Summary of Pascal Lecture by Charles Rice (Part 1)

Here's the first part of my account of Charles Rice's Pascal lecture tonight. For background, see previous posts on this blog. I will try to report fairly what Rice said, but I'm evidently biased. Inside quote marks the quotes are exact to the best of my ability to take notes; other comments are just paraphrases of what he said. My comments are in brackets.

My guess is that there were about 100-150 protesters outside & inside the building, and about 150-200 listening to the lecture inside an auditorium that could hold 500. There were a lot of empty seats, despite the controversy.

Charles Rice: 80-year-old professor of law at Notre Dame & former Marine who looks 65.

Rice was introduced by David B. Perrin, the President of St. Jerome's University, the Catholic university that is affiliated with the University of Waterloo (it used to be called a "church college"). [Perrin pronounced "Pascal" as if it rhymed with the computer language Haskell, and pronounced "Marine Corps" as "Marine Cores", both of which I found odd.] Throughout the night, Rice behaved almost as if it were an undergraduate lecture, moving out from behind the podium, asking questions directly of audience members, and rambling a bit.

By the way, in contrast to all the previous Pascal lectures I've attended, no member of the University's administration was there to welcome and introduce the speaker: neither President nor Provost. This was a pointed statement that the University administration did not approve of the choice of Rice as speaker.

Rice started with a joke, saying he was a lawyer and that "99% of lawyers give the rest of us a bad name". Throughout his approximately one-hour lecture, he had some mild jokes, some of which were more successful than others. He said his talk would be about epistemology - "how do you know?" He quoted Pope Benedict as saying that "modern culture restricts reason to the empirical", but that this was unwise, since if reason can only reach the empirical, it can't reach objective moral truth or God. Questions about objective moral truth and God are dismissed as non-rational in our society, Rice claimed, because reason cannot know anything about them. "We lose the ability to ask if a law is unjust because if reason is limited to the empirical, we can't decide, what is justice?"

He then said he was "frankly surprised to the objection to my participation in these lectures. I'm just a guy from Mishiwaka, Indiana. Why should I get singled out?" [I found this disingenuous. He's not just "a guy", he's a law professor at a major university who has inserted himself into public controversies before, such as when he protested Obama's selection as commencement speaker at Notre Dame. So it's a little ironic that he claims not to understand why someone would protest his own selection as a speaker. I think he knows quite well.]

The objections, Rice said, are because "I advance the teaching of the Catholic Church. I plead guilty. I fully agree with all the teachings of the Catholic church. Jesus Christ, who is God, lives in and teaches through the Catholic church. I respect the protesters and their protest. I admire their tenacity."

He went on to rule out any questions about anything except the subject of his lecture: "Don't take what I say as disparagement, but I'm not getting into these subjects in this lecture. It would be a disservice to the foundational issues to allow the discussion to be diverted into another agenda. Questions will have to be limited to things covered in the lecture. I don't want the focus to be diverted." [I found this a transparent ploy to avoid answering any hard questions about his extensive record of bigoted statements. It is ascholarly and disgraceful.]

He said, "We're going to talk about conscience. What is it?" Thomas Aquinas said it is "how we judge the rightness of wrongness of a particular action." Is there an objective standard, or is it simply your decision? Pope John Paul 2 said our society says "whatever I decide is right for me".

The Enlightenment's goal was "to organize society as if God does not exist". That is its basic principle.

He then asked a number of people in the audience individually if they think God exists. First person: "No." Second person: "No." Third person (me): "No!" [I think he was taken aback by this; he's probably not used to so many people disagreeing with one of his basic beliefs. Well, Waterloo is not Notre Dame, where he's used to teaching.] Finally, someone in the audience said, "I do!"

Rice then tried to move to causality. He said, "If I drop a pen" and asked why it fell, and you said, "No reason", would anybody believe it? There are things, he said, that are self-evident. One is the "principle of sufficient reason": every effect has a cause. [I don't understand why people elevate this claim to a universal. Causality might fail, for example, at very small or very large scales. For example, when an individual U-238 atom decays, what is the cause of its decay? The modern view of physics at the quantum level (admittedly not shared by all physicists) is that randomness is really "built in" and some "causes" are only statistical, not the deterministic ones envisioned by Rice. It seems to me that as a scholar, he needs to deal with this objection forthrightly.]

God is "an eternal being" and people "are immortal". "Only spiritual beings, such as humans, can abstract and reflect." [This seems just like a groundless assertion to me. I think Rice needs to read some ethology, such as the work of Gordon Gallup and Frans de Waal. It is not clear at all that the ability to abstract and reflect is restricted to humans; indeed there is evidence that baboons and apes can do so.]

More tomorrow...