Prayers for the New Year

I'm not pessimistic about the Arab Spring because I think that whenever there's a revolution, the most violent people will come forward and take control at first. The question of whether they will stay in control is another question. So, despite the inauspicious start, it may have a positive effect in the long term.

Nevertheless, this does not allow us to ignore the atrocities that are taking place. The Middle East Forum has summarized Muslim persecution of Christians for the month of November, and it is pretty horrifying. Please pray for them.

Christmas Quote

My friend Syd told me about the following intriguing quotation from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King:

When Sam awoke, he found that he was lying on some soft bed, but over him gently swayed wide beechen boughs, and through their young leaves sunlight glimmered, green and gold. All the air was full of a sweet mingled scent.

He remembered that smell: the fragrance of Ithilien. 'Bless me!' he mused. 'How long have I been asleep?' For the scent had borne him back to the day when he had lit his little fire under the sunny bank; and for the moment all else between was out of waking memory. He stretched and drew a deep breath. 'Why, what a dream I've had!' he muttered. 'I am glad to wake!' He sat up and then he saw that Frodo was lying beside him and slept peacefully, one hand behind his head, and the other resting upon the coverlet. It was the right hand, and the third finger was missing.

Full memory flooded back, and Sam cried aloud: 'It wasn't a dream! Then where are we?'

And a voice spoke softly behind him: 'In the land of Ithilien, and in the keeping of the King; and he awaits you.' With that Gandalf stood before him, robed in white, his beard now gleaming like pure snow in the twinkling of the leafy sunlight. 'Well, Master Samwise, how do you feel?' he said.

But Sam lay back, and stared with open mouth, and for a moment, between bewilderment and great joy, he could not answer. At last he gasped: 'Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?'

'A great Shadow has departed,' said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then, as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from his bed.

'How do I feel?' he cried. 'Well, I don't know how to say it. I feel, I feel' -- he waved his arms in the air -- 'I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!' He stopped and he turned towards his master. 'But how's Mr. Frodo?' he said. 'Isn't it a shame about his poor hand? But I hope he's all right otherwise. He's had a cruel time.'

'Yes, I am all right otherwise,' said Frodo, sitting up and laughing in his turn. 'I fell asleep again waiting for you, Sam, you sleepyhead. I was awake early this morning, and now it must be nearly noon.'

'Noon?' said Sam, trying to calculate. 'Noon of what day?'

'The fourteenth of the New Year,' said Gandalf; 'or if you like, the eighth day of April in the Shire reckoning. But in Gondor the New Year will always now begin upon the twenty-fifth of March when Sauron fell, and when you were brought out of the fire to the King. He has tended you, and now he awaits you. You shall eat and drink with him. When you are ready I will lead you to him.'

Syd pointed out an interesting thing about this passage. The day when "everything sad [is] going to come untrue" and when "A great Shadow has departed" is the 25th of March, a day we do not celebrate. Instead, we celebrate nine months later. And now the King who has tended and will tend us, and with whom we shall eat and drink, awaits us. "Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests".

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

The Spiritual Disciplines, Edgar Allan Poe, and South Park

The idea behind the spiritual disciplines, I gather, is to practice certain behaviors that develop one's personality in a positive direction. It's similar to an athelete's physical training: not only does he practice the specific activity he is planning to undertake (hitting the baseball with a bat, throwing a shotput, etc.) but he has to exercise to keep himself in good shape and to develop the muscles that will help him accomplish the specific activity more successfully. And even though the bench presses, squats, and shrugs may not seem to have any direct relevance to that activity, they do in fact help him to do it better. It's not a matter of trying so much as it is training. So it may not appear obvious how some spiritual disciplines will develop your character in a positive way (like fasting) but other people older, wiser, and further along in their training than you recommend it highly, just as the coach may tell the long-distance runner that he has to do a lot of crunches. We can't expect to do the right thing on a particular occasion if we haven't trained and built up the kind of character capable of doing it, anymore than we can expect to win a weightlifting competition if we've never built up the right kind of body capable of doing it.

Now the idea behind this idea is that we can, through little things, become capable of doing great things or horrific things. If we want to become capable of committing a terrible crime, we can perform little steps which incrementally make it easier. Of course, most people who commit crimes have not intentionally engaged in such a program. But you can see how it would work. Through our daily choices we are making ourselves more capable of great things or terrible things. The further down one road we go, the less able we are to do the things down the other road. If we choose to be angry or bitter or sad, we will eventually reach the point where we can no longer choose not to be angry or bitter or sad. Slowly, as we live our lives, we are taking away our own freedoms. This doesn't mean that the end result involves the removal of our free will, just that if we choose to do the things that develop good character, we will eventually be unwilling and unable to commit terrible acts. If we do not develop good character, our sphere of freedom could still include terrible acts. Of course it's different for every person: some people have an innate disposition for goodness or badness; some people are genuinely satisfied at one level while others will want to travel further down the path; some people will have a wider sphere of freedom so that they can encompass more of the opposite path than they have chosen. And of course, most people do not really choose their path, they just drift through life without going very far down either one -- or perhaps being unaware that they are going down one. Nevertheless, as a general truth we are, by our daily choices, becoming the people we will forever be. We are choosing to have a character that is good or bad or just passive. If we take the idea of eternal life seriously, we will want to have a good character; we will want to be capable of great things, not evil things. Eventually the sun will rise on our characters and turn them to stone, so we'd better make sure they're in a position you wouldn't mind being in forever.

We all want to indulge ourselves. When an opportunity presents itself, we will find excuses why it's appropriate to give in to this particular occasion. The problem with this is that if you don't practice not giving in to such temptations, you'll eventually be unable to refrain from doing so. When I was in the Marines I had a friend who slept around all the time, even though, at any given moment, he had a serious girlfriend. I told him one time that I felt sorry for whatever woman he would eventually marry because she would have a cheating husband. He was (understandably) offended by this. He insisted that he would be completely faithful to his wife. The reason this seemed so implausible to me is that he couldn't even be faithful to a girlfriend. He didn't practice being faithful, he didn't build up within himself the strength to turn women down when they offered themselves to him, so how could he seriously start doing it successfully for the first time once he was married?

This is the idea behind Edgar Allan Poe's wonderful short story "The Imp of the Perverse". Click on the title and read it first, because there are spoilers below, and it's not too long.

Done? OK, so the narrator enjoyed the feeling of rebellion we get when we are told we should or shouldn't do something. We instead want to assert ourselves and do the opposite of what we should or shouldn't do -- this is the imp of the perverse. The narrator enjoyed this so much he committed himself to never denying himself the pleasure of doing something that he felt he shouldn't and vice-versa. Not that he would do it unthinkingly; he would take his time, making sure he wouldn't get caught. But he would do it. So when he realized he "shouldn't" kill a relative for the inheritance, he went ahead and did it, and did it cleverly enough that he got away with it.

Then, years later, he feels very satisfied with himself, realizing that no one will ever be the wiser about his crime. Unless, of course, he were to confess it. But that's crazy, he shouldn't do that.

Oops.

He had indulged himself for so long in doing whatever he shouldn't do, that he was unable to withstand this occasion. He didn't have the muscles built up to do what he should and not do what he shouldn't. He had taken away his own freedom, his own ability to disobey the imp of the perverse.

A more profane example comes from South Park. In the episode "Le Petit Tourette" Cartman discovers Tourette's Syndrome and pretends to have it so that he doesn't have to filter what he says. This is funny, partially because Cartman isn't really starting from a position of strength on this issue. Anyway, he swears, yells racial epithets, etc., and not only does he not suffer any negative consequences from it, but receives compassion and attention from everyone. Eventually, he manages to get himself booked on a national television show to talk about Tourette's. Of course, for him the only reason to do it is to have a national audience forced to hear whatever he wants to say. But before he goes on TV, he starts saying things he doesn't want to say. Personal things, embarassing things. He has spent so much time just yelling whatever he felt like yelling, that he was no longer able to filter it. Anything that popped into his head popped out of his mouth. Chaos and alleged hilarity ensue. You can watch the whole episode here.

The point is the same. Indulgence is very tempting, but the more we give in to it, the less able we are to refrain from it on occasions where we should, where we want to. This fits into the general perspective of the spiritual disciplines. We should exercise those faculties so that we are not compelled to do the wrong thing because we simply aren't strong enough to resist it. But again, the disciplines aren't about trying to do the right thing when the occasion presents itself, but of training yourself so it's not difficult to do the right thing on those occasions.

A sure indicator of philosophical achievement

Alvin Plantinga made the pages of the New York Times. I'll bet he's sitting at home thinking to himself, "I've finally made it big."

Quote of the Day

First, who is going to assure us that the Epistles of Paul are themselves genuine? It is foolish of believers to resent these perpetual questions. Nothing was thought in those days of putting a respected name on your essay or epistle. Early Christian literature includes a number of spurious Epistles and Gospels. And, since Paul's style is so characteristic, the ordinary apparatus of literary criticism enables us to say that some of the Epistles which bear his name were not written by him. They have not the same style and ideas.

This does not matter so very much for my purpose, but I will take those Epistles of which Professor Drews admits the genuineness. He says that in these Paul never refers to Jesus as a human being: that his Jesus is a deity only, whom later Christians supposed to have lived on earth at one time: that the apparent references to earthly experiences are really quotations of the things attributed to the Messiah in the prophets.

It seems to me that the whole argument of Professor Drews, Professor Smith, and others breaks down before one statement which runs from end to end of Paul's Epistles: the emphatic statement that Christ died on a cross and rose from the dead, and that this is the very basis of faith in him. It is little use recalling that Osiris or Tammuz rose from the dead. Ignorant Egyptians could believe that a god, as such, had a body, which could be killed. To a man like Paul such an idea would seem monstrous. He distinguishes quite clearly between God and Jesus. God, a purely spiritual being, takes human shape in Jesus, and sheds his blood on a cross, is buried, and then, in human shape, comes to life again. I do not see how anybody not obsessed by a theory can fail to recognize that, less than ten years after the alleged crucifixion of Jesus, Paul fully accepted that part of his story. "Being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." With infinite variations of expression, that formula is found in every Epistle, and it is Paul’s fundamental belief about Jesus.

Now this single statement carries us a very long way. No one has ever suggested that Paul had any doubt about the divinity of Jesus. it would follow, though Paul merely says that Jesus was "born of a woman," that he accepted some sort of miraculous story about the actual birth and childhood of this God in human shape. He refers repeatedly, in all Epistles, to Cephas or Peter and other Jews who boasted of some superior mission to his, because they had seen and known the Lord. He represents that Jesus preached and taught in Judea. In one place (I Cor. ix 14) he quotes as a saying of the Lord something ("They which preach the gospel should live by the gospel") which Matthew (x 10) and Luke (x 7) give, in other words, as the actual teaching of Jesus. He says nothing plainly about healing miracles; but is it likely that Paul believed Jesus to be God himself in human form and did not credit him with signs and wonders as he went about Judea? Finally, there is a passage (I Tim. vi 13) in which he speaks of his trial before Pontius Pilate: there are a hundred passages in which he says that Jesus was crucified, and by the Jews (I Thess. ii 15): and there are a thousand references to his physical resurrection.

We may put aside as spurious or interpolated such isolated statements as that the Christian supper is founded upon the actual last supper of Christ (I Cor. x 16 and xi 23-26): though no one will doubt that there was such a supper among the earliest Christians. We may similarly set aside the isolated references to Pontius Pilate, to Peter's claim to have seen Jesus after the resurrection, and to the ascension (Eph. iv 10). But there remains one unshakable story about Jesus which is found in every single Epistle. I run over them and for the convenience of the reader indicate these passages, one or more in every Epistle: Rom. i 3-4, iv 24, v and vi in full, etc.; I Cor. x 16, xi 23-6, xv, etc.; II Cor. iv 10; Gal. i 4, iv 4, vi 14; Eph. i 7, 20, etc.; Philipp. ii 8; Coloss. i 20, 22, etc.; I Thess. i 10, ii 15; I Tim. vi 13; II Tim. i 10, ii 18, etc.; Titus iii 4-6; Hebr. i 2-3, ii 9, ix 14, etc.

It is, therefore, no use (from our present point of view) arguing that this or that Epistle is not genuine. Unless we follow the eccentric opinion of Van Manen, and say that they are all spurious, Paul bears definite witness to Jesus. He lived on earth, in Judea, for at least two or three decades; because he was "born of a woman," yet lived to be a teacher. He was put to death on a cross by the Jews; and it was an article of faith with his followers that he rose from the dead. Just as consistently, from end to end, Paul repeats the assurance of Jesus that the end of the world is at hand, and the Lord will judge the living and the dead.

Farther, the Epistles uniformly and entirely depict the early Christian world in a manner which must interest us. Paul's great period of activity was from about 45 to 65 A.D. Let us say that the Epistles were mainly written between 50 and 60 A.D. There were then groups of believers in Jesus, on the same lines as Paul, in every large center from Jerusalem to Rome. Many of them were old enough to have lost their first fervor, and he describes them as much given to fornication. His persistence and emphasis also indicate that there is some reluctance to believe in the resurrection, which is, he says, "foolishness to the Greeks" -- thus clearly showing that he means a physical resurrection. The little "churches" or communities are full of dissensions, but they are not on Gnostic lines. They are about the Jewish law, the way in which Christ saves from sin, the resurrection, and the question of authority. There is repeated reference to a group of men, chiefly Cephas, who are described as the living companions and appointed apostles of Jesus. Their center is Jerusalem. They are intensely Jewish and have many a fiery conflict with Paul.

The witness of Paul is, then, that from about 40 A.D. to 60 A.D. there were, scattered over the Greco-Roman world, small groups of followers of Christ, and they were visited occasionally by Jews who had, they claimed, known Jesus in the flesh and received instruction from him. They all believed that he was the Son of God, who had assumed a human form and died on a cross to atone for the sins of men. This atonement by blood was of the very essence of their faith. It was the common idea of the time in the east that bloody sacrifice was the best atonement for sin, and it was a magnificent idea to some of these mystic Orientals that God himself should take human form and become a human sacrifice. To work out that belief they had to give God two aspects (which later theology would call "persons"), Father and Son; but Jewish religion had already plenty of references to Sons of God, and Greek mysticism also spoke of a Logos of God.

We will see later what this witness of Paul proves -- if it proves anything. For the moment it is enough to establish that Paul does believe in the human historicity of Christ. He never ceases to repeat that Jesus was a teacher in Judea, who died on the cross and rose from the dead. The condescension of God in taking human form, the shedding of real human blood in the ignominious punishment of the cross, are the quintessence of his gospel. The Jesus of Paul was a divine human person, who was put to death at Jerusalem somewhere about 30 A.D.

Joseph McCabe
"Did Jesus Ever Live?"
The Myth of the Resurrection and Other Essays

How to Read a Blog

Here's the list of great books you can find at the end of Mortimer Adler's How To Read a Book. Don't go through them too quickly.

Classical Global Skepticism and the EAAN

Global skeptical claims are those that call virtually everything we think we know into question. Two of the most common are the evil genie and the brains-in-vats scenarios. The idea behind such claims is that they introduce situations where our experiences would be exactly the same as they are even though virtually everything we experience is a massive illusion. And if our experiences would be identical, then there's no way to test whether our experiences are veridical or whether the skeptical scenario is true.

Descartes, in establishing his philosophy, proposed a hyperbolic doubt for methodological purposes -- that is, he said, "Let's doubt everything we can and see if there's some level we can't doubt". So he doubted that his senses give him reliable information about the physical world, he doubted that he was awake since it was possible that he was dreaming, etc. When he got to a priori knowledge, such as mathematics, he argued that it's possible that there be an evil genie who manipulates his thought processes whenever he tries to add two numbers together so that he comes up with the wrong answer every time. Of course Descartes wasn't suggesting this as a real possibility, or even that we could doubt such things on a practical level, he was just saying that it's logically possible to doubt it. He ultimately got to the ground level with his cogito: I can't doubt that I'm doubting. Doubting is a form of thought and thought requires a subject who is doing the thinking. As such, I must exist. I think therefore I am (cogito ergo sum).

Now this fails for a very obvious reason. If we're willing to consider the possibility of the evil genie, why can't we just say the genie is also manipulating our thought processes when we try to derive the conclusion of the cogito? Yes it seems as if I can't doubt that I'm doubting, but maybe that's just the evil genie having his way with me. Once the genie is proposed, it applies to everything, including Descartes's argument.

The brains-in-vats scenario is sometimes used in science-fiction. The idea is that we are all disembodied brains being manipulated by scientists or aliens or something to think we are interacting with objects and other people in a physical world. This was used in the Matrix movies, although there they weren't disembodied brains. John Pollock begins his Contemporary Theories of Knowledge with a cute little short story illustrating the problem here. A man finds scientists taking people's brains out of their heads and hooking them up to electrodes. The man is discovered and is told that the people don't know the difference because they're programming them to think that their lives are continuing on without interruption as they had before; they can't tell the difference. The upshot is that, just as the man thinks they're going to do the same thing to him, the scientist laughs and says, "Oh no. We did it to you three months ago." Then they let him go.

Now global skeptical claims are fascinating and they play a huge role in the theory of knowledge. Michael Williams uses them as the main method in establishing his epistemology in his brilliant Problems of Knowledge. But no one takes them seriously as actual possibilities. For whatever reasons, we just don't feel threatened by them. Yes, it's possible that my experiences of the physical world and other people are all illusory, but why should I think so? Simply pointing to the possibility doesn't really make them realistic options. They're just bizarre stories that someone made up. We can certainly use them to further our concept of knowledge, but that's all.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that one of the criticisms given to Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (EAAN) is that it is just one more form of global skepticism, and so should be treated the same way. Philosophers already have ways of dealing with such claims, and even if they didn't they wouldn't need them to reject the claim as nothing more than an interesting puzzle.

There's some truth to this: Plantinga's argument is that if naturalism is true, the likelihood that our beliefs would be mostly true is low or inscrutable. Therefore, for any particular belief, regardless of how reasonable it seems, the probability that it be true is low or inscrutable. And of course, naturalism is itself a belief. Therefore, if naturalism is true, belief in naturalism would be irrational. I'll go into more detail about that in future posts, but for now I'll just point out that the unreliability of our cognitive faculties would amount to a form of global skepticism.

There's more to the story though. The problem with traditional global skepticism is that it calls everything into question a priori. Before we have the right (deontologically) to accept any particular belief, we have to show that the belief in question is not subject to the skeptical claim. To do this, however, would require some form of argument -- and that argument would be under the same cloud as the belief it seeks to defend since the skeptical claim would equally apply to it. There's no way out.

However, everyone (except me) accepts that Plantinga is an externalist, and part of the strength of externalist epistemologies is their ability to avoid global skepticism. A belief constitutes knowledge if it is connected in the right way to its object. Thus, if you believe that there is a tree in front of you because there is a tree in front of you, you know it. The global skeptical questions only come into play when we ask second order questions (do you know that you know there is a tree in front of you?). But you do not have to solve that problem before you can know that there is a tree in front of you. Thus externalist epistemologies don't really solve global skepticism so much as they bypass it.

Moreover, Plantinga denies that all beliefs have to be believed for a reason before they constitute knowledge (he calls his epistemology Reidian foundationalism after Thomas Reid); rather, he maintains that some beliefs are properly basic, i.e. they are simply given and we are justified or warranted in accepting them (thus they constitute knowledge) until we have a reason to doubt them. As such, they are not beyond doubt, they can potentially be shown to be false, they are just innocent until proven guilty.

With these two points in mind, Plantinga's EAAN is significantly different from classical global skepticism. First, we do not have to have a reason for a belief if it is properly basic, and such a belief can constitute knowledge even if we don't know that we know it. We are justified, or our beliefs are warranted, up until the point where we have a reason for thinking them to be false. The EAAN provides just such a reason: if naturalism is true, then it is improbable or inscrutable that any given belief would be true. After this, the EAAN has the same effect as the more traditional global skeptical arguments: any reason you can give for a particular belief is itself subject to the EAAN and is therefore not trustworthy. There is no stopping the rot once it's started. Indeed, part of the genius of Plantinga's argument is that it amounts to a global skeptical argument that arises from within externalism. Not to mention the fact that by saying that belief in our cognitive faculties' reliability is warranted until we have some reason to deny it Plantinga is also able to ward off a tu quoque argument being constructed against theism.

Another significant difference is that the other global skeptical claims involve scenarios that are logically possible but that we don't take seriously. Plantinga's, however, involves a scenario that is actually believed by many people, namely naturalism, and even those of us who don't believe it tend to take it seriously (that is, we don't consider it as crazy as the evil genie or brains-in-vats scenarios). It's like if someone came up with an argument that if theism is true, it leads irrevocably to the evil genie scenario. If the argument were sound it would be much more than just an interesting puzzle.

A third difference cuts the other way: traditional global skepticisms posit situations where it is extremely probable, almost certain, that our cognitive faculties are unreliable. Plantinga's EAAN merely argues that it is either less than 50% probable that they are reliable, or if we feel we cannot ascribe any probability, inscrutable. We can certainly modify the traditional scenarios to make them more parallel, but the point is that in their traditional formulation they are stronger than Plantinga's argument.

A fourth difference is that the traditional global skepticisms do not allow for any way out. The brains-in-vats suggestion applies to everybody. But the EAAN allows for a way out, since it only holds if naturalism is true. We can avoid it by simply rejecting naturalism. Since naturalism entails the non-existence of God or any supernatural agency, it follows that in order for us to have knowledge of anything there must be a God or some sort of supernatural agency (although "supernatural" comes with a lot of baggage, so perhaps we could come up with another term that doesn't have as many connotations).

Two final points: first, Plantinga's argument only applies to those who have heard it; the naturalist who hasn't heard the EAAN or a similar one (such as J. R. Lucas's Gödelian Argument against physical determinism) does not have a reason to reject any particular belief. So it's not the case that one has to affirm the existence of God in order to have knowledge. The claim is that there must be some supernatural agency in order for us to have knowledge, not that we have to recognize that there is a supernatural agency. The problem here is very similar to axiological (moral) arguments for the existence of God. The point of these arguments is not that one has to consciously believe in God in order to be a moral person or believe in objective moral truths. Rather the claim is that one is being inconsistent in believing that there are objective moral truths without an objective anchor for them which transcends individual people and cultures. Of course atheists do not deny that murder is immoral, the argument just seeks to show that this is inconsistent with atheism.

Second, when we ask what the supernatural agency in question is, Plantinga immediately points to God. I think instead that the agency is the individual human being. We are supernatural agents, and rational thought is a supernatural process. I would argue further that this ultimately requires God's existence via a less direct route, but that's a post for another day.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

70 years

since the Pearl Harbor attacks. I was stationed on Oahu 20 years ago at K Bay, and a friend of mine and I planned to go to Pearl Harbor on the 50th anniversary of the attacks to get bombed. We ended up going to a movie instead. I'm slightly more respectful nowadays.

My Vote for "Best Subtitle Ever, Ever"

How to Philosophize with a Hammer.