Philosopher Michael Murray and cognitive psychologist Paul Bloom discuss the cognitive science of religion and its philosophical and theological implications in this Bloggingheads discussion. A number of interesting issues come up - enjoy!
May 2009 Archives
Richard Gale reviews Bruce Langtry’s God, the Best and Evil for NDPR. Langtry has done some interesting work on the problem of no best world. This is not, frankly, an especially balanced and enlightening review. But there it is.
There is no shortage of escathological paradoxes. Here’s another. Suppose God distributes punishments and rewards based on how well we live up to moral standards over time and God determines when we die and when will be judged. For simplicity, suppose everyone knows what the standards are, the standards are objective and precise, excusing and mitigating conditions never arise, and so on.
No matter what time God selects for our death and judgment, it is true that we might live a much better life. So, God cannot be justified in choosing a time to make the judgment. I initially thought the following was true.
- God is justified in punishing S at t iff. it is true at t that (i) S has not led a good life and (ii) S would not live a good life after t, were he to continue living.
Continue reading An Escathological Paradox.
October 22-24, 2009
Durango, Colorado
Featured Speakers:
Michael Bergmann: "Commonsense Skeptical Theism"
Wes Morriston: "My Ways Are Not Your Ways: Human Cognitive Limitations and Divinely Authorized Genocides in the Hebrew Bible"
CFP: The conference has no particular theme, and papers on any topic of philosophical interest will be considered. The SCP welcomes both Christians and non-Christians as presenters, commentators, and participants. Submissions should be 3,000 words or less, prepared for blind review, and saved in an accessible format (e.g. Word, PDF, RTF, etc.). Please indicate in your cover letter whether, should your paper not be accepted, you would be willing to serve as commentator. For further information on both conference details and Durango attractions, visit the conference website at: philosophy.fortlewis.edu/scp.html
Deadline for submission: August 15, 2009.
Submissions, inquiries, and requests to comment can be sent to Justin McBrayer at mcbrayer_j@fortlewis.edu.
I am not completely convinced by the following argument, but let's try it.
Let p be a positive real number. A p-widget is a device that on its back has written down a positive integer (perhaps in very small numerals), and that is physically necessitated to behave as follows: As soon as a p-widget w is made, it makes a copy of itself--another p-widget. The amount of time it takes to make a copy of itself is n-p years, where n is the number on w's back. Moreover, while making the copy, w inscribes n+1 on the copy's back (all within that n-p year period). Finally, a p-widget does not perish once made.
So, once a p-widget comes into existence with 1 written on its back, it makes a copy of itself in 1-p years and the copy has 2 written on its back. The copy then takes 2-p years to make a copy, which has 3 written on its back. And so on. However, it seems that the enemies of supertasks and actual infinities should not object to a p-widget if p is less than or equal to 1. The reason for that is that if a p-widget is produced where p does not exceed 1, then although the production times for subsequent p-widgets do get smaller and smaller, nonetheless there is no supertask or actual infinity involved--at any given time, there are only finitely many p-widgets. The reason for that is that if p does not exceed 1, then the amount of time for infinitely many p-widgets to come into existence is 1-p+2-p+3-p+... and this is equal to infinity if p is less than or equal to 1.
On the other hand, if p>1, then this infinite series adds up to a finite number, and so after a finite amount of time, there will be infinitely many p-widgets. For instance, if the first 2-widget has 1 written on its back, then there would be an infinite number of 2-widgets after pi2/6 years. This, of course, the enemy of supertasks and actual infinities will claim to be impossible. So the initial difficulty for the enemy of supertasks and actual infinities is that a 0.9-widget and a 1-widget could be made, but a 1.1-widget cannot. That seems problematic--why should there be this intrinsic logical limit on how much faster new widgets can be produced?
But there is a further move I want to make. If the only objection is to supertasks and infinities, then the opponent of supertasks and actual infinities should not object to a world that contains a 2-widget--as long as God miraculously intervenes to stop the reproduction of 2-widgets before the pi2/6 years are up. For if God does so intervene, then no paradox ensues.
Now imagine a world that contains only God and physical stuff and a time sequence lasting at least two years (the magic number pi2/6 is approximately 1.64493), including initially a 2-widget with 1 written on its back. It is now metaphysically necessary that if such a world is actual, then God miraculously intervenes at some time in the first pi2/6 years. But that seems really, really strange: Why would God be necessitated to miraculously intervene? There is something very odd about the answer: "He must intervene to prevent a supertask or actual infinity." (One could perhaps imagine a case where an essentially omnibenevolent, omnipotentent and omniscient being would have to intervene to prevent an evil. But to prevent a supertask or an actual infinity?)
Continue reading More on supertasks and actual infinities.
A nice, thoughtful, unharried interview with Alvin Plantinga here and another with Richard Swinburne here. Both collected on this terrific site with lots of other excellent entries featuring John Leslie, David Chalmers, Bede Rundle, Quentin Smith, Michael Tooley, Tom Flint, Peter van Inwagen, and many others.
A new reprint edition of The Many-Faced Argument: Studies on the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God (edited by John Hick and Arthur C. McGill) has just been published by Wipf and Stock.
This book contains John's well-known paper that introduces the distinction between factual necessity and logical necessity in response to the modal ontological argument. I had the honour to write a brief foreword for this new reprint. John has arranged for the royalties from the book to go to Arthur McGill's widow, Lucy, now living in Florida.
This is one of two excellent anthologies on the ontological argument. (The other is Alvin Plantinga's The Ontological Argument: From St. Anselm to Contemporary Philosophers, which, unfortunately, has been discontinued.)
It just struck me that while it is very puzzling why there is law-like regularity at the bottom level--in fundamental physics--the puzzle about why there are law-like regularities at higher levels--in astronomy, psychology, biology, chemistry and non-basic physics--is a separate puzzle. In other words, even if we had an explanation of regularity at the bottom level, we would not thereby have an explanation of why there are higher explanatory levels where there are also regularities, albeit somewhat more approximate ones. Thus, when we are puzzled by the laws of nature, there are two things to be explained:
- Why there is regularity at the level of fundamental physics.
- Why this regularity, together with the initial conditions, gives rise to regularities at multiple higher levels of organization.
This gives rise to what one might call a generalized fine-tuning argument. The standard fine-tuning argument asks why the laws of nature (and especially the constants in them) are such that life arises. The generalized fine-tuning argument asks why it is that the laws of nature and initial conditions are such that multiple explanatory levels (either left unspecified like that, or enumerated: astronomy, psychology, biology, chemistry, etc.) arise from these laws and conditions.
Whether the generalized fine-tuning argument is good argument for the existence of God depends on two things: (a) how likely it is that apart from the theistic hypothesis that such multiple levels should arise, and (b) how likely it is on the theistic hypothesis that they should arise.
As for (b), I think in Aquinas and Leibniz we find compelling accounts of how an infinite but simple deity would have good reason to create a world that images his infinity via a diversity of elements and his simplicity via a unity running through these diverse elements. Unity at multiple explanatory levels allows even more of that diversity and unity.
What about (a)? I don't know. I think the question is easier when the levels are enumerated, as then the considerations from the standard fine-tuning arguments can be used. But the general question is quite interesting, too.
(Cross-posted to my own blog.)
Tom Morris once proposed, in response to some otherwise cogent incompossibility arguments, that God is the delimiter of possibility. What Morris had in mind, inter alia, is that the contours of broad logical possibility depend on the essential properties of God. Or, at least, he had in mind that the Anselmian is in a position to insist that contours of broad logical possibility depend on the essential properties of God. If Morris is right, we have a devastating response to incompossibility arguments. It presents no problem at all that, as a matter of fact, we have a strong modal intuition that possibly an omnipotent being performs a morally wrong action. If God delimits possiblity, then that intuition is radically wrong: worlds in which an omnipotent being performs a wrong action are not in general possible. Similarly for every intuitive, but troublesome, claim about possible worlds in incompossibility arguments. We find quickly that the divine attributes are compossible!
Continue reading Compossibility and Divine Limits On Possible Worlds.
(Cross-posted to my own blog.)
Sam Cole, one of the students in my upper level metaphysics class, wrote an interesting paper (I am writing this with his permission) where he argued that if we do not accept the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), then the following question will be unanswerable:
- Under what circumstances should we accept a given explanatory hypothesis instead of the hypothesis that the phenomenon in question simply has no explanation?
I think this is a really neat question. We have some idea of the sorts of criteria we employ in choosing between alternate explanatory hypotheses: simplicity, prior probability (perhaps I repeat myself), etc. But if we do not accept the PSR, then the no-explanation hypothesis is going to be, presumably, always available. On what grounds do we judge between our best explanatory hypothesis and the no-explanation hypothesis?
It is tempting to say: If the best explanatory hypothesis is pretty good, then we go for it. But the evaluation of the quality of hypotheses seems to be innately comparative. So this "pretty good" does not seem like it should be absolute. But if it is relative, then what is it relative to? If it is relative to other explanatory hypotheses, then its being "pretty good" seems irrelevant when comparing it against the no-explanation hypothesis. The hypothesis that JFK was shot by a bunch of gorillas escaped from the zoo is pretty good as compared to the hypothesis that JFK was killed by a rifle-toting clam, but that is irrelevant when we compare the gorilla hypothesis to the Oswald hypothesis. So what we need to know is whether the explanatory hypothesis is "pretty good" as compared to the no-explanation hypothesis. But we have no criteria for that sort of comparison!
Another tempting suggestion is this: Whenever any narrowly logically coherent explanation has been offered (asking for more than that may run into Kripkean problems), we should reject the no-explanation hypothesis. This is a more promising answer to (1). Note, however, that an opponent of the PSR who takes this route cannot oppose the use of the PSR in the Cosmological Argument. For in the context of the Cosmological Argument, the PSR is employed to claim the existence of explanations for phenomena for which narrowly logically coherent explanations--namely, theistic ones--have indeed been offered.
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