August 2007 Archives

In a discussion about the metaphysical status of race (of all things) on my personal blog, Econ Grad Stud said something that led to a question that I've thought about before but having really arrived at anything definitive about. Assume an atemporal view of God and an orthodox position on the Trinity and the Incarnation. Answer the following questions:

1. Did Christ become human?
2. If so, was there a time when Christ was merely divine (and thus not human)?
3. In what sense, if any is Christ atemporal?

I'm not sure what I think of this, but I'll try out a toy theory, which does have some argumentative support.

Application information is now available for the Venice Summer School on Science and Religion held in Venice, Italy.  This is a three-year program of one-week seminars.

The theme for the 2008 summer school chosen by school coordinators Karl Giberson, Thomas Jay Oord, William Shea, and Donald Yerxa is “God and the Laws of Nature.”  The school will meet 27 May through 1 June 2008.  Lecturers for the first year include Paul Davies, Owen Gingerich, and John Polkinghorne.

Interested individuals should submit materials when applying for admission.  Application materials for the first year’s school are due 12 November 2007.

Further information can be found here.

[Given the substantiveness of Alexander's last comment from the Onward Christian Spaceman thread I'm giving it its own post. -Matthew]

Let's try this tack.  Let's forget all about this high-flown metaphysics, and just ask what a double incarnation would have to be like, given what we know about a single incarnation.

To do this, I will assume something that I do not actually believe: that some objects have parts.  I think some of the things I say will work without that assumption, with some modifications, but in any case I am not going to inflict my weird ontology on people here.

Suppose two incarnations.  It is true, as Justin and I have pointed out, that we don't want to say that Aslan and Smith are proper parts of one person.  However, we ought to say that Aslan's leonine body and Smith's human body are proper parts of one person.  My body is a proper part of me--here I assume that materialism is false, of course.  Surely it would likewise be true that Aslan's leonine body is a proper part of Aslan, and Smith's human body is a proper part of Smith. 

I've just been perusing the recent CUP volume of essays on Alvin Plantinga which is in the Contemporary Philosophy in Focus series. 

I don't have time to comment on the individual essays other than to mention that our own Jon Kvanvig has a really nice essay on defeat and that the Sosa chapter on EAAN advocates a circularity which he thinks is virtuous and I think is not.  The Divers chapter is probably the best intro to the metaphysics of modality since Konyndyk's book.   

Also, the introduction has a nice brief biography.  Much of it is culled from the famous "Self-Profile" and his essay in _Philosopher's Who Believe_, but the profile might be hard for some to come by and there is some neat new material as well. 

I'll put the blurb from the publisher followed by the TOC below the fold.

The September issue of Nous is out and it contains a discussion between Cory Juhl--we briefly mentioned our disapproval of his "Fine Tuning is not Surprising"--on whether there is a reasonable argument for a multiverse in the neighborhood. 

I find this discussion much more interesting that the Find Tuning paper and I find myself mostly siding with Juhl this time--at least on proceedural issues of the Bayesian use of evidence.  Leeds makes many fine points on procedural matters as well. 

Also just out is the September issue of the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly and in it is the paper "Probabilistic arguments for multiple universes" by Draper, Draper, and Pust.  It is more of a survey and a bit more open ended.

Both papers will be relevant to those interested in probabilistic versions of the fine-tuning argument and both papers yield some interesting insights on the nature of probability and evidence.

On the lighter side, I thought this was a new urban legend, but it's on MSNBC and Newsweek so it's a pretty good urban legend if it is. 

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Aug. 20-27, 2007 issue - In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation."

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I thought surely the Dalai Lama would, in a translife act of civil disobedience, declare that he was going to reincarnate in Tibet, but he says he will abide by this directive.  He says he doesn't want to be born in Tibet anyway.  Sour grapes?

Interestingly, officials are worried about rival claimants to the succession inside and outside of Tibet--Avignon Lamacy?  Perhaps they'll read the discussion on the post below--Onward Christian Spaceman--and conclude that they can *both* be the Dali Lama! 

The story is available here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227400/site/newsweek/

I'd like to welcome Prosblogion's latest contributor Clayton Littlejohn. Some of you will know of Clayton from his comments here or from his personal blog Think Tonk. Currently Clayton is a lecturer in the philosophy department at Southern Methodist University. Most of his current research concerns the justification of belief and action and assorted issues in the philosophy of mind. 

Please join me in welcoming Clayton to the site.

Over at my philosophy blog--This is the Name of This Blog--a discussion has cropped up on the theological consequences of a probabilistic account of counterfactuals.  Some readers might be interested in that discussion.  I know I'd be interested in readers' comments. 

The set of issues usually entitled "God and morality" is at the metaethical level.  This includes a difficulty (the Euthyphro problem), an argument for the existence of God (the argument from morality) and just a really interesting set of questions about the relationship between God and morality.

There is, however, also a set of issues at the normative and applied levels largely independent of the metaethical level.  Whatever the metaethical story of the relationship between God and the truth of moral propositions, one can ask about any particular rule at the normative level or any particular ethical judgments at the applied level whether the particular ethical truth in a special way depends on the existence of God. 

To see that this question is in large part independent of the metaethical one, take a trivial case at the applied level: the duty to thank God for our lives.  This is indeed a moral duty, and it depends on the existence of God in a special way: namely, we need to thank God for our lives because God exists and has created us.  This is true if the right meta-ethics makes no reference to God, as in the Kantian case--there still is a general duty to be grateful to our benefactors, and we can apply this to the case of God creating us.  And this may well be true even if the right meta-ethics makes reference to God, as in the divine command theory case--God commands the general principle to be grateful to our benefactors;  in this case, our benefactor is God, so the duty to thank him depends in a special or additional way on the existence of God.

The interesting question, of course, is about moral duties that do not make explicit reference to God.  Do some of these moral duties presuppose the existence of God?  If so, then they give rise to arguments for the existence of God, though the atheist might just deny the existence of the duty.

So let me open this up for discussion--what moral duties are there that, although they do not say so on their face, in fact depend on the existence of God?

Note: It might seem that such special claims of dependence are incompatible with the idea of ethics not being dependent on revelation.  But that problem is only there if both (a) the belief in the existence of God requires revelation and (b) our knowledge of these ethical claims requires a belief in the existence of God (the truth of the claim may depend on the existence of God, but it does not follow that the claim epistemically depends on the claim that God exists, just as the truth of there being a rainbow depends on facts about refraction of light, but the claim that there is a rainbow does not epistemically depend on claims about refraction of light, being independently knowable).

As a warmup, let me suggest this one: Is it the case that the duty to love everybody depends on the existence of God, e.g., because only if everybody is in the image of God, or only if everybody is loved by God, is it the case that everybody is lovable. 

I just came across this passage in an interview with famed African novelist Chinua Achebe. He was raised by Christian converts but has--artistically at least--reverted to his ancestral religion (he admits he doesn't really think about it because he doesn't think anyone can know). I think this comment, though, is a nice instance of the main point behind the Irenaean Theodicy.

"I believe now that what we have to do is make our passage through life as meaningful and as useful as possible, I think our contribution to the creation of the world is important, and I take my bearing in this from a creation story of the Igbo people in which there is a conversation between God and humanity. They are discussing the state of the environment -- what to do to lift man from the state of wandering, the state of animals, to becoming human, i.e., agricultural. And this is embedded in a story, a parable. Man is sitting disconsolate on an anthill one morning. God asks him what the matter is and man replies that the soil is too swampy for the cultivation of the yams which God has directed him to grow. God tells him to bring in a blacksmith to dry the soil with his bellows. The contribution of humanity to this creation is so important. God could have made the world perfect if he had wanted. But he made it the way it is. So that there is a constant need for us to discuss and cooperate to make it more habitable, so the soil can yield, you see."

From the Fall 1991 issue of Conjunctions.

At the risk of readers thinking I've lost my marbles, let me just say that as I take work-breaks in this intense summer of study and teaching (three summer classes is harder than five semester classes) I like to let my mind wander far and wide.

In two of my classes this summer I asked students to tell me--anonymously on a piece of paper--the thing which they would most like to know.  If they could find out the answer to just one question, what would that question be?

To my surprise, in one class fully half the class wanted most to know whether there was life on other planets.  In one of the little anthologies of Lewis's essays\ there's one entitled, as I recall, "Of Religion and Rocketry" (which, as I recall, Hooper states in his introduction the original publisher insisted calling "Onward Christian Spaceman").

At the time of my reading this--junior in High School--I was hard-pressed by a teacher who really pressed the verificationist line and told me that my religious assertions were meaningless (literally) unless I could cite something that would constitute evidence against them.  One item I came up with was the discovery of (intelligent) life on other planets (and maybe non-intelligent life).

Lewis's essay changed my mind about that (for the most part).  So, I do recommend the essay and I'm very interested in others reactions to this both immediate and then reflective.  Would you have taken such a discover in itself to be counter-evidence?  What about now that you've thought about it a bit?  Are there any particulars of such a discovery that could affect it's evidential status?  Whatcha think?

Off and on during the Summer I've been exploring the limits of the connection between orthodox Christianity and paganism.  Previously this has included polytheism (a sense of which I endorsed twice over) and deification (in the theosis sense).  Now I want to ask a question about the Earth as a conscious individual.  Somewhere in the Four Loves, Lewis is discussing the worship of an elan vital and notes that if there is a Life Force, it is a fallen creature like all others.  I've always found that interesting.

So let's just assume some kind of Humeanism (one which Chesterton seems to endorse in his Orthodoxy) and say that about any given property might have any given causal powers, to wit: suppose intentional states might be realized by mantle and magma, i.e. suppose there's no *philosophical* problem with a rock having thoughts.  So then other than an argument from silence, can anyone think of a distinctively theological reason to rule out the Earth herself as one of the fallen creatures in the universe, and I mean as a conscious individual with at least desires and perhaps even thoughts?

St Paul denies that Christians do evil that a greater good may come of it.  But what about allowing evil that a greater good may come of it?  Is that permitted?  Suppose that killing Jones would make possible the production of a vaccine that would save thousands.  This is not permitted.  But suppose that I see someone else working in my lab who is going to do this.  Am I obliged to stop him, or can I say that although I am not permitted to do evil that good may come of it, I am permitted to allow evil that good may come of it?

There are two interrelated theological arguments that it is permissible to allow evil that greater good may come of it: (1) standard Christian theodicies suggest that God allows evils to happen in order to bring greater goods out of them, and, specifically, (2) the Christian tradition calls the sin of Adam a felix culpa, rejoicing that this sin made possible Christ's salvific sacrifice, and suggests that this is why God permitted that sin.

On the other hand, once one is talking about allowing an evil that good may come of it, one seems to be implying that the evil is intended as a means, a means that one brings about through non-action rather than action.  But it is always wrong to intend an evil, since that sets one's will on the evil.

The Christian philosopher thus seems to have a trilemma: either (1) undercut theodicy by insisting that one should not even permit an evil that a greater good may come of it, or (2) deny the basic principle that one should not set one's will on evils, even as means, or (3) hold that ethics is essentially different for God and human beings (and not just different in application, so that God may kill me because he owns my life, while you may not because you don't). 

I want to reject the third horn completely.  I am going to argue that there is still a way out of the   dilemma between (1) and (2).

First take the case of Adam and Eve.  Deny Molinism.  Then there is no fact of the matter whether Adam would sin unless Adam in fact chooses between good and evil.  Therefore (and I suppose an argument is needed here, but I am just going to proceed intuitively--I suspect the blanks can be filled in;  I need to refute Frankfurt examples to do this, but that I think should be doable) God cannot ensure that Adam does not sin without taking away Adam's choice between good and evil.  What God intentionally allows is Adam's choice between good and evil.  Let us suppose he foreknows that the choice is in fact going to be for evil.  It does not follow that God intends the choice to be for evil, especially since without Molinism, God's foreknowledge of Adam's choice of evil is going to have to be explanatorily (but not temporally) posterior to God's decision to allow Adam the choice. 

Nonetheless, the insight from the tradition that the sin of Adam is a felix culpa is still relevant.  For God might be argued to be remiss in intentionally allowing Adam to choose between good and evil if the expected value of the effects choice were too low (this is of course like stuff that Swinburne says).  Without actually intending that Adam will sin, God can consider the fact that if Adam sins, things will be even better in the long run than if he doesn't, and this consideration makes it reasonable for God to offer him the choice.  (I might allow my child a decision where I know the child might choose something bad if I know that should the child choose the bad thing, a good will come of it, say the child's learning a lesson.  In doing so, I need not be intending that the child choose the bad thing, but simply considering the contingencies, and thinking that whatever happens, it won't be bad in the long run, so I can allow the decision to the child.)

Theme: Options and Issues in Applied Ethics

Location: Niagara University
Dates: April 18-19, 2008

Papers on any topic of philosophical interest will be considered, with some preference given to papers that connect with the conference theme. We are especially interested in papers dealing with issues of social responsibility and teleology in relation to applied ethics. However, we would like a broad range of philosophical interests represented. Participation is welcomed from both Christians and non-Christians.