Time and Eternity

I'm in a discussion at Fides Quaerens Intellectum about what the relation is between the two following positions:

(1) God is atemporal.

(2) A tenseless theory of time is true.

Johnny-Dee had suggested that they are biconditional (assuming we are talking about theists): God is timeless if and only if time is tenseless. I disagreed since I don't think (1) commits one to any particular theory of time, and this is being discussed in the comments. I'm having difficulty with the comments over there today, however, so I thought I'd put my comment here as well, just in case. It's almost long enough for its own post, anyway.

"God exists now" is not the same proposition as "God's existence is tensed". The former only implies that "God exists" is true now. The latter implies that God's existence exhibits the same limitations in virtue of tense that the existence of temporal things does. Atemporalists shouldn't have any problem with saying that God exists now, any more than they should have a problem with saying that God exists with regard to any creaturely feature. God's existence is logically and metaphysically prior to the existence of anything He creates, so no matter what the difference between God and creatures may be, God exists. To suggest that God's duration is measured out according to a privileged temporal present, however, is a very different thing, requiring a very different (and rather difficult) set of arguments before it can be established.

As Xavier implies, it's fairly common among atemporalists to deny that the relation of creatures to God is perfectly symmetric with God's relation to creatures: in a sense the relations of creatures to God all partake of the limits and nature of creatures, whereas the relation of God to creatures partakes of the attributes of God. Or, in other words, creatures are related to God in a creaturely way (tensed, if creatures are tensed) and God is related to creatures in a divine way (eternal, if God is eternal).

Incidentally, with regard to Johnny-Dee's original point, I think there is a significant issue on which tenseless vs. tensed theory of time will affect one's view of God and time: someone who believes in a tenseless theory of time will see eternity as a rigorous analogue of omnipresence, while someone who believes in a tensed theory of time will at most consider it analogous in a more loose and indirect way.

Propositional Modality vs. Predicate Modality

Need these two be interpreted in the same way?

(A') I could believe that a unicorn exists on the Mongolian plains.

(B') It is possible that I believe that a unicorn exists on the Mongolian plains.

Now, as a matter of fact, (B') is false given that I believe no unicorns exist, and recognize that this implies that none exist on the Mongolian plains, and don't believe explicitly contradictory things. But (A') is true, because I could believe it, even granted that (in fact) I believe no unicorns exist and recognize that this implies none existing on the Mongolian plains and don't believe explicitly contradictory things. For (B') to be true on the suppositions, there must be a possible world in which the suppositions are true but "I believe that a unicorn exists on the Mongolian plains" is also true. For (A') to be true it simply has to be true, in this actual world, that it would be possible for me to believe that a unicorn exists on the Mongolian plains even though the suppositions are true. Indeed, the fact that we are able to make sense of this 'even though' shows that we have to be able to distinguish (A') and (B') in some cases.

(A') basically says: With regard to me this is not impossible: believing that p. (B') basically says: This is not impossible: I believe that p. Colloquially we can treat them the same, but when we are more precise the two are not really the same, and they don't combine with other propositions in the same way. There is a set of propositions S such that S + (B') leads to a contradiction, but S + (A') does not.

Presumably there is some connection between (A') and (B'). But it isn't, I would suggest, equivalence. If this is true, it would seem to be quite general.

Gipsy-Cursed Bunny Slippers

A great slapstick parody of Angel:

Cherub: The Vampire with Bunny Slippers

They've put up three episodes; another comes out March 6. There will be twelve episodes in all for the first season; each episode is about 4-7 minutes. But beware that dark force of evil, Johnny Mildly-Irritating.

Bonaventure on Teaching Wisdom

It is impossible for wisdom to be taught save through words. But words are not sufficient to teach unless they be pithy, and a man cannot speak pithily, unless his discussion be eloquent, supported by evidence, and convincing, that is, unless he has words (1) capable of speaking about everything, (2) able to be apprehended or known, and (3) to which one's mood can be inclined. Moreover he appropriately expresses what he says through literary art, rationally investigates through the discipline of logic, and effectively persuades through rhetoric. That in which Solomon was adept, therefore, is a part of philosophy; i.e., the science of discourse, which is threefold (as is clear).

Bonaventure, Collations on the Seven Gifts of the Spirit, Collation IV.

My translation above is somewhat crude and rather loose, by the way. One of the reasons is that English doesn't really have the words (or, perhaps: I don't really have the English words) to express in a straightforward way what Bonaventure is trying to say. The Latin, for those interested:

Impossibile est, quod sapientia fiat doctrina nisi per sermonem. Sermo autem non est sufficiens ad docendum, nisi sit sententiosus. Et non loquitur homo sententiose, nisi sit sermo eius discussivus, inquisitivus et persuasivus, scilicet quod habeat sermonem potentem ad loquendum omne illud, quod potest apprehendi vel nosci, vel ad quod affectus potest inclinari. Congrue autem exprimit quod dicit per grammaticam, rationabiliter investigat per scientiam logicam et efficaciter persuadet per rhetoricam. Ista est igitur pars philosophiae, scilicet scientia sermocinalis, quae triplex est, ut patet, quam adeptus est Salomon.

The occasion for this passage is Bonaventure's discussion of Solomon as an example of someone with the spiritual gift of knowledge. He argues that Solomon had the three types of knowledge (of words, of things, and of morals), each with their three divisions. The whole scheme is roughly as follows:

Sermocinalis (knowledge of discourse)
Grammatics (the literary art): how to speak, write, and interpret
Logic: how to reason and come to know
Rhetoric: how to persuade and influence

Veritatis Rerum (knowledge of things)
Physics: Concrete forms
Metaphysics: Abstract forms
Mathematics: Separate forms

De Morali (knowledge of morals)
Monastic (i.e., individual): pertaining to the organization of one's own life
Economic (i.e., domestic): pertaining to the organization of the family
Political: pertaining to the organization of the city

'Grammatica' is a much broader term than our 'grammar'; writing a history, for instance, would be an application of grammar in the medieval sense. It's the knowledge relevant to literary matters. (Usually considered to be practical, but there were exceptions to this.)

A Few Points on Wieseltier's Review of Dennett

Having recently managed to read Wieseltier's review (this is a slightly abridged version, see below) of Dennett's Breaking the Spell, I confess myself disappointed, both with the review and with some of the critics of the review in the blogosphere. The review is not particularly great; but the swarming with indignation isn't particularly admirable, either.

A case in point is the mention of Hume as a theist. Contrary to what some of the critics say, this is not a sign of ignorance, nor is it necessarily a misrepresentation. Far from it; the position Wieseltier adopts (the "wan god", or attenuated theism/deism) is, and has been, quite common in Hume scholarship; the major figures in favor of this general sort of interpretation would be scholars like Gaskin and Livingston. I suspect that Wieseltier has derived his view of Hume from one or the other or both, although it's always possible that he just got it by reading Hume's Natural History of Religion -- it's the simplest and most straightforward interpretation of Hume's philosophy of religion, because other interpretations have to see Hume as engaging in strategic maneuvers. (Some of these interpretations, of course, are also respectable and well-reasoned, e.g., Russell's or Fieser's. The simple explanation is not always the right one in the interpretation of texts. Nonetheless, simplicity is a factor, which is why the attenuated-theism interpretation keeps popping up in the scholarship.)

In any case, it's not essential to Wieseltier's argument, since close reading shows what his point in bringing up Hume is. Hume is very clear and explicit that the question of whether 'God exists' is rationally supportable ("its foundation in reason") is a very different question from that of why masses of people tend to have the belief that God or gods exist ("its origin in human nature"). He also explicitly says, as Wieseltier points out, that the former is the more important. Wieseltier's charge against Dennett is that he tries to turn this on its head. He quotes Dennett as saying, "The goal of either proving or disproving God's existence [is] not very important," which he appears (rightly or wrongly) to read as a dismissal of Hume's first question. In this light we see that Wieseltier's review is chiefly devoted to this complaint: to put it crudely, his primary complaint is not that Dennett is anti-religion but that the work is, contrary to Dennett's intention, anti-reason. The evidence that this is Wieseltier's point mounts up if you look at the things he says: e.g., "There is not intellectually respectable surrogate for rational argument"; "For Dennett, thinking historically absolves one of thinking philosophically"; "In the end, his repudiation of religion is a repudiation of philosophy". As he says early on, "Dennett is the sort of rationalist who gives reason a bad name; and in a new era of American obscurantism, this is not helpful."

Another major charge by Wieseltier is that Dennett is really a biological reductionist. This section of the review was the worst section. One of the reasons this is a disappointing review is that it is very obscure, for two reasons: (1) Wieseltier is not always very clear about what argument in Dennett he is arguing against; (2) the flow of thought is very difficult to follow. I think careful reading can easily untangle the point about reason mentioned above, and that critics who have not recognized are simply not reading carefully. But while I'm often the first to rant against intelligent people not taking the trouble to read carefully, in this case I can't honestly blame them. The review is in parts very difficult to follow, and this is true especially of the biological reductionism section. I can sort of see where Wieseltier is going with his argument: he wants to say that Dennett, despite his claim otherwise, is committed to saying that we don't "transcend our genome," i.e., that all of human life is nothing but survival and reproduction mechanisms, with no other value and no other significance. He's going for something along these lines, but he doesn't argue for it very well. It's difficult to see that the passage he quotes has quite that implication, or, indeed, is as confused as Wieseltier thinks it is.

Wieseltier's third major charge is that Dennett shows himself to have nothing but a caricature of religion in his head. Not having read the book, I can't say if this is entirely just when applied to the book. However, comparison of Wieseltier's comments with a recent essay Dennett wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education shows, I think, that Wieseltier's probably right. The criticisms Wieseltier makes of the book are similar to criticisms I made of the essay when it came out. The essay was muddled, full of unsupported and unsupportable generalizations, and mostly showed itself to be a tissue of prejudices rather than anything a rational person could take seriously.

In a paragraph of the review that are left out of the abridged version linked to above, Wieseltier says:

It will be plain that Dennett's approach to religion is contrived to evade religion's substance. He thinks that an inquiry into belief is made superfluous by an inquiry into the belief in belief. This is a very revealing mistake. You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason. In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.

Contrary to Myers's reading of it, this isn't a case of using the origins of an idea to discredit it. It's a somewhat obscure and confusing summary of an argument made by Nagel (who is mentioned briefly earlier in the review) in The Last Word. In fact, it's the same argument Alejandro recently criticized in the interesting review at "Reality Conditions" I had mentioned in a previous post. (I suspect Wieseltier is a big fan of Nagel's book, and that this is the source of the reason argument. Wieseltier also seems to imply that Dennett criticizes Nagel at some point, which, if so, perhaps explains the real source for the negativity of the review.) In any case, it's not really Myers's fault that he couldn't see this, since it would only be noticeable to someone who had read Nagel's book; Wieseltier doesn't flag the point at all.

The review is not very well written; from what little I've read of Wieseltier's work, this is not his best, by far. Despite its critics, however, it is not ignorant, either, although the argument is in places controversial; and it is just as disappointing to see so many people buzzing so indignantly about it as it is to read the review itself. A more careful reading would have cut out many of the more absurd criticisms; but Wieseltier does himself no favors, and many of the misreadings are not surprising given the way the argument is formulated. Even more disappointing are that handful of people in the blogosphere making snide remarks about how religious people will jump up indignantly at anything that seems on the surface even slightly critical of their pet beliefs when an impartial spectator could tell in an instant that they are doing the same thing they are accusing the religious of doing. It is, alas, a common human flaw. Difficult as it may be for us to get our minds around the notion, thinking should take priority over opening the mouth.

In any case, my impression of the review is that we are left pretty much where we were: to form any ultimate judgment in the matter, we still need to read Dennett's book. From everything I've read about it, the book doesn't sound too interesting -- largely a popularization of things that have been around for a while, for which your time is probably better spent reading the posts on cognitive science of religion at Mixing Memory and the articles Chris points to in those posts. But I must confess that close examination of Wieseltier's review has actually whetted my curiosity a bit, since now I want to know what Dennett says about Nagel.

Compassion, Truth, and Respect

Rebecca at "Rebecca Writes" has a post well worth reading on cancer and divine providence. I think a great many things said about the problem of evil (in all its various forms) that are put forward as if they showed some special sensitivity to those who suffer are, in fact, extremely condescending, and Rebecca's post makes very clear one way in which this is so. In doing so, the post also points out incidentally a key fact about hope: people get genuine hope only from something that serves as a sure foundation for it. In a case like this, this requires that everyone look at the world frankly and think things through (use their noggins, as Rebecca says). I've never faced the sort of trial Rebecca has, but in college I did a lot of volunteering; one unfortunate fact that my experiences made me aware of is that there are a lot of people who are far more interested in the feeling of being compassionate than they are in actually being compassionate. One sign of the difference is that the former are always muddying the waters, obscuring their view of the world, because the people in that group are always more interested in their own feelings (either the feeling that they are being compassionate or the feeling of superiority or morality or what-have-you that they get in feeling it) than in the truth; with people who are actually compassionate, the reverse is true. The former group have no genuine sense of respect, because their 'respect' for people in unfortunate circumstances is built entirely around what makes them feel like they are acting (or thinking, or arguing) morally; it's a sort of narcissism that real compassion eschews. So on that level I can entirely understand Rebecca's impatience and frustration with the attitudes she talks about.

Notes and Links

* In Pseudohistory and Pseudoscience (PDF) Douglas Allchin discusses the use and misuse of history of science in science education. There's a fairly good discussion of Harvey. (HT: prosthesis)

* GetReligion has a good discussion of how much of the so-called 'clash of civilizations' is really a clash between two ideals, among Muslims, of Islamic civilization.

* Alan Rhoda has a good post at "Prosblogion" discussing four different types of open theism. The genuinely traditional'classical theist', of course, would want to know what, precisely, we mean when we say, "God knows p at time T", since he will deny that "at time T" can legitimately qualify God's knowing, because divine knowledge does not, in itself and directly, admit of temporal measurement (what God knows, of course, can admit of such measurement, and the classical theist will allow "at time T" to qualify that; likewise, those to whom God reveals can admit of such measurement, so the classical theist will allow "at time T" to qualify that).

* "verbum ipsum" has an interesting post on Protestant Mariology. Mariology, of course, is Christology by way of Mary. As John Damascene said of the most important of all Marian doctrines, "The name of the Theotokos expresses the whole mystery of God's saving dispensation." And Mary is intimately bound up, liturgically and doctrinally, in a number of Christian Feasts: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Presentation, and the Crucifixion. Something that is often forgotten is that Acts strongly implies that she was at Pentecost (1:13-14, 2:1). Of all the people in the New Testament, the ones we have most faith-related information about, and thus that are most important for the formation of our lives of faith, are Jesus, Paul, and Mary. So it's good to see that, despite the obvious cautions, Protestants are taking an interest in the prophethood (to use the closest term available) of Mary; failure to do so inevitably impoverishes our discourse about Christ.

* Speaking of which, it is interesting to read Calvin's commentary on the Magnificat:

Now follows a remarkable and interesting song of the holy virgin, which plainly shows how eminent were her attainments in the grace of the Spirit. There are three clauses in this song. First, Mary offers solemn thanksgiving for that mercy of God which she had experienced in her own person. Next, she celebrates in general terms God’s power and judgments. Lastly, she applies these to the matter in hand, treating of the redemption formerly promised, and now granted to the church....Sadness and anxiety lock up the soul, and restrain the tongue from celebrating the goodness of God. When the soul of Mary exults with joy, the heart breaks out in praising God. It is with great propriety, in speaking of the joy of her heart, that she gives to God the appellation of Savior Till God has been recognised as a Savior, the minds of men are not free to indulge in true and full joy, but will remain in doubt and anxiety. It is God’s fatherly kindness alone, and the salvation flowing from it, that fill the soul with joy. In a word, the first thing necessary for believers is, to be able to rejoice that they have their salvation in God....Now observe, that Mary makes her happiness to consist in nothing else, but in what she acknowledges to have been bestowed upon her by God, and mentions as the gift of his grace....Thus, when Mary says, that it is God who casteth down nobles from their thrones, and exalteth mean persons, she teaches us, that the world does not move and revolve by a blind impulse of Fortune, but that all the revolutions observed in it are brought about by the Providence of God, and that those judgments, which appear to us to disturb and overthrow the entire framework of soclety, are regulated by God with unerring justice.

Calvin is particularly interesting in that he puts forward a Mariological argument against Catholic Mariology. His argument is that Catholics fail to take Mary sufficiently seriously as a teacher, and (in effect) argues for a Reformed approach to Mary that does take her seriously as a teacher of divine things. It's an interesting argument; you can find it by following the above link and reading Calvin's whole discussion of the Magnificat. I recommend it to Catholic and Protestant alike as giving a more serious and constructive argument on the subject than is usually aired.