118

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118
24"x20" oil on canvas

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"It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all"

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The argument from reason:

Metaphysical naturalism: the view that nature as studied by the natural sciences is all that exists. Naturalists deny the existence of a supernatural God, souls, an afterlife, or anything supernatural. Nothing exists outside or beyond the physical universe.

The argument from reason seeks to show that naturalism is self-refuting, or otherwise false and indefensible.

According to Lewis,
 "One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the naturalistic worldview].... The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears.... [U]nless Reason is an absolute--all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based."
    — C. S. Lewis, "Is Theology Poetry?", The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses
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Similar views by other thinkers
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Philosophers such as Victor Reppert,[5] William Hasker[6] and Alvin Plantinga[7] have expanded on the argument from reason, and credit C.S. Lewis as an important influence on their thinking.

Lewis never claimed that he invented the argument from reason; in fact, he refers to it as a "venerable philosophical chestnut."[8] Early versions of the argument occur in the works of Arthur Balfour (see, e.g., The Foundations of Belief, 1879, chap. 13) and G.K. Chesterton.

In Chesterton's 1908 book Orthodoxy, in a chapter titled "The Suicide of Thought", he writes of the "great and possible peril . . . that the human intellect is free to destroy itself....It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?""

Similarly, Chesterton asserts that the argument is a fundamental, if unstated, tenet of Thomism in his 1933 book St. Thomas Aquinas: "The Dumb Ox":

    "Thus, even those who appreciate the metaphysical depth of Thomism in other matters have expressed surprise that he does not deal at all with what many now think the main metaphysical question; whether we can prove that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real. The answer is that St. Thomas recognised instantly, what so many modern sceptics have begun to suspect rather laboriously; that a man must either answer that question in the affirmative, or else never answer any question, never ask any question, never even exist intellectually, to answer or to ask. I suppose it is true in a sense that a man can be a fundamental sceptic, but he cannot be anything else: certainly not even a defender of fundamental scepticism. If a man feels that all the movements of his own mind are meaningless, then his mind is meaningless, and he is meaningless; and it does not mean anything to attempt to discover his meaning. Most fundamental sceptics appear to survive, because they are not consistently sceptical and not at all fundamental. They will first deny everything and then admit something, if for the sake of argument--or often rather of attack without argument. I saw an almost startling example of this essential frivolity in a professor of final scepticism, in a paper the other day. A man wrote to say that he accepted nothing but Solipsism, and added that he had often wondered it was not a more common philosophy. Now Solipsism simply means that a man believes in his own existence, but not in anybody or anything else. And it never struck this simple sophist, that if his philosophy was true, there obviously were no other philosophers to profess it."

In Miracles, Lewis himself quotes J. B. S. Haldane, who appeals to a similar line of reasoning in his 1927 book, Possible Worlds: "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."

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Top image: Rembrandt (possibly)

Text: Wikipedia

Bottom image: Reality eran_folio_by_pyxelated

Norah Jones – Black Hole Sun (Detroit Fox Theatre 5.23.17)

"All Sad People Like Poetry"

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There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

But there’s a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

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from Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality
image and title from Penny Dreadful, the tv show

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Up! And On!

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Up! And On!
To ever greater
heights of
aimless wandering

Krups Baby, Starbucks Man

Dig It Daddy-o

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Grain Hai-ull !!!

Diana Jaramillo

"We blew it."

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A line from the movie; you'll see in a minute.
I took this old thing down off the wall at Mom's house, where it's been hanging, apparently, since 1975. An oil painting on Masonite I did for a gift; it's about 16"x14" and the subject was a "real" plastic bowling pin converted to a planter; that's a live flower -- of whatever kind, I forget -- and Mom's actual bowling ball behind.
The real treat, for me however, was what I found on the back...

It's my final -- gloriously unfinished -- high school art class project! Billy (Dennis Hopper) and Wyatt (Peter Fonda) scootin' across the desert in Easy Rider. I remember there was a paperback book about the movie that had some stills in it and I was using one of those.
Then school let out and distractions abounded (many stories there; suffice here to say, I was kinda emulating these guys...), and it got set aside. Why I chopped it up for a flower picture...I was poor and out of canvas, I guess.

I've thought about that painting, that idea, many times over the years, especially since the internet, but I can't seem to find that same still shot. Maybe someday. But I never expected to find its remains on back of that masonite. I'm a little bit inspired by that, but then it's always exciting to run across old work having not seen it for years. Still...maybe someday...

That even looks a bit like Dennis Hopper, doesn't it? If you look closely you can even see some pencils lines where I sketched it in.

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Edit 7/9/19: Cleaning out a closet at Mom's house just the other day I came across this, a preliminary sketch of the bowling ball painting:

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Another of the rarities...

...a self-portrait, this one from 1976. Pencil on an 11x8.5" sketchbook page that had been removed from the book, trimmed a bit and framed as a gift.  Mirror image, by the way so, drawn from life, age 24.

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The Legend of Tarzan - Trailer

 


To me, all Tarzan movies are great; even that Caspar Van Dien one; even the Bo Derek one; all except the cartoon ones, I don't, can't watch those. Fuckin Disney. And I don't care what any critics say about any of them. Critics -- ALL critics -- are dipshits. This is a great movie. "He doesn't sound like I expected him to."

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