June 2017 – Page 2 – Maverick Philosopher

Votes by Non-Citizens May Have Cost Trump the 2016 Popular Vote

On 10 December of last year in an entry entitled 'Post-Truth' I wrote the following:

For the Left, Donald Trump is the prime post-truther, the post-truth poster boy if you will, the prima Donald of the practice of post-truth. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post doesn't expect him to truth up anytime soon. "Indeed, all signs are to the contrary — most glaringly Trump’s chock-full-of-lies tweet that 'I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.' "

A very stupid example, Ms. Marcus! There is not even one lie in the tweet, let alone a bunch of them. Although verifiable in principle, Trump's tweet is unverifiable in practice. Trump had no solid evidence for the truth of his assertion. Still, it could be true. Don't forget the 'necro-vote' (a word I just coined) and the illegal vote. Trump's epistemic 'sin' was not that he stated what is not the case with the intention to deceive but that he confidently asserted something for which he had insufficient evidence. He pretended to know something he could not know. Very annoying, and possibly a violation of a Cliffordian ethics of belief, but not a lie.

So he didn't lie. What he did was close to what Harry Frankfurt defines as bullshitting in On Bullshit, a piece of close analysis, fine, not feculent, that was undoubtedly more often purchased than perused. The bullshitter doesn't care how things stand with reality. The liar, by contrast, must care: he must know (or at least attempt to know) how things are if he is to have any chance of deceiving his audience. Think of it this way: the bullshitter doesn't care whether he gets things right or gets them wrong; the liar cares to get them right so he can deceive you about them.

So you could fairly tax Trump in this instance with bullshitting. He shot his mouth off in a self-serving way without much concern over whether what he said is true. But why pick on Trump?

Because you are a leftist and thus a purveyor of double standards.

Obama bullshits with the best of them. A prime example was his outrageous claim that 99.9% of Muslims reject radical Islam. It is false and known to be false. (You can check with PEW research if you care to.) Now was Obama lying in this instance or bullshitting? A lie is not the same thing as a false statement. Let us be perhaps excessively charitable: Obama made a false statement but he had no intention of deceiving us because he did not know the truth. (Compare: G. W. Bush was wrong about the presence of WMDs in Iraq, but he did not lie about them: he was basing himself on the best intelligence sources he had at the time.)

But that Obama is pretty clearly bullshitting is shown by the cliched and falsely precise 99.9% figure. The whole context shows that Obama doesn't care whether what he is saying is true. He said it because it fits his narrative: Islam is a religion of peace; we are not in a religious war with Islam; Muslims want all the same things we want, blah, blah, ad nauseam. The difference between this case and the Trump tweet is that we know that Obama was wrong, whereas we don't know that Trump was wrong.

So once again we have a double standard. Trump is 'post-truth'; but Obama and Hillary are not?

So that's what I said back in December. But now we have evidence that Trump was right:

We don't know the exact number of illegal votes. No one does. But the data that are available suggest that the number of illegal votes was substantial — probably in the millions, as Trump said — and likely had a significant impact on the election's outcome.

Even Democrats should find this troubling; every vote cast by a noncitizen voter negates the vote of a citizen voter. It's that simple. It's time the Democratic Party started living up to its name and stop encouraging noncitizens and illegal aliens to vote in our election.

But of course the Democrats will not live up to their name, being elitists and globalists; and of course they are not troubled by the votes of non-citizens. The best proof of this is their opposition to photo ID at polling places. Their intention is transparent: to win by any means, legal or illegal.

Would You Go into Business with this Person?

If not, why are you marrying her?

Marriage is undoubtedly more than an economic arrangement. But it is that.

Cornelius Plantinga on Cicero on Growing Old

Here

The Left and Political Violence

A very interesting Vanity Fair article.

Does Your Disagreement Give Me Good Reason to Question My Position?

In general, no. For you may be foolish or ignorant or otherwise incompetent with respect to the subject matter under discussion. Or you may be morally defective: a bully, a blowhard, a bullshitter, a quibbler, a sophist. But suppose none of these predicates attach to you. Suppose you are my moral and intellectual peer, and what's more, a competent practitioner in the discipline or subdiscipline which is home to the thesis we are disputing. Thus we are both competent, and we are equally competent. And suppose I believe you to be as intellectually honest and as competent as I am.

Suppose further that I have given careful thought to my thesis and have advanced it in respectable, peer-reviewed journals.

If you disagree with me, does this fact supply a good reason for me to question my thesis? Ought I question it? Or would I be justified in ignoring your disagreement?

We note that this is a meta-question that sires a meta-disagreement. This meta-disagreement is between the Conciliationist and the Steadfaster.

I am a Conciliationist. Thus I tend to think that your disagreement with me (given the stipulations above) ought to give me pause. It ought to cause me to re-examine my view and be open to the possibility of either rejecting it or withholding assent from it. It ought to undermine my epistemic self-confidence. I tend to think I would be intellectually amiss, less than intellectually honest, were I simply to dismiss your disagreement. I tend to think I would be unjustifiably privileging my own point of view, preferring it over yours simply because is is mine. This seems wrong to me given that we are trying to arrive at the objective and impersonal truth. Truth cannot be mine or yours.

The Steadfaster stands fast in the face of disagreement. Whereas the Conciliationist allows the fact of disagreement to undermine his epistemic self-confidence, the Steadfaster takes the fact of disagreement to undermine his prior conviction that his interlocutor is as morally and intellectually capable as he initially thought he was. So when you disagree with me, I question whether I am right. But when I disagree with you, you question my competence, rationality, probity, etc.

But now a puzzle arises. If I am a Conciliationist, then my position would seem to require that I question my Conciliationism due to the fact that the Steadfaster disagrees with me. (Assume that the Steadfaster is as morally and intellectually well-endowed as I am and that I believe him to be such.)

It seems that the consistent Conciliationist cannot be steadfast in his Conciliationism given that there are Steadfasters out there who are, and whom he believes to be, his moral and intellectual equals. So what should our Conciliationist do? Should he:

Suspend judgment and neither affirm nor deny Conciliationism?
Make an exception for the Conciliationst thesis itself by steadfastly adhering to it ar the meta-level while remaining otherwise a Conciliationist?
Reject Conciliationism and become a Steadfaster?
Do something else?

Test Your Bullshit Detector Against the . . .

Turbo Encabulator! (HT: Dave Bagwill)

Companion post: There is no Truth, Only Bullshit

Andrew M. Bailey’s Analytic Philosophy Generator and the ‘Scholasticism Charge’

The AnalPhilGen is a bit of humor from occasional MavPhil commenter Andrew Bailey. I generated the following using Bailey's 'device':

It is a consequence of proper functionalism that polyadic predicates reduce to non-human consciousness.

On the standard Kripkean modal semantics, trope theories supervene on something like Rawls' famous Difference Principle.

Intuitively it seems obvious that both definite descriptions and proper names always lead to zombie arguments.

I came to Bailey's Analytic Philosophy Generator by way of a crappy article that complains about the 'scholasticism' of contemporary philosophy "talking about itself to itself in its own jargon." The article suggests that most of what analytic philosophers write is as meaningless as the above three sentences. The just-quoted phrase suggests that the problems of philosophy discussed by academic philosophers in their narrowly-focused, jargon-laden books and articles are not 'real,' but are merely artifacts of a highly ingrown way of talking.

This is simply not the case.

If you are a philosophy 'insider' you know this; if an 'outsider' then you probably cannot be 'reached.' Or maybe you can. Let someone else try.

Here is the crappy article.

A Quasi-Pyrrhonian Metaphilosophical Puzzle

Some of us are tempted by the metathesis (MT) that every substantive philosophical thesis is such that the arguments for it and the arguments against it are equally plausible and thus 'cancel out.' But the metathesis is itself a philosophical thesis. So if the metathesis is true, then every argument in support of it is cancelled out by an equally plausible argument against it. But then (MT), if true, is such that we cannot have any good reason to accept it.

Is there a genuine problem here for a latter-day quasi-Pyrrhonian who subscribes to the metathesis?

Definitions

D1. An argument A1 for a thesis T cancels out an argument A2 for the negation of T just in case both arguments are equally plausible to the producers(s)/consumers(s) of the arguments, assuming that these individuals are 'competent practitioners.'

Plausibility is relative to an arguer and his audience, if any. Thus plausibility is unlike soundness, which is absolute, like truth herself. Note that there cannot be sound arguments both for a thesis and its negation. For if there is a sound argument for T, then T is true. And if there is a sound argument for ~T, then ~T is true. This is 'fallout' from the definition of 'sound,' see D2 below. But then (T & ~T) is true which violates the Law of Non-Contradiction.

Canceling out is symmetrical: If A1 cancels A2, then A2 cancels A1. It seems to follow that canceling out is also conditionally reflexive, which is to say that if A1 cancels A2, then A1 cancels itself. Right?

A competent practitioner is not the same as an epistemic peer. A number of individuals may be epistemic peers, but all incompetent. I won't try for a crisp definition of 'competent practitioner,' but if Tom is a competent practitioner in the philosophy of religion, say, then he is a a sincere truth seeker, not a quibbler or a sophist; he knows logic and the empirical disciplines that bear upon the arguments he is discussing; he is familiar with the relevant literature; and so on.

D2. An argument is sound just in case it is valid and all of its premises are true.

D3. An argument for a thesis is unopposed just in case there is no argument for its negation plausible to all competent practitioners.

D4. A proposition is rationally acceptable just in case it involves no logical contradiction, and coheres with the rest of what we know or justifiably believe.

Rational acceptability, like plausibility, and unlike truth, is a relative property: That water is an element was rationally acceptable to the ancient Greeks, but not to us.

The Puzzle as an Aporetic Tetrad

1) Every substantive philosophical thesis is such that the arguments pro et contra cancel out. (MT)

2) MT is a philosophical thesis.

3) A philosophical thesis is rationally acceptable only if there is at least one good unopposed argument for it.

4) MT is rationally acceptable.

Solutions

The quartet of propositions is inconsistent. Any three limbs, taken in conjunction, entail the negation of the remaining one. Which should we reject? (2) is not plausibly rejectable: metaphilosophy is a branch of philosophy.

One could hold that the first three propositions are true, but the fourth is false. This implies that a proposition could be true but not rationally acceptable. But if MT is true but not rationally acceptable, what reason could we have for believing it?

A better solution of the tetrad is by rejection of (1). This is the position of the optimist about philosophical knowledge. He holds that some theses are supported by unopposed arguments and that we know what these arguments are.

I accept (1) on the basis of strong inductive evidence which renders it rationally acceptable. Accepting as I do (1), (2), and (4), I must reject (3). Well, why not?

Why can't I say the following?

3*) A philosophical thesis is rationally acceptable just in case there are some good arguments for it accepted by some competent practitioners.

Why Accept the Metathesis?

MT expresses a very bold claim; I imagine most philosophers would just deny it. To deny it is to affirm that there is at least one philosophical thesis that can be conclusively demonstrated. Can anyone give me an example? It has to be a substantive thesis, though, not, for example the thesis that it is contradictory to hold that it is absolutely true that all truths are relative. Here are some examples of substantive philosophical theses:

There are no nonexistent objects.
There are uninstantiated properties.
There are no modes of existence.
The properties of particulars are tropes, not universals.
God exists.
The soul is immortal.
The human will is libertarianly free.
Each of us is numerically identical to his living body.
I am not my living body; I merely have a living body.
Anima forma corporis.
Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.
Laws of nature are just empirical regularities.
Truths need truth-makers.
Only facts could serve as truth-makers.
There are no facts.
Relations reduce to their monadic foundations.
There are no properties, only predicates.
The predicate 'true' serves only as a device for disquotation.
Race is a social construct.
Social and economic inequalities are justified only if they benefit the worst-off.
And so on.

Out of Power, the Left Resorts to Violence

In power, leftists denounce the politics of personal destruction and issue hypocritical calls for 'civility'; out of power, the end justifies the means, personal destruction is full on, and civility is out the window. George Neumayr:

Liberalism, philosophically speaking, is proudly unprincipled, insofar as it recognizes no divine law prior to man’s will. The arrogant humanism underpinning liberalism, combined with fallen human nature, makes the temptation to violence irresistible, especially in times of political exile. When safely ensconced in positions of power, liberals demand “civility” and the like (remember the ludicrous “civility” commissions set up during the Clinton era to counter Rush Limbaugh and company). But once out of power, liberals flirt with ends-justify-the-means radicalism.

That certainly seems to be what is going on as quisling 'conservatives,' i.e., Never-Trumpers, aid and abet Deep State operatives, the Democrat Party, and the liberal media in their attempt to destroy the Trump administration by any means.

For example, Trump is supposed to have colluded with the Russians to swing the election in his favor. No evidence of this has emerged despite months of searching. But we know all about the Clinton Foundation's role in the Russian uranium deal, and we know about it from The New York Times! So why isn't the former Secretary of State being investigated? Because it is Trump who needs to be destroyed.

The Architecture of Regime Change

The 'architecture' is laid out in convincing detail by Victor Davis Hanson in yet another piece of penetrating analysis.

We are witnessing a desperate putsch to remove Trump before he can do any more damage to the Obama project. Political, journalistic, and cultural elites of a progressive coastal culture aim at destroying the Trump presidency before it can finish its full four-year term.

The branches of this insidious coup d’état are quite unlikely anything our generation has ever witnessed.

Guest Post: On the Vapidity of the Popular Music of the 1950s

By London Ed.

Possibly vapid music

Bill writes ‘The creativity of the 1960s stood in stark contrast to the vapidity of '50s popular music’, citing as a prime example Perry Como’s Magic Moments (1960).

This is a sentiment I recognise and still identify with. I grew up with what is now called ‘British light music’, supposedly a ‘less serious’ form of Western classical music, a prime example of which would be Puffin' Billy, the theme of the BBC Light Programme's ‘Children's Favourites’, from 1952 to 1966. Note the Light Programme, one of precisely three radio stations in early 1960s Britain, the other two being the Home Service (news and interviews) and the Third Programme (classical music and improving highbrow stuff like interviews with Iris Murdoch). The idea of American style radio with disc jockeys and music other than serious and less serious was not entertained until the advent of pirate radio. When I first heard Burning of the Midnight Lamp (Hendrix, 1967), it was obvious the world had changed, and I joined my peers in a complete rejection of everything that had gone before. I still unconsciously divide all music into what came before 1967, and everything thereafter.

That said, there is music that is not ‘serious’, but which clearly has a merit within its own genre and perhaps beyond, which never conformed to the 60s progressive ethos. Once I grew up in the 1970s, I realised its value, and continue to listen with pleasure. Here is some of it:

1. All The Things You Are (Jerome Kern 1938). In this version by Dorothy Kirsten and Percy Faith (1951) it is close to schlock. Yet it is transcendent, with its complex harmonic structure, and qualities that were recognised by jazz musicians from early on, particularly by the devotees of the bebop genre. This Charlie Parker version is a classic.

2. You Win Again (Hank Williams 1952) is a simple and timeless story ‘of an utterly defeated narrator who cannot bring himself to leave his love despite her infidelities’. Country music like this was utterly despised by thinking people in the 1960s and 70s. I had a girlfriend who refused to let my Williams records in her apartment. Yet country music is really the same music as folk music, absent the left wing rhetoric. The timeless qualities it appeals to (women who cheat, lonely men drinking at bars) sadly cannot be politicised.

3. Old Cape Cod (Rothrock/Yakus/Jeffrey 1957) Best known in the version by Patti Page. While her earlier Doggie In The Window (1953) is without any redeeming properties, ‘Old Cape Cod’ was revived by hipster house music group Groove Armada in 1997, who clearly saw something of value therein.

4. Route 66 (Nelson Riddle 1962) Not the well known Bobby Troup song. It was written by Riddle as the theme for the 1960s American television drama of the same name, after CBS decided to commission a new song rather than pay royalties to Troup. Riddle is best known for his schmaltzy backing arrangments for Nat King Cole, and his music never appealed to thinking people and leftists. Yet he is a master of arrangement, and the number is clever (in my view).

5. Up Up and Away (Jimmy Webb 1967) Recorded by The Fifth Dimension and released in July 1967, barely a month before Woodstock, it is difficult to see how anyone would take this seriously, and it is exactly the sort of music the Woodstock generation loathed. But it was written by Jimmy Webb, who also penned Wichita Lineman, thought to be the first existentialist country song, and MacArthur Park, another existential song recorded by many, including country artist Waylon Jennings in 1969. Listen to these two fine songs first, and then to ‘Up Up and Away’, upon which it becomes clear that they are by the same writer, and that what distinguishes the last two, also makes the first notable, at least in some odd way.

6. September Song (Kurt Weill 1938). At last some material by a bona fide leftist, a people’s songwriter who cut his teeth in the Novembergruppe group of left leaning Berliners that included communist scribbler Bertold Brecht. Its intellectual credentials are solid, yet here it is in a fine version by Frank Sinatra (1965), sounding just like the sort of vapid 1950s muzak the progressives so despised.

7. Dancing Queen (Andersson/Ulvaeus/Anderson 1975) recorded by the Swedish pop group ABBA. I like this version from the1999 film Mamma Mia for its uncompromising fluffiness. Its value is in conveying precisely the sentiment it wishes to convey. Intellectuals now take Abba seriously, but why didn’t they tell us so at the time, instead of making us listen to the Soft Machine?

The Summer of Hate

Fifty years after the Summer of Love, the summer of 2017 is shaping up as the Summer of Hate.

The Left has come full circle, from (talk of) peace and love to resistance and hate.

Their resistance is tantamount to sedition. Lefties posture as like unto the brave members of the French Resistance who opposed by assassination and sabotage the Nazi occupation. But Trump was duly elected, and to date no evidence of collusion with the Russians has emerged. The leftist posturing belongs in the Theater of the Absurd. Leftists are in effect opposing our system of government.

As for hate, prominent liberals, leftists, 'progressives,' are working to incite it. They should be held morally accountable and not allowed to hide behind the First Amendment. Good advice from Victor Davis Hanson:

The Trump administration should insist that all universities and colleges that receive federal funds guarantee to their students First Amendment protections of free speech, due process, civil rights, and the right to assemble peacefully. If they cannot or will not comply with the Bill of Rights, then campuses should come under review of their funding from Washington.

Moreover, anyone who makes a direct threat or clear allusion to killing the president of the United States should be put on a terrorist no-fly list for six months, an act that can be done without a formal indictment and trial. If revving up a crowd in Washington by yelling out a personal wish to blow up the White House and its occupants, or holding up a facsimile of the decapitated head of the president to galvanize a video audience does not constitute enough suspicion to take a breather from flying, then nothing much else does. If Madonna had to take a slow freighter back to London, then she might curb her macabre enthusiasm at her next rally.

The only way that the Resistance can be halted is to insist that its efforts remain lawful. If they are not, perpetrators must be held accountable.

The first of Hanson's point is rock-solid. The second raises the ticklish question of when hate speech ceases to be protected speech. See first of the related articles below.

You should read the whole of Hanson's latest.

Sunday Afternoon at the Oldies: Scott McKenzie, San Francisco, Summer of Love

Bending to popular demand, here is some more about the Summer of Love, now 50 years in the past. A re-do and clean-up of an entry from five years ago.

………………

Nostalgia time again. Scott McKenzie, famous for the 1967 anthem "San Francisco" penned by John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas, died at 73 in 2012. Gen-X-er Mick LaSalle gets it exactly right in his commentary:

The thing about that song is that . . . however naive and even sanctimonious it might be, it is so clearly a true expression of a mindset, of a vision, of a moment in time, of a generation, of an aspiration that, even if it is singing about a San Francisco that never happened and a dream that never came true and never really had a chance of coming true, and that had only a scant relationship with reality . . . it’s a precious thing. It’s a document of a moment, but more than that, a perfect poetic expression of that moment.

It was not MY youth, but I can recognize in that song and in the purity of McKenzie’s vocal something that is as unmistakably honest, in its way, as Gershwin playing the piano, or Fred Astaire dancing, or Artie Shaw playing the clarinet. It is youth finding itself in the world and saying the most beautiful thing it can think of saying at that particular moment. You can’t laugh that away. You have to treasure that. Really, you have to love it.

Speaking of the Mamas and Papas, here are some of my favorites: Dedicated to the One I Love (1967), a cover almost as good as the Shirelles original. But it is hard to touch the Shirelles.

[Correction: H. Fisher in a comment points out that the "5" Royales did it first, in 1957. Or at least before the Shirelles. Some of these songs go back a long way.]

Twelve Thirty. Creeque Alley with great video. California Dreamin'.

And then there's Eric Burdon and the Animals, San Franciscan Nights from '67.

The so-called Summer of Love transpired 50 years ago. (Some of my reminiscences of the Monterey Pop Festival of that same summer of '67 are reported here.) Ted Nugent, the guru of kill and grill, and a rocker singularly without musical merit in my humble opinion, offers some rather intemperate reflections in a Wall Street Journal piece, The Summer of Drugs. Excerpts:

The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.

[. . .]

While I salute and commend the political and cultural activism of the 1960s that fueled the civil rights movement, other than that, the decade is barren of any positive cultural or social impact. Honest people will remember 1967 for what it truly was.

Although I am not inclined to disagree too strenuously with Nugent's indictment, especially when it comes to drug-fueled self-destruction, Nugent misses much that was positive in those days. For one thing, there was the amazing musical creativity of the period, as represented by Dylan and the Beatles above all. The summer of '67 saw the debut of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP of the lads from Liverpool. This creativity stood in stark contrast to the vapidity of '50s popular music. Has there been anything before or since in popular music that has come up the level of the best of Dylan? That is what we call a rhetorical question.

Perhaps I should give an example of '50s vapidity. How about Perry Como, Magic Moments? It came out in 1960, I believe, the last year of the 1950s. Of course, songs like this were also found aplenty in the '60s. My point, however, is that they were not characteristic of the '60s as they were of the prior decades in American popular music. Ours was a music of engagement, not escape. A good example is Phil Ochs' There But for Fortune.

The '60s also offered welcome relief from the dreary materialism and social conformism of the '50s. My generation saw through the emptiness of a life devoted to social oneupsmanship, status-seeking, and the piling up of consumer goods. We were an idealistic generation. We wanted something more out of life than job security in suburbia. (Frank Zappa: "Do your job, do it right! Life's a ball, TV tonight!")

We were seekers and questers, though there is no denying that some of us were suckers for charlatans and pied pipers like Timothy Leary. We took on the Big Questions, even if we did so via dubious popularizers such as Alan Watts. We questioned the half-hearted pieties and platitudes and hypocrisies of our elders. Some of the questioning was puerile and dangerously utopian, but at least we were questioning. We wanted life and we wanted it in abundance in rebellion against the deadness we perceived around us. We experimented with psychedelics to open the doors of perception, not to get loaded.

(Trivia questions: name the title of the book to which I allude with 'doors of perception,' its author, his place of residence in later life, and the Los Angeles band that took its name from the title.)

We were a destructive generation as well, a fact documented in Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s. But the picture Nugent paints is onesided. Here is Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" which was one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement. It is a great version by Alanis Morissette and uploaded to YouTube by our very own London Ed.

Or give a listen to the Youngblood's Get Together. This song captures the positive spirit of the '60s, a spirit not much in evidence nowadays.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Monterey Pop Festival, June 16-18, 1967

It transpired 50 summers ago, this June, the grand daddy of rock festivals, two years before Woodstock, in what became known as the Summer of Love. Your humble correspondent was on the scene. Some high school friends and I drove up from Los Angeles along Pacific Coast Highway. I can still call up olfactory memories of patchouli, sandalwood incense, not to mention the aroma of what was variously known as cannabis sativa, marijuana, reefer, tea, Miss Green, Mary Jane, pot, weed, grass, pacalolo (Hawaiian term), loco weed, and just plain dope. But my friends and I, students at an all-boys Catholic high school that enforced a strict dress code, were fairly straight: we partook of no orgies, smoked no dope, and slept in a motel. The wild stuff came later in our lives, when we were better able to handle it.

I have in my hand the program book of the Festival, in mint condition. Do I hear $1,000? On the first page there is a quotation from Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice:

How sweet the moon-light sleeps upon this bank! Here we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night, become the touches of sweet harmony.

Ah yes, I remember it well, the "sweet harmony" of the whining feedback of Jimi Hendrix's Fender Stratocaster plugged into his towering Marshall amps and the "soft stillness" of the The Who smashing their instruments to pieces. Not to be outdone, Jimi lit his Strat on fire with lighter fluid. The image is burned into my memory. It shocked my working-class frugality. I used to baby my Fender Mustang and I once got mad at a girl for placing a coke can on my Fender Deluxe Reverb amp.

On the last page of the programme book, a more fitting quotation: the lyrics of Dylan's The Times They Are A'Changin', perhaps the numero uno '60s anthem to youth and social ferment. (Click on the link; great piano version. Live 1964 guitar version.) Were the utopian fantasies of the '60s just a load of rubbish? Mostly, but not entirely. "Lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it's been."

Tunes and Footage:

The Who, My Generation. I hope I die before I get old."

Mamas and Papas, California Dreamin'

Mamas and Papas, I Call Your Name

Jefferson Airplane, Somebody to Love

Janis Joplin, Down on Me

Otis Redding, Try a Little Tenderness

Scott MacKenzie, San Francisco

“Some of Us Just Go One God Further”

A revised version of an entry from 26 July 2010.

…………………

I've seen the above-captioned quotation attributed to Richard Dawkins. From what I have read of him, it seems like something he would say. The idea, I take it, is that all gods are on a par, and so, given that everyone is an atheist with respect to some gods, one may as well make a clean sweep and be an atheist with respect to all gods. You don't believe in Zeus or in a celestial teapot. Then why do you believe in the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob?

What Dawkins and his New Atheist colleagues seem to be assuming is that the following questions are either senseless or not to be taken seriously: 'Is the Judeo-Christian god the true God?' 'Is any particular god the true God' 'Is any particular conception of deity adequate to the divine reality?'

The New Atheist presupposition, then, is that all candidates for deity are in the same logical boat, and that this boat is one leaky vessel. Nothing could be divine. Since all theistic religions are false, there is no live question as to which such religion is true. It is not as if there is a divine reality and that some religions are more adequate to it than others. One could not say, for example, that Judaism is somewhat adequate to the divine reality, Christianity more adequate, and Buddhism not at all adequate. There just is no divine reality. There is nothing of a spiritual nature beyond the human horizon. There is no Mind beyond finite mind. Man is the measure. This is it!

That is the atheist's deepest conviction. It seems so obvious to him that he cannot begin genuinely to doubt it, nor can he understand how anyone could genuinely believe the opposite. Belief in God is like belief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or Ed Abbey's Angry Unicorn on the Dark Side of the Moon. You don't believe in any of those nonentities, do you? Well, Dawkins & Co. just go one nonentity further!

This morning I received a message from a Canadian reader, C. L., who asks whether Dawkins and friends are begging the question against the theist. That depends on whether they are giving an argument or just making an assertion. It also depends on what exactly 'begging the question' is. If they are just making an assertion then I say: Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. But suppose they intend the following argument:

1) All gods are on an epistemic/doxastic par: they are all equal in point of rational acceptability. Therefore:

2) If one god is such that its existence is not rationally acceptable, then this is true of all gods.

3) There are gods such as Zeus whose existence is not rationally acceptable. Therefore:

4) No god is such that its existence is rationally acceptable.

This is a valid argument: it cannot be the case that the premises are true and the conclusion false. Does it beg the question? The problem here is that it is not very clear what the informal fallacy in question (pun intended) is supposed to be. If I argue that The Los Angeles Times displays liberal bias because its reportage and editorializing show a left-of-center slant, then I reason in a circle, or beg the question. That is a clear example. But suppose I argue that The L. A. Times displays liberal bias because all mainstream media outlets display liberal bias and The L. A. Times is a mainstream media outlet. Have I begged the question? Not so clear. Surely we don't want to say that every valid argument begs the question! (John Stuart Mill floated this suggestion.) On the other hand, it is impossible for a valid argument to have true premises and a false conclusion which suggests that he who accepts the premises of the second argument above has in so doing begged the question: he has at least implicitly committed himself to an affirmative answer to the question, 'Does The L. A. Times display liberal bias?'

'Beg the question,' I suggest, is not a very useful phrase. Besides, people nowadays regularly conflate it with 'raising a question.' See On Begging the Question. It is becoming a useless phrase.

Regarding the above argument, I would say that, while valid, it is nowhere near rationally compelling and is therefore rationally rejectable. What reason do we have to think that all candidates for divine status are on a doxatic/epistemic par?

In sum, either Dawkins is asserting or he is arguing. If he is asserting, then his gratuitous assertion can be met with a gratuitous counter-assertion. If he is arguing, and his argument is as above, then his argument is easily turned aside.

The fundamental issue here is whether there is anything beyond the human horizon. The issue dividing theists and atheists can perhaps be put in terms of Jamesian 'live options':

EITHER: Some form of theism (hitherto undeveloped perhaps or only partially developed) is not only logically and epistemically possible, but also an 'existential' possibility, a live option;

OR: No form of theism is an existential possibility, a live option.

Theist-atheist dialog is made difficult by a certain asymmetry: whereas a sophisticated living faith involves a measure of purifying doubt, together with a groping beyond images and pat conceptualizations toward a transcendent reality, one misses any corresponding doubt or tentativeness on the part of sophisticated atheists. Dawkins and Co. seem so cocksure of their position. For them, theism is not a live option or existential possibility. This is obvious from their mocking comparisons of God to a celestial teapot, flying spaghetti monster, and the like.

For sophisticated theists, however, atheism is a live option. The existence of this asymmetry makes one wonder whether any productive dialog with atheists is possible. It is probably no more possible than productive dialog with leftists. We live on different planets.

Companion post: Russell's Teapot: Does It Hold Water?