January 2008 Archives

Careful readers will have noted that I posted an argument against Molinism earlier this morning, and it committed a modal fallacy. I took down the argument as soon as I realized the fallacy. Here's an argument that doesn't seem to commit the same modal fallacy, but the cost of it is that it has some much more controversial premises. Let C a complete description of the circumstances at the time of Jones' choice. The main point of Molinism is to make possible situations like this:

1. Were Jones in C, he would freely choose to mow the lawn.
2. Because of (1), God brings it about that Jones is in C.

3. If p is explanatorily prior to Jones' choosing what to do in C, and p entails that Jones will choose to mow the lawn, then Jones does not freely choose to mow the lawn. (This is a version of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities.)
4. Explanatory priority is transitive.
5. If, because of q, God brings it about that p, then q is explanatorily prior to p.
6. If C is a complete description of the circumstances at the time of Jones' choice, then that Jones is in C is explanatorily prior to Jones' choosing what he chooses.
7. If p and q are explanatorily prior to r, then p&q is explanatorily prior to r.

I was reminded this morning that the van Inwagen/Zimmerman joint Persons: Human and Divine is now available in print. What reminded me was Eric Olson's review of the book in the latest edition of Mind. (Link for subscribers.) Perhaps the most significant aspect of this book is that it contains a number of essays defending substance dualism which, to quote Olson, "get a more sympathetic hearing than current fashion would dictate." Most of the other essays appear interesting and thoughtful, though some tread well worn ground.

Best passage of the review:

Perhaps the most interesting essays are those devoted to the incarnation, original sin, and the trinity. Taken literally, these doctrines are baffling to the point of absurdity, and Christian philosophers will be sorely tempted to reinterpret or ignore them. There are no such evasions here. These essays offer the elevating spectacle of a first-rate mind operating in a tight spot. (Emphasis added)

One of the assignments I give to my philosophy of religion course is to have students write a paper reflecting on the impact of philosophy on their own religious beliefs.  As preparation for this paper, I have them read a number of select autobiographies from God and Philosophers and Philosophers who Believe.  This term, I've added a number of chapters from the recently published Philosophers without Gods (this is the volume that has the wonderful paper by the late David Lewis, "Divine Evil," that Michael has mentioned on his blog). 

While at the Eastern APA, I picked up Faith and the Life of the Intellect, which is in the same vein, but with contributions by Catholic philosophers working primarily in the Continental tradition.  My favorite line in the volume comes from Ralph McInerny:

"It matters who you hang out with philosophically" (239).

But I'm slightly puzzled by a quotation from the chapter by Jude Dougherty:

"Luther had little regard for philosophy.  Sworn enemy of Scholasticism, he once remarked that God had sent Aristotle as a punishment for the sins of mankind" (172).

Does anyone know where in Luther's corpus this comment is found?

Hello my name is Matthew and I too read the Leiter Reports. Today Leiter points to the new Secular Philosophy blog that features contributors such as Daniel Dennett and Colin McGinn (aka The Usual Suspects). Leiter uses the announcement to take issue with remarks from a recent McGinn interview in which McGinn remarks that there are fewer and fewer "Christian philosophers". Concurring with remarks that appeared here in the past, Leiter concludes that, "To be sure, religious philosophers are probably still a minority in academic philosophy in the U.S., but my sense is they are less of a minority than 25 years ago."

I'll be adding Secular Philosophy to the blogroll just as soon as I can figure out how to get it working again.

"THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION"

Keynote Speaker: Michael Tooley, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, Boulder

Friday, March 8 and Saturday, March 9

I've often heard the charge that theists have a harder time responding to the problem of evil if they hold to a deontological ethical view. Deontology recognizes duties that can't easily be overridden by consequences the way consequentialism allows. Consequentialists say the right thing to do is to do whatever leads to the best consequences. If God does this, then God can do things that lead to bad consequences as long as the good consequences that also happen are better enough to outweigh the bad. So it's easier to deal with the problem of evil if all it takes to justify God's allowance of evil is that it leads to a slightly better outcome overall, even if it's worse with respect to the evil itself. Deontologists, on the other hand, might just say that the duty not to harm or not even to allow harm can't so easily be outweighed by the overall good. Some things are just wrong, and God shouldn't therefore do them. Allowing very great evils seems to be a pretty good candidate for that category of action. It's thus harder to respond to the problem of evil with a deontological view than it is with a consequentialist view.

I used to be a little disturbed at this problem, wondering whether a "higher goods" type of defense that I favor requires a consequentialist view, a view I'm not otherwise attracted to. But it's occurred to me recently that the problem assumes a kind of deontology that I don't agree with. It assumes the absolutism of Immanuel Kant's deontology, not a more moderated kind of deontology such as that of W.D. Ross, which I favor. On Ross's view, we have prima facie duties, none of which are absolute the way duties for Kant are. Duties can often conflict for Ross, and when they conflict only one will turn out to be an actual duty, whichever one is morally more important. In a case of lying to save a life, the life is more important than the normal duty not to lie, but in a case of lying to protect your reputation it's still going to be wrong to lie, even if the consequences are better from lying. So this is not consequentialism, but it's not absolutism either.

Now apply this to the problem of evil. There will be potential cases when God would not do something wrong, because even though the consequences are better it would be wrong to do it. But it leaves open that some goods are so important that God might allow pretty serious harm in order to achieve them. This means that the moderate deontologist can have consequence-based responses to the problem of evil that an absolutist deontologist can't have. This may have been all I was worried about losing by adopting a deontological ethical view, even if consequentialists might have yet more to say to defend a divinity from being immoral for allowing evil.

The main problem with the idea of Christ's suffering as substitutionary punishment is the agent-centeredness of punishment (to use Mike's idea): justice does not say that someone is to be punished but that the malefactor is to be punished. I want to offer three considerations which go some way--probably not all the way--towards alleviating this concern. I suspect they are complementary parts of the truth.
1. The Church: It is a mistake to think of justification as simply something individual between me and Jesus. Salvation is through incorporation in the Church, the Body of Christ. But Christ is the Head of the Church. He suffers on behalf of the whole Body of Christ of which we are members. The punishment of a sin committed with the hand need not involve the hand. If we take seriously the idea of the Church as the Body of Christ, we might have the resources to understand how the Head can take on the sufferings due to the rest of the Body. Of course we have to be careful. The idea is a metaphor. But it indicates a reality, and it is not, I think, implausible that the reality of identification between Christ's body and his Church be sufficient for an account of substitutionary sacrifice.
2. Love: Nozick in "Love's Bond" particularly clearly brings out an aspect of love already found in Aristotle's account of friendship and central to Aquinas' account of how we love God in loving neighbor: When x loves y, the increases and decreases in y's welfare are directly (i.e., constitutively, and not mediated through any sentiment of sympathy) increases and decreases in x's welfare. (Nozick takes this to be the definition of love, but he's wrong. For then by definition everyone would love herself, but that is false. However, he is right that this is a part of the concept of love.) There is a union between lover and beloved: the beloved is another self. Aquinas talks of the mutual interpenetration of lover and beloved in intellect and affection: we see things from our beloved's point of view, we will things from our beloved's point of view, and we embrace the beloved with our intellect and affection. These four aspects of the mutual interpenetration of will and intellect are present even when the love is not reciprocated, and so even unreciprocated love involves a union of will and intellect with the beloved. Reciprocation heightens the union by providing the four converse aspects: the beloved wills things from the lover's point of view, and so on.
Take all these ideas of the closeness of lover and beloved seriously.
Now, take these ideas of the unitiveness of love really seriously. Then I think it is at least not entirely implausible that in mutual love, one might be able to take on the other's punishments. When one's welfare is decreased, so is the other's. Each sees from the other's point of view; each acts in some way from the other's point of view. When by grace we accept Christ's love, we return love for love, since without love salvation is impossible. We are united with Christ in love, and in this love's union it may well be that his innocent sufferings are appropriately credited to us.
3. Sanctification: The previous two considerations pointed towards ecclesiology and the believer's grace-moved response as important to an account of substitutionary punishment. Both of these moves manifest something about the believer's "closeness" to Christ, a closeness that seems to me important to the substitutionary sacrifice. And just as we should not divorce an account of justification from its ecclesial dimension and the believer's response, we should also not divorce it from sanctification. We should, instead, see justification and sanctification either as the same thing or as two aspects of the same thing. If we do this, we see another closeness between Christ and the believer. Sanctification consists in its coming to be the case that in a mysterious way "it is not I who live, but Christ that lives in me" (Gal. 3:20). But if the Christian's life is no longer her but Christ's, if it is Christ living here in her, manifest in her actions, then it is no surprise that his punishment is credited to her. For it is not credited to someone alien to Christ: it is credited to someone who, in the very act of being credited, is sanctified, is made such that it is Christ who lives in her. We might even look at the substitutionary sacrifice here as closely tied to the fittingness of such union: if the Christian's life is lived by Christ in an intimate and deep sense, then there would almost be a kind of responsibility for the Christian's sins in Christ, her life having been taken on by him.

The theory of penal substitution goes something like this:

1) Human beings have sinned, and so justice demands that we be punished for our sin.
2) God, as a just God, must therefore satisfy the demands of justice.
3) But because of God's great love for us, God pours his punishment and wrath not on us, but on Jesus, God's only Son.
4) The punishment and wrath that we deserved was placed on Jesus so that the demands of justice have been met.

I don't know if this is the best characterization of the theory, but I thnk that something close to this is correct. It is very different from Michael Murray's characterization of the theory, but Murray seems to blur the penal substitution and satisfaction-debt theories.

Questions:
a) Is there a better characterization of the penal substitution theory? How might (1)-(4) be refined?
b) What's the problem with (1)-(4) (or the penal substitution theory generally)? Why is it that it seems that a lot of people (including Christian theologians and philosophers) have a problem with them/it? (And these people don't only have a problem with (1)-(4), it seems, but anything close to (1)-(4), specifically (3).)

I was thumbing through Richard Fumerton's Epistemology text tonight when I ran across a curious remark.

"An atheist, quite literally, would have trouble surviving in philosophy at certain historical moments. These days it's hard to find theists in the philosophical community." Fumerton pg6

I should mention that the book is otherwise quite good!

January 25-26, 2008
Pres House
731 State St., Madison, WI

C.S. Lewis was an inspiration and a help to many during the late 20th century, and many suspect that he may be equally helpful in the 21st century.

Where is C. S. Lewis's thought helpful to us as we face the problems of the 21st century,and where does his thought need to be supplemented, extended or challenged?

You won't want to miss this exciting and important conference!

Does the existence of objective evil matter to the problem of evil? Suppose that whether x is evil or morally bad for S depends (metaphysically) on whether, after due consideration, S (strongly) prefers that x not be the case. Now, importantly, I'm not supposing that there exists no (dis)value. No, there certainly is (dis)value: it just happens that the metaphysics of value is different from what you (might have) thought. The (dis)value is there; you can still quantify over instances of it as you always have: all that's changed is its metaphysics. Now consider two possible worlds.

1. World (1): Smith is suffering immense pain at the hands of a ruthless torturer, the pain endured is morally bad in the proposed sense that Smith's welfare is near bottom.

2. World (2): Smith is suffering immense pain at the hands of a ruthless torturer, the pain endured is morally bad in sense that Smith's welfare is near bottom and the pain is objectively bad.

Now imagine someone advancing both (I) and (II)

I. The suffering is severe and God has compelling reason to prevent it in world (2).

II. The suffering is severe but God has no compelling reason to prevent it in world (1).

There seems as much (to be generous, nearly as much) reason for a being with the attributes of God to prevent the suffering in world (1) as there is for such a being to prevent the suffering in world (2). The reasons are compelling in both worlds. The idea that God would have to check the metaphysical status of the disvalue of the suffering before he knew whether he had any reason to prevent it is just incredible. It is difficult to take seriously someone urging: "Oh yes, that child was raped and beaten to death. But since the terrible suffering didn't have the additional property of being objectively evil, God had no good reason to prevent it". This leaves me wondering how much the "objectivity" of the objective disvalue of suffering matters to the problem of evil.

Pre-Script: Matt, thanks for all your hard work updating the site!

This is a *very* inchoate idea, but that should be what blogs are for. So I've been thinking about transubstantiation. I'm going to throw a bunch of stuff out there and then try to tie it together. It will be the most disorganized thing I've ever posted but I've still got a few MS deadlines (almost done for now tho!) and, again, this is a friendly blog (and I don't think the post so hopeless as to be rude to post). It will largely consist in my affirming the possibility of various things, many of which might be pretty controversial in some quarters. Nevertheless, for those that share the affirmations there might be a way of understanding transubstantiation in the neighborhood.

Suppose you're reading a novel and it says that a powerful wizard moved an object from one side of the planet to the other in an instant. You might worry about exactly what theory explains how that other object is the *same* object, but I don't think there's much reason to think the author has attributed the impossible to the magician. I don't think even a philosopher with no off switch (me!) should be stopped in their tracks by such a story. I think it's sufficient that it's *that* object which the wizard decided to move *there*.

I think the same is true with time travel. Time travel stories involve no clear incoherencies. I think conceivability or apparent conceivability is defeasible evidence of possibility, and I'm aware of no clear arguments for the incoherence of time travel.

I think we need primitive thisness and primitive identity to solve various problems in metaphysics anyway (associated with Chisholm's paradox) so I'm going to help myself to them if need be.

Finally, I think bilocation is possible (a species of multi-location where a usually one-one relation is one-many).

Finally finally, I think that the "accidents" or "secondary qualities" or whatever of substances are a result of the causal powers they have and that they have whatever causal powers God wills that they have at any given time.

So here's the inchoate hunch/hope. God takes certain molecules of the body of Jesus and causes them to multi-locate across time and gives them new causal powers, one's which mimic the normal causal powers of bread and wine.

I'm not claiming that this is original (maybe lots of people have already thought of something like this) or that it exhausts the doctrine (for example the "Soul and Divinity" part remains unexplained but I'm just trying to cover the material part). What I find interesting in this approach is that it seems to get us pretty close to the doctrine while making it clear what it commits us to and it's surprisingly little (in my view since I hold all these views anyway, I get this view at *no* additional cost).

I have no doubt that Alex and Tim will let me know if I've run afoul of Catholic dogma (something I don't want to do), but, again, I am not suggesting this as a definition of the doctrine but rather pointing out how far we can get towards it with such (relative) clarity and little cost.

Bill Vallicella and I have been worrying about variants of the problem how an atheist who does not believe in objective good and evil can formulate an argument from evil against the existence of God (see this post on Vallicella's blog and this post on Prosblogion). The problem is that the argument from evil requires objective evil. (If we were talking of subjective evil, theodicy becomes trivial--we can say that the evils of this world are evils from our point of view, but not from God's.)

Here is one way of formulating the problem. On the view that there is no such thing as objective evil, the term "objective evil" becomes nonsense--the view isn't merely that there happens not to be objective evil, but that the concept makes no more sense than the concept of a perception with no perceiver.

Here I want to raise the problem of auxiliary premises. I will formulate the following in the case of the deductive argument from evil for simplicity, but I think the issues generalize to the inductive case.

The typical theist believes that God exists and that objective evil exists. She is very unlikely to grant that if evil exists, then God exists. Thus, the deductive argument from evil requires some additional premises besides the claim that evil exists. At least one of these premises will involve both "God" and "(objective) evil", and our atheist takes the second of these terms to be nonsense--and the first, too, most likely.

Perhaps, this will be a premise like: "If God exists, he eliminates all evils he can." Now this premise will not be a mere tautology. Even if we grant that tautologies using nonsense terms make sense, a controversial question (see this this post and discussion on my blog), so that all borogoves are borogoves, a non-tautologous statement involving nonsense terms, such as that some borogoves are mimsy, seems to be simply nonsense.

So our atheist's argument from evil involves premises that she believes to be nonsense. This creates, first of all, a formal problem. What does it mean for an argument involving nonsensical sentences to be valid? Perhaps a purely formal solution to this can be given--if it is has the form of a valid argument, it is a valid argument (If all borogoves are mortal, and George is a borogove, then George is mortal). I think we shouldn't be too sure. The distinction between narrowly logical necessity, on the one hand, and conceptual necessity on the other hand, is not as clear as one might wish.

But I want to raise a second worry. These auxiliary premises cannot be something the atheist coherently believes, since the atheist takes these premises to be nonsense. The argument thus is not just a reductio, but an ad hominem one.

But now we have a problem that I touched on in my last prosblogion post on this topic, though perhaps not as clearly. Suppose the theist simply rejects one of these auxiliary premises. The atheist cannot say that the premise is true. The most she can say is that by the theist's lights it is true. But to say that the premise is true by the theist's lights when the theist rejects it seems to involve at least a little chutzpah. Moreover, how can the atheist criticize the theist for denying a premise that by the atheist's own lights is nonsense? Perhaps the atheist can give a formally valid auxiliary argument from other premises that the theist believes. But similar problems are going to come up, since the conclusion of that auxiliary argument is nonsense, and hence at least one of its premises is nonsense or else its premises are inconsistent.

The basic point here is this: The theist can always get out of the atheist's argument by rejecting something that the atheist thinks is nonsense or contradictory--and how can the atheist complain about that?

Let's go back to the concrete issue. Our atheist does not think that God, if he exists, eliminates all (objective) evils he can--that conditional is nonsense by our atheist's lights. The theist doesn't believe that either. So where is the conflict? Perhaps the atheist can argue that if x is omnibenevolent, then x eliminates all (objective) evils. But our theist presumably rejects that, just as our atheist does, though for different reasons (the theist because she thinks it's false, and our atheist because she thinks it's nonsense). Perhaps the atheist can give a compelling analysis of omnibenevolence. But there is chutzpah in giving an analysis of omnibenevolence that you think is nonsense, and it is hard for the atheist to object to an alternate analysis that yields a different conclusion, since our atheist thinks both analyses are nonsense.

Of course some atheists do believe in objective good and evil, and these issues do not come up.

The latest issue of Episteme (4:2) is now out and available online by subscription. Guest Editor David Coady has put together a nice issue on conspiracy theories which includes two articles that are likely to be of interest to Prosblogion readers.

In 1999 Brian Keeley kicked off interest in conspiracy theories with the publication of "Of Conspiracy Theories". In this issue Keeley returns to the topic with an essay on "God as the Ultimate Conspiracy Theory". Keeley stretches the concept a bit, but draws some interesting parallels between appeals to divine providence and the claims of conspiracy theorists. The essay takes a curious turn as Keely deploys considerations about conspiracy theories to defend agnosticism against Hanson's "Agnostic’s dilemma."

Michael Baurmann's "Rational Fundamentalism? An Explanatory Model of Fundamentalist Beliefs" will also be of interest to some readers.