Omniscience and the Odyssey Theodicy

Improvement upon my response to Mawson's "Divine Eternity" is now here.

Where have you been?

Said the straight man, to the late man,
Where have you been?
I've been here, and I've been there,
And I've been in between.

I talk to the wind,
My words are all carried away,
I talk to the wind,
The wind does not hear,
The wind cannot hear.

That's how "I Talk To The Wind" begins, 1968

What is Logic?

It seems to me that what we mean, when we say that some reasoning is logical, is that it is the kind of reasoning that would always, if we started with nothing but some truths, take us to nothing but truths. It is, for example, logical for me to deduce that you are a human from the (presumed) truth that everyone reading this is human, because if all the objects of a certain kind have a certain property, then any particular object of that kind will have that property. Why is that the case? Well, it just seems to be self-evident. I suppose that I could show the self-evidence by drawing a lot of red dots: given those dots, each of them is, of course, red (and each of them is a dot). Such reasoning is self-evident because it gives us just some of what we already had. Now, it seems to me that first-order logic is a mathematical model of such logical reasoning, which is about things (subjects) and their properties (predicates). In short, I take predicate logic to be linguistic, and first-order logic to be mathematical. But I am beginning to wonder if I have got this all wrong, because I found the following description of predicate logic on a paper in a book in the library:

Predicate logic (first-order logic) is a formal system that extends propositional logic by breaking sentences down into subjects, predicates (properties), and quantifiers. It enables precise reasoning about objects by defining properties and relationships, allowing for statements like "all dogs are blue", which propositional logic cannot express.

Travels = Travails

I'm Back in England for the Summer (except for Aberdeen next month) but all I'm doing is rewriting my response to Mawson and having deep thoughts... News Flash: I'll be hosting the best Carnival in the world wide web next month too (it needs doing hint hint and it's fun to play god :)

Is there a question?

Is it the job of analytic metaphysicians, to put back the pictures that the axiomatic mathematicians remove from our scientific descriptions of reality; and if not, why not?

Limerick

There once was a man from Limerick
Who got, in his weakest limb, a wrick;
His eyes filled with glints
As he spied, of splints
Split from a tree's limb, a rick.

Stuff (and this and that)

Kripke (Naming and Necessity) described how "water" means H2O because people once indicated the liquid form of H2O and said something like "that stuff," so that (via a causal chain) we now mean by "water" what they meant by it. But if so, then had some weird spacetime wormhole (or something) substituted that bit of water for XYZ briefly, just before they said "that stuff," then we would have been misusing "water" ever since (and obviously we have not, whereas it's not so obvious that such a substitution could not have been).
......Furthermore their folk metaphysics may not have been much like ours, way back then (instead of our chemistry, something like alchemy maybe), so why would "that stuff" have meant H2O then? Indeed, what stops us referring, with our "water," to H2O in any of its fluid phases (the liquid phase is largely H+ and OH- ions anyway), or to any similar mixture of hydrogen and oxygen (similarly) or of nucleons and electrons, or to just the oxygen or just the nucleons, or (conversely) to impurities in the water as well as the H2O (as we may well do ordinarily), and so on?
......Presumably we all presume some (similar) folky metaphysics, so that our "that"s are intimately (if subconsciously) associated with something like a description (if an indescribable one) in our heads. Furthermore, once we've separated out such descriptivistic content, there might not be anything externalistic left over.
......Even if the reference of "water" is fixed from day to day, by our thinking "that stuff" while thinking of some actual water, the substance underlying H2O might be a different one on different days (e.g. as subatomic strings randomly pointed in different directions, or something), and we would not then mean, by "water," different substances on different days. If the underlying variation made no observable difference, it would be like there was (as presumably there is) no variation; the stuff referred to would be the constant chemical (defined by its chemical description, and hence via the meaning of "chemical"). And if it did make a difference then descriptivistic content would again determine which stuff we were referring to (cf. normal versus heavy water).
......Furthermore, while there may seem to be an externalistic element with the "that" of "that stuff," there would surely be (after all the descriptivisitic stuff) an internalistic "this," because only a reference to this Actuality (containing both that stuff and us) would be able to lack descriptivistic content.
......There is therefore (for a frivolous consequence) surprisingly little incoherence between Biblical literalism and modern science; e.g. when originally creating water (not just below but also above the starry firmament) God would have had some description (some range of relational roles or whatever) in mind, but such details as the underlying substances (e.g. the particles that comprise the H and the O nowadays) might quite naturally have varied as the more crucial (e.g. moral and psychological) matters were settled.

Form is the diagram of forces

                       Dark incarnate hearts
pump hard as rooks heave at dusk,
wing-beats glistening.

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 how could that have been possible); 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 (re no place but) "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).

Russell was Wrong

Russell thought that we could base a logical view of the world around us on our direct perceptions because we could not be wrong about a patch of colour being a certain colour. However, we cannot even guarantee being right about whether a square on a checkerboard is black or white, as this amazing picture shows: checkerShadow (PS, in 2015, YouTube had this video of the illusion)

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, a modern-physical instantiation of Levy's Paradox, will be appearing (in a graduate session) at the Joint Sessions in Aberdeen in July (dream come true :-)

April is cruel

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Dylan Thomas, 1933

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.

Determination and Determinism

Why is the Two Envelopes paradox paradoxical? After some thought I've decided that I don't really know (so the following is less clear than I'd hoped it would be) but maybe the reason is related to our difficulties with such concepts as deliberation and probability. Perhaps we overlook (for some reason) something that we intuit easily enough in the case of, for example, Pascal’s Wager:
......Even were you totally unsure, whether or not there was a God, it would clearly be silly to act as though God probably existed just because (even if you did know that) the net rewards for doing so were very much greater than those for not doing so. Intuitively, such rewards are irrelevant if there is no genuine chance of whichever is not already the case (if it is not as if someone will toss a fair coin fairly, and give you those rewards on heads)—and that is, I think, reminiscent of the calculation (see my previous post) of the expected gain on exchanging your envelope (when only one of the ‘X’s in the equation for expected gain named the definite amount in your envelope). Such a distinction, between genuine and other chances, is obscure but apposite (cf. Denyer's 'proof,' below) because whenever we are thinking rationally we have already presupposed that our decisions might make a genuine difference.
......After all, with your original choice of envelope (which gave you the 50% chance of X = 1 and 50% chance of X = 2) there was no temptation to wonder how it could be that, whilst X = 3/2 is impossible, 50% of X (= 1) + 50% of X (= 2) = 3/2. And those chances were genuine (so to speak; and even if, counterfactually, your envelope had been given to you, via some deterministic mechanism, your epistemic uncertainty would have yielded a similarly quasi-genuine, if then entirely imaginary, chanciness). By contrast, the chances that seemed paradoxical, when focusing upon just part of what you know (when ignoring the parenthetical identities in the equation below for expected gain on exchange), could have measured nothing more than your ignorance about what was already the case.
......Regarding that possibility (that ‘could’), it seems (as below) that simply to be rational is to have (rather obscurely) related presuppositions about what is possible—beliefs so obscure (so analytically dubious) that we might well overlook their import when a scenario encourages us to (and plausibly the way in which that happens within the two envelopes scenario is a clue as to how to analyse such beliefs). Similarly, we might presuppose that (certainly) 2 + 2 = 4, even those of us who think that a (Cartesian) demon, fooling us about such things, is not just possible (despite its inconsistency with 2 + 2 = 4) but is not necessarily unlikely. And if determinism is like that, if its nonexistence is a necessary presupposition of the practice of our rationality (for all that various determinisms are prima facie possible), then the fact that possible worlds are, in themselves, rather deterministic objects (whereas in no possible world is it false that 2 + 2 = 4) might help to account for why philosophers (who have tended to favour possible worlds analyses) have tended to find the Two Envelopes so paradoxical (cf. Pascal being a deterministic Jansenist, which might explain his view of his Wager).
......So maybe the answer (to why we find the two envelopes so paradoxical) has something to do with the following argument (inspired by Denyer's "Time, Action & Necessity") for free will (and against Stephen Law's most recent argument). Many Naturalists believe that there are, in reality, such relativistic particles and fields as are the subject-matter of physics, and that what the other subjects (biochemistry, psychology, politics and so forth) concern themselves with are really just relatively large chunks of that. Many Naturalists also believe that, given how much we know, from such sciences, it would be irrational to believe in such things as souls and revelations; and they think that it would, of course, be wrong to be irrational.
......Thinking is important (we can all agree, at least here). Coming to the right decision is important—it should not just be a random event, choosing what to think about the real world, of real people (many Naturalists are humanists too). One could be irrational, but that would be wrong. And thinking rationally (making a responsible decision on the basis of the evidence) cannot be something that you are bound to do, in a totally determined way, if it is something that you might neglect to do, could be at fault for not doing. Naturalists arguing against the possibility of religious knowledge are, in particular, very aware of the ‘ought’ in ‘thought;’ and ought implies can—there would be little point in arguing against irrational beliefs if believers are bound to believe as they do, as would be the case were the physics of their physicalistic minds deterministic.
......But the only alternative to determinism, in this physical universe (of which we know a vast amount, thanks to modern physics), is randomness; if there is another alternative, and if mind is reducible to physics, then it’s odd that we don't know about it in modern physics (which has even revealed to us the relativity of space and time). And how could mere randomness be the cause of the difference between a moral act (thinking properly) and an immoral act (thinking improperly); how could it be that we should try to get result A rather than B, if it is just random whether A or B? So (to end with my reply to Law) the very rationality that Naturalists are fond of opposing to religious knowledge presupposes something that cannot be either of the options (determinism or randomness) available to them, as physicalistic atheists; so that, according to their own scientific standards, all the evidence available to us, at any time, must be evidence between the major alternatives (such as some modern monotheisms).

Two Envelopes

Suppose that someone put some money (say, an arbitrary unit) into one envelope and twice as much (two units) into another. You get to choose an envelope, and since you are ignorant of their contents you have, intuitively, a 50% chance of getting 1 (arbitrary unit), and a 50% chance of getting 2 (of them). Let the amount in your envelope be X, and the amount in the other be Y, so that either X = 1 = Y/2, which I call case A, or else B is the case, and X = 2 = 2Y.
......You are asked if you want to exchange your envelope for the other. In case A you have (whether or not you look inside your envelope) X = 1, so you would definitely gain X = 1 on switching; and if you would have lost, you would have been in case B, with X = 2. In case B you would definitely lose 1/2 of that on switching (and if you would have gained, you would have been in case A). And it was 50-50 which envelope you chose (as above), so it is similarly 50-50 which of A and B is the case, and so your expected gain on switching is:
......50% of X (= 1 = Y/2) – 50% of X/2 (= 1 = Y) = 0
......No paradox yet, but if you ignore the parenthetical identities (which should not, intuitively, affect that equality) then the remainder of that equation says that you have a 50% chance of gaining X (the definite amount you are holding) and a 50% chance of losing X/2, and that those two cancel out; so a puzzle is, how could X = X/2? But the paradox dissolves with the seeing of that question as silly. Athough X is a definite amount, only one of the ‘X’s in that equation names it (since it can't be that both B and A are the case; by contrast, if someone flipped a coin fairly, gave you X on heads, and took X/2 off you on tails, your expectation would indeed be X/4).
......A puzzle remains: Why do philosophers find the above so puzzling? (To be continued (a clue: we are like this!).)