March 2006 Archives

3. Trent Dougherty: When you were offered the Nolloth Chair I recall that at first you weren't *certain* you were going to take it given the relative economies and other factors. What have been pros and cons of accepting the chair and living in England?

Brian Leftow: Oxford is wonderful in ways you'd anticipate. The philosophy scene is intense and varied even when you consider home-team talent, and the visiting speaker menu is stellar. And the best undergrads here are as talented the best anywhere, and perhaps better overall due to the tutorial system. But it is also great in ways you wouldn't anticipate. Among the latter: the Colleges feed their Fellows and the food can be marvelous: sometimes restaurant-quality, and free. (Well, more precisely, it's a benefit you earn, like medical insurance.) And some Oxford dons raise conversation to an art, almost a form of music--the casual wit that flows out of them is amazing. I've enjoyed the people here tremendously. Really, the job and all that has been directly connected to it have had no down-sides at all so far. On the other hand, the Nolloth has to agree to take a 2-year turn as Chair of the theology faculty board (roughly, department chair)--it's in the contract. That won't be fun.

Life in the UK has pluses and minuses.
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Royal Society of Arts
For those fellow audiophiles out there the Royal Society of Arts brings us a fabulous program with Daniel Dennett and the Revd Professor Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University. (Listen)

Dennett opens by continuing to promote the bizarre meme that there is a taboo against the scientific study of religion. He then follows up with his Golden Bough like story of primitive beliefs evolving into more abstract and organized religion by way of memes. It would be nice to see Dennett address the literature in the anthropology and sociology of religion that rejects this Golden Bough view as flying in the face of evidence. As H. Allen Orr points out "...the origin and diffusion of religion, like the origin and diffusion of music, laughter, and xenophobia, reside in a largely irretrievable evolutionary past. We know virtually nothing about the religion, if any, practiced by our ancestors on the African savanna hundreds of thousands of years ago. It's far from obvious that explaining unprovable beliefs with unprovable theories constitutes progress"

You could hardly ask for a more able respondent that the Revd Professor Alister McGrath. A lapsed atheist with a D.Phil for research in the natural sciences McGrath later studied for ordination at Westcott House, Cambridge. McGrath agrees with Dennett's opening remarks to the effect that people often don't like to have their beliefs examined, but I think that this is to generous for Dennett's particular claim. McGrath pushes hard on Dennett's use of memes and attendant problems of deploying memes. McGrath gets bonus points for a touch of humor.

Dennett doesn't get off easy when it comes to the moderator or the Q&A. The program is lengthy but well worth listening to in full.

Open Source
Dennett was recently on Christopher Lydon's NPR program Open Source. (Listen) Poor Lydon gets in over his head pretty fast. Fortunately Lydon had the foresight enlist philosopher Michael Murray and evolutionary biologists David Sloan Wilson and Jeffrey Schloss. While the program is all to brief, both Wilson and Schloss push back at some Dennett's ideas while Murray gets in some good points.

I made the following point in the comments on Kevin's Theological Determinism and Supererogatory Salvation post:

I think there's an interesting set of complaints about traditional Christian theology that turn out to be inconsistent. One is the claim that it's morally abhorrent to allow people to suffer eternally when it can be avoided. The other is the critique of penal substitution that says that God would be unjust to allow Jesus to take people's penalty when they deserve it. I'm not sure if any careful thinker has made both claims (though I suspect someone has and just hasn't connected them), but I think the fact that the latter claim has some staying power in philosophical circles suggests that the former isn't as well-motivated by utterly obvious intuitions as some think.

Heath suggested we move the discussion to a new post so as not to distract from the discussion of Kevin's post, so here we are. I'll take my further thoughts into the comments.

Paul Draper, who specialized in philosophy of religion and philosophy of science at Florida International University, has accepted a senior appointment in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University. This appointment fills the vacancy left by William Rowe's recent retirement. Draper will be joining familiar names such as Michael Bergmann, Jeffrey Brower, Daniel Frank, an emeritus William Rowe, and fellow traveler Jan Cover, giving Purdue one of the highest concentrations of faculty working in philosophy of religion.

Due to the nature of blogovision, the three posts below are in reverse order, so I thought I should put a note on top that the three posts below are part of a new series. Have fun!

Trent Dougherty: You are best known for your work on the nature of God's relation to time, especially for defending divine timelessness. This view has relatively few defenders today. Why do you think that is?

Brian Leftow: Original sin. Or else that (a) temporalism is the picture we think we see in the Bible (though there are things there that point in a different direction, I think) and tend to develop as we think of God on analogy with ourselves, and (b) the metaphysical picture which tended to offset this in more enlightened times (broadly, Platonism) has less pull today. As (b) is so, the weight of argument needed to offset (a) has grown. Or were you looking for the answer "I'm not very persuasive"?

Trent Dougherty: Do you mean to say that atemporalism is logically dependent on some kind of Platonism? Do you think there is any devotional theology riding on this issue?

Brian Leftow: There's no logical dependence. It's just that Platonists are generally friendly to timeless entities. In one respect I don't see a devotional issue here. Lived Christianity is carpentry; the temporalism/atemporalism issue concerns the physics of wood. The world we experience should come out looking the same no matter what the true underlying account is- that's a condition on the adequacy of the account. Of course in saying this I am supposing that things do look the same to us if God is atemporal. But that seems correct. I pray; something happens which I take to be God's answer to it. Surely it doesn't matter whether He heard the prayer just when I prayed it or 'from all eternity.' And if the latter, then again surely it doesn't matter whether we read that phrase as temporalists or as atemporalists do. I'm also supposing that atemporalism doesn't throw up obstacles to events' being answers to prayer, but I've argued this elsewhere. I guess I tend to think God "bigger" or more awesome if atemporal than He would be if temporal; it's that sort of feeling that inclined me toward atemporalism enough to want to investigate whether it was defensible. But others seem not to share that view.

1. Trent Dougherty: In your essay "From Jerusalem to Athens" in God and the Philosophers you note a bias against Christians in academic philosophy. Have you noticed much of a change there in the 13 years since that piece was written? How does it compare in England?

Brian Leftow: Notre Dame has had great success getting people interviewed and hired by secular departments. St. Louis U is starting to get some people into such jobs too. That might suggest that there is less bias, but it could be instead that there are just candidates good enough to overcome it. I've heard a couple of grad students say they thought it was worse, which surprised me. I guess all this adds up to "I don't know." And I as yet know nothing at all on UK hiring.

Trent Dougherty: But some Christian philosophers get hired by not doing work in PR and/or by remaining silent on such work. There remain issues of tenure and promotion, but the same things can happen there. My question was aimed at the broader non-tangible price Christians pay in academic culture, perhaps especially in Philosophy. Do you care to comment on that either State-side or in England?

Brian Leftow: You've actually changed the question a bit, to attitudes to PR rather than Christianity as such. I think there's likely to be a presumption that people coming out of ND or SLU are Christian; if so, they may be test cases that let us distinguish a bit how people see Christians from how they see Christians who want to do PR. Things on the PR front seem to me pretty much unchanged. It was a hard field to get a job when I first hit the market, and still is. Most of the Top 25 dep't's in the Gourmet Report don't even have someone who occasionally writes in it, and at a quick glance I'd bet that no more than five have someone who'd list it as an AOS. The reasons for this remain the same too. Most philosophers are the sort of atheist who reads "philosophy of religion" as "philosophy of voodoo." (That is, of Dennett's opinions, more or less, but willing to be polite.) And there's also (I suspect) a tendency to think or hope that the religion department will cover it- which given what goes on in US religion dep't's these days is almost never the case. In the UK, PR has traditionally been taught in theology faculties. (The Nolloth Professorship is actually a theology chair, though I count as holding a post in both philosophy and theology.) Yet it's mostly studied by philosophers: in Oxford's Finals, generally about 10 theology undergrads and at least 120 in philosophy write the PR paper. So there's a need for more philosophy teaching in this, and Oxford did recently try to make a hire. I don't know how things stand at other UK universities. PS- we didn't actually hire someone, and so will probably search again in the near future.

I recently interviewed Brian Leftow and I'll be posting that interview in parts this week. Below in this post I'll paste a brief introduction and then I'll publish two questions in individual posts. As the week goes on I'll post the rest of the questions each in its own post. Enjoy!

Brian Leftow was one of the first analytic philosophers I ever read. I got into philosophy primarily through philosophical theology and I was a Thomist (though not yet a Catholic) so I was interested in defenses of divine timelessness. I found Time and Eternity a tour de force. The way it combined logical acumen with thorough knowledge of the history of philosophy (and not a little modern science) was an exemplar to me of what good philosophy should look like. That book is still a modern classic on the subject. Since then I have read everything he's published and continue to be impressed.
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Patrick Todd has sent me some interesting comments on my grace paper that have got me thinking. I think he raises an interesting issue, and so I want to raise it here.

Here are the stipulations, which I'll collectively call S:
1. Theological determinism is true.
2. Universalism is false.
3. Despite 1, God doesn't cause the damnation of any individual. Let to her own devices, each individual will become damned. Rather, He simply refrains from causing their salvation. It is this refraining that accounts for the truth of 2.
4. God owes salvation to no individaul. That is, for every act of saving an individual by God causing them to come to saiving faith, that act is a supererogatory action.

So here are the two questions that I'd like to open up for discussion:
A. Is S consistent with divine omnibenevolence? In other words, is there a tension between 3, 4, and God's gooness?
B. Given 1 and 2, is 3 compatible with divine goodness even apart from 4? In other words, is the fact that God determines that everyone will be damned if not caused to come to saving faith by God , and the fact that He doesn't cause all to come to saving faith, compatible with divine goodness apart from one's view about the nature of superegatory actions?

Royal Institute of Philosophy and University of Birmingham Public Lecture

"Love and the Problem of Evil"

Professor Robert Merrihew Adams (Oxford University and Yale University) with a response by Dr. Yujin Nagasawa

Thursday 4pm, June 8, 2006
Large Lecture Theatre, Arts Building, University of Birmingham
Admission free

If an omnipotent and morally perfect God exists, why is there so much evil in this world? The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham are delighted to host a public lecture by one of the most prominent living philosophers of religion.

For further details contact Dr. Lisa Bortolotti or Dr. Yujin Nagasawa.

My article on the divine simplicity for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is now available. Authors of these articles are supposed to update them regularly. So I welcome any comments anyone has on style and content. And if you know of any additional literature I should cite, whether on-line or in print, please let me know. At the moment, the webliography is a bit weak.

By the way, the well-heeled among you ought to consider making a contribution to SEP. It is widely regarded as the premier philosophy resource on the World Wide Web. But to remain free it requires financial support. See here. In case you are wondering, the authors of entries work pro bono.

Christianity, like the other two Abrahamic religions, is monotheistic. But unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity holds to a trinitarian conception of God. The idea, spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are numerically distinct from one another. How is this possible? How can Christians convince Jews and Muslims that their position is logically tenable and does not collapse into tritheism, and thus into polytheism to the detriment of the divine unity and transcendence?

I'd like to welcome Prosblogion's latest contributor Bill Vallicella. Bill is a former Associate Professor at the University of Dayton, but he is perhaps better known for striking out on his own as an independent philosopher. Bill has published in most journals one would wish to see their work in. A small sample of past publications that might be of particular interest to Prosblogion readers include:

• "Incarnation and Identity," Philo, vol. 5, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 2002), pp. 84-93.
  
• "The Creation-Conservation Dilemma and Presentist Four-Dimensionalism," Religious Studies 38 (June 2002), pp. 187-200.
  
• "From Facts to God: An Onto-Cosmological Argument," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 48, no. 3 (December 2000), pp. 157-181.
  
• "Does the Cosmological Argument Depend on the Ontological?" Faith and Philosophy, vol. 17, no. 4 (October 2000, Special Issue on Kant's Philosophy of Religion), pp. 441-458.
  
• "God, Causation, and Occasionalism," Religious Studies 35 (1999), pp. 3-18.
  
• "Could a Classical Theist be a Physicalist?" Faith and Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 2 (April 1998), pp. 160-180.
  
• "Has the Ontological Argument Been Refuted?" Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 97-110.
  
• "Divine Simplicity: A New Defense," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 4 (October 1992), pp. 508-525.

I'm finally getting around to reading the Dennett-Swinburne exchange that Matthew linked to a few weeks ago. One argument he makes along the way is a development of the fine-tuning argument for an intelligent designer even given the many-universes hypothesis. I've never seen this move made before. Does he argue this elsewhere, or is it a point anyone else has seen? Here is the relevant excerpt:

Some sort of multiverse theory might well be true. My point was that if there is a multiverse, it's a multiverse of a kind which will produce at least one universe which will produce humans. But it's logically possible that there might instead have been other quite different kinds of multiverse, or just one universe, not productive of humans. So why are the most general laws of the multiverse as they are? Why do all particles behave in exactly the same way as each other, so as together ultimately to produce human life? This enormous coincidence in particle behaviour requires explaining.

An updated version of the paper on grace that I gave at the Mizzou philosophy of religion conference can now be found here: http://home.sandiego.edu/~ktimpe/grace.pdf. Any further comments or devistating objections that you'd like to give me before I send it off for review would be appreciated (well, maybe the devistating objections wouldn't be appreciated!). Thanks.
PS--Kudos to Matthew, our gracious host and administrator, for converting my paper to PDF format to make things easier on all of you.

In the comments on Kevin's post Divine Eternity and Libertarian Free Will, several commenters have raised the problem of how an atemporal God can know what time it is. There are several directions someone can go with this question, and I wanted to comment on it in a little more detail than seemed right in a comment thread. The main problem is as follows.

1. God is omniscient, i.e. God knows every true proposition.
2. God is atemporal, i.e. God does not experience events in temporal succession but instead experiences every temporal event timelessly.
3. The A-theory of time is correct, i.e. there is a fact beyond the facts about what happens before and after other events, namely the fact about which of those events is taking place now.
4. By 1 and 3, God knows what time it is.
5. If God knows what time it is, then God is in time.
6. By 4 and 5, God is in time.
7. By 2 and 6, we have a contradiction. So something above must be denied.

I used to reject the Boethian understanding of eternity (i.e., the claim that God is atemporal) because I thought there were good objections to the view. And since the truth of divine simplicity would entail the truth of divine eternity (though it isn't clear that the entailment goes the other way), these objections would also be objections to divine simplicity. But I'm becoming less and less convinced that the concept of divine eternity is problematic. One of the objections that I used to think was problematic involves our having free will. One way of spelling out the objection in more detail is as follows:

Knowledge Objection:
If agents have libertarian free will, then it is not the case that all of their actions are determined by antecedent causes outside of their control (including God). But if God isn't the ultimate cause of an agent's action, then He does not know about that action in virtue of causing it. Instead, God actually has the knowledge that He does because of a free agent's action. Thus, God is dependent on the agent's action for His knowledge. However, if God's knowledge is dependent on another agent's action, then that agent's action causally affects God. However, the doctrine of eternity rules out that God can be causally affected by anything outside of Himself, since to be causally affected it a kind of change, and change requires time.

There is a post here containing John Haldane's brief response to Dennett's book.

The main thrust is that whatever (surely speculative) story one can come up with about the rise and uses of religion, the bottom line remains, for the philosophically minded person, the truth of religious claims. Swinburne tried to engage him on that too of course, but it seems like Daniel doesn't want to play.

Alvin Plantinga, John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has weighed in on Judge Jones opinion in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District

I won't offer an opinion on whether the judge's decision is correct — although apparently he's never met an objection to intelligent design he doesn't like and some of his "findings" seem vastly more sweeping than is appropriate. First, a general question: What sorts of issues can a judge decide just by fiat? Jones rules, among other things, that:

• ID is just warmed-over creation science
• ID tries to change the very definition of science
• The scientific community has refuted the criticisms of evolution brought by the IDers
• ID involves a kind of dualism and that this dualism is doomed.

But how can one hope to settle these matters just by a judicial declaration?

Brian Weatherson is slated to discuss blogging and philosophy at the upcoming APA. He wants to try to run an analogy between philosophy blogging and philosophy conferences, which seems rather natural to me. I have to say that being at Missouri's 1st Annual Philosophy of Religion Conference, which had a strong contingent of Prosblogion contributors and readers in attendance, only served to strengthen this analogy in my mind. I must admit though that some days this place feels more like a seminar than a conference.

One thing I surprised Brian hasn't commented on is the ability blogs have to connect people working in the same areas. Given that most philosophy departments are rather small I would imagine that it is rather unusual for most people to have colleagues who work in their area. One advantage here is that it allows individuals to work out problems and questions with people working within their own subdiscipline. These posts that may start out as test balloons can become papers in their own right. If I'm not mistaken a couple of contributors here have material that started out as a post here and is now under review.

If you have thoughts on blogging and conferences perhaps you can help Brian with his closing question.

After reading the Swinburne Dennett exchange in Prospect Magazine, I browsed the other debates and found one from May 1998 between some guy named Nicholas Beale and Colin Howson of Howson and Urbach's magisterial _Scientific Reasoning_. Unfortunately it wasn't available online without a subscription so I had my library get it for me. I'd post the PDF but it's just too lame to bother. [OK, I ended up saying more than I thought I would so here's the article.]

I'd never heard of Beale but I thought it would be fascinating to see what Howson had to say in response to fine tuning arguments, having had something to say about that myself (with Ted). As it turns out Beale is incredibly amateurish in his gambit, it's embarrassing really. I think he mentions some good evidence but I've rarely seen it used more incompetently, though he comes off better on defense. At any rate here are some observations I found interesting (some surprising some not).

*He describes himself as a "simplicity skeptic" (Nay!)
*Says lilkihoods are no good on their own. (Yay!)
*Says that morality is not objective and most philosophers believe this. (Nay!)
*Says that theism makes no detailed predictions about the universe. [Similarly to Sober, but a bit different view it seems.]
*Says no physicist he knows thinks quantum theory is true. (Yay!)
*Says there is little evidence that the world is comprehensible. (Nay!)
*Prefers societies which do not torture babies to those which do. (Um, Yay?)
*Thinks the "resurrection myth" was encouraged by its "propaganda value". (Nay!)
*Says the Bible contradicts itself. (Yay! No wait, Nay!)
*Says that Jesus was not a great moral teacher. [Russell's reason: he taught Hell]
*Says the probability of theism given evil is zero.

More below the fold.

In case you missed it, there was a debate this last Friday between Peter van Inwagen (hereafter PVI) and Michael Tooley of the University of Colorado. It was announced here if you want to see how it was billed and compare that with this review.

According to the report (which for me was continually interrupted by very distracting Victoria's Secret ads!!) Tooley was arguing the "affirmative" Be it resolved: God does not exist. His gambit was, a bit surprisingly, the logical problem of evil. This wouldn't be surprising if it were some guy off the street, but it's surprising to see a professional philosopher with some knowledge of the philosophy of religion taking that route, especially with PVI who is on record as saying "It used to be widely held that evil was incompatible with the existence of God: that no possible world contained both God and evil. So far as I am able tell, this thesis is no longer defended" about the same time Bill Alston said "It is now acknowledged on (almost) all sides that the logical argument [from evil] is bankrupt."

The presumably neutral Daily Collegian (which, I must say, must be sponsored by Victoria's Secret, man I'm not kidding) describes the transition this way "The tone of the debate was switched from Tooley's fervency to subtleness when Professor Peter van Inwagen took a stand." PVI then gives an impressively frank and heartfelt presentation of the free will defense with a hint of Swinburne's oft-pressed point about the necessity of natural laws for human knowledge.

Sadly, the Q&A ended like a lot of my Intro to Ethics classes: "How can one define what is moral and immoral?"

Prospect magazine has published an exchange between Daniel Dennett and Richard Swinburne on how we should study religion. One nitpicky point about the opening. While it is true that Swinburne read for a diploma in theology in 1960, it seems a rather egregious mistake to label Swinburne a theologian. Given his faculty title, Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, and the bulk of his publications, it should appear rather obvious that he is a philosopher and not a theologian. It is the kind of thing you'd expect a fact-checker to catch. I find Dennett's claim that we must "set aside the traditional exemption from scrutiny that religions have enjoyed" rather curious in that I have no idea what he is talking about. I don't know how science is demarcated, but religion has been a subject of study within psychology for at least a hundred years. More recently there have been approaches to the subject in evolutionary psychology, and neuroscientists have looked for areas of the brain sensitive to religion. Let me highlight a curious remark by Swinburne too.

The supposition that there is such a God is a very simple one. For it is the supposition that there exists one "person" (not many persons), who is the simplest kind of person there could be.

I'd like to publicly thank our own Kevin Timpe for refunding my registration and banquet fee when I was held up in Chicago to do bad weather and the utter incompetence of United Airlines and couldn't make the Pacific SCP conference. It was unsolicited and accompanied by a nice hand-written note (I'm glad to find that I've got competition for worst handwriting ever ;-)

It would not have been obviously wrong of them to keep it, or at least if wrong the practice is wide-spread enough that it is common even in the Christian world. I subscribe to enough things that eventually I have problems. Christianity Today Inc. has run roughshod over me in the past. Philosphia Christi was also begrudging when I was missing some issues and tried hard to charge me exorbitant fees. On the other hand First Things and Faith and Philosophy have always rushed to fix problems with nary a suggestion of additional fees. IVP bookclub has also been very forgiving even once when it was clearly my fault (though also on two other occasions when it was their fault and one the post office's). Mars Hill Audio took a little nudge but it wasn't too bad.

I might not have remarked on it had I not had so many troubles in the past, both those mentioned above and recently trying to get some kind of compensation out of United which was like pulling teeth and bore little fruit. My department was not covering the trip, I just wanted to see my friends and acquaintances, and I am out $550 due to United's total lack of concern for customers. So the check coming back was such a welcome surprise that I wanted to publicly express my gratitude. I should also acknowledge Sandy Goldberg for reducing student fees for the Central States Philosophy Association which was a real help.