Labels

My theory on labeling my blogposts is that labels should be broad rather than specific. This is partially for the benefit of my readers (hi honey!), so they don't have to negotiate an endless list of labels, and partially for my own benefit so I don't have to compose and keep track of such a list. Thus, I have labels for Religion and Science (but not for the Anthropic Principle or Big Bang Cosmology) and for Philosophy (but not for Epistemology or Philosophy of Mind). Occasionally I've found it necessary to be more specific. So from Culture and Ethics I made labels that dealt specifically with Homosexuality and Abortion; from Books I made a label for Quotes; etc. But I was having a difficult time with labels for particular people. I write enough about C. S. Lewis that I knew I should have a label for him from day one, but over time, I've realized that there are other people who I mention frequently enough that they warrant their own label as well.

Recently I experimented with splitting the labels listed on the sidebar into subject labels and people labels. Then I started going through my posts looking at the people (philosophers, mostly) who I've mentioned more than once. You can probably guess how that ended up. Just going over my posts for the last several months I had more people labels than subject labels, because people labels are inherently specific, and most of them only had one reference. So I scrapped the whole thing, just went back to "Labels", and included two new subjects: Philosophers and Theologians. In the future, if I focus on a particular thinker several times, I'll try to give them their own label.

Linkfest

-- Top 10 greatest science fiction detective novels.

-- Top 10 Underrated Fantasy Stories Before 1937, that being the year The Hobbit was published. (I almost wrote, "the year The Hobbit came out", but thought that could be misinterpreted.)

-- Quantum teleportation achieved over ten miles of free space. "As we've explained before, "quantum teleportation" is quite different from how many people imagine teleportation to work. Rather than picking one thing up and placing it somewhere else, quantum teleportation involves entangling two things, like photons or ions, so their states are dependent on one another and each can be affected by the measurement of the other's state. When one of the items is sent a distance away, entanglement ensures that changing the state of one causes the other to change as well, allowing the teleportation of quantum information, if not matter." Eventually, it might be able to "span the distance between the surface of the earth and space." Kind of reminds me of Orson Scott Card's "philotics" from the first Ender series.

-- The Most Badass Alphabet Ever. Via Got Medieval.

-- Hubble catches planet being devoured by its star. It's only got about ten million years left. Tick, tick, tick ...

-- Here's an incredible essay about someone who stopped going to church years ago, and then found it again. Very inspiring.

-- Here's a website about philosopher Peter Wust, run by his granddaughter. He was a Christian existentialist in the first half of the 20th century, and being more of an analytic philosopher, I haven't read any of his stuff. She should put some of his books and essays online.

-- Here are some interesting political quotes. The fact that they're all from the political right is just an amazing coincidence. First, "A love of autocracy often lurks beneath the liberal veneer. There's this idea that the right answers are known and the people are just too deluded and distorted to see what they are and to vote for them."

-- Second, "Europeans are post-Christian in this sense, too: they have tried to "liberate" themselves from the curse of Adam by substituting borrowing for working, and from the curse of Eve by not having children. It was entirely foreseeable that neither of these efforts would end well."

-- Third, "Every murderous totalitarian government of the 20th century began with some insulated group of faux-intellectuals congratulating each other on how smart they are, and fantasizing about how, if they could just install a dictatorship-for-a-day, they could right all the wrongs in the world. It is the ultimate fantasy of the narcissist. And we’ve got whole generations of them, in control of our media and our government, all intent on “remaking America.”"

-- NASA to Test World’s Fastest Hypersonic ScramJet this Month, and hoping to break the several second barrier.

Social Justice

Tyson has a dynamite, must-read post on social justice in the Bible, and its applicability to us today. If you're a Christian on the political right, I encourage you to wrestle with it. It's easy to say that these issues should be dealt with by us as individuals rather than by our governments, but that could just as easily be used as an excuse to avoid doing the right thing. Tyson also links to this post on another blog which addresses similar issues. You might also want to read a couple of essays by Christian political philosopher J. Budziszewski, entitled The Problem With Liberalism and The Problem With Conservativism.

Evil

There are occasions where something bad happens and the evil is palpable; it imposes itself on my psyche just as much as the physical world does when I feel pain. As such, I can't deny the existence of evil anymore than I can deny the existence of the physical world. I mean this not just as a rational claim, but that I'm literally incapable of disbelieving it. I may insulate myself in privacy and theoretically question whether evil or the physical world really exist, but it never gets beyond that theoretical level. For example, on 9/11 the evil was tangible.

But an event doesn't have to be horrific and huge in scope in order for me to recognize it as evil. Sometimes it can be something simple and otherwise inconsequential. Maybe just the utterance of two short words. Like those the student utters towards the end of this video. It gives me chills.

Quote of the Day

A second suggestion, perhaps connected with the plea of inability to do otherwise, is given by the idea that the very practice of science presupposes rejection of the idea of miracle or special divine action in the world. "Science proceeds on the assumption that whatever events occur in the world can be accounted for in terms of other events that also belong within the world," says Macquarrie; perhaps he means to suggest that the very practice of science requires that one reject the idea (e.g.) of God's raising someone from the dead. Of course the argument form

If X were true, it would be inconvenient for science; therefore, X is false

is at best moderately compelling. We aren't just given that the Lord has arranged the universe for the comfort and convenience of the National Academy of Science. To think otherwise is to be like the drunk who insisted on looking for his lost car keys under the streetlight, on the grounds that the light was better there. (In fact it would go the drunk one better: it would be to insist that because the keys would be hard to find in the dark, they must be under the light.)

But why think in the first place that we would have to embrace this semideism in order to do science? Many contemporary physicists, for example, believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; this belief seems to do little damage to their physics. To be sure, that's physics; perhaps the problem would be (as Bultmann suggests) with medicine. Is the idea that one couldn't do medical research or prescribe medications if one thought that God has done miracles in the past and might even occasionally do some nowadays? To put the suggestion explicitly is to refute it; there isn't the faintest reason why I couldn't sensibly believe that God raised Jesus from the dead and also engage in medical research into, say, Usher's syndrome or multiple sclerosis, or into ways of staving off the ravages of coronary disease. What would be the problem? That it is always possible that God should do something different, thus spoiling my experiment? But that is possible: God is omnipotent. (Or do we have here a new antitheistic argument? If God exists, he could spoil my experiment; nothing can spoil my experiment; therefore....) No doubt if I thought God often or usually did things in an idiosyncratic way, so that there really aren't much by way discoverable regularities to be found, then perhaps I couldn't sensibly engage in scientific research; the latter presupposes a certain regularity, predictability, stability in the world. But that is an entirely different matter. What I must assume to do science, is only that ordinarily and for the most part these regularities hold. This reason, too, then, is monumentally insufficient as a reason for holding that we are somehow obliged to accept the principles underlying Troeltschian biblical scholarship.

Alvin Plantinga
Warranted Christian Belief

Linkfest

For the last couple of months, I've had considerably less time to spend online, but have been trying to maintain my blogging schedule nonetheless. I fear I may have to cut back a little. We'll see how it goes. At any rate, here are several links I put aside to blog about, but then never got around to; hence, some are a couple of months old.

-- For years, a group of Zimbabweans have claimed to be a lost tribe of Israel. Now genetic testing has verified it.

-- When you prick a continent, does it not bleed?

-- The Age of Faith. "Globally, as Jenkins sees it, the existential threat to Islam comes not from the declining number of Europeans indoctrinated in the quasi-Marxist “Imagine” creed, but from the burgeoning millions of the Third World. Whether Muslims are impressed by the secular belief system captured so succinctly in John Lennon’s song is open to debate. But the attractions of Christianity to the populations of the Third World apparently is not. Whatever the appeal of Islam in London might be, it is less so in Africa."

-- J. B. S. Haldane criticized C. S. Lewis's space trilogy (described here), and you can read Haldane's critique online. To read Lewis's clever riposte, you will, unfortunately, have to see his collection entitled On Stories.

-- Christian aid workers deported from Morocco. Apparently for being Christian.

-- In this post on David Thompson's blog is the interesting claim that the standard slur of Jews -- that they are money-grubbers, involved in the banking industry and other forms of making money from other people's money, and related nonsense -- is actually an expression of anti-capitalism. Jews are hated because they are unjustly and incorrectly perceived as the personification (or perhaps ethnification) of capitalism. I call this claim "interesting" because anti-Semitism is usually ascribed to the political right, but this would ascribe it to the political left. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about this to justify having an opinion about it.

-- From the same blog comes this essay on the elitist mindset of the academy.

-- In space news, which I have not been able to keep abreast of, the US military launched an unmanned miniature space shuttle. And Japan is planning to launch a sail-powered craft beyond orbit.

Cute

My sister sent me the link to this video. It has the feel of a Pixar short, but the credits belie this impression.

More on Recycling

As a follow-up to this post, my wife just told me that she was out with the kids the other day, and were near the place we take our recycling. They have one big receptacle for colored glass and another for clear glass, so, like everyone else, we dutifully separate them accordingly. While they were there, the truck came by to empty out the receptacles, and since my son loves everything that's large and mechanical they stopped to watch. First he dumped the receptacle of clear glass into the truck. Then he dumped the receptacle of colored glass into the same truck. If I weren't already cynical about it, this would certainly have been enough to send me over to the dark side.

Congratulations Mr. and Mrs. Verter

The Wordverter and Francie the Wise got married today. I introduced them so I get some major brownie points. They're both great people and when great people find each other it's just really really cool.

Causality and the Big Bang

Since Big Bang cosmology is the claim that matter, energy, space, and time all sprang into existence, it strikes many people as similar to the theistic doctrine of creation ex nihilo (and by "similar" I mean "identical"). So some philosophers and some cosmologists have tried to find ways of avoiding the theistic implications.

One of the most common is to claim that causality is a physical phenomenon; it describes what takes place within the universe. You can't apply it to the beginning of the physical universe. The idea here is that causality is a posteriori like the laws of physics or chemistry, not a priori like the laws of logic. As such, it only describes the conditions inside the universe and can't be applied to the beginning of the universe itself. This is the tack taken by some illustrious philosophers, such as Adolf Grünbaum and Quentin Smith

It's certainly true that causality is not a priori in the same way the laws of logic are. We simply can't imagine the law of non-contradiction failing to hold, but we can imagine causality failing to hold -- that is, we can imagine (form a mental picture of) something popping into existence without a cause. But it's incorrect to say that we discover causality the same way we discover the laws of physics, i.e. through observation. Causality is derived from our basic intuition that something does not come from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit: out of nothing, nothing comes). To limit this intuition to physical processes would be a case of special pleading; there's no reason why it wouldn't apply to the beginning of the universe. Causality is not a physical principle, it's a metaphysical principle.

Perhaps one could suggest that once we have the principle of causality via intuition, we can then establish it via observation and continue to believe it based on the latter. But it's not clear to me how causality could be falsified, or what would count as observation of causality not holding. At best you could say that you didn't observe a cause of an effect, but everyone would infer that the effect does in fact have a cause and we just didn't observe it. It's not like you could set up a scientific experiment to observe the absence of causality, since if the conditions you set up are sufficient to bring about the effect, then obviously the former caused the latter. As such, I think William Lane Craig's argument that causality has never been falsified is an empty claim. There are plenty of times where we observe an effect without a cause, but no amount of such experiences will ever convince a sane person that the effects didn't have a cause, merely that the causes weren't observed.

Or, perhaps one could simply deny the intuition. There are problems with this though: for one thing, science presupposes causality. If causality goes out the window, science goes with it. This is not only absurd and unacceptable, it's a conclusion I doubt nontheists would be willing to accept, since they (mistakenly) think science is on their side. For another thing, while causality is not a priori in the same way that the laws of logic are, it is still a precondition of thought. If causality did not hold, then there would not be an appropriate connection between our beliefs and their objects, such that we could never know if any of them are true. So it's not merely scientific knowledge that would be endangered; if we deny causality, then the possibility of any knowledge becomes impossible. So it's not like this intuition is just some random assertion.

But doesn't quantum physics posit virtual particles coming into existence without causes? This is a misunderstanding. As Craig writes,

... virtual particles do not literally come into existence spontaneously out of nothing. Rather the energy locked up in a vacuum fluctuates spontaneously in such a way as to convert into evanescent particles that return almost immediately to the vacuum. ... The microstructure of the quantum vacuum is a sea of continually forming and dissolving particles which borrow energy from the vacuum for their brief existence. A quantum vacuum is thus far from nothing, and vacuum fluctuations do not constitute an exception to the principle that whatever begins to exist has a cause.

Another suggestion might be that Hume denied causality. But ignoring the fact that Hume was not inerrant, this is another misunderstanding. Hume argued that just because we've observed a particular cause producing a particular effect in the past, we cannot know that the cause will produce the same effect. In other words, he argued that we can't infer an effect from a cause. Those who deny causality applies to the creation of the universe are claiming that we can't infer a cause from an effect -- that just because we observe that an effect has taken place, we can't claim that it was caused. This is radically different from what Hume was claiming, and Hume explicitly repudiates such an idea as absurd.

A final claim might be to suggest that applying causality to the Big Bang is just as problematic for the traditional theistic doctrine of creation. The doctrine, after all, is called creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) and the intuition is that ex nihilo nihil fit (out of nothing, nothing comes). But again, this is a misunderstanding. Creation ex nihilo is the claim that the universe didn't have a material cause -- that it wasn't constructed out of some pre-existent "stuff". This is certainly a radical claim and we should recognize it as such. But it doesn't deny that the universe has an efficient cause -- some entity or agent that brings about the effect -- since the claim is that God is the efficient cause of the universe. Those who deny that causality would apply to the beginning of the universe, however, are claiming that the universe had neither a material cause nor an efficient cause. So I simply put it to you, which of these two explanations is more plausible: that the universe's beginning has an efficient cause but no material cause, or that it has neither?

Now it's all well and good to say that applying causality to the beginning of the universe creates some philosophical issues, but the alternative is that it just popped into existence without any cause whatsoever. That people who portray themselves as skeptics would be willing to accept this shows that their skepticism is absurdly selective. If this is the the only way to avoid believing in God then there's just no contest.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Two Arguments

1. I've mentioned the Simplicity Argument before. Roughly, the idea is that a thought (of the color blue for example) cannot be subdivided into constituent parts. However, the neurons, molecules, and atoms that are involved in someone thinking of the color blue can be subdivided. Therefore, thoughts -- and by extension, thought -- cannot be reduced to the physical processes involved in thinking. Therefore, there must be a non-physical aspect of the human being which is unified and indestructable. Some of the Argument's proponents have started a website on it here, and have kindly linked to my review of the book The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments which deals with the Simplicity Argument as it developed in early Modern philosophy.

2. Another interesting argument, although one I'm much more skeptical of, is the Argument from Evolution. That link takes you to a blog that presents an argument to the effect that biological evolution is not only compatible with Christianity, but is actually evidence for Christianity. Click on over to check it out and vote on how convincing you find it. The guy who came up with it also blogs here. There are other arguments from evolution out there -- Plantinga has one, Craig has another -- so I was expecting it to be a reiteration of something I'd already heard; but it looks original (at least I've never heard of it before).

Followers

OK, I finally succumbed to vanity and put a followers gadget on my sidebar. Feel free to register on it and make me feel better about myself.

Flew to God

Antony Flew has died. This happened a week ago and I didn't hear about it until today. He was one of the most prestigious atheist philosophers of the 20th century, but he came to believe in God several years ago. Ironically, it was largely due to the theistic argument most ridiculed by atheist philosophers: the teleological (or design) argument as applied to biology. He thought the complexity of life discovered by contemporary science showed that God must exist. He never accepted any religion; his belief was in an Aristotelian God, a Prime Mover, who didn't interact with his creation. You can read an interview he gave soon after his conversion, which was published in Philosophia Christi (a philosophy journal), here.

Pure Rock

The most rocking song I've ever heard was never released as a single, doesn't have a video, didn't get any radio air time, and the band doesn't play it in their concerts. Listen to it here. Wow.

Quote of the Day

You ask me why I've never written anything about the Holy Communion. For the very simple reason that I am not good enough at Theology. I have nothing to offer. Hiding any light I think I've got under a bushel is not my besetting sin! I am much more prone to prattle unseasonably. But there is a point at which even I would gladly keep silent.
...
Some people seem able to discuss different theories of this act as if they understood them all and needed only evidence as to which was best. This light has been withheld from me. I do not know and can't imagine what the disciples understood our Lord to mean when, His body still unbroken and His blood unshed, He handed them the bread and wine, saying they were His body and blood. I can find with the forms of my human understanding no connection between eating a man -- and it is as Man that the Lord has flesh -- and entering into any spiritual oneness or community or κοινωνία with him. And I find "substance" (in Aristotle's sense), when stripped of its own accidents and endowed with the accidents of some other substance, an object I cannot think. My effort to do so produces mere nursery-thinking -- a picture of something like very rarefied plasticine. On the other hand, I get on no better with those who tell me that the elements are mere bread and mere wine, used symbolically to remind me of the death of Christ. They are, on the natural level, such a very odd symbol of that. But it would be profane to suppose that they are as arbitrary as they seem to me. I well believe there is in reality an appropriateness, even a necessity, in their selection. But it remains, for me, hidden. Again, if they are, if the whole act is, simply memorial, it would seem to follow that its value must be purely psychological, and dependent on the recipient's sensibility at the moment of reception. And I cannot see why this particular reminder -- a hundred other things may, psychologically, remind me of Christ's death, equally, or perhaps more -- should be so uniquely important as all Christendom (and my own heart) unhesitatingly declare.

However, then, it may be for others, for me the something which holds together and "informs" all the objects, words, and actions of this rite is unknown and unimaginable. I am not saying to anyone in the world, "Your explanation is wrong." I am saying, "Your explanation leaves the mystery for me still a mystery."

Yet I find no difficulty in believing that the veil between the worlds, nowhere else (for me) so opaque to the intellect, is nowhere else so thin and permeable to divine operation. Here a hand from the hidden country touches not only my soul buy my body. Here the prig, the don, the modern in me have no privilege over the save or the child. Here is big medicine and strong magic. Favete linguis.
...
I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.

C. S. Lewis
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer