Reality and Fakery

A week or so ago, I saw a movie on the TV of my favorite eat joint.  It was full of computer-generated images (which I found out just now are called CGI) that made the impossible look real, and added quite a lot of pizazz and "can't not look" to the movie.  I had to search to find the title: "Live Free or Die Hard."

One of the first things I noticed was a long drawn-out fistfight between two men (I think one was the Bruce Willis character) that involved more violence than I think any human being could handle.  Part of the fight took place in an elevator shaft, with both actors doing what I think were impossible acrobatics.  I believe one of the guys was hanging on one of the elevator cables at one point, which didn't seem possible to me.  During or after the firstfight, Willis was all bloody; but I noticed that as the story went on, the blood didn't change color as it dried (someone slip up in makeup?)  Then there was the scene with the semi and the jet plane that appeared to be hovering while it shot at the semi, which Willis was driving underneath collapsing freeway ramps - which of course missed him.  (I worked in public works engineering for 27 years, and though I'm not a concrete expert, I will bet that freeway ramps just don't collapse like that! -- they're full of re-bars.)

Another movie I saw just a few days ago, same eat joint, was "Starship Troopers."  That one was full of computer images (good monsters, though)!  Again, it had this "can't not look" quality.

I'm thinking that if you make a movie interesting to look at, you can make it as implausible as you like, but you've got the audience eating out of the palm of your hand, and their cash is in your bank.

Fake is more interesting than real.  That may be why porn is more popular than marriage.
(I don't know that it is, but I'd bet my shirt on it.)
Or recreational drug use almost an epidemic.

When I was taking Physics 1 at the university in 1962, we learned about falling-body problems and acceleration due to gravity All the problems said "neglect air resistance." I asked the prof when we could figure that in; he said, "Come back when you've had five quarters of calculus."


Reality is messy and difficult to deal with.  It takes learning, dedication, growing skill, and good judgment.  Makes no difference whether you're trying to establish a solid relationship with a new spouse, take care of a colicky teething kid still in diapers, raise a kitchen garden, rehab an old double-hung sash window, or do practically anything for real.

Anyway, I'm suspicious of the popularity of these high-grade fantasy movies, video games, and all that.  I get a sneaking suspicion in my nasty suspicious mind that an awful lot of people prefer fantasy to reality.  I think it's one of the things that's ruining our country.  And worse yet, it gets in the way of salvation: there's no resurrection without death first.

Faith and Reason - Fides et Ratio

I happened to turn on the TV this evening, and came in right at the start of Inherit the Wind, made in 1960, based on the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (no, not that Robert E. Lee) which in turn was based on the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925.

It's a powerful movie, partly because some of it (I'm not sure how much) really happened, and, to my mind, mostly because it's a clash between science and religion. Now I have to qualify that. It seems to me the movie portrayed a clash between atheistic science and very fundamentalist religion; in other words, two opposite poles -- two extremes -- which I think a Catholic thinker would avoid, because neither pole represents the balance that Catholicism offers.

I'm currently reading John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio, in which it seems (I'm only a little way into it) he insists there's no real conflict between real science and real religion. This is a notion that, as far as I know, the Church has held since at least Aquinas and probably further back than that. (I understand the great Fathers of the first few centuries adopted the methods and some of the terminology of Greek philosophy, in order to attempt to make divine revelation clearer.)

Anyway, in the textbook used for the course in medieval history at the University of Minnesota in the late 1960s, Robert S. Hoyt's Europe in the Middle Ages, there is a good five-page discussion of Aquinas. One of the principal things Prof. Hoyt says in the book about St. Thomas is this (on p. 383):

"To summarize Thomas' view of the Christian universe, part is cognizable by unaided natural reason , and it is connected in logical probability with the second part which must, ultimately, be accepted on faith. But if revelation be granted as providing valid premises or first principles, this second part also can be shown to be no less rational than the first part. The two parts of the Thomistic universe are nature and supernature. The conclusions concerning nature can be demonstrated to be true; nature can be demonstrated to be consonant with supernature as revealed, in the sense that by arguments from natural reason no revealed truth can be demonstrated to be false and all revealed truths can be demonstrated to be not impossible. The Christian universe is thus coherent: its parts fit together logically if faith is accepted, and if faith is not accepted it still cannot be shown that the two do not fit together logically. Hence the final conclusion that the universe is one and rational."

G. K. Chesterton wrote a little book on St. Thomas (I highly recommend it to anyone) which Etienne Gilson -- arguably the finest scholar of St. Thomas -- praised by saying, "I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas."

(Chesterton wrote a great heap of equally brilliant works too; my favorites are Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man.) In one of these books he came up with a brilliant little quip which I stole and used against an atheist (or at least agnostic) professor of philosophy at the U. of M. about 1969: "Faith and reason are not incompatible. It's an act of faith to believe your thinking bears any relation to reality."

Religion has the Ten Commandments, science has the ten postulates of Euclid. A rabbi I read many years ago said that the Ten Commandmants are not the last word in morality, but the first word that must be said before any others can be. As to Euclid, the statement "Any quantity equals itself" is either self-evidently true or it's nonsense. The common thing is that whether with morality or science, you have to start somewhere. You have to have first principles, or else you've got nothing. You can't put Descartes before the horse. :-}