April 2007 Archives

Just got word today that another paper Ted (Poston) and I wrote together will see the light of day.  Faith and Philosophy will be publishing our paper "Hell, Vagueness, and Justice: A Reply to Sider."  It is a reply to Ted Sider's vagueness argument against Hell which also appeared in Faith and Philosophy. 

We discussed parts of that paper here on Prosblogion and got very helpful comments.  I also thank those readers who attended the Rutgers PR conference where I presented the paper (I previously blogged about some papers on evil presented there). 

The June issue of Religious Studies (try this link or this RSS feed depending on your access) is out and in it is the paper Ted and I wrote together on Divine Hiddenness (with a, um, a rather terse reply by Schellenberg).

Thanks to those of you who workshopped that paper with us!

The following propositions are incompatible:

1. Metaphysically necessarily, there are no facts of the matter about future free actions.
2. Metaphysically necessarily, one is better off insofar as one's morally good plans are fulfilled and worse off insofar as one's morally good plans are not fulfilled.
3. Metaphysically possibly, there was a person x who permanently ceased to exist and who made a morally good plan whose fulfillment required a free action after x's permanent death.
4. Metaphysically necessarily, one is neither well nor badly off when one does not exist.

I conclude that (1) is false, but others might draw other conclusions.

There is a difficulty about the permanent cessation of existence. As Jon Kvanvig has pointed out, if there is an open future, there are some difficulties in making sense of any logically contingent facts about the future, even ones that are predictable by means of the laws of nature. However, if an at all orthodox open theism (not that I think an open theism can be very orthodox) is true, then God has to be able to guarantee claims about the respective eternal destinations of the just and the unjust. If God can do that in some way (say, by making binding promises), he should be able to guarantee that x permanently ceases to exist. Alternately, if one thinks that temporally gappy existence of persons is logically impossible, one can replace "permanently ceased to" with "ceased to exist". There will also be theological difficulties for those who think that annihilation, which is after all worse than eternal damnation, is incompatible with divine goodness. Open theists convinced of these difficulties will be able to shrug off my argument.

Blackwell Updates today contains a book on ID that looks somewhat interesting, but a little suspect.  The interesting part is that the author actually seems to consider Dembski rather than Morris/Gish/Ham-type people, the suspect part comes from blurbs like this:

""Sarkar's scientific expositions and dissections of Dembski's specious arguments and Behe's lack of imagination are clear, surgical, and authoritative. For those who would fear a return to the midd..."

There doesn't appear to be a way to see the rest of the quote but (using methods outlined in Dembski's Design Inference) I infer that "midd..." is the beginning of the phrase "middle ages" and so I think all that review needed to read was the table of contents.

That table of contents is on the Blackwell site here. 

(Bleg: I am entirely unfamiliar with this author.  Does anyone know anything about him.)

Leiter's blog has an interesting conversation about the role of gender and race in the profession (and TAR has a related discussion about gender and publication here).  One of the issues discussed is the under-representation and under-utilization of non-white-males in the profession at large.  I want to raise some questions about the same phenomenon in the SCP.  The gender aspect of this issues was raised by Dan Speak at this past year's Pacific SCP, though I think that the race aspect was also noticable (Manuel Vargas gave a paper, but that may have been the only paper by a non-caucasion.  I don't have the program in front of me, so I'm just going on memory.  And lest any of you think I'm picking on Dan's conference, I doubt that the one I hosted in 2006 was any different.  I could go back and check, but I bet >90% of the papers were by white males.  I wonder what the ratio of non-white-male presentations to non-white-male submissions is--perhaps I don't want to know!).

I haven't done an official study, but it seems that the percentage of papers by non-white-males at SCP conferences is even lower (and likely significantly lower) than the percentage of papers by non-white-males at philosophy conferences in general.  So some questions to get the ball rolling:

(1) Do you agree that this is probably true?

(2) Is it worth doing an official study of the question in (1)?

(3) Should we care about the answers to (1) and (2)?

(4) If the answer to (1) is yes (and the study in (2) confirms this), what are possible explanations for this fact?

(5) If the answer to (1) is yes (and the study in (2) confirms this), what should the SCP do to address this fact?

I'm interested not just for the sake of the SCP, but also for my own students.  Of my students that have gone on to graduate study or will go on to graduate study from here at USD, all have been female (and all are interested in, among other things, philosophy of religion).  And I wonder about what they will encounter in the discipline.

Here is another attempt at theodicy based on a dubious moral principle.  I am posting this in the hope of sparking discussion, and perhaps someone will actually find a good defense of the moral principle or a related one that is more defensible.

Let S be a set of options.  If A and B are members of S, then say that B is morally preferable to A relative to S provided that an agent who was choosing between the members of S would do morally better to choose B than to choose A.  How we spell this out will depend on the particular moral theory we have (incommensurables are going to be a problem;  a potentially hypothetical phronimos may need to be posited).  I now need two axioms:

Expansion.  If S is a subset of T and B is morally preferable to A relative to S, then B is morally preferable to A relative to T. 

Better-than-OK.  If an agent choosing between a set S of options would be permitted to choose A, and if B is morally preferable to A relative to S, then the agent would be permitted to choose B.

In case you're wondering what the "dubious moral principle" I was talking about initially, it's Expansion.  The intuition behind Expansion is that preferability of one option to another does not depend on what other options are available.  But there are some odd cases where Expansion can be questioned (Jeff McMahan has an intricate fairly recent paper where he discusses something like Expansion and argues against it).  Moreover, Expansion arguably depends on consequentialistic assumptions.

But suppose we grant Expansion and Better-than-OK.  Then theodicy becomes quite easy. 

Several readers have been asking why I haven't posted Plantinga's review of Dawkins in Christianity Today and Books and Culture.  I explained that I was all blogged out on Dawkins and Dennet--we had a lot of fun with them last summer or last semester.  But I suppose it's best to put up the link before it goes behind the subscribers only wall (unlike First Things, CT is very stingy about such matters). 

This made me think of Alister McGrath's book _Dawkins' God_, so if you have any underclassmen or non-academic friends influenced by Dawkins this is a pretty good critique.  A copy of McGrath's review of the book in the London Times from just last month is available on his website here.  His new book book _The Dawkins Delusion_ should be available any day now.  It's got a great subtitle: "Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine."  It's available via the UK Amazon.com or you can pre-order it through the US Amazon.com (via this site please [Matthew if I don't get the link right so sorry!]  The Prosblogion archives have plenty on this as well, including audio files. 

While on the subject of McGrath, I just found out he's giving the Gifford Lectures in 2009 and before that a big Natural Theology conference in 2008. I'm sure we'll be hearing more about that.

Finally, Daniel Dennett spoke here in Rochester last week.  He spoke at the local community college.  It's too bad he didn't come over to the University because as Matt notes (and quotes) in this post our own H. Allen Orr has made penetrating criticisms of Dawkins's meme myth.  Sadly, I found out about it only the day before and already guests invited for dinner.  I think it only would have been frustrating for me anyway.

Well, that's all the news I've got time for right now, back to defending the possibility of justified basic inductive beliefs. 

I've never had trouble with the idea of God creating a world with an infinite past.  (Perhaps being a B-theorist and seeing God as outside of time helps?)  But for some years now, I've been wondering whether it would be possible for God to create a world containing a backwards infinite sequence of interconnected libertarian-free (l-free) choices.  This would be a sequence where for each l-free choice there was an earlier l-free choice, and the earlier choice contributed substantially to the conditions under which the later one was made. 

Why would this be any more of a problem that God just creating a run-of-the-mill world with an infinite past?  Well, I still don't have a very clear argument, but maybe if I share my considerations one of you will be able to help me formulate a good argument--or show me how I am confused.  As background, I am assuming that both theological compatibilism and Molinism are false.  The former assumption is essential to setting up the problem.  I do not know if the latter is. 

Now in the case of God creating a world containing free agents but no backwards infinite sequence of interconnected l-free choices, it is easy to find a model for creation.  God directly creates (i.e., strongly actualizes) an initial state, and then lets things evolve, intervening at appropriate points, letting l-free choices happen, and of course cooperating in the choices of creatures and in other causal events in whatever way the correct doctrine of continual creation requires, thereby weakly actualizing the whole world.  No problem. 

There is perhaps also no problem with God's creating a deterministic world with an infinite past.  God simply strongly actualizes an infinite past all at once, with all the events in it in their appropriate causal relations (assuming this makes sense--I am not completely sure at this point). However, if the infinite past contains l-free choices and if theological compatibilism is false, this model fails.  I, however, the infinite past only contains finitely many l-free choices the model can be salvaged--God just creates all at once the past prior to the first l-free choice. 

Another model for God's creating a deterministic world with an infinite past is that God sets the boundary conditions at minus infinity, and lets things evolve according to the laws.  But that, too, will not work here.  For the boundary conditions at minus infinity are going to be a limit of the conditions at large negative finite times.  But these conditions include the choices of the agents at these past times.  Thus among the limiting conditions there will be limiting properties of the sequence of choices as one goes back in the sequence.  For instance it might be that the choices as one goes further and further back increase in virtue, tend asymptotically to a single level L of virtue.  Then one of the boundary conditions will be that the limiting level of virtue in choices as one goes back is L.  But if to create something with an infinite past one sets boundary values, then this fact about the limiting level of virtue in choices is one that God has to set.  But how can God do that if the choices are l-free?

The basic difficulty here is in spelling out how the explanatory interaction between human choices and God's creation works in this case.  The conditions, internal and external, under which a choice is made are partly explanatory of the choice.  (The problem reminds me of the following question: Suppose two people are given qualitatively the same choice at the same time.  Can God bring it about that they make the same choice?  Can God bring it about that they make different choices?)  

This is vague.  I know.  I can't do better right now. 

This post will be of interest to very few people.  Spoiler: I found an endorsement of the Kalam cosmological argument in a 19th Century thomist.  This was really quite surprising to me though for thomists tend to denigrate the Kalam argument (Bonaventure, an almost exact conemporary of Aquinas, was a Franciscan and they didn't always get along with the Dominicans). 

During the post-Leo XIII Thomist revival there were a lot of new scholastic manuals published.  One of my favorite things to do is to read them.  I was reading _Logic and Mental Philosophy_ today by one Rev. Charles Coppens, S.J.  My copy is dated 1891.  There is this passage in the middle of a demonstration of God's existence, note the parenthetical remark. 

But besides the fact that such a series is absurd (because an infinite series in the past could never have come to a particular effect, since the infinite can never be passed through or left behind), even if it were not absurd, it would be inadequate to produce such an effect. For a multitude of contingent beings without a necessary cause could not have a sufficient reason for existence; since contingency is the want of an intrinsic reason for existence. Therefore no contingent being can exist unless there exists a necessary being which is its first cause.

So, there you have it you historians of the first Thomist revival (the second was the one with Gilson, Maritain, Pegis, Regis, et al.).

The Coppens text is available here at the Maritain Center website at Notre Dame (which also has a huge collection of online scholastic texts here). 

Happy Easter!  M'shikha qam!  Christos anesti!  Christus resurrexit!

On strong skeptical theism, if God exists, we do not expect to find putative justifying reasons (PJRs) for God's allowing a given evil, and hence (this is the "strong" part) our inability to find PJRs provides no evidence against the existence of God.  I shall also assume a setting with point probabilities (things will be more complicated with probability ranges).

Here is a poor objection.  If we do not expect to find PJRs if God exists, then, it seems, our finding of a PJR seems to be evidence against the existence of God.  But sometimes we can find PJRs--for instance, Christ's salvific sacrifice provides a PJR for Christ's crucifixion.  It would be absurd to think that these counted as evidence against the existence of God.

The objection is poor because the fact that E is unlikely on a hypothesis H does not in itself constitute evidence against H.  It only constitutes evidence against H when E is more likely on not-H.  If the skeptical theist is to avoid the absurdity that finding PJRs for evils constitutes evidence against the existence of God, he must believe that:

(*) P(we find a PJR for E|God exists) is no less than P(we find a PJR for E|God does not exist).  

But in order to be a strong skeptical theism, he must also hold that:

(**) P(we do not find a PJR for E|God exists) is no less than P(we do not find a PJR for E|God exists). 

It follows from (*) and (**) that:

(***) P(we find a PJR for E|God exists)=P(we find a PJR for E|God does not exist).  

Now, (***) does not strike me as at all plausible.  It would seem to me to be a very odd sort of coincidence if these two probabilities came out the same.  Surely God's existence makes a difference for probabilities of finding PJRs.  This gives me good reason to deny (***).  Claim (*) is extremely plausible--finding a PJR certainly is not less likely given theism.  If so, then I have good reason to deny (**).  But by denying (**) I am denying strong skeptical theism.  Hence I have good reason to deny strong skeptical theism.

I came across this story earlier today, and I was nonplussed by the title: "Belief in Reincarnation Tied to Memory Errors."  After reading the story, I realized that 'belief in reincarnation' here meant belief that one had been reincarnated as some particular person, as opposed to the belief that people qua souls/atmans are reborn in different bodies commensurate with their latent karma.

It's a standard assumption in the Hindu literature with which I'm familiar that an individual is not and cannot become aware of his or her past lives--at least as long as he or she continues to have an embodied existence.  Buddhism is a bit different, but even there it is only an Arhat (one who has achieved full enlightenment) who can become aware of his past lives.  The point here, outside of the ambiguity in the article's title, is that even within the traditions I'm aware of which accept the occurence of rebirth in some form, there's still not much reason to take most people's claims about the particulars of any previous births seriously.  Even from within those traditions, one should probably put as much credence in such claims as a typical Catholic should in the divine origins of the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich.

1. Evil is a lack of being.
2. God was free not to create anything at all.
3. If a state of affairs S is in every respect better than a state of affairs T, and it was permissible for God to bring about T, then it is permissible for God to bring about S.

Together, these statements seem to add up to a universal theodicy, i.e., a theodicy for every (narrowly logically possible?) state of affairs. For let N be the state of affairs brought about by God in not creating anything. If S is any state of affairs other than N, then S is better than N in every respect, since anything that exists in N exists in S and evil is non-being, so any kind of evil in S is also found in N, but there is a good in S not found in N, since S involves God's creating something. Call this line of thought the pseudo-Augustinian theodicy--it is inspired by St. Augustine's discussions in the Confessions, though as we shall see I doubt that St. Augustine would endorse this.

I'd like to welcome Prosblogion's latest contributor Alexander Pruss. Alex is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, but has unofficially accepted an appointment to join the philosophy faculty at Baylor University. Reader's may want to check out his excellent new book The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Reassessment, or his numerous publications in Faith  Philosophy, Religious Studies, and the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.

Please join me in welcoming Alex to the site.