Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? Having heard from both Tanked Michael and cartoonist (that's his self-portrait at right) Jeremiah Murphy that I failed to fully explain my Lewis Carroll reference, I would like to say a little more. I didn't want to go into too much detail in my earlier post, partly because I wanted to give a sense of my own inarticulateness and frustration in the conversation with J., and partly because I didn't know how to say what I wanted to say without sounding self-righteous. But this is a blog, and trying to fight the urge to champion one's beliefs in this medium is like trying to play a Sixties garage classic without a fuzzbox. So . . .
What struck me the most about Carroll's brainteaser was how brilliantly he satirized the futility of trying to explain a metaphysical concept that one knows is right. Using an example from my own circle of friends, when Tanked Michael picked up a gold bracelet that a woman dropped on the street, most of his friends who witnessed or heard about it believed that it would be right for him to return it. They may or may not have believed in God, but they believed that a higher concept of goodness should influence Michael to go against his desire to keep the jewelry. Yet, no amount of chiding on their part could make him agree that there was such a higher goodness, or that he should follow it. [UPDATE: Michael, who has posted a response to this post on his Web site, writes to me in an e-mail, "Just to be clear, I did not want that bracelet. I didn't want the woman to have it, which is not the same."]
How do we know the time? We get it from our clocks, which get it from the Atomic Clock or some such construction, which gets it from calculations which are ultimately based on the movement of the earth in relation to the sun. When we believe what our clock says, we allow ourselves to take on the clock's knowledge, so to speak.
Likewise, how do we know when we are right? If you believe in God—and this goes for Jews as well as Christians—then you believe that God is the source of rightness, and that being right means placing ourselves in a position where we admit God's knowledge, either by acknowledging it, or, as Christians would put it, allowing ourselves to take on his knowledge—to set ourselves by His clock, as it were.
But, as Carroll points out, using a transcendent metaphysical source for rightness strikes rational materialists—like J.—as a tautology. J. doesn't believe in a transcendent metaphysical source, so J. believes that those who point to that source are merely interpreting the world by their own rules—or by rules that other people made up. So J. is frustrated by my propounding a tautology, and I'm frustrated by my inability to make it seem like anything other than a tautology.
11:34 PM
