MetaCatholic

After a short break, Stephen comes back swinging in response to this post. Fascinatingly, he seems to me to be just as good, if not better, at putting words into my mouth as he claims I am at putting a caricature of his argument into his. I won’t attempt to sum up his argument this time: just read it for yourselves. (Read John Hobbins’ comment also.)

I do, however, offer a few notes and observations in response. Obviously, the existence or otherwise of “objective truth” whatever exactly that is, is a matter of belief, but a case can be made that such a belief is reasonable., rather than blind. I haven’t offered an argument on my About page, so much as a mini-creed.

Believing that truth is external to our perceptions of it, and that in seeking to perceive truth, we are seeking to discover the meaning and reality of what is rather than invent it, seems to me to be a corollary of believing in a God who is exterior to our being, and the being of the universe. Again, you can’t prove or disprove God, only offer more or less reasonable accounts of those beliefs.

Failure to perceive something does not mean there is nothing to be perceived. There are long-tried accounts of why our knowledge of God is (to say the least) inadequate that also have something to say about our knowledge of the truth.

Failure to agree in practice does not mean agreement in principle is impossible, only that it is hard to achieve. The empirical observation that people do come to agreement through apparently intractable disputes is as important to any grand theory as the regular and all too frequent disagreements that are often more noticeable and more intensely expressed.

The existence of different community histories leading to different paradigms of thinking (a rather overused concept) fails to prove anything about the nature of reality. To assume otherwise is to collapse ontology into epistemology. In practice we do communicate across paradigms, but with severe difficulty and frequent misunderstanding. All we can do is tell stories that invite people to enter a different paradigm and find it a more satisfying story. The possibility of events that disrupt paradigms can never be discounted. Sometimes the paradigm will absorb the event, sometimes the accumulation of events will explode the paradigm. The fact that this happens suggests that “reality” as an external something can indeed impinge on, and transform, our ways of knowing it.

Another little update on switching operating systems, for those who are curious, and those who are pondering the same move.

The first lesson: there’s no such thing as a perfect computer system, whatever enthusiasts tell you. The second lesson is that (whisper who dares) Windows and OS X are not as far apart as you might think. It’s more than a big-endian and little-endian dispute, but far nearer that than to the Arian controversy, despite the religious intensity of the battle. Lesson number three is that the oft-touted word “intuitive” often (but not always) means “what I’m used to”.

One downside story first. I couldn’t for the life of me work out why the Notes feature of Mail wasn’t working. I trawled the various discussions and support sites, and clearly quite a few other people had had or were having the same problem. Most were writing this off as a bug. Then I stumbled across one site that had the answer. The Marker Felt font needed to be enabled. Many of us jaded long-time users of any system are prone to turn fonts and font sets on and off as needed. I’d moved this particular font into a group that was disabled. But it is hardly elegant to make a feature depend on a particular non-system font, and throw up no warning dialogue. One thing that definitely does seem to be a bug (and not a faux bug like the notes one) is the failure of iCal to purge old events according to the settings. I had to get rid of mine by purging them on the Palm TX and then syncing.

On the major upside, I thought it was time to put into action something I’d quite wanted to do for some time. I copied part of Jesus of Nazareth to the Mac (using the excellent Handbrake) and then edited about 25 minutes of the passion sequence down to just over four in iMovie. Then I overlaid Wonderwall from my iTunes library, and exported it as a QuickTime movie, for use as an unusual meditation piece in an informal evening service. (I’d love to show you, but I think I’d be violating all sorts of copyright.) The various importing and rendering times were tedious, but I could get on with other stuff. The actual work was relatively brief. The final product may have been rough and ready (and I really undertook it as a learning experience) but I managed it without any reference to any manual or guide, and just be trying things out. In this case, it was fairly intuitive – once I realised that the Mac’s default option to make something happen is drag one thing over another.

The saga continues.