To Beg the Question

It came to my attention recently that there is a lot of misuse of the phrase ‘to beg the Question’. I heard an example of this the other day on the TV, always the place to go if you want to hear semi-academic language being abused embarrassingly by pompous thirty-somethings. I then repaired to my ‘Dictionary of Bullshit’, a work which has been invaluable to me in my studies of the native tongue of my new workplace.

The Dictionary has this to say: ‘Begging the question once applied to logical argument. You begged the question by assuming the truth of that which you wanted to prove…The expression, however, sounds as if it ought to mean something along the lines that here is a question urgently prompted by circumstance, once that is crying out to be answered. So many people use it this way that I think its meaning will inevitably change.’

Interestingly, the great thinkers of history were serial offenders when it came to begging the question, at least when it came to religion. It’s amazing to me that past cultures’ greatest minds could be so…stupid. Here is an example from Thomas Paine, whose ‘The Age of Reason’ I was reading on the bus today:

‘Of what use is it, unless it be to teach man something, that his eye is endowed with the power of beholding to an incomprehensible distance, an immensity of worlds revolving in the ocean of space? (He’s talking about the stars.) Or of what use is it that this immensity of worlds is visible to man?...A less power of vision would have been sufficient for man, if the immensity he now possesses were given only to waste itself, as it were, on an immense desert of space glittering with shows’.

So, what he’s saying is:

Man has a powerful vision --> if he did not use it to study astronomy, it would be wasted --> therefore God wants Man to study astronomy

Isn’t a step missing here? Paine is assuming that God doesn’t want us to waste our vision. He is also assuming that God cares.

I suppose that’s not so bad. And other than that, the work has been relatively incident free. Except for the traditional ‘I didn’t make myself, therefore God must have done, therefore he must exist’ that all the believing philosophers use. Socrates really loved that one too. It’s odd to me that such supposedly great thinkers could be so illogical that a lowly office worker (me) can catch them out and think how stupid they are. I can only conclude that it must be very hard, almost impossible, to snap out of the received thinking of your culture. Great thinkers today must make similar stupid errors of thought – and while we can debate some of their opinions, some pronouncements will go uncontested until a few generations later. Because we haven’t even noticed that they’re contestable.

Anyway, moving on. Thomas Paine has some pretty interesting things to say about Christianity. He describes how the Church founders got together at the beginning and decided which books to include in the Bible. They had a vote on what should be considered the word of God! But he doesn’t provide any evidence, or say where he got his information from. Maybe bibliographies hadn’t been invented in 1794. I’m sure he would approve of my thinking, well Tom, that’s a revelation for you, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s unproven.

Philosophers were a pretty arrogant bunch. They all seemed to believe that Man was the centre of the universe, and that the reason Man is so extraordinarily wonderful is that God wanted Mankind to admire Him. Think of Thomas Paine’s comments about the special powers of human sight – what about animals? Can they see the stars? Do we know? Isn’t he assuming that we are the only species that can see them? Because if other species can see them, doesn’t that suggest that they too were intended to study astrology? Not a one thinker seems to have considered that maybe God doesn’t give a damn what we think or do with our mental powers – I mean, maybe Man isn’t his chosen species at all. That reminds me of a cartoon I once saw – I think it was the Far Side – where aliens arrive on Earth and start communing with the cows.

I picked up a book of random essays by David Hume not so long ago, having fond memories of him from my university days, but I got so sick of his pompous, unsupported pronouncements that I gave up in disgust. I’m trying to remember some of what he said. No…it’s gone. I only remember thinking that if I wanted to hear opinions presented as facts I could just listen in on any conversation on the bus.