Why Calvinists Can't Solve The Problem of Evil

I'm going to redate the old post, but I'm fixing the argument from evil to leave out the stuff about the best of all possible worlds.

The title here suggests that Arminians (or maybe universalists) can solve the problem of evil, and maybe that's something I don't want to imply. However, I am going to argue that while the theist has some hope of providing a rebuttal to the argument from evil if Calvinism is false, the theist who is as Calvinist is thoroughly embarrassed in the face of the atheist argument.

Let's look at the atheist argument from evil. The argument goes as follows:

1. God, if God exists, is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good.
2. If there is a God, then there is no unnecessary evil.
3. But there is unnecessary evil.
4. Therefore God does not exist.

Now a lot of responses to the problem of evil employ two themes. One of those themes is that many evils in the world are not caused by God, but are the result of God's allowing creatures to act freely. If God makes us free to commit murder or not to commit murder, then God cannot guarantee that we not commit murder. Second, some things that seem evil from a temporal, present-day perspective may not be evils from an eternal perspective. So, for example, it may seem to me to be an evil that I have a certain health problem, but from God may see that there are elements of character that will improve within me if I suffer from this health problem.

The problem with Calvinism is that on the Calvinistic view God sovereignly determines the outcome of every action. And there are situations which persevere into eternity which very clearly could have been better. In particular, "Smith's going to hell" is a situation which goes preseveres into eternity and is not going to get better.

Consider what philosopher Douglas Jesseph calls "The World of Mr. Rogers."
In the world of Mr. Rogers, it's all a big happy neighborhood and everyone does what is right, and then go to heaven when they die. This world is obviously a better world than this one. Just ask anyone who has gone to hell and see if they wouldn't prefer the World of Mr. Rogers.

Do creatures in the World of Mr. Rogers act freely? If you accept the Compatibilist theory of Free Will, then they do. The Compatibilist points out that there is a difference between doing what you want to do, and doing what you don't want to do. You act unfreely if you are dragged in chains back to your jail cell. You act freely if you are listening to your favorite CD, playing your favorite game, watching your favorite movie, etc. When your actions and your desires match up, you are acting freely. If your actions and desires don't match, then you aren't.

Now suppose you have the desires that you are caused to have. God arranges it so that you always want to do the right thing. God controls your desires and then gives you the freedom, that is the power, to act out those desires.

Given this theory of free will, it is easy to see that God could still give us free will and nevertheless still be able to create the World of Mr. Rogers, where no one sins and no one goes to hell. If Calvinism is true, then that is exactly the kind of free will that God has granted us. Calvinists will often say that God has every right to punish us for our sins because, after all, it is not the case that we wanted to do the right thing and were forced against our will to do the wrong thing. Rather, we did what we wanted to do, even though we were predestined to do it.

Is the World of Mr. Rogers boring? Well, if it's boring, then heaven will be boring too, because heaven is supposed to be a sin-free zone.

The simple fact is that if Calvinism is true, then God could have created the World of Mr. Rogers, but sovereignly chose not to. Why?

At this point it is possible to now appeal to human limitations, either limitations in human knowledge or in human goodness. Even though we can't see that this world is better than the WMR, it really is better, even though some people are damned in this world and no one is damned in WMR.
I think these arguments from the limits of our knowledge have more force where the final outcome is unknown or inadequately understood. We know the final outcome in both worlds. Everyone is happy in the WMR and everyone gets saved. Many people suffer in our world and some are lost.

Another way of replying is to present a version of Paul's rebuttal from the Book of Romans, "Who are you, o man, to answer back to God?" Now if this is a version of the argument from the limitations of our knowledge, which I think it is, then it has some value, but not on a Calvinistic scenario. If however, it is a way of simply dismissing the argument from evil, it is a transparently question-begging argument. The AfE questions whether there is a God, that is, a being omnisicent, omnipotent, and perfectly good, to answer back to. We cannot assume that such a being exists in order to eliminate the question as to whether or not an OOP being exists.

But why would God want to give us any kind of free will other than the kind of free will that the compatibilist (and the Calvinist) is prepared to admit? The incompatiblist holds that human beings have the kind of freedom that is incompatible with our acting from a determining cause. If we sin, we could have done otherwise under the actual circumstances.

Consider a Star Trek I once saw. There was a man, who in the show was named Flint, who was born several thousand years BC, whose body was able to regenerate whenever it was damaged, granting him an virtually endless life. What that meant was that, over and over again, he saw his companions and wives die. He ended up on a planet in outer space where he decided to build the perfect companion, an android named Rayna. Rayna could converse with him on any subject imaginable, could be physically affectionate, but there was one problem. Its "love" for Flint was fully and completely determined by Flint's programming, and therefore was deficient as love. So Flint brought the Enterprise and Captain Kirk to the planet so that he could be a rival for Rayna's affections. (Captain Kirk was, in more ways than one, modeled after President John F. Kennedy--JTK, JFK. Say no more.) Anyway, since Rayna was an android, Rayna couldn't choose freely, and so fell over and became deactivated.

If God is love, then isn't there something deficient about love that is fully and completely determined by the one who recevies the love? If this is the case, then there is a good reason why a loving God might choose to give us incompatiblist freedom, even if this freedom results in sin and perhaps even eternal separation from God for some persons.

A response of mine on Logic Matters on the Trilemma

These are some comments of mine from the Logic Matters blog.

The trilemma seems to be pointing to two sets of facts or, at least apparent facts. On the one hand we have the moral genius of Jesus, the kind of moral genius that produces things like the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and on the other hand we have the claim, implicit and explicit through the Gospels, to be God. The discussion thus far has been presupposing that both of these set of facts are real facts, but want to say that they are psychologically compossible in Jesus. I was trying to show with my student story that we have good reason to suppose that it is hard to believe that this combination could exist in the real world, and that we would certainly not expect someone who was deluded into believing oneself to be God could even be good and wise enough to be a fair grader and a good classroom teacher, much less a moral genius of the caliber of Jesus. So I was trying to support your side of this discussion, Mike. If you accept the "local delusion" theory suggested by Smith here and by John Beversluis in his revised book, then the students should be reassured by the dean. But the dean's reply doesn't seem reassuring to me at all. Of course here probabilities have to enter the picture--if you have priors according to which any naturalistic account is preferable to any supernaturalist account, then of course the LLL argument isn't going to carry any weight. Or you can say that the facts I alluded to above are only apparent facts but not facts. But what seems to me to be implausible is to accept these two sets of facts as facts and somehow fail to see a serious dissonance that requires some explaining, to say the least. The argument is not bad, or stupid, or idiotic, in my view. The existence of possible alternatives doesn't mean that those alternatives are plausible.

On Calvinism and Evil

One of my earliest posts was one entitled "Why Calvinists Can't Solve the
Problem of Evil" Steve Hays on Triablogue responded to it,

SH: Let's return to his syllogism:
 
1. God, if God exists, is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good. 
2. If there is a God, then there is no unnecessary evil, that is, an evil
that the world would be better off without. As Leibniz would say, if there
is a God, then this is the best of all possible worlds. 
3. But there is unnecessary evil. This is clearly not the best of all possible
worlds. 
4. Therefore God does not exist. 
 
The weak link is #2.
 
1.Assuming, for the sake of argument, that there is a best possible world,
why is God obligated to create the best possible world?
 
The choice between better and best is not equivalent to a choice between
good and evil. A second-best possible world could still be a world without
any unnecessary evil. Indeed, it could be a world without any evil at all.
Or does Reppert deny the possibility of alternative goods? Can?t there be
more than one good state of affairs?

VR: I didn't necessarily support this version of the argument, and since I?m
a theist I of course don?t think its conclusion is true. Perhaps Leibnizian
creative requirements are excessive.  What we are talking about here, though,
are gratuitous damnations. We are talking about people suffering an eternity
of torment and separation from God. I take it the Calvinist is claiming that
God could have given everyone free will (in the compatibilist sense) and
then caused everyone to do what is necessary to receive saving grace. If
there was a reason for God not to make earth the World of Mr. Rogers, surely
God should make eternity the world of Mr. Rogers.

SH: 2.That brings me to the next point: why assume there is a best possible world?
It's like asking if a Gothic cathedral is better than a Byzantine basilica.
Now, you can say that one Gothic church is better than another, or that one
basilica is better than another.
 
But one type of architecture may have distinctive esthetic values which cannot
be replicated in another type of architecture. 
 
VR: Maybe there isn't a best of all possible worlds. Maybe God created all the
good worlds. The question is, is a world in which someone is damned by decree
before the foundation of the world a good world?

SH: Is the common good the greatest good? What if there is no greatest good for
the greatest number? What if there's a tradeoff between a greater good for
a lesser number, and a lesser good for a greater number?
 
Reppert says: "And there are situations which persevere into eternity which
very clearly could have been better. In particular, "Smith's going to hell"
is a situation which goes preseveres into eternity and is not going to get
better."
 
No doubt the situation could have been better for Smith. But is what is good
for Smith equivalent to the summum bonum?
 
What is good for Smith is good also for those who love Smith. And someone
who is being perfected in love is going to love Smith. The more we love our
neighbor as ourselves, the more we find the eternal damnation of our neighbors
unacceptable.

I realize that this is in large part Tom Talbott's argument for universalism.
The only conceivable escape from it is the argument that Smith has chosen
self over God, and that God could have done nothing to prevent Smith from
continuing in that choice without violating Smith's freedom. However, that?s
an Arminian theodicy of damnation, not a Calvinist one.

SH: What if a greater good for Smith entails a lesser good for Baker, Brown,
and Jones? 

How could it? Baker, Brown and Jones all love Smith, since they are in God?s
community of love.

SH: 3.In addition, what if greater goods are second-order goods, contingent on
the evil abuse of first-order goods?
 
I don't see any possible second-order good arising from a disobedience that
persists for an eternity.

SH: 4.In fact, don't we find this very theodicy implicit in the pages of Scripture?
To take a few examples:
 
It was not that this [blind] man sinned, or his parents, but that the works
of God might be displayed in him? (Jn 9:3).
 
Jesus said, "For judgment I came into this word, that those who do not see
may see, and those who see may become blind?" (Jn 9:39).
 
Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace
abounded all the more? (Rom 5:20).
 
For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, ?For this very purposes I have raised
you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed
in all the earth'? (Rom 9:17).
 
What if God, desiring to make known his power, has endured with much patience
vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches
of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory??
(Rom 9:22-23).
 
But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by
faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe? (Gal 3:22).
 
None of these involve eternal disobedience. In one passage at the end of
the famous Romans 9-11 section, Paul says:

For God has shut up all in disobedience so that He may show mercy to all.

So that's the point of all the shutting up in disobedience, the hardening
of hearts, the vessels of wrath. This is all aimed at having mercy upon all.
And no, let's not play any Calvinist word games about what all means.

SH: 5.As to his final paragraph, there are a couple of problems:
 
i) As a matter of human experience, is love always a choice? Isn't it natural
for parents to love their children, and children to love their parents? As
a rule, isn't this a spontaneous and involuntary affection for our own?
 
But is a love that is guaranteed by the actions of the one being loved real
love, or puppetry?

ii) Reppert begs the question of whether it's even possible for God to confer
libertarian freedom on his creatures. There are some things God cannot do
without ceasing to be God.

Now look who's putting limits on the power of God.

A Princeton Seminary Student's Defense of Universalism

HT: Ed Babinski.

Roger Peck on Design Arguments for God

Reply to the Calvinists

In the course of our previous discussion on Calvinism, there are several lines of argument that need attention. I think the Calvinists have taken somewhat divergent lines in defending their position. Bnonn seems inclined to be critical of my claim the conception of goodness that we apply to God needs to be continuous with the concept that we apply to human beings. He seems, much more that Paul, to want to push in the general direction of theological voluntarism. He maintains that while we do, and must come to Christ and to Scripture with a conception of what goodness is, we must be prepared to allow our conception of goodness to be corrected by Scripture. There are two problems with his suggestion.
First, while I admit that Scripture can correct my conception of goodness, accepting reprobation would, on my view, not be a correction, but an out and out reversal, of what goodness seems to me to be. If Hitler was wrong to send people to Auschwitz, could it be OK for God to send people to an everlasting Auschwitz, when he could have chosen eternal bliss for them?
Second, it’s the very influence of Scripture on my character that makes Calvinism a problem. Scripture teaches that I should love my neighbor as myself and undermines the idea, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, that there are people outside the pale of being my neighbor. If I think about the people whom I come the closest to loving as I do myself, I don’t find that there are two good options, either an eternal bliss in relation to God, or eternal justified punishment forever and ever separated from God. The more I love someone, the less acceptable the second option is.
Finally, the summum bonum that God pursues in saving and damning is supposed to be his own glory. How in the world does damning someone eternally glorify God. How does taking voices out of the heavenly choir glorify God? Sending people to hell by a decree before the foundation of the world deprives God of glory.
Paul Manata does not think that Calvinism relies on theological voluntarism, and does therefore think that God’s goodness, even on a Calvinistic view, is in some way commensurable with goodness as human beings ordinarily understand it. He claims Sudduth blows the idea that Calvin is a theological voluntarist. He quotes a passage with suggests otherwise, but I wonder how he would interpret the following statement form the Institutes

The will of God is the highest rule of justice, so that what He wills must be considered just…for this very reason, because he wills it. (Institutes, vol ii, chap 3, trans. John Allen. Philadephia: Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, p. 23) quoted in John Beversluis’ C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion p. 230.

Now, as I see it not much turns on whether Calvin was a voluntarist (or, to use Beversluis’ terminology, and Ockhamist) or not. I suspect that a textual case could be made on both sides of the issue. I am more interested in Manata’s suggesting that, for the most part, you can use many of the same defensive responses to the problem of evil if you are a Calvinist. Of course you can’t use the free will defense, but there are other considerations used by people like Plantinga, Alston, Adams, etc, that a Calvinst can still use.

In particular, most responses to the problem of evil make use of some sort of argument from human epistemic limitations. In response to, say, Loftus’ argument that a good God would have given us wings, theists point out that while this looks like an improvement to someone like Loftus, it is fairly easy to see that if we were to consider all the effects of giving us wings, it might not be an improvement.

In many cases, we find that some things that seem to be gratuitously evil turn out to have good sides we couldn’t see. The wicked act of selling Joseph to the slavers resulted, after a long chain of events, in Jacob’s family being able to settle in Egypt and to avoid the ill effects of the famine. So if something appears evil, it may not be because

1) We don’t see all the causes and effects that will result for this so-called evil.
2) We don’t see the long-term consequences of the evil.
3) We don’t see the eternal consequences of the evil.
4) We don’t see the possible bad consequences of eliminating the evil.

Now if someone went to hell as a result of divine decree who could have been saved, and I say that isn’t something a good God could permit, which one of these mistakes could I be making? It’s a final result for someone’s soul. We see all the causes and effects, at least so far is this particular life is concerned. The long-term consequences are known, even the eternal consequences are known, and the alternative possibility of God’s saving that person is also known. So my error can’t be traced to any of these four sources. So where did I go wrong if I thought this would be wrong for God to do, but it really isn’t? It must be that my conception of goodness is dead wrong. That’s all that’s left.

Reply to Solon

Respectfully, if you want to speak on this topic you need to go study philosophy seriously, and not in the wasteland of the typical Anglo-Saxon phil. department in the US. Christian belief is centred on the notion of a true world of being, apart from the false world of becoming. I.e., Christianity condemns the bodies we know, this world we know, as false and meaningless.

This strikes me as a misrepresentation. The world is, of course, God's creation according to Christianity. We're Christians, not Gnostics.

Christianity has placed all value in another world for which it has no evidence whatsoever, but in which you must have faith.

Again, a misrepresentation. Christians offer evidence on behalf of their beliefs. Or very often do. I'm not a fideist. Now it may turn out that evidence is lacking, but you aren't entitled to just assume this.

Your only value is that you partake in it by the mystery of the "soul." The suspicion arises, however, that this "other" world does not exist, and that it is thus, as the opposite of this world, the opposite of life, i.e., death, nothingness. Ultimate judgments are never true but only useful semiotically, revealing of the judgment creators.

If true, this would include your own comments. You're in no better or worse shape than the Christians you attack. Your own ultimate judgment is no more true than mine on your own view!

Christianity's genealogy suggests it's judgments arose out of a hatred of life, by a people that suffered from life. Is Christianity an expression of revenge upon life? Hence a form of illness?

Now you are claiming to make true judgments about what is ill and what is healthy. If there's no truth, you can't do that.

Peter Smith of Cambridge attacks the LLL argument

By doing what John Beversluis also does, suggesting that if Jesus claimed to be God, and wasn't, the delusion could be, and likely was what I would call a local delusion, not necessarily affecting his overall moral character or his moral teaching.

HT: Eric Thomson.

Some Shorter Statements of the AFR

From Jim Slagle, who wrote his master's thesis on the AFR at the University of the Louvain in Belgium.

I'm getting fried on the Internet Infidels Discussion Board again

Same old stuff. It's an appeal to ignorance, Carrier refuted me back in 2004, apologists are are dishonest because, after all, they're apologists you know. It's late and I'm tired.

Answering back to God, or is it Fred?

God could want there to be wicked creatures for his own good purpose???

Which purpose? So that others might be saved. We can imagine the following scenario: Smith and Jones are members of the Crips, Jones dies is a drive-by shooting and Smith has a vision of Jones in hell. Smith repents of his sin, accepts Jesus as his Lord and Savior, becomes an inner-city minister who brings thousands of kids otherwise headed for a life of gang violence to Jesus.

Except for one one thing. Smith, and every one of those gang kids could have been saved by God's sovereign decree if he had chosen to give it. Jones' eternal damnation could have been avoided without any further loss of souls.

It is easier to make these "hidden good" arguments where the hidden good might become evident once if we knew what free choices other people might have made, or where we don't know the final outcome of everything. Hurricane Katrina, for all its horror, could end up resulting in more people going to heaven than would otherwise have gone to heaven. But for every soul which suffers eternal punishment. we know that that sould could have been saved, and that that person's being saved would not have resulted in any other person's being lost. The final result is known, to suggest that some other final result would not have been better would be to violate every moral intuition I have.

But shouldn't I nevertheless accept it because it is taught in God's word? God, by definition, is a being who is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good. A being who predestines people for everlasting punishment doesn't meet the third requirement, and therefore isn't God. So if the Bible teaches predestination and reprobation, it is not God's word, but only the Word of an omnipotent Fred.

Who are you O man, to answer back to Fred? Not such a show-stopper, is it?

Schick on arguing from science to atheism

Here's a version of a popular line of argument from science to atheism.

HT: Sara Sciborski Munson.

An argument against compatibilism

Here's an argument against compatibilism.

1. If compatibilism is true, then God could have created the world in such a way that everyone freely does what is right.
2. If God is omnipotent and perfectly good, then, if God could have created the world in such a way that everyone freely does what is right.
3. But God did not create the world in such a way that everyone freely does what is right.
4. Therefore, compatiblism is false.

Oh yeah, 1 is true only if theism true. But theism is true, therefore, the argument works!

A debate between John Schellenberg and Jeffrey Jordan

Jeff Jordan and I shared an office at during my year at Notre Dame in 1989-1990. This debate contains his re-deployment of Pascal's Wager.

Wau! A New Religion

I just became an abolitionist!

Now why would I need to do a thing like that? Because just as torture didn't end with the Spanish Inquisition, slavery didn't end with the Emancipation Proclamation, even in America, sad to say. I'm afraid that a lot of what you buy in the store was made by slaves. Where's Frederick Douglass now that we need him?

Tom Gilson was on this a long time ago

This was published by BreakPoint, critical of Dawkins' claims about child abuse.

From my exchange with Parsons on Secular Outpost

You have a duty as a parent to teach your children what you think is true, not what you think is false. Whatever goes wrong when a parent teaches Young Earth Creationism to a child goes wrong when someone comes to accept those beliefs, not in teaching the doctrine to one's children. Creationists don't think that what they are teaching is false, they think it's true, otherwise they wouldn't teach it.

As a Christian I think it's wrong to teach atheism to a child, since, on my view, it gets the wrong answer to the question of God. I also think it's wrong to teach YEC to children because I don't believe that, and I think it especially regrettable if the parent teaches the child that anyone who dissents from YEC is something less than a real Christian. It;s unfortunate that they hold those beliefs, but they still have a duty to be honest in teaching their children In most cases, however, a parent should not be shy about tell a child what they themselves believe.

It's wrong to teach dogmatic and narrow-minded Christianity to children, just as it's wrong to teach dogmatic and narrow-minded atheism to children. In view Dawkins-style atheism is just another brand of fundamentalism. Anybody who thinks that nonbelievers have a monopoly on open-mindedness has beeen drinking Kool-Aid.


I'll stand by my basic claim: Dawkins' comparison of religious upbringing to child sexual abuse is horrendously irresponsible. Even where teaching the doctrine of hell is concerned, you have to consider how it is done; what understanding of hell is presented and how the presentation is done. It can be harmful, but it need not be. No such distinctions need to be drawn in the case of child sexual abuse. We have solid documentation of the claim that however it is done, child sexual exploitation does grievous harm. Speculating about needed to protect children from religious "indoctrination" raises the automatic question as to who will do the protecting.

We all want our children to get the "right" answers to the big question in life. We have to look closely at the concept of indoctrination. Parents will give the child a world-view which does give that child a set of control beliefs--I don't see how that's avoidable. But of course they're bound to question those when they grow up.

Reply to Bill Snedden on teaching hell

VR: "And if someone believes in hell, it then gets problematic to argue that they ought not to teach the doctrine at all (keep it secret?). At most one is left with the constraints about age-appropriate teaching, which I was trying to cover in my post."
Bill S.: I don't find it problematic at all to argue that people who believe in morally repugnant notions ought not to teach them. If a concept is morally evil, then it shouldn't be taught as good, period. Whether a person believes that concept to be good is wholly beside the point.
Parents who are KKK members and believe that miscegenation is morally evil should not teach such rubbish to their children. That they disagree is beside the point.
Your point about different views of the doctrine of hell is well taken, I think. However, if we were to agree that a doctrine of eternal torment was morally repugnant, would we not also agree that it should not be taught to anyone (as true), much less children?
VR: I think some of the discussion has gotten a little off track here, and I think I ought to get it on track.
First, we might distinguish between ways in which we might assess different versions of the doctrine of hell.
1) Doctrines of hell which are morally coherent and at least plausible from within a Christian perspective.
2) Doctrines of hell that, in the final analysis, are morally incoherent, but which can be held in good conscience by at least some Christians.
3) Doctrines of hell which are morally incoherent, and where the moral incoherence should be evident to anyone who reflects on it.
I realize that there are arguments for the claim that no doctrine of everlasting punishment falls into category 1, and that this case is made not only by atheists but by universalist Christians like Tom Talbott. Another position might be that while the DEP may not be incoherent, many popular versions of the doctrine are morally incoherent. If the missionary's truck broke down on the way to the village before the dying man preached the gospel to him, and he ends up in an eternal torture chamber rather than in eternal bliss because of it, then I've got to be concerned about the concept of eternal punishment in use here.
Another example of a doctrine that I find morally incoherent is Calvinism. In spite of the biblical and moral arguments which I have heard over the years, this view just seems to be just completely incoherent morally. It's a view that leaves me just shaking my head at how anyone can actually believe that God can do that and be good. And yet, I know that there are Christians of good will and good conscience who believe it.
I'm not saying this to launch a debate on that topic. I'm saying I would oppose the claim that people who believe this should refrain from teaching it to their children. That's what they honestly think is true. If they don't teach it to their children, they would be liars. It now becomes a matter, and a matter only, of how they teach that doctrine.
Suppose, however, the doctrine could not be held by a reasonable person. That is what Bill is suggesting when he talks about the KKK and people who oppose miscegenation. The problem here seems to be that the doctrine shouldn't be believed by any reasonable person. But if, my some intellectual failure, it is believed by someone, I think I would still have to say that you can't argue that it is wrong to teach the honest truth to one's children. The error, the intellectual dishonesty if that is what is involved, occurred when the belief was formed. I don't see how you could give someone a reason not to teach some particular version of the doctrine of everlasting punishment to children (even a version of it that you or I might both find detestable) without at the same time giving the holder of the belief a reason to abandon the doctrine itself.
If I fire a gun at someone I think to be and armed robber, and I shoot an innocent 15-year-old boy instead and kill him; if we assume that I am within my rights morally to shoot an armed robber under these circumstances, then depending on how I formed my belief that the moving object over there really was an armed robber, I could be morally in the clear for firing the shot, even though an innocent 15-year-old died as a result.
You have to act on the beliefs you have, not the beliefs that someone else might wish that you had.

On teaching the doctrine of hell to children

More from my response to Parsons' thread on the Secular Outpost.


Any world view, except the sunniest forms of theistic universalism, I take it, commits you to unpleasant realities that you probably are not going to be too eager to teach to your children, and if you do teach them to your children, you would have to do so in a gingerly way, exercising a certain amount of caution in making sure that the teaching was done in an age-appropriate way. A Christian who taught the doctrine of hell to a five-year-old, or a Christian who used made a special effort to present the doctrine of hell in an especially terrifying way, with the intent of scaring the child into proper behavior, would be teaching the doctrine abusively. But an atheist who constantly emphasized to their children that their Christian schoolmates who hope for an eternal life in heaven are deluded, and that when you die you rot, rot, rot, would be teaching the atheist view of death in a way that seems to me abusive as well. If you had someone who, through no epistemic fault of their own but due to some unfortunate intellectual circumstances, came to hold that the Jews controlled the banking industry and that black people were inferior (Darwin seems to have held that latter belief), then one would have to teach those beliefs to one's children in some sort of appropriate way. You can't teach your children what you think isn't true, you have to teach them what you think is true. That's what makes this nonsense about "teaching falsehoods to children" nonsense. I have trouble believing that an educated person today could hold those kinds of beliefs without some sort of culpability, just as I am sure Dawkins doesn't think that anybody could believe in the doctrine of everlasting punishment without some culpability.

On the Tolkien Estate

HT: Colin Duriez. With some information about previously unavailable Tolkien work.

The New Atheists and the Religious Right: Two Peas in a Pod?

The Secular Outpost: SUPERLATIVELY SILLY SUPER-SENSITIVE SECULARISTS:

VR: "I would object myself to compulsory religious education in the public schools, which you could have surmised if you, well, read my comment. Of course Dawkins can complain about that; I would complain about it myself and I think, so would C. S. Lewis. My complaint is that some of the people in the New Atheist group start sounding like they want the government to actively support atheism. You can't advocate that and at the same time object to such lovely institutions as prayer in public schools. If you subscribe to the thesis that whoever is in power gets to promote their own favorite beliefs in the area of religion (the thesis that got 1/3 of the population of Europe killed in the 17th Century), then you're on the same page with Oliver Cromwell, Cotton Mather, and Charles V.

In the Soviet Union they didn't send believers to re-education camps, they just made sure that kids were taught Soviet atheism in the public school and prevented parents from teaching Christianity to children. The New Atheists at least sound as if they are suggesting the same idea. If they are saying that, they are making themselves hypocrites when the oppose the sort of joining of Church and State advocated by the Religious Right in America. If they're not saying that, then they need to be a lot more careful about what they say."

Reply to Parsons on the New Atheism

Keith: We've discussed this quite a bit over at my place. It is one thing to criticize critics of religion for excessive rhetoric and inadequate justification for the assertions they make. I think that case can be made against Dawkins and company. It is another thing to criticize them for being unduly harsh. Here it gets tricky. One should be entitled, it seems to me to attack real intellectual fraud in as harsh of terms as is necessary. However, if one is really making an intellectual fraud charge, or if one is accusing an opponent of being culpably wrong, one assumes a much higher burden of proof. I, for example, in one post, took my friend Dick Purtill to task because he challenged Dr. Beversluis's intellectual integrity while at the same time misidentifiying the central claim of his chapter on A Grief Observed. The safest road is always civility, just because if you aren't civil you've really got to prove it. If people like Dawkins were to take the sort of tone they take but provide careful analyses of the doctrines they criticize, taking the time and effort to get things right, I would think better of him than I do now. A third problem is if these New atheists" have actually advocated doing thing that undermine the principles underlying the separation of church and state. Did Harris say, or did not say, that the death of God should be taught in the public schools. I'm sorry, but can you imagine what would hit the fan if a Christian were to say that he wanted the Resurrection of Jesus preached in the public schools? Did Dawkins describe the education of children in a particular religion in a religious faith as child abuse, or did he just think that an upbringing that made undue use of the fear of hell is child abuse. From the quotes I have seen it looks like he thinks all religious upbringing, including the education of my own daughters as Christians, is abusive. Am I being unduly sensitive if I am not too happy with Dawkins for implying that my wife and I are child abusers? Did Dennett say that we shouldn't let religious people teach falsehoods to children, such as teaching them to reject evolution? It's one thing to teach evolution in the public schools, it's another thing to tell parents that they can't tell their kids that it's all false. How would you enforce that sort of thing, without undercutting the foundations of the separation of church and state? In the "new atheist" literature they have gone beyond the sensible thing that one might say on these matters and have said things that to me undermine the underlying prinicple behind the doctrine of the separation of church and state. Maybe they didn't mean it, but then I have to say that people need to pay attention to what they are saying, and what these claims imply. Of course vigorous critique and debate is never a bad thing. If the main problem with Dawkins et al is that they aren't nice, that would be a minor problem. But I think they are open to more serious criticism than that on several fronts, including, I think, a rejection of the prinicples underlying the separation of church and state. If they don't mean these things, they should be speak more carefully in the future.

Chad McIntosh defends the Conceptualist Argument

Further dialogue with anonymous on telology at the basic level

Anon: I disagree. With theism, you have teleology that God doesn't cause right there in God's nature. If we allow brute, bedrock order/teleology/functionality in *this* case, then why not for the universe?

VR: Yes, you could have an immanent teleology built into the universe. That would make you, um, an idealist, or maybe a pantheist. I'm not arguing against those positions.

Anon: It's not as though the claim that all order/teleology comes always and necessarily from minds is a synthetic a priori proposition. But if not, then we need a poseriori evidence for it. Unfortunately, this isn't what we see. Order/teleology is observed to come from minds, but it also comes from instinct (e.g., the functionality and order of spider's webs), and it is observed to come from prior internal principles of order (e.g., seeds give rise to rosebushes). So we have multiple observed causes of order/teleology.

VR: But are those cases of teleology part of the real world, or something nonteleological that mimics teleology. I would say that if you take that hard-core Darwinian position with no background teleology the purpose of your eyes is not to see, but the eye is placed in the head through trial and error in such a way that it does what it would do if it were designed, even though it isn't. If this is so, whose purpose is it pray tell me?

Anon: So what are the most fundamental causes of such *derivative* order? Well, the best we can do is reason from from the observed causes of order to unobserved, ultimate causes of order via arguments from analogy. But if so, then since there are multiple *observed* causes of *derivative* order, and some of these are non-intelligent in nature, then we have no principled way of ruling out that the *fundamental* causes of order are analogous to the *non-intelligent* causes we observe.

VR: But there are a lot of things left out here. Non-mental facts underdetermine intentionality, they underdetermine purposiveness, they certainly don't provide for the existence of a perspective that is different from another person's perspective (try getting indexical facts out of non-mental information), and they provide no norms in and of themselves. We look at something and decide that it does pretty well at fulfilling a purpose, but the poor dumb objects have no idea what is going on.

Answers to some questions from Anonymous

Q: I'm curious: why is naturalism (i.e., the denial of the supernatural) committed to the causal closure of the physical? Or is it?

VR: I wouldn't simply treat naturalism as the denial of the supernatural, because there are world-views according to which are mentalistic in nature but maintain that reality is, in the last analysis mental and not physical. If that is the case, the natural/supernatural distinction breaks down. I prefer to ask a different fundamental question, are the basic causes operating in the universe mental or non-mental. If we analyze down to the bottom, as it were, and reasons are still in the explanation, then we have a mentalistic world-view, even if it is not traditional theism. If we analyze down to the bottom and the mental is analyzed out, then we have a non-mentalistic world view.

Q: Second, are *theists* committed to the causal closure of the most basic level of reality?

VR: Certainly not the causal closure of the non-mental.

Q: Finally, if abstract objects exist, then they are arguably a part of "the basic level of reality". If so, then wouldn't that mean that there's no violation of causal closure even if abstract objects and the physical interact? If you don't like causal-talk here (perhaps it's rejected that abstracta and concreta can't causally interact, although they must be related in *some* way), then replace such talk with "influence".

VR: No, the non-mental world goes on without reference to the abstract objects. For objects in the space-time manifold to pay heed to abstract objects would mean that they do something other than what the laws and prior facts would indicate that the will. Hence, something that "doesn't fit in" to the physical is breaking in to the physical. Lewis says that that is "supernatural", but it isn't spooky or weird or ghostly. It's just irreducibly mentalistic.

Hasker's "How Not to Be a Reductivist"

Can't recommend this one enough.

A new infidels discussion on naturalism: the conceptualist argument

Perhaps this might bear following. It looks to be a version of the conceptualist argument.

For and against capital punishment

Lecture Notes on Socrates

III. Socrates
A. Dialectical method
1. Starts conversation
2. Isolates key term, asks "What is X"
3. Asks for help defining X
4. Asks for clarification
5. Shows definition to be inadequate
6. Repeats process until it becomes evident the “victim” doesn’t know what he’s talking about
B. Theory of knowledge
1. Socratic dialogue presupposes that there is something quality or property that the term refers to. Universal definitions can capture the truth. A sophist would say that words mean whatever you can get them to mean, for the purposes of advancing yourself.
2. The midwife of ideas
3. Doctrine of innate ideas
C. Metaphysics
1. The soul is the most important part of the person, not just the accompaniment of the body
2. The soul is worth caring for independently of whether or not it will last for an eternity.
D. Virtue
1. The goal of life is not just living, but living well. To do what is immoral in order to preserve oneself, as Antiphon suggested is to defend one’s body by harming one’s soul.
2. Being virtuous is fulfilling our nature. The good life is not just the pleasant l life.
E. Knowing a doing
1. Socrates said that to know the good is to do the good. No one chooses to do evil knowingly.
2. What he means is that when people do wrong they often do so out of a misplaced idea of what is good. Ex. Willie Sutton the bank robber. Why do you rob banks, Willie? Because that’s where the money is.
3. Knowledge isn’t just possessing the information. It is more like wisdom. What is involved in knowing that smoking causes cancer. You can read on every pack of smokes that it does. But if you really knew what you were doing to yourself would you smoke? (The answer to all of this may not, on reflection, support Socrates’ contention. Aristotle, for example, rejected it).
F. Political philosophy
1. Social contract theory- Socrates refuses to escape because he has agreed his receiving the benefits of society means he should accept the penalties it metes out.
2. Natural law theory: There is a universal moral law that can be known through reason and experience, not created by governments. Governments are just insofar as their laws conform to the natural law.

Terminology

A lot of times I have struggled with discussions amongst evangelicals where a certain type of evangelical vocabulary is equated with Christian faith or Christian orthodoxy. For example, the phrase "accept Christ as your Lord and Savior" isn't in the Bible at all, and while Scripture mentions being born again about three times, it never hyphenates the phrase "born-again" with Christian.

What happens is that people who don't disagree sound as though they do, but also people can appear to agree with one another because both can use evangelical terminology, while not agreeing with one another at all.

My philosophy lecture on the Sophists

I. The Sophists
A. Two central emphases
1. Skepticism- we have no knowledge
2. Success—we should do what will make us successful
B. Protagoras
1. Man is the measure of all things.
2. Is this man individually or man as a group? In either case Protagoras is a relativist
3. With respect to perception, Protagoras is an individual relativist. All knowledge comes from sense experience. Sense experience is person-relative. Therefore, all knowledge is person-relative.
4. With respect to ethics Protagoras is a social relativist. Society’s traditions are as good as any. Don’t rock the boat.
5. In philosophy of religion Protagoras is an agnostic who thinks it is nonetheless expedient to worship the gods.
C. Antiphon
1. The law of self-preservation is absolute-it’s the law of nature
2. Social conventions often enjoin is to do what is against the law of nature
3. Therefore, we should follow social laws when people are watching, but when we are alone (and can get away with it), the law of nature
D. Can you imagine that Sophist philosophy might be regarded as socially dangerous? It implies that in the final analysis, the actions of a Mother Teresa are not really better than the actions of an Adolf Hitler. While if you follow the teachings of Protagoras you won’t become a serial killer, it does mean that you will accept the practices of your community and have no perspective from beyond the norms of your community from which to say that the norms of the community are wrong.
E. But how do you answer these people?
1. One answer would be to appeal to the existence of an almighty, all-good God who commands people to act rightly, and who, at the end of the day, rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked.
2. But the ancient Greeks did not have these kinds of beliefs available to them. The “gods” they believed in were amoral or immoral, and no one of them was in supreme command.
3. The philosophies of Socrates and Plato, and even to some extent Aristotle, are best seen as attempts to respond to Sophism.

Basic information on Socrates

This page is a good introduction to Socrates.

The new atheism and the role of government

Reading some of the comments made in defense of people like Richard Dawkins on atheism and in doctination, my suspicion is that the best you can come up with on their behalf is that they don't have a well-thought-through position on the relation of church and state, or rather, the principles that would underlie a church-state separation doctrine. That's how you can get comments about child abuse and protecting children from in doctrination, or even proclaiming the death of God from the public school classroom.

But this isn't very good, is it? If you say you want the death of God proclaimed in the school classroom, then you can't complain about the establishment of religion by religionists, otherwise your commitment to the separation of church and state becomes selective and unprincipled. That's my point. When it comes to granting freedom, the test is always whether you are willing to grant freedom to the other guys.

I see no good reason why atheists should be able to avoid the mistakes religionists have made when they engaged in religious persecution. Why does unbelief provide any immunity? I don't get it. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition from unbelievers, but in people like Dawkins and Harris we can see lines of thought that lead to the thinking of Torquemada.

What if some Christian were to say "I look forward to the day when the Resurrection of Jesus will be proclaimed in every school classroom in America." Have even people like Falwell said that??

Anthony Horvath responds to Carrier on Flew

I've run out of steam when it comes to getting into it about the Flew controversy. But this is an interesting response from Horvath.

Brandon on exclusivism and tolerance

And keeping the two issues distinct. HT: John Depoe.

The first of Hasker's three arguments for libertarian free will

I. Why should we reject determinism and accept libertarian free will
A. Our experience of choice. “This experience seems to carry with it the strong conviction that the various alternatives were within our power.” Descartes thinks that this demonstrates libertarianism and that it is absurd to doubt what we inwardly experience
1. Hasker thinks this goes too far. What seems to us to be true may not be true. (I could be, for example, deceived by an evil demon. Or just unaware of the determining causes of my action).
2. However, the inner conviction of freedom deserves to be taken seriously. Consider (my example) my seeming to see a tree in front of me. I could have good evidence that my tree-seeing experience is not veridical. But in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, I have every reason to believe that I do see a tree. The arguments for determinism are less that persuasive, according to Hasker, so we do have a good reason to take our experience seriously and believe that my will is free in the libertarian sense.

Dawkins on child abuse

"God Delusion" author Richard Dawkins complains that "Our society, including the nonreligious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them — 'Catholic child,' 'Protestant child,' 'Jewish child,' 'Muslim child,' etc."

Dawkins says those "labels" are "always a form of child abuse" and concludes:

"Maybe some children need to be protected from indoctrination by their own parents."

There you have it. Dawkins is at least playing around with the idea of using the powers of the state to prevent Christian parents from raising children in the Christian faith.

The whole idea of separation of church and state is that however much we might like to use the power of the state to advance a religious agenda, since the state is inherently coercive, we've got to back off. I may want to lead my third grade class in prayer, but if I get to do it, then I have to let the Catholic teacher next door do it, or the atheist or Mormon or Satanist down the hall do it, and I have to leave the atheist (or whoever else doesn't concur with my prayer) out, and so I have a duty to forbear out of respect for the beliefs of others.

The thinking that leads to religious persecution goes like this: those guys over there who are teaching false religious claims are exposing others to a greater likelihood of eternal damnation. So we have to stop these people no matter what it takes. Maybe people need to be protected from false teaching. Believe me, religious persecutors have everyone's best interests at heart.

So do anti-religious persecutors. Removing eternal damnation from the picture doesn't eliminate the temptation to persecute. They will say that these religious people may not be exposing people to hell, but they are spreading scientific illiteracy and possibly ushering in a new dark age, and they just have to be stopped.

If I were told that I could not teach Christianity to my children, you can bet I would consider myself to be a victim of persecution. (Unfortunately for Dawkins, we already "indoctrinated" our kids, and they are dedicated Christian adults now.)

Yes, yes, I know, Dawkins says maybe. And the next atheist that comes along will say definitely. And it will be more tempting for these people to say definitely the closer they are to acquiring political power.

Determinism has its own website!

The New Atheism and Separation of church and state

I think my previous link to this article actually linked to the last page of it. Atheists listen up. For years atheists have been the foremost advocates of the separation of church and state. I have always been a firm believer in church-state separation, though I haven't always been happy with the extent to which, say, the ACLU pushes it. Atheists like Harris and Dawkins want to use the power of the state, especially through the public schools, to advance atheism and destroy religion. The do NOT believe in any recognizable form of the separation of church and state. In short, these people are the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells of atheism. How they can decry religious persecution or the religious right is beyond me. If Christians tried to do for their faith what the New Atheists are trying to do for atheism, they would be rightly condemned as fanatics and advocates of religious persecution.

I will defend the separation of church and state against those of my own faith who would push is in the direction of theocracy. Atheists who believe in church-state separation should do the same with the atheocrats amongst them.

Incompatibilism and the argument from cosmic justice

A redated post

My argument is going to be an argument from cosmic injustice. No matter how the "freedom" is described, in the final analysis you have to have a certain amount of cosmic luck to have that sort of freedom and to exercise it rightly. (Or maybe good predestination, if you are operating within a theological framework. On my view compatibilism turns the argument from evil into a really good argument). But still, the ultimate responsibility goes up the causal chain to the original source.

I don't know how you could develop a Frankfurt case that would dispel my sense of cosmic injustice that Jeffrey Dahmer is blamed for his bad actions, and Mother Teresa is credited with her good actions, in spite of the fact that Teresa and Jeffrey just happened to be on the end of causal chains that produced their respective actions.

I heard about Calvinism before I heard about compatibilism, but my objections to both are the same.

The Wikipedia on Libertarian Free Will

Hasker's critique of the case for determinsm

A redated post

Hasker consider the case for determinism

Two misconceptions about determinism

1) Determinism means that people do not make choices.

Determinists do not deny the existence of choices. They just maintain that actions are determined by past causes.

2) Determinism means that our choices make no difference.

My actions are causally effective even if determinism is true.

Arguments for determinism

1) Determinism is a necessary truth of reason. For every event that happens, there must be a sufficient cause. Otherwise the causes would be insufficient, and the event would not take place.
2) We always act on our strongest desire. Therefore, the strongest desire determines what we do. Our strongest desire is always the sufficient cause for our actions. Given our desires, we cannot do otherwise from what we do. (Psychological determinism).
3) Determinism is a presupposition of science. The scientists seeks to predict and control nature, this presuppose that nature is predictable and controllable. Science is the business of looking for and finding universal natural laws to explain everything. To deny determinism is therefore to oppose science.
4) Determinism is supported by the conclusions of the sciences.

Hasker, however, thinks that these arguments are not convincing.

1) Determinism is not self-evident. It can be asserted, but that doesn’t prove it.
2) There is no good way of deciding what one’s strongest desire is apart from seeing what motivates action. So “strongest desire” just means “the desire we act on.” Therefore the principle “We always act on our strongest desire,” just means “We always act on the desire we act on.” That’s trivially true.
3) Science seems to be getting along fine without determinism in physics. Quantum indeterminacy does not prove free will, but it does undercut the argument from presupposition for determinism.
4) The results of science also don’t support determinism. A good deal of behavioral science is statistical in nature. The existence of statistical laws is consistent with determinism, but also consistent with the rejection of determinism.

Therefore, Hasker concludes, the case for determinism is insufficient.

Another argument for determinism occurs to me. Suppose we assume a naturalistic or physicalistic world-view. If we do, then the physical world is a causally closed system. And everything else that exists, at least in space and time, is a necessary consequence of the state of the physical. Now it seems as if we don’t choose the state of the physical, since the physical is determined and determined only by other physical states. Nor are we responsible for the necessary consequences of the physical. But if our actions are the necessary consequences of the physical, then we are not responsible for our actions either.

Of course, one must be a physicalist in order to accept this argument, which Hasker is not.

Response to comments on Hasker

Also a redated post

Anon 1: These are interesting responses. Of course Max can't prevent what does happen. That isn't what libertarianism says. Libertarianism just says that when we act, we could have done otherwise.
Anon 2: He's not arguing against compatibilism because it has bad consequences. He's saying that the consequences of determinism is that moral responsibility is an illusion. That's an argument that could be used by hard determinists, who say that moral responsibility is an illusion, or by libertarians, who believe that determinism is false.
Libertarianism maintains that we are responsible for some actions, and does not require that we be responsible for all our actions.
Hasker doesn't deny that if determinism is true, we make choices. It is just that, if determinism is true, then our choices are determined and therefore we are not the ultimate causes of our actions. Therefore, in the final analysis, we aren't responsible.
Hasker is an open theist; so he does see a problem reconciling foreknowledge with free will. On his view omniscience is knowledge of all there is to know. God doesn't know the future comprehensively, according to open theism, because it depends of future free choices. Google "open theism" and find out what open theism is.
Hasker attacks the Frankfurt counterexamples of pp. 86-94 of the Emergent Self. Have these arguments been rebutted?
I don't see how, in the final analysis, I can be responsible for the logical consequences of thins I am not responsible for.
I think that if you take moral responsibility to involve a difference of desert based on a difference of conduct, I think Hasker's argument really is a slam dunk. However, there may be some concepts of moral responsiblity don't involve desert, and if we are using those concepts perhaps some sense can be made out of compatibilism. Nevertheless, I am convinced that if determinism is true then whether I am virtuous or not is a matter of moral luck.

More Hasker on free will: Hasker's refutation of compatibilism

This is a redated post also.

Hasker provides a definition of compatibilism or soft determinism

There is no logical inconsistency between free will and determinism, and that it is possible that human beings are free and responsible for their actions even though these actions are causally determined.

Of course, for it to be soft determinism, as opposed to compatibilism, it must be the case that determinism is true.

One thing a lot of people get confused about that they typically suppose that soft determinism as opposed to hard determinism is a different type of determinism—that our actions are determined in a different way depending on which type of determinism it is. That’s false. Soft determinism and hard determinism do not differ with respect to how the actions are determined. The difference is that hard determinists bite the “hard” bullet and accept the idea that moral responsibility is an illusion, while soft determinists do not.

The soft determinist position is an initially appealing one, and the textbook author (Thiroux) defends it. However, Hasker presents what I think is a powerful attack against it.

To get soft determinism off the ground, you need a concept of what it is to act freely which doesn’t conflict with determinism. According to compatibilism a free action has three characteristics:

1) It is not caused by compulsion or by states of affairs external to the agent. A compelled action would, for example, be an act performed at gunpoint. The robber says “Your money or your life!” and most people (Jack Benny excepted, who in the famous comedy sketch had to think it over), even though they desire to keep their money, give it to the robber to protect their own lives.
2) Instead the immediate cause of the action is a psychological state of affairs internal to the agent—a wish, desire, intention or something of that sort.
3) The situation is one in which it was in the agent’s power to have acted differently, if he had wanted to.

Hasker presents a refutation of compatibilism or soft determinism which to my mind is very forceful. He uses as his example the case of Max, a 17-year-old high school dropout, who was caught stealing hubcaps. He wasn’t forced to steal them, he stole them because he wanted new ones to replace his old hubcaps, which were scratched and rusty. There is, according to soft determinism a sufficient condition of his taking them—such that, given those events and circumstances, it is impossible that he should not steal the hubcaps. He calls these set of events and circumstances the proximate cause. In this case the proximate cause is his desire for new hubcaps and the belief that he could get them only by stealing them. Since these are internal states of Max, according to the compatibilist, this makes his action free and responsible.

But, Hasker says, this is an illusion. Soft determinism earns a appearance of legitimacy so long as we pay attention to the proximate cause and ignore what he calls the prior cause. The prior cause is the set of events a circumstances which together constitute a sufficient condition for the occurrence of the proximate cause, and if determinism is true, then there is a set of circumstances sufficient for the occurrence of the proximate cause all of which occurred before Max was conceived or born.

The problem if this: Max is clearly not responsible for two facts, which jointly entail that Max will steal the hubcaps.

1) The prior cause, which occurred at a time when Max did not exist.
2) The fact that if the prior cause occurs, Max will steal the hubcaps.

1) existed before Max did, and 2) is a necessary consequence of the laws of nature (or the eternal decrees of God, if God exists).

“The act of stealing is causally necessitated by the events and circumstances of the prior cause, to which Max contributed nothing at all. And given that the prior cause did occur, Max could not more prevent its inevitable outcome—the stealing of the hubcaps—than he could stay the planets in their courses or stop the crustal plates of the earth in their relentless march across the ocean floor. So determinism and moral responsibility just are incompatible, and that is that."

A Series on Freedom and Determinsm

This is a redated post.

My class in ethics will be covering the free will problem next week, so I am doing a series of posts on it. This is just to introduce a couple of the central concepts:

I’m somewhat frustrated with the textbook’s (Thiroux's) treatment of the freedom and determinism question, so I am going to present some of my own ideas on the subject. Well, for the most part I’m going to be following the chapter of William Hasker’s book Metaphysics: Constructing a World-View (Downer’s Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1983) ch. 2.

First of all, what kind of freedom is involved in the freedom and determinism problem? The answer has to be the kind of freedom that is necessary for moral responsibility. The idea of moral responsibility implies that we can deserve something bad for doing something bad, and deserve something good for doing something good. For example, it is a commonplace idea, which seems to make sense, that one should not be blamed for the color of one’s skin, and that it is unjust to give advantages to one person over another simply on the basis of race. What underlies this conviction? Is it not the fact that persons do not choose their race; that one happens to be black, or white, or red, or yellow, and that it’s impossible that one’s race could be either merited or demerited.

What at least appears to threaten this conviction is the thesis of determinism. I think that because the concept of causation is not as clear as it might be, the textbook's definition of determinism as the thesis of universal causation is inadequate. For example, we often say that smoking causes cancer, but it does not necessitate cancer. Smokers do sometimes live cancer-free lives. Hasker provides some more clarification when he defines determinism as follows:

Determinism: For every event which happens, there are previous events and circumstances which are its sufficient conditions or causes, so that, given those previous events and circumstances, it is impossible that the event should not occur.

On the other hand, for Hasker, libertarianism is the thesis that:

Libertarianism: some human actions are chosen and performed by the agent without there being any sufficient condition or cause of the action prior to the action itself. (Thanks, Dennis for the correction).

Now the notion of a cause being sufficient is very important here. It is a necessary condition for me to buy your car that you offer it for sale. But your offering it for sale is not sufficient cause of my buying the car; I may choose not to buy it.

Keith Parsons thinks the objection isn't so overrated

A redated post.

Keith Parsons thinks the argument is not so overrated. See these comments in a two-journal exchange with me:

It will simply not do far Hart (or Reppert) to take refuge in familiar Humean conundrums about causality. Much of the progress of science has been progress in understanding how things interact: Plate Tectonics tells us how crustal plates interact to produce earthquakes, volcanoes, mountains and other geological phenomena. Likewise, ecology helps us to understand the enormously complex interactions with their physical environment and each other. Molecular biology explains the interactions of complex molecules, e. g. enzymes and their substrates. Even at the rock-bottom level of quarks and gluons we have well-confirmed, mathematically precise theories that often make (as in Quantum Electrodynamics) astonishingly accurate predictions. These theories tell us how fundamental particles interact.
Keith M. Parsons, "Further Reflections on the Argument from Reason" Philo (Spring-Summer 2000), 93.

As Lycan notes above, Descartes took this objection seriously, and he should have. Surely dualists owe the rest of us some sort of account. After all they posit and entity that has no physical properties (and consequently is undetectable by any empirical means), but which is not an abstract entity since it somehow interacts with physical things—in a way that violates conservation laws, by the way. Souls could not have been produced by physical means, and their putative existence raises a host of unanswerable questions. (For example, at what point at the evolution of hominids did our ancestors acquire souls? Homo habilis or Homo erectus, maybe).

Keith M. Parsons, "Need Reasons be Causes? A Further Reply to Victor Reppert's Argument from Reason", Philosophia Christi (Vol. 5, No. 1, 2003) pp. 72-73.

An overrated objection to Cartesian dualism

A redated post.

William Hasker, who is not a Cartesian dualist, thinks so.

The hoariest objection specifically to Cartesian dualism (but one still frequently taken as decisive) is that, because of the great disparity between mental and physical substances, causal interaction between them is unintelligible and impossible. This argument may well hold the record for overrated objections to major philosophical positions. What is true about it is that we lack any intuitive understanding of the causal relationship between Cartesian souls and bodies. And there is no doubt that, other things being equal, a mind-body theory that allowed such understanding would seem preferable to one that did not. The reason this is not decisive is that, as Hume pointed out, all causal relationships involving physical objects involving physical objects are at bottom conceptually opaque. We find the kinetic theory of gases, with its ping-pong-ball molecules bouncing off each other, fairly readily understandable. This, however, is only because we have learned from experience about the behavior of actual ping-pong balls, and our expectations in such cases have become so habitual that they seem natural to us; we have no ultimate insight into the causal relations except to say, “That’s the way things are.” But equally and emphatically, “the way things are” includes the fact that our thoughts, feelings, and intentions are affected by what happens to our bodies, and vice versa, and to deny these palpable facts for the sake of a philosophical theory seems a strange aberration.

William Hasker, The Emergent Self (Cornell, 1999) p. 130.

Obama doesn't want to be called a liberal

But should be be so reticent. Contrast him with JFK:

...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people - their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties..if that is what they mean by a "liberal" then I am proud to be a liberal.

Why the new atheism is illiberal

This is really an excellent piece, from the New Republic.

On hypocrites

I forgot to point out that this is a readated post, and that the first two comments were from people writing 2 and a half years ago.

Before I went offline, I went over to Maverick Philosopher's site and posted a comment which I really ought to put here.

What's very interesting about hypocrisy is that it is an inevitable by-product of having a high moral standard and rewarding socially behavior that lives up to that moral standard. If the bar is high, then you are always going to have some people who want the social benefits of appearing moral without actually being moral, and if that is the case then you'll get hypocrites. Thus it is an argument for being a member of a Christian church, and not an argument against it, that there are hypocrites in the church. If you dumb down your moral standard to the level that everyone can fairly easily satisfy, you'll get rid of the hypocrites, along with the high standard. Russell, for example, preached free sex and by golly, he practiced it! Does that say anything great about him?

Aquinas on ethics

VI. Aquinas’s teleological ethics
Similar to Aristotle, as you might expect
All events occur to achieve some end.
Humans have their own natural ends and inclination.
However, humans can choose how they will fulfill a given end.
Ethics concerns what ends are worthy to pursue.
Good fulfills our natural end, evil is a deficiency or privation, something that keeps us from fulfilling our natural goal.
VII. Are all actions either good or bad?
Aquinas distinguishes between the actions of humans and human actions. The former are voluntary, the latter are involuntary.
While the latter are neither good nor bad, the former are always either good or bad.
The will naturally desire what is good, but it needs reason to tell it what is really good and the appropriate means for achieving it.
VIII. Three features of an action
The object of the action.
The circumstances
The end that is sought.
D. All these features of an action are necessary to evaluate the goodness of an actions.
IX. Aquinas and Oprah
Consider Oprah’s giving cars away. In itself the action seems is beneficial.
However, the act can be wrong if, for example, the cars were stolen.
If the needs of the people were trivial, but the financial burdens of here family were greater, that would affect the quality of the action.
If she was just trying to get praise (or ratings) then the motive would not be worthy.
In order for an action to be truly good, the object, circumstances, and end must all be good.
X. Where Aristotle’s Moral Theory Falls Short
Aristotle’s ethics is purely naturalistic,
He treats humans as one more species in nature. He does not believe that humans have a special relationship to God. There is no sense that what is right is commanded by God.
The final end of human life is the happiness and self-fulfillment found in the appropriate development of all categories of human excellence, especially intellectual virtue.
This moral vision is good as far as it goes, but must be supplemented and corrected by a Christian understanding.
XI. The human good for Aquinas
We desire the good in its fullest form.
Any good found in the natural realm can only be a particular and finite good.
Nature does not provide us the means to fulfill our spiritual nature, but points beyond itself to what does fulfill us.
If the purpose of life is the possession of the supreme good, this can only be found in God himself.
This is not just knowledge about God, but acquaintance with God.
Perfect knowledge of God is impossible in this life, so it must be attainable in a (heavenly) afterlife.

Why Darwinian Ethics is a Screamin' Failure

This is a redated post.

This is an account of the life of Screamin' Jay Hawkins. The following item, in Jay's story, is what is interesting from the point of view of Darwinian ethics:

Hawkins left many children by many women. About 55 were known (or suspected) upon his death, and upon investigation, that number "soon became perhaps 75 offspring." [1]

Now from the point of view of Darwinian ethics, here is a screamin' success. This man passed on his genes 75 times! (I wonder what Wilt Chamberlain's numbers were?) But is this success? Was Hawkins even trying to pass on his genes? Or did he have more immediate goals in mind when these kids were conceived? Would Hawkins, an accomplished musician, even think that this was his own greatest accomplishment?

Yet, if Darwin's theory of evolution dictates moral norms, reproductive success would have to be the main goal of human existence. It's not, so Darwin's theory does not dictate moral norms.

More on psychological egoism

In order to affirm that all actions are really selfish, (and that is what you have to say if you're a p-egoist) we have to define a set of actions that would be unselfish if we were to perform them, and then argue that no, we never are unselfish in that sense. It is not enough to say that the desire in question is a desire that we have, and that we satisfy it by performing the action. Obviously that's the case. But it's can't be enough to say that Mother Teresa wants to comfort the dying, and therefore she does, so her action is selfish. What action of ours doesn't satisfy a desire, for crying out loud? This would be to define the word selfish in such a way as to trivialize it. What action could fail to satisfy a desire. What we have to argue is that the object of our actions is always some state of self and not some state of others. And once we define selfishness in that way, it seems that the evidence against psychological egoism just becomes overwhelming.

Consider someone who falls on a grenade to save his fellow soldiers. Do we have good reason to suppose that the soldier has no real interest in the safety of his fellow soldiers, and is really aiming at some good feeling he might have for falling on the grenade (for the few more seconds he's still alive?) Give me a break.

Butler on Psychological Egoism

This is an explanation of Butler's critique of psychological egoism.

Psychological egoism

A. Psychological egoism
1. Difference between psychological egoism and ethical egoism. Strong psychological egoism is the view that all of our actions are really selfish. Weak psychological egoism is the view that we often, but not always, act out of self interest. Neither doctrine support ethical egoism, the doctrine that we ought to act in our own self interest.
2. Psychological egoism is a descriptive, not a normative theory. It talks about what we actually do, not what we ought to do. Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarian (thoroughly anti-egoist theory) was a psychological egoist.
3. Psychological egoism seems on its face to be false. Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to notices the sacrifices that parents make for the sake of their children.
4. Typically, however, the egoist has a response. The egoist says that all actions are really selfish because they are aimed at some state of, say, the child, the real goal is to satisfy oneself.
5. The 18th century philosopher and clergyman Joseph Butler argued that this defense of psychological egoism is based on a confusion. Invariably when we succeed achieving a goal, we receive some satisfaction. However, it doesn’t follow that the action is aimed at achieving that satisfaction. Rather, the act is aimed at a state of the child, and if it genuinely helps the child, then quite naturally some satisfaction will arise as a byproduct.
6. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of apparently altruistic actions that are in fact selfish. Take, my favorite example, Oprah Winfrey giving cars away. At least some of us might be inclined to suppose that the real purpose of her giving away cars is not the interests of the recipients, but, maybe, ratings???

Americans and C. S. Lewis: A podcast by Bruce Edwards

Bruce Edwards explains the continuing appeal of C. S. Lewis, especially amongst Americans, in this podcast.

John Depoe on Friendly Atheism

Sometimes, I wish present-day atheists would put their Dawkins down for an hour or so and read a classic essay like William Rowe's "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism."

Hasker on the problem of interaction

Since Mark Frank has raised the issue that dualism has a problem dealing with the possibility of mind-body interaction, I thought I should link to a passage from Hasker's book which was quoted on John DePoe's blog.

Frank Dilley's defense of Cartesian Dualism

Stanford Encyclopedia on Moral Relativism

Is there a secular argument against homosexuality?

This is a redated post.

When people say "the purpose of X is Y," what do they mean? Well, if what we are talking about was created by a human being, then we are talking about the intended purpose for the object. The purpose of glasses is to help you see something, the purpose of a baseball is to be used the game of baseball, the purpose of a car is to impress girls, etc. But what if the object is a natural object. The purpose of your eye is to see, but what does that mean. If you believe that they eye was intelligently designed, then we have an intended purpose. But what if you don't believe that natural objects were intelligently designed. Well, there is Darwinian function. Something exists because its performing a certain function allowed the thing to be selected for by evolution. The purpose of your eye is to see because it is the seeing capacity of the eye that permitted critters with eyes to survive.

Aristotle seems to have a concept of purpose that is neither an intended purpose nor a Darwinian purpose. It is a natural tendency of something to reach a certain goal. The metaphor here is that of the acorn and the oak tree. The natural progression of the acorn is toward an oak tree, and not toward a tomato plant. But although Aristotle believes in an unmoved mover, the unmoved mover does not intend for the acorn to become an oak, because the UMM is pure thought thinking itself and it is not even aware of the acorn.

Is this concept of natural purpose plausible? Sometimes people argue against homosexuality in virtue of the fact that it conflcts with the procreative natural purpose of sexuality. If "purpose" is intended purpose, then we are going to need some information from the one who has a purpose for us in order to know if that claim is correct. That would, of course, make the argument a religious argument. The fact that homosexuality is a Darwinian liability isn't much of an argument. After all, we have no moral mandate to reproduce as much as possible. So maybe what people have in mind is an Aristotelian sense. But is Aristotelian purpose plausible in the absence of intended purpose? I don't think so.

Theistic ethics

This is a redated post.

This is in response to some comments of Ed's.

Most theistic ethics is far beyond the "Becuase I said so" or even the "Because is said so and if you don't you're going to hell." That's an awfully crude and misleading picture of Christian ethics. The overall view that could be sketched goes something like this. God creates humans so that they will be able to get along for an eternity if they develop certain states of character. Certain states of character are reinforced by certain types of actions, and undermined by certain other types of actions. God then reveals to humans (slowly, over a period of evolving understanding) what kinds of actions will result in eternal flourishing. God creates you in such a way that your intended purpose and your inherent purpose are the same. You can only by happy forever by allowing yourself to be converted in to a person with a certain type of character.

It seems to me that, depending on some contingent features of human life, you might be able to be happier overall, by being a completely immoral, selfish SOB if it were really 70 years and out. With an eternity I think that's ruled out.

Purpose, morality, and God

There is a complicated issue as to whether a belief in a purpose for human existence commits you to some religious view or other. One ordinarily thinks of purposes as requiring a purposer. Aristotle was one philosopher who did not think in this way; there is an inherent purpose for human life but it is not a purpose intended by the Unmoved Mover (Aristotle's version of God) but is inherent in human nature itself. However, modern forms of atheism, such as materialism, tend to eliminate that kind of purpose as well. On these atheistic views we acquire certain behavioral propensities from nature, we are taught other in order to make us easy to deal with as members of the social groups of which we are a part, and it seems as if on these world-views the question is left open as to whether "being moral" is in our interests as human beings or not.

Behaving in ways that at least appear moral seems necessary for the fulfilment of the goals of many of us as social beings. But we also have social motivations for doing things that morality ordinarily considers to be wrong. You faced a lot of disapproval if you opposed segregation in the pre-civil-rights South, for example. We also have sympathetic feelings for other people, and those feelings often push us in the direction of socially praiseworthy behavior, with or without religion. But sometimes the sentiment of sympathy can lead us to act unjustly.

But if our makeup isn't terribly social and isn't terribly sympathetic, what motivation to we have to be moral?

Buddhism, of course, has no God, per se, put it has an ulitmate goal for human life: Nirvana.

Adding religion to the mix is also double-edged in the sense that if someone can convince themselves that what they want to do is what God wants, even though it isn't what most of us would call moral, how do you argue with them? How do you argue against God? But at least rationally, such religious position can be criticized from the standpoint of religion itself.

What is conservatism? Some reflections from Paul's ponderings

I was growing up in Arizona when Barry Goldwater ran for President. Back then I know what a conservative was. A lot of things go by the name of "conservatism" today and I am not at all sure we understand the term so clearly now. I do know this. Someone who lowers taxes but spends like a drunken sailor is not a conservative.

More clarification of causal closure

The causal closure principle is a doctrine designed largely to explain what a materialistic world-view must be committed to at minimum. In my analysis of what a philosophical materialist, and, I would say also, a philosophical naturalist must believe, there are three doctrines which comprise is:

1) A purpose-free physical level.
2) The causal closure of the physical level.
and
3) The supervenience of everything that cannot be captured in the language of physics upon that which can be captured in the language of basic physics.

(It gets a little more complicated when you want to bring in timeless entities like numbers, for example, or even sets. However, such entities, if they exist, are irrelevant to how events are produced in the world).

Now causal closure is consistent with epiphenomenalist forms of dualism, according to which there are mental substances that do not cause any effects in the physical world.

Yes, the AFR is an attack on the causal closure principle, in fact one of the classic defenses of it, chapter 3 of William Hasker's The Emergent Self, is entitled "Why the Physical Isn't Closed."

Why should we believe the causal closure principle? Well, for the reasons that are offered for being a philosophical naturalist of some kind. If the physical world is all there is, then nothing else exists.

So yes, my argument from reason is an attack on the causal closure principle. But I was simply trying to explicate what a contemporary naturalist believes.

There are some people who call themselves philosophical naturalists who deny the causal closure principle, though I think that position leads to incoherence.

Condolences to NIU

I spent a year teaching four Contemporary Moral Issues classes at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL (famous, and famous only, for the university and the flying ears of corn signs I have even seen in Arizona). So I was shocked to hear that a school shooting took place at that school. I am praying for all the wounded and for that university's community as well.