellows and junior faculty. People setting out to make a career in science are utterly dependent on federal funding. In fact, a specific requirement for getting a faculty appointment in most cases (I was an exception) is what's called a "K" award, a training grant from NIH. As currently structured, medical schools and schools of public health are entirely non-viable without federal funding. It pays much of the salaries of faculty, so-called indirect costs in federal contracts pay for the building, it supports the students. Without it the entire enterprise would collapse.

So we have an interruption in that funding. We don't know for how long, and we don't know what's going to happen next. But it has some powerful immediate effects. It means the schools are spending money that isn't being reimbursed. It means that careers are on hold and staff may have to be laid off. It's rather complicated, but since research grants are always time-limited there is constant turnover in the projects to which research assistants, data analysts and project directors are assigned. As current grants run out they depend on new ones coming in to keep their jobs. Same goes for research faculty, of course.

 

That means that right now, as some current projects are running out, and expected grants aren't coming in, the research infrastructure is deteriorating.  This started right away, and it's going to get worse as the days and weeks go on. It's real damage that will take considerable time to repair, if it can be done at all. If the money doesn't start coming in soon, it's going to create spreading economic damage. The local restaurants will feel it immediately, but eventually it will ripple out to the entire regional economy.

Now think about all the other streams of federal funding that have been blocked. Road and bridge projects, municipal construction (my town has a federal grant to restore the town hall, for example), Head Start programs, substance abuse treatment, public health programs, on and on -- all of these employ people and that means they don't just accomplish their immediate goals, they support the families of workers and put money into communities. A lot of people who voted for Trump are going to be hurt badly, in fact some of them already have been. The possibility looms of economic catastrophe, although stock market investors don't seem to have noticed yet. 

I'm eagerly waiting to see how people are going to react to this.

Sunday Sermonette: Now for something completely different

Chapter 40 begins what scholars call "Deutero Isaiah," a completely different book written during the Babylonian exile. Actually, although I haven't seen any indication of this from learned commentators, I suspect that the previous three chapters, copied from the Book of Kings, were probably added during the exile, quite possibly by the same person, who may also have written them in the first place. Remember that Kings was first completed during the reign of Josiah, but material was added during the exile to account for the downfall of Judah. 

 

Anyway, as with the prophecies of the original Isaiah, this is entirely about the presumably imminent restoration of Judah, and the return of the exiles to Zion. It seems a fair surmise that the exile community was aware that Babylon was under pressure from Persia, and likely to fall; and furthermore that they knew that Cyrus's philosophy of empire involved home rule by tributary kingdoms, and the practice of indigenous religions. Indeed, the Persians may even have communicated this intention to them in order to foment subversion. It certainly reads that way to me -- the writer knows, or at least hopes for, what is about to happen. 

However, as with the original book of Isaiah, Christians reinterpreted this chapter to be about the coming of their messiah centuries later. That's patently ridiculous, but I have to present this because substantial pieces of this chapter are read in Christian churches during Advent, and the language is central to Christian worship. The "voice crying in the wilderness" is usually taken to refer to John the Baptist. Verse 4 is read in church during advent, although notably, none of this actually happened with the ostensible coming of Jesus. Note the imagery of going up on a mountain to lift one's voice, which is common in Christian hymns. Anyway, talk about cultural appropriation . . .

40 Comfort, comfort my people,
    says your God.
² Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
    and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
    that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand
    double for all her sins.

³ A voice of one calling:
“In the wilderness prepare
    the way for the Lord^[a];
make straight in the desert
    a highway for our God.^[b]
4 Every valley shall be raised up,
    every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
    the rugged places a plain.
⁵ And the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
    and all people will see it together.
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

⁶ A voice says, “Cry out.”
    And I said, “What shall I cry?”

“All people are like grass,
    and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field.
⁷ The grass withers and the flowers fall,
    because the breath of the Lord blows on them.
    Surely the people are grass.
⁸ The grass withers and the flowers fall,
    but the word of our God endures forever.”

⁹ You who bring good news to Zion,
    go up on a high mountain.
You who bring good news to Jerusalem,^[c]
    lift up your voice with a shout,
lift it up, do not be afraid;
    say to the towns of Judah,
    “Here is your God!”
¹⁰ See, the Sovereign Lord comes with power,
    and he rules with a mighty arm.
See, his reward is with him,
    and his recompense accompanies him.
¹¹ He tends his flock like a shepherd:
    He gathers the lambs in his arms
and carries them close to his heart;
    he gently leads those that have young.

¹² Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,
    or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?
Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket,
    or weighed the mountains on the scales
    and the hills in a balance?
¹³ Who can fathom the Spirit^[d] of the Lord,
    or instruct the Lord as his counselor?
¹⁴ Whom did the Lord consult to enlighten him,
    and who taught him the right way?
Who was it that taught him knowledge,
    or showed him the path of understanding?

¹⁵ Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket;
    they are regarded as dust on the scales;
    he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust.
¹⁶ Lebanon is not sufficient for altar fires,
    nor its animals enough for burnt offerings.
¹⁷ Before him all the nations are as nothing;
    they are regarded by him as worthless
    and less than nothing.

¹⁸ With whom, then, will you compare God?
    To what image will you liken him?
¹⁹ As for an idol, a metalworker casts it,
    and a goldsmith overlays it with gold
    and fashions silver chains for it.
²⁰ A person too poor to present such an offering
    selects wood that will not rot;
they look for a skilled worker
    to set up an idol that will not topple.

²¹ Do you not know?
    Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
    Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
²² He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
    and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
    and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
²³ He brings princes to naught
    and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
²⁴ No sooner are they planted,
    no sooner are they sown,
    no sooner do they take root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
    and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.

²⁵ “To whom will you compare me?
    Or who is my equal?” says the Holy One.
²⁶ Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
    Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
    and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
    not one of them is missing.

²⁷ Why do you complain, Jacob?
    Why do you say, Israel,
“My way is hidden from the Lord;
    my cause is disregarded by my God”?
²⁸ Do you not know?
    Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
    the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
    and his understanding no one can fathom.
²⁹ He gives strength to the weary
    and increases the power of the weak.
³⁰ Even youths grow tired and weary,
    and young men stumble and fall;
³¹ but those who hope in the Lord
    will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
    they will run and not grow weary,
    they will walk and not be faint.

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 40:3 Or A voice of one calling in the wilderness: / “Prepare the way for the Lord
2. Isaiah 40:3 Hebrew; Septuagint make straight the paths of our God
3. Isaiah 40:9 Or Zion, bringer of good news, / go up on a high mountain. / Jerusalem, bringer of good news
4. Isaiah 40:13 Or mind

The problem of democracy

Plato, in case you didn't know it, had a lot of rather, shall we say, strange, ideas. For example, he wanted all the poets expelled from Athens, because he thought poetry caused disordered thinking. But that's a digression. He didn't trust democracy -- even such as it was in Athens, with voting rights restricted to free male citizens. He didn't think the people generally had the wisdom to rule themselves, so he advocated for rule by philosophers -- philosopher kings. There were to be two other castes, warriors and "producers," such as farmers and artisans. Of course, women and slaves aren't even considered.

A major shortcoming in his theory is that he didn't seem to have any idea of how the philosopher kings were to be credentialed and selected for office. But the problem liberal democracy now seems to be facing around the world -- that the people don't seem to possess the wisdom even to choose their own leaders, let alone rule -- is also for real. They certainly aren't voting for philosophers. For your amusement, I refer you to this Daily Kos story, which includes the Latino who voted for Trump because he had no idea Trump hates Mexicans; a Medicaid recipient who voted for Trump whose family is now telling her that Trump wants to cut the Medicaid budget and she can't believe it; the Palestinian-American who voted for Trump because he was going to stop U.S. support for Israel; and the Trump voter whose boyfriend is losing the job he expected to get because of the hiring freeze - it apparently never occurred to her that when promised to cut the federal budget by $2 trillion, it might mean there would be fewer federal employees.

I don't really have any magic bullet for this.

What the heck is science, anyway?

I think Chuckie's comment on my previous post about belief goes a long way toward answering my question -- how can I be absolutely certain about matters on which some people disagree with equal certainty? But it's a complicated question and it's not really possible to write out an adequate brief summary. 

 

There are enough worthwhile books on epistemology to fill a library, but if I had to recommend one it would be The Knowledge Machine, by Michael Strevens. It's a substantial, fairly dense book, so again I'm not going to pretend I can adequately summarize it here but I will offer what he proposes as the core of his argument, which he calls the Iron Rule of Explanation. There is no such thing as THE scientific method. Science uses a bewildering variety of methods. But it does require that propositions be tested against reality. That is, it has standards for what counts as evidence, and requires that scientific discourse be limited to such evidence. Scientists are free to think whatever they want in their private lives but must resort to valid evidence in their public roles.

There's a lot to unpack there and I'm not really going to try to do it. But I will make two important points. The first is that people who adhere to unscientific belief systems essentially work in the opposite direction. They start with a conclusion, then they try to fix the facts around it. Any evidence that doesn't fit the preconception is disparaged -- there has to be something wrong with the purported evidence, because we already know the truth. Any coincidence or even fabrication that does seem to support the preconception is singled out and amplified. 

The second is that it takes a lot of time and effort to understand what are often complex layers of evidence and trails of logic that underlie important scientific knowledge and theories. (And no, "theory" doesn't mean a hypothesis or an unproven concept. There are innumerable scientific theories which are so well established they are considered incontrovertible, for all practical purposes.) While I am not so modest that I can't say I have devoted much more time and effort to understanding many field of science than most people, we all, even Nobel laureates, to a considerable extent do need to trust people who work in fields outside of our main expertise. 

 

I have never looked at a eukaryotic cell through a powerful microscope but I don't waste any time worrying about whether it really does contain the components and work in the way biologists say it does. I do have a general understanding of cellular biology, cosmology, evolution, and much more in part because my grandparents gave me a subscription to Scientific American when I was 13 and I've had it ever since; because I have done some limited study of physics, biology, mathematics and other fields as an undergraduate and in graduate school; and because I read a lot of books on science and the philosophy of science. Most people aren't going to do that. It's much easier just to be told the answers, and the simplest answers to understand, and often the most psychologically satisfying, are the wrong ones. 

Accepting this conclusion raises some very challenging questions about the viability of liberal democracy, which I will turn to next.

Wednesday Bible Study: More cut and paste

Isaiah 39 is a reprint of 2 Kings 20 12-19. It was actually an addendum to Kings, written during the Babylonian exile, to retcon the supposedly secure position of Judah in the reign of King Josiah. The next chapter begins the book called "Deutero Isaiah," which was composed by an unknown author, again during the exile. It is possible that this is the same person who inserted the material from the Book of Kings that we have just been reading, indeed he may be the original author of this material as well. But we just don't know. 

 

As for this, Hezekiah seems awfully self-centered. He's not concerned about the disaster predicted for his descendants, as long as everything will be copacetic during his own lifetime. There seems to be a lot of that going around right now.

39 At that time Marduk-Baladan son of Baladan king of Babylon sent Hezekiah letters and a gift, because he had heard of his illness and recovery. ² Hezekiah received the envoys gladly and showed them what was in his storehouses—the silver, the gold, the spices, the fine olive oil—his entire armory and everything found among his treasures. There was nothing in his palace or in all his kingdom that Hezekiah did not show them.

³ Then Isaiah the prophet went to King Hezekiah and asked, “What did those men say, and where did they come from?”

“From a distant land,” Hezekiah replied. “They came to me from Babylon.”

⁴ The prophet asked, “What did they see in your palace?”

“They saw everything in my palace,” Hezekiah said. “There is nothing among my treasures that I did not show them.”

⁵ Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the Lord Almighty: ⁶ The time will surely come when everything in your palace, and all that your predecessors have stored up until this day, will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the Lord. ⁷ And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood who will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.”

⁸ “The word of the Lord you have spoken is good,” Hezekiah replied. For he thought, “There will be peace and security in my lifetime.”

True Belief

As Chucky says, there are some beliefs that as a pragmatic matter, we treat as certain. Maybe we're actually living in a computer simulation, or it's all a dream, but there isn't anything to be gained by even bothering to think about that. We navigate through spacetime assuming that the immediate apprehensions of our senses are generally accurate. The familiar objects around us are really there, the ordinary processes of cause and effect work,  the sun is in the sky . . . 

There is another category of belief that I am quite certain about. I do not apprehend with my senses directly that the earth is approximately spherical (diameter slightly greater at the equator than pole-to-pole), that it rotates, producing the illusion that the sun, moon and stars move across the sky, and that it revolves around the sun, which is actually a star but it's only about 91.5 million miles away instead of multiple light years. I am quite certain that the earth is about 4.54 billion years old (exactly when the molten blob qualified as "the earth" is perhaps a judgment call) and that all life on earth evolved from a common ancestral cell that existed at least 3.7 billion years ago.

Note that although I am quite certain of every assertion in the previous paragraph, nobody believed most of it until quite recently in historical times. The ancient Greeks new that the earth was approximately spherical and Eratosthenes measured its circumference quite accurately in about 240 BC. Copernicus figured out that the earth revolves around the sun, but he kept it a secret until just before his death in 1543, and it took a while before people generally came to believe it.  Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1854, but it wasn't until the 20th Century that the age of the earth became known, along with the mechanism by which the sun shines, and the mechanism of heredity, and the theory of evolution became plausible and then generally accepted.

Note, however, that there are people who do not believe some or any of this. I'm not sure how many of the flat earthers are sincere, and how many are just goofing, but clearly some really do believe it. And there are a whole lot of creationists who don't buy any of those Satanic lies about the age of the earth, or evolution. How can it be that what I know with absolute certainty some people know, with equal certainty, to be wrong? And why, under the circumstances, am I so confident?

Next time.

Sunday Sermonette: More plagiarism

Chapter 38 is taken from 2 Kings 20, with the song of Hezekiah inserted. More of 2 Kings 20 makes up the following chapter 39. Just so you know. Obviously all of this material was added by someone other than the author of the preceding prophecies. No, I don't know why.

I'll get back to my regular blogging, hopefully later today. Sorry for the interruption.

38 In those days Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death. The prophet Isaiah son of Amoz went to him and said, “This is what the Lord says: Put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.”

² Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord, ³ “Remember, Lord, how I have walked before you faithfully and with wholehearted devotion and have done what is good in your eyes.” And Hezekiah wept bitterly.

⁴ Then the word of the Lord came to Isaiah: ⁵ “Go and tell Hezekiah, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of your father David, says: I have heard your prayer and seen your tears; I will add fifteen years to your life. ⁶ And I will deliver you and this city from the hand of the king of Assyria. I will defend this city.

⁷ “‘This is the Lord’s sign to you that the Lord will do what he has promised: ⁸ I will make the shadow cast by the sun go back the ten steps it has gone down on the stairway of Ahaz.’” So the sunlight went back the ten steps it had gone down.

⁹ A writing of Hezekiah king of Judah after his illness and recovery:

¹⁰ I said, “In the prime of my life
    must I go through the gates of death
    and be robbed of the rest of my years?”
¹¹ I said, “I will not again see the Lord himself
    in the land of the living;
no longer will I look on my fellow man,
    or be with those who now dwell in this world.
¹² Like a shepherd’s tent my house
    has been pulled down and taken from me.
Like a weaver I have rolled up my life,
    and he has cut me off from the loom;
    day and night you made an end of me.
¹³ I waited patiently till dawn,
    but like a lion he broke all my bones;
    day and night you made an end of me.
¹⁴ I cried like a swift or thrush,
    I moaned like a mourning dove.
My eyes grew weak as I looked to the heavens.
    I am being threatened; Lord, come to my aid!”

¹⁵ But what can I say?
    He has spoken to me, and he himself has done this.
I will walk humbly all my years
    because of this anguish of my soul.
¹⁶ Lord, by such things people live;
    and my spirit finds life in them too.
You restored me to health
    and let me live.
¹⁷ Surely it was for my benefit
    that I suffered such anguish.
In your love you kept me
    from the pit of destruction;
you have put all my sins
    behind your back.
¹⁸ For the grave cannot praise you,
    death cannot sing your praise;
those who go down to the pit
    cannot hope for your faithfulness.
¹⁹ The living, the living—they praise you,
    as I am doing today;
parents tell their children
    about your faithfulness.

²⁰ The Lord will save me,
    and we will sing with stringed instruments
all the days of our lives
    in the temple of the Lord.

²¹ Isaiah had said, “Prepare a poultice of figs and apply it to the boil, and he will recover.”

²² Hezekiah had asked, “What will be the sign that I will go up to the temple of the Lord?”

Wednesday Bible Study: Cut and paste

 Isaiah 37 is a copy of 2 Kings 19. That's all it is, it's just lifted.  Check it out for yourself. Presumably someone inserted it here to put Isaiah and his prophecies in context. Is this historically accurate? There's no way to know about any of the details, but it is true that Sennacharib besieged Judah in 701 BC. The outright defeat, due to a plague, described in Kings and reposted here, is probably a misrepresentation, however, as Hezekiah ended up paying tribute to Assyria and other contemporary accounts do not describe such a defeat.

Be that as it may, the point for us is that the book of Isaiah is about current events in and around 700 BC, and its prophecies concern the immediate future. It is not concerned with the coming of a Messiah hundreds of years later. The gospels were not written until a hundred years or so after the purported ministry of Jesus, and they are not eyewitness accounts. There were various versions and they disagreed on many points. The early Christian leaders in subsequent times faced the problem of deciding which accounts they would certify as authentic, and the more difficult problem of sorting out the relationship between what they labeled the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, which they relabeled as the Old Testament. 

 

Various commentators around the Middle East -- in Jerusalem, Antioch, and the Nestorian monastery in what is now Iraq, took on the work of trying to stitch together the Old and New Testaments. They scoured the Hebrew Bible for anything that could plausibly be related to their new faith, and among their strategies was deforming the prophecies of Isaiah into something they could reinterpret as having to do with their newly invented Messiah. It really doesn't work.

37 When King Hezekiah heard this, he tore his clothes and put on sackcloth and went into the temple of the Lord. ² He sent Eliakim the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary, and the leading priests, all wearing sackcloth, to the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz. ³ They told him, “This is what Hezekiah says: This day is a day of distress and rebuke and disgrace, as when children come to the moment of birth and there is no strength to deliver them. ⁴ It may be that the Lord your God will hear the words of the field commander, whom his master, the king of Assyria, has sent to ridicule the living God, and that he will rebuke him for the words the Lord your God has heard. Therefore pray for the remnant that still survives.”

⁵ When King Hezekiah’s officials came to Isaiah, ⁶ Isaiah said to them, “Tell your master, ‘This is what the Lord says: Do not be afraid of what you have heard—those words with which the underlings of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me. ⁷ Listen! When he hears a certain report, I will make him want to return to his own country, and there I will have him cut down with the sword.’”

⁸ When the field commander heard that the king of Assyria had left Lachish, he withdrew and found the king fighting against Libnah.

⁹ Now Sennacherib received a report that Tirhakah, the king of Cush,^[a] was marching out to fight against him. When he heard it, he sent messengers to Hezekiah with this word: ¹⁰ “Say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let the god you depend on deceive you when he says, ‘Jerusalem will not be given into the hands of the king of Assyria.’ ¹¹ Surely you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the countries, destroying them completely. And will you be delivered? ¹² Did the gods of the nations that were destroyed by my predecessors deliver them—the gods of Gozan, Harran, Rezeph and the people of Eden who were in Tel Assar? ¹³ Where is the king of Hamath or the king of Arpad? Where are the kings of Lair, Sepharvaim, Hena and Ivvah?”

Hezekiah’s Prayer

¹⁴ Hezekiah received the letter from the messengers and read it. Then he went up to the temple of the Lord and spread it out before the Lord. ¹⁵ And Hezekiah prayed to the Lord: ¹⁶ “Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim, you alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. ¹⁷ Give ear, Lord, and hear; open your eyes, Lord, and see; listen to all the words Sennacherib has sent to ridicule the living God.

¹⁸ “It is true, Lord, that the Assyrian kings have laid waste all these peoples and their lands. ¹⁹ They have thrown their gods into the fire and destroyed them, for they were not gods but only wood and stone, fashioned by human hands. ²⁰ Now, Lord our God, deliver us from his hand, so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you, Lord, are the only God.^[b]”

Sennacherib’s Fall

²¹ Then Isaiah son of Amoz sent a message to Hezekiah: “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Because you have prayed to me concerning Sennacherib king of Assyria, ²² this is the word the Lord has spoken against him:

“Virgin Daughter Zion
    despises and mocks you.
Daughter Jerusalem
    tosses her head as you flee.
²³ Who is it you have ridiculed and blasphemed?
    Against whom have you raised your voice
and lifted your eyes in pride?
    Against the Holy One of Israel!
²⁴ By your messengers
    you have ridiculed the Lord.
And you have said,
    ‘With my many chariots
I have ascended the heights of the mountains,
    the utmost heights of Lebanon.
I have cut down its tallest cedars,
    the choicest of its junipers.
I have reached its remotest heights,
    the finest of its forests.
²⁵ I have dug wells in foreign lands^[c]
    and drunk the water there.
With the soles of my feet
    I have dried up all the streams of Egypt.’

²⁶ “Have you not heard?
    Long ago I ordained it.
In days of old I planned it;
    now I have brought it to pass,
that you have turned fortified cities
    into piles of stone.
²⁷ Their people, drained of power,
    are dismayed and put to shame.
They are like plants in the field,
    like tender green shoots,
like grass sprouting on the roof,
    scorched^[d] before it grows up.

²⁸ “But I know where you are
    and when you come and go
    and how you rage against me.
²⁹ Because you rage against me
    and because your insolence has reached my ears,
I will put my hook in your nose
    and my bit in your mouth,
and I will make you return
    by the way you came.

³⁰ “This will be the sign for you, Hezekiah:

“This year you will eat what grows by itself,
    and the second year what springs from that.
But in the third year sow and reap,
    plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
³¹ Once more a remnant of the kingdom of Judah
    will take root below and bear fruit above.
³² For out of Jerusalem will come a remnant,
    and out of Mount Zion a band of survivors.
The zeal of the Lord Almighty
    will accomplish this.

³³ “Therefore this is what the Lord says concerning the king of Assyria:

“He will not enter this city
    or shoot an arrow here.
He will not come before it with shield
    or build a siege ramp against it.
³⁴ By the way that he came he will return;
    he will not enter this city,”
declares the Lord.
³⁵ “I will defend this city and save it,
    for my sake and for the sake of David my servant!”

³⁶ Then the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning—there were all the dead bodies! ³⁷ So Sennacherib king of Assyria broke camp and withdrew. He returned to Nineveh and stayed there.

³⁸ One day, while he was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisrok, his sons Adrammelek and Sharezer killed him with the sword, and they escaped to the land of Ararat. And Esarhaddon his son succeeded him as king.

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 37:9 That is, the upper Nile region
2. Isaiah 37:20 Dead Sea Scrolls (see also 2 Kings 19:19); Masoretic Text you alone are the Lord
3. Isaiah 37:25 Dead Sea Scrolls (see also 2 Kings 19:24); Masoretic Text does not have in foreign lands.
4. Isaiah 37:27 Some manuscripts of the Masoretic Text, Dead Sea Scrolls and some Septuagint manuscripts (see also 2 Kings 19:26); most manuscripts of the Masoretic Text roof / and terraced fields

More on belief, and truth

Even after we set aside moral and ethical beliefs, and personal preferences, the remaining category -- Habermas's "First World," the realm of intersubjective reality, what is "out there" -- contains several different kinds of belief. People still make category errors when arguing about matters even within the First World. Plato and Socrates didn't recognize these distinctions and in fact, it wasn't until Fermat and Pascal came along in the 17th Century that we began to develop the epistemological tools even to think about them.

One way we get into trouble is by failing to recognize that the word "opinion" has multiple meanings. It includes Second and Third World beliefs -- moral and esthetic preferences. Again, we're putting those aside for now, but it can also include people's expectations about First World questions that are in dispute. For example, one physicist may have the opinion that the mysterious dark matter consists of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, whereas another may have the opinion that Einstein's theory of gravity is incomplete in some way. Most physicists may favor the first alternative, some may favor yet others. But there isn't any way to put a number on the likelihood of who is right. We're just groping with the unknown.

Alternatively, there are questions about which physicists are overwhelmingly in agreement. These include, for example, the properties of the electromagnetic field and it's instantiation in radiation and charged particles. These are firmly held beliefs which physicists will tell you are almost certainly true and justified. This is the category where the formulation dating back to Socrates works. On the other hand, physicists have discovered that the way the world works at very small scales is not like that, and for many purposes it isn't like that at large scales. That is where we encounter Fermat, Pascal, and their successors including Gauss and Bayes, the realm of probability.

The theory of probability quantifies what we don't know. It allows us to hold very definite beliefs about what is likely to be true, or to happen, but these are beliefs that include a substantial component of not knowing. And here the concepts of truth and justification get murky indeed. That's where we'll go next time.

 

 

Sunday Sermonette: Something a little different

I'm going to skip chapters 34 and 35 because they're just one more round of prophesying the downfall of Judah (and massive destruction elsewhere) followed by a restoration. However, many scholars believe that these two chapters are a later addition by someone else, copying Isaiah's style. 

 

Chapter 36 suddenly switches to past tense and tells a story which is probably more or less historically accurate. Scholars aren't sure if this is by the same author as the preceding chapters, even though it's completely different in style and content. I expect it was appended by someone else, but scholars generally don't ascribe authorship to a later period until Chapter 40, which is thought to have been written during the Babylonian exile. This was at least more or less contemporaneous with the prophet Isaiah. Note that even in 700 B.C.E., Aramaic is the vernacular -- the people no longer speak Hebrew, although as far as we know this was originally written in Hebrew. Sennacherib's field commander insists on speaking Hebrew because he wishes to communicate only with the king's servants, not the common people.

36 In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah’s reign, Sennacherib king of Assyria attacked all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. ² Then the king of Assyria sent his field commander with a large army from Lachish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem. When the commander stopped at the aqueduct of the Upper Pool, on the road to the Launderer’s Field, ³ Eliakim son of Hilkiah the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary, and Joah son of Asaph the recorder went out to him.

⁴ The field commander said to them, “Tell Hezekiah:

“‘This is what the great king, the king of Assyria, says: On what are you basing this confidence of yours? ⁵ You say you have counsel and might for war—but you speak only empty words. On whom are you depending, that you rebel against me? ⁶ Look, I know you are depending on Egypt, that splintered reed of a staff, which pierces the hand of anyone who leans on it! Such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who depend on him. ⁷ But if you say to me, “We are depending on the Lord our God”—isn’t he the one whose high places and altars Hezekiah removed, saying to Judah and Jerusalem, “You must worship before this altar”?

⁸ “‘Come now, make a bargain with my master, the king of Assyria: I will give you two thousand horses—if you can put riders on them! ⁹ How then can you repulse one officer of the least of my master’s officials, even though you are depending on Egypt for chariots and horsemen^[a]? ¹⁰ Furthermore, have I come to attack and destroy this land without the Lord? The Lord himself told me to march against this country and destroy it.’”

¹¹ Then Eliakim, Shebna and Joah said to the field commander, “Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, since we understand it. Don’t speak to us in Hebrew in the hearing of the people on the wall.”

¹² But the commander replied, “Was it only to your master and you that my master sent me to say these things, and not to the people sitting on the wall—who, like you, will have to eat their own excrement and drink their own urine?”

¹³ Then the commander stood and called out in Hebrew, “Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria! ¹⁴ This is what the king says: Do not let Hezekiah deceive you. He cannot deliver you! ¹⁵ Do not let Hezekiah persuade you to trust in the Lord when he says, ‘The Lord will surely deliver us; this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.’

¹⁶ “Do not listen to Hezekiah. This is what the king of Assyria says: Make peace with me and come out to me. Then each of you will eat fruit from your own vine and fig tree and drink water from your own cistern, ¹⁷ until I come and take you to a land like your own—a land of grain and new wine, a land of bread and vineyards.

¹⁸ “Do not let Hezekiah mislead you when he says, ‘The Lord will deliver us.’ Have the gods of any nations ever delivered their lands from the hand of the king of Assyria? ¹⁹ Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Have they rescued Samaria from my hand? ²⁰ Who of all the gods of these countries have been able to save their lands from me? How then can the Lord deliver Jerusalem from my hand?”

²¹ But the people remained silent and said nothing in reply, because the king had commanded, “Do not answer him.”

²² Then Eliakim son of Hilkiah the palace administrator, Shebna the secretary and Joah son of Asaph the recorder went to Hezekiah, with their clothes torn, and told him what the field commander had said.

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 36:9 Or charioteers

The African plains ape continued: Belief

Plato and Socrates didn't really unpack the concept of belief. Either you believe it or you don't. That's understandable, since they were just starting to think about what we now call epistemology so they used chunky concepts. In pagan Rome and later Christian Europe people didn't think about it much at all, or if they did it wasn't written down. For Christians, belief was simply not questioned, and people who did question it got tortured to death. Galileo managed to escape that fate, but they did shut him up.

People who have studied philosophy in any depth will no doubt want to take issue with what I am about to say as an oversimplification, but I can't help it, this is just a blog post. In the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment era, philosophers were so gobsmacked by the discoveries of science that they came to argue -- starting with Comte and leading to the Vienna circle and Wittgenstein -- that only statements that are subject to empirical verification are meaningful, ultimately going so far as to say that the meaning of a sentence is equivalent to the means by which it can be verified, and any statements that cannot be verified are nonsensical. This was called positivism.

Wittgenstein eventually recognized the absurdity of this position. It is mistaken in at least three ways. The first is that many speech acts, in fact most of them, are not even trying to be verifiable assertions.  Positivism would render most of what Socrates is purported to have said nonsensical, because he mostly asked questions. But even leaving that aside, if we restrict ourselves to assertions, positivism is mistaken in two more or less orthogonal dimensions.

The first is that there are different kinds of assertions, as Jürgen Habermas notably discussed in The Theory of Communicative Action. Many assertions are about ethics and morality -- what is right and wrong, and socially proper. These are certainly meaningful and criticizeable, but they are not subject to verification in the same way as empirical claims. We also make assertions about our personal feelings and preferences. Others may take issue with these, or believe the person is dissembling, but only the speaker knows if she is being truthful. (Promises can be seen as a special case of this sort of assertion, and we will eventually know if they are broken. I might also come to doubt, for example, that she really loves me. But these sorts of complications are not our concern here.) Many arguments are feckless because people make category errors about assertions.

The second is that even for empirically verifiable claims of the sort that are in the domain of science, belief is not binary -- there are degrees of belief, and even different kinds. Here we get into the philosophically fraught realm of probability, which we'll take up next time.

Wednesday Bible Study: More current events

 I'm going to give you two chapters today, since the first one is relatively short. Again, to be perfectly clear, Isaiah is commenting on current events in the 8th Century BCE. He is not making any predictions about events 700 or 2,700 years later. In chapter 31 he is talking about right now, as he writes. He doesn't like King Hezekiah's alliance with Egypt, apparently because the Egyptians don't worship Yahweh. He thinks that Yahweh will destroy the Assyrians without any outside help. Of course, that's not what happened, the Babylonians eventually did it. 

In Chapter 32, he predicts hard times in one year from the time he writes, followed by better times. He doesn't explain what exactly is going to happen, just that it'll be bad and women should be worried. That's it. This has absolutely no relevance to any matter of theological interest to anyone who wasn't living in Judah around 700 BC. That's it.

31 Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help,
    who rely on horses,
who trust in the multitude of their chariots
    and in the great strength of their horsemen,
but do not look to the Holy One of Israel,
    or seek help from the Lord.
² Yet he too is wise and can bring disaster;
    he does not take back his words.
He will rise up against that wicked nation,
    against those who help evildoers.
³ But the Egyptians are mere mortals and not God;
    their horses are flesh and not spirit.
When the Lord stretches out his hand,
    those who help will stumble,
    those who are helped will fall;
    all will perish together.

⁴ This is what the Lord says to me:

“As a lion growls,
    a great lion over its prey—
and though a whole band of shepherds
    is called together against it,
it is not frightened by their shouts
    or disturbed by their clamor—
so the Lord Almighty will come down
    to do battle on Mount Zion and on its heights.
⁵ Like birds hovering overhead,
    the Lord Almighty will shield Jerusalem;
he will shield it and deliver it,
    he will ‘pass over’ it and will rescue it.”

⁶ Return, you Israelites, to the One you have so greatly revolted against. ⁷ For in that day every one of you will reject the idols of silver and gold your sinful hands have made.

⁸ “Assyria will fall by no human sword;
    a sword, not of mortals, will devour them.
They will flee before the sword
    and their young men will be put to forced labor.
⁹ Their stronghold will fall because of terror;
    at the sight of the battle standard their commanders will panic,”
declares the Lord,
    whose fire is in Zion,
    whose furnace is in Jerusalem.

 

32 See, a king will reign in righteousness
    and rulers will rule with justice.
² Each one will be like a shelter from the wind
    and a refuge from the storm,
like streams of water in the desert
    and the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land.

³ Then the eyes of those who see will no longer be closed,
    and the ears of those who hear will listen.
⁴ The fearful heart will know and understand,
    and the stammering tongue will be fluent and clear.
⁵ No longer will the fool be called noble
    nor the scoundrel be highly respected.
⁶ For fools speak folly,
    their hearts are bent on evil:
They practice ungodliness
    and spread error concerning the Lord;
the hungry they leave empty
    and from the thirsty they withhold water.
⁷ Scoundrels use wicked methods,
    they make up evil schemes
to destroy the poor with lies,
    even when the plea of the needy is just.
⁸ But the noble make noble plans,
    and by noble deeds they stand.

The Women of Jerusalem

⁹ You women who are so complacent,
    rise up and listen to me;
you daughters who feel secure,
    hear what I have to say!
¹⁰ In little more than a year
    you who feel secure will tremble;
the grape harvest will fail,
    and the harvest of fruit will not come.
¹¹ Tremble, you complacent women;
    shudder, you daughters who feel secure!
Strip off your fine clothes
    and wrap yourselves in rags.
¹² Beat your breasts for the pleasant fields,
    for the fruitful vines
¹³ and for the land of my people,
    a land overgrown with thorns and briers—
yes, mourn for all houses of merriment
    and for this city of revelry.
¹⁴ The fortress will be abandoned,
    the noisy city deserted;
citadel and watchtower will become a wasteland forever,
    the delight of donkeys, a pasture for flocks,
¹⁵ till the Spirit is poured on us from on high,
    and the desert becomes a fertile field,
    and the fertile field seems like a forest.
¹⁶ The Lord’s justice will dwell in the desert,
    his righteousness live in the fertile field.
¹⁷ The fruit of that righteousness will be peace;
    its effect will be quietness and confidence forever.
¹⁸ My people will live in peaceful dwelling places,
    in secure homes,
    in undisturbed places of rest.
¹⁹ Though hail flattens the forest
    and the city is leveled completely,
²⁰ how blessed you will be,
    sowing your seed by every stream,
    and letting your cattle and donkeys range free.

 

The plains ape's life gets more complicated

The first writing we have discovered was actually an inventory record for barley, made in Sumeria (today Iraq) around 3,100 BC. It's an inscription on a clay tablet. We don't know when people started writing about more interesting subjects. Since it was quite laborious to inscribe clay tablets, there couldn't have been any best sellers, and presumably personal communications weren't ordinarily preserved. (Clay tablets could be dissolved in water, then reconstituted for reuse.) Papyrus, a material with properties similar to paper, was invented in Egypt, maybe two or three centuries later, and it allowed for lengthier documents to be made more easily. 

 

Still, they had to be copied out by hand so presumably only highly valued documents were considered valuable enough to be recopied many times and preserved. Since papyrus is perishable, anything less valuable would likely be lost, although some stores of less prestigious papyrus were preserved by accident and are now available to scholars. Most survivors were documents of religious importance. Note that we don't have any early copies of the Hebrew Bible, for example, but rather material that was copied and recopied through the millennia. In fact the only copies we have from BCE are a translation into Koine Greek. The sources of the definitive Hebrew text, the Masoretic text which was compiled in the diaspora in the first millennium CE, are lost.

Anyway, as society and technology grew more complex, and knowledge of the world extended over vastly greater distances and now, thanks to writing, over time as well, the status of knowledge itself became more problematic. How are we to know what is really true, when priests and rulers are making competing claims, rumors come from distant lands, and historical documents don't always agree? And, now that there was a class with leisure to study nature and the stars, what had once seemed obvious or nobody thought to ask became mysterious, and the immediate evidence of our senses often turned out to be misleading.

Presumably people thought and argued about the nature of knowledge, how we can know what is true, and what truth even consists of before any written records of such discourse have survived, but the earliest example we have was written by the Athenian Plato around 369 B.C. It is called the Dialogue of Theaetetus because it purports to be the record of a discussion between a young student of that name and the late Socrates, which would have happened many years before because Socrates was long dead. (Theaetetus went on to become a mathematician who proved that there are five and only five regular polyhedra, although in the dialogue he appears rather dim witted.) 

 

It was necessary to think about this because the Greeks, and especially the Athenians, were making all sorts of discoveries and inventions, some of a purely abstract nature such as the geometry in which Theaetetus participated, some much more concrete. In fact, for one impressive example, just a hundred or so years later, Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth quite accurately. But how could we know he was right?*

 

In the Dialogue Socrates considered, although he ultimately was not convinced by it, a doctrine which came to be known as Justified True Belief, and which became the core framework for epistemology -- the philosophy of knowledge -- ever since. Since we have a noun modified by two adjectives, we need to work backwards to unpack this construction. First we need to define belief; then we have an entity called a true belief, so we need to define truth; and then we need to consider how a true belief may be justified. Socrates never got into any of that very deeply -- after all, as far as we know [sic] nobody had ever thought about this before, so it was enough just to come up with it.  So we'll take up these problems next.

* No, Columbus didn't have the brilliant insight that the earth is round so you could get to Asia by sailing west. Every sailor already knew that the earth was basically spherical, Columbus was just an idiot who thought it was 2/3 its actual size. If he hadn't blundered onto the Caribbean islands, he and his crew would have died of hunger and thirst. Also, he was not Italian, he died thinking he was sailing back and forth to the islands of the South China Sea, and he never set foot in North America or even knew of its existence.