An Allegory

[HumbledCatholic]

The Baby Doll, The Little Girl, and the Scientist
by HumbledCatholic

The little baby doll had a round ceramic face, blushing cheeks, and delicate, dark brown eyes. It wore a little pink gown with a small hole on the back. Out of the hole came a little metal loop on the end of a string. When you pulled the string, the doll would say, “I love you, Mommy” and giggle endearingly. It was a singularly loveable toy, the favourite of little Mary.

When she came home from school, little Mary would take the doll in her arms and rock it gently back and forth. She would gaze affectionately into its dark brown eyes and sing it a lullaby. Then, she would take out her little toy bottle and, feeding it, rock it to sleep. As she rocked it to sleep, Mary herself often would grow drowsy and fall into a sweet daytime slumber with the little doll in her arms. Only occassionally, so as not to spoil the thrill of it, she would pull the little string on the back of her beloved toy and smile as it told her, “I love you, Mommy,” and giggled endearingly.

One day, however, Mary’s older brother got bored, and decided to pick on her. He swaggered up to the little girl as she lovingly cherished her little doll, and snatched it from her arms.

“What is it with you and this doll?” he taunted, “All day long you just hold it and hug it. Pssh…it’s not even real. Look!”

And he took off the little pink gown, got out a screwdriver, and pried open the back of the toy.

“See, I bet you thought that string actually made it talk, stupid little girl. All it does is pull this little lever here, and that activates this voicebox with a little recording on it, and that’s what makes it talk! You’re so stupid, I bet you thought the doll actually loved you when it said that! And look at its eyes -” he tapped on one, “they’re just glass over a painting. It can’t see you - look, it hasn’t even got a brain! You moron, what a worthless piece of junk!”

Then he threw the little doll on the floor so hard that it switched the little voicebox on, and the sweet little voice said, “I love you, Mommy,” and giggled endearingly. Mary’s brother laughed and shouted, “See, stupid, it doesn’t care what you do to it! It loves me just as much as it loves you!” and swaggered away.

Little Mary’s sweet blue eyes welled up with tears as she gathered up the broken, beloved doll in her arms and tried to put it back together again. She tried and tried, but she couldn’t seem to get it quite right, and so she wept over her little doll. Her father, seeing her crying, ran over to her, and asked what the matter was. She told him through her tears about what her brother had done.

“That’s silly,” said her father, "someone made that toy because they loved you and wanted you to play with it to learn how to love your own kids one day! Taking it apart doesn’t change that!

“Why, did you love your doll before your brother opened it?” She nodded. “And isn’t the doll just as good a doll as it was before he opened it?” She nodded. “And do you think the toymaker made it with any less love just because your brother tried to spoil it?” She shook her head. “Good. Always remember that!” said her father, and he put the back piece onto the doll, dressed it in its little pink gown, and gave it back to little Mary.

She hugged her daddy, took her precious toy in her arms, and ran off to her room. She pulled the little string on the back of the doll. “I love you Mommy,” it said, and giggled endearingly.

“I could make it talk if I threw it hard enough,” she thought to herself, “but why would I ever do that?” Then she grinned and, tucking the little doll into its crib, went outside to play.

The premise: We experience telos, and consequently meaning or purpose, phenomenologically and holistically - by experience of the integral thing, rather than by dissection of it.

The girl played with the doll and, in their proper context, all of the doll’s features made sense and made it more loveable. Although the doll was not an end in itself, it was end-directed, and was intended to teach the girl about motherhood.

Her brother, on the other hand, was blind to the purpose of the doll, and thought any such purpose disproved simply by demonstrating that the doll was not an end in itself. Further, as so much modern science revels in doing, he found an alternative way to operate the doll’s voicebox (by hurling it to the ground, rather than cradling it and gently tugging the string) which immediately made the recorded message, so appropriate and charming in context, seem absurd and meaningless.

I’m having difficulty explaining this thought in a prosaic way; that’s why I wrote the story. Hopefully these comments help; otherwise, read the allegory and discuss!

 

[JohnDamian]

My dear HumbledCatholic – your allegory is good insofar as it represents the fact that the act is not the end of a particular function; in the case of the doll the function being geared towards the end of love/motherhood; rather than just a toy.

Your comparrison to Science also holds true; Science often drives to pursue a single end, out of the context of that end as a function of a higher or greater end. This false conception often leads people to hold the medium the end; to give a visual example it leads them to mistake the step for the race.

Pursuing the particulars of a thing only serve insofar as acheiving those particulars; pursuing the ends of a specific thing nessecarily encapsulates it’s particulars; yet unites them to form a greater and more real whole. In your case; the particulars of the doll and it’s functions are geared to the end of motherhood; and as an element of that perform their function in a manner that is accessible and enjoyable – but this or that function does not serve as the ultimate purpose of the vehicle.

Good Job distilling a reasonably advanced idea within an accessible mode.

 

[tonyrey]

A superb allegory of the fundamental truth that we are persons with a capacity for love designed and created by God rather than biological machines which exist for no reason or purpose whatsoever. Congratulations!

 

[reggieM]

I thought that was excellent. It’s an allegory on several levels - it goes much deeper than one might expect at the beginning of the story.

 

[AntiTheist]

Your story is nicely written, though I feel compelled to point out that it can be read in exactly the opposite way, as well: the story reveals that “meaning” is a phenomenon entirely constructed by the minds of the little girl and her father, overlayed on top of the blind mechanical world.

The father in this story even consciously lies to the little girl in constructing the myth of meaning. He says, “someone made that toy because they loved you and wanted you to play with it to learn how to love your own kids one day! Taking it apart doesn’t change that!” In truth, toys aren’t made by people with love – they’re produced by soulless multinational corporations (usually designed by committee group-think and based on marketing research into what children want) and assembled entirely by machines, for the sole purpose of turning a profit.

Any idea that a toy loves you or that you love a toy comes entirely from you, from your mind.

EDIT: I realize that the point of this tale is that the doll was designed for a purpose (to be played with) and that purpose is unchanged despite big bad mean old science having to be a fuddy duddy stick in the mud and actually showing you how things work – but the little boy didn’t say, “There! That demonstrates that the doll doesn’t have a function!” He specifically attacks the idea that the doll actually loves the little girl. And he’s right – it doesn’t love her.

 

[HumbledCatholic]

AntiTheist,

But don’t you see, I agree with that premise! Outside mind is exactly that which imparts meaning to the material world! The only reason ever to object to anyone’s making that point is very simply if that person does not admit the mind of God which imparts meaning to all things.

That was the point of the story! To know the purpose of a thing, its real meaning, one must know the mind of its creator (and, yes, the idea of the multinational conglomerate making anything with love came to my mind, too - I concluded in the end that some toy designer, if not the factory worker or robot himself, had at some point to design that particularly charming and disarming toy with love). We can understand this by allegory to things which we create with a purpose in mind. I saw a television programme the other day as I was waiting in the lobby of a QuikStop for my car to be serviced - the point of the programme was to show the host, a famous cook, a novel kitchen implement, and then for her to take stabs at guessing what the purpose of that instrument was.

Bear in mind: here we are dealing with things which we know to be constructed for a specific purpose by human minds. Yet, despite knowing that the thing had a purpose, and indeed, despite knowing that the thing’s purpose was somehow to assist in cooking, the host was often completely puzzled as to what the thing could be for, often guessing wrongly. The only way she came to know for certain what the actual, intended purpose of any device was, was simply to be told plainly the purpose of it.

This show brings up another interesting point - very often she could come up with alternative uses for these implements: that is, she imparted meaning to that which she did not understand. But this does not make her imparted meaning equally as valid as the intention of the inventor, especially in those instances when the device was intended to be used in conjunction with another device for a greater purpose. In this case, the meaning the host would have assigned to the implement would only have inhibited its fullest use.

In short, I agree with you, I just believe in God.

 

[reggieM]

This story has some similarities to the conversion of the famous atheist, Whittaker Chambers.

I date my break with Communism to a very casual happening… My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear – those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind, ‘No, those ears were not created by chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.’ The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design supposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid on my forehead.

 

[reggieM]

To know the purpose of a thing, its real meaning, one must know the mind of its creator (and, yes, the idea of the multinational conglomerate making anything with love came to my mind, too - I concluded in the end that some toy designer, if not the factory worker or robot himself, had at some point to design that particularly charming and disarming toy with love).

You could possibly enhance the story with details about how that doll was handmade by a toy craftsman. There are many things in this world which are made with love. But even soulless machines or robots are built with love and purpose.

One might say that the ultimate purpose is to sell the toy and make money. But that wouldn’t be true either. Making money is not the final end (since money itself is useless unless it can be exchanged for value).

So, the making of the toy was done to achieve some goodness – to receive value for the maker, and in those cases where the craftsmen care about children and their customers – to provide an object that teaches about love and family.

Science is limited to explaining how it works. This can only look at the superficial realities – the string, voicebox, etc. It reduces the thing to a collection of parts. By its own, necessary limitations, science cannot have the holistic view.

 

[HumbledCatholic]

Exactly. And I think this is where the allegory differs from your comparison – it is not so much a tale of how someone came to a realisation of the meaning or end-directedness of an object; it is rather a look at how we experience the concept of meaning itself.

Meaning or purpose (I find them identical) is not something which can be discovered scientifically – not because science is erroneous or untrue, but simply because meaning is a phenomenon which is realised by different modes of inquiry from those which science employs.

The existence of subjective meaning predicates only on a rational mind to assign it to an object. For objectivity in questions of purpose, meaning, or end-directedness, however, we must look instead towards the mind ultimately responsible for the objects to which we would assign meaning, and we must be informed in some way by this mind of the nature of that purpose. This is best understood by allegory to the realm of human creation, where the existence of meaning is not just a possibility, but rather a given.

This ties in with my notions of faith itself. I borrow from Pascal a little when I presume the Deus absconditus. Those who seek will indeed find, but there remains the possibility of not finding. As such, the way in which God reveals Himself to us cannot be so blatantly obvious (for instance, healing amputees the world over) as to preclude our free choice. Rather, I see His self-revelation this way:

God reveals Himself primarily as a Person. To “know” a Person is a much surer and deeper thing than to know a fact. Now, there are three modes of knowledge, knowledge by our own observation (although the paradigms through which we observe the world are imparted to us by others), knowledge by relationship (to know a Person), and knowledge by reliable witness. That last mode of knowledge is the mode whereby we attain to the greatest part of what we know. I cannot prove general relativity mathematically myself, but I have solid reasons to trust those who tell me that such a theory is worthy of belief. As such, I put my trust in their reliable witness and accept what they say as true.

Now, God wishes to be known as a Person, but His knowability (separate from His existence) is not apparent to reason alone. As such, He has revealt to us by the reliable witness of the Evangelists and St. Paul first, and thereafter the whole company of the Saints who have come to know Him as a Person, that He may be known, and in what ways Man may come into a relationship with God.

So by reliable witness we come to know that God is knowable. We are free to trust or not to trust this witness; this is a choice we must make - the leap of faith. Having trusted this witness, however, we set about to establish a relationship with God as a Person, and this is the surest Truth and Consolation given to the believer. For by knowing the Creator’s mind, we come to know our own purpose.

 

[HumbledCatholic]

To expound upon the three modes of knowledge: as you might notice, they are all bound up in one another.

For we learn to observe first by witness, but our observation and experience corroborates their testimony. Most often, too, the people from whom we learn observation and reason we also relate to as Persons, and this is the basis for our trusting their testimony. The first knowledge that a young child has is this personal mode of knowledge - “Daddy”, “Mommy”, and by nature he trusts them. As such, they instruct him as a trusting and willing learner, as witnesses, and he learns of them the paradigms by which to contextualise his observations of the world.

So, as intimately related as they are as human knowledge, nevertheless the distinction between the three modes of knowledge, despite their intimate relationships, is appropriate and apt since, once all three modes have been attained, they become more discrete.

 

[MindOverMatter2]

I’m having difficulty explaining this thought in a prosaic way; that’s why I wrote the story. Hopefully these comments help; otherwise, read the allegory and discuss!

Good story. It seems that what you intend to show us is that there is an aspect of reality which transcends mere cause and effect or mechanistic functionality. There is an intrinsic meaning in the many forms we encounter in life, expressing a meaningful intelligibility which cannot be meaningfully reduced to the mechanistic functionality of parts. These encounters compel us to form qualitative inferences such as “mother”, “father”, “love”, “wisdom”, “truth”, “beauty”, “good and evil” or “moral truth”, and many other things which cannot be contained or even described by a purely empirical approach to reality. This prompts us to envisage that there are in fact different ontological aspects to reality (for lack of better words) by which these qualitative experiences make intelligible sense. These aspects are perceived by personal minds, many of which feel compelled to point out that such things make no intelligible sense if reality is nothing more than an intrinsically meaningless mechanistic expression of mindless atoms or quantum fluctuations.

The law of proportionality.

In other words, the idea that only physical reality exists, breaks the law of proportionality. Its a contradiction. Just like a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time, it also follows that a thing cannot produce more than what it is by nature. Thus if a particular thing, like a paper aeroplane, does suddenly produce something more than its actual nature, such as a fully fuel jet fighter aircraft, it does so only by the power or nature of something else working in unison to it; since a paper plane, free from other influences, does not have in its immediate nature the power to suddenly become a jet fighter. Things of a certain nature have to be added to the nature of the paper before there can be even a slight probability of something like that occurring. Similarly, the intrinsic meaning we find in reality cannot be produced or entirely explained by mere mechanistic cause and effect. We therefore, by law of proportion, must conclude that there is something else of a different nature (non-physical) at work in reality, in-order for us to justify our experience meaning.

Out of nothing comes nothing.

 

[MindOverMatter2]

Good story. It seems that what you intend to show us is that there is an aspect of reality which transcends mere cause and effect or mechanistic functionality. There is an intrinsic meaning in the many forms we encounter in life, expressing a meaningful intelligibility which cannot be meaningfully reduced to the mechanistic functionality of parts. These encounters compel us to form qualitative inferences such as “mother”, “father”, “love”, “wisdom”, “truth”, “beauty”, “good and evil” or “moral truth”, and many other things which cannot be contained or even described by a purely empirical approach to reality. This prompts us to envisage that there are in fact different ontological aspects to reality (for lack of better words) by which these qualitative experiences make intelligible sense. These aspects are perceived by personal minds, many of which feel compelled to point out that such things make no intelligible sense if reality is nothing more than an intrinsically meaningless mechanistic expression of mindless atoms or quantum fluctuations.

The law of proportionality.

In other words, the idea that only physical reality exists, breaks the law of proportionality. Its a contradiction. Just like a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time, it also follows that a thing cannot produce more than what it is by nature. Thus if a particular thing, like a paper aeroplane, does suddenly produce something more than its actual nature, such as a fully fuel jet fighter aircraft, it does so only by the power or nature of something else working in unison to it; since a paper plane, free from other influences, does not have in its immediate nature the power to suddenly become a jet fighter. Things of a certain nature have to be added to the nature of the paper before there can be even a slight probability of something like that occurring. Similarly, the intrinsic meaning we find in reality cannot be produced or entirely explained by mere mechanistic cause and effect. We therefore, by law of proportion, must conclude that there is something else of a different nature (non-physical) at work in reality, in-order for us to justify our experience of meaning.

Out of nothing comes nothing.