Thy Kingdom Come (Undone)

Peter's Opening Statement Scorecard

2012-02-19T23:31:00.000-08:00

Here's how I'm scoring Peter's opening statement:

I award 3 points for the main skeleton of his main argument (A), That skeleton is the following:

1) Seemingly gratuitous suffering exists in nature.
2) None of the standard familiar theodicies we can think of satisfactorily explain these cases of suffering.
From 1 and 2:
3) Therefore, probably, gratuitous suffering exists in nature.

Although it would have been nice to see a precise syllogism, I think it is clear enough to see what his approach is and it isn't too different from the classic approach taken by William Rowe.

I have my issues with the argument (all evidential arguments from suffering really), but as a judge I cannot let my philosophical disagreement with the argument color how I score someone defending it. (3 points)

Next, I award 2 points for argument B):

"Should no needless suffering exist, we are in the best of all possible worlds and any attempt to remove suffering would make us worse off because we would lose the associated outweighing benefit and decreasing net benefit to all people."

I award two points to this argument because unlike the first, it isn't as clearly stated nor defended with the same strength or rigor as the first. It seems to me he's making two conditional claims:

1) ~N --> BPW

Where N stands for needless suffering and BPW stands for Best Possible World. This then reads: If there is no needless suffering then we are in the best possible world.

Then he argues the following:

2) If we are in the best of all possible worlds then intervening in what we perceive to be moral evils would make us worse off because we'd loose the outweighing benefit associated with the suffering.

I think that's just false, I wont go into detail why, and it's irrelevant to my awarding points here. I award 2 points because it seems to me like B is actually two arguments in one. Nowhere does Peter defend 1), and since I don't think it's obviously true (perhaps there is no one best possible world but a potentially infinite number of them) then I can't award points for that argument. He does defend 2) and as such overall I award 2 points for B. Given that there are actually two arguments in need of unpacking there and given that one of them goes undefended I can't award 3 whole points to it. (2 points)

Next up I will award points given the strength of his defense of each individual premise for Peter's Main Argument: Seemingly Gratuitous suffering exists in nature. Examples include:

Babies that suffer intensely and then die from birth defects.
Non-human animals suffering intensely in the wild and in factory farms
Bubonic plague that killed over 25 million people in the 14th century.

Since "no higher benefit can be identified that would logically require any of these examples" they count as cases of seemingly gratuitous suffering (given his definition). This is not a very controversial premise (it does seem like there is gratuitous suffering in nature, the real question is whether we can go from seems to actually is or probably is). (3 points)

Next up Peter considers possible theodicies:

Free-Will: It isn't too clear what the main line of argument here is. Peter says that only Compatibilism "makes sense". I'm not too sure what that means, does he mean that compatibilism makes most sense of what we mean by human freedom and responsibility? Does he mean that only compatibilism makes logical sense and, by implication, libertarianism is incoherent? I'm not sure what he means here, and he doesn't argue for it. Since this part is neither clear nor argued for I can't award points. Next he considers the fact that God seems to have compatibilist freedom and so do those who are in heaven. He doesn't say why God seems to have compatibilist freedom (he's assuming the audience is familiar with the literature on this). Why does it seem this way? As for believers having compatibilist freedom in heaven, yes, this is a problem, and it does seem like this is the only way to make sense of their situation in heaven. However, the fact that they have that kind of freedom there does not entail that only compatibilism is coherent or even that this is the only type of compatibilism we have here on Earth. (1 point)
Punishment for Sin: There's a lot I want to say here, but any commentary I have would be responses to Peter's commentary and so I'll leave that for another day and simply say that he did a good job here. (3 points)
Need for Natural Law: Peter doesn't seem to touch on the difference between logical necessity and metaphysical necessity. I won't say anything more than that since I don't want to provide CL with more ammo. (1 point)
Soul-Building (2 points)
Human Accomplishment: Why exactly think that what is meaningful is God-defined? (2points)
Benefits of Heaven: I'm not sure why the fact that it is theologically undecided whether or not babies go to heaven is relevant here. Philosophical arguments may demonstrate what a good being would do and thus supplement theology here. I'm just not sure it's relevant. Peter also seems to bring in a hidden assumption, that our moral obligations are the same as God's obligations towards us. Why think that? (1 point)

I award 3 points to his discussion on reindeer and his discussion on why the appeal from "it seems like there is no justification for X, therefore, probably, there is no justification for X". I disagree with the soundness of this move, but that isn't enough reason to take points off here. He's defending the view that an inductive inference to a negative existential is okay to do here. Even if the defense fails (as I think it does), there's nothing structurally wrong with what he does here. (3 points)

By my count Peter has earned all the possible points he could have earned on this round.

Now, I'm not going to put too much value on points in this debate, as it seems to me like he accumulated all those points in virtue of having a lot of arguments. The points here are more of a formality than anything. At the end of the debate I'll post an essay explaining who I think won and why in more detail than points can do justice to.

Anyway, there's a lot of stuff I want to say in response to Peter, but I'm not the one debating him, so I'll withhold all my arguments until the end of the debate.

He did a great job and I'm looking forward to seeing how CL responds.

Does Gratuitous Suffering Exist?

2012-02-16T13:48:00.000-08:00

Peter Hurford and CL from The Warfare is Mental have a debate on the existence of gratuitous suffering here. As I've been asked to be a judge (representing the agnostic position) in this debate, here is my initial write up of Peter's opening argument.

Peter opens with two contentions:

A) There is gratuitous suffering in the world. He defines gratuitous suffering as "anything that causes pain to an entity capable of feeling it and is not logically required in order to realize a higher benefit for that entity or other entities."

B) "Should no needless suffering exist, we are in the best of all possible worlds and any attempt to remove suffering would make us worse off because we would lose the associated outweighing benefit and decreasing net benefit to all people."

The bulk of Peter's post concentrates on arguing for A). He then briefly comes back to argue for B).

Here's the structure of Peter's main argument as I see it:

1) Seemingly gratuitous suffering exists in nature. He gives 3 examples:

Babies that suffer intensely and then die from birth defects.
Non-human animals that suffer intensely in the wild and within our factory farms.
Bubonic plague that killed over 25 million people in the 14th century.

Regarding these Peter writes "No higher benefit can be identified that would logically require any of these examples."

2) None of the standard familiar theistic theodicies we can think of satisfactorily explain these cases of suffering. Among these are the following:

Free-Will Defense: This defense fails, presumably because only a compatibilist, as opposed to libertarian, conception of free-will makes sense. Why? Because a) this is the kind of free-will God himself has and b) this is presumably the only type of free-will that could make sense in heaven. Secondly, Peter says that none of the cases he discusses of gratuitous suffering involve free-will (technically, factory farming is something that results from human agency, so I think he should amend this).
Punishment for Sin Theodicies: This defense fails because a) animals are not moral creatures and thus it cannot make sense to punish them, b) babies have made no conscious choice to disobey God and thus punishing them would not be warranted, c) There is no correlation between the sinfulness of any given society and the amount of suffering brought upon them by nature, thus making punishment unlikely.
Natural Law Theodicy: These fail because different worlds that contain no suffering yet contain similar creatures as us are logically possible, therefore God ought to have instantiated those worlds.
Soul-Making Theodicy: These fail because a) the type of virtues that come about through suffering can simply be instilled in a creature from the moment of birth and thus suffering for that creature is pointless if you can obtain the same result, that given virtue, without the suffering, b) God himself is thought to possess all virtues and yet God has not suffered to obtain them, therefore suffering is not logically necessary for the obtaining of virtues, c) animals and young persons cannot benefit from the suffering since animals cannot reflect upon the suffering and therefore become virtuous and infants who die at a young age similarly cannot develop these virtues.
Human Accomplishment: These fail because a) If what people find meaningful is dictated by God, then God could have simply altered what humans would find meaningful, b) It would take too long and it would be too hard for humans to "solve" the problem of animal suffering since re-engineering biology would be a technically unfeasible monstrosity and would take too long, c) those who suffered from the bubonic plague did not have the resources necessary to "solve" the problem in the first place, d) suffering is not necessary for human accomplishment since, presumably, there is no suffering in heaven and yet we should think human accomplishment continues to exist there.
Heavenly Recompense: The idea that suffering is justified since God will repay those who suffer doesn't work because a) it isn't clear that Christianity teaches that the unborn or animals will go to heaven, b) it is wrong to put someone through suffering without their knowledge even if you expect to pay them back in the future. If it is wrong for us to do so then it is also wrong for God to do so.

3) Peter then argues that his argument is not an argument from ignorance given that we reason from particulars to negative existentials all the time. He gives the following example:

"How do we know that reindeer cannot fly? Sure, we’ve investigated reindeer and not found any biological wings, helicopter blades, or jetpacks – but maybe they defy gravity through some undiscovered means. Sure, we’ve never observed a flying reindeer and observed millions of reindeer that don’t fly their entire lives, but this could just mean reindeer are holding out on us. Is this an argument from ignorance? Are we unfairly reasoning from 'I can’t see a reason why reindeer are incapable of flight' to 'Reindeer cannot fly'?"

Since this type of reasoning is not fallacious then, analogously, similar thinking in the domain of gratuitous evils is also not fallacious.

4) Peter then gives the following argument for B):

"How do we really know that rape and murder is bad? Certainly there could be some higher benefit that rape and murder play in our society and we actually could be making the world worse off by banning rape and murder. If we were to worry about these exceedingly unlikely chances that the suffering we observe is actually necessary for a higher benefit, there is no way we could reason morally that we ought to actually stop raping and murdering. It is special pleading to suggest that we should only question some instances of suffering (like my examples), and not question other instances of suffering (like rape and murder)."

5) Therefore, probably, gratuitous suffering exists. If it does not, CL has to explain what suffering would have to look like to be considered gratuitous.

My thoughts:

I can't say much here since the judges have agreed not to interact with the argument so as not to "help" CL in his response to Peter, a shame since there is a lot to be said on practically every point Peter makes here.

First, the good: Peter's post was clearly argued, followed a clear format and was easy to follow. He did an excellent job at pre-empting possible theodicies CL might come up with. I saw no glaring errors in his reasoning, certainly nothing fallacious. Overall he made a strong inductive case for his position.

Room for improvement: While Peter's post was clearly written and argued, my own personal preference is to see clearly laid out syllogisms for one's argument. There's no rule that says you have to do that, and sometimes it makes it harder (you really have to be precise with your terms in a syllogism), but overall it makes following your train of thought a lot easier and it makes any possible fallacious reasoning a lot easier to spot. Obviously just my own personal preference, it makes doing philosophy a lot easier, but if Peter chooses to go his own route then that's perfectly fine.

Here I'll write how I would approach Peter's argument, though I'll just outline it, I won't provide the arguments I'd use, those I'll write up once the debate is over. Some of my general worries are the following:

Peter's definition of gratuitous suffering.
Peter's challenge to CL to provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for determining what cases are gratuitous.
Peter's contention that he is not committing an argument from ignorance (which I agree with, but inductively speaking, the move is still not valid, though I won't say why here)
His pre-emptive attacks on possible theodicies all have perfectly adequate responses

I'll be very interested to see how CL approaches Peter's argument.

To conclude, I think the following quote by William Alston best illustrates the difficulty in establishing Peter's position:

"The point is that the critic is engaged in attempting to support a particularly difficult claim, a claim that there isn't something in a particular territory, while having a very sketchy idea of what is in that territory, and having no sufficient basis for an estimate of how much of the territory falls outside his knowledge." (Alston, 120)

Source:

William Alston, “The Inductive Argument From Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition” in The Evidential Argument From Evil, pp. 97-125

Does The Argument from Contingency Commit The Fallacy of Composition?

2012-02-12T21:16:00.000-08:00

There are different versions of the argument from Contingency. A basic formulation of this argument is as follows:

1) Anything that exists has an explanation grounded in itself or in some thing external to itself. (Principle of Sufficient Reason)

2) The Universe exists.

3) The explanation for the universe is not grounded in its own necessary existence.

From 1-3:

4) Therefore the explanation for the universe lies in something external to itself.

Now, how do we establish the truth of premise 3? There are two popular ways to do so. One way we can show 3 to be true is by arguing that, if standard Big Bang Cosmology is true, then there was a beginning to the universe. If the Universe has not always existed then it exists contingently given that necessarily existing things don't pop into or out of existence, to do so obviously means they don't exist necessarily at all. This seems to be the most promising way to establish this premise, but generally there is another argument:

1) Everything that exists within the Universe is contingent.

2) Therefore the universe itself is contingent.

Now, the reason I bring this up is because I have no idea whether this line of reasoning is fallacious. Does this commit the fallacy of composition? The fallacy of composition arises when one infers a conclusion about a whole based on properties that each constituent part of the whole has. Or to put it slightly differently:

"A fallacy of composition arises when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole or even of every proper part of the whole." (1)

A popular example of this fallacy is the following:

1) Every chapter in this book is short.
2) Therefore the book itself is short.

The above argument is fallacious because even though every chapter of the book may be short, the book could still have, say, a thousand chapters and thus the book itself could still be a long book.

Here's a problem though, not all arguments that have that form are fallacious. An example that usually trips my logic students up on tests is the following:

1) Each member of the Supreme Court is conservative.

2) Therefore, the Supreme Court itself is conservative

This argument is not fallacious even though it shares exactly the same structure as the book example.

My question then is this: does the argument that the universe is contingent because each individual component of the universe is contingent commit the fallacy of composition, or is it a valid inference like the Supreme Court example? How do we go about determining something like that?

On The Confirmation and Falsification of Scientific Theories

2012-02-12T10:46:00.000-08:00

One of the central questions in the philosophy of science is under what conditions, if any, it can be said that a scientific law has been conclusively established and if there exist similar conditions that allow us to conclude that a law has been conclusively falsified. A number of different answers have been proposed in response to these questions. In this essay I shall explain the views of Carnap, Popper, and Lakatos, and will then attempt to defend one of these views as the most adequate.

According to Rudolf Carnap, the laws of science are nothing more than statements that express as precisely as possible the repetitions or regularities that we observe in nature. (15) He writes that “If a certain regularity is observed at all times and all places, without exception, then the regularity is expressed in the form of a ‘universal law’.” (15) Carnap makes a distinction between universal laws and statistical laws. Statistical laws are in the form of “Ripe apples are usually red”. (15) Universal laws on the other hand take the following logical form:

(x) (Px > Qx)

This can be translated as: for all x, if x has the property P then x will have the property Q. In Carnap’s terms: “If ‘x’ stands for any material body, then the law states that, for any material body x, if x has the property P, it also has the property Q.” (15) This understanding of a universal law is what gives rise to the central question Carnap wishes to investigate: “What justifies us in going from the direct observation of facts to a law that expresses certain regularities of nature?” (17) Carnap writes that “science begins with direct observations of single facts. Nothing else is observable. A regularity is not directly observable. It is only when many observations are compared with one another that regularities are discovered. These regularities are expressed by statements called “laws.”

Can we ever be fully certain that a law will hold at all times and at all places? In Carnap’s view, we can’t. At most laws can only be verified by cumulative observations. His reasoning is as follows: he writes that “A law about the world states that, in any particular case, at any place and any time, if one thing is true, another thing is entirely true.” (18) This implies an infinite number of possible instances in which this law should hold. Yet no law has ever been tested an infinite number of times. What we have are a finite number of observations in which the law has held. From these finite observations we generalize, predict, and expect that the law will hold constant in future observations. Yet, if there is an infinite range of instances that the law should cover, then “no number of finite observations, however large, can make the ‘universal’ law certain.” (18) Thus, on Carnap’s view, we can never arrive at full verification of a scientific law, they can only be confirmed via repeated observations of the law holding.

Even though a scientific law may never be fully verified, they can nevertheless be conclusively refuted. One need only find a single counter-example in order to refute a theory. He writes that “if a law says that every object that is P is also Q and we find an object that is P and not Q, the law is refuted.” (18) Thus “It is easy to refute a law; it is exceedingly difficult to find strong confirmation.” (18)

According to Karl Popper, the verification or confirmation of theories can easily be found if one simply makes one’s theory comprehensive enough. In his attempt to address the central question of whether or not theories and laws can be conclusively established or refuted, Popper examines three famous so called “scientific theories” using his falsifiability criterion: Marx’s theory of history, Freud’s psycho-analysis, and Alfred Adler’s “individual psychology.” Popper’s view on science come from his observation that practically any observable fact could be accounted for by any theory one wants to defend if one makes it vague and broad enough. To Popper it seemed as though “the world was full of verifications of a theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it.” (5) It seemed odd (and suspicious) that two very different examples of human behavior could be explained with equal ease by adherents of a theory like Adler’s. Popper’s example is that of a man who pushes a child into the water with the intention of drowning it; and that of a man who sacrifices his life in an attempt to save the child. What struck Popper as odd was that under Freud’s theory “the first man suffered from repression (say, of some component of his Oedipus complex), while the second man had achieved sublimation.” and that under Adler’s “the first man suffered from feelings of inferiority (producing perhaps the need to prove himself that he dared to commit some crime), and so did the second man (whose need was to prove to himself that he dared to rescue the child).” (6) He continues that “it was precisely this fact- that they always fitted, that they were always confirmed- which in the eyes of their admirers constituted the strongest argument in favour of these theories. It began to dawn on me that this apparent strength was in fact their weakness.” (6) In contrast with Carnap’s reliance upon confirmation of a theory, Popper places the emphasis on the role of falsification. To Popper, the mark of a good, productive theory is one that makes bold predictions that are, at least in principle, falsifiable. What distinguished Einstein’s theory of relativity from the social theories Popper criticizes is the element of risk involved in the predictions the theory makes. Popper writes that “If observation shows that the predicted effect is definitely absent, then the theory is simply refuted. The theory is incompatible with certain possible results of observation- in fact with results which everybody before Einstein would have expected.” (6-7) Popper then is not much concerned with the verification of theories, he thinks such verifications come cheaply and easily. What he’s most interested in is in producing theories that make predictions, risky predictions. A good scientific theory must also forbid certain states of affairs from obtaining. If a theory is compatible with every possible combination of events then the theory explains too much. A good theory should be able to tell us not only what is the case but necessarily what can also not be the case. The proper method for science to proceed is to test theories. However, what Popper means by testing a theory is to attempt to refute it. Since verifications are easy to find, if we allowed testability to simply mean finding such confirmations then practically every theory could be vindicated. We should therefore attempt to falsify theories.

Like Thomas Kuhn, Lakatos rejects the idea that scientific theories can be justified merely by accumulating instances of certain laws holding and generalizing from there. Unlike Kuhn however, Lakatos rejects the idea that a scientific theory or law can ever be completely falsified. Lakatos believes that such “dogmatic falsificationism” rests on two false assumptions:

That “there is a natural psychological borderline between theoretical or speculative propositions and factual (basic) propositions on the other.”
“If a proposition satisfies the psychological criterion of being factual or observational then it is true.” (173)

Lakatos believes both assumptions are wrong. Firstly, Lakatos points out that there is no such thing as “pure” and “direct” observation. Galileo’s observations were not unaided pure observations which then led to the refutation of his Aristotelian critics; it was rather his “observations” in light of his optical theory that confronted Aristotelian observations in light of their theory of the heavens. Lakatos thus writes that “there is no natural demarcation between observational and theoretical propositions...” (173)

Lakatos’s main argument against falsificationism however is this: no (or at least not many) well established scientific theories forbid any observable states of affairs. Lakatos argues that any clever scientist, through the use of additional auxiliary hypotheses, will be able to rescue any pet theory from falsification. Lakatos believes that it is “a specific theory together with (some) clause which may be refuted. But such a refutation is inconsequential for the specific theory under test because by replacing the ceteris paribus clause by a different one the specific theory can always be retained whatever the tests say.” (175) One further argument Lakatos brings forward against falsificationism is the fact that probabilistic theories are in principle undisprovable, for “no finite sample can ever disprove a universal probabilistic theory.” (175)

Lakatos’s approach is to put forward what he calls “Sophisticated Methodological Falsificationism.” Under this banner, “a theory is ‘acceptable’ or ‘scientific’ only if it has corroborated excess empirical content over its predecessor (or rival), that is, only if it leads to the discovery of novel facts.” (182) The main idea behind sophisticated methodological falsificationism is that “no experiment, experimental report, observation statement or well-corroborated low-level falsifying hypothesis alone can lead to falsification...there is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.” (184) In this view, neither verifications nor falsifications take center stage but rather the corroborating instances of excess information. Theories are not “refuted” in the naive sense of a crucial experiment showing some fatal flaw in a theory but rather theories are superseded by better theories that can incorporate the so called anomalies in a non-ad-hoc way. The crucial distinction between Lakatos’s views and those of Popper are that Popperian falsificationism calls “for the replacement of falsified hypotheses by a better one, sophisticated falsificationism stresses the urgency of replacing any hypothesis by a better one.”

It seems to me Lakatos’s method is the most rigorous of the three and can account for the complexity of scientific progress in a more realistic way than Carnap’s confirmation views or the naive falsificationism of Popperianism. Lakatos’s arguments against naive falsificationism seem to be decisive. If a scientific law simply describes what ought to be the case under “ideal conditions” then any observation that doesn’t meet the expected result can simply be interpreted as an instance in which those ideal conditions were not met through the invocation of numerous auxiliary hypotheses. The “ideal condition” theory thus remains untouched while the observation in question is seen as somehow being “contaminated” by some outside force. This can be done ad-nauseum since it is difficult to imagine any part of our universe producing ideal conditions for any real type of interesting scientific law. Lakatos’s view on the other hand sees the scientific enterprise as a process of competing theories, hardly any of them being individually falsifiable through some “crucial experiment” but rather judged on the merits of their explanatory scope and how they can acomodate discordant data. Popperian falsificationism also falls victim to Duhem’s attacks against crucial experiments in science. If a scientific theory T1 can only be put forward by accepting parent theories A1, A2, and A3, and T1 makes prediction H1 which does not come to pass, then a Popperian will say we ought to reject T1. Duhem on the other hand correctly points out that it is not merely T1 which is threatened but rather the conjunction of T1, A1, A2, and A3. The theory in question plus the scaffolding upon which it rests is falsified. What falsification can’t do is point out where the problem lies. Popper would argue that a good scientist ought to reject the theory and move on. If Duhem’s arguments are sound then the conjunction of theories ought to be rejected, but this would not be good for science. Perhaps the problem lies with A1, while A2 and A3 are okay. Perhaps the only thing necessary is to replace A1 with A1+. Under falsificationism, the entire edifice is thrown away. A better approach would be to re-examine the theories in question and look for where the problem lies.

A Brief Argument Against Egoism

2012-02-12T10:02:00.000-08:00

"Egoism as a general principle is equivalent to regarding myself as valueless from a reflective point of view, because it says that my interests, like those of every other person, provide others with no reason for action except in so far as they can be linked to the other person's prior motives.

If, on the other hand, from a reflective standpoint we do not regard ourselves as worthless, then we must accord a more general weight to at least some of our reasons for acting. And because of the character of the reflective attitude, this weight will automatically be accorded to similar reasons arising in the lives of others, and these will in turn constrain what we are justified in doing in the pursuit of our own lives."

Nagel, Thomas. "Universality and the Reflective Self." The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge University Press, 1996. 200-209. Print.

Divine Providence, Causal Closure, and Gratuitous Suffering (Draft)

2012-02-06T21:35:00.000-08:00

According to the evidential problem of evil “there exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.” (Rowe 336) I will develop a strand of thought that will show how the knowledge of such apparent gratuitous suffering in nature leaves an opening for the theist to show how at a bare minimum, such suffering is not causally inert. From the fact that we know such apparent gratuitous suffering is not causally inert one can develop a possible defense of the existence of such evils by showing how knowledge of such evils may itself serve as the causal mechanism by which God brings about a justifying good. Even if this line of defense seems improbable, the theist may still be reassured by the fact that there is at least one avenue we know God could use to bring about good in the world from the existence of apparently gratuitous evil and thus, instances of apparent gratuitous evil are not "causally closed."

William Rowe’s Evidential Argument from Evil proceeds as follows:

There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

An omniscient, wholly being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
Therefore, there does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being. (336)

In this paper I will focus on premise 1 of Rowe’s argument. One example of an apparently gratuitous case of suffering found in nature would be to imagine a creature, say Bambi, being caught in a forest fire and dying a painfully horrific and tragic death. What makes suffering like this appear to be gratuitous is the fact that we can conceive of no justifying reason as to why God would allow such suffering to occur. In the case of human suffering and moral evil one can come up with a list of possible reasons why God may allow humans to experience suffering throughout their lives. One such story points to the existence of virtues, perseverance being an example, that could not exist in the absence of suffering. These “soul-making theodicies” as they’re called cannot be invoked in cases of animal suffering, particularly suffering that leads to the death of a creature for various reasons. One reason is that animals like deer cannot reason or reflect upon their past experiences. Virtuous traits are therefore not very likely to arise in creatures that cannot reason about them. Second, even if such an animal could reflect and therefore develop some type of virtue from experience, if the animal dies in the process of some calamity it isn’t clear how such suffering could be conducive to the development of some virtuous propensity since, well, the animal is dead. It is also difficult to imagine how the suffering and death of a creature can benefit humans since most of the suffering that occurs in nature occurs far away from human eyes and civilization. It simply does not seem very plausible to think that any of the deaths that occur in the animal kingdom on a daily basis have anything to contribute to our well-being. Even if some benefit to humans could be identified, it would still be difficult to see how animal suffering could contribute any good to us. Perhaps the death of individual creatures may be necessary for some greater good (preventing over-population perhaps), but why the suffering? Surely God could bring about the same good (preventing overpopulation) without the suffering of Bambi, why then doesn’t it seem like Bambi’s death was a peaceful one?

The theist response to this line of argumentation is typically to argue that just because we don't see a justifying reason for some case of apparently gratuitous suffering, it does not follow that therefore there is no justifying reason, a reason that we simply don't have any access to. (Adams) Thus the basic gist of the response is best summarized by Alvin Plantinga: “Why suppose that if God does have a reason for permitting evil, the theist would be the first to know?” (Plantinga 10)

Firstly, I think we can say with a relatively high degree of confidence that no instance of seemingly gratuitous evil is causally inert. By this I mean that even if we can't think of a single possible outcome that could morally justify the suffering we observe, we can at least know that said suffering does affect the world in at least one way. That is: we can talk about it. Here's one possible way that a suffering squirrel or a burning Bambi could lead to a net gain of good in the world. Suppose a hiker comes across the charred burnt carcass of Bambi. Like many people before him, he questions what possible reason God could have efor allowing Bambi to meet such a terrible end. He sees no bite marks on the corpse which leads him to believe that no animals had a chance to feast on it which in turn would lead to their continued survival for the forseeable future. By all appearances, Bambi died and the world was no better off for it. If even the scavengers of nature didn’t benefit from Bambi’s death, it’s difficult to see how her death was anything but pointless. To the hiker, this would surely count as an instance of gratuitous suffering. When thinking about the possible reasons God could have had for allowing Bambi to die the hiker turns his attention to things external to himself. He thinks about the possible effects on the ecosystem, and upon concluding that there were no effects, he gives up in despair on not finding any such reasons. But perhaps the chain of events that leads to the justifying reason starts with the observation that an animal has died an apparently gratuitous death. From the simple fact that the death of Bambi has changed what the hiker was and would be thinking about (presumably his attention would have never turned to gratuitous suffering had he not come across the corpse) we can conceive a myriad of outcomes that in turn themselves have causal relations with other events in the future that continue to multiply beyond our epistemic horizon.

One such possibility is that this hiker is led to pick up books of philosophy written on the subject of evil which then furthers his interest in philosophy, or leads him to contribute to the academic debate on the subject, or leads to his desiring to discuss what he has read with his friends or family members which in turn may spark a chain of events far into the future. The point is, from the mere event of observing a corpse an entire (possibly endless) chain of events can unfold which could somehow lead to the justificatory reason for Bambi's death.

One problem with this line of thought however is that this could only account for cases of suffering that we directly observe, either in the moment or in the aftermath. The observing of Bambi's carcass led to a chain reaction that could possibly reveal and instantiate its justification. Yet what about cases of suffering we simply never observe? Surely animals die painful deaths in the Saharan dessert or the Amazon or the Tundras of the world that we simply never observe. Sure, nature documentaries bring the suffering to our attention some of the time, the times there are cameras rolling, but we have pretty good reason to believe (at least most sane people would) that such suffering continues even after the cameras are long gone. I think most of us would be perfectly comfortable with believing that there have been plenty of animals that have died and continue to die this very moment painful deaths that we never had a chance to find out about. A lion kills a Gazelle this very moment in some remote region of the world where no human will see its remains or the actual instance of the killing. How can these cases causally affect the world in a way that will instantiate the justifying reason later down the line? Keith Parsons drives the point home:

“Still, the situation theists face with respect to the existence of evil is one where the odds seem to be overwhelmingly against them. Let’s suppose that, since the first existence of life sufficiently neurologically advanced to suffer pain (far back in the Paleozoic, no doubt) there have been a trillion instances of undeserved, unwanted suffering (seems a reasonable number). The theist must hold that God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting every single one of those trillion instances of suffering, that is, not one can be gratuitous. Obviously, a being cannot be perfectly good if it permits pointless suffering—even one instance—that it can easily prevent. Hence, if one Diplodocus once suffered needlessly in the Jurassic, then God does not exist. Since we have presupposed a trillion instances of unwanted, undeserved suffering over the history of sentient life, the theist must hold that each such instance of suffering has nearly a zero chance of being gratuitous, otherwise the probability of the disjunction of these trillion individual probabilities will add up to a very high probability that some evil is gratuitous. What rational grounds could anyone have for holding that no sentient creature anywhere ever suffered needlessly? Here I shall merely assert that theists have no rational basis for such an assurance, and put the ball in their court to show that they do." (Parsons)

I think Parsons overstates the charge of irrationality above. If a theist has independent grounds for believing in God (through say some set of arguments from natural theology) then, if the probability of Theism on the grounds of those arguments is high, the theist can employ the G.E. Moore Shift such that a new argument will go as follows:

There exists an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.
An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
(Therefore) It is not the case that there exist instances of horrendous evil which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

The argument is just as valid as Rowe’s evidential argument from evil and thus one cannot charge the theist of irrationality for holding the conclusion. Another way the theist may be rationally warranted in believing that no creature suffers gratuitously is that “God may reveal to us that 1 (gratuitous suffering) is false, and we might be justified in accepting the message as coming from God. Indeed, revelation might provide not only justification for denying 1 but also justification for beliefs about what God’s reasons are for permitting this or that case of suffering or type of suffering...” (Alston 99) Regardless, Parson’s point remains, how is each particular case of seemingly gratuitous suffering justified?

One legitimate question is whether each specific case of seemingly gratuitous suffering in the world necessarily has its own justifying reasons down the line. What if the knowledge of suffering in general is what leads to the instantiation of the justifying reason? Perhaps the death of the Gazelle didn't locally or immediately affect anyone around it in such a way that it brings about the justifying reasons later down the line, but perhaps the general knowledge that such Gazelles exist and suffer does the work. Perhaps it is the set of all things that suffer that is in need of some justification. If this is the case then, in virtue of belonging to that set, a justification for the set is ipso facto a justification for a particular instantiation of suffering.

At any rate, I think it is pretty safe to say that at a bare minimum, cases of seemingly gratuitous suffering are not causally inert. The knowledge they exist is a good enough starting point to sketch out possible theodicies and also may be the route by which the good comes about. After all, the more philosophers and laymen talk about the problem of evil, the more complex the causal chains become that start from a mere observation to a much larger network of events that could potentially provide the overriding reasons God had for allowing the suffering of certain animals.

Alvin Plantinga. God, Freedom and Evil. (Allen & Unwin, 1975.)

Keith Parsons, “A Simple Statement of the Problem of Evil”, the Secular Outpost

Marilyn McCord Adams, “Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God” in The Symposium of The Aristotelian Society, July 1989, vol. 63, supplement, pp. 297-310.

William Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” in American Philosophical Quarterly, 1979, vol. 16, pp. 335-341

Henry Sidgwick's Proof for Utilitarianism

2012-01-26T13:46:00.000-08:00

Henry Sidgwick, the third and last of the great classical utilitarians, sought to provide a proof for what he called "universalistic hedonism", or in more popular terms, utilitarianism.

He sought to establish the principle of universalistic hedonism by establishing what he took to be more general and abstract self-evident moral principles. He wrote:

"There are certain absolute practical principles; the truth of which, when they are explicitly stated, is manifest; but they are of too abstract a nature, and too universal in their scope, to enable us to ascertain by immediate application of them what we ought to do in any particular case; particular duties have still to be determined by some other method." (Sidgwick, 379)

Some of these self-evident moral principles include:

"Whatever action any of us judges to be right for himself, he implicitly judges to be right for all similar persons in similar circumstances." (379)
Impartiality in the application of general rules. (380)
"The mere difference of priority and posteriority in time is not a reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one moment that to that of another. (381)
"The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view of the universe, than the good of any other; unless there are special grounds for believing that more good is likely to be realized in the one case than in the other." (382)
As a rational being I am bound to aim at good generally, so far as it is attainable by my efforts, not merely at a particular part of it.

From the conjunction of the last two self-evident principles he then infers the principle of universal benevolence:

"From the two above one can deduce the maxim of Benevolence; 'Each one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own, except insofar as he judges it to be less, when impartially viewed, or less certainly knowable or attainable by him.'" (382)

Thus, Sidgwick thinks that he has established our ethical duty to aim at the universal good.

Against Craig's Cosmological Argument

2012-01-17T13:47:00.000-08:00

In his defense of the Kalam Cosmological argument, William Lane Craig argues that the first premise: “Whatever begins to exist has a cause” is a premise that “is constantly confirmed in our experience.” I take this to be an inductive defense of this metaphysical principle. If our every day experience confirms that things that begin to exist have causes then such every day experiences would serve as empirical confirmations of his premise which would, on balance, make this principle more likely to be true than its negation. I argue that this is not the case.

In discussing the standard Big Bang Model, which Craig takes to be evidence for his second
premise: “The Universe began to exist”, Craig writes that it is important to note that “the origin it posits is an absolute origin ex nihilo. For not only all matter and energy, but space and time themselves come into being at the initial cosmological singularity.” (Craig, 477) There is a crucial distinction that must be made here that shows Craig’s assertion that our experience constantly confirms premise one of the Kalam argument is simply mistaken. The problem is that we never observe things coming into being ex nihilo in our experience. What we do observe are rearrangements of previously existing materials into new arrangements. In that case we do observe that things coming into being from previously existing materials do not come into being uncaused. These rearrangements are a result either of the laws of nature (water freezing and becoming ice as a result of a temperature drop) or as a result of the intentional actions of individuals (shaping a statue out of rock). Given that our observations are always about rearrangements rather than about the coming into being of objects ex nihilo, not out of previously existing materials, any empirical confirmation of the former cannot serve as inductive evidence for the latter. Since we don’t observe things coming into being ex nihilo, caused or uncaused, they are on inductively equal ground, that is to say, the weight of our experience does not make one more likely than the other.

Craig has heard of a version of this objection before, yet his response is not very good:
In response to a Youtube challenge to the Kalam Cosmological Argument, Craig responds:

“The video tells us that the atoms of a watch have existed as long as the universe itself has existed, and that this is the same with everything in the universe. Never mind that atoms have not, as a matter of fact, existed as long as the universe; the more fundamental confusion is obviously the conflation of a thing with the material out of which the thing is made. Because the atoms currently composing my body have always existed, have I always existed? Did I exist during the Jurassic Age and the era of galaxy formation? If such a conclusion is not evidently absurd, reflect: I have certain essential properties, properties without which I could not exist. For example, it is essential to me that I am a human being. But my atoms prior to my conception were not a human being. Therefore, they were not I. Moreover, medical science tells us that every seven years the material constituents of my body are almost completely replaced by new constituents. So prior to my conception which set of constituents that have formed my body over my lifetime were me? The video's suggestion that nothing has (ever) come into existence is therefore ludicrous.” (Craig, Reasonable Faith)

In this response, Craig seems to think that the fact that he himself has not always existed shows that things do come into existence, which is true, if by coming into existence he means out of pre-existing matter. Craig does not believe that he came into existence ex nihilo, that would be absurd, thus once again, the fact that things come into existence in our world, and their coming into existence is (usually) observed to be caused does not give empirical weight to the principle that things that come into being out of nothing must also be caused.

While the first premise of the Kalam Cosmological argument sounds on the face of it plausible, Craig does not give many reasons to accept it other than the above. Yet, in other publications Craig has defended the metaphysical principle as a necessarily true principle. He writes

“Premise (1) seems obviously true- at the least, more so than its negation. First and foremost, it’s rooted in the necessary truth that something cannot come into being from nonbeing. To suggest that things could just pop into being uncaused out of nothing is to quit doing serious philosophy and to resort to magic.” (Craig, 14)

The choice of words here is interesting, if the premise is rooted in or is itself a necessary truth, then why qualify it by saying it seems “at least, more (true) than its negation”? It’s hard to see how Craig could defend the first principle on a priori grounds given how easy it is for us to imagine say, an elephant, popping into existence out of nowhere. If this were metaphysically impossible then it presumably ought also to be inconceivable, at least if you buy the notion that conceivability is a guide to possibility, something Craig seems to affirm when he writes: “We have, we think we can safely say, a strong intuition of the universe's contingency. A possible world in which no concrete objects exist certainly seems conceivable. We generally trust our modal intuitions on other matters; if we are to do otherwise with respect to the universe's contingency, then atheists need to provide some reason for such skepticism other than their desire to avoid theism. But they have yet to do so." (Craig-Moreland 468)

While the first premise of the Kalam Cosmological Argument sounds intuitively appealing, Craig has not provided good reasons for the agnostic of the premise to accept it as Craig’s inductive and a priori justifications fail.

Craig, William L. "Subject: Youtube Takes Out the Cosmological Argument!" Reasonable Faith. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Jan. 2012. .

Craig, William L. "Richard Dawkins on Arguments for God." God Is Great: God Is Good. Inter Varsity Press, 2009. 7-31. Print.

Craig, William L., and J.P Moreland. "The Existence of God." Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview.463-481. Print.

Spencer on the Special Creation of Man

2012-01-16T17:46:00.000-08:00

"Doubtless many will reply that they can more easily conceive ten
millions of special creations to have taken place, than they can
conceive that ten millions of varieties have been produced by the
process of perpetual modification. All such, however, will find, on
candid inquiry, that they are under an illusion. This is one of the
many cases in which men do not really believe, but rather believe they believe. It is not that they can truly conceive ten millions of special creations to have taken place, but that they think they can do so. A little careful introspection will show them that they have never yet
realized to themselves the creation of even one species. If they have formed a definite conception of the process, they will be able to answer such questions as — How is a new species constructed? and How does it make its appearance? Is it thrown down from the clouds? or
must we hold to the notion that it struggles up out of the ground? Do
its limbs and viscera rush together from all the points of the compass?
or must we receive some such old Hebrew notion as, that God goes into a forest-cavern, and there takes clay and moulds a new creature? If they say that a new creature is produced in none of these modes, which are too absurd to be believed, then they are required to describe the mode
in which a new creature may be produced — a mode which does not seem absurd; and such a mode they will find that they neither have conceived nor can conceive.

Should the believers in special creations consider it unfair thus to call upon them to describe how special creations take place, I reply, that this is far less than they demand from the supporters of the development hypothesis. They are merely asked to point out a conceivable mode; on the other hand, they ask, not simply for a conceivable mode, but for the actual mode. They do not say — Show us
how this may take place; but they say — Show us how this does take place. So far from its being unreasonable to ask so much of them, it would be reasonable to ask not only for a possible mode of special creation, but for an ascertained mode; seeing that this is no greater a demand than they make upon their opponents."

-- Herbert Spencer, 'The Development Hypothesis', in 'The Leader', Mar. 20, 1852

Tim Wise's Latest

2012-01-12T14:52:00.000-08:00

‎"When you support or give credence to a candidate, you indirectly empower that candidate’s worldview and others who hold fast to it. So when you support or even substantively praise Ron Paul, you are empowering libertarianism, and its offshoots like Ayn Rand’s “greed is good” objectivism, and all those who believe in it. You are empowering the fans of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, in which books they learn that altruism is immoral, and that only the self matters. You are empowering the reactionary, white supremacist, Social Darwinists of this culture, who believe — as does Ron Paul — that that Greensboro Woolworth’s was right, and that the police who dragged sit-in protesters off soda fountain stools for trespassing on a white man’s property were justified in doing so, and that the freedom of department store owners to refuse to let black people try on clothes in their dressing rooms was more sacrosanct than the right of black people to be treated like human beings." - Tim Wise

The Contingency of the Universe

2012-01-11T09:44:00.000-08:00

"We have, we think we can safely say, a strong intuition of the universe's contingency. A possible world in which no concrete objects exist certainly seems conceivable. We generally trust our modal intuitions on other matters; if we are to do otherwise with respect to the universe's contingency, then atheists need to provide some reason for such skepticism other than their desire to avoid theism. But they have yet to do so." (Craig-Moreland 468)

Two points: One, as Erik Wielenberg argues, God's non-existence is also conceivable. If Craig and Moreland want to argue that the modal intuition of "Possibly, the universe could not exist" implies the non-necessary nature of the universe then the modal intuition "Possibly, God could not exist" also implies the non-necessary nature of God. Is conceivability a guide to possibility or isn't it?

Second:

"Some contemporary theists recognize that if it is necessarily true that God exists, that God exists is a non-obvious necessary truth, one that cannot be seen to be true simply by considering it. For example, Alvin Plantinga asserts that “it is indeed necessarily true [that God exists], but it isn’t self evident to us. Cleanthes suggests that the same may be true of the natural universe, declaring that '[w]e dare not affirm that we know all the qualities of matter; and, for aught we can determine, it may contain some qualities which, were they known, would make its non-existence appears as great a contradiction as that twice two is five. If God can exist necessarily despite His existence not being self-evident to us, why may not the same be true of the natural universe?" - Erik Wielenberg

Examining the Myth of “Reverse Racism"

2012-01-09T16:08:00.000-08:00

"As a white person, I always saw the terms honky or cracker as proof of how much more potent white racism was than any variation practiced by the black or brown. When a group of people has little or no power over you, they don’t get to define the terms of your existence, they can’t limit your opportunities, and you needn’t worry much about the use of a slur to describe you, since, in all likelihood, the slur is as far as it’s going to go. What are they going to do next: deny you a bank loan? Yeah, right. So whereas “nigger” is a term used by whites to dehumanize blacks, to “put them in their place” if you will, the same cannot be said of honky; after all, you can’t put white people in their place when they own the place to begin with." - Tim Wise

Leiter on the Analytic/Continental Split

2012-01-09T15:27:00.000-08:00

"There are real dividing lines in the history of philosophy, but the one between the “analytic” and the “Continental” isn’t one of them, though it’s interesting today from a sociological point of view, since it allows graduate programs in philosophy to define spheres of permissible ignorance for their students. A real dividing line, by contrast, one that matters for substantive philosophical questions, is between “naturalists” and “anti-naturalists.” The naturalists, very roughly, are those who think human beings are just certain kinds of animals, that one understands these animals through the same empirical methods one uses to understand other animals, and that philosophy has no proprietary methods for figuring out what there is, what we know, and, in particular, what humans are like. The anti-naturalists, by contrast, are (again, roughly) those who think human beings are different not just in degree but in kind from the other animals, and that this difference demands certain proprietary philosophical methods - perhaps a priori knowledge or philosophical ways of exploring the distinctively “normative” realm in which humans live."

(Link)

A Confutation of Convergent Realism: A Summary

2011-12-05T09:09:00.001-08:00

A brief sketch of Larry Laudan's landmark paper A Confutation of Convergent Realism.

Convergent realism is a theory about the nature and history of science that according to Larry Laudan encompasses the following (though not necessarily the simultaneous conjunction of all) claims:

R1: Scientific theories are typically approximately true and more recent theories are closer to the truth than older theories in the same domain.
R2: The observational and theoretical terms within the theories of a mature science genuinely refer
R3: Successive theories in any mature science will be such that they ‘preserve’ the theoretical relations and the apparent referents of earlier theories
R4: Acceptable new theories do and should explain why their predecessors were successful insofar as they were successful. (1115)

Theses R1 through R4 then entail the following:

R5: Mature scientific theories should be successful; these theses constitute the best, if not the only, explanation for the success of science. The empirical success of science (in the sense of giving detailed explanations and accurate predictions) accordingly provides striking empirical confirmation for realism.

In defence of R2, Laudan identifies four further claims in need of defending in order to hold R2:

S1: The theories in the advanced or mature sciences are successful.
S2: A theory whose central terms genuinely refer will be a successful theory.
S3: If a theory is successful, we can reasonably infer that its central terms genuinely refer.
S4: All the central terms in theories in the mature sciences do refer. (1117)

It is here where Laudan begins his first line of attack. Concerning S1, Laudan states that proponents of realism say very little in regards to just what “success” amounts to. One plausible working definition of success that Laudan adopts is a theory’s ability to “work well, so long as it has functioned in a variety of explanatory contexts, has led to confirmed predictions and has been of broad explanatory scope.” (1118). The question the realist wants to be able to answer is why it is that theories in science have met these criteria.

In regards to S2, Laudan claims the history of science provides abundant counter-examples: “The chemical atomic theory in the 18th century was so remarkably unsuccessful that most chemists abandoned it in favor of a more phenomenological, elective affinity chemistry. The Proutian theory that the atoms of heavy elements are composed of hydrogen atoms had, through most of the 19th century, a strikingly unsuccessful career, confronted by a long string of apparent refutations.” (1119) The history of science provides abundant examples of theories that genuinely refer yet proved scientifically unsuccessful and unfruitful. Why is this? Because “a genuinely referring theory need not be such that all-or even most-of the specific claims it makes about the properties of those entities and their modes of interaction are true.” (1119) The mere fact that a theory genuinely refers to entitities that really do exist does not by itself ensure that the properties we ascribe to them and that the relationships such entities have with other entities are accurate. To give an illustration, two friends may know of a nearby horse named Charlie. They’ve both seen and played with Charlie but, for whatever reason, one of the friends remembers Charlie as being three feet taller than he really is. Based on their memory of Charlie, both friends make a set of predictions, friend A who has an erroneous belief about the height of Charlie predicts that Charlie will be able to jump over a fence that is 5 feet tall. Friend B who has no such erroneus belief predicts that Charlie won’t be able to jump it, for Charlie simply isn’t tall enough to accomplish such a feat. In such a case, it is clear why genuine reference isn’t enough to ensure a successful scientific theory or hypothesis: they are both referring to the same horse, but merely referring to the same horse does not mean they also have correct beliefs about the predicables of the horse.

Laudan then attacks S3: the claim that if a theory is successful then we can reasonably infer that its central terms genuinely refer. In response to this Laudan again provides counter-examples from the history of science (for the sake of space I will only mention one of his examples here): “the electrical fluid, a substance which was generally assumed to accumulate on the surface rather than permeate the interstices of bodies, had been utilized to explain inter alia the attraction of oppositely charged bodies, the behavior of the Leyden jar, the similarities between atmosphereic and static electricity and many phenomena of current electricity.” (1121) Of these examples Lauden says that “on any account of empirical success which I can conceive of, non-referring 19th century aeither theories were more successful than contemporary, referring atomic theory.” (1121) A weakened version of S3 won’t work either. If the success of a theory ensures that at least some terms refer then there can be no justification for R3 since R3 tells us that we should retain the theoretical relations and referents of earlier theories, but if we can only be confident that some terms genuinely refer then we have no reason to demand that all future theories preserve all terms. Thus “a version of S3 strong enough to license (R3) seems incompatible with the fact that many successful theories contain non-referring central terms. But any weakening of (S3) dilutes the force of, and removes the rationale for, the realist’s claims about convergence, retention, and correspondence in inter-theory relations.” (1123)

Having tackled the problem of reference, Laudan then turns to R1. As with the problem of defining what counts as “success”, realists are also faced with the problem of what counts as “approximate truth.” Even if one assumes something roughly along the Popperian view that “a theory, T1, is approximately true if its truth content is greater than its falsity content” (1125) nothing at all is logically entailed by such a view. It is after all perfectly conceivable that all of its tested consequences turn out to be false. Regardless, Laudan writes that “even if the realist had a semantically adequate characterization of approximate or partial truth, and even if that semantics entailed that most of the consequences of an approximately true theory would be true, he would still be without any criterion that would epistemically warrant the ascription of approximate truth to the theory.” In other words, even if we know precisely what we mean by “approximately true”, how can one be in an epistemic position to grant such a title to a theory?

Not only is there no logical entailment between genuine reference and approximate truth and the

success of a theory such that:

Genuine Reference → Entails → Successful Theories

but there is also no reason to believe that the connection flows the other way around either such that:

Genuine reference ← Is entailed by ← Successful theories.

The history of science once again gives us a plethora of examples of “successful” theories which nevertheless turned out to be non-genuinely referential, among these Laudan mentions “the crystalline spheres of ancient and medieval astronomy; the humoral theory of medicine; the effluvial theory of static electricity...” etc. He adds that “for every highly successful theory in the past of science which we now believe to be a genuinely referring theory, one could find half a dozen once successful theories which we now regard as substantially non-referring.” (1128) If we accept the possibility that false theories can have true consequences then the mere presence of a successful theory cannot entail genuine reference.

Science And Religion: Where The Conflict Really Lies.

2011-11-30T11:14:00.001-08:00

Plantinga Lecture on his new book. Might be picking it up this winter break.

Four Accounts of Philosophical Moral Reflection

2011-11-16T00:13:00.001-08:00

Cross-posted from The Splintered Mind. I'm squarely on camp #2.

What happens to your moral behavior and moral attitudes when you reflect philosophically? Philosophers all seem to have opinions about this, but those opinions diverge and there's very little serious research on the issue.
Here are four possibilities:

(1.) The booster view: Philosophical moral reflection leads to the discovery of moral truths – either general moral truths that people tend to not to endorse absent such reflection (such as, perhaps, thateating meat is morally bad) or particular moral truths about specific situations that would not otherwise have been properly morally appreciated (such as that some particular behavior would be objectionably sexist). Such discoveries have a significant positive overall impact on moral behavior – though perhaps only on average, to a moderate extent, and in some areas. Furthermore, since it reveals connections between specific instances of moral behavior and general moral principles, philosophical moral reflection tends to increase the overall consistency between one’s broad moral attitudes and one’s practical moral behavior.

(2.) The epiphenomenalist view: Philosophical moral reflection is virtually powerless to change moral behavior or moral attitudes, either for better or for worse – though it may produce decorative linguistic justifications of what we would have thought and done in any case.

(3.) The rationalization view: Philosophical moral reflection tends to increase the consistency between attitudes and behavior, as the booster suggests, but it does so in the opposite causal direction than the booster suggests: The ethically reflective person’s attitudes shift to match her behavior rather than her behavior shifting to match her attitudes. The philosophically reflective person’s practical behavior may be unaffected by such rationalizations (the inert rationalization view); or the tendency to rationalize may morally worsen philosophically reflective people by freeing them to act on immoral impulses that are superficially but unsatisfactorily justified by their reflections (the toxic rationalization view). On the inert rationalization view, for example, one will either steal or not steal a library bookas a result of psychological processes uninfluenced by one’s philosophical reflections, and then one will shape one’s moral attitudes to justify that incipient or recently past behavior. On the toxic rationalization view, one might feel an inclination to steal the book and act on that inclination as a consequence of a spurious moral justification for the theft.

(4.) The inert discovery view: Philosophical moral reflection tends to lead to the discovery of moral truths (as also suggested by the booster view). However, such discoveries have no material consequences for the practical behavior of the person making those discoveries. Philosophical reflection might lead one to discover, for example, that it is morally wrong to eat the meat of factory-farmed mammals, but on this view one would continue to eat factory-farmed meat at virtually the same rate as one would have done absent any philosophical reflection on the matter.
Any wagers?

Philosophy Circles on Google+

2011-11-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

If you use Google+ to connect with real life friends then chances are your newsfeed is a barren wasteland.
Fortunately there are tons of users out there who use it to connect primarily with non-real life individuals who share the same interests. I was thinking of deleting my Google+ account when I saw no one was posting anything with as much regularity as Facebook. Then I found a cool way to add tons of new friends who share the same interests with one click. I can't keep up with my newsfeed anymore.

You can go here to find a spreadsheet that sorts friend circles by categories. I'm mostly following the Science and Philosophy ones, but there are tons of circles here.

Philosophy:

Philosophy Circle
Philosophy Circle 2
Continental Philosophers

Here's my current Science Circle:

Scientists

Stephen Law Vs. William Lane Craig: The Aftermath

2011-10-31T17:40:00.000-07:00

Larry Laudan's Philosophy of Science

2011-10-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

A brief overview of Larry Laudan's views on Philosophy of Science.

Larry Laudan's Philosophy of Science can be summarized as follows:

If we correctly set our aims toward a specified goal for science then we might arrive at a set of objective criteria which may guide a scientist in theory selection, thus ridding us of the fuzziness and vagueness of Duhem’s “good sense” and the problems raised by Kuhn's observation of the role of subjective values that have played a major role in the way scientists have adopted competing theories in the history of science.
Laudan’s view is that “the aim of science is to secure theories with a high problem solving effectiveness.” (145) How do we know what counts as progress in science? When “successive theories solve more problems than their predecessors.” (145) According to Laudan, there are two benefits to this approach:

It “captures much that has been implicit all along in discussions of the growth of science” (145)
It “assumes a goal which is not intrinsically transcendent and hence closed to epistemic access.” (145)

Laudan believes there is much trouble in thinking of scientific theories as giving us accurate reports that correspond with the way the world actually is, or that even such theories are slowly converging on true accounts of the world. (1) If we conceive of scientific theories as merely attempts to solve problems then we can sidestep the issues of how we can know they’re actually true and simply focus on much easier to identify criteria such as just how successful they are at solving these problems.
It is here where Laudan gives us a taxonomy of the types of problem solving that goes on in science. He distinguishes between empirical problems and conceptual problems. According to Laudan, there are three types of empirical problems:

Potential Problems: “What we take to be the case about the world, but for which there is as yet no explanation.” (146)
Solved Problems: “Class of germane claims about the world which have been solved by some viable theory or other.” (146)
Anomalous Problems: “Actual problems which rival theories solve but which are not solved by the theory in question. A problem is only anomalous for some theory if that problem has been solved by a viable rival.” (146)

Conceptual problems are the following:

Internal inconsistency problems
A theory that “makes assumptions about the world that run counter to other theories or to prevailing metaphysical assumptions”
When a theory “violates principles of the research tradition of which it is a part” (146)
When a theory “fails to utilize concepts from other, more general theories to which it should be logically subordinate.” (146)

Laudan’s problem-solving model “argues that the elimination of conceptual difficulties is as much constitutive of progress as increasing empirical support.” (147) In this model it is even possible “that a change from an empirically well-supported theory to a less well-supported one could be progressive, provided that the latter resolved significant conceptual difficulties confronting the former.” (147)

Of course, in this model a theory should be accepted if and only if it offers solutions to problems. Laudan then gives criteria by which we may judge when and how a particular problem, empirical or conceptual, has been solved. He writes that “a theory solves an empirical problem when it entails, along with appropriate initial and boundary conditions, a statement of the problem.” (148) Similarly, “a theory solves a conceptual problem when it fails to exhibit a conceptual difficulty of its predecessor.” (148) What happens when competing theories seem to fare equally well in solving problems? Laudan suggests that in such situations, a scientist should employ a cost-benefit analysis of the theories in question by “assessing the number and the weight of the empirical problems (a theory) is known to solve; similarly, assess the number and centrality of its conceptual difficulties or problems...Prefer that theory which comes closest to solving the largest number of important empirical problems while generating the smallest number of significant anomalities and conceptual problems.” (149)

Laudan also writes that our cognitive stance towards theories should not be exhausted by either “belief” or “unbelief”. There are further options:

A theory may deserve further investigation
A theory warrants further elaboration

Laudan then introduces us to the concept of “research traditions”. Research traditions are characterized by:

“A set of beliefs about what sorts of entities and processes make up the domain of inquiry.” (151)
“A set of epistemic and methodological norms about how the domain is to be investigated, how theories are to be tested, how data are to be collected, etc.” (151)

Like theories, Laudan gives several criteria for when research traditions should be supplanted by competing ones. He writes that “one research tradition is more adequate than another just in case the ensemble of theories which characterize it at a given time are more adequate than the theories making up any rival research tradition.” (152) Laudan then finishes by tackling the question of how to judge when novel approaches to certain problems ought to be taken seriously. He tells us that we ought to assess the progress or rate of progress of such theories and research traditions. He defines progress as “the difference between the problem-solving effectiveness of the research tradition in its latest form and its effectiveness at an earlier period.” (153)

The appeal of this theory is its simplicity as well as its unambiguous straightforwardness about the stated goals of science. Science is a tool to solve problems. It would certainly be an added bonus if the solutions to such problems also gave us true beliefs about the world, but one need not constantly concern oneself with worries about whether one’s theories correspond with the way the universe actually works, such an approach is a dead end. We can be content with knowing that science can solve problems, and it certainly does that well. This approach also has the benefit of encouraging an internal as well as inter-disciplinary coherence of our picture of the world. Conceptual problems are legitimized as worthy of serious attention and consideration, equally so as empirical problems. Laudan’s views remove the ambiguity that plagues the scientist if he/she attempts to adopt Duhem’s “good sense”. Both theories accept general criteria by which the scientist should go about the business of theory selection; Laudan’s theory has the benefit of refining those criteria in specifiable and quantifiable ways.

Some Possible Worries:

In order to accept Laudan’s criteria for theory selection one must first agree with an underlying assumption (which he does indeed defend in other publications) that science is not (and cannot) be about finding theories that accurately correspond to the way the world works. If one accepts Laudan’s view of science as a problem solving enterprise then his criteria for theory selection, accept those theories which solve the most problems, has much prima facie appeal. If on the other hand we don’t share his commitments, if we care about scientific theories that give us truth then whether a theory solves the most problems or not will not be the measuring stick by which all theories should be evaluated. It seems on the face of it possible that a theory may solve problems, empirical or conceptual, without the theory itself being true (whatever that may mean). One possible worry Laudan’s views might raise is its strong emphasis on fruitfulness of new research that theories should have. The purpose of theories is to solve problems. Eventually one should hope that a proposed theory solves problems so well that there won’t be any remainder for us to worry about. If there are a finite number of problems in the universe, something that seems highly plausible (do we really think there are an infinite number of mysteries to be solved?) then eventually, ideally, science should slowly close that gap; the number of problems for us to solve decreasing steadily. So then we should expect that some theories are so good at doing what Laudan wants them to do, explain and solve things to such an extent that no further research is required. In some sense then, the best theories should lead to less research since they’ve done successfully what they were invoked to do in the first place, solve the mysteries. Perhaps Laudan’s criteria for theory selection might encourage scientists to prefer theories which give rise to new pseudo-problems because they worry that any theory that explains a problem fully ought to be distrusted. Of course this worry should only arise at the end of science (if such a moment could ever even come). Laudan probably believes that our best science is still in its infancy and that to think we’re even close to fully solving problems without remainder is to be hopelessly optimistic and idealistic about the current state of scientific knowledge.

Bonus Links

2011-10-12T16:20:00.000-07:00

"We haven’t yet solved the problem of God,” the Russian critic Belinsky once shouted across the table at Turgenev, “and you want to eat!”

Bonus Links

2011-08-24T12:29:00.001-07:00

Are the findings of Neuroscience Normatively Significant?

2011-08-22T23:17:00.000-07:00

Two differing opinions. I'll be breaking them down sometime within the next couple of months and tease out where the relevant differences lie.

From neural 'is' to moral 'ought': what are the moral implications of neuroscientific moral psychology? - Joshua Greene

The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience - Selim Berker

Against The Possibility of Resurrection

2011-07-27T13:19:00.000-07:00

In his essay "The Possibility of Resurrection", Peter Van Inwagen gives three arguments against an Aristotelian conception of resurrection in which, rather than humans having souls that leave our bodies after death, souls that eventually make it to heaven, it is our bodies that will instead be resurrected at the end of time. This view Van Inwagen holds is closer to biblical Christianity than the Platonic/Cartesian view that emphasizes the existence of a non-material soul instead. Being an Aristotelian Christian himself, Van Inwagen nevertheless sees such a view as riddled with some big problems. He offers the following three arguments against the possibility of human resurrection:

A. The atoms of which I am composed cannot be destroyed by burning or the natural processes of decay, but they can be destroyed, as can atomic nuclei and even subatomic particles. (Or so it would seem: The principles for identity through time for subatomic particles are very hazy; physical theory has little if anything to say on the subject.) If, in order to raise a man on the Day of Judgment, God had to collect the "building blocks"- atoms, neutrons, or what have you- of which that man had once been composed, then a wicked man could hope to escape God's wrath by seeing to it that all his "building blocks" were destroyed. But according to Christian theology, such a hope is senseless. Thus, unless the nature of the ultimate constituents of matter is different from what it appears to be, the "Aristotelian" theory is inimical to a central point of Christian theology.

B. The atoms (or what have you) of which I am composed may very well have been parts of other people at some time in the past. Thus, if the "Aristotelian" theory is true, there could be a problem on the day of Resurrection about who is resurrected. In fact, if that theory were true, a wicked man who had read his Aquinas might hope to escape punishment in the age to come by becoming a life-long cannibal. But again, the possibility of such a hope cannot be admitted by any Christian.

C. It is possible that none of the atoms that are now parts of me were parts of me when I was ten years old. It is therefore possible that God could collect all the atoms that were parts of me when I was ten, without destroying me, and restore them to the positions they occupied relative to one another in 1952. If the "Aristotelian" theory were correct, this action would be sufficient for the creation of a boy who could truly say, "I am Peter Van Inwagen." In fact, he and I could stand facing each other and each say truly to the other, "I am you." But this is conceptually impossible and therefore the "Aristotelian" theory is not correct.

He goes on to say "I conclude that my initial judgment is correct and that it is absolutely impossible, even as an accomplishment of God, that a man who has been burned to ashes or been eaten by worms should ever live again."

Source:

Van Inwagen, Peter (1978). ``The Possibility of Resurrection". International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9:114-121.

What Can You Infer About Someone Who Self-Identifies As An Atheist?

2011-06-29T13:31:00.000-07:00

Atheists are fond of saying things like: "Atheism is a rejection of belief in a deity, only. It says nothing at all about the beliefs a person does hold or his/her ethics, morals, or values." This is usually used as a means to criticize those who would lump all atheists together into one neat little group to attack or as a way to respond to those who claim atheists are nihilists or communists or some silly fundamentalist type of attack. This is nothing more than a subtle trick to prevent atheists from being lumped into a sociological aggregate of people which we may study to discover common trends and patterns of belief among those who self-identify as atheists.

There's a problem here though. The typical train of thought is something roughly along the lines of:

Atheism is defined by "a disbelief in the existence of deity"
You cannot logically infer anything about a person's extended web of beliefs merely in virtue of their identification as an atheist since, by definition, it is the lack of belief in some object X.
Therefore, you can't really say much about atheists as a whole.

The problem with this though is that it merely resorts to the dictionary for the definition of the word atheist and then asks us what kinds of things we can infer about a person based on the definition alone. But of course that's not the only way people come to have knowledge of the kinds of things other human beings believe. If I want to have a full picture of what Mormons believe I'm not going to consult the dictionary to find out. Instead I'm going to do a survey of the sociological data of the group in question to see what, empirically, we can discern are the general trends of beliefs among those who self-identify as Mormons.

The atheist is essentially asking us to imagine ourselves being in a type of Rawlsian veil of ignorance in which all background knowledge of atheists is wiped clean and we're asked what we can infer about a person standing in front of us if all we have to go by is his self-identification as an atheist. If this is the type of scenario we're under, then sure, there isn't much I can infer about this person's beliefs. I can't possibly know whether this person would be more likely to vote democrat over republican, I can't know what his stance on the abortion issue would be, I can't know if he's an ethical realist or anti-realist, etc. This is because all we'd have to work with is the mere dictionary definition of the word atheist.

But, again, this is flawed. If we apply this same criteria to Christians then, by the atheist's own logic, there's barely anything at all we can infer about the Christian's web of beliefs. We can do a parody of the reasoning along these lines:

A Christian is defined by "A person who has received Christian baptism or is a believer in Jesus Christ and his teachings."
You cannot logically infer anything about a person's extended web of beliefs merely in virtue of their identification as a Christian since, by definition, it is merely the belief in the person of Jesus and his teachings.
Therefore, you can't really say much about theists as a whole.

Most of the things we think we can say about Christians as a demographic are things we have received through experience. Things like "Christians are moral realists", "Christians tend to be republicans", "Christians are pro-life," "Christians believe in the sanctity of marriage", etc. None of these things are logically entailed by the definition of the word "Christian" itself. These are things we've learned to associate with the word Christian based on a typically white anglo-saxxon sampling of Christians as a whole. These are mental shortcuts given to us by experience.

If we put the atheist in the same position he asks us to be in, the veil of ignorance, and we ask him what he can infer about a person only given the knowledge that this person self-identifies as a Christian, what could he come up with?

Hardly anything. Here's a list of things he might say:

This person is likely to be Republican

Why think this person is an American Christian interested in American politics at all? All we're given is the word "Christian". Had we been given "This person is an American Atheist" we'd think "oh, he's probably a democrat." But the atheist is telling us that we can't look at anything but the definition. If we apply this consistently then you can't say anything about the Christian's political beliefs.

This person believes in the innerrancy of the Bible

How can we know this? There are plenty of Christians who don't. Again, the above is something given to us by experience, experience of what people who identify as Christians tend to believe. But once we use the "tend to believe" line we're now saying we're willing to allow experiential knowledge to be submitted into the pot and from there we can make inferences about the person. But why can we do this with the Christian but not with the Atheist? We have plenty of experiential knowledge about atheists. They tend to be democrats. They tend to be pro-choicers. They tend to be naturalists. They tend to accept the theory of evolution. Etc. None of these are logically entailed by the word atheist, but they're things we've come to know based on our interactions with them. Same thing with a Christian then. Very little is logically entailed by the mere title of "Christian". Just about everything we know about them comes to us via experience.

He believes in the literal resurrection of Jesus

Again, not everyone does. Plenty of liberal Christians don't. Unless the Atheist wants to make the very questionable move of "Ah, but a real Christian would believe it" this is not something we can infer. It'd be very suspicious if an atheist claimed to know what "real" Christians are supposed to believe. Isn't it they who are fond of catching Christians committing the No True Scotsman fallacy?

Is Pro-Life

Again, this is a sociological trend among Christians, not a logical entailment of the definition, which, again, is all the atheist claims we can look at.

If we go down the list of things we typically associate with the word "Christian" we quickly realize just how many of these things aren't things logically entailed by the title of "Christian" but are rather trends we have observed through sociological examination of what those who self-identify as Christians tend to believe.

Atheists aren't a special group immune from Sociological study, even if they'd like to think they are.

We can infer a great deal of things from someone who self-identifies with the word "Atheist" in very much the same way we infer things about people who call themselves Christians.

Evolution and Moral Knowledge

2011-06-03T19:20:00.002-07:00

"The Evolutionary Debunking Thesis: If S's moral belief that P can be given an evolutionary explanation, then S's moral belief that P is not knowledge."

Index in Progress:

A Darwinian Dilemma For Realist Theories of Value- Sharon Street
Dissolving a dilemma: why Darwinian considerations don’t confront moral realism with hard choices.- Kevin Brosnan
On The Evolutionary Debunking of Morality- Erik Wielenberg
Naturalism and Moral Realism- Michael Rea
The Evolution Of Morality- Richard Joyce
The Moral Lottery- Richard Chappell

Can A Naturalist Have Moral Knowledge?

2011-05-10T13:49:00.000-07:00

Evolutionary accounts of the origins of morality as offered by Primatologists like Frans De Waal raise some fundamental questions about the epistemic and ontological status of moral facts that we claim to know, or claim to be capable of discovering. In her paper “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”, Sharon Street argues that if a Darwinian account of the origins of morality as De Waal defends is correct, then a dilemma ensues for any person who accepts a type of moral realism in which moral facts are true independent of any of our moral evaluative attitudes. Here I will explain and Street’s Darwinian argument against moral realism and subject it to criticisms of my own and those offered by Derek Parfit and Erik Wielenberg.

The basic problem that Street identifies is this: If a Darwinian account of the origins of morality is true, then how can we be sure that our inherited moral evaluative attitudes correctly identify and track the objective moral truths that moral realism posits? Street wonders how it is that our evaluative attitudes, themselves shaped by the contingencies of history and unguided processes of evolution could somehow converge or accurately track evaluative facts or truths that are themselves objectively true regardless of our evaluative attitudes. By “evaluative facts” street means “facts or truths of the form that X is a normative reason to Y, that one should or ought to X, that X is good, valuable, or worthwhile, that X is morally right or wrong, and so on.” (Street) By “evaluative attitudes” Street means “states such as desires, attitudes of approval and disapproval, unreflective evaluative tendencies such as the tendency to experience X as counting in favor of demanding Y, and consciously or unconsciously held evaluative judgments, such as judgments about what is a reason for what, about what one should or ought to do, about what is good, valuable, or worthwhile, about what is morally right or wrong, and so on.” (Street) What reason do we have to believe that the contingencies of Darwinian evolution would equip us with the right sort of cognitive equipment that would produce evaluative judgments that are themselves truth aimed?

She wants to know “what relation there is, if any, between the selective forces that have influenced the content of our evaluative judgments, one the one hand, and the independent evaluative truths that realism posits, on the other.” This leaves the realist with two options, to either assert or deny a relation. In her paper, Street argues that adopting either horn of the dilemma will lead to an unfavorable conclusion for the realist. For the sake of space, I will merely cover the first horn of the dilemma and why the realist cannot adopt it.

If the realist wants to deny that there is a relation between the two then his position will be something roughly along the following: It is true that Darwinian forces have influenced our moral evaluative attitudes throughout history, but these forces have themselves not been truth aimed; if anything, these forces are random ones that sometimes, by mere coincidence, produce some true beliefs, while at other times leading us astray. Darwinian forces alone are not likely to have produced largely correct moral beliefs and evaluative attitudes that accurately track the independent moral facts of realism. An analogy offered by Street is the following: “On this view, allowing our evaluative judgments to be shaped by evolutionary influences is analogous to setting out for Bermuda and letting the course of your boat be determined by the wind and tides: just as the push of the wind and tides on your boat has nothing to do with where you want to go, so the historical push of natural selection on the content of our evaluative judgments has nothing to do with evaluative truth. Of course every now and then, the wind and tides might happen to deposit someone’s boat on the shores of Bermuda. Similarly, every now and then, Darwinian pressures might have happened to push us toward accepting an evaluative judgment that accords with one of the realist’s independent evaluative truths. But this would be purely a matter of chance, since by hypothesis there is no relation between the forces at work and the “destination” in question, namely, evaluative truth.” (Street)

If we accept the above then we are led to a practical form of epistemological moral skepticism. Given that Darwinian processes are not truth aimed, we have no good reason to trust our moral attitudes as correctly corresponding to the objective moral facts of realism. The realist however may have a way out of this. It is true that Darwinian forces have largely shaped and influenced our evaluative attitudes throughout history, but these are not the only forces that have influenced our evaluative attitudes. We aren’t merely creatures of instinct but are also reflective creatures. We know of times when our gut feelings to a moral dilemma are much different from the evaluative attitudes we reach when we reason about said dilemma. The realist then can invoke a form of reflective equilibrium by which we may rationally reflect through our evaluative attitudes and arrive at new ones that correspond with the objective moral facts of realism. Analogously “just as a compass and a little steering can correct for the influence of the wind and tides on the course of one’s boat, so rational reflection can correct for the influence of selective pressures on our values.” (Street)

Street is careful to note that her view does not deny at all that we are reflective creatures. She writes that “any full explanation of why human beings accept the evaluative judgments we do would need to make reference to the large influence of rational reflection. The view I am suggesting by no means involves thinking of us as automatons who simply endorse whatever evaluative tendencies are implanted in us by evolutionary and other forces. On the contrary, the view I am suggesting acknowledges the point that we are self-conscious and reflective creatures, and in a sense seeks to honor that point about us better than alternative views, by asking what reflective creatures like ourselves should conclude when we become conscious of what Kant would call this ‘bidding from the outside’ affecting our judgments.” (Street) The problem, as Street sees is, is that reflective equilibrium suggests that engaging in rational reflection provides a means of standing apart of our evaluative judgments, “sorting through them, and gradually separating out the true ones from the false- as if with the aid of some uncontaminated tool.” (Street) But this is not what reflective equilibrium does. It simply can’t do so, “for what rational reflection about evaluative matters involves, inescapably, is assessing some evaluative judgments in terms of others.” (Street) What equilibrium can do is help us sort out inconsistencies, look for holes in our reasoning, etc. What it does not do is create new evaluative judgments out of thin air. We may reflect on the logical and practical moral implications of viewing pain as an intrinsically bad thing on issues regarding, say, animals, and what ought to be done about it, but equilibrium itself does not produce the starting point that pain is a bad thing, it merely helps us flesh out what follows from this. Street writes that “rational reflection must always proceed from some evaluative standpoint; it must work from some evaluative premises; it must treat some evaluative judgments as fixed, if only for the time being, as the assessment of other evaluative judgments is undertaken. In rational reflection, one does not stand completely apart from one’s starting fund of evaluative judgments: rather, one uses them, reasons in terms of them, holds some of them up for examination in light of others…ultimately, we can test our evaluative judgments only by testing their consistency with our other evaluative judgments, combined of course with judgments about the (non-evaluative) facts.”

Thus, “If the fund of evaluative judgments with which human reflection began was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate influence- and the objector has offered no reason to doubt this part of the argument- then the tools of rational reflection were equally contaminated, for the latter are always just a subset of the former.” (Street)

There is a possible avenue for the realist to take here: perhaps moral truths are truths of reason. If we have good reason to trust our cognitive faculties as truth aimed in other realms (the truths of mathematics, truths of logic, etc.) then reflective equilibrium could be used to discover those truths. Instead of starting out with evaluative judgments given to us by the contingencies of history and evolution, we could ditch them, as best we can, and try to discover the moral truths of reason (I’m thinking something along Kantian lines here).

The Second Horn of the Dilemma:As noted earlier, Street’s argument poses a dilemma for the moral realist: to either assert or deny a relationship between the Darwinian processes that have influenced our development and the moral beliefs we hold. We have seen that the first horn of the dilemma: that of denying a relationship between Darwinian processes and the content of our moral beliefs leads the realist to an unpalatable conclusion: that we just so happened, through sheer accident, to come to possess moral beliefs and that they just happened to be correct. We have also seen that denying a relationship and putting forward the alternative of reflective equilibrium faces its own problems. These aren’t the only avenues available to the realist however. The realist may accept the second horn of the dilemma which Street describes as follows: “The answer is this: we may understand these evolutionary causes as having tracked the truth; we may understand the relation in question to be a tracking relation...Surely, he or she might say, it is advantageous to recognize evaluative truths; surely it promotes one’s survival (and that of one’s offspring) to be able to grasp what one has reason to do, believe, and feel. As Derek Parfit has put the point: it is possible that ‘just as cheetahs were selected for their speed, and giraffes for their long necks, the particular feature for which we were selected was our ability to respond to reasons and to rational requirements.’” (Street 28) In essence, correct moral beliefs proved advantageous to our species, and thus were selected for in our evolutionary past.

Street objects to this response by pointing out that such an account presents itself as a scientific explanation for the phenomenon in question. In response to the question “Why do humans hold the values that they do?” the tracking account responds that we do so because possessing said true beliefs proves/-ed advantageous in our survival. But, Street claims, this is not the only story we can tell, there are a number of different stories we can tell that can explain with just as much, if not more, explanatory power why we hold the evaluative attitudes we do. One such story Street offers is what she calls the adaptive link account: “tendencies to make certain kinds of evaluative judgments rather than others contributed to our ancestors’ reproductive success not because they constituted perceptions of independent evaluative truths, but rather because they forged adaptive links between our ancestors’ circumstances and their responses to those circumstances, getting them to act, feel, and believe in ways that turned out to be reproductively advantageous.” (Street 19)

This account suggests that there are selective advantages for certain behaviors that have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the beliefs in question. Street gives the example of helping someone who has helped one before: “Just as we may see a reflex mechanism as effecting a pairing between the circumstance of a hot surface and the response of withdrawing one’s hand, so we may view this evaluative judgment as effecting a pairing between the circumstance of one’s being helped and the response of helping in return. Both of these pairings of circumstance and response, at least if the evolutionary theory of reciprocal altruism is correct about the latter case, are ones that tended to promote the reproductive success of ancestors who possessed them.” (Street)

Street argues that when we compare the tracking account to her own adaptive link account, the latter wins in virtue of explanatory power, simplicity, and clarity. She writes: “Consider, for instance, the judgment that the fact that something wouldpromote one’s survival is a reason to do it, the judgment that the fact that someone is kin is a reason to accord him or her special treatment, and the judgment that the fact that someone has harmed one is a reason to shun that person or retaliate. Both the adaptive link account and the tracking account explain the widespread human tendencies to make such judgments by saying that making them somehow contributed to reproductive success in the environment of our ancestors. According to the tracking account, however, making such evaluative judgments contributed to reproductive success because they are true, and it proved advantageous to grasp evaluative truths. According to the adaptive link account, on the other hand, making such judgments contributed to reproductive success not because they were true or false, but rather because they got our ancestors to respond to their circumstances with behavior that itself promoted reproductive success in fairly obvious ways: as a general matter, it clearly tends to promote reproductive success to do what would promote one’s survival, or to accord one’s kin special treatment, or to shun those who would harm one.” (Street 21) The second horn of Street’s dilemma then places the realist in the position of having to defend the tracking account by means of offering it as an inference to the best explanation. This approach, however, simply wont work, as for every explanation offered for any given evaluative attitude X by the realist, Street will offer an equally compelling and much more parsimonious account that appeals only to the survival adaptability of said evaluative attitude and not much else. What views are immune to Street’s dilemma? Before assessing possible objections to Street’s dilemma it should be worth pointing out what positions are vulnerable to it and which ones are immune. One view that is immune to Street’s dilemma is a theistic moral realism. Street’s argument counts against moral realism under a naturalist worldview, more specifically, a naturalist worldview in which unguided Darwinian evolutionary processes are responsible for our development. A theistic evolutionary account of our origins would have an easy way out of Street’s dilemma: namely, we are not in the position that her Bermuda lifeboat analogy suggests. If there is some deity that roughly resembles the God of the Abrahamic religions and he is involved in our evolutionary development so as to ensure the instantiation of some telos for the human race then we may be warranted in believing that he has ensured our cognitive faculties accurately track moral facts. Street’s dilemma only counts against unguided accounts of Darwinian evolution.

Another view that is immune from Street’s dilemma are naturalist theories of value. Unlike non-natural moral realism, naturalist theories of value claim that evaluative facts reduce to natural facts. Street writes: “Since these ordinary natural facts are in the same general category as facts about fires, predators, cliffs, and so on, presumably there is going to be a plausible evolutionary account available as to why we were selected to be able to track them, just as I myself have supposed there is a plausible evolutionary account available as to why we were selected to be able to track facts about fires, predators, cliffs, and so on.” (28)

Thus the only view which Street’s argument counts against are non-natural moral realist views that place evaluative attitudes as obtaining independently of our evaluative attitudes.

Objections:
In his paper “On the evolutionary debunking of morality”, Erik Wielenberg argues that Street’s dichotomy is false, it is not the case that our beliefs are either perceptions caused by moral facts and thus constituting knowledge nor that our beliefs are mere projections of our internal attitudes and thus not constituting knowledge. Wielenberg adopts a third approach: that “despite not being caused by moral facts, at least some of our moral beliefs are reliably-formed and so constitute knowledge.” (Wielenberg 3) Wielenberg first points out that there are certain traits that are directly selected for by evolution because of their evolutionary adaptability and then traits that are indirectly selected for by in essence “piggybacking” on those directly selected for. He gives us the example of vision. For obvious reasons evolution is likely to favor creatures that can see the world around them over creatures that have no mechanism by which to interpret and know what is around them. Something like vision then can be seen as a trait that is directly selected for. Yet with this trait come many secondary traits that “piggyback” on it. One such benefit of vision is the ability to see distant stars on a clear night sky. Of course it is of no evolutionary advantage to be able to see stars, but given the adaptability of vision itself secondary non-adaptive traits like the ability to see distant stars are indirectly selected for.

Having sketched out this distinction, Wielenberg then attempts to give us an evolutionary story that accounts for many of our moral beliefs through this piggybacking effect. He first points out that it is an obvious evolutionary advantage for a creature to belief him/herself as possessing a “moral barrier”, a barrier that signals other creatures what types of actions may not be taken against the agent with the moral barrier. These actions include things like rape, murder, theft, etc. He writes that “At least part of the explanation for such moral beliefs’ ability to do this presumably lies in the fact that they can function as conversation (and deliberation) stoppers. Viewing ourselves as possessing boundaries that may not be transgressed no matter what provides a distinctive kind of motivation to resist such transgressions by others. Holding such beliefs disposes one to resist behavior on the part of others that typically dramatically decrease one’s prospects for survival and reproduction.” (7) We also apply this “moral barrier” to our offspring, though this is accounted for indirectly. Wielenberg reasons that we come to extend the moral barrier to others by virtue of applying something resembling the likeness principle, roughly “things that are alike with respect to their known properties are alike with respect to their unknown properties. This principle is selected for given that it “helps us to determine which of the many things we might eat will nourish and which will poison us.” (8) The same principle then is used to “lead us to conclude that non-kin posses the same moral barriers as ourselves...Because reasoning in accordance with the Likeness Principle benefits us across a variety of contexts, we are disposed to reason in accordance with it in moral contexts as well, where it may not serve our interests so well.” (9)

Wielenberg reasons that if evolution has given us sufficiently reliable cognitive mechanisms, and if those mechanisms are employed when grasping moral truths, then we have sufficient warrant for those moral beliefs to count as knowledge. If we take for example the likeness principle as discussed earlier, Wielenberg writes that “at least some beliefs are generated by the disposition to reason in accordance with the Likeness Principle. Given the laws of nature that hold in the universe, this belief-forming process has a high degree of conditional reliability. That is, when it takes true beliefs as inputs, it tends to produce true beliefs as outputs.” (13) If we imagine that a being who believes correctly that she has certain rights encounters a second being similar to herself with respect to its known properties, and “if the process of reasoning in accordance with the Likeness Principle leads her to form the belief that the second being has the same rights that she has, then this belief is formed by a conditionally reliable process operating on true beliefs.” (13)

It seems that Wielenberg’s argument forces Street into a dilemma of her own:
If Wielenberg’s account is correct, then the epistemic warrant our moral beliefs possess will be determined by the reliability of the cognitive process used to arrive at said beliefs. If the reasoning employed to arrive at our moral beliefs sufficiently resembles or just is the same type of reasoning we employ when we deliberate on other non-moral matters then Street must give us an account as to why such reasoning is trustworthy on these other matters but not on moral ones. To deny Wielenberg’s argument would commit Street to a thoroughgoing skepticism, one she does not intend to defend. Thus, Wielenberg forces Street to confront the following question: If the same cognitive equipment and reasoning processes are used to arrive at our moral convictions as they are to our non-moral convictions, then what reason is there to doubt the first but not the latter?

Wielenberg’s case concludes as follows: “If we assume that beliefs that are produced by highly reliable processes (including highly conditionally-reliable processes operating on true beliefs) have a degree of warrant sufficient for knowledge, then the evolutionary model sketched earlier implies that at least some moral beliefs constitute knowledge (again, assuming that moral barriers exist). If the evolutionary explanation of our beliefs about moral barriers sketched earlier is correct, and those barriers are real, then may of us know that we (and others) possess such barriers.” (13)

It is unclear what approach Street would take in responding to such an argument. Street’s argument is dangerously close to Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, an argument Street does not wish to endorse. Wielenberg’s argument however forces street to be skeptical of all our knowledge or otherwise accept that if some of our beliefs are warranted then, given the similarity of the process by which we arrive at moral beliefs, such beliefs can count as knowledge.

Another avenue for the critic of Street to take is to call into question her argument against reflective equilibrium. As Derek Parfit has put it: “At this point, however, the normative realist is in no better position than the person who question-beggingly insists that she won the New York Lottery, even though she has no reason to think so apart from the fact that she entered it. If we are normative realists, we think there is a “winning” coherent system (or systems) of normative thought; we also think there are countlessly many false coherent systems of normative thought, which, but for sheer good fortune on our part, causal forces might have shaped us to endorse; we think that as it so happens, ours is among (or approximating) one of the true ideally coherent systems; but when asked to give our reason for thinking so, all we can say is to repeat, in so many words, that it is among the true ones—to insist that we, and not the countless number of mistaken possible others, “see” or “sense” what is normatively true. But this is no better than insisting, without any non-trivially-question-begging reason to think so, that one has won the New York Lottery. Given the odds we can reasonably suppose to be in play in this “normative lottery” case, we should conclude that in all probability we didn’t win—that, if there is indeed such a thing as the robustly independent normative truth we are positing as a substantive normative premise, then we are probably among the unlucky ones who (just like the ideally coherent Caligula, grass-counter, hand-clasper, and so on) are hopeless at recognizing it.” (Parfit) Furthermore: “That's not to say that our first-order normative beliefs necessarily suffice as a decisive refutation of Street's skeptical argument against realism (there's more to Street's argument than there is to the whimsical despot's demand), but nor can they be dismissed as entirely irrelevant or 'illegitimate' to appeal to. If we want to work out what to believe, we need to consider all our beliefs -- everything we find most plausible, and judge to be (likely) true -- in wide reflective equilibrium, and work out how best to fit the various claims together: what to keep, and what to discard, to yield the overall most plausible conclusions.” (Chappel)

Yet another avenue to attack Street on is her contention that if a belief A can be explained solely in terms of its evolutionary adaptivenes then any appeal to its truth will be superfluous. This argument echoes Gilbert Harman’s argument that moral facts aren’t required to explain why individuals believe that some actions are morally right or wrong given that sociological and psychological explanations suffice to provide such explanations. Contrary to this view, Kevin Brosnan argues that “if a natural fact, whether about fitness or burning cats, screens-off a moral fact from a moral belief, it does not follow that moral facts are either independent of moral beliefs or that they are causally inert with respect to them.” (Brosnan 23) For this he gives the following example:

“Suppose my dialing your telephone number causes your phone to ring, and the ringing of your phone causes you to answer it. The proximate cause screens off the distal cause from the effect; if your phone rings, the probability of your answering it is the same regardless of whether it is I who has dialed your number (you don’t have caller ID). But this hardly shows that my dialing your number does not cause you to answer your phone.” (24)

Further, Brosnan makes the distinction between the selecting for and selecting of a trait. Selection for a trait happens when the trait in question increases fitness. Selection of a trait however can be perfectly compatible with traits that are causally inert to fitness. To illustrate he gives the following example:

“Suppose that in a population of beetles, there is selection for being fast, since fast beetles evade predators better than slow ones. Suppose further that the number of spots on any beetle’s wings is selectively irrelevant- there is no adaptive problem in the beetle’s environment that spot number affects one way or another. Now suppoes that all and only the fast beetles have 12 spots on their wings. It follows that if fast is selected, so is having 12 spots. Because of the perfect positive correlation between these two traits, their fitness values are identical. The trait of having 12 spots is fitter than the trait of having some number other than 12, despite the fact that it is causally inert with respect to fitness. Being fast is selected for, having 12 spots is selected of. So moral beliefs can evolve by natural selection even if having this or that moral belief doesn’t cause a fitness difference.” (25)

I have sketched out Sharon Street’s Darwinian argument against realist theories of value and have subjected it to various criticisms offered by myself and others who have found her argument unpersuasive. One argument is that if one accepts a reliabilist account of human knowledge then the cognitive processes responsible for most of our beliefs are the same behind our moral beliefs. If we doubt the latter then we should doubt the former unless one can give a relevant difference between the two, a task Street has not done. Another avenue of attack is to criticize her forbidding of the use of reflective equilibrium to examine whether the content of our moral knowledge is true. Her argument that appeals to the truth of a moral proposition is superflous to account for our belief in it is also problematic. It seems the naturalist is well within his epistemic rights to assert possession of moral knowledge.

Citations:

Brosnan, K. “Dissolving A Dilemma: Why Darwinian Considerations Don’t Confront Moral Realism With Hard Choices.” University of Cambridge.

Chappell, Richard. "The Moral Lottery." Philosophy, Et Cetera. N.p., 4 May 2011. Web. 10 June 2011.

Street, S. (2006). “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value.”

Philosophical Studies, 127, 109-166.

Wielenberg, Erik J. (2010). On the evolutionary debunking of morality. Ethics 120 (3):441-464.

Sam Harris Vs. William Lane Craig Debate

2011-04-14T14:06:00.000-07:00

Points-wise, Craig won as usual. But his moral argument still sucks.

Harris's Moral Landscape isn't that much better.

A First Unmoved Mover

2011-02-26T21:26:00.000-08:00

This was too great not to repost:

"The Atomists – Leucippus (if he existed) and Democritus – had this idea that there were a load of atoms zooming around a void, and sometimes they’d bump into each other, and as a result – occasionally – form compound substances.

Aristotle complained that the Atomists hadn’t explained the source of all this motion; basically, he didn’t much like that the idea that motion and the continuation of motion might not need an explanation.

So here’s an amusing thing (if you’re amused by things that aren’t amusing, that is). This is how Frederick Copleston handles this issue in Volume 1 of his (remarkable, actually) history of philosophy (pp. 74-5)

To us, indeed, it may well seem strange to deny chance and yet to posit an eternal unexplained motion…but we ought not to conclude that Leucippus meant to ascribe the motion of the atoms to chance: to him eternal motion and the continuation of motion required no explanation. In our opinion, the mind boggles at such a theory and cannot rest content with Leucippus’ ultimate; but it is an interesting historical fact, that he himself was content with this ultimate and sought no “First Unmoved Mover”.

Okay, well that’s pretty clear. Bad Leucippus. This is how Bertrand Russell handles the same issue in his History (pp. 66-7).

Aristotle and others reproached him [Leucippus] and Democritus for not accounting for the original motion of atoms, but in this the atomists were more scientific than their critics. Causation must start from something, and wherever it starts no cause can be assigned for the initial datum. The world may be attributed to a Creator, but even then the Creator Himself is unaccounted for. The theory of the atomists, in fact, was more nearly that of modern science than any other theory propounded in antiquity […] All causal explanations…must have an arbitrary beginning. That is why it is no defect in the theory of the atomists to have left the original movements of the atoms unaccounted for.

Copleston and Russell were both writing at roughly the same time, but they have a very different take on this issue. The explanation? Copleston was a Jesuit priest; Bertrand Russell, wasn’t."

Source

Bonus Links

2011-02-26T19:58:00.000-08:00

Why are (some) physicists so bad at Philosophy?
Recovering Sight After Scientism
The New Philistinism: "The New Atheist writers are supremely self-confident in their ability to dispatch opponents with a sarcastic quip or two. And they show no evidence whatsoever of knowing what they are talking about."
Why materialism is Unscientific
Christian Fundamentalism: Fighting Ideas with Bullets
John Lennox/Peter Atkins Dialogue: In this video (and audio), provided by The Big Questions website, ProfessorJohn Lennox and Professor Peter Atkins discuss the God question and what science can or cannot reveal about a Creator. (Why anyone ever invites Peter Atkins is beyond me. He has nothing interesting to say.)
The Templeton Foundation: Friend or Foe?- "The Templeton Foundation claims to be a friend of science. So why does it make so many researchers uneasy?"
How The Internet Gets Inside Us
God And The Ontological Foundation of Morality
China Bans Reincarnation Without Government Permission
Rejection Letters of Ancient Philosophers

And a ton more at the Philosopher's Carnival.

Does Philosophy Make Progress?

2011-02-23T10:23:00.000-08:00

John Loftus should know better. Why does he quote this approvingly?

"I do think it’s fair to say New Atheists favor science and are suspicious of philosophy generally, and theology in particular. To my mind, there are several good reasons for this.

Like me, I suspect most New Atheists grew up seeing and benefitting from the ever-increasing fruits of science. It’s been said a million times, but I don’t think it can be over-emphasized: Science works. Science produces things. Philosophy and theology, on the other hand, seem only to produce more and more words.

Neither ever seem to resolve anything. Witness the debate over Thomism vs. Scotism...I’ll admit to knowing very little about either, but I do know that Duns Scotus died around 1300, about 40 years after Aquinas. Can you think of a significant scientific dispute that remains no closer to being resolved after 700 years? Shit, philosophers still debate Euthyphro.

Another example:

At least 4/5 of the medical profession thought that Louis Pasteur was a raving lunatic about antiseptic practices.

But Pasteur was a scientist, not a philosopher. And within only a few decades of years the doubting four-fifths had come around, and Pasteurization was ubiquitous around the world. So I put it to you – in how many years can we expect Thomas’ Fifth Proof, or the Kalaam, or the Argument from Reason – or even just Dualism, for cripe’s sake! -- to be accepted with similar unanimity?"

Let's break this down:

"Science produces things. Philosophy and theology, on the other hand, seem only to produce more and more words."

Yes, Science produces things. Awesome things. Cool things like iPads, iPhones, Android phones, space shuttles, airplanes, satellites, all that cool stuff. But this criticism is misguided. Every field produces something. What is it that the author of the quote wants Philosophy and Theology to produce? Things like iPads I suppose, but why should we expect Philosophy or Theology to produce the same kinds of things that science produces? That's what science is there for, to investigate certain phenomena, empirical phenomena. As a result new discoveries sometimes allow us to manipulate what we observe which in turn leads to cool inventions and technologies that increase our quality of life. By his logic though we'd also have to throw out fields like Sociology, Critical Race theory, Literary theory, Religious Studies, History, Political Theory, and any other number of academic disciplines that don't "produce" the types of tangible things he asks for. But why should we care about his silly demands? What these fields produce is thought. Critical thought about the issues they each target. Does the author propose we simply stop thinking about how race affects the power structures of society simply because thinking about these issues don't produce the "results" he demands, whatever it is that he means by "results"? Does he propose that we stop thinking about matters of ethics since at the end of the day ethicists can't seem to agree on much? Should philosophers stop writing about the moral conundrums of trolley problems since they're so damn hard to get around? Should we simply stop reading and writing about great classic novels and works of literature since to do so would only produce "more words"? What exactly is wrong with "more words" anyway? If the words are meaningful then there's nothing wrong with them, in fact they're of great value.

"Neither ever seem to resolve anything. Witness the debate over Thomism vs. Scotism...I’ll admit to knowing very little about either, but I do know that Duns Scotus died around 1300, about 40 years after Aquinas. Can you think of a significant scientific dispute that remains no closer to being resolved after 700 years? Shit, philosophers still debate Euthyphro."

Does not being able to solve a centuries old problem indicate a problem with the field and that the entire enterprise is nonsense and should be thrown out, or does it perhaps point to the difficulty of the problem instead? Progress in Philosophy is slow because we don't have the tools available to solve them. Does he have any solutions other than "just give up because you've been debating this for so long now that you're not ever gonna solve it."? Isn't that a rather unscientific attitude?

Regardless, he's wrong. Progress is being made in Philosophy, and has been made. Slowly, but it happens. The author at Philosophy, et cetera gives us a few examples:

Knowledge does not require certainty. But nor does justified true belief suffice.
Psychological egoism is false: it is possible to act from non-selfish desires, i.e. for some good other than your own welfare.
Rational egoism is false: we are not rationally required to always and only act in our own self-interest.
(E.g. Moral) Principles may take situational variables into account without thereby sacrificing their claim to objectivity.
The question whether God actually exists is independent of the question whether there is genuine normativity ("ought"-ness).
Valuing tolerance needn't lead one to moral relativism. (Quite the opposite.)
Red herrings may (and black ravens may not) constitute evidence that all ravens are black.
It's not analytic (true by definition) that cats are animals. But it is metaphysically necessary: there is no possible world containing a cat that is not an animal.
Slightly more controversial (but still extremely well-supported, IMO):
"Common-sense" morality, with its agent-relative ends, is self-defeating.
Capitalism is not intrinsically just. (Libertarianism must be defended on consequentialist grounds, if any. Those who think otherwise are confused about the nature of property and coercion.)
It is possible for desires (or ultimate ends) to be irrational. So there is more to rationality than just instrumental rationality.
One may be harmed by events that took place prior to their coming into existence.

Gary Gutting has also written a book titled "What Philosophers Know: Case Studies in Recent Analytic Philosophy"

Luke Prog from Common Sense Atheism gives more examples:

"Many philosophy professors are also trained scientists conducting their own experiments to test philosophical theories. Philosopher Thomas Metzinger helped found the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, and has helped conduct experiments that separate our self-model from our bodies (in order to study consciousness). Joshua Greene is a philosopher and neuroscientist working on the borders of psychology and philosophy. Joshua Knobe, Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Prinz, Shaun Nichols, Edouard Machery, Stephen Stitch, and many other philosophers have conducted experiments aiming to learn about people’s folk intuitions about philosophical ideas. As for researchers in cognitive science, it is often hard to know whether to call them philosophers, psychologists, or neuroscientists – often, these researchers are probably all three.

Philosophers of biology and physics are working at the theoretical cutting edge of those fields, and their work is often indistinguishable (and interactive with) professors in biology or physics departments who work on those same problems.

A few examples only from the philosophy of biology: In the 1970s, philosophers Alexander Rosenberg, Mary B. Williams, Susan Mills, John Beatty, and Elliot Sober helped biologists overcome the apparent tautology involved in saying “the fittest will survive” (“fittest” was defined in terms of “survival”). Philosophers have also produced new results by carefully analyzing the mathematics of population genetics (Pigliucci & Kaplan, Making Sense of Evolution; Okasha, Evolution and the Levels of Selection), helped revive group selection theory in evolutionary biology (e.g., Sober and Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior), and clarified certain confusions in the biology literature (e.g., Orzack and Sober, Optimality and Adaptation). Philosopher David Hull helped biologists apply systematics to the study of phylogeny in the 60s and 70s. Philosophers such as Kenneth Waters, Lindley Darden, and many others have also contributed to conceptual progress in molecular biology.

Then there are scientists who, like Hawking, publish philosophical work – except that most of them are more rigorous and careful than Hawking when publishing philosophy. E.T. Jaynes was an important physicist, but his most lasting legacy will be his work in philosophy: specifically, in probability theory. Much of the debate in string theory (or M Theory), or in how we should interpret quantum mechanics, turns out to be philosophical and not scientific, because the empirical data cannot (yet) decide the issue. Hawking himself argues for M Theory on philosophical grounds in The Grand Design, because the scientific data have not yet arrived.

Third, it is worth remembering the subject matter of philosophy. We use to philosophize our way to theories about astronomy, chemistry, physics, and psychology. But once our tools and methods were developed enough, these fields were handed (mostly) over to science. So it should not surprise us that, for example, philosophers have little to contribute to chemistry. They are still working on other problems, like philosophy of language, epistemology, and value theory.

So not only is it untrue that philosophy is no longer contributing to physics, it’s also the case that even if it was true, philosophy would be far from dead, because it is (obviously!) working on other problems than physics and the other sciences."

"In how many years can we expect Thomas’ Fifth Proof, or the Kalaam, or the Argument from Reason – or even just Dualism, for cripe’s sake! -- to be accepted with similar unanimity?"

Newsflash, virtually nothing in Philosophy is accepted with unanimity. Why? Because these are tough topics in which reasonable people can and do disagree viciously. What solutions does he have? Presumably he thinks we should turn to science to answer all these questions. Well, here's my challenge to him, show us how a scientist could go about investigating and solving the following philosophical questions. After all, if science is the only way of knowing, and it is the only field that produces results then it follows it should easily handle these questions. Again, sketch out a research project by which scientists may research these questions empirically so that we may finally make up for the time wasted by those awful philosophers who don't seem to be up to the task themselves. Tell us what a scientist can contribute to the following that a philosopher can't. While you're at it, sketch out what experiments and instruments you'd use to investigate the following that haven't already been tried by philosophers:

A priori knowledge: yes or no?

Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?

Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?

Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?

Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?

Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?

Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?

Logic: classical or non-classical?

Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?

The list can go on and on, but it seems like the hypothetical savior scientist the author envisions should have no trouble solving these in a timely manner. Good luck.

What Theists Must Believe, And Why I Can't.

2011-02-21T21:21:00.000-08:00

The evidential problem of evil states the following:

There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
(Therefore) There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.

Some clever theists have responded by performing what is called the "G.E. Moore Shift":

There exists an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.
An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
(Therefore) It is not the case that there exist instances of horrendous evil which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.

The argument is certainly valid. The reasoning behind it is that if we have solid grounds for believing a maximally great being exists (the Christian God for them), then this belief provides the grounds for accepting the conclusion that there are no cases of gratuitous (aimless and pointless) suffering in the world.

But I don't buy it. I simply can't buy it. Firstly, if the theist wants to use the G.E. Moore shift he/she is burdened with the task of either demonstrating that God exists or at the very least showing that His existence is more plausible than not. A heavy burden to have to take on to say the least.

The problem here though is that, quite simply, no argument for God's existence gives us such a strong confidence that He exists that it makes the plausibility of premise "there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being" higher than "There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse."

When we judge the two side by side, which one are we more confident in? My intuitions immediately tell me that premise two not only is far more likely, but it seems obviously true. To put it in perspective, Keith Parsons lays it out:

"Still, the situation theists face with respect to the existence of evil is one where the odds seem to be overwhelmingly against them. Let’s suppose that, since the first existence of life sufficiently neurologically advanced to suffer pain (far back in the Paleozoic, no doubt) there have been a trillion (10¹²) instances of undeserved, unwanted suffering (seems a reasonable number). The theist must hold that God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting every single one of those trillion instances of suffering, that is, not one can be gratuitous. Obviously, a being cannot be perfectly good if it permits pointless suffering—even one instance—that it can easily prevent. Hence, if one Diplodocus once suffered needlessly in the Jurassic, then God does not exist. Since we have presupposed a trillion instances of unwanted, undeserved suffering over the history of sentient life, the theist must hold that each such instance of suffering has nearly a zero chance of being gratuitous, otherwise the probability of the disjunction of these trillion individual probabilities will add up to a very high probability that some evil is gratuitous.³ What rational grounds could anyone have for holding that no sentient creature anywhere ever suffered needlessly? Here I shall merely assert that theists have no rational basis for such an assurance, and put the ball in their court to show that they do."

Essentially, imagine every death that has ever occurred in nature. Every single fight between animals that led to the suffering of at least one of them. Every forest fire that has ever happened in nature that led to the destruction, suffering, and death of the animals in its ecosystem. Every case of still conscious animals being eaten alive by their predators while they sat there defenseless. Every case of a cat torturing a mouse before its death. Imagine every single bit of pain that animals have aggregately suffered since the evolution of animals with neurological mechanisms advanced enough to feel pain came about, and imagine the theist telling us that not, a, single, one of them could have been otherwise. That every single instantiation of pain in nature was necessary to bring about some greater good, a greater good we have no way of determining or identifying. The theist must read about the endless suffering found in nature and then say "It is all for the better."

This is what the Christian theist must believe. As Parsons says, this is not a rational belief, this is an article of faith. The atheist is simply expected to believe this is true, without argument, in spite of what we observe daily in front of us.

I don't have that faith. Believing what Christian theists ask me to believe would lead to a thoroughgoing skepticism about all inferential statements I make in every day scenarios. It would lead to my inability to trust my judgment or observations in nature. It would lead to moral paralysis, since, after all, why should I help out an animal in need if I know that God necessarily will bring about the greater good, regardless of how I act in any given situation?

I can't believe this. And if I find myself unable to believe this crucial premise, then, logically, I cannot believe the conclusion. And that conclusion entails that there is no God.

So be it.

As Parsons concludes:

"So, Plantinga admits that Christians do not know why God permits evil. He thinks that, despite this, Christians can still have confidence that God does have good reason for permitting evil. But how??? How do we penetrate the wall of imponderables raised by Craig and other defenders of the UPD? If the capacities and opportunities of omnipotence are unknown, then they are unknown. NONE of us can say with any confidence whether God probably does or does not have good reasons for permitting evils. So be it. In that case, NONE of us can say with any confidence that God exists."

Some Thoughts On Gratuitous Suffering

2011-02-20T19:54:00.000-08:00

According to the evidential problem of evil there exist instances of suffering in the world that seem to have no greater justifying purpose for their occurring. A famous example is to imagine Bambi getting caught in a forest fire and dying a horrific fiery death. Cases like these provide prima facie evidence for gratuitous suffering (suffering which has no greater justifying purpose) which in turn is used to construct an argument against God's existence.

The theist response is to argue that just because we don't see a justifying reason for the suffering of the animal doesn't mean there is no justifying reason that we simply don't have any access to for a myriad of different reasons. The idea is that even if we don't know what God's reasons are for allowing suffering there is simply no compelling reason to believe we'd be the first ones to know what they are. Thus the basic gist of the response is best summarized by Plantinga:

“Why suppose that if God does have a reason for permitting evil, the theist would be the first to know?”

That's a very rough sketch of the debate. The blog Philosophical Disquisitions has a far more detailed sketch of the state of the debate here. Keith Parsons also has a pretty good and layman level summary here.

In thinking about this, I've found that I have some loose strands of thought regarding instances of gratuitous evil. Firstly, I think we can say with a relatively high degree of confidence that no instance of seemingly gratuitous evil is causally inert. By this I mean that even if we can't think of a single possible outcome that could morally justify the suffering we observe, we can at least know that said suffering does affect the world in at least one way. That is: we can talk about it. Here's one possible way that a suffering squirrel or a burning Bambi could lead to a net gain of good in the world. Say a hiker comes across the charred burnt carcass of Bambi. Like many people before him, he questions what possible reason God could have had for allowing Bambi to burn. He sees no bite marks on the corpse which leads him to believe that no animals had a chance to feast on it which in turn would lead to their continued survival for the forseeable future. By all appearances, Bambi died and the world didn't even blink. To the hiker, this would surely count as an instance of gratuitous suffering. Yet, possibly, when thinking about the possible reasons God could have had for allowing Bambi to die the hiker turns his attention to things external to himself. He thinks about the possible effects on the ecosystem, and upon concluding that there were no effects, he gives up in despair on not finding any reasons. But perhaps the chain of events that leads to the justifying reason starts with the observation that an animal died an apparently gratuitous death. From the simple fact that the death of Bambi has changed what the hiker was and would be thinking about (presumably his attention would have never turned to gratuitous suffering had he not come across the corpse) we can conceive a myriad of outcomes that in turn themselves have causal relations with other events in the future that continue to multiply beyond our epistemic horizon.

One such possibility is that this hiker is led to pick up books of philosophy written on the subject of evil which then furthers his interest in philosophy, or leads him to contribute to the debate, or leads to his desiring to discuss what he has read with his friends or family members which in turn can spark a chain of events far into the future from leading one of them to become a philosophy major to further explore these problems and diving into the literature which leads to teaching it to others which in turn leads to the comfort of those who are suffering in times of need, etc. The point is, from the mere event of observing a corpse an entire (possibly endless) chain of events can unfold which somehow lead to the justificatory reason for Bambi's original death. Certainly, reflection on the suffering of animals will in the future lead to our looking for ways to remedy that suffering through medical means.

One problem with this line of thought however is that this could only account for cases of suffering that we directly observe, either in the moment or in the aftermath. The observing of Bambi's carcass led to a chain reaction that could possibly reveal and instantiate its justification. Yet what about cases of suffering we simply never observe? Surely animals die painful deaths in the Saharan dessert or the Amazon or the Tundras of the world that we simply never observe. Sure, nature documentaries bring the suffering to our attention some of the time, the times there are cameras rolling, but we have pretty good reason to believe (at least most sane people would) that such suffering continues even after the cameras are long gone. I think most of us would be perfectly comfortable with believing that there have been plenty of animals that have died and continue to die this very moment painful deaths that we never had a chance to find out about. A lion kills a Gazelle this very moment in some remote region of the world where no human will see its remains or the actual instance of the killing. How can these cases causally affect the world in a way that will instantiate the justifying reason later down the line? It's hard to say.

One question I have is whether each specific case of seemingly gratuitous suffering in the world necessarily has its own justifying reasons down the line. What if the knowledge of suffering in general is what leads to the instantiation of the justifying reason? Perhaps the death of the Gazelle didn't locally or immediately affect anyone around it in such a way that it brings about the justifying reasons later down the line, but perhaps the general knowledge that such Gazelles exist and suffer does the work. Though this itself has its own problems, namely, why do we need so many cases? Wouldn't one observed case of gratuitous suffering be enough to bring the issue to the public consciousness? It's impossible to tell. And that's the difficulty of assessing the evidential argument from evil, the possibilities are infinitesimal. We simply can't know what avenue it is that God takes to bring about the greater good.

At any rate, I think it is pretty safe to say that at a bare minimum, cases of seemingly gratuitous suffering are not causally inert. The knowledge they exist is a good enough starting point to sketch out possible theodicies and also may be the route by which the good comes about. After all, the more philosophers and laymen talk about the problem of evil, the more complex the causal chains become that start from a mere observation to a much larger network of events that could potentially provide the overriding reasons God had for allowing the suffering of certain animals.

As Keith Parsons did, I think it best to leave the final word to Alvin Plantinga:

"Why does God permit all this evil, and evil of these horrifying kinds, in his world? How can they be seen as fitting in with his loving and providential care for his creatures?…The Christian must concede he doesn’t know. That is, he doesn’t know in any detail. On a quite general level, he may know that God permits evil because he can achieve a world he sees as better by permitting evil than by preventing it; and what God sees as better is, of course, better. But we cannot see why our world with all its ills, would be better than others we think we can imagine, or what, in any detail, is God’s reason for permitting a given specific and appalling evil. Not only can we not see this, we can’t think of any very good possibilities. And here I must say that most attempts to explain why God permits evil—theodicies, as we may call them—strike me as tepid, shallow and ultimately frivolous. Does evil provide us with an opportunity for spiritual growth, so that this world can be seen as a vale of soul-making? Perhapssome evils can be seen this way; but much leads not to growth but to apparent spiritual disaster. Is it suggested that the existence of evil provides the opportunity for such goods as the display of mercy, sympathy, self-sacrifice in the service of others? Again, no doubt some evil can be seen this way…But much evil seems to elicit cruelty rather than sacrificial love. And neither of these suggestions, I think, takes with sufficient seriousness the sheer hideousness of some of the evils we see."

Bonus Links

2011-02-14T19:37:00.000-08:00

Frontline one hour special on for-profit universities.
The Male Privilege Checklist
An overview of published scientific studies on how men can attract women. Because Science is the best pickup-line.
The Neuroscience of Music
Reductio Ad Ridiculum. Christopher Hitchens's favorite debate tactic.
Paul Haggis vs. The Church of Scientology
Religion Today: Are we ready to meet an alien culture?
Zombies! Zombies?
Is The Unconscious Philosophical Zombie Possible?
Hating God: The Untold Story

The Singularity, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Meta-Ethics:

Anyone interested in reading more on this topic should read check out the book Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Artificial Intelligence.

This video is also gold:

The challenge of friendly Artificial Intelligence

William Lane Craig And The Inner Witness Of The Spirit

2011-02-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

"William Lane Craig insists that nothing could possibly counter indicate the truth of the Gospels because of a self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit in his heart than gives him knowledge independent of all questions of evidence.

...Before I or any other doubter, atheist, skeptic, or non-believer engages in a discussion about the reasons for and against God, the believer must look deep into his heart and mind and ask this question: Are there any considerations, arguments, evidence, or reasons, even hypothetically that could possibly lead me to change my mind about God? Is it even a remotely possible outcome that in carefully and thoughtfully reflecting on the broadest and most even body of evidence that I can grasp, that I would come to think that my current view about God is mistaken? That is to say, is my belief defeasible?

If the answer is no, then we’re done. There is nothing informative, constructive, or interesting to be found in your contribution to dialogue. Anything you have to say amounts to sophistry. We can’t take your input any more seriously than the lawyer who is a master of casuistry and who can provide rhetorically masterful defenses of every side of an issue. She’s not interested in the truth, only is scoring debate points or the construction of elaborate rhetorical castles (that float on air).

In all fairness, we must demand the same from skeptics, doubters, and atheists. They are just as guilty of conflict if they rail against religious beliefs for lacking rational justification, but in turn there are no possible considerations that could ever lead them to relinquish their doubts."

Via Dangerous Idea

Source

Craig makes a distinction between how one knows Christianity is true versus how one can go about showing how/why Christianity is true. He claims he knows via the self-authenticating witness of the holy spirit whereas his arguments are used to show others who lack said witness why it is justified. He makes a curious point:

"The answer is that the witness of the Holy Spirit is unmistakable (though not indubitable) for him who has it and attends to it."

He claims the inner witness is not indubitable which literally means there may always be some reason for us to doubt it. Consider the following argument then:

-That which is indubitable cannot be wrong.

-The inner witness of the spirit of the holy spirit is not indubitable

---

Therefore, the inner witness of the spirit can be wrong.

Premise one may be tricky to defend given that there may not be any necessary connection between indubitability and its being necessarily true. Indubitability may always simply be a psychological state. We can think of a possible scenario in which we program an A.I.'s mind into not being able to doubt the goodness of its creators. For the A.I. then, it is indubitable that his creators are benevolent and good beings whereas we know that this isn't necessarily the case. If indubitability is merely a psychological state of affairs then premise one is wrong.

Yet, the way Craig is using "the inner witness is not indubitable" seems to mean that "there may be grounds for doubting its truth and reliability" which therefore means there may be possible overriding evidence that will come in the future that will give us an epistemic defeater for trusting the witness which therefore means the inner witness cannot be the catch-all defeater defeater for all philosophical objections to Christianity as Craig takes it to be. Consider the following statement by him:

"My knowledge of Christianity’s truth, while supported by strong arguments, is not ultimately based on those arguments but on the witness of God Himself. If, therefore, I find myself confronted with a well-prepared and articulate Mormon who blows away my arguments and presents a case for Mormonism that I can’t answer, I should not apostatize, since I have the witness of the Holy Spirit to Christianity’s truth and so realize that although I’ve lost the argument, Christianity is nonetheless the truth (and I need to be better prepared next time!)."

I may be mistaken, but it seems plainly obvious that Craig here takes the inner witness of the holy spirit to be a defeater for every argument thrown his way. But then, why would he say the inner witness is not indubitable? What if we labeled an argument against the reliability of the inner witness of the spirit? To assume the spirit's reliability in order to fight off said argument would be question begging so he'd be forced to defend it on other grounds...but then he's back on to playing the evidentialist game which he claims the inner witness of the spirit does away with.

Something has definitely run afoul here. Either Craig misspoke or his position is self-defeating.

Disagreement Does Not Entail Irrationality

2011-01-20T09:42:00.000-08:00

From William Rowe's "The evidential problem of evil and some varieties of atheism":

"Suppose your friends see you off on a flight to Hawaii. Hours after take-off they learn that your plane has gone down at sea. After a twenty-four hour search, no survivors have been found. Under these circumstances they are rationally justified in believing that you have perished. But it is hardly rational for you to believe this, as you bob up and down in your life vest, wondering why the search planes have failed to spot you. Indeed, to amuse yourself while awaiting your fate, you might well reflect on the fact that your friends are rationally justified in believing that you are now dead, a proposition you disbelieve and are rationally justified in disbelieving. So, too, perhaps an atheist may be rationally justified in his belief and yet hold that some theists are rationally justified in believing just the opposite of what he believes."

Was Foster's character in Contact guilty of irrationality for continuing to believe in what she experienced despite the fact that she could produce no evidence to convince an outside observer? In a scenario like the one in Contact it seems pretty clear that Foster's character is justified in continuing to believe in her experience while at the same time the skeptics were perfectly justified in their disbelief. No one is guilty of irrationality in this case. Both beliefs cannot possibly simultaneously be true, but both beliefs can simultaneously be rational. There's an important distinction there. Same with the theism/atheism debate. Neither side necessarily has to be guilty of some form of irrationality. Perhaps a theist did everything in his/her power to examine the evidence and arguments and came to the conclusion that perhaps an argument like the Leibnizian Cosmological argument points to the existence of a necessarily existing creator and sustainer of the universe. Of course this argument is contested, but there's nothing even closely resembling a full blow disproof of it. In cases like these reasonable people may disagree without either side being guilty of violating some type of intellectual duty.

Why faith isn't enough.

2011-01-15T14:13:00.000-08:00

I've just thought of a possible way one can deal with a family member who insists that questions about God and religion are best left up to faith and not to reason or science. This is all simple elementary logic but if you have family members like mine it still needs to be said.

The argument in this blog is directed against a "layman's" idea of faith rather than a more philosophically sophisticated one like say, J.P. Moreland's claim that faith is "trusting that which you have good reason to believe is true." He could be right in that historically speaking that's what the term "faith" has meant, but for the purpose of this blog I'll set that aside and simply focus on what the average person on the street thinks about faith which tends to be something along the lines of "continued belief in the absence of evidence" or "belief despite contrary evidence."

Whenever I have a conversation with family members over religion (always because they try to find a way to take a jab at me and start arguments with me, never the other way around) I get exasperated because the conversation typically runs something like this:

Family member: "How can you not believe in God?!?!"

Me: "The list of reasons is too long, but a short version basically boils down to: not enough evidence."

Family member: "But thinking like a scientist will only disappoint you in the end. Always questioning everything will never give you fulfillment. People like you end up questioning whether even the rocks in front of you exist!"

Me- *sigh* "That's just silly."

Family member: "Why don't you try FAITH? Just believe and trust. You'll never get the evidence you need, but try FAITH."

To which I never know how to respond. You can't argue with that. Whenever a family member brings out the faith card they've officially admitted that they're not interested in truth or evidence or genuinely going wherever the better arguments take them. To them, even in the absence of evidence, it is a worthwhile and praiseworthy thing to believe. I could try to explain to them philosophically why said position is dangerous and irresponsible, but it's to no avail.

Even if I can never convince them to give up such outmoded ways of thinking I think perhaps there might be a way to shut them up and steer the conversation towards your home turf:

Whenever a family member asks you to just try faith all you need to do is respond with "I do have faith. I have faith that God doesn't exist." That'll obviously shock them and probably catch them off guard. It'll shake them for a few minutes, but once they're done thinking about it, they'll most assuredly reply with something along the lines of faith in God being greater or preferable to faith in no God. Once you say "Okay, I have faith" you're officially in a scenario of "Faith vs. Faith." If they want to convert you, which they most assuredly do, they'll have to find a way to demonstrate why faith A is better than Faith B. And how could they do that? They can't just arbitrarily tell you "have faith in A, just because!" The only way someone could persuade you from abandoning faith in A in favor of B is if said person has better reasons for believing in B. One need not even say something like "I have faith that there is no God", all one really needs is to provide the following scenario:

Person X has a whole buffet line of religious beliefs in front of him.
You have religion A, B, C, and D. Each respective religion requires the faith of its adherents. This is essentially the way things are right now with Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all requiring faith that the central claims of each are true.

Now, all one needs to do is ask the religious believer the following:

"I have a muslim friend who has been telling me about the Quran and the things Islam preaches. He's telling me that I should have faith in Allah and that I will be rewarded in the end. You're telling me to have faith in Jesus and I'll be rewarded in the end. How can I non-arbitrarily pick between the two?"

This will force the person who believes religion should be left up to a matter of faith instead of reason to necessarily engage in evidential forms of arguing if they want to convince you. They'll have to demonstrate why the probability of A being true is higher than B's or something along those lines. If they hope to do so they'll have to muster up some arguments for A which then steers the conversation into a much more comfortable position for the person like me who studies Philosophy of religion and who enjoys arguing the merits and flaws of specific pieces of natural theology. If they can't come up with reasons then they've admitted that their faith is completely arbitrary, irrational, and can simply not be supported. You can then follow up with the question of why it would be a commendable thing for you to follow in the footsteps of that type of irresponsible thinking. I can assure you, as someone who has been in many arguments over these things, showing why a specific argument for God's existence fails is much more interesting and fun and rewarding than attempting to show someone why "believing by faith alone" is bankrupt and dangerous.

Moral of the story: Steer the conversation in such a way that your opponent will be forced to defend their belief through argument rather than allowing them to hijack the conversation and beating you over the head with the word "FAITH".

Faith never settled anything. Arguments did.

Apologetics Are a Strange Thing

2011-01-08T10:49:00.000-08:00

Over at the faith interface blog they've reposted an excerpt from J.P Moreland on "Three ways Christians must change."

Moreland's suggestions are:

1. Christians need to start using cognitive language and not just faith language.
Christians need to use terms relating to knowledge, evidence, reason, learning and thought, in addition to language about a tender heart and about faith. The Bible uses the word “knowledge” more than it does the word “faith”. Christians must become comfortable with the idea of ourselves as a community of thoughtful and learned people. A Christian can be learned without being snooty or arrogant.
If knowledge “puffs up”, the solution is not IGNORANCE. The solution is HUMILITY.

2. Christians must be taught how to argue for their faith and defend their faith. Christians need to be taught why they believe what they believe.

3. Christians need to restore a view of Jesus Christ as an intellectual; as an intelligent and thoughtful person with a knowledge of reality – in addition to being holy. Christians must restore the value of the life of the mind in the Christian community.

I completely agree with 1, and he's written extensively on it in his book Love your God with all your mind.

Number 2 is puzzling to me though. The phrase "Christians need to be taught why they believe what they believe" is very revealing about the way people arrive at their religious views.

How could you be "taught" why it is that you believe something? Isn't that a bit oxymoronic, or at the very least just ass backwards? If you need to be "taught" what reasons there are and what evidence exists for that which you already believe then it simply follows that you did not arrive at that belief through and as a result of those reasons, otherwise you would presumably already know those reasons and wouldn't need someone to teach them to you. Essentially this is confirmation by an apologist that for the most part, people come to belief in God through nothing resembling careful evidence based thinking but rather they come to a belief in God and then seek out evidence that confirms what they already believe. Everyone already pretty much knows this, but as an apologist I would love to hear Moreland's take on whether or not the belief of the people he is instructing was justified prior to his teaching them the evidence. Knowing him though he'd probably go with something like the inner witness of the holy spirit serving as the ultimate justification for belief in God, with reason and evidence playing a secondary role.
William Lane Craig has already admitted it:

"…the way we know Christianity to be true is by the self-authenticating witness of God’s Holy Spirit. Now what do I mean by that? I mean that the experience of the Holy Spirit is… unmistakable… for him who has it; …that arguments and evidence incompatible with that truth are overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Spirit…¹

…it is the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit that gives us the fundamental knowledge of Christianity’s truth. Therefore, the only role left for argument and evidence to play is a subsidiary role… The magisterial use of reason occurs when reason stands over and above the gospel… and judges it on the basis of argument and evidence. The ministerial useof reason occurs when reason submits to and serves the gospel. In light of the Spirit’s witness, only the ministerial use of reason is legitimate. Philosophy is rightly the handmaid of theology. Reason is a tool to help us better understand and defend our faith…²[The inner witness of the Spirit] trumps all other evidence.^3"

Moreland's suggestion only confirms what Michael Shermer has always said:

"Smart people believe weird things because they've become skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."

Dawkins: Dishonest or Deaf

2011-01-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

Dawkins needs to go away already. No one takes him seriously except for fellow buffoons like the rational response squad.