The Creed of Chalcedon (A.D 451) set forth the following dogma, among others: (my emphasis)
".. one and the same Christ ….to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son . . ."
The deliberate language of 'two natures' in 'one Person' is really remarkable. When you find some time, can you give me a bit of direction in determining, first – what it is for a person to 'have a human nature' and second – depending on that answer, is there any way to explain the concept of a person having two 'natures'? I even find the statement that human persons have both an 'animal nature' and a 'human nature' troublesome. There is a category mistake that I sense but cannot yet explain.
The reader poses three questions. After answering them, I will pose a fourth question that the reader doesn't explicitly ask.
Q1. How can a human person have both an animal nature and a human nature? I don't see much of a difficulty here. If man is a rational animal (Aristotle), then Socrates, in virtue of being human, is an animal. Now he is both animal and human essentially as opposed to accidentally. Thus Socrates could not have existed without being an animal: he could not have been inanimate, say a statue or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy. And he could not have existed without being human: he could not have been nonhuman like a cat or a jelly fish. Whether or not every essential feature of a thing is part of its nature, every nature is essential to a thing that has it. So I see no problem in saying that Socrates has both an animal nature and human nature, where the latter includes the former, though not conversely. Nature N1 includes nature N2 just in case it is impossible that something have N1 but not have N2.
Q2. How can a person have two natures? This is answered above. Humanity and animality are distinct — the first includes the second, but not conversely — but there is nothing to prevent one and the same individual substance from having both of them.
Q3. What is it for a person to have a human nature? On the Boethian definition, a person is an individual substance of a rational nature. So the question might be: How can a rational individual — an individual being that has the capacity to reason — also be human? Well, I don't see much difficulty here. Not every person is a human being, but every human being is a person. So humanity includes personhood.
Q4. How can one and the same person have two seemingly incompatible natures? I suspect that this is the question the reader really wants to pose. There is no obvious problem about one person having two natures if they are logically compatible as they are if one includes the other. The problem is that while humanity includes animality, humanity appears to exclude divinity. Among the marks of humanity: animality, mortality, mutability, passibility; among the marks of divinity: spirituality (non-animality), immortality, immutability, impassibility.
According to Chalcedon, one and the same person is both fully human and fully divine. Now, necessarily, anything human is passible, thus capable of suffering. But, necessarily, nothing divine is passible; hence nothing divine is capable of suffering. So if one and the same person is both human and divine, then one and the same person is both capable of suffering and not capable of suffering. This is a contradiction. Herein lies the difficulty.
The reader needs to tell me whether this is the problem that is exercising him. (Note that the problem can be developed using attributes other than passibility.)
I wonder whether the reader would be satisfied with the following strategy and the following analogy. Christ qua human is capable of suffering, but Christ qua divine is not. This removes the contradiction. Analogy: Obama qua president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but Obama qua citizen is not.
I am not endorsing either the reduplicative strategy or the analogy.
In a criminal case the probative bar is set very high: the accused has to be shown guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Here too there seems to be a legitimate appeal to ignorance: if it has not been shown that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the conclusion to be drawn is that he is not guilty.
We will have to examine this more carefully in a separate post.
Herewith, the separate post. Plainly, the following is an invalid argument:
1. It was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Smith who killed Jones.
ergo
2. Smith did not kill Jones.
Examples like this appear to support the idea that some appeals to ignorance (or arguments from ignorance) are reasonable and non-fallacious. According to Douglas N. Walton,
. . . the criminal law presumes that a person is not guilty if he has not been shown to be guilty. This is an ad ignorantiam form of argument, but it can be reasonable in the context of the rules of argument in the criminal law. (Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation, Cambridge UP, 2007, 20th ed., p. 47)
I wonder if this is right. Which better represents a criminal process that terminates in an acquittal? Is it the above argument or the following argument?
1. It was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Smith who killed Jones.
ergo
3. The presumption of Jones' innocence has not been defeated and Jones is in the eyes of the law not guilty.
I now think it is the second argument. But note that (i) the second argument is valid, and (ii) there is no appeal to ignorance in the second argument. The validity of the second, enthymematic, argument is obvious when we make explicit the tacit assumption, namely, that
4. If the accused in a criminal proceeding has not been proven to be guilty of the crime with which he is charged beyond a reasonable doubt, then the presumption of innocence has not been defeated and the accused is in the eyes of the law not guilty.
So the second argument is (formally) valid. It also does not represent an appeal to ignorance. One is not arguing that: Jones is not guilty in reality (as opposed to in the eyes of the law) because it has not been proven that he is not guilty. One is arguing that the presumption of innocence has not been defeated. The following are different propositions:
a. Jones is not guilty
b. Jones' presumption of innocence (POI) has not been defeated.
It ought to be obvious that they are different. They are logically independent. Each is consistent with the negation of the other. Thus the following sets are consistent dyads: {Jones is guilty; Jones' POI has not been defeated}, {Jones is not guilty; Jones' POI has been defeated}.
Conclusion
According to Walton, ". . . the criminal law presumes that a person is not guilty if he has not been shown to be guilty. This is an ad ignorantiam form of argument . . ." I think this betrays a misunderstanding of the notion of presumption, and in particular, presumption of innocence.
The presumption is not that a person is not guilty if he has not be shown to be guilty; the presumption is that he is to be treated as if not guilty, if he has not been shown to be guilty. In the case of O. J. Simpson, almost everyone agrees that he is guilty of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Yet he was found not guilty. Obviously, there is a difference between being not guilty (being not guilty in fact) and being found not guilty (being not guilty in the eyes of the law). The presumption of innocence was not defeated in that trial. But that is consistent, as I argued above, with the accused's being guilty.
It is therefore a mistake to think that the POI procedural rule embodies an appeal to ignorance. And since there is no appeal to ignorance here, there is no reasonable or non-fallacious appeal to ignorance.
UPDATE: Dave Bagwill writes,
My grand-dad did not mince words, nor did he suffer fools. When I tried to trick him with verbal technicalities, he would accuse me of "trying to pick the fly shit out of the pepper".
He would have said that about your latest post 'On Ad Ignorantiam and the Law', but he would have been wrong. You made some very fine, fine distinctions in that post that really cut to the heart of the matter. Thanks, and well done. (I've used that book by Walton for years and generally found it useful.)
You're welcome, Dave. My response to your grandfather would be to make yet another distinction, one between hairsplitting and the drawing of necessary distinctions, and then distinguish different kinds of hairsplitting.
One sort of hairsplitting is to make distinctions that correspond to nothing real, distinctions that are merely verbal. The 'distinction' between a glow bug and a fire fly, for example, is merely verbal: there is no distinction in reality. A glow bug just is a firefly. Similarly there is no distinction in reality between a bottle's being half-full and being half-empty. The only possible difference is in the attitude of someone, a drunk perhaps, who is elated at the bottle's being half-full and depressed at its being half-empty.
But this is not what people usually mean by the charge of hairsplitting. What they seem to mean is the drawing of distinctions that don't make a practical difference. But whether a distinction makes a practical difference depends on the context and on one's purposes. The truth of the matter is that there are very few occasions on which the charge of hairsplitting is justly made. On almost all occasions, the accuser is simply advertising his inability to grasp a distinction that the subject-matter requires.
Walton may be the premier writer on informal logic. His book is apparently well-thought-of. 2007 saw the 20th edition. I'd guess there have been editions since then.
Before we get on to songs with 'I' in the title — the word, not the letter or the Roman numeral — we pause to note the passing of Jack Bruce, bass player for Cream who died a week ago. It is appropriate, therefore, that we should begin with
I Ain't Superstitious, leastways no more than Howlin' Wolf, but two twin black tuxedo cats just crossed my path. All dressed up with nowhere to go. Nine lives and dressed to the nines. Stevie Ray Vaughan, Superstition. Guitar solo starts at 3:03. And of course you've heard the story about Niels Bohr and the horseshoe over the door:
A friend was visiting in the home of Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr, the famous atom scientist.
As they were talking, the friend kept glancing at a horseshoe hanging over the door. Finally, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, he demanded:
“Niels, it can’t possibly be that you, a brilliant scientist, believe that foolish horseshoe superstition! ? !”
“Of course not,” replied the scientist. “But I understand it’s lucky whether you believe in it or not.”
Firearms instructors sometimes say that every gun is loaded. That is plainly false as it stands, but a wise saying nonetheless if interpreted to mean: every gun is to be presumed loaded until proven unloaded. Presumptions are procedural rules. To presume every gun to be loaded is to adopt a procedural rule to treat every gun as if it is loaded regardless of how antecedently likely it is that it is loaded. Suppose the likelihood is near zero: I examined the gun carefully an hour ago and I found it to be unloaded. Nevertheless, the presumption that it is loaded remains in force. I continue to behave as if it is loaded. For example, I don't point the gun at anything unless I want to destroy it.
I conclude that to presume that p is not to assert that p is true, nor to assert that p is probably true, nor to assume that p is true, but to decide to act as if p is true. A presumption, then, is not a proposition, although it embeds one. A presumption is something like a decision. More precisely, a presumption is the accusative of an act of presuming, an accusative that is not itself a proposition, but embeds one.
A presumption is not like a belief in the following important respect. To presume that a gun is loaded or that a man is innocent is not to believe that it is or that he is. To believe that p is to believe that p is true. But to presume that p is not to presume that p is true; it is to act as if p is true without either accepting or rejecting p. To presume that Jones is innocent until proven guilty is not to believe that he is innocent until proven guilty; it is to suspend judgment as to guilt or innocence until sufficient evidence is presented by the prosecution to warrant a verdict one way or the other. When I presume that p, I take no stand as to the truth-value of p — I neither accept nor reject p — what I do is decide to act as if p is true.
Presumptions must be defeasible. (I suspect that an indefeasible presumption is no presumption at all.) The presumption of being loaded is defeated in a particular case by carefully examining the gun and showing that it is unloaded. So while a presumption is not a proposition, it embeds a proposition that can be shown to be false. Defeasible presumption and burden-of-proof are correlative notions. (They are like rights and duties in this respect but also in that both are normative notions.) In a court of law, for example, if the accused enjoys a presumption of innocence, as he does in the Anglosphere, then the accuser bears a burden of proof, a burden which, if properly discharged, defeats the presumption.
Appeal to Ignorance?
So if person A claims to person B that a certain gun is unloaded, the burden of proof is on A to show that it is unloaded; person B does not bear the burden of proving that it is loaded. It is not just that he bears a lesser burden'; he bears no burden. Indeed it seems that B would be within his epistemic rights were he to claim that his ignorance of whether or not the gun is loaded is good evidence of its being loaded. But this is an appeal to ignorance. It has not been shown that the gun is unloaded; ergo, the gun is loaded.
It has not been shown that ~p; therefore p gives us the form of the ad ignorantiam 'fallacy.' Construed as a deductive argument, it is clearly invalid. Construed as an inductive argument, it will be in many cases weak. For example, suppose the gun is straight from the manufacturer and right out of the box. Then the probability of its being loaded is very low, and the argument: This gun out of the box has not been shown to be unloaded; ergo, this gun is loaded is very weak.
Nevertheless, safety considerations dictate a defeasible presumption in favor of every gun's being loaded, whether out of the box or not, a presumption that places the onus probandi on the one who maintains the opposite. So one might conclude that the appeal to ignorance in this case is reasonable even though the argument is deductively invalid and inductively weak.
The situation is similar to that in a court of law. The defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty, so the burden of proof rests on either the state in a criminal proceeding, or on the plaintiff in a civil trial. In a criminal case the probative bar is set very high: the accused has to be shown guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Here too there seems to be a legitimate appeal to ignorance: if it has not been shown that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the conclusion to be drawn is that he is not guilty.
We will have to examine this more carefully in a separate post.
Safety Considerations
There are 'safety' considerations in both the gun example and the law example. It is because we want to be on the safe side — and not get shot — that we presume every gun to be loaded. "Better that a hundred guns be unnecessarily examined than that one sentient being be accidentally shot."
And it is because we want to be on the safe side — and not sentence an innocent person — that we presume the accused to be innocent until proven guilty. "Better that a hundred guilty people go free than that one innocent person be wrongly convicted."
But now what about God? Don't safety considerations apply here as well? If God exists, then our ultimate happiness depends on getting into right relation with him. So why can't one make a legitimate appeal to ignorance here? Now of course from the fact that no one has proven that God does not exist, it does not follow that God exists. That is an invalid deductive argument. That would be a truly fallacious instance of ad ignorantiam. But it is also invalid to infer than a gun is loaded because it hasn't been proven to be unloaded, or that a man is innocent because he hasn't been proven to be guilty. It just doesn't follow in any of these cases. And yet we reasonably consider the gun loaded and we reasonably find the accused to be innocent. And so why can't we reasonably presume God to exist on the basis of the fact that he hasn't been shown not to exist? If the burden of proof rests on the one who claims that gun is unloaded, why doesn't the burden of proof rest on the one who claims that God is nonexistent? We don't want to get shot, but we also don't want to lose our ultimate beatitude — if ultimate beatitude there be.
You can't say that that the burden of proof rests on the theist because he is making a positive claim; for there are positive claims that need no proof. And you can't say that the burden of proof rests on the theist because he is making an existential claim; for there are existential claims that need no proof. If you claim that extraterrestrial intelligent beings exist, then the burden is on you. But if you claim that there are Saguaro cacti in Arizona, then the burden of proof is not on you but on the one who denies it. Nor can you say that the burden rests on the theist because he is controverting the widely-accepted; the consensus gentium is that God exists.
Earlier I argued that we shouldn't bring BOP considerations into the God discussion at all. But if we do, why doesn't the BOP rest on the atheist?
Pigliucci's Confusion
Massimo Pigliucci thinks that if one understands who bears the burden of proof in a trial, then one ought to see right away that the burden of proof rests on the theist. For, "the burden of proof is always on the party making a positive claim, not on the one making a negative one." This strikes me as confused. It is true that the party making a complaint or bringing a charge is making a positive claim, but this is not the reason why the BOP rests on the accuser. It rests on the accuser because of the presumption of innocence that the accused enjoys. The BOP rests on the accuser not because his claim is positive but because of the procedural rule enshrined in our system of law according to which one is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
It is not true that the BOP is always on the one who makes a positive claim. 'That hillside is studded with Saguaro cacti' said to my hiking companion needs no proof. I shoulder no probative burden when I make a commonplace observation such as that. Therefore, the following is an unsound argument:
Everyone who make a positive claim bears a BOP. The theist makes a positive claim. ergo The theist bears the BOP in his debate with the atheist.
I argued above that if BOP considerations are relevant to the God debate, then the BOP is on the atheist. To appreciate the argument I gave, you have to realize that the God question is not merely theoretical. It is a practical question. In that respect it is like the gun safety and court room cases. My interest in whether or not a particular firearm is loaded or unloaded is not merely theoretical, or I should say, not at all theoretical. It is a practical interest in maintaining the health and physical integrity of myself and the people around me. Similarly with the law. If you are accused of homicide you are in deep trouble and face the loss of your liberty or your life. Arguably, the God question is in the same boat.
So I invite you to accept one or the other of the following conclusions. The BOP is borne by the atheist. BOP considerations should be kept out of the theist-atheist debate altogether.
. . . and we say farewell once again to Jack Kerouac, cat man and mama's boy, as he prepares to "leave all San Francisco behind and go back home across autumn America" proving once again to his romantic predecessor Thomas Wolfe that one can go back home again where "it'll all be like it was in the beginning — Simple golden eternity blessing all . . . My mother'll be waiting for me glad — the corner of the yard where Tyke is buried will be a new and fragrant shrine making my home more homelike somehow — On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars — Something good will come out of all things yet — And it will be golden and eternal just like that – There's no need to say another word." (Big Sur, 1962, last lines, last page.)
It's a good last word: something good will come of it all: of all of the wandering, all of the searching, all of the pain, and misery, and drunken folly, and lonely nights, and broken dreams. The vanity will give way to vision. The beat will taste beatitude. The road will end and the restless will rest.
It doesn't merit a lot of attention, but I will mention two stupid moves that Jerry Coyne makes. Or if not stupid, then intellectually dishonest.
First, Coyne states that "We know now that the universe could have originated from 'nothing' through purely physical processes, if you see 'nothing' as the 'quantum vacuum' of empty space." By the same token, we now know that Jerry Coyne is a fool if you see 'fool' as equivalent in meaning to 'one who thinks that a substantive question can be answered by a semantic trick.'
Second, Coyne maintains that the belief that human beings have souls "flies in the face of science." In other words, the belief in question is logically inconsistent with natural science. Why? Because, "We have no evidence for souls, as biologists see our species as simply the product of naturalistic evolution from earlier species." The reasoning is this:
1. Biologists qua biologists see the human biological species as simply the product of evolution.
Therefore
2. Biology uncovers no evidence of souls.
Therefore
3. Biology rules out the existence of souls.
(1) is true. (2) is a very unsurprising logical consequence of (1). For biology, as a natural science, is confined to the study of the empirically accessible features of living things, including human animals. It is therefore no surprise at all that biology turns up no evidence of souls, or of consciousness or self-consciousness for that matter. By the same token, cosmology and quantum mechanics uncover no evidence that anything is alive.
The move from (2) to (3), however, is a howling non sequitur. (In plain English, (3) does not logically follow from (2), and it is obvious that it doesn't.) Biology is simply in no position to uncover any evidence of souls that there might be, and it shows a failure to grasp what it is that biology studies to think that such evidence would be accessible to biology.
To argue from (2) to (3) would be like arguing from
5. Mathematics rules out the existence of anything in nature that can be studied using complex (imaginary) numbers.
That too is a howling non sequitur: we know that alternating current theory makes essential use of complex numbers.
At the root of Coyne's foolishness is scientism, the view that the only genuine knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge. Scientism is the epistemology of naturalism, the view that reality is exhausted by the space-time system. Both are philosophical views; neither is scientific. There are powerful arguments against both.
Enough beating up of a cripple for one day. And that reminds me: Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols refers to Kant as a concept-cripple (Begriffskrueppel). What would that make Coyne? A stillborn concept-cripple?
More critique of Coyne here. The man should stick to biology. And the same goes for Dawkins.
