Pierce on Dr. Seuss

Jeremy Pierce:

Here is what I don't see a lot of people saying in response to the Dr. Seuss books that the publisher will no longer be making. Theodore Geisel was a very progressive, liberal-minded person, anti-racist in the most literal sense of that term. Yet he portrayed people in ways that we today recognize to be stereotypical and somewhat offensive. People have been calling him a racist for years, when his views were anything but. How could the author of the Sneetches, an explicitly anti-racist story in the literal sense of that term, be counted as a racist just because he had absorbed some of the stereotypical imagery of his day and brought it out in his depictions of people from around the world when wanting to expose children to multi-cultural stuff and to think more globally?

The metaphysics of race

I haven't had the time to read Reformed philosopher Jeremy Pierce's ongoing series on the metaphysics of race (yet). It looks quite interesting. Here's the first post:

"Metaphysics of Race: Introduction"

Was Van Til a voluntarist?

(Posted on behalf of Steve.)

Jeremy Pierce 1/17/2016 12:12 AM

I haven't read any Van Til directly, so I don't know where it is, but people I know who have studied him at length have said that he held to the Cartesian view that God created the laws of logic and mathematics and that even the truths we take to be necessary God could have made false. God could have made true contradictions and so on. Voluntarism about ethics follows from that, I think, although I don't know if he explicitly held that. I'm pretty sure Descartes' voluntarism about logic and mathematics is what influenced Locke to hold to voluntarism about ethics. So Van Til is my guess about where this is coming from, anyway, if it's legitimate at all.

Of course, there was that confusing and confused piece from Scot McKnight recently that simply confused Calvinism with voluntarism. It just occurred to me that it might have something to do with that mess.

A few observations:

1. A friend of mine said he only knows one sentence is Van Til's voluminous output which might possibly suggest the Cartesian position:

   The law of contradiction, therefore, as we know it, is but the expression on a created level of the internal coherence of God’s nature. An Introduction to Systematic Theology.

   Even in that case, he doesn't say the law of contradiction is created, but rather, the law of contradiction "as we know it" is created. Seems to me his qualifier is just a variation of the Clark controversy, where Van Til denied that man's knowledge is identical at any point with God's knowledge. So I take the qualifier to be in reference to the human understanding of logic, and not logic itself.

2. Even if Van Til were a Cartesian possibilist, I don't think that would entail ethical voluntarism unless it was combined with divine command theory. On natural law theory, there'd still be right and wrong because human social ethics and individual ethics are, in no small measure, grounded in God's design for human nature. To that extent, ethics is contingent, because human nature is contingent, but it's not relativistic.

   In theory, there could be different ethics for extraterrestrials if their nature (physiology and psychology) is sufficiently different. But it wouldn't be cultural relativism or moral relativism. Given the same nature, the same morality would always be in force. Universal in time and place for that kind of creature.

3. Finally, I ran this by John Frame, who replied:

   I’m quite sure that VT was not a voluntarist.

   There are three alternatives: (1) logic is above God, (2) logic is created by God, and (3) logic is an aspect of the divine nature.

   In his various polemics, VT often opposed (1).

   He was less clear on (2), but he was critical of the classic “voluntarist” philosophers like Duns Scotus. His basic picture was that (1) is rationalist, (2) is irrationalist, leaving (3) as the biblical alternative.

   Of course, he didn’t want to say with Clark that “logic is God,” so his witness to (3) was blunted somewhat.

   [JF: better to say that yes, logic is God; but mercy, justice, wisdom, eternity, are also God—i.e. God from various perspectives.]

   He should have been more careful in his thinking on this matter which was, unfortunately, distorted by intra-Reformed polemics.

God and Time

http://www.academia.edu/1180974/review_of_God_and_Time_Four_Views_ed._Gregory_Ganssle

Upending the good?

On Facebook, Christian philosopher Jeremy Pierce commented on a post by (or hosted by) Arminian/Anabaptist NT scholar Scot McKnight:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2015/12/30/calvinism-and-pantheism-and-the-good-wesley-walker/

Pierce responded:

This is utterly weird. Scot McKnight issues a challenge to a view he keeps calling Calvinism, but it's a particular version of divine command theory that he turns out to be criticizing, not anything to do with Calvinism. 

The issues are not tied together in any way. They're about different things. One is about God's relationship with the events that take place in creation. The other is about God's relationship with moral truths. Calvinists hold that God is sovereign over every event that occurs, even our free choices. Divine command theorists hold that God's commands are what make moral truths true. You can be a divine command theorist without being a Calvinist (as John Locke was), and you can be a Calvinist without being a divine command theorist (as Gottfried Leibniz was). 

And not even every version of divine command theory would be subject to McKnight's objection. Robert Adams and Bill Alston's versions of divine command theory wouldn't be, since they ground God's commands ultimately in God's nature and not in arbitrary, groundless commands. So it's just a mistake to think that these are arguments that are even about Calvinism, never mind serious criticisms of it.

True Christians, Muslims, and Scotsmen

Christian philosopher Jeremy Pierce recently made some interesting observations about the No True Scotsman Fallacy in relation to Muslims and Christians:

So is the No True Scotsman Fallacy only a fallacy if you're using it to say someone isn't really a genuine Christian?
To be clear: there's a huge difference between IS and what most Muslims believe and practice. Nevertheless, last I checked, the core of being Muslim is (1) to believe (a) there's one God and (b) Muhammad is his prophet and (2) to practice the five pillars of Islam. Those who say the Nation of Islam isn't really Muslim are wrong, even if there are some huge differences between the Nation of Islam and the predominant beliefs and practices of Islam.
There's a good amount of diversity within Islam, and there's no reason to assume of any particular Muslim that they fit any particular manifestation of the broader religion without knowing more about them. Nevertheless, it's very clear that it's a version of Islam that motivates al Qaeda and a different version of Islam that motives IS. They are both religiously motivated, and it's clear that they are both legitimately classified as Islamic extremism. IS is severely atypical of Islam worldwide, but that doesn't make them not Muslims.
I recommend being careful of applying the No True Scotsman Fallacy label in particular cases, because it's often abused. There are ways to go back to the original core of a belief system to see who is a genuine member of the group or to look to key documents that the group produced over time to indicate who is in and who is out. There are groups that consider themselves part of Christianity but who have clearly departed from central teachings. There are people who have adopted the label but have not believed or followed the central gospel message. And it's important to recognize that there are sometimes borderline cases where it's hard to know what the right answer is (or even if there is a right answer).
But I don't see how anyone can claim that it's the No True Scotsman Fallacy to say that Hitler wasn't really Christian in any important sense. He wasn't a follower of Jesus in any serious way, and he explicitly contradicted several core teachings of Christianity. Saying he wasn't really a Christian is not an instance of the fallacy. But saying that IS isn't Muslim is simply ridiculous, by the very standards that most Muslims use to explain their big tent admissions requirements for belonging to the religion. They do fit the criteria, and anyone who says otherwise is committing the No True Scotsman Fallacy.
I want to reiterate that most Muslims think IS theology is not just wrong but offensive. Their theology of rape, for instance, is offensive to the vast majority of Muslims, and their use of that theology to recruit men who will be able to rape sex slaves at will is pretty despicable and at odds with traditional Muslim teaching about sexual morality. Nevertheless, sexual morality, political philosophy, and other issues that set apart IS from the rest of Islam are not among the three criteria for whether someone counts as Muslim. There are Christians who believe offensive things but who accept the core Christian teaching. I wouldn't say they aren't Christian.
Yes, those would be genuine instances of the fallacy. Westboro Baptist theology is within orthodoxy, and for all we know people who murder doctors or bomb churches might as well be orthodox in their theology. Any church worth its salt would engage in church discipline with such people (and probably take the side of the law against them on legal questions), but their views are within orthodoxy.

1. Let's unpack this. When we consider criteria for Muslim identity, there are basically two questions: (i) What does it take to be a true Muslim? (ii) Is a certain practice (e.g. jihad, sex slavery) consistent with Islamic theology? 

i) To be a Muslim involves observing the five pillars of Islam: The shahadah: there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet; five daily prayers; almsgiving; Ramadan fast, and a pilgrimage to Mecca. 

Notice, here, the emphasis on actions rather than belief. Even in the case of the shahadah, it's less about personally believing the shahadah than publicly professing the shahadah. 

To illustrate, when Queen Noor (née Lisa Najeeb Halaby) married the late King Hussein, a precondition was her conversion to Islam. But conversion to Islam doesn't mean the same thing as conversion in evangelical theology. It's not like she had an epiphany in which she became convinced that the Angel Gabriel dictated the Koran to Muhammad. It's not about conviction, but saying and doing the right things. Islam is a very public religion. 

This goes to the fact that Islam is based on justification by works rather than justification by faith, unlike Christian theology. 

Of course, Islam also has a detailed code of social ethics (Sharia). But in that case, I think the question of observance or nonobservance involves a distinction between good and bad Muslims rather than true and false Muslims. 

ii) The other question is whether a particular practice is consistent with Islamic theology, or even required by Islamic theology. Islam isn't simply a religion of the book (Koran). It's a religion that's defined, not only by the Koran, but authoritative tradition, viz. Hadith, schools of jurisprudence. I think it's safe to say that in venerable Islamic tradition, jihad is considered a sacred duty. Killing the infidel is permissible or even mandatory. 

2. Christian identity is more complex. By "Christian," I'm confining myself to evangelical theology. Unlike Islam, Christian identity is centered on faith. And that has different aspects:

i) Minimal orthodoxy is a necessary condition of saving faith. This involves belief in certain doctrines. 

I say "minimal" because you don't have to be a theologian to be a Christian. 

In that respect, Christian identity has a more personal orientation than Islam. Although Christian identity has a social dimension as well (e.g. the communal life of the church), even the social dimension is grounded in this individual component: personal conviction. 

So we'd say John Spong or Dale Tuggy is not a true Christian because he lacks minimal orthodox belief. They flub that preliminary test. 

ii) However, orthodox belief is a necessary rather than sufficient condition of Christian identity. There's more to saving faith than bare assent. There's trust. Trust that's rooted in the experience of saving grace. 

For evangelical theology also has a category of dead orthodoxy. A person can be a believer but not be a true believer. 

That's because Christianity, unlike Islam, has a doctrine of original sin, which, in turn, has the new birth as a corollary. To be a Christian, it is not enough to merely believe. You must be a regenerate believer. Have sanctifying grace. Have the Holy Spirit. 

As a result, evangelical theology draws a principled distinction between nominal believers and true believers. You don't have the same distinction in Islam, because you don't have the same theological underpinnings. 

By contrast, Islam has no doctrine of original sin. Indeed, every human is born Muslim.

So we might say someone doesn't seem to be a Christian, even if they are doctrinally orthodox, because something else, something crucial, is missing. 

For instance, it's not something they live for. Not their frame of reference. If they ceased believing it, that would make little appreciable difference.

Or take loss faith. That's retrospective, but with the benefit of hindsight, we'd say they had an accidental faith. Apostasy waiting to happen. They lost their faith because even when they had it, the basis of their faith was deficient. Their apostasy exposed something that was deficient all along. 

3. Let's consider some illustrations. 

i) Are members of the Westboro cult Christian? They might pass the minimal orthodoxy test. 

However, we might still have good reason to doubt their state of grace. There's a distinction between whether their overall theology is Christian, and whether they are Christian. A distinction between Christian identity in terms of doctrine and Christian identity in terms of appropriation. Has the theology been properly internalized? 

In addition, their commitment to orthodox theology appears to be nominal. Their defining characteristic is hate-mongering. 

ii) Are Confederate theologians like Thornwell and Dabney Christian? Certainly they pass the doctrinal test. And their personal piety is not in serious doubt. 

So, yes, I'd say they were true Christians, despite their defense of Southern slavery. 

iii) Ironically, their theology made it very challenging to defend the institution of slavery. Their theological commitment to monogenism meant they couldn't deny the common humanity of black Africans. But that, in turn, made it hard to justify enslaving blacks rather than whites. Why drawn the line along racial lines? That's arbitrary.

Likewise, in the Mosaic law, Hebrew slaves were term-limited. Moreover, indentured service was voluntary. And black Christians would be analogous to Hebrew slaves (or debt servants) rather than foreign slaves. 

We could say Dabney and Thornwell were Christian, but their position on slavery was unchristian. 

Terrorism: Church Shootings, Baltimore Riots, & Political Bias

http://parablemania.ektopos.com/archives/2015/06/terrorism.html

Is coercive interrogation ethical?

http://parablemania.ektopos.com/archives/2004/12/ethics_of_tortu.html#more

The age of accountability

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/07/age-of-accountability

Humean Inconsistency

http://parablemania.ektopos.com/archives/2015/04/hume-inconsistent.html

Reigniting the debate on "torture"

The release of the partisan, lameduck Senate report on CIA interrogation has fanned the smoldering embers of the "torture" debate. So often, this goes awry at the outset by asking the wrong questions. Here are two good discussions that draw necessary distinctions:

http://parablemania.ektopos.com/archives/2004/12/ethics_of_tortu.html

https://www.uta.edu/philosophy/faculty/burgess-jackson/The%20Logic%20of%20Torture%20(Wall%20Street%20Journal,%20Version%202).pdf

Reformed evangelism

Moral of the story: leave evangelism to the supras:

Can a timeless God know time?

Jeremy Pierce
That's the one thing timelessness can give them [i.e. freewill theists]. It doesn't resolve the compatibility issue, but it does provide a means of immediate awareness, since every time is immediately accessible for God.

I don't see how divine timelessness ipso facto makes every time immediately accessible to God. Perhaps this assumes an implicit contrast to a temporal God who only has immediate access to the present (as well as remembered access to the past). Unlike a temporal God, a timeless God isn't "confined" to the present. 

Perhaps this plays on the picturesque metaphor of a God who is "above" time, so that he can see the entire timeline. Or, to vary the metaphor, "outside" time so that he can objectify the timeline. If so, that's figurative and anthropomorphic. It's not clear how we'd translate that into a literal counterpart. 

And, if anything, the opposite seems to be the case. If God is timeless, and that's it, then isn't God isolated from time? Hermetically sealed off? He's not in direct "contact" with temporal events. 

Now Calvinism has metaphysical resources which mere classical theism does not. A timeless predestinarian God can know whatever happens, because he makes it happen, by planning it and causing it. 

Intolerant tolerance

D.A. Carson offers three instances of the intolerance of tolerance.

Jeremy Pierce has some follow-up comments.

Hell and Possible Worlds

http://parablemania.ektopos.com/archives/2012/11/hell-possible-worlds.html

HT: Paul Manata, Patrick Chan

Complementarians

Jeremy Pierce

    I would advise complementarians to recognize that John Piper and Wayne Grudem are complementarians trying to find their way in applying complementarianism in a complex world and that what they say need not (and should not, despite most egalitarians’ criticisms) be taken as “what complementarians think”. Many complementarians disagree with some of their particular applications without disagreeing with complementarianism. And we need to remind critics that egalitarians say things much sillier and more damaging to the gospel and to the Bible than anything we can find in Piper or Grudem. Consider Evans’ book, for starters. But, that being said, I think the Piper-Grudem introduction to Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is one of the weakest sections of that book. The actual engagement with the biblical texts is very well done. Some (but not all) of the other material is not so careful.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2012/10/30/a-year-of-ridiculous-biblical-interpretation/?comments#comment-103711

Providence and evil

On Facebook, Jeremy Pierce offers characteristically intelligent analysis of a current kerfuffle. Keep in mind that he's speaking off the cuff. I'll just reproduce his end of the exchange:

Richard Mourdock is being attacked for believing Genesis 50:20. It's not about abortion or rape but divine sovereignty, goodness.

    Jeremy Pierce I would have thought it was pretty obvious that what he was saying is that God has created a life, and that life is a gift, regardless of its origins. It's perfectly compatible for good to come out of something bad, and therefore it undermines the argument that abortion is all right merely because the pregnancy resulted from rape. That makes quite a lot of sense. It basically identifies the genetic fallacy in the argument for abortion in rape cases.  

    Jeremy Pierce It's not a sexual ethics argument. This isn't an issue of whether the sex or rape is allowed but what's morally allowable afterward. His point is that not being responsible for being in a situation doesn't remove responsibilities that incur merely from being in that situation. Like the baby on the doorstep situation except that you're also the biological parent and thus have at least a prima facie responsibility to care for the child.

    Jeremy Pierce On the specific point of Mourdock, though, I think some of the complaints assume he's speaking of the rape as good and not the more obvious antecedent, the child. And there's also a further confusion of something's being good in itself vs. used by God for a good. You have to take it the former way also to get their interpretation, and if he did mean to refer to the rape as intended for god he'd almost certainly mean the latter. Standard theodical point in discussions of God and evil. 

    Jeremy Pierce There is another assumption, though, that we have a responsibility to take care of what God entrusts us with. 

    His comments assume he means the pregnancy. That's what I've been saying. But some of his critics are taking him to mean the rape. 

    Jeremy Pierce He's not trying to argue against the person who doesn't think a fetus has moral status. He's trying to argue on behalf of the view that once you have that the rape exception isn't justified. And he isn't arguing for passivity but for proactive care for those entrusted to us. 

    The reason to your question in the second comment is that he's a politician, and people who can just give the simplest and most careful argument are usually incapable of getting elected to public office. I don't pretend that politicians are going to make the best arguments for their views. But I do get irked when their opponents take them to be saying something totally implausible when there's a much more charitable and likely meaning. The idea that he thinks God must endorse the rape as good flies in the face of what Christians have always believed about theodicy, going back to Gen 50 but also including the very cross itself, which Peter twice in Acts says was an evil act on the part of Jesus' murderers but was part of God's very plan. So accusing him of thinking the rape is justified is also accusing him of not partaking in the very great tradition of theodicy that his statement sure sounds like it stands within. 

    The last few sentences of your second comment seem to me not to distinguish between something's being good in itself and something's being bad but allowed because it serves a higher good. Suppose Mourdock meant to affirm the rape itself was something God deliberately allowed. I suspect he might believe that. Anyone with a view of divine sovereignty that's stronger than open theism must do so, since they accept that God knew it would happen and didn't stop it. I don't think that's what Mourdock's actual statement was about, but suppose it was. It doesn't follow that he endorses rape as good, because it doesn't follow from taking God to have allowed it to happen to serve some higher purpose that God endorses the evil act itself as morally allowable. It's only open theists and hyper-Calvinists who would disagree with that. And I think these critics of Mourdock must be assuming there's no view in between hyper-Calvinism and open theism, because the argument makes no sense unless there is no such middle ground. But that middle ground is exactly where we find the majority of Christians both historically and now. 

    Jeremy Pierce I'm not trying to evaluate his argument, just complaining that he's being grossly misinterpreted and strangely being taken as outside the mainstream. The things he's saying are well within the mainstream. 

    Jeremy Pierce And these same critics say nothing about Mourdock's opponent's co-sponsorship of the infamous "forcible rape" bill, which for Ryan means he approves of rape and can even be used against Buerkle, who got them to remove that language. 

    Jeremy Pierce Gen 50:20 has to do with being sold into slavery by one's own brothers and being separated from one's family for decades. I wouldn't say we can compare easily which is worse when you compare that to rape, but surely it's a great evil that the Bible nonetheless can say quite clearly was intended by God for good, even though the people who did it intended it for evil. What it shows us is not anything directly about rape but that God can intend evil by someone's greatly evil act. The cross is the prime example of this principle. In one sense it was the most evil act in the history of humanity. Yet it was fully intended by God as the most good act of God in all of history. 

    Our valuation of our circumstances is perspectivally-located, and sometimes our circumstances and perspective can lead us to be sensitive to truths that others cannot see, but sometimes they can lead us to ignore truths that others can see. Someone in that position is seeing it as good or bad in terms of what she would normally expect, how evil what happened is, how the results differ from what she would normally and should normally expect, how easily she can bear it, and so on. She is not thinking from the perspective of the one whose existence began through that terrible act. There are real people out there who were conceived as a result of rape. I'm not going to tell them that their very existence is an evil or that God didn't want them to exist. Ideally someone commenting on such issues would be able to take into account the experiences of both people. Mourdock didn't do that, and he can be faulted for that. 

    But his critics have completed failed in taking account the existence of these real people whose origins lie in a very evil act but who nonetheless are created by God, made in his image, and have the full worth of any person. They are also the children of the woman who was raped and not just of the rapist, despite how this issue is usually presented (as if they're his child, and their mother ought therefore to have no connection with her own child because of that fact), which just furthers the notion that there's something wrong with them that children of rape can often have. 

    As I've said above, his reasoning falls short of a good argument. As Jonathan said, would need to bring in other things to make it work, and once those are there this stuff isn't necessary (but I do think they add something, even if they're not necessary). But I think the critics are being unfair, and I think they're criticizing not just this particular view of his but something fundamental to Christianity.

Perception

http://parablemania.ektopos.com/archives/2012/07/perception.html

Pauline style

Over on his Facebook wall, Jeremy Pierce recently defended the Pauline authorship of the Pastorals. One of Jeremy’s arguments is that it’s not unusual for a writer’s style to change over time, to develop as he ages.

In that regard, the evolution of John Ruskin’s prose style provides a concrete comparison. For instance:

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/wilmer1.html

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15200/15200-h/15200-h.htm#Style

Authorship of Pastorals

http://parablemania.ektopos.com/archives/2004/08/authorship_of_p.html

http://www.wordandspirit.co.uk/blog/2012/07/11/fake-paul-and-the-pastoral-epistles/