Maverick Philosopher – Page 328 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation

God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality. God creates potential rebels. He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway. Lucifer as the father of all perversity.

God creates and sustains, moment by moment, other minds, like unto his own, made in his image, who are yet radically other in their inwardness and freedom. He creates subjects who exist in their own right and not merely as objects of divine thought. How is this conceivable?

We are not mere objects for the divine subject, but subjects in our own right. How can we understand creation ex nihilo, together with moment by moment conservation, of a genuine subject, a genuine mind with intellect and free will and autonomy and the power of self-determination even unto rebellion?

This is a mystery of divine creation. It is is above my pay grade. And yours too.

God can do it but we can't. We can't even understand how God could do it. A double infirmity. An infirmity that sires a doubt: Perhaps it can't be done, even by God. Perhaps the whole notion is incoherent and God does not exist. Perhaps it is not a mystery but an impossibility. Perhaps Christian creation is an Unbegriff.

Joseph Ratzinger accurately explains the Christian metaphysical position, and in so doing approaches what I am calling the ultimate paradox of divine creation, but he fails to confront, let alone solve, the problem:

The Christian belief in God is not completely identical with either of these two solutions [materialism and idealism]. To be sure, it, too, will say, being is being-thought. Matter itself points beyond itself to thinking as the earlier and more original factor. But in opposition to idealism, which makes all being into moments of an all-embracing consciousness, the Christian belief in God will say: Being is being-thought — yet not in such a way that it remains only thought and that the appearance of independence proves to be mere appearance to anyone who looks more closely.

On the contrary, Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence. In this it goes beyond any mere idealism. While the latter , as we have just established, explains everything real as the content of a single consciousness, in the Christian view what supports it all is a creative freedom that sets what has been thought in the freedom of its own being, so that, on the one hand, it is the being-thought of a consciousness and yet, on the other hand, is true being itself. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, German original 1968, latest English version Ignatius Press, 2004, p. 157)

And that is where the good Cardinal (later Pope Benedict the XVI) leaves it. He then glides off onto another topic. Not satisfactory! What's the solution to the paradox?

If you tell me that God creates other minds, and then somehow releases them into ontological independence, my reply will be that makes hash of the doctrine of creatio continuans, moment-by-moment conservation. The Christian God is no mere cosmic starter-upper of what exists; his creating is ongoing. In fact, if the universe always existed, then all creation would be creatio continuans, and there would be no starting-up at all.

On Christian metaphysics, "The world is objective mind . . . ." (155) This is what makes it intelligible. This intelligibility has its source in subjective mind: "Credo in Deum expresses the conviction that objective mind is the oproduct of subjective mind . . . ." (Ibid.) So what I call onto-theological idealism gets the nod. You don't understand classical theism unless you understand it to be a form of idealism. But creatures, and in particular other minds, exist on their own, in themselves, and their Being cannot be reduced to their Being-for-God. Therein lies the difficulty.

Is divine creation a mystery or an impossibility?

Compensation

To compensate us for loss of hearing, old age grants us the wisdom to appreciate that most of what is said is not worth hearing in the first place.

Hugh Hefner’s Legacy

Here:

Divorce, broken homes, bankruptcy, generations of children raised by a single parent, sexually-transmitted diseases, addiction, AIDs, early death, loneliness, despair, guilt, spiritual ruin, and 58 million innocent children butchered in the one place they should be safest, in their own mother’s womb.

Read it all. I am not clear, however, how the libertarian opening coheres with the sequel.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Tom Petty (1950-2017)

When the '60s ended my musical interests shifted to jazz and classical, so my acquaintance with rock from the '70s on is pretty spotty. But I sat up and took notice when, in the late '80s, Petty teamed up with his elders Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne to form the supergroup, The Traveling Wilburys. With Petty's death, Dylan and Lynne are the sole remaining Wilburys.

And as we all approach The End of the Line, the Traveling Wilburys have some words of wisdom:

Maybe somewhere down the road a ways
You'll think of me and wonder where I am these days
Maybe somewhere down the road when someone plays
Purple Haze

[. . .]

Well it's all right, even if you're old and gray
Well it's all right, you still have something to say
Well it's all right, remember to live and let live
Well it's all right, best you can do is forgive.

Free Fallin'

I Won't Back Down

Johnny Cash has a great version

Handle with Care

Were Trump Voters Irrational? Instrumental and Epistemic Rationality; Truth and Accuracy

A very good article. I agree that the answer to the title question is in the negative. But I have a couple of questions about the following:

Cognitive scientists recognize two types of rationality: instrumental and epistemic. Instrumental rationality is achieved when we act with optimal efficiency to achieve our goals. Epistemic rationality concerns how well beliefs map onto the actual structure of the world—that is, whether our beliefs are accurate, or true. A quick and memorable way to differentiate the two is to say that they concern what to do (instrumental rationality) and what is true (epistemic rationality). Of course, the two are related. In order to take actions that fulfill our goals, we need to base those actions on beliefs that are properly calibrated to the world. In order to understand the rationality (or irrationality) of the Trump voters, I will focus first on instrumental rationality and then turn to epistemic rationality.

The definition of instrumental rationality is perfect.

The definition of epistemic rationality, however, leaves something to be desired. And I should think truth and accuracy ought not be conflated.

Epistemic Rationality

It seems we we are being told that a belief is epistemically rational if and only if it is true. But that cannot be right. Epistemic, or better, doxastic, rationality is a relative property while truth is absolute. What it is rational to believe at one time might not be rational to believe at another time. But if a proposition is true it is true independently of time, place, and the vagaries of belief and desire. For example, it was doxastically rational for the ancient Greeks to think of water as an element even though we now know that to be false. The history of science is littered with beliefs that were at one time rationally accepted but are now rightly rejected as false.

So what it is rational to believe needn't be true. On the other hand, a proposition can be true but not rational to believe. It is easy to imagine situations in which a person speaks the truth but it would not be rational for his audience to believe him because of circumstances or his low credibility or the high antecedent improbability of the proposition asserted.

Truth and Accuracy

The author conflates these two; this strikes me as a mistake.

What is the difference between truth and accuracy as properties of statements and such cognate items as declarative sentences, propositions, beliefs, judgments, etc.?

It seems obvious that 'false' and 'inaccurate' do not have the same meaning as is indicated by their differential usage by competent speakers of English. To say that John F. Kennedy finished his first term in office in good health is to say something false, not inaccurate, while to say that he was assassinated on 23 November 1963 is to say something inaccurate (and also false). He was assassinated on 22 November 1963.

Suppose someone says that there are people now living on the Moon. No one competent in English would say, 'That's inaccurate!'

Intuitively, an inaccurate statement is near the truth. Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald on the 22nd of November, 1963. If I state that, then I make a statement that is both true and accurate. If I say he was shot on the 23rd, then I say something very near the truth but inaccurate. Similarly if I said that he was shot on the 22nd in Fort Worth rather than in Dallas. Inaccurate but near the truth.

If I simply say that Kennedy was assassinated, then I say something true. But is it also accurate? If every inaccurate statement is false, then, by contraposition, every true statement is accurate.

If I say that Kennedy was not assassinated, then I say something false. But is it also inaccurate?

Perhaps we should say the following. While every statement is either true or false, only some statements are either accurate or inaccurate. Which statements? Those that feature terms that admit of degrees or somehow imply numerical values. 'Tom is a smoker' would then be either true or false but not either accurate or inaccurate. But 'Tom is a pack-a-day smoker' would be either true or false and either accurate or inaccurate. Of course, if it is accurate, then it is true, and if it is inaccurate, then it is false.

It is plausible to maintain, though not self-evident, that while accuracy admits of degrees, truth does not. A statement is either true or not true. If bivalence holds and there are only two truth values, then, if a statement is not true, it is false. It does not seem to make sense to say that one statement is truer than another. But it does make sense to say that one statement is more accurate than another. 'The value of $π$ is 3.14159' is more accurate than 'the value of $π$ is 3.1415.' Neither statement is entirely accurate, and indeed no such statement is entirely accurate given the irrationality of $π$ . But I suggest that the following is both entirely true and entirely accurate: ' $π$ is the mathematical constant whose value is equal to the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter.'

Here is something bordering on a paradox. Given its irrationality, $π$ is such that every statement that can be made in a finite time about its value is inaccurate. But if every inaccurate statement is false, then every statement that can be made in a finite time about the value of pi is false.

The blood libel is an outright lie perpetrated by many Muslims. It would be absurd to speak of it as 'inaccurate.'

How Can a Simple God Know Contingent Truths?

Chris M writes,

If God simply is his act of existence, and if his existence is necessary, how can God have knowledge of contingent truths? What I mean is that it is possible for God to do other than he does (say not create, or create different things.) If he did differently – say, if the world didn't exist – his knowledge would be different in content. Yet God is supposed to be a single act of being, purely simple and identical across all possible worlds. God's essence just is his act of necessary existence, knowing and willing. It seems God's knowledge of contingents thus is an accident in him. But God can have no accidents. How then can he, as actus purus and necessary existence, have properties (such as knowing x or willing x) which he may not have had ?

That is a clear statement of the difficulty. As I see it, the problem is essentially one of solving the following aporetic tetrad:

1) God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2) God knows some contingent truths.

3) Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4) God exists necessarily.

The classical theist, Aquinas for example, is surely committed to (1), (2), and (4). The third limb of the tetrad, however, is extremely plausible. And yet the four propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.

For example, it is contingently true that Socrates published nothing and contingently true that God knows this truth. He presumably knows it in virtue of being in some internal mental state such as a belief state or some state analogous to it. But this state, while contingent, is intrinsic to God. The divine simplicity, however, requires that there be nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God. Since God exists necessarily, as per (4), the belief state exists necessarily, which contradicts the fact that it must exist contingently.

I discuss this problem here, and in nearby posts in the Divine Simplicity category.

Is It ‘Racist’ to Hose Dog Droppings off Sidewalk?

Thanks to 'liberals,' we live in an age of race obsession. Almost everyone and everything is 'racist' these days.

Story here (and it is no joke):

According to the [Seattle] Times, Councilmember Larry Gossett “said he didn’t like the idea of power-washing the sidewalks because it brought back images of the use of hoses against civil-rights activists.”

The article did not reveal Gossett's race. It turns out he's black.

Isn't it profoundly racist for the the author not to mention Gossett's race so that blacks can get the credit they deserve for having among them a man of his great sensitivity and compassion?

Come and Take Them, Bret Stephens

David Harsanyi's refutation of Bret Stephens' call to repeal the Second Amendment begins like this:

The idea that gun-control advocates don’t want to confiscate your weapons is, of course, laughable. They can’t confiscate your weapons, so they support whatever feasible incremental steps inch further towards that goal. Some folks are more considerate and get right to the point.

Exactly right. Never underestimate the mendacity of a leftist.

You will have noticed that the Left is now opposing free speech. Time then to repeat: It is the Second Amendment that provides the concrete back-up to the First.

A few days before the Las Vegas massacre I penned an entry that refutes Stephens' optimism about disagreement. He naively thinks that mutually respectful conversations on hot-button issues will converge on agreement. Well, events have borne me out.

Can anyone in his right mind think that 'conversations' about the Second Amendment will converge on agreement?

You see, when a leftist speaks of 'conversations,' what he means is that the right-minded need to shut up and acquiesce in what the loons say.

To which the only rational and appropriate response is of the middle-fingered sort.

Bourgeois Norms and Race

This from an alt-right correspondent. My responses in blue. For the record, I am not alt-right, neo-reactionary, or dissident right (except for my contempt for the yap-and-scribble, do-nothing, anti-Trump, elitist, bow-tie brigade).

…………………..

As part of my ongoing attempt to nudge you further to the right . . . consider these "life-enhancing bourgeois values preached by Amy Wax". In your earlier entry on this topic you say:

Now let me see if I understand this. The bourgeois values and norms are 'racist' because blacks are incapable of studying, working hard, deferring gratification, controlling their exuberance, respecting legitimate authority and the like? But surely blacks are capable of these things. So who are the 'racists' here? The conservatives who want to help blacks by teaching them values that are not specifically white, but universal in their usefulness, or the leftists who think blacks incapable of assimilating such values?

I'm sure that almost all blacks are capable of deferred gratification and hard work (etc.) to some degree. And I'm sure that many are capable of being 'bourgeois' to pretty much the same degree as typical white people. But is it sure that blacks as a group, on the whole, are capable of exhibiting these virtues and being inspired by these bourgeois values to the same degree as whites, on the whole?

BV: But I didn't say that blacks as a group are equally as capable as whites as a group at deferring gratification, saving and investing, avoiding drugs and crime, etc. I don't believe that this is the case as a matter of empirical fact at the present time. I merely said that they are capable of these things, and in fairly large numbers. So I'd say you are attacking a straw man here. My present view is that blacks as a group are capable of deferring gratification, etc. but not to the same degree as whites, and that for this very reason it is important to preach the values that Amy Wax and her colleague preach.

I assume that people of good will want every group to do as well as it can.

My question is why leftists object so ferociously to Wax and Co. What explains this? My reader has an explanation. He begins with the fact that blacks are not as good as whites at implementing the bourgeois values that make for success. Given this fact,

. . . it might also be 'racist' in a sense to demand that all groups embrace these bourgeois values. Maybe it just doesn't come naturally, or as naturally, to all of these groups. It's not 'racist' in the idiotic SJW sense, of course. But maybe a proper respect for distinct varieties of human nature does require us to let different groups live in the ways that they find natural and comfortable and reasonable. An analogy with sex differences might help. It's not 'sexist' to have different expectations for men and women in many areas of life. Just because we expect men to support themselves and protect their families, and we tend to look down on men who won't or can't do these things, it doesn't follow that we should have the same expectations of women–or that we should never tell men to 'be a man about it' or 'man up' (or whatever) just because we don't talk that way to women. Just because we expect women to be nurturing and empathetic, and we frown on women who don't want to spend lots of time with their young children, it doesn't follow that we should have exactly the same expectations of men. Since they tend to have different abilities and interests, a reasonable society allows for some differences in expectations and norms appropriate to their different strengths and weaknesses.

BV: The idea that my correspondent is floating seems to be that it is 'racist' to demand or even suggest to a racial group that it behave in ways that don't come all that naturally to it even if those ways of behaving would benefit them enormously. My suggestion, above, was the opposite, namely, that it is 'racist' not to suggest that they behave in these 'bourgeois' ways. For then you are falsely denying, on racial grounds, that they can improve their lot by implementing life-enhancing values.

This brings me back to one of my standard complaints: people sling the world 'racism' around with no preliminary clarification as to what it is supposed to mean.

Still it's true that if people are going to live in a bourgeois society where these particular virtues and values are pretty important, and often necessary for having a decent life, then everyone will have to act like a typical bourgeois white European. And yet, if my hypothesis about group differences is true, this would be especially hard for some groups–a problem or obstacle that only some groups have to deal with. Maybe a more humane and sustainable policy would be to let these groups live differently, let them have their own societies, where different norms are accepted. These societies wouldn't have to be purely race- or ethnic-based. You could have an explicitly bourgeois society, where it's understood that people who just won't or can't live by these particular values are not wanted; you could have some other, non-bourgeois society with a different understanding. But inevitably the first one would be predominantly white (with some north Asians). Is this a rejection of 'universal values' in your view? I'm not sure. In a sense, yes it is–but then rejection of 'universal values' in that sense seems reasonable, or just as reasonable as rejection of 'universal values' with respect to the sexes. What do you think?

BV: I stick to my assertion that bourgeois virtues and values are universal in the sense that all people of whatever race can profit by their acquisition and implementation. But it doesn't follow that all groups are equally good at their acquisition and implementation. What I oppose is the notion that these virtues and values are inherently white, whatever that might mean. Do whites own them? Does 'whitey' own them such that if a black studies, improves himself, works hard, saves, invests, buys a house, etc. then he is guilty of 'cultural appropriation' in some pejorative sense?

I say the virtues and values in question are no more white than the theorem of Pythagoras of Samos is 'Samosian.'

The True and the Good are universal.

The Unserious ‘Serious’ Discussion About Guns

George Neumayr is one of the few who is talking sense on the issue. What follows is a fine complement to what I say in The Problem: Gun Culture or Liberal Culture?

I have bolded some passages.

………………….

The philosophy underlying liberalism is at once totalitarian and relativistic. It proposes more government and less morality. It laughs at the mustiness of the Ten Commandments, then demands respect for a flurry of new laws. It scoffs at old codes of self-control, then presses for “gun control” and greater state controls on this or that freedom.

From this ethos, regnant for decades in elite circles, has come an out-of-control society in which pols reflexively respond to unspeakable tragedy by advocating more and more laws for a people whose gradual loss of virtue guarantees that they will violate them. The terminus of this toxic admixture of totalitarianism and relativism is the transformation of society into a kind of prison: an endless number of laws and deprivation of freedoms imposed on an increasingly soulless citizenry. Of course, the people running such a system, the totalitarian elite, make sure to exempt themselves from the confines of the prison even as they boast of its glorious benefits. Recall the Soviet thugs who would impress Western visitors with stats proving the Soviet Union’s “low crime rate,” or Fidel Castro showing visiting dignitaries “how safe Havana is.”

That is the utopia to which gun-control liberals hope to lead America. They clamor for a tragedy-proof America in which “nothing bad ever happens to anyone,” except the massive loss of their freedom. The gun control lobby’s “solution” to crime isn’t the recovery of a civil society that teaches virtue but the granting of more and more power to a state that treats everyone like a criminal.

Conspicuously absent from all the sanctimonious lectures on gun control this week was any grappling with America’s cultural meltdown, which is the most comprehensible explanation for a spike in mass shootings even as laws and restrictions multiply. Indeed, the loudest voices for gun control come from the degenerate cultural forces most responsible for that meltdown. They demand that America “get serious about gun control,” even as they get less and less serious about the values and institutions most essential to the preservation of civilization. Educrats who have decimated America’s public schools profess shock at an increase in “school shootings”; late-night hosts who roll out the red carpet for blood-and-gore stars wonder at the “glamour of violence”; an elite that prides itself on destroying the traditional family is aghast at the rise of so many mass-shooting misfits who come from broken families.”

All of the hasty calls for more gun control from these preening frauds conveniently ignored that the Las Vegas shooter used illegal guns. If anything, the tragedy is an indictment of their exclusive focus upon legislation as a solution to criminal pathology. That they would politicize it so quickly, without bothering to engage any of the facts of the tragedy, underscores the opportunistic totalitarianism always lurking beneath their demagoguery. They never let a crisis or a mass shooting go to waste.

According to the media, late-night comedy talk show hosts now serve as the “conscience of the nation” at these fraught moments, which sounds about right for a democracy as fatuous as ours. In between showing clips from the latest demented, violence-drenched Hollywood movie, they are going to lead the nation towards “sensible gun control,” apparently. “Sensible gun control” is the elite’s euphemism for making sure that everyone except their bodyguards is deprived of guns.

Beware of the word “sensible” in the mouth of statists. It is what they say right before they violate a right. Obama’s call for “sensible conscience protections” foreshadowed his fiat violating the consciences of all employers by forcing them to cover the abortifacients and contraceptives of their employees. “Sensible gun control” foreshadows the destruction of the Second Amendment.

The left is neither sensible nor serious about controlling wicked behavior. If it were, it would seek to shore up the foundations of civilization, without which the multiplication of laws is useless, to which the tragedy in Las Vegas attests. It is insensible to think that good laws can protect the innocent without a functioning civil society that reinforces them. It is precisely the fruit of that civil society, a culture of self-control, that the liberal elite has done the most to poison. Liberals favor “gun control” without self-control. In the end, this just means more and more government control — an endless cycle of relativism leading to totalitarianism.

Camille Paglia on Hugh Hefner

Here:

Hugh Hefner absolutely revolutionized the persona of the American male. In the post-World War II era, men's magazines were about hunting and fishing or the military, or they were like Esquire, erotic magazines with a kind of European flair.

Hefner reimagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed all the fine pleasures of life, including sex. Hefner brilliantly put sex into a continuum of appreciative response to jazz, to art, to ideas, to fine food. This was something brand new. Enjoying fine cuisine had always been considered unmanly in America. Hefner updated and revitalized the image of the British gentleman, a man of leisure who is deft at conversation — in which American men have never distinguished themselves — and the art of seduction, which was a sport refined by the French.

Camille Paglia does not merit the plenary MavPhil endorsement, but C. P. is a good partial antidote to P. C. , and she never fails to entertain.

You may enjoy this critical piece: Camille Paglia on Philosophy and Women in Philosophy.

You Shouldn’t Trust Liberal Journalists

Here.

A Cold One

Larry Correia on Suppressors

On guns, Correia knows whereof he speaks.

First read this 'viral' post written in response to the Sandy Hook shooting. He lists his credentials.

Then this on suppressors.

If there is any need for suppressors, they need to take the form of muzzles for Hillary, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi and the rest of that pack of know-nothings who ought to be made to keep their traps shut about matters about which they know nothing.

Alberto Brandolini’s Bullshit Asymmetry Principle and Vallicella’s First and Second Corollaries

Here:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

The pseudo-precision of 'energy' and 'order of magnitude' aside — in what units is this 'energy' measured ? — the idea is a good one.

Vallicella's First Corollary:

The amount of effort needed to grade and correct and annotate a lousy term paper is much greater than the effort needed to produce it.

Vallicella's Second Corollary:

The amount of effort needed to referee a journal submission and justify one's evaluation is inversely related to the quality of the submission.