The Prosblogion

Since the summer break is nearly here, I thought I'd remind folks of the Younger Scholars Prize so that the summer break could be used to write/finish entries. Here's the ad:

Prosblogion readers will most likely be interested in the competition details for the Younger Scholars Prize for Philosophical Theology.

I am defending a soul-making theodicy for animals in the book, and I am going to briefly summarize some objections and reply to them. Google Scholar turns up not a whole lot on the surface, and I might as well respond to people's actual concerns, so, if you please, let me know what objections/articles/chapters you find most worthy of being responded to. Thanks.

[x-posted on Newapps] A few days ago, I had the privilege of attending a lecture by Paul Draper, probably one of the most prominent atheist philosophers of religion today. His lecture had a wealth of ideas (including a proposed solution to Hume's problem!), but I'd like to focus on one tiny piece of the lecture, viz. his argument that the burden of proof is on the theist, and not on the atheist.

Here goes the argument, which Paul was kind enough to discuss with me, prior to posting it. I apologize if there are any remnant misrepresentations.

Let's assume that there are a number of epistemically possible world views: some are naturalistic, some are supernaturalistic, let's even grant there are others (non-supernatural, non-natural, but some third, unknown view). Then we can see that the following diagram exhausts all epistemic possibilities: N (naturalism), S (supernaturalism) and not-N and not-S.

Let 'PSR' stand for the principle that whatever is, but need not be, has an explanation for its being.

More exactly:

(PSR) Whatever obtains, but doesn't obtain of necessity, has an explanation for its obtaining.

Equivalently: Every contingent state of affairs has an explanation.

One might think that PSR has both a priori and empirical support. Regarding the a priori, when we consider an arbitrary state of affairs that obtains but doesn't have to obtain, we feel motivated to wonder why it obtains; and that wonder seems to reveal an inclination in us to think there ought to be an explanation.

As for empirical support, PSR is a simple (the simplest?) explanation of all the cases of explanation anyone has encountered.

The support is defeated, however, if there are counter-examples to PSR. And, my sense is that most philosophers these days think or suspect or worry that there are counter-examples.

Perhaps the most commonly cited counter-examples are these: (1) quantum events, and (2) the Biggest Contingent Fact. It turns out to be difficult, however, to get these counter-examples to stick, as I'll attempt to explain. I'll focus more on (2), since I take it to be the more serious candidate.

In chapter 6 of his Philosophical Theology (1969), James F. Ross undertakes the very ambitious task of showing that the evil in the world does not provide even a prima facie case against divine moral perfection. Ross takes the phrase 'a prima facie case' in the legal sense: to provide a prima facie case is essentially to bring charges that need answering. So, for instance, someone who says that the evils in the world are justified by some greater good which would be impossible without them is conceding that there is a prima facie case and attempting to answer it. Ross believes that there is no such case that needs answering. After explaining his argument, I will show that, even if Ross's answer to the alleged conflict between the evils of the world and divine moral perfection succeeds, the evils of the world can still be used to make a prima facie case against divine benevolence, and Ross's strategy cannot be used to defuse this.

UPDATE: I want to clarify one thing here. My principle target was not the authors of the study (which I have no intention to read, as I judge that doing so has negative expected utility). Rather, my principle target was the editors of SA. The author of the article is a minor target (its bad reporting) but she probably gave the editors what she had every right to expect they wanted. Here is what I would have said in a calmer moment:

"People have been implying that the content of this article casts aspersons on the rationality of religious belief. I assert that that is false and confused. I dare (double dog dare) anyone to construct a cogent argument from the content of this article which casts aspersions on the rationality of religious belief. I assert that it cannot be done. I also find the article greatly misleading in multiple ways and perhaps culpably so."

I still think it is worth recording my initial reaction, though, so that friends who posted this article in ways that implied that it did cast aspersions on the rationality of religious belief--there were too many to write individually--can see the palpable frustration with which such misdirection causes people like me: Christions living in a very secularized environment where people they really like often say or do things very hurtful (though not intentionally, of course). There are many ways in which it is not easy to be a Christian in academic philosophy. Being an unprotected minority is frustrating, anxiety-inducing (I received threats as a result of this post), and sometimes deeply discouraging. [Any other Christians who feel this way should redouble their efforts to reach out to other minorities and simply set aside in good faith the fact that those minorities have advocates in a way that we do not, for we have our own Advocate.]

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That venerable publishing outlet of the Secular-Industrial Establishment the Scientific American at least once had decent journalism and intelligent writing. That started to slide at least a decade ago, and though there are still some occasional gems, there is also plenty of tripe. To wit: this article called--utterly misleadingly--"How Critical Thinkers Lose Their Faith in God: Religious belief drops when analytical thinking rises.

Rarely have I been so annoyed as by this piece. And it is a token of a type that is all too prevalent. I judge, and hope I do not regret it, that the removal of the snarkiness would not be worth the effort. I don't like being drawn into such rhetoric, but it is not irrelevant that the piece made me *angry*. Anger is an emotion that can be appropriate or inappropriate and upon reflection, I think anger is an appropriate emotional response to this nonsense. #notproofread #lateforconference

Story: Immortal Ike was born, has lived an infinite number of days,
and is alive today.

Question 1: Is this story logically possible?
Question 2: If so, what is the structure of Ike's days?

I suggest that the answers are: 1) yes, and 2) the structure of an infinite number in a nonstandard model of arithmetic, which looks a bit like:

| | | | | ... ...| | | | | | ... ....| | | | |

Note that everyday, except for the first, needs a yesterday; everyday, except for the last, needs a tomorrow -- ruling out such answers as omega + 1.

But interestingly, over a number of informal conversations, many people answer "no" to 1). I have yet to see a knock down argument. Is there such?

Earlier on this blog, I have reported results of a survey on natural theological arguments (N=802), see here and here. To briefly recall, the survey asked philosophers to rate the strength of natural theological arguments, grouped into 8 arguments that seek to support belief in the existence of God, and 8 arguments that seek to support belief in metaphysical naturalism. My initial analysis indicated that religious belief (theism, atheism or agnosticism) reliably predicts the extent to which people will evaluate these arguments. However, in my analysis I examined only the effects of religious belief on the total overall assessments, not the arguments individually. In this post, I will report some fine-grained analyses on how philosophers evaluate individual arguments, as a function of their religious belief, gender and whether or not they specialize in philosophy of religion. Since the statistics are quite detailed, I will make this a two-part post, starting out by the positive arguments. The analyses have been conducted by Robert O'Brien, a statistician at the University of Miami.

Philosophy of religion, as practiced by religious believers, is often confused with apologetics. (Perhaps it is even so confused, on occasion, by some of its practitioners.) Indeed, if we use the term 'apologetics' more broadly, to include not just the giving of an apologia (defense) of religion, but of just any belief system, then we could say that philosophy in general is often confused with apologetics. This is, I think, a serious mistake. The philosopher, qua philosopher, is up to something quite different than the apologist, qua apologist. The 'qua' clauses are necessary, because of course the same person may engage in both philosophy and apologetics and, as will emerge, it is even possible to do both at the same time, but as activities they have fundamentally different aims. I will try, in this post, to clarify this difference and explain why it matters.

An acquaintance of mine, paleoanthropologist, regularly handles ancient hominid fossils - part of the job requirement. One day, while holding one of these objects (a skull if I recall rightly, but perhaps my memory is infected by imagery of people holding skulls in paintings and plays), he got a profound "areligious experience". Suddenly it hit him that he was going to die, and there would be nothing beyond his present life - his memories and self-awareness would simply disappear. In the future, the only thing that would be left of him (if he were buried, placed in congenial archaeological context, with an environment that isn't too dry, too acid etc.) would be a skull similar to the one he was holding, and perhaps a few large bones like the femora. Prior to this, the paleoanthropologist was already an atheist, but the areligious experience intensified his conviction that the natural world is all there is. His areligious experience was strong, non-inferential, and elicited in him a powerful belief in the non-existence of God--an experience in some respects analogous to religious experience.