Thursday, December 12, 2024

Not Merely Intellectual

 Man sees meaning in the universe, but it is not merely intellectual. The symmetry and order and grace he observes in a rose or in a galaxy of stars is more than just intelligible; it is enjoyable. The symbols he uses to communicate meaning to others are not mere intellectual tools, but pleasurable ones also. He uses poetry and drama, painting and sculpture, music, all the various art and literary forms to express meaning in ways that are truly beautiful. In both nature and art we see unity in diversity, harmony and rhythm in the concrete, the splendor of order manifesting the truth and goodness and unity of material things, and symbolizing thereby man's search for Truth, Goodness, Beauty Itself.

[James Royce, Man and Meaning, McGraw-Hill (New York: 1969) p, 222.]

An Unexhausted Cup of Day

 Love’s Lantern
(For Aline) 
by Joyce Kilmer

 Because the road was steep and long
 And through a dark and lonely land,
God set upon my lips a song
 And put a lantern in my hand. 

 Through miles on weary miles of night
 That stretch relentless in my way
My lantern burns serene and white,
 An unexhausted cup of day. 

 O golden lights and lights like wine,
 How dim your boasted splendors are.
Behold this little lamp of mine;
 It is more starlike than a star!

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

HAIAFE

 Carlo Alvaro has recently argued for what he calls the "Heaven Ab Initio" Argument from Evil (HAIAFE):

1. As a perfect being, God’s goal is to create free-willed creatures that choose to love God and forever exist with him in a state of eternal bliss. 
2. An omnibenevolent God would want to create free-willed beings in a state of eternal bliss devoid of evil if he could and if evil and suffering were unnecessary. 
3. An omnipotent God can create free-willed beings directly in a spiritual state of eternal bliss devoid of evil.
4. However, God created physical creatures in a physical world that is full of unnecessary evil and suffering.
5. Therefore, God is either not omnipotent, not omniscient, or not perfectly good.

A minor problem with the argument as stated is that the conclusion includes omniscience despite the fact that the argument has no premise that requires it; perhaps it is taken to be assumed in (3). A more serious problem is that (1) tells us that God intends to create free-willed beings that choose to love God and forever exist with him in a state of eternal bliss, but choice drops out of the rest of the argument. That God can create free-willed beings directly in a spiritual state of eternal bliss does not necessarily imply that doing so is consistent with creating free-willed beings whose love of God is a choice. And, in fact, it's not difficult to find people who would deny it. 

It's easy enough to see where the main problem in the argument is, however; (1) is highly equivocal. To say that something is "God's goal" has the implicature of its being His only goal; and this is indeed how it has to be understood for the rest of the argument to work (it is necessary for the "if he could" in (2) and the "unnecessary" in (2) and (3)). But there is no particular reason to think that God has only one goal; almost no theist, perhaps no theist at all, thinks this is true. God is not an eternal-bliss-maximizing machine.  And the concept of "perfect being" certainly doesn't entail single-mindedness of goal, either. Thus the sense in which (1) works in the argument is not a sense that anyone thinks plausible; the sense in which it seems plausible is too weak for the argument.

The broader diagnosis for the argument, however, is the usual one with analytic arguments from evil; it violates the principle of remotion. How are we supposed to know any of these premises? It has to be by something like direct intuitive perception, or causal inference from effects, or trustworthy testimony (like divine revelation). Do we have direct intuitive perception of (1), (2), or (3)? We do not have it by direct intuitive perception of God, because if we did, God would have to be a perfect being who is omnipotent and 'omnibenevolent', and we would already know the argument is wrong. We do not have it by direct examination of our ideas of perfection, omnipotence, or 'omnibenevolence'; if the ideas were so adequate and trustworthy as to ground the premises, the most plausible explanation of this would again be God existing with these qualities. So do we get (1), (2), or (3) by causal inference? We do not; the argument from evil is itself an argument that the effects do not allow the kind of inference to a cause described by those premises. Do we then get (1), (2), or (3) by testimony? We don't get it directly; where is the alleged divine revelation that directly gives us (1), (2), or (3) without any qualification? One would have to argue that we get it indirectly from testimony, by inference, but we would need to know the particular testimony and the particular inferences in question; and it is pretty clear that most people are not inferring (1), (2), and (3), without any qualification or nuanced contextualization at all, as the most obvious interpretation of the Bible or the Koran. The premises look probable, but they are in fact pulled out of air, either by saying something like what theists might say but without the qualifications or outside of the specific context in which they might say it, or by saying something that sounds good but that we could not possibly know. Beyond some very generic claims that might be made on the basis of some causal inferences and some specific but very narrow and limited claims that might be made on the basis of divine testimony, we don't really know anything about divine motivations or plans, for the obvious reason that we are not 'omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent' beings, and therefore have only the haziest idea how such a being would view the world.


Tuesday, December 10, 2024

No Morality Without Metaphysics

 James Lenman, Morality without metaphysics, at "OUPblog":

This is the everyday world of moral common sense but there are always sceptical voices: perhaps it’s just nonsense. Can there really be truths, proper objective truths about what is and isn’t okay just the way there are objective truths about chemistry and geology? Some people argue that it makes no sense to suppose there are moral truths somehow baked into the constitution of the universe, radically independent of human beings and our moral experience, and so morality is nonsense. 

 I argue that while that rather grandiose metaphysical picture is indeed false, the best way of understanding our moral common sense presupposes nothing so fancy nor so fanciful. There need only be human beings jointly committed to a shared enterprise of living together in peaceful and orderly moral community regulated by norms of justice and civility that we can justify to each other in a shared currency of reasons shaped by and expressive of our passionate natures. It is not so complicated. For many good reasons, I don’t want to live in a world where we say it is okay to beat someone to death because you do not like the way they dress. Neither do you. So let’s not.

Oh, is that all it takes?  We don't need moral truths baked into the constution of the universe independent of us; instead, all we need baked into the universe independent of us is:

the conditions for the existence of human beings capable of justifying norms by reasons shaped by passions;
the conditions for the possibility of joint commitments to shared enterprises of living together;
the conditions for the possibility of peaceful and orderly moral community;
the conditions for the possibility of norms of justice and civility that are capable of being justified by reasons;
and the conditions for the ability of norms to regulate communities in some way.

I have to say, though, that that is starting to look an awful lot like "moral truths somehow baked into the constitution of the universe, radically independent of human beings and our moral experience." Whatever way you run things, either this is a universe structured so that moral and immoral behavior is really possible, or it is not. Carl Sagan famously said that if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Likewise, if you want to have a morality, you first must have the metaphysics for it. You need "baked into the constitution of the universe" moral agents capable of moral thinking about the possibility of moral community in light of moral norms in a way that can be rationally evaluated. A universe that allows these things is a universe that has at least some moral truths 'baked in', even if for some reason you want to insist that they are very general. And, of course, moral common sense tells us that we do in fact experience the universe to have these things, so your account of the universe had better allow it to do so -- not that the universe had to wait for your permission, of course.

The weird thing is that this is literally what Lenman goes on to say, in different words, since he thinks he's determined by the universe to value morality, and apparently all or most of the human race, too; apparently determined purely contingently, which gets a little confusing. But regardless, it's a universe that makes morality possible and in our case actual; and that's a metaphysical point worthy of some reflection.

Monday, December 09, 2024

Links of Note

 Currently a bit crushed under end-of-term grading; things will continue to be light, for the most part.

*Wen Chen & Xiaoxing Zhang, Perceiving God Like an Angel (PDF)

* Charles Journet, Palamism and Thomism, translated by Matthew Minerd.

* Ryan Miller, Aquinas's Science of Sacra Doctrina as a Platonic Techne (PDF)

* David Bannon, Mary Shelley's Grief, at "Front Porch Republic"

* Guoxiang Peng, Spiritual and Bodily Exercise: The Religious Significance of Zhu Xi's Reading Methods (PDF)

* Lydia Walker, What is decolonisation?, at "Aeon"

* Mark T. Nelson, Paley Before Hume: How Not to Teach the Design Argument (PDF)

* John Baez, Martianus Capella, at "Azimuth"

* Daniel J. Smith, How Is an Illusion of Reason Possible? The Division of Nothing in the Critique of Pure Reason

* Dan Williams, What is misinformation, anyway?, at "Conspicuous Cognition"

* David S. Oderberg, Action, passion, power

* Gregory B. Sadler, Anselm of Canterbury on Divine Power and What God Can't Do, at "Gregory B. Sadler -- That Philosophy Guy"

Sunday, December 08, 2024

Saturday, December 07, 2024

The Quest that Was Fruitless and Long

 Apology
(For Eleanor Rogers Cox)
by Joyce Kilmer 

For blows on the fort of evil
 That never shows a breach,
For terrible life-long races
 To a goal no foot can reach,
For reckless leaps into darkness
 With hands outstretched to a star,
There is jubilation in Heaven
 Where the great dead poets are. 

 There is joy over disappointment
 And delight in hopes that were vain.
Each poet is glad there was no cure
 To stop his lonely pain.
For nothing keeps a poet
 In his high singing mood
Like unappeasable hunger
 For unattainable food. 

 So fools are glad of the folly
 That made them weep and sing,
And Keats is thankful for Fanny Brawne
 And Drummond for his king.
They know that on flinty sorrow
 And failure and desire
The steel of their souls was hammered
 To bring forth the lyric fire. 

 Lord Byron and Shelley and Plunkett,
 McDonough and Hunt and Pearse
See now why their hatred of tyrants
 Was so insistently fierce.
Is Freedom only a Will-o’-the-wisp
 To cheat a poet’s eye?
Be it phantom or fact, it’s a noble cause
 In which to sing and to die! 

 So not for the Rainbow taken
 And the magical White Bird snared
The poets sing grateful carols
 In the place to which they have fared;
But for their lifetime’s passion,
 The quest that was fruitless and long,
They chorus their loud thanksgiving
 To the thorn-crowned Master of Song.