Possibly Obvious

The Spiritual Resources of Weekend Fisher have recently been for those dealing with dying; and they're v.g.i. ... b.t.w. though, Jean Kazez ended an article on dealing with dying (People Don't Die, Do they?) on this thoughtful note:

We still haven’t had to cope with a major loss. But, when the time comes, we will cope with our feelings without any waffling. “He had a wonderful life. We’ll always remember him. He’s a part of us.” These platitudes don’t remove the pain of loss, but they’re the truth, as some of us see it. There’s no place but here. We think.

What I don't get is how those so-called platitudes (trite or banal remarks) aren't more like waffle (evasive or vague speech). Was his life really full of wonders; and will they always remember him? But I can't even make sense of his being (present tense) a part of them. Of course, it's important what valued others think of one, and so one's sense of who one is is already bound up with one's sense of what such people think of one; but surely that would not make one part of them, not even if there was nothing else left (and not even if they are their thoughts, and one is present in propositions about oneself, and their thoughts are propositional).
......I also suspect that the truth is rather that "here" refers, either to all that the speaker's location is part of (which might include parallel universes, or even transcendental realms) or else only to the known part (and the presumption that that is all there is is rather arrogant), so that much of the force of Jean's thought might arise via equivocation (or waffle) ...a bit like saying that only physical things exist, and then defining "physical" so that if there was a transcendental creator of the Big Bang, ex nihilo and deliberately, for example, then that God would be a purely physical thing (which is—tellingly?—as good a defence of Physicalism as many professional philosophers can manage nowadays).
......On a deeper note, to end my facile post (since logic is concerned with truth, which is concerned with what there is), the following, from a letter from Stephen Bilynskyj to Peter van Inwagen (taken from page eleven of the latter's The Problem of Evil), belies nicely the idea that having the hope of Heaven encourages thoughtlessness.

As a pastor, I believe that some sort of view of providence which allows for genuine chance is essential in counseling those facing what I often call the “practical problem of evil”. A grieving person needs to be able to trust in God's direction in her life and the world, without having to make God directly responsible for every event that occurs. The message of the Gospel is not, I believe, that everything that occurs has some purpose. Rather, it is that God's power is able to use and transform any event through the grace of Jesus Christ.

Omniscience and the Odyssey theodicy

Mawson argues in Divine Eternity (forthcoming in Int.J.Phil.Rel.) that Open theism (that God's future is to some extent open) implies that God is not omniscient and hence not omnipotent either, whence God's goodness would be, to some extent, a matter of luck! So in Omniscience and The Odyssey Theodicy I defend Open theism against that charge—hopefully introducing to a wider world (this world is so odd) my yearling theodicy (that we asked to be born because we wanted to be the instruments of a scientific investigation into God’s uniqueness) as part of that defence (since evil is less of a problem for theism if we asked to be born, which we could more plausibly have done if God is everlasting rather than timeless).

Tri-via

(a) The Best Visual Illusion of 2008 appears today (also interesting, a Window-shade illusion; not to mention the checkerShadow). [b] Almost stimulating, was simulated sex with a snail (an easy illusion, since Isabella looks like a bank manager); also awesomely, Galaxies collide. <c> How science works (comically), and how it categorically does not (lolly); also, the nature of the Catastrophe (more lolly).

Haiku; by who?

......Yellow butterfly
fluttering—fluttering on
......over the ocean.

The best haiku ever (at least in translation)—I read it years ago and cannot now recall who wrote it (and Google was unusually unenlightening); does anyone out here know?

Happy Talk

The final bit of my tryptich, Infinite Probes, will be appearing (in a graduate session) at the Joint Sessions in Aberdeen in July (dream come true :-)

April is...

how The Waste Land began, of which :>this<: is my hermeneutical reading (too busy polishing unpublishable papers to write more :-l

The Philosophers' Stone

An old, and rather silly paradox: Can almighty God create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it? If He did create such a stone (the paradox goes) then there would be something that He could not do (i.e. lifting it), but that cannot be because (since He is almighty) there is nothing that He cannot do. Hence He did not (and will not) create such a stone—but therefore there is something that He cannot do (i.e. creating such a stone). Consequently (the paradox concludes) no such omnipotent being (a being for which nothing is impossible) could exist; but several replies are possible, most obviously that "omnipotence" should be defined in such a way that impossible things do not have to be done by omnipotent beings. The paradoxical reasoning can then be taken to be showing that such a stone is impossible—since an omnipotent being could move any possible weight of stone, so no such stone is a possible object. It is certainly hard to get any sense of what such a stone would be like (e.g. were it filling all of an infinite space, it could not then be lifted, but then it would not be too heavy, so much as too big to lift).
......God might even be contradictory (so powerful His powers transcend our mundane powers of linguistic description) of course, although I personally think of God as almighty in the sense of His being able to do (at least) whatever He wants with His Creation (which is at least this Cosmos) and presumably much more besides (although presumably God could not do what He did not want to do with His Creation, and the idea of God possibly wanting something that He does not actually want is rather obscure, whence the modalities are also obscure); but what strikes me about this paradox is how odd it is, to think of Him lifting stones at all (like He was like Hercules, only bigger)—far more impressive is His creation ex nihilo of a pebble. Now, traditionally God not only creates, but also at each moment keeps all created things in existence, which raises the question: Why bother with all of that (in the case of purely material objects, like stones) just to generate the phenomena sensed by sentient creatures; why not generate the latter directly? One theistic argument for Idealism (the topic of this fortnight's Philosophers' Carnival) is that material objects do seem a bit pointless (e.g. they might be less deceptive than mere appearances, but only if modern physics has got them very wrong).
......Creation itself seems a bit gratuitous though; so, one might ask: Could almighty God create an object that He did not have to keep in existence, from moment to moment, which was instead self-sustaining, to some extent? Maybe (since that does not seem to be contradictory), but God is also traditionally eternal in the sense of existing atemporally (a bit like numbers do), so it is hard to see what difference that would amount to. Still, for all we know God (and all Creation) exists more in the manner of a person—fully (if mutably) in the immense present—whence we might ask: Could almighty God create an object so self-sustaining that even He could not destroy it? He can create souls (as well as stones) it seems, and with such free will that even Satan is a possible object; and the giving of such freedoms, to His creatures, involves the voluntary limiting of (what we naturally regard as) His powers, within Creation (on this view of eternity), so maybe He could—such an object does not seem to be contradictory. Maybe, like the aforementioned stone, it is no more than a Philosopher's plaything, but such a perfectly indestructible object could conceivably be something that God would want to create (maybe our lovely Creator knows better than to be certain that Beings with powers akin to His, but of which He is, as yet, unaware, do not exist).

Atheism and Explanation

New to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy this week, was a thought-provoking article on Mathematical Explanation; and this week also saw the start of this year's Gifford Lectures (previously, e.g., the excellent Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed) here in Glasgow, on Religion and Its Recent Critics. And so, since next week's Carnival (for philosophy bloggers) favours Idealism, I thought I'd compare a popular atheistic claim—that not believing in God is negative (so that the onus is on those who believe)—with the negativity of not believing in material objects, or in natural laws. Is the lack of evidence for material objects (evidence sufficient to justify introducing things of such an ineffably strange kind into our ontology) sufficient to justify Idealism; and is the lack of evidence for natural laws (over and above the observed regularities) sufficient to justify Humean Supervenience? Idealists and Humeans can argue that it should be, if they want to; but do we actually find many atheists either (i) making the effort to be Idealists or Humeans, or (ii) being in possession of evidence sufficient to justify the corresponding positive beliefs? Regarding the latter, it would hardly be good enough to claim that such beliefs are universal (Berkeley and David Lewis being the obvious counter-examples) or self-evident (similarly); but the former option is just silly—Idealism is ideally suited to theistic explanations, while the evolution of minds in a world of Humean Supervenience would be too odd, no?

The Human Paradox

If we saw a lot of black crows (and no other kind) we might well believe that all crows are black, if we wanted to; but we could quite rationally (although we would naturally find it quite absurd to) believe in Humean Supervenience, and hence that there was no evidence for such a belief (and either way the albino crow would come as no great surprise). Facts, in other words, are what we want to believe—we want to believe the facts, because we value truth; and truth is useful, but what about when it isn't? On a Naturalistic view of humans, we value truth because to do so is so useful, in general, that primitive hominids that didn't do so died out; whence we value it even when it would be more convenient for us not to. Facts force themselves upon us as true. Snow is white, it seems, whence we believe that it is.
......That tree is pink with blossom—is its pinkness (as it seems to be) something that is out there, in the world, or is it in our heads? Naturalists believe that only the photons are out there (or rather, somewhere that corresponds to the "out there" that is similarly in our heads). And does the objective reality (for Naturalists) of particles in spacetime contain some thing that is that tree? Logically that seems unlikely; but still, does it really matter? Such is how reality is represented in our brains (evolution has probably led to the world as we perceive it being a good enough map of reality for our natural purposes). Winter seems to be closed in on itself; loved ones seem to shine—such a useful map, and presumably evolution has similarly led to moral axioms being included in our mental maps.
......Having in it some moral axioms (such as the Golden Rule) would have similarly aided our survival, as would a tendency to accept the more local rules; we value loyalty, as well as objectivity (and hominids too lacking in either would have died out). So maybe a propensity to form such beliefs as that God is watching us arose naturally. Does such a God exist, the Naturalist wonders; but still, why worry about that? Such a belief should help the worst of us to behave better (and to be more readily identified, and possibly corrected) and anyway, the best of us regard the evidence for its falsity as inconclusive. But (the Naturalist persists) surely it matters whether or not that belief is true? Well, if it's part of our natural representation then surely (for Naturalists) it's at least as true as that that tree is pink.
......The human paradox is that, even were Naturalism true, the value of our natural beliefs in something like God (assuming that we humans have such beliefs) would hardly be outweighed by the value of such objectivity as we could ever attain. We do of course value truth, but many atheists do value loyalty more (in the confusion out there), while many believers regard the Naturalistic versions of objective truth (e.g. scientific modelling) as mere shadows of objective reality—if the truth is that God is watching us, then there really could be an objective truth, one worthy of our valuing it absolutely (and there could more easily be some logical object that is that tree, only approximately analysable into particles).

Jesus lives; is Christianity a corpse?

The title derives from Jeff's deep thought, but this post is about homophobia in particular (some shallow thoughts upon which made the Philosophers' Carnival this biweek, although the following was inspired by some words of Obama's (via Parableman's discussion of them), which seemed reasonable (and certainly not homophobic) but which reminded me that I would reject any hypothesis (e.g., that one should take the whole Bible seriously) that implied that I ought to be anti-gay—I wouldn't have to reject it, insofar as I'm not gay (although I guess that, even if I was, I could just accept that I was in a fallen state), but since my conscience informs me that homosexuality is not wrong (however unattractive it may seem (and I do have homophobic tendencies)), hence any such hypothesis would seem wrong (I've yet to find any doctrine strong enough to withstand gut instincts (although I might just be too fallen to have a fully functioning conscience about such things)))...
......Recently I've been contemplating the content of the concept of Creation, the idea that this universe (and its people) were deliberately Created (that we are kept in being by the relatively almighty and all-knowing, and transcendentally immaterial person who made us up ex nihilo in He/r image), and the most useful metaphor that I've found for Creation is, well, some blend of our compositions (musical, poetic, prosaic and so forth) and our dreams: God is, to some degree, according to such analogical interpretations of "Creation" (and how else should we interpret that word?), to this world as we are to our dreams (and if we're made in He/r image then such an analogy would make sense, would even be sound insofar as we allowed for our being finite, where S/he is infinite etc.). So, the question arises, what is the metaethical content of that metaphor (for Creation)?
......After all that intro, what follows is surely far too weak (so it needs your comments!); but just as our physics would (on the posited view of Creation) be describing nothing more immutable than the stuff of (this episode of) this divine paradream (so to speak), for all that we do not, of course, regard it as variable, not in our day to day lives (cf. my comments here), so it would be apposite for our ethics to be similarly sensitive, for all that we should not ordinarily regard it as flexible (of course (e.g. homosexuality was never wrong, I feel))—we naturally project our ethics onto everything (as we project our percepts onto objects, seeing them as coloured), but surely our morality should adapt as society evolves, especially when such changes are divinely inspired (the eating of pigs, disloyalty towards the king, the emancipation of women and so forth). And would other sorts of sapient creatures (apes, dolphins, angels and so forth) have to have a morality like ours, in order to be good? Probably there is a continuum of ethical law, from God's own definition of the Good, to local conventions within He/r paradreams. And it strikes me that even those Christians who are anti-gay would, many of them, allow for the possibility of an acceptable incest (in order to retain the literality of Genesis) on such grounds as that our biochemistry might, in those days, have been less corrupted.