Jime Sayaka interviews philosopher of religion Michael Sudduth on the topic of postmortem survival. (HT: Dave Lull) Excerpt:
My central thesis is that traditional empirical arguments for survival based on the data of psychical research—what I call classical empirical arguments—do not succeed in showing that personal survival is more probable than not, much less that it is highly probable, especially where the survival hypothesis is treated as a scientific or quasi-scientific hypothesis. So my objection is first and foremost a criticism of what I take to be unjustified claims regarding the posterior probability of the hypothesis of personal survival, that is, it’s net plausibility given the relevant empirical data and standard background knowledge. Consequently, the classical arguments, at least as traditionally formulated, do not provide a sufficiently robust epistemic justification for belief in personal survival. That’s my thesis.
Our friend Sudduth a couple of years ago made the journey to the East (to allude to a Hermann Hesse title). Thus he states elsewhere in the interview, "I am a Vedantin philosopher, so I certainly accept the idea of survival, at least broadly understood as the postmortem persistence of consciousness." I would have appreciated some clarification and elaboration on this point. I would guess that Michael now no longer believes in the survival of an individuated, personal consciousness, but believes instead in the survival of a pre-personal or impersonal consciousness common to all of us. But I am only guessing. I am aware, though, that one can be a Vedantin without being an Advaitin.
I still read your blog conscientiously, but sometimes stare at your words in ignorant awe.
I have a question for you this morning which may be of interest. In a recent conversation with someone who described himself as a "gay" Christian (or is it a Christian "gay" ?), I gave reasons for observing that "gay Christian" is an oxymoron. My interlocutor said I must not be judgmental and justified his position by the saying, “You have your way, I have my way. As for the right way, it does not exist.” I made no headway with my argument that a belief in moral relativism is incompatible with a belief in God. If God is the incontestable ground of moral absolutes, it seems to me you can't have one without the other. Am I on the right track ?
Thank you for reading. Several points in response.
1. Can one be a Christian and a homosexual? I don't see why not, as long as one does not practice one's homosexuality. So I don't see that 'gay Christian' is an oxymoron. (AsI am using 'practice,' a homosexual man who succumbs to temptation and has sexual intercourse with a man on an occasion or two, while believing it to be immoral, is not practicing his homosexuality. The occasional exercise of a disposition does not constitute a practice.)
2. To be judgmental is to be hypercritical, captious, cavilling, fault-finding, etc. One ought to avoid being judgmental. But it is a mistake to confuse making moral judgments with being judgmental. I condemn the behavior of Ponzi-schemers like Bernie Madoff. That is a moral judgment. (And if you refuse to condemn it, I condemn your refusal to condemn.) But it would be an egregious misuse of language to say that I am being judgmental in issuing either condemnation.
3. If your friend thinks it is wrong to make moral judgments, ask him whether he thinks it is morally wrong. If he says yes, then point out that he has just made a moral judgment; he has made the moral judgment that making moral judgments is morally wrong.
4. Then ask him whether (a) he is OK with contradicting himself, or (b) makes an exception for the meta assertion that making moral judgments is morally wrong, or (c) thinks that both the meta judgment and first-order moral judgments (e.g., sodomy is morally wrong) are all morally wrong. (C) is a logically consistent position, although rejectable for other reasons.
5. He might of course say that 'must not' in 'must not be judgmental' is not to be construed morally, but in some other way. Press him on how it is to be construed.
6. Is moral relativism compatible with theism? No. If the God of the Christian faith exists, then there are absolute (objective) moral truths. This is quite clear if you reflect on the nature of the Christian God. It is not clear, however, that the arrow of entailment runs in the opposite direction. A Christian could affirm that it does, but he needn't. Either way, moral relativism and theism are logically inconsistent.
7. A further point. When your friend 'went relativistic' on you, there was nothing unusual about that. Alethic and moral relativism in most people are not thought-through positions, but simply ways of avoiding further discussion and the hard thinking necessary to get clear on these matters. It is a form of 'psychic insulation': "You can't teach me anything, because it's all relative."
8. A final point. That there are moral absolutes leaves open what they are. While moral relativism is easily dismissed, especially if one is a theist, it is considerably less easy to say what the moral absolutes are, even if one is a theist. So there is no call to be dogmatic. One can, and I think ought to, combine anti-relativism with fallibilism.
Everybody profiles. Liberals are no exception. Liberals reveal their prejudices by where they live, shop, send their kids to school and with whom they associate.
The word 'prejudice' needs analysis. It could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar. We should all condemn blind prejudice. It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people do that? How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior.
'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.' Although blind prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good. We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant. We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past exerience. Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience. The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious. After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam. They distill from their unpleasant olfactory experiences a well-grounded prejudice against the products of the distillery.
My prejudgments about rattle snakes are in place and have been for a long time. I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. I do not treat each new one encountered as a 'unique individual,' whatever that might mean. Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa. What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.
So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice. The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark. Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re.
But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not 'discriminating' against them? Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates. Liberals are especially discriminating. The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in. Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways. That's why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction.
Is the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' as marriage discriminatory? Of course! But not all discrimination is bad. Indeed, some is morally obligatory. We discriminate against felons when we disallow their possession of firearms. Will you argue against that on the ground that it is discriminatory? If not, then you cannot cogently argue against the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' on the ground that it is discriminatory. You need a better argument. And what would that be?
'Profiling,' like 'prejudice' and 'discrimination,' has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation. Unjustly. What's wrong with profiling? We all do it, and we are justified in doing it. Consider criminal profiling.
It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.
Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can't answer this question, then you lack common sense. But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a five-minute romp. Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.
Or let's say you are walking down a street in Mesa, Arizona. On one side of the street you spy some fresh-faced Mormon youths, dressed in their 1950s attire, looking like little Romneys, exiting a Bible studies class. On the other side of the street, Hells Angels are coming out of their club house. Which side of the street would you feel safer on? On which side will your concealed semi-auto .45 be more likely to see some use?
The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness.
Their brains are addled by the equality fetish: everybody is equal, they think, in every way. So the vigorous 20-year-old is not more likely than the old man to have committed the rape. The Mormon and the Hells Angel are equally law-abiding. And the twenty-something Egyptian Muslim is no more likely to be a terrorist than the Mormon matron from Salt Lake City.
I refer to contemporary liberals as LINOs, liberals in name only. Why? See here:
I couldn’t believe it. I was trying to discuss traditional marriage – and the state was trying to stop me.
Incredible, in a 21st-century European country, but true. I was invited to speak at a conference on marriage last summer, to be held at the Law Society in London. The government had just launched a public consultation on changing the law to allow same-sex marriage. The conference was a chance for supporters of traditional marriage to contribute to the debate. [. . .]
A few days before the conference, someone from Christian Concern, the group which had organised the event, rang me in a panic: the Law Society had refused to let us meet on their premises. The theme was “contrary to our diversity policy”, the society explained in an email to the organisers, “espousing as it does an ethos which is opposed to same-sex marriage”. In other words, the Law Society regarded support for heterosexual union, still the only legal form of marriage in Britain, as discriminatory.
This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the so-called British Invasion of 1964 – 1966. Here is one reasonably complete list of 'invaders.' Tonight, selections from A through C.
This is a second entry in response to Hennessey. The first is here.
Consider again this aporetic tetrad:
1. If S sees x, then x exists
2. Seeing is an intentional state
3. Every intentional state is such that its intentional object is incomplete
4. Nothing that exists is incomplete.
The limbs of the tetrad are collectively logically inconsistent. Any three of them, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one. For example, the conjunction of the first three limbs entails the negation of the fourth.
But while the limbs are collectively inconsistent, they are individually very plausible. So we have a nice puzzle on our hands. At least one of the limbs is false, but which one? I don't think that (3) or (4) are good candidates for rejection. That leaves (1) or (2).
I incline toward the rejection of (1). Seeing is an intentional state but it is not existence-entailing. My seeing of x does not entail the existence of x. What one sees (logically) may or may not exist. There is nothing in or about the visual object that certifies that it exists apart from my seeing it. Existence is not an observable feature. The greenness of the tree is empirically accessible; its existence is not.
The meat of Hennessey's response consists in rejecting (3) and runs as follows:
. . . it does not seem to me to be right that the object of an intentional state “is incomplete.” If he and I were both looking at the cat of which he makes mention, I of course from the left and he of course from the right, [of course!] neither of us would see the side of the cat which the other would see. The cat, however, would be complete, lacking neither side. And we would each be seeing the same complete cat, though I would be seeing it as or qua visible from the left and he would be seeing it as or qua visible from the right.
There is a scholastic distinction that should be brought to bear here, the distinction between the “material object” of an intentional act such as seeing and its “formal object.” My vision of the cat and Bill’s vision of the cat has the same material object, the cat. But they have distinct formal objects, the cat as or qua visible from the left and the cat as or qua visible from the right.
5. I conclude, then, that rather than adopting limbs (2), (3), and (4) as premises in an argument the conclusion of which is the negation of (1), we should adopt limbs (1), (2), and (4) as premises in an argument the conclusion of which is the negation of (3). Seeing is an existence-entailing intentional state. But I stand ready to be corrected.
Richard's response is a reasonable one, and of course I accept the distinction he couches in scholastic terminology, that between the material and the formal object of an act. That is a distinction that needs to be made in any adequate account. If I rightly remember my Husserl, he speaks of the object as intended and the object intended. Both could be called the intentional object.
What I meant by 'intentional object' in (3) above is the object precisely as intended in the act, the cogitatum qua cogitatum, or intentum qua intentum, precisely as correlate of the intentio, the Husserlian noema precisely as correlate of the Husserlian noesis, having all and only the properties it appears to have. It seems obvious that the formal object, the object-as-intended, must be incomplete. Suppose I am looking at a wall. I can see it only from one side at a time, not from all sides at once. What's more, the side I see as material object is not identical to the formal object of my seeing. For the side I am seeing (and that is presumably a part-cause of my seeing it) has properties that I don't see or are otherwise aware of. For example, I might describe the formal object as 'beige wall' even though the wall in reality (if there is one) is a beige stucco wall: I am too far away to see if it has a stucco surface or not. The wall in reality, if there is one, must of course be one or the other. But the formal object is indeterminate with respect to the property of having a stucco surface.
Here is a further wrinkle. Necessarily, if x is beige, then x is colored. But if I see x as beige, it does not follow that I see it as colored. So it would seem that formal objects are not closed under property entailment.
This is why I consider (3) to be unassailably true. Richard and I both accept (2) and (4). But he rejects (3), while I reject (1).
So far, then, a stand-off. But there is a lot more to say.
2014 will be a big year for 'tin' website anniversaries, tin being the metal corresponding to tenth anniversaries. Many of us got up and running in 2004. My tenth blogiversary is coming up in May. Today marks Anthony Flood's tenth anniversary. His site, however, is not a weblog.
Flood has been an off-and-on correspondent of mine since the early days of the blogosphere: I believe we first made contact in 2004. I admire him because he "studies everything" as per my masthead motto. As far as I can judge from my eremitic outpost, Tony is a genuine truth seeker, a restless quester who has canvassed many, many positions with an open mind and a willingness to admit errors. (The man was at one time a research assistant for Herbert Aptheker!) Better a perpetual seeker than a premature finder. Here below we are ever on the way: in statu viae. But Flood may be settling down now, in a position wildly divergent from those he occupied hitherto.
Here he marks a decade and comments briefly on the article referenced below.
Bobby Fischer, supreme master of the 64 squares, died on this date in 2008, at age 64.
The day after he died I received this lovely note from my old friend Tom Coleman:This is a death in the family. I thought of you the moment I heard
the news this morning. Though not a talented player myself, at only
eight years old, six years younger than he, I marvelled at his
prowess as others did over Micky Mantle's. I never knew bitterness
toward my betters at either sports or chess. Many of us who were
neither as brilliant or disturbed as he still felt his agony, even
as a half-talented music student can feel Beethoven's agony even
after centuries. He had no heirs in the flesh; genius is no
evolutionary advantage. All brilliance points to transcendence and
whispers of immortality.
For Americans of a certain age and a certain bent, it is indeed as if a relative has died. Old Tom must have been consorting with Calliope when he penned his concluding line.
London Karl refers me to this piece by Stephen H. Webb in which we read (emphases added):
I recently reviewed Hart’s new book, The Experience of God, at First Things. Hart defends three basic points: First, there was a consensus among ancient philosophers and theologians regarding the simplicity of God. Divine simplicity can be stated in many ways, but it basically means that God has no parts. Or you could just say that God is immaterial (since anything material can be divided). Second, this consensus was shared by nearly all the world’s oldest religions. Third, this consensus is crucial for the Christian faith. It is, in fact, the only way to make sense of God, and thus it is fundamental for everything that Christians believe and say about the divine.
The first bolded passage is inaccurate. On traditional theism God is of course immaterial, and is maintained to be such by all traditional theists. But the doctrine of divine simplicity is not identical to the claim that God is immaterial, a claim rejected by many traditional theists. The simplicity doctrine entails the immateriality doctrine, but not vice versa. Thus the simplicity doctrine says more than the immateriality doctrine. If God is simple, then God has and can have no (proper) parts, hence has and can have no material parts; a simple God is therefore an immaterial God given that every material thing is partite, actually or potentially. But an immaterial God needn't be simple. The simplicity doctrine implies that there are no real distinctions among:
God and his existence
God and his attributes
Any divine attribute and any other one
Existence and nature in God: God doesn't have, he is, his nature.
Potency and act in God: God is actus purus.
Matter and form in God: God is forma formarum.
Consider God and the attribute of omniscience. According to the simplicity doctrine, God does not exemplify omniscience; he is (identical to) omniscience. And the same holds for all the divine attributes. For each such attribute A, God does not have (exemplify) A; he is (identical to) A.
Someone who holds that God is immaterial, however, holds that God has no material parts (and also no spatial parts, and no temporal parts if there are temporal parts). One can hold this consistently with holding that God is disinct from his attributes as he must be if he exemplifies them, exemplification either being or being very much like a dyadic asymmetrical relation.
But what if one were a constituent ontologist who thought that the attributes of a thing are parts thereof (in some suitably extended, non-mereological sense of 'part')? Then too the simplicity doctrine would not be identical to the immateriality doctrine. For immateriality has to do with a lack of material parts while simplicity has to do with a lack of material and 'ontological' parts such as attributes.
As for the second bolded passage, it is certainly false. Webb needs to read Plantinga and Swinburne.
A tribute to Dave Lull. If he ever publishes a blog, he might name it "Lullabies." But then again he might not.
Matter: solid, liquid, gaseous, conscious? Bullshit in a gaseous state? Do physicists ever bullshit? You bet they do. See here and here. Am I anti-science? Obviously not. I am anti-bullshit.
The perils of the royal game: Man admits to eating landlord's heart following dispute over chess move. With or without Tabasco sauce? (HT: Brandon Smith)
The Left's methods make Governor Christie look like Little Bo Beep.
Greetings from the least free state in the union (so says a George Mason study, anyway).
I thought you might appreciate an example of the terrible policy that leftist irrationality leads to.
I am a proud owner of a Smith and Wesson .38 revolver. I received this gun as a gift while I lived in Texas. In 2012 my wife and I moved to Rochester, NY. I thought that it would probably be a good idea to check the gun laws in the state. I discovered that I had to be approved for a license to keep a handgun in my own house.
Despite this affront to my freedom, I decided I wanted to be a law abiding citizen. I found the application for the license online, only to read this, "…the processing of a pistol permit application can take approximately 6 to 9 months. This time-frame is just an estimate, and not a guarantee. Applications may take longer than 9 months to be processed."
How absurd! I guess if a burglar breaks into my house, I'll kindly tell him to return in 6 to 9 months, at which time I can properly defend myself, my wife, and my baby daughter.
The application packet, which is 24 pages in total (to be fair and honest, some of those 24 pages were blank, and some were directions. They are not all for info that I must provide them.), only grew more absurd. A couple pages in, I learn that I must provide four character references from people who have known me since I moved here and are residents of the county in which I live. Furthermore, since I have not lived here for 3 years, I must provide 3 additional notarized character references from persons from the state or county in which I previously lived.
I'm sure it will come as no surprise that I am having second thoughts about completing this application. There are so many obstructions to me exercising my right that I don't know if I want to exert the effort to break past them all.
Best to you in this new year,
J. S.
It is small consolation, but it would be worse for my reader if he lived in NYC. Cf. John Stossel's experience with the hoplophobes.
I spent most of yesterday troubleshooting, but no fix yet. But adversity is good, up to a point. I have been forced to learn how to use this iPad Air. And I have learned more than I wanted to know about device drivers. Blogging from the iPad, however, is a royal PITA.
Addendum (1/16). Solved the problem myself yesterday with the help of a man down the street and in the process saved myself a lot of money. Good old American self-reliance can come in handy. Learned a lot by doing it myself, but I won't bore you with the details except to say that part of the trick is to think about the problem as carefully and systematically as possible, trying all the obvious solutions first. Turned out to be a hardware problem internal to the computer. But the fix was as easy as inserting a new network adapter which only costed a few dollars.
