May 2007 Archives

Several years ago Trent and I were biking in the hills of Missouri thinking about design arguments when one of us (we don’t recall who) said “isn’t it odd that the ID folks stress how hostile the universe is to life while the fine-tuning folks stress how universe is fit for life.”  It took us a while to work out this intuition but the result is coming out in Religious Studies.  Thanks to all who gave us excellent feedback on earlier drafts of this paper!

Compare: Who is the President's President?  The President.  I've seen bumper stickers saying "Bush is not my president."  I don't know if these people mean this in the optative mood or if they really intend it to be the indicative mood, but, whether they like it or not, George W. Bush *is* their president.  George W. Bush is also George W. Bush's President.  

Awhile back, Dale (Tuggy) and I had a few go-rounds on social Trinitarianism (I'm fer it, he's agin' it).  The debate included my post "Of Course Trinitarians are Polytheists!  Duh!" (which was perhaps a bit overwrought, but so was some of the stuff I was responding to.)  I will assume--as is pretty standard--that "God" is a title-term. 

One item Dale mentioned that was supposedly evidence for something or other with which I disagreed was that Jesus calls the Father his "God."  I don't think much of significance in the debate follows from this since the Father is also the Father's God.  He is his own God just as Bush is his own President [insert political joke here].  

Is Jesus the Father's God?  In some sense yes.  Jesus is the God-the-Son of the Father it seems to me.  I'm inclined to think that the deity (predicate adjective) of the Son is in some sense the same deity as the deity of the Father and so the Son is the God of the Father in the exact same sense in which the Father is the God of the Son.  There's nothing new under the sun, so I'm sure if I've committed some heresy here I'll hear about it.

It could be that a *real* social Trinitarian will want to say that the Father is the God of the Son in an asymmetric way since the Father bears the begetting relation to the Son which is a species of generation relation, and nothing bears any relation of that type to the Father.  Not sure if that matters to the debate either.  

I think some good might be got by thinking about this more.  Wish I had time!

Ben Bradley reviews Robert Merrihew Adams's A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good (OUP, 2006), in the most recent Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  (LINK)

For the curious, here's a final paragraph from Ben (who, being a fellow Up-state New Yorker, I've had the pleasure of fine dinner conversation on a few occasions: he is a very nice guy and a good conversationalist). 

I should mention, for the curious, that this book is unlike Finite and Infinite Goods in that Adams's theory, and his arguments, are wholly detachable from his theological views ('God' makes an appearance, but primarily in parentheses). 

Note  that--keeping use and mention in their proper place--it is the *word* God that makes an an occasional parenthetical appearance.  I think Adams would hope that in some sense there'd be a genuine theophany of the *person* of God!  :-)~

1. We should only be grateful for a feature of the world if a person is responsible for that feature.
2. We should be grateful for the existence of butterflies.
3. No non-divine person is responsible for the existence of butterflies.
4. Therefore, a divine person exists.

(Actually, I am not sure about 3.  It may be that angels were involved in creation.)

Joseph Long of the Florida Student Philosophy Blog has reconstruction and response to Sam (Letter to a Christian Nation) Harris’s Reasons for Belief Argument. Long is fairly generous in his response, though he still arrives at the conclusion that Harris is mistaken.

Razib of Gene Expression has a informative response the the piece in Edge titled Why the Gods are Not Winning. In short "to some extent the two authors are offering an inverted narrative from that of the religious triumphalists, cherry-picking data congenial to their arguments and mixing & matching adjectives and superlatives with specific numbers in a way that might beguile the uninitiated."

Papers

• Philippe Schlenker on Anselm’s Argument and Berry’s Paradox
• Peter Lipton on Science and Religion: The Immersion Solution
  

Carl Gillett, Illinois Wesleyan University, has been awarded a John Templeton Foundation Grant for his work on reductionism and emergentism in the metaphysics of science. Gilett will use the funds to work on his tentatively titled monograph The Roots of Reduction and the Fruits of Emergence.

Here is a sound argument for the existence of God. 

1. If it is permissible and makes rational sense to have unconditional love for a person, that person must either be God or created by God. (Premise)
2. It is permissible and makes rational sense to have unconditional love for someone. (Premise)
3. Hence, someone is God or created by God.
4. Hence, God exists.

Question: Is there reason to accept (1) independent of accepting the consequent?  My intuition is that there might be.

Define Our Task Pelagianism (OTP) as the doctrine that without grace it is possible that a person does all the actions and has the mental states that are directly sufficient, given God's promises, for entering into heavenly joy.  The "directly" here is meant to rule out the interposition of further actions or mental states, but is meant to be compatible with the idea that God's gracious causality is still needed to move us into heaven after we have done the required actions or mental states--God is at least needed to reward our merit.  

The "directly" is kind of messy, but is needed in an account of Pelagianism.  For it is compatible with the denial of Pelagianism that God has specifically promised that Jones will be saved (e.g., God might have made this promise to Jones or to Jones' mother).  Then Jones' blowing his nose is sufficient, given God's promises, for entering into heavenly joy, since the content of God's promises entails that Jones will be saved whether or not he blows his nose.  But Jones' blowing his nose is not directly sufficient, since other actions and/or mental states are needed, e.g., faith.  On the other hand, a doctrine that says that God's judgment is based on whether we have blown our noses--all those who had go to heaven and all others go to hell--would imply OTP given that we do not need God's grace to blow our noses.  (We need divine creation, sustenance and cooperation to blow our noses, but grace goes beyond creation, sustenance and cooperation.)

I assume OTP is false. 

Call a bunch of actions and mental states that are jointly directly sufficient for entering into heavenly joy given God's promises "salvific".  Pelagians and non-Pelagians agree that there are salvific actions and mental states.  Thus, all agree that faith, hope and love in mind and action would be sufficient for salvation given God's promises.  Our Task Pelagians, however, hold that there is a salvific bunch of actions and mental states that could occur absent God's grace.

The less that a doctrine requires of salvific actions and mental states, the more likely it is that it implies OTP.  First, note that a doctrine which made some set of purely external physical movements compatible with the laws of nature directly sufficient for salvation would very likely imply OTP, since any set of purely external physical movements compatible with the laws of nature might well be done without grace, simply on a whim, or might even occur purely randomly due to quantum processes, and hence absent God's grace. 

 

Life in the real world has kept me from fully maintaining my blogging duties. So, I've a bit of catching up to do. The first order of business is that I need to plug Dale Tuggy's Trinity survey project. Dale is attempting to survey the Christian public as to how their conception of God comports with trinitarian theories and creedal statements. I think Dale has captured all of the recent Trinity theories, and some non-trinitarian theories as well, that are represented in recent philosophical theology literature. So, head over and take the survey, then you'll get to see the results. And please, encourage any seminary professors or those teaching Christian theology at the graduate level to participate.

The second annual Online Philosophy Conference has begun. Be sure to catch the keynote address by Ernest Sosa on "Epistemic Normativity."

[cross-posted at Parableman] Elliot Sober has a new paper, "Intelligent Design Theory and the Supernatural: The 'God or Extra-Terrestrials' Reply", in the latest issue of Faith and Philosophy (January 2007). I received my copy today, and I was amazed that this paper could get past the reviewers of a top philosophy of religion journal without serious modification, even from such an important philosopher of science as Sober.

Sober makes the following argument. Defenders of intelligent design often point out that ID arguments are not religion, and one support for this (a relatively less important one, in my view) is that the conclusion of ID arguments is silent on what the designer is like other than that the designer is intelligent and must have worked purposes into nature somehow. Sober's paper is a response to that argument, and his response is extremely strange. He argues that supernatural assumptions are implicit in the ID argument, and thus the ID defender is committed to a conclusion that there is some supernatural being.

Suppose that's all true. I'm not invested very seriously in whether that part of his argument is correct, since I happen to believe there is a supernatural being. I don't even care whether ID defenders are committed to the existence of a supernatural being, since I know no one who accepts ID who doesn't also accept a supernatural being. So I'll assume for the sake of argument that Sober is correct, and ID arguments do involve a commitment to the existence of some supernatural being. My question is how this helps Sober. His point in the paper is to show that ID arguments involve a religious conclusion. The only way he should be able to conclude that is if he thinks being implicitly committed to the existence of a supernatural being is somehow itself religious. Yet it isn't.

In another post, I mentioned one difference between exegesis of Scripture and of secular texts, stemming from the different role of the principle of charity in the case of an inerrant and a fallible text.  There is also a second, perhaps less "hot", difference (not unrelated to the first) between interpreting the Word of God and interpreting works of philosophy (what I say will apply less in the case of poetry, fiction, etc.) 

If I read Plato, I want to figure out what Plato thought about different issues, or what Plato thought at different times about different issues.  The main reason I want to do this is because Plato was a pretty smart guy, and his views are likely to advance to search for truth.  The focus, then, is on Plato.  If Plato is silent in his extant works about some particular issue but I can find out from other historical sources what he thought about it, then apart from the accidental fact that in his case these other sources aren't all that reliable, this is about as good as reading it in his work.  Thus, on the basis of the historical discussions of Plato's famous lecture on the Good, I think I know that it is a part of Plato's view that the Good has a knowable mathematical structure.  I haven't read this claim in any of the texts, though the weird arithmetic towards the end of the Republic is confirmatory (I'm following Myles Burnyeat's interpretation here; I am no Plato scholar).  Moreover, if I can infer from some text that Plato held p, then even if Plato never asserts p in the text, that still directly furthers my exegetical goal to know the mind of Plato.  As a final thought experiment, if we found a lost work by Plato and were somehow able to authenticate it, this would automatically be just as good to us as the other works vis-a-vis the tasks of Plato interpretation, unless it were of inferior intellectual quality.

However, the case of the Scriptural works of St. Paul is different.  There what we read as Christians is God's word.  What Paul says is a direct guide to truth: what Paul asserts in Scripture is true.  Knowing the mind of Paul is a means to the primary exegetical goal of knowing what the text, and hence the Holy Spirit, is teaching us.  This is the reverse of the pattern we had in the case of Plato where knowing what the text is teaching us was a means to knowing whe mind of Plato. 

This has implications.  If we learned from reliable non-Scriptural sources that Paul believed p, this would not be just as good vis-a-vis our primary exegetical goal as reading p in the text of Paul's Scriptural texts.  Learning that Paul believed p might well help us with exegesis of Scripture, but does not directly further the exegetical task of knowing God's word.  What Paul teaches in Scripture is God's word.  What Paul believes is a good thing to know, because Paul was smart, a good Christian and had good access to apostolic doctrine, but it does not have the authority that Scripture possesses.  In the case of Plato, the text possesses no authority, and hence it is the mind of Plato we most want to know.

Likewise, if we can infer from a text that Paul believes some proposition, we should not treat that proposition on par with the propositions actually taught by Paul in the text.  That proposition tells about the mind of Paul, but does not tell us directly about the mind of God who inspires Scripture.  It is interesting what is on the mind of Paul.  It may shed a light on what the meaning of the text in various places is, given that the meaning of a text is closely bound up with the expressive intentions of the author.  But it lacks authority. 

In particular, it follows that even if inerrance holds, there can be texts in Scripture from which we can infer that the author was ignorant of something or even believed a falsehood.  For instance, consider the following pattern of reasoning that we employ in the exegesis of secular texts: "The author wrote that p.  The only reason the author might have thought p was relevant in this context was because he believed q.  Hence the author believed q."  This is a perfectly fine piece of reasoning.  But even if we can sometimes correctly deploy it in the case of Scripture, q will not have the authority of p.  It is not what the human author believes, as such, that has authority, but what the human author teaches.  

This observation, especially combined with Donnellan's famous distinction between the referential and attributive uses of language, can be a powerful tool for handling certain concerns about inerrance in cases where it is evident from Scripture that the author believed a false scientific claim.  As long as the author did not assert the claim, or something that entails it, there is no difficulty.

Of course what St. Paul teaches is a subset of what he believes--the texts of Scripture are sincere.  

A way to highlight the difference is what would happen if we found a new text by St. Paul.  Unless we had good reason to include that text in the canon (e.g., we also found lots of early Church texts showing that the text was accepted as part of the canon;  this is unlikely, since one would expect that if a text were considered canonical, it would have been copied a lot and hence it wouldn't have been lost).  This would be a wonderful find for knowing the mind of Paul.  But it would not have the kind of authority Scripture does.  Though, in the special case of Paul, it might have some Apostolic authority (and in the special case of Peter, even infallible papal authority), but only if it was a text intended to bear authority.

However, I do not want to deny the fact that there are purposes for which we can read Scripture in the same was as we read Plato.  Someone writing a book on the life and views of Paul of Tarsus will read St Paul's Scriptural works not as Scripture, but as reflections of the mind of Paul.  Moreover, such work can be extremely illuminating for the exegesis of Scripture because of the at least partially constitutive role that the author's intentions play in the meaning of the text.  But the goal of the primary sort of Biblical exegesis is to figure out what the author teaches in the text.

I want to also note that there are modes of reading Plato that are more interested in what the text says than in what Plato thinks.  There is certainly room for that sort of reading, and it is important.  In the case of works of fiction, this kind of reading is crucial.  In the case of Plato it can still be very important.  It is less important in the case of a less literary text, like Aristotle's texts.  The line is not quite as clear-cut as I indicate above.

Let me end on the note there are other kinds of important and properly Scriptural exegesis besides this: there is allegorical, tropological and anagogical, for instance.  These kinds are even less about the mind of Paul and even more about the mind of God.  But these kinds rest on the foundation of what I have been talking about, which the Church Fathers called a discernment of the "literal" meaning of Scripture (certainly not to be understood as "literalistic").  

There's been lots of discussion in the previous post about canonicity.  Which books are the inspired books that God has given to his church?  We want a canon that contains all and only the inspired texts.  Only inspired texts, so that we aren't led astray by phonies; all inspired texts, so that we aren't missing something vital.  

But, how is the Christian supposed to know which canon is the right one?  The Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants all have different canons, and that's just mentioning the three most common canons.  There are many other professed canons out there.  How does the Christian know which to affirm?  

What sorts of things could justify the Christian in judging /this/ canon to be all and only God's word?  I'm not asking (yet) for the whole story; I'm asking a more general question.  What sorts of justification /could/ do the work here?

More below the fold.

Saint Louis University, a Catholic Jesuit institution dedicated to student learning, research, health care, and service, seeks candidates with doctoral degrees already in hand, for two postdoctoral teaching fellowships in the Department of Philosophy for the 2007-08 academic year.  These one-year TEACHING post docs, which have the possibility of  renewal for a second year, will carry a 3/3 teaching load. In addition, a secondary assignment emphasizing research and or other related obligations and or opportunities complementary to the teaching responsibility will be decided by the chair and the post doc fellow. Salary: $30,000 plus benefits (including health insurance).  All applications must be made online at http://jobs.slu.edu, and must include a c.v. and cover letter. In addition, all applicants must send by post a transcript and two letters of recommendation to Fr. Ted Vitali, Chair, Department of Philosophy, 3800 Lindell Blvd., St. Louis MO 63108-3414.  Positions open until filled.  Saint Louis University is an Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity Employer (AA/EOE), and encourages women and minorities to apply.

Just getting around to mentioning it, but in case anyone missed it Alex's review of Oppy's Arguing about Gods came out this morning in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 

One of the hallmarks of modern Biblical scholarship--which is not entirely modern--is an attempt to use the same methods for Scriptural exegesis as are used for the interpretation of secular texts.  This is a valuable exercise that can free the interpreter from personal biases and bring interesting and at times important features of the text to light.  But in this post I want to highlight two differences between interpreting Scripture and secular texts, and ask the readers for comments on how this affects exegesis.  The differences arise from two features of Scriptural texts: the texts' inerrance and the fact that what is of theological interest is what the texts assert.  In this first part of the post, I will focus on inerrance.

I was reading through the new issue of Faith and Philosophy when I saw this  footnote:

"I use the term "Phat" on the advice of my hip-hop savvy colleague Matt Halteman, who assures me that this fits the paradigm use of "phat" as an adjective predicated of hyper-accessorized cars ("pimp mobiles," I believe Matt called them) and the like."

What a great thing to find, hidden in the back of the article with the mundane footnotes.

Bryan Frances had a post last year over at knowability on philosophical insults, calling for readers' favorite insults by philosophers.  What are some other clever/funny/insulting/ironic/incredible footnotes, hidden at the ends of articles and books like Easter Eggs hidden on DVDs?  This one's a joke, but no good footnote find should go unappreciated.