Monday, February 12, 2018
Sisyphus
A perfect image of meaninglessness, of the kind we are seeking, is found in the ancient myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus, it will be remembered, betrayed divine secrets to mortals, and for this he was condemned by the gods to roll a stone to the top of a hill, the stone then immediately rolled back down, again to be pushed to the top by Sisyphus, to roll down once more, and so on again and again, forever. Now in this we have the picture of meaningless, pointless toil, of a meaningless existence that is absolutely never redeemed. It is not even redeemed by a death that, if it were to accomplish nothing more, would at least bring that idiotic cycle to a close…Nothing ever comes of what he is doing, except simply more of the same…a repetitious, cyclic activity that never comes to anything.Now let us ask: Which of these pictures does life in fact resemble? And let us not begin with our own ives, for here both our prejudices and wishes are great, but with the life in general that we share with the rest of creation. We shall find, I think, that it all has a certain pattern, and that this pattern is by now easily recognized.We can begin anywhere, only saving human existence for our last consideration. We can, for example, begin with any animal. It does not matter where we begin, because the result is going to be exactly the same.Thus, for example, there are caves in New Zealand, deep and dark, whose floors are quiet pools and whose walls and ceilings are covered with soft light. As one gazes in wonder in the stillness of these caves it seems that the Creator has reproduced there in microcosm the heavens themselves, until one scarcely remembers the enclosing presence of the walls. As one looks more closely, however, the scene is explained. Each dot of light identifies an ugly worm, whose luminous tail is meant to attract insects from the surrounding darkness. As from time to time one of these insects draws near it becomes engaged in a sticky thread lowered by the worm, and is eaten. This goes on month after month, the blind worm lying there in the barren stillness waiting to entrap an occasional bit of nourishment that will only sustain it to another bit of nourishment until…Until what? What great thing awaits all this long and repetitious effort and makes it worthwhile? Really nothing. The larva just transforms itself finally to a tiny winged adult that lacks even mouth parts to feed and lives only a day or two. These adults, as soon as they have mated and laid eggs, are themselves caught in the threads and are devoured by the cannibalistic worms, often without having ventured into the day, the only point to their existence having now been fulfilled. This has been going on for millions of years, and to no end other than that the same meaningless cycle may continue for another millions of years.All living things present essentially the same spectacle. The larva of a certain cicada burrows in the darkness of the earth for seventeen years, through season after season, to emerge finally, into the daylight for a brief flight, lay its eggs, and die–this all to repeat itself during the next seventeen years, and so on to eternity. Robert Taylor, "The Meaning of Life," E. Klemke & S. Cahn, eds. The Meaning of Life: A Reader (Oxford, 3rd. ed., 2008), chap. 12.
That's reminiscent of the famous opening to Ecclesiastes. That narrator was an existentialist 3000 years ago.
This has seemed to many human observers to be the very model of absurdity, an utterly pointless existence…The best response to this argument is that it projects human needs and sensibilities onto other species. The human observer simply does not have the salmon's point of view. Joel Feinberg, "Absurd Self-Fulfillment," E. Klemke & S. Cahn, eds. The Meaning of Life: A Reader (Oxford, 3rd. ed., 2008), 163-64.
i) There's an element of truth to Feinberg's observation. Atheists who contend that a good God wouldn't create a world characterized by predation commit that fallacy. Animals don't share the viewpoint of the human observer, who's aghast at the law of the jungle.
ii) But in another respect, Feinberg misses the point. The comparison is based on dramatic irony: the fact that human observers are aware of something that insects and other animals–even higher animals–are not. And from a secular standpoint, we're chained to the same Sisyphean predicament as other organisms.
iii) From a Christian standpoint, there are similarities as well as differences. There's a robotic repetition to the lifecycle of plants and animals. If there was nothing behind it, no benevolent intelligence, then universal nihilism would reign. Likewise, if humans suffer the same fate. If we make our replacements, then pass into oblivion.
iv) From a Christian standpoint, the cycles of nature illustrate boundless divine ingenuity–as well as benevolence, by providing a stable environment in which humans can live and flourish. And they furnish a point of contest. We share many things in common with animals. Yet God has set us apart by the gift of consciousness and immortality. Animals are ephemeral in a way humans are not. Animals are a means to an end, whereas humans are an end in themselves.
Sunday, February 11, 2018
Men on strike
i) I'm going to make a few anecdotal observations about feminism. I believe there's increasing evidence that many men have given up on marriage. Feminism isn't entirely to blame for this. Before women's lib, there was still lots of marital unhappiness. Unrequited love. The Sorrows of Young Werther and all that. In a fallen world, longing, rejection, and domestic malaise are inevitable. However, feminism has exacerbated those problems.
ii) It's my impression that as a rule, men are easier to please than women. Take two examples. I've spoken with beauticians who say women customers are tougher customers than men. Harder to satisfy. Harder to get it right.
Likewise, take the cliche of the wife who's always nagging her husband to fix things or make improvements around the house on the weekend.
iii) Some professional women are offended by professional men who marry down. Offended that men are so easily satisfied in a wife. Offended that men aren't more finicky when it comes to picking a mate. To them, that means the man isn't treating the woman as an equal.
This, however, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of normal male psychology. Or a refusal to even attempt to understand normal male psychology.
Many men thrive on competition. However, they like to compete with other…men.
They don't view their wife or prospective wife as a colleague. They're not looking for a woman to play that role. They're not looking to a woman to be interchangeable with a man in that regard. In some cases they may enjoy a good argument with a female colleague, or interviewer, or lawyer from the opposing firm, but that's at work.
Although they enjoy competition, they don't want marriage to be another competitive arena. When they come home, they want to put the battlefield behind them and just relax. Let down. Home is supposed to be an escape.
They don't want to be in a performance situation 24/7. They want some down time. To interject a competitive dynamic into marriage is the very thing they wish to avoid. That's something they look for in a man, not a woman. A woman is supposed to be different. If she's not different, what's the point of having a long-term relationship with a woman in the first place?
Throughout the week, they test their mettle against other men. They aren't hankering to test their mettle against their wife.
We all want a place to go where we're just accepted. Where we don't have to prove ourselves to anyone. Among other things, family is supposed to be a retreat. I don't have to impress you. I can just be myself. And I'll return the favor.
Cosmic theater of the absurd
I'm going to comment on some statements by Thomas Nagel, in. E. Klemke & S. Cahn, eds. The Meaning of Life: A Reader (Oxford, 3rd. ed., 2008), chap. 13.
Most people feel on occasion that life is absurd, and some feel it vividly and continually. Yet the reasons usually offered in defense of this conviction are patently inadequate; they could not really explain why life is absurd. Why then do they provide a natural expression for the sense that it is?Consider some examples. It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now. In particular, it does not matter now that in a million years nothing we do now will matter. Moreover, even if what we did now were going to matter in a million years, how could that keep our present concerns from being absurd? If their mattering now is not enough to accomplish that, how would it help if they mattered a million years from now?Whether what we do now will matter in a million years could make the crucial difference only if its mattering in a million years depended on its mattering, period. But then to deny that whatever happens now will matter in a million years is to beg the question against its mattering, period; for in that sense one cannot know that it will not matter in a million years whether (for example) someone now is happy or miserable, without knowing that it does not matter, period.What we say to convey the absurdity of our lives often has to do with space or time…Our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead any minute. But of course none of these evident facts can be what makes life absurd, if it is absurd. For suppose we lived forever; would not a life that is absurd if it lasts seventy years be infinitely absurd if it lasted through eternity?
i) It isn't clear to me if Nagel thinks these are different reasons or variations on the same basic reason.
It's true that a life that's intrinsically absurd if it lasts seventy years will still be absurd if it lasted through eternity. This, however, doesn't mean that how, whether, or when something ends is irrelevant to its absurd or meaningful status. For instance, some movies and TV dramas have a plot that's initially and deliberately puzzling. The point is to stimulate the viewer's curiosity. The plot intentionally raises more questions than it answers. At that stage of the plot, multiple interpretations are possible. If the plot is well-crafted, it will eventually tie up the loose ends, in logical, yet unexpected ways, with clever, surprising plot twists.
If, however, the series is canceled before the director has time to develop the various plotlines and bring them to culmination, then the series would be absurd. The abortive ending didn't allow the plot to achieve its telos.
Or take a composer who dies in the middle of a composition. The musical fragment is tantalizing, but absurd because we don't know where it's going.
By the same token, the future is not irrelevant to whether a human life has significance in the present. Any cutoff may be arbitrary. Any termination may frustrate its telos.
ii) This also goes to the distinction between temporal ends and teleological ends. If the pattern lies in the whole rather than the parts, then a teleological end may be temporally unending. Take a flower garden as it passes through the four seasons. Because that's a cyclical process, there's no logical starting-point or end-point. You can break into the cycle at any point in the cycle. You can visit the garden at any time of year. Spring and fall may be the prettiest. Sometimes summer is just as pretty. Winter is more austere, but a necessary preparation for spring.
If, by the same token, the significance of a human life lies in the whole, in the overall pattern, then oblivion may nullify its value. But this also goes to the difference between secular and Christian anthropology. From a secular standpoint, human life doesn't exist for a reason. It just so happens that life is cyclical. Life evolved in such a way that once you reach sexual maturity, create and raise offspring, you've outlived your usefulness. You created your replacements. You dwindle and die. It's just repetition for repetition's sake–the byproduct of a mindless, mechanical process.
From a Christian standpoint, by contrast, the lifecycle is somewhat artificial. We're created for eternity. Although that generally includes a family life, that doesn't exhaust human destiny. God is a storyteller with infinite imagination. He never runs out of good ideas. The plot continues to unfold…forever.
Since justifications must come to an end somewhere, nothing is gained by denying that they end where they appear to, within life…
That simply begs the question. In fairness, this was an early essay (1971). He wrote it in his mid-30s. In his mid-70s, he expressed dissatisfaction with atheism (Mind & Cosmos).
It would be different if we could not step back and reflect on the process, but were merely led from impulse to impulse without self-consciousness. But human beings do not act solely on impulse…Each of us lives his own life–lives within himself twenty-four hours a day. What else is he supposed to do–live someone else's life? Yet humans have the special capacity to step back and survey themselves, and the lives to which they are committed…they can view it sub specie aeternitatis…We see ourselves from the outside.
That's the conundrum for atheists. According to naturalistic evolution, we're the only animals smart enough to realize the absurdity of human existence. We lack the blissful ignorance of other animals in that regard. Our intellect is our curse, because we're just smart enough to be conscious of our utter irrelevance. Like a cruel hoax which the universe played on us. That's our great discovery.
Extragalactic creators
In this post I'm going to interact with Robert Nozick's contention that even if there is a God, the value of human existence isn't conferred by God. I believe Nozick was a secular Jew:
One prevalent view, less so today than previously, is that the meaning of life or people's existence is connected with God's will, with his design or plan for them. Put roughly, people's meaning is to be found and realized in fulfilling the role allotted to them by God. If a superior being designed and created people for a purpose, in accordance with a plan for them, the particular purpose he had for them would be what people are for.First, we should ask whether any and every role would provide meaning and purpose to human lives. If our role is to supply CO2 to the plants, or to be the equivalent within God's plan of fixing a mildly annoying leaky faucet, would this suffice?…Clearly, what is desired is that we be important; having merely some role or other in God's plan does not suffice. The purpose God has for us must place us at or near the center of things, of his intentions and goals. Moreover, merely playing some role in a central purpose of God's is not sufficient–the role itself must be a central or important one.Indeed, we want more than an important role in an important purpose; the role itself should be positive, perhaps even exalted. If the cosmic role of human beings was to provide a negative lesson to some others ("Don't act like them") or to provide needed food for passing intergalactic travelers who were important, this would not suit our aspirations…There are two ways we individually or collectively could be included in God's plan. First, our fulfilling our role might depend upon our acting in a certain way, upon our choices or cooperation; second, our role might not depend at all upon our actions or choices–willy-nilly we shall serve…About the first way we can ask why we should act to fulfill God's plan, and about both ways we can ask why fitting God's plan gives meaning to our existence. That God is good (but also sometimes angry?) shows that would be good to carry out his plan. (Even then, perhaps, it need not be good for us–mightn't the good overall plan involve sacrificing us for some greater good?) Yet how does doing good provide meaning?How can playing a role in God's plan give one's life meaning? What makes this a meaning-giving process? It is not merely that some being created us with a purpose in mind. If some extragalatic civilization created us with a purpose in mind, would that by itself provide meaning to our lives? Nor would things be changed if they created us so that we also had a feeling of indebtedness and a feeling that something was asked of us. It seems it is not enough that God have some purpose for us–his purpose itself must be meaningful. If it were sufficient merely to play some role in some external purpose, then you could give meaning to your life by fitting it to my plans or to your parents' purpose in having you. In these instances, however, one immediately questions the meaningfulness of the other people's purposes. How do God's purposes differ from ours so as to be guaranteed meaningfulness and and importance?The purposes parents have when they plan to have children…do not fix the obligations of the child…He is under no obligation to cooperate, he is not owned by his parents even though they made him. Once the child exists, it has certain rights that must be respected (and other rights it can assert when able)…Nor do children owe to their parents whatever they would have conceded in bargaining before conception (supposing this had been possible) in order to come into existence. Since children don't owe their parents everything that leaves their lives still a net plus, why do people owe their ultimate creator and sustainer any more?…We don't cost an omnipotent God anything, there's nothing to pay back to him and so no need to.Once you come to feel your existence lacks purpose, there is little you can do…The task required all of my knowledge, skill, intuitive powers, and craftsmanship. It seemed to me that my whole existence until then had been merely a preparation for this creative activity, so completely did it draw upon and focus all of my experience, abilities, and knowledge. I was excited by the task and fulfilled, and when it was completed I rested, untroubled by purposelessness.But this contentment was, unfortunately, only temporary. For when I came to think about it, although it had taxed my ingenuity and energy to make the heavens, the earth, and the creatures upon it, what did it all amount to?…For my sole purpose then was to give meaning to my existence…Such questions press me toward the alternative I tremble to contemplate, yet to which I find my thoughts recurring. The option of ending it all…To imagine God himself facing problems about the meaningfulness of his existence forces us to consider how meaning attaches to his purposes…For if it were possible for man and God to shore up each other's meaningfulness in this fashion, why could not two people do this for each other as well?Nor will it help us to escalate up a level, and say that if there is a God who has a plan for us, the meaning of our existence consists in finding out what this plan asks of us and has in store for us.What is it about God's purposes that makes them meaningful? If our universe were created by a child from some other vast civilization in a parallel universe, if our universe were a toy it had constructed, perhaps out of prefabricated parts, it would not follow that the child's purposes were meaningful. E. Klemke & S. Cahn, eds. The Meaning of Life: A Reader (Oxford, 3rd. ed., 2008), chap. 19.
1. Nozick fails to distinguish between purpose, gratitude and/or obligation. In some cases they're separable and in some cases they can be combined.
For instance, suppose a country is in a fight for national survival. It sends a special ops unit on a suicide mission. If the unit succeeds, that will turn the tide in the war effort. However, the military doesn't tell the unit that they are going on a suicide mission.
On the one hand, their mission is clearly purposeful. They won't die in vain. Their actions saved their nation.
On the other hand, the fact that they were used and deceived as expendable pawns means they have no grounds to be grateful or dutiful to their superiors.
In principle, they might still be grateful for the opportunity to save their nation. And they might have knowingly volunteered for a suicide mission, if it had a good chance of success and was pivotal in the fortunes of the war effort.
ii) A sense of indebtedness is essential to social life. That intuition runs deep. But it's complex.
If a doctor or a lifeguard saves my life, I'm grateful, yet my gratitude is limited by the fact that he was just doing his job.
If a stranger saves my life, I'm inclined to be more grateful.
If a stranger risks his own life to save mine, I'm even more grateful.
To take another comparison, teenage boys have been known to perform dumb pranks. Suppose a student squirts water into the locker of another student. Suppose that after the prankster turns around, he sees a security camera trained on that bank of lockers. He's now afraid he'll be expelled.
In panic, he seeks out a classmate who's a computer whiz to hack into the system and delete the incriminated footage. This is a classmate he normally makes fun of as a hopeless nerd.
Suppose the geeky classmate agrees. The prankster should be grateful for several reasons:
i) He got out of trouble
ii) He got out of trouble even though he did something wrong
iii) A classmate did him a favor
iv) The classmate who did him a favor wasn't his friend
It's possible to get into trouble even when you did nothing wrong. In that situation, it's a relief to get out of trouble.
If, however, you deserve to be punished, but you're given a second chance, then that's a reason to be grateful.
Likewise, if someone treats you better than you treated them, if they help you out in a bind, then that's a reason to be grateful–since you're getting better than you deserve.
2. Filial duty is limited for a variety of reasons: Parents are humans just like us. They're just a few steps ahead of us on the lifecycle. But they're not superior beings. Moreover, that's how they came into the world, too.
3. Are the alien creators intellectually superior or merely technologically superior?
i) Even if they're intellectually superior, they're still finite beings who exist on the same continuum we do.
ii) More to the point, superior intelligence doesn't imply superior wisdom.
iii) Furthermore, obligation and gratitude depend on whether a creator is benevolent or malevolent. Take engineers (bionics, genetic engineering) who make a race of supersoldiers. The engineers aren't acting in the interests of the supersoldiers, who are expendable by design.
4. I don't think the significance of individual human lives depends on being at the center of God's plan or having a central role to play. Rather, it's sufficient that we be occupied by things that are suitable to the nature God has given us. Fixing drippy faucets hardly fulfills our social, emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic capacities. It has to be at the level of our natural endowment and potential.
5. Nozick's denial notwithstanding, why can't the meaning of our existence consist in discovering God's plan for our lives? For predestinarian traditions, God is like a novelistic who creates the characters, setting, and plot.
In the case of the elect, although life in a fallen world may be full of anguish, we are buoyed by the hope that eventually the worst will be behind us with nothing but good in store for all eternity. Every day I wake up with that expectation. Another day on the journey towards that destination. So long as I know God has a good plan for my life, then that gives me something to look forward to. Each day has it's surprises. God wrote that role just for me. It's a far more satisfying life than I could improvise on my own.
6. The specter of a god who creates in order to make his own existence meaningful dovetails with the anthropomorphic god of open theism.
Saturday, February 10, 2018
Talisman
Now Israel went out to battle against the Philistines. They encamped at Ebenezer, and the Philistines encamped at Aphek. 2 The Philistines drew up in line against Israel, and when the battle spread, Israel was defeated before the Philistines, who killed about four thousand men on the field of battle. 3 And when the people came to the camp, the elders of Israel said, “Why has the Lord defeated us today before the Philistines? Let us bring the ark of the covenant of the Lord here from Shiloh, that it may come among us and save us from the power of our enemies.” 4 So the people sent to Shiloh and brought from there the ark of the covenant of the Lord of hosts, who is enthroned on the cherubim. And the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were there with the ark of the covenant of God.
5 As soon as the ark of the covenant of the Lord came into the camp, all Israel gave a mighty shout, so that the earth resounded. 6 And when the Philistines heard the noise of the shouting, they said, “What does this great shouting in the camp of the Hebrews mean?” And when they learned that the ark of the Lord had come to the camp, 7 the Philistines were afraid, for they said, “A god has come into the camp.” And they said, “Woe to us! For nothing like this has happened before. 8 Woe to us! Who can deliver us from the power of these mighty gods? These are the gods who struck the Egyptians with every sort of plague in the wilderness. 9 Take courage, and be men, O Philistines, lest you become slaves to the Hebrews as they have been to you; be men and fight.”
10 So the Philistines fought, and Israel was defeated, and they fled, every man to his home. And there was a very great slaughter, for thirty thousand foot soldiers of Israel fell. 11 And the ark of God was captured, and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, died (1 Sam 4:1-11).
A winning formula for losing is to assume you can't lose. That happens in politics, economics, and sports. If you think you're unbeatable, that attitude makes it more likely that someone will beat you. That's because you underestimate your opponent. You get cocky and lazy.
Watching the Catholic church is like those sci-fi stories in which alien invaders take over by means of infiltration. They quietly replace humans with alien lookalikes. Your neighbors begin to change. Your coworkers begin to change. Even your spouse and kids begin to change. By the time you realize what's happening, it's too late. You're cornered and outnumbered.
Pious Catholics and Catholic apologists assume their denomination is invincible. They think Mt 16:18 is a promise to and for their denomination. The gates of hell will not prevail against the church of Rome.
In the meantime, outsiders like me watch as key institutions in Catholicism are co-opted by modernists. Catholic colleges and seminaries. The priesthood. The episcopate. All the way up to the pope. Like alien invaders who systematically replace humans with alien operatives.
Assuming your denomination can't be taken over is the very way your denomination can be taken over. Your false sense of security gives the modernists an opening. The Israelites thought the ark of the covenant made them undefeatable. And, ironically, that's why they got creamed.
All in a day's work
A stock objection to young-earth creationism is that too much is happening in Gen 2 to wedge into one day. Indeed, it describes daylight activities, so it has to be squeezed into about 12 hours, give or take, and that's unrealistic.
I think some of the strain can be relieved by recognition that, contextually, Adam didn't name every kind of animal on earth, but only animals that frequented the garden. But there are additional issues.
One striking difference between Gen 1 and Gen 2-3 is that unlike Gen 1, with its 7-day framework, Gen 2-3 lack temporal markers. Considered on its own terms, there's no indication long it took for incidents described in Gen 2 to happen. It doesn't say one thing happened at a particular hour, or day later, week later, month later, year later. There's some chronological progression, but no indication how long a particular incident took, or how soon after one incident another incident occurred. If all we had to go by was Gen 2, there'd be no reason to assume it all happened on the same day. Like Jonah, the action in Gen 2-3 reflects narrative compression.
So where does the pressure to wedge it into one day come from? Well, it comes from attempting to synchronize day 6 in Gen 1 with events in Gen 2. Since Gen 1 says mankind was made on day six, and Gen 2 recounts the creation of Adam and Eve, the assumption is that Gen 2 must be synchronized with day six in Gen 1–at least in regard to the origin of Adam and Eve.
There may be an element of truth to that, but I think it's simplistic. To take a comparison, consider the "discrepancy" between Gen 6:19 & 7:2. Yet that's not a real contradiction. Rather, that's what Mark Futato dubs the synoptic/resumptive-expansive technique, where the narrator introduces a subject in general terms, then talks about something else, then circles back to that subject, but qualifies the original statement with additional information. Gen 7:2 is the definitive statement, not 6:19.
With that compositional technique in view, while it's necessary to say that Adam was created on day six, I don't think it's necessary to confine all the activities in Gen 2 to day six. The creation of man would be initiated on day six, but needn't terminate on day six.
The description of day six in Gen 1 is a general statement that can be further modified by Gen 2–just as Gen 7:2 modifies the scope of 6:19. Indeed, a basic function of Gen 2 is to supplement Gen 1 by providing more detailed information regarding the creation of mankind. As such, I think the synchrony can be limited to the terminus ad quo rather than the terminus ad quem. Although Gen 2 overlaps with day six of Gen 1, they needn't coincide.
If we make that adjustment, then I think Gen 2 is consistent with young-earth creationism–although that adjustment is equally consistent with old-earth creationism.
Twilight
God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day (Gen 1:5).
The sequence of dusk followed by dawn is puzzling to commentators. Sarna thinks it reflects the Jewish calendar, where Passover and other festivals begin and end at sunset.
Dusk to dawn is a way of saying "night". The literary function may be to transition from one day to the next.
Sunlight is a positive theological metaphor. That's because humans are diurnal creatures who rely on eyesight. If we were nocturnal creatures, then sunlight wouldn't have the same emblematic significance.
The syntactical relation between v1 and v2 is disputed. If v1 is included in the events of the first day, then there was, in the absolute sense, a first day.
Because sunup and sundown are cyclical–indeed, paradigmatic examples of periodic phenomena–it seems like there's always another day before today. But according to one reading of Gen 1, if you step into the time machine, you can only go back as far as the first day. There's no day before that. Nothing before that. No time or space. There's God, but the time machine won't take you to God.
Twilight is ambiguous. Is it the beginning of a new day or the ending of the day? Will it get brighter or darker? If you woke up outside at twilight, could you tell if it was dawn or dusk?
If you had a sense of direction, you could infer that from the direction of the light. Of course, the significance of east and west in that regard is something we appreciate from experience. But if, like Adam, on the day he was made, we had no prior experience of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, we couldn't detect or predict what twilight represented. To experience the new world for the first time would be bewildering, in a nice way.
Friday, February 09, 2018
Aim low
Roger Olson recently posted "Why My Conversations with Calvinists are Rarely Productive".
What's ironic about his post is how it replicates the Street Epistemology of atheists. Fact is, most folks aren't good at defending their beliefs unless they do that for a living. That's hardly unique to lay Calvinists. That's true if you start grilling the average Christian.
That's especially true if you question them on the spot. That's why even someone as brilliant and educated as William Lane Craig engages in meticulous research for every debate, so that he will have prepared answers at the ready.
As a rule, when you quiz most folks on why they believe what they believe, it doesn't take long before they run out of answers. If you challenge Ben Shapiro, Michael Medved, or Mark Levin on their political beliefs, they can go several layers deep because they're smart, articulate, and do that for a living. They have lots of facts and figures at their disposal. But even they have to work full-time on those issues to stay on top of the issues.
By contrast, if you conduct man-on-the-street interviews, they usually bottom out very fast. That proves nothing regarding the truth of their beliefs.
Even for professional philosophers, it's hard work to provide a rigorous justification for your position.
If you attack soft targets, you get predictable results. That's true for just about anything. Freewill theists are no exception.
What sometimes happens is that you have a bright young cradle Christian who takes his faith for granted, suddenly finds himself in a situation where his faith is challenged, comes up short, then begins to relay his faith from the bottom up, one story at a time. Not everyone has the aptitude or opportunities to do that. But it's beneficial for others if they share the results of their experience.
It's funny how Olson acts as though his experience confirms his negative view of Calvinism. Acts as though he scored a coup. He's too hidebound to realize that you get the same result whenever you challenge people to justify their beliefs, unless that's their area of specialization. Some people have the talent, but not the training or leisure time.
Olsen is recycling objections that people like me have repeatedly refuted.
The ethics of football
Kirk Knudsen •
I have an entirely different take on this issue. I started playing football in 7th grade, and played every year through my senior year of college (10 years total), at a Bible college in MN. I never suffered a major injury playing football nor missed time for a football injury, and have never suffered a head injury playing football or basketball (which I played for 12 years). I coached high school football for three years following college. I greatly enjoy the game. I think it would be helpful in this post to differentiate the injury status/level of various levels of football. As far as I know, most who have played football only through high school do not have anywhere near the traumatic head injury levels or long term effects professionals see The game gets exponentially bigger, faster, and stronger for each level beyond high school. The speed, strength, weight, and total time invested/involved all greatly impact the short and long-term effects of head or any other injuries.
To me it seems unfairly narrow, as well as inaccurate to say the only two reasons people would watch football are money or that people enjoy seeing each other hurt each other. There is much strategy, coaching, teamwork, planning, and athleticism to be observed. Moves and counter-moves for those who know the game make for interesting and engaging scenarios as teams seek to adjust to and stop each other from what they are trying to do. The game moves fast, generally involves much scoring, and takes a great deal of thought, team work, athleticism, and strategy to do it well, plus in any given game there are many individual match-ups to observe. Those are just a few more reasons to watch it. I know many who greatly enjoy watching football, and I've not heard one of them say they enjoy watching someone get hurt. That seems like a point to demonize those who oppose your position on this topic, which doesn't seem fair or necessary to me.
For me personally, I have learned more about leadership, coaching, team work, dealing with adversity, discipleship, relationships, conflict management, and working with others you don't like in football than in any other single venture. Those lessons have been highly valuable in my now 20+ years of vocational church ministry. That by itself suggests there are many reasons to like and participate in football. I've never been paid in any form for playing, nor benefitted monetarily. In the three years I coached, I was paid $800 for two of the seasons, averaging 20+ hours per week from August into November. I coached because it gave me (then a youth pastor) access into kids lives and into our schools doing something I knew and loved.
I have no interest in soccer. As a college player, I was 6' 6" and weighed 285. That won't work in soccer. Soccer allows for basically one kind of body type and a comparatively narrow set of skills to succeed. Football offers opportunity for athletes of many different skill sets, sizes, and athletic abilities to participate and be successful. The teamwork required allows men to work together in their respective tasks and be highly successful even if they never touch the ball or if their long-term endurance isn't a great strength (to be a great soccer player, you need to have the ball with some regularity and you need great endurance).
I think there are concerns, and you address some of them for football (which also apply to other sports too). Players are starting too young and expected to invest far too much time too early in their lives into sports. I don't think it benefits us to have elementary aged kids playing extensive game schedules in any sport. Second, more time needs to be given by schools and organizations offering football to training coaches well, instead of letting any warm-body coach. If football coaches from the junior high level up were offered more training in how to coach and teach players to avoid head injuries (and injuries in general) I think it would go a long way towards minimizing the injury problems. Finally, I think football at all levels need to continue to penalize hits to and from the head more aggressively. If players start missing game time for head hits, and unsafe play, they will decrease.
Sacramental intention
In Catholic theology, right intent on the part of the officiant is a necessary condition of a valid sacrament. That raises an interesting question. Given the degree to which modernism pervades the Catholic priesthood and episcopate, how many priests and bishops who celebrate Mass subscribe to transubstantiation? How many even believe in the real presence?
If they don't assent to what the Eucharist represents, according to traditional Catholic theology, how can they exercise right intent when they consecrate the communion elements?
If not, then when faithful Catholics attend Mass, they aren't receiving a valid sacrament. The communicant isn't receiving sacramental grace. It's just plain old bread and wine.
Thursday, February 08, 2018
Papal dilemma
Ratzinger has expressed muted concern over the direction that his successor is taking the church. His diplomatic understatement no doubt reflects a much deeper dismay or panic. His life's work is unraveling.
Why doesn't he intervene more forcibly? Of course, at his age, he doesn't have the stamina for a knockdown drag out fight. But this is just a question of making public statements.
My guess is that he's be reticent because Francis presents an intractable papal dilemma. It's exceedingly rare to have two living popes. Suppose they have a very public disagreement over the fundamental direction of the church. Suppose Ratzinger says he's the voice of authentic Catholicism while Francis says he's the voice of authentic Catholicism? Which pope are faithful Catholics suppose to follow? Flip a coin?
I suspect Ratzinger doesn't say more because that would expose the Catholic conundrum. So long as this is a hypothetical scenario about contradictory popes, it's easier for Catholic apologists to paper over the divergence. But if you have two living popes at loggerheads, the system self-implodes.
It's a game of chicken: blink or head-on collision. Ratzinger can only oppose Francis by causing a track wreck that destroys the papacy. Mutual annihilation.
So there is no solution. At best, Catholicism was an idealistic theory. But things have come to a head. If you have two leaders at the top of the pyramid, and they give the faithful contradictory directions, there is no referee.
The pope was supposed to be the referee. When popes disagree, the practical incongruity of the system is exposed.
In one sense this is nothing new. There's plenty of diachronic contradiction between a former pontificate and a later pontificate. But when it's simultaneous, that brings the dilemma from the background to the foreground.
Civil war in Rome
If I didn't know any better, I'd almost suspect that Catholicism is a blueprint for anarchy:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archbishop-rebukes-top-cardinals-proposal-for-liturgical-blessing-for-homos
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archbishop-rebukes-top-cardinals-proposal-for-liturgical-blessing-for-homos
Is determinism unlivable?
I think that you’ve successfully identified a problem with determinism in general, Leif, of which Calvinism is but a specific instance, given the Calvinist’s view that God determines everything that happens.A determinist cannot live consistently as though everything he thinks and does is causally determined—especially his choice to believe that determinism is true! Thinking that you’re determined to believe that everything you believe is determined produces a kind of vertigo. Nobody can live as though all that he thinks and does is determined by causes outside himself. Even determinists recognize that we have to act “as if” we had free will and so weigh our options and decide on what course of action to take, even though at the end of the day we are determined to take the choices we do. Determinism is thus an unliveable view.This presents a real problem not just for the Calvinist, but for the naturalist. For insofar as naturalism implies that all our thoughts and actions are determined by natural causes outside ourselves, free will is an illusion. But we cannot escape this illusion and so must go on making choices as though we had free will, even though we don’t. Naturalism is thus an unliveable worldview.
i) It's hard to find much of an argument here. Even if libertarian freedom were true, some aspects of human experience are undoubtedly deterministic. For instance, when Craig hit adolescence, he found himself attracted to females. That's naturally caused by hormones. Is it unlivable to be casually determined to find women physically appealing? Empirical evidence would seem to suggest that men have found that pretty easy to live with!
ii) Or consider the role of habit in human behavior. We train our minds to remember certain tasks so that we don't have to consciously think about them. Like learning a foreign language, learning to play a musical instrument, learning to sightread music, learning to play a sport, learning the route from one place to another, learning to read a text. Much of this operates at a subliminal level. We've programmed our minds to do certain things automatically.
Now, if we had to stop and think about what we were doing, about how to do it, that might have a paralyzing effect–but of course, that defeats the purpose of forming mental habits! The whole point is to delegate that to the unconscious part of your mind so that you don't have to consciously execute every step in the process.
Is that kind of mental self-programming unlivable? Hardly. To the contrary, it would be unlivable if we couldn't free up our conscious attention span. It works because we don't have to be aware of it.
iii) How does Craig's argument actually disprove determinism? If determinism is true, then agents do in fact live consistently with that reality. They have no alternative. If determinism is true, then what they feel about it has no impact on the reality of their determinism. Their actions will be determined whether they know it or not.
If my beliefs and actions are determined, this doesn't imply that I know what the determinants are. I just make up my mind based on the conscious and subconscious factors that feed into belief-formation and decision-making.
If I knew ahead of time what I was determined to do, then that would introduce a countersuggestive dynamic. But a determined agent doesn't know in advance what he's been determined to do, so abstract belief in determinism has no particular impact on the outcome. And to the extent that belief in determinism affects the outcome, that in itself is just another determinant in the outcome.
iv) The fact that we consider alternate courses of action doesn't mean those are all viable options. After all, we can imagine many unrealistic courses of action. And their impossibility may not be apparent, if we don't act on them. In some cases their impossibility becomes apparent when we attempt to act on our choice. It turns out our choice was shortsighted and oversimplified the variables. In reality, there were many impenetrable barriers in the way of realizing our chosen pathway. Surely that's a commonplace of human experience. Has Craig never found his plans frustrated by uncooperative factors beyond his control?
Tapout
I'll comment on Tim Stratton's attempt to rebut my response:
Au contraire! Hays’s mistake is question-begging. He assumes predestination is equivalent with determinism…Thus, Hays begs the question (a logical fallacy) in favor of his favorite kind of predestination.
Stratton is hopelessly befuddled. He originally said, “Thus, the Calvinist assumes that the means by which God predestines all that He has decreed is via causal determinism.”
So he was attributing a position to Calvinism. Attempting to state what Calvinism represents.
It doesn't beg the question to use Calvinistic definitions when defining Calvinism! The question at issue isn't whether Calvinism is true or false, whether Molinism is true or false, but what Calvinism stands for. Stratton is so lacking in critical detachment that he can't accurately state the opposing position on its own terms. Instead, he confounds his own position with the opposing position when attempting to expound Calvinism.
Not only was he unable to see his blunder for himself, but even when I explain it to him, he repeats the same blunder. His elementary confusion has yet to sink in.
However, Molinists have offered a model demonstrating exactly *how* God can predestine all things without violating the libertarian free will of the creature! That is to say, Molinism offers a model of divine predestination which is not fully deterministic.
Molinism does no such thing. Rather, Molinism posits two controversial assumptions:
i) Human agents have libertarian freedom
ii) God has foreknowledge and counterfactual knowledge of human choices.
As John Martin Fischer explains, Molinism simply takes those two key assumptions for granted:
So, what Hays must do is argue and demonstrate exactly how the Molinist model fails — not merely assert that it is no good or assert that “predestination means the same thing as determinism.” That is, unless he is content with basing arguments on logical fallacies.
All I need to demonstrate is that Stratton's original response to Bignon was poorly-reasoned. That doesn't require me to disprove Molinism.
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