Month: November 2010

God and the ‘No Angry Unicorn’ Argument

This from an astute reader commenting on the Hell post:

'No angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon'

Does this not refer to doxastic uncertainty rather than a fatuous equation of God with something material? This is how I interpreted it when I read it. More in the vein of: why venerate something tenuous in lieu of a Lucretian reality? Not a profound solution by any means, but an almost noble one if lived humbly– not sensually. Although , I suppose this is an agnostic take on the phrase. ( I've been reading too much of Montaigne!)

Thanks for exposing me to Henryk Gorecki . Do you know of Arvo Part?

I love Arvo Part, and Montaigne too.  But onto the issue you raise. To quote Cactus Ed himself, "Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?"

Angry unicorn Now it would be foolish to try to discern in the scribblings of Ed Abbey anything very clear or precise or carefully thought-through.  But it seems clear to me that Abbey is likening God to an intramundane object much as Bertrand Russell likened him to a celestial teapot.  In so doing, both demonstrate a profound ignorance of what sophisticated theists mean by 'God.'  They are not talking about a being among beings, let alone a material being among beings. (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens, et cetera.)  But you focus on the epistemic side, with justification, as the quotation shows. 

Accordingly, Abbey is suggesting that, regardless of the nature of God, the evidence of his existence is no better than the evidence of the existence of an irate lunar unicorn, a lunicorn if you will.   

But please note that questions about the evidence for something are connected to questions about the nature of that something.  The existence of a lunicorn would be strongly disconfirmed were a a bunch of lunar modules to fail to detect the presence of any such critter.  But no number of space probes could disconfirm the existence of God.  Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was surely talking nonsense when he reported that he saw no God during his famous suborbital flight.  The empirical undetectability of God no more tells against his existence than the empirical undetectability of the square root of pi tells against its existence. 

So while Abbey's remarks do have an epistemological flavor, they cannot be divorced from their metaphysical import.

But there is also an axiological side to it, which may be even more important.  Abbey is implying that it doesn't much matter whether God exists or not.  He could have added 'Who cares?' after 'Who knows?' to his list of questions.  After all, it is of no great moment whether there are any lunicorns or celestial teapots out there.  My happiness cannot hang on that.  The meaning of life does not stand or fall with the existence or nonexistence of such things. 

Abbey's aphorism sums up the atheist attitude quite well.  Does God exist?  Who cares? Who cares whether there is some weird extra object in the ontological inventory?  And how would you know anyway?  "Bartender, another round!"

A Vision of Hell

The spiritually immature have spiritually immature conceptions of man and God, heaven and hell. If you think of man as just a physical being, then, if you think of God at all, you will most likely think of him as a physical being, as a sort of Man Writ Large, or Big Guy in the Sky. This will lead either to a childish form of theism (God as Big Daddy, supplier of material needs, wish-fulfiller) or to a form of atheism of the Edward Abbey 'No angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon' variety.

Something similar is true of conceptions of heaven and hell. The materially minded will develop crass conceptions. Popular Islam's notion of paradise as an endless disporting with 72 black-eyed virgins, as a doing there all the carnal things one is forbidden here, is as theologically hopeless as is a Christian fundamentalist's notion of hell as fire and brimstone.

I suggest the following as closer to the theological reality of hell where hell is permanent separation, recognized as such, from one's absolute good, recognized as such.

To be in hell is to be in a perpetual state of enslavement to one's vices, knowing that one is enslaved, unable to derive genuine satisfaction from them, unable to get free, and knowing that there is true happiness that will remain forever out of reach. Hell not as a state of pain but of endless unsatisfying and unsatisfied pleasure. A state of unending gluttony for example, or of ceaseless sexual  promiscuity. A state of permanent entrapment in a fool's paradise –  think of an infernal counterpart of Las Vegas — in which one is constantly lusting after food and drink and money and sex, but is never satisfied. The fire of desire endless and unfulfilled, but with the clear understanding that one is indeed a fool, and entrapped, and cut off permanently from a genuine happiness that one knows exists.

An Argument Against Bukowski

He had no appreciation of nature.  That says something about a man. And what it says ain't good.  I'll have to dig up one of his anti-nature poems for documentation.  I recall one in which he has good things to say about smog, the atmosphere of LaLaLand, the oxygen of (fallen) Angelenos.  Those last cute phrases are mine not his.

There is a Bukowski category now, for more on this dude.

The Lure of the Trail

It astonishes me that there are able-bodied people who cannot appreciate the joy of movement in nature. I don't expect people to share my pleasure in solo wilderness adventures. Most people are incorrigibly social: it's as if they feel their ontological status diminished when on their own. With me it is the other way around. But I can easily understand how many would feel differently about this.

I once proposed to a woman that she and her husband accompany me and my wife on a little hike. She reacted as if I had proposed that she have all her teeth extracted without benefit of anaesthetic. She   seemed shocked that anyone would suggest such a thing. Finally she said, "Well, maybe, if there's a destination."

A destination? Each footfall, each handhold, each bracing breath of cold mountain air is the destination. Did John Muir have a destination when he roamed the Range of Light? Was Henry Thoreau trying to get somewhere during his crosscountry rambles?

Modern man, a busy little hustler, doesn't know how to live. Surrounded by beauty, he is yet oblivious to it, rushing to his destination. If one does not have the time to meditate on the moonset, celebrate the sunrise, or marvel at a stately Saguaro standing sentinel on a distant ridgeline, it is a serious question whether one is alive in any human sense at all.

You may end up at your destination all right — in a box, never having lived.

Pseudo-Intellectual Tripe from William Sloane Coffin

William Sloane Coffin (Credo, Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, p. 5) thinks to correct Socrates and Descartes but makes a fool of himself in the process. Here is what he says:

     Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the
     uncommitted life that is not worth living. Descartes too was
     mistaken; "Cogito ergo sum" –"I think therefore I am"? Nonsense.
     "Amo ergo sum" — "I love therefore I am."

This is pseudo-intellectual tripe of the worst sort. It is an asinine form of cleverness in which one drops names without understanding the doctrines behind the names. It is the sort of thing that can impress only the half-educated, while eliciting scorn from those who drink deep from the Pierian spring.

Socrates' point is that self-examination is a necessary condition of a life well-lived. Coffin's point is that commitment is a necessary condition of a life well-lived. These two points are obviously consistent: they can both be true. (And I should think they are both true.) But by saying that Socrates had it wrong, Coffin implies that his view entails the negation of Socrates' view — which is silly. Suppose A says that G. W. Bush was once governor of Texas, and B says, 'No you've got it wrong, he was once in the National Guard.' It is the same kind of silliness.

It should also be pointed out that even if commitment is a necessary condition of a life well-lived, it doesn't follow that it is a sufficient condition thereof. The committed but unexamined lives of a Nazi, Communist, or Islamo-totalitarian are not examples of lives well-lived.

As for Descartes, Coffin doesn't understand him at all. Else he would have realized that loving is a species of thinking in the broad Cartesian sense of the term. Thinking in this sense covers all mental   acts, including remembering, anticipating, perceiving, imagining, wishing, willing, loving, hoping, and thinking in the narrow sense of conceiving. All mental states having the property Brentano called   intentionality (object directedness) fall under the cogito, the 'I think.' Thus Coffin commits an obvious ignoratio elenchi when he takes Descartes to be using cogito in the narrow sense that excludes amo.

Alexander Pope  penned the following lines:

     A little learning is a dangerous thing
     Drink deep or taste not  the Pierian spring
     There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
     But drinking largely  sobers us again.

I learned these lines in high school, and they have stood me in good stead ever since. 'Pierian' from Pieria, a region of ancient Macedonia  where the Muses lived. Not to be confused with Peoria.

Thoughts on Marriage

Dennis Prager and Michael Medved are my favorite AM band talk jocks. Both intelligent and wise, they raise the level of the general culture unlike toxin-merchants such as Howard Stern who lower it. He's no star in my firmament. Prager and Medved know that they have a moral obligation not to add to the cultural pollution. And they have the intellect and good sense to make a positive contribution. Intellect is important, but wisdom and good judgment are even more important.  Rare commodities these, not to be found on the Left with its adolescent querulousness, snarkiness, and the mindless incantation of the SIXHIRB litany:  sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted. (That particular list from Prager.)

But my topic is marriage.

Prager a while back cited respect and liking as two of the factors most important for a successful marriage. He placed love much lower on the list. Prager's remark struck me as astute. Do you like this person? Can you put up with her morning and night through good times and bad? Do you respect this person? These are important questions to ask before doing something rash. The nature of her endowments fore and aft will no doubt come into consideration, and ought to. But leave that for later in the logical, if not the temporal, order of considerations. A wise man knows which of his heads is for thinking, and which for linking. He thinks with the big one.

Brain, heart, penis/vagina, in that (logical) order. I trust my meaning is clear.

It helps if one can admire one's partner for attributes and skills one does not possess oneself. Marriage is a quest for completion, for the other half with which to make a whole, to cop a riff from Plato's Symposium. In a good marriage, the partners do not compete with one another, they complete one another. One does well to consider whether it is wise to marry someone in the same line of work. Would I want to be married to a female equivalent of myself? I need completion, not duplication.  One of me is enough.

Nietzsche somewhere says that marriage is a long conversation.  But how would he know?  Marriage is better described as a long wordless understanding.  It's deeper than words.  In any case you will be talked out soon enough.  So there had better be something deeper for the relation to rest upon.

There must be both sameness and difference. Sameness for compatibility, difference for complementarity. But here is the hard part: the ways in which the partners are similar must be conducive to their getting along, and the ways in which they are different must also be conducive to their getting along.

Example. Don't marry someone with different views about money. If you are frugal, you would be insane to marry a person who thinks of Nirvana as a charge card with an unlimited line of credit. But if you are sharp about money, you may want to think twice about marrying someone who is also sharp about it, for you may come into conflict on how best to save and invest, spend and lend. The sameness and the difference must be balanced. The partners need to have the same general view about money, but one of the partners should keep the books, leaving the other to perform tasks more suitable for him or her. There will of course be exceptions to this rule of thumb.

A Logic Problem

Consider this argument:

   1. A necessary truth is true.
   2. Whatever is true is possibly true.
   3. Whatever is possibly true could be false.
   Therefore
   4. A necessary truth could be false.
   
A sound argument is one that satisfies two conditions: its premises are all true, and the reasoning it embodies is correct. Is the above argument sound?

If not, what has gone wrong in the argument? Answer below the fold.

Continue reading “A Logic Problem”

The Fly and the Fly Bottle

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out?  Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy?  He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all that that entails: inconclusiveness, endlessness . . . .  He should have just walked away from it.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it.  You are free to go, the door is unlocked.  This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view.  But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy.  Just do it, if that's what you want.  It can be done.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit.  (That would be like copulating your way to chastity.)  For any justification proffered, perforce & willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy.  You cannot have it both ways.  You either walk away or stay.

(Exercise for the reader: Cite chapter and verse of the Epictetus and Wittgenstein passages to which I allude above.)

To Brandeis Girl

I gave you my love
You handed it back
A letter unread.

You said,
"It was wrongly addressed
To being-in-love
And not to me."

You were wrong about that.
I loved love, but you too.
You should have handed it back
Without explanation.

Better a brute refusal
Than a refusal rationalized
Badly.

With that I began to take a hard-eyed look at you
The cataracts of love lasered to bits
Your faults swam into view
And our love was soon a dead letter.

 

Avis Rara

Man is a strange bird, a rare bird, divided against himself.  He is one and two, two and one.  Witness to his antics, he listens to himself singing and then bepuzzles himself with thoughts about the Witness (Is it one or many?) and its relation to the feathered biped perched on the branch (identity or difference?).

A touch of class would be added to this observation were I to dig up the implied Upanishad verse.  But that would cost too much effort and time.  Old Sol is set shortly to rise over the magnificent Superstitions and I must go for my  long Sunday run now if I am to make my Mesa breakfast date with Peter and Mikey at Cindy's Greasy Spoon.

Lower and Higher Ways of Wasting Time

A Bukowski binge appears to be in the offing, following hard on the heels of Beat October, all part of ongoing ruminations on styles of life  and modes of muddling along the via dolorosa of this vale of samsara enroute to points unknown.  Here is something that came out of my pen early in the predawn:

Barfly and gambler, flâneur and floozy fritter away their time.  And they are condemned for so doing by the solid bourgeois.  But the latter thinks, though he may not say, that the pursuits of the monastery and the ivory tower, though opposite to the low life's  dissipation, are equally time-wasting.  Prayer, meditation, study for its own sake, translation and transmission of culture, the vita contemplativa, Pieperian leisure, otium liberale, moral scrupulosity, mindfulness, the various disciplines of palate and penis, heart and memory, working out one's salvation with diligence  – all will evoke a smile from the worldly  bourgeois fellow, the man of substance solidly planted in the self-satisfied somnolence of middle-class mediocrity.   He's tolerant of course, and superficially respectful, but the respect becomes real only after the time-waster has managed to turn a buck or secure a livelihood from his time-wasting by becoming a teacher in a college, say, or a pastor of a church.

For further exfoliation, see Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood.

The Problem of Evil and the Argument from Evil

(A reader found the following post, from the old PowerBlogs site, useful.  So I repost it here with minor modifications and additions.)

It is important to distinguish between the problem of evil and the argument from evil. The first is the problem of reconciling the existence of God, as traditionally understood, with the existence of natural and moral evils.  As J. L. Mackie points out, this "is essentially a logical problem: it sets the theist the task of clarifying and if possible reconciling the several beliefs which he holds." (The Miracle of Theism, Oxford 1982, p. 150) Mackie goes on to point out that "the problem in this sense signally does not arise for those whose views of the world are markedly different from traditional theism." Thus the theist's problem of evil does not arise for an atheist. It might, however, be the case that some other problem of evil arises for the atheist, say, the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with life's being worth living.   But that is a separate matter.

The argument from evil, on the other hand, is an attempt to show the nonexistence of God from the fact of evil, where 'fact of evil' is elliptical for 'the existence of natural and moral evils.'

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND THE ARGUMENT FROM EVIL

The main difference between the problem of evil and the argument from evil is that the former is an ad hominem argument whereas the second is not. I am using ad hominem in the way Peter Geach uses it on pp. 26-27 of his Reason and Argument (Basil Blackwell 1976):

This Latin term indicates that these are arguments addressed to a particular man — in fact, the other fellow you are disputing with. You start from something he believes as a premise, and infer a conclusion he won't admit to be true. If you have not been cheating in your reasoning, you will have shown that your opponent's present body of beliefs is inconsistent and it's up to him to modify it somewhere.

As Geach points out, there is nothing fallacious about such an argumentative  procedure. If A succeeds in showing B that his doxastic system harbors a contradiction, then not everything that B believes can be true. Now can an atheist prove the nonexistence of God in this way? No he cannot: at the very most he can prove (with the aid of various auxiliary premises that he and his interlocutor both accept) that God exists and Evil exists cannot both be true. But it does not follow therefrom that God exists is not true. For the atheist to transform the ad hominem problem of evil into a non-ad hominem argument from evil, he would have to establish, or at least assert, that evil exists, and not merely that the theist believes that evil exists. To see my point consider the following conditional, where P is the conjunction of auxiliary premises:

C. If evil exists & P, then God does not exist.

The atheist who raises the problem of evil for the theist asserts (C), or rather a proposition of that form. But to assert a conditional is not to assert its antecedent, or its consequent for that matter; it is to assert a entailment connection between the two. Now although it is the case that for each argument there is a corresponding conditional, and vice versa, arguments must not be confused with conditionals.

Transforming (C) into an argument from evil yields:

Evil Exists

P

Therefore

God does not exist.

Clearly, an atheist who gives this argument, or rather an argument of this form, must assert both premises. Doing so, he ceases his ad hominem examination of the consistency of another person's beliefs, beliefs he either rejects or takes no stand on, and 'comes clean' with his own beliefs.

THE ARGUER FROM EVIL NEEDS TO AFFIRM OBJECTIVE EVIL

If the atheist's aim is merely to poke holes in the logical consistency of the theist's belief-set, then it doesn't matter whether he thinks of evil as objective or subjective. Indeed, he needn't believe in evil in any sense. He could hold that it is an illusion. But if the atheist's goal is to support his own belief that God does not exist with an argument from evil, then he needs to maintain that evil is objective or objectively real.

Consider all the enslavement of humans by humans that has taken place in the history of the world. Suppose it is agreed that slavery is morally wrong. What makes this true? Define a moral subjectivist as one who agrees that the claim in question is true, but holds that the truth-maker of this moral truth, and of others like it, is an individual's being in a psychological state, say, the state of being repulsed by slavery. For the moral subjectivist, then, sentences like 'Slavery is wrong' are elliptical for sentences like 'Slavery is wrong-for-X,' where X is a person or any being capable of being in psychological states. Furthermore, the moral subjectivist grants that moral claims have truth-makers, indeed objective truth-makers; it is just that these truth-makers involve psychological states that vary from person to person.

Now if our atheist subscribes to a theory of evil along those lines, then, although there will be objective facts of the matter regarding what various individuals feel about the practice or the institution of slavery, there will be no objective fact of the matter regarding the wrongness or moral evil of slavery.

If so, the fact of evil subjectively construed will have no bearing on the existence of God, a fact, if it a fact, that is objective.

Suppose a torturer tortures his victim to death solely for the satisfaction it gives him. And suppose that moral subjectivism is true. Then the torturing, though evil for the tortured, is good for the torturer, with the upshot that the torturing is neither good nor evil objectively. Now if I were on the scene and had the power to stop the torturing, but did not, would my noninterference detract from my moral goodness? Not at all. (The same goes a fortiori for God.) For nothing objectively evil is transpiring: all that is going on is that one person is securing his pleasure at the expense of another's pain. If you insist that something evil is going on, then that shows that you reject moral subjectivism. But if you accept moral subjectivism, then nothing evil is going on; the torturing is evil only in the mind of the victim and in the minds of any others who sympathize with him. If you accept moral subjectivism and continue to insist that the torturing is evil, then you would also have to insist that it is good, since it is good from the perspective of the torturer. But if it is both good and evil, then it is (objectively) neither.

What I am claiming, then, is that the atheist arguer from evil must construe evil objectively. This will result in trouble for the atheist if it can be shown that objective evil cannot exist unless God exists. For then the atheist arguer from evil will end up presupposing the very being whose existence he is out to deny. No doubt this is a big 'if.' But it is worth exploring.  The problem for the atheist is to explain how there can be objective good and evil in a Godless universe. 

And another line worth exploring is a theistic argument to God from the fact of objective good and evil.  No such argument could PROVE the existence of God, but it could very well have the power of cancelling out the argument from evil.

Charles Bukowski Meets Simone Weil

Bukowski

Both refused to live conventionally.  The Laureate of Low Life and the Red Virgin.  Both said No to the bourgeois life.  But their styles of refusal were diametrically opposed.  Both sought a truer and realer life, one by descent, the other by ascent.  For one the true life, far from the ideological sham of church and state and family values, is the low life:  drinking, gambling, fornicating, drug-taking, petty crime like busting up a room and skipping out on the rent, barroom brawling.  Not armed robbery, rape, and murder, but two-bit thievery, whoring and picking fights in dingy dives.  Nothing that gets you sent to San Quentin or Sing-Sing. 

For the other the true life is not so readily accessible: it is the life in pursuit of the Higher, the existence and nature of which is only glimpsed now and again.  (GG 11)  The succor of the Glimpse — this is indeed the perfect word — is unreliable, a matter of grace.  One is granted a glimpse.  A matter of grace, not gravity.  It is hard to rise, easy to fall — into the the bed of sloth, the whore's arms, the bottle.  The pleasures of the flesh are as reliable as anything in this world.  In that reliability lies their addictive power.  Satisfaction of crass desire breeds a  bad infinity of crass desires.  Desire is endlessly reborn in each satisfaction.  One is not granted the rush of the lush-kick by a power transcendent of the natural nexus; it is a matter of determinism once you take the plunge.  Drink, snort, shoot and the effect follows, which is not to say that one does not freely decide to drink, snort, shoot.  The point is that the free agent's input sets in motion a process utterly predictable in its effect.  Not so with the "lightning flashes" (GG 11) that reveal the Higher.

Simone_weil_2 At best, one positions oneself so as to enjoy the gusts of divine favor should any come along.  Like al-Ghazzali in search of a cooling breeze, you climb the minaret.  There you are more likely to catch the breeze than on the ground, though there is no guarantee.  One cannot bring it about by one's own efforts, and the positioning and preparing cannot be said to be even a necessary condition of receipt of the divine favor; but the creaturely efforts make it more likely.

Bukowski versus Weil.  The Dean of Dissipation versus the Categorical Imperative in skirts.  Self-indulgence versus self-denial as opposed paths to the truer and realer life.  Dissipation versus concentration, versus Weil's attention.  "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." (Gravity and Grace, p. 106)

The low life (Buk) will not renounce but dives head first into the most accessible goods of this world, the lowest and basest and commonest.  The angel in him celebrates the animal in man thereby degrading himself and 'gravitating' towards food and drink, sex and drugs.  You just let yourself go and gravity does the rest.  The fall is assured.  No self-discipline in matters of money either.  Our man worships at the shrine of Lady Luck, betting on the horses at Santa Anita, Del Mar, and Hollywood Park, all within striking distance of his beloved Los Angeles.

The spiritual aspirant who aims high and beyond this life, though tempted by booze and broads and the whole gamut of the palpable and paltry, seeks the Good beyond all finite goods.  Pursuit of the Good demands detachment from all finite goods (GG 12 ff.).

The Aporia.  Positivistic dissipationism versus a concentrationism that is hard to tell from nihilism.  Self-loss via dissipation, the dive into the diaspora of the sensory manifold versus self-loss by absorption into a Transcendence that cancels individuality.  Salvation of the self by annihilation of the self.  ". . . the object of all our efforts is to become nothing." (GG 30)