Theistic Arguments

Occasionally comments go astray (usually if people are commenting on a mobile platform); they needed to be rooted out of hiding. Jarvis left a recent comment that hid away but is interesting:

In an old post, Rational Compulsion, Reasoned Argument, Positing, and God's Existence, you wrote, "...my own very extreme view [is] -- that there are a lot of excellent arguments for the existence of God, some of which can be considered demonstrative (that last clause is especially rare these days) . . . " I wonder if you still hold this opinion? If so, I am particularly interested in which arguments you consider demonstrative. Best, Jarvis

It is indeed still my opinion; in fact I have become more convinced of it as time has gone on. An example of an argument that I think is essentially demonstrative can be found in John Duns Scotus's Treatise on God as First Principle; one can find an older English translation of it here. I do think it needs some updating in light of particular philosophical topics that have arisen since, namely,

(1) the external world
(2) the nature of causation
(3) the nature of explanation

But I am increasingly sure that serious consideration of each of these three topics ends up strengthening the argument, in the sense that I think the course of philosophical argument since has shown that in order to reject principles that are at least broadly like those Scotus uses, you have to make much more significant intellectual sacrifices than people usually recognize. (I am most certain of this with (1), which is the one with which I am most familiar; and a surprising number of positions on (2) and (3) that are inconsistent with Scotus's Threefold Primacy argument have very problematic consequences for (1).)

But I am not, in fact, mortally committed to such arguments actually being really and truly demonstrative; but they are good arguments that show some evidence of being demonstrative and that on close examination can be seen to withstand the major attempts to argue that they are not. Many objections to theistic arguments are put forward as if they had no serious implications beyond stopping the argument. But theistic arguments deal with fairly fundamental things. If you reject the premise of the First Way that whatever is moved is moved by another, you have, given how it is understood in argument, committed yourself to claiming that what is not actual can become actual without any causal explanation at all, and you've committed yourself to whatever reasons you use to support that conclusion. That's perfectly fine, of course, but if you are going to do this you had definitely better be willing to follow through on all the implications and be willing to address any apparent problems caused by that commitment; as Schopenhauer says somewhere, arguments are not like cabs -- you can't ride them only as far as you want and then get off. I think people have an unusually egregious tendency to treat objections as taxi cabs when arguing against theistic arguments; I'm not sure why this is so, although it could be (since you can find some of the same behavior on the other side) simply because philosophical arguments on this topic reach a massively greater audience than philosophical arguments on almost any other topic, and that this is just a byproduct of that.

The more general position here, however, is simply that (1) there are plenty of reasonable arguments that something exists that can reasonably be called divine, whether or not one wishes to consider them demonstrative (or even whether one thinks they are actually right, since arguments can be perfectly reasonable and still not be quite right); and that (2) of these reasonable arguments, at least some of them are quite excellent as arguments, whether or not one wishes to consider them demonstrative: Scotus's Threefold Primacy argument, the First Way, Boethius-style arguments for the Good, the too-often-overlooked family of infinite intelligible arguments, certain cautious arguments from religious experience, and so forth. In other words, it is not actually difficult to be a theist for reasons that stand up to examination pretty well. This is itself a fairly weak position. One can be an atheist and accept it, since it's entirely possible to believe that some arguments for X are reasonable and even quite impressive while believing nonetheless that some arguments for not-X are definitive and conclusive. It was once not very difficult to find atheists who agreed with it, although it seems to be somewhat out of fashion at present. Nonetheless, it needs to be kept distinct from the view that there is good reason to think some of these reasonable, reasonably good arguments to be in fact demonstrative, which is an entirely different position altogether: you can have very good reasons that are not even in the vicinity of being rigorously demonstrative.

Links for Noting

* The LOTR Project

* The Imaginative Conservative has an interesting review of Gene Healy's The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power

* "On the Main Line" has a funny story about one of the great Jewish philosophers, Moses Mendelssohn.

* D. G. Myers discusses de Rougemont and gay marriage at "The Commonplace Blog".

* Jack Thornton on Tolkien's manuscripts.

* Colorsystem discusses a large number of color ordering systems.

* R. J. Snell discusses John Courtney Murray and the two kinds of barbarism.

* Shaun Nichols, The Rise of Compatibilism: A Case Study in the Quantitative History of Philosophy (PDF). The 'quantitative' is less quantitative than Nichols makes it sound; it should really be 'Comparative' rather than 'Quantitative'.

* Philosophers' Carnival #145; the posts on the Liar Paradox and on values in scientific reasoning are particularly interesting.

* Ancient Commentators on Aristotle

* ThonyC corrects some common errors about Tycho Brahe.

Dream and Thought and Feeling Interwound

The Soul's Expression
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

With stammering lips and insufficient sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound
And only answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground.
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air:
But if I did it,—-as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.

Self-School'd, Self-Scann'd, Self-Honour'd, Self-Secure

Shakespeare
by Matthew Arnold

Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,
Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,


Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foil'd searching of mortality;


And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,
Didst tread on earth unguess'd at.—Better so!


All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

Fortnightly Book, November 11

For the fortnightly book, I thought I would re-read J. R. R. Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, as edited by Christopher Tolkien. This consists of two narrative poems written by Tolkien, the New Lay of the Völsungs, and the New Lay of Gudrún. They are not translations, but an attempt to unify various strands in the Norse traditions about the Völsungs; Christopher Tolkien notes that Tolkien had mentioned them in a letter to W. H. Auden, in which he says that he wrote them while "trying to learn the art of writing alliterative poetry" (p. 6). Christopher Tolkien adds to the two poems a portion of a lecture by Tolkien on the Elder Edda, and some extensive commentary on each.

I thought the introductory paragraph to Christopher Tolkien's introduction was interesting:

Many years ago my father referred to the words of William Morris concernign what he called 'the Great Story of the North', which, he insisted, should be to us 'what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks', and which far in the future 'should be to those that come after us no less than the Tale of Troy has been to us.' On this my father observed: 'How far off and remote sound now the words of William Morris! The Tale of Troy has been falling into oblivion since that time wtih surprising rapidity. But the Völsungs have not taken its place.' (p. 13)

It is a very Tolkien-esque sentiment.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was actually born in South Africa; his parents were in South Africa more or less because his father was in charge of an international division of a British bank. While on a visit to England with his mother, his father, still in South Africa, died, and thus the Tolkiens did not return. His mother became Catholic when Tolkien was eight; the rest of the family was Baptist, so this did not go down well. She died four years later, but she had arranged for a priest at the Birmingham Oratory to be Tolkien's guardian should anything happen to her. He got a degree from Exeter College in Oxford in English Language and Literature. He fought in World War I, but he deliberately delayed his enlistment so that he could finish his degree. He came down with trench fever in 1916 and was sent home. His recovery took a long time, and it was while he was recovering that he began The Book of Lost Tales. After the War he worked first for the OED, then began to teach at the University of Leeds. He almost served in World War II as a codebreaker, even having taken an initial course, but never actually did so. He moved after WWII to Merton College, Oxford. He retired in 1959 and died in 1973.

Some Jottings on Dynamic Mereotopology

These are just some loose thoughts, not very developed. A mereology is a theory of part-and-whole relations. A topology is, roughly, a theory of relations that remain constant under continuous changes -- boundaries and connections being the most important, so a topology can be considered a theory of connection-and-limit relations. A mereotopology, of course, joins the two. We tend to regard these as spatial in character, but in principle a mereotopology is capable of covering a great deal more (concepts, abstract structures, and so forth). In any case, it would be worthwhile to have some account of mereotopology that included some conception of change -- a dynamic mereotopology. There are two ways one could include change in a mereotopology.

One way would be to develop a mereotopology of changes themselves. It is clear that changes do have mereotopological features. One change can be part of another change; changes can be connected to each other; changes can overlap; changes can be interior to or within the boundaries of other changes. In this sense, parthood, overlap, connection, and boundary would be applied to changes themselves.

A second way would be to have one's mereotopology apply to changing things -- changing regions, perhaps, or changing structures. There are perhaps several different ways you could go about doing this. But one way would be take all your mereotopological concepts and modalize them for changes. There are two major modal operators, Box and Diamond. Box in effect tells us that something is the case with no exceptions; Diamond says that something is the case even if there are exceptions, or although there may be exceptions. (Diamond does not say there are exception, only that there may be.) So we could take each mereotopological operator and Box or Diamond it.

Take basic parthood (the sense of 'part' in which a thing can be counted as part of itself). We would then get a Box-parthood and a Diamond-parthood. Box-parthood would be invariant parthood; Diamond-parthood would be at least variant parthood. Of course, invariant parthood includes at least variant parthood, in the way that 'always' includes 'at least sometimes'. If x is invariantly a part of y, then x is at least variantly a part of y, although not vice versa. The same thing can be done with proper parthood (the sense of 'part' in which the whole is definitely not counted as a part; you can use either parthood or proper parthood as your basic concept without changing the mereology in any significant way). Of course, one difference is that it's possible to argue that there is always at least one invariant part, even though there may not always be at least one invariant proper part: everything is arguably always an invariant part of itself.

We can do the same thing with other mereological notions, like overlap. x overlaps y when there is something (call it z) that is part of both x and y, some z such that z is part of x and z is part of y. Invariant overlap and variant overlap work much the same way as invariant and variant parts, and are definable in terms of them: invariant overlap occurs when z is an invariant part and variant overlap occurs when z is a variant part.

In an analogous way, we would have invariant connection (Box) and variant connection (Diamond). An interesting question arises as to how the mereology connects to the topology at this point. In a typical mereotopology using overlap and connection, one would hold that 'x overlaps y' implies 'x is connected to y'. (You can do the same with parthood directly, but it's slightly cleaner to use overlap.) But what happens when we differentiate different kinds of overlap and connection? It seems clear that some general bridge principle still exists: namely, that if x either variantly or invariantly overlaps y, then x is either variantly or invariantly connected to y. But this is quite weak. Is there a stronger principle? Does invariant overlap imply invariant connectiom and variant overlap imply variant connection? This does seem plausible, although I wonder if there are unusual cases where one would be better off sticking to the more general principle.

We can, again, do the same with other concepts like 'is an interior part of' or 'is a boundary of'.

Tanaver II

The following chapters have been done at Tanaver.

Part I

Chapter I: A Day in the Life
Part I, Part II

Chapter II: This Darkest Sea
Part I, Part II

Chapter III: Conversation over Lunch **New**
Part I, Part II

Chapter IV: City in Heaven **New**
Part I, Part II

The current wordcount is around 13200. One of the things I definitely decided on early was to make ordinary spaceflight to be long and tedious, and I have succeeded. Here we have two transitional chapters with nothing happening; very difficult to write. Chapter II, I think, is particularly weak; it had to be written over a series of very busy days and shows it. I am also behind two days, i.e., one chapter or somewhere between 3000 and 4000 words, because of Election Day: I had no time, having had office hours, logic tests to grade, an election to vote in, and a meeting to attend. That was one exhausting Tuesday. And by Wednesday evening I was exhausted. Normally Mondays and Wednesdays are my long days; I wouldn't have expected a Tuesday to be the first to set me back. And I have been unable since then to catch up. I'm hoping to make up the difference this week at some point. With extraordinary luck I might even make it all the way through Part I this week; but I am not banking on it. This November may be quieter than most, but November really is the busiest month of my year.

I had been thinking that for a 'special feature' I would talk a bit about Samar philosophy, but I think I will actually save that for next time, and this time just say something about how much of all this was thought out beforehand. I've had the general storyline for quite some time. The Samar, while background characters, provide key structural elements, and there are certain important characters who ground everything else in the story. But most of what is actually written is as new to me as to anyone else; it's all very, very first draft. This includes most of the background. I had deliberately done very little preparation here; I started throwing together a few Sylven poems about a week before this whole thing began so that I wouldn't get mired in the very first chapter, but doing any serious preparation without actually writing major parts of the story itself wouldn't really have been possible, and I wanted to keep actual writing as much in NaNoWriMo as possible. There are certainly less exhausting ways to write, but it seemed more in keeping with the spirit of things. It really is all thrown together, albeit with some rhyme and reason.

The Sylven poetry, of course, is based on Finnish and Estonian models, although here and there I stray west to Scandinavia or the Faroe Islands or south to Hungary. There are reasons for this, but they should come out over time in the story itself. Since it's all supposed to be in translation, anyway, I settled on primarily nonasyllabic formats to give it a distinctive feel.