A couple of years ago I heard a funny, and saddening, story about a conference that sought to bring together analytic philosophers of religion and theologians for a conference. I'm sure it seemed like a great idea at the time, but from the report I got the event was an unmitigated disaster. Apparently someone hadn't taken into account that the philosophical background of most contemporary theologians is largely continental/French theory/postmodern. Pick your unmixable metaphor to imagine how well analytic philosophy and postmodernism go together--most certainly a recipe for disaster.

I've wondered about the influence of postmodern thought on seminaries and religious studies programs. I even posted on the subject last year after attending a regional AAR event. As I said then, there is no sign that postmodernisms influence on religious thought is on the way out. If anything postmodern thought is gaining serious ground, especially in emergent churches. This state of affairs is a little mystifying when one considers that analytic philosophy is the dominant style of philosophy in the English speaking world. So, why has analytic philosophy been spurned by so many theologians?

Today is the Feast of the Ascension on the Roman calendar. The Ascension always bothered me, it seems to me the spookiest part of the life of Christ. Virgin birth: no problem. Resurrection: what's the big deal. This is small change for God. But the Ascension just seems *weird*. "And He was taken up and covered by a cloud"? Give me a break.

I was thinking about this on the Feast of the Ascension about four years ago and I had this thought: What are the alternatives? It seems that the following map gives the relevant options. He could 1. Be seen to depart or 2. Not be seen to depart. If he is seen to depart then He must depart 1a. statically, "fade away" so to speak, or 1b. dynamically, be "transported" away (i.e. move from sight in some direction). If he is moved in a direction then it must be either 1b' a major point of the compass, or 1b'' an oblique angle.

Not being seen to depart would be the least spooky, but also the least educative. If He were just never seen nor heard from again, if He'd just disappeared, I think I would be even more disturbed actually. At any rate it would have left open-ended where the heck He went. Is he still out there, like Sasquatch, lurking in the forests eating berries? No, that's no good.

I also don't think the fade away would be any less spooky. The point of being transported "up" is to convey that He's going "up" to be with the Father. I don't know (or particularly care) whether the Apostles thought God was physical and lived in a castle in the air. I suspect they did not. However, I also suspect they had the same natural associations as we have and "the heavens" are, after all, a metaphor for Heaven. So why not up?

None of the other points of the compass convey much. Up is the only real "loaded" direction (I suppose "down" is loaded, but unsuitable for obvious reasons!). So I think it's a contest between the Fade and the Ascension. Can you imagine celebrating the Feast of the Fade?

The most recent volume of the journal Child Development has a fascinating article on "Trust in Testimony: How Children Learn About Science and Religion" by Paul Harris and Melissa Koenig. Though the two are psychologist, there is plenty of philosophy put to good use in the article. Harris and Koenig review a number of studies relating to children's understanding of unobservable scientific and religious entities. (Sorry Dennett, more evidence that there is no taboo against the scientific study of religion.) Children appear to conceptualize the two subjects in similar fashion while bracketing the two into separate domains. Unsurprisingly, children place more confidence in the information they receive regarding unobservable scientific entities than about things in the religious domains. However, "it would be a mistake to conclude that children’s trust in testimony simply offers them a way to amplify or extend their own powers of observation. Although in some domains it does just that, it also leads them to be credulous toward spiritual claims that are not ultimately grounded in observational evidence."

Roger Lundin, Blanchard Professor of English at Wheaton College, has an interesting essay in Books & Culture on pragmatism, postmodernity, and the theology of experience. I wish I had time for more thoughtful comment, but I particularly enjoyed the traced connections between Emerson and William James, their work, and the enduring influence of their work.

Beliefnet editor Laura Sheahen has an interview with The End of Faith author Sam Harris on why religion must end.

Anthony Matteo, professor of philosophy at Elizabethtown College, has a lengthy article in Science & Spirit one why naturalism might not be able to solve the problem of consciousness T

om Hundley of the Chicago Tribune reports on the decline of religious belief in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe. Some of this is the aftermath of communism, but it's important because while Europeans and Americans share some common heritage we are diverging on matters of faith and religion.

Nextbook has an interview with Rebecca Goldstein, professor of philosophy at Trinity College, on Baruch Spinoza and her recent book Betraying Spinoza. 

This weekend I chaired a session at the Eastern Regional Meeting of the Society of Chistian Philosophers in which Dale Tuggy put Reid and Hume on the psychologists couch. It was an interesting exercise in moral psychology. It also reminded me to post on the Trinity, since Dale is a detractor of social Trinitarianism (ST) of which I am an adherent. Dale has a 2003 Philosophia Christi piece criticizing my main man Ed Wierenga's ST paper which appeared in Faith and Philosophy in 2004 (the publication order is explained by the fact that Dale commented on Ed's paper at a conference before either were published).

I was not able to join the discussion here which Bill started but I think the discussion only briefly touched on the real issue.

To my mind, Tom made just the right move in that discussion: God is not a person, though he is personal. I think Bill's response is too quick: "If the personality is divided among the Persons, then the one God is subpersonal." I question whether "divided among" is the right way to think about it and I question whether even on that interp God comes out as subpersonal. It has always driven me crazy when Plantinga says that God is a person. He very frequently defines theism as the belief that "there is such a person as God." I've always cringed at this and I think in every text I have where he says that I've scrawled in he margins "No! God is personal!"

Social Trinitarians are *not* saying that the personality of the Godhead is divided among the divine persons in the same way that the personality of my Logic class is divided among my students and I. The relationship between the divine persons and each other and with the Godhead is much more intimate than that. Can I spell it out precisely? No I cannot (I might be more worried if I could!). But I don't think that's an objection in this context. ST-theorists, like all Trinitarians, will always have more work to do.

I do wish to note that papers arguing against ST tend to neglect of some of the details of Swinburne's 2nd section--"The Traditional Doctrine"--of his Chapter on the Trinity in The Christian God , especially 180-1, 186, 189. What he says there clearly distinguishes the society of persons in the Godhead from ordinary societies. Is the mystery going to disappear? Of course not (and we should be worried if it did!). Still, Swinburne states, in clear terms using standard terminology from analytic philosophy, a property which distinguishes them and which naturally expresses, though in a mind-boggling way, the interconnectedness of the persons of the Trinity. Anti-social Trinitarians will want more, no doubt, but I think it is enough.

Now to the polytheism bit.

Just a reminder to graduate students that submissions are coming due for the 2006 Saint Louis University Graduate Student Conference: The Epistemology of Religious Belief. Thanks to Aaron Cobb for the reminder.

The SEP has a new entry on Medieval Mereology. I've only skimmed it and it looks quite good and perhaps of interest to a significant (enough) number of readers of this blog. Here's an interesting little tidbit.

"For instance, both Abelard and Aquinas think that only substances, such as individual donkeys, palm trees, and human beings, are continuous wholes. Abelard thinks that this is true because only God can fuse parts together into a continuous unity. Humans operations, no matter how finessed, are only capable of placing parts in close proximity to one another."

Given the recent proclivity for approaching the Trinity with mereology in hand, I hope to read this article thoroughly at some point.

I've been thinking lately about God's foreknowledge as it relates to His providence. More specifically, I've been thinking of an argument made by a number of philosophers (Hasker, Flint, Basinger--but most forcefully I think in Sanders' "Why Simple Foreknowledge Offers No More Providential Control than the Openness of God," Faith and Philosophy 1997) that God's having simple foreknowledge (as opposed to middle knowledge) would not aid God in His providential control of the world. The basic idea is that if God has foreknowledge, then what He knows is true, and it's thus 'too late' for Him to do anything to providentially control whether or not what He foreknows will happen. I think a helpful way to think of it is in terms of the following (more below the fold).

Just so ya know: there are two Susan Haacks

I saw recently that the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity (site was down for awhile) which is a Christian bioethics think tank and (I think) tied to the Trinity Evangelical complex is having a conference with speakers listed as "John F. Kilner, J. P. Moreland, Susan Haack, and Edmund Pellegrino." I knew all those names of course and Haack's brought to mind Kermit the Frog singing "one of these things is not like the other."

I thought maybe Haack was there to make the conference "fair and balanced" but I'm pretty familiar with her writings (she writes on all the stuff I'm interested in) and I didn't recall anything that would fit the bill here. Well, after digging around a bit I discovered that there's a Susan Haack, MD as well as a Susan Haack, PhD. It is, of course, the former who will be at the CBHD event. The latter is a confirmed skeptic. I was really perplexed and intrigued for about 15 minutes, so I thought perhaps this post would spare some others the same confusion.

For what it's worth, Haack's writings on the nature of religious belief seem, well, underinformed. Granting that they are usually semi-popular works they still seem a bit amateurish. Perhaps that's not quite the right word, but, like Dennett I suppose, she seems to assume that all the religion stuff was proved nonsense many years ago, not something that a modern individual takes seriously. That's too bad because she's got such a fine mind, I tremendous respect for her as a philosopher (in the disciplines in which she's a specialist and in some others as well).

As a token example, the only time I've been able to find her refer to referring to Swinburne it's from his popular book _Is There a God?_ rather than any scholarly work and she simply repeats one of Mackie's complaints (the very non-Humean complaint about how the non-physical cannot conceivably cause physical events) and moves on. I'd have been keenly interested if she'd really engaged. It seems such a shame that so many good minds never really do.

Yale historian Jaroslav Jan Pelikan (1923-2006) has died of lung cancer at the age of 82. Pelikan was one of the world's leading scholars of the history of Christianity and medieval intellectual history. Pelikan served on the faculty at Yale University from 1962 to 1996. His numerous awards include the Yale Graduate School's Wilbur Cross Medal, the Medieval Academy of America's Haskins Medal, and the John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences. He is a past president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, delivered the 12th annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, and twice delivered Gifford lectures. Pelikan's 1992-93 Gifford lectures were published as Christianity and Classical Culture, just one of the more than 30 books Pelikan published. Though, Pelikan is perhaps best known for his five volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. A useful biography is the 1990 profile of Pelikan for Christianity Today by historian Mark Noll of Wheaton College. Associated Press Obituary

I have a recent paper that I've just posted on my website, available here, that I'd welcome any feedback on. The paper takes as its starting point the traditional view that God is necessarily eternal. There are a number of philosophical objections to the doctrine of divine eternality. Some philosophers argue that the idea of an eternal God is incoherent. Others argue that it leads to absurdities, that the doctrine isn't biblical, or that an eternal God couldn't act in time. Still others object that eternity rules out all contingency in the world. The objection that I'm concerned with here, however, is that divine eternity would rule out God having foreknowledge of libertarian free human actions insofar as simplicity and eternality are incompatible with God's knowledge being causally dependent on those actions. According to this objection, either (a) God must causally determine the free actions of human agents (thus leading to a theological version of compatibilism) or (b) God cannot know, and thus cannot respond to, the free actions of human agents. In the present paper, I argue that one can consistently maintain that God is not causally dependent on anything, even for His knowledge, without being committed to either (a) or (b), by paying careful attention to the metaphysics of truthmaking as it applies to the objects of God's knowledge. The free actions of created agents can be the truthmakers for the objects of God's knowledge without causing a change in God or His knowledge. In other words, the objection considered fails to show that divine eternality is incompatible with God having knowledge of actions brought about via the exercise of libertarian freedom.

In my response to my critics at my APA book session, I pursued an analogy between pain and truth: pain is always and everywhere prima facie bad, but this badness is sometimes defeated or overridden; truth is always and everywhere prima facie valuable, though this value, too, can be defeated. Robert Johnson and I talked a bit about the alternative view of pain, where it takes a valence depending on context. For example, pain in the wicked is a good thing, and not because their wickedness defeats the prima facie badness of pain because they deserve it. It is rather that pain has no valence independent of context, and acquires one depending on the context.

This viewpoint on pain connects in an interesting way with the objection by universalists that heaven can't be complete bliss because those in heaven will know of the suffering of the damned. Somebody, perhaps Tertullian, replied that part of what makes heaven so blessed is this very knowledge, the knowledge that the wicked are suffering the pain of hell.

This isn't a philosophy of religion question at all, but since so many of you here know a lot about blogging, I thought I'd ask. Is there any way to generate the box (logical necessity) operator in ASCII--or any other easy way to get it to show up in text in an HTML document? Thanks in advance.