Right Reason

The 4^th of July is American Independence Day, on which Americans celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence (the Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand is also interesting, but that’s for another time). It’s one of those days when revisionary political liberals sharpen their pencils and write letters to the editor to try to offset the natural effect that facts have on people. In other words, they attempt to convince people of things that aren’t so. When it comes to the Declaration of Independence, perhaps the major thing that secular liberals might want to do is to distract people from what the declaration says – especially all that stuff about God – and to remind people of the supposed fact that in a truly free nation, religion stays out of the public square. Reading the Declaration of Independence pushes any such thought well into the background:

Consider the opening words of the Declaration:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The basis of human equality, along with the basis of human rights, is explicitly theological God bestows equal status and dignity upon human beings. From Abraham Lincoln to John F. Kennedy, these sentences have held a place of privilege in many political figures since the time they were written.

Some secular liberals, however, are honest. Yeah I know, try to subdue your shock. Within the literature on political philosophy and the issue of religion in the public square, I’ve found that – unlike the opinion pages of the local newspaper – there’s a tendency to actually deal with reality. Take Martha Nussbaum for example. She doesn’t try to re-write history. She accepts the facts of what the Declaration of Independence says, but she’s a secular liberal, so she does the honest thing: She denounces the declaration. In fact, since she realises that a thoroughgoing secular outlook has no way of defending the claim, made in the declaration, that all people are really equal, she declares that this too, along with the reference to God, makes the declaration unacceptable in a secular liberal democracy. I don’t like her ideas, but I love her honesty.1

Glenn Peoples

1. Martha Nussbaum, “Political Objectivity,” New Literary History 32 (2001), 883-906, especially 896. [↩]

Scientism, as I am using that term here, is an approach to studying an issue that assumes that if something is a question of fact, then it can be answered by science. A very strong form of scientism would be logical positivism. Logical positivism, now a largely abandoned perspective, said that in order for a question to be meaningful it had to be either scientifically verifiable, or else it had to be something that was true by definition (e.g. squares have four sides). Scientism need not go this far.

Richard Dawkins has been accused of employing scientism in his attacks on religious belief. I’ll look directly at the accusation shortly. In a recent blog by Stephen law, he takes issue with this accusation and seeks to exonerate Dawkins from it. Before I get to that, another comment in the same blog entry caught my attention. Law writes: “The God Delusion is a world-wide best-seller that provoked a huge storm of criticism from the religious, who accused Dawkins of all sorts of confusions, muddles and bad arguments.”

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A couple of times in recent history I’ve encountered Christians who have used the sentence “you’re going to be dead a lot longer than you’re going to be alive” as a way of referring to the fact that heaven (or hell) is forever.

Christians have said it when responding to the popular book, “The Secret.”

One of the finest spokespeople for intellectually defensible Christianity has said it when responding to the likes of Sam Harris. This example frankly shocked me.

I just don’t know why Christians say this at all. They cannot possibly believe it. The language suggests a complete rejection of the physical world in our eternal future, beginning with the point of our death. Our experience will be of heaven or hell forever and ever, and we will always – always – be physically dead, living on only in a disembodied afterlife. Hence, we are (physically) alive for a short while until we die, but we will be dead forever after that, and so “we’re going to be dead a lot longer than we will be alive.”

But Christianity has literally never taught this. This denies the resurrection of the dead. If the resurrection of the dead is true, then we will be dead temporarily, but alive forever. Now, I’m not accusing the many Christians who use this careless phraseology of actually denying the resurrection of the dead – but why use language that does precisely this? Why say something so confusing when it reflects the opposite of what all Christians actually affirm? Please stop.

Do believers in a divine designer really believe in a God of the gaps?

Some opponents of intelligent design say that because it draws on what is in their view an inevitably theological explanation, it must be a kind of “god of the gaps” way of reasoning. One such critic says that “A theory such as ID posits what is pejoratively known in philosophy as a ‘God of the gaps’: in short, it slots the concept of a God into any feature of existence which science or reasoning cannot explain (for the moment).” Proponents of intelligent design maintain that this is a mistaken analysis of their position. Which of these two competing claims is correct does not interest me here. The point is that once a person is found guilty of using “god of the gaps” argument, they are at fault and should withdraw their argument. That much at least is accepted by proponents and opponents of Intelligent Design. What does interest me, however, is the way that some (but surely not all) opponents of belief in God may be tempted to read far too much into the objection that someone is using a god of the gaps mentality.

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I’m in the process of writing the next podcast episode on Alvin Plantinga and his arguments around the idea of belief in God as a properly basic belief. In it, I’m clearly on Plantinga’s side, and I think his work in that area represents a crucial contribution to philosophy of religion (and to epistemology).

I thought, therefore, that I should balance that with the following rather less friendly assessment. I’ve mentioned before that I think that Plantinga’s defence of mind-body dualism is his major weakness (maybe his ontological argument for the existence of God is is second major weakness). Here he is briefly defending mind-body dualism in a talk with Robert Kuhn:

Argument: “It seems to me to be perfectly conceivable that I should exist when my body doesn’t.”

Now, it’s clear to me what Plantinga is getting at, and it’s equally clear that Kuhn has trouble understanding it. Most of Plantinga’s critics at Youtube who watched this clip have the same problem that Kuhn does. Kuhn is getting tangled up in the idea that if something is “possible” then everything in discussion is relegated to a possible world, so we don’t even know if the possibility exists in this world. One of the commentors at Youtube who – ironically – felt that he was competent to assess the philosophical quality of the argument rejected it, saying: “Worst goddamn philosopher ever. Because I can imagine it it’s? true…? .” This is (obviously) wrong, and Plantinga’s argument is a lot better than that. Plantinga’s argument is as follows:

1. If I am identical with B (my body), then absolutely every true statement about me will be true of my body as well (since they are the same thing)
2. “This thing can possibly exist without B” is a statement that’s true of me, but it’s clearly not true of B
3. Therefore I am not identical with B (my body)

It’s not the worst argument in the world, granted, but an argument needs more than that going for it in order to be a good one.

The thought experiment derived from the story Metamorphosis has a couple of problems. For one, beetles don’t have eight legs, they have six. But that’s not the elementary error that matters here – it’s a different elementary problem. Is it really conceivable that I might exist when my body doesn’t? Plantinga’s language reveals a degree of question begging when he says that someone in the story woke up and found himself “in the body of a beetle.” In? It sounds like that description just supposed that we exist independent of a body and can be “in” any number of different bodies. If this is what he really means, then of course only a dualist could find this example even remotely plausible. A physicalist will just look at this thought experiment, if this is what Plantinga means, and say “no, this example is no good. That’s just impossible.”

Of course, the word “metamorphosis” does not at all suggest what Plantinga suggests here. Metamorphosis involves physical change, so what we have here is not Plantinga existing when his body does not. Instead, Plantinga’s form has changed from an upright two legged type form to a black, shiny six legged form. It’s deceptively easy to imagine this scenario just because it’s easy to imagine yourself looking like a beetle. This ease of thought distracts us from the rather significant metaphysical question that we are overlooking, namely that of whether it’s possible to exist apart from our body.

Perhaps an example from the classic horror movie The Wolf Man will suffice to make the point. In the movie, Larry Talbot is the wolf man. He has the curse of the werewolf, and in the full moon he transforms into the terrifying beast that feeds on human flesh. But nobody would take a transformation like this as evidence that Larry Talbot isn’t even a physical being! For Larry, B still exists. It just happens to be a lot hairier than usual.

For Plantinga’s thought experiment to work, therefore, it has to be construed as a case where 1) B is destroyed, 2) there is no causal relationship between B and the beetle body, and 3) There is no truthful sense in which B is the beetle body. But given these constraints, what will the physicalist make of Plantinga’s claim that this scenario is perfectly conceivable? The physicalist will be well with her rights reply, “no, it isn’t conceivable at all.” Verbalising a scenario is not at all the same of really conceiving of it in all of its details. All that Plantinga is really conceiving of, the physicalist will say, is waking up and looking like a beetle.

Greetings dear readers.

It has been really encouraging of late to see the number of visitors to the site continuing to grow. The last few blog entries on the question of historical evidence outside the New Testament for the existence of Jesus in particular have generated a lot of interest – the site stats show that the interest was far greater than is indicated by the comments alone. If you’re  a regular reader/listener, or if you’re a newcomer who likes what’s here, please make sure you spread the word. Also make sure you tell people that you can access the podcast via the iTunes store. Under the podcast category, just search for the title “Say Hello to my Little Friend,” or search Glenn Peoples in the author category.

Here’s an update on what’s going on at the moment. The podcast has been quiet for a moment, but it’s about to roar into life again. As some of you will know, Alvin Plantinga recently retired from his position as the John O’ Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Prompted by this turn of events, the next  episode will introduce listeners who have not yet had the pleasure to one of Plantinga’s most important contributions to philosophy of religion and epistemology – and to philosophy in general, actually, namely the concept of properly basic beliefs and the way that at least some religious beliefs may function as properly basic beliefs. If that sounds dull, trust me – it’s not. I’ll start putting that episode together tonight. I’ve been a little distracted from this over the last couple of days as my wife has been in hospital, but fortunately it looks like all will be well.

As I mention from time to time, I’m also preparing for my approaching trip to the UK to speak in Oxford. For more about this (if you haven’t seen it before), details are here, and if you want to get involved and help me get there, that would be greatly appreciated!

I’m trying to seek out other possible speaking opportunities while I’m in the area too. I’m making contact with the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics to see if they’re interested in a visiting speaker. It would be great if that could take place, so here’s hoping. Here in New Zealand too I’m open to speaking opportunities on a whole range of subject areas.

Also, as I mentioned not too long ago, I’m venturing into starting up an online peer reviewed philosophy journal called The Philosopher’s Stone. Right now I’m assembling an editorial board for this journal. The role of that board is simply to peer reviewed articles that are submitted for publication, or locate someone who would peer review the article. If you’re suitably qualified and think you might be interested, please get in touch.

And that’s all I can tell you for now without having to kill you. Take care out there, kids!

Glenn Peoples

This is the third and final instalment in a short series of blog entries on the discredited but “popular on the internet” belief that not only is Christianity false, but Jesus of Nazareth never even existed at all. In the first part, I looked briefly at the unacceptable and controlling bias when demanding that only sources from outside the New Testament be regarded as historical evidence. In part two I looked at some historical sources that give further credibility to the historicity of the person behind the Christian faith, namely Jesus himself. Those sources, while clearly useful and such that they cannot simply be dismissed, were arguably of minor significance, often due to questions of when they were written.

In this third part, continuing to draw on the excellent work of Paul Eddy and Greg Boyd cited in the previous part, I’ll move on and briefly look at some early but extra-biblical sources on the historical Jesus that are more significant than those already mentioned, and which make a fairly compelling case that Jesus of Nazareth, the founder of Christianity, was known by many as an historical figure. Of course, our expectations need to be realistic. During Jesus’ actual lifetime, Jesus was virtually unknown apart from in the communities in which he lived and taught (and even then, many would not have known who he was). This fact makes the sources that do refer to him even more significant. Let’s take a look at three important such references now.

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