The editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy want me to revise my Divine Simplicity entry by March 20th. Written in 2006, it needs revision. If anyone who knows this subject has any constructive comments on the style, content, coverage, or organization of the present entry, I'd like to hear them. In particular, references to recent literature not included in the present bibliography would be helpful.
Month: February 2010
New Search Engine: Duck Duck Go
While on 'ego surfari' I came upon this page. What a wonderful time to be alive, despite the general horrors of existence, not to mention those particular to our time and place and individual circumstances. See the Whole from many sides. There is much more to it than your foreshortened persepctives allow. Don't obsess over the those crushed in Haitian and Chilean earthquakes when there is also bliss and beauty and beatitude in the world. If you decry the shit, don't ignore the beautiful roses it fertilizes.
As for the ego, it is ugly and odious — Le moi est haïssable said Pascal famously and pensively — but that is only its night side: ego betokens spirit in us. Only a spiritual being can say 'I' and mean it. An answering machine can say it but not mean it. Only an I can recognize and love a Thou and stand master of the universe in thought. An ambiguous structure, the ego is a principle of both alienation and union.
MACRUES, Semantic Defeaters, and Epistemic Defeaters (Peter Lupu)
(A guest post by Peter Lupu. Editing and commentary by BV.)
As Bill notes, we are attempting to secure and study a copy of James Anderson’s book, Paradox in Christian Theology. (Publication details here, including links to reviews.) Meanwhile, I will propose here some tentative observations that Anderson’s book may or may not have addressed. These observations are inspired by the following point Bill makes in a post above as well as by some conversations we had about the subject:
“…if I cannot see that a proposition is rationally acceptable (because it appears contradictory to me) then I wouldn't know what proposition I was accepting.”
A similar point is made by Richard Cartwright in On the Logical Problem of the Trinity: "Nor is a mystery supposed to be unintelligible, in the sense that the words in which it is expressed simply cannot be understood. After all, we are asked to believe the propositions expressed by the words, not simply that the words express some true propositions or other, we know not which."
1). Let us agree that a Trinitarian Sentence (TS) is such that
(ii) The surface structure (SS) of TS exhibits the logical form of a contradiction;
(iii) We are not in the position currently and may not be in the position in our present form of existence ever to construct a contradiction free formulation or deep structure (DS) for TS;
Continue reading “MACRUES, Semantic Defeaters, and Epistemic Defeaters (Peter Lupu)”
‘No News is Good News’
Spencer Case, 'on the ground' in Afghanistan, writes:
Try translating the following sentence into logic: "No news is good news."
Whenever I try it, I end up saying that there isn't any good news and that's not what I mean to say. If you're not too terribly busy, I'd like to see how the trick is done.
Also, the Idaho State Journal has been publishing my blog online. It is available here.
Clearly, the translation cannot be: (x)(Nx –> ~Gx). For what the sentence means is not that no news report is a good news report. What it means is that it is good not to receive news reports. (For if one receives no news, one will not receive any bad news.) But even this is not quite right. To be precise, what the target sentence expresses in standard contexts of use is that every report that there is nothing to report is a good report. For any x and y, if x is a first-order report of recent events, and x expresses the proposition *There is nothing to report*, then x is a good report. In symbols: (x)(y)(Rx & Exy & y = *There is nothing to report* –>Gx).
But there may be a better parsing.
Saturday Night at the Oldies II: Three Suicide Songs
You're getting a double dose this Saturday, muchachos — to make up for last Saturday. These go out to S.S. Slim. We begin on a humorous note with James Darren's hit from 1961, Goodbye Cruel World. And then to a rather more somber number of the same name by Pink Floyd. But neither can hold a candle to Tom Waits, Shiver Me Timbers.
Leavin' my family, I'm leavin' my friends
My body's at home but my heart's in the wind
Where the clouds are like headlines on a new front page sky
Tears are salt water and the moon's full and high
And I know Martin Eden is gonna be proud of me
Many before me who've been called by the sea
To be up in the crow's nest and singin' my say
And shiver me timbers I'm a-sailin' away
The fog's liftin' and the sand's shiftin' and I'm driftin' on out
Ol' Captain Ahab ain't got nothin' on me
So come on and swallow me, don't follow me, I'll travel alone
Blue water's my daughter an' I'm skippin' like a stone
And please call my missus and tell her not to cry
My goodbye is written by the moon in the sky
And nobody knows me, I can't fathom my stayin'
And shiver me timbers, I'm a-sailin' away
The fog's liftin' and the sand's shiftin' and I'm driftin' on out
Ol' Captain Ahab ain't got nothin' on me
So come on and swallow me, don't follow me, I'll travel alone
Blue water's my daughter an' I'm skippin' like a stone
And I'm leavin' my family, and I'm leavin' my friends
My body's at home but my heart's in the wind
Where the clouds are like headlines on a new front page sky
And shiver me timbers, I'm a-sailin' away.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Magic ’60s
I'm So Glad to join you, My Best Friend, as we follow Mr. Tambourine Man on an Embryonic Journey to hear the Chimes of Freedom as we Break on Through to the Other Side.
God, Gratitude, and Gladness
Jim Ryan of Philosoblog posts infrequently, but always interestingly. Ryan is both a conservative and an atheist. Being a conservative, he appreciates the importance of gratitude. Being an atheist, he sees no reason to take gratitude and its importance as supportive of theistic belief. Herewith, some commentary on his post A New Error Theory for Theism.
1. Gratitude and human flourishing. Ryan rightly suspects a connection between gratitude and human flourishing: "The ordering of attitudes and dispositions in the soul is dysfunctional if at or near the center of these there is no deep gratitude, by which I mean gratitude that this world exists and that one lives in it." I believe this is a genuine insight.
2. The nature of gratitude. Let us first note that gratitude exhibits a triadic structure. To feel grateful is for someone X to feel grateful to someone Y for something or someone Z. If I receive a gift, I am grateful to the donor for the gift. 'To whom?' and 'For what?' are both questions it is appropriate to ask in ordinary cases of gratitude. And as the grammar of 'To whom?' suggests, the donor must be a person. I cannot be grateful to a vending machine for disgorging a can of Pepsi upon the insertion of a few coins. Here too we have a triadic relation: the machine gave me a can of soda. But I cannot be grateful to a machine, though I could perhaps be grateful to its installer or manufacturer or inventor. It would be a case of incorrect or inappropriate emotion were one to feel grateful to a vending machine. I hold, with Brentano, that one can distinguish between correct and incorrect emotion.
Note also that what one is grateful for, the gift, must be gratuitously given. I can be appropriately grateful only for that which is freely given, which implies that the donor is both a free agent and an uncoerced free agent. If Robin Hood forces you to give me your money, I cannot be appropriately grateful to you, though I may be to Robin Hood. For there to be gratitude, there must be a donor, and it is necessary that the donor be a person; but it is not sufficient that the donor be a person: the donor's donation must be a free act.
3. Can one be grateful to a not presently existing donor? If I am grateful to a person P at time t does it follow that P exists at t? Or can one appropriately feel gratitude only to persons who presently exist? Suppose someone likes what I write and mails me a check as a gift for my blogging endeavours. Unbeknownst to me, the donor dies before I receive the check. I am grateful to him for the check even though at the time of receiving the check and feeling the gratitude he no longer exists. This suggests that gratitude to a person P does not entail the present existence of P. And certainly it does seem that gratitude to past persons is appropriately felt. A child, student, philosopher might appropriately feel gratitude in respect of his deceased parents, teachers, predecessors. If one feels grateful to a person surely the gratitude does not end when the person does. My gratitude to you can survive your death though it cannot survive mine. (I am assuming for the moment that we are not immortal souls.)
4. Gratitude to a never existing donor? Can one appropriately feel grateful to a nonexistent person? A child, for example, feels grateful to Santa Claus for her Christmas presents. This looks to be a genuine case of gratitude despite the nonexistence of the person to whom the child feels grateful. But note that for the child the existence of Santa Claus is an epistemic possibility. If the child were convinced of the nonexistence of the fat guy, then she couldn't feel grateful to him. Note also that the triadic structure is preserved. The girl is grateful to Santa Claus for her presents despite his nonexistence. If a theist is grateful to God for his existence, his gratitude is what it is whether or not God exists. But a person who disbelieves in God cannot be grateful to God.
5. Must the relata of a relation all of them exist? #4 points up a fiendishly difficult philosophical question that turns up in many different contexts: Can a relation obtain if one or more of its relata do not exist? #3 points up the same problem on the assumption of presentism, the doctrine that (the contents of) the present alone exist, that past and furture items to do not exist.
6. Metaphysical gratitude. What Jim Ryan is talking about, however, is not ordinary gratitude — gratitude to some intramundane person for some intramundane object — but what we might call metaphysical gratitude or what he calls "deep gratitude": gratitude for the existence of the world and our lives within it. Now if this is a genuine case of gratitude, it seems appropriate to ask to whom we feel grateful. This person can only be God, as Ryan realizes, since only God could bestow the gift of the world's existence. So it would seem that a metaphysically grateful person is grateful to God. A theist might try to argue from gratitude to God as follows:
a. We are appropriately grateful for the existence of the world
b. To be grateful is to be grateful to someone
c. The only person to whom one can be appropriately grateful for the
existence of the world is God
—–
d. God exists.
7. Ryan's rejection of this argument. Ryan will of course reject this argument by rejecting premise (b). He maintains:
P: There is no entailment from the proposition that one feels gratitude to the proposition that there is someone to whom one feels gratitude.
That could be read, not as a denial of the triadic structure of gratitude, but as saying that, from the mere fact that one feels grateful, it does not follow that the person to whom one feels grateful exists. (Compare the Santa Claus example above. The child is grateful to someone, namely, Santa Claus; but it does not follow that Santa Claus exists. Or consider the situation in which presentism is true and one is grateful to a dead parent. One would then be grateful to a nonexistent donor.) So from the mere fact that one feels grateful for the existence of the world, it does not follow that God exists, even in the presence of the auxiliary premises that gratitude is by its very nature gratitude to a person, and the only possible donor of the world is God.
This seems right and refutes the (a)-(d) argument. But it raises an interesting question. Suppose the following: subject S is grateful for some object O; O can only be the gift of some person P and S knows
this to be the case; S either knows or else is subjectively certain that P does not exist. Are these suppositions consistent? Can I be grateful to a person I am subjectively certain does not exist? Ryan is subjectively certain that God does not exist. How then can he feel grateful for the existence of the world given that he knows that gratitude is by its very nature gratitude to a person and that in the
present case the person can only be God?
8. Gratitude and Gladness. I say that Ryan cannot be grateful that the world exists given his atheism. For if he is grateful, he is grateful to someone, and this someone can only be God given that the object of the gratitude is the existence of the world. I grant that gratitude for the existence of the world does not prove the existence of God. But the gratitude to be gratitude must allow the existence of God: the existence of God must be epistemically possible for the subject of gratitude. But Ryan's 'gratitude' is blended with subjective certainty of God's nonexistence: the existence of God is not an epistemic possibility for Ryan. So I say that what Ryan feels is not gratitude. Ryan concludes,
Atheists can feel deep gratitude, as well, however. When we construe the emotion as deep gladness and modesty, the personal object (God) drops out. One is simply glad that this universe exists and that one lives in it. There need be no one to whom one is grateful. So, the error theory doesn't cast any aspersions on deep gratitude. It is perfectly consistent with holding, as I do, that deep gratitude is indeed part of proper functioning for human beings.
I deny that atheists can feel deep (metaphysical) gratitude, gratitude for the very existence of the world and our lives in it. An atheist is one who explicitly denies the existence of God. For such a person it is not epistemically possible that there be a person to whom to be grateful for the existence of the world. Since the existence of God is a priori ruled out, what the atheist feels cannot be gratitude. Gratitude by its very nature is gratitude to a person. Granted, the existence of the person is not guaranteed by the presence of the emotion; but it can't be excluded by it either. It is incoherent to feel gratitude to a person one believes did not ever exist. Ryan can no more feel gratitude for the existence of the world than I can feel gratitude for Christmas presents whose existence could only be explained by Santa's having dropped them down my chimney.
An atheist can be glad that the world exists, but gladness is not gratitude.
Save the Planet with George Carlin
I have never thought much of that overgrown adolescent, George Carlin. But this is a brilliant and hilarious performance which serves as a useful corrective to environmental extremism and nature idolatry. (Hat tip: The blogging biker.)
The Question of the Reality of God: Wittgensteinian Fideism No Answer
Taking a Wittgensteinian line, D. Z. Phillips construes the question of the reality of God as like the question of the reality of physical objects in general, and unlike the question of the reality of any particular physical object such as a unicorn. Phillips would therefore have a bone to pick with Edward 'Cactus Ed' Abbey who writes,
Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?
Abbey's meaning is clear: It is as idle to suppose that there is a God as to suppose that there is an irate unicorn on the far side of the moon. Of course, there could be such a unicorn. It is logically possible in that there is no contradiction in the idea. It is also epistemically possible in that the supposition is consistent with what we know. (Perhaps a clever extraterrestrial scientist synthesized a unicorn, put him in a space suit, and deposited the unfortunate critter on the moon.) But there is no positive reason to believe in something so outlandish. The same goes for God according to Abbey, Russell, and plenty of others. Such theists think of God as just one more being among beings, as something in addition to all the other things that exist.
How might a theist respond to this puerile conception? (And to such cognate 'objections' as Russell's Teapot? ) One way to respond is that of the Wittgensteinian fideist. A fideist like Phillips would take Abbey to have misconstrued the very sense of the theist's affirmation. Abbey takes the theist to be adding a weird object to the ontological inventory: hence the comparison of God to an irate lunar unicorn. Phillips, however, clearly sees that this is a mistake. His positive theory, however, is just as bad. Phillips thinks that the claim that God exists is more like the claim that there are physical objects in general. That there are physical objects in general is presupposed by any inquiry into whether a particular physical object exists. It is a presupposition without which such an inquiry would make no sense. As Phillips puts it:
Similarly, the question of the reality of God is a question of the possibility of sense and nonsense, truth and falsity, in religion. When God's existence is construed as a matter of fact, it is taken for granted that the concept of God is at home within the conceptual framework of the reality of the physical world. . . . to ask a question about the reality of God is to ask a question about a kind of reality, not about the reality of this or that, in much the same way as asking a question about the reality of physical objects is not to ask about the reality of this or that physical object. ("Philosophy, Theology, and the Reality of God," Phil. Quart., 1963, reprinted in Rowe and Wainwright, p. 281)
Phillips blunders badly in this passage when he says that construing the divine existence as a matter of fact takes it for granted that the concept of God belongs within the conceptual framework of the reality of the physical world. For if anything is clear, it is that God for the theist is not a physical object. Surely, in claiming that God exists as a matter of fact, the theist who understands his doctrine is not claiming that God exists as a physical object. What Phillips should have said is that construing God's existence as a matter of fact presupposes, not that God is a physical object, but that God is a being or an existent.
Phillips would want to deny that too. His view is that the reality of God is not the reality of a special being, but the reality of a presupposition that is not and cannot be questioned from within a religious language-game (or at least from within a theistic religious language-game). The reality of God has to do with what a religious believer is prepared to say: ". . . the religious believer is not prepared to say that God might not exist. It is not that as a matter of fact God will always exist, but that it makes no sense to say that God might not exist." (280)
Perhaps the following analogy will clarify what Phillips is driving at. Consider the reality of checkmate in chess. The existence of checkmate is not a matter of fact in the way that it is a matter of fact that Karpov opened a certain game with 1. d4. For within the game of chess it makes no sense to say that checkmate might not exist. Checkmate and the rules governing it are defining features of the game. They cannot be questioned from within the game, and to question them from without the game is simply to reject the game. For that reason, it makes no sense to demand proof of these rules, nor can one raise the question whether they are reasonable. Is it reasonable that one cannot castle out of check, into check, or though check? It is neither reasonable nor unreasonable. The question of reasonableness cannot arise. Similarly, for Phillips, it is neither reasonable nor unreasonable that God exists. To play a theistic language-game is to presupposes the meaningfulness of God-talk just as to play chess is to presuppose the meaningfulness of talk of checkmate. And just as God exists in theistic language-games, checkmate exists in chess. But also: just as checkmate does not exist outside chess, God does not exist outself theistic language-games. For if God does exist apart from theistic language-games, then there would be a fact of that matter as to the existence of God.
At this point one can see what is wrong with Phillips' view. Every sane person is an anti-realist about checkmate, but to be an anti-realist about God, as Phillips' view seems to require, is to make a joke of theistic belief. Phillips' claim that "theology is the grammar of discourse" (282) is therefore as preposterous as the claim that botany is the grammar of discourse about plants. There is of course a sense in which for the theist the existence of God is necessary, but this is not the sense in which a rule is necessary for a language-game. Chess is not chess without checkmate, so checkmate is necessary within chess. God, however, is not a rule, nor a linguistic presupposition, nor concept, nor anything dependent on human talking and acting. So the necessity of God is not the necessity of a rule. God is a necessary being, which implies that he is a being, which implies that he exsts independently of human talk and speech if he exists at all. God cannot be reduced to God-talk and God-ritual. Chess just is chess-talk and chess-ritual: chess has no reality outside chess conventions and the chessic form of life. Not so with God.
These points are frightfully obvious, but one can understand why Phillips was driven to contravene them. Surely God is not a physical object, and it is arguable that he is not a being among beings. What then is God, and how understand his reality? His is not the reality of any sort of abstract object, nor that of any sort of collection; thus he is not the world-whole. So Phillips is driven to say something equally untenable, namely, that God is immanent to certain language-games, as a sort of framework truth of those language-games.
The question of the reality of God is a hard nut to crack, but surely it won't do to say that the reality of God is a matter of talk and practice, as if God were merely a feature of certain language games and forms of life. If God exists, then he is a reality transcendent of any Sprachspiel or Lebensform.
The Recluse Aphorizes, Laconically
By oneself one can be oneself.
Limits
The young should test their limits. The old, having tested them, should respect them. Two misfortunes: never to learn what one is capable of; to come to grief from attempting what one is incapable of.
From the Mail: John Bishop, Believing by Faith
Dr. Vallicella,
Another excellent post with which I whole-heartedly agree!
A. Rationalism: Put your trust in reason to deliver truths about ultimates and ignore the considerations of Sextus Empiricus, Nagarjuna, Bayle, Kant, and a host of others that point to the infirmity of reason.
B. Fideism: Put your trust in blind faith. Submit, obey, enslave your reason to what purports to be revealed truth while ignoring the fact that what counts as revealed truth varies from religion to religion, and within a religion from sect to sect.
C. Skepticism: Suspend belief on all issues that transcend the mundane if not on all beliefs, period. Don't trouble your head over whether God is or is not tripersonal. Stick to what appears. And don't say, 'The tea is sweet'; say, 'The tea appears sweet.' (If you say that the tea is sweet, you invite contradiction by an irascible table-mate.)
D. Reasoned Faith: Avoiding each of the foregoing options, one formulates one's beliefs carefully and holds them tentatively. One does not abandon them lightly, but neither does one fail to revisit and revise them. Doxastic examination is ongoing at least for the length of one's tenure here below. One exploits the fruitful tension of Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and religion, reason and faith, playing them off against each other and using each to chasten the other.
I recommend (D). Or are there other options?
John Bishop (University of Auckland) has a book , Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Faith (OUP, 2007) which is perhaps the best book that I have read on the subject. He argues for what he calls a ‘supra-evidential fideism’ in which one is ‘morally entitled’ to “take as true in one’s practical and theoretical deliberations” a claim that lacks evidence sufficient for epistemically-justified acceptance or rejection.
It is a developed Jamesian’ approach to the right to believe. He does not allow for beliefs that go contrary to the weight of evidence, thus he rejects Wittgensteinian fideism. One may believe beyond the evidence, but not against the evidence. He holds that one must always respect the canons of rational inquiry and not dismiss them, even in matters of faith. Yet, by the very nature of the faith-issue, they can be transcended with moral entitlement.
Nor does he allow for ‘induced willings-to believe.’ He holds that one who already has an inclination / disposition to believe is morally entitled to do so if the issue is important, forced, and by the nature of the issue cannot be decided upon the basis of ‘rationalist empiricist’ evidential practice.I came across the book on a list of important books in philosophy of religion on Prosblogion.
I think that it is a type of fideism that combines your categories B and D – fideism and reasoned faith.
Mark Weldon Whitten
They Refused to Look Through the Telescope
There were churchmen and other contemporaries of Galileo who, standing fast on convictions swotted up from the lore of Aristotle and his commentators, refused to look through the Italian's telescope. Similarly, there are atheists and mortalists today who, standing fast on convictions derived from less reputable sources, refuse to engage in the spiritual practices which could serve as their 'telescope.'
Just as the scientific attitude demands of us an openness to one range of experience, the religious attitude demands of us an openness to another.
Talk is Cheap?
Talk is cheap, they say, but the right word, at the right time, spoken from the heart with purity of intent to the right person can be priceless.
What Socializing and Whisky Have in Common
A little socializing, like a little whisky, is good. But more is not better. The sobriety of solitary silence is superior to the sloughing off of self into the social, and the value of the latter is to enhance, by way of contrast, the delights of the former. Thus spoke the introvert.