HOW THINGS BEGAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 556, 17 February 1950, Page 5

HOW THINGS BEGAN

Sir,-Mr. Prior charged me with usifig the term "self-contradictory" in an indiscriminate fashion, and I asked him to prove this charge by quoting several instances, The best he could do was to quote my statement that Monism is "incompatible with the principle of contradiction." I pointed out that "incompatible with the principle of contradiction" is not the same as "self-contradictory." Mr. Prior now writes (Listener, February 3): "Father Duggan now tells us

that one of the propositions which he describes in his book as self-contradic-tory is only ‘mediately’ so." To refute this assertion it is enough to repeat that I did mot describe the proposition as self-contradictory. The remainder of Mr. Prior’s discussion rests on a view which he erroneously attributes to me and which he describes as "a novel extension of the notion of self-contradiction," viz., the view that "mediately incompatible with the principle of contradiction" is equivalent to "self-contradictory." I. wrote (Listener, January 20): "A statement may be immediately or mediately incompatible with the principle of contradiction, and only in the former case is it self-contradictory." For Mr. Prior’s benefit, "the. former case" refers to the term "immediately," and the meaning is: "A proposition is self-contradictory » "aly

when it is immediately incompatible with the principle of contradiction." There is nothing novel about that notion of self-contradiction. Comment on Mr. Prior’s dialectical methods I leave to the discerning reader. Mr. Prior seems aggrieved that I- did not explain the difference between "effect" and "change." There was no need for me to do this because we were discussing the possibility of an uncaused change, and Mr. Prior dragged in the tefm "effect." For his benefit, the terms are not identical, because change is a process, whereas an effect may be a permanently existing thing. A motor-car is an effect, but not a change. Mr. Prior says: "A man may hold without self-contradiction that some changes have no cause." Once again, I disagree, for it is immediatély evident that every change must have some cause. Whatever the change may be, the mind has only to know it as a change to know’ at the same time that it must have some cause. Since this truth is self-evident it cannot be strictly proved, but only con->» firmed by an appeal to experience. And is it not a fact that when we perceive some change, e.g., when we get a flat tyre, we spontaneously look for the cause and would dismiss as literally absurd the suggestion that some changes (and if some, why not this one?) may occur without any cause?

G. H.

DUGGAN.

S.

M.

(Greenmeadows). ~

Sir,-A. Stenberg declares that evolution is a blasphemous anti-God theory and then promptly ddds insult to blasphemy by declaring that, according to infallible Scriptures, God created man in His own image. Just imagine anyone ascribing an image to that immense power and wisdom, which dominates the whole universe, and which developed the first humans on this earth, the Neanderthal and the Java man and three or four similar types (after His own image?) about 500,000 years ago. Yet, according to Genesis the whole universe was only made about 3000 years ago. Chinese records go back over 6000 years and the rays from some remote suns take 50 million years to reach our little grain of dust called earth. Since man began to study nature there has never been known one instance of any type of life having been created without a very gradual process of evolution.

Every farmer knows that and uses these laws for the improvement of his stock.

G. F.

B. WEISS

(Mangonui).