This weblog turns 18 today. I won't repeat what I said on this date when she turned sweet sixteen though it still holds.
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Substack latest.
Is that why it was leaked?
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A correspondent replies:
Yes, Bill, I believe so. Someone in Sotomayor's or Kagan's office.
It was a call to action. They weren't going to let their side be blindsided.
The leaker will either be protected or, if caught, then lionized. For them, the end of Roe is the end of the world. Roberts will do for Roe what he did for Obamacare. The homes of Alito et al. will be picketed, their occupants threatened to revise their opinion. The enemy's been planning for this as they have for the next election.
Sadly, our political opponents are indeed enemies. If you are one of us, broadly conservative and/or classically liberal, and you do not understand this, then you are a useful idiot. One of the reasons the destructive Left is so hard to defeat, despite the obvious lunacy of so many of their assertions and policies, is because of this very large group of useful idiots. It includes roughly half of the Republicans in government, and a large segment of rank-and-file Democrats who live in the past, or for some other reason are oblivious to the threat the 'woke' folk pose to them, their progeny, their beliefs, their security, and their way of life. If you are not on the hard Left and you voted for Biden, then you are a useful idiot. I have noticed, however, that people do not like being called idiots; adding the qualifier 'useful' does little to mitigate their umbrage. For they understand that they are being called useless to the cause of the Sane and the Reasonable.
What follows is a comment by David Brightly which just came in but is buried in the comments to an old entry. I have added my responses in blue.
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I have just spotted that you quote EJL as saying,
This, of course, raises the question of how we can so much as talk about Caesar now that he no longer exists simpliciter — how we can speak about 'that which is not.'
My understanding is that 'no longer' is a marker of a tensed verb. So Lowe appears to be using 'to exist simpliciter' as if it were tensed. This leaves me somewhat confused. I'm not at all sure that 'simpliciter' adds (or subtracts) anything here. Lowe's paragraph, minus the 'simpliciter', makes sense as ordinary tensed English.
BV: As you see it, David, 'Caesar no longer exists' and 'Caesar no longer exists simpliciter' express exactly the same thought. That same thought is expressed by 'Caesar existed but Caesar does not exist (present tense). 'Simpliciter' adds nothing to 'exists.'
I suppose that you will say that the old Platonic riddle of nonbeing — how can we speak about 'that which is not' when that which is not is not 'there' to be spoken of — is a pseudo-problem, at least when raised with respect to wholly past items. I suppose that you will say that we can now refer to Caesar because he existed, and that nothing more need be said. Your view, I take it, is that Caesar can, at the present time, be an object of successful reference and a logical subject of true predications without existing simpliciter or tense-neutrally. It suffices for successful reference to Caesar who is now nothing that he was something, i.e., that he existed. You might take it a step further and argue that the Platonic pseudo-problem arises from a failure to stick to ordinary tensed English, and that the 'problem' is dissolved (as opposed to solved) by simply using the tenses of our beloved mother tongue in their ordinary work-a-day ways and not allowing language to "go on holiday" (Wittgenstein).
To put words in your mouth: you are saying that there is no genuine problem about the reality of the past; said reality consists solely in the fact that we can use the past tense to make true statements, e. g., 'Churchill smoked cigars.'
Have I understood your position? If I have, then what we are really discussing is whether the debate that divides presentists and 'eternalists' is a genuine debate or instead a pseudo-debate sired by a misuse of language.
Also, further down you say,
However things stand with respect to the future, the past surely seems to have a share in reality.
Could you not have said '…the past seems to have had a share…'? Again,
The question is whether what WAS has a share in reality as opposed to being annihilated, reduced to nothing, by the passage of time. [my emphasis]
BV: I don't say it your way because I believe that 'existence simpliciter' has a specific, non-redundant use. I believe that one can sensibly ask whether what exists (present tense) exhausts what exists simpliciter. I believe that both of the following are substantive claims:
a) Only what exists (present tense) exists!
b) It is not the case that only what exists (present tense) exists!
For me, (a) is not a tautology, and (b) is not a contradiction. Why not? Because, for me, if x exists simpliciter, it does not follow that x exists (present tense). So if (a) is true, it is true as a matter of metaphysics, not as a matter of formal logic. And if (a) is false, it is not false as a matter of formal logic but as a matter of metaphysics.
You, David, do not admit the distinction between what exists (present tense) and what exists simpliciter. For you, 'exists simpliciter' collapses into 'exists' (present tense).
You then return to the truthmaker objection. It seems to me quite natural and unproblematic to say that the past both had a share in reality and has been reduced to nothing. Problems only appear when we say the past both has a share in reality and has been reduced to nothing.
BV: But of course I don't say that. It is contradictory to say that the past has a share in reality and has been reduced to nothing. I say that there are very good reasons to hold that the past is not nothing, that is is real (actual, not merely possible; factual not fictional) but merely lacks temporal presentness.
Suppose that a certain building B has been completely demolished. On your view B has been reduced to nothing. All will agree that B is now nothing. But you want to say more. You want to say that what is now nothing is nothing sans phrase (without qualification). You want to say that what is nothing now is nothing without any temporal qualification. Can you prove that? Can you refute the view that wholly past items, which by definition are nothing now, have (tenselessly) a share in reality? Can you prove that the past — past times, past events, processes, continuants, etc. — are simply nothing as opposed to nothing now?
The past is arguably actual, not merely possible, and factual, not fictional. If so it is (tenselessly) real, and therefore not nothing. The passage of time does not consign what has become wholly past to nothingness. Can you refute this view? I grant that it has its own problems. The main problem, as it seems to me, is to specify what it means to say that a temporal item — an item in time — exists tenselessly.
My view is that these problems about the relation of time and existence are genuine but insoluble. Your view, I take it, is that the problems are pseudo-problems susceptible of easy dissolutions if we just adhere to ordinary ways of talking.
Have I located the bone of contention? Or have I 'dislocated' it? (A pun I couldn't resist.)
Substack latest. A Boethian-Hegelian rumination.
It can't hurt to back up a bit to examine some definitions, make some distinctions, nail down some terminology, and catalog some questions. See how much you agree with.
1) A little girl falls into a mine shaft but is pulled out three days later alive and well. People call it a 'miracle.' That is a misuse of language because the unlikelihood of an event does not justify labelling it miraculous.
2) David Hume's two-part definition has dominated subsequent discussions. The gist of his definition is that a miracle is "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity . . . ." (Enquiry, sec. x, part i)
3) Hume's definition raises a number of questions. What is a law of nature? What is it to 'transgress' or violate a law of nature? Could a violation of a law of nature occur without supernatural agency? If so, would it count as a miracle? If a supernatural agent such as God brings about something by an act of will, but without violating any natural law, is that a miraculous bringing-about? If God ("the Deity") is involved in every miracle, what attributes must God have to be so-involved? The God of Aquinas could be a miracle worker, but what about the deus sive natura of Spinoza?
4) Laws of nature must not be confused with laws in the political-legal realm. And this despite the use of 'transgression,' 'violation,' and 'law' with respect to both kinds of law, and despite talk of laws of nature 'governing' this or that phenomenon and of phenomena 'obeying' laws. Two differences come immediately to mind: legal laws, unlike laws of nature, are enacted by legislatures and need enforcement. Kepler's laws of planetary motion, for example, were neither enacted by a legislature nor do they need enforcement. There is no need for an 'astro-cop' to make sure that the planets keep to their elliptical orbits, or to ensure that no signal exceeds the cosmic speed limit, 186,282 mi/sec. This ties in with another apparent difference. Legal laws are prescriptive, permissive, or proscriptive statements; statements of laws of nature are merely descriptive: they merely codify what happens. And even if they codify what must happen, the necessity involved is not legal but nomological or nomic. This point leads to a further distinction.
5) A legal law is just a statement that states either what is legally required, or legally permitted, or legally prohibited. There is no distinction between a legal law and something in the world of nature that makes its true. But in the case of laws of nature we need to distinguish between law statements and the laws themselves. Let me explain.
On one theory of laws, the regularity theory, a law is just an exceptionless regularity, a repeatable pattern of event sequences. A sample of pure water at sea-level is heated to 212 deg. Fahrenheit. That is one event token. It is followed by a second spatiotemporally contiguous event token: the beginning to boil of the same sample of water. The two event tokens make up an event sequence. What makes it a causal sequence is its instantiation of a pattern which, formulated in a statement, would go like this: "Whenever pure water at sea level is heated to 212 Fahrenheit, it boils." What makes this universal generalization true is the underlying pattern of heating-boiling events 'out there in the world.'
A statement of a law of nature, therefore, must be distinguished from the law that it states. The latter exists whether or not the former does. If Coulomb's law is true it was true long before the birth of Charles-Augustin de Coulomb.
6) Now what is a transgression of a law of nature? I should think that a law of nature is more than an exceptionless regularity in that laws support counterfactual conditionals. But without going into this, we can confidently say the following. Whatever a law of nature is, it either is or entails an exceptionless regularity. A transgression/violation of a law would then be an exception to the regularity, i.e., a counterexample thereto. But then it would seem to follow that miracles as Hume understands them are not just impossible, but logically impossible. Try this argument on for size:
1) A miracle is an exception to a law of nature.
2) Every law of nature is an exceptionless regularity.
Therefore
3) A miracle is an exception to an exceptionless regularity. But:
4) An exception to an exceptionless regularity is logically impossible.
Therefore
5) Miracles are logically impossible.
This argument seems to show that if miracles are to be logically possible, then they cannot be understood as violations of laws of nature. How then are they to be understood? Please note that (2) merely states that whatever a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity. Thus (2) does not commit one to a regularity theory of laws according to which laws are identified with exceptionless regularities. The idea is that any theory of (deterministic) laws would include the idea that a law is an exceptionless regularity.
Interim conclusion: If miracles are possible, then they cannot be construed as Hume construes them. And now: modus ponendo ponens? Or modus tollendo tollens?
(To be continued)
7) Humean miracles are violations ("transgressions") of laws of nature by divine agency. But are miracles Humean? William Lane Craig thinks not:
That is, I think, an untenable definition of what a miracle is . . . . Miracles are not violations of the laws of nature. The laws of nature describe what would happen in a particular case assuming that there are no intervening supernatural factors. They have what are called ceteris paribus clauses implicit in them – namely, all [other] things being equal, this is what will happen in this situation. But if all [other] things are not equal, the law isn’t violated. Rather, the law just doesn’t apply to that situation because there are other factors at work. In the case of a miracle, God doesn’t violate the laws of nature when he does a miracle. Rather, there will be causal factors at work, namely God, which are supernatural and therefore what the laws of nature predict won’t happen because the laws of nature only make predictions under the assumption that there are no intervening supernatural factors at work. So a miracle, I think, properly defined, is an event which the natural causes at a time and place cannot produce at that time and place. Or, more succinctly, a miracle is a naturally impossible event – an event which the natural causes at a certain time and place cannot bring about. It is beyond the productive capacity of nature. (Emphases added)
There is no political solution, not only for the reasons that Musk gives, but also because it is not the best who rise in politics but often the very worst. That is certainly true in the USA at present. The current administration is characterized by blatant mendacity, corruption, sheer stupidity, and mental incompetence.
I was happy to find the following item in the mailbag the other morning:
Hi Bill,
I recall (however, I can't find exactly where) that you mentioned in an old blog post your intention to publish a work on metaphilosophy at some point in the future. I am curious, is this still a goal of yours? If so, is it in progress? I would be delighted to read it, but I understand if you've chosen not to pursue that project.Your grateful reader,Chandler
. . . finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic. Finish it before your standards become too exacting. 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.
A similar thought is to be found in Franz Brentano, though I have forgotten where he says this: Wer eilt, bewegt sich nicht auf dem Boden der Wissenschaft. "One who hurries is not proceeding on a scientific basis."
On the Continental Divide trail near Abiquiu, New Mexico, August 2015.
Chapter Six of Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise is entitled, "Of Miracles." We do well to see what we can learn from it. Spinoza makes four main points in this chapter, but I will examine only two of them in this entry.
We learned from our discussion of Augustine that there is a tension and possibly a contradiction between the will of God and the existence of miracles ontically construed. Miracles so construed violate, contravene, suspend, transgress, or otherwise upset the laws of nature. But for theists the laws of nature are ordained by God, regardless of how laws are understood, whether as regularities or as relations of universals that entail regularities (as on David M. Armstrong's theory of laws) or whatever. So it seems as if the theist is under a certain amount of conceptual pressure to adopt an epistemic theory of miracles. We heard Augustine say, Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura: A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature. We find a similar view in Spinoza, despite the very considerable differences between the two thinkers:
. . . the universal laws of nature are decrees of God following from the necessity and perfection of the Divine nature. Hence, any event happening in nature which contravened nature's universal laws, would necessarily also contravene the Divine decree, nature, and understanding; or if anyone asserted that God acted in contravention to the laws of nature, he, ipso facto, would be compelled to assert that God acted against His own nature — an evident absurdity. (tr. Elwes, Dover, p. 83)
It follows from this that miracles are to be construed epistemically:
Further, as nothing happens in nature which does not follow from her laws, and as her laws embrace everything conceived by the Divine intellect, and lastly, as nature preserves a fixed and immutable order; it most clearly follows that miracles are only intelligible as in relation to human opinions, and merely mean events of which the natural cause cannot be explained by a reference to any ordinary occurrence, either by us, or at any rate, by the writer and narrator of the miracle. (p. 84, emphasis added)
Since the course of nature, being ordained by God, cannot be contravened, miracles ontically construed are impossible. Talk of miracles, therefore, is simply talk of events we cannot explain given the present state of our knowledge. Miracles are thus parasitic upon our ignorance. They are natural events that simply surpass our limited human comprehension. To a perfect understanding nothing would appear miraculous. That is the first main point that Spinoza makes in his chapter "Of Miracles."
The second main point is that neither God's nature, nor his existence, nor his providence can be known from miracles, but can be known only from the fixed and immutable order of nature.
Spinoza's argument, expressed in my own way, is something like the following. If we take miracles ontically, as actual interruptions or contraventions of the order of nature, and thus of the will of God, then not only are they impossible, but they can provide no basis for knowledge of God. If, on the other hand, we take miracles epistemically, as events the causes of which we do not understand, then in this case as well we have no basis for knowledge of God. For we cannot base knowledge of God on ignorance, and events are miraculous only due to our ignorance of their natural causes.
Spinoza concludes his defense of his second main point with the surprising claim that belief in miracles leads to atheism:
If, therefore, anything should come to pass in nature which does not follow from her laws, it would also be in contravention to the order which which God has established in nature for ever through universal natural laws; it would, therefore, be in contravention to God's nature and laws, and, consequently, belief in it would throw doubt upon everything, and lead to Atheism. (p. 87)
Thanks to Elon Musk, Twitter has been liberated from the speech police. Free at last! I may sign up. In these hyperkinetic times, pithy sayings are needed to punch through the noise. And sometimes one needs to SHOUT.
THE DEMS NO LONGER SUPPORT FREE SPEECH. And you are STILL a Democrat? What is wrong with you? Jonathan Turley:
Yet recently, the Democratic Party seems to have abandoned its historic fealty to free speech. Democratic writers and leaders are publicly calling for everything from censorship to the criminalization of free speech. The latest such clarion call appeared in The Washington Post by a column from MSNBC analyst and former Obama official Richard Stengel.
This is a revised version of an entry from November 2009. Long-time reader Thomas Beale has got me thinking about miracles again. I cannot tell you what to believe about this vexing topic, but I can help you think clearly about it by making some distinctions. Below I distinguish between ontic and epistemic approaches to miracles.
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In The City of God, Book XXI, Chapter 8, St. Augustine quotes Marcus Varro, Of the Race of the Roman People:
There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Castor records that, in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed its colour, size, form, course, which never appeared before nor since. Andrastus of Cyzicus, and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said that this occurred in the reign of Ogyges.
The Bishop of Hippo comments:
So great an author as Varro would certainly not have called this a portent had it not seemed to be contrary to nature. For we say that all portents are contrary to nature; but they are not so. For how is that contrary to nature which happens by the will of God, since the will of so mighty a Creator is certainly the nature of each created thing? A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature. (Modern Library, p. 776, tr. Dods, emphasis added.)
Augustine's approach is thus epistemic. It is because of our ignorance of nature's real workings that we take as contrary to nature what in reality is not contrary to nature. The contrast is this:
ONTIC: Whether or not event M is a miracle does not depend on what any finite mind thinks, believes, opines, expects, takes to be the case, etc. There is a fact of the matter as to whether or not an event is a miracle; whether or not M is a miracle is not relative to us and our knowledge and ignorance.
EPISTEMIC: There are no events contrary to nature; there are no "transgressions" (to use Hume's word) of laws of nature. M is a miracle only in the sense that it does not comport with our understanding of nature, does not fit our picture of nature, thwarts our expectations as to how nature will behave, etc. To a perfect understanding there would be no miracles.
So far, so good. But the epistemic approach to miracles has an untoward consequence noted by Antony Flew in his entry "Miracles" in The Encylopedia of Philosophy, vol. 5, 346-353. Miracles have an apologetic function: they can be cited as attesting to the reality of God or as supporting the credibility of a putative divine revelation. For example, the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes, if accepted as fact, serves the apologetic purpose of attesting to the divinity of Jesus. Only a divine being could do that, or change water into wine, or walk on water, or raise the dead, etc. But if these events are merely inexplicable to us at present, then we have no reason to take these events as having any special divine origin. If theism is true, everything other than God has a divine origin. But for miracles to have probative force in respect of specific theses such as the divinity of Jesus, they would have to be brought about by a special divine intervention. They would otherwise be no different than any other event belonging to the created order.
Suppose you see a man walking on water, and suppose your seeing is veridical: the man really is walking on water. (And to preempt the unserious, we are talking about water in the liquid state.) That is not possible given the laws of nature as we understand them. The surface tension of water is not great enough to support a man's weight. But it may be that our understanding of the laws of nature is very incomplete. There may be special psychophysical laws, unknown to us, that allow certain human beings possessing great powers of concentration to affect by force of will alone the surface tension of water. Suppose that is so in the case of Jesus. Then there would be nothing ontically miraculous about his walking on water. There would be no violation or suspension of the laws of nature. If so, Jesus' walking on water would not give one reason to infer that he was divine. He might simply be a man with very special powers.
For the miracles associated with Jesus to attest to his divinity they must be construed as genuine ontic miracles, as being special divine interventions that are contrary to nature. But if nature is whatever God wills, then there cannot be any ontic miracles. For nothing can act contrary to the will of God. The problem is similar to the problem we confront in connection with Hume. If laws either are or entail exception-less regularities, then there cannot be any miracles given that miracles are violations of, e.g., exceptions to, laws.
It looks as if Augustine's position faces a dilemma. Either we construe miracles epistemically or we construe them ontically. If we construe them epistemically, then in Flew's words, they "provide no good ground at all for believing that doctrines associated with these occurrences embody an authentic revelation of the transcendent." (348) But if we construe miracles ontically, then we face a version of the difficulty pointed out by Hume. Just as there cannot be exceptions to exceptionless regularities, there cannot be any occurrences contrary to nature given that what occurs in nature is willed by God.
