Spring Time Thoughts

When I was on the beach last week, I gave my son a teaspoon of philosophical reality. I stamped my foot into the wet sand and pointed that footprint to him as the surf washed over it. In a second, the indentation was gone, as if it never existed in the first place. That, I said, is our life on earth. It is but a vapor in the vastness of oblivion, a barely noticed flash on the endless riboon of time. As the preacher (not The Byrds!) in Ecclesiastes said: "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die." In the local cemetary, I came across a ninety year old grave marker that had toppled over. As I turned it upright, I wondered if anyone today even knows or cares that person lived or died. And I realized that the day will come that no one will know or care if I or anyone else for that matter lived or died. Man is not the measure of all things as I'm reminded of Shelley's poem Ozymandias.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away

Even if our faith takes us to a belief in the afterlife or in reincarnation, it doesn't mean that our life here on earth is much more than a ripple from a pebble tossed into a boundless ocean, a twig swirling into oblivion. That said, our response cannot be cloud-dwelling morbidity as life is to be lived, and it is our awareness of death that gives life poignancy and urgency. We are always hearing time's winged charriot hurrying near, and it is this knowledge that brings us closer to what and whom we cherish. For me, this means spending less time with tele-evangelists and tele-politicans and more time with my family and friends, and less time worrying about stuff I can't do anything about and more time enjoying the stuff that makes up my life.

To life!

The Rhinoceros in the Room

Russell on Wittgenstein.

"My German engineer, I think, is a fool. He thinks nothing empirical is knowable - I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn't."

Solipsism

"You can search the skeptical literature all you want. You will never find anyone who has ever argued, for any X, "I haven't seen X, thus X cannot exist."

Go ahead and prove me wrong. Find a quotation that says anything like that, and post it here."

I dislike the word "prove" out of context with logic, science, or law almost as much as I dislike verbal absolutisms such as "never". But to answer you question, this view has a pedigree going back to the Greek presocratic sophist Gorgias (c. 483-375 BC) who is quoted as stated:

Nothing exists;
Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and
Even if something could be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others.

Thus, he might say, Churchill doesn't exist, but if he does exist, his existence cannot be communicated. This relates to epistemological solipsism, in which "only the directly accessible mental contents of the solipsistic philosopher can be known." I don't know how deep an answer you want from me. The tone of your post suggests that you don't want me to get into Humean causality or Kantian idealism but were trying to score a late night point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_solipsism

The Morality of Retarded Suicide Bombers

Two mentally retarded women were fitted with bomb vests and sent to a crowded pet market milling with families and children. The bombs were remotely triggered.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22945797/

I wonder if there is a bottom somewhere that we can all agree on, an absolute of sorts. I was totally nauseated by the use of these women, who could not consent. I was nauseated at the place of the attack. After a while, you want the world to scream in outrage and I hear too few of those screams.

I would be happy to agree that one's free consent is foundational to morality. Unfortunately, this is very much a minority view it would seem, with most claiming that consent is objectively a fiction as is morality. Even people of faith use expresssions that subjectivize their moral code-- "it is true to me" or "Jesus is in my heart". The free will presumption clarifies what is moral and immoral. Consider for example your most cherished conviction, perhaps your faith in God. Let us say that someone abducted the person who you most love, say a child or parent, and said that they would murder that person unless you renounced your faith. Would you do so? The Kantian moralist would say: no, you are obligated to always tell the truth irrespective of consequences. As much as I admire the categorical imperative, here Kant is wrong in my view. Why? Kant is wrong because the predicate to morality has been violated, namely one's unconstrained capacity to be immoral or moral. In the absence of freedom of choice or consent, there is a state of amorality. Given that, you are obligated in this case to lie to achieve a higher moral good, namely, the life of your loved one.

The Problem of Pain

A man named Rick Rood wrote this interesting article about "The Problem of Evil". It starts by saying, "John Stott has said that "the fact of suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith." It is unquestionably true that there is no greater obstacle to faith than that of the reality of evil and suffering in the world. Indeed, even for the believing Christian, there is no greater test of faith than this--that the God who loves him permits him to suffer, at times in excruciating ways. And the disillusionment is intensified in our day when unrealistic expectations of health and prosperity are fed by the teachings of a multitude of Christian teachers. Why does a good God allow his creatures, and even his children to suffer?"

www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/evil.html

According to the Bible, God punishes those who hate or ignore him as in Ezekiel 20:24-26:

"Because they had not executed my judgments, but had despised my statutes, and had polluted my sabbaths, and their eyes were after their fathers' idols. Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the LORD."

It hardly seems God is allowing freedom, but instead demanding obedience. This passage does not suggest that the evil is the natural or inevitable result of disobedience, but the specific act of God in response to it.

Good observation. However, there are many other passages that intimate that God is a god of grace, and that mercy proceeds justice.

I also have a problem with Hume's formulation:

"David Hume, the eighteenth century philosopher, stated the logical problem of evil when he inquired about God, "Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"

Consider a father with a five year old playing next to a busy street. That father would indeed be evil if he did not prevent an immanent evil of that child running into the traffic. But that same father would not be evil if that child was a mature ten year old. The question is no longer a matter of the father's impotence or inability to to prevent evil, but the father now recognizing that the child is developing personhood and commonsense to prevent the evil himself from happening.

I also have a problem with the notion that pain is punishment or that pain is meant to teach us some kind of a lesson. Here is an essay I wrote on this point.

“Tell me about your God of love,” an atheist wrote to me, “for all that I see is 1 Samuel 15:3, 2 Samuel 24:15, 2 Samuel 6:6, and 1 Chronicles 21:14.” Never let it be said that atheists haven’t read the scriptures. Sometimes they have read it only too well. And I must admit that I too I have trouble squaring God’s command to “slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” with the One who said “Permit little children, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” That God would inflict pain or even allow pain has challenged man since the days of Job.
Grandma June provided one answer to Natalie Angier. “When I was eight years old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died,” she writes. “The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother’s living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father’s Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle’s station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.”

A 16 year old has more questions for an advice columnists: “When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids of the block making fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nights, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose—although I’m a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes. I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people—even myself—so I can’t blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she cries terribly when she looks at me. What did I do to deserve such a terribly bad fate? Even if I did some bad things, I didn’t do any before I was a year old and I was born that way. I asked papa and he says he doesn’t know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born, or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I don’t believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?”

The basic formulation for the problem is as follows: If God is good, He is not God. If God is God, He is not good. If God is good, He would wish to make his creatures happy. If God was all-powerful, He would be able to do what He wished. But His creatures are suffering. Thus, God lacks power or goodness or both. Either God doesn’t exist or He is impotent or He is evil.

In The Brothers Karamazov, the greatest novel of the 19th century, Fyodor Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of the atheist Ivan the one irrefutable objection to a personal God, that the only possible religious answer is that human suffering will be justified by the divine harmony and the end of history. It’s a hollow argument made by some theologians to explain the holocaust—that Hitler was God’s punishment of European Jews for their secularization and Biblical prophecy was fulfilled when the state of Israel was born.

“Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpected tears to 'dear, kind God'! “

The classic counter is that God made man not as robots but with free moral agency. God freely limited his own freedom and put no limit on ours. God thusly could not have created a moral universe without at the same time freeing man’s spirit. If God had programmed all humans to be good, there would be no evil but there would be no virtue as well. Evil exists because free will exists. Blind force, instinct, or the orchestrations of God do not compel us. The classic Christian reply to suffering makes sense only if we assume that God is not in control of all that happens. If God controls plane crashes, terminal cancers, and atom bombs, then God must be responsible. If those actions are bad, then God must be evil and the author of evil. I cannot believe that. Rather, I believe that God created a contingent universe and delegated to humanity the freedom to work through the vicissitudes of life—dealing with war, disease, and poverty. By doing so, humanity develops morally, intellectually, and technologically. So this is another reason why I believe God’s self-limiting sovereignty and that we determine our own destiny in the face of life, death, and God.

This accords with the view of Harold Kushner, whose young son had progeria, the “rapid aging disease. By the time his son had died at 14, the boy looked like an old man. “An aching sense of unfairness” led Kushner to write the best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Kushner argues that bad things didn’t happen because God wants to punish us for our sins, test our strength, or teach us lessons. Instead, Kushner sees randomness to the universe. Lottery winners are merely lucky—not blessed. And when bad things happen, we shouldn’t question ourselves or God and be angry because the world is imperfect and unfair. Insurance companies call earthquakes and hurricanes that kills hundred of people “acts of God”, but they use God’s name in vain. These are acts of nature, not acts of God. Nature is morally blind. The act of God is the courage of us to continue in the face of disaster.

But I think this is a sterile argument that doesn’t address the core issue of the suffering of the innocent. I think for example of the two million Jewish babies and children that were swallowed by the maw of the Nazi death camps, including kids of relatives of my wife. It makes me think that if there is a God, it’s a God who is blind. That children must die so that we will be good strikes me as incomprehensible. Following the death of his young boy, Huxley replied to a letter from the Reverend Charles Kingley: “As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read as part of his duty, the words “If the dead rise not, let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.” I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all the best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! Because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to source from whence it came, the cause of great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, am I to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in the forge.”

I have great sympathy for this reaction, and should I lose my wife or child, my grief would be as great, but I could not be persuaded that their lives had been at no purpose. I think of the Oxford don C.S. Lewis who aggressively promoted the orthodox Christian answer to evil and suffering in The Problem of Pain. You may remember the movie “Shadowlands”, played by Anthony Hopkins as Lewis, in which he had a crisis of faith when he watched his young bride die of cancer. At the end of the day, there are no satisfactory answers—only the consolation of faith in the One who also suffered-- and our friends. In one of the last scenes in “Shadowlands,” we see the professor hugging his young step-son after his wife had just died-- both in tears. Perhaps that is the only real answer in the face of the silence and distance of God. Faith is not all green pastures and still waters. The comforters in the Book of Job put forth their rational arguments, and at the end Job—without an explanation but with the existential experience of God—turns for questioning to wondering silence: “I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” In this fragment of time on this island in space, we are in this together and we must help each other out. Evil and suffering is inextricably part of the human condition individually and institutionally, and if there is one thing we must believe in, it is that we can make a difference. To live is to suffer. To suffer is to find meaning. And, if there is purpose in life, there must be purpose in suffering and death. The Psalmist said that “My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.” It did not say, “My tragedy comes from the Lord.” The bad that happens in our life has no meaning. But we can redeem it by giving it meaning.

It's really due to Epicurus, not Hume. Many explanations for evil have been invented. Some, such as the free will defense you cite, do an acceptable prima facie job with moral evils such as war and crime, but do not even touch on contingent evils such as natural disasters and epidemic diseases.

Why reject the free will defense of evil as a method of teaching the ways of God to man? My answer would be that it is obviously random and often misapplied. God allows a child to die a cruel death to teach the parents to serve him better? Not truly credible. God's methods of insruction in this defense seem crude and unfocused —the innocent are often taken with the guilty.

It is true that natural disasters appear random and that is because they are random. Insurance companies call them Acts of God, only because they are outside of the domain of man's control, such as a hurricane. I agree that there is no credibility to the idea that they such disasters are meant to impart a moral lesson (a view that many fundamentalists ascribe to the 9/11 attacks-- Wall Street was attacked because of what the gays were doing in San Francisco.) The rebuttal is a ditty that circulated after the 1907 earthquake in San Francisco, that goes like this:

If, as some say, God spanked the town
For being over frisky,
Why did He burn the churches down
And save Hotaling's whiskey?

The only answer that makes sense to me is to presuppose a God who is not immanent and who is not omnipotent, at least in the way we perhaps would like to believe. Thus, natural disasters that wipe out the good and the bad, the wise and the dumb, the rich and the poor, are all inseperable from the human condition. And, as such, God gives humans the gift of evil so that we can transcend ourselves through medicine, inventions, discovery, and charity. A world that is free from evil would also be free from morality and love as well as science and reason. Perhaps we cannot do good without experiencing evil anymore than we can have light without also having darkness. In Shadowlands, Lewis proclaims that "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." But in the rueful acceptance and grief of the death of his wife, he finds that "We can't have the happiness of yesterday without the pain of today. That's the deal."

Christian Neoplatonism

I'm enjoying your well written posts.

Thanks for your kind words.

Maybe you can clear something up for me. I was at a party some time ago and the guests were evangelical Christians in the most positive sense of the term. I have a problem with evangelicals. I made some small talk with a guest and she said I was a neo-Platonist. It was a thinly disguised insult to a Christian as I learned later.

Use as a prejorative, I think it means that you are a mystic to the exclusion of anything real or rational that might inform that mysticism. Neoplatonism also rejected the afterlife as well as the existence of evil and posited "the Source" or "the Absolute", from whence all things spring and all things return. It might be contrasted to materialism, empericism, and pragmatism. (William James: "Damn the Absolute!") It was popular in the middle to late 1800s, and was influential in the thought of Hegal, Goethe, Emerson, and others.

We should make a distinction between Christian Neoplatonism, which is essentially Christian Theosophy and Christian Platonism, which runs through much of orthodox Christian theology . An example is CS Lewis in which he suggests that the afterlife is more real than this life, and this life is the a mere image-- a copy of a copy-- of what is real, somewhat equivalent to Plato's cave metaphor. We see this rather poignantly in his Narnia Chronicles, the kids in the last chapter are transported to Narnia as they die in a train wreck:

Lucy said, "We're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often."

"No fear of that," said Aslan. "Have you not guessed?"

Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose withi them.

"There was a real railroad accident" said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are-- as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands-- dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."

What is a Fact?

When relationships are simple, the word "fact" is used instead of "law".

I'm not sure I understand your sentence, so I will state what I think a fact is. A fact epistomologically speaking is that which is the case. It is not what I theorize is the case or believe is the case, although it may well be. It is not a construct-- a conceptualization from many facts-- that leads to a theory or a law based on an accumulation of evidence. The reason for this is the distinction between subjectivity-- images in our mind-- and what objectively is.
To make this clearer, I will state some facts and some non-facts. Now, non-facts do not necesserily equate to non-truth or nonsense. They are simply what is objectively real.

1. Every snowflake is unique. This is a non-fact. We have no way of establishing this obejectively. There are after all a lot of snowflakes.

2. Evolution is true. A non-fact. It is too sweeping a statement to reduce it to an objectively verifiable claim.

3. 2 + 2 = 4. A non-fact, as the symbols you see are expressions of deductive logic based on a prioris.

4. "If you died without a will, you would die intestate." Tautologies, essentially A = A, are not facts, as no meaning is added to the proposition. The indicative conditional phrasing however can be factual, i.e. "If X, then Y".

5. The speedometer of my car in the garage shows zero. This is a fact on in so far as we can trust the realities that statement implies, that there is a car, that there is a garage, that the speedometer is not broken, and so on. It is similar to this statement: "Washington is the capital of the United States", a fact so long as there is a objectively verifiable correspondence with the terms in question to the real world. This is really a compound fact as each term relies on whether or not it is the case, i.e. there is such a place as the United States, and so on.

The idea is to separate the "isness" of existence from the apprehension of existence by humans or instruments. This is no small task. Bertrand Russell uses an example where he looks a timetable and finds it is stated that a train leaves King's Cross for Edinburgh at 10 AM. A fact? Russell writes that "I shudder when I think of its complexity. If I were to develop the theme adequately, I should be occupied with nothing else till the end of the present volume, and then i should only touched the fringe of the subject.." He goes on to discuss the social aspect, the physical aspect, the definition of terms, the legal implications, the question of time, and so on. Russell associated datum with fact, and datum, he says, is something that we know without inference. But I'm not sure this is a good definition.

How many Angels Dance on a Pin?

I was struck by the following statement.

"Philosophers may argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but scientists understand that there is no way to disprove any number of angels on a pin. "

http://www.synapses.co.uk/evolve/lec1b.html

Angels dancing on a pin has become kind of an idiom for useless debate. But I'm curious about where this phrase came from. Did the medievalists actually debate this? if so, what were the issues and arguments?

Anyway, while googling, I found two different answers attributed to the 13th century scholastic Thomas Aquinas.

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_132.html

"Finally, he inquired whether several angels could be in the same place at once, which of course is the dancing-on-a-pin question less comically stated. (Tom's answer: no.)"

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=523054

"In Aquinas' view, the correct answer was "infinitely many": while angels have no bodies and occupy no space, they do have location."

I can imagine a hundred angels doing the Snoopy dance.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=6-Ei-ZFttsQ

Reminds me of the joke of which I'll give you the paraphased and sanitized version.

It was a hard day. Boss lady screamed at me. I got a flat coming home from work. The kids were crying. In the mail was an invitation to an IRS audit. I settled into my easy chair in front of the TV and then suddenly the doorbell rang. Who should appear at the front door but the sweetest little angel holding a Christmas tree. She asked, "where would you like to put this tree?"

O;^)
^
^ ^ ^
^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^
+

Does the Universe Have a Purpose?

The following link has their complete essays to the question posed by the John Templeton Foundation:

Professor Laurence Krauss. Unlikely

Professor David Galernter. Yes

Professor Peter Atkins. No

Senior Fellow John F. Haught. Yes

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Not Sure.

Professor Nancy Murphey. Indeed.

Nobelist Christian de Duve. No.

Jane Goodall. Certainly.

Professor Owen Gingerich. Yes.

Astrobiologist Paul Davis. Perhaps.

Astrophysicist Bruno Guiderdoni. Very Likely.

Professor Eli Wiesel. I Hope So.

What do you think?

The implications of the question presupposes that if there is a "purpose" to this universe, something determines the purpose that would not be part of the universe. Some like to call this purpose giver God.

I think you put your finger on the problem. On one hand, the question presupposes that the universe has intentionality apart from the animal intelligences that inhabit it. But, framed as a question of ethics, the questions becomes clearer. The purpose of the universe becomes nothing more or less than the purpose that you find as you walk life's journey. Bertrand Russell's purpose as he saw it was to act so as to produce harmonious rather than discordant desires, and that the good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Thus, while there may not be Platonic purpose as such, we can still find for ourselves purpose by aspiring for harmony and the good life.

Dawkins makes some interesting comments about the Templeton Foundation in The God Delusion. Broadly about the way their money can cause some scientists to compromise their principles.

If I gave you a million dollars, would your compromise your principles? If the answer is yes, then I submit they were never your principles in the first place. On the other hand, I do agree that money can corrupt scientists and intellectuals no less effectively as it can politicans and businessmen. I hope Dawkins can cite examples.

The mutability of principles reminds of British playwright George Bernard Shaw's quip who found himself at a dinner party beside an attractive woman. "Madame," he said. "Would you go to bed with me for a fifty thousand pounds?"

She coyly replied: "Perhaps."

"And if I were to offer you five pounds?" Shaw asked.

"Mr. Shaw!" said the woman. "What do you take me for?"

"We have already established what you are," Shaw replied. "Now we are merely haggling over the price."

Regarding the Templeton Foundation....there is considerable disagreement among scientists concerning whether accepting Templeton funding taints a scientific project, considering that the foundation has as its semi-overt objective the reconciliation of science and religion.

Richard Dawkins: "Freeman Dyson, by accepting the Templeton Prize, sent a powerful signal to the world which, whether he likes it or not, will be taken as an endorsement of religion by one of the world's most distinguished physicists."

Of course, money can have a warping effect on principle. The same is true with the awarding of prizes, the granting of professorships or any kind of employment, celebrity or fame, or the proximity to celebrities and the famous. I think it was Walter Lippman who said journalists might as well throw away their pencil the moment they accept an invitation to give the president their advice. I must admit a bias to philosophers who are work outside of institutions such as churches, think tanks, and universities. These institutions compromise people who do their thinking, protestations to the contrary. These institutions are gateways. They let in certain people—the elites-- and keep out other people—the great unwashed. And, when institutions filter people, they also filter ideas, including conflicting ideas. I wonder what would have happened if they had called Jesus rabbi and had welcomed Paul to the academy. The thinking that emerges from that experience seems to me to be more authentic and applicable than scribblings made in the sterility of a university garret. As much as I admire, for example, Saul Kripke’s theories on semantics, I consider his work inferior to, say, Eric Hoffer, the itinerant longshoreman and migratory field laborer. Kripke, who has spent his professional life on college campuses, may generate more theses, but Hoffer has shaped more minds. And, at the end of the day, that is the acid test of an enduring philosophy.

It may be that the Tempelton prize is corrupting, but that is only because they who have received it are corruptable. And Dawkins' contention that the acceptance of the prize should be taken as an endorsement of relgion leaves me less than aghast. Horrors at the thought that religion might be something other than an unqualified evil and surely undeserving of reconcilition with the august discipline of Science.

That's a little disingenuous of you. Surely you are aware that many are trying to pervert science to dignify certain articles of religious dogma with a veneer of scientific support?

I don't think that's Templeton's aim, however. It appears that his goal is to see if there is common ground between two disciplines, given the assumption of good will and rationality. I don't think his goal is to butress creedal claims with science. Perhaps it's a middle child inclination, but I think I can find middle ground between virtually any two centers of thought. Paganism? I also love nature. Mormonism? I also love family. Catholicism? I also love tradition. Atheism? I also love skepticism. Islam? I also love terrorism. (joking)

My view generally is too much hate is engendered from supposed differences of world views when many but not all of those differences are more apparant than real.

Endurance and popular appeal seems to me a rather lousy test of philosophical quality.

What would you regard as a good test of philosophical quality?

Logical consistency, novel perspective, scientific insight, functional integration.

Those are good tests of scientific utility, but unless you assume that science and utility is the ground and end of philosophy, I don't see how they are the basis for discriminating between poor philosophy (mine, say) and great philosophy ( Plato or Kant, say). While argumentum ad popularum is a fallacy, the staying power of an idea isn't, unless you make yet another assumption: that truth and coherence are somehow independent of the judgment of others over space and time. Needless to say, those two sets of assumptions that are the bedrock of scientism in the first instance and solipsism in the second instance fail the tests of logical consistency, novel perspective, scientific insight, and functional integration.

The Golden Rule

What about those who hate themselves? What about those who have no self-esteem? What about masochists? Should they do onto others as they would have others do onto themselves? Is that the proper basis of morality? My answer is no.

First, your question needs to be contextualized with what the Bible says.

(Luke 6:27-36) "But I say to you who listen: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If anyone hits you on the cheek, offer the other also. And if anyone takes away your coat, don't hold back your shirt either. 30 Give to everyone who asks from you, and from one who takes away your things, don't ask for them back. 31 Just as you want others to do for you, do the same for them. 32 If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 If you do [what is] good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to be repaid in full. 35 But love your enemies, do [what is] good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For He is gracious to the ungrateful and evil. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful. (Also compare to Matthew 5:38ff).

The Bible doesn't state what we call the Golden Rule, but the implication of loving your enemies is unmistakeable. Compare those verses, for example, to Leviticus 24:20: "Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him."

You're not the first person who has criticized the ethic of reciprocity. George Bernard Shaw, for example, said, "Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."

My view is that it is a valid but limited moral principle. The Bible makes no claim that this is the only or the most important moral principle that should govern one's actions. The principle of mutual respect certainly doesn't work for people who do not respect themselves. A stronger moral principle that the Bible states by implication is the centrality and signficance of the individual-- that you matter. Those that deny they matter will also deny that others matter, not always by word but by deed. Those who have believe they matter, who have strong but balanced esteem and character, will embrace this ethic. I'm not talking about the esteem of the swaggering bully, which is usually no esteem at all. And so it is no coincidence that this principle is found in most religions.

In my view, a stronger moral ethic is one that disclaims kind of positive tit for tat-- but rather you act because it is simply the right thing to do. It is moral obligation divorced from consequences or even the specificity of whether or not someone is a masochist or lacks self-esteem. As Kant put it: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

What is Truth?

What is truth?

"What is truth" jested Pontius Pilate, and would not stay for answer.

But you can answer your own question by answering whether or not the following statements are true or false.

Careful!

1. Three times three is nine
2. No two snowflakes are the same.
3. Paris is a city in France.
4. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life
5. "Ah! County Guy, the hour is neigh." (from Sir Walter Scott's "Serenande")
6. This pencil is seven inches long.
7. I like rhubard pie.
8. The train leaves for Boston at 8:05.
9. In 1492/Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
10. I drink, therefore I am.

Nothing is Absolute

Some people say that "nothing is absolute except the relative". Others say that "nothing is absolute including the relative". Do you believe either of these two are correct? If not, what would you say is correct?

Neither are correct and both are correct. To resolve this paradox, I think these statements can be approached in terms of fact, values, and morals.

There are absolutes in terms of universal constants and in terms of measurements of time and mass, for example. And of course there are objective, undeniable scientific truths, such as: the earth revolves around the sun. There are also absolute truths within the context of deductive mathematics, that, based on its axioms, may deliver different but valid results. In one such system of mathematics, for example, two plus two must absolutely equal four.

As to questions of values, we enter a twilight zone in which subjectivity and objectivity mesh. Money is useful to most but not all people. There is to most people an objective quantative difference between kindergarten drawings and the drawings of the Old Masters, and also the worst kindergarten and Old Master paintings and the best.

As to morals, we enter further yet into the morass of subjectivity. Personally, I link ethics to the search for and an understanding of truth, but this is by no means a consensus view. However, generally, I believe that morals is a relative expression of each person's conscious and unconscious presuppositions concerning life and his or her own existence.

Your example of money is subjective, meaning its worth is different to each person and its average value on an Exchange, which represents an average of lots of people's values, fluctuates.

But the fluctuation of money, stocks, and commodities is not merely subjective. The spread is like may flies around a dead rabbit, but the dead rabit, i.e. the intrinsic value, is objectively present albeit individually subjectively apprehended. Those that defy this become victims to bubbles and scams or lucky-- real life lessons in epistomology.

Ethics (morality) is the study of how people actually behave (social science) or, how they should behave (philosophy & theology). Here again, as with values, I know of no universal, objective ethics.

Except for our mutual physicality-- surely you would agree that our bodies are objectively real. "Do I not bleed" is the objective basis of most law.

Show me where the intrinsic value resides in money?

Money isn't at all arbitrary. It is absolute but in a fragment of time.

I heard on NPR radio that in Zimbabwe, which is experiencing 11,000% percent inflation, a loaf of bread now costs $22,000. Notwithstanding the social fiction of fiat currency, the bread is still something humans want. Because humans want it, its value still exists because it can be exchanged even for hyper-inflated money.

The same is true in the stock market. A company, let's call it Cat Herding, Inc., is capitalized at 1,000,000 shares. On FNN, you see that each share is worth $10. What is it's value? I would argue that the value is absolutely what the free market auction gives it in that instant of time, i.e. $10,000,000. That we think it is worth $20 dollars or $5 dollars is irrelevant. That $10 reflects or whims and hunches of the ignorant and the insane and also the considered judgment of professional short and long sellers and optioneers, and also databases, computer systems, and neural networks that talk to each other to say nothing of exogenous events such as politics and weather. It could be that Cat Herding is watered stock-- overinflated and hyped-- but even that reflects the prevailing knowledge of the marketplace at that moment in time.

This is true with the market as a whole. There is no shadowy "them" that controls market values, such as the price of gas, as the market is bigger than any billionare, oil oligarchy, or federal reserve system. It is the naked South Seas fisherman who trades two shells for a fish and it is the Deutche Bank wire-transferring a hundred million to the Bank of Hong Kong. The voice of the market is the voice of God, all knowing and all powerful-- the most powerful entityin existence. (I dare say more people pay homage to this God than any other.) The market is both rational-- in that it deals with the metaphysics of what is real-- real people creating real things-- and it is irrational and psychological-- akin to the irrational panic of the wilderbeast on the savannah of Africa reacting to cat growls or perhaps nothing at all.

Again, the values are in the head, not in the art works.

I think your arguments voids the definition of value. Thus, the imputed value of the Mona Lisa, for example, is not even the value of the wood and paints. It is merely the shared belief that the painting is priceless. The question is: is that shared belief enough to create a reality of value?

However, an "objective basis for ... law" does NOT exist.

My quote from "The Merchant of Venice" ("If you prick me, doo I not bleed") wasn't meant to demosntrate that humans are real, but that we share a common physicality, which provides an objective basis for law. There are other objective bases for law, such as humanity's instinct to form families and communities, respond to weather, accumulate possessions, and think about death. But I think our own biology is the key factor.

Ordinary man and woman embrace and recoil the same no matter where they live. That history is made up of cannibals and fascists doesn't negate this idea of the universality of biologically-derived moral values. Of course, there are layers of culture, but underneath, the same mix of nobility and criminaity emerges no matter where you look. Thus, when the facts came to light, humanity was appalled at the genocides inflicted on three separate continents—German Europe in the 1940s, Cambodian Asia in the 1970s, and Rwandan Africa in the 1990s.

Well, what of those who were not appalled? I think the answer lies in an example-- our response as to why we should not torture, present adminsitration policy notwithstanding. We do not torture for ethical reasons-- it violates the categorical imperative of inflicting needless pain-- and for utlitierian reasons-- that for some people it doesn't provide the results the torturer wants. That some people have constitutions impervious to pain or may welcome pain doesn't undermine the proposition that such conduct is unethical. Rather, it recognizes the diversity of humanity that allows people to be wired as they are. It is a recognition of their individuality as well as their humanity that requires that we consider torture unacceptable. In other words, and perhaps paradoxically, the ordinary man and women will reject torture because of their recognition that there are extraordinary men and women who do not reject torture.

Russell and Causality

"There seems no reason to regard causation as a priori, though this question is not simple. Given certain very general assumptions as to the structure of space-time, there are bound to be what we have called causal laws. These general assumptions must really replace causality as our basic principles. But general as they are, they cannot be taken as a priori; they are the generalization and abstract epitome of the fact that there are causal laws, and this must remain merely an emperical fact, which is rendered probable, though not certain, by inductive argument."

Bertand Russell (1927)

(I've no idea what Lord Russell is saying, but I enjoyed typing it.)

The Kingdom of Ends

From an ethical perspective, the ends can never justify the means, because that statement suggests that you should do whatever it is you have to do to get the results you desire, morals and ethics be damned.

But how can the results you want be ethical unless the ends justify the means? For example, arguably, the atomizing of Hiroshima was ethical as the means corresponded (let us stipulate) with its ethical goal of bringing the war to an end.

This of course is the classic dilemma posed by two seemingly antithetical systems of ethical thought-- utiliterianism ("greatest good for the greatest number") and the unconditional Kantian ethics of the Categorical Imperative.

But it seems to me that the contradiction may be more apparant than real, in which one exercises the sometimes Machiavellian art of the possible to achieve what Kant calls the Kingdom of Ends

Is Good An Opinion?

So an atheist thinks good and evil is not a view point or opinion? To you the strong is not impose their goodness to the weak?

I'm very sorry to say that it appears you are losing this argument. First, atheism has nothing whatever to do with an understanding or recognition of good, evil, power, and weaknesses. Secondly, it seems that your argument boils down to the claim that what you and I call good and evil are merely opinions, somewhat akin to my opinion that the Cubs will win the pennant this year. If I kick you in the shins, it is more than likely that you will find that a less than good experience. Why can I conclude that having not even met you? The answer is simply because we share a common physicality from whence comes our understanding of goodness and badness and indeed taboos and traditions that stretch across cultures and over time-- not as an absolute but generally. The facts from anthropology, biology, and history do not support a theory of radical moral relativism.

Free Will and Virginia Tech

Is there any point in adding to the explanatory mix for the Virginia Tech massacre a collapse in moral responsibility?

I believe that the answer is: yes. Elsewhere on this website, I have written on the question of free will, decisively afirming that it does exist and it is axiomatic to understanding ourselves, ethics, and law. To put it in the negative, I reject as morally suspect and emperically unjustifiable theories that affirm predestination, kismet, fate, astrology, behavorism, and the like.

In the case of Seung-Hui Cho, I'm willing to concede that his actions were the confluence of forces that he and we cannot comprehend. But there is a point where background forces stop and individual choices begin. In the case of this incident, moral responsibility doesn't merely rest with the shooter. From his own admissions, he had self-awareness, enough so as to prevent this tragedy from unfolding. And the same is true with other actors in this drama-- the police and judges, the psychologists and counselors, teachers and students, legislators and citizens. The confluence of countless decisions converged to produce an immoral act.

The Choice

"One has only the choice between God and idolatry. If one denies God...one is worshipping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself imaging the attributes of Divinity in them."

Simone Weil