Upon hearing an Eric Clapton guitar solo

[fpb]

At times like this, I really do feel sorry for atheists. One has to be grateful for artistry so miraculous, but they have nobody to be grateful to. (And don't give me any crap about "the human spirit" - that is what we owe the Murdoch press and robotic dance noise to.)

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Read my essay on Darwin and Newton in my community fpb_de_fide. You will find it all there, along with a number of things it would be useful for you to know.

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

What you describe there seems to me to be captured better by something like "remarkable achievement", since you refer both to talent and circumstances. Here, you stress the underlying (apparently) innate talent of Clapton as the main thing.

Either way, you opine that "genius" is predicated on a rare combination of events, like I have here. I therefore take it that it is its rarity which you find to be the defining feature of the phenomenon at hand. I continue to say that the rarity is inherently a feature of nature. Perhaps you can explain your position to me on another example.

Michael Jordan had a rare set of athletic talents, well suited to engaging in an activity known as the game of basketball. The circumstances were such that he was able to use these talents to make millions happy and excited. Where does God enter the picture, again?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It is not rarity that I stress, it is unpredictability. Randomness in its most basic manner. You can, if you are a tyrant and the fancy strikes you that way, breed men for height, or for strength, or for blonde hair, or even for IQ; these are things that are partly or wholly innate and that can be bred into someone, whether or not their presence is rare. (There are Indians and black Africans with blue eyes.) But the end of my argument, and the core of it, is that it is a logical impossibility to breed for genius; that any program that sought to create geniuses by any kind of planned action would achieve the reverse of its goals, producing a generation of loquacious but imperceptive critics. That is because genius happens at the interception of a particular kind of individual potential, which is not always the same - the white-hot mathematical logic of the fanatic Newton was certainly not comparable to the emotional fervour of the irascible drinker, Beethoven - and specific cultural and social developments whose appearance cannot be predicted in advance. Eric Clapton would never have been what he is without the electric guitar, the American tradition of blues playing, and the peculiar position of England with respect to anything American - always both near and distant, offering a chance of reflection that the natives perhaps might not achieve. For instance.

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

So to you the unpredictability and hence uncontrollability of the phenomenon of genius implies that the atheist's experience of (exposure to) it is incomplete?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Um. Putting it like that jumps a few connections I would make, and I would not say that that is the main feature about it. But having said all that - yes.

That is a long journey for something I really meant as a boutade - and that is not very novel either.

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

Okay.

As far as contemporary science knows, it is in principle impossible to predict the position at which an electron will hit a screen after it passes through a narrow slit. Is the atheist's appreciation of this phenomenon incomplete?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Did an electron write the Divine Comedy? And yes, I know that Dante's body was full of electrons. As for the principle of randomness, I think it is completed once you understand it as an aspect of the free will of a sovereign God as expressed in His creation.

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

Since you seem to be concerned with tackling that which you assume I am going to say after you answer "no", am I to take it that your answer to my question is "no"?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I thought the question had to do with the principle of randomness and I tried to answer it accordingly.

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

The question is the following: are there natural phenomena which are unpredictable (either in principle or in practice - due to their great complexity) of which the atheist's experience is complete? If yes - please provide an example. If no - please justify.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No. Because everything that exists has an extra dimension from whose perception the atheist has cut him/herself off.