The Prosblogion

The dialogue I am interested in is between two persons whose religious views relevantly differ. The puzzle is that (a) such dialogue seems to actually happen--it seems that people are having a dialogue, both talking on and the same topic, exchanging views that make contact, even though (b) it seems that the two people mean different things by the words they use.

Let me give a couple of examples, in all of which one interlocutor is a Catholic and the other a naturalist, though many other combinations will generate similar examples.

1. Marriage: The naturalist (typically) understands marriage as a social status, conferred by society, while the Catholic understands it as having an objective component that is at most causally and contingently dependent on the conferral of a social status.
2. Papacy: The Catholic's concept of the Pope is such that it is a priori that the Pope is the successor of Peter (if Peter had no successor, then there is no Pope), while the naturalist's concept of the Pope makes it at best an a posteriori truth that the Pope is the successor of Peter.
3. Baptism: The conferral of grace is a part of the concept of baptism for the Catholic--it wouldn't be baptism without it, but "invalid baptism" (which is related to baptism in the way in which a merely apparent oasis is related to an oasis), without it. On the other hand, the naturalist understands baptism as a human ceremony.

I wonder if any of what Moser is saying commits him to empirical claims about skeptics. As I read him, I keep getting the feeling that he is: I get the sense that he is saying that they are selfish, unwilling to submit to higher authorities (like God), unwilling to follow their consciences in certain areas, desire to be autonomous, and perhaps more. Of course, Moser hasn't directly said these things, I think. (Moser doesn't say believers don't have these tendencies, but I think he'd say that they have chosen to refrain from them, and so are able to come to know God.)

Here. Graham complains about the structure of the work but seems to like the individual essays for the most part. The complaints concern the notion of analytic theology, in particular how it is different from plain old philosophical theology. Worth a look.

Graham ends the review by claiming:

In his essay Oliver Crisp employs the ancient dictum of "faith seeking understanding". This is not the same as faith seeking truth. Given its "ineradicable pluralism", however, philosophy is not plausibly interpreted as seeking truth anyway. What it seeks is a distinctive kind of understanding, a profoundly intellectual one that can only be gained through an exercise of strictly intellectual virtues.

I applaud the idea that truth is not the only goal of cognition, and also the focus on understanding, but I also note problems here. This passage has a bad argument (inferring that philosophy isn't seeking truth because of a pluralism explained earlier as involving ineradicable disagreement), but that's not my central concern. Nor is the second mistake in the passage my primary concern: it is simply false that understanding can only be gotten through the use of the intellectual virtues (it can be a "gift of the gods", one would expect, given a decent account of what understanding is). No, my real concern is about the purported contrast between truth and understanding, since if philosophy isn't after truth, it's going to have trouble getting understanding. There is of course the affective side of understanding, involving the wonderful feeling of seeing things finally falling into place, but that alone isn't sufficient. Understanding is factive when propositional and quasi-factive when objectual, and I hear there are some neat arguments available in print for such a view! (Lamarck understood his own theory quite well, but he didn't understand how the inheritance of characteristics works, since he was wrong about that.)

Here.

First, thanks to Matthew Mullins and the other Prosblogion contributors for setting up and participating in this online book club. The second part of Moser's equivocally named chapter 1 ("Doubting Skeptics", where "Doubting" refers both to skeptics' doubting of God's reality and Moser's doubting of skeptics' having discharged their epistemic obligations) consists of four sections: "5. Volitional Knowing"; "6. Skeptical Tests"; "7. Trust and Distrust"; and "8. Voice Lessons". Since each of these sections is part of chapter 1, I shall also refer to them as "1.5", "1.6", etc. Anyway, below the fold are my summaries and critiques of §§1.5-1.8.

With the annual Episteme conference going on I had the opportunity to have a couple of fellow travelers over for dinner. The conversation ranged over a number of philosophical topics, but one question stuck with me this morning. We'd never come to a satisfactory answer to the question, "What is it to be a Christian?" Of course, being philosophers, we were inquiring as to the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a Christian.

I think there may be at least two ways in which one could answer the question of what it is to be a Christian. The first is to tell some kind of causal/historical story about how a present individual's belief and practice relates to a certain 1st century sect. One has to be careful about how one tells this story so that certain contemporary groups don't come out Christian, e.g. Islam has a historical relationship to Jesus Christ, but you wouldn't want to say it was Christian. (Not that I'd mind if it turned out that all Muslims were Christian, but my Muslim friends seem to find such things irritating.) The second way that one might try to account for what it means to be a Christian is to tell some story about the relationship between a certain set of beliefs and practices and the person Jesus Christ. I take it that the first meaning is something like what one would expect from a sociologist of religion, while the second is what you might expect the individual to say of herself. Perhaps there are more ways to give an account of 'Christian' and I'd be interested in hearing those in the comments section.

I'm sure some of the readers and contributors here have thought about this question a bit more than the three of us last night. If you'd like to make a stab at an analysis, I'd love to read it in the comments. Here are some desiderata we came up with for giving an analysis of being a Christian:

• It shouldn't be the case that Jesus Christ be in the set of things Christian.


• It shouldn't be the case that God be in the set of things Christian.


• It shouldn't be the case that evil demons be in the set of things Christian.


• It shouldn't be the case that one have eternal salvation and not be a Christian.

In the latest former-former-theist news, British biographer and poet A.N. Wilson has renounced atheism. His own account occurs here in the New Statesman.

The story is a few months old but, as most readers know and many have commented, I've been incognito this semester.

I find this very interesting for a number of reasons including. 1. It's a token of the type intellectual revert. 2. It's a token of the type British intellectual revert. 3. I read his biographies of Jesus and of C.S. Lewis and found them a bit bifurcated. There seemed to be a half-believing Wilson and a half-belligerent Wilson. 4. I once would have disassociated myself from the sort of case he makes, but now endorse it, and have been experimenting with formalizing it.

Rea has an interesting paper arguing that if one assumes bivalence, then presentism is incompatible with free will. I think there are problems in his argument, but I was also thinking that there might be a variant argument to similar effect.

Start with this. Sally intentionally started a forest fire F, but she ceased to exist before the fire started. (E.g., she set fire to a pool of gasoline, intending the fire to spread to the forest, but ceased to exist before the fire spread to the forest.) The forest fire, then, is plainly something that Sally had a choice about, something that Sally is (or was? -- the grammar of English is unclear on this point) responsible for.

Now:
A1. If x had a choice about the occurrence of E, then E depends on x.
A2. If E never depended, does not depend and will never depend on x, then x never had a choice about the occurrence of E.
A3. Necessarily, if E depends on x, then x exists.
A4. If E depended, depends or will depend on x, then there is a t such that E depended, depends or will depend on x at t.
A5. If E depended, depends or will depend on x at t, then it was, is or will be true at t that E depends on x.
A6. If was, is or will be true at t that E and x exist, then E and x existed, exist or will exist at t. (Presentism)
A7. Necessarily, if E depends on x, then E and x exist.
A8. Suppose for a reductio that Sally had a choice about the occurrence of F.
A9. Therefore, F depended, depends or will depend on Sally. (A2, A8)
A10. Therefore, there is a t at which F depended, depends or will depend on Sally. (A4, A9)
A11. Therefore, there is a t at which it was, is or will be true that F depends on Sally. (A5, A10)
A12. Therefore, there is a t at which it was, is or will be true that F and Sally exist. (A7, A11)
A13. Therefore, there is a t at which F and Sally existed, exist or will exist. (A6, A12)
A14. There is no t at which F and Sally existed, exist or will exist. (Sally ceased to exist before F started.) This contradicts A13!

[Oops, that wasn't ready. I published a stub by accident. Here's the finished post--CL]

I have only the first four sections of the first chapter of Moser's, The Elusive God, so I think this will be brief as it seems that Moser is setting the stage at this point.

Moser's religious skeptic is concerned with theistic religious commitment and that skepticism might either take the form of someone who doubts the reality of God or doubts that an affirmation of God's reality has positive epistemic value (32). Moser thinks that the religious skeptic's view is not nearly as compelling as some philosophers (including some of my favorites, I'm guessing) would have us believe. He reminds us (rightly) that the religious skeptic cannot be satisfied with showing that some particular individuals lack adequate evidence for believing that God exists as the skeptic wants to show that people in general lack adequate evidence.

In response to the allegation that we all lack adequate evidence for God's existence and thus ought to doubt the reality of God, Moser does not follow the lead of the fideist in saying that we don't need evidence for religious commitment but instead wants to say that on the right sort of understanding of "adequate evidence" the skeptic is right to suggest that this is something we need but wrong in thinking that it is not something that can be had.

How should we understand the demand for 'sufficient' evidence? Moser suggests that some religious skeptics demand cognitive reproducibility, that we can exert a kind of control over the evidence whereby we can reproduce the evidence again for ourselves or for someone else. This is implausible. He remarks, "Much of the inferred original evidence in cosmology, astrophysics, and geology ... is neither under our control nor reproducible by us" (34). He then suggests that the lesson to be drawn from this is that we ought to reject this stricture, "if evidence of God's reality isn't reproducible by us, then it isn't genuine evidence" (34). It's hard to take issue with this. I doubt there's anyone who thinks that all evidence must be under our control and reproducible, so unless there's some reason to think that there' s something special about evidence for God's existence, I can't imagine a religious skeptic making much of this.

Moser also notes that it is inappropriate to demand proof as there are many things believed without proof but believed with adequate evidence (35). The upshot is that even if it can be shown that we can't prove God's existence, this does nothing to encourage skepticism. Again, I think there's no question that Moser is right on this point.

Evidence for God's existence is, according to Moser, "a truth-indicator for the proposition that an authoritatively and morally perfect agent worthy or worship actually exists" (37). He takes Russell to task for saying that if he met God after his death, he would tell God that he gave us insufficient evidence. Moser's response:

Insufficient for what? For Russell's highly questionable expectations of God? ... a humbled Russell, unlike the actual Russell, would have asked: "God, what purposes of yours led to your being subtle and elusive in the purposively available evidence of your reality?" It's astonishing and regrettable too, that Russell ... gave no indication of being aware of such a compelling and important question for a rational truth-seeker" (37).

Were Russell's expectations unreasonable? Someone like Russell would say that the existence of Klansmen and fascists have always seemed to me to be precisely the sort of thing we wouldn't expect to see if God existed. As the details are coming later, there's not much to say on this point. It seems that Moser thinks that Russell is ignoring something important: he's neglected the question, 'If God exists, what parameters for the evidence would God observe?' (I'm not sure Russell's ignored it, but maybe he didn't think sufficiently hard about it.) The kind of evidence we'll get, suggests Moser, is not the kind of evidence we would prefer but the sort of evidence that God prefers us to have. To determine what sort of evidence a morally perfect being worthy of worship would give us, Moser suggests that we would have to know what such a being would think is in our best interests and what this being intends for this world. That being said, he concedes, "If ... we were to face a world of nothing but unrelenting pain and suffering we would have significant evidence against God's reality. We would then have significant evidence against the reality of a God who truly cares for all humans, and we would have no positive indication of the reality of such a God" (38). He adds, however, "The actual world ... is clearly not a world of nothing but unrelenting pain and suffering" (38). Not for me, at least. There's an interesting question about the scope of Moser's claims. If we were to face a world including subjects whose lives were pretty much nothing but unrelenting pain and suffering, does Moser concede that this is strong evidence for the non-existence of a God that cares for this subject? Moser is right that the actual world contains its silver linings (e.g., Mother Teresa reaching out to the poor), and that means that this world is not one of unrelenting pain and suffering but it is consistent with there being individual lives that are filled with pain and suffering with little relief. Can the religious skeptic say that the evidential situations of those who live miserable lives strong evidence either for God's non-existence or God's lack of concern for some individuals?

Moser clarifies that his discussion will not assume that the God of traditional theism exists of the God of some specific tradition exists, but he will hope to show that we have pretty much what we'd expect to have in terms of evidence if in fact a morally perfect God exists. It is then that we can ask whether our evidence actually points in favor of God. The advantage of such a project seems to be that we can ask whether our evidential situation is the evidential situation we would expect if there were a Jewish or Christian God that comes to us with authoritative evidence, "evidence demanding that we yield our wills to the divine source of the evidence in question" (47). Arguments for religious skepticism that assume that we will receive spectator's evidence (i.e., evidence that we can receive without bending our wills to the will of the source of the evidence) are the sorts of arguments that Moser will argue are unconvincing even if they show convincingly that there is little evidence for some sort of God that would do little to challenge us. The kind of evidence we would expect to have on the hypothesis that the Jewish or Christian God exists is not necessarily the sort of evidence that we could gather simply by investigating nature (48). Moser is skeptical that we can, by means of our own resources, come upon sufficient evidence for God's existence. I guess I have a vague concern about this. If God doesn't provide adequate spectator evidence but might be concerned to provide adequate authoritative evidence, those with flawed characters (Russell? Me?) will likely never receive evidence that could rationalize a commitment to the God of Judaism or Christianity. Is this a tragic situation? Is the loss suffered by those who can't come to know God (in some sense of 'can't') proportional to the failings of character that prevent them from (allegedly) coming to know God to exist? It seems that a morally perfect being would not want these sorts of tragic situations to arise (i.e., for the degree of loss to be highly disproportional when we take account of the subject's vice or irresponsible conduct), but if that's right, then why should we expect there to be a huge gap between authoritative evidence and spectator's evidence since it seems on its face that relatively minor sins can leave someone in the position of a rational agnostic.

There's not much I can say at this point. The project is really interesting, Moser's points thus far seem perfectly correct, so I can't wait to see how this all plays out in the chapters to come.

A draft of my entry for Oxford Bibliographies Online can be found here. Comments and advice welcome and appreciated, and for that purpose it is worth reminding that the purpose of these is to be selective, attending to the most important issues and publications to help guide newcomers through the blithering array of material that shows up in a usual Google search.