Agent Intellect

I'm sorry

2012-02-03T09:20:00.001+01:00

but this is hilarious. So is this.

In the mail

2012-01-30T20:03:00.000+01:00

1. Tyson sent me this interesting article on scientism as it relates to the attempts to apply materialism to the mind. It's an appreciative review of the book Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity by secular humanist Raymond Tallis.

2. Matko, remembering this post, points out that communism, fascism, and Nazism all share the same origin in Karl Marx. He suggests I read -- in this order -- The Birth of Fascist Ideology by Zeev Sternhell and Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism by A. James Gregor. I'm a little preoccupied with my dissertation at the moment, so I encourage my readers to beat me to the punch.

Quote of the Day

2012-01-27T22:28:00.005+01:00

Considering the evident dangers of applying the adaptationist program incorrectly, why are the Darwinians nevertheless so intent on applying it? The principal reason for this is its great heuristic value. The adaptationist question, "What is the function of a given structure or organ?" has been for centuries the basis for every advance in physiology. If it had not been for the adaptationist program, we probably would still not yet know the functions of thymus, spleen, pituitary, and pineal. Harvey's question "Why are there valves in the veins?" was a major stepping stone in his discovery of the circulation of blood. If one answer turned out to be wrong, the adaptationist program demanded another answer until the true meaning of the structure was established or until it could be shown that this feature was merely an incidental byproduct of the total genotype. It would seem to me that there is nothing wrong with the adaptationist program, provided it is properly applied.

Ernst Mayr
"How to Carry Out the Adaptationist Program?"
The American Naturalist 121/3 (1983): 324-334.

Two Faiths

2012-01-26T09:27:00.001+01:00

There's a wonderful passage in Philippians 4:6-7 where Paul writes, "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." My question is, why the thanksgiving? What does thanksgiving contribute to the process? Prayer and petition I understand; indeed, I don't see the difference between them in this context. To petition God is to pray. To present a request to God in prayer is to petition him. That's another problem I won't go into; meanwhile, I'm still asking about the thanksgiving part. Is it just that to ask God for certain things requires that one is in a right relationship with him, and this requires, among other things, a general attitude of thanksgiving? I guess that's possible but I don't think that's what Paul is saying here.

Let me present my answer to this question by first pointing out that we tend to think of "faith" in two ways. The first is discussed in Hebrews 11:1: "faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." Being certain of what we do not see suggests that everything that one is not seeing at the present moment is believed on faith. I think we can extend this beyond sight as the author of Hebrews presumably did not mean to exclude things that we are immediately experiencing via some other sense or introspection. Even so, taken this way, faith is incredibly broad. It would mean that I have faith that the wall behind me is still there while I'm typing this. I have faith that the dinner I just had with my family actually happened. The only thing we would not call faith are those things that one is immediately experiencing at the present moment. Since the future is precisely such a thing, we are exhorted to have faith that God will keep his promises. This kind of faith is propositional in nature, it is intellectual assent, and it is not the faith by which we are saved. When people say they believe that God exists by faith they are employing this concept of faith. You have faith that a particular proposition is true or false. I have faith that the wall behind me is still there, even though it's not immediately present to my mind. This is problematic however since God sometimes makes his presence known to people directly, in such a way that we are immediately aware of him. According to this first definition, we do not have faith in God at those moments. It's no good saying, "Yes, maybe in those moments we don't have faith because we know God is there," because faith has traditionally been conceived of as a kind of knowledge. So this strikes me as a problem for the first type of faith.

The other kind of faith is also in Hebrews 11:1. This is not intellectual assent, it is essentially trust. Faith like this is not faith that God exists, but trust in him. So the statement "I have faith in God" can be taken in two ways: it can be taken as an assertion that the person believes that God exists, or it can be taken as an assertion that since God exists, the person trusts him. The presence of this second kind of faith in Hebrews 11:1 is not self-evident; it comes from asking the question, "Why should we be sure of what we hope for?" The reason is that we can trust God. It is based on what God's character is like, based on the Bible and on one's experience of him. Our experience of him does not necessarily refer to theophanies or the like; it refers to the experiences we have had in which God was faithful to us, where he showed himself to be trustworthy by bringing us through difficulties or blessing us with things we asked for.

And now we can see why we should present our requests to God "with thanksgiving." We are being told that, when we ask God for something specific, we should reflect on the times when God showed himself to be eminently trustworthy. This doesn't mean that he will do everything and anything we ask for. It means that we can trust him to carry us through whatever happens. We can trust that he has our best interests at heart. Jesus said it: "Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion?" We may think our best interests entail a particular state of affairs and pray that God bring about that state of affairs. God has a longer view than we do, and in all likelihood knows a few things about what we're asking for that we don't know. But he also loves us and loves to bless us. Regardless, when we ask God for something, we should do it with thanksgiving, thanksgiving for how he has carried us through the fire in the past. The point being that this should impact our confidence in asking for God to give us something in particular. In fact it should do more than impact it, since Paul tells us what the result will be of presenting our requests before God with thanksgiving: "And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

That's all I need to say about the Philippians passage, but I have more to say about these two concepts of faith. They are closely related. When I was a kid I had faith that my mother wouldn't deliberately hurt me or allow me to come to harm. This is clearly the second kind of faith. But just as clearly, it can be formed into a proposition that I believed, since I just did so. So I can have the first kind of faith that the proposition "My mother won't hurt me" is true. I can also just trust my mother based on my experience of her as a loving, gentle woman who loved me dearly.

Here's another point: neither kind of faith is incompatible with evidence or proof. If I had been intellectually sophisticated enough, I could probably have provided plenty of evidence attesting to my mother's character and that hurting her child is incompatible with this character. I could even have constructed this evidence into an argument demonstrating it. Did I have evidence? Yes. Could I have proven it beyond any reasonable doubt? Yes. Did I have faith? Yes. The only point where faith would conflict with evidence is the point mentioned above regarding the first kind of faith and something immediately present to the mind. But this is because my belief in something I'm directly experiencing -- that I'm looking at a computer screen right now, or that I have a headache, or whatever -- isn't really a product of evidence. I don't weigh the evidence for or against something I'm directly experiencing. I don't formulate an argument like: "via introspection I discover that my head hurts; introspection about what one is directly experiencing at the present moment cannot be mistaken; therefore I believe that my head really does hurt." My belief is not based on evidence or argument at all. Of course, this brings us back to the claim that God can and does reveal himself directly to our minds. This would then imply that we do not require evidence or argument to believe in him either. As mentioned above, this would seem to conflict with the first type of faith. But perhaps we can comfort ourselves in those moments by settling for the second.

Vallicella on Plantinga on Science and Religion

2012-01-25T21:30:00.001+01:00

Bill Vallicella has been reading Alvin Plantinga's new book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism and posting reviews of it chapter by chapter. Here are the links so far; I'll update this post as more are forthcoming.

Notes on the Preface
Notes on Chapter One
Plantinga versus Dawkins: Organized Complexity

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

The benefits of science-fiction in Christian ministry

2012-01-18T15:50:00.000+01:00

I found an interesting statement by Frederik Pohl, one of the great science-fiction authors, in the afterword to his story "The Day After the Day the Martians Came" in Dangerous Visions (published in 1967).

Between the time I wrote "The Day After the Day the Martians Came" and now, I met a minister from a small town in Alabama. Like many churches, not only in Alabama, his is torn on the question of integration. He has found a way, he thinks, to solve it -- or at least to ameliorate it -- among the white teen-agers in his congregation: he is encouraging them to read science fiction, in the hope that they may learn, first, to worry about green-skinned Martians instead of black-skinned Americans and, second, that all men are brothers ... at least in the face of a very large universe which is very likely to contain creatures who are not men at all.

I like the way this man serves his God. It's a good scheme. It ought to work. It better work, or God help all of us.

Of course, I hope that if there are intelligent aliens out there that we can recognize them as brothers and sisters. But I like the use of science-fiction to show that we should start that process by recognizing other human beings as brothers and sisters.

Islam and Terrorism

2012-01-17T11:31:00.000+01:00

Here is an excellent article by a Muslim denouncing terrorism. He doesn't pull his punches at all.

All of these attacks have been conducted by people who call themselves "Jihadis", this they claim is their struggle in the path of God. One cannot imagine to what extent the minds and the hearts of these people have become poisoned that in the month of Ramadan when even frowning is undesirable, they chose to murder and maim indiscriminately. The most incomprehensible aspect of these atrocities is that a vast majority of their victims are the very people on whose behalf these wars are waged!

If they want to fight and die for God, they are welcome. There are over 200,000 American soldiers, in Iraq and Afghanistan, who are there specifically to oblige them. Why not go and fight them?

These cowards, who call themselves Jihadis, run and hide from soldiers seeking to fight them and instead target helpless and unarmed civilians. They repeatedly confirm that they have no regard for social order, for law, for human life and even for the sacred injunctions from the God whose pleasure they seek through violence.

If they really wish to wage a Jihad (struggle) in this holy month of Ramadan, then their first target should be their own cowardice and the profound Jahiliyyah (ignorance) that disables them from seeing what is right and what is wrong.

I'm always encouraged by this kind of thing, because I believe that the repudiation of Islamic terrorism has to come from within Islam in order to have any effect. Of course, as he points out, since the vast majority of the people being killed and maimed by Muslim terrorists are Muslims -- and since the terrorists have not exactly demonstrated a high level of rationality -- it's doubtful that being condemned by other Muslims would have any influence on them.

Brubeck on Chopin

2012-01-16T07:36:00.002+01:00

I've never been much of a fan of jazz music, but some of the greats just amaze me. Dave Brubeck and the way he plays with meter is incredible. The only Brubeck CD I have -- really the only jazz CD I have -- is Jazz Impressions of Eurasia. One of the songs on there, "Thank You (Dziekuje)", barely qualifies as jazz at all: it's a tribute to Chopin that sounds like an original piece by him. I'm not exaggerating, it's just stunning.

"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."

2012-01-14T14:54:00.007+01:00

Living overseas (or as I call it, "elsewhere") means that I'm out of the loop for a lot of the cultural phenomena that take place in the United States (or as I call it, "civilization"). While I don't experience such phenomena, however, I sometimes still learn of it via the Internet. So I hear about Denver quarterback Tim Tebow and how he is a polarizing figure because he constantly drops to one knee to thank God for his athletic abilities after plays. One of the frequent objections I keep hearing is that he's just not a very good quarterback: he's not a good passer, he does a lot of the running himself, etc. Tebow's defenders point out that Denver was having a very bad season before he was made the starting quarterback, and since then they not only managed to get a winning season, they went on to the playoffs and even managed to pull out a surprise upset last week. So by what standard are his detractors saying he's not a good quarterback? He doesn't complete a lot of his passes, sure, he just keeps winning instead.

Now I have no idea whether Tebow is a good quarterback or a bad quarterback. But these claims reminded me of a passage by Dallas Willard in Hearing God where he discusses the 19th century evangelist D. L. Moody.

In his day Moody was a constant source of wonder precisely because the effects of his ministry were so totally incommensurable, even incongruent, with his obvious personal qualities. He was a man of very ordinary appearance, unordained by any ecclesiastical group and quite uncultured and uneducated -- even uncouth and crude to many.

At the height of Moody's effectiveness, between 1874 and 1875, Dr. R. W. Dale, one of the leading nonconformist clergymen in England, observed his work in Birmingham for three or four days. He wished to discover the secret of Moody's power. After his observations were completed he told Moody that the work was most plainly the work of God, for he could see no relation between him personally and what he was accomplishing. A smaller person might well have been offended at this, but Moody only laughed and replied that he would be very sorry if things were otherwise.

Perhaps that's an explanation of why Tebow is so successful despite not being a good quarterback (assuming, of course, that it's true he's not a good quarterback). God sometimes reveals himself this way. And I suspect if someone told Tebow the same thing Dale told Moody he would respond the same way Moody did.

Thought of the Day

2012-01-13T07:09:00.000+01:00

I told my father that Nietzsche said God is dead. My father laughed, then said, "I don't think Nietzsche's going to win that particular fight."

Breaking news from the heliosheath

2012-01-08T19:54:00.002+01:00

Last month Voyager 1 passed two important milestones. Voyager 1 is currently 120 a.u. or 16 light-hours from earth, and is travelling at over 60,000 kilometers (38,000 miles) per hour. It is the farthest and fastest spacecraft yet built. Even so, it will take another 14,000 years before it travels a single light-year.

First, it detected the Lyman-alpha radiation from the Milky Way galaxy for the first time. We detect Lyman-alpha radiation from other galaxies no problem, but the radiation from our own sun drowns out our ability to detect it coming from our own galaxy. So Voyager 1 is far enough away from the sun that sun's radiation is no longer overwhelming the Lyman-alpha radiation. I find this pretty amazing.

Second, scientists have been estimating that Voyager 1 could break through the heliopause any day now, almost certainly by 2015. This is the point where the solar wind stops pushing outward from the sun because the radiation from nearby stars, the stellar wind or interstellar medium, becomes more powerful than it. The heliopause is usually considered to be the boundary of the solar system. In other words, Voyager 1 is on the verge of entering interstellar space. A month ago, they announced that it had reached a stagnation region or "cosmic purgatory" where the solar wind was starting to turn inward. The interstellar medium is beginning to force the solar wind to turn back toward the sun. Again, I find this pretty amazing.

Eliminating Reductivism

2012-01-07T18:28:00.005+01:00

Bill Vallicella has a couple of great posts on the attempt to avoid eliminative materialism while still maintaining a reductive materialist stance. His first post engages Jaegwon Kim's Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, a book I desperately want to read, and his second post clarifies some issues. Good stuff.

Multiversial Musings

2012-01-05T07:51:00.010+01:00

The multiverse, or many worlds hypothesis, is the idea that there is a trans-universe universe which is constantly giving birth to little universes, of which we are one. Its relevance for science and religion is that it is an attempt to obviate both cosmological arguments and teleological arguments. It obviates some cosmological arguments by saying that our universe's beginning with the Big Bang was not an ultimate beginning, but merely the beginning of one of many universes, brought about by natural processes (where "natural" is defined in reference to the multiverse). It obviates teleological arguments by saying that, given an innumerable or infinite number of universes, there is bound to be one that has the right conditions for life and in which life originates and evolves. I discussed the multiverse hypothesis before here and here.

The multiverse is certainly a very clever idea. However there are a few problems with using it to avoid these theistic arguments. Before I get into them, though, I'd like to make two points that aren't objections so much as interesting postulates. First, as I point out here, the multiverse can be used to obviate the argument that the occurrence of evil is incompatible with God's existence just as much as it can be used to obviate cosmological and teleological arguments. So if we use it to take away some reasons for believing in God, we can also use it to take away some reasons for not believing in God. Second, the multiverse hypothesis, if successful, would negate cosmological arguments based on the universe having a beginning and all teleological arguments. Yet these arguments have been around for millennia and I'm unaware of anyone employing a multiverse concept to get around them. Of course this doesn't mean it's false, but perhaps it should make us a little suspicious.

Anyway, here are the problems, as I see them, with using the multiversial to avoid theistic arguments.

1. The multiverse is just as metaphysical an explanation as the claim that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Appealing to the multiverse's natural processes in order to account for our universe's origin does not make it a physical explanation, since those processes transcend the processes of the matter, energy, space, and time that make up our universe.

2. No one has yet been able to produce a model for a multiverse that does not itself have a beginning. So it doesn't really remove the necessity of an ultimate cosmic origin, it just pushes it one step back.

3. At any rate, cosmological arguments did not originate with the discovery of the Big Bang. They have been defended for millennia based on the mathematical problems that arise if we posit an actual infinite amount of things. In order for the multiverse to not have a beginning itself, it would entail an actual infinite number of cause-and-effect events, and so the mathematical problems are still applicable.

4. Ockham's Razor plays havoc with the multiverse. This is the claim that we should prefer simpler explanations that posit fewer entities over complex explanations that posit more entities. Ockham's Razor is one of the most important principles in science. In order to account for one universe having the right conditions for life the multiverse posits trillions or an infinite number of other universes. In contrast, the theistic explanation requires us to posit one further level of reality to this universe. If we have to choose between these two options, the claim that God created the universe wins hands down.

4.1. It may be objected that the God being posited, as the creator of the universe, would be enormously complex, and so Ockham's Razor, which prefers simpler explanations, would point us to the multiverse. This, however, misunderstands two things: first, in Ockham's Razor, "simple" does not mean ontologically simple, it means numerically simple. To put it another way, it is not a matter of qualitative complexity but of quantitative complexity. The Razor claims that, all things being equal, we should prefer explanations which posit the fewest number of entities. The multiverse posits innumerable other universes in order to explain this one. Theism posits one other realm of reality in order to explain it. We should prefer the latter over the former according to Ockham's Razor. Second, traditionally the God of theism has been conceived as being the simplest of all beings. This is known, not very imaginatively, as the doctrine of divine simplicity. So, even if we ignore the first point, theism is not positing a more ontologically complex explanation of the universe than is the multiverse.

4.2. It may be objected further that the multiverse is not really positing all these other universes as distinct entities, but as outgrowths of a single all-encompassing ur-cosmos. There are two problems with this: first, we can do the same thing with the theistic explanation. Our universe is a part of reality; the whole of reality includes God and everything else he has created. As C. S. Lewis put it in Miracles, atheists "have mistaken a partial system within reality, namely Nature, for the whole." Second, at any rate, this is not a viable strategy, since any charge that something conflicts with Ockham's Razor could be explained away by saying all the other entities being posited are just parts of a larger singular entity. In other words, if we say that the multiverse doesn't conflict with Ockham's Razor, nothing else does either. Ockham's Razor is defunct and empty. This is not a reasonable conclusion.

5. In addition to flying in the face of Ockham's Razor, the multiverse commits the inverse gambler's fallacy. This plays on the much more famous gambler's fallacy. If someone sees a coin being flipped a hundred times and it comes up heads each time, he commits the gambler's fallacy if he bets the coin will come up tails on the next flip because he thinks it's due. The inverse gambler's fallacy says that, regardless of the merits of the bet, the gambler is essentially assuming that if there were innumerable coins being flipped, one of them was bound to come up heads a hundred times in a row. Yet this would only be a viable explanation if the gambler had actually witnessed all these other coins coming up with all their other results. Without such observation, you're best off thinking that the coin-flips are fixed somehow. Similarly, if we find ourselves in a universe that meets just the right conditions for life, we're best off thinking that the game is rigged: the universe was made that way on purpose.

6. The multiverse hypothesis, by itself, is not sufficient to avoid the cosmological and teleological arguments. We must specify a multiverse of a particular type and character. This is problematic because the more conditions one has to add to the bare-bones multiverse, the more contrived or ad hoc it is; and the more ad hoc an explanation, the less likely it is true.

6.1. Having an infinite number of universes will not lead to one having the requisite conditions for life if they're all identical, or only vary within set limits. Why think this is not the case? Why assume that the universes spawned by the multiverse are sufficiently random so that they exhaust all possibilities -- or at least the possibilities that entail one universe being hospitable to life?

6.2. For that matter, why assume that the multiverse spawns an infinite number of universes, or a number sufficient to make a biophilic universe possible? What if the multiverse only spawns 5,000 universes? Or 50? Or five? We have to specify a number of universes large enough to neutralize the incredibly high probabilities against a universe allowing the possibility of life, but we have no reason for assuming that a multiverse would have produced such an incredible number of universes.

7. Finally, given the multiverse, we should expect to find ourselves in a vastly different cosmos than the one in which we do, in fact, find ourselves. Roger Penrose points out in The Road to Reality that the odds of a universe having the low entropy condition that ours has is one in 10^10(123). The odds of our solar system coming together by the random collision of particles is one in 10¹⁰⁽⁶⁰⁾ -- enormously improbable, but "utter chicken feed" in comparison to the odds against the low entropy condition being met. In other words, a universe that consisted entirely of our solar system is vastly more probable than the actual universe we have. Or, alternately, solar system universes would be much more plentiful than universes like the one in which we live, so, given the multiverse, we should expect to find ourselves in a much different, a much smaller universe.

7.1. Let me put this another way. Some of the anthropic coincidences are necessary because of the effects they produce. Universes in which those effects are met directly rather than through an anthropic coincidence are, at least in some cases, more probable. For example, when the universe sprang into existence, the property of dark energy (the stretchiness of the space-time fabric) had to be precisely what it is in order for the universe to expand at just the right speed so that gravity didn't overpower it and collapse the universe but not so fast as to prevent stars and galaxies from forming. This property has to be fine-tuned to one part in 10¹²⁰. But a universe that just cuts to the chase and is created fully-formed with just one earth, one sun, and one moon would not need to meet this condition. So, all other things being equal, a smaller, simpler universe would be more likely than the universe we actually find ourselves in. Yet, superficially, such a universe would seem to be designed, moreso than ours. In fact, some people argue that if God really created the universe, we wouldn't expect it to be as expansive as it is; we should just expect the earth, sun, and moon (I think Stephen Hawking makes this point in A Brief History of Time, but I'm not sure). Such a universe, which would seem to bespeak of divine design, would be a much more likely product of a multiverse than the universe we actually have. In other words, our universe is much less plausibly explained via the multiverse hypothesis than a universe that critics of theism suggest would convince them of God's existence. This strikes me as a pretty big deal.

Now, all of this may suggest that I'm hostile to the multiverse. However, I'm only hostile to it as an alternate explanation of the universe's origin and apparent design. One of God's characteristics, at least the God of Judaism and Christianity, is that he loves to create. So it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that there is more to reality than just two levels. To quote C. S. Lewis again:

...no man was, I suppose, ever so mad as to think that man, or all creation, filled the Divine Mind; if we are a small thing to space and time, space and time are a much smaller thing to God. It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion.

So I have no problem with the claim that there are other universes, other realities, than our own; indeed, I would be surprised if there weren't (think of the Wood between the Worlds). Since this belief is rooted in my belief in God, however, it cannot be used to write him out of the picture. If God does not exist, I no longer have a reason for thinking there are other realities. But then the problem of the universe's origin and fine-tuning re-present themselves.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Prayers for the New Year

2011-12-30T12:44:00.003+01:00

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

2011-12-25T06:59:00.003+01:00

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

2011-12-21T21:50:00.003+01:00

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

2011-12-18T22:39:00.002+01:00

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

2011-12-13T11:15:00.004+01:00

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

2011-12-11T23:39:00.000+01:00

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

2011-12-08T22:20:00.002+01:00

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

2011-12-07T08:55:00.001+01:00

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"

2011-12-01T09:30:00.001+01:00

How to Philosophize with a Hammer.

Please pray

2011-11-28T00:04:00.002+01:00

for James Joyner and his two little girls. His wife passed away in her sleep at the age of 41 from unknown causes. Their daughters are 23 and 5 months old -- I'm sure the younger was still breastfeeding. Joyner suddenly finds himself a single father and has to deal with overwhelming grief. I can barely keep from tearing up just writing this.

The Phoenix Landing

2011-11-25T11:37:00.005+01:00

This is three years old and I can't believe I didn't mention it when it happened, but one of the utterly fascinating things involved with the Phoenix spacecraft is that another spacecraft, the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter in orbit around Mars, took pictures of Phoenix as it descended through the Martian atmosphere and after it landed. It just blows me away to think of two separate spacecraft coming into contact with each other like that.

The only thing that I find more mind-boggling than this is when Apollo 12 landed a stone's throw away from Surveyor 3 and the astronauts wondered on over to it.

Dude

2011-11-19T11:27:00.000+01:00

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration.

EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact.

Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month.

I need to get back to the States before they ban the actual drinking of water to prevent dehydration.

Quote of the Day

2011-11-18T15:23:00.002+01:00

I dreamed that a number of us bought a ship and hired a crew and captain and went to sea. We called her the State. And a great storm arose and she began to make heavy weather of it, till at last there came a cry "All hands to the pumps -- owners and all!" We had too much sense to disobey the call and in less time than it takes to write the words we had all turned out, and allowed ourselves to be formed into squads at the pumps. Several emergency petty officers were appointed to teach us our work and keep us at it. In my dream I did not, even at the outset, greatly care for the look of some of these gentry; but at such a moment -- the ship being nearly under -- who could attend to a trifle like that? And we worked day and night at the pumps and very hard work we found it. And by the mercy of God we kept her afloat and kept her head on to it, till presently the weather improved.

I don't think that any of us expected the pumping squads to be dismissed there and then. We knew that the storm might not be really over and it was as well to be prepared for anything. We didn't even grumble (or not much) when we found that parades were to be no fewer. What did break our hearts were the things the petty officers now began to do to us when they had us on parade. They taught us nothing about pumping or handling a rope or indeed anything that might help to save their lives or ours. Either there was nothing more to learn or the petty officers did not know it. They began to teach us all sorts of things -- the history of shipbuilding, the habits of mermaids, how to dance the hornpipe and play the penny whistle and chew tobacco. For by this time the emergency petty officers (though the real crew laughed at them) had become so very, very nautical that they couldn't open their mouths without saying "Shiver my timbers" or "Avast" or "Belay".

And then one day, in my dream, one of them let the cat out of the bag. We heard him say, "Of course we shall keep all these compulsory squads in being for the next voyage: but they won't necessarily have anything to do with working the pumps. For, of course, shiver my timbers, we know there'll never be another storm, d'you see? But having once got hold of these lubbers we're not going to let them slip back again. Now's our chance to make this the sort of ship we want."

But the emergency petty officers were doomed to disappointment. For the owners (that was "us" in the dream, you understand) replied "What? Lose our freedom and not get security in return? Why, it was only for security we surrendered our freedom at all." And then someone cried, "Land in sight". And the owners with one accord took every one of the emergency petty officers by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his trousers and heaved the lot of them over the side. I protest that in my waking hours I would never have approved such an action. But the dreaming mind is regrettably immoral, and in the dream, when I saw all those meddling busybodies going plop-plop into the deep blue sea, I could do nothing but laugh.

My punishment was that the laughter woke me up.

C. S. Lewis
"A Dream"
Present Concerns

Archaeology of the EAAN

2011-11-14T22:07:00.003+01:00

Alvin Plantinga has spent much of the last two decades arguing that naturalism is self-defeating. He calls his argument the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism or EAAN, and the reason it's evolutionary is because Plantinga applies it specifically to evolution. If naturalism is true, our belief-forming capacities are not aimed at the production of mostly true beliefs; rather, they are aimed at survival since that is what evolution would select for. But then any particular belief is not produced by cognitive faculties aimed at producing true beliefs -- including belief in evolution itself. Therefore, either evolution is true or naturalism is true; not both. Since naturalists generally consider evolution to be their primary argument (mistakenly, I would argue for further reasons), the EAAN takes their strongest weapon and uses it against them.

Plantinga's first widely-read presentation of this argument is chapter 12 (pp. 216-37) of Warrant and Proper Function (henceforth WPF), published in 1993, entitled "Is Naturalism Irrational?" (chapter 11 is relevant too). But I came across a handful of references to an earlier essay published in 1991 in Logos simply titled "An Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism." I suspected this article was probably just an earlier version of the final chapter of WPF but I'm one of those people who likes to track these obscure references down. Unfortunately, there are a few journals named Logos and none of those I had access to were the right one. So I finally resorted to drastic measures: I requested the article via inter-library loan.

The journal, it turns out, is the now-defunct Logos: Philosophic Issues in Christian Perspective, volume 12 (1991), with Plantinga's article taking up pages 27-49. As I suspected it's very similar to chapter 12 of WPF, although not identical; the chapter is an updated version of the essay. Regardless, now I had both.

Yet then I encountered another reference. William Alston begins his essay "Plantinga, Naturalism, and Defeat" (page 176 in James Beilby, ed., Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism [Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2002]) by saying that Plantinga published the EAAN in two places at the same time, one of those places being WPF. The second reference was not to Logos, however: it was to Faith in Theory and Practice: Essays on Justifying Religious Belief, edited by Elizabeth S. Radcliffe and Carol J. White (Chicago: Open Court, 1993). My suspicion, however, was that the latter article was not the updated chapter but merely a republication of the original Logos essay. Fortunately, I did have access to this book in one of the faculty libraries, so I went and copied the article -- pp. 35-65 and titled "An Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism" -- and compared it to the earlier article. Sure enough, the Radcliffe-White article is identical to the Logos article (although it has an abstract not present in the latter) and thus is similar but not identical to the final chapter of WPF.

So if you're a pedantic researcher like me and want to track down these earlier references even though there are no significant differences between them and the version presented in WPF (which is available online here), you can just get the Radcliffe-White book, since it's much more accessible. You're welcome.

Spinozan SF

2011-11-13T17:37:00.004+01:00

I've never read Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, I've only read about it -- partially because C. S. Lewis wrote his Space Trilogy to provide a sort of Christian counter-example to it. Now I learn that Star Maker can be seen as a science-fiction expression of Spinoza's philosophy. That moves it to the top of my list.

Three more books

2011-11-12T20:50:00.007+01:00

A friend for whom I recently did a minor favor very graciously bought me a $50 gift certificate for Amazon.com. This is probably the best kind of gift to give to someone like me. The shipping costs to send them to Belgium were fairly high, but I managed to finagle three books out of it. I really wanted to get Jaegwon Kim's Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, but couldn't figure out a way of doing it and still getting two more books. I received my order a few days ago and realized that as the books are completely incommensurate with each other, they illustrate the diversity of my psychoses. Here they are, for what it's worth:

Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. I use this book in my dissertation, and it finally reached the point where it was much more convenient to own it than to continue getting it from a library. In fact, I really need to familiarize myself with all of Dennett's books as his philosophical foci overlap mine in several places. Also, the more I read him the more I like him.

Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion. I've been wanting this one ever since it came out, especially to read Dennis Danielson's chapter, but never had the spare change to buy it. Now all I need is the spare time to read it.

Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge. I've mentioned before how this book sounds like it's written to address my particular spiritual condition. I read somewhere that you shouldn't constantly read new books on spirituality, but instead find a handful of books that speak to your condition and just feed off them. Dallas Willard's books fill that role for me. I also note that his website has brought back the page on his current projects which I mentioned here.

Happy Nigel Tufnel Day

2011-11-11T23:11:00.002+01:00

Or corduroy day or whatever.

(Yes, I know it's Veterans Day -- Armistice Day in Europe -- but it kind of ticks me off because, as a Marine Corps veteran I've never had Veterans Day off. No it's other people who get to take it off to honor veterans but the actual veterans have to work. Seriously, how messed up is that? Why not make Veterans Day a day when you honor veterans by giving veterans the day off? Having a day to honor veterans where most veterans get treated the same as any other day makes you look kind of like a jerk. OK, sorry, rant off.)

Wir danken dir, Gott

2011-10-22T22:23:00.005+02:00

Folks, I'm sorry I haven't been posting much of late. I can only appeal to the demands of academia again. In the meantime, here is another favorite piece of music: the opening sinfonia to "Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir" (we thank you, God, we thank you), by Johann Sebastian Bach, which is a reworking of a violin partita. I haven't been able to find a version of this on YouTube that I like, since they all place an emphasis on the organ, and my few years of attending church as a kid ruined me for organ music. Fortunately I found a version on Grooveshark that is all strings -- in fact, I think it's the same version I originally heard and loved which may explain why the organ versions don't move me as much.

This piece epitomizes baroque music for me. It's just magical. If I had to point to one piece of music that captures everything I love about classical music, this would be it. Take a listen.

Update (23 Oct): For comparison, here's the violin partita he culled it from (#3, Preludio):

Like my wife says, it's hard to believe all that is coming from one instrument.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence...

2011-10-15T20:29:00.003+02:00

...until you're on the other side and realize there's nothing to eat but grass. I just read a hilarious and disturbingly accurate article from Cracked: 6 Reasons Your Plans to Move Abroad Might Not Work Out. Number 3 is "What You Hate About America, You Find Everywhere". I read this article Friday afternoon, and it was incredibly appropriate because that morning my wife and I observed a white European being insanely racist towards a black African, racism on a level that is all too common in Europe but would never happen in the States. Seriously, if the racist stuff that flies under the radar here happened in the States, cities would burn. It's mind-boggling. Probably the most blatant example of this is Zwarte Piet, "Black Pete". You see, in the lowlands, Santa Claus has a black slave named Pete who accompanies him wherever he goes. His job is to scare the children into being good. Because being black is scary. Oh, and also Pete is always portrayed by white people in blackface. Notice I write "white people" not "white men"; Pete is often portrayed by women.

Of course, another point made in the Cracked article is that when you live overseas you eventually start blaming your host culture for every single thing that you find offensive or annoying. For example, customer service is, as far as I can tell, an American phenomenon -- or perhaps an Anglo phenomenon. So is lining up to get on a bus, train, elevator, etc. So is safety. My wife and I were once walking down a busy street and passed a circular saw, plugged in and spinning, just laying there. No protective guard or anything. Some workers had been doing something with it, and went to take a break. Nobody else thought it was unusual to have a saw that could cut off their legs spinning away in the middle of the sidewalk, they just stepped around it.

Future Space

2011-10-07T21:16:00.002+02:00

Future Pundit is a blog that focuses on all things technological. However, I'm really just interested in his posts on space exploration and space colonization.

Pajamas Linkfest

2011-10-06T00:15:00.001+02:00

Here are a few interesting links from Pajamas Media, a collocation of bloggers. They tend towards libertarianism, but my interest in the stories below are not primarily political.

-- NASA’s ‘Shuttlyndra’ a Massive Waste of Tax Dollars by Rand Simburg who also blogs at Transterrestrial Musings.

-- Literary B-Sides: Five of the Most Under-Rated Books from Famous Authors

-- The Sicko Side of the Sci-Fi Circuit. I'd never heard any of this before, but I've never been to a SF convention.

-- Islam's History of Forced Conversions. Interesting, but purely anecdotal. He sees parallels between a recent event and an event from several hundred years ago. He needs to point to more than two examples in 500 years to make his case.

-- No More Harems: The Hidden History of Muslim and Ex-Muslim Feminism. Inspiring.

-- Hey Lady Gaga, Kids Have a Time-Tested Answer for Bullies: Punch Them in the Mouth. Fairly self-explanatory.

-- Deconstructing Mad Men’s Title Sequence. I watched some of the first season, but it didn't do anything for me. The title sequence, however, is haunting.

Quote of the Day

2011-09-28T23:13:00.004+02:00

Sexual eros points to something deeper in a second way. As we have just seen, it is a sign or type of a deeper reality, a kind of love for God of which we now just have hints and intimations. It is also a sign, symbol, or type of God's love -- not just of the love God's children will someday have for him but of the love he also has for them. As we noted above (p. 312), Scripture regularly compares God's love for his people and Christ's love for his church to the love of a groom for his new bride. Now a widely shared traditional view of God has been that he is impassible, without desire or feeling or passion, unable to feel sorrow at the sad condition of his world and the suffering of his children, and equally unable to feel joy, delight, longing, or yearning. The reason for so thinking, roughly, is that in the tradition originating in Greek philosophy, passions were thought of (naturally enough) as passive, something that happens to you, something you undergo, rather than something you actively do. You are subject to anger, love, joy, and all the rest. God, however, is pure act; he doesn't 'undergo' anything at all; he acts, and is never merely passive; and he isn't subject to anything. As far as eros is concerned, furthermore, there is an additional reason for thinking that it isn't part of God's life: longing and yearning signify need and incompleteness. One who yearns for something doesn't yet have it, and needs it, or at any rate thinks he needs it; God is of course paradigmatically complete and needs nothing beyond himself. How, then, could he be subject to eros? God's love, according to this tradition, is exclusively agape, benevolence, a completely other-regarding, magnanimous love in which there is mercy but no element of desire. God loves us, but there is nothing we can do for him; he wishes nothing from us.

On this particular point I think we must take leave of the tradition; this is one of those places where it has paid too much attention to Greek philosophy and too little to the Bible. I believe God can and does suffer; his capacity for suffering exceeds ours in the same measure that his knowledge exceeds ours. Christ's suffering was no charade; he was prepared to endure the agonies of the cross and of hell itself ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"). God the Father was prepared to endure the anguish of seeing his Son, the second person of the trinity, consigned to the bitterly cruel and shameful death of the cross. And isn't the same true for other passions? "There is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent" (Luke 15:7); is God himself to be excluded from this rejoicing?

Similarly for eros: "As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you" (Isaiah 62:5). The bridegroom rejoicing over his bride doesn't love her with a merely agapeic love. He isn't like her benevolent elder brother (although Christ is also said to be our elder brother). He desires and longs for something outside himself, namely union with his beloved. The church is the bride of Christ, not his little sister. He is not her benevolent elder brother, but her husband, lover. These scriptural images imply that God isn't impassive, and that his love for us is not exclusively agapeic. They suggest that God's love for his people involves an erotic element of desire: he desires the right kind of response from us, and union with us, just as we desire union with him.

We can take this one step further (and here we may be crossing the boundary into groundless speculation). According to Jonathan Edwards, "The infinite happiness of the Father consists in the enjoyment of His Son." This presumably isn't agape. It doesn't involve an element of mercy, as in his love for us. It is, instead, a matter of God's taking enormous pleasure, enjoyment, delight, happiness, delectation in the Son. Given the necessary existence of the Father and the Son, and their having their most important properties essentially, there is no way in which God could be deprived of the Son; but if (per impossible) he were, it would occasion inconceivable sadness. The love in question is eros, not agape. It is a desire for union that is continually, eternally, and joyfully satisfied. And our being created in his image involves our capacity for eros and for love of what is genuinely lovable, as well as knowledge and agenthood.

Accordingly, the eros in our lives is a sign or a symbol of God's erotic love as well. Human erotic love is a sign of something deeper, something so deep that it is uncreated, an original and permanent and necessarily present feature of the universe. Eros undoubtedly characterizes many creatures other than human beings; no doubt much of the living universe shares this characteristic. More important, all of us creatures with eros reflect and partake in this profound divine property. So the most fundamental reality here is the love displayed by and in God: love within the trinity. This love is erotic. It is a matter of perceiving and desiring and enjoying union with something valuable, in this case, Someone of supreme value. And God's love for us is manifested in his generously inviting us into this charmed circle (though not, of course, to ontological equality), thus satisfying the deepest longings of our souls. Within this circle, there is mercy, self-sacrifice, overflowing agape; there is also that longing and delight, that yearning and joy that make up eros.

Alvin Plantinga
Warranted Christian Belief

Pessimism and Aphorism

2011-09-26T20:48:00.009+02:00

Maverick Philosopher analyzes some aphorisms of Emil Cioran. I would offer Cioran more grace with regards to their consistency: to be consistent is to be systematic and to demand that aphorisms be systematic is to demand a standard they are not usually trying to meet. It's hard enough to be systematic when you're writing a systematic work. Plus, if you're trying to point to the absurdity of life, as Cioran is, consistency may not be a high priority. Nevertheless, I agree that you can point to the inconsistencies and recognize them as such, I just don't think it makes him "an unserious literary scribbler".

I'm very glad I encountered God before I encountered Cioran (or Schopenhauer). I'm naturally pessimistic, so philosophical pessimism would have ensnared me. My soul yearns, my heart cries out ... for non-existence. As Cioran puts it, "Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?" An image I've carried with me since I was a teenager is that I want to vomit myself up. I want to vomit until there's nothing and no one left. Of course, this is contradictory (thank God): I have to exist to vomit, so there would always be a core being that remains.

I doubt I would have realized this if I had encountered philosophical pessimism before Christ. But Christianity explains it perfectly. "So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God -- through Jesus Christ our Lord!" A part of me wants to say I don't want to do good, that's the problem -- but then why is it a problem? There's a part of me, however small you want to make it, that recognizes it's a problem, that wants to do good; and it is this part of me that rebels against who I am and what I do and wants to vomit it up, exterminate it. That part of me wants to do good, wants to be holy. Pessimism says that since a part of me -- perhaps a large part of me -- is enmired in sin, evil, absurdity, that all of me must be. But if all of me is so enmired, what's the part of me that recognizes it for what it is and rebels against it? As Maverick Philosopher writes, "Cioran's thought undermines the very possibility of its own expression. That can't be good."

Pessimism is too simple; it views the situation as univocal when it is really a duality. But that shouldn't be too surprising: reality is often more complicated than how we would like it to be.

Site Seeing

2011-09-21T16:25:00.004+02:00

I've decided to combine three elements of my sidebar into one, and economize them a bit, under the title Site Seeing. These are simply websites and blogs that I find interesting. Some of the sites, blogs in particular, cover politics, but the fact that I'm linking to them should not be taken as an endorsement or agreement.

First are several philosophy websites and blogs. Dallas Willard is a professor at USC, and is an expert on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. His site includes most of his philosophical essays. But Willard has made a name for himself in the Christian community by writing some incredibly insightful books on spirituality and Christian living (I wrote about one here), and his site also includes a large collection of his essays on these subjects as well. If you're a Christian, I can't recommend strongly enough that you get to know his writings. Victor Reppert's blog, Dangerous Idea (derived from his book C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea, which defends the argument from reason) is where he writes about philosophy, theology, C. S. Lewis, politics, etc. Dangerous Idea 2 is dedicated exclusively to the argument from reason. Just Thomism is an absolutely outstanding philosophy blog, one of the best around. It's written by James Chastek. Bill Vallicella's blog, Maverick Philosopher is equally outstanding in this regard. The Prosblogion is a group blog written by numerous philosophers of religion and very interesting. Another link is to William Lane Craig's site Reasonable Faith, although you have to have a username and password to access much of it. If you don't want to do that, his old site is still up, and has most of the stuff available from the new site. Craig's contribution to academia is primarily in defending Christianity. He has written numerous articles on philosophical proofs for and against the existence of God, as well as issues regarding the historical Jesus. I also link to a site on his debates. I'm also including the Philosophers' Carnival which links to various philosophical blogposts every three weeks, but is hosted by a different blog each time.

Next are some sites dealing with Christianity and culture that are definitely worth your time. Books and Culture is an online magazine, although its most recent articles are usually only available in print. Yet it's still very much worth checking out. Another excellent online magazine is First Things. Next is a purely online resource called Leadership U. They have plenty of articles on religion and culture, philosophy, science, etc. An excellent blog on contemporary culture is The Anchoress, written by Elizabeth Scalia, who also writes at First Things.

I've also listed several sites that deal chiefly with religion and science. Bede's Library is the apologetics site of James Hannam, a philosopher and historian of science, and the author of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (US title: The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution. James's website explodes many of the myths surrounding the alleged conflict between science and Christianity, and I'm very pleased that he invited me, and a few others, to join him on his blog Quodlibeta (formerly Bede's Journal). The Counterbalance Interactive Library has a bunch of lectures and articles by leading scientists and philosophers of science, arguing most points of view. It really is an excellent resource. Another site is Reasons to Believe, a Christian ministry. I've belonged to a local chapter of it, and they also do an excellent job. However, they are critical of evolution, something I find unnecessary. Nevertheless, that is pretty much the only point where they conflict with contemporary science; most of the site demonstrates how modern physics, astronomy, and cosmology not only fit within the Christian worldview, but support it, often to the exclusion of other worldviews.

As for science simpliciter, I link to the Carnival of Space, which updates interesting stories and facets of space travel every week. Cosmic Log is a blog written by Alan Boyle and focuses on science, especially space science (something I'm very interested in), but also comments on other issues. It's a good starting place for scientific news and discoveries. A few sites that promote space exploration and getting permanent human colonies on other solar system bodies besides the earth are the Mars Society and the Moon Society. You can probably guess which bodies they have in mind. They are actually in slight conflict, since the Mars Society advocates their Mars Direct program to go directly to Mars without first setting up stations on the Moon. Two more sites along these lines are the National Space Society and the Planetary Society. Finally is Vintage Space, an excellent blog dealing with the history of space exploration.

Now for miscellanea: First is Homestar Runner. If you don't already understand why I'm linking to them, any argument would be futile. It's the source of my (former) nom de cyber, Tragic Clown Dog. Actually, it was a toss-up between that and Mushy Chamberpot, but my wife nixed the latter. Next, Things of Interest. I discovered this right before I started writing this blog. This guy writes all kinds of stuff, but the most interesting are his short stories. He is reminiscent, to my mind, of Fredric Brown, who I consider one of the better SF writers around in terms of short stories. I write short fiction too, and frankly I was starting to get a little impressed with myself before I read this guy's stuff. Some of the blogs from my old blogroll that successfully made the transfer include: Raskolnikov, Lost in the Cosmos, which I originally found by doing a Technorati search to see if anyone linked to my first blog. After reading him a few times, I was hooked. Besides, how can you not like a guy who names himself after a Dostoyevsky character? Wayfaring Stranger is written by Tyson, who I met him online a few years ago, after he linked to me. He's a father and a pastor, and has prayed for me during some hard times. Very nice guy. His blog is mostly concerned with religious issues from a specifically Christian perspective. Jacob Longshore writes the Wordverter blog. We know each other face to face, because we studied at the same school. Also a very nice guy, and an expert on C. S. Peirce (pronounced "purse").

A Breath of Fresh Aire

2011-09-17T20:41:00.007+02:00

When I was a kid my sister had the early Mannheim Steamroller albums and I just went rummaging through YouTube to find one particular tune from them that I've always found just haunting. When I get back to the States and my piano I'm going to get the sheet music to it. Here it is: Amber

While I was at it, I found a few more that I remember that are a little more, shall we say, jaunty. For example, The Cricket:

And The Third Door:

The first two are from Fresh Aire III and the third is from Fresh Aire II.

Quote of the Day

2011-09-14T08:38:00.001+02:00

We must also recall that the whole scheme, the whole radical subpicture, seems incoherent in a familiar way. One who states and proposes this scheme makes several claims about the Dinge: that they are not in space and time, for example, and more poignantly, that our concepts don't apply to them (applying only to the phenomena), so that we cannot refer to or think about them. But if we really can't think the Dinge, then we can't think them (and can't whistle them either); if we can't think about them, we can't so much as entertain the thought that there are such things. The incoherence is patent.

Would it be possible to induce coherence by refusing to make the distinction between phenomena and noumena, speaking only of what, if we did make that distinction, would be the phenomena, and claiming that whatever there is, is either a bit of experience or an object constructed by us from bits of experience by way of concepts (i.e., rules for constructing things from experience)? That is extremely hard to believe: are the stars, for example, which, as far as we can tell, existed long before we did, either bits of human experience or objects constructed by us from bits of human experience? How are we supposed to make sense of that? On this view, furthermore, the objection to Christian belief would not be that serious Christians improperly take it that they can refer to God; the objection would be that there is no God. If there were such a person, he certainly wouldn't be either a bit of human experience or something we have constructed from it. Still further, on this picture we ourselves (because we are among the things there are) would either have constructed ourselves from bits of experience or we would just be bits of experience; but of course we couldn't have constructed ourselves before we existed, so we must have started off, at least, as bits of experience with the power to construct things. Not a pretty picture. And even if we could somehow induce coherence here, why should we feel obliged to believe it? What possible claim could such a bizarre scheme have on us?

By way of conclusion then: it doesn't look as if there is good reason in Kant or in the neighborhood of Kant for the conclusion that our concepts do not apply to God, so that we cannot think about him. Contemporary theologians and others sometimes complain that contemporary philosophers of religion often write as if they have never read their Kant. Perhaps the reason they write that way, however, is not that they have never read their Kant but rather that they have read him and remain unconvinced. They may be unconvinced that Kant actually claimed that our concepts do not apply to God. Alternatively, they may concede that Kant did claim this, but remain unconvinced that he was right; after all, it is not just a given of the intellectual life that Kant is right. Either way, they don't think Kant gives us reason to hold that we cannot think about God.

Alvin Plantinga
Warranted Christian Belief

Images of Evil

2011-09-11T08:09:00.031+02:00

I suspect that as everyone from an older generation remembered where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had been shot, everyone from my generation will remember how they heard about 9/11. It's been ten years since those terrorist attacks, and it's far too easy to not think about the events of that day. I believe that these attacks were blatantly evil, and we have to remind ourselves of this in order to combat further atrocities from being committed in the future. So in order to recall that there is real evil in the world, here are the videos of the various plane strikes from 9/11. Bear in mind as you watch these that I'm not posting them to satiate anyone's morbid curiosity. You're watching hundreds of people, in the planes and in the buildings, being murdered. So consider that your content warning. Also, if you want to leave a comment espousing some conspiracy theory nonsense, find another website.

American Airlines flight 11
This is the famous and clearest shot of the first plane, filmed by the Naudet brothers, two French documentarians who were filming a documentary on New York firefighters. They completed it, although it became a documentary of 9/11. You can see part 1 here and then follow the links to part 2, 3, etc.

This next one was a webcam, a video art project by Wolfgang Staehle, that took a picture of the Manhattan skyline every second or so from the rooftop of another building. It has a picture of the plane approaching and then immediately after it hit.

(Update: I just realized that the video above excludes a picture taken right after the plane hits for some reason, and I'm unable to find another video that includes it. So below is the sequence of photos taken by the webcam, with the missing one being in the middle.)

This one is much more difficult to see, so I chose a version that shows it several times and slows it down (just ignore the last 45 seconds of the video). The guy who took this, Pavel Hlava, didn't even realize he had caught the first plane striking the twin towers until months later. After filming this part, he went through a tunnel, and upon emerging he filmed the second plane hitting the towers. So his is the only video that contains both plane hits.

This doesn't show the plane hitting the tower, but you hear it, and then the cameraman shows one of the towers and the smoke plume. It was filmed by a news crew from WNYW in New York.

United Airlines flight 175
After the first plane strike, everyone and their dog were looking up at the twin towers, and those who had video cameras were filming it. Thus the second plane strike was caught by multiple people from multiple angles, and millions of people saw it live on TV. Here's a collection that alleges to be all of the videos made public of the second plane strike.

And this one claims to show all of the plane strikes on the two towers sans sound.

American Airlines flight 77
There is very little video showing the plane that hit the Pentagon, although it was witnessed by hundreds of people. This shows the video taken from a security check-point. Like the Staehle webcam, you only see a snapshot of the plane on the right side of the video at 0:25 and then the explosion.

This next one shows only the relevant portion of the previous video.

And this one shows the same thing from the security check-point one lane over.

This video shows a computer reconstruction of the Pentagon plane strike, which then interposes it on the security video above to show how they match.

And this is a video taken from a hotel that shows the explosion, but not the actual plane. There is a white blur right before the explosion that, at first glance, looks like it could be the plane, but when you look closer, it appears to be a vehicle on the overpass. The plane was going much faster than the vehicle.

United Airlines flight 93
The fourth plane that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania was not caught on film. Up until a few days ago, the photograph below was the only known photo of the smoke plume created when it crashed into a field. This is the plane the passengers tried to take back, and forced the terrorists to crash it before it reached its target (probably either the United States Capitol building or the White House). The passengers may have been able to get control of the cockpit in the last few moments, but they were unable to stop the plane from crashing.

However, just a few days ago a family released a video taken of the smoke plume after the plane crashed. The man who shot it has since passed away, and his family wants to remain anonymous.

While hundreds of people were killed when the planes struck the towers, most of the people who died there died in the subsequent fires, or when they jumped from the towers, or when the buildings collapsed. These were also filmed by multiple cameras and multiple news crews. So the prolificity of such videos is one reason why I'm not going to try to collect them all here.

Another reason is that my point in showing the actual plane strikes (or the immediate aftermath in the case of United 93) is to show the evil of 9/11 and I think that is best exemplified by the free actions of the terrorists who committed it (even though Islamic theology generally denies human free will). The reason I want to show the evil is because I think it must be confronted and stopped rather than glossed over or accommodated, and for obvious reasons, we want to forget the horror of that day. While the videos of the people jumping and of the towers collapsing are horrific, they are results of the original act undertaken by people who chose to align themselves with evil.

The third reason I'm not going to show pictures of people jumping from the towers to their deaths and the towers collapsing is that, frankly, I'm morally exhausted by all of this.

Social issues

2011-09-09T12:11:00.006+02:00

1. I've taken several tests to determine my political standing -- not being intelligent enough to simply know them -- and here are the results of the most recent:

I feel neutral, oh so neutral...

This isn't too surprising, since my political views are not systematic but eclectic. Many of my answers were almost contradictory to other answers. I'm posting this so that next time someone tries to pigeon-hole me as one thing or another, I can just send them here to show them that the political world really does revolve around me.

2. One of the questions is whether patriotism makes sense, since we don't have any control over the citizenships we receive upon birth. I strongly disagreed with that. I didn't have any control over who my parents are either, but to suggest that therefore I shouldn't love them deeply, that I shouldn't be willing to sacrifice anything, perhaps everything, on their behalf is not only false but immoral.

3. Some friends sent me a couple of links, and I feel the need to pass them on. One is that Americans are still perceived as the coolest people in the world. The subtitle points out that Belgians come in last, and they sent me a link that emphasizes that point here.

Now as one of the coolest people living among the least cool, let me just say this in defense of the Flemingos: they get crap from all sides. Everybody hates them. They're like Europe's New Jersey. I have found them to be wonderful people and I greatly respect them. They certainly have a tendency toward passivity, but if everyone hated you, you probably would too. They've been conquered so many times that they can't be expected to be standing tall. What impresses me about them is that they're still standing.

Quote of the Day

2011-09-07T08:43:00.004+02:00

The first move: materialism as scientific hypothesis
U. T. Place argued that it is tenable to say that certain events and processes traditionally classified as mental (for example, sensation) are identical with events and processes in the brain. That this is indeed so he labelled as materialism, and argued that it is in fact a scientific hypothesis. In response to Smart he agreed further that the conditions required for the assertability of such a hypothesis -- conditions under which alone such an identity statement can be true -- are subject to philosophical debate rather than empirical testing. But once such conditions are specified, the remaining question is empirical. For the described 'mental' events and processes have a certain complexity, which brain events and processes may or may not have. The name "materialism" is also given to this or closely similar claims about the psychological e.g. by David Armstrong.

There are three preliminary questions to be raised. First of all, not every replacement for what I have called the Thesis can be accepted as the 'real' materialism -- can this one? Since the main question before us is what exactly the materialist's main thesis could be, we should perhaps accept any seriously offered contender. But if we could identify certain familiar psychological events and processes with physiological ones in some not too weak sense, we would hardly be finished with the traditional concerns of materialism. That a person has a purpose, for example, does not consist in any specific type of occurrent event or process; nor that her sins are forgiven, that she is in a state of grace, or that she is precious beyond rubies. And these are only examples about persons; what else may there not be between heaven and earth never dreamt of in materialist philosophy? I don't want to be fanciful, but merely establishing that sensations are brainstates seems hardly more than a drop in the bucket for the materialist. The virtue of such a ringing Thesis as "Matter is All" was to settle the hash of all such stuff once and for all.

Second preliminary question: does the description of the 'mental' or the psychological in terms of which the replacement thesis is formulated, do justice to its intended concern? Armstrong was rather more conscious than Place of the second preliminary question when he was debating Malcolm, a Wittgensteinian. Today he would also have to contend with putative failures of functionalism, arguments that no computational theory of consciousness could even in principle be successful, and demonstrations that truth conditions for belief attributions must have historical and social parameters outside the believer.

But leave these debates aside. Third question: supposing the empirical claim is false, or is scientifically investigated and found wanting, will there or will there not be a fall-back position to call 'the real materialism after all'? It would be a poor game if after much scientific strife, the loser could say "that's not it at all, that is not what I meant at all." Well, what if we accept Place's or Armstrong's formulation, and their empirical claims are found wanting? Suppose, for example, that no neurological process can be identified which can even in principle predict human decisions reached simultaneously or at the exact end of that process. The next empirical question would be what probabilities can be assigned to the (neutrally described) actions being decided upon, conditional on the states of the central nervous system. If these probabilities cannot even in principle be made as near zero and one as we like, is that the end of materialism?

Think of the exact parallel: no quantum state will predict the exact time of radio-active decay. Is that the end of materialism? It is not; and neither would materialism come to an end if what humans do could be related only probabilistically to their brainstates. A favorite belief of the materialists would have to be relinquished, but they would all know how to retrench. For the spirit of materialism is never exhausted in piece-meal empirical claims.

The second move: whatever it takes
If you press a materialist, you quickly find that the most important constraint on the meaning of the Thesis is that it should be compatible with science, whatever science comes up with. This is contrary to what some of them say. If, they say, certain phenomena could not be explained purely in terms of material factors, then the scientific thing to do would be to give up materialism. But, holding the Thesis, they make the bold conjecture that this will never happen. That what would never happen?

If that question cannot be answered with a precise and independent account of what material factors are, there is still one option. That is to nail a completeness claim to science, or to a specific science such as physics. The instructive example here is J. J. C. Smart, who begins his essay "Materialism" with an offer to explain what he means:

By 'materialism' I mean the theory that there is nothing in the world over and above those entities which are postulated by physics (or, or course, those entities which will be postulated by future and more adequate physical theories).

He quickly discusses some older and more recent postulations in actual physics, which make that 'theory' look substantive. But of course the parenthetical qualification makes that discussion completely irrelevant!

Smart may believe, or think that he believes, the 'theory' here formulated; but if he does, he certainly does not know what he believes. For of course he has no more idea than you or I of what physics will postulate in the future. It is a truly courageous faith, that believes in an 'I know not what' -- isn't it?

Indeed, in believing this, Smart cannot be certain that he believes anything at all. Suppose science goes on forever, and every theory is eventually succeeded by a better one. That has certainly been the case so far, and always some accepted successor has implied that the previously postulated entities (known, after all, only by description) do not exist. If that is also how it will continue, world without end, then Smart's so-called theory -- as formulated above -- entails that there is nothing. Let's not be too quick to celebrate this demonstration of clear empirical content (about what the future of physics will not be like). Most likely Smart did not notice this implication and would have preferred to rephrase if he had.

In a clear indication that he is at least subliminally aware of the problem, Smart quickly adds some extra content. Not content with his initial formulation once he realizes that it is compatible with emergent properties, holism, and the irreducibility of biology to physics, he says

I wish to lay down that it is incompatible with materialism that there should be any irreducibly emergent laws or properties, say in biology or psychology.... I also want to deny any theory of 'emergent properties'.... (ibid. pp. 203-204)

We should read this as an amendment of the above definition of materialism, for the 'theory' formulated above does not fit this bill. We must wonder how Smart knows that it is not adequate. Is he perhaps telling us that either physics will forever eschew emergent properties, or else materialism is false? Since quantum physics provides, at this point, a clear example of holism, should we conclude that materialism has already come to an end?

Of course not. Faced with the consequences of the stance that materialism should be whatever it takes to be a completeness claim for physics, Smart started backpedalling. Everything that is "repugnant" to him (to use his phrase) may be incorporated in future physics. So he adds, in effect, that physics will be false if that happens. But faced with that consequence, no materialist will stick by him if he sticks by that. They'll point out, quite rightly, that he was of a 'classical' mind, and like so often happens with the older generation in physics itself, quite unable to assimilate new visions of the structure of the material world.

Materialism as false consciousness
So is it all just a matter of scientific reactionaries with their self-trivializing theses dressed up as uncompromising metaphysical constraints on science? No, it is not. For all this effort to codify materialism bespeaks something much more important: the spirit of materialism. Materialism is a hardy philosophical tradition, which appears differently substantiated in each philosophical era. Each instantiation has its empirical as well as its non-empirical claims, which interpret for that era, in its own terms, the invariant attitudes and convictions which I call here the 'spirit of materialism'.

How shall we identify what is really involved in materialism? Our great clue is the apparent ability of materialists to revise the content of their main thesis, as science changes. If we took literally the claim of a materialist that his position is simply belief in the claim that all is matter, as currently construed, we would be faced with an insoluble mystery. For how would such a materialist know how to retrench when his favorite scientific hypotheses fail? How did the 18th century materialists know that gravity, or forces in general, were material? How did they know in the 19th century that the electro-magnetic field was material, and persisted in this conviction after the aether had been sent packing?

Of course it is possible to measure certain quantities. But that cannot provide the criterion needed. Just think again of the transition from Cartesian to Newtonian physics. Newton identified forces as the causes of changes in states of motion. Accordingly, if you measure the direction and rate of change of momentum, you obtain a description of that cause in terms of its effects. (The recipe for measuring force direction and magnitude is exactly to measure those effects.) But it could be added consistently that these causes are immaterial, spiritual -- even mental, if Mind does not need to be someone's mind. If instead the forces are said to be material just like the extended bodies so classified before, the materialist must seemingly have some rather mysterious type of knowledge: a knowledge-that the newly introduced entities have the je ne sais quoi which makes for materiality.

But what is it then, in this metaphysical position, that guides the change in content, which it would be pedantic to signal with a change in name? If the "physicalist" or "naturalist" part of this philosophical position is not merely the desire or commitment to have metaphysics guided by physics -- i. e. something that cannot be captured in any thesis or factual belief -- then what is it? This knowledge of how to retrench cannot derive from the substantive belief currently identified as the view that all is physical. So what does it derive from? Whatever the answer is, that, and not the explicit thesis, is the real answer to what materialism is.

Hence I propose the following diagnosis of materialism: it is not identifiable with a theory about what there is, but only with an attitude or cluster of attitudes. These attitudes include strong deference to science in matters of opinion about what there is, and the inclination to accept (approximative) completeness claims for science as actually constituted at any given time. Given this diagnosis, the apparent knowledge of what is and what is not material among newly hypothesized entities is mere appearance. The ability to adjust the content of the thesis that all is matter again and again is then explained instead by a knowing-how to retrench which derives from invariant attitudes. This does not reflect badly on materialism; on the contrary, it gives materialism its due. But it does imply that only the confusion of theses held with attitudes expressed, which yields false consciousness, can account for the conviction that science requires presumptive materialism.

I mean this as a diagnosis of materialism, not a refutation. Its incarnation at any moment will be some position distinguished by certain empirical consequences, and these will either stand or fall as science evolves. But whether they stand or fall, materialism as general philosophical position, as historical tradition in philosophy, will survive. Given this, however, there can -- for that very reason -- be no question of regarding materialism as an assumption at the foundations of science. There is no 'presumptive materialism' which constrains scientific theories to consistency with certain determinate factual theses. For even materialism itself is not so constrained, and it survives by changing so as to accommodate the new sciences.

Bas C. van Fraassen
"Science, Materialism, and False Consciousness"
Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology: Essays in Honor of Plantinga's Theory of Knowledge

Thought of the Day

2011-09-05T09:09:00.002+02:00

Jesus baptized death.

Domino-what now?

2011-08-31T22:41:00.005+02:00

The religious controversy du jour is that a New York Times editor wrote that he wants to ask the Republican candidates for President certain questions about whether their religious views would have an effect on their governing. It's mostly a controversy because he doesn't realize that the same questions would be just as appropriate for Democrat candidates. President Obama, for example, has said explicitly that his political views are directly influenced by his Christian beliefs. Nor does the editor seem aware that religious devotion has influenced many of America's greatest Presidents, such as Abraham Lincoln. Moreover, he claims that three candidates in particular belong to a "fervid subset of evangelical Christianity", despite the fact that the three mentioned are Methodist, Lutheran, and Catholic respectively. At any rate, the article in question is just condescending to all religious believers, and the editor seems completely oblivious to it. This just feeds into the charge that the mainstream media doesn't "get religion." So of the myriad responses that have been made, I'll just send you to the rebuttal posted at Get Religion. (Oh, OK, here's one from Strange Herring too.)

But one part of the article that stood out to me is his emphasis on whether the candidates support "Dominionism", a theological movement to establish the Old Testament laws as the laws of the United States. I've heard of this movement before, but not in the places one would expect. I have a Masters degree in Theology from a fairly conservative-minded seminary (theologically conservative, that is) that was essentially evangelical. Our two main textbooks for the standard theology courses were Christian Theology by Millard Erickson and Integrative Theology by Gordon Lewis and Bruce Demarest, although these were supplemented by dozens of other books on all sorts of theological topics. So I've studied evangelical theology pretty extensively. At no point in my studies was this Dominionist movement mentioned, or anything comparable to it. The point being that this movement has no influence within evangelical Christianity. It is an extreme position that simply has no purchase on most Christians or Christian theologians precisely because it is so extreme.

So I didn't hear of this movement from studying evangelical Christian theology. Where did I hear it? You probably already know: from the mainstream media. Every now and then, certain forces in society feel the need to exaggerate the dangers of their political opponents, and so discovered this insignificant movement and decided to apply it to any and all Christians -- or wait, sorry, just those Christians they disagree with politically. It's not that different from smearing all Christians as flat-earthers just because there are some actual people who claim that the earth is flat. The number of proponents of Dominionism and flat-earthism are probably about the same, after all.

To be clear, though, I don't consider this to be anything like a conspiracy on the part of the media. I think it is simply a blind spot. A willful blind spot perhaps; a self-reinforcing blind spot. But a blind spot nonetheless.

Best SF

2011-08-28T21:47:00.004+02:00

NPR recently asked its readers and listeners to vote on what the best science-fiction and fantasy novels are (series counted as single votes). I neglected to inform you, dear reader, but did manage to vote myself -- although I've forgotten some of what I voted for (and of course, I hadn't read many of the options and so couldn't vote for them). I do remember several that made their final cut though: The Lord of the Rings (#1), The Dune Chronicles (4), The Hyperion Cantos (51), The Mote in God's Eye (61), The Mars Trilogy (95), and The Space Trilogy (100).

Quote of the Day

2011-08-19T11:58:00.008+02:00

I have claimed that, on the assumption of the causal closure of the physical, no one ever accepts a belief because it is supported by good reasons., Since this assertion is key to the argument, some further discussion is in order. What we have to consider is the relationship between the physicalistic explanation of a person's holding a belief -- "She believes so-and-so because of such-and-such antecedent physical conditions" -- and the rational explanation of that same belief -- "She believes so-and-so because she sees that it is supported by sound reasons." By hypothesis, the physical causes are sufficient, under the given conditions, to produce the belief in question. There can be no question, on the other hand, of the reasons for the belief being by themselves sufficient to produce the belief. For the reasons to give rise to the belief, the person's cognitive apparatus has to be in working order, and this includes a vast number of extremely complex circumstances that are quite distinct from the possession of the reasons in question.

But is the possession of good reasons necessary, under the given circumstances, for the production of the belief in question? What we have to evaluate is the following pair of counterfactual conditionals:

(a) She would have accepted the belief if she had not seen that it was supported by good reasons.
(b) She would not have accepted the belief if she had not seen that it was supported by good reasons.

I submit that, in the absence of further information, neither of these counterfactuals can be evaluated as true. Following John Pollock, we assume that a counterfactual conditional is true if and only if the consequent is true in all those worlds minimally changed from the actual world in which the antecedent is true. Would a world minimally changed from the actual world in which she doesn't see that her belief is supported by good reasons, be one in which she would not accept that belief? No doubt there are a number of different ways in which the world could be changed just enough to satisfy the antecedent of the conditional; in some of these she accepts the belief while in others she doesn't. And there is no basis for saying that those in which she doesn't accept it are less changed from the actual world than those in which she does -- or vice versa. We conclude, then, that (a) and (b) are both false; what is true is

(c) If she had not seen that the belief was supported by good reasons, she might have accepted the belief, but it's also the case that she might not have accepted it.

Consider, on the other hand:

(d) She would have accepted the belief if the antecedent conditions were not sufficient (as determined by the laws of physics) for her accepting it.
(e) She would not have accepted the belief if the antecedent conditions were not sufficient (as determined by the laws of physics) for her accepting it.

Here we can state unambiguously that (d) is false and (e) is true; the fact that one, and not the other, is in accord with the physical laws means there is no question that worlds in which she does not accept the belief are closer to the actual world than the ones in which she does. All of this merely restates, in the language of counterfactual conditions, what should by now be obvious: In a physicalistic world, principles of sound reasoning have no relevance to determining what actually happens.

Because the matter is so crucial, I am going to risk excess by restating the point once more, this time in terms of possible worlds. In order to identify the possible worlds we want to consider, note again the final clause in the definition of strong supervenience: "necessarily, if any y has [physical property] G, it has [mental property] F." If "necessarily" here is understood as physical necessity, identifying the relevant world is easy: consider a possible world that is physically exactly similar to the present world, but in which the natural laws establishing psychophysical connections do not obtain. In such a world all the physical facts, and with them the entire physical course of events, are exactly as in the actual world: the complete absence of mentality makes no difference whatever. Similarly, we may consider a possible world physically identical with the actual world, but in which mental properties are redistributed in as bizarre a fashion as one might wish: this world is still indistinguishable from our own in all physical respects. Could there be a more dramatic demonstration of the fact that, given the closure of the physical, mental facts are irrelevant to the physical course of events?

Suppose, however, "necessarily" in the definition of supervenience is understood as metaphysical necessity. This embodies the idea (for which I've expressed some sympathy) that the natural laws that obtain are expressions of the essential causal powers of the kinds of objects that exist, so that in no possible world do those very same objects exist governed by different natural laws. This means we can't simply cancel the psychophysical connections while leaving the rest of the actual world unchanged. Instead, we proceed as follows: take a world consisting of objects exactly similar to the objects of our world, except with regard to the psychophysical connections that obtain. For reasons that should be evident, we will designate this as the physically equivalent zombie-world to our own world. In the zombie-world matter will not consist of protons, neutrons, electrons, etc., but rather of zombie-protons, zombie-neutrons, zombie electrons ... The zombie-electrons will not have the properties of mass, charge, and spin but rather of zombie-mass, zombie-charge, and zombie-spin. Such a world will be similar to the "mindless world" described in the previous paragraph in every respect but one: it will not contain the identical objects, organisms, etc. that exist in our world (and in the mindless world) because those objects consist of ordinary matter and not of zombie-matter. But the zombie-world is physically equivalent to both the mindless world and the actual world; all three worlds are identical in all physically observable respects. Once again, we have a dramatic demonstration of the fact that neither in the zombie-world, nor in the mindless world, nor in the actual world given the assumption of the causal closure of the physical, do principles of rational inference play any role whatever in determining what happens. And in the actual world (which is not mindless), the principles of inference play no role, given causal closure and supervenience, in determining what beliefs people come to accept.

One way in which a physicalist might respond here is by questioning the assumption that good reasons and principles of rationality need to be thought of as causally relevant to what happens in the world. Wittgensteinians often adopted the stance that reasons-explanations and causal explanations belong to different language-games and so do not conflict with each other. And Kim recommends as "well worth exploring" the idea that rationalizing explanation is "a fundamentally noncausal mode of understanding actions," so that "a rationalizing explanation is to be viewed as a normative assessment of an action in the context of the agent's relevant intentional states."

Whatever its merits in general, Kim's suggestion is singularly unpromising in its application to the relation between reasons and beliefs. To see this, the reader is asked to reflect on the way she goes about assessing an argument of moderate complexity. I presume she begins by reflecting on the premises of the argument -- are they propositions she believes, or at least considers reasonably plausible? She then considers carefully the logical connections that are alleged to obtain between the premises and the conclusion -- do the premises indeed provide support for the conclusion, and if so does the support amount to deductive validity, or is there some lesser degree of support? Are there ambiguities in the argument which might undermine the soundness of the inference? Sometimes these questions are assessed in the light of specific, explicitly formulated principles of logic and argument; at other times she relies on a more intuitive grasp of the particular argument at hand. If the assessment is favorable, she accepts the conclusion, either tentatively or with considerable firmness, depending on the particulars of the case. If she is skillful in carrying out such assessments, she is said to possess "good logical insight," an intellectual virtue which is prized, in part, for the specific reason that it enables one to reach good, well-justified conclusions about the arguments one encounters. The entire process makes no sense at all, except on the assumption that a person's awareness of reasons and her knowledge and application of principles of rationality make a difference to the conclusions that are accepted.

Kim's suggestion, as applied to the relation between reasons and beliefs, is not only implausible; it is also futile. For surely those who would argue that principles of rationality serve the purpose of a "normative assessment" of our reasoning would allow that these principles can in fact be used in making such an assessment. But of course, such a normative assessment of a piece of reasoning is itself also an example of the kind of reasoning that is being assessed. (Note that the example of reasoning described above involved precisely the examination of an already formulated argument.) Are good reasons, and the principles of sound reasoning, allowed to be causally effective in determining the outcome of the assessment process? Or is some other account to be given of how the process goes? In any case, whatever answer is give here could equally well have been given in the first place; the move to the level of "normative assessment" changes nothing.

William Hasker
The Emergent Self
(footnotes omitted)

Curing Cancer

2011-08-14T22:38:00.004+02:00

I just got back from a wonderful trip to a beautiful country: Luxembourg. I highly recommend it. However, we left before I could point to an incredibly exciting development in medical science: a potential cure for cancer. The particular cancer in question is leukemia, although the potential cure may be applicable to others. Basically, they reprogrammed some of a patient's white blood cells to hunt down any and all cancer cells. They tested it with three people with advanced-stage leukemia: a couple weeks later, they experienced the equivalent of a horrible case of the flu -- which meant it was working. A year later, two of the patients have no sign of cancer, and the other still has it, but is no longer dying from it. Amazing!

Sand power

2011-08-11T09:22:00.005+02:00

I've been a fan of Jazz Shaw ever since he posted on the Moderate Voice. He has just written an excellent post about the oil sands in northern Alberta. This is oil embedded in sand, clay, and water. I guess I fall into the "all of the above" theory of energy policy (I thought I was the only one), so I find this an encouraging development, especially regarding the environmental considerations that are involved. It's part 1 of a series, so I'll update this post as more entries are posted. See also The Man Made Miracle of Oil from Sand by Ron Bailey.

And while we're on alternative energy, Robert Zubrin has issued a challenge to make ten $10,000 bets that he can make his car more economically efficient running on methanol rather than gasoline. Bear in mind that methanol can be made out of just about anything, so it doesn't involve food crops like ethanol often does.

Update (15 Aug): Here's part 2 and part 3 of Jazz Shaw's posts. He also links to an approving article about Canadian oil sands at the Washington Post. And here's part 2 of Bailey's: Conflict Oil or Canadian Oil?

This

2011-08-10T00:15:00.001+02:00

is just about the coolest thing I've ever heard. Boeing Workers Will Fly to ISS Aboard Their Company's New Spaceship. Let's get going with private businesses going into space. Someone start mining Helium 3 on the Moon already!

War Is Hell

2011-08-08T22:44:00.003+02:00

In the lead-up to the anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, philosopher John Pepple at I Want a New Left has been emphasizing atrocities committed by the Japanese in World War 2. His motive for this is that he feels that many people today tend to blame America for everything while glossing over much more horrific acts done by other countries. My motive for linking to him is that people often focus on the evils the Nazis committed, but many are unaware of the horrors perpetrated by the Japanese. Pepple went over The Bataan Death March, The Rape of Nanking, The Manila Massacre, Korean Comfort Women, and Medical Experiments on Live Prisoners.

By the way, regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you should check out this post.

OT Social Justice

2011-08-04T21:43:00.003+02:00

The Wayfaring Stranger is writing what looks to be an excellent book entitled Learning To Do Right: Social Justice in the Old Testament and has been posting excerpts from it on his blog. You can click on over and scroll, or follow these links to particular entries:

Christians as salt and light in the world
How the early church related to society
How Christianity became aligned with politics under Constantine
An alternative example: Celtic Christianity
The role of government and its limitations
Advocating a "Christian position" for social good
Christians as prophetic mediators for society
"Standing in the gap" through democratic means
Social justice in the Old Testament rules for tithing
An objective basis for justice
Social justice in instruction for the Sabbath and debt cancellation
Social justice in the Old Testament: God's justice for day laborers
God's justice includes salvation for the weak and oppressed
Child sacrifice as analogous to abortion
Deriving principles from the Old Testament
Social justice in the Old Testament rules for gleaning

Quote of the Day

2011-07-31T06:53:00.000+02:00

A typical test in the Kahneman and Tversky work is this. A subject is told to imagine that he is a participant in a TV quiz show and that his answers thus far have won him $100. The quizmaster now offers the participant a choice: (1) take the $100 and quit, or (2) win $500 for a correct answer to the next question but forfeit all, including the $100, if he fails. The participant is told that, of the earlier questions, he has answered one in three correctly. What should the participant choose? Decision theory shows how to estimate the utility of each alternative: that of (1) is 100/1 = $100; that of (2) is 500/3 = $166.67. Because of the utility of the second is greater, decision theory endorses the second choice. Most of Kahneman and Tversky's subjects choose the safe $100. In fact, Kahneman and Tversky have worked out a number of psychological utility functions and have shown their departure from the ideal or mathematical function. It might thus seem plausible that the mathematics of decision do not supply a competence theory for the psychology of decision.

But the mathematics is a simplification and idealization of real situations. The mathematics does not apply, if the participant's life depends on having $100 and if he has no pressing need for an addition $400. It does not apply if the participant is so frightened or bored by being on the quiz show that he would be prepared to pay $67 to be out of it. It applies only within narrowly defined circumstances. Perhaps the tendency of subjects to choose differently from the mathematicians is due in part, though not altogether, to a failure to grasp the mathematical presuppositions or to keep from crowding in considerations that mathematicians studiously block off.

There is, however, much more to be said about the interpretation of Kahneman and Tversky's data. Suppose that instead of testing naive subjects, they tested mathematicians who had studied decision theory. Would not the results be different? Suppose, too, that before taking part in the experiments, subjects were required to read a couple of Kahneman and Tversky's papers. Would the results not be different? Of course they would be, but why? Presumably, because the subjects would then have satisfied themselves that the mathematics of decision theorists reflects intuition better than untutored impulse. But that is precisely to claim that the mathematics is a competence theory, that it does reflect carefully sifted intuition. (For present purposes, I assume that Kahneman and Tversky are applying the appropriate mathematics, though the matter is disputed by Cohen (1981).) Kahneman and Tversky (1982) go some distance toward recognizing all this:

It is important to emphasize ... that the [psychological] value function is merely a convenient summary of a common pattern of choices and not a universal law.

Kahneman and Tversky have also gone some distance toward explaining erroneous decisions. Take, for example, the common gambler's fallacy, as manifested by betting on tosses of a coin. A particular case of the fallacy is that it is an advantage to bet heads after a run of tails. Kahneman and Tversky (1973) suggested that the fallacy can be explained if we suppose that the gambler knows that long runs of tails are unlikely but fails to take account of the fact that a coin has no memory. The naive gambler, then, is acting on a belief, in this case a true one, that makes his action intelligible. The irrationality lies in the failure to take account of other relevant facts. Notice, though, that the belief that rationalizes the naive gambler's decision is itself a mathematical one -- the probability of a particular outcome is the ratio of the number of event types favorable for an outcome to the number of all relevant event types. Though the gambler may not have quantified things so precisely, the mathematical law does make the intuition precise.

Nevertheless, Tversky and Kahneman (1983) do seem to reject the idea that a mathematical ideal can be a psychologically useful competence theory:

Indeed, the evidence does not seem to support a "truth plus error" model, which assumes a coherent system of beliefs that is perturbed by various sources of distortion and error. Hence we do not share Dennis Lindley's optimistic opinion that "inside every incoherent person there is a coherent one trying to get out," and we suspect that incoherence is more than skin deep. (p. 313)

This brings us back to the specter discussed in the last section, so I do not repeat here the remarks made there. Instead I would like to comment on what seems to be one of the main grounds for the judgment just cited. It is that "in cognition, as in perception, the same mechanisms produce both valid and invalid judgments" (Tversky and Kahneman 1983, p. 313).

Apart from any scruples we may have about the use of the word "mechanisms" in this connection, there is something unsatisfactory about the last statement. Tversky and Kahneman are drawing a parallel with visual illusions and they observe, correctly, that visual illusions are the product of a perfectly running visual system. But the analogy is in many ways misleading. Just imagine for a moment that what vision delivers in the first instance is a set of uninterpreted, well-formed formulas in a language, a position I am inclined to adopt because of certain findings in visual perception (see Niall (unpublished)). If that position is correct, the parallel Tversky and Kahneman seek to establish cannot be constructed. The reason is that the output of an inference in everyday reasoning is an interpreted sentence. There is nothing wrong with the bent appearance of a straight stick partly submerged in water; it is the interpreted sentence, "The stick is bent," that is unsatisfactory. There is something deeply wrong with the gambler's conclusion that, because runs of tails are rare, the probability of a head increases after such a run.

How does this difference make a difference? Well, it would be odd if the same set of implicators (in my language), properly applied (as Tversky and Kahneman allow), yielded both valid and invalid inferences. Something is needed to explain the variation. To begin, note that the same set of basic implicators must be available to Kahneman and Tversky on the one hand and to their subjects on the other. How, then, could Kahneman and Tversky use such untrustworthy devices to attain such certain results as the mathematics against which they interpret their subjects' responses? Any answer I might offer is going to be far more uncertain than the mathematics in question. But the existence of that mathematics and of Kahneman and Tversky's access to it undermines their rejection of the mathematics as the appropriate competence theory.

In the light of that general stance I can offer one conjecture. In the first place, there are many implicators, and people seem to be able to add to the set that nature has endowed them with. That was the lesson of an earlier discussion in this chapter. It could be that an individual or group of individuals could add a faulty implicator, as the gambler's fallacy suggests. It could be that the implicators involved in decision under uncertainty are remote from the basic ones and require a long train of intermediate inferences in justification of their validity. My conjecture is that the basic set with which we start out comprises only valid implicators and that their operation is infallible in clear cases. it is surely this that enables mathematicians to overcome the impulses they share with the naive gambler -- start out from clear and compelling intuitions and build up the system called decision theory. Mathematicians must find sure footing somewhere; I suggest that it is in the basic implicators. This is not to say that the output of the basic implicators is imposed on the mind, that judgment is forced by them. Rather, the idea is that their output is inevitably presented to the mind whenever the conditions for their operation are satisfied. Judgment seems to be another manner.

This all leads to the conclusion that we have seen no good grounds, theoretical or empirical, to reject the thesis that (ideal) logic supplies a competence theory for the psychology of human reasoning.

John Macnamara
A Border Dispute: The Place of Logic in Psychology

Heh

2011-07-29T04:58:00.001+02:00

6 Technologies Conspicuously Absent from Sci-Fi Movies. They had me at #6: bicycles. Also, while we're at it, here's 6 Baffling Flaws in Famous Sci-Fi Technology. R-rated language warning for both.

The Bible and the Age of the Universe, part 3

2011-07-27T10:05:00.006+02:00

In parts 1 and 2 I argued that we cannot assess how old the universe or the human race are respectively from the Bible alone. One common challenge to both points is that they are attempts to reconcile the Bible with contemporary science. The claims I've made were (allegedly) unheard of prior to the scientific revolution, the implication being that the Bible does imply an age for the universe and humanity that are incompatible with science. As an aside, I find it interesting that the two camps who tend to make this charge are secularists and young-earth creationists, who often seem to team up. In studying this subject I've discovered that it is not monochromatic, but supports both sides in different ways.

When The Fundamentals (from whence we get the derogatory term "fundamentalist") were written at the beginning of the 20th century, they argued for an ancient earth and universe and in particular for the day-age interpretation -- that the days of creation should be understood as long periods of time. However, they didn't merely appeal to the Bible, but to Church history as well: "Do not think that this larger reading of the days is a new speculation. You find Augustine in early times declaring that it is hard or altogether impossible to say of what fashion these days are, and Thomas Aquinas, in the middle ages, leaves the matter an open question" (see also here). Astronomer Hugh Ross has documented in Creation and Time and A Matter of Days plenty of Christians throughout Church history who argued that the days of creation were long periods of time. Christian philosopher Kenneth Richard Samples, a colleague of Ross, writes, "From the time of the Church fathers, through the Reformation, and up to the present, various views have prevailed, some more broadly represented than others, but none was ever considered the definitive, or the only, orthodox biblical position." Similarly, the 19th century theologian William G. T. Shedd wrote in his Dogmatic Theology:

The very common assertion, that the church has altered its exegesis, under the compulsion of modern geology, is one of the errors of ignorance. The doctrine of an immense time, prior to the six creative days, was a common view among the fathers and schoolmen. ... Respecting the length of the six creative days, speaking generally, for there was some difference of views, the patristic and mediaeval exegesis makes them to be long periods, not days of twenty-four hours. The latter interpretation has prevailed only in the modern church.

In response to this, young-earth proponents state that these claims are simply false: for example, in The Genesis Debate which has proponents of three different interpretations of Genesis 1 defend their positions, J. Ligon Duncan III and David W. Hall write "This claim [that there was no exegetical consensus on the days of Genesis] is wrong. There was only one view following the repudiation of Augustine's view, and seldom (if ever) before the nineteenth century was the day-age or the framework view advocated." Similarly, in another book Mark Van Bebber and Paul Taylor write, "One is caused to question whether Dr. Ross has actually read any of the writings he quotes. Most of the 'Church Fathers' he claims as believing in figurative 'days' actually believed just the opposite. This is even evident within the same context of the quotes Ross reported. Creation and Time misinterprets no fewer than 9 of the 14 men listed." Unfortunately, the title of the latter book is the same as the book they are criticizing: Creation and Time. It's difficult to accept their condemnation of Ross's alleged misrepresentations when they gave their book the same title as his, and had Ross's name (in the subtitle) in larger font on the cover than their own -- all without permission (Ross, Matter of Days, 262, n. 7). I could certainly be wrong, but it looks like they were trying to trick people into thinking they were buying his book instead of theirs. Moreover, they don't give any reason for thinking the day-age interpretation is figurative rather than literal; and I don't understand why they found it necessary to put "Church Fathers" in scare quotes.

As far as I can understand them, there are plenty of statements in the Church fathers which, at the very least, strongly imply that some of them understood the days of creation as calendar days. Conversely, in defense of the view expressed by Shedd, Ross, Samples, and The Fundamentals, it must be recognized that there are also plenty of statements in the Church fathers which claim or imply that the days of creation were millennia. For example, some of the fathers argued that God's statement to Adam that he would die "in the day" that he ate the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:17) referred to the sixth day of creation. Since the time between Adam's creation and his death was slightly less than a thousand years (Gen. 5:5), and since a thousand years is as a day to the Lord (Ps. 90:4), the sixth day (when Adam was created) was a thousand years long (see, i.e. Justin Martyr, Dialogue With Trypho, 81; Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5:23:2). Others, in similar language as Hebrews 4, identified the present or (more often) the future age with the seventh day of creation, sometimes claiming that it was instituted with Christ's first advent (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 30:4; 33:2; Origen, Against Celsus, 6:61).

There's more to the story, though. Prior to the Reformation, most biblical commentators believed in multiple interpretations of Scripture. That is, any given passage had several different meanings. And it seems apparent that the Church fathers understood the day-age interpretation as a secondary one; that is, the days of creation referred to long spans of time in addition to their primary meaning.

This is evident from the fact that they thought each day was an age of human history. For example, they often understood the sixth day of creation as referring to the 1,000 years prior to Christ. The problem comes in when we remember that human beings weren't created until the sixth day. So if the sixth day referred to both the thousand-year period leading up to Jesus' time and the time when human beings were first created, were they suggesting that Adam and Eve were created sometime within the millennium before Christ? Were they suggesting that all of human history -- from Noah to Abraham to Moses to David to Nehemiah, etc. -- could be squeezed into the 1,000 years leading up to Jesus' birth? Of course not. Obviously, understanding the sixth day as a millennium is a secondary interpretation.

So what can we conclude from this? Not as much as some might hope. For one thing, the recognition that it was a secondary interpretation does not negate the fact that it was still a common interpretation. Regardless of whether it was secondary, the early Church fathers still understood the days of creation to be reasonably interpreted as long periods of time. They gave exegetical arguments for it. Perhaps those arguments were not sound, but it can't be claimed that the day-age interpretation is just a recent position. Part of the problem here is that the ancient and medieval exegetes thought that the various interpretations of Scripture fell into particular categories, and so they read these categories into the Bible, even where they didn't fit. This often led to interpretations which were highly subjective and forced. But this is not the case for the days of creation. They gave exegetical arguments for why they should be understood as long periods of time, and these arguments were widely accepted. Moreover, the point is not whether we should understand the Bible as having several different interpretations (Catholics do, Protestants don't, I make no comment here) but whether the early Church fathers did.

For another thing, young-earth proponents seem to assume that since the day-age view was a secondary interpretation, the primary interpretation was the calendar-day view. But this doesn't seem clear. There are few explicit statements to this effect, and we know that some of the fathers, most notably Augustine, thought that all of the events of creation week took place instantaneously. Others argued that some aspects of the syntax in Genesis 1 were unusual, and shouldn't be understood superficially. Origen went so far as to mock those who took the creation stories in Genesis 1-3 as historical (De Principiis, 4:1:16) The point being that there was controversy in the early Church over how the creation narrative should be interpreted, and this controversy extended to the nature of the creation days. If a Christian writer of the time thought that the days of creation were calendar days, he would have had to make that clear to his readers since some of the most prolific Christian authors denied it. In the absence of such clarifications, there is simply no reason to assume that the calendar-day interpretation was universally presumed as the primary interpretation. How do we know that the "instantaneous" view wasn't the primary interpretation?

Thus far, I have been discussing what the Church fathers wrote about the days of creation, rather than what they wrote about the age of the universe. But their understanding of the latter can be easily determined by reflection upon the former: if they thought that the six creation days were each 1,000 year periods, or that all of the events in Genesis 1 took place instantaneously in no time, how old would they have concluded the universe is? Well, several thousand years. They state this pretty explicitly. Because of this, many young-earth proponents think that their views are much closer to those of the early Church, and with some justification.

However, it must be borne in mind that the reason contemporary young-earth proponents make this claim is because they insist that the days of creation can only be validly interpreted as referring to calendar days. In other words, they have different reasons for believing the earth to be several thousand years old than Christians have historically.

The significance of this is twofold: first, an argument is only as good as its premises. Since modern young-earth proponents disagree with the traditional premises that the creation days are millennia (the day-age view) or that they're metaphorical (the instantaneous creation view), their "agreement" that the universe is several thousand years old becomes irrelevant.

Second, modern day-age proponents are closer to the beliefs of the early Christians, since they agree with one of their premises, that the days of creation refer to long periods of time. They disagree that they were long periods of a specific length (1,000 years), and that this constitutes a secondary, rather than the primary, interpretation. But their agreement is more significant than the superficial one between modern young-earth proponents and the Church fathers.

I've been emphasizing the views of the early Church since this is the focus, or one of the foci, of both sides of the debate. I haven't studied the medieval exegetes enough to say much about them, other than there doesn't seem to be much alteration of the themes discussed above. Augustine's view of instantaneous creation was commonly accepted. Anselm, for example, wrote (in Cur Deus Homo, 1:18)that "the whole creation took place at once, and those days in which Moses appears to describe a successive creation are not to be understood like such days as ours."

With the Reformation, Protestants rejected multiple interpretations of the Bible and, while respecting the views of Christians throughout history, did not let traditional interpretations determine their understanding of the biblical text. Many accepted the calendar-day interpretation, including Martin Luther, but he also wrote in The Creation that the creation account "contains things the most important, and at the same time the most obscure," and, in light of all the differing interpretations of it made before his time, despaired of ever truly understanding Genesis 1 beyond the simple facts "that the world began, and was made of God, out of nothing."

Protestants formed creeds to summarize their positions regarding the most important aspects of Christianity. Very few of them addressed the nature of the creation days or the age of the universe. The Belgic Confession merely states that God created everything "when it seemed good to him" (quand bon lui a semblé; art. 12), which suggests its authors were being deliberately agnostic about the universe's age.

The Protestant confession that is most often appealed to by young-earth advocates is the Westminster Confession. Some of the 151 authors expressed elsewhere a belief in the calendar-day interpretation (five or fifteen of them depending on who you ask), and the Confession itself states that God created everything "in the space of six days" (ch. 4). From this it is claimed that the Westminster Confession affirms the calendar-day interpretation.

I think this is reading too much into the Confession. I agree, after all, that God created everything in the space of six days. I disagree, however, that he created everything in the space of six calendar days. The Westminster Confession does not say that the days of creation should be understood as 24-hour periods; and, again, given the diversity of views on this issue, if they were intending to do so, they would have had to make this much more explicit. The faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary, which subscribes to the Westminster Confession, commissioned a report on this issue, and concluded that the phrase "in the space of six days" was not meant to define the days of creation as calendar days. Rather, it was intended to counter (but not condemn) the Augustinian view that creation took place instantaneously and took no time.

... we recognize that the exegetical question of the length of the days of Genesis 1 may be an issue which cannot be, and therefore is not intended by God to be, answered in dogmatic terms. To insist that it must comes dangerously close to demanding from God revelation which he has not been pleased to bestow upon us, and responding to a threat to the biblical world view with weapons that are not crafted from the words which have proceeded out of the mouth of God.

So there were a multiplicity of views on how to understand the creation narrative in Genesis 1 throughout Christian history, long before the discoveries of modern science that the universe is ancient. The day-age interpretation in particular is neither new nor unusual. If it is objected that no one predicted that the universe is billions of years old from the Bible alone, I simply respond that the whole point of these posts is that the Bible does not give us enough information by itself to determine a specific age of the universe, so I don't consider the fact that no one did to be a failing.

The study commissioned by Westminster Theological Seminary makes a further point, that this issue "never seems to have been regarded as a test of orthodoxy in the reformed churches." Perhaps the most important thing to take away from all of this is that historically Christians have not considered the length of the days of creation a significant issue, and they were tolerant of different interpretations. This point is made best by Gleason Archer and Hugh Ross in their contributions to The Genesis Debate:

Prior to 1650 exegetes gave little attention to the length of the creation days. Of the approximately two thousand extant pages of creation-day commentary by early Church fathers, only a total of about two pages address the duration of the creation days. Anyone who reads the original source literature will notice the difference in tone between the early Church fathers and modern 24-hour advocates. The older writings are devoid of passionate certainty and dogmatism about the length of the creation days. Rather, they evidence a tentativeness and exhibit tolerance on this point.

Since this topic often generates more heat than light among Christians, and since it is an excuse that certain secular forces in society use to justify rejecting Christianity, I suggest we should try to imitate the humility of those who have gone before us in the way of Christ.

(see also part 1 and part 2)

Thought of the Day

2011-07-26T09:37:00.000+02:00

Some people defend mentioning God on our currency and in the pledge of allegiance because they are merely historical references to our country's Christian foundation, and not an endorsement of a religious position. I'm not so sure. I would rather have such things banned because they mean something than allowed because they don't.

Please pray

2011-07-25T09:30:00.005+02:00

for the people of Norway and the victims and their families in the aftermath of the horrific terrorist attack. Everyone thought that it must have been Muslim terrorists and some Muslim groups even tried to take credit for it. However, after a day or so it became clear that the person responsible was a Norwegian who described himself as a Christian and politically right-wing. When I heard the Christian claim I felt even more horrified than I already did. How could someone say they are a follower of the King of Life, the Prince of Peace, and then commit such horrific crimes? My revulsion has been slightly lessened -- and that may say something unfortunate about me -- as it is beginning to appear that his acts were more the product of his political views than his religious views. He was a nationalist, anti-Muslim, anti-multiculturalism right-wing zealot. Nevertheless, as a Christian I completely condemn these horrific actions of a man who has chosen to align himself with evil. He spit in the face of the very God he claims to worship.

One interesting thing is how this incident made people do abrupt reversals. Those who think Islam is inherently violent, and were pointing to this attack as further evidence, are now saying that we can't say that his political or religious beliefs had anything to do with it. Those who think Muslims are being persecuted in the West, and were insisting that we can't generalize from this attack to condemn Islam in general, are now saying that the attack was obviously the product of his right-wing politics and Christianity. Strange days.

Update (27 July): Sam Harris, one of the "new atheists" (a group I haven't paid attention to yet), finds some passages in the murderer's manifesto that make it difficult to say he was a devout or serious or (as some newspapers are saying) "fundamentalist" Christian. Here's the beginning of a longer quote:

I’m not going to pretend I’m a very religious person as that would be a lie. I’ve always been very pragmatic and influenced by my secular surroundings and environment.

Via KBJ. Again, I'm a little disconcerted by the fact that I'm somewhat relieved to hear this. As if it brings any of the victims -- mostly children -- back to life to know that he wasn't doing it in the name of Christianity.

Update: More from Sultan Knish:

Breivik described himself as not a religious person and mentions praying only once. His plans leading up to the attacks involved multiple visits to prostitutes. ... Breivik did call himself a Christian, but meant that in a cultural sense, rather than a theological one. He emphasized that he was not seeking a theocracy, but a secular society. His idea of a Christian Europe had nothing to do with religion.

Space News

2011-07-23T20:17:00.003+02:00

I've really been slacking on keeping up to date with what's going on off-Earth. Here are a few tidbits.

1. As you may have heard, the Space Shuttle is kaput. Kaput is Russian for "we own space now". However, this opens the door for private enterprise to take over, and I'm cautiously optimistic about that. Rand Simburg even thinks private investors could potentially get to the Moon before China.

2. NASA is planning to send a new rover to Mars. Good idea. The plan is to search for the remains of life, which they are bound to discover since several million tons of this planet has been dumped on that planet over the last few billion years.

3. The Dawn spacecraft arrived in orbit around the asteroid Vesta a few days ago. Cool and groovy. Grool.

4. Considering how much I focused on it en route it's unfortunate that the arrival of the Messenger spacecraft in orbit around Mercury a few months ago went unnoticed here as it was during my recent brown-out.

Poster Boy

2011-07-16T09:41:00.000+02:00

If you're interested in my posts I've added some interesting posts to my Posts of Interest post post hoc.

I was told there would be no math myth

2011-07-14T07:32:00.002+02:00

In two earlier posts I argued that the stories of Jesus in the New Testament cannot be explained (or explained away) as either mythological or as urban legend. I should clarify some of the issues involved as well as the difference between the two, bearing in mind that I'm not an expert.

Mythology has many elements to it, but here I'll focus on two. First, it develops over a long period of time. It's sometimes compared to the game of telephone, where one person whispers something in someone else's ear, the second person whispers to a third, etc. After several people, the story has become mangled. This, however, is incomplete. A closer parallel would be the same game where every third or fourth person has to say what he heard aloud, and allow himself to be corrected by the first person. So with mythology: it takes a long time for it to replace the original story because the original is still available and has more credibility.

The telephone game analogy suggests that mythology evolves slowly over time. It should be noted, however, that the inaccurate ideas may arise quickly. What takes a long time is the replacement of the original with the myth. The collective memory of the actual events simply takes a long time to dissipate. A. N. Sherwin-White argued in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament that two or three generations was too short a time to have the original story replaced by a myth. Indeed, when it was first suggested in the 19th century that the accounts of Jesus in the Bible are mythological, it was assumed that none of them were written until the late 2nd century, since that's how long it would have taken for a myth of that magnitude to arise and be widely accepted. At least there aren't any known examples of it happening faster. Indeed, were this not the case, we would virtually have to abandon the field of ancient history, since almost no ancient historical writings were written close in time to the events they narrate. Since all but a few of the books of the New Testament are dated by scholars to within the first century, the time necessary for them to be mythological simply isn't there. In fact, there is no competing story other than the one found in the gospels until you get to the mid to late second century. As William Lane Craig writes:

The letters of Barnabus and Clement refer to Jesus’ miracles and resurrection. Polycarp mentions the resurrection of Christ, and Irenaeus relates that he had heard Polycarp tell of Jesus’ miracles. Ignatius speaks of the resurrection. Quadratus reports that persons were still living who had been healed by Jesus. Justin Martyr mentions the miracles of Christ. No relic of a nonmiraculous story exists. That the original story should be lost and replaced by another goes beyond any known example of corruption of even oral tradition, not to speak of the experience of written transmissions. These facts show that the story in the Gospels was in substance the same story that Christians had at the beginning. (emphasis mine)

A second element of mythology is that it functions as a literary genre. This is a very important point: as the story changes, so does the way it is told. To suggest that the ancients could have written mythology but not in the genre of mythological writings is simply incoherent; these were two aspects of one thing. It is only in the Modern era that we have classified these literary genres and how they function. So in order for someone in the ancient world to write a mythological story but not in the mythological genre is to suggest that he foresaw the development of Modern literary criticism and adjusted his style of writing in order to trick his future readers -- two millennia in the future -- into thinking that the stories he was telling were not mythological when they really were. This is about as conspiracy theory-ish as you can get without spontaneously combusting.

One aspect of the process of mythologization is that it tends to eliminate irrelevant details -- either by simply erasing them or by ascribing some meaning to them (thus eliminating their irrelevancy). In a myth, every element has a role to play, but historical writings record things that are "messy", that don't have some meaning to the overall story. The biblical accounts of Jesus are replete with such little details. Several times before Jesus would speak to people, Mark records him sighing deeply (7:34; 8:11-13) or gazing at them intently (3:5, 34; 10:23). When a crowd brings an adultress before Jesus, he stoops down and doodles in the dust with his finger (John 8:2-11). A few copies of the New Testament several centuries later tried to accommodate this by adding that Jesus wrote down the sins of the woman's accusers to show that they were not without sin. That's exactly how mythology works, by changing the details so that they have some relevance to the story.

Gregory Boyd gave several examples of this in John 20:1-8 in a letter he wrote to his non-Christian father, later published as Letters from a Skeptic (I should note that I disagree with Boyd on some of the points he makes here):

Early on the first day of the week (when? does it matter?), while it was still dark (who cares?), Mary Magdalene (an incriminating detail, see the next criteria) went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved (John's modest way of referring to himself -- another mark of genuineness) and said, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!" (note her lack of faith here) So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. They were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first (John's modesty again, but who cares about this irrelevant detail?). He bent over (the tomb entrance was low -- a detail which is historically accurate for tombs of wealthy people of the time -- the kind we know Jesus was buried in) and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in (why not? irrelevant detail). Then Simon Peter, who was behind him (modest repetition again), arrived and went into the tomb (Peter's boldness stands out in all the Gospel accounts). He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head (irrelevant detail -- what was Jesus wearing?). The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen (could anything be more irrelevant, and more unusual, than this, Dad? Jesus folded one part of His wrapping before He left!). Finally the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went inside (who cares about what exact order they went in?).

The presence of little details like this should not be understood as absolute. Fully mythological stories can have irrelevant details, and historical writings can show how little details were actually relevant to what was going on. The point is that in general, the more such details there are, the less mythologized the story is. This gives us the ability to test how far along the mythologization process a story is.

Here's a non-biblical example: The Voyage of Saint Brendan is an early medieval text describing an Irish monk who built a small leather boat and, essentially, sailed it around the North Atlantic Ocean. Tim Severin, in The Brendan Voyage, relates how his wife, an expert in medieval literature, thought that The Voyage of Saint Brendan was a partially mythologized story of something that actually happened.

"There's something odd about the Saint Brendan text," remarked my wife Dorothy one evening. Her casual comment immediately caught my attention.

"What do you mean by 'odd'?" I asked her.

"The text doesn't match up with much of the other literature written at about the same time. The best way to explain it is that it doesn't have the same feel. It's a curiosity. ... The story has a remarkable amount of practical detail, far more than most early medieval texts. It tells you about the geography of the places Brendan visits. It carefully describes the progress of the voyage, the times and distances, and so forth. It seems to me that the text is not so much a legend as a tale that is embroidering a first-hand experience."

Severin decided to build a leather boat out of the same material that would have been available in that particular part of Ireland at that particular time and sail it across the North Atlantic (à la Kon-Tiki). Not only did he successfully sail from Ireland to North America (via the Faroes and Iceland), he learned that a leather boat had great advantages over wooden ones: at one point, they struck an iceberg strong enough that it would have punched a hole in a wooden boat, big enough to sink it. A leather boat, however, can be sewn up en route.

Anyway, the point is that no scholar has ever suggested that the gospels are written in the genre of mythology. Those who have argued that they are mythological (primarily in the late 19th century) said they should be understood this way despite the genre in which they are written. In fact, this is so blatant, so screamingly obvious, that you can verify it yourself: simply read the gospels side-by-side with actual mythological writings -- not modern retellings of mythological stories, but the actual myths themselves. It's obvious that they're not in the same genre. Until fairly recently, it's been a contentious point what genre the gospels belong to, other than that they were roughly historical writings. But in the last few decades, scholars have accepted that they are written in the genre of ancient biography, similar to Diogenes Laërtius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. As I pointed out here, that doesn't mean that they are historically accurate in every detail, but it certainly makes it very difficult to claim that they are inaccurate in their central claims.

I've spent an inordinate amount of time on mythology. Urban legend is simpler: it basically lacks many of these elements. An urban legend is not based on a long process of mythologization but on someone telling a false story. Thus, in contrast with actual mythology, urban legends do not replace the original story, they are, in a sense, competing with it. Having said that, urban legends are similar to mythology in that they will often lack the irrelevant details that we find in veridical accounts. Urban legends are trying to make a point, and so simply ignore the details that don't play a role in this. In my post on this, I argue that the people who originated an urban legend either a) simply made it up (i.e. they lied); b) hallucinated; c) experienced something they mistook for something else (such as nondescript lights in the sky which are mistaken for alien spacecraft); or d) were insane (didn't really experience anything, but now actually think they did). The biblical accounts of Jesus cannot fit into any of these categories. Rather than rehearse them here, I'll just commend you to my earlier post.

Incidentally, if you haven't read The Brendan Voyage, I strongly recommend it.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Quote of the Day

2011-07-13T11:56:00.005+02:00

Let us suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be theoretically justified with no appeal to objective value. It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat', than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element'. The head rules the belly through the chest -- the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest -- Magnanimity -- Sentiment -- these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

And all the time -- such is the tragi-comedy of our situation -- we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

C. S. Lewis
The Abolition of Man
(footnotes omitted)

Wrong

2011-07-06T23:30:00.000+02:00

This is infuriating. I have some sympathy for those who don't want the government to give to charity for us (i.e. welfare) because that is a responsibility we should not delegate to others, much less to a bureaucracy. But for government to actively prevent people from feeding the poor is just abominable. Via Ann Althouse.

Cyber-Lewis

2011-07-01T23:26:00.002+02:00

In the comments to this post are several essays and books by C. S. Lewis that are available to read online. I knew about a few of them, but there's a lot more than I realized. Via Victor Reppert.

Basil Mitchell, RIP

2011-06-28T11:31:00.000+02:00

Basil Mitchell, one of the most important contemporary Christian philosophers, passed away a few days ago at the age of 94. You can read his Gifford Lectures online, entitled Morality, Religious and Secular.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Quote of the Day

2011-06-25T23:10:00.005+02:00

There are many other arguments which claim to show us that we can be determinists without upsetting any of our notions of moral responsibility or human freedom. We may keep our concepts in different pockets. The language we use to describe actions is often different from the language we use to describe events: there are different principles of identity and individuation, for what are to count as the same action and what are to count as the same event. And therefore, it is argued, the conflict between free-will and determinism is illusory, because the concepts occur in different languages and so cannot come into collision. Free-will belongs to the agent's language, determinism to the spectator's. I, as an agent, perform some actions freely: he, as a spectator, may predict events correctly. But I am not he; to be an active participator is not the same as to observe from the sidelines, and actions and events are logically very different; and therefore, it is claimed, no conflict can arise between my belief as an agent that I am acting freely and his certainty, as a spectator that events will follow their pre-established course; since the key concepts of the opposition must be formulated in different languages, no contradiction between them can arise.

The distinction drawn between the language of agents and actions and the language of observations and events -- a distinction which seems to be the modern formulation in linguistic terms of one that Kant drew -- is a distinction that needs to be drawn; but, like the one Kant drew, is unable to resolve this particular problem. It is true that agents and spectators do use different languages, and many mistakes have been caused by the unconscious equation of actions and events: many of the legends about Oracles and the fulfilment of their prophecies to the confusion of the enquirer, turn on his having wrongly translated from the Oracle's spectator-language into his own, agent-language. But from the languages' not being the same in all respects it does not follow that they differ in all respects. The languages, though admittedly different, overlap each other in many places. The same man can speak both as an agent and as a spectator, and the same things can be described from the two different points of view. Just as Kant's solution requires a sort of philosophical schizophrenia on the part of the thinker beyond the power of most reflective men, so the solution suggested here requires, as it were, a thorough-going schizoglossia which is blatantly at variance with the facts. We may not be able to equate actions with events: but we can say something in the event language which will translate into something in the action language that is incompatible with some things the agents would have liked to have been able to say. Thus I may think that my action in inviting the visiting professor to dinner was free, and that I could have quite well just asked him how his work was getting on: but if a psycho-physiologist with complete information about the state of my brain and my environment at some previous time can predict that upon my meeting a human being of such and such type, my lips will contort themselves so that such and such sounds come out, then, whatever the niceties of what exactly constitutes an action, I shall no longer be able to maintain that I could have not acted as I did. The argument of the two languages will not work because the spectator and the agent can communicate, indeed may be the same person. So, anything the spectator can know the agent could know also: and if the spectator in his language can predict certain events, then this state of affairs will be describable in the agent's language as well, and may be inconsistent with, or entail, certain courses of action on his part. Therefore if the determinist thesis occurs in the spectator's language, it can be expressed in the agent's language too, and the problem will not have been dissolved.

J. R. Lucas
The Freedom of the Will
(footnotes omitted)

Literary Science-Fiction

2011-06-22T11:42:00.002+02:00

1. I just learned that the last novel of Franz Werfel -- one of the most important German writers of the first half of the 20th century, and the last husband of Alma -- was a science-fiction novel entitled Star of the Unborn (in German: Stern der Ungeborenen). So that's on my to-read list, once I finish writing my dissertation.

2. I've started reading Gene Wolfe's massive four-novel series The Book of the New Sun, but I don't really have the time. I note in an interesting interview that his fellow science-fiction author Patrick O'Leary has a very high view of him.

Forget "Speculative Fiction." Gene Wolfe is the best writer alive. Period. And as Wolfe once said, "All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it."

No comparison. Nobody--I mean nobody--comes close to what this artist does. ...

He has the intellectual whimsy, invention and rigour of Borges, the grace and music and hard beauty of Nabokov, the richness of voice and character of Faulkner, the moral insight and passion of Le Guin, the compassion and weirdness of P.K. Dick, and a courage and integrity of spirit that are entirely his own--all grounded, somehow rooted in a modesty, a working-class respect for the dirt and anguish and joy of everyday life. Ultimately he loves spinning a good yarn. And he is a lot of fun.

Read a story, say, "The Ziggurat" or "A Cabin On The Coast" or "The Death of Doctor Island"--it doesn't get better than that. Read a chapter, say, the Alzabo Chapter in The Book of The New Sun, or any [#*&!@] chapter from In Green's Jungles--the best novel I've ever read--Dude, this man is operating on all cylinders. He's like the lead in Steely Dan's "Reeling in the Years"--Jesus, do you remember the first time you heard that? Wolfe achieves that virtuosity and soul for whole books.

And then he does it backward. And in braille. And after the fifth time you read the same page and realize he's [#*&!@] doing it on a Kazoo while juggling tomatoes--you give up. You know--forgetaboutit--he's the best. He is so good, he's scary.

3. The Wordverter recently alerted to me to something that will be humorous to other Frank Herbert fans who are also parents: Goodnight Dune. It made me laugh, at least. I also laughed at this which is, unfortunately, serious.

Jesus' humanity

2011-06-21T07:01:00.002+02:00

My wife just had a spectacular insight about Jesus that focuses on his humanity. It's important for Christians to remember that Jesus was both fully God and fully human. That can be difficult at times, though. Anyway, she remembered a particular passage from Seven Woes:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

My wife's insight is kind of obvious when you think of it, but it had never occurred to me. It's this: Jesus -- through whom everything was made, the one who holds the entire universe together -- washed dishes. At some point in his life, he had to clean dinnerware. That is how far down the food chain he was willing to go in order to show us how much he loves us. Pretty amazing.

One more click

2011-06-20T08:56:00.000+02:00

I mentioned a little while ago that the Hunger Site added a Veterans tab, where advertisers will pay for meals for veterans if you click a button. They've recently added another tab for Autism where advertisers will pay for therapy for autistic children each time you click. So get to it.

Just call me a conscientious carnivore

2011-06-19T00:09:00.001+02:00

Keith Burgess-Jackson, a vegetarian, posted an interesting quote on eating meat from A Political Philosophy by Roger Scruton. Here's the final paragraph:

Furthermore, I would suggest not only that it is permissible for those who care about animals to eat meat; they have a duty to do so. If meat-eating should ever become confined to those who do not care about animal suffering then compassionate farming would cease. All animals would be kept in battery conditions and the righteous vegetarians would exert no economic pressure on farmers to change their ways. Where there are conscientious carnivores, however, there is a motive to raise animals kindly. And conscientious carnivores can show their depraved contemporaries that it is possible to ease one’s conscience by spending more on one’s meat. Bit by bit the news would get around, that there is a right and a wrong way to eat; and—failing some coup d’état by censorious vegetarians—the process would be set in motion, that would bring battery farming to an end. Duty requires us, therefore, to eat our friends.

I'm definitely carnivorous (technically, I'm omnivorous), but I'm also an animal lover, so this idea appealed to me. My first thought against it, however, is that Scruton limits the possible influence "righteous vegetarians" could have on farmers to economic pressure. But surely they could exert other kinds of pressure that would have an influence on cruel farming practices. My second thought against it is this argument would apply equally to cannibalism: if the only people who eat members of ethnic group A are those who care nothing of their suffering, then there will be no motivation to minimize such suffering. If we really care about ethnic group A, "duty requires us, therefore, to eat our friends." Of course, one could get around this by adding more to the equation: human beings are not merely animals; we have other motivations for eating animals than simply reducing their suffering; etc. But by itself, the quoted argument strikes me as insufficient. Of course, there's a whole book surrounding it, so maybe I should read it instead of pass judgment on it.

Thought of the Day

2011-06-16T22:27:00.001+02:00

In ancient Greece, Diogenes would urinate in public in order to prove that human beings are merely animals. But animals don't urinate in public in order to make a point.

On parenting

2011-06-14T11:31:00.004+02:00

David Mamet, the playwright and screenwriter, has come out of the closet recently as a political conservative. I was reading an interview with him about it, but the point that stood out to me was something that didn't have anything to do with politics. He was asked by the interviewer if he intends to promote conservativism through his writing.

No, it’s not my job as a playwright to send a message. It’s my job as a playwright to entertain the people. And it would be an abuse of their trust to addend a message to an entertainment. It’s like…
It’s like ending a wonderful fairy story that you tell your children, and saying and so, remember it’s always good to be kind to people and blah, blah, blah. No, you’ve just destroyed your kid, right? He thought that he was…he suspended his disbelief in order to have this wonderful moment with his father, where they both engage in this fantasy. And at the end, you’re saying but more important than that, son, let me misuse the gift of your attention to teach you a lesson.

I don't know what other people think of this, but my response was something along the lines of, "Oh my gosh, I'm not the only one who thinks that way!" Having said that, my pathetic attempts at fiction are absolutely message-driven. I only agree with Mamet about the parenting part.

Heh

2011-06-13T13:29:00.001+02:00

Tips for Not Appearing Crazy on the Internet.

More Favorite Movie Scenes

2011-05-31T12:22:00.000+02:00

Tombstone

Despicable Me

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

Jaws

Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Lethal Weapon

Lethal Weapon 2

At the Circus

Ratatouille

Man on the Moon

Jurassic Park

The Caine Mutiny

Very interesting

2011-05-23T13:36:00.005+02:00

Here's an audio recording of Hilary Putnam and Alvin Plantinga, two of the greatest living philosophers, discussing the existence of God. I didn't realize that Putnam is Jewish. It's from ten years ago, but it was just put on YouTube a couple of days ago.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Sorry

2011-05-20T10:23:00.003+02:00

Apologies for not posting much for the last few months. As I've mentioned, I'm finishing up my dissertation, and haven't had the time to blog. Out of devotion to my readers I point you to this fascinating article about three boys from an island in the South Pacific who took a small boat and were lost at sea for 51 days with almost no food and water.

Quote of the Day

2011-05-08T22:27:00.005+02:00

The kind of situation Goldman describes, namely one in which two events C and C* are seen to be nomologically necessary and sufficient for each other, and in which each of them is thought to constitute an explanans for one and the same event E, is an inherently unstable situation. This is so especially when C and C* are each a member of a system of events (or concepts) such that the two systems to which they respectively belong show the kind of systematic nomological connections Goldman envisages for the psychological and the physiological. The instability of the situation generates a strong pressure to find an acceptable account of the relationship between C and C*, and, by extension, that between the two systems to which they belong; the instability is dissipated and a cognitive equilibrium restored when we come to see a more specific relationship between the two explanations. As we shall see, in cases of interest, the specific relationship replacing equivalence will be either identity or some asymmetric dependency relation.

Another way of putting my point would be this: a certain instability exists in a situation in which two distinct events are claimed to be nomologically equivalent causes or explanations of the same phenomenon; stability is restored when equivalence is replaced by identity or some asymmetric relation of dependence. That is, either two explanations (or causes) in effect collapse into one or, if there indeed are two distinct explanations (or causes) here, we must see one of them as dependent on, or derivative from, the other -- or, what is the same, one of them as gaining explanatory or causal dominance over the other.

The tension in this situation that gives rise to the instability can be seen in various ways. First, if C and C* are each a sufficient cause of the event E, then why isn't E overdetermined? It is at best extremely odd to think that each and every bit of action we perform is overdetermined in virtue of having two distinct sufficient causes. To be sure, this differs from the standard case of overdetermination in which the two overdetermining causes are not nomologically connected. But why does the supposed nomological relationship between C and C* void the claim that this is a case of causal overdetermination? Notice the trade-off here: the closer this is to a standard case of overdetermination, the less dependent are the two explanations in relation to each other, and, correlatively, the more one stresses the point that this is not a case of standard overdetermination because of the nomic equivalence between the explanations, the less plausible is one's claim that we have here two distinct and independent explanations.

Second, if C and C* are nomic equivalents, they co-occur as a matter of law -- that is, it is inomologically impossible to have one of these occur without the other. Why then do they not form a single jointly sufficient cause of E rather than two individually sufficient causes? How do we know that each of C and C* is not just a partial cause of E? Why, that is, should we not regard C and C* as forming a single complete explanation of E rather than two separately sufficient explanations of it? How do we decide one way or the other?

When we reflect on the special case of psychophysical causation, where C, let's say, is a psychological event, C* is its physiological correlate, and E is some bodily movement associated with an action, it would be highly implausible to regard C as directly acting on the body to bring about E (e.g., my belief and desire telekinetically acting on the muscles in my arm and shoulder and making them contract, thereby causing my arm to go up); it would be more credible to think that if the belief-desire pair is to cause the movement of my arm, it must "work through" the physical causal chain starting from C*, some neural event in the brain, culminating in a muscle contraction. If this is right, we cannot regard C and C* as constituting independent explanations of E. We must think of the causal efficacy of C in bringing about E as dependent on that of its physical correlate C*.

I believe that these perplexities are removed only when we have an account of the relation between C and C*, the two supposed causes of a single action, and that, as I shall argue, an account that is adequate to this task will show that C and C* could not each constitute a complete and independent explanation of the action.

Jaegwon Kim
"Mechanism, Purpose, and Explanatory Exclusion"
Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays

My two favorite musical passages

2011-05-02T00:09:00.002+02:00

In addition to my favorite piece of music, there are also short passages of music that I absolute love. Below are my two favorites. Of course I love the entire pieces in which they appear, and recommend you listen to the whole pieces, since part of what makes these passages so wonderful is the parts they play in the overall pieces.

I've mentioned before that I think Bach is at his best when he writes for solo instruments, and his cello suites are no exception. Here is the prelude to his sixth suite performed by Yo-Yo Ma. The video is kinda freaky. The passage that I love is from 2:55 to 3:04. Prior to this point the piece is in a fairly standard 12/8 time signature (I assume), divided into four beats with three eighth notes per beat: 3 + 3 + 3 + 3. In the passage I love, he divides it up differently: 2 + 5 + 3 + 2. Perhaps the 5 could be divided up as 2 + 3, but I'm not sure. Regardless, this is insane. And no one could have pulled it off except Bach. The man was an absolute genius.

The next piece is the first movement from Mendelssohn's violin concerto in E minor, with Sarah Chang on the violin. In my opinion, Mendelssohn is one of the most underappreciated composers in history; he's famous, but he should be as famous as Mozart and Beethoven. My wife is not as appreciative of the minor keys, but when she heard this she was just in awe: "The violin just sang" she said. The passage I love is from 8:56 to 9:42. Here, you really have to listen to the whole piece because what makes the passage so amazing is that it repeats the main theme from the piece in a different and utterly brilliant format.

Happy Easter

2011-04-22T21:27:00.004+02:00

Sorry for the lack of posting, I've been swamped. Given that it's almost Easter, the day when Christians celebrate the resurrection of Christ,* I thought I'd just link to my main posts on Jesus. For more check out the Historical Jesus tag.

William F. Buckley Jr. on Jesus' Resurrection
The Jesus Myth
Your Own Personal Jesus
Re: visions of the Historical Jesus
1 Corinthians 15:3-8
Was Jesus' Resurrection an Urban Legend?
Some Issues in NT Historiography, part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4; part 5
He Is
Craig vs. Spong
The Christ Myth Myth

* Of course, the early church moved the celebration of the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday in recognition of Jesus' resurrection. So Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus every week.

Four Myths about the Crusades

2011-04-06T21:28:00.003+02:00

Fascinating article over at First Principles. The one that surprised me was myth number 4, that Muslims held a grudge against Christians and Christianity because of the Crusades. The author points out that, prior to World War I, the Muslim world wasn't that bothered by the Crusades because they had the impression that they won those wars. And really, they pretty much did: they still have Asia Minor (Turkey), they still have northern Africa, they still have Iran, they still had Jerusalem until fairly recently (and they didn't lose it to Christians). What they lost is Al-Andalus (Spain). But all of those places were heavily Christian before the Muslims came, saw, and conquered, so the Christian Crusades were essentially a counter-attack against Muslim aggression. Which, incidentally, is addressed in refuting myth number 1, that the Crusades were an unprovoked attack.

Interview

2011-04-03T20:22:00.000+02:00

Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) interviews Jerry Pournelle, one of the great science-fiction authors, here.

Quote of the Day

2011-03-30T07:02:00.001+02:00

A double-aspect theorist might object at this point that our entire discussion of the double-aspect theory thus far has been based upon a misunderstanding of it. He might claim that he can slip between the horns of the dilemma we have posed for him. The common reference he needs is achieved while the contradiction we point out is avoided, if the same thing can be considered in two bodies of discourse from different points of view. He believes this possible and holds that in one perspective a piece of human behavior can be seen as a determined event while in another perspective the same thing can be seen as a free act. The behavior seen as the trigger being pulled in the event-perspective is seen in the action-perspective as the pulling of the trigger. The difference in perspective removes the contradiction, without precluding common reference.

But this approach does not remove the contradiction; it only appears to do so. The appearance is created by the metaphor of "different points of view." The notion of points of view is based on an analogy between vision and propositional knowledge.

Different visual points of view on the same object present, so to speak, different pictures of one and the same thing. These pictures can be radically different -- for example, the view of a coin on edge and the view of the coin's face. Yet these pictures do not contradict one another; they are simply different. They do not conflict precisely because they are pictures of the object; they make no claims about the object itself.

Propositional points of view are like visual points of view in some ways, but are different in a crucial respect: The propositions which collectively constitute a point of view on some subject matter are not pictures of the subject matter. If they are affirmed, they are claims about the subject matter itself. It is one thing to say that a coin on edge looks like a two-dimensional rectangle; it is another thing to affirm that the coin on edge is a two-dimensional rectangle.

What perhaps lends plausibility to the analogy is the way in which certain propositions are expressed. For example, "He was standing to the right of the desk" and "He was standing to the left of the desk" seem to be contradictory, but both could be true, if stated by persons who viewed the situation from different visual points of view. But this use of the expression "different points of view" is simply another way of expressing the requirement of the principle of noncontradiction usually expressed by "in the same respect."

Thus these two statements, if both true, are not expressions of contradictory propositions. Either they are not fully explicit statements of the same proposition or they are not fully explicit statements of different propositions. If they are statements of the same proposition, then the difference in point of view has been discounted and no contradiction is involved; if they are statements of different propositions, then the points of view are included in the propositions as part of the states of affairs being described. In the latter case, since the subjects of predication are different, the propositions cannot be contradictory. Thus, the difference of points of view construed in this way is of no use to the double-aspect theorist; Sfc [free will] and Nfc [determinism] are contradictories; they refer to the same thing in the same respect.

The flaw in the points-of-view analogy can now be explicated. Different visual points of view produce different pictures of the same thing. By treating propositional knowledge as if it were vision, one easily takes for granted that contradictory propositions are merely different pictures of the same thing. On this analogy, contradictory propositions would be incompatible only if they were affirmed from the same point of view. If they are affirmed from different points of view, however, such propositions are only different pictures of the same thing.

But here the analogy is carried too far. A proposition affirmed from a given propositional point of view about something other than the point of view itself does not characterize the point of view. Instead, someone uses it it [sic] pick out some other state of affairs and affirms that this state of affairs obtains -- obtains independently of the conditions of one's knowing it and talking about it. Thus, the contradictory propositions affirmed about the same state of affairs from different propositional points of view are no less contradictory for their being affirmed from these different points of view. These propositions are not about the points of view from which they are affirmed, but about some other state of affairs; what they articulate is that state of affairs, independent of anyone's knowing it and talking about it. If it happens that the point of view of one affirming a proposition is confused by him with what he is talking about, then he makes false statements about the world.

Our point can be restated more briefly. The difference between visual points of view depends on the conditions for seeing, not on what is seen. Propositional knowledge about something, however, claims to articulate states of affairs, not the conditions of one's knowing them to be so. Different propositional points of view are precisely different conditions for one's knowing and talking about things. Hence the difference of points of view in this case makes no difference at all; differences in propositional points of view are precisely excluded by the claim involved in the affirming of any proposition: that the state of affairs which it picks out obtains

Joseph M. Boyle, Jr., Germain Grisez, and Olaf Tollefsen,
Free Choice: A Self-Referential Argument

Heh

2011-03-28T06:58:00.000+02:00

Five ways Phillip K. Dick's insanity changed the world of movies.

Click

2011-03-27T12:00:00.003+02:00

I link to the Hunger Site on the sidebar because it's a very easy way to do something good. You click once a day and advertisers agree to pay for food for hungry people in exchange for advertisement space on the website. Since it started, they've introduced several other tabs you can click on as well, such as Child Health, Literacy, Animal Rescue, and Breast Cancer, the latter providing free mammograms for poor women.

Recently they added a new tab, Veterans, which gives free meals to those who served America in the armed forces. So take a minute and click on all of these sites -- and remember to do it again tomorrow.

Thought of the Day

2011-03-23T06:38:00.002+01:00

Fight Club in five words:
"Life is pain. Pursue life."
(Also: "Fight Club in five words.")

The Bible and the Age of the Universe, part 2

2011-03-21T23:29:00.004+01:00

In part 1 I wrote that, while the Bible does not give an age of the universe, some people attempt to calculate it by adding together the passage of time from the creation of the universe to the creation of the first human beings and the passage of time from the creation of the first human beings to some undisputed historical event. Ignoring my arguments that the first figure cannot be determined from the Bible, can we determine the second figure? Those who attempt this generally argue from the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11. This is not as simple as it may first appear, however. Two excellent essays on this issue that are available online are "Primeval Chronology" by William Henry Green (originally published in Bibliotheca Sacra [1890], 285-303) and "The Genesis Genealogies" by John Millam. Most of this post is taken from these articles.

The first problem that presents itself is that the ancient Hebrew concepts of father and son were not limited to the individual's male parent or offspring, but applied to any male ancestor or descendent; thus you have statements like, "Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham" (Matt. 1:1), even though there were many intervening generations between Abraham and David, and between David and Christ.

This goes far beyond the mere use of the words "father" and "son," but applies to the concept of parenthood regardless of the terminology used. Case in point, the Hebrew verb "to beget" used in the Genesis genealogies (yalad) is used in the above sense, particularly in the book of Genesis: we are told that Canaan begot whole ethnic groups (10:15-18), and that Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah begot their grandchildren and great-grandchildren (46:6-25). So we see that the concept of parenthood, and the terms used in the Genesis genealogies in particular, can refer to any ancestor and not merely to one's parent.

In fact, the concept of fatherhood is sometimes even extended to one's predecessor regardless of whether or not they're related. Genesis 4:20-21 describes Jabal as "the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock," and his brother Jubal as "the father of all who play the harp and flute." What's especially interesting about this passage is that the context in which it occurs is concerned with biological fatherhood. Thus, the Genesis genealogies move back and forth between different concepts of fatherhood without any textual indications that they are doing so.

This leads us to another factor: Jewish genealogies were not exhaustive, nor were they meant to be understood as such. Rather, they were selective to give the "highlights," or to emphasize a numerical structure by reducing the number of names to a multiple of seven and/or ten (this is called "telescoping"). For example, when Matthew describes the genealogy of Jesus (Matt. 1) he deliberately skips over several people who lived during the exile to Babylon. Why? Because he's trying to arrange it so that there are 14 names from every period he's describing (from Abraham to David; from David to the Babylonian exile; and from the exile to Christ). This does not constitute error, it's simply the way the ancient Jews wrote genealogies. A similar pattern is found in the genealogies in Gen. 5 and 11 where each list consists of ten names, which implies that the author was limiting who he included for some literary purpose. Other examples of this include Ruth 4:18-22 which lists 10 names; 1 Chronicles 1:5-23 (the list of the nations) which lists 70 names, and Luke 3 which lists 77 names (21 + 21 + 14 + 21).

In fact, the Bible specifically tells us that there are gaps in the Genesis genealogies: in Luke 3:35-36 we are told that Noah was the father of Shem, who was the father of Arphaxad, who was the father of Cainan, who was the father of Shelah. But this genealogy is mentioned twice in the early chapters of Genesis, and in both cases Cainan is not mentioned. Instead we are told that Arphaxad begot Shelah (Gen. 10:24; 11:12):

Luke: Noah --> Shem --> Arphaxad --> Cainan --> Shelah
Genesis: Noah --> Shem --> Arphaxad ---------------> Shelah

Again, I want to reiterate that this is not a contradiction, it's just how Hebrew genealogies were written.

If we delve further, we find that there is a very close parallel to the Genesis genealogies elsewhere in the Bible: the genealogy from Jacob to Moses is described in four passages, two of which are traditionally ascribed to Moses himself (Exod. 6:16-20; Num. 26:57-59; 1 Chr. 6:1-3; 23:6-13). All of these passages list five generations: Jacob --> Levi --> Kohath --> Amram --> Moses. Part of the problem comes in when we recognize that Gen. 46:11 states that Kohath was born before the descent into Egypt, and one of the genealogies (Exod. 6:16-20) states how long the individuals lived. If we ignore the facts that Kohath was probably already a grown man when he went to Egypt, and that he and Amram probably didn't father their children on their deathbeds, the maximum amount of time the Bible gives us between Kohath's birth, before the descent into Egypt and the time when Moses led the people out of Egypt is Kohath's lifetime (133 years) plus Amram's lifetime (137 years) plus the age of Moses at the time of the Exodus (80 years -- Exod. 7:7). But this only adds up to 350 years, and the Bible states explicitly that the Hebrews were in Egypt for 430 years (Exod. 12:40-41).

This problem is further exacerbated when we note that 1 Chronicles 7:20-27 covers the same period, giving the genealogy from Jacob to Joshua, a younger contemporary of Moses. Rather than listing only five generations, this passage lists twelve. Another problem is that Numbers 3:27-28 states that at the time Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt, Kohath had 8,600 male descendants. If Kohath was Moses' grandfather, this number cannot be correct: if Kohath had 20 sons, and each one of them also had 20 sons, and each one of them also had 20 sons, you'd still come up short -- not to mention the fact that the Bible never mentions such an extraordinary scenario. The only resolution to these problems is that there are gaps in Moses' genealogy, and we cannot create a timetable based on the ages it gives.

When the Bible intends that a series of numbers be added together to produce a total, it gives this total itself (Num. 1:46; 2:32; Matt. 1). Since the genealogies in Exod. 6:16-20 and Gen. 5 and 11 do not give any such summation, or are ever used to provide such a summation anywhere else in the Bible, they were not intended to specify the amount of time that passed during these genealogies. The ages are given rather to demonstrate the age at which someone became a father, and how long he lived, because fatherhood and old age are considered blessings from God.

So how should we understand the genealogies in Gen. 5 and 11? Given the fluidity of the Bible's concept of fatherhood and the nature of biblical genealogies, when the text says "A lived X years and begot B," it could simply mean that A was X years old when he became the ancestor of B; that is, when he fathered the genetic line that would eventually culminate in the individual B and the B tribe. To apply it to the case where we know of a gap, when the text says, "When Arphaxad had lived 35 years, he became the father of Shelah" (Gen. 11:12), it means Arphaxad was 35 when he fathered Cainan, and Cainan eventually fathered Shelah. Of course, this is ignoring the fact that there are probably more gaps between Arphaxad and Cainan and between Cainan and Shelah. Moreover, when we note that the Bible often refers to representatives of nations or tribes (like Canaan, Israel, or Judah) as if they are the individuals they are descended from and named after (Jdg. 1:3; Ps. 80:1), "A" and "B" could merely refer to representatives of the A and B clans, either ancestors or descendants of A and B.

Since biblical genealogies vary greatly in how complete they are, we simply cannot ascribe a figure to how long of a period the Genesis genealogies are meant to encompass. And since the only way to determine the age of the universe from the Bible involves calculating this figure, we cannot determine how old the universe is from the Bible.

Update (27 July): See also part 1 and part 3

Time, Eternity, and Meaning

2011-03-16T10:26:00.001+01:00

Great post by Bill Vallicella (Maverick Philosopher) on meaning and the passage of time in light of Nietzsche and Boethius. This part really got me:

The problem with time is not that it will end, but that its very mode of being is deficient. The problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time in the first place. For this reason, more time is no solution. Not even endlessly recurring time is any solution. Even if time were unending and I were omnitemporal, existing at every time, my life would still be strung out in moments outside of each other, with the diachronic identifications of memory and expectation no substitute for a true unity. To the moment I say, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (Goethe, Faust) but the beautiful moment will not abide, and abidance-in-memory is a sorry substitute, and a self diachronically constituted by such makeshifts is arguably no true self. Existing as we do temporally, we are never at one with ourselves: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present fleeting. We exist outside ourselves in temporal ec-stasis. We are strung out in temporal diaspora. The only Now we know is the nunc movens.

This is very similar to the overall idea behind my ongoing attempt at writing a science-fiction novel, Kalypso's Envy. I haven't yet reached the point where I explain the title, but when I do it will make a very similar point to Vallicella's.

Update (April 3): I thought about this issue again recently. My son and I started walking around a restaurant near our apartment, and we did it over and over again. More to the point, my son wanted to do it exactly the same way each time: he held my hand while walking up the stairs at a particular point, would run halfway around the restaurant (which is round), then sat down on a curb. I sat next to him, he'd drape his arm over my leg, then jump up and run down a ramp, then around to where we started. Over and over. It occurred to me that by repeating the experience, he was trying to capture it in a way that experiences cannot be captured in time. He was trying to relive the experience, even though after reliving it, it would be gone once more. Indeed, this may be the motive behind the battle cry of the child: "Again!" I don't want the experience to be over, I want to continue experiencing it, I want to capture it, contain it, and keep it. So perhaps we are aware of the "temporal diaspora" as soon as we are able to think.

Then this got me thinking about rituals. In repeating certain things, we are participating, so we think, in something eternal, something which does not end. But we do not capture the experience, the experience captures us. Thus the temporal is subsumed into the eternal.

But that's not the whole story, since many rituals are repetitions of past events. Jewish Passover or Christian Communion are repeating events that took place at a particular place at a particular time. So how does this involve eternity? Perhaps it does not. But perhaps the original events were expressions of something eternal, and the repetitions are further participations in that eternal event. Passover is not just a meal repeating an earlier meal, it is repeating a meal that symbolizes the ancient Hebrews' emancipation. Communion, or the Lord's Supper , is not just repeating the Last Supper Jesus ate with his apostles. It symbolizes Christ's death, the bread and wine becoming, in some sense, his broken body and spilled blood: in Communion, the Christian participates in Christ's atoning death. Jesus died at a particular place at a particular time. Yet he is also "the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world". So time weaves itself into eternity -- and vice-versa -- in interesting ways.

Oh. Wow.

2011-03-15T09:59:00.002+01:00

This is an utterly mind-blowing video that consists entirely of actual photographs of Saturn and its moons taken by the Cassini spacecraft. The whole thing is amazing, but at about one minute in it becomes ... amazing squared. Maximize it on your screen if you can. It's a demo reel from a future film entitled Outside In that does a grand tour of the whole solar system this way. Via io9.

5.6k Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation from stephen v2 on Vimeo.

Please pray

2011-03-14T10:10:00.000+01:00

for the people in Japan. Because of their preparedness, the earthquake (upgraded now to 9.0) and the tsunami caused significantly less damage (in terms of human lives and property) than it would have anywhere else. Nevertheless, entire towns have been washed away. Japan's main island of Honshu was moved in its entirety eight feet (2.3 meters) to the east. We know people there and we are praying for them and trying to get in contact with them, but electricity is out all over the place, and water and food is scarce as well. Nuclear power plants are a huge concern too. Blogs and websites documenting the damage are ubiquitous; I'll just point you to Patterico since they're doing as good a job as any in collecting videos and keeping up with the news. Just pray that the devastation does not continue and that the people in Japan get the help they need as soon as possible.

Bumblebee Tuba

2011-03-06T22:46:00.002+01:00

My father-in-law, who plays the French horn (and could do it professionally if he wanted to), pointed me to this insane video.

Quote of the Day

2011-02-28T14:27:00.000+01:00

Ever since Hume's famous Essay it has been believed that historical statements about miracles are the most intrinsically improbable of all historical statements. According to Hume, probability rests on what may be called the majority vote of our past experiences. The more often a thing has been known to happen, the more probable it is that it should happen again; and the less often the less probable. Now the regularity of Nature's course, says Hume, is supported by something better than the majority vote of past experiences: it is supported by their unanimous vote, or, as Hume says, by "firm and unalterable experience." There is, in fact, "uniform experience" against miracles; otherwise, says Hume, it would not be a Miracle. A miracle is therefore the most improbable of all events. It is always more probable that the witnesses were lying or mistaken than that a miracle occurred.

Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely "uniform experience" against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.

There is also an objection to Hume which leads us deeper into our problem. The whole idea of Probability (as Hume understands it) depends on the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Unless Nature always goes on in the same way, the fact that a thing had happened ten million times would not make it a whit more probable that it would happen again. And how do we know the Uniformity of Nature? A moment's thought shows that we do not know it by experience. We observe many regularities in Nature. But of course all the observations that men have made or will make while the race lasts cover only a minute fraction of the events that actually go on. Our observations would therefore be of no use unless we felt sure that Nature when we are not watching her behaves in the same way as when we are: in other words, unless we believed in the Uniformity of Nature. Experience therefore cannot prove uniformity, because uniformity has to be assumed before experience proves anything. And mere length of experience does not help matters. It is no good saying, "Each fresh experience confirms our belief in uniformity and therefore we reasonably expect that it will always be confirmed"; for that argument works only on the assumption that the future will resemble the past -- which is simply the assumption of Uniformity under a new name. Can we say that Uniformity is at any rate very probable? Unfortunately not. We have just seen that all probabilities depend on it. Unless Nature is uniform, nothing is either probable or improbable. And clearly the assumption which you have to make before there is any such thing as probability cannot itself be probable.

The odd thing is that no man knew this better than Hume. His Essay on Miracles is quite inconsistent with the more radical, and honourable, scepticism of his main work.

The question, "Do miracles occur?" and the question, "Is the course of Nature absolutely uniform?" are the same question asked in two different ways. Hume, by sleight of hand, treats them as two different questions. He first answers "Yes," to the question whether Nature is absolutely uniform: and then uses this "Yes" as a ground for answering, "No," to the question, "Do miracles occur?" The single real question which he set out to answer is never discussed at all. He gets the answer to one form of the question by assuming the answer to another form of the same question.

Probabilities of the kind that Hume is concerned with hold inside the framework of an assumed Uniformity of Nature. When the question of miracles is raised we are asking about the validity or perfection of the frame itself. No study of probabilities inside a given frame can ever tell us how probable it is that the frame itself can be violated. Granted a school time-table with French on Tuesday morning at ten o'clock, it is really probable that Jones, who always skimps his French preparation, will be in trouble next Tuesday, and that he was in trouble on any previous Tuesday. But what does this tell us about the probability of the time-table's being altered? To find that out you must eavesdrop in the masters' common-room. It is no use studying the time-table.

If we stick to Hume's method, far from getting what he hoped (namely, the conclusion that all miracles are infinitely improbable) we get a complete deadlock. The only kind of probability he allows holds exclusively within the frame of uniformity. When uniformity is itself in question (and it is in question the moment we ask whether miracles occur) this kind of probability is suspended. And Hume knows no other. By his method, therefore, we cannot say that uniformity is either probable or improbable; and equally we cannot say that miracles are either probable or improbable. We have impounded both uniformity and miracles in a sort of limbo where probability and improbability can never come. This result is equally disastrous for the scientist and the theologian; but along Hume's lines there is nothing whatever to be done about it.

C. S. Lewis
Miracles

Commentary

2011-02-25T14:54:00.003+01:00

Following up on the greatest website and the greatest video illustration, I hereby present to you the greatest comments thread on the Internet.

The Bible and the Age of the Universe, part 1

2011-02-21T07:28:00.002+01:00

Many people believe that the Bible teaches that the earth and universe are only several thousand years old. Although the Bible never actually provides such a figure itself or a specific date from which we could calculate it, this conclusion is derived from adding two figures together: 1) the passage of time from the universe's creation to the creation of human beings, plus 2) the passage of time from the creation of human beings to some undisputed historical event (like the Jewish exile to Babylon or the life of Jesus).

The first figure is usually arrived at by adding together the days of creation presented in Genesis 1. Human beings were created on day six, and so only five days had transpired between the creation of the universe and the creation of human beings. Thus, the days of creation should be understood as calendar days or solar days or human days or "normal" days. Unfortunately this is based on a very superficial understanding of the text. There are several factors present in this chapter and throughout the Bible that render it more complex and much more difficult to maintain the calendar day view.

1. Ancient Hebrew, like most ancient languages, had a much smaller vocabulary than contemporary English. Thus, Hebrew words generally had broader semantic ranges than they do in English -- that is, they were used to refer to a more diverse number of concepts than their English counterparts. This is true in particular of the Hebrew word for "day", yom. Lexicons give this term four definitions: i) daylight, ii) the period of daylight (from sunrise to sunset), iii) a calendar day (24-hour period), and iv) an undefined period of time. These all qualify as literal definitions. If we want to limit the meaning of yom to its root definition (ignoring the fact that this is an exegetical fallacy known as the "root fallacy"), then we are stuck with only the first definition: daylight. Not the period of daylight, not a 24-hour period. Moreover, there was no other word in ancient Hebrew that could refer to undefined periods of time. I've seen several alternate words suggested, but upon examination they cannot function as yom does in Genesis 1. This, at least, certainly opens the door for understanding the days of creation as something other than calendar days.

2. The account of the first day of creation (Gen. 1:3-5) involves the introduction of light and its distinction from the darkness that had previously been ubiquitous. "God called the light 'day,' [yom] and the darkness he called 'night.' And there was evening, and there was morning -- the first day." Again, on the surface this seems to be referring to a normal calendar day, but this doesn't stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, the ancient Hebrews measured the day from sunset to sunset; a new day began once the sun was down. Yet here the text says, "and there was evening, and there was morning," ending the first day of creation at sunrise instead of sunset. This is not how the ancient Hebrews measured the calendar day, and this would have been immediately evident to the original audience.

For another thing, the author changed terms right after defining two sets of terms that would have served his purpose much better. He had just used two pairs of terms to refer to the elements of a 24-hour period: light (or) and darkness (choshek), and day (yom) and night (layelah). Then, when he concludes the first day of creation he specifically uses two different words: evening ('ereb) and morning (boqer). If the first day was intended to be understood as a calendar day, why not use one of the two sets of terms he had just used to define the elements of a calendar day? Why not say, "and there was light and there was darkness -- the first day"? Or, "and there was day and there was night -- the first day"? Instead he goes out of his way to use different vocabulary. This suggests that the author was specifically, albeit implicitly, distinguishing the first day of creation from a calendar day.

In fact, why have this clause at all? Why not just write, "God called the light 'day,' and the darkness he called 'night' -- the first day"? Instead he includes another phrase ("And there was evening, and there was morning") that specifically changes the vocabulary and does so in a way to make the first day incompatible with the Hebrew calendar. The point being that if the syntax and grammar of a passage is particularly unusual and out of the ordinary, it probably wasn't intended to be understood in the usual and ordinary way.

3. Genesis 1:14 states that on the fourth day of creation God placed the sun, moon, and stars in the sky: "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years." There are several things one could say about this -- for example, the sun, moon, and stars would have been included in the merism "heavens and earth" that were created "in the beginning" -- but for now I just want to point out that this passage introduces "seasons and days and years" as calendar concepts. As such, it is enormously difficult to argue that the three creation days preceeding this were calendar days. If the concept of the calendar day is not even introduced until day four, then obviously the first three days of creation are not meant to be understood as calendar days. Moreover, it is at least doubtful whether the ancient Hebrews could have even conceived of a "sunless" 24-hour day. That is, their conception of a 24-hour day was (in all likelihood) inextricably bound up with the role the sun played therein. In other words, a 24-hour day meant a solar day. So, again, since the sun is not introduced until the fourth day of creation, it is difficult to claim that the first three days of creation should be understood as solar days. At the very least, we would have to conclude that the first three days of creation were radically dissimilar from calendar days or solar days.

4. On day six, God creates various kinds of animals and then human beings, both male and female. Since Genesis 1 tells us that God created both man and woman on the sixth day, all of the events described in Genesis 2 between the creation of Adam and the creation of Eve took place during day six. Genesis 2 states that God placed Adam (Hebrew for "man") in the garden to cultivate it. Then God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone," and so brought the various animals to Adam for him to name. Since none of the animals were a suitable companion, God put Adam to sleep and created Eve. Now if we take this description literally, as those who argue for a young earth are wont to do, it is very difficult to see how Adam could have accomplished all of these tasks during the daylight portion of a calendar day. God placed him in the garden so that he could cultivate it; it would be unusual for God to give him this task and then give him another one before even starting the first. So the text implies (but does not demand) that Adam tended the garden. Moreover, God created the garden specifically for Adam -- not to mention the fact that it was paradise -- so he would have been quite content in it. But after God gives Adam his working orders, he then says, "It is not good for the man to be alone," clearly implying that he was not content. So probably, but not certainly, Adam worked in the garden long enough to grow discontent due to his lack of companionship.

Then God brought the animals to Adam to name them. We can certainly limit the number of animals that he had to name to some extent: he probably only had to name the animals in the garden, not the whole world; he may have only had to name more general groups rather than each individual species; etc. However, in the Bible, as well as the ancient world in general, the act of "naming" was not a simple, cursory process, but rather one which was intended to characterize the nature and essence of the object being named; as such, it required considerable thought as well as extensive knowledge of the object. Moreover, the name was meant to reflect the relationship between the object and the one doing the naming, and this presupposes the passage of a sufficient amount of time for the one to have a significant impact on the other. Therefore, the idea that Adam could have named the (at least) hundreds or (more likely) thousands of animals that God brought before him within the daylight period of a 24-hour day is ridiculously implausible.

Then God put Adam to sleep and created Eve. When Adam woke up and saw Eve, he exclaimed "happa’am," which Brown-Driver-Briggs defines as "now, at length." But if Adam had only been created a few hours earlier, he simply hadn't existed for a sufficient length to justify saying, "Now, at length." Therefore, he had been without companionship for longer -- longer than just the daylight portion of a 24-hour period. But since both Adam and Eve were created on the sixth day of creation (according to Genesis 1), the sixth day was not a 24-hour period.

5. The creation account concludes with the seventh day of creation in the first few verses of Genesis 2. Interestingly, however, the seventh day does not conclude with the "evening and morning" motif as do the other six days. In the ancient synagogues the Hebrews would read the account of the seventh day in Genesis 2:1-3 together with Psalm 95, which warns its readers not to rebel against God like the Exodus generation did, and quotes God as saying, "So I declared on oath in my anger, 'They shall never enter my rest.'" The fact that they read these passages together implies that the ancient Hebrews understood that God's Sabbath rest (as described in Genesis 2:1-3) is the same rest that the Exodus generation failed to enter (as described in Psalm 95); and since the readers of Psalm 95 were warned that they could fail to enter this rest as well, it was an event continuing up to the present time.

When we get to the New Testament, we find this connection stated more explicitly in the epistle to the Hebrews (3:12-4:11). Here, the author expounds upon Psalm 95 by reiterating that the Exodus generation failed to enter into God's rest, and that this applied to the Hebrews living at the time Psalm 95 was written as well (King David's time). According to the author of Hebrews, this means that the rest God offered them was not simply entrance into the promised land of Canaan, because when Psalm 95 was written the Jews had been living in the promised land for many generations (4:7-8). The author further maintains that the promise to enter into God's rest (and the potential for failing to do so) applies to us today (4:1), and that this rest began after God finished creating the universe, thus demonstrating that this rest has been going on for all of human history (4:3b), and is still continuing to the present (4:6). And just in case this isn't clear enough, the author of Hebrews refers to this rest as the seventh day, and quotes Genesis 2:2 to emphasize the point (4:4). Therefore the seventh day of creation was not a 24-hour period thousands of years in the past. We're in it. This is the seventh day of creation.

There are many other arguments I could give along these lines and there are also plenty of counter-arguments one must deal with. From my examination of the issue I have concluded that the days of creation were not meant to be understood superficially as calendar days (or human days, solar days, "normal" days, or whatever). Instead, my inclination is to accept the "day-age" view which holds that each creation day refers to an undefined period of time, but there are plenty of other options on the table. Therefore, we cannot ascribe a date, even an approximate date, to God's creation of the universe from the Bible because the Bible gives us no basis for assessing how much time transpired between the creation of the universe and the creation of human beings.

Update (27 July): See also part 2 and part 3.

My new favorite website

2011-02-20T10:05:00.001+01:00

Weaselballs.com. Seriously. Go read it. Go read it now.

Thought of the Day

2011-02-16T23:53:00.000+01:00

You are what you eat. Take Communion.

Songs from my childhood

2011-02-12T11:28:00.003+01:00

There was a cute little melody I remembered from watching Looney Tunes cartoons as a kid, but I couldn't remember which cartoon, and the only lyric I remembered was "dimple". To fill in the blanks I wrote some moderately obscene lyrics to it. This past week I was playing some cartoons of Grosminet on YouTube for my son and found this one where Tweety is singing the song in question from 1:13 to 1:37.

So I searched around a bit and found that it was a song by Nellie Lutcher, who was famous in the late 1940s and early 50s (and who only died a few years ago). Further searching revealed her recording of the song here.

That is all.

A Millennia-old Scientific Prediction

2011-02-07T07:27:00.001+01:00

Let me ask two distinct questions: first, Did the universe begin to exist? and second, Does the universe have a cause? Since there are two conditions we are dealing with we can put the possible combinations of these conditions into four possible positions one could hold:

1. The universe began and it has a cause.
2. The universe didn't begin and it has a cause.
3. The universe began and it doesn't have a cause.
4. The universe didn't begin and it doesn't have a cause.

In theistic religions, 1 has been the most common option. But it should be noted that there were still some who held 2, that the universe, despite not having a beginning, still has a cause (such as Aristotle, Averroes, and the Latin Averroists). There is a good reason for this: simply showing the universe had no beginning is not sufficient to show that it has no cause; many forms of the cosmological argument argue from the premise of an infinitely-old universe.

Historically, the response of atheists was to accept 4, that the universe has neither a beginning nor a cause. Prior to the advent of Big Bang cosmology, position 3 was empty; at least I've never heard of anyone who accepted it, and the calls in the academic literature to find anyone who fits into it have gone unanswered. And yet it seems to be the position that atheists are driven to today. Of course, the fact that it has not been accepted historically does not mean that it is not a viable position to hold, but it surely gives us food for thought.

Ultimately, the claims that the universe began or that it did not amount to scientific predictions. The claim that it did have a beginning has been empirically verified by contemporary cosmology, and the claim that it did not has been empirically disconfirmed. And historically, the first category consists solely of theists, while the second category consists mostly of nontheists with a few theists. However, while theists argued for the universe's beginning, they did not think refuting this would refute theism -- in other words, while their prediction that the universe began could be falsified, their theism could not be (at least not by this factor). Atheists, however, gave no such indication: if you refuted the universe's eternality, then you would refute atheism, since it was accepted by all parties that if the universe began, it must have a cause. So the atheists' prediction was falsifiable, and by the same lights, so was atheism.

The problem, again, is that the atheists' prediction has been falsified. Thus, it would seem that atheism has been falsified. Yet atheists often claim to base their views on science and accuse theists of ignoring science. Surely this is backwards. Theists and atheists alike made a scientific prediction, the theists have had their prediction substantiated and the atheists have had their prediction refuted. In order to salvage their position, atheists have had to embrace a position that never occurred to anyone because it rejects the principle of causality. They have had to redefine their position so that it is no longer disproven by science. Again, this does not amount to a refutation of atheism, but if the tables were turned, do you think theists would be given the benefit of doubt?

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Busy, busy, busy

2011-02-05T23:47:00.002+01:00

Just in case it isn't clear from the woeful lack of recent posts, I have a lot of things on my plate at the moment, and this will probably continue for a few months. So, apologies. I'll post when I can.

Oh happy day!

2011-01-28T21:02:00.003+01:00

I just found out that one of my favorite Robert Heinlein stories, "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag" (really, a novella), is being made into a movie that is due to be released this year. I quote this story frequently in conversation as it has some interesting theological conclusions. I hope they do it right.

Is there a text on this blog?

2011-01-26T10:08:00.002+01:00

OK, who do you think wrote this:

I myself became a believer in American exceptionalism the first time I visited Europe, in 1966.

That would be Stanley Fish in an essay praising Sarah Palin's new book. I have not yet been able to reformulate my worldview so as to account for this. Via Ann Althouse who provides the best video illustration in the history of the Internet.

A Few More Blogs

2011-01-16T21:15:00.003+01:00

One of the wonderful things about the Innernets is that you meet people that you share a lot of interests with, even though they're geographically far removed. I've recently met Michael Caton who shares my interests in science, speculative fiction, heavy metal (although my metal days are behind me), philosophy of mind, and religion. Apparently we're each other's evil twins, which is a bit paradoxical. There are a few minor differences between us: his interest in philosophy of mind is more on the cognitive science side, while mine is more on the philosophy side. And our interests in religion aren't exactly the same. Anyway, here are his blogs:

Speculative Nonfiction
Cognition and Evolution
The Lucky Atheist

Quote of the Day

2011-01-08T20:44:00.005+01:00

I will conclude with a discussion of the non-revisability of our world-picture. We have seen that eliminative materialists believe that our ordinary ways of characterizing human mental life are deeply mistaken; that nothing science is likely to discover in its investigation of what they call the mind-brain will correspond to the supposedly felt experiences and sensations that plain men call "beliefs", "thoughts", "intentions", and "desires". If this should turn out to be the case, they predict that these terms may well be dropped from our folk-psychological vocabulary. Further, they argue that because these notions are part of our common sense framework, such changes would amount to a massive revision of that framework. Suppose that, contrary to what both Wittgenstein and I claim, this should happen; that the whole range of psychological terms should disappear from everyday discourse. Would that affect Wittgenstein's claim that our common sense system of beliefs -- our world-picture -- is not revisable? The answer is that it would not.

As I pointed out earlier, in speaking of beliefs Wittgenstein is not speaking of mental functions in the sense of introspective felt experiences, but of certain sorts of practices or activities that are constitutive of communal life. What does he mean by this? Let us take a specific example, what he calls "the game of doubting". Suppose a friend asserts that Smith holds the record for consecutive hits in baseball. Your recollection is that it was Jones. Your recollection gives you a reason for doubting the claim. But now you set out to discover the answer. You check old newspapers, clippings in libraries, various baseball encyclopedias. These activities are what Wittgenstein means by the game of doubting. When you find the answer in a book of records the game of doubting comes to an end. You now show the answer to your friend. If he refuses to accept the report, he has resumed the game; but if he has no further grounds than his own recollection for challenging the accuracy of the report, serious doubting has stopped. The game is no longer being played according to established community rules. Your friend is now outside the language game. This is what the sceptic does when he contends that seeing is no longer a reliable criterion for believing that a chair is in the room. In that case, serious doubting has come to an end.

Now is it conceivable that even if the word "doubt" should be dropped from common usage that the practice of doubting should cease? Well, it is, of course, conceivable that all human beings might be forced to ingest a so-called "concessive drug" whose effect would be to secure universal agreement on all issues, no matter what the claim. Then in that sense we can imagine the practice of doubting to disappear. But this is not a serious conjecture nor is it comparable to what eliminative materialists are asserting. Their claim is that now, persons as we know them, are not constituted in ways that their everyday speech suggests. That is, eliminative materialists mean that present day society, as we know it, might without conceptual loss revise its vocabulary so as to eliminate such terms as "doubt" and "belief", relegating them to a dust bin that includes such other folk-concepts as "demon" and "witch". So the parallel question is whether, without any conceptual loss, we can conceive of present day society without the practice of doubting and its congeners. I submit we cannot, and will give two arguments in support of this claim.

The first of these is an argument tu quoque. It does not show that Wittgenstein is right simpliciter; what it shows is that if the eliminative materialists are right, then Wittgenstein is also right in saying that our common sense framework is not revisable. For if they are right, then it would mean that any scientist would have to play the game of doubting in order to show that there is no correlation between our supposedly felt mental states and what science discovers about the brain. Scientists would do something analogous to what you did when you challenged your friend's assertion about the record for consecutive hits. They would begin by doubting a certain thesis. They would go on to collect and assess evidence purporting to show that no brain state corresponds to any felt or introspectible mental experience. That process would be highly complex, and would involve their engaging in a number of familiar human practices. From a Wittgensteinian perspective, they would have been playing the game of doubt. Accordingly, it is evident that scientific practice is not correctly described by eliminative theory, since doubting is an essential ingredient of that practice. In effect, the eliminative materialist is hung upon his own petard for the practice of revising in science would not exist unless the practice of doubting did as well. But the latter is an inexpungible part of our common sense framework. if it is not eliminable then neither is the framework itself.

But since I have indicated that I do not think the eliminativist is right, then we need an independent argument to show that Wittgenstein is right. That argument, whose full scope cannot be developed here, holds that human communal life is to a great extent defined by a spectrum of practices, not only those about which we have been speaking, but also the practice of revising itself. What would it be like to revise that practice? Is the notion of revising the practice of revising sensible? I submit that it is not, that the endeavor would require engaging in the very practice it seeks to amend. The suggestion does not, therefore, engender a world-picture we can comprehend. Insofar as it purports to describe anything that "thing" will not be a human community, since it would lack all investigative procedures, not only those of the sciences and social sciences, but those of everyday life as well. "Such a 'revision'", Wittgenstein writes putting the word 'revision' in quotes, "would amount to the annihilation of all yardsticks". (492)

This same lack of cogency will apply to the suggestion that we can revise or eliminate such practices as doubting, judging, and affirming, and that we shall still be left with a human society. To make such claims is to assert that human society would be what it now is, and in the same breath to affirm by these essential modifications that it would not be. And this is clearly nonsensical. It would be like insisting upon playing the game we call "chess" without using the piece we call "the queen". That is the sort of impossibility that Wittgenstein is describing in On Certainty.

Avrum Stroll
"Wittgenstein and Folk Psychology"
Philosophy of Law, Politics, and Society: Proceedings of the 12th International Wittgenstein Symposium
(Philosophie des Rechts, der Politik und der Gesellschaft: Akten des 12. Internationalen Wittgenstein Symposiums)