Author: Bill Vallicella

On Religious Pluralism and Religious Tolerance

If you are an adherent of a given religion, why ought you tolerate other religions?  We must tolerate other religions because we do not know which religion is true, if any is, and this would be something very important to know if it could be known.  So we must inquire, and our inquiry will be aided by the availability of a a number of competing religions and nonreligious belief systems. 

But toleration has limits.  No religion or nonreligious ideology may be tolerated if it doesn't respect the principle of toleration.  And so we ought not tolerate a religion whose aim is to suppress and supplant other religions and force their adherents to either convert or accept dhimmi status.  Proselytization is tolerable but only if it is non-coercive.  The minute it becomes the least bit coercive we have every right to push back vigorously.  But equally, we ought not tolerate the ideology of the New Atheists  if and to the extent that they aim to suppress religion.  But is there any such tendency among the New Atheists?  Here is Stephen Prothero (God Is Not One, Harper 2010, p. 321) on Sam Harris, one of the 'Four Horsemen' of the New Atheism:

Harris then attacked the ideal of religious tolerance as "one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss."  "Some propositions are so dangerous," he wrote in a chilling passage, "that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them."  For Harris, religious tolerance is almost as dangerous as religion itself.  Belief in God is not an opinion that must be respected; it is an evil that must be confronted.

Like me, Harris believes that toleration has limits.  Of course it does.  But Harris and Co. draw the line in the wrong place, and they do so because they are not merely opposed to fanatical religion, jihadist religion, religion that violates freedom of inquiry and autonomy of thought, but to religion as such.  For them, religion itself is the problem.  But this is a shockingly puerile view that ignores the vast differences among religions, differences that Prothero's book does a good job of setting before us in all their richness.

On an approach more nuanced than that of the New Atheist ideologues, one grasps that some religions are tolerable, some are intolerable, some antireligious ideologies are tolerable, and some are not.  If the fulminations of Harris and friends spill over into actions that involve the suppression of religion, then he and his ilk are intolerable and ought to be opposed with vigor.

My view is not merely that most religions and anti-religious ideologies ought to be tolerated, but that the existence of these competing worldviews is a good and enriching  thing in that it helps us clarify and refine and test our own views and practices and helps us progress toward truer and more life-enhancing systems of thought and practice. 

Louis Lavelle on Our Dual Nature

 Louis Lavelle, The Dilemma of Narcissus, tr. Gairdner, Allen and  Unwin, 1973, p. 165:

The centaur, the sphinx, and the siren express the idea that man emerges out of an animal, and that he never sheds his hoofs, his claws, his scales. Man is a mixture; his dual nature is what makes him man; it is the essence of his vocation and destiny. It is folly to imagine him a god or reduce him to an animal; he is more like a satyr with two natures, and it would be hard to say whether his deepest desire is to raise the animal within him to the contemplation of the divine light, or to bring the god down into his animal body, and make him feel every impulse coursing through his flesh.

I would only add that it is man's spiritual nature that allows him to make such errors as to think that he is — nothing but an animal.

Why Philosophical Problems are Important

Philosophical problems are genuine intellectual knots that show us our intellectual exigency.  They humble us, whence their importance.  They rub our noses in the infirmity of reason.  The central problems are genuine and important but humanly insoluble. That is what two millenia of philosophical experience, East and West, teaches.  Their genuineness is wrongly denied by the Ordinary Language crowd; their spiritual importance by most analytic puzzle-solvers; their absolute insolubility by the optimistic pure theory types.

A Closer Look at Material Composition and Modal Discernibility Arguments

(For David Brightly, whom I hope either to convince or argue to a standoff.)

Suppose God creates ex nihilo a bunch of TinkerToy pieces at time t suitable for assembly into various (toy) artifacts such as a house and a fort.  A unique classical mereological sum — call it 'TTS' — comes into existence 'automatically' at the instant of the creation ex nihilo of the TT pieces. (God doesn't have to do anything in addition to creating the TT pieces to bring TTS into existence.)   Suppose further that God at t  assembles the TT pieces (adding nothing and subtracting nothing) into a house.  Call this object 'TTH.'  So far we have: the pieces, their sum, and the house.  Now suppose that at t* (later than t) God annihilates all of the TT pieces.  This of course annihilates TTS and TTH.  During the interval from t to t* God maintains TTH in existence.

I set up the problem this way so as to exclude 'historical' and nonmodal considerations and thus to make the challenge tougher for my side.  Note that TTH and TTS are spatially coincident, temporally coincident, and such that every nonmodal property of the one is also a nonmodal property of the other.  Thus they have the same size, the same shape, the same weight, etc.  Surely the pressure is on to say that TTH = TTS?  Surely my opponents will come at me with their battle-cry, 'No difference without a difference-maker!'  There is no constituent of TTH that is not also a constituent of TTS.  So what could distinguish them?

Here is an argument that TTH and TTS are not identical:

1. NecId:  If x = y, then necessarily, x = y. 

2. If it is possible that ~(x = y), then ~(x = y). (From 1 by Contraposition)

3. If it is possible that TTS is not TTH, then TTS is not TTH. (From 2, by Universal Instantiation) 

4. It is possible that TTS is not TTH.  (God might have assembled the parts into a fort instead of a house or might have left them unassembled.)

5. TTS is not TTH. (From 3, 4 by Modus Ponens)

The gist of the argument is that if x = y, then they are identical in every possible world in which both of them exist.  But there are possible worlds in which TTS and TTH both exist but are not identical. (E.g., a world in which the pieces are assembled into a fort instead of a house.)  Therefore, TTS andf TTH are not identical.

If you are inclined to reject the argument, you must tell me which premise you reject.  Will it be (1)? Or will it be (4)? 

Your move, David.

 

Of Haircuts, Amphibolies, and Maxims

I got my quarterly haircut the other day.  A neighbor remarked, "I see you got a haircut," to which I responded with the old joke, "I got 'em all cut."

In this as in so many other cases the humor derives from ambiguity, in this case amphiboly (syntactic ambiguity.)  The spoken 'I see you got a haircut' can be heard as 'I see you got a hair cut.'

The neighbor laughed at the joke, but I spared him the analysis, not to mention my theory of humor, both of which would have bored him.

Two relevant maxims: 'Tailor your discourse to your audience' and 'Among regular guys be a regular guy.'  And a meta-maxim: 'Step out of your house only with maxims at the ready.'

Reason, Passion, and Persuasion

1. The cogency of an argument is neither augmented nor diminished by the passion of the arguer.  Cogency and passion are logically independent.  The same goes for the truth or falsity of an assertion.  The raising of the voice cannot transform a false claim into a true one, nor make a true one truer.

2.  What's more, any display of a passion such as anger is likely to be taken by the interlocutor as a sign  that one's argument is nothing but an expression of passion and thus as no argument at all.  He will think your aim is to impose your will on him rather than appeal to his intellect.  The interlocutor will be wrong to dismiss your argument on this ground, but you have yourself to blame for losing your cool and failing to understand human nature.  If your aim is to convince someone of something, then you must attend  not only to your thesis and its rational support, but also to the limitations of human nature in general and the particular limitations of those you are addressing.  'Tailor your discourse to your audience' is a good maxim.

3.  While bearing in mind points 1 and 2, you must also realize that a failure to show enthusiasm and commitment may also work against your project of convincing the other. 

4.  'Rhetoric' is too often employed pejoratively.  That is unfortunate.  The art of persuasion is important but difficult to master.  It is not enough to know whereof you speak; you must understand human nature if you will impart your truths to an audience.

Logic’s Limit

Logic is not to be denigrated, nor is it to be overestimated. It is an excellent vehicle for safe travel among concepts and propositions. It will save us from many an error and perhaps even lead us to a few truths. But it cannot move us beyond the plane of concepts and propositions and arguments. It aids safe passage from thought to thought, but cannot  transport us beyond thought to the source of thoughts, to their thinker, the transcendental condition without which there would not be any thoughts.  It cannot transport us to the Transdiscursive.  For that a different vehicle is needed, meditation.