Here.
Month: November 2015
Gary Gutting on Richard Dawkins’ Logical Mistakes
Here.
Atheism we will always have with us. But in a few years the puerile and uninformed fulminations and excesses of the New Atheists will be forgotten.
Galen Strawson: It is Certain that the Christian God does not Exist!
Here, in The New York Review of Books:
To the Editors:
Thomas Nagel writes that “whether atheists or theists are right depends on facts about reality that neither of them can prove” [“A Philosopher Defends Religion,” Letters, NYR, November 8]. This is not quite right: it depends on what kind of theists we have to do with. We can, for example, know with certainty that the Christian God does not exist as standardly defined: a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly benevolent. The proof lies in the world, which is full of extraordinary suffering. If someone claims to have a sensus divinitatis that picks up a Christian God, they are deluded. It may be added that genuine belief in such a God, however rare, is profoundly immoral: it shows contempt for the reality of human suffering, or indeed any intense suffering.
Galen Strawson
Strawson is telling us that it is certain that the God of Christianity does not exist because of the suffering in the world.
How's that for pure bluster?
What we know is true, and what we know with certainty we know without the possibility of mistake. When Strawson claims that it is certain that the Christian God does not exist, he is not offering an autobiographical comment: he is not telling us that it is subjectively certain, certain for him, that the Christian God does not exist. He is maintaining that it is objectively certain, certain in itself, and thus certain for anyone. From here on out 'certain' by itself is elliptical for 'objectively certain.'
And why is it certain that the Christian God does not exist? Because of the "extraordinary suffering" in the world. Strawson appears to be endorsing a version of the argument from evil that dates back to Epicurus and in modern times was endorsed by David Hume. The argument is often called 'logical' to distinguish it from 'evidential' arguments from evil. Since evidential or inductive or probabilistic arguments cannot render their conclusions objectively certain even if all of their premises are certain, Strawson must have the 'logical' argument in mind. Here is a version:
- If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
- If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
- If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
- If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
- Evil exists.
- If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
- Therefore, God doesn’t exist.
It is a clever little argument, endlessly repeated, and valid in point of logical form. But are its premises objectively certain? This is not the question whether the argument is sound. It is sound if and only if all its premises are true. But a proposition can be true without being known, and a fortiori, without being known with certainty, i.e., certain. The question, then, is whether each premise in the above argument is objectively certain. If even one of the premises is not, then neither is the conclusion.
Consider (5). It it certain that evil exists? Is it even true? Are there any evils? No doubt there is suffering. But is suffering evil? I would say that it is, and I won't protest if you say that it is obvious that it is. But the obvious needn't be certain. It is certainly not the case that it is certain that suffering is evil, objectively evil. It could be like this. There are states of humans and other animals that these animals do not like and seek to avoid. They suffer in these states in a two-fold sense: they are passive with respect to them, and they find the qualitative nature of these states not to their liking, to put it in the form of an understatement. But it could be that these qualitatively awful states are axiologically neutral in that there are no objective values relative to which one could sensibly say something like, "It would have been objectively better has these animals not suffered a slow death."
The point I am making is that only if suffering is objectively evil could it tell against the objective existence of God. But suffering is objectively evil only if suffering is objectively a disvalue. So suffering is objectively evil and tells against the existence of God only if there are objective values and disvalues.
Perhaps all values and preferences are merely subjective along with all judgments about right and wrong. Perhaps all your axiological and moral judgments reduce to mere facts about what you like and dislike, what satisfies your desires and what does not. Perhaps there are no objective values and disvalues among the furniture of the world. I don't believe this myself. But do you have a compelling argument that it isn't so? No you don't. So you are not certain that it isn't so.
And so you are not certain that evil exists. Evil ought not be and ought not be done, by definition. But it could be that there are no objective oughts and ought-nots, whether axiologically or agentially. There is just the physical world. This world includes animals with their different needs, desires, and preferences. There is suffering, but there is no evil. Since (5) is not certain, the conclusion is not certain either.
Now consider (2): If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil. Is that certain? Is it even true? Does God have the power to eliminate the evil that comes into the world through finite agents such as you and me? Arguably he does not. For if he did he would be violating our free will. By creating free agents, God limits his own power and allows evils that he cannot eliminate. Therefore, it is certainly not certain that (2) is true even if it is true. Reject the Free Will Defense if you like, but I will no trouble showing that the premises you invoke in your rejection are not certain.
Pure ideologically-driven bluster, then, from an otherwise brilliant and creative philosopher.
Islam: The Religion of Submission
If there is conflict between us, and I submit to your will to power, there will be peace between us. But is that a peace worth having? There is a sense in which Islam is the religion of peace, but it is more honestly described as the religion of submission.
I've added some emphases to the following quotations from Jude P. Dougherty, Fictional ISIS and the True Threat:
The word “Islam,” Goldziher reminds his reader, means “submission.” The word expresses first and foremost dependency on an unbounded Omnipotence to which man must submit and resign his will. Submission is the dominant principle inherent in all manifestations of Islam, in its ideas, forms, ethics, and worship, and it is, of course, demanded of conquered peoples. Adherence to Islam not only means an act of actual or theoretical submission to a political system but also requires the acceptance of certain articles of faith. Therein lies a difficulty.
[. . .]
To illustrate the difference between Christianity and Islam, Brague draws upon the work of Ibn Khaldun, a fourteenth-century Muslim scholar. According to Khaldun the Muslim community has the religious duty to convert all non-Muslims to Islam either by persuasion or by force.
Other religious groups do not have a universal mission, says Khaldun, and holy war is not a religious duty for them, save for defensive purposes. The person in charge of religious affairs in other religious groups is not concerned with power politics. Royal authority outside of Islam comes to those who have it by accident, or in some other way that has little to do with religion, and they are under the religious obligation to gain power over other nations. According to Khaldun, holy war exists only within Islam and is imposed upon its leaders by sharia law.
Theological warrant aside, Brague asks how Islam’s greatest philosophers view jihad. He puts the question to three Aristotelians – al Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. All three permit the waging of holy war against those who refuse Islam – al Farabi and Averroes against Christians, Avicenna against the pagans of his native Persia.
Al Farabi, who lived in the lands where the enemy was the Byzantine Empire, drew up a list of seven justifications for war, including the right to conduct war in order to acquire something the state desires, but is in the possession of another; and the right to wage holy war to force people to accept what is better for them if they do not recognize it spontaneously.
Averroes, writing in the western part of the Islamic empire, approved without reservation the slaughter of dissidents, calling for the elimination of people whose continued existence might harm the state. Avicenna similarly condones conquest and readily grants leaders the right to annihilate those called to truth, but who reject it.
Western leaders fighting ISIS [oe pretending to fight it such as the contemptible hate-America leftist, Obama] generally fail to acknowledge the genuine motivation of those committed to jihad. Whether from cowardice or woeful ignorance, they (at Europe’s peril) continue to speak of “the far reaches of ISIS,” without confronting the real threat.
Vita Brevis
This mess we are in, this predicament, the fall into time . . . leaves us no time for its solution.
Between the Inhuman and the Unphilosophical
It is inhuman to care not at all about the praise of one's fellows, but unphilosophical to care much.
Doubt and Belief
Doubting no more confers dubitability upon that which is doubted than believing confers credibility upon that which is believed.
The Left’s Hatred of Conservative Talk Radio
At the moment the MavPhil commentariat includes a couple of sharp young philosophers whose views are to the Right of mine. My brand of conservatism takes on board what I consider to be good in the old liberal tradition. Their brand looks askance at paleo-liberalism and sees it as leading inevitably to the hard leftism of the present day. So a fruitful intramural debate is in progress, and I thank these gents for their commentary. Who knows? Perhaps they will shift me a bit in their direction.
I am re-posting the following 2010 entry so that the young guys can tell me what they think, especially with regard to the Horowitz quotation below. I have bolded the sentence that I expect will be the cynosure of their disapprobation.
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The qualifier 'conservative' in my title borders on pleonasm: there is is scarcely any talk radio in the U.S. worth mentioning that is not conservative. This is part of the reason the Left hates the conservative variety so much. They hate it because of its content, and they hate it because they are incapable of competing with it: their own attempts such as Air America have failed miserably. And so, projecting their own hatred, they label conservative talk 'hate radio.'
In a 22 March op-ed piece in the NYT, Bob Herbert, commenting on the G.O.P., writes, "This is the party that genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating, nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry."
I find Herbert's vile outburst fascinating. There is no insanity, hatred, or bigotry in any of the conservative talk jocks to whom I listen: Laura Ingraham, Dr. Bill Bennett, Hugh Hewitt, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager or Michael Medved. There is instead common sense, humanity, excellent advice, warnings against extremism, deep life wisdom, facts, arguments, and a reasonably high level of discourse. Of the six I have mentioned, Prager and Medved are the best, a fact reflected in their large audiences. Don't you liberals fancy yourselves open-minded? Then open your ears!
So what is it about Herbert and people of his ilk that causes them to react routinely in such delusional fashion?
It is a long story, of course, but part of it is that lefties confuse dissent with hate. They don't seem to realize that if I dissent from your view, it doesn't follow that I hate you. It's actually a double confusion. There is first the confusion of dissent with hate, and then the confusion of persons and propositions. If I dissent from your proposition, it does not follow that I hate your proposition; and a fortiori it doesn't follow that I hate the person who advances the proposition. This double confusion goes hand in hand with the strange notion that the Left owns dissent, which I duly refute in a substantial post.
I leave you with a quotation from David Horowitz, Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey (Spence, 2003), p. 273, emphasis added:
The image of the right that the left has concocted — authoritarian, reactionary, bigoted, mean-spirited — is an absurd caricature that has no relation to modern conservatism or to the reality of the people I have come to know in my decade-long movement along the political spectrum — or to the way I see myself. Except for a lunatic fringe, American conservatism is not about "blood and soil" nostalgia or conspiracy paranoia, which figure so largely in imaginations that call themselves "liberal," but are anything but. Modern American conservatism is a reform movement that seeks to reinvent free markets and limited government and to restore somewhat traditional values. Philosophically, conservatism is more accurately seen as a species of liberalism itself — and would be more often described in this way were it not for the hegemony the left exerts in the political culture and its appropriation of the term "liberal" to obscure its radical agenda.
One more thing. You can see from Herbert's picture that he is black. So now I will be called a racist for exposing his outburst. That is right out of the Left's playbook: if a conservative disagrees with you on any issue, or proffers any sort of criticism, then you heap abuse on him. He's a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, a 'homophobe,' a bigot, a religious zealot . . . .
A Reason to Curtail Immigration from Muslim Lands
"Overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land, according to a worldwide survey by the Pew Research Center." Inform yourself.
Recognizing Microagressions and the Messages They Send
A remarkable document. Tell me what you think.
To understand the Left you must understand that central to their worldview is the hermeneutics of suspicion which is essentially a diluted amalgam of themes from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
Thus nothing has the plain meaning that it has; every meaning must be deconstructed so as to lay bare its 'real meaning.'
Suppose I say, sincerely, "The most qualified person should get the job." To a leftist that means: "People of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race."
Or suppose I describe a black malefactor as a thug. What I have actually said, according to the hermeneutics of suspicion, is that the malefactor is a nigger. But 'thug' does not mean 'nigger.' 'Thug' means thug. There are thugs of all races.
Leftists often call for 'conversations' about this or that. Thus Eric Holder famously called for a 'conversation' about race. But how can one have a conversation — no sneer quotes — about anything with people who refuse to take what one sincerely says at face value?
I now hand off to Dennis Prager, American Universities Begin to Implode.
Don’t Say ‘Turkey Day’
Say 'Thanksgiving' and give thanks. You don't need to eat turkey to be thankful. Gratitude is a good old conservative virtue. I'd expatiate further, but I've got a race to run. You guessed it: a 'turkey trot.'
Of Books and Gratitude
Occasionally, Robert Paul Wolff says something at his blog that I agree with completely, for instance:
To an extent I did not anticipate when I set out on life’s path, books have provided many of the joys and satisfactions I have encountered. I am constantly grateful to the scholars and thinkers who have written, and continue to write, the books from which I derive such pleasure, both the great authors of the past . . . and those less exalted . . . .
Gratitude is a characteristically conservative virtue; hence its presence in Wolff softens my attitude toward him.
As Wolff suggests, our gratitude should extend to the lesser lights, the humbler laborers in the vineyards of Wissenschaft, the commentators and translators, the editors and compilers and publishers. Beyond that, to the librarians and the supporters of libraries, and all the preservers and transmitters of high culture, and those who, unlettered themselves in the main, defend with blood and iron the precincts of high culture from the barbarians who now once again are massing at the gates.
Nor should we forget the dedicated teachers, mostly women, who taught us to read and write and who opened up the world of learning to us and a lifetime of the sublime joys of study and reading and writing.
Attitude, Gratitude, Beatitude
Happy Thanksgiving to all my Stateside readers.
The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude. Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon? Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness. However you say it, it is true. The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene.
Broad generalizations, these. They admit of exceptions, as goes without saying. He who is afflicted with Weilian malheur or clinical depression cannot think his way out of his misery. Don't get hung up on the exceptions. Meditate on the broad practical truth. On Thanksgiving, and every day.
Liberals will complain that I am 'preaching.' But that only reinforces my point: they complain and they think, strangely, that any form of exhortation just has to be hypocritical. Besides not knowing what hypocrisy is, they don't know how to appreciate what actually exists and provably works. Appreciation is conservative. Scratch a liberal and likely as not you'll find a nihilist, a denier of the value of what is, a hankerer after what is not, and in too many cases, what is impossible.
Even the existence of liberals is something to be grateful for. They mark out paths not to be trodden. And their foibles provide plenty of blog fodder. For example, there is the curious phenomenon of hypocrisy-in-reverse.
A Case for Open Immigration?
The events of the day, and the presence of some sharp commenters, prompt me to repost the following entry which first appeared in these pages on 3 July 2010.
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Spencer Case sent me a link to a short op-ed piece by Michael Huemer who teaches philosophy at the University of Colorado. Huemer's thesis is that
. . . U.S. immigration policy is fundamentally unjust. It disregards the rights and interests of other human beings, merely because those persons were born in another country. It coercively imposes clear and serious harms on some people, for the sake of relatively minor or dubious benefits for others who happened to have been born in the right geographical area.
Huemer's argument stripped to essentials and in his own words:
1. It is wrong to knowingly impose severe harms on others, by force, without having a good reason for doing so. This principle holds regardless of where one's victims were born or presently reside.
2. The U.S. government, in restricting immigration, knowingly and coercively imposes severe harms on millions of human beings.
3. The U.S. government has no good reason for imposing such harms on potential immigrants.
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4. It follows that U.S. immigration policy is morally wrong.
Before addressing Huemer's argument, some preliminary points need to be made.
A. First, a difficult issue such as the one before us cannot be resolved via some quick little argument like the above. Numerous considerations and counter-considerations come into play.
B. Here is a consideration in the light of which Huemer's argument has an aura of the fantastic. The U. S. is a welfare state. Now no welfare state can hope to survive and meet it commitments to provide all sorts of services at taxpayer expense if it opens its borders wide. Without trying to estimate the tsunami of humanity that would flood into the country from all sides were immigration restrictions removed, it is clear that open borders is a wildly impractical proposal. And note that this impracticality itself has moral ramifications: if bona fide citizens have been promised that they will be taken care of by some such system as Social Security into their old age, and the government reneges on its promises because of an empty treasury, then the rights of the retirees will have been violated — which is a moral issue.
If state functions were stripped down to 'night watchman' size as certain libertarians would advocate, then perhaps an open borders policy would be workable; but obviously such a rollback of governmental powers and functions has no chance of occurring. Let the quixotic rollback occur; THEN and ONLY THEN we can talk about open borders. Meanwhile we do have border control, half-hearted as it is. It is not obviously unjust to those who immigrate legally to allow others in illegally?
C. An open borders policy is impractical not only for the reason mentioned, but for many others besides. I catalog some of them in Immigration Legal and Illegal.
Now to Huemer's argument.
I see no reason to accept premise (2) according to which the U. S. government imposes severe harms on people by preventing them from immigrating. Suppose you have foolishly gone into the desert without proper supplies. You soon find yourself in dire need of water. Coming upon my camp, you enter it and try to take my water. I prevent you from doing so. Have I harmed you? I have not inflicted any harm upon you; I have merely prevented you from getting something you need for your well-being. But you have no right to my water, even if I have more than enough. If you steal my supplies, you violate my property rights; I am therefore morally justified in resisting the theft. You are morally obliged to respect my property rights, but I am under no moral obligation to give you what you need, especially in light of the fact that you have freely put yourself in harm's way.
Similarly, the U. S. government does not harm those whom it does not allow to enter its territory, for they have no right to enter its territory in the first place, and in so doing violate the property rights of the U. S.
Once this is appreciated it will also be seen why (3) is false. The U. S. does have a good moral reason to prevent foreigners from entering its territory, namely, to prevent them from violating the property rights of the U. S.
Now at this point I expect someone to object as follows. "I grant you that illegal aliens are not justified in violating private property rights, but when they cross public lands, travel on public roads, use public facilities, etc. they are not violating any property rights. The U. S. has no property rights; there are no public property rights that need to be respected."
This objection is easily rebutted. It is based on a false analogy with unowned resources. An incursion into an uninhabited region not in the jurisdiction of a state does not violate property rights. But the public lands of the U. S. are within the jurisdiction of the U.S. These lands are managed and protected by the state which gets the werewithal of such management and protection, and in some instances, the money to pay for the original acquisition, from coercive taxation. Thus we taxpayers collectively own these lands. It is not as if the land, roads, resources and the like of the U.S. which are not privately owned are somehow open to anyone in the world who wants to come here. Just as an illegal alien violates property rights when he breaks into my house, he violates property rights when he breaks into my country. For a country belongs collectively to its citizens, not to everyone in the world.
The fundamental point is that foreigners have no right to immigrate. Since they have no such right, no moral wrong is done to them by preventing them from immigrating even though they would be better off were they to immigrate. Furthermore, the U.S. government and every government has not only the right, but also the moral obligation, to control its border for the the good of its citizens. After all, protection from foreign invasion is one of the legitimate functions of government.
Why Defend Tolerance and not Intolerance?
Jacques commented:
. . . I'm reluctant to say that tolerance needs defending more than intolerance.
The Muslim world is intolerant of many things that should be tolerated, such as 'paganism' and atheism. But then, the Muslim world is also rightly intolerant of all the worst things about our culture. They don't tolerate blasphemy-for-the-sake-of-blasphemy. If halfwits with 'education' degrees want to teach their young children that it's great to be 'gay' or 'trans', and maybe they should try it out, Muslims will not stand for it. They don't tolerate rape and murder just because stopping it would have 'disparate impact' across races. Don't we want to defend their intolerance in these respects?
[. . .]
I basically agree with Jacques although the penultimate sentence of the above quotation needs to be toned down and qualified. But it is certainly true that "the Muslim world is also rightly intolerant of all the worst things about our culture." I have argued this myself:
Thursday, February 10, 2011
What Do We Have to Teach the Muslim World? Reflections Occasioned by the Death of Maria Schneider
I was one of those who saw "Last Tango in Paris" when it was first released, in 1972. I haven't seen it since and I don't remember anything specific about it except one scene, the scene you remember too, the 'butter scene,' in which the Marlon Brando character sodomizes the Maria Schneider character. Maria Schneider died last week at 58 and indications are that her exploitation by Brando and Bertolucci scarred her for life.
Islamic culture is in many ways benighted and backward, fanatical and anti-Enlightenment, but our trash culture is not much better. Suppose you are a Muslim and you look to the West. What do you see? Decadence. And an opportunity to bury the West.
If Muslims think that our decadent culture is what Western values are all about, and something we are trying to impose on them, then we are in trouble. They do and we are.
Militant Islam's deadly hatred of us should not be discounted as the ravings of lunatics or psychologized away as a reflex of envy at our fabulous success. For there is a kernel of insight in it that we do well to heed. Sayyid Qutb , theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood, who visited the USA at the end of the '40s, writes in Milestones (1965):
Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance
at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms,
wine bars and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for
naked flesh, provocative pictures, and sick, suggestive statements
in literature, the arts, and mass media! And add to all this the
system of usury which fuels man's voracity for money and engenders
vile methods for its accumulation and investment, in addition to
fraud, trickery, and blackmail dressed up in the garb of law.
A wild exaggeration in 1965, the above statement is much less of an exaggeration today. But setting aside the hyperbole, we are in several ways a sick and decadent society getting worse day by day. On this score, if on no other, we can learn something from our Islamist critics. The fact that a man wants to chop your head off does not mean that he has nothing to teach you. We often learn more from our enemies than from our friends. Our friends often will spare us hard truths.
Companion post: What Ever Happened to Linda Lovelace?
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Jacques' challenge to me I take to be the following: Why do you defend tolerance and not intolerance when, as ought to be obvious to any sensible person, there are things that we ought to tolerate and things that we ought not tolerate? Equivalently, why is tolerance in general better than intolerance in general? An anonymous commenter adds support to Jacques' challenge:
All sides can say "it is important that the right kinds of things are tolerated and important that the wrong kinds of things are not tolerated". Isn't that the only sense in which you, or anyone, is a proponent of "tolerance"?
I don't think so. In order to determine what is tolerable and what is not we must inquire, we must examine, we must canvass various options. For this we need the help of others. We need to read their writings and hear their voices. We need access to a broad base of historical and other knowledge. We ought therefore to tolerate a wide variety of views in order to understand the issues and possibly arrive at the truth about them.
We don't know what all to tolerate and what all not to tolerate. Should we allow (tolerate) immigration from Muslim lands at the present time? That is a serious question. The answer is not obvious. If you claim to know the answer you are blustering. This is a legitimate topic of open inquiry. Among the conditions of the possibility of open inquiry is toleration of opposing points of view.
So, even to get clear about what toleration is and is not, to get clear about its limits, to get clear about how it gears into other values, to get clear about what our first-order moral commitments ought to be, we need a space in which there is the free exchange of ideas, a space that is possible only under the aegis of toleration, and not in the precincts of Islamic fundamentalism or Leftism.
Suppose you say to me, "Look, free exchange of ideas is just one more thing that we ought to tolerate; but that is not a reason to defend tolerance in general rather than intolerance." Well, I think it is. For how do you know that free exchange of ideas ought to be tolerated? That is something that needs to be investigated. Tolerance is the space within which alone these questions can be addressed and possibly resolved (though I am not sanguine about resolutions); as such, tolerance and its conditions are not just further things that ought to be tolerated.