Stephen Davis on the trilemma and other matters

Steve Davis is a longtime friend of mine. His essays here are quite good, including two on the Mad, Bad or God argument. Apparently Last Seminary is what used to be apollos.ws. A great resource, and it looks like it's free again. The one on self-caused religious belief is an interesting one as well.

All religious beliefs are true, except that one!

From Biblical Worldview Academy.

 A story is told of an East Coast pastor who began his sermon with the statement all religious beliefs are true.  During the sermon a college student near the front squirmed in his seat as he listened to the pastor preach.  At the end of the sermon, as the congregation was filing out the back, the pastor greeted them.  The student tried to sneak out but the pastor stopped him and asked him where he was from?  He said I am on break from a seminary in Bowling Green.  The pastor asked what religious belief he was and the student said he’d rather not say.  The pastor asked why not?  The student replied I don’t want to offend you.  “Oh son,” the pastor replied, “it doesn’t matter what your beliefs are, they are all true.  So what do you believe?”  The student said okay and whispered in the pastor’s ear, “I believe you are going to hell.”  The pastor got red faced and said, I guess I made a mistake.  All religious beliefs cannot be true, because yours certainly isn’t true!

Predestination and Health Care

Some people see the passage of the health care bill as the end of civilization is we know it. I think the bill, while not perfect, will do more good than harm. Many of my fellow Christians disagree with me on this. Now, if you are a political conservative and an Arminian, like bossmanham, you can explain the passage of the health care bill in terms of the abuse of human free will. If you are a Calvinist, the nultimately, the bill passed because God, before the foundation of the world, chose, in his infinite wisdom, to decree that the bill should pass 219-213, with the exact wording in it that it in fact has. Who are you, o man, to answer back to God?

Well, I suppose if you're a Calvinist, you've already swallowed the Holocaust and eternal hell as predestined by God, so I suppose to object to the predestination of Obamacare would be straining at a gnat after having swallowed a camel. And yes, Calvinism does not say that God morally approves of all the actions he predestines us people perform, so that, yes, he has a good purpose for doing it, no, we don't know what it is, and no, that doesn't excuse the perpertrators of the offense.

Still, the whole thing strikes me as ironic.

My bucket list

Includes doing a debate on the existence of God. I don't think I'm a born debater like Bill Craig, though.

A secular debate about abortion

Here is a debate on Internet Infidels between two atheists, Jennifer Roth and Richard Carrier, on the abortion issue. The debate's very existence should undermine any idea you might have had that the abortion issue is all about religion.

Catholic Answers on Creation and Genesis

The "literal" interpretation of Genesis 1 insisted on by Young Earth Creationists was NOT a test for orthodoxy in the early centuries of the Church.

Wood and Loftus are at it again

I'm going to listen to this as soon as I get a little time. David said he used some of my arguments.

Exodus and abortion

Is there a case to be made for abortion in Exodus 21:22? This site comes from Liberated Christians of Phoenix, whose views are, uh, er, out of the evangelical mainstream. Interestingly, the claim has some support from philosopher James Rachels, who writes:

The scriptural passage that comes closest to making a specific judgment about the moral status of fetuses occurs in the 21st chapter of Exodus. The chapter here is part of a detailed description of the law of the ancient Israelites. Here the penalty for murder is said to be death; however, it is also said that if a pregnant woman is caused to have a miscarriage, the penalty is only a fine, to be paid to her husband. Murder was not a category that included fetuses. Clearly, the Israelites regarded fetuses as something less than full human being.[29]

To which his son Stuart Rachels, a philosophy professor (and an International Master in chess) at the University of Alabama, added:

We say that the Bible does not treat abortion as murder: Exodus 21 says that the punishment for abortion is only a fine. (5/e, 65; 6/e, 60) I now refer to three more biblical passages which support the same conclusion: three times the death penalty is recommended for women who have had sex out of wedlock, even though killing the woman would also kill any fetus she might be carrying. (Genesis 38:24; Leviticus 21:9; Deuteronomy 22:20-21; see 6/e, 59-60)  

However, one of the reviewers for Rachels' book on Amazon suggests that this judgment might be exegetically suspect:

Rachels might have a PH.D, but he is no Hebrew scholar. The mistranslation of "yatsa" as miscarriage in the NAS version implies the death of the fetus, but it still takes conjecture and speculation on Rachels part to conclude that the baby definitely died upon leaving the mother early. With easy access to other biblical translations and the Internet (just type Exodus 21:22 in a search engine like GOOGLE) there is no excuse for Dr. Rachels shoddy academic discourse on such a salient issue in today's society.  

 I'm guessing that the Amazon commentator is right. If there's a biblical case to be made on either side of this issue, it's going to take more work than Rachels has put in.

 

Why "fact vs. opinion" is BS

Does everything have to fit into facts and opinions? I realize many people learned this "fact or opinion" crap in grade school, but if you go by that, either something is cut and dried (we can prove it conclusively), or it's opinion (however anyone feels about it is just dandy). And that leaves out a whole realm of controversial problems where the claims can be true or false, and we have things that can count as evidence one way or another, but we aren't at the point where all reasonable people agree.




Take whether or not there's a God. Do we want to say that's a matter of fact? Well, people have offered "proofs" on both sides, but there's still a debate. Really smart people disagree. Is it opinion? Well, even if there's no proof one way or the other, don't we at least know that either God exists or God does not exist?



Fact vs. opinion is right up there at the top of my list of pet peeves.

Frankfurt, the Devil, and Tiger Woods

First, we have to come up with an account of responsiblity that accounts for all the times when we absolve people of responsiblity on the grounds that they couldn't help it. On the face of things, every time we tell a teacher we have good reason not to be penalized for turning a paper in late, we are appealing to the principle of alternate possibilities. So before I start worrying about Frankfurt cases, I want to know what the opponent of PAP's story is on normal, everyday cases. Why does it suffice to say that I couldn't attend class because I was in the hospital and couldn't get out in time to attend? Why don't we say "That's still your fault. Just because you couldn't have attended class because you were in the hospital doesn't mean that you are free of responsiblity for showing up for class?" When people make excuses for failure to perform, we may in fact think that they aren't telling is the truth, or, at least, the whole story. But if Flip Wilson's Geraldine is right that the devil made her buy the dress, then we'd have to say she's not responsible. Otherwise, she wouldn't be even bothering to use that as an excuse. I'd like to tell the compatiblist "You explain our ordinary excuse-making and excuse evaluating practices, before I have to explain what is supposed to be happening in Frankfurt cases." I'm not saying this can't be done; I am saying we need to deal with normal cases before we deal with Frankfurt cases.




Second, I take it that one critical element of a responsible choice is deliberation. It at least has to be possible for the agent to deliberate. Indeed there is a class of actions which are rightly criticized because the agent didn't deliberate before acting, so there is a kind of sub-choice as to whether or not to deliberate. The Murder 1/ Murder 2 distinction suggests that we don't accord the highest level of moral responsibility in the absence of deliberation.



Which brings us to our Frankfurt cases. Let's say the Devil is our controller. Tiger, a married man, is being tempted to commit adultery with a cocktail waitress named Jaimee. As it happens, the Devil intends to make Tiger commit adultery unless he chooses freely to do so. He deliberates on the possibility of committing adultery, and then what? The moment he starts to take the possibility of not committing adultery seriously in the course of his deliberations, the Devil steps in and makes him do it? But the deliberation and serious consideration of the alternative is what might have been required to make him responsible in the first place, or at least fully responsible. So in order stay in keeping with the concept of responsibility embedded in the murder 1-2 distinction, the Devil can't step in until his adulterous action is fully premeditated. So that means the Devil can only step in and make him do it once he begins the process of choosing to refrain from the adultery. But if that has happened, he has already performed an alternative act of will. PAP holds, and the counterexample folds.



Which means, that if Tiger ever figures out about what the Devil was doing, he can't say "The Devil made me do it" unless he starts to refuse, and is then forced to commit adultery even though he was beginning to choose not to commit adultery. If he commits adultery without Satanic assistance, he is responsible because he could have made an alternative choice. The fact that the Devil would have forced the opposite action doesn't meant the choice wasn't possible. If the Devil is an all-determining deity, then we can all say "The Devil Made Me Do It." Ditto for the Calvinistic God.

Lydia McGrew on Understanding Heaven

Which includes some comments critical of Calvinism.

On what Hasker conceded on the Flicker Strategy

Not really very much.

Vic:

As for what I conceded: it's about the stuff on p. 91 of TES. John wrote and pointed out that what I said there about him was wrong -- that he does not make responsibility "fundamentally dependent on the overt act," and he does accept the point made by Kant, and affirmed at the bottom of that page. I went back and re-read the relevant section in his book (The Metaphysics of Free Will), and I saw that he was right, so I admitted as much. I never agreed that the Frankfurt examples are successful. And as I wrote earlier, I'm with you on the "flicker" issue.

Bill

Perelandra, Plantinga, and the Happy Fall

There's a popluar argument that the Fall is really a good thing overall, because it opens the door for the Incarnation of the Second Person, which Plantinga has endorsed. I don't buy this at all. Interestingly enough, C. S. Lewis's Perelandra a rebuttal to that that theory. As I recall the story, the Un-Man, who is Weston's Body taken over by the Bent Eldil (in other words Satan), uses felix culpa type arguments to persaude the Green Lady (the Venusian Eve) to fall. (It will really do good for you to fall, in fact, it will do so much good that God Himself, in the Second Person, actually came to the Third Planet).




We do have goods that arose as as response to the Fall, involving the Incarnation, but we do not have a basis for comparing what did happen to what would have happened had there been no Fall.

If God had the power to actualize a world in which everyone freely does what is right, it seems reasonably evident that He should have done so. Unless universalism is true, it would have saved a lot of people from eternal damnation. Of course, I don't think God had the power to actualize such a world, because if God guarantees that everyone freely does what is right, then significant freedom is missing.

More on those flickers of freedom

Why not say the "flicker of freedom" is enough for responsibility?

Steven: Because it is "repugnant to the intellect", as Plantinga once said (though about something else).







If you are so set in your ways about PAP, then of course you'd think that a flicker of freedom is robust enough to ground responsibility. You'd rather have that then compatibilism. But I'd say you're just being wild, at that point. Blinded to reason and unable to form sound judgment.






It is hard to see how people in Frankfurt cases are responsible in virtue of that fact they can either X or begin to form an intention to not-X and then be manipulated into X-ing.






That seems outrageous. Like Fischer says, getting responsibility from flickers of freedom is akin to alchemy.




VR: I don't see any arguments here at all. Is my position self-contradictory? Are there any fundamental principles of logic I have violated? My central point is that Frankfurt counterexamples are abnormal cases. We take a principle that we use in ordinary circumstances (I couldn't have finished my assignment, because I was in the hospital because of a car accident), the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) and we ask how we are going to apply that principle to bizarro cases where there's a Controller who would have prevented me from carrying out my action if I had started to will it. The "flicker" shows that there WAS an alternative possibility, and comparisons to alchemy and insistence that I can't reason soundly are not going to undermine this fact.



It's a little bit like the Thomsonian intuition pump with the violinist. Someone who is firmly enough convinced of the overriding character of the right to life can simply say "No. you don't have the right to get up and walk away. The violinist has a right to life, you're violating that right if you walk off." If you are prepared to go to the mat for the principle of the right to life, you can resist the violinist argument. No amount of ridicule from the other side will dissuade you, or should dissuade you.



Or consider people who say that we have to give up on the law of non-contradiction because of the liar paradox. If we look at all the things we do with the law of non-contradiction, and its role in making discourse even possible, it looks to me as if, even if I don't have a nice neat solution to the liar paradox, I shouldn't just trash the law of non-contradiction.



Look at what we do with PAP on a daily basis. "I'm sorry, I didn't have a choice. I had to.... so I couldn't...." How many times do we say "I couldn't help it?" Why did Flip Wilson build an entire career out of the phrase "The Devil made me do it." Because if the Devil really did make you do it, you're not responsible, or so we ordinarily think.



In fact, earlier versions of compatibilism prior to Frankfurt, such as those of A. J. Ayer, affirmed PAP but argued that the alternative possibility statements had suppressed "if" clauses. "I would have done otherwise if I had wanted to."



What has always seeemed correct to me is that puppets, including conscious or willing puppets, are not responsible, and this is so whether or not there is a someone pulling the strings. This seems more evident to me that any result that might be generated by the Frankfurtian intuition pump. Because it is a set of intuition pumps, and the cases are deliberately contrived, I have trouble seeing how they can undermine so basic a principle.

The flicker of freedom

A flicker is still an alternate possiblity. The fact that all you get is a flicker is a function of the "cooked" character of these Frankfurt cases. In the real world, unless determinism is true, we have more than a flicker of freedom. Denying the PAP means that there are no alternative possibilities. No means no. We point out that there has to be some movement toward the opposite action in order for the Controller to act, and then we are told "Oh, that's just a flicker. You can't base moral responsibility on that."




Why the heck not?

Explaining Hume's Fork

Hume is a classic, consistent, empiricist. He thinks that all ideas come from experience, because they all come from what he calls impressions. Now these impressions are experiences, however, some of them come from within ourselves as opposed to the five exterior senses. Second, he thinks that all justified beliefs are justified through experience, except for what he called relations of ideas. What relations of ideas were were simply how our ideas are related to one another. So, for example, you could know that all bachelors are unmarried without interviewing any bachelors to find out their marital status, because that is a matter of how we define the word "bachelor." He also asserts that all mathematical knowledge is just the knowledge of definitions. But we can't know anything about, say, whether something exists or not based on how we define the word. So attempts like the ontological argument to show that God must exist because of the way we define "God," are bound to fall flat. On the other hand, any knowledge that might lead us to conclude anything about what is real outside of our own minds, according to Hume, has got to come from experience.




Rationalists think that we can have knowledge of the world outside of our minds through reason, independently of experience. Kant, for example, thought that we could deduce our moral duties through rational reflection and use of the Categorical Imperative. Hume, on the other hand, thought morals derived from feelings.



Hume calls what we can know apart from experience relations of ideas, and what we need experience for matters of fact. This is called, in philosophy, Hume's Fork.

Some notes on Churchland's How do Neurons Know?

Yes, of course this is in conflict with not just the AFR, but with a lot of what we think we know about ourselves. And yep, I think the whole mess is self-referentially incoherent. Showing that it is, however, is more of a chore than you realize.


On the one hand, the Churchlands are committed to listening to brain science and seeing what those disciplines have to tell us about what our cognitive enterprise is like. Interestingly enough you have a lot their fello naturalists, like Jerry Fodor, who aren't looking to brain science to provide much info on what our cognitive life is like. The reason is that there seems to be too big of a disconnect between our mental life as we know it through introspection and what science is going to come up with. There are people who say, yes, in some sense it is all material, but you shouldn't be too eager to throw over huge elements of what Sellars called the Manifest Image (as opposed to the Scientific Image), because to do that is going to undercut what we know about our mental life. So I guess there's a kind of promissory note put out there that the disconnect will go away someday, but an unwillingness to turn neuroscience into philosophy.

The Churchlands are the deadly enemies of people like Fodor; they think we have to start taking neuroscience seriously now, even if it means that we start thinking that we are dead wrong about having things like propositional attitidues like belief. So they are classed as eliminative materialists, eliminativists in the sense that they say that we have to be prepared to throw over our common-sense understanding of our cognitive life. It is typical to couch their position as the claim that there are no beliefs, but actually what they suggest is that as science develops on cognition, we may have to be prepared to drop the notion of belief. We may have better terms to use once brain science gets where it will eventually go. The problem that they face is precisely what you mentioned: that when they talk about all of this they use the langauge of common sense psychology. But it's not as if they're going to hit their heads and say "I never thought of that" if you point out to them that they are using prescientific language. I mean, what other language would you suggest they use? We don't have the scientific image mapped. So they may say "if you think about it" but they may think that, if they knew enough future neuroscience, they wouldn't talk like that. They routinely hit self-referential objections with a charge of begging the question.

My contention is that the disconnect between naturalistically acceptable talk about cognition and the common-sense talk (I did the mathematical question, and concluded such-and-such) is a logical disconnect, and that any reconciliation is bound to be based on some sort of confusion of categories. For starters, surely neurons don't know, even if things composed of neurons do know. Talk about neurons making predictions seems puzzling as well. What does that mean? If I say, "I predict the Lakers will win the NBA Finals this year", that doesn't make sense unless you attribute to me all kinds of states that are naturalistically illegal.

In fact, I have identified four dimensions of our mental lives which seem to be automatically excluded from base-level naturalistic accounts: intentionality, normativity, subjectivity and purpose. The divide between something that these terms can apply to, and that which these terms cannot apply, doesn't work. And being told "Aha, look at all the nifty stuff science is discovering about the brain! Surely this great divide will someday be crossed if we keep going on brain science!" doesn't wash. It is as if a lot of nifty maps of one side of the Grand Canyon can tell us how to get across the Grand Canyon. Bridging attempts, such as functionalism, appear to work, in my view, because we take out eyes off the ball and miss the category mistakes.

But this has been battled out numerous times on Dangerous Idea 2. Haven't been over there much lately, because I haven't done a lot of AFR stuff of late. There are also some very nice BDK/Doctor Logic vs. Darek Barefoot debates that were done around late 2007, when I was writing the Blackwell Companion entry on the Argument from Reason.

Pojman on desert

New content for today:

I am redating this post one more time because I believe that the paper here shows the extent to which we are starting to stop thinking in terms of what someone deserves. Pojman is, in fact, trying to regain a role for desert in our thinking which he thinks is an endangered species.

I think one essential feature to many religious traditions is that there is some sort of answer to the question "What do people deserve?" I think this makes the free will problem a problem, in that determinism tends to undercut this notion that people should receive either something good or something bad for doing something bad, simply because this is deserved. If you stop thinking that way, you may do a number of things in the interests of behavior modification that are similar to what you would do if you were trying to give people what they deserve, but that doesn't mean that you actually believe in desert.

So if someone says "I am a compatibilist" on free will, it is not clear based on that whether they really think desert and determinism are compatible. Dennett's Elbow Room is a classic example of someone who reconciles all the varieties of freedom and all the varieties of moral responsibility worth wanting with determinism, but doesn't really find room in his thinking for desert. This suggests to me that he's really finding ways of living without free will, and the sort of moral responsibility that free will was supposed to provide for, rather than reconciling free will with determinism. I see him as a hard determinist who hasn't come out of the closet.

This is a fascinating paper by Louis Pojman on the vanishing role of desert in, particularly, liberal political thought. Though I'm not sure its role in conservative thought is so secure. If I read him correctly, it looks as if Marx wasn't the Marxist most of us are inclined to think of him as being, in that he didn't seek to implement "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" from the outset, and criticized some utopian socialism for attempting this, making the kinds of criticisms against that program that defenders of capitalism would make against 20th-Century communism.

So, how should it go?

"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to the principle of utility"
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his deserts."
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his merits." (and note the difference between merit and desert in Pojman).

The Blatchford Controversy Archive

This is the archive of the Chesterton-Blatchford controversy. It doesn't look to me as if he ran into compatibilism in that controversy.

Secularism, desert, and moral responsibility

I think there is a profound problem in the discussion of freedom and moral responsibility because I think the idea of desert fits in well with a religious world view like Christianity, and is in fairly serious danger from a secular perspective, which is something worth noticing when you read Lewis's essay on the Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.

But even if Desert drops off the table, if you have a serial killer running around killing people, you want him to stop doing it, you want to deter others from doing the same, and if perchance it is possible to make him a productive member of society, you want to see that happen, too. You also don't want angry people in the community. You have a batch of utilitarian considerations that will probably result in our doing, in many cases, the same things to the person that would have been done if you thought the person was really morally responsible. It's not like we would say "Sorry to see you're killing people, but it isn't your fault, so I guess we've got to leave you alone."

Chesterton wrote: The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment. He must not say to the sinner, "Go and sin no more," because the sinner cannot help it. But he can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment.

But, so is saying "Go and sin no more." It may modify the "sinner's" behavior. But as a revelation of some truth about the sinner, I think Chesterton is right. Real sin, real blameworthiness, requires being something more than a biological machine.

In a consistent secular world-view, following that view down the path of materialism/naturalism, I think the whole idea of desert can't be sustained. But there can and will be a lot of conduct on our part that looks and sounds like we're holding people morally responsible. But on close examination, the heart of moral responsibility, an assessment of desert, drops out of the picture.

The link is to some quotes on Chesterton and materialism.