Author: Bill Vallicella

Fall of Man or Rise of Man? The Aporetics of Genesis 2 and 3

At Genesis 2,17 the Lord forbids Adam from eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, on pain of death.  In the next chapter, however, Eve is tempted by the serpent, succumbs, eats of the tree, and persuades Adam to eat of it too.  As punishment for their disobedience, Adam and Eve are banished from the garden of Eden  and put under sentence of death.  Thus mortality is one of the wages of Original Sin.

The story has a puzzling feature that Peter Lupu made me see.  Let us agree that a moral agent is a being that (i) possesses free will, and (ii) possesses knowledge of the difference between good and evil, right and wrong.  Clearly, both conditions are necessary for moral agency.  And let us agree that no agent can be justly punished unless he is a moral agent and does something wrong.  But before eating from the tree, Adam and Eve are not moral agents.  For it is only by eating from the tree that they acquire the knowledge of good and evil, one of the necessary conditions of moral agency.   And yet God punishes them.  How then can his punishment be just?  My problem concerns not the truth of the story, but its coherence and meaning.  The problem can be set forth as an aporetic pentad:

1. If God punishes, God punishes justly.
2. If God punishes an agent justly, then that agent is a moral agent that deliberately does something wrong.
3. A moral agent possesses the knowledge of good and evil.
4. God punishes Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit.
5. Adam and Eve did not possess the knowledge of good and evil prior to eating the forbidden fruit.

The pentad is logically inconsistent: the first four limbs entail the negation of the fifth.  To rescue the coherence of the story one of the limbs must be rejected.  But which one?

(1), (3), and (4) are undeniable.  This leaves (2) and (5).   One might think to deny (2).  My dog is not a moral agent, but I can justly punish it for some behavior.  But punishment in this sense is mere behavior-modification and not relevant to the case at hand.  So it appears that the only way out is by denying (5).  Adam and Eve did possess the knowledge of good and evil prior to eating the forbidden fruit.  If so, the so-called 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil' is not a tree the eating of the fruit of which is necessary for becoming a moral agent.

Support for this way out can be found at Genesis 1, 26: "Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness . . . ."  This image, I argue, is a spiritual image.  You would have to be quite the lunkheaded atheist/materialist to think that the image is a physical one.  Now if God created man in his spiritual image, then presumably that means that God created man to be a moral agent, a free being who is alive to the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong. So before receiving the command not to eat of the tree of good and evil, Adam and Eve were already moral agents.  On this interpretation, whereby (5) is rejected, the coherence of the story is upheld.

"But then why is the tree in question called 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'?"  I have no idea.

Another intriguing suggestion that Peter Lupu made to me in conversation was that the Genesis story recounts not the Fall of man, but his rise or ascent from a pre-human condition of animal innocence to the status of a moral being possessing the knowledge of good and evil.  This makes sense if if it is by eating the forbidden fruit that man first become man in the full theomorphic sense.  And so, to put it quite pointedly, it is only by disobeying the divine command that Adam becomes a son of God! Before that he wallows in a state of animal-like, pre-human inocence.  Now surely a God worth his salt would not want mere pets; what he would want are sons and daughters capable of participating in the divine life. He wants his 'children' to be moral agents.  Indeed, one might go so far as to suppose — and this I think is the direction in which Peter is headed — that God wants them to be autonomous moral agents, agents who are not merely (libertarianly) free, and awake to the distinction between good and evil, but who in addition are morally self-legislative, i.e., who give the law to themselves, as opposed to existing heteronomously in a condition where the law is imposed on them by God.

The trajectory of this interpretation is towards secular humanism.  God fades out and Man comes into his own.  I don't buy it, but that's another post. 

Theocracy and the Left

I wrote, "To reverse the scriptural phrase, they will swallow the imaginary gnat of 'theocracy' while straining at the all-too-real camel of Islamo-terrorism."
 
A reader comments, "I'm not so sure it's gullibility as much as flat-out dishonesty half the time. Honestly, when I first heard the 'Dominionist' rumblings again, I thought it was comedy. As in, someone was making a joke, not that this was a serious charge. Imagine my surprise."

It is indeed dishonesty and we can expect more of it as Perry and Bachmann gain traction.  The Left will trot out the same old tired exaggerations and lies that they deployed during the Bush administration.  So it is appropriate that I repost  the following 2005 entry from the old blog.

………………

Serious thinkers, those who aim at the truth, do not engage in linguistic sleight-of-hand. This is a tactic of ideologues and polemicists, whose goal is not truth but power. So my advice to all contenders in the political arena who want to be taken seriously as serious thinkers is that they avoid trying to advance their positions by way of the misuse of language. One sort of misuse is verbal inflation: one takes a word with a fixed specific meaning and inflates it to cover phenomena to which it cannot legitimately be applied. A good recent example is the loose and irresponsible use of the word 'theocracy.' I should think that this term counts as a pejorative for most all of us, whether on the Left or the Right. Very few of us want a theocracy. But to proceed further, we need a definition. 

Theocracy is a form of government in which the rulers are identical to the leaders of the dominant religion, and  governmental policies are either identical to or strongly influenced by the principles of the majority religion.  The idea is much better conveyed by 'ecclesiocracy' since 'theocracy' is something of a misnomer inasmuch as God himself does not rule in any so-called theocracy.  But the word is in use and we are stuck with it.  In a theocracy, the government claims to rule on behalf of God or a  higher power, as specified by the religion in question.

This definition of 'theocracy' is clear enough and comports well with standard usage. In light of it, those who refer to the Bush administration as 'theocratic' are clearly inflating and misusing the term. They are trying to win the debate by changing the rules of the debate in midstream. Among these rules is one that forbids tampering with the neutral terminology in which alone a reasonable debate can be conducted.

Let us see if we can be clear about some elementary points. A  conservative is not the same as a theist. A theist is not the same as a Christian. A Christian is not the same as a fundamentalist. A theist is not the same as theocrat.

Lefties need to be careful about their identity theories. Theist =  theocrat is perhaps not as outrageous as Bush = Hitler, but just as false.

Are there advocates of theocracy here in the USA? Yes. Do they pose any sort of threat? Not that I can see.  But lefties don't care about truth; they care about winning.  And they will do anything to win.  The end justifies the means.

Two Opposite Mistakes Concerning Original Sin

One mistake is to think that the doctrine of Original Sin is empirically verifiable.  I have seen this thought attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr.  (If someone can supply a reference for me with exact bibliographical data, I would be much obliged.)  I could easily be mistaken, but I believe I have encountered the thought in Kierkegaard as well. (Anyone have a reference?)  G. K. Chesterton says essentially the same thing.  See my post, Is Sin a Fact?  A Passage from Chesterton Examined.  Chesterton thinks that sin, and indeed original sin, is a plain fact for all to see.  That is simply not the case as I argue.

The opposite mistake is to think that Original Sin is obviously false and empirically refutable by evolutionary biology.  Thus: no Fall because no original biologically human parents.  As if the doctrine of the Fall 'stands or falls' with the truth of a passage in Genesis literally interpreted.  I lately explained why I think that is a mistake, and indeed a rather stupid one, though my explanation left something to be desired.  (I am working on a longer post on the Fall as we speak.)

So on the one hand we have those who maintain that the doctrine of Original Sin is true as a matter of empirical fact, and on the other we have those who maintain that it is false as a matter of empirical fact.  On both sides we find very intelligent people.  I take this disagreement as further evidence that we are indeed fallen beings, 'noetically wretched,' to coin a phrase, beings whose reason is so infirm and befouled that we can even argue about such a thing.  And of course my own view, according to which OS is neither empirically true nor empirically false, is just another voice added to the cacophony of conflicting voices, though, as it seems to me, it has more merit than the other two.

So we are in deep caca, intellectually, morally, and in every which way — which is why I believe in 'something like'  Original Sin. Our condition is a fallen one, and indeed one that is (i) universal in that it applies to everyone, and (ii) unameliorable by anything we can do, individually or collectively.  You say I need to justify these bold claims?  I agree! But it's Saturday night, the sun is setting, and it's time to close up shop for the day.  So, invoking the blogospheric privilege deriving from the truth that brevity is the soul of blog,  I simply punch the clock.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Four Black Barbara’s

Barbara George, I Know.  A cute ditty from late 1961, 'I Know' made the Billboard Hot 100  #3 spot in the U.S. George counts as a one-hit wonder at least on one definition of the term.  She left the music business by the end of the '60s and died in 2006.

Barbara Lynn, You'll Lose a Good Thing. This great R & B number made it into the Billboard top ten in 1962.

Barbara Lewis, Baby I'm Yours.  From June 1965.  I like Hello Stranger from 1963 even better. 

Barbara Mason, Yes I'm Ready.  From 1965.

Michele Bachmann and Dominionism Paranoia

Doug Groothuis, The Constructive Curmudgeon, points us to his article, Michele Bachmann and Dominionism Paranoia.  Excerpt:

There is a buzz in the political beehive about the dark dangers of Bachmann's association with "dominionism"—a fundamentalist movement heaven-bent on imposing a hellish theocracy on America. In the August 15 issue of The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza asserts that Bachmann has been ideologically shaped by "exotic" thinkers of the dominionist stripe who pose a threat to our secular political institutions. The piece—and much of the subsequent media reaction—is a calamity of confusion, conflation, and obfuscation.

Leftists are astonishingly bad at threat assessment.  To reverse the scriptural phrase, they will swallow  the imaginary gnat of 'theocracy' while straining at  the all-too-real camel of  Islamo-terrorism.

Back Off! I’m Grumpy

Grumpy Back Off 

I spied a composite of the above two images  on the rear window of a beat-to-hell pickup truck. The
decal depicted the character Grumpy of Snow White and the Seven  Dwarves brandishing guns in the manner of that Yosemite Sam character one sometimes sees on mud flaps with the logo, "Back off." Can I squeeze any logico-philosophical mileage out of this? But of course.

The multiple ambiguity of 'is' has been well-known to philosophers for some time, although it is only recently that an American president has put the ambiguity to work in a successful bid at saving his political  hide. Said president pointed out that much rides on what the meaning of 'is' is.  A key distinction is between the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication. The decal exploits this ambiguity to achieve its  humorous effect. 'I am Grumpy' asserts the identity of the speaker  with Grumpy, whereas 'I am grumpy' predicates a property of the  speaker, the property of being grumpy. A key difference between identity and predication is that the former is symmetrical whereas the latter is aysmmetrical.

(Please do not confuse asymmetry with nonsymmetry. Loves is a nonsymmetrical relation: if I love you it does not follow that you love me; but it also does not follow that you do not love me.)

In previous posts I have explored the idea that many cases of humor derive from logico-conceptual incoherence, as above. The equivocation on 'is,' as between its predicative and identitarian senses, is at the root of the decal's funniness.  That is why it is funny.  Or so I claim.  In fact, I toy with the notion that most humor stems from logico-conceptual incoherence.  Another example is Yogi Berra's "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."  Or:  "Who was that lady I saw you with last night?  That was no lady, that was my wife!"  Or:  "I see you got a haircut.  I got 'em all cut."

The decal also alludes to a Platonic theme, that of the self-predication of Forms. Forms are not properties but paradigms. Thus the Form Wisdom is the paradigm case of wisdom. As such, Wisdom
is wise, The Good is good, Virtue is virtuous — and The Grumpy is grumpy! (Assuming, as Plato would almost certainly not assume, that there is a Form corresponding to 'grumpy.') Thus grumpy things are grumpy in virtue of participating in The Grumpy which is grumpy in virtue of participating in itself.

A self-participating Form is (identically) what it has. Here the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication coalesce. Wisdom is wise in virtue of being identical with itself. God is not a good thing, but Goodness Itself; thus God is not good by having goodness but by being Goodness. Here we glimpse the connection between the self-participation of Forms and the doctrine of the divine simplicity.

And all of this squeezed out of one lousy decal on the rear window of a beat-to-hell pickup truck probably owned by some illegal alien.

An Anti-Border Argument Demolished

Libertarians and conservatives share common ground, unlike conservatives and contemporary liberals (i.e., leftists); but on some issues libertarians are as loony as the looniest liberal.  One such issue is open borders.  Deogolwulf at The Joy of Curmudgeonry supplies the requisite refutation of one open border argument:
One sometimes hears the following enthymeme: most of nature does not have borders, therefore, mankind should not have borders. The enthymematic form leaves unspoken a premise which the argument must have in the logical form, to which a man who makes the argument is rationally committed, and which in this case stands as follows: mankind should not have that which most of nature does not have, wherefrom it follows that mankind should not have reason, thought, or speech, nor of course the fruits thereof: no philosophy, religion, science, mathematics, good books, half-witted arguments, clothing, tea-kettles, bank-holidays, and so on, given that most of nature does not have these things. Maybe here is the unspoken urge of those who appeal to the “freedom” of non-human nature as the model for human nature: to be lifted of the burden of rational nature and to live without thought or underpants; yet maybe still further, for most of nature is also without life.

Are Facts Perceivable? An Aporetic Pentad

'The table is against the wall.'  This is a true contingent sentence.  How do I know that it is true except by seeing (or otherwise sense perceiving) that the table is against the wall?  And what is this seeing if not the seeing of a fact, where a fact is not a true proposition but the truth-maker of a true proposition?  This seeing of a fact  is not the seeing of a table (by itself), nor of a wall (by itself), nor of the pair of these two physical objects, nor of a relation (by itself).  It is the seeing of a table's standing in the relation of being against a wall.  It is the seeing of a truth-making fact.  (So it seems we must add facts to the categorial inventory.)  The relation, however, is not visible, as are the table and the wall.  So how can the fact be visible, as it apparently must be if I am to be able to see (literally, with my  eyes) that the table is against the wall? That is our problem. 

Let 'Rab' symbolize a contingent relational truth about observables such as 'The table is against the wall.'  We can then set up the problem as an aporetic pentad:

1. If one knows that Rab, then one knows this by seeing that Rab (or by otherwise sense-perceiving it).
2. To see that Rab is to see a fact.
3. To see a fact is to see all its constituents.
4. The relation R is a constituent of the fact that Rab
5. The relation R is not visible (or otherwise sense-perceivable).

The pentad is inconsistent: the conjunction of any four limbs entails the negation of the remaining one.  To solve the problem, then, we must reject one of the propositions.  But which one?

(1) is well-nigh undeniable: I sometimes know that the cat is on the mat, and I know that the cat is on the mat by seeing that she is. How else would I know that the cat is on the mat?  I could know it on the basis of the testimony of a reliable witness, but then how would the witness know it?  Sooner or later there must be an appeal to direct seeing.  (5) is also undeniable: I see the cat; I see the mat; but I don't see the relation picked out by 'x is on y.'  And it doesn't matter whether whether you assay relations as relation-instances or as universals.  Either way, no relation appears to the senses.

Butchvarov denies (2), thereby converting our pentad into an argument against facts, or rather an argument against facts about observable things.  (See his "Facts" in Javier Cumpa ed., Studies in the Ontology of Reinhardt Grossmann, Ontos Verlag 2010, pp. 71-93, esp. pp. 84-85.)  But if there are no facts about observable things, then it is reasonable to hold that there are no facts at all.

So one solution to our problem is the 'No Fact Theory.'  One problem I have with Butchvarov's denial of facts is that (1) seems to entail (2).  Now Butch grants (1).  (That is a loose way of saying that Butch says things in his "Facts' article that can be reasonably interpreted to mean that if (1) were presented to him, then would grant it.)  So why doesn't he grant (2)?  In other words, if I can see (with my eyes) that the cat is on the mat, is not that excellent evidence that I am seeing a fact and not just a cat and a mat?  If you grant me that I sometimes see that such-and-such, must you not also grant me that I sometimes see facts? 

And if there are no facts,then how do we explain the truth of contingently true sentences such as 'The cat is on the mat'? There is more to the truth of this sentence than the sentence that is true.  The sentence is not just true; it is true because of something external to it.  And what could that be?  It can't be the cat by itself, or the mat by itself, or the pair of the two.  For the pair would exist if the sentence were false.  'The cat is not on the mat' is about the cat and the mat and requires their existence just as much as 'The cat is on the mat.'  The truth-maker, then, must have a proposition-like structure, and the natural candidate is the fact of the cat''s being on the mat.  This is a powerful argument for the admission of facts into the categorial inventory.

Another theory arises by denying (3).  But this denial is not plausible.  If I see the cat and the mat, why can't I see the relation — assuming that I am seeing a fact and that a fact is composed of its constituents, one of them being a relation?  As Butch asks, rhetorically, "If you supposed that the relational fact is visible, but the relation is not, is the relation hidden?  Or too small to see?"  (85)

A third theory comes of denying (4).  One might think to deny that R is a constituent of the fact of a's standing in R to b.  But surely this theory is a nonstarter. If there are relational facts, then relations must be constituents of some facts. 

Our problem seems to be insoluble.  Each limb makes a very strong claim on our acceptance.  But they cannot all be true.  

A Summary of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals

If you want to understand the Left, their tactics, their ruthlessness, and their imperviousness to ethical considerations, then you need to read Alinksy.  Summary here.  You will then understand what is behind the outrageous attacks of leftist scum bags, such as this guy, on conservatives.  They see politics as warfare, and they believe the end justifies the means.

David Brooks on the Vigorous Virtues

David Brooks makes some good points in The Vigorous Virtues, but ends on a silly and naive note:

Finally, there is the problem of the social fabric. Segmented societies do not thrive, nor do ones, like ours, with diminishing social trust. Nanny-state government may have helped undermine personal responsibility and the social fabric, but that doesn’t mean the older habits and arrangements will magically regrow simply by reducing government’s role. For example, there has been a tragic rise in single parenthood, across all ethnic groups, but family structures won’t spontaneously regenerate without some serious activism, from both religious and community groups and government agencies.

First of all, no one thinks that a reduction in the role of government  "will magically regrow . . . the older habits and arrangements."  So that was a silly thing to write.  Such  a reduction is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of a reversal of American decline.  Second, only a liberal could believe that government activism could lead to a flourishing of the 'vigorous virtues'  of self-reliance, personal responsibility, industriousness and a passion for freedom.  Action is required, but at the level of the individual, the family, the neighbohood, the community, the church, the school.

These virtues are what make good government possible.  The notion that government can inculcate them is silly.  The inculcation occurs primarily in the family.  But what does government do? It undermines the family. 

On a positive note, David Brooks is a very entertaining and mainly sane writer and proof that the leftist rag-of-record, the NYT, hasn't completely gone to hell on its opinion pages.

Why Blog?

To know your own mind.  To actualize your own mind. To attract a few like-minded travellers on the road to truth.  (And to  learn how to write in this pithy, telegraphic, and  non-academic style.)

The Slanderous Left

When they lie about us we must tell the truth about them.  We must expose them for the moral scum that they are. The examples of their hate-driven mendacity are legion, but here is a particularly egregious instance of race-baiting slander.  Representative Andre Carson, D-Indiana, a leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said the following: 

Some of these folks in Congress would love to see us as second-class citizens. Some of them in Congress right now of this tea party movement would love to see you and me … hanging on a tree . . .

Gibson Guitars and the Totalitarian Left

ES-335 TD 
My title is not meant to suggest that there is a totalitarian Left and a non-totalitarian Left; the Left as Left is totalitarian.  There are innumerable examples.  I was once a proud owner of a Gibson ES-335 TD (pictured above). I foolishly sold it during a period of youthful poverty.  Dumbest thing I ever did.  So this attack of our leftist government on Gibson caught my eye. Excerpt from the article by Bob Barr:

In 2000, Charlton Heston, then serving as president of the National Rifle Association, and fighting gun control proposals, held a flintlock rifle over his head and declared famously, “from my cold dead hands.” Gibson’s CEO needs to rally freedom-loving Americans similarly; raising a Les Paul Gibson guitar over his head. All Americans who believe in freedom and limited government should come to Gibson’s defense; not just those who are guitar players.

Another recent example of governmental overreach is the 'lunch-line bully' legislation which makes of bullying at a school a police matter. 

Here again we see demonstrated the complete lack of common sense on the Left, and a fundamental difference between Right and Left.  Conservatives solve problems at the  individual level, or at the local level of the family, the church, the school, the neighborhood.  They bring government in only as a last resort, and then local government before state government before federal government.  The approach is bottom-up.  The leftist approach is top-down.  A fundamental difference. 

Original Sin and Eastern Orthodoxy

There was another point I wanted to make re: John Farrell's Forbes piece, Can Theology Evolve?  Farrell writes, "The Eastern Orthodox Churches, for example, do not accept the doctrine of Original Sin . . . ." I think this claim needs some nuancing.   (Here is my first Farrell post.)

First of all, Eastern Orthodoxy certainly accepts the doctrine of the Fall, and so accepts the doctrine of Original Sin, unless there is some reason to distinguish the two.  Timothy Ware, expounding the Orthodox doctrine, writes, "Adam's fall consisted essentially in his disobedience of the will of God; he set up his own will against the divine will, and so by his own act he separated himself from God." (The Orthodox Church, Penguin 1964, p. 227.)  If anything counts as Original Sin, this act of disobedience does.  So, at first blush, the Fall and Original Sin are the same 'event.'  Accepting the first, Orthodoxy accepts the second.

But both 'events' are also 'states' in which post-Adamic, postlapsarian man finds himself.  He is in the state or condition of original sinfulness and in the state or condition of fallenness.  This fallen state is one of moral corruption and mortality.  This belief  is common to the Romans, the Protestants, and the Orthodox.  But it could be maintained that while we  inherit Adam's corruption and mortality, we don't inherit his guilt.  And here is where there is an important difference between the Romans and the Protestants, on the one hand, and the Eastern Orthodox, on the other.  The latter subscribe to Original Sin but not to Original Guilt.  Timothy Ware:  "Men (Orthodox usually teach) automatically inherit Adam's corruption and mortality, but not his guilt:  they are only guilty in so far as by their own free choice they imitate Adam." (229)

I conclude that Farrell should have said, not that the Orthodox do not accept Original Sin, but that they do not accept Original Guilt.  Or he could have said that the Orthodox do not accept the Roman Catholic doctrine of Original Sin which includes the fomer idea.  Actually, given the context this is probably what he meant.

There is something repugnant to reason about the doctrine of Original Guilt.  How can I be held morally responsible for what someone else has done?  That is a morally obnoxious notion, as obnoxious as the notion behind calls for reparations for blacks.  Surely I am not morally responsible for crimes committed in the 19th century.  The more I think about it, the more appealing the Orthodox doctrine becomes.