June 2004 Archives

David Efrid’s post on Mysterianism has got me thinking of the problems that surround the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation. Until recently I had not given much philosophical thought to the doctrine of the Incarnation. However, when I did begin to consider the doctrine from a philosophical perspective I was stunned by the number of contradictions that present themselves. I am sure there are plenty of things I should have read regarding this topic and I am sure many of you will be happy to point them out to me. So I would like to layout the problem for the doctrine of the Incarnation, and why I think it is contradictory, and then perhaps I can get some feedback as to how orthodox Christians can extract themselves from this problem.

I've just posted some reflections at OrangePhilosophy about predictive prophecy and how to deal with counterfactuals in such a case. It isn't about God's foreknowledge of the future but takes its start from a fantasy role-playing case, but it raises some of the same issues and may be interesting from a philosophy of religion standpoint, so I figured it would be worth linking to it from here.

Suppose we agree with the following: in every case of moral responsibility, there is a flicker of freedom, construed as involving a counterpossibility of some sort (there's been discussion of this here already, so I won't repeat), but also that the flicker in question isn't sufficient to undergird attributions of responsibility. This, I think, is John Fischer's semi-compatibilist position.

Suppose also that only necessary universalism, as opposed to contingent universalism, has a chance of solving the problem of hell. On this view, it is metaphysically necessary that everyone end up in heaven.

The primary argument against necessary universalism appeals to the value of freedom and the impossibility of guaranteeing that a free individual chooses in whatever way choice is related to presence in heaven. This argument has to be replaced, I think, if the above account is correct. I think freedom has been valued to the extent it has because it is thought that freedom is necessary and sufficient for responsibility. With this assumption, the freedom argument makes it your own fault if you're not in heaven.

On the above account, freedom may be necessary for responsibility but it is not sufficient. So even if there is a flicker of freedom, that is no guarantee that it's your own fault if you're in hell.

That still leaves it possible for a person to be in hell and it to be their own fault. But the kind of possibility here is weaker than metaphysical possibility. It is the kind in which the truth of what is said before doesn't logically imply the opposite of the claim in question. That is, the kind of possibility here is logical possibility. There is no argument, however, from such a logical possibility to metaphysical possibility. Hence, it looks like the freedom argument against necessary universalism succumbs if the Fischer view is correct.

Sound right?

Following Thomas Nagel, Colin McGinn maintains that the mind-body problem is not solvable. His widely read paper, 'Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem', begins in the following way:

'We have been trying for a long time to solve the mind-body problem. It has stubbornly resisted our best efforts. The mystery persists. I think the time has come to admit candidly that we cannot resolve the mystery. But I also think that this very insolubility -- or the reason for it -- removes the philosophical problem.'

Owen Flanagan has labelled McGinn a 'mysterian' about the mind-body problem. Mysterianism, to use such a horrible word, is not confined to the mind-body problem: there are mysterians about the origin of the universe, mysterians about the nature of thinking, and so on.

Taking my cue from the proliferation of such mysterian positions and also from the spectacular failure of the natural theological and atheological arguments to convince the other side, I wonder if we should be mysterians about the problem of rationally resolving whether God exists. One who is a mysterian about this problem maintains that there could (epistemic sense of 'could') not be a rationally compelling argument, one that should convince everyone concerned, for theism or for atheism. And perhaps, as McGinn maintains about the mind-body problem, the very insolubility of the problem of whether God exists removes the problem, that is, removes it as a distinctively philosophical problem.

I'm in the middle of writing a piece on hell for an Oxford Handbook. The last material I've seen on the subject is the interchange between Talbott and Murray, as well as the interchange between Walls and Talbott (all on universalism). There's also Sider's piece on hell and vagueness, arguing that hell will have to be unjust because its not vague whether you go there but it has to be vague whether one has done anything that deserves being sent there.

Anyone know of other new stuff on hell?

David Efird's post on whether Divine Command Theory (DCT) can be shown to be false or circular contained the following argument:

(1) Necessarily, if God commands that subject S commit action A, then it is ethically right for S to commit A.
(2) Possibly, God commands subject S to commit an act of wanton cruelty.
So, (3) Possibly, it is ethically right for S to commit an act of wanton cruelty.

David wanted to deny (1) and had to deal with a charge of circularity. My inclination was to deny (2) and say that God couldn't command something contrary to his nature, but David's worry about that was that you then have denied DCT. DCT is supposed to explain morality in terms of God's will, but then if you deny (2) it seems to be not God's will but God's nature that grounds morality. I think this is a mistake, and William Alston's "Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists" gives a way to do this without that consequences. In the comments, I'd mentioned Alston's solution, but now that I've gone back and read his paper I think I did his suggestion some serious injustice, so I'd like to explain how Alston's response would handle the issue at hand.

I've been reading Plantinga's third volume and am puzzled by his account. As I understand it, Plantinga wants to block merely epistemic complaints about Christian belief--that is, he wants to block the kind of complaint where you bracket the truth of the claims in question and claim that whether or not the beliefs are true, there is something wrong, on purely intellectual grounds, with holding them.

The method used by Plantinga seems to be this: describe a model on which, together with his account of warrant, the beliefs would be warranted if the model is true. This is the perplexing part for me.

In his 'Eternity' (in Quinn and Taliaferro (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 257-63), Brian Leftow canvasses some of the more prominent arguments for God being in time. Some of these are (quoting Leftow and retaining his labeling):

(b) God is alive. Lives are events. Events must occur in time. So God is in time.

(g) God acts. Actions are events. Again, events must occur in time.

(h) God is a cause. Either causal relations link only events, or they also link agents to events ("agent causality"). If the first, then as events occur only in time, God is in time. If the second, the agent's action is dated at the time of the effect. So if God has any temporal effects as an agent cause, He is in time. (pp. 260-61)

Leftow notes that all of these arguments assume that:

(E) Events must occur in time.

He thinks that all of the arguments for this assumption are bad arguments. I think he is wrong about one of them.

Topic-oriented group philosophy blogs continue to multiply. I would like to welcome PEA Soup to the blogsphere. PEA Soup is a blog with a focus on ethics. The contributors include Dan Boisvert (California State University, Bakersfield), Josh Glasgow (Occidental College), Dave Shoemaker (Bowling Green State University), and Doug Portmore (California State University, Northridge).

One of the standard objections to divine command theory (DCT) can be framed in terms of the following argument.

(1) Necessarily, if God commands that subject S commit action A, then it is ethically right for S to commit A.
(2) Possibly, God commands subject S to commit an act of wanton cruelty.
So, (3) Possibly, it is ethically right for S to commit an act of wanton cruelty.

How should the DCTer respond to this argument?

Since Molinism seems to have such a strong place in the comments section, I want to try out an issue on the concept of prevolitionality. The issue is central to discussions of Molinism, because Molinists take the truth of counterfactuals of freedom (CFs) to be prevolitional for God: that is, they are true prior to, in the logical order of things, anything that is true as a result of God's will.

Some Molinists, such as Tom Flint, also claim the prevolitionality claim is the same as claiming that there is nothing God could do to make such CFs false. I have resisted this identification in print, insisting that the presence of snow in a certain spot in northern Indiana is prevolitional with respect to me but not beyond my control: I could have put a piece of cardboard over the spot and it would not have had snow on it.

Flint replied by claiming that the case of God is different. He thinks God's case is more like what would be the case had I thought about the spot in Indiana, and consciously refrained from interfering, claiming "Here, a full explanation of why the snow is there would have to take account of the various acts and processes going on in my mind. So the ground�s being snow covered would obviously be both post-volitional and non-resilient." (A claim is resilient for S iff S lacks counterfactual power over its truth-value.)

I think this response is inadequate. If we begin with the concept of prevolitionality, the natural understanding of it is in terms of causality. We might say that a truth is prevolitional for S iff it is not true in virtue of any act of S's will, but the notion of "in virtue of" seems obviously causal. If we take prevolitionality in causal terms, there is a straightforward understanding of causation on which, even if I decided not to go to Indiana and interfere, no act of my will caused the presence of snow on the spot in question.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James makes the following claims about mystical experiences:

(1) Mystical states, when developed, usually are and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.

(2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.

(3) They break down the authority of non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith. (460-61)

Claim (1) seems to say that mystical experiences give a sort of invulnerable authority, or, one might say, indefeasible warrant, for mystical beliefs (beliefs concerning mystical experiences). Claim (2) might be interepreted, when purged of some unfortunate features, as saying that the warrant spoken of in Claim (1) for mystical beliefs is not transmissible by testimony from the one who experienced the mystical state to one who has not.

Whether or not this is an accurate interpretation of James, I would like to ask: how should we understand James's use of 'authority' in Claim (1) and does this understanding fit with Claim (2)?

In a previous entry, on Baldwin's counter-ontological argument, I considered whether there might be divine twins, that is, two co-existing individuals sharing all of their repeatable intrinsic properties, which are the traditional perfections. One reason for thinking that there couldn't be two such individuals is that there couldn't be two co-existing omnipotent agents. I've gone through what I've written before, and, I think, improved my argument that there could be two omnipotent agents, and I'm posting it below the fold.

There is another topic-oriented philosophy blog. Three of us at the University of Missouri have started it (Kvanvig, Markie, McGrath), and many more epistemologists are signing on as authors. We'll update the author list later, but here's the link to Certain Doubts:
http://blog.coas.missouri.edu/certain_doubts/

In his Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Philip Quinn terms the claim:

If God did not exist, then everything would be permitted.

'Karamazov's Thesis' (KT). Are divine command theorists committed to KT? And are divine command theorists then committed to saying that if God did not exist, stealing this diamond ring would be permitted?

Here's a hard problem that I've been thinking about and making very little progress. I was reminded of it reading Hugh McCann's reply to Rowe in the January 2001 issue of Faith&Philosophy. Rowe took a Reid line against McCann's version of Thomism about the way in which God concurs with human beings in acting, claiming that "God leads us around by the nose." The criticism seemed appropriate, since what God wills is logically sufficient for us doing the actions we do.

McCann's reply? That logical sufficiency doesn't undermine even libertarian free will, because the logical relationship between our wills and God's will is symmetrical: God's general concurrence is sufficient for us acting as we do, but our willing as we do is also sufficient for God's concurring as He does. (This is a bit mysterious, but I'll let it pass for now.) So if logical sufficiency undermines free will (here I mean by that libertarian free will), then God can't have free will either. McCann's resolution of the issue is that the loss of free will has to be tied to causal or nomological implications, not logical ones.

This same issue arises in the literature on freedom/foreknowledge. Bill Craig and David Hunt both claim that the mere fact that some event or state of affairs logically implies that I will mow my lawn tomorrow is irrelevant to whether I will freely mow my lawn tomorrow, even if that event or state of affairs is one strictly about the past. For both, the question of freedom here is tied to causal or nomological implications, not logical ones.

Leibniz faces a problem that many philosophers think he can't get out of. He wants to avoid Spinoza's view that everything is necessary, believing that God is free and has chosen the best possible world. God wouldn't have chosen a lesser world, because God wouldn't want a lesser world. God could have chosen not to create or to create the best possible world. Either way, Leibniz's own Principle of Sufficient Reason requires him to say that God had to have had a reason to choose to create the best possible world rather than not create. I don't remember enough Leibniz to know what he says about why God chose to create at all, but he does have to say this. The problem is then that it seems God had to create if there had to have been a sufficient reason to create, and he had to create this world if its being the best possible world together with God's moral nature is sufficient for the creation of this very world. Spinozism follows, doesn't it?

Jonathan Bennett has a nice way of putting Leibniz's response. He says "contingency squeezes into Leibniz's metaphysic through the narrow slit between God's character and his actions" (A Study of Spinoza's Ethics, p.116). Bennett thinks the problem is simply insoluble, because Leibniz wants God's freedom to involve some sort of inclining without necessitating, something Leibniz never spells out except in terms of human choices in ways that don't apply to God. Even if he could spell out such an account, does the Principle of Sufficient Reason allow it? Does something that inclines without necessitating still somehow a sufficient reason? Bennett says no.

I think Leibniz can be rescued from this difficulty, though I'm not sure how faithful this proposal would be to everything he says. It seems to me to be in the spirit of Leibniz.

In his paper, 'There might be nothing' Analysis 56: 231-38, Thomas Baldwin gives the following argument, which he terms 'the counter-ontological argument':

(1) It is a mark of concrete objects that they do not satisfy the Identity of Indiscernibles. So the identity of a concrete object is not determined by the intrinsic properties which determine what kind of thing it is.

(2) In the case of any being whose existence is necessary, the fact that its existence is necessary is determined by the kind of thing it is, and thus by its intrinsic properties.

(3) For any being whose existence is necessary, the intrinsic properties which determine its existence also determine its identity.

From these premises, it follows that there are no concrete, necessary existents. Now if one supposes also, that is, in addition to (1) - (3), that:

(4) If God exists, he is the sort of thing that can be causally efficacious.

(5) Anything that is the sort of thing that can be causally efficacious is concrete.

(6) If God exists, he is a necessary existent.

It follows that God does not exist. What to do?

Here's a question related to van Inwagen's consequence argument and its implications for an Edwardsian position on the compatibility of strong sovereignty and (compatibilist) free will, I think, but I'm not here commenting on his argument but rather a general point. (Those of you more up-to-speed on van Inwagen and free will may be able to educate me here...)

The argument I'm thinking about begins with the usual understanding of determinism:
Premise 1: some specification of initial conditions
Premise 2: a listing of the true laws of nature
Conclusion: the entirety of the future
The idea of the argument is that determinism allows one to infer the entirety of the future given only the laws of nature and some specification of initial conditions.

(There is a caveat here that I will ignore below. We need also to insist that determinism involves the claim that nothing ever happens except what can be explained in the above fashion. Otherwise the possibility of miracles, in terms not of contradicting laws of nature, but of contravening them in some other way, changes the status of the above argument. It changes it in such a way that the conclusion follows from the premises, not of logical necessity, but only of nomological necessity. This difference won't matter below, so I ignore it in what follows.)

Now for my version of a consequence argument. It employs three premises:
Premise 1: In the above argument, the first premise is necessary.
Premise 2: In the above argument, the second premise is necessary.
Premise 3: In the above argument, the connection between the premises and the conclusion is necessary.
Conclusion: Therefore, the conclusion of the above argument is itself necessary.

I'm interested in the general principle that "from necessary premises, necessary conclusions follow." Call this principle "NPNC". This principle is fine when the kinds of necessity in the premises are the same, but note that in my version of the consequence argument, there are 3 kinds of necessity. In premise 1, the necessity is accidental necessity; in premise 2, nomological necessity; and in premise 3, logical necessity. NPNC is also fine in some cases where the kinds of necessity differ. If, for example, the necessities can be nested in terms of strength, the principle is fine as long as the necessity attributed to the conclusion is the weakest kind. So is there any defensible version of NPNC for this argument?

In Paul Helm's entry in the IVP book on freedom/foreknowledge, he maintains a strong view of sovereignty and a compatibilist account of free will. He also denies the transitivity of causation, apparently to avoid the objection that God causes all of our actions.

There are several problems with this response, the most troubling coming from van Inwagen's consequence argument, I think (I'll have more to say about that argument in this context later). But apart from the consequence argument, which relies on concepts of necessity and bypasses talk of causation entirely, I don't see how the denial of transitivity will help here. If we adopt a compatibilist account of free will, we'll hold that an action is free when and only when it is the product of the right kinds of internal causes. In order to preserve freedom on this account from encroachment by God's sovereignty, failure of transitivity will have to occur in every case in which human actions are free. No mere denial of the transitivity of causation can secure such a happy coincidence. So, as far as I can tell, the denial of the transitivity of causation is a necessary condition for preserving the compatibility of compatibilist free will with the strong view of sovereignty. It does not come even close to being a sufficient condition for preserving that compatibility.

Suppose then that there is no general assurance that there is the needed happy coincidence. Then Helm's position on the compatibility of free will and sovereignty requires a different form of compatibilism than that above. He needs to say that an action is compatibilistically free if, but not only if, it is the product of internal causes. Amending the theory in this way yields an account of free actions that is incomplete.

So either way, the strong Edwardsian position that Helm defends on the relationship between freedom and sovereignty is incomplete.

This idea of a philosophy of religion blog is a great idea, and I look forward to being part of it.

My most recent thinking in philosophy of religion has been about freedom/foreknowledge, while teaching a course on the same using the IVP "Four Views" text. A sociological remark first, and I'll post some philosophical thoughts later: the students liked David Hunt the best ("best choice to get a beer with") and Bill Craig the least ("least fun to get a beer with"), even though Craig's position and Helm's position were tied for the most adequate philosophically. Least adequate: open theism, of course!!

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