June 2010 Archives

A reader wrote in to ask for advice on material relevant from the move from Bare Theism to Xn Theism. I'm sympathetic with that request, because I think it's a neglected point. I think that might be because there is much historical material which must come into the discussion then, and many philosophers aren't as comfortable/knowledgeable about that.

Swinburne is both comfortable and knowledgeable in that area, and has written a fair amount about it across several books. An outline of suggested readings follows.

In my previous post "Non-skeptical Skeptical Theism?", discussion made a bit more clear what I'm trying to say. At least it's enough more clear to be more clear on what's not clear (since not only is there much we know we don't know but much we don't know we don't know, coming to know you don't know something can be important progress, no?).

So I'll try to lay this out a bit more carefully if for no other reason than to highlight the unclarity of what remains unclear.

Let a justifying reason R for some bad state E be the proposition that E occurring is necessary for some greater good or to prevent some equally bad or worse evil.

Let an inscrutable evil be an evil for which we can think of no plausible justifying reason.

H = That horrendous evil occurred (ostending some horrendous evil).

I = There is some inscrutable evil.

T = Theism is true.

Here is what I think is an edict of Common Sense (note the caps!).

(T1) Pr(I/T) = not too low or quite high

Let CST be the thesis that (T1) is an edict of Common Sense.

I'm asserting--for the purposes of this post--CST.

Skeptical theists usually assert certain skeptical theses concerning some sort fall in human knowledge. It has always seemed to me that much the same result can be achieved without the skepticism. Here's a first approximation at a general principle of confirmation:

G If H predicts E, then, c.p. observing E doesn't disconfirm H.

Now let H = theism, E = approx: "There are evils we couldn't think of a reason for."

It seems to me that theism predicts or at least doesn't make very improbable that we would observe evils we can't think of a reason for.

Now, it might seem that this value of E depends upon some skeptical theses. Maybe that's true (so I should call it "Less-skeptical Skeptical Theism"), but I'm not sure what they are. E just seems pretty clearly true to me. I suspect it must have *something* to do with cognitive limitations, but I don't see that I have to fill in just how it's supposed to work because E just seems clearly true on it's own. Maybe E', "Life is really really complicated, and we have pretty limited resources" is enough to support E. It seems to me to be so.

If I'm right about that, then I'm going to be in better shape with this defense than with standard skeptical theism because standard skeptical theists skeptical theses don't seem to me to get them with they want, or if they do I don't like them for other reasons (like they get them too much!).

I'm not at all sure about this, just a hunch taking shape.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) says that every contingently true proposition has an explanation. Suppose you are impressed by the following thought:

1. In cases of libertarian free choice, while we can explain why x chose A by citing the non-necessitating reasons R for A, we cannot explain why x chose A rather than B by citing such reasons, since x would have had R even had x chosen B. In other words, there is no contrastive explanation for x's choosing A.

On its face, it seems to. Let p be the "contrastive proposition" that x chose A rather than choosing B. If one can't explain why x chose A rather than choosing B, then one can't explain p. However, I have the following objection (developed with the help of various folks at the philosophy of religion summer seminar at the University of St Thomas).

[This post is not wholly unrelated to this one, which is a point I'll be harping on for, oh, say, the next 30 years. It's also not wholly unrelated to my recent confession concerning naturalism.] So Al is retiring as we know, and many people have been reminiscing about various aspects of his career. One thing that I think needs remembering is the brilliant and simple argument of _God and Other Minds_.

That argument, in brief, can be sketched as follows.

1. The case for the existence of other minds and the case for the existence of a Divine Mind are on a par (w.r.t. formal arguments).

2. If 1, then affirming one of them is rational if and only if affirming the other is rational.

3. It is rational to affirm the existence of other minds.

4. So it is rational to affirm the existence of the Divine Mind (supernaturalism).

My only quarrel is that I think the *philosophical* case for God is better than that for other minds, but let's let that go. Here's why it's important to me to bring this up now. During grad school, I met many more people who had come to believe in God during or just prior to grad school than who lost their belief. But those few who did all seemed to suffer from the same kind of bad epistemology, something very much like what Al calls "evidentialism": needing a pretty much indesputable argument for God's existence to believe. (N.B. all, please, PLEASE, that this is not what evidentialism is in epistemology, the latter is a supervenience thesis about propositional justification).

Forget that this standard is not applied consistently. My point is that, yes, design arguments and cosmological arguments have disputable points (though it's awfully hard to dispute the premises of Koons's or Pruss's arguments). But unless one starts out as an "antecende" naturalist (which, unfortunately, many do), then theism is the only game in town. And, naturalism is in shambles. It's the Metaphysical Shrug. I think Hume is totally with me on this. Unlike Hume, I think we can go on to give more content to supernaturalism, but that's a different matter. That's the discussion we should be having.

Updated 6.12.10

I mean to say I’m not essentially a person. Let’s say someone is a person if and only if he possesses self-awareness, consciousness, rationality, the ability to communicate, and so on. Call that the standard view. The standard view is found in Singer, Glover, Tooley, Lowe, Williams, McMahan, and Parfit and goes at least as far back as Locke. According to the standard view, the property of being a person confers a special moral status on those who instantiate it. Only persons have the full profile of moral rights, so their lives have a moral protection that is not afforded to non-persons.

I deny the standard view, since we (we normal adult humans, if you insist) have rights and none of us are persons. Suppose for reductio that I am a person essentially. I have essentially the properties of consciousness, self-awareness, rationality, ability to communicate, etc. The predicates describing a person are, of course, vague. There are borderline cases of rationality, self-awareness, consciousness, and the ability to communicate. Alzheimer’s disease, among other debilitating diseases, might cause me to be indeterminately rational, conscious and self-aware. If I am indeterminately rational, conscious and self-aware, then I am indeterminately a person. It’s possible that there are indeterminate persons (given the standard view), but it’s not possible that I indeterminately exist. There exist things that are indeterminately persons, but there can exist nothing, persons or otherwise, that have the property of indeterminately existing. Since I am a person essentially, I determinately exist only if I am determinately a person. But I am an indeterminate person. Therefore, I indeterminately exist. That’s impossible. That concludes the reductio. I cannot be a person essentially.

Objection: You can be a person essentially without that entailing that you indeterminately exist. Instead, you should conclude that you cease to exist if the person-defining properties you instantiate become indeterminate.

Reply: True. But then being a person does not provide me with any moral protection. If you cause me to become borderline rational, you kill me. But you do not thereby violate my right to life.

Over the weekend Prosblogion passed the six year marker. This year we served up well over 850,000 page views to over 375,000 visitors, and we climbed to over 10,000 comments. (Hmm I wonder which philosophy journals get that many page views?) Thanks to all the contributors for their efforts in making Prosblogion such a fantastic site by putting up quality content week after week. Thanks too to all of our commenters, and lurkers, for playing along.

Suppose that the future is not open, so that there are non-trivial truths about what people will freely do. (If we want more precision, we may suppose unrestricted bivalence, excluded middle and the rule: (exists(t) & t>now & ~will-hold-at(p,t)) → will-hold-at(~p,t).) According to ot, God does not know all such truths. Thus, according to non-open-future open theism (nofot), God knows some but not all truths. If one accepts nofot (as van Inwagen and Hasker seem to), then when defining the range of omniscience (there are several aspects to omniscience: the range aspect specifies what truths are known by the omniscient being; but there is also the inerrance aspect, the justification aspect, and maybe a modal aspect), we cannot simply say that God knows all truths. Something else needs to be said.

Some have said things like this:

1. God knows p iff p is true and in some possible world p is known by somebody (cf. van Inwagen).

Anyway, Bill Hasker and I have had an extended email discussion on the question of how to define the range of omniscience, and Bill kindly let me comment on that discussion in public, as long as I included "the statement that [Hasker's] personal concern is primarily with the question, 'What truths must God know, if God is omniscient?'" I take this to mean that Bill's focus is on the issue of the range of omniscience.

N.B. This post belongs to Stephen Maitzen

I take it that the modal ontological argument (for instance, in Plantinga’s version) requires a principle at least as strong as

B: If possibly necessarily P, then P,

where the modal operators are read in the metaphysical (or “broadly logical”) sense. That is, the argument from “It’s possible that a maximally great being exists” to “A maximally great being exists” sooner or later requires B. Indeed, Plantinga’s version seems to invoke the stronger S5 even if all it needs is B.

Here’s the problem. B can be shown to imply the Barcan formula (BF), and BF implies that the only individuals that could have existed are the individuals (past, present, or future) that actually exist. For BF implies this: “If there could have been an individual that satisfies a given predicate, then there actually exists an individual that could have satisfied that predicate.” But surely God could have made an X instantiating a given individual essence even though God didn’t actually make X (and X doesn’t otherwise exist). Creation could have had X although in fact creation lacks X, and God wouldn’t have been constrained to “make X out of some actual individual” or “turn some actual individual into X.” Those quoted phrases don’t even make sense, given that X would have its own individual essence. Must the friend of the modal ontological argument defend BF by saying that this world, down to its every particle, is the only world God could create or actualize?

If God could have made X even though X never actually exists, then BF is false, in which case B is false, in which case the modal ontological argument is unsound even if we grant what most folks say is the truly controversial premise, namely, “It’s possible that a maximally great being exists.”

What have I missed? Has this objection been replied to somewhere? If you’d rather reply off-list, please email me at smaitzen [shift+2] acadiau.ca .

Plantinga's EAAN argues that evolutionary naturalism is self-defeating, i.e., the belief that naturalism (N) & evolution (E) is true defeats itself because E&N imply that probability that we are reliable (R) is low or inscrutable, which in turn provides a defeater to the belief that E&N are true. One of the crucial claims of Plantinga's argument, if not the most crucial claim, is that the Pr(R/E&N) is low or inscrutable. This means that if evolutionary naturalism is true then the chance that our belief forming mechanisms are reliable, i.e., produce mainly true beliefs, is very low or just can't be determined. Plantinga's argument for this claim involves the claim that evolution selects adaptive behavior. So the role of belief in the course of evolution lies in its adaptiveness, not solely in its truth-conditions. So far so good, but consider the problem of intentionality, "Brentano's problem". Brentano's problem is a possibility problem: how is it possible that there are states with intentional contents? For instance a belief that there are cats is an intentional state whose content is "there are cats." This content is true iff there exist an x such that x is a cat. Cat-facades, dogs that look like cats, tv-cats, raccoons on a dark night don't make that content true. The content "there are cats" zeroes in on a specific kind of biological organism--cats. Brentano's problem is very difficult for physicalists. Bill Lycan has a series of papers taking up this challenge again to existing physicalist accounts of intentionality (for starters, see Bill's paper "Giving Dualism Its Due" AJP, 2009). What does Brentano's problem have to do with Plantinga's EAAN? In short, Plantinga's right that evolutionary naturalism has a problem with true beliefs, but the reason this is a problem is because evolutionary naturalism has a problem with intentional content. One of Plantinga's examples is that the different beliefs "that is a tree" and "that is a witch-tree" might have the same adaptive behaviors. This is supposed to illustrate the point that false beliefs might be on par with true belief when it comes to adaptive behavior. That's right as far as it goes. But given that evolutionary naturalism can't explain intentional content, it's hard to see how it might throw up a belief that there are witch-trees, let alone throw up the belief that there are trees. I think the Brentano's problem is fundamental here. To put it contentiously: until we get a solution to Brentano's problem Plantinga's EAAN simply is too "down stream" to evaluate. A more agreeable way to put the point is this: Plantinga's right that evolutionary naturalism is self-defeating but the reason for this is that evolutionary naturalism can't answer Brentano's problem.

March 31-April 1, 2011
Hope College
Holland, Michigan

Topic: Values and Virtues

Plenary speakers:

Robert C. Roberts (Baylor University)
Address: "Emotions in the Sense of Duty"

Eric Wielenberg (DePauw University)
Address: "Divine Deception"

Papers are especially encouraged on matters of virtue ethics, the relation between religion and ethics, applied ethical topics (especially as they might relate to the Christian tradition), or value theory more generally. Papers on any topic of philosophical interest will be considered. We welcome the submissions of 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 (hard copy submissions will not be accepted). Please indicate whether you would be willing to serve as a commentator, should your paper be accepted.

Deadline for submission: December 10, 2010.

Please send any queries, submissions, or requests to comment to Jack Mulder at mulderj@hope.edu.

Dean Zimmerman talks about God’s relation to time and a puzzling question (attributed to Leibniz, among others) about why God did not create the universe earlier. The answer to that question seems obvious. If God created the universe 14 billion years prior to time t then it is impossible that God should have created the universe earlier or later than 14 billion years before t. I’m not denying, of course, there are uninteresting ways in which God might have created the universe earlier, since there are universes in which the current time is more than 14 billion years after the big bang. But in that case, we are mistaken about what the current time is, not about when the universe began.