Month: January 2023

An Online Catalog of Theistic Arguments

Chad McIntosh writes,

I'd like to let you know about a project I've been working on for the past two years that I have just completed (for now): a fairly comprehensive, organized list and summary of theistic arguments. I hope it will be a useful resource.

https://www.camcintosh.com/theistic/index.html

I've also included at the very end (under META > Cumulative Case) a calculator that allows visitors to come up with their own estimate of the evidential power of the arguments.

The website is a little clunky, but serviceable (it is best as expanded window on desktop). Of course, I've included several of your arguments:

ONTOLOGICAL > Possibility Defenses > Kordig & Vallicella 
METAPHYSICAL > Facts
AXIOLOGICAL > Deontic Value > Modal Axiarchism 

I thought I should take a look at your book A Paradigm Theory of Existence with the intent to summarize it's main argument, but that's a hard book to get a hold of! There's also a similar argument just published by Christoph de Ray called "Existence Exists and it is God," in which he interacts with your book. I may integrate both yours and de Ray's arguments in a future update to the page. 

Great to hear from you, Chad. You've created an interesting and useful resource. The site is a bit clunky but it displays clearly and easily on my desktop and is easy to navigate. Thank you for your references to my work. As for my existence book, I'd send you a copy if I had one to spare. If someone reading this has a copy he would be willing to part with, please contact Chad. I don't recommend that you buy it; it is way overpriced, although on occasion the Amazon pricing algorithm goes haywire and the tome becomes relatively affordable.

Thanks also for referring me to Christophe de Ray, whose article I found here.  I will have to read it.

Let me make two minor comments on the material in the Prolegomena section. You define 'theistic argument' as follows:

Theistic arguments are arguments for (or the rationality of belief in or commitment to) the existence of a being with at least one God-like attribute, such as necessity, God-like power or knowledge, ground of morality, creator or designer of the natural world, and so on.

The first is that you need a second 'for' after 'or' in the parenthesis. The second is substantive. Suppose an entity has exactly one God-like attribute. I wouldn't call an argument for the existence of such an entity an argument for God given your definition of theism:

 Theism is the view that there is a personal God like that worshipped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

The Good of Plato, the One of Plotinus, the deus sive natura of Spinoza,  the objevktiver Geist of Hegel, and F. H. Bradley's Absolute, to mention just these five, are each such as to have one or more God-like attributes, but none of them are persons.  I have no objection to your definition of theism; my point is that it does not comport well with your definition of 'theistic arguments.' The latter is easily repaired, but I'll leave that to you.

Comments are enabled and invited.

The Paradox of the Misanthropic Naturalist Animal Lover

Top of the Stack. It concludes:

You may recall the case of  Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. 

In an Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the unmistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or  some other 'icon.'

Deny God, devalue man, and end up bear shit. Way to go 'man.' 

Psychiatry as Ideology in the USSR

Sidney Bloch, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Warneford Hospital, Oxford
Journal of medical ethics, 1978, 4, 126-131

I got the reference from an article on the defenestration of Jordan Peterson.  Commentary on Bloch's paper from the same article:

The Oxford psychiatrist Sidney Bloch’s classic 1977 academic paper “Psychiatry as Ideology in the USSR” demonstrated how psychiatry in Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union actually worked—in an eerily similar way to how it now also works in Justin Trudeau’s Canada. Firstly, whilst only a minority of psychiatrists were full-blown Communist Party members, almost all those in positions of actual authority were, reflecting Stalin’s key principle that loyalty to leftist party ideology was more important than actual professional ability when it came to handing out the top jobs; the Ontario College of Psychologists might agree.

A full 25 percent of Soviet medical students’ curriculum was devoted to studying not actual medicine, but unrelated Marxist-Leninist dogma—more than studying actual surgery. Russia replaced the old Hippocratic Oath with a new one in which medics swore to “in all my actions be guided by the principles of Communist morality” rather than, say, actual medical reality—hence, a “good” psychiatrist might commit an entirely sane political dissident to a mental home just to shut them up, something justified on party grounds, not medical ones.

Victims were accused of suffering from entirely fictional disorders like “sluggish schizophrenia”—whose symptoms, conveniently enough, were so vague they could only be noticed by trained Communist physicians, not the wider public, to whom the patient might appear 100 percent sane, a diagnosis that makes about as much sense as saying someone who is clearly still walking around wide awake has slipped into a symptomless coma. The only real way for patients deliberately misdiagnosed to escape from incarceration was to agree with their doctors that, yes, they really were mad after all, and that their “incorrect” opinions were simply unfortunate symptoms of their insanity, much as Jordan Peterson is expected to admit his own “incorrect” views are symptoms of his own mental unfitness to practice today.

Juvenilia

I pulled out my scribblings from the summer of '66.  Puerile stuff from a half-century ago. Painful in places.  But earnest and sincere with a good line here and there.  The old man honors the adolescent he was.

I wrote for posterity, though I didn't realize it at the time.  And I still do.  The posterity of self. 

BV '66 or '67 Fender Mustang

Reader Asks: What Should I Read?

Nathaniel T. writes,

In the new year, I'm committing to some more regular reading habits. 
 
What serious books would you recommend to someone outside academia who has about half an hour uninterrupted in the morning to read, three times a week? How about a list that would last that person a year? 
 
Here are some additional parameters that might aid in your selection:
 
I went to St. John's College in Annapolis, so I've read many of the "greats" in whole or in part, at least once. I have kept up some serious reading since my graduation in 2012, just irregularly. 
I already pray and read the New Testament and spiritual reading daily. 
 
Thanks for your insight and writing!
 
The best advice I could give anyone  with your background who is committed to the life of the mind is to buy and study a copy of A. G. Sertillanges, O. P., The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. He explains how to proceed.  It is a classic. He draws upon Aquinas and upon Alphonse Gratry, of whom C. S. Peirce had a very high opinion. So I also recommend Gratry's Logic if you can find a copy. Reference here.
 
I hesitate to offer a list of books on particular topics given the constraints on your time.  But here are a couple that are  short, very clear, and unusually thought-provoking: Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation (make sure to get the Sea Harp Press edition which contains an introduction by C. S. Lewis); Romano Guardini, Jesus Christus (anything by Guardini is worth reading).
 
If perchance you are interested mystical theology, and have already read the great Spanish mystics, Juan de la Cruz and Teresa de Avila, and have the stamina for a long slog, then I recommend Augustin Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer: A Treatise on Mystical Theology. Reference and notes here.
 
For more suggestions see my Bibliophilia category.
 
Combox open if anyone has any recommendations.
 
By the way, has St. John's College, Annapolis gone 'woke'?  

Questions about Global Warming

Crisis or hoax? How much of which? At the top of the Stack.

……………..

Ed Buckner writes,

I can help with your first three questions.

1. Is global warming (GW) occurring?

2. If yes to (1), is it naturally irreversible, or is it likely to reverse itself on its own? And if irreversible, how would you know that?

3. If GW is occurring, and will not reverse itself on its own, to what extent is it anthropogenic, i.e., caused by human activity, and what are the human causes?

To the first, undeniably yes. The science is that as the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a physical effect that causes temperature to rise, all other things being equal. Note the rider: things are generally not equal, as there are other (well known) effects on climate. This also answers your third question. Yes, the warming caused by CO2 is man-made.

BV: You did not answer my third question. I asked to what extent is GW man-made. A priori, from the armchair, we know that if there is GW — if the Earth's atmosphere, land masses and oceans are in the aggregate getting warmer and warmer over time –  then GW cannot be wholly anthropogenic and also that human activity cannot have zero effect on it.  The empirical question for the climatologists is: how much of the GW is due to human activity?  The answer to this question has serious repercussions for policy decisions.  I suspect, though I do not claim to know, that the percentage of GW due to human activity — carbon emissions and what all else — is not high enough to justify the draconian "Green New Deal " measures of the GW alarmists.  The onus probandi, I should think, is on them to prove otherwise.

Is the science settled with respect to the empirical question I have posed? Has consensus been reached among competent climatologists?  That is not a rhetorical question. I would really like to know,

You write, "Yes, the warming caused by CO2 is man-made."  I didn't ask that question. I didn't ask what causes the warming. I asked, given that GW is occurring, about the extent to which the causes — whatever they are — are man-made. Not that I deny that CO2 plays a role.  But as you know, CO2 is also produced naturally, and some of the warming produced by naturally occurrent CO2 is precisely not man-made.  

So here is another empirical question: How much of the CO2 in the atmosphere originates naturally and how much from human activity? Has scientific consensus been reached on this question?

However, there is other stuff you must know. First, the known physics does not explain the predicted rises in temperature. The predicted rises are based on speculation to do with water vapour ‘positive feedback’.

Second, ‘global warming’ is ambiguous between cause and effect. We know a bit about the forcing, less about the water vapour possible cause. Regarding effect, we only have temperature measurement to go by, and the records are not long term enough. I have looked at Antarctic data and there is no evidence of any change, except at the limb of the Antarctic peninsula, which is coastal and affected by the sea. Also, the peninsula is some way from the Pole, and is naturally quite warm.

BV: Very interesting. So you are saying that the water vapor caused by GW causes more GW?

Third, and this addresses your question about reversibility: for every amount of CO2 in the atmosphere there corresponds an equilibrium temperature. Were all CO2 emission to halt, the atmosphere would take a while to establish that equilibrium, then remain there, so long as the CO2 concentration remained constant (which it won’t, as it will tend to fall).

Fourth, and global warmists tend to avoid this fact like the plague, the rise in temperature is logarithmic to the CO2 concentration. If the concentration doubles, equilibrium temperature goes up x degrees. If it doubles again, another x degrees. And so on. So a lot of the scare stories show linear charts of concentration, not logarithmic, which is somewhat misleading.

Fifth, and here I agree somewhat with the warmists, while the effect of warming can be continuous with no step changes, there is a well-known step change that occurs when ice melts. With an average of 1/10 degree below freezing point, the ice will not tend to melt. With the same amount above, it will eventually melt. So Antarctica would melt if its average temperature were a tiny amount above freezing point. But that won’t happen because Antarctica is huge and most of it close enough to the Pole that temperatures are way way below freezing.

Hope that helps.

BV: It does indeed, and thanks very much. The fourth and fifth points add to my understanding of the topic. The fifth is particularly interesting since it raises the logico-philosophical question of the metabasis eis allo genos, the shift into another genus, the somersault from a quantitative change into a qualitative one.

By the way Ed, since you are an historian of logic, do you have a list of sources on the metabasis eis allo genos?  I first encountered a reference to it in Kierkegaard. Does Trendelenburg say anything about it? Must go back to Aristotle. Medievals had to have addressed it.

One more question: if the issue is global warming, why the talk of climate change? That move involves an ascent from the species to the genus.  Obviously the global climate can change by getting hotter and by getting cooler.

Can you answer me this one, Ed?  (Knowing me, you know that I suspect wokeassed chicanery at work.)

COMBOX now open.

Detachment and Renunciation

The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, Volume Two, The Quest, p. 130, #242:

Detachment from the world is an absolute necessity for the man who seeks authentic inner peace, and not its imagined counterfeit. But renouncement of the world is not necessary to any except those who have an inborn natural vocation for the monkish life.

It is not easy, but one can be in the world but not of the world. Paradoxically, however, the monastic life is an easier way to detachment. To live a life of monkish virtue in a monastery is relatively easy; to do so in the world, hard.  This is why monasteries were established in the first place.

Against Philosophical Dismissal

To dismiss Hegel is as bad as to dismiss Donald Davidson. On second thought, it is far worse. For you cannot understand Marx without understanding Hegel, and you cannot understand the current culturally Marxist, 'woke' mess we are in without understanding Marx and his successors. Davidson & Co. can be safely ignored if it is the latter understanding you are after.

Ideas, whether true or false, whether rationally defensible or indefensible, have social and cultural consequences. Short-sighted folk dismiss philosophy as so much hot air. But when the 'air' of such Luftmenschen as Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche drifts down from the ivory towers and the garrets and influences the climate on the ground, then things can get 'hot' in a different sense.

Four Ways to Vote

1) There is voting proper, with a ballot at the polling place. It won't do much if any good except at the local level. And even there it won't do any good if proper procedures are not followed, something that cannot be taken for granted these days.

2) There is 'voting with your feet.' Sick of crime in New York? Sick of the fools with power whose policies insure that there will be crime and ever more crime? Move to Florida.

3) There is 'voting by social cancellation.' Have any of your friends 'gone woke'? Politely inform them that their willful self-enstupidation deprives them of the privilege of your friendship. Why should they get the benefit of interaction with someone sane, reasonable, mentally awake, and morally straight?

4) There is 'voting with your wallet.' This alone is most effective and for reasons I needn't state. In second place comes (2), and in third (3). (1) comes in last.

"The first shall be last and the last shall be first" to adapt a scriptural saying.