Month: May 2011

How Could an Impassible God be Offended or Know Any Contingent Fact?

Earlier (here and here) I asked how an all-good God could sentence a human agent to sempiternal punishment, punishment that has a beginning but no end.  If the punishment must fit the crime, and the crimes of finite agents are themselves finite, then it would seem that no one, no matter what his crimes, would deserve sempiternal punishment.  To make this a bit more precise we ought to substitute 'sin' for 'crime.'  They are different concepts.  Sin, but not crime, implies an offense to God.  If there is no God then there cannot, strictly speaking, be any sin.  But there could still be crime relative to an accepted body of positive law.  And if there is no positive law, but there is a God, then there could be sin but no crime.  (Positive law is the law posited by human legislators.) 

So let us say that the punishment must fit the sin.  My claim, then, is that no sin or sins committed by a human agent is such as to merit sempiternal punishment.  To put the point more sharply, a God who would condemn a finite human agent to unending misery is a moral monster, and not God.  (I am assuming that the agent in question has come to admit the error of his ways and is truly sorry for them. I have no problem with the unending misery of a recalcitrant rebel.) 

In response, Leo Mollica said that the offense to God, as an offense to a being of infinite dignity, is itself infinite and so deserves sempiternal punishment.  This prompted me to ask how an impassible God could be offended, which is the topic of this post.

Impassibility.  To say that God is impassible is to say that nothing external to God can affect God.  As Brian Leftow points out in his SEP article, impassibility is not the same as immutability.  He gives two reasons, but all we need is one: a God who induces a change in himself is not immutable but still could be impassible.  Now if God is impassible, then he cannot be offended by the antics of the Israelites as when they fell to worshipping a golden calf, etc.  He cannot be offended by sin.  And if he cannot be offended by sin, then he cannot be 'infinitely' offended by it.  Or so I maintained.

In response Mollica made a clever move.  He pointed out, rightly, that a person could be offended (wronged, slandered, calumniated, etc.) without knowing that he is.  Such a person would be offended without being affected.  I took the suggestion to be that God too could be offended without being affected.  Thus impassibility does not rule out God's being offended.

To this my reply was that God is omniscient.  He knows everything there is to know. So although it is true that a finite person could be offended without knowing it, and so not affected by the injury that was done to him, God could not be offended without knowing it. Good Thomist that he is, Mollica came back at me with the notion that God is not affected by what he knows.  So when the creature sins, God is offended; but his being offended in no way affects him:  he is not affected 'cognitively' by his knowledge that he is being offended, nor is he affected or injured  'morally' by his being offended.

Very interesting, but very problematic, as problematic as the Thomist line on divine knowledge.  If God is God, then he must be a metaphysical absolute and the pressure is on to say that he is both impassible and immutable.  (An immutable being is one that cannot undergo 'real' as opposed to 'mere Cambridge' change.)  After all, a decent absolute is not the sort of thing that could change or be affected by other things. If it underwent change or affection it would be relativized. But how could such an unchanging  God know anything contingent?  If God is unchanging, then his knowledge is unchanging: it cannot vary over time, or from possible world to possible world.  Here is an argument adapted from  Hartshorne.

1.  If p entails q, and q is contingent, then p is contingent.
2. *Tom sins at time t* is contingent.
3. *God knows that Tom sins at t* entails *Tom sins at t*.
Therefore
4. *God knows that Tom sins at t* is contingent.
Therefore
5. The property of knowing that Tom sins at t is an accidental (not essential) property of God.
6. God has no accidental properties: it is no part of his unchangeable essence that he know any contingent fact, any fact that could have been otherwise.
7. (5) and (6) are contradictories.  So one of the premises must be rejected.  (6) is the premise most plausibly rejected; but then impassibility and immutability go by the boards.

The challenge for our resident Thomist is to explain how an impassible and immutable God can know any contingent fact.

Bad to Die Young but Not Bad to Die? An Aporetic Dyad

Herewith, a rumination on death with Epicurus as presiding shade. The following two propositions are both logically inconsistent and yet very plausible:

1. Being dead is not an evil for anyone at any time. 

2. Being dead at a young age is an evil for some.

Obviously, the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true.  Each entails the negation of the other.  And yet each limb lays serious claim to our acceptance. 

(1) is rendered credible by Epicurean reasoning along the following lines. It is reasonably maintained that bodily death is annihilation of the self or person.  Now in the absence of a person, there is nothing to possess properties, experiential or not, such as  being conscious, being dead, being nonexistent, etc. We are assuming that a person's corpse cannot be the subject of the putative state of being dead.  When I am dead and thus nonexistent my corpse will continue to exist for a time.  (Assuming my end doesn't come in the form of 'vaporization.') But I am not my corpse.   My being dead is not my corpse's being dead, for it is not dead: only what was once alive can properly be said to be dead, and my corpse is never alive.  I am dead, if I am, not my corpse.  So my corpse cannot be the subject of the putative state of my being dead.  And anyway my being dead will obtain at future times when my corpse will not exist.  So for this reason too my corpse cannot be the subject of the putative state of my being dead.

There is, then, no subject of being dead if death is annihilation.  Since there is no subject, there is, strictly speaking, no state of my being dead.  A state is a state of something in the state, and in this case nothing is in the state.  It follows that the 'state' of my being dead cannot be an evil state.  There is no such state, so it can't be evil — or good, or anything.  It furthermore follows that being dead cannot rationally be feared — or looked forward to either. 'I'll be glad when I'm dead 'makes  as little  sense given the cogency of the Epicurean reasoning as 'I'll be sad when I'm dead' or Warren Zevon's 'I'll sleep when I'm dead.' 

Support for (2) has its source in a widely-accepted intuition.  Suppose a happy, healthy, well-situated 20 year old full of life and promise dies suddenly and painlessly in a freak accident.  Almost all will agree that in cases like this being dead (which we distinguish from both the process and the event of dying) is an evil, and therefore neither good nor axiologically neutral.  It is an evil for the person who is dead whether or not it is an evil for anyone else.  It is an evil because it deprives him of all the intrinsic goods he would have enjoyed had he not met an untimely end.

It is not quite the same for the 90 year old.  One cannot be deprived of the impossible (as a matter of conceptual necessity), and the older one gets the closer the approach to the nomologically impossible.  (I assume that there is some age — 150?  — at which it become nomologically impossible for what could reasonably count as a human being to continue to live.) So one cannot employ the same reasoning in the two cases.  If we say that the being dead of the 20 year old is bad because it deprives him of future goods, we cannot give the same reason for the badness ( if it is badness) of the being dead of the 90 year old.  Someone who lives a life that is on balance happy and healthy and productive and then dies of natural causes at 90 or 100 is arguably not deprived of anything by his being dead. 

The problem, then, is that (1) and (2) cannot both be true, yet each is plausible.

Just Say ‘No’ to Panhandlers

What do you do when a beggar approaches you on the street? Do you give him money? I've given away food, but as a general rule it is foolish and wrong to give money to bums. Once, in downtown Phoenix, I came out of a rib joint with a box of luscious leftovers. A beggar approached asking for money for food. I opened the box, showed him the ribs, and said, "If you are  hungry, you can have these." He thankfully accepted the gift and we both went away satisfied.

But if a bum asks for money, I refuse, sometimes adding, 'Get a job.' This isn't the Great Depression. There are jobs galore. That's why there is a Mexican invasion.

Beggars are for the most part scammers and liars. A bum in Hawaii once asked me for a quarter to make a phone call. I foolishly gave him the quarter.  Later in the day, he passed me again and again asked for a quarter to make a phone call. (No, I am not hasty generalizing, I am illustrating a general proposition to the effect that bums are for the most part liars and scammers.) If you give beggars money, they will buy alcohol or drugs with it. Do you want to contribute to their further degradation? Do you want more inebriated people on the streets?  Do you give any thought to what the bums do to others when drunk?  But even if they use the money for a good purpose, by giving them a handout, you undermine what little work ethic they have.

It is not easy to be genuinely helpful to others.  It takes thought, lest you make them worse. 

Of course, I don't expect the typical  liberal to understand this. For a guilt-ridden, feel-good liberal, one who substitutes emoting for thinking, one shows 'compassion' by contributing to people's dependence and degradation.  It is not that liberals intend to degrade and make dependent, but that is the unintended consequence of their unthinking  'compassion.'

The conservative who refuses to aid and abet unproductive behavior is the man of true compassion. For he gives the bum a reason to cease his bumming. This is why the expression 'compassionate conservative' is ill-advised. True conservatism is compassionate by its very nature. The expression 'compassionate conservative' is a foolish concession to the Left, suggesting as it does that conservatives are not as a rule compassionate. It is an expression like 'articulate black,' which   suggests that blacks are not as a rule articulate.

Further reading: Have a Heart, Give Smart.

 

From McTaggart to Rome

Peter Geach, Truth and Hope, University of Notre Dame Press, 2001, p. 9:

Soaking myself in McTaggart, I imbibed a desire for Heaven and eternal life, which of course I had not to abandon on becoming Catholic; and meanwhile I was preserved from giving my heart with total devotion to some less worthy end, as I saw many contemporaries doing.  Even as regards the relation of time and eternity I had no need to find McTaggart wholly mistaken.  God's life, the life of the Blessed Trinity, really is the sort of Boethian eternity that McTaggart ascribed to all persons; and we have the great and precious promise that, in a way we cannot now begin to understand, we shall transcend all the delusion and misery and wickedness of this life and become sharers in that eternal life.

No Eternal Punishment? Then Why Eternal Reward?

Suppose God exists and there is an afterlife the quality of which depends on how one behaves here below.  Suppose that the justice which is largely absent here will be meted out there.  And suppose we take as a moral axiom that the punishment must fit the crime.  The question then arises: what crime or series of crimes would merit everlasting post-mortem punishment of the perpetrator?  I earlier opined that no crime or series of crimes would merit such punishment.  Thus it is offensive to my moral sense that a just God would punish everlastingly a human evildoer.  (It may be otherwise with angelic evildoers such as Lucifer, so let's leave them out of the discussion.)  But I added a qualification  in my earlier post: unless the perpetrator wanted to maintain himself in a state of rebellion against God, in which case my moral sense would have no problem with God's granting the rebel his wish and maintaining him in a state of everlasting exclusion from the divine light and succor. 

Suppose that, after death, Stalin sees the errors of his ways and desires to come into right relation with God.  He must still be punished for his horrendous crimes. Surely justice demands that much.  What I fail to grasp, however, is how justice could demand that Stalin be punished everlastingly or eternally (if you care to distinguish eternity from everlastingness) for a finite series of finite crimes. 

Discussing my earlier post, Richard Hennessey raises an interesting counter-question:   ". . .  if justice demands an eternal or everlasting punishment for no finite sin or crime or finite set of finite sins or crimes, no matter how heinous, does justice demand an eternal or everlasting reward for no finite good deed or finite set of finite good deeds, no matter how virtuous?"  I think what Hennessey is asking here is better put as follows.  If justice rules out everlasting punishment for finite crimes, does it also rule out everlasting reward for finite good deeds? 

To sharpen the challenge, let's translate the interrogative into a declarative:  If no everlasting punishment is justified, then no everlasting reward is either.  If that is the point, then I could respond by saying that the Beatific Vision is not a reward  for good things we do here below, but the state intended for us all along.  It is something like a birthright or an inheritance.  One doesn't earn one's inheritance; it is a gift, not a reward.   But one can lose it.  Similarly with the Beatific Vision.  One cannot earn it, and one does not deserve it.  But one can lose it.

"But this is all speculation!"  Indeed, but if a philosopher can't speculate, who can?

Theomonism

Richard E. Hennessey coins the useful term 'theomonism' to describe the onto-theological position of Seyyed Hossein Nasr.  "Theomonism is the conjoint thesis that (1) there is but one and only one being, and thus the 'monism,' and (2) God is that being, and thus the 'theo.'"  So there is exactly one being, and that being is God.

One wonders what creation could be on such a scheme.  If God is the sole reality, and if, as is obvious, God is not a creature, then it would seem to follow that there are no creatures.  Moreover, if it is necessarily the case both that God is the sole reality and that God is not a creature, then it would seem to follow that it is impossible that there be any creatures.  How can it be true both that God is the sole reality and that God created the world?  Hennessey quotes Nasr:

Since the One God is Infinite and Absolute as well as the Infinitely Good, He could not but create. His Infinitude implies that he contains within Himself all possibilities, including that of negating Himself, and this possibility had to be realized in the form of creation.

Hennessey glosses the quotation as follows:

There seems, that is, to be at work here a thought sequence something like the following: The creation of the non-divine is the negation of the divine. Now the divine is the real and thus the negation of the divine is the negation of the real. But the negation of the real is the creation of the non-real. It follows, therefore, that the creation of the non-divine is the creation of the non-real.

Only those among [us] who think that the many extended changing beings surrounding us are genuinely real could object.

Well, it seems to me that one could reasonably object to Nasr's theomonism even if the plural world revealed to the senses is not taken to be genuinely real.  But it depends on what is meant by 'genuinely real.'  

There is a clear sense in which the plural world is genuinely real: it is not nothing.  Anyone who asserts that the plural world of planets and people, cabbages and computers, is literally nothing is either a fool or a sophist or doesn't understand the English language.  A second sense in which the plural world is genuinely real is that it is not an illusion.  This is not perfectly obvious and so requires a bit of arguing, but for now I take it as given that the world revealed by the outer senses (and their instrumental extensions) is not illusory.  It may be Erscheinung in  Kant's sense, but it cannot be Schein in his sense.  (One could perhaps mount a Contrast Argument: Soviel Schein, soviel Sein! to invoke a German proverb.)

So the plural world is not nothing, and it is not illusory.  But I would maintain that no one who holds that the plural world is a created world can maintain that the members of the plural world are independently real.  So if 'genuinely real' means 'independently real,' then I would deny that "the many extended changing beings surrounding us" are genuinely real.  They are not genuinely real because they are not independently real.  They lack plenary reality.  They are real all right; but dependently so.  Assuming creatio continuans, the denizens of the mundus sensibilis are dependent at every instant on divine support for their very existence.  That, I would urge, is an entailment of a sophisticated theism.

One could put the point by saying that God and creatures enjoy different modes of Being, but both truly are:  creatures are not nothing and they are not illusory.  This leads us back to the modes-of-Being problematic about which I have written a number of posts. (See Existence category.)

Nasr's theomonism is untenable because it denies a plain fact, namely, that there is a plural world.  That is a datum, a starting point, a fact that is surely more evident than the existence of God.  Extreme monism, a species of which is Nasr's theomonism, cannot accommodate the fact of plurality.  A tenable theism is a moderate monism according to which there is exactly one independently real being that serves as the ultimate ontological ground of the plurality of dependently real beings.

The One and the Many.  Each must be given its due. 

Was Moses High on Mount Sinai? If Yes, What Follows?

Benny Shanon is quoted by The Guardian as saying:

     As far as Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a
     supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend,
     which I don't believe either. Or finally, and this is very
     probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under
     the effect of narcotics.

   and

     The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of
     Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the
     imaginings of a people in an altered state of awareness . . . In
     advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is
     accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings.

These speculations of Professor Shanon raise some interesting questions. I take Shanon to be saying that Moses on Sinai (i) really did have an unusual experience, and that therefore there is nothing   legendary about the report in Exodus of this experience, but that (ii) this experience was not supernaturally caused, but caused by Moses' ingestion of a psychotropic drug, and that the etiology of the experience shows that the experience was nonveridical. Thus God did not reveal the Torah to Moses on Sinai; Moses had a drug-induced nonveridical experience of God revealing the Torah to him.

Question One

One question concerns the validity of the inference from

   1. Subject S under the influence of drug D experiences that p

   to

   2. S's experience that p is nonveridical.

Simply put, the question is whether one can validly infer the nonveridicality of an experience if the experience was had while the subject of the experience was under the influence of a drug.

Surely this is a non sequitur. Right now, under the influence of caffeine, I note that my coffee cup is empty. This is consistent with the perceptual experience of the cup's being empty being veridical,   which it is. So from the mere fact that a subject is 'on drugs,' it does not follow that that any of the subject's experiences are nonveridical. Now caffeine is a very mild drug. But suppose I was I was on a combination of caffeine, nicotine, marijuana, and methampehtamine. Even then one could not infer that the perception in question was nonveridical. Even on a dose of LSD-25 most of one's perceptual experiences remain veridical. In the case of Moses, from the fact, if it is a fact, that he was under the influence of a psychotropic drug while on Sinai, it does not follow that his experience of being addressed by God and being given the Decalogue was nonveridical.

(And anyway, aren't we always on 'drugs'?  The consciousness we enjoy in this life is brain-mediated, and the brain is the site of innumerable electro-chemical reactions.  In this life at least, 'No consciousness without chemistry.'  Our brains are always 'on drugs.'  But we don't take this fact as ruling out veridical perceptions, valid reasonings, true judgments, correct moral intuitions, etc.)

Returning to the case at hand, if you begin by assuming that there is no God, then it is plausible to explain the Sinai experience by saying that it was drug-induced. But that simply begs the question against the theist.

The crucial point is that a subject's being on drugs is logically consistent with the veridicality of his experiences; therefore, one cannot infer from the fact, if it is a fact, that Moses was under the   influence of a psychedelic or psychotropic drug that his experience was nonveridical. And that holds true for anyone's mystical or religious experience. 

If, however, there were independent reasons for believing that a certain experience was nonveridical, then one could explain the occurrence of the experience in terms of the influence of the drug.  But the occurrence/nonoccurrence of an experience is not to be confused with the veridicality/nonveridicality of the content of an experience.  So questions about how an experience arose, whether by normal or abnormal means, are distinct from questions about the content of the experience.  To fail to observe this distinction may lead one to commit the Genetic Fallacy.  It is so-called to highlight the fact that questions about origin or genesis are logically independent of questions about truth and falsehood.  If it has been antecedently established that the content of an experience is nonveridical, then it is legitimate to inquire into the origins of the experience.  But one cannot demonstrate  that the content of the experience is nonveridical by adducing facts about its origin.

So even if Shanon could prove that Moses and the people around him were under the influence of powerful drugs, that would not support his contention that nothing supernatural occurred on Sinai. It would not because it is consistent with theism. How does Shanon know that the drugs Moses supposedly took did not open "the doors of perception" (in Aldous Huxley's phrase) allowing him access to the transcendent, as opposed to shutting him up among figments of his own imagination?

Question Two

There is a second question whose full discussion should be reserved for a subsequent post. It is clear that mathematical and other truths can be grasped whether one is awake or dreaming, sober or drunk, on drugs or not. Sometimes when I dream I know that I am dreaming.  This awareness that I am dreaming is veridical despite the fact that I have it while dreaming.  After all, I am not dreaming that I am dreaming.  Or if a valid proof occurs to a mathematician in a dream, it is no less valid because the mathematician is dreaming. Why should not the same hold for moral truths? If it is true that it is morally obligatory not to kill human beings, then the experiencing of this truth is veridical whether or not the subject is awake or sleeping, sober or drunk, on drugs or not. So even if it could be proven that  Moses was under the influence of powerful drugs on Sinai, what  relevance would that have? At the very most it might cast doubt on the  veridicality of Moses' perception of God, but not on the veridicality of his experiencing of the content of the Decalogue. If it is true that one ought not kill, then it is true whether or not God exists.  And if it is true that one ought not kill, then one's intuiting that  it is true is veridical whether one is awake of dreaming, sober or drunk, on drugs or not, or a brain in a vat as opposed to a brain in a skull.

Suppose that all of Moses' perceptions of unusual physical phenomena while he was on Mt. Sinai were hallucinatory and thus nonveridical as the result of his ingestion of a drug.  Suppose there was no burning bush, etc.  It could still have been the case that he had veridical insights into objective moral truths. 

Advice on Sex from Epicurus

Epicurus (circa 341-271 B.C.) wrote the following to a disciple:

     I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much
     inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclinations as you
     will provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb
     well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure
     your own body, nor waste your possessions. That you be not checked
     by some one of these provisos is impossible; for a man never gets
     any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not
     receive harm. (Italics added, Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican
     Sayings, trans. R. M. Geer, Macmillan, 1987, pp. 69-70)

Had Bill Clinton heeded this advice, kept his penis in harness, and his paws off the overweight intern, he might have left office with an impressive legacy indeed. But instead he will schlep down the  centuries tied to Monica like Abelard to Heloise — except for the fact that he got off a lot easier than poor Abelard.

Closer to home is the case of Robert Blake whose lust led him into a tender trap that turned deadly. He was very lucky to be acquitted of the murder of Bonnie Lee Bakeley. Then there was the case of the dentist whose extramural activities provoked his dentist wife to run him down with the family Mercedes. The Bard had it right: "Hell hath  no fury like a woman scorned."

Most recently, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has secured himself a place in the annals of libertinage while wrecking his career.  Ah, those sophisticated Frenchmen.

This litany of woe can be lengthened ad libitum. My motive is not Schadenfreude, but a humble desire to learn from the mistakes of others. Better that they rather than I should pay my tuition in the school of Hard Knocks.  Heed me, muchachos, there is no more delusive power on the face of the  earth than sex. Or as a Turkish proverb has it, Erkegin sheytani kadindir, "Man's devil is woman." And conversely.

Butchvarov on Metaphysical Realism and Logical Nonrealism

This post is a  stab at a summary and evaluation of Panayot Butchvarov's "Metaphysical Realism and Logical Nonrealism" which is available both online and in R. M. Gale, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell 2002), pp. 282-302.  Page references are to the Blackwell source. The ComBox stands open if readers have some informed commentary to offer. ('Informed' means that you have read Butchvarov's paper, and my response, and you have something pertinent to contribute either in objection to or agreement with either Butchvarov or me.)

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David Gordon to Teach Course on Ayn Rand

I received an e-mail message this morning from David Gordon of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.  He tells me that he will be teaching an online course entitled Ayn Rand and Objectivism.  He also informs me that the Rand crowd, having got wind of the fact, have begun attacking him.  They focus on Gordon's 1994 Journal of Libertarian Studies review of Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.  A bit of the review is reproduced below. I have added some comments in blue and have marked some passages I consider important in red.

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