November 2007 Archives

The Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at the University of Oxford will host a conference entitled "God, Nature and Design: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives" July 10th - 12th 2008. Speakers will include John Hedley Brooke, Ron Numbers, Michael Ruse and Richard Swinburne.

The official Call for Papers can be found here. Possible topics include the argument from design in its historical or contemporary forms, divine activity in nature, debates about intelligent design, fine-tuning arguments, and the implications of evolutionary thought for theistic interpretations of nature.

The following is a version of the Anderson-Goedel ontological argument with somewhat weaker premises, and which is apparently not subject to Oppy's parody (Analysis, 2000):

Axiom 1. If a property is positive, its negation is not positive.
Axiom 2. If P is a positive property, and P entails Q, then Q is a positive property.
Axiom 3. Necessary existence is a positive property.
Definition 1. If P is a property, then EP is the property of having P essentially.
Definition 2. P is strongly positive iff it is necessary that EP is positive.
Definition 3. God-likeness is the property of having all strongly positive properties.
Axiom 4. God-likeness is a positive property.

Given an appropriate modal logic that includes S5 and assumes that properties are necessary beings, we get:

Theorem 1. If Axioms 1-4 hold, then there necessarily exists an essentially God-like being.

Note: Since EP entails P, by Axiom 2, any strongly positive property is positive.

The details of proof don't matter much but are below the fold for completeness.

The hard question is whether we can give an interpretation to the notion of a "positive property" that makes Axioms 1-4 plausible and the conclusion of Theorem 1 interesting.

Theism entails that evil is not a positive reality, since all positive reality either is God or is continually sustained in existence by God. Augustine thinks that evil is a privation of good. A privation is more than a lack. Leglessness in a dog is a privation, but in a snake is just a lack. If evil were just a lack, then the problem of evil would be easily solved by the consideration that, of necessity, everything other than God is lacking, since only God is infinite. I want to argue, however, that seeing evil as a privation of good still helps vis-a-vis the problem of evil. This argument continues two earlier posts of mine which discuss an Augustinian theodicy (Part I; Part II).

Sometimes an atheist who argues against the existence of God based on the problem of evil does not herself believe that there is such a thing as objective evil. The standard explanation of the apparent inconsistency here is that the atheist is arguing on the assumption that there is objective good and evil, an assumption that it is fair to use in an argument against the typical theist who is committed to it. I used to think this was a perfectly satisfactory story about what the atheist is doing. But no longer.

Here's why. The atheist is arguing that there are events E such that:
(*) If it were the case that there is a God and objective good and evil, then E would be an evil, and God would have no justification for permitting E.
(Or maybe it should be an indicative conditional, but not argued for merely on the grounds that the antecedent is false.) Now it seems strange to be confident about this complex conditional proposition when one is not confident about the proposition:
(**) E is objectively evil.
To argue for (*), the atheist will use our intuitions about what kinds of things could morally justify what. But these intuitions also pull us towards (**), and do so more strongly. We should be rather more confident that, say, some horrible crime is unambiguously and objectively evil than we are of the claim that somewhere there isn't some justification for God's allowing it. For one, part of what makes the atheist's argument plausible is precisely our belief that the crime in question is so horribly evil that it is hard to see what could justify such an evil. And that the crime is objectively evil is an essential part of this (if relativism holds, allowing the crime would be justified if God simply got himself to think about this as justified!). But if the atheist thinks that our faculties of moral intuition are wrong about the crime being so horrible that it is an objective evil, then I do not see how she can have a justified confidence in thinking that they are reliable at judging of conditionals like (*).

But perhaps the amoralist atheist is not offering an argument that she finds plausible. Perhaps she is simply offering an argument that she thinks the theist finds plausible. The theist claims, let us say, that God would be justified in allowing the crime in order to allow the victim the opportunity for exercising the virtue of forgiveness. The atheist says that the justification is not sufficient. But the atheist does not believe this. Instead, she believes that this is what the theist is committed to by the theist's moral intuitions. But the theist denies such commitment. Then the discussion takes on an air of unreality--the atheist claiming that the theist's intuitions say otherwise than the theist claims they do.

Of course none of this arises in the case of the problem of evil raised by someone who believes in objective good and evil.

Suppose Jane and Bob live alone on their planet, hundreds of lightyears from any other people.  They are 20 years old, and they find themselves with a deadly disease that will suddenly and painlessly kill both of them in a year.  They pray for divine aid, and an angel comes to them with the following offer: While they will die in a year, their mental and bodily functioning, as well as that of their environment, will be sped up by a factor of seventy, so that while they will die in a year, during that year they will have lived the equivalent of seventy ordinary years of life. Since their internal clock is sped up, it will feel to them as if they lived through seventy years. Moreover, they will forget that the angel had visited them, and so they will not know that each subjective minute is only a seventieth of a minute.

Question 1: Prudentially, should Jane and Bob take up this offer?  (My intuition: Yes.)  Note that it is not just a matter of it feeling like they get seventy years of life.  They really do get seventy years' worth of learning, interacting, stewarding their environment, praying, growing emotionally, and so on.

Question 2: Are Jane and Bob as well off in this scenario as they would be in a scenario on which their disease is cured and they live for another seventy years?  (I go back and forth. My initial inclination is to say "Yes" or "Almost".)

Suppose we answer Question 2 in the affirmative.  Now modify the case.  Jane and Bob pray for eternal life.  An angel comes to them with an offer: Instead of eternal life, God will do the following for them.  During the next six months, their and their environment's speed of functioning will be increased up by a factor of two, so they will feel like they are living the equivalent of a year.  During the next three months, their and their environment's speed of functioning will be sped up another factor of two, so it'll feel like they are living the equivalent of another year during those three months.  During the next 1.5 months, we get another speedup, so it will feel like those 1.5 months were a year of life.  And so on.  And then at the end of the year they will die.  But it will have felt to them like they were living forever.

Question 3: Is this just as good as eternal life?

Question 4: Do answers to any of these questions depend on the nature of time?

I have a question about Plantinga's Free Will Defense that I assume someone here can help me answer.  It's a question, not an argument.

I've long suspected that the basic structure of Plantinga's free will defense doesn't require a libertarian view of free will, but I've never gotten around to trying to figure out in detail why that might be so. Well, Andrew Fulford has a proposal. Relying on the notion of creaturely integrity, Andrew offers an account of why God's options might be limited by how God himself may have intended a person's compatibilist freedom to work itself out, and for all we know this may be true for every actual person. In other words, it may well be that transworld depravity of a very particular sort may be true. It's possible for all we know that, for each actual person, there is no possible world in which that person does no wrong. There is the problem of dealing with non-actual people, but that's where God's choice to actualize people with a certain kind of creaturely integrity comes in. Perhaps it's true that anyone with the right sort of creaturely integrity, that God would have good moral reasons for wanting to bestow on people, will be transworld depraved in the way Andrew imagines.

What's interesting about this proposal is that objections to it seem to be the same sort that people might raise against Plantinga's own libertarian version of transworld depravity or his use of it. If that's right, then he's used the basic structure of the free will defense without relying on libertarian freedom.

I thought this was just awesome.  I found it on Dylan Dodd's website.

"Those who deny such manifest things need punishment..., for as Avicenna puts it: "Those who deny a first principle should be beaten or exposed to fire until they concede that to burn and not to burn, or to be beaten and not to be beaten, are not identical." And so to, those who deny that some being is contingent should be exposed to torments until they concede that it is possible for them not to be tormented."

Duns Scotus, Reportatio I A prol. q. iii. art. i

Let 'w' refer to any world.  Then "exists in" expresses a perfectly fine relation between entities and worlds.  Let S be the set of worlds in which history ends in 30 BC.  Then, there are some members w of S such that Aristotle exists in w, but for every member w of S it is the case that Charlemagne does not exist in w (assuming essentiality of approximate time of conception).  Thus, for any given w, some entities are related by "existing in" to w and some are not.  Call this relation "E".

Now, we can define two "exists" predicates.  Let '@' rigidly refer to our world.  Then, we can say "x exists" provided xE(the actual world) and that "x exists*" provided xE@.  For any relation term R and any referring term t, "___Rt" is a predicate.  So "exists" and "exists*" are predicates.

Here's a hypothetical dialogue between an agnostic and a theist.

A: Evolutionary theory (whether genetic or mimetic or a combination) can explain why you believe in theism. This explanation has nothing to do with the truth of theism. Hence, you should not be a theist.

B: The explanation has much to do with theism. For a good creator would want us to believe in him, and hence, if our beliefs arose through evolutionary means (which you grant!), he would have likely set up the evolutionary pressures in such wise that they should favor belief in theism.

A: You're begging the question by depending on the theism that my argument puts into question.

B: Are you a sceptic about our empirical, logical and mathematical knowledge?

A: I would be really stupid to be such, since scepticism about any of these areas would undercut my belief in evolutionary theory.

B: Good. But now consider this claim: One can give an evolutionary explanation (genetic or mimetic or a combination) of your empirical, logical and mathematical belief.

A: Yes, I can, and I see where you're heading. There is, however, a crucial asymmetry between the theistic case and the empirical, logical and mathematical ones. The explanation of why we hold these empirical, logical and mathematical beliefs depends on the truth of these beliefs. It is useful to believe tigers are dangerous because they are dangerous and the environment is such that true beliefs about dangerous things are useful.

B: But it is useful to believe that God exists because God has set up an environment in which having theistic beliefs is useful for the dissemination of genes or memes.

A debate between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath has been posted on "The Official Richard Dawkins Website". In my opinion, the typical person who enters the debate "on the fence" will most likely leave siding with Hitchens.

This is not due only to Hitchens's polemical acumen (or at all to McGrath's lack of talent -- he's certainly not lacking for that). Rather, I think that any debate set up as this one seems to have been will always favor the atheist (not to say the atheist will always get the better of the theist).

Thesis: If Open Theism is true, then either possibly there are some things some humans know that God doesn't know or possibly God has some false beliefs.  The conclusion is absurd, hence we should reject Open Theism.

Argument:

For simplicity I will abbreviate "x does not fulfill the promise P and nothing prevents x from keeping P, nor does x conclude a defeater arises, nor does x forget" as "x violates P". 

1. Let x and y be humans.  Often when x knows y's character to be solid and knows y to have promised to do something for x, x is not only justified in believing y will not violate the promise, but x knows it.
2. If Open Theism holds, there is no possible divine doxastic policy such that, necessarily: (In every case like the one described in (1), God believes y will not violate the promise, and God has no false beliefs).
3. Therefore, whatever possible divine doxastic policy is adopted, either in some worlds there will be a situation like that described in (1) where x knows y will not violate the promise, but God doesn't believe it and hence doesn't know it, or in some worlds God will have a false belief.
4. This is absurd, and so Open Theism should be rejected.

Moreover, it is very likely that in the actual world either there are going to be cases of (1) where God doesn't know y will not violate the promise, or cases where God has some false belief.  For there are so many cases of (1) in the actual world, that it is highly likely that any divine doxastic policy that doesn't involve foreknowledge of free actions will either miss some cases of (1) or will lead to belief in some cases where y in fact violates the promise.