New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Weekly Philo of Economics: Emerson, Complicity and the Natural Sentiments

"Greece and Judea, furnish the mind and the heart by which the rest of the world is sustained"

Every hour brings us from distant quarters of the Union the expression of mortification at the late events in Massachusetts, and at the behavior of Boston. The tameness was indeed shocking. Boston, of whose fame for spirit and character we have all been so proud ; Boston, whose citizens, intelligent people in England told me they could always distinguish by their culture among Americans; the Boston of the American Revolution, which figures so proudly in John Adams's Diary, which the whole country has been reading; Boston, spoiled by prosperity, must bow its ancient honor in the dust, and make us irretrievably ashamed. In Boston, we have said with such lofty confidence, no fugitive slave can be arrested, and now, we must transfer our vaunt to the country, and say, with a little less confidence, no fugitive man can be arrested here ; at least we can brag thus until to-morrow, when the farmers also may be corrupted.--Emerson, "THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW ADDRESS TO CITIZENS OF CONCORD, 3 MAY, 1851"

The second passage above was at the core of a fantastic lecture, "A Kantian Account of Complicity," delivered by Julia Driver in Ghent yesterday (and tomorrow in Amsterdam), all the more notable because Driver tends toward a more consequentialist moral philosophy. The core of Driver's lecture, was on the relationship between complicity and a certain form of action-guiding self-respect (even integrity). For, in Emerson, the dishonor of Boston creates a collective shame that potentially leaves none untouched.

In the passage, Emerson re-actives what we may call a republican rhetoric, in which commerce, luxurious prosperity, and city-life are associated with cowardice and tameness. By contrast, the independent, self-reliant, rustic farmer all stand for heroic virtue. But Emerson also insists that even beyond the suburbs, the country is no safe haven from the shared complicity in injustice (tomorrow the farmer). As Emerson said in his lecture, "Great is the mischief of a legal crime. Every person who touches this business is contaminated." So, in his lecture, Emerson's analysis relies on a different strain of argument, one greatly indebted to Adam Smith, who as regular readers may recall, thinks we can even be polluted if we unwillingly contribute to harm of others (and connects shame to pollution).

Can you stop yourself from being an atheist through prayer?

Having presented his famous wager, Pascal considers the atheist who sincerely wants to bet on God but who is psychologically unable to. He urges "Endeavour, then, to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you […] Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness."

Tim Mawson (member of the Oxford philosophy faculty) has a similar suggestion in a paper published in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. Suppose you are an atheist but consider it possible (with a non-negligible probability) God exists. According to Mawson, you are then under an epistemic obligation to pray to God ask him to stop you from being an atheist. He writes "the person who prays that God help him or her to believe in Him is as reasonable as someone who finds himself or herself shouting ‘Is anyone there?’ in a darkened room about which he or she has various reasonable prior beliefs." If you hear something, that's prima facie evidence that there is in fact a person in the dark room. If you don't hear anything, this is evidence too: "When one shouts into a darkened room, ‘Is there anyone there?’ and hears nothing by way of reply, this is in itself evidence that there’s no-one there, all other things being equal."

The problem is that the evidence is defeasible (especially if it is positive), and I think it is even more so than Mawson allows for. 

Some second-order qualms on Catarina's campaign against male genital alteration

I would like to articulate some reservations about Catarina's campaign against male genital alteration (recall also her earlier post). My reservations are second-order and do not concern any judgment about her normative position (I am pulled in different directions).

First, I am an analytic egalitarian (and you should be, too!) For me this consists of three core commitments:

[1] Naturally all people are equal, and most salient differences are the product of institutions (law, education, culture, etc).

• [A] This includes the philosophical/economist-expert
• [B] Even if [1] is not quite literally true, (nearly) all people consider themselves to be (at least as) equal when it matters to them.

[2] From [1A] it follows that the the philosophical/economist-expert should be put inside the model or conceptual framework

[3] From [1B] we learn that human affairs are (at least) in part intentional systems. (That is, we can't have a fully extensional model.)

Second, in practice analytic egalitarianism implies (at least) three important norms for how the experts/philosophers and public policy ought to interact:

1. Philosophers/experts can't keep themselves (their incentives/their roles, etc) out of the model/proposal. In practice this means that we can't simply assume that philosophers are disinterested truth-seekers in the context of policy.
2. Philosophers/experts shouldn't promote policies where the down-side risks of implementation are (primarily) shifted onto less fortunate others.
3. Philosophers/experts should make an effort to educate policy and opinion-makers to counter-arguments to the policies they advocate.

In practice, of course, considerable and controversial contextual judgment is required in evaluating the suitability and content of these norms (which may involve a weighing of conflicting interests, etc).  Okay, with that out of the way, let me turn to Catarina's campaign.

Further thoughts on genital alteration

 A heated discussion ensued from my post on circumcision last week, which in turn was essentially a plug to a thought-provoking post by Brian D. Earp at the Oxford Practical Ethics blog. The controversial point was whether circumcision is or is not to be compared to female genital cutting.

I’ve learned a lot from the different perspectives presented during the discussion; among other things, I’ve learned the terms ‘genital alteration’ and ‘genital cutting’, which now seem to me to be more adequate than either ‘circumcision’ or ‘genital mutilation’ to formulate the issue in a non-question-begging way (as argued here). And yet, I am now even more convinced that the analogy between male genital alteration and female genital alteration is a legitimate one – which (and let me say this again!) does not mean that there are no crucial differences to be kept in mind. That's what an analogy is, after all.

Circumcision, aka male genital mutilation

Via Christian Munthe on Twitter, I came across a thought-provoking blog post by Brian D. Earp on the latest AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) report on circumcision. The post is very critical of the report's failure to outright condemn the practice of circumcision, which is what a neutral, evidence-based analysis should conclude.

I realize that circumcision is a highly sensitive topic, in particular after the recent circumcision ban in Germany. It may well be that I am not sufficiently sensitive to the relevant political and cultural implications, but I don’t quite see in which ways male genital mutilation would be so fundamentally different from the (thank God!) widely condemned practice of female genital mutilation, still common in some parts of Africa, [UPDATE] from a physiological point of view. (This is not to deny the fundamental cultural, political differences between the male and female cases.) [END UPDATE] (But there is good news: female genital mutilation seems to be decreasing significantly!)

I invite readers to comment on the Practical Ethics blog post here; it seems to be a debate worth having.

UPDATE: Here is a very informative lecture on the extensive physiological effects of male circumcision (short version, long version) -- thanks to 'Parent' below for the h/t.

FINAL UPDATE: Here is a follow-up post on the topic, where I elaborate further on the similarities between male and female cases in light of the fruitful discussion ensued from this post.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Adam Smith, David Hume, and the Hebrew Bible on Shepherding

Early in Genesis we encounter the story of Cain (a farmer), who kills his brother, Abel (a shepherd), because he is jealous over God's (mysterious) unwillingness to accept his sacrifice (while accepting Abel's). In his The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (CUP, 2012), Yoram Hazony, reminds us that we are  in addition to being a farmer, Cain also founds a city; cities are viewed negatively because of their tendency toward despotic-imperialism in the Hebrew Bible. [Full disclosure Hazony and I have co-authored a piece on Hume and Newton.] In Hazony's hands the Biblical (archetype) life of a shepherd (think also of Abraham, Moses, Jacob, David) stands for an anarchic "life of dissent and initiative" (108) away from the polity. While the life of the farmer (think of Noah, Isaac, and Joseph) stands for "pious submission, obeying in gratitude the custom that has been handed down, which alone provides bread so that man may live" (108). According to Hazony, The History of Israel (basically Genesis through Kings), favors the shepherding life, but as the story unfolds comes to recognize that anarchy is not self-sustaining. Hazony reads the Hebrew Bible as a search for a politics grounded in ethics--one that makes the state "limited in its aspirations" (153-4). (Some other time I'll say more about Hazony's handling of these issues.) 

Implicit in this reconstruction of the Hebrew Bible is a kind of genealogy of civilization: first, in the Garden of Eden we are gatherers (maybe hunters, too); then, second, humanity splits in between mutually antagonistic shepherds and farmers, from which city-governments with an impulse toward territorial (and other) ambitions spring. As Hazoney notes  (308 n. 26), Jean-Jacques Rousseau certainly read the Bible this way (see his posthumous Essay on the Origins of the Languages, written about the time of the second Discourse) and sides with the anarchic impulse of the "author of Genesis."

Now consider this prominent passage from Adam Smith:

This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, 1.2.1)

Judith Butler responds to hostile Jerusalem Post article on her having been awarded the Adorno Prize

The press release, dated June 8, announcing the Prize is here (in German). The hostile Jerusalem Post article, dated Aug 26, is here. Butler's reply, dated Aug 27, is here. Excerpts:

The accusations against me are that I support Hamas and Hezbollah (which is not true) that I support BDS (partially true), and that I am anti-Semitic (patently false). Perhaps I should not be as surprised as I am that those who oppose my receiving the Adorno Prize would seek recourse to such scurrilous and unfounded charges to make their point. I am a scholar who gained an introduction to philosophy through Jewish thought, and I understand myself as defending and continuing a Jewish ethical tradition that includes figures such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt....

I studied philosophy at Yale University and continued to consider the questions of Jewish ethics throughout my education. I remain grateful for those ethical resources, for the formation that I had, and that animates me still. It is untrue, absurd, and painful for anyone to argue that those who formulate a criticism of the State of Israel is anti-Semitic or, if Jewish, self-hating. Such charges seek to demonize the person who is articulating a critical point of view and so disqualify the viewpoint in advance. It is a silencing tactic: this person is unspeakable, and whatever they speak is to be dismissed in advance or twisted in such a way that it negates the validity of the act of speech. The charge refuses to consider the view, debate its validity, consider its forms of evidence, and derive a sound conclusion on the basis of listening to reason. The charge is not only an attack on persons who hold views that some find objectionable, but it is an attack on reasonable exchange, on the very possibility of listening and speaking in a context where one might actually consider what another has to say....

I do support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in a very specific way. I reject some versions and accept others. For me, BDS means that I oppose investments in companies that make military equipment whose sole purpose is to demolish homes. It means as well that I do not speak at Israeli institutions unless they take a strong stand against the occupation. I do not accept any version of BDS that discriminates against individuals on the basis of their national citizenship, and I maintain strong collaborative relationships with many Israeli scholars.

Read the whole thing.

Hume, Smith, and Posidonius: true liberty, magnanimity, design arguments, and a once-famous Stoic...

But if all the parts of the universe have been so ordered that they could not have been better adapted for use, or more beautiful as regards appearance, let us see whether they are the work of chance, or whether their arrangement is one in which they could not possibly have been combined except by the guidance of consciousness and the divine providence. If, then, the things achieved by nature are more excellent than those achieved by art, and if art produces nothing without making use of intelligence, nature also ought not to be considered destitute of intelligence. If at the sight of a statue or painted picture you know that art has been employed, and from the distant view of the course of a ship feel sure that it is made to move by art and intelligence, and if you understand on looking at a horologe, whether one marked out with lines, or working by means of water, that the hours are indicated by art and not by chance, with what possible consistency can you suppose that the universe which contains these same products of art, and their constructors, and all things, is destitute of forethought and intelligence? Why, if any one were to carry into Scythia or Britain the globe which our friend Posidonius has lately constructed, each one of the revolutions of which brings about the same movement in the sun and moon and five wandering stars as is brought about each day and night in the heavens, no one in those barbarous countries would doubt that that globe was the work of intelligence.--Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods.

There are three explicit mentions of Posidonius, the great Stoic philosopher, in Cicero's dialogue, On the Nature of the Gods. (I have used a slightly dated translation.) The first one is in Cicero's own voice, when he includes Posidonius among his "teachers.' The second is the passage above, which was celebrated in  eighteenth century renditions of the design argument. Let's call it the "Posidonian argument." It shows up, for example, in Derham's very popular and influential Physico and Astro-Theology (originally 1714, I think). But it is also familiar in the seventeenth century. (See Cumberland's use of it here.) It reminds us that Paley's famous argument has a long and known pre-history. Hume alludes to a version of the argument in the Enquiry and discusses it more at length in his Dialogues (here and here) and may have even enjoyed transforming Cicero's "Britain" into a desert island. Even so, Hume's treatment does not explicitly mention Posidonius or his portable planetarium (not unlike the now famous Antikythera mechanism [this post was inspired by Jo Marchant's entertaining book about the mechanism!]) In an age in which the motions of the heavenly bodies define time, a planetarium just is a watch.

 

"I'm not religious, I'm spiritual" - changes in the meaning of "spiritual" over time

An interesting article on BBC on the rising numbers of the so-called "nones" in America, people who would in the past have ticked the Christian box, when asked for religious affiliation, and who now tick "none". Most of them are not atheists, i.e., explicit and firm in their rejection of a supernatural worldview. Those numbers are rising too, from 1% to 5%. The larger part of those 40% who do not self-identify as religiously affiliated are "religious but not spiritual". Weekly church attendance in the United States went down from about 40% in 1970 to 33% in 2010. There is a clear downward trend in church membership. Mainline protestants are hit hardest, but evangelicals do not do well either. Catholics should not be complacent - their steep decline in membership is masked by the influx of Hispanics.

It is not easy to find out why this is happening. I was reminded by a lovely lecture by the gerontologist Vern Bengston at Oxford some months ago. He examined how aging correlates with religiosity. Particularly: is the fact that we see mainly older people in church a cohort effect (i.e., younger generations are less churchy) or an age effect (i.e., when one gets older one thinks "Oh, no, I'm going to die, I'll better go to church then!).

Free Pussy Riot!

We've been a bit quiet here at NewAPPS this week, as presumably we are all sort of busy (speaking for myself anyway), and well, Eric is on a vacation... But (following a very sensible suggestion by Juliette Kennedy), here's a small token of support to Pussy Riot, the punk band on trial today basically for having been too critical of Russian establishment. Here is an overview Guardian article, and below the fold two videos: their 'concert' inside Russia's official church (which was the proverbial 'last drop' for their arrest), and a video with an earlier performance. (By the way, apparently one of them is a philosophy student, as earlier reported by Leiter.)

Free Pussy Riot! (The are so cool on so many levels...)

UPDATE: Apparently, they have been convicted, according to the Guardian live coverage.

Why did a Christian philosopher of religion convert to Hinduism?

This is one of those cases where google autofill can surprise you. I was googling "Michael Sudduth", the name of a well-known philosopher of religion, to find a particular paper of his, when google autofill provided me with "Michael Sudduth apostasy" and "Michael Sudduth hinduism". Intrigued, I followed these links and found out that Dr. Sudduth has converted to hinduism in late 2011 - early 2012. I know Sudduth's work quite well, especially his 2009 monograph The Reformed objection to natural theology (published by Ashgate) that aims to combine Reformed epistemology with natural theology.

According to Sudduth himself, his conversion to hinduism has two components. While teaching a world religions module, he found himself more and more interested in classical hindu texts, such as the Bhagavad Gita. This was followed by powerful religious experiences (of Krishna) and a near-fatal car accident. He explains the process in a Facebook open letter to his friends. Since this letter is widely circulated on the internet, I will post parts of it here as well, at the end of this blogpost. 

What I'm interested here now is not so much Sudduth's conversion, but the reactions this got on Christian blogs. Unsurprisingly, most of these were negative, see e.g., here. Looking for causes of his conversion they appealed to the following factors 

Theology from non-literature cultures

Tomorrow [correction, in a few days] I will be giving a keynote lecture at a philosophy of religion conference in Poland (see here). My lecture will be on whether or not theological reasoning, like more folk religious beliefs can be "natural". I think it can be, and that theology has important continuities with everyday reasoning.

Robert McCauley, who will also be giving a keynote at this conference, does not believe so. In his 2011 book "Why religion is natural and science is not", he argues that theology is as "unnatural" as science. He uses the term natural in a fairly restrictive sense, namely as "maturationally natural", by which he means, early developed, spontaneously emerging, easy to process and cross-culturally ubiquitous: "Like scientists, theologians occupy themselves with forms of reflection that are difficult to learn and difficult to master and that occasionally even issue in representations that are just as cognitively unnatural [as science] Theology is one of the few academic undertakings that can result in formulations that are very nearly as distant from and as obscure to humans' common understandings of the world as the most esoteric theoretical proposals of science are (McCauley, 2011, 212).

Theologians of the past seem to agree with this view. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, started from the observation that most people lack the time, patience, motivation, opportunity and intelligence to do theology to argue that faith does not require natural theological reasoning. McCauley (2011) cites the near-absence of theology in non-western, non-literate cultures.

More generally, in the cognitive science of religion there is a consensus that theology is a practice for the select few, working in highly institutionalized environments. If this were the case, we should expect theology to only appear in cultures with a high degree of literacy and social stratification, which would allow for a cognitive division of labor that is necessary for such an unnatural and arcane practice. Hence, we should only expect theology in the western traditions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, and in Asian literature cultures, such as South and South-East Asia (e.g., Hindu and Buddhist theology). To offer just a few counterexample, I would like to discuss two highly sophisticated theologies from non-literate cultures.

The opinion of epistemic superiors as evidence for/against theism?

[X-posted at Prosblogion] A few months ago, I met a grad student who has a prominent philosopher of religion (X) in his department. The graduate student was a theist when he started grad school, but soon realized that this is a minority position in philosophy. Disparaging remarks about theists (and specifically Christians) fueled his insecurity. Although there are no longitudinal surveys on this, it seems that atheism increases as people climb the academic ladder. For example according to the PhilPapers survey, in philosophy, only 14.6% of philosophy faculty believe in God. When postdocs are included, this percentage rises to 16.3%. Graduate students have the highest percentage of theists, 20.8%. So it seems plausible to me that at least some graduate students lose their faith as a result of the majority opinion in academia.

As the graduate student and I discussed X and what a brilliant scholar she is, the graduate student said that one important reason he is still a theist is the fact that X is a theist. He said "X is one of the smartest academics I know. The fact that X is a theist, even though she considered counterevidence carefully (like the problem of evil), constitutes strong evidence for theism for me, and for me it's a good enough reason to remain a theist". Is the graduate student rational?

Faith as an attitude distinct from hope and belief - are aesthetic reasons sufficient reasons for faith?

I've just met Robert Audi in Oxford. With a small group of philosophers of religion, we looked at his excellent new book Rationality and religious commitment (Oxford, 2012). One of the claims of this book (in particular chapter 3) is that faith has been often conflated with belief, but that both are distinct attitudes. Faith (and not just religious faith) in something entails a (usually global) positive attitude towards this person/proposition; is compatible with doubt, and is - unlike belief - at least in part under voluntary control.

A particularly interesting element Audi brought up is the fluidity of faith: faith typically wavers, exhibiting peaks and valleys. Beliefs can waver too, but not characteristically so. For instance, an untenured person can have faith in her own capacities as a researcher, but this faith can be frequently shaken (e.g., by unsuccessful job applications) or occasionally boosted (e.g., by successful publication). Similarly, religious faith has this fluid, wavering, pattern with peaks (e.g., through religious experience or reading a particularly strong paper in philosophy of religion) and valleys (e.g., by being confronted by gratuitous evil or strong naturalistic arguments). Audi claims that the rationality of faith and religious commitment cannot be purely gauged by standards usually employed for rationality for beliefs. Rather, faith has its own standards of rationality.

The common consent argument for God's existence and cognitive science of religion

[X posted from prosblogion] I've just returned from a wonderful 2-day philosophy of religion workshop at Glasgow organized by Victoria Harrison, who put together a diverse and high-quality program. One of these exciting papers was by Joshua Rollins' (U of Oklahoma) on the common consent argument.

Roughly speaking, in its crudest form, the Common Consent argument (CCA) goes as follows:

1. Most people believe in God
2. Therefore, God exists

This argument, traditionally widely endorsed, has fallen on hard times. Not only does it seem problematic to infer the truth of a belief from its mere popularity, declining religiosity in the western world have challenged premise (1). However, the recent shift in epistemology to social epistemology has rekindled an interest in the CCA. As Joshua indicated, social epistemologists have convincingly demonstrated that we do (and ought) take other people's opinion into account as evidence. We do this in the case of testimony - where we acquire a vast amount of knowledge through other people - and in the case of peer disagreement, where disagreement with others is a fact we need to take into consideration in many cases. In what follows, I'll reflect on some ideas offered by Thomas Kelly, who wrote a recent paper on CCA, and implications of cognitive science of religion for CCA.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Adam Smith on Religion (with hints to Spinoza)

[In honor of Ryan Hanley, the author of a very fine book on Adam Smith, and my host this week, I do a post on Smith's philosophy of religion--ES]

Discussions of Adam Smith's views on religion are bedeviled by two obsessively posed questions: (i) does the so-called 'invisible hand' instantiate or rely on a providential order?; (ii) is Smith a Humean skeptic about the existence of God? In what follows I ignore these. Consider, first, the following passage:

In the Decalogue we are commanded to honour our fathers and mothers. No mention is made of the love of our children. Nature had sufficiently prepared us for the performance of this latter duty. Men are seldom accused of affecting to be fonder of their children than they really are. They have sometimes been suspected of displaying their piety to their parents with too much ostentation. The ostentatious sorrow of widows has, for a like reason, been suspected of insincerity. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), III.3.13)

Here Smith treats the Ten Commandments sociologically. The Decalogue offers insight into which of our moral duties are innate (i.e., they don't need to be mentioned in the them) and which duties require sanctions (the ones listed). Given that at least for this item on the list he treats it as a reliable authority, he understands Moses or Moses' source as a wise-lawgiver (on this matter). This has affinity with chapter three of Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise. (I return to this below) As an non-trivial aside, if we are allowed to treat the whole list in such sociological terms then it appears that Smith thinks that the very idea of a mono-theistic God is not natural (nor innate) to us but requires social reinforcement mechanisms. (This echoes the first chapter of Hume's Natural History of Religion.)

Paul Draper's burden of proof for theists

A few days ago, I had the privilege of attending a lecture by Paul Draper, probably one of the most prominent atheist philosophers of religion today. His lecture had a wealth of ideas (including a proposed solution to Hume's problem!), but I'd like to focus on one tiny piece of the lecture, viz. his argument that the burden of proof is on the theist, and not on the atheist. 

Here goes the argument, which Paul was kind enough to discuss with me, prior to posting it. I apologize if there are any remnant misrepresentations. 

Let's assume that there are a number of epistemically possible world views: some are naturalistic, some are supernaturalistic, let's even grant there are others (non-supernatural, non-natural, but some third, unknown view). Then we can see that the following diagram exhausts all epistemic possibilities: N (naturalism), S (supernaturalism) and not-N and not-S. 

 

Is the dark night of the soul a fancy term for unbelief?

Recently, I've been reading a lot on divine hiddenness as a challenge to theism, and I find it a particularly interesting and forceful argument in favor of atheism. The idea is, roughly speaking, that non-culpable unbelief is incompatible with the concept of a loving, all-powerful and good God who would want a relationship with his creatures. I was particularly struck by reading about Mother Teresa's persistent doubts about the existence of God, and her inability to feel his presence in the eucharist or his responding to her prayer. Although she had mystical experience early in life, when she went to live with the destitute in Calcutta, her mystical experiences ceased and she was troubled by her continued inability to experience or relate to God.

For decades, she passed through what has been dubbed a "dark night of the soul". On a recent conference organized by the CFI, Dennett talked about Mother Teresa's unbelief, and said that 'dark night of the soul' is, "let's face it, just a fancy term for atheism, a way  of theists to explain away persistent unbelief in a person who is such an exemplar for Catholics and christians more generally '. He wrote elsewhere: "wouldn’t it be wonderful if the outing of Mother Teresa inspired a few thousand of them to come out of the closet and acknowledge their atheism! Then it might start being obvious not only that faith in God is not a requirement for morality". In response to this, theists have argued that Dennett et al do not get "dark night of the soul" at all... For instance, Anne Barbeau Gardiner argued that "The dark night of the soul that saints experience is the highest rung of the contemplative ascent in the Catholic faith. It is a state reserved for a very few whom God prepares for perfect union with Him. In this mysterious dark night, the saints experience a painful abandonment of mind and soul, as if God were absent, when in fact He is more truly present, though deeply hidden, than before." 

It seems to me that both sides of the debate get it wrong. I think there is a qualitative difference between DNS and atheism - for one thing, it seems far-fetched on the part of Dennett to argue that "Perhaps it was her [Mother Teresa's] guilt at being unable to convert herself that drove her to work so hard to convert others to take her place among the believers." But at the same time, DNS hardly seems a boon, reserved for the very few mystics - there is some connection to atheism, since Mother Teresa did express her doubts that God exists in several of her letters.  

Perhaps we can distinguish between atheism and DNS as follows: DNS is an alief (to borrow Tamar Gendler's distinction), a non-reflective belief ("God isn't present, he doesn't respond etc"), but this alief does not translate itself into a reflective, atheistic belief (i.e., "God doesn't exist"). By contrast, an atheist may have an alief that God exists and an explicit, reflective belief that he doesn't exist. Indeed, another possibility are those atheists who admit to having theistic aliefs but disavow theistic beliefs. For instance, Jesse Bering, an atheist cognitive scientist, admits to sensing God's presence, but explains this by arguing (in detail in his recent book The God instinct) that this alief is a cognitive adaptation to facilitate cooperation - a view similar to Ruse's error theory about moral objectivism. If that's true, there is a distinction between DNS and unbelief. An unreflective unbelief is not sufficient for atheism. 

The influence of gender and philosophical specialization on assessing natural theological arguments - part 1

[X posted on Prosblogion] Earlier on this blog, I have reported results of a survey on natural theological arguments , see here and here. To briefly recall, the survey asked philosophers to rate the strength of natural theological arguments, grouped into 8 arguments that seek to support belief in the existence of God, and 8 arguments that seek to support belief in metaphysical naturalism. My initial analysis indicated that religious belief (theism, atheism or agnosticism) is a strong predictor of the extent to which participants evaluate these arguments. However, in my analysis I examined only the effects of religious belief on the total overall assessments, not the arguments individually. In this post, I will report some fine-grained analyses on how philosophers evaluate individual arguments, as a function of their religious belief, gender and whether or not they specialize in philosophy of religion. Since the statistics are quite detailed, I will make this a two-part post, starting out by the positive arguments. The analyses have been conducted by Robert O'Brien, a statistician at the University of Miami.

Very nice Gutting NY Times piece on the Sermon on the Mount

Man it's so nice to have Gary Gutting's gentle meditations in the Stone.

Gutting's piece on the Sermon on the Mount today is HERE (reset your cookies by hitting "Clear Recent History" if the paywall blocks you). Gutting concludes:

Read alone, the Sermon on the Mount will either confuse us or merely reinforce the moral prejudices we bring to it.  To profit from its wisdom we need to understand it through traditions of thought and practice within or informed by Christianity.  This does not require membership in any particular church, but it does require immersion in the culture and history of the Christian world.   In this sense, to forget the church is to forget Jesus.

While I agree with Gutting, not just with respect to the Sermon on the Mount (about which he has many interesting particular things to say) but to approaching scripture as a whole, as a liberal Protestant I do feel the need to protest just a little bit. For us, Matthew 25 is absolutely canonical.

Advice to Christian Philosophers

[Note: I posted the following last Easter and thought I'd repost it today. It holds up pretty well; if I'd better followed the advice myself I'd have had a much better year. My only regret in rereading it is that there is far too much griping about Christian organizations that (paradoxically and disastrously) bar people who don't self-identify as Christians.

Not that I disagree with anything I wrote, but Easter is joyous and the missive should have been balanced by a celebration of  the wonderful people in such groups who do great things. My explanation for the negativity is that I was (and remain) distraught by the inhumanity shown by many Christians leaders of such groups towards gay, lesbian, and transgendered people as well as continuing organized attacks on basic science education by such people. But today is Easter, a time for hope!

And inany case, the advise and criticism still do seem sound to me. This Easter my prayer is that I do better this coming year in following it myself (in addition to the rest of the log becoming unlodged). What follows is simply cut and pasted from last year's letter.]

People who read this will discern an obvious pragmatic self-reflexive contradiction; it is a consequence of the advice I am about to give that I should not be in the business of giving people advice.

Miracles and epistemic principles in New Testament scholarship

This blog post is prompted by discussion on my recent entry on Prosblogion on miracles and testimony, and on my reading of Stephen Law's thought-provoking paper in Faith and Philosophy, entitled "Evidence, Miracles and The Existence of Jesus". Unfortunately, almost all my F&P issues are still in my house in Belgium, so I cannot quote from the text verbatim (and I do not have electronic access to F&P).

In the paper, Law offers the following thought experiments: Suppose you have a couple of friends, whom you know have been reliable witnesses in the past (it might be interesting to imagine real friends for this purpose, try to think of normal people not prone to delusions, flights of fancy, and who do not enjoy playing pranks). One day they tell you that they were visited by a man called Ted who came to drink tea. You accept this testimony at face value. Now suppose that they next tell you Ted started flying around in the room (you can add some more miracles, such as that he died there and became alive again, that he made things appear out of thin air, etc.). According to Law, in keeping with Hume, it would not only be unreasonable to believe this testimony, it would actually be reasonable for you to doubt the existence of Ted.

On the journeys of faith...

"Fleischacker argues that religion provides something that secularism fails to offer successfully -- what he calls "ethics," a telos for the moral life, that which makes living the moral life and life itself meaningful and worthwhile. Fleischacker presents an extended set of convincing arguments for the very legitimacy of seeking a life-telos and "meaning" in life. Then he charges secularism with an inability to provide a persuasive resolution of that seeking. He rejects as an adequate telos for life knowledge, pleasure, self-flourishing, projectivism (that we ourselves bestow value on our life), and Kantian accounts of worth. In any case, he argues, secular views about the meaningfulness of life have no more justification than do religious views (religious views, though, have the advantage of acknowledging that they are held in faith.)"--The passage is from this review.

Leaving aside the merits of the arguments against secularism, the parenthesis suggests that defenders of revelation have made a remarkable journey from Hume's deliciously ironic closing lines "Of Miracles" with stops at Kierkegaard's leap and Nietzschean assertion of faith (in truth, revelation, etc) as (resentful) will to power. Now we learn not just that the life of faith has more integrity than the secular one (which -- echoing Nietzsche -- is disclosed as ultimately relying on faith), but it is also ultimately (in a non-trivial sense) more philosophical (because it has better self-understanding) and the only one that is capable of sustain meaning. Those of us that dance the Pyrrhica Saltatio smile.

Expertise in Analytic Philosophy of Religion is not expertise on the existence of god.

A propos the discussion prompted by Helen de Cruz's wonderful post: let me grant that analytic philosophers of religion (APoR) have a special expertise (despite the fact that I tend to think they are dominated by apologetics for parochial views of god). APoR expertise is best summarized by a competence in evaluating arguments about the existence of god and offering distinctions that can make these arguments more fine-grained and illuminating. This is not nothing. However, I deny that APoR training and practices create any expertise in establishing God's existence (unless by 'God' something merely conceptual is meant, but that is generally not the God thought worth having). Despite the prominence of discussion of fine-tuning and various neo-Bayesian arguments in APoR, I see no evidence that competence in evaluating evidential practices of how to establish the existence of non-mid-sized objects is widespread in APoR (or anywhere else in philosophy--even much epistemology or philosophy of science is far removed from such expertise). And without competence in such evidential practices (which outstrip mere argument), I have no idea why APoR views on the existence of God have any privileged status over the views of, say, theologians, sociologists of religion, cosmologists, and other smart people with a reasonably thought-out belief.

Confirmation bias or expertise? The prevalence of theism in philosophy of religion

[This entry is X-posted from Prosblogion]

One of the striking results from my survey on natural theological arguments is that most philosophers of religion are theists. Even if I restrict my count to a subsample consisting only of those people who are philosophers, who have listed philosophy of religion as one of their areas of specialization, and who are faculty or non-faculty with PhDs, the sample is overwhelmingly theist. Of this select subsample (N = 118), 70.3 % are theists, 16.9% atheists and 12.7% agnostics (the rounding explains why we are not at exactly 100 %). As you may recall, the percentage of theists slightly higher (around 73%) in my general sample philosophers of religion, which also includes graduate students, undergraduates and those outside of academia. Given that the PhilPaper survey gave a similar result, we can be highly confident that about 7 in 10 philosophers of religion are theists. One of the discussions of my preliminary results on Prosblogion is whether we should accord any evidential weight to this (i.e., should we defer to the expertise of those who are studying the existence of God), or whether this should lead us to an increased skepticism about philosophy of religion as a discipline. 

Results on the survey on natural theological arguments

[this is cross-posted in Prosblogion] I would like to thank everyone who has completed my survey on natural theological arguments. This survey's aim was to get a rough idea on how philosophers today evaluate various natural theological arguments in terms of their strength/plausibility. My study was motivated by the observation that philosophers frequently voice intuitions about the general plausibility of natural theological arguments, e.g., "since Darwin, the argument from design has lost its appeal", or "the hiddenness argument is a strong contender to the problem of evil as an argument against the existence of God." However, actual data on philosophers' assessments of these arguments was, to my knowledge, unavailable. I'm very pleased with the large sample (802 respondents!). The data will be used in a monograph I am currently writing on the cognitive basis of natural theology. The main results are published here: 

Esoteric arguments for the existence of God in Maxwell and Hertz

Vulgar, not to mention warmongering, Straussians have given a bad name to the very idea of esotericism by associating it with a nihilistic/atheistic interpretation of Nietzschean will to power. But, of course, one can use esoteric means to hide many kinds of messages. Below I explore the works of two very famous Victorians, Maxwell and Hertz, who practice a form of esotericism when presenting physics inspired arguments for the existence of god. In Maxwell's case it's pretty clear what he is up to, while in the Hertz case I am genuinely uncertain about how he wants us to read his text.

What does it take to be a Christian?

The Society for Christian Philosophers is open to "anyone interested in philosophy who considers himself or herself a Christian". This always seemed to me to make sense, but I recently got thinking about this as a result of the presentation of data by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (UK) Religious and Social Attitudes of UK Christians in 2011. This survey, based on 1,136 respondents who said they were Christians showed surprising results: only 32 % of respondents said to believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus (a further 39 % believed in a spiritual resurrection; 44% believed that Jesus is the Son of God. 49 % did not attend religious services, except weddings, funerals and baptisms. Only 35 % knew that Matthew is the first book of the New Testament. Richard Dawkins thinks these data strongly question the place of Christian practices in British societies such as faith schools and bishops in the house of lords, because a large majority of the respondents "are not really Christian at all", but merely "tick the Christian box". 

So does not having the orthodox beliefs and relevant practices mean that people are not Christians? Or is religion such that if one self-identifies as x, one is x, even if one (to take a limiting case) does not observe *any* of the practices or fails to uphold *any* doctrines?

Survey on natural theological arguments

I would be very grateful if New APPS readers could fill out the following, very brief survey: https://surveys.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_6XKYbWbsP5SBsBS

It will take only about three minutes of your time. The survey is part of my current project on cognitive science and natural theology. The aim is to get a better idea of how philosophers today evaluate natural theological arguments for or against the existence of God. Note that you do not need to be a philosopher of religion or a faculty member to complete this survey. I will post a digest of the results in a few weeks. 

Weekly Philo of economics: our slavery, Adam Smith and Thoreau

This is from a footnote in Wilberforce's Correspondence, presumably added by the editors (his sons I believe). The second, more amusing part of the anecdote (starting with "one day") is usually attributed to Sir Walter Scott, who turns it into a satirical moral on how two great teachers of philosophy engage each other.