Christianity in the Middle East, The (Not!) Death of RSS, and Scientism (Across the Sundering Seas, #22)
Hi there, readers!
I had a lovely week this week, and hope you did as well. My family’s celebration of America’s Independence Day was quite interesting this year, in that it coincided with a thunderstorm and I enjoyed both an extra spectacular light show in the form of lightning mingling with the fireworks and a bit of a shower in the form of, well, rain.
Into some links!
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The Impossible Future of Christians in the Middle East, Emma Green, May 2019 – a sad and troubling look at the impact the last several decades of war have had on one of the oldest communities in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Iraqi Christians. Green’s reporting is consistently excellent, but this is among her best. Sad to say, it is in large degree American interventionism that has led to this state of affairs, and American intervention now may merely be prolonging the inevitable. This is a sad mess, but it’s one worth understanding.
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The Rise and Demise of RSS, Sinclair Target, December 2018 – a fascinating dive into a piece of technology that in many ways represents the best and worst of the “indie web” world: it’s wonderful (and I use it every day, as do many of you, I suspect) but it’s just arcane enough and just poorly named enough and—as this piece highlights—just political enough that it was easy for social media effectively to bury it in the early 2010s. This history digs into a great deal more than just the way that RSS nearly vanished from public consciousness after Google shut down Google Reader, and I learned quite a bit about the early history and the internal jockeying among the maintainers of the standards from it.
But I also think that the title is rather too sure that RSS is dead. It could be. Or it could be that it’s just a bit more niche than social media—and that we’ve come to think that anything which isn’t at Massive Total Internet Scale™ is dead. Nothing could be further from the truth. RSS isn’t dead! But there are some very important lessons to be learned from its eclipse by social media, and this piece is a great help in learning some of them.
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Fallacies physicists fall for, Edward Feser, July 2018 – a careful takedown of the view called scientism, which I might also label materialist reductionism. Science is great! Seriously: I did my undergraduate work in physics and much as I love my day job, I constantly miss working in the sciences and have seriously pondered some way for physics or the like to be a second career in thirty years.
But. Physics (and other sciences) are, as Feser notes here, not self-interpreting, and indeed are incapable of being self-interpreting:
The metaphysical implications of relativity theory, or indeed of any theory in physics, is something the physics itself does not reveal. Then there are more general philosophical questions about science which science itself does not and cannot answer. For example, what is the relationship between the abstract mathematical representation of nature afforded by physical theory and the concrete reality that it represents? Is there more to nature than mathematical representations can capture? What demarcates science from non-science? What is a law of nature? Why is the world law-governed in the first place? And so on.
The tendency of those beholden to scientism, including professional scientists who are beholden to scientism, is to dismiss such questions on the grounds that the only thing worth talking or thinking about is whether the predictions pan out – which entails positivism, or instrumentalism, or some other form of anti-realism. And yet, when pressed about this implication, or when presenting the findings of science to the layman, the same people will usually insist on a realist understanding of scientific theories – apparently blithely unaware of the contradiction.
This is not some kind of philosophical gotcha that’s irrelevant to our world, either. Scientists speak, on many subjects, authoritatively in our culture. But most of the scientists who do so have no idea what they’re talking about in many of the areas they address; and, more importantly, they don’t understand the limits of what scientific data can say. Many prominent figures constantly commit the naturalistic fallacy—is means ought—to take just one obvious example. (I note that many of my fellow theology types are just as guilty of making serious fundamental philosophical mistakes, and get science wrong constantly. So do my fellow software engineers. This seems to be a human failing, not specific to any specific field.)
Hope that gives you all some interesting reading! More in a week!