June 2009 Archives

Here.

The Philosophy of Religion Group is issuing a call for papers for its session at the 2010 American Philosophical Association Central Division Meeting on the topic of "The Hiddenness of Spiritual Realities." While the topic of "divine hiddenness" has received a modest amount of attention in recent years, the topic of this session is being cast a bit more broadly. Those proposing papers are welcome to address the topic of divine hiddenness, however the program committee is also interested in considering papers that address hiddenness in non-theistic traditions, as well as aspects of hiddenness that are not focused on the existence of God. Papers might thus address other topics where the hiddenness of a spiritual reality is initially surprising or unexpected given particular claims within a tradition. For example, for traditions with an emphasis on natural law, the hiddenness of divine moral mandates might merit attention. For traditions with a commitment to reincarnation, the seemingly minimal evidence for the existence of "past lives" might require explanation. Etc.

Those wishing to submit papers for consideration should send 350 word (or less) abstracts to the Program Chair, Michael Murray at michael.murray@fandm.edu no later than SEPTEMBER 1, 2009.

First, thanks to Matthew Mullins and the other Prosblogion contributors for setting up and participating in this online book club. The second part of Moser's equivocally named chapter 1 ("Doubting Skeptics", where "Doubting" refers both to skeptics' doubting of God's reality and Moser's doubting of skeptics' having discharged their epistemic obligations) consists of four sections: "5. Volitional Knowing"; "6. Skeptical Tests"; "7. Trust and Distrust"; and "8. Voice Lessons". Since each of these sections is part of chapter 1, I shall also refer to them as "1.5", "1.6", etc. Anyway, below the fold are my summaries and critiques of §§1.5-1.8.

With the annual Episteme conference going on I had the opportunity to have a couple of fellow travelers over for dinner. The conversation ranged over a number of philosophical topics, but one question stuck with me this morning. We'd never come to a satisfactory answer to the question, "What is it to be a Christian?" Of course, being philosophers, we were inquiring as to the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a Christian.

I think there may be at least two ways in which one could answer the question of what it is to be a Christian. The first is to tell some kind of causal/historical story about how a present individual's belief and practice relates to a certain 1st century sect. One has to be careful about how one tells this story so that certain contemporary groups don't come out Christian, e.g. Islam has a historical relationship to Jesus Christ, but you wouldn't want to say it was Christian. (Not that I'd mind if it turned out that all Muslims were Christian, but my Muslim friends seem to find such things irritating.) The second way that one might try to account for what it means to be a Christian is to tell some story about the relationship between a certain set of beliefs and practices and the person Jesus Christ. I take it that the first meaning is something like what one would expect from a sociologist of religion, while the second is what you might expect the individual to say of herself. Perhaps there are more ways to give an account of 'Christian' and I'd be interested in hearing those in the comments section.

I'm sure some of the readers and contributors here have thought about this question a bit more than the three of us last night. If you'd like to make a stab at an analysis, I'd love to read it in the comments. Here are some desiderata we came up with for giving an analysis of being a Christian:

• It shouldn't be the case that Jesus Christ be in the set of things Christian.


• It shouldn't be the case that God be in the set of things Christian.


• It shouldn't be the case that evil demons be in the set of things Christian.


• It shouldn't be the case that one have eternal salvation and not be a Christian.

In the latest former-former-theist news, British biographer and poet A.N. Wilson has renounced atheism. His own account occurs here in the New Statesman.

The story is a few months old but, as most readers know and many have commented, I've been incognito this semester.

I find this very interesting for a number of reasons including. 1. It's a token of the type intellectual revert. 2. It's a token of the type British intellectual revert. 3. I read his biographies of Jesus and of C.S. Lewis and found them a bit bifurcated. There seemed to be a half-believing Wilson and a half-belligerent Wilson. 4. I once would have disassociated myself from the sort of case he makes, but now endorse it, and have been experimenting with formalizing it.

Rea has an interesting paper arguing that if one assumes bivalence, then presentism is incompatible with free will. I think there are problems in his argument, but I was also thinking that there might be a variant argument to similar effect.

Start with this. Sally intentionally started a forest fire F, but she ceased to exist before the fire started. (E.g., she set fire to a pool of gasoline, intending the fire to spread to the forest, but ceased to exist before the fire spread to the forest.) The forest fire, then, is plainly something that Sally had a choice about, something that Sally is (or was? -- the grammar of English is unclear on this point) responsible for.

Now:
A1. If x had a choice about the occurrence of E, then E depends on x.
A2. If E never depended, does not depend and will never depend on x, then x never had a choice about the occurrence of E.
A3. Necessarily, if E depends on x, then x exists.
A4. If E depended, depends or will depend on x, then there is a t such that E depended, depends or will depend on x at t.
A5. If E depended, depends or will depend on x at t, then it was, is or will be true at t that E depends on x.
A6. If was, is or will be true at t that E and x exist, then E and x existed, exist or will exist at t. (Presentism)
A7. Necessarily, if E depends on x, then E and x exist.
A8. Suppose for a reductio that Sally had a choice about the occurrence of F.
A9. Therefore, F depended, depends or will depend on Sally. (A2, A8)
A10. Therefore, there is a t at which F depended, depends or will depend on Sally. (A4, A9)
A11. Therefore, there is a t at which it was, is or will be true that F depends on Sally. (A5, A10)
A12. Therefore, there is a t at which it was, is or will be true that F and Sally exist. (A7, A11)
A13. Therefore, there is a t at which F and Sally existed, exist or will exist. (A6, A12)
A14. There is no t at which F and Sally existed, exist or will exist. (Sally ceased to exist before F started.) This contradicts A13!

[Oops, that wasn't ready. I published a stub by accident. Here's the finished post--CL]

I have only the first four sections of the first chapter of Moser's, The Elusive God, so I think this will be brief as it seems that Moser is setting the stage at this point.

Moser's religious skeptic is concerned with theistic religious commitment and that skepticism might either take the form of someone who doubts the reality of God or doubts that an affirmation of God's reality has positive epistemic value (32). Moser thinks that the religious skeptic's view is not nearly as compelling as some philosophers (including some of my favorites, I'm guessing) would have us believe. He reminds us (rightly) that the religious skeptic cannot be satisfied with showing that some particular individuals lack adequate evidence for believing that God exists as the skeptic wants to show that people in general lack adequate evidence.

In response to the allegation that we all lack adequate evidence for God's existence and thus ought to doubt the reality of God, Moser does not follow the lead of the fideist in saying that we don't need evidence for religious commitment but instead wants to say that on the right sort of understanding of "adequate evidence" the skeptic is right to suggest that this is something we need but wrong in thinking that it is not something that can be had.

How should we understand the demand for 'sufficient' evidence? Moser suggests that some religious skeptics demand cognitive reproducibility, that we can exert a kind of control over the evidence whereby we can reproduce the evidence again for ourselves or for someone else. This is implausible. He remarks, "Much of the inferred original evidence in cosmology, astrophysics, and geology ... is neither under our control nor reproducible by us" (34). He then suggests that the lesson to be drawn from this is that we ought to reject this stricture, "if evidence of God's reality isn't reproducible by us, then it isn't genuine evidence" (34). It's hard to take issue with this. I doubt there's anyone who thinks that all evidence must be under our control and reproducible, so unless there's some reason to think that there' s something special about evidence for God's existence, I can't imagine a religious skeptic making much of this.

Moser also notes that it is inappropriate to demand proof as there are many things believed without proof but believed with adequate evidence (35). The upshot is that even if it can be shown that we can't prove God's existence, this does nothing to encourage skepticism. Again, I think there's no question that Moser is right on this point.

Evidence for God's existence is, according to Moser, "a truth-indicator for the proposition that an authoritatively and morally perfect agent worthy or worship actually exists" (37). He takes Russell to task for saying that if he met God after his death, he would tell God that he gave us insufficient evidence. Moser's response:

Insufficient for what? For Russell's highly questionable expectations of God? ... a humbled Russell, unlike the actual Russell, would have asked: "God, what purposes of yours led to your being subtle and elusive in the purposively available evidence of your reality?" It's astonishing and regrettable too, that Russell ... gave no indication of being aware of such a compelling and important question for a rational truth-seeker" (37).

Were Russell's expectations unreasonable? Someone like Russell would say that the existence of Klansmen and fascists have always seemed to me to be precisely the sort of thing we wouldn't expect to see if God existed. As the details are coming later, there's not much to say on this point. It seems that Moser thinks that Russell is ignoring something important: he's neglected the question, 'If God exists, what parameters for the evidence would God observe?' (I'm not sure Russell's ignored it, but maybe he didn't think sufficiently hard about it.) The kind of evidence we'll get, suggests Moser, is not the kind of evidence we would prefer but the sort of evidence that God prefers us to have. To determine what sort of evidence a morally perfect being worthy of worship would give us, Moser suggests that we would have to know what such a being would think is in our best interests and what this being intends for this world. That being said, he concedes, "If ... we were to face a world of nothing but unrelenting pain and suffering we would have significant evidence against God's reality. We would then have significant evidence against the reality of a God who truly cares for all humans, and we would have no positive indication of the reality of such a God" (38). He adds, however, "The actual world ... is clearly not a world of nothing but unrelenting pain and suffering" (38). Not for me, at least. There's an interesting question about the scope of Moser's claims. If we were to face a world including subjects whose lives were pretty much nothing but unrelenting pain and suffering, does Moser concede that this is strong evidence for the non-existence of a God that cares for this subject? Moser is right that the actual world contains its silver linings (e.g., Mother Teresa reaching out to the poor), and that means that this world is not one of unrelenting pain and suffering but it is consistent with there being individual lives that are filled with pain and suffering with little relief. Can the religious skeptic say that the evidential situations of those who live miserable lives strong evidence either for God's non-existence or God's lack of concern for some individuals?

Moser clarifies that his discussion will not assume that the God of traditional theism exists of the God of some specific tradition exists, but he will hope to show that we have pretty much what we'd expect to have in terms of evidence if in fact a morally perfect God exists. It is then that we can ask whether our evidence actually points in favor of God. The advantage of such a project seems to be that we can ask whether our evidential situation is the evidential situation we would expect if there were a Jewish or Christian God that comes to us with authoritative evidence, "evidence demanding that we yield our wills to the divine source of the evidence in question" (47). Arguments for religious skepticism that assume that we will receive spectator's evidence (i.e., evidence that we can receive without bending our wills to the will of the source of the evidence) are the sorts of arguments that Moser will argue are unconvincing even if they show convincingly that there is little evidence for some sort of God that would do little to challenge us. The kind of evidence we would expect to have on the hypothesis that the Jewish or Christian God exists is not necessarily the sort of evidence that we could gather simply by investigating nature (48). Moser is skeptical that we can, by means of our own resources, come upon sufficient evidence for God's existence. I guess I have a vague concern about this. If God doesn't provide adequate spectator evidence but might be concerned to provide adequate authoritative evidence, those with flawed characters (Russell? Me?) will likely never receive evidence that could rationalize a commitment to the God of Judaism or Christianity. Is this a tragic situation? Is the loss suffered by those who can't come to know God (in some sense of 'can't') proportional to the failings of character that prevent them from (allegedly) coming to know God to exist? It seems that a morally perfect being would not want these sorts of tragic situations to arise (i.e., for the degree of loss to be highly disproportional when we take account of the subject's vice or irresponsible conduct), but if that's right, then why should we expect there to be a huge gap between authoritative evidence and spectator's evidence since it seems on its face that relatively minor sins can leave someone in the position of a rational agnostic.

There's not much I can say at this point. The project is really interesting, Moser's points thus far seem perfectly correct, so I can't wait to see how this all plays out in the chapters to come.

A draft of my entry for Oxford Bibliographies Online can be found here. Comments and advice welcome and appreciated, and for that purpose it is worth reminding that the purpose of these is to be selective, attending to the most important issues and publications to help guide newcomers through the blithering array of material that shows up in a usual Google search.

Rea has argued in "Presentism and Fatalism" that presentism + bivalence + libertarian free will form an inconsistent triad. (The paper can be found here.)

I'm trying to understand his argument. I'll explain what I take to be the basic strategy behind the argument and why I don't see how that strategy can succeed. I'll then offer a hypothesis as to why Rea might have mistakenly thought his argument succeeds. All of this is designed to help you, the audience, understand the nature of my lack of understanding of Rea's argument. The hope is that someone will straighten me out. (I hope this note isn't too far removed from philosophy of religion... Rea's argument does have implications for theological systems: e.g., a presentist might view it as a challenge to the free will defense.)

I just finished Trenton Merricks' recent Phil. Review (2009, 118:1) article "Truth and Freedom". Like most of his stuff, his arguments were crisp and clear. I'll say at the outset that I'm far from being an expert in the freewill/foreknowledge/fatalism literature. (I make that explicit, because I know that some readers of this blog are!)

It was fun to see Merricks apply some of his work on the nature of truth to the fatalism problem. He starts with the mundane, general point that a proposition is true because of what the world is like; i.e., truth depends on the world, not the other way around. Furthermore, this dependence is not a causal one (more on this below).

I have a question maybe people on this blog can help me answer.

1) What is worship? (I take an answer to this question to be in the form of a filling in of the analysans of an illuminating biconditional of the form: S worships T if and only if ... )

'Worship' is sometimes used as an adjective, and I'm not concerned with understanding what 'worship' means when people talk about "worship services". I'm concerned with 'worship' as a verb. Here are some paradigm worship ascriptions. Call this group A:

- Sally worships her boyfriend.
- Todd worships money
- Gina worships God.

Now I'm wondering if 'worship' in these sentences is different from 'worship' in these sentences:

- when John was appeared to by the Lord in Revelation, he fell prostrate and worshiped.
- the Israelites worshiped the Lord at Mt. Sinai.
- "Then the man said, "Lord, I believe," and he worshiped him." (John 9:38)

Call this group of sentences Group B. Are these uses of 'worship' different? The latter sentences appear to be true at more localized periods of time. The former appear to be about a more general attitude towards an object. Do people see what I'm getting at?

I'll be happy to analyze 'worship' once I get clear on whether there are two different senses of 'worship' in Groups A and B or not. If people want to take a stab at an analysis anyway, that'd be welcome as well.

I just finished writing a review of a wonderful new collection, Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology.  A draft of the review is here, though the official copy may be shortened due to constraints of the journal. 

I think that many of the readers of this blog will be intersted in the book, as its chapters contain a little something for everyone.  Rather than reproduce the entire review here, let me just note that, at the very least, you should read Mike Rea's introduction. 

Typically in writing these posts I recount some thrilling statistics about the blog's performance over the last year, but five years seems like a rather significant milestone for a blog. To change things up I want to recognize some fantastic achievements on the part of Prosblogion's contributors. Perhaps most significantly, five of our contributors landed or started their first tenure-track jobs this year.

• Trent Dougherty will start at Baylor University in the Fall of 2009


• Clayton Littlejohn will start at the University of Texas, San Antonio in the Fall of 2009


• Robert Gressis started at California State University, Northridge in the Fall of 2008


• Tim Pawl started at the University of St. Thomas in the Fall of 2008


• Joshua Thurow started at Mount Marty College in the Fall of 2008

I'd like to welcome Prosblogion's latest contributor Kevin Corcoran. Kevin is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College. Reader's may want to check out his most recent book, Rethinking Human Nature: A Christian Materialist Alternative to the Soul. You can also check out the preface to his work in progress, Incurably Human: The Ache and Hope of Life on Earth.

Please join me in welcoming Kevin to the site.

Beginning the week of June 22nd we will start up our summer reading group for Paul Moser's recently published book, The Elusive God. Each week a different contributor will take responsibility for kicking off each section with a post. We've broken the book up into eight sections by dividing the first three chapters in half. This should help keep the readings for each week easily manageable.

Our own Jonathan Kvanvig had this to say about the book:

"I found The Elusive God to be the most profound and interesting work I have read in the past twenty years at the intersection of philosophy and theology. Instead of beginning with a demand for evidence of the existence of a divine being, the author argues that we should expect any intrusion into our lives of the sort that would convince us that God exists to be authoritative evidence that calls us not only to a cognitive viewpoint but also to a surrendering of our wills. The result of such an investigation is a re-conceptualization of the epistemological landscape relevant to the possibility of the knowledge of God."

This promises to be an interesting, and perhaps provocative, read. If you want to participate in the reading group, head over to your university library or go on-line to grab a copy of the book.

Consider two claims about God's knowledge.

1. For all p, if p, then God knows p.
2. For all p, if p, and possibly God knows p, then God knows p.

3. Necessarily, God's knowledge is closed under conjunction and tautological implication (i.e., if God knows p and God knows q, then God knows (p and q), and if God knows p, and p tautologically implies q, then God knows q).
4. There is at least one proposition p such that possibly God knows p and possibly God knows not-p.

Here is the argument that (2)-(4) entail (1). Fix any true p. By (4), let q be any proposition such that possibly God knows q and possibly God knows not-q. If q holds, then let r=q. If q does not hold, then let r=not-q. Note that r is true. Observe that possibly God knows not-r (if r=q, then this follows from the fact that God possibly knows not-p; if r=not-q, then this follows from the fact that God possibly knows q as well as (3), since q tautologically implies not-r). Let s be the proposition (p or not-r). Then, God possibly knows s. For God possibly knows not-r, and in any world where God knows not-r, God also knows (p or not-r) by (3). Now, s is true as p is true. Therefore, s is a proposition that is true and possibly known by God. Therefore, by (2), God knows s. Moreover, r is a true proposition, and God possibly knows r (since God possibly knows q and God possibly knows not-q). Therefore, God knows r, by (2). But s is (p or not-r). By (3), it follows that God knows p, since (s and r) tautologically implies p.

So if one attempts to limit omniscience by saying that omniscience only means that God knows things that God can know, or that God only knows things that possibly are known by someone (which also entails (2)), one hasn't limited omniscience at all: God still ends up knowing all true propositions, assuming (3) and (4). Is there some other way of non-arbitrarily limiting omniscience? I am not sure. But, fortunately, there is no need to limit omniscience. God knows all truths.

Keynote Speakers:
Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago
Matthew Halteman, Calvin College

Philosophers have often played a role as public intellectuals and social critics, reaching beyond the guild to speak to wider sectors of society. While the philosophical academy is an important "public," philosophical research can also serve a wider public. The past century provides a plethora of examples of philosophers who have engaged in cultural conversations as public intellectuals: from Bertrand Russell and Hannah Arendt to Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, Cornel West, and Charles Taylor. We find philosophers writing not just for Mind and Nous but also the New York Review of Books and The National Review.

This concern for other "publics" is both amplified and specified for Christian philosophers. As Alvin Plantinga observed in his inaugural address, "Advice to Christian Philosophers," Christian philosophers "are the philosophers of the Christian community; and it is part of their task as Christian philosophers to serve the Christian community." This impinges not only on the questions we ask, but the audiences we address. As Plantinga concludes, "The Christian philosopher does indeed have a responsibility to the philosophical world at large; but his fundamental responsibility is to the Christian community, and finally to God."
This conference encourages Christian philosophers to re-value the importance of "public intellectual work"--both for the wider society as well as the more specific "public" of the church. Our keynote speakers provide examples of such work. Jean Bethke Elshtain is a widely-cited commentator on contemporary politics, including issues of war and justice. Matthew Halteman is an emerging expert on issues of animal ethics and has written an important booklet for the Humane Society of the United States.

If open future views are true, I think it is puzzling that we have so many propositional attitudes about future propositions that we are in a position to know for sure are not true. We intend, fear or hope (or al three at once!) that something will happen, though the propositions that are the objects of our intentions, fears or hopes are typically ones that, according to open future views, either lack truth value or are false, and sometimes even necessarily false (thus, on the view of Rhoda et al., propositions saying that someone will freely do something are necessarily false). In fact, much of our life is spent dealing with these allegedly non-true propositions. These propositional attitudes are sometimes inappropriate, but sometimes quite appropriate. If one has the intuition that our lives as emoters and agents should be centered on reality, the sheer amount of life appropriately spent in concern about the future will be in tension with open future views.

On behalf of Morgan Luck (Charles Sturt University, Australia):

We are pleased to announce the formation of the International Philosophy of Religion Association (IPRA). IPRA is presently comprised of the following member groups:

* Australasian Philosophy of Religion Association
* Austrian Society of Philosophy of Religion
* British Society for the Philosophy of Religion
* European Society for Philosophy of Religion
* Evangelical Philosophical Society
* German Society for Philosophy of Religion
* Nordic Society for Philosophy of Religion
* Society of Christian Philosophers
* Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology

The association aims to encourage, publicize and circulate scholarly work within the field of philosophy of religion. To this end we have created the following website (http://www.csu.edu.au/research/ipra.htm) and mailing list (to join the list email ipra@csu.edu.au with the subject header 'Join IPRA').

For more information regarding the activities of the association please check our website, or contact us directly by email (ipra@csu.edu.au).

Oxford is beginning a large venture, to create selective bibliographies across disciplines of important topics in each discipline. Duncan Pritchard is editing the philosophy section, and I'm not sure who else is on the editorial board, but as part of my agreeing to be on it, I also agreed to do some entries. One of them is on heaven and hell, available here. The draft is very rough at this point, so any comments, including sins of omission as well as commission, are welcome!

The John Templeton Foundation (JTF), the Society of Christian Philosophers (SCP), the University of Oklahoma and Oxford University are pleased to announce the Templeton Research Fellows program for 2010-2011. The Templeton Research Fellows program offers extended interactions at Oxford University with philosophers of religion and scientists. This one-year fellowship is designed to advance new research in the philosophy of religion and to further the professional development of Fellows.

The Templeton Research Fellows Program offers fellowships devoted to (i) philosophy of religion or (ii) philosophical theology or (iii) interdisciplinary research areas between philosophy of religion and the natural sciences (with preference given to projects targeting the intersection (a) between philosophy of religion and philosophy of logic/mathematics or (b) between philosophy of religion and philosophy of physics and cosmology).

We invite recent Ph.D.'s and more advanced scholars in the fields of the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mathematics and logic, and the philosophy of physics or scientific cosmology to apply for a year-long fellowship at Oxford University for the opportunity to engage in sustained contact with some of the world's foremost philosophers, scientists, historians of science, theologians, and other specialists in religion.