August 2009 Archives

Maybe that should be ‘Yablo on Hartshorne on God’. Stephen Yablo (see, for instance, ‘Textbook Kripkeanism and the Open Texture of Concepts’) points up the inevitable reply to Anselmian ontological arguments that the theist is equivocating on ‘possibility’. The Anselmian God is epistemically possible, sure, but that Anselmian God is not metaphysically possible. Yablo’s point is that this textbook Kripkean distinction is not available to the textbook Kripkean. For Kripkeans, conceivability and possibility pull apart in cases where the presentation of some statement S is possible, but the proposition expressed by S is not possible. The problem is that this does not (or does not obviously) happen in the Anselmian argument. The standard example goes as follows.

1. Water is not H2O. (metaphysically impossible)

2. The watery stuff is not H2O. (metaphysically possible)

If the reference of ‘water’ is fixed by ‘the watery stuff’ (or the liquid potable stuff, or what have you), then it is no more than contingent apriori that water is the watery stuff. When we are tempted to assert that (1) is possible, what tempts us is the genuine possibility of (2). Indeed, it is because (2) is metaphysically possible that (1) is epistemically possible. Hence the illusion that (1) is possible. Notice that you cannot substitute ‘water’ for ‘the watery stuff’ in (2) to get (3).

(3) Water is not H2O (metaphysically possible)

For simplicity, I shall ignore the distinction between God talking and Jesus talking. I shall also write "deny" for "deny libertarian-freely" (note: typical libertarians allow for the possibility of free choices that are determined by character and circumstances, as long as the agent had a sufficient role in forming the character through properly indeterministic choices; it is only the latter that I will call "libertarian-free"). Take the case where God tells Peter that Peter will deny him. What divine knowledge was the prophecy based on? Suppose we say: God tells Peter that Peter will deny because God knows that Peter will deny. This would be a simple-foreknowledge (SF) account of prophecy. Now we have an apparent circularity in the order of explanation. God telling Peter that Peter will deny is explanatorily prior ("e-prior") to Peter's denial--it affects Peter's state of mind when choosing whether to deny. But Peter's denial is, presumably, e-prior to God's knowing that Peter will deny. (Thomists and Calvinists will likely deny this. And so such Thomists and Calvinists will have no difficulty.) And God's knowing that Peter will deny is e-prior to the prophecy. So we come full circle.

There is a way out of this argument: God ensures that Peter's choice whether to deny is causally isolated from Peter's memory of the prophecy. This breaks the circle, since then God's prophesying to Peter that Peter will deny will no longer be e-prior to Peter's denial. Moreover, Scripture says that only after the denials did Peter remember the prophecy, so there is some exegetical ground for supposing some causal isolation.

The difficulty with this SF account of prophecy is that it only makes prophecy possible in cases where the prophecy is isolated from the prophesied event. I shall argue that the Molinist may face a similar problem.

Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Volume 2 is now on Amazon. OUP's site lists it here, with the following information:
Table of Contents
Introduction , Jonathan L. Kvanvig
1. On Evil's Vague Necessity , Michael J. Almeida, (University of Texas, San Antonio)
2. Epistemic Humility, Arguments from Evil, and Moral Skepticism , Daniel Howard-Snyder, (Western Washington University)
3. Fission, Freedom, and the Fall , Hud Hudson, (Western Washington University)
4. Evaluating Religion , Tomis Kapitan, (Northern Illinois University)
5. Against Deity Theories , Brian Leftow, (University of Oxford)
6. Pointless Suffering? How to Make the Problem of Evil Sufficiently Serious , Hugh J. McCann, (Texas A&M University)
7. Divine Will Theory: Intentions or Desires? , Christian Miller, (Wake Forest University, North Carolina)
8. Design Inferences in an Infinite Universe , Brad Monton, (University of Colorado, Boulder)
9. Gods , Graham Oppy, (Monash University, Australia)
10. The Evolutionary Answer to the Problem of Faith and Reason , J. L. Schellenberg, (Mount Saint Vincent University, Nova Scotia)
11. Lotteries and Miracles , Jordan Howard Sobel, (University of Toronto)
12. Ockhamism and Molinism -- Foreknowledge and Prophecy , Ted A. Warfield, (University of Notre Dame)

This final chapter of Moser's The Elusive God serves as both a summary and a guide for applying the ideas developed earlier in the book.  As with the volume as a whole, Moser emphasizes the volitional role we play in coming to have evidence of God's perfectly loving and noncoercive redemptive purposes. 

Much of what Moser says is, I think, something that most Christians would agree with quite easily: the importance of finding and knowing God, the ways in which life is a gift, how eternal life is received rather than earned, the impact of death, that our only hope to escape death requires something outside of ourselves, the difference btween self-interestedness and the vice of selfishness, etc....   And there is much that I like here (such as his discussion of faith as a disposition to trust God).  But, in what is (perhaps unfortunately) standard philosophical fashion, I'll focus on what's unclear or potentially problematic.

A central theme here is that the "truth indicators that constitute evidence need not be arguments" (244); furthermore, it seems that Moser thinks of these indicators in a non-propositional way altogether, more along the lines of what Eleonore Stump calls 'second-person experiences'.  Surely Moser is right to say that "divine-human interpersonal interaction in direct firsthand knowledge of divine relvation" is central (245).  But I think that Moser should grant (perhaps he does grant--it's not clear to me) that propositional beliefs, and natural theology in particular, can help us decide whether such second-person experiences are veridical or not.  If I have an experience of what I think is a direct encounter with God, say of an Abrahamic sort to kill my son Jameson, I'd want to test that experience in light of what I know about the nature of God before deciding to obey it.  (This is particularly true if we take seriously, as Moser does, the ways in which sin can distort our thinking.  More on this in a bit.)  If I should "willingly 'fall into the abyss of God's incomprehensibility'" (246), I ought to make sure that it is God's incomprehensibility that I am falling into--and beliefs will be an essential aspect of making this judgement.

(More below the fold...)

Very glad to report that Bruce Langtry has posted this informative reply to Richard Gale’s NDPR review of God, the Best, and Evil.

Deadlines have kept me away from the discussion since my last comment on, I think, one of the very first posts. So it's good to have this deadline to make me get this post up. If Moser is playing John the Baptist here, am I doomed to play Judas? You'll sense a lot of frustration with this chapter, but I tried to keep it light-hearted as usual. If you read me as outright angry, just imagine an emoticon smiley face at the end of every other paragraph. :-) I'm not angry or mean, just frustrated. Well I'm not angry anyway. The litany of questions pleading for clarification is below the fold.

I've been working through Huemer's recent book Ethical Intuitionism, and I've overall been finding it to be exceptionally clear and well written, especially compared to a lot of other metaethics and moral epistemology I've read.

Huemer raises a series of objections to Divine Command Theory (DCT), the view that "that right actions are right only because God commands them" (p. 55). His second objection is as follows:

(Cross-posted to my blog.)

Sceptical scenarios are usually taken to raise "A how do we know that not p?" question. But let's ignore that question. Of course, we are not brains in vats, there is no evil demon deceiving us about everything, most of our perceptual states have causes, and the world is more than five minutes old. The question how we know, or at least are justified in believing in, these facts is for the epistemologists to scratch their heads over, but we metaphysicians and natural theologians can take them for granted just as dentists and archaeologists do.

Nonetheless, there are genuinely metaphysical questions in the vicinity. Given a sceptical scenario p, we can ask: "Why is it not the case that p?" Why do we have bodies rather than just being brains, why are there no evil demons deceiving us about everything, why do at least most of our perceptual states have causes, and why did the world come into existence in inchoate form with a big bang, rather than fully-formed the way it was five minutes ago?

We can also ask the more general question: Why are all sceptical scenarios non-actual?

A theist has a fairly easy answer to the general question (essentially Descartes' answer): God is unlikely to permit persons to be generally deceived in ways that they cannot reasonably get out of no matter how hard they try. And this answer also works for the specific questions. An anti-realist has a way of getting out of the question by arguing that no distinction can be sensibly made between p and not-p.

PAPER DEADLINE: Saturday, August 15

October 22-24, 2009, Durango, Colorado

Featured Speakers:

Michael Bergmann "Commonsense Skeptical Theism"

Wes Morriston "Divinely Mandated Genocide and the Limits of Human Knowledge"

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

Submissions, inquiries, and requests to comment can be sent to Justin McBrayer at mcbrayer_j@fortlewis.edu.

A standard kind of design argument is one that takes a nomic generalization, and asks why the law in question holds. One can either ask about particular laws (e.g., fine-tuning arguments do that) or about why there are laws at all. I have nothing against such arguments, but I want to suggest that it's worth thinking about a different family of design arguments: arguments from non-nomic generalizations in science.

Here are some generalizations that appear to be non-nomic:

1. Every species on earth, with the exception of one root species, has an evolutionary explanation of its existence.
2. Every particle is a P₁ or a P₂ or ... or a P_n. (Here, n is a small finite number, many orders of magnitude smaller than the number of particles in existence. Physics isn't yet capable of making this generalization, since we don't yet have a complete list of all particles.)
3. Every planet in the solar system is in approximately the same orbital plane.

Now, in some cases, one might seem to have a perfectly fine physical explanation. It seems we can explain (3) in terms of the way our solar system actually formed from a bulgy disc around the sun. There may, further, be facts that imply that this method of planetary formation is much more probable than other methods, given the initial conditions. But, while I am willing to concede this case, I want to make two points. The first point is that the explanation may well end up depending on non-nomic (and perhaps only statistical) generalizations about the initial conditions of our universe, so the problem may simply get pushed back. The second is that the explanation depends on the principle that nothing can come from nothing. After all, if planets could come into existence ex nihilo, then to explain why all planets in the solar system have coplanar orbits would require us to explain why no new planets came into existence ex nihilo with weird orbits. And it is not clear that one can, in the end, defend the principle that nothing comes from nothing without defending the most controversial premise of the cosmological argument.

There is quite a bit of interesting material in these sections; I’ve tried to cover most of it while keeping the word count down as much as possible. At the end, I’ll raise a couple of objections and propose a friendly(ish) amendment to Moser’s overall project.

Having left Athens behind, Moser turns his focus to Jerusalem, and in particular the “kerygmatic core” of the Good News movement, according to which God sent or raised Jesus (why not “and”?), the proper response to which brings certain benefits (p. 163). Moser then explores (pp. 164ff.) some of the controversial questions surrounding the atonement—i.e., some of the questions regarding the connection between the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus on the one hand, and the forgiveness of human sins (human “resistance to divine unselfish love”) on the other. Moser labels his approach to the atonement the divine manifest offering approach, and he summarizes it as follows (p. 165):

The NDPR Review of Linda's new book can be found here. Though it is not written to address the topic of atonement in Christian theology, it has important implications for that area, and it is because of this connection that I note the review and the publication of the book. It looks like must-reading for anyone interested in theories of the atonement.

The website for the Templeton Research Fellows Program at Oxford University is now online). The program is seeking highly-qualified Fellows with an established record of successful publication, and whose proposed research will open up new avenues for interdisciplinary growth in the philosophy of religion. For full details, visit the website.

We return this week to Moser's book The Elusive God. In these three sections Moser addresses God's intervening Spirit, the acquaintance with the power of God's intervening Spirit, and the split between Jerusalem (philosophy) and Athens (theology). While there are a number of places in which I wanted to agree with Moser, I found the arguments scarce, the explanations often confusing, and some of the claims simply repetitive. Perhaps this is because this section marks more of a turn to theology rather than philosophy, but nonetheless I still expected more clarity.

1. Spirit

As we've seen to this point, Moser certainly doesn't think it is sufficient to have propositional knowledge of God. His claim is that a perfectly loving God is going to offer a distinctive kind of purposively available evidence. A kind of evidence that has been widely overlooked by philosophers and theologians. This evidence is that divine self-revelation of God's imparted Spirit to humans. With the imparting of God's Spirit, humans receive the power to be transformed towards God's moral character.

I'm far from an expert on these matters, but from the small sample of theology I've read it doesn't seem to me that the imparting of God's Spirit and it's transformative power have been much neglected. Perhaps I've just been reading all the right stuff, but I doubt it. Examples like this, and the repeated kicking at natural theology, keep me thinking that I wished Moser would just make the case for his positive argument without trashing the practice of philosophy and theology along with their practitioners.

In any case, Moser makes a number of appeals to the writings of Paul in making the case for how the imparting of God's Spirit gives us two things, (1) a new noncoercive power that is felt by the recipient and observable by others, and (2) directly self-authenticating firsthand veridical evidence of God's reality. One thing that get's confusing is that it often isn't clear on the first reading who power is supposed to be evidence for. On the one hand we can have knowledge of God's Spirit via our conscience, but we can also have knowledge via the evidence of new power. Of course both of these are also supposed to serve as evidence for others, at least if the have "eye's to see".

I've read this section about 15 times and it still isn't clear to me what the Spirit is supposed to be. I suspect that if one didn't grow-up Christian, or spend a good deal of time reading theological literature, one could easily get lost or confused about the Spirit. Here are a few candidates for what Moser means when he talks of Spirit:

1. Spirit = Holy Spirit (i.e. third person of the Trinity)


2. Spirit = God (e.g. God is Spirit and he's imparting himself)


3. Spirit = gift of spirit