Author: Bill Vallicella

The Islamic Car and Some Parodies

According to this source,

Malaysia, Iran and Turkey plan to build an "Islamic car" fitted with a compass to find the direction of Mecca, and a compartment to keep the Koran in, the Malaysian state news agency said.

This invites parody.

Islamic Car, Turkish kismet model: Very economical inasmuch as it is devoid of all safety features. Reflects the popular belief that "when  your number is up, your number is up." But the Nazar Boncuk comes  standard.

Buddhist car: This amphibious vehicle is specially equipped to transport its passengers across the river of Samsara.

Mahayana model: This Buddhist SUV is known as the "Greater Vehicle" because of its superior cargo capacity.

Hinayana model: This Buddhist subcompact, popularly known as the "Lesser Vehicle," conducts to the same ultimate destination as the Greater Vehicle but with greater fuel economy.

Hezbollah Hummer: Specially designed to explode upon impact.

Luther's Lemon: The attempt to power this baby on faith alone (sola fide) resulted in a vehicle that works not.

Commie Car: Designed for "people not profits," this unreliable  contraption delivers neither.

Catholic car: This vehicle features an onboard navigation system  premised on the truth that "all roads lead to Rome."

Mao's Maserati: This sports car, produced by slave labor under the watchful eye of Italian designers, is available only to high Party officials. It makes a "great leap forward" in under ten seconds.

Gorbachev's Covertible: This vehicle featured plenty of glasnost, but  like the Edsel, was soon out of production.

The Mormon Machine: Features a special jump seat for spare wives, but the beverage holders are conspicuous by their absence.

The Race Car: A liberal favorite, the Race Car conducts one to a racial destination no matter what the starting point.

The Bright Car: Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and their fellow 'brights' drive these. They exhibit a marvelous design that came about through the marvel of blind engineering.

Trotsky’s Faith

Trotsky The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him.  Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe.  Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have been a revolutionary; and for forty-two I have fought under the banner of Marxism . . . I will die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist.  My faith in the communist future of mankind is no less ardent, indeed it is even stronger now than it was in the days of my youth. [. . .] Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air might enter more freely into my room.  I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight is everywhere.  Life is beautiful.  Let the future generations cleanse it of evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full. (Patenaude, pp. 234-235)

No pie-in-the-sky for old Trotsky, but pie-in-the-future.  Those of us who take religion seriously needn't deny that it can serve as opium for some.  But if one can see that, then one should also be able to see that secular substitutes for religion can be just as narcotic.   Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?  Why is a faith in Man and his future more worthy of credence than faith in God?

I should think that it is less credible.  Note first that there is no Man, only men.  And we human beings are a cussedly diverse and polyglot lot, a motley assortment of ornery sons-of-bitches riven by tribalisms and untold other factors of division.  The notion that we are all going to work together to create a workers' paradise or any sort of earthly paradise is a notion too absurd to swallow given what we know about human nature, and in particular, what we know of the crimes of communism.  In the 20th century, communists  murdered 100 million to achieve their utopia without achieving it.

We know Man does not exist, but we do not know that God does not exist. Religious faith, therefore, has a bit more to recommend it than secular faith.  You say God does not exist? That may be so. But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard,  is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.

There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.

Trotsky, as you can see from the quotation, believed in a redemptive future.  Life in this world is beautiful and will be cleansed by future generations of evil, oppression, and violence.  But even if this fantasy future were achieved, it could not possibly redeem the countless millions who have suffered and died in the most horrible ways since time beyond memory.  Marxist redemption-in-the-future would be a pseudo-redemption even if it were possible, which it isn't. 

There is also the moral and practical absurdity of a social programme that employs present evil, oppression, and violence in order to extirpate future evil, oppression, and violence.  Once the totalitarian State is empowered to do absolutely anything in furtherance of its means-justifying ends it will turn on its own creators as it did on Trotsky.  Because there is no such thing as The People, 'power to the people'  is an empty and dangerous phrase and a cover for the tyranny of the vanguard or the dictator.  The same goes for 'dictatorship of the proletariat.'  What it comes to in practice is the dictatorship of the dictator.

The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana.

It is interesting to compare Edith Stein and Lev Davidovich Bronstein.  Each renounced the present world and both set out in quest of a Not-Yet, one via contemplation, the other via  revolution.  Which chose the path of truth, which that of illusion?  it is of course possible that both quests were illusory.

How strange the stage of this life and the characters that pass upon it, their words and gestures resounding for a time before fading away.

John Gardner and Mannered Prose

Over lunch yesterday I showed a writer friend the first page of John C. Gardner's Mickelsson's Ghosts (Vintage 1985).  I asked him whether the opening paragraphs made him want to read on.  He didn't answer that question, though his handing of the book back to me without a request to borrow it hinted in the negative direction.  But he did describe Gardner's writing as "mannered."  This morning I opened Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist (Harper & Row, 1983) and stumbled by chance on this passage:

If a writer cares more for his language than for other elements of ficition, if he continually calls our attention away from the story to himself, we call him "mannered" and eventually we tire of him.  (Smart editors tire of him quickly and reject him.)  (p. 11)

Here are the first three sentences of MG:

Sometimes the sordidness of his present existence, not to mention the stifling, clammy heat of the apartment his finances forced him to take, on the third floor of an ugly old house in Binghamton's West Side — "the nice part of town," everybody said (God have mercy on those who had to live in the bad parts) — made Peter Mickelsson clench his square yellow teeth in anger and once, in a moment of rage and frustration greater than usual, bring down the heel of his fist on the heavy old Goodwill oak table where his typewriter, papers, and books were laid out, or rather strewn.  He'd intended to split the thing in two, though perhaps the intent was not quite conscious.  In any case, no such luck.

Is that "mannered" writing?  My friend and I will agree that that writing like this won't  make you any money.  So perhaps the writing is mannered by the standards of the trash that sells.  But I'd say it is good writing, in part because of and not despite the elaborate syntax.  I shudder to think what some contemporary bonehead of a thirty-something editor would do to the opening sentence — assuming he had the attention span to get through it.  Back in 1985, those three sentences drew me into the novel, all 590 pages of which I read. And I dip into it again from time to time, rereading marked passages.

A curious bit of trivia: on page 486 there is a reference to "Castaneda — Carlos not Hector — . . . ."  Sic transit gloria mundi: Hector is as little read today as Gardner.  I don't know whether anyone still reads Carlos.  But I do know he is less worth reading than the other two.

Is Divine Simplicity Consistent With Contingent Divine Knowledge?

The day before yesterday, I sketched the problem mentioned in the title.  Today I offer a more rigorous presentation of the problem and examine a solution.  The problem can be set forth as an aporetic triad:

1. Every free agent is a libertarianly-free (L-free) agent.

2. God is ontologically simple (where simplicity is an entailment of aseity and vice versa).

3. There are contingent items of divine knowledge that do not depend on divine creation, but do depend on creaturely freedom.

Each limb of the above triad has a strong, though not irresistible, claim on a classical theist's acceptance.   As for (1), if God is L-free, as he must be on classical theism, then it is reasonable to maintain that every free agent is L-free.  For if  'could have done otherwise' is an essential ingredient in the analysis of 'Agent A freely performs action X,' then it is highly plausible to maintain that this is so whether the agent is God or Socrates.  Otherwise, 'free' will mean something different in the two cases.  As for (2), some reasons were given earlier for  thinking that a theism that understands itself must uphold God's ontological simplicity inasmuch as it is implied by the divine aseity.  An example of (3) is Oswald's shooting of Kennedy.   The act was freely performed by Oswald, and the proposition that records it is a contingent truth known by God in his omniscience.

But although each of (1)-(3) is plausibly maintained and is typically maintained by theists who uphold the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS), they cannot all be true.  Therein resides the problem.  Any two limbs imply the negation of the third.  Thus:  (1) & (3) –> ~(2); (1) & (2) –> ~(3); (2) & (3) –> ~(1). 

To illustrate, let us consider how (1) and (3), taken together, entail the negation of (2).  Being omniscient, God knows that Oswald freely chose to kill Kennedy.   But Oswald's L-freedom precludes us from saying that God's knowledge of this contingent fact depends solely on the divine will.  For it also depends on Oswald's L-free authorship of his evil deed, an authorship that God cannot prevent or override once he has created L-free agents.  But this is inconsistent with the divine aseity.  For to say that God is a se is to say that God is not dependent on anything distinct from himself.  But God has the the property of being such that he knows that Oswald freely chose to kill Kennedy, and his having this property depends on something outside of God's control, namely, Oswald's L-free choice.  In this way the divine aseity is compromised, and with it the divine simplicity.

It seems, then, that our aporetic triad is an inconsistent triad.  The problem it represents can be solved by denying either (1) or (2) or (3).  Since (3) cannot be plausibly denied, this leaves (1) and (2).  Some will deny the divine simplicity.  But an upholder of the divine simplicity has the option of denying (1) and maintaining that, while God is L-free, creaturely agents are free only in a compatibilist sense.  If creaturely agents are C-free, but not L-free, then Oswald could not have done otherwise, and it is possible for the upholder of divine simplicity to say that that Oswald's C-free choice is no more a threat to the divine aseity than the fact that God knows the contingent truth that creaturely agents exist.  The latter is not a threat to the divine aseity because the existence of creaturely agents derives from God in a way that Oswald's L-free choice does not derive from God. 

See Jeffrey E. Brower, Simplicity and Aseity, for this sort of solution.  I cannot see that the solution is entirely satisfactory, but it is worth considering.

John Gardner on Fiction and Philosophy

John Gardner, On Writers and Writing, p. 225:

. . . at their best, both fiction and philosophy do the same thing, only fiction does it better — though slower. Philosophy by essence is abstract, a sequence of general argument controlled in its profluence by either logic (in old-fashioned systematic philosophy) or emotional coherence (in the intuitive philosophies of say, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard). We read the argument and it seems to flow along okay, make sense, but what we ask is, "Is this true of my mailman?" . . .

Fiction comes at questions from the other end. It traces or explores some general argument by examining a particular case in which the universal case seems implied; and in place of logic or emotional coherence — the philosopher's stepping stones — fictional argument is controlled by mimesis: we are persuaded that the characters would indeed do exactly what we are told they do and say . . . . If the mimesis convinces us, then the question we ask is opposite to that we ask of philosophical argument; that is, we ask, "Is this true in general?"

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The Aporetics of Divine Simplicity

Thomist27 e-mails: 

Thank you first of all for a spectacular blog. I discovered Maverick Philosopher a few years ago and have been reading it regularly ever since. Through your blog, I learned that you wrote the SEP's article on divine simplicity, among similar things; I think, then, that you are qualified to answer my questions. 

My questions concern divine simplicity and divine knowledge, two nuts that I've lately been making every effort to crack. First, do you think that theism can be salvaged without absolute divine simplicity? I know that there are many theists who don't believe that God is simple, but is such a concept of Deity coherent?

I believe a case can be made, pace Alvin Plantinga and other theistic deniers of divine simplicity, that to deny the absolute ontological simplicity of God is to deny theism itself.  For what we mean by 'God' is an absolute reality, something metaphysically ultimate, "that than which no greater can be conceived." (Anselm)   Now an absolute reality cannot depend for its existence or nature or value upon anything distinct from itself.  It must be from itself alone, or a se.  Nothing could count as divine, or worthy of worship, or be an object of our ultimate concern, or be maximally great, if it lacked the property of aseity.  But the divine aseity, once it is granted, seems straightaway to entail the divine simplicity, as Aquinas argues in ST.  For if God is not dependent on anything else for his existence, nature, and value, then God is not a whole of parts, for a whole of parts depends on its parts to be and to be what it is.  So if God is a se, then he is not a composite being, but a simple being.  This implies that in God there is no real distinction between: existence and essence, form and matter, act and potency, individual and attribute, attribute and attribute.   In sum, if God is God, then God is simple.  To deny the simplicity of God is to deny the existence of God.  It is therefore possible for an atheist to argue:  Nothing can be ontologically simple, therefore, God cannot exist.

A theist who denies divine simplicity might conceivably be taxed with idolatry inasmuch as he sets up something as God that falls short of the exacting requirements of deity.  The divine transcendence would seem to require that God cannot be a being among beings, but must in some sense be Being itself . (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens:  God is not an existent but self-subsisting Existence itself.)  On the other hand, a theist who affirms divine simplicity can be taxed, and has been taxed, with incoherence.  As an aporetician first and foremost, I seek to lay bare the problem in all its complexity under suspension of the natural urge for a quick solution.


Second, if my understanding is correct, then according to the doctrine of divine simplicity, God has no intrinsic accidents. How is that compatible with divine freedom? I know it's trite, but I haven't seen a good answer to the question of how God could have properties such as having created mankind or having declined to create elves without their being just as necessary to Him as His benevolence and omnipotence (especially if He is what He does).

This is indeed a problem. On classical theism, God is libertarianly free: although he exists in every metaphysically possible world, he does not create in every such world, and he creates different things in the different worlds in which he does create.  Thus the following are accidental properties of God:  the property of creating something-or-other, and the property of creating human beings.  But surely God cannot be identical to these properties as the simplicity doctrine seems to require.  It cannot be inscribed into the very nature of God that he create Socrates given that he freely creates Socrates.  Some writers have attempted to solve this problem, but I don't know of a good solution.

Even if there's a solution to that problem, what's to be said about God's knowledge? Isn't His knowledge an intrinsic property of His? But, since the truth of a proposition like the planet Mars exists is contingent, isn't God's knowing it an accidental property, and, furthermore, an intrinsic accidental property?

Well, this too is a problem.  If S knows that p, and p is contingent, then S's knowing that p is an accidental (as opposed to essential) property of S.  Now if God is omniscient, then he knows every (non-indexical) truth, including every contingent truth. It seems to follow that God has at least as many accidental properties as there are contingent truths.  Surely these are not properties with which God could be identical, as the simplicity doctrine seems to require.  Now there must be some contingent truths in consequence of the divine freedom; but this is hard to square with the divine simplicity. 

And if it is in fact the case that God's knowledge is the cause of things, then how are we to understand His knowledge of the free actions of creatures? I know that God is supposed to be the final cause of these actions, as well as their ultimate efficient cause, but the issue is still unclear to me.

This is also a problem.  The simplicity doctrine implies that God is identical to what he knows. It follows that what he knows cannot vary from world to world.   In the actual world A, Oswald shoots Kennedy at time t.  If that was a libertarianly free action, then there is a world W in which Oswald does not shoot Kennedy at t.  Since God exists in very world, and  knows what happens in every world, he knows that in A, Oswald shoots Kennedy at t and in W that Oswald does not shoot Kennedy at t. But this contradicts the simplicity doctrine, according to which what God knows does not vary from world to world.  The simplicity doctrine thus appears to collide both with divine and human freedom.

I sincerely look forward to your addressing these questions. Thank you in advance for your consideration of these weighty matters.

I have addressed them, but not solved them.  Solutions have been proffered, but they give rise to problems of their own — something to be pursued in future posts.

Pure Indexicals Versus Demonstratives

Suppose you like Italian cold cuts and cheeses, but you are not en rapport with the names: prosciutto, mortadella, capicola, salami, provolone, ricotta. So you are reduced to pointing when you belly up to the deli counter: 'I would like a pound of this, finely sliced.'

Your use of 'this' must be accompanied by a gesture, a demonstration; your use of 'I,' however, need not be. There is no need to point to oneself when one utters the first-person singular pronoun. One can, of course, but I don't advise it. (And if you point, point to your chest, not to your groin — though it stands to reason that if the chest or the shirt on one's chest can go proxy for the self, why not the groin or the codpiece?) 'This' and 'that' are demonstratives; 'I,' 'here,' and 'now' are pure indexicals. They are pure in that there is no need for demonstration or ostension.  This much I learned from David Kaplan.

But now I notice a difference between the pure indexicals 'I' and 'now.' One can point to oneself — or at least to one's body — when uttering 'I' but one cannot point to a time or an occupant of a time (an event) when one utters 'now.' Something pointable, ostensible, can go proxy for a self, but nothing pointable can go proxy for a time. Time, you are an elusive bitch; would that I could seize you and stop you. (Verweile doch, du bist so schön.) 'Here' appears midway between 'I' and 'now': one can point to a place by pointing to its occupant. 'I am here' he said, with his right index finger pointing to his chest and his left index finger pointing to his feet.

Courtesy

I suggest that we think of courtesy as a mean between rudeness and obsequiousness. The courteous are neither churls nor courtiers. This despite the etymology of 'courtesy.' (As a separate post could argue, there is no such thing as the true meaning of a word, and even if there were, etymology would not guide us to it.) To put it crudely, so that even a contemporary can get the point: the courteous neither show, nor kiss, ass.

Passion

Passion dies out in the old, but there is no credit in that. If your vices abandon you before you abandon them, you are no candidate for praise. The trick is for the young and the midstreamers to learn to control passion while there is time left to enjoy the passion-free state.

Race and Race

During my 26.2 mile trip from the Peralta trailhead to Apache Junction's Prospector Park, I had ample opportunity to observe the ethnic and social composition of my fellow marathoners.  Only two blacks did I spy, an observation in illustration of a general truth: (American) blacks are not proportionally represented at running events.  No, I am not hastily generalizing from this one observation.  I am illustrating a general truth by giving an example.  Generalization and illustration are distinct intellectual procedures.  For corroboration of the general truth, see here.  And don't tell me that I could observe only the runners that ran near me: I surveyed the whole field before the race began as I walked from the starting line to the back of the pack before the gun went off.

The tendency of liberals will be to conclude that 'racism' is at work, that blacks are being excluded, and will call for a government program to 'level the playing field' to use one of the sillier of their silly expressions.  It apparently doesn't occur to these nimrods that certain sorts of people simply have no interest in certain sorts of things.

Here is a piece on U.S. runner demographics.  Figures on race are conspicuous by their absence, a fact that reflects the political correctness of the age.  There is nothing a liberal  fears more than to be labeled a racist, and for a liberal, any mention of race makes one a racist.

Bleg: Divine Simplicity

The editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy want me to revise my Divine Simplicity entry by March 20th.  Written in 2006, it needs revision.  If anyone who knows this subject has any constructive comments on the style, content, coverage, or organization of the present entry, I'd like to hear them.  In particular, references to recent literature not included in the present bibliography would be helpful.

New Search Engine: Duck Duck Go

While on 'ego surfari' I came upon this page.  What a wonderful time to be alive, despite the general horrors of existence, not to mention those particular to our time and place and individual circumstances.  See the Whole from many sides.  There is much more to it than your foreshortened persepctives allow.  Don't obsess over the those crushed in Haitian and Chilean earthquakes when there is also bliss and beauty and beatitude in the world.  If you decry the shit, don't ignore the beautiful roses it fertilizes. 

As for the ego, it is ugly and odious  — Le moi est haïssable said Pascal famously and pensively — but that is only its night side: ego betokens spirit in us.  Only a spiritual being can say 'I' and mean it.  An answering machine can say it but not mean it.  Only an I can recognize and love a Thou and stand master of the universe in thought.  An ambiguous structure, the ego is a principle of  both alienation and union.

MACRUES, Semantic Defeaters, and Epistemic Defeaters (Peter Lupu)

(A guest post by Peter Lupu.  Editing and commentary by BV.) 

As Bill notes, we are attempting to secure and study a copy of James Anderson’s book,  Paradox in Christian Theology.  (Publication details here, including links to reviews.)  Meanwhile, I will propose here some tentative observations that Anderson’s book may or may not have addressed. These observations are inspired by the following point Bill makes in a post above as well as by some conversations we had about the subject:

“…if I cannot see that a proposition is rationally acceptable (because it appears contradictory to me) then I wouldn't know what proposition I was accepting.”

A similar point is made by Richard Cartwright in On the Logical Problem of the Trinity:  "Nor is a mystery supposed to be unintelligible, in the sense that the words in which it is expressed simply cannot be understood. After all, we are asked to believe the propositions expressed by the words, not simply that the words express some true propositions or other, we know not which."

1). Let us agree that a Trinitarian Sentence (TS) is such that

 (i) The Bible entails TS;

(ii) The surface structure (SS) of TS exhibits the logical form of a contradiction;

(iii) We are not in the position currently and may not be in the position in our present form of existence ever to construct a contradiction free formulation or deep structure (DS) for TS;

Example of a TS: "The Father is God, the Son is God, the Father is not the Son, and there is exactly one God."  The surface structure of this sentence is contradictory.

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