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God? Or No God?
One of the great ongoing battles in the modern era is the question of God. Is there a God or isn’t there?
A good part of modern intellectual thought has been “atheist,” meaning analyzing the world on the assumption that there is no God.
The atheist belief system is centered on Darwin’s theory of evolution, that
that species evolve over generations through a process of natural selection, where organisms with heritable traits better suited to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce.
The point is that Darwinian theory doesn’t need God.
Chaps like Vox Day spend a lot of time proving that Darwin must be wrong. And now scientists are agreeing that, when you look at the organization of life, especially down in the DNA, it is so complex and interwoven that the simple idea of Darwinian natural selection doesn’t seem to be necessary and sufficient to explain the development of life. And especially the origin of life.
I am pretty relaxed about all this. In my world view, humans knowledge has always come up against a brick wall, and we have tended to say that, on the other side of the brick wall is God. And since we can’t see over the brick wall we can’t figure out what God is up to.
No problem. I think that every human society — since when, do you think? — has had some idea of a creator God and some sort of creation myth, and various stories and myths and epics that tell the story of the world in the olden time.
I am reading a delicious book about Alexandria. Now, a ways south of Alexandria along the Nile there is a well and on Midsummers Day the sun shines pretty well straight down the well. But at Alexandria, on Midsummers Day, this chap set up a stick and noted that the sun was not overhead. What could explain the difference? Hey, what if the world were round? Then, he did a calculation and came up with the diameter of the Earth assuming it was round. This was about 200 BC.
Right now, scientists are worried that the Big Bang was not the origin of the universe, but just another Bang in a series of Bangs in the Multiverse. No problem. For me, the Big Bang is a creation myth, and in due course it will be replaced by another creation myth. In the Bible, God created the Earth in six days, and rested on the seventh. All across the world, humans have come up with different creation myths. And there will be more.
I am a strong believer in creation myths. They tell you a lot about the society that created the creation myth.
The Greek gods?
Greek gods are powerful, anthropomorphic deities inhabiting Mount Olympus, embodying natural forces and human traits like jealousy, love, and rage. They are not perfect, but rather immortal, superhuman entities controlling aspects of existence[.]
It’s interesting that when we get to Zoroaster, we have now have one good god and one bad god. And with Christianity we have one good God and the bad god has been taken care of. We will leave the modern secular gods from Marx to Lenin to Hitler for future generations who, experts agreed a century ago, would shortly create Heaven on Earth.
I wonder what the next God will be, and what the next creation myth will be. It could be interesting. For the young generation.
But my point is to suggest that we don’t get too excited about God or no-God, about whether the universe is 14 billion years old or just in a 14 billion year phase since the last Bang. Let’s not get too worried about whether life could have created itself or whether it needed a God to do it.
We all want to know how the world was created, and how everything works, and what comes next.
But I say: relax, sports fans. Seattle won the Super Bowl last Sunday, and some other team will probably win next year.
And if you want to think about “life, the universe, everything” I’d suggest checking out Shakespeare here. Because that guy sure knew a thing or two. Especially for the son of a glovemaker.
| perm | 02/09/26 11:45 pm ET | comments |
Rule One: Nobody Has a Clue
I am getting towards the end of Technological Revolutionss and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez.
It’s full of useful stuff, but after reading Chapter 14, The Sequence and its Driving Forces, I have a problem.
Perez seems to assume that the actors know what they are doing. She projects a mechanical understanding of human society and the various actors. She seems to experience “production capital” and “financial capital” and “socio-institutional framework” as forces trying to impose their will upon the world.
I don’t like the mechanical Newtonian world view. I believe that the modern paradigm, proposed by Kant, is that we only know appearances. Everything else, starting from the image of the world that our brains construct from the so-called visible-light “photons” that flood into our eyes, is an imaginary construction, a castle in the air.
Now, I believe that technological revolutions start miles away from “production capital.” They start with some yokel with a crazy idea. There was John D. Rockefeller, a store clerk, that started thinking about the barrels of oil out back. He saved the whales because Pennsylvania oil worked in oil lamps that God thought would look really cool in Hollywood Westerns. Or Andrew Carnegie, a telegraph messenger, but a telegraph messenger for Thomas A. Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad. And that started his ascent, because he got to know a bunch of people that could help him. Henry Ford started as an apprentice machinist, then started building cars in a workshop on his parents’ farm. Steve Jobs was the adopted son of a coastguard mechanic. He and Steve Wozniak developed Wozniak’s Apple I computer into the Apple II. Elon Musk was born in South Africa and determined to get to the US. So, at age 18, he filled out the forms to immigrate to Canada.
In other words, in what Perez calls the “irruption” phase, what is actually going on is a bunch of yahoos, nobodies trying out new stuff. We don’t know anything about the guys that had good ideas, but only the guys whose good ideas worked and who were able to get their good ideas that worked into production and into the minds of consumers.
Of course, as more and more people get to hear about these new ideas that work, there gets to be a “frenzy” as everyone wants to get in on the action. And typically too many people get into the frenzy on borrowed money and go bottom-up when the frenzy tops out. Because nobody knows when and how the “bubble” will pop.
In the subsequent recession or depression, Perez writes,
at such times, the role of the state and various social forces becomes indispensible for shaping the direction in which society will move [thereafter].
You think that the “state” and “social forces” have a clue what is going on and what to do about it? Please! The response of the state is inflation, as in FDR going off the Gold Standard after the 1929 Crash and Ben Bernanke doing QE and QE2 in response to the 2008 Crash. And then there is the inflation financed government spending that probably, experts will one day agree, delayed the economic recovery.
The only thing that governments know how to do is print money and go to war.
My basic point is that we should all understand that, most of the time, nobody has a clue. Nobody has any idea what new ideas are going to work. Nobody has a clue about a boom in the stock market. Nobody has an idea about how to regulate finance and balance the various financial concepts from debt to equity. And nobody has an idea about how the get the economy back on track after a crash.
Governments and elite cultures are based on the assumption that political and cultural leaders know what they are doing. They don’t! They are just faking it.
That’s why I am always looking for ideas that accept that we really don’t have a clue and are stumbling along trying to avoid bumping into things. One of the ideas that has half a clue about this is the venture capital startup culture. The venture capitalists consciously fund a bunch of startups because they know that you cannot know in advance which good idea will turn out to be the good idea that works.
| perm | 02/07/26 1:04 am ET | comments |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
[Voters are] tired of politicians who won’t let the wounds of the past heal. — Winsome Sears
Socialism is the religion that sanctifies loot and plunder as moral obligations.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Confronting the Left's Pejorative Politics
