(Source)
HT: Andy Naselli.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Conflicted atheism
On the one hand, Luke conducts this moralistic pep rally for the faithless:
http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=16355
On the other hand, this is the rotting foundation of his moral vision:
http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=16373
After Atheism
Congratulations. You figured out the universe runs on physics, not magic.
Given your background and normal human psychology, that may be an impressive feat. It took memore than 20 years.
Please enjoy resisting, debunking and openly mocking religion.
But don’t stop there.
Now you’re living in the real world, and there are real problems here. In the real world, there is no rule that says the good guys win in the end. We live in a world beyond the reach of God, things can go very wrong, and we need your help.
“Critical thinking” is just the start. The rabbit hole of better thinking goes deeper. There aremathematical laws of thought, a mainstream cognitive science of how we depart from them, and experiments showing us how to do better.
Aiding the slow death of religion and superstition is also just a start. We face more pressing concerns, like the fact that every few decades we invent a new technology that can destroy our entire species.
After atheism comes adulthood, with all its challenges and its opportunities. Want to be a hero? Good. We need heroes. Here’s what you do.
http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=16355
On the other hand, this is the rotting foundation of his moral vision:
My Latest Thoughts on Desirism
I’ve finally come to admit that I probably won’t continue to record the Morality in the Real World podcast, which intended to explain the moral theory of desirism. People ask me if I still “believe in” desirism, so let me explain my current thinking. First, a few reminders:
Desirism never posited anything more than the standard, reductionistic, scientific picture of the world.
Given that most uses of moral terms refer to things that don’t exist (categorical imperatives, divine commands, etc.), my MitRW co-host Alonzo Fyfe several years ago proposed a set of “reforming definitions” for moral terms intended to (1) capture something similar to what most people had meant when using moral terms, but (2) capture a set of processes thatactually exist. This is standard practice in moral philosophy: see Rawls, Brandt, Railton, etc.
Most moral theories treat acts as the primary objects of moral evaluation, but Alonzo’s reforming definitions made motives (“desires”) the primary object of moral evaluation, ala Adams (1976).
Alonzo’s reforming definitions construed (non-moral) “value” as a relation between desires and states of affairs, such that a state of affairs has value just in case it is desired.
The existence of a desire is a state of affairs, and according to desirism desires are the primary objects of moral evaluation. A desire is”morally” good, on the desirist view, if it tends to fulfill other desires. This phrase “tends to fulfill” needs quite a bit of fleshing out, which is what we started to do in our podcast. An important point is that this claim does not require that desire fulfillment have any “intrinsic” value: see A Harmony of Desires.
Whether you want to call this a theory of “moral realism” or “anti-realism” depends on your attitude toward the meaning of those terms: see Pluralistic Moral Reductionism and Joyce (2011).
“Desire” in desirism was always a metaphor for “whatever a completed neuroscience tells us about the thing that is sort of like the thing we currently call ‘desire’,” and my studies in the neuroscience of human motivation and agent theory in AI have encouraged my view that something close enough to “desire” exists to support a notion of “value,” while in another sensehuman motivation in particular works quite differently than the folk theory of desire claims. Overall, I’ve shifted away from finding it useful to talk about human “desires” when I’m not talking casually.
But the larger reason I’ve stopped talking about morality in the language of desirism is that I’m tempted to not use moral terms at all. Moral language is thoroughly confused and corrupted and strongly motivated, and I’m more tempted than ever to abandon the entire language and start with a new one.
Will I continue to use desirist language on a regular basis? Probably not, because (1) moral language itself is not that appealing to me anymore in serious discussion...
http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=16373
The Arminian inferno
I’m going to expand on something I said earlier. According to Arminians, why does God damn anyone? Why does God send anyone to hell?
The stock answer is that God can’t force free agents to trust him, love him, worship him.
There are, of course, obvious problems with that answer. Monergism isn’t forcing the sinner to do something against his will.
Likewise, even on libertarian assumptions, it’s implausible to insist that there’s no possible world in which every agent freely does what’s right.
However, let’s examine the question from another angle: To say that God can’t make everyone go to heaven doesn’t logically entail God sending anyone to hell.
If the Arminian God can’t make everyone believe in him, so what? Why must he make unbelief a damnable offense? Why would he consign someone to eternal torment or everlasting misery just because they refuse love or worship him?
Wouldn’t it be more loving to create a tropical paradise for them to spend eternity? Even if they were thankless, wouldn’t we expect a loving God to do whatever he could to make them as happy as possible? Do as much for them as they allow him to do? Do them good (rather than harm) regardless of their ingratitude?
Now some Arminians (e.g. Rauser, I. H. Marshall) are annihilationists. But that raises the same question. If God can’t make everyone go to heaven, the logical alternative is not to zap them out of existence. Why not let them continue in unbelief? That’s a lower quality of life than heaven, but it’s better than oblivion.
Maybe an unbeliever wants to play golf forever. A limited existence, to be sure, but a loving God could easily let him spend eternity in a wonderful golf resort, with other godless golfers.
Perhaps the Arminian would say that let’s unbelievers off too easily. But there are problems with that response:
i) First of all, that’s a very different argument. The Arminian is no longer contending that God must send unbelievers to hell because he can’t make them believe. Rather, he’s saying God must send them to hell because they’re unbelievers.
ii) but that just pushes the question back a step. Why must a loving God make belief a condition of avoiding hell?
iii) In what sense would God be unjust if he didn’t punish unbelievers? According to Arminians, Jesus made universal atonement for sin.
Perhaps the Arminian will say sinners must believe in Jesus’ atonement. If so, why does a loving God make that a prerequisite for avoiding hell? Why can’t he just forgive the redeemed, whether or not they love him back?
According to Arminianism, God is as loving to sinners as they permit him to be. He can be more loving to some than to others. That’s up to them.
But love doesn’t require reciprocity. Indeed, there’s a type of disinterested love that gives and gives, expecting nothing in return.
Tebow in defeat
We walked toward the exit -- among the last to leave the locker room after a 41-23 loss to the Patriots on Sunday -- as I began to ask the first of what I hoped would be a series of questions.Read the rest here.
"How is the strength of your faith impacted after a loss?" I started.
"It puts things in perspective," Tebow said. "God is still God. I still have a relationship with Christ, and a loss doesn't change anything. Win or lose, everything is still the same. What matters is the girl I'm about to see, Kelly Faughnan. If I can inspire hope in someone, then it's still a good day."
And just like that, with a transition smooth enough to make a movie producer proud, Tebow crossed through the threshold of a doorway to the glowing face of a 22-year-old survivor of a brain tumor. After one question, the interview was over. A more important priority awaited him.
Rauser's spooftexting
According to Randal Rauser:
Many Christians assume that God loves all people. This is hardly surprising since scripture declares that God loves all creation (John 3:16-17) and desires to see all people saved (1 Tim.2:4; 2 Pe.3:9).
i) Since Rauser denies the inerrancy of Scripture, why is he prooftexting his position? According to him, the Bible frequently misrepresents God’s character. Frequently misattributes actions to God. So even if we grant his interpretation, what presumption is there that these passages accurately reflect God’s true intentions?
ii) How does Jn 3:16 teach the omnibenevolence of God? Isn’t that promise restricted to believers only–a rather small subset of humanity at large?
iii) Apropos (ii), why would an omnibenevolent God even require faith? If he were really omnibenevolent, wouldn’t he create a physically pleasant afterlife for unbelievers? Why could they not spend eternity on a tropical paradise, forever ignoring God–if they so choose?
iv) Is kosmos synonymous with “creation” in Jn 3:16-17? No. As one commentator explains:
Some argue that the term ‘world’ here simply has neutral connotations—the created human world. But the characteristic use of ‘the world’ (ho kosmos) elsewhere in the narrative is with negative overtones—the world in its alienation from and hostility to its creator’s purposes. It makes better sense in a soteriological context to see the latter notion as in view. God loves that which has become hostile to God. The force is not, then, that the world is so vast that it takes a great deal of love to embrace it, but rather that the world has become so alienated from God that it takes an exceedingly great kind of love to love it at all. A. Lincoln, The Gospel According to St. John, 154.
This meaning is attested in standard Greek lexicons, viz. BDAG, EDNT.
iv) 2 Pet 3:9 doesn’t denote all human beings.
God’s patience with his own people delaying the final judgment to give them the opportunity of repentance, provides at least a partial answer to the problem of eschatological delay…The author remains close to his Jewish source, for in Jewish though it was usually for the sake of the repentance of his own people that God delayed judgment. R. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, 312-13.
v) 1 Tim 2:4 doesn’t denote all human beings:
The purpose of the reference to ‘all people,’ which continues the theme of the universality in this passage, is sometimes misconstrued. The reference is made mainly with the Pauline mission to the Gentiles in mind (v7). But the reason behind Paul’s justification of this universal mission is almost certainly the false teaching, with its Torah-centered approach to life that included either an exclusivist bent or a downplaying of the Gentile mission…Paul’s focus is on building a people of God who incorporate all people regardless of ethnic, social, or economic backgrounds. P. Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus, 177-78.
It may be that they [the false teachers] were consumed with genealogies because they restricted salvation along certain ethnic lines (1 Tim 1:4)…When Paul says that God desires all to be saved (1 Tim 2:4), and that Christ was the ransom for all (1 Tim 2:6), he may be responding to some who excluded Gentiles from salvation for genealogical reasons…Titus 2:11 should be interpreted along similar lines…Paul counters Jewish teachers (Tit 1:10,14-15; 3:9) who construct genealogies to exclude some from salvation. T. Schreiner, Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ, 184-85.
Back to Rauser:
Indeed, the notion that God is loving to all, a doctrine known among theologians by the fancy name “omnibenevolence”, would qualify for many as a basic axiom, a starting point for all further theological reflection.
According to a Catholic philosopher, that’s actually a theological innovation:
As such, it may be surprising to discover that theologians within the Calvinist tradition reject the doctrine of divine omnibenevolence.
If Rauser were intellectually serious, he’d interact with Paul Helm’s essay “Can God Love the World?” in chap. 8 of Nothing Greater, Nothing Better.
The other position stakes out a more unambiguous position by declaring without qualification that God does not love those he does not save; indeed, he hates them.
The love/hate lingo is a carryover from Mal 1:2-3. It’s a Hebrew idiom for select/reject. A hyperbolic rhetorical contrast.
And why does he hate them? I will argue in a subsequent post that the reasons are arbitrary. That is, he could just as easily have loved those he hates and hated those he loves as hated those he hates and loved those he loves. That, I would submit, is a deeply disturbing implication, both theologically and pastorally.
An alternate history doesn’t have the same set of people. An alternate history has different genealogies as well as different tradeoffs.
Hubner's dissimulation
Jamin Hubner has done a couple of recent posts. Among other things, he says:
But seriously, can you imagine if our judgments on people’s character and the reliability of their work was based solely on the reading of other people‘s opinions of them?...it. I don’t have to consult secondary sources on the work since I’m one to produce them.
That's simply a lie–which he keeps repeating ad nauseam. In addition to book reviews I've also cited Burge's op-ed pieces in Sojourners. That's Burge in his own words. And this is in the public domain:
No matter who or what group uses a particular source, that does not determine its truthfulness. The truth is true whether its used or abused, understood or misunderstood, popular or unpopular, etc.
i) That's fine if you already know that your source is truthful. But we generally turn to sources when we lack firsthand knowledge of the event. So the source is our source of information. In that case it would be credulous not to consider the quality of the source.
ii) A reporter's preexisting reputation is certainly germane to evaluating his credibility. Take Joseph Smith. The fact that he had a preexisting reputation as a charlatan (e.g. dabbled in the occult) rightly figures in how we evaluate his testimony.
We have to ask in situations like these: how does the author intend the source to be used? Since Tur (and Hays, who made the original accusation about Burge’s work being pro-Hamas) have not even read the original source themselves, they are incapable of even knowing what the author’s intention really is.
That's the fallacy of question-framing, where you act is if there's only one correct way of broaching the issue. But aside from book reviews, if Burge has also tipped his hand in other sources, you don't have to read his book to know his position. You can just as well get that from other things he's written.
All of this is a distraction from the truth and the main concerns that I’ve tried and contiually try to raise: whether or not “Israel” today is the “Israel” of OT...
A red herring–since I haven't used that argument.
...regardless of its continual cover-up of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Which begs the question.
Moreover, if Israel is engaged in a campaign of “ethic cleaning,” then it’s certainly a very inefficient campaign.
If there is some hidden pro-terrorist agenda behind this Wheaton NT professor’s work that we should know about, then perhaps that should be demonstrated before going any further.
A straw man. Obviously Burge doesn't see it that way. That's the nature of dupery. If you knew you were being duped, you wouldn't be a dupe.
But do any of these “reviews” (which I have looked at) really establish through adequate facts and documentation that this college professor is intentionally helping terrorists (a “shill for Hamas” promoting pro-Hamas “propaganda”) through his work or otherwise?
Notice the equivocation. Burge doesn't regard them as "terrorists," but as victims. He sees their response as self-defense.
Either Jamin is consciously caricaturing the objections or else he's so wrapped up in self-justification that he can't think clearly.
I’ve read the book! I know what’s in it.
And how is his vouching for the book different than a reviewer?
The burden of proof is to demonstrate that so-called pro-Hamas’ propaganda actually is pro-Hamas propaganda – if that’s what all of this is really about. (For me, it’s obviously more than that, esp. since I know that Burge’s assertions can/could have been substantiated by a number of other sources, as Burge says nothing profoundly new in the larger scheme of things.
i) Yes, he can cite other sources. For instance, he recently cited a thesis which contained supporting material like a video of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Seems to me that's a decidedly suspect source of information.
ii) Conversely, I've cited counterevidence. For instance:
That’s why I ignored this tangent on sources and sought to address the underlying presuppositions behind Hays’ violent reaction by asking him 3 simple questions, all three of which Hays (to my knowledge) has not to this day answered himself.
Like a lawyer asking "simple" questions.
(Oh, and I did just notice that this ‘Hamas Shill’ and Hamas ‘propagandist’ just wrote a new book endorsed by Craig Blomberg, Marshall, Longenecker and others).
So he's saying we should judge a book by hearsay?
Jamin continues to suffer from lack of responsible mentoring.
Sloppy philosophers
Eric Reitan says:
Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 6:00pm
Here is, for me, the big problem: God’s preordaining some sinners for reprobation is supposed to reflect God’s justice, which tempers His mercy and love (or the other way around?). The idea is that sin is such an intolerable affront to God’s holiness and majesty that divine justice demands that it be repudiated. And so God casts some sinners away forever as a display of His just wrath against sin, even as he elects others for salvation to display His mercy and benevolence.
The problem is this: In casting sinners away from His presence, He casts them away from the only thing that (according to the very theology underlying this theory) can overcome sin. Thus, God guarantees that this intolerable affront to His majest continues eternally in the souls of the damned. In short, the view essentially amounts to this: sin is so terrible that God decisively acts to guarantee that this intolerable thing continue in all its intolerability forever and ever. “What you’re doing is so inconceivably unacceptable that I am going to make absolutely sure that there is no way for you to ever stop doing it!”
And making sure that this intolerable affront to His holiness never stops is supposed to be God’s justifying reason for not electing all, and so for truncating the scope of his benevolence? Is that a coherent understanding of divine justice?
I think a variant of this problem obtains not only for Calvinists, but for any adherents to that understanding of hell according to which the God-justifying purpose for damnation is to justly punish sin. It is not a problem for those understandings of hell more like C.S. Lewis’s, in which damnation is a regrettable outcome of divine respect for the free choices of rational creatures.
But if I go on, I’ll end up summarizing John’s and my entire book in a blog comment, and then no one will buy it even when it comes out in the affordable paperback version…
i) First off, I’d like to thank Reitan for sparing us the need to read his book. Given the quality of his summarized argument, it would be poor stewardship of time and money to invest in the book.
ii) I’d also like to make a general observation: in theory, philosophers ought to be more logical than folks who lack formal training in philosophy. A large part of philosophy involves spotting fallacious arguments.
Yet, in practice, philosophers frequently use their training to retroactively justify their prejudice. This is often the case in political philosophy, but it spills over into other branches. They use their training to rationalize positions they didn’t arrive at rationally. Reason in the service of emotion.
iii) As for Reitan’s argument (such as it is), he tries to contrive an artificial dilemma by casting the issue in terms of tolerance. As he frames it, the Calvinist God tolerates the intolerable. Hence, Reformed theism is self-contradictory.
iv) But he’s burning a straw man. In Calvinism, “sin” is not “intolerable” to God. “Sinners” are not intolerable to God.
What’s “intolerable” (if you wish to put it that way, which may not be the best way to put it) isn’t sin, but injustice. Isn’t sin, but allowing sin to go unpunished. What’s “unacceptable” isn’t the existence of sinners, but justice denied. Sooner or later, the scales of justice must be righted.
It not a question of “overcoming” sin, but exposing sin for what it is, then meting out a suitable punishment. That, in turn, reveals the moral character of evil–for the punishment fits the crime.
v) Put another way, in Reformed theodicy, evil is “acceptable” to God as a means, but not as an end. Evil has an instrumental value in God’s plan.
Something can be evil in its own right, but also be a source of good. The Crucifixion is a paradigm-example.
vi) Finally, Reitan is a universalist, to that’s his underlying objection to Calvinism.
Did Matthew And Luke Think They Were Writing History?
Amy-Jill Levine recently wrote an editorial about Christmas for the Washington Post. She makes no effort to interact with the counterarguments to her position. Her article is largely about the allegedly unhistorical genre of the infancy narratives. See my post on that subject here.
Why does a New Testament scholar like Levine put forward a view that's so contrary to the historical evidence? And why is the public so easily misled by arguments like Levine's and so poorly prepared to argue against her position?
Why does a New Testament scholar like Levine put forward a view that's so contrary to the historical evidence? And why is the public so easily misled by arguments like Levine's and so poorly prepared to argue against her position?
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
On the eve of Iowa
I’ve said a lot about the individual candidates. Let’s take stock one more time.
Gingrich
Like Data and Lore, there are two of him: good Gingrich and bad Gingrich. Like The Three Faces of Eve, you never know which personality will emerge.
Good Gingrich is the iconoclast who challenges the conventional wisdom. Who questions a false premise. Who shakes up the establishment. Examples of good Gingrich are his positions on the federal judiciary and the so-called Palestinians.
Bad Gingrich is the pundit who contradicts himself because he talks too much, because he’s seduced by academic fads, because he lacks an ideological center. The political precession of the equinoxes.
Perry
I think Perry has good instincts. I think he’d be better than Romney. But on national and international issues, he comes across as a psychic or faith-healer who lost his earpiece. That blank look when he can't hear the backstage advisor whispering his cues.
Romney
Romney and Gingrich are a study in contrasts. Gingrich has a disturbing capacity to self-destruct.
But I prefer him to Romney. He had more of a conservative core than Romney–who has none.
Romney is less likely than Gingrich to implode. That’s both a strength and a weakness. He’s timid, cautious. Plays it safe.
The downside of being risk-averse is that he doesn’t generate any excitement. He’s so predictable and scripted. It’s like the difference between live TV (where anything can happen), and prerecorded TV–which edits out the flubs.
Romney would handle himself well in a debate with Obama. Smooth, affable, unflappable.
But is that enough? Wouldn’t that makes it sound like a discussion between two reasonable men? We need a candidate who can draw blood in a debate with Obama.
Enter Gingrich. Gingrich is scrappy. A street-fighter. He’d try to destroy Obama in debate. If he succeeded (and he has the ability to pull it off), Obama would stagger out of the debate like a battered boxer. I think that would be far more damaging to Obama’s image than a gentlemanly debate between Obama and Romney.
Ron Paul
I actually like some of his proposals. For instance, he wants to ax the departments of energy, housing and urban development, commerce, interior, and education. He also wants to let young workers opt out of Social Security and shift Medicaid and Food Stamps to states in the form of block grants.
Great ideas!
But therein lies the problem. Those actions require Congressional authorization. He’s been serving in Congress on-and-off since the mid-70s. If these proposals were doable, why hasn’t he done it by now?
Even when he’s right, he’s ineffectual. If all I cared about was ideological purity, Bachmann would be preferable to Ron.
Santorum
He’s my favorite candidate. I do think he needs to recalibrate his position on foreign policy. Nation-building was a bust. You can’t keep pouring resources down a bottomless drain. You need to show tangible results. Measurable progress.
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