Author: Bill Vallicella

A Liberal Asks: What are the Bases of Liberal Opposition to Religion?

Harriet E. Baber, professor of philosophy, "unrepentant liberal," and proprietor of The Enlightenment Project writes,

I'm an academic. Most of my friends and colleagues are atheists, have no sympathy for religion of any kind and, in particular, detest Christianity. Being a good liberal I read good liberal sources because I like to read people who agree with me but when it comes to religion they don't agree with me. [. . .] As a Christian, I am exceedingly pissed off about about being characterized as Other, and not only Other but Dangerous Other. What is the problem?

Is it because we hold beliefs you regard as false or flat out stupid? I have some sympathy with that because I don't have any sympathy with stupidity. [. . .]

Is it because you take Christianity to be a moral and, more importantly, political agenda, putting a lid on sexual expression and generally making people miserable?

Which is it? Or is it something completely different? I'm just curious. OK, not just. I want to convert the wor[l]d.

I would certainly not characterize myself as a liberal as this term is popularly understood, but I am deeply sympathetic to religion, though also quite critical of it as readers of this blog know. Like Baber, I am puzzled by the depth of the animus against religion, Christianity in particular, that emanates from the Left.  Why the blind, raging hostility to it?  Why the inability to see anything good in it?  Why the fulminations of people like A. C. "Gasbag" Grayling?  As I see it, the following are some of the main reasons why otherwise intelligent liberals oppose religion.  It is obvious that not every person who self-identifies as 'liberal' is opposed to religion; it is equally obvious that most are.  So when I speak of liberals I mean most contemporary liberals.

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Dorothy Healey on Political Correctness

Communism as a political force, though not quite dead, is moribund; but one of its offspring, Political Correctness, is alive and kicking especially in the universities, the courts, in the mainstream media, in Hollywood, in the Democrat Party, and indeed wherever liberals and leftists dominate. This is one of the reasons why I am interested in the history of Communism. I want to understand PC, and to understand PC one must understand the CP, for the former is child of the latter.

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Opposition to Abortion Need Not be Religiously Based

It is commonly assumed that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises. To show that this assumption is false, only one counterexample is needed. What follows is an anti-abortion argument that does not invoke any religious tenet:

(1) Infanticide is morally wrong; (2) There is no morally relevant difference between abortion and infanticide; ergo, (3) Abortion is morally wrong.

Whether one accepts this argument or not, it clearly invokes no religious premise. It is therefore manifestly incorrect to say or imply that all opposition to abortion is religiously-based. Theists and atheists alike can make use of the above argument.

Is it a good argument? Well, it is valid as logicians use this term: if one accepts the premises, then one must accept the conclusion. That is a logical ‘must’: one who accepts the premises but balks at the conclusion embraces a contradiction. But there is nothing to stop the argument from being run in reverse: Deny the conclusion, then deny one or both of the premises. Thus, one might argue from ~(3) and (2) to ~(1). Someone who argues in this way is within his logical rights, but is saddled with having to swallow the moral acceptability of infanticide.

Louis Lavelle on the Need for Enemies

Louis Lavelle, The Dilemma of Narcissus, p. 125:

I need the reassurance and the help of friends, but I need men's hatred too. It tests me, forces me to become aware of my limitations, to grow, to perform a work of ceaseless self-purification; it makes me more and more faithful to myself, protects me against all the temptations to take the easy way to 'success'; it compels me to fall back on what is deepest, most secret and most spiritual in me, where those who hate me are powerless to hurt, where they meet no object into which to fix their claws, and nothing they can destroy.

Is God in Bad Taste? Some Anti-Searlean Remarks

In Mind, Language and Society, John R. Searle writes:

In earlier generations, books like this one would have had to contain either an atheistic attack on or a theistic defense of traditional religion. [. . .] Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not to be discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.

What has happened? [. . .] I believe that something much more radical than a decline in religious belief has taken place. For us, the educated members of society, the world has become demystified. . . . we no longer take the mysteries we see in the world as expressions of supernatural meaning. We no longer think of odd occurrences as cases of God performing speech acts in the language of miracles. Odd occurrences are just occurrences we do not understand. The result of this demystification is that we have gone beyond atheism to the point where the issue no longer matters in the way it did to earlier generations. (pp. 34-35)

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On Searle: Irreducibility Without Dualism?

As I said earlier, John R. Searle is a great philosophical critic. Armed with muscular prose, common sense, and a surly (Searle-ly?) attitude, he shreds the sophistry of Dennett and Co. But I have never quite understood his own solution to the mind-body problem. Herewith, some notes on one aspect of my difficulties and his.

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Searle, Dennett, and Zombies

A zombie is a critter that is physically and behaviorally exactly like a human being (or any being that we consider to be conscious) but lacks consciousness. That is a stipulative definition, so don't argue with me about it. Just accept it. I'll use 'zombie' to refer to human zombies and won't worry about cat zombies, etc.

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Zombie Girl: But She’s Not There!

The Zombies were a 1960's British Invasion rock group that had a couple of smash singles before vanishing into the oblivion whence they sprang. Out and about one Saturday afternoon, surfing the FM band, I came across one of their hits, "She's Not There." I have heard it countless times, and it is probably playing in your head right now, dear reader. (I apologize for the meme infestation.)

Suddenly, after all these years, the song assumed New Meaning, Deep Meaning. The Zombies were singing about a philosophical zombie! The refrain, "But she's not there" referred to the light (of consciousness) being out in the poor lass.  (And how do you know that said light was not out in them as well?)

A Heideggerian could gloss the situation as follows. To be there is to be a case of Dasein, Da-Sein. The girl was vorhanden all right, and perhaps even zuhanden (as a tool for sexual gratification), aber sie war nicht da, nicht ein Fall vom Dasein. She was a Black Forest zombie.

Can Consciousness Be Explained?

To answer this question we need to know what we mean by 'explain' and how it differs from 'explain away.'

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Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant’s Birthday

Kant-so Immanuel Kant was born on this day in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 31 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978.  But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 31 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)

So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30.  Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 285th birthday. Sapere aude!

Cartoon borrowed from site of Slobodan Bob Zunjic

Anarchism is to Political Philosophy as Skepticism is to Epistemology

In Nicole Hassoun's NDPR review of Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan (eds.), Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?, Ashgate, 2008, we read:

Anarchism should be of interest [to social liberals] because it plays the role in political philosophy that skepticism plays in epistemology — raising the question of what, if anything, could justify a state in the way that brains in vats, etc. raise the question of what, if anything, could justify beliefs. The debate between anarchists and libertarians should be of interest because if the anarchists are right then libertarianism commits one to anarchism. So, social liberals who take libertarianism seriously may have to take anarchism seriously too.

I was struck by the notion that anarchism is as it were political philosophy's skepticism.  A fruitful analogy.  The anarchist is skeptical about the moral justifiability of the state in the way in which the epistemological skeptic is skeptical about whether what we take to be knowledge really is knowledge.  There is a strong temptation, one I feel, to revert to a double insistence: first, that we have knowledge of the external world whether or not we can answer every conceivable objection to the possibility of such knowledge; and second, that some states are morally justified whether or not we we can explain to everyone's statisfaction what it is that confers moral justifiability on them.

Perhaps the right atitude is as follows.  Provisionally, we should just accept that some beliefs about the external world amount to knowledge and that some states are morally justified.  Ultimately, however, this is not a philosophically satisfactory attitude.  One wants rational insight in both cases.  And so we should keep working on the problems.  But lacking as we do proof of the impossibility of knowledge and of the moral unjustifiability of the state, we have no good reason to abandon our commonsense views about the existence of knowledge and the moral justifiability of some states.  You cannot be a philosopher without being a procedural skeptic; but if your skepticism hardens into dogmatic denial of the commonsensical, then the burden of proof is on you.

 

Deus Ex Machina: Leibniz Contra Malebranche

I have been searching the 'Net and various databases such as JSTOR without success for a good article on deus ex machina objections in philosophy.  What exactly is a deus ex machina (DEM)?  When one taxes a theory or an explanatory posit with DEM, what exactly is one alleging?  How does a DEM differ from a legitimate philosophical explanation that invokes divine or some other nonnaturalistic agency?  Since it is presumably the case that not every recourse to divine agency in philosophical theories is a DEM, what exactly distinguishes legitimate recourse to divine agency from DEM? Does anyone have any references for me?  Herewith, some preliminary exploratory notes on deus ex machina.

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The Boston Marathon and the Return of “Boston Billy”

Bill Rodgers 2009 Today is Patriot's Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the  occasion of the 113th running of the Boston Marathon, the grandpappy of them all.  My mind drifts back to my own attempt 30 years ago in 1979.  Like Bill Rodgers in 1999, I dropped out at Heartbreak Hill, 21.3 miles into it.  I was running with a knee injury, chondromalacia patellae, having foolishly overtrained.  Not only did I mess up my knee training for Boston, I trashed my immune system: the following summer I got three infections which developed with no visible external cause.  One day, upon returning from a long hard training run, I urinated blood: a sure sign of working too hard.  Akrasia in reverse, one might call it: I got caught up in the flush of burgeoning running prowess and I failed to discipline my discipline.  Just as it sometimes takes courage to be a 'chicken,' it sometimes takes discipline to cut yourself slack.  The spirit is famously willing where the flesh is weak.  The theory of training can be summed up in one sentence: you tear yourself down in order to build yourself back up at a slightly higher level of fitness.  But plenty of rest is essential to the equation.  A little common sense and cross-training can't hurt either.

Age and prostate cancer have taken their toll on Rodgers, who is now 61.  He completed today's 26.2 mile race but it took him 3:59.  That averages to a bit more than 9 minutes per mile.  A far cry from the sub-5 minute miles of the glory days.  He is no longer competitive even in his age group.  But every finisher is a hero so long as he does his best.  And perhaps those whose pace is slower, because they suffer longer, are more heroic than the elite competitors.  As George Sheehan wrote when he was seventy-something,

. . . every finisher warrants applause, especially those farthest back.  How does their 95 percent effort differ from the winners'?  It doesn't — not in pain, not in fatigue, not in shortness of breath.  In every respect, I race at the very edge of what I can handle, and I do it longer.  Those of us who ran along with the leaders in years past and are now in the bottom third of the finishers know this firsthand . . . . When I finish, I will stand at the end of the chute and watch as those who ran behind me come through.  And I'll see that all are spent, some near collapse.  No one has done less than their best.  And their best, in a real sense, is better than everyone who finished ahead of them.  They are winners and heroes all. (On Running to Win, Rodale 1992, p. 147.)