December 2007 Archives

An interesting interview with Catholic theologian John Haught, which can be found here. Tagline: "Theologian John Haught explains why science and God are not at odds, why Mike Huckabee worries him, and why Richard Dawkins and other 'new atheists' are ignorant about religion."

Haught has a forthcoming book, God and the New Atheism, which promises to be interesting. Plus, we can never have enough criticism of Dawkins, can we? Some of you might also be interested in what he has to say about the relationship between faith and biological evolution, like his statement that "Darwin's thought is a gift to theology."

If skeptical theism is right, then any event may have ramifications far beyond our ken, ramifications that dwarf the original event in significance.  Some folks--notably Graham Oppy and our own Mike Almeida--have argued that this means that if skeptical theism is right, we ourselves do not have reason to prevent great evils, such as rapes and murders, because for aught that we know great good will come of them.

While I no longer accept skeptical theism, I think this argument is mistaken.  I am going to be very rough probabilistically here.  To do this precisely, would require bringing in appropriate measures of correlation, and then the post would be snowed under with technicalities.  The technicalities in this case are important, and I have not worked them out, so maybe what I say will ultimately fail.  But let's try to be rough here.

Any action has foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences.  We all agree on this, even if we are not skeptical theists.  The only difference is that the skeptical theist thinks that the unforeseeable ones may be much larger than we think.  Now, there are, basically, three possibilities about the space of all possible actions:

1. There is no correlation between the values of foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences.
2. There is a positive correlation between the values of foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences.
3. There is a negative correlation between the values of foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences.

The quick version of my rough argument is this.  Even given skeptical theism, we have no reason to accept (3).  But given either (1) or (2), we should prevent evils when the foreseeable consequences are good, without worrying unduly about unforeseeable consequences.  For unless there is a negative correlation between the values of the foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences, it is not more likely that something unforeseeable and bad will come of preventing the evil than that something unforeseeable and good will come of preventing the evil. 

Skeptical theism makes (1) plausible.  Naturalism makes (1) or (2) somewhat plausible (evolutionarily, we would likely develop choice-procedures that have beneficial unforeseeable consequences).  In either case, we have no reason to accept (3), I think.

This will be of interest to Young Philosophers of Religion.

I just secured some funding to start a Young Philosophers Lecture and Podcast Series. The call for papers is up at www.youngphilosophers.org

SUNY Fredonia’s philosophy department will bring two young philosophers to campus each semester. Each philosopher will give two talks. The first talk will be a research talk pitched to the philosophical community. The second talk will be a shorter talk that is accessible to a broad audience with no background in philosophy.

I did this at Certain Doubts for top-rated epistemologists by this metric, so for fun I thought I'd do it here.  I didn't really try to get a comprehensive list of people in philosophy of religion, but simply used the Leiter Report specialty rankings for philosophy of religion departments, and gleaned likely suspects from faculty lists for those departments.  So people at non-PhD programs will be slighted here, but I'll be happy to insert any such philosophers into the list when the omissions are noticed.  Anyway, the list is below the fold, for what it is worth.  But first:  I hereby disavow the implication that I myself think such metrics measure something important--it is true, however, that more and more administrators are thinking it measures something important, so if one doesn't, it will be useful to become acquainted with the metric and its flaws.   The measure used is the Hirsch number, and there are links to more information about it at Certain Doubts; what I've done relies on research citations for people who work in philosophy of religion, excluding citations of edited volumes and other non-research publications.

Here is an example of some reasoning that should be of interest to philosophers of religion. We don't have a complete science of the brain yet, but look at what recent neuro-science has shown. Don't the recent successes of neuro-science give us good reason to believe that there will one day be adequate evidence for the proposition that the brain is completely scientifically explainable. Shouldn't we then now think that the brain is completely scientifically explainable?

I think many would find something like the above reasoning plausible. I have to admit I find it plausible, and there are a few other kinds of arguments out there in philosophy that make a similar kind of move.

But here is where I start to get worried. For these strategies to work, something like the following principle must be true.

(1) If S is justified in believing that at some future time S will be justified in believing P, then S is justified in believing P now.

However, this won't do. I am justified in believing that, at some future time, I will be justified in believing that my dog is dead. After all, I'm pretty sure my dog isn't immortal. That doesn't mean I'm justified in believing that my dog is dead now. We might think there is a quick fix that can get around this.