Bill Vallicella – Page 409 – Maverick Philosopher

God and Proof

This is an addendum to clarify what I said two days ago.

My claim is that we have no demonstrative knowledge of the truth of theism or of the falsity of naturalism. 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).

Can one prove the existence of God? That is, can one produce a proof (as above defined) of the existence of God? I don't think so. For how will you satisfy condition (5)? Suppose you give argument A for the existence of God. How do you know that the premises of A are true? By argument? Suppose A has premises P1, P2, P3. Will you give arguments for these premises? Then you need three more arguments, one for each of P1, P2, P3, each of which has its own premises. A vicious infinite regress is in the offing. Needless to say, moving in an argumentative circle is no better.

At some point you will have to invoke self-evidence. You will have to say that, e.g., it is just self-evident that every event has a cause. And you will have to mean objectively self-evident, not just subjectively self-evident. But how can you prove, to yourself or anyone else, that what is subjectively self-evident is objectively self-evident? You can't, at least not with respect to states of affairs transcending your consciousness.

Paging Baron von Muenchhausen.

I conclude that no one can prove the existence of God. But one can reasonably believe that God exists. The same holds for the nonexistence of God. No one can prove the nonexistence of God. But one can reasonably believe that there is no God.

Of course, when I say that no one can prove the existence of God I mean no one of us. Presumably God can prove the existence of God, if he exists, not that he needs to. And when I said above that a probative argument is such that all its premises are known to be true, I meant, as any charitable reader would have assumed, "known by us."

The same goes for naturalism. I cannot prove that there is more to reality than the space-time system and its contents. But I can reasonably believe it. For I have a battery of powerful arguments each of which satisfies conditions (1), (2), (3) and (6) and may even, as far as far as I know, satisfy (4).

"So how is the atheist not irrational on your view, assuming he is apprised of your arguments?"

He is not irrational because none of my arguments are rationally compelling in the sense I supplied, namely, they are not such as to force every competent philosophical practitioner to accept their conclusions on pain of being irrational if he does not. Surely it would be foolish to say that atheists, the lot of them, are irrational people.

Either God exists or he does not. But both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable.

To end with a psychological speculation: those who hanker after proofs of God and the soul or the opposite are insufficiently mature to live with doxastic insecurity.

Our life here below is insecure physically, psychologically, socially, economically, and in every way, including doxastically. We need, and sometimes crave, security. Our pursuit of it can be ordinate. For example, the wise make provision for the future by saving and investing, taking care of their health, buying insurance, planning how they will react to certain emergencies, etc. Fools, by contrast, live as if there is no tomorrow. When tomorrow comes, they either perish of their folly or suffer unnecessarily.

But there is also an inordinate pursuit of security. It is impossible in this life totally to secure oneself in any of the ways mentioned, including with respect to belief. One must accept that life is a venture and an adventure across the board.

Trump and the Conservative Cause

A very rich and perceptive essay by Charles Kesler.

The following passage illustrates what Keith Burgess-Jackson calls 'academentia':

It’s no coincidence that the two loudest, most consequential socio-political forces in America right now are Political Correctness and Donald Trump. One is at home on college campuses, the other in the world of working people. Yet they are already beginning to collide. At Emory University recently, someone scrawled “Trump 2016” in chalk on steps and sidewalks around the campus. About 50 students swiftly assembled to protest the outrage, shouting, “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” Aghast at “the chalkings,” the university president complied.

At Scripps College, just a few weeks ago, a Mexican-American student awoke to find “#trump2016” written on the whiteboard on her door. The student body president, in a mass email, quickly condemned the “racist incident” and denounced Trump’s hashtag as a symbol of violence and a “testament that racism continues to be an undeniable problem and alarming threat on our campuses.” The student body’s response, apparently, was underwhelming. Shortly the dean of students weighed in with an email of her own, upbraiding students who thought the student body president’s email had been, oh, an overreaction. The dean noted that although Scripps of course respects its students’ First Amendment rights, in this case the “circumstances here are unique.” Note to dean: the circumstances are always unique.

I say: death to political correctness. We need more free speech, and more denunciations of liberal-left evil-doers, not only the termites undermining our institutions, but also the thugs on the streets. Not to mention more of that which backs up free speech.

Neither the Existence Nor the Nonexistence of God is Provable

A post of mine ends like this:

To theists, I say: go on being theists. You are better off being a theist than not being one. Your position is rationally defensible and the alternatives are rationally rejectable. But don't fancy that you can prove the existence of God or the opposite. In the end you must decide how you will live and what you will believe.

About "Don't fancy that you can prove the existence of God or the opposite," Owen Anderson asks:

How would we know if that claim is itself true? Isn't it is possible that one or the other can indeed be proven?

To formulate my point in the declarative rather than the exhortative mood:

P. Neither the existence nor the nonexistence of God is provable.

How do I know (P) to be true? By reflection on the nature of proof. An argument is a proof if and only if it satisfies all of the following six requirements: it is deductive; valid in point of logical form; free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii; possesses a conclusion that is relevant to the premises; has premises each of which is true; has premises each of which is known to be true.

I say that an argument is a proof if and only it is rationally compelling, or rationally coercive. But an argument needn't be rationally compelling to be a more or less 'good argument,' one that renders its conclusion more or less rationally acceptable.

Now if my definition above gives what we ought to mean by 'proof,' then it is clear that neither the existence nor the nonexistence of God can be proven. Suppose you present a theistic or anti-theistic argument that satisfies the first five requirements. I will then ask how you know that the premises are true. Suppose one of your premises is that change is the conversion of potency into act. That is a plausible thing to maintain, but how do you know that it is true? How do you know that the general-ontological framework within which the proposition acquires its very sense, namely, Aristotelian metaphysics, is tenable? After all, there are alternative ways of understanding change. That there is change is a datum, a Moorean fact, but it would be an obvious mistake to confuse this datum with some theory about it, even if the theory is true. Suppose the theory is true. This still leaves us with the question of how we know it is. Besides, the notions of potency and act, substance and accident, form and matter, and all the rest of the Aristotelian conceptuality are murky and open to question. (For example, the notion of prime matter is a necessary ingredient in an Aristotelian understanding of substantial change, but the notion of materia prima is either incoherent or else not provably coherent.)

To take a second example, suppose I give a cosmological argument the starting point of which is the seemingly innocuous proposition that there are are contingent beings, and go on to argument that this starting point together with some auxiliary premises, entails the existence of God. How do I know that existnece can be predicated of concrete individuals? Great philosophers have denied it. Frege and Russell fanmously held that existence vannot be meaningfully predicated of individuals but only of cncepts and propositional functions. I have rather less famoulsy argued that the 'GFressellina' view' is mstaken, but this is a point of controversy. Furtrhertmore, if existence cannot be meaningfully predicated of individuals, how can individuals be said to exist contingently?

The Appeal to Further Arguments

If you tell me that the premises of your favorite argument can be known to be true on the basis of further arguments that take those premises as their conclusions, then I simply iterate my critical procedure: I run the first five tests above and if your arguments pass those, then I ask how you know that their premises are true. If you appeal to still further arguments, then you embark upon a vicious infinite regress.

The Appeal to Self-Evidence

If you tell me that the premises of your argument are self-evident, then I will point out that your and my subjective self-evidence is unavailing. It is self-evident to me that capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain cases. I'll die in the ditch for that one, and pronounce you morally obtuse to boot for not seeing it. But there are some who are intelligent, well-meaning, and sophisticated to whom this is not self-evident. They will charge with with moral obtuseness. Examples are easily multiplied. What is needed is objective, discussion-stopping, self-evidence. But then, how, in a given case, do you know that your evidence is indeed objective? All you can go on is how things seem to you. If it seems to you that it is is objectively the case that p, that boils down to: it seems to you that, etc., in which case your self-evidence is again merely subjective.

The Appeal to Authority

You may attempt to support the premises of your argument by an appeal to authority. Now many such appeals are justified. We rightly appeal to the authority of gunsmiths, orthopaedic surgeons, actuaries and other experts all the time, and quite sensibly. But such appeals are useless when it comes to PROOF. How do you know that your putative authority really is one, and even if he is, how do you know that he is eight in the present case? How do you know he is not lying to you well he tells you you need a new sere in your semi-auto pistol?

The Appeal to Revelation

This is the ultimate appeal to authority. Necessarily, if God reveals that p, then p! Again, useless for purposes of proof. See Josiah Royce and the Paradox of Revelation.

Move in a Circle?

If your argument falls afoul of petitio principii, that condemns it, and the diameter of the circle doesn't matter. A circle is a circle no matter its diameter.

Am I Setting the Bar Too High?

It seems to me I am setting it exactly where it belongs. After all we are talking about PROOF here and surely only arguments that generate knowledge count as proofs. But if an argument is to generate a known proposition, then its premises must be known, and not merely believed, or believed on good evidence, or assumed, etc.

"But aren't you assuming that knowledge entails certainty, or (if this is different) impossibility of mistake?" Yes I am assuming that. Argument here.

Can I Consistently Claim to Know that (P) is true?

Owen Anderson asked me how I know that (P) is true. I said I know it by reflection on the concept of proof. But that was too quick. Obviously I cannot consistently claim to know that (P) if knowledge entails certainty. For how do I know that my definition captures the essence of proof? How do I know that there is an essence of proof, or any essence of anything? What I want to say, of course, is that it is very reasonable to define 'proof' as I define it — absent some better definition — and that if one does so define it then it is clear that there are very few proofs, and, in particular, that there are no proofs of God or of the opposite.

"But then isn't it is possible that one or the other can indeed be proven?"

Yes, if one operates with a different, less rigorous, definition of 'proof.' But in philosophy we have and maintain high standards. So I say proof is PROOF (a tautological form of words that expresses a non-tautological proposition) and that we shouldn't use the word to refer to arguments that merely render their conclusions rationally acceptable.

Note also that if we retreat from the rationally compelling to the rationally acceptable, then both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable. I suspect that what Owen wants is a knock-down argument for the existence of God. But if that is what he wants, then he wants a proof in my sense of the world. If I am right, that is something very unreasonable to expect.

There is no getting around the need for a decision. In the end, after all the considerations pro et contra, you must decide what you will believe and how you will live.

Life is a venture and an adventure. You cannot live without risk. This is true not only in the material sphere, but also in the realm of ideas.

Is Race a False Theory? Is it a Theory at All?

A strange idea has gained currency recently, namely, that racial differences are invented, that race is a social construct, a theory, indeed a false theory. And so we hear David Livingstone Smith, a professor of philosophy from the University of New England, asserting that "Phenotypic diversity is a fact, but race is a theory."

Malcolm Pollack offers a critique.

How to Beat Girls

Self-identify as one and then enter their track and field and other events. This is actually happening and the mommies of the girls are none too pleased. Don't the mommies understand that sex and race are matters of personal decision?

God and the Transcendental Ego

God does what Husserl's transcendental ego wanted to do but couldn't pull off, namely, constitute beings not as mere unities of sense, but as beings, as "independent reals" to borrow a phrase from Josiah Royce. Husserl's transcendental idealism never gets the length of Sein; it reaches only as far as Seinsinn.

This leads us to perhaps the ultimate paradox of divine creation. God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality. God creates potential rebels. He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway. Lucifer as the father of all perversity.

God creates and sustains, moment by moment, an other mind, like unto his own, made in his image, who is yet radically other in its inwardness and freedom. How is this conceivable?

We are not objects for the divine subject, but subjects in our own right. How can we understand creation ex nihilo, together with moment by moment conservation, of a genuine subject, a genuine mind with intellect and free will?

This is the mystery of divine creation. It is is above my pay grade. And yours too.

God can do it but we can't. We can't even understand how God could do it. A double infirmity.

What Happened to Angela Davis?

Roger Kimball:

Saturday marked the 44th anniversary of Angela Davis’s acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. Remember Angela Davis? I asked several of my younger colleagues: No one under 35 had heard of her. But the former Black Panther, recipient of the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize, and two-time vice-presidential candidate on the Communist Party ticket with Gus Hall, was once a household name. That was enough for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, which last Thursday bestowed on Ms. Davis the 2016 Sackler Center First Award, “honoring women who are first in their fields.”

Previous honorees include the novelist Toni Morrison, Miss Piggy and Anita Hill—pioneers all, no question. Ms. Davis is surely the first person to have parlayed an appearance on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted list into a tenured professorship at the University of California.

Read it all.

On the Misuse of Religious Language

A massage parlor is given the name Nirvana, the implication being that after a well-executed massage one will be in the eponymous state. This betrays a misunderstanding of Nirvana, no doubt, but that is not the main thing, which is the perverse tendency to attach a religious or spiritual significance to a merely sensuous state of relaxation.

Why can’t the hedonist just enjoy his sensory states without glorifying them? Equivalently, why can’t he admit that there is something beyond him without attempting to drag it down to his level? But no! He wants to have it both ways: he wants both sensuous indulgence and spirituality. He wants sensuality to be a spiritual experience and spirituality to be as easy of access as sensuous enjoyment.

“When you buy gold you’re saying nothing is going to work and everything is going to stay ridiculous,” said Mackin Pulsifer, vice chairman and chief investment officer of Fiduciary Trust International in New York. “There is a fair cohort who believes this in a theological sense, but I believe it’s unreasonable given the history of the United States.”

So to believe something 'in a theological sense' is to believe it unreasonably. It follows that liberals have plenty of 'theological' beliefs. In the 'theology' of a liberal theology can be dismissed unread as irrational.

Know Your Limits

Cautionary tale: Geraldine Largay's Wrong Turn: Death on the Appalachian Trail

The Never Hike Alone warning found in most hiking books is not just a piece of CYA boilerplate required by publishers. It is good advice. I have violated it numerous times in unforgiving country in quest of my inner Thoreauvian, but then I am extremely cautious. But I don't go quite as far as Henry David's harsh, "I have no walks to throw away on company." It's a balancing act: the wilderness explorer seeks solitude but he also hopes to return to hike again. A competent partner will raise the probability of that.

The following disclaimer is my favorite, from local author, Ted Tenny, Goldfield Mountain Hikes, p. 4:

The risks of desert hiking include, but are not limited to: heatstroke, heat exhaustion, heat prostration, heat cramps, sunburn, dehydration, flash floods, drowning, freezing, hypothermia, getting lost, getting stranded after dark, falling, tripping, being stung, clawed or bitten by venomous or non-venomous creatures, being scratched or stuck by thorny plants, being struck by lightning, falling rocks, natural or artificial objects falling from the sky, or a comet colliding with the Earth.

Still up for a hike?

If you lose the trail, or have the least doubt that you are still on trail, stop. Do not plunge on. Retrace your steps to where the trail was clear and then proceed. Thus spoke the Sage of the Superstitions.

Martin Heidegger on Muhammad Ali

Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes last night gushed over the late boxer as a "transcendent" specimen of humanity. Her over-the-top performance put me in mind of what I call the 'Pincers Passage' in Heidegger's 1935 lecture, Introduction to Metaphysics (tr. Ralph Manheim, Doubleday 1961, p. 31, emphasis added.

This Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on the one side and America on the other.From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man. At a time when the farthermost corner of the globe has been conquered by technology and opened to economic exploitation; when any incident whatever, regardless of where or when it occurs, can be communicated to the rest of the world at any desired speed; when the assassination of a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo can be 'experienced' simultaneously, and time as history has vanished from the lives of all peoples; when a boxer is regarded as a nation's great man; when mass meetings attended by millions are looked on as a triumph — then, yes then, through all this turmoil a question still haunts us like a specter: What for? — Whither? — And what then?

Organized Leftist Thuggery

The formidable Tammy Bruce exposes the organizational underpinnings of the supposedly 'spontaneous' violence directed against Trump and his supporters:

Make no mistake — these supposed anti-Trump riots are not organic nor are they natural; they are the result of leftist organizing using paid stooges. Fox News reported in March a Craigslist ad posted by Bernie Sanders supporters offering $15 an hour to protest at a Trump rally in Wisconsin. They would also provide shuttle bus transport, parking if you needed it and ready-made signs.

[. . .]

When confronted with the fact that the organizers of these melees are Bernie Sanders supporters, and representatives from Democrat-allied groups, like La Raza and MoveOn.org, the Democratic party establishment denies, denies, denies. They then condemn the violence with one hand, while their allies perpetuate it.

By the way La Raza means 'the race.' So who are the real racists?

The Peculiar Madness of Charles Blow

I am tempted to run a pun past his name. It is a temptation I will resist. I've seen him on C-SPAN and I've read too many of his columns from the piss-poor pages of the Grey Lady's Op-Ed section. Nice guy, apparently, lovely wife. But a fool. Judge for yourself.

Are You a True Kerouac Aficionado?

Then this will interest you. If and only if. Something about the instrument here. October is Kerouac Month hereabouts and so I won't say more now. I must discipline my Kerouac 'obsession' (speaking loosely). Only four months to go!

Hillary Milhous Clinton

Jonathan Turley:

It has taken almost 50 years, but the Democrats have finally found their inner Nixon. Make no mistake about it: Hillary Clinton is the most Nixonian figure in the post-Watergate period. Indeed, Democrats appear to have reached the type of moral compromise that Nixon waited, unsuccessfully, for Republicans to accept: Some 71% of Democrats want Clinton to run even if indicted.

Read it all.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fighting Songs

Some of us are old enough to remember when he fought and bragged under the name, 'Cassius Clay.' Later known as Muhammad Ali, the great boxer died yesterday in Scottsdale at age 74. I won't comment on the man except to wonder how much of Donald Trump's braggadoccio and argumentative tactics were inspired by him.

Simon and Garfunkel, The Boxer. "A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest."

Rolling Stones, Street Fighting Man

Bobby Fuller Four, I Fought the Law (and the Law Won)

Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Born in Chicago

I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty one
I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty one
Well my father told me
Son you had better get a gun.

It's worse than ever. Liberal policies have turned Chicago into a first-rate killing field.

Og Boo Dirty, Let Dem Hos Fight. So what's this inspiring ditty a commentary on? For contrast:

Youngbloods, Get Together

Johnny Horton, The Battle of New Orleans

Addendum (6/5). The following from Wikipedia. Does it remind you of someone?

"Talking trash"

Ali regularly taunted and baited his opponents—including Liston, Frazier, and Foreman—before the fight and often during the bout itself. Ali's pre-fight theatrics were almost always highly entertaining, and his words were sometimes cutting, and were largely designed to promote the fight. His antics often targeted a particular psychological trigger or vulnerability in his opponent that would provoke a reaction and cause the opponent to lose focus. He said Frazier was "too dumb to be champion", that he would whip Liston "like his Daddy did", that Terrell was an "Uncle Tom" and that Patterson was a "rabbit." In speaking of how Ali stoked Liston's anger and overconfidence before their first fight, one writer commented that "the most brilliant fight strategy in boxing history was devised by a teenager who had graduated 376 in a class of 391."^[125]

Ali typically portrayed himself as the "people's champion" and his opponent as a tool of the (white) establishment (despite the fact that his entourage often had more white faces than his opponents'). During the early part of Ali's career, he built a reputation for predicting rounds in which he would finish opponents, often vowing to crawl across the ring or to leave the country if he lost the bout.^[16] Ali admitted he adopted the latter practice from "Gorgeous"George Wagner, a popular professional wrestling champion in the Greater Los Angeles Area who drew thousands of fans to his matches as "the man you love to hate."^[16]

ESPN columnist Ralph Wiley called Ali "The King of Trash Talk."^[129] In 2013, The Guardian said Ali exemplified boxing's "golden age of trash talking."^[130]The Bleacher Report called Clay's description of Sonny Liston smelling like a bear and his vow to donate him to a zoo after he beat him the greatest trash talk line in sports history.^[131]