May 2010 Archives

I am tempted by the claim that open theism is in a better position to respond to the problem of evil than is Molinism. Consider some particular evil e1 that has occurred at a particular time t2. A group of innocent German Jews is gunned down before a mass grave they have been forced to dig themselves, let's say. On the open view, God knew at some time before t2 that e1 would occur. But God did not know that e1 would occur from time immemorial. It won't be as if God has built e1 into the basic structure of the world, as it appears God does on Molinism. Intuitively, it seems to be easier to defend God's failure to prevent e1 given that God becomes aware of its forthcoming occurrence at t1 rather than prior to the creation of the world. That, at least, is how it has seemed to me.

Against this intuitive appeal comes the "Molinist Retort". The basic idea behind it is that whatever resources are available to the open theist to justify God's permission of e1 at t1 are equally available to the molinist to justify God's permission of it from before the creation of the world. Presumably the open theist will have to appeal to some kind of balancing of goods contingent upon free will over against the amount and gruesomeness of evils parasitic upon the goods. The molinist can claim to make appeal to these self-same considerations. I think this retort fails.

This argument is inspired by AP’s post below. I will argue from the fact that some rational persons enjoy eternal bliss to universalism. My conclusion is that necessarily, universalism is true.

POINT. For each eternally damned person P, there is a point to P being damned in W iff. R is the reason that P is damned in W and for all worlds W’ in which P exists, reasons R hold and there are no reasons R’ such that (R & R’) are weaker reasons for P to be damned, P is damned.

The justification for POINT is evident. Let R be all of God’s reasons for and against P’s damnation. R either is or is not sufficient reason for P’s damnation. If R is sufficient reason for P’s damnation, then R is sufficient reason for P’s damnation in any world in which it holds.

Abstract Submission: July 31, 2010

Full Paper Submission: October 7, 2010

Papers should address the question: Which theory or theories of the mind-body relation gives the best account of the following religious doctrines?

Islamic Doctrines

1. The human-related words in Quran and their implications for materiality or immateriality of persons ("Nafs", "Rūh ", "Insān", "Bashar"...)
2. Afterlife
• The Doctrine of Barzakh -an intermediate state between death and resurrection- (life in Barzakh, motion or change in Barzakh, transfer from this world to Barzakh, possibility of relations between people in this world and people in Barzakh, rewards and punishments in Barzakh...)
• The Doctrine of Resurrection (identity of people in this world and the next, bodily or spiritual resurrection, A'rāf...)
• The Doctrine of Heaven (Peculiar characteristics of life in heaven, such as tirelessness of bodies...)
• The Doctrine of Hell (Peculiar characteristics of life in hell, such as constant replacement of skins ...)
3. God-Human Relations (tawbah [repentance], human dignity in Quran, quality of human creation in Quran, prayers, ilhām...)
4. The Concept of God (Divine properties shared by humans, personification of God...)
5. Prophecy (revelation, miracles, kirāmāt, tawasul...)
6. Pre-life existence (The world of dhar or Day of Alast)

Jewish-Christian Doctrines

1. The human-related words in Old and New Testaments and their implications for materiality or immateriality of persons ("nehphesh", "nshahmah", "ruach", "psyche", "pneuma")
2. 2. Afterlife
• The Christian Doctrine of Resurrection (identity of persons in this world and the next, bodily or spiritual resurrection in the New Testament, Heaven, and Hell)
• The Doctrine of an Intermediate State or Purgatory
3. God-Human Relations
• The Human Nature, Sin, and Grace (Salvation in Christ, Indwelling of the Holy Spirit)
• The Doctrine of Redemption (Incarnation, Atonement)
• Other Doctrines: Revelation, Miracles, Sacraments, Theism and the coherence of nonphysical/incorporeal agency

Notes

Papers can explain the above doctrines in terms of mind-body theories, such as those of Islamic Peripatetic philosophy, Illuminationism, Transcendental philosophy, theoretical mysticism, Islamic theology (Kalam), Christian-Jewish theology, and contemporary theories.

The list is open-ended; you are welcome to write about another relevant topic

Send the MS Word files of your abstracts and papers through the conference website or email them to icrm2011@gmail.com

Write your affiliations on the first page of your abstracts and papers

Papers should be 4000-12000 words

The accepted papers are expected to be published in both English and Farsi

Postal Address: Iran, Qom, P.S. Box: 37185/3688

Tel/Fax: (+98) 251-7748064

Email for your questions: icrm@seminars.ir
Email for sending your papers: icrm2011@gmail.com
Website: www.seminars.ir/icrm

The Plantinga Retirement conference was just amazing. It was a blast to see so many of the folks I like to talk to in one place, the average quality of participants and attendees was astounding.

Anecdotes were oft in play, and I've got a few of my own below the fold, but this is an occasion where I think I can safely say, without even taking a poll, that on behalf of the contributors to Prosblogion, we express our profound respect for Al's amazing career and gratitude in teaching us (even those of us who disagree the most!)

We wish him the best for his "retirement."

God bless you Al!

[This is perhaps a good time to revisit the winners of my little photo contest]

Michael Tooley's SEP article on the problem of evil is an excellent and thorough introduction to the problem of evil. In section 3.5 Tooley focuses on the inferential step from (a) there appear to be no goods that justify God in permitting some evils to (b) there are no goods that justify God in permitting some evils. My presentation involves a simplification to Tooley's discussion and also a change from deontological terminology to axiological terms, but these changes are inessential for the point I want to make. Tooley has an interesting defense of this inference in light of the unknown goods move. He imagines that there might be some unknown good that would justify God in permitting evil. But he then claims that the probability that there'd be some such good is equal to the probability that there'd be some unknown evil. So on the assumption that we are prima facie justified in believing (b) on the basis of (a), Tooley reasons that appeals to unknown goods don't help. Why? There are four possibilities: (i) the unknown good obtains and no unknown evil obtains; (ii) the unknown good obtains and an unknown evil obtains; (iii) no unknown good obtains and no unknown evil obtains; and (iv) no unknown good obtains and some unknown evil obtains. Tooley then observes that in three of these four cases, the original problematic state of affairs remains impermissible. It's only in (i) that the original problematic state of affairs is justified. Tooley mentions that all this needs tightening up, but the main intuition is relatively clear. I think there are several lines of response to Tooley's argument, but I want to consider a smallish point that I think Tooley may agree with. The point is that the unknown goods defense accomplishes this: it lessens the evidential burden on theism by raising the probability of theism. I'll put the details below the fold.

I shall argue that one should not both be a sceptical theist and accept Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism (eaan). In my argument, I shall assume that the only two serious doxastic options are theism and naturalistic evolution.

I shall take it (stipulatively, if need be) that the central claim of sceptical theism is that if E is a "not too horrendous" evil, then whether or not we can think of a good reason for God to allow E:

1. P(theism|E) is close to P(theism),

even if P(theism) is strictly between 0 and 1 (which I shall assume below, though I actually think the Christian should assign P(Catholicism)=1 and hence P(theism)=1). Here, I say that two probabilities A and B are "close" if and only if either they are both undefined or else they are both defined and both A/B and (1-A)/(1-B) are approximately equal to 1, and I say that an evil is "not too horrendous" if it is not significantly worse than the sum total of the worst evils hitherto observed. (I do not want to saddle the sceptical theist with some view like that P(theism | someone is innocent but suffers unjustly for eternity) is close to P(theism).) I take the central claim of eaan to be that:

2. P(reliable|~theism) is low or undefined,

where reliable is the event of human doxastic faculties being reliable, and that if (2) is true, then ~theism is self-defeating (I am assuming that theism is the only really tenable alternative to naturalism here; I think this can be defended). In all the probabilities, I shall take the existence of human beings and something like an evolutionary process to be a part of the background.

Now, the unreliability of human beings would be a very bad one, but it would not be too horrendous. It would not worse than the sum total of all moral evil and suffering hitherto observed. Thus, by (1):

3. P(theism|~reliable) is close to P(theism).

But by Bayes' theorem, it follows that:

4. P(~reliable|theism) is close to P(~reliable|~theism).

Therefore:

5. P(reliable|theism) is close to P(reliable|~theism).

By (2):

6. P(reliable|theism) is low or undefined.

But according to eaan, if (2), then ~theism is self-defeating. Hence, if this reasoning is good, then by (6), theism is self-defeating. (Or, maybe, the conclusion should be: scepticism ensues, whether or not theism is true.)

Therefore, one better not accept both eaan and sceptical theism.

Some maybe-what-counts-as-applied-PR...

Those with high views of Scripture often resort to talk of models from Scripture for how our lives ought to be lived. There are money-manager-models, Christian-marriage-models, child-raising-models, employer-employee-models (aka slave-master-BS), and whether-to-expect-miracles-in-this-modern-era-models, and more esoteric ones such as what-the-glossalalic-experiences-reported-in-the-NT-mean-for-current-Christians-model, and lots more that I've encountered and apparently have blocked from memory.

Enough to make one suspicious of the entire methodology, but what's amazing about this is the selectivity of such appeals. My biggest complaint here is about the role and purpose of government. From Glenn Beck's castigation of Christian concern for social justice to Pat Robertson's endorsement of assassination for leaders such as Hugo Chavez, what is amazing is a total lack of appeal to any Scriptural model underlying such normative judgements.

Here it is worth noting that the Scriptural record involves two distinctive Jewish experiences. The first is as an autonomous state, and the second is as a conquered nation. Pretty clearly, the second will provide no conservative-theology model for current US experience. So what about the other possibility? Here any honest model would attend to the role and function of government in pre-exilic Israel and Judeah, and the moral criticisms of the practices of people with power contained in the prophetic literature. A prediction: you just can't find much short of progressive politics here, which explains why politically conservative Christians are so selective in the models they espouse.

In my last post, I expressed my happiness to be back to blogging, and it looks like I need some practice, because I posted one topic in the body and another below the fold!

So I've fixed that now, I apologize to those who commented on the last one, but this will be a better target anyway.

-----
I just can't take naturalism seriously. That is, I can't take seriously any view that entails either the proposition that some contingent fact occurred for no reason or that in essentials, the universe (or world or nature or whatever you want to call it) couldn't have been relevantly different from the way it in fact is. And if I had to accept some set of contingent facts as brute, I'd be strictly guided by the number of types and tokens and parameters postulated by a theory. I also find implausible impersonal accounts of a necessary ground in some "natural" force or fact. The closest thing to naturalism that I can take seriously is the axio-arch-ism Leslie defends. The reason I can take that somewhat seriously is that it has both value and mind at the foundations. And given my views on God and value, maybe I'm not so far apart from Leslie anyway. I reviewed a book of his, so maybe I should go read that.

But apart from my inability to take seriously any kind of naturalism abstractly characterized (fairly minimally, in terms of certain entailments), what really strikes me as wildly implausible is that any kind of information we actually have from "science" (the purpose of the scare quotes is that there's really no such thing: there are the sciences, i.e. the science of Physics, the science of Chemistry, and the science of Biology (not sure if there are any others not built out of these)) makes likely that naturalism is true and, in particular, that theism (minimally specified in a Swinburnian sort of way) is improbable. If I were an atheist, I'd be a nervous wreck. More below the fold.

I stopped blogging a few months before I went on the job market. I persist in thinking that being openly religious in a traditional/unfashionable religion hurts one in getting a job at non-religious institutions, especially fashionable ones (which is different than hurting one on the job market generally, where, I think, it helps (as it happens I had multiple interviews on both sides of the line and felt a bit of hostility toward my pretty traditional Catholicism on both sides of it).

Baylor has been an extremely welcoming community and made sure that my first year was not burdensome in the least (far from it), by, among other things, sheltering me from anything that didn't move me toward tenure.*** Still, I had a full plate of commitments for writing and speaking, so the blogs stayed on hiatus (though I did quietly pass the 100 post/1000 comments mark with my very sporadic forays).

I'm more busy than ever, the busiest I've ever been in my life, but blogging is too much fun to forego any longer, so I'm going to be posting a bit more regularly this summer (though I will not have time to polish them, and that's the great thing about a blog, a place to mull things over).

It's good to be back!

***One of the things I was enabled to do, though, was put together a Philosophy of Religion Colloquium series, which I post below. If anyone will be around during these times, feel free to contact me about attending.

2010
Fall
Sept 10th - Linda Zagzebski (Oklahoma) - TBA
Oct. 29th - Timothy O'Connor (Indiana) - TBA

2011
Spring
February 25th - Eleornore Stump (SLU) - TBA
April 8th - Richard Cross (Notre Dame) - Analogical Predication

Fall
November 18th - Alvin Plantinga (Notre Dame)

2012
March - Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers) (tentative)

Lots of people believe that a perfect being must actualize the best possible world if:

(i) there is a best possible world and

(ii) the best possible world is actualizable.

To paraphrase David Johnson, give me a little time and I’ll give you an argument with no discernible flaw that this common belief is false. Assume for simplicity that, necessarily, the best possible world is also the best actualizable world. I make no assumptions about the nature of free action. The argument works as well under the assumption of compatiblism (determinism) as it does under the assumption of libertarianism. More precisely, the widely believed claim is in P.

P. Necessarily, if there is a best possible world W, an (essentially) morally perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, necessarily existing being actualizes W.

P is not merely false, it’s impossible. It is impossible that a perfect being is such that he necessarily actualizes the best possible world. It is impossible that any being is such that he necessarily actualizes the best possible world. Here’s the proof that P is (necessarily) false.

1. Necessarily, a perfect being actualizes the best possible world. Assume for Reductio
2. W is the best possible world. Assumption
3. A perfect being exists. Assumption
4. W includes a great deal of natural and moral value. From def. of ‘best world’
5. W is the only possible world. From 1,2,3
6. Everything possible is actual in W. From 5
7. W is a fatalistic world. From 6
8. No moral agent is libertarian or compatibilist free in fatalistic worlds. Fact
9. No moral agent is free in W. From 7, 8
10. There is no moral value in W. From 9
11. W is not the best possible world. From 10, 4. Contradiction 11,2
12. ∴ It is not necessary that a perfect being actualizes the best possible world. From 11,2

That concludes the reductio ad absurdum. It is easy to see that P is not merely false, but necessarily false. So, if there is a best possible world, a perfect being could not be such that necessarily he actualizes that world. So, the commonly held belief is false. It is P’ that is true, not P.

P’. If there is a best possible world and that world is actualizable, it is possible that a perfect being does not actualize it.

Let Egalitarian Universalism (EU) be the doctrine that God exists and gives everyone infinite happiness, and that the quantity fo this happiness is the same for everyone. The traditional formulation of Pascal's Wager obviously does not work in the case of the God of EU. What is surprising, however, is that one can make Pascal's Wager work even given the God of EU if one thinks that Bayesian decision theory, and hence one-boxing, is the right way to go in the case of Newcomb's Paradox with a not quite perfect predictor (i.e., Nozick's original formulation).

Here is how the trick works. Suppose that the only two epistemically available options are EU and atheism, and I need to decide whether or not to believe in God. Given Bayesian decision theory, I should choose whether to believe based on the conditional expected utilities. I need to calculate:

1. U₁=rP(EU|believe) + aP(atheism|believe)
2. U₂=rP(EU|~believe) + bP(atheism|~believe)

where r is the infinite positive reward that EU guarantees everybody, and a and b are the finite goods or bads of this life available if atheism is true. If U₁ is greater than U₂, then I should believe.

We'll need to use our favorite form of non-standard analysis for handling infinities. Observe that

3. P(believe|EU)>P(believe|~EU),

since a God would be moderately to want people to believe in him, and hence it is somewhat more likely that there would be theistic belief if God existed than if atheism were true (and I assumed that atheism and EU are the only options). But then by Bayes' Theorem it follows from (3) that:

4. P(EU|believe)>P(EU|~believe).

Let c=P(EU|believe)-P(EU|~believe). By (4), c is a positive number. Then:

5. U₁−U₂=rc + something finite.

Since r is infinite and positive, it follows that U₁−U₂>0, and hence U₁>U₂, so I should believe in EU.

The argument works on non-egalitarian universalism, too, as long as we don't think God gives an infinitely greater reward to those who don't believe in him.

(However, universalism is false and one-boxing is mistaken.)

While reading PvI (in Problem of Evil) on understanding God as the greatest conceivable being, I began wondering about my grasp of the concept of greatness. I understand moral goodness and the possession of virtues to be great-making properties. But I'm not sure I have this intuition about power.

To examine this intuition more carefully, I imagine a being B1, who, in circumstances C1-C10, would perform a morally right action in each of these circumstances. Being B2, in circumstances C1-C10, would perform the morally right action in C1-C9, but would perform a morally wrong action in C10. If we stipulate that B1 and B2 are otherwise identical, it seems that B1 is greater than B2.

But suppose P1 can perform actions A1-A100, and P2 can perform A1-A99 but cannot perform A100. We will stipulate that P1 and P2 are otherwise identical. It does not seem to me that P1 is a greater being than P2.

Suppose Steve would resist robbing a bank, committing adultery, cheating on his taxes, and lying to his neighbor. Tom would do the same, but he would lie to his neighbor. All else being equal, it seems that Steve is a greater being than Tom.

Suppose Jenny can walk, talk, ride a bike, swim, and wiggle her ears; Sally can perform all of these acts but cannot wiggle her ears. All else being equal, it does not seem that Jenny is a greater being than Sally, even though Jenny is more powerful.

Power, in itself, does not seem to be a great-making property. How does this sound to people?

Consider this Naive Design Argument:

1. If something as complicated and functional as the human brain came to be, then probably, it would be ultimately a product of design.
2. Human brains came to be.
3. Therefore, probably human brains are ultimately a product of design.

The critical premise is, of course, (1). A lot of people seem to think that a premise such as (1) has been undercut by the evidence for Darwinian evolution. The appearance of design can be explained away, they say. I myself have thought this. But what is the reason exactly for thinking that Darwinian evolution explains away an appearance of design? More precisely, the inference in question is this:

D. If we have good evidence for Darwinian evolution, then that evidence reduces the credibility of (1).

In this post, I'd like to consider what reasons one might have for (D). This is an open question for me: what reasons do people have for accepting (D) or something in the neighborhood?

(There are, of course, other objections to consider, such as "Who designed the designer?", but those aren't my focus here.)

This note is to announce a symposium dedicated to the recent work of J.L. Schellenberg, in particular his trilogy with Cornel U press - Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion (2005), Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism (2007), The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion (2009)

The one-day symposium will take place in Montreal, at Concordia University, Sunday, May 30th, 2010 -- and is part of the Canadian Philosophical Association's annual meeting. The main focus of the event will be over Schellenberg's provocative claim that (i) traditional religious outlooks, including theism, are no longer tenable, but that (ii) religion may well have a very interesting future that human beings, at this stage in their evolutionary development, can only begin to grasp.

Participants Include:

J.L Schellenberg (Mount St Vincent)

Paul Draper (Purdue University)

Stephen Wykstra (Calvin College)

J.J Macintosh (University of Calgary)