Last Call, Dave van Ronk. "If I'd been drunk when I was born, I'd be ignorant of sorrow."
(Last night I had) A Wonderful Dream, The Majors. The trick is to find in the flesh one of those dream girls. Some of us got lucky.
This night in 1985 was Rick Nelson's last: the Travelin' Man died in a plane crash. Wikipedia:
Nelson dreaded flying but refused to travel by bus. In May 1985, he decided he needed a private plane and leased a luxurious, fourteen-seat, 1944 Douglas DC-3 that had once belonged to the DuPont family and later to Jerry Lee Lewis. The plane had been plagued by a history of mechanical problems.[104] In one incident, the band was forced to push the plane off the runway after an engine blew, and in another incident, a malfunctioning magneto prevented Nelson from participating in the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois.
On December 26, 1985, Nelson and the band left for a three-stop tour of the Southern United States. Following shows in Orlando, Florida, and Guntersville, Alabama, Nelson and band members took off from Guntersville for a New Year's Eve extravaganza in Dallas, Texas.[105] The plane crash-landed northeast of Dallas in De Kalb, Texas, less than two miles from a landing strip, at approximately 5:14 p.m. CST on December 31, 1985, hitting trees as it came to earth. Seven of the nine occupants were killed: Nelson and his companion, Helen Blair; bass guitarist Patrick Woodward, drummer Rick Intveld, keyboardist Andy Chapin, guitarist Bobby Neal, and road manager/soundman Donald Clark Russell. Pilots Ken Ferguson and Brad Rank escaped via cockpit windows, though Ferguson was severely burned.
Could there be a better way to end such a surreal year?
It starts tomorrow, New Year's Eve, at 6 AM and runs for three and one half days on the SyFy channel. Here is the schedule. Two I won't miss tomorrow morning:
9 am: The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine 9:30am: Escape Clause
Here is your chance to view some of the episodes you may have missed. Me, I've seen 'em all, multiple times each. The best of them are phenomenally good and bristling with philosophical content. Back in aught-nine I offered my analysis of "The Lonely" which aired in November, 1959.
The original series ran from 1959 to 1964. In those days it was not uncommon to hear TV condemned as a vast wasteland. Rod Serling's work was a sterling counterexample.
The hard-driving Serling lived a short but intense life. Born in 1924, he was dead at age 50 in 1975. His four-pack-a-day cigarette habit destroyed his heart. Imagine smoking 80 Lucky Strikes a day! Assuming 16 hours of smoking time per day, that averages to one cigarette every twelve minutes. He died on the operating table during an attempted bypass procedure.
But who is to say that a long, healthy life is better than a short, intense one fueled by the stimulants one enjoys? That is a question for the individual, not Hillary or Obama Yomama or any latter-day leftard to decide.
Your body is your vehicle on the highways and byways of the mundus sensibilis. Does it not make sense to keep it ever roadworthy? Is it not morally incumbent upon you to do so? Either maintain it or get it off the road.
This is a revised entry from over five years ago. I re-post it to solicit the comments of the Opponent and anyone else who can provide some enlightenment. I am not a theologian, but theology is far too important to be left to professional theologians.
……………..
An archeologist who claimed to have uncovered the site of Plato's Cave would be dismissed as either a prankster or a lunatic. There never was any such cave as is described in the magnificent Book VII of Plato's Republic. And there never were any such cave-dwellers or goings-on as the ones described in Plato's story. And yet this, the most famous allegory in the history of philosophy, gives us the truth about the human condition. It lays bare the human predicament in which shadow is taken for substance, and substance for shadow, the truth-teller for a deceiver, and the deceiver for a truth-teller.
The reader may have guessed where I am going with this. If the allegory of the Cave delivers the truth about the human predicament despite its falsity when taken literally as an historical narrative, the same could be true for the stories in the Bible. No reasonable person nowadays could take Genesis as reporting historical facts. To take but one example, at Genesis 3, 8 we read that Adam and Eve, after having tasted of the forbidden fruit, "heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the Garden . . . ." Taken literally, this implies that God has feet. But if he has feet was he shod on that day or not? If shod, what was his shoe size? 10 1/2? Obviously, nothing can have feet without having feet of a determinate size! And given that the original parents heard God stomping around, then he had to be fairly large: if God were the size of a flea, he wouldn't have made any noise. If God were a physical being, why couldn't he be the size of a flea or a microbe? The answer to these absurdities is the double-barreled denial that God is a physical being and that Genesis is an historical account. I could give further examples. (And you hope I won't.)
This is why the deliverances of evolutionary biology do not refute the Fall. (I grant that said deliverances refute some doctrines of the Fall, those doctrines that posit an original pair of humans, without animal progenitors, from whom the whole human race is descended.) Indeed, it is quite unintelligent to think that the Fall can be refuted from biology. It would as stupid as to think that the truths about the human condition that are expressed in Plato's famous allegory can be negated or disconfirmed by the failure of archeologists to locate the site of Plato's Cave, or by any physical proof that a structure like that of Plato's Cave is nomologically impossible.
And yet wasn't that what Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago biologist, was quoted as maintaining?
Earlier I quoted John Farrell quoting biologist Jerry Coyne:
I’ve always maintained that this piece of the Old Testament, which is easily falsified by modern genetics (modern humans descended from a group of no fewer than 10,000 individuals), shows more than anything else the incompatibility between science and faith. For if you reject the Adam and Eve tale as literal truth, you reject two central tenets of Christianity: the Fall of Man and human specialness.
I suppose this shows that the wages of scientism are (topical) stupidity.
Addenda
1. I said that the Allegory of the Cave "gives us the truth about the human condition." Suppose you disagree. Suppose you think the story provides no insight into the human condition. My point goes through nonetheless. The point is that the truth or falsity of the story is unaffected by empirical discoveries and nondiscoveries. Anthropological and archeological investigations are simply irrelevant to the assessment of the claims being made in the allegory. That, I hope, is perfectly obvious.
2. There is another point that I thought of making but did not because it struck me as too obvious, namely, that the Allegory of the Cave is clearly an allegory, and is indeed explicitly presented as such in Chapter VII of the Republic (cf. 514a et passim), whereas the Genesis account is neither clearly an allegory, nor explicitly presented in the text as one. But that too is irrelevant to my main point. The point is that biological, anthropological, and geological investigations are simply irrelevant for the evaluation of what Genesis discloses or purports to disclose about the human condition. For example, at Gen 1, 26 we are told that God made man in his image and likeness. That means: Man is a spiritual being. (See my post Imago Dei) Obviously, that proposition can neither be established nor refuted by any empirical investigation. The sciences of matter cannot be expected to disclose any truths about spirit. And if, standing firm on the natural sciences, you deny that there is anything other than matter, then you fall into the easily-refuted mistake of scientism. Furthermore, Genesis is simply incoherent if taken as presenting facts about history or facts about cosmology and physical cosmogenesis. Not only is it incoherent; it is contradicted by what we know from the physical sciences. Clearly, in any conflict between the Bible and natural science, the Bible will lose.
The upshot is that the point I am making about Genesis cannot be refuted by adducing the obvious difference between a piece of writing that presents itself as an allegory and a piece of writing that does not. Plato's intention was to write an allegory. The authors of Genesis presumably did not have the intention of writing an allegory. But that is irrelevant to the question whether the stories can be taken as reporting historical and physical facts. It is obvious that Plato's story cannot be so taken. It is less obvious, but nonetheless true, that the Genesis story cannot be so taken. For if you take it as historical reportage, then it is mostly false or incoherent, and you miss what is important: the spiritual, not the physical, meaning.
The Opponent writes:
I have been telling the Maverick Philosopher here about Benjamin Sommer’s theory of divine fluidity, which is one solution to the problem of anthropomorphic language in the Hebrew Bible. The problem is not just Genesis 1:26 (‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’) but also Genesis 3:8 ‘They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze’. Can God be a man with feet who walks around the garden leaving footprints? As opposed to being a pure spirit? The anthropomorphic conception is, in Maverick’s opinion ‘a hopeless reading of Genesis’, and makes it out to be garbage. ‘You can’t possibly believe that God has feet’.
Yet Benjamin Sommer, Professor of Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages at the Jewish Theological Seminary, proposes such a literal and anthropomorphic interpretation. As he argues (The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel), if the authors of the Hebrew Bible had intended their anthropomorphic language to be understood figuratively, why did they not say so? The Bible contains a wide variety of texts in different genres, but there is no hint of this, the closest being the statement ofDeuteronomy 4.15 that the people did not see any form when the Ten Commandments were revealed at Sinai.
My response is as follows.
The Opponent, following Sommer, asks: " if the authors of the Hebrew Bible had intended their anthropomorphic language to be understood figuratively, why did they not say so?" This rhetorical question is grammatically interrogative but logically declarative: it amounts to the declaration that the authors did intend their crudely anthropomorphic language to be taken literally because they didn't say otherwise. This declaration, in turn, is a telescoped argument:
The authors did not say that their language was to be taken figuratively;
ergo
Their language is to be taken literally.
The argument, however, is plainly a non sequitur. It therefore gives me no reason to change my view.
Besides, it is preposterous to suppose that the creator of the the physical universe, "the heavens and the earth," is a proper part of the physical universe. Since that is impossible, no intelligent reading of Genesis can take the creator of the universe to be a bit of its fauna. Presumably, God gave us the intelligence to read what is obviously figurative as figurative.
And if one takes the Bible to be divine revelation, then it is natural to assume that God is using the authors to get his message across. For that to occur, the authors needn't be terribly bright or apprised of the variety of literary tropes. What does it matter what the authors intended? Suppose they intended talk of man being made in the divine image and likeness to be construed in some crassly materialistic way. Then they failed to grasp the profound spiritual truth that they, willy nilly (nolens volens), were conveying.
3. The mistake of those who think that biology refutes the Fall is the mirror-image of those benighted fundamentalists and literalists who think that the Fall 'stands or falls' with the historical accuracy of tales about original parents, trees, serpents, etc. The opposing groups are made for each other. The scientistic atheist biologist attacks a fundamentalist straw man while the benighted fundamentalist knocks himself out propping up his straw man. Go at it, boys! The spectacle is entertaining but not edifying.
Subtitle: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ. Thomas Nelson, 2016, 269 pp. I was aware of Klavan only as a hard-punching conservative PJ Media columnist before reading a review that 'turned me on' to this book. It arrived last night thanks to the synergy of Amazon.com and the U.S. Mail. I'm on p. 18, nearing the end of Chapter 1, "Great Neck Jew." Klavan is an uncommonly good writer and I will undoubtedly read the whole thing. If you are a tough-minded American Boomer like me on a religious/spiritual quest you will probably be able to 'relate' very well to this book. A fortiori, if you are Jewish.
Le Vieux Testament est un chifre. (Pascal) Surely that is right? A cipher is a coded message that needs to be deciphered. The Astute Opponent seems not to agree.
. . . there is no substantive philosophical position for which there is *better* philosophical support than theism. I'm open to the possibility that at least one other philosophical position–namely, dualism–is at least as well supported by philosophical argument as theism. But nothing's got better support.
[. . .]
That said, I find St. Thomas's second way indubitable. I also find the modal ontological argument compelling. The kalam cosmological argument seems pretty much irrefutable.
In another comment in the same thread, Toner writes,
But we still do (or can) know God and the soul with certainty through the use of natural human reason. (emphasis added)
What interests me in this entry is Toner's explicit claim that the modal ontological argument is (rationally) compelling, and his implicit claim that this argument delivers (objectively) certain knowledge of the existence of God. While I consider the argument in question to be a good argument, I don't find it to be compelling. Nor do I think that it renders its conclusion certain. My view is that no argument for or against theism is rationally compelling. No such argument resolves the issue. I think it would be wonderful if there were a compelling argument for the existence of God. The metaphysical knowledge generated by such an argument would be the most precious knowledge that one could possess. So I would be much beholden to Toner if he could show me the error of my ways.
Perhaps there is a theistic argument that is rationally compelling. If there is I should like to know what it is. I am quite sure, however, that the following argument does not fill the bill.
A Modal Ontological Argument
'GCB' will abbreviate 'greatest conceivable being,' which is a rendering of Anselm of Canterbury's "that than which no greater can be conceived." 'World' abbreviates 'broadly logically possible world.' 'OA' abbreviate 'ontological argument.'
1. Either the concept of the GCB is instantiated in every world or it is instantiated in no world.
2. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in some world. Therefore:
3. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in every world. (1, 2 by Disjunctive Syllogism)
4. The actual world is one of the worlds. Therefore:
5. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in the actual world. (3, 4 ) Therefore:
6. The GCB exists. (5)
This is a valid argument: it is correct in point of logical form. Nor does it commit any informal fallacy such as petitio principii, as I argue in Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 97-110. Note also that this version of the OA does not require the controversial assumption that existence is a first-level property, an assumption that Frege famously rejects and that many read back (with some justification) into Kant. (Frege held that the OA falls with that assumption, cf. Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, sec. 53; he was wrong: the above version is immune to the Kant-Frege objection.)
(1) expresses what I call Anselm's Insight. He appreciated, presumably for the first time in the history of thought, that a divine being, one worthy of worship, must be noncontingent, i.e., either necessary or impossible. I consider (1) nonnegotiable. If your god is contingent, then your god is not God. There is no god but God. God is an absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is contingent. End of discussion. (If, however, (1) is reasonably disputable, then this only strengthens my case against compellingness.)
It is premise (2) — the key premise — that ought to raise eyebrows. What it says — translating out of the patois of possible worlds — is that it it possible that the GCB exists.
Whereas conceptual analysis of 'greatest conceivable being' suffices in support of (1), how do we support (2)? Why should we accept it? How do we know that (2) is true? Some will say that the conceivability of the GCB entails its possibility. But I deny that conceivability entails possibility.
Conceivability Does not Entail Possibility
The question is whether conceivability by finite minds like ours entails real possibility. A real possibility is one that has a mind-independent status. Real possibilities are not parasitic upon ignorance or on our (measly) powers of conception. Thus they contrast with epistemic/doxastic possibilities. Since what is epistemically possible for a person might be really impossible (whether broadly-logically or nomologically), we should note that 'epistemic' in 'epistemically possible' is an alienans adjective: it functions like 'decoy' in 'decoy duck.' Ducks don't come in two kinds, real and decoy. Similarly, there are not two kinds of possibility, epistemic and real. To say that a state of affairs is epistemically/doxastically possible for a subject S is to say that the obtaining of the state of affairs is logically compatible with what S knows/believes. For example, is it possible that my State Farm insurance agent Tim be working his office during normal business hours today ? Yes, epistemically: it is not ruled out by anything I know. But if Tim unbeknownst to me 'bought the farm' last night, then it is not really possible that Tim be working in his office today.
By 'conceivability' I mean thinkability by us without apparent logical contradiction.
First Argument
Why should the fact that a human being can conceive something without apparent logical contradiction show that the thing in question can exist in reality? Consider the FBI: the floating bar of iron. If my thought about the FBI is sufficiently abstract and indeterminate, then it will seem that there is no 'bar' to its possibility in reality. (Pun intended.) If I think the FBI as an object that has the phenomenal properties of iron but also floats, then those properties are combinable in my thought without contradiction. But if I know more about iron, including its specific gravity, and I import this information into my concept of iron, then the concept of the FBI will harbor a contradiction. The specific gravity of iron is 7850 kg/cu.m, which implies that it is 7.85 times more dense than water, which in turn means that it will sink in water.
The upshot is that conceivability without contradiction is no sure guide to (real) possibility. Conceivability does not entail possibility.
Second Argument
Both the existence and the nonexistence of God are conceivable, i.e., thinkable by us without apparent logical contradiction. So if conceivability entails possibility, then both the existence and the nonexistence of God are possible. If so, God is a contingent being. But this contradicts the Anselmian Insight according to which God is noncontingent. So if the Anselmian Insight is true, then conceivability-entails-possibility is false and cannot be used to support premise (2) of the modal OA. The argument can be put in the form of a reductio:
a. Conceivability entails possibility. (assumption for reductio)
b. It is conceivable that God not exist. (factual premise)
c. It is conceivable that God exist. (factual premise)
d. God is a noncontingent being. (true by Anselmian definition)
Ergo
e. It is possible that God not exist and it is possible that God exist. (a, b, c)
Ergo
f. God is a contingent being. (e, by definition of 'contingent being')
Ergo
g. God is a noncontingent being and God is a contingent being. (d, f, contradiction)
Ergo
~a. It is not the case that conceivability entails possibility. (a-g, by reductio ad absurdum)
Or, if you insist that conceivability entails possibility, then you must give up the Anselmian Insight. But the modal OA stands and falls with Anselmian insight.
Is Conceivability Nondemonstrative Evidence of Possibility?
We don't need to discuss this in any depth. Suppose it is. This won't help Toner's case. For if it is not certain, but only probable that (2) is true, then this lack of certainty will be transmitted to the conclusion, which will be, at most, probable but not certain. In that case, the argument will not be compelling. I take it that an argument is compelling if and only if it renders its conclusion objectively certain.
Are There Other Ways to Support the Possibility Premise?
I can think of one other way. It has been suggested that the possibility premise can be supported deontically:
A. A maximally perfect being ought to exist. B. Whatever ought to exist, is possible. Therefore C. A maximally perfect being is possible.
I discuss this intriguing suggestion in a separate post wherein I come to the conclusion that the deontically supercharged modal OA is also not compelling.
What is it for an Argument to be Compelling?
My claim on the present occasion is that the modal OA provides no demonstrative knowledge of the truth of theism. Demonstrative knowledge is knowledge produced by a demonstration. A demonstration in this context is an argument that satisfies all of the following conditions:
1. It is deductive 2. It is valid in point of logical form 3. It is free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii 4. It is such that all its premises are true 5. It is such that all its premises are known to be true 6. It is such that its conclusion is relevant to its premises.
To illustrate (6). The following argument satisfies all of the conditions except the last and is therefore probatively worthless:
Snow is white ergo Either Obama is president or he is not.
On my use of terms, a demonstrative argument = a probative argument = a proof = a rationally compelling argument. Now clearly there are good arguments (of different sorts) that are not demonstrative, probative, rationally compelling. One type is the strong inductive argument. By definition, no such argument satisfies (1) or (2). A second type is the argument that satisfies all the conditions except (5).
And that is the problem with the modal OA. Condition (5) remains unsatisfied. While the possibility premise may be true for all we know, we do not know it to be true. So while the modal OA is a good argument in that it helps render theism rational, it is not a compelling argument.
As the book reaches its climax, Rodrigues feels the sand giving way beneath him:
From the deepest core of my being yet another voice made itself heard in a whisper. Supposing God does not exist. . . .
This was a frightening fancy. . . .What an absurd drama become the lives of [the martyrs] Mokichi and Ichizo, bound to the stake and washed by the waves. And the missionaries who spent three years crossing the sea to arrive at this country – what an illusion was theirs. Myself, too, wandering here over the desolate mountains – what an absurd situation!
Scorsese’s Silence is not a Christian film by a Catholic filmmaker, but a justification of faithlessness: apostasy becomes an act of Christian charity when it saves lives, just as martyrdom becomes almost satanic when it increases persecution. “Christ would have apostatized for the sake of love,” Ferreira tells Rodrigues, and, obviously, Scorsese agrees.
The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful [sic] untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.
UPDATE (12/28).
Tully Borland points us to The Sinister Theology of Endo's SILENCE. A good article, but a bit smug and pat for my taste. The author seems not to appreciate the moral bind Rodrigues is in. A topic to be explored in a separate entry.
