Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has commented here on my previous “Logic and Faith’ post, with his usual thoughtfulness and insight. He has also expatiated further on the general question of faith and intuition.
I feel the need to add a few more thoughts of my own.
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, comments here on Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. I haven’t read the book, so I must be careful about what I say here, but from the excerpts quoted, and the interview given by Harris at Amazon, he (Harris) appears to be staking out a position that, with unintended irony, is the product of his own faith. The most telling example of this is something he said in this interview:
“Faith” is a false belief in unjustified convictions.
There has been quite a ruction lately about the Topeka, Kansas school board’s wish to accommodate literalist Christians by introducing new teaching standards for biology. The proposed guidelines would suggest to the impressionable student that the Darwinian idea, in which modern organisms (including humans) arose through a lengthy process of evolution by natural selection, is mere scientific dogma, and that an alternative account of the phenomena — “intelligent design” — should be given serious consideration.
Yesterday’s Times carried a sad notice: renowned bassist Niels-Henning Oersted Pedersen has died at age 58 in Denmark. I in no way intend this space to be devoted strictly to remembrances of deceased bass players, but Niels deserves a mention. He was one of the great ones, and played, in his long career, with the best of the best.
On Thursday, the 24th of March, New York City’s musical family assembled at the Church of the Tranfiguration on East 29th Street to say goodbye to the gifted bassist Wayne Pedziwiatr (a.k.a. Pedzwater), who had died the previous week after a long and grueling struggle with gastric cancer. To know Wayne was to love him, and since pretty much every professional musician in New York knew him, the gathering was not small.
Wayne was a remarkable figure; he seemed to glow from within. He was tall, athletic, and strikingly handsome, with the sort of physical presence that one might imagine could only be the result of a carefully managed eugenics program. He had a dazzling smile, a nimble, curious and capacious mind, and a splendidly pungent sense of humor. Above all, though, were his extraordinary musicianship and his dedication to excellence.