Miracle reports, independence, and mutual support

This is the somewhat technical post to go along with my recent video on miracles and mutual support. It's been fun for me to revisit these topics mentally in the last week or so as I've been planning the video. Since 2008 when Tim and I published our mutual support paper in Erkenntnis, I've published individually a lot more work on independence and testimony. I'm going to include below a list of some relevant publications, some of them (alas) probably available only through institutional subscriptions. But some of them may be available to independent scholars through a free JSTOR account, so do give that a try. 

First, here is the diagram that I used in the talk. (Hat tip to Esteemed Husband for making it look nice.)

As I emphasized in the video, no line of support contains a loop. The discussion is necessarily simplified, especially as regards the role of background evidence concerning the reliability of a source (such as a single Gospel) that reports both the resurrection and the other miracle. Let me say a little more about that.

First, whether you have evidence that two reports are true or false, if they truly support one another in some way, this is always one-directional, even if you think that the people involved are lying or mistaken. The possibility of fabricated reports doesn't in any way mean that you have a loop. Let me make this concrete: Suppose that Joe tells you two different stories. In both of these stories, Joe is set upon by an enemy or by enemies who try to beat him up, and he wins the fist fight. You may suspect that Joe is lying in both cases. This would mean that you think he is a braggart who is trying to make himself look tough. Even so, there would be no loops of support. Call one story Report A and the other Report B. Call their contents Fight A and Fight B. Suppose that you, based on your other information about Joe (e.g., that he's a puny little guy) decide that neither Fight A nor Fight B happened. In that case, the reports still support each other, in the sense that receiving Report A gives you some additional reason to expect Report B, since Report A supports the umbrella hypothesis that Joe is a braggart who wants to look tough by telling fight stories. Hence, you have somewhat of an expectation that he will tell another story of the same general kind. By the same token Report B gives you some reason to think you may receive Report A, via the same route in the other direction. (Here it is somewhat helpful to imagine receiving the reports at different times and imagining that you receive them in one order and then imagining that you receive them in the other order, but this is just to help keep things clear.) So the reports are mutually supporting (each raises the probability of the other) via the proposition that Joe is a particular kind of liar, and that mutual support is non-circular. 

On the other hand, if you have, or gain, information that leads you to think of Joe as truthful and humble, as a person who tells things that are embarrassing to himself and doesn't make things up, if you learn independently that Joe has studied martial arts, and the like, this will decrease the probability that he is lying. In that case, Report A will have more force for Fight A (that that fight actually occurred). By the same token, you will have support from Report A (given your other background evidence about Joe's truthfulness) for a different umbrella hypothesis concerning character and circumstances--e.g., that Joe has (or tends to attract) enemies who try to beat him up, and that when that happens he is a good fighter. This "truthful" or "positive" unifying hypothesis will give you some additional reason to expect another actual fight in the real world, won by Joe. In this way, Report A supports Fight A; Fight A supports the hypothesis that Joe is a fellow who tends to get into fights and win them, which in turn raises the prior probability of Fight B. That also increases at least somewhat the prior probability that you will receive Report B, since Joe seems to tell you about these things. In turn, if you receive from Joe the input Report B, that provides some evidence via the opposite (non-looped) route that raises the prior probability of Fight A.

This means that in these kinds of scenarios, other background evidence that supports the truthfulness of a source that tells both stories tends to focus the evidential force of each report in such a way as to support the content of the other story. To apply this to a Gospel: The more separate reason we have to believe that John the evangelist is truthful and does not make up stories that promote a theological agenda, the more reason we have to believe (all else being equal) that his story about the healing of the man born blind is true. That, in turn, helps to support the hypothesis that there is something very special about Jesus (that he is at least a prophet, if not God himself), which increases at least somewhat the prior probability of the resurrection. And vice versa. The reports can be thought of as inputs. (Technically, as a strong foundationalist, I'm going to take the inputs at any given time to be things like your apparent memories at time t of reading the reports at time t - 1 and so forth--things to which you have direct access.) The force of each input in favor both of its own content and of the content reported by the other input is increased by other evidence that supports the truthfulness of a source that contains both reports.

On the other hand, if we were to have independent evidence that John the evangelist makes up marvellous stories about Jesus, the story about the man born blind would have little force to support the resurrection of Jesus, not only because it would probably be false (would have little force for its own content), but also because it wouldn't support a positive "unifying hypothesis" (such as Jesus' deity or the idea that there is something special and supernatural about Jesus) that would in turn increase the probability that Jesus would really rise from the dead. A negative "unifying hypothesis" (that John makes up theological stories) could still unify the reports--the report of the man born blind in John might give us some additional reason to think that John would also report the resurrection--but not by way of allowing each report to support the truth of its own content and thereby to support the other event.

To put it briefly, as we come to have more and more justified confidence that this person/author doesn’t make stuff up, we get closer and closer to an uncomplicated situation in which we can reasonably say, “Well, since that event happened, that makes it more likely that this other event happened, too.”

Another point: While the testimony of an otherwise highly reliable source is itself good evidence that the next thing he tells us is true, it is of course especially helpful if the story in question contains specific marks of realism. That makes the report even stronger evidence for what it attests, and this comes on a quasi-continuum. We should not be agnostic about each report on a passage-by-passage basis. That is something I have always spoken out against and will have much more to say about in The Eye of the Beholder. On the other hand, a brief, undetailed report will in the nature of the case carry less weight that a longer report in which we can point to specific marks of truth. In the accompanying video I draw a contrast in this regard between the account in John 9 of the healing of the man born blind and Mark's account of Jesus' healing of a blind man in Mark 8:22-26. Even the latter is not a bare statement, "Jesus healed a blind man near Bethsaida" and nothing more. It contains the oddity of Jesus spitting on the man's eyes (similar to his creating a paste from saliva and mud in John 9). It contains the bit of dialogue in which the man says he sees people walking like trees and Jesus touches his eyes again, which could potentially be embarrassing to a person wanting to make Jesus look more powerful. (Yes, I know that one can make up theological meanings for this, but those are subjective and unconvincing.) And there is Jesus' attempt to get him not to tell others about the miracle, which fits with other cases in the Gospels. So even here there are indicators of truth. An example of an even more spare account would be John 2:23, which just says that Jesus performed "signs," unspecified, when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover. The healing of the man born blind in John 9, being longer and more detailed, provides more opportunity for markers of truth to come up. 

The discussion of general reliability above concerns one source that tells both stories. If you have additional evidence from another document, another person, etc., for one or both of the events or for details mentioned in the story, all the better. That, too, would be included in the direct evidence for that story as modeled in the diagram. In the video, I included a bundle of different things in E1. In the case of the resurrection, we have several different Gospel accounts, evidence for the reliability of those other Gospels, as well as other evidence (e.g., in Acts) for the disciples' early attestation of the physical resurrection under conditions of great personal danger. Undesigned coincidences between accounts help to show independence as well as truth--a twofer. Apparent contradictions help to show independence.

As I say, it's been a lot of fun to return to this material, and believe it or not, there are still more complexities that I haven't discussed here. I've been making some additional notes in a document of some other thoughts on the probabilistic issues that I'm not including here.

Below is a small bibliography, ordered from most recent on top to oldest on the bottom, of some of my professional publications on these topics, including a more recent individual publication in Erkenntnis on undesigned coincidences. At a minimum, the combination of the video and this post shows that it is possible to "keep accounts" so that we are not using loops of support when there really is mutual support between miracle accounts (or between any accounts). Evidence for Gospel reliability is highly relevant to all of these issues, though "keeping accounts" is somewhat complex.

************************************

“Undesigned Coincidences and Coherence for an Hypothesis,” Erkenntnis, 85 (4) (August 15, 2020), pp. 801-828. On-Line First, August 6, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0050-4 Author’s accepted manuscript version archived here.

“Finessing Independent Attestation: A Study in Interdisciplinary Biblical Criticism,” Themelios 44.1, pp. 89-102 (April, 2019)

“Accounting for Dependence: Relative Consilience as a Correction Factor in Cumulative Case Arguments,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 95:3 (2017), 560-572, DOI 10.1080/00048402.2016.1219753. Abstract here. Does not include whole article.

“Evidential Diversity and the Negation of H: A Probabilistic Account of the Value of Varied Evidence,”  Ergo 3:10 (2016), available here.

“Foundationalism, Probability, and Mutual Support,” With Timothy McGrew, Erkenntnis 68 (2008):55-77. JSTOR entry here (does not include whole article).

Faux simplicity arguments against the existence of God

 

Faux simplicity arguments against the existence of God

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

This interview between Esteemed Husband and Dale Tuggy on the Trinities podcast contains a lot of good stuff. (Yes, I know that Tuggy is not a trinitarian. Yes, I acknowledge the irony and weirdness of having a podcast named "Trinities" hosted by a non-trinitarian. No, that isn't relevant to this post nor to the content of this particular podcast.)

I have to admit up front that I have not yet listened to the entire podcast myself but only to the first twenty minutes of it. It takes me a while to listen all the way through podcasts, for some reason.

But a really interesting issue comes up in those first twenty minutes (indeed, in the first seven minutes) that is worth highlighting in itself.

Naturalists will often try to do a kind of crude "subtraction" simplicity argument against the existence of God and for naturalism, and it just stinks as an argument. To be clear, I am saying nothing against simplicity as a criterion of theory choice. It is ubiquitous and important. It is what shows us that conspiracy theories are ridiculous. We tacitly use simplicity considerations constantly.

What Esteemed Husband is speaking out against here is a double abuse of simplicity.

1) Reduce simplicity considerations in theory choice to a crude "subtraction of entities" notion, where "entities" does not include things like thoughts, intentions, actions, and coincidences.

2) Place an irrational amount and type of weight on those crudely defined "simplicity" considerations, so that one treats it as argumentatively legitimate to dismiss or explain away positive evidence for the existence of an entity on the grounds that one's resulting "ontology" is "simpler."

Tim's Abraham Lincoln example here (in the early minutes of the interview) is particularly instructive. Suppose that I take my "ontology of entities" and simply subtract Abraham Lincoln from those entities that I believe exist. But I still have the same evidence for the existence of Abraham Lincoln. Is this reasonable to do? Can I justify the resulting bizarre lengths to which I will have to go to explain away the evidence for the existence of Abraham Lincoln on the grounds that there is one entity the fewer in the world described by these conspiracy theories and hence that they are more probable than the theory that Lincoln existed? Obviously not. "One entity the fewer" doesn't translate into "simpler overall" and certainly doesn't translate into "more probable on the evidence that I have."

In fact, any theory that tries to explain the evidence I have for the existence of Lincoln while denying his existence will be far more complex than the theory that Lincoln existed. In the place of the one man, Lincoln, I will have to hypothesize a large number of intentions to deceive, coincidental confusions and mistakes, etc., on the part of innumerable other people, all converging to appear erroneously to support the existence of Lincoln. A-Lincolnism is by no means a simpler theory, and it certainly is not more probable than Lincolnism! But, if I attribute these deceptions and errors all to persons who really existed (other than Lincoln), and if I don't consider thoughts and intentions to be separate entities in an ontological list, then the "list of ontological entities" is shorter by the absence of one entity--Lincoln. Whoop-de-do.

This is very much what the naturalist is doing. The naturalist/atheist makes a great song and dance about the "greater simplicity" of his atheism, but that is really quite meaningless and pointless in the presence of evidence for the existence of God.

Simplicity considerations are always relevant to our actual knowledge of what exists only by being comparative considerations applied to candidate explanations of existing evidence. None of us sits around in a literal evidential vacuum counting up entities.

The question of whether God exists arises because there is some putative evidence for the existence of God, just as the question of whether Lincoln exists would never have arisen in the first place if there weren't (taken to be) some reason to think that Lincoln exists. (The same argument can be applied to the existence of your mother or your best friend.)

Hence, simplicity should be thought of in actual practice as a three-place (at least) relation: Theory A is simpler than Theory B (or theories B-Z) as an explanation of evidence E, which I possess.

As Tim points out (a very important point), there is no general rule in probability theory that, relative to some body of evidence, (A & B) has lower probability than (A & ~B). People are sometimes confused about this from the fact that (A) alone is strictly more probable than (A & B). But it simply does not follow that (A & ~B) is more probable than (A & B). Asserting the negation of B is itself a theoretical commitment that takes on its own theoretical risk and may be improbable relative to the evidence at hand. (And to cover agnosticism, asserting the metalevel claim "The probability of B is no greater than some ceiling n" is also a commitment that may be wrong, given the actual evidence. It is not the same thing as merely asserting A.)

Agnostics and atheists harp on a faux simplicity argument against the existence of God, and sometimes Christians are thrown by it. I think that they may be thrown because they think that the correct way to proceed is to go back to some hypothetical pre-evidential state (that no real person is ever in), to "award points" to an hypothesis that has fewer entities than another hypothesis, then to move forward to take the evidence on board while always continuing to award these extra points (and they are usually supposed to be large amounts of points) to the hypothesis with the fewer "entities." (Again, with a very restrictive notion of "entities.")

But we would never do this in the case of the existence of Lincoln, your mother, zebras, or any other actual entity. We would never sit around in angst over how many points we should award to the hypothesis that there are no zebras, which would in turn allow us to explain away large swathes of positive evidence for zebras. We would never do that for the existence of Lincoln, either. Any consideration of additional ontological "weight" that we take on with the existence of Lincoln or zebras is obviously wholly swamped by the consideration that we would have to compass land and sea (hence radically violating simplicity norms) in order to do without Lincoln, zebras, or Mom in our ontology while still explaining the evidence.

Whether or not the positive evidence for the existence of God actually works to support God's existence is, of course, a separate matter that has to be examined by actually looking at the evidence. (A point Tim emphasizes repeatedly in the interview.) In the course of that evaluation, naturalists should not be given a free pass to keep running back to some unreal, pre-evidential situation and awarding their atheism special points for not having God in its ontology. Evidence evaluation just doesn't work that way.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on December 9, 2016 10:54 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (evidentialism) (philosophy of religion)

There are no slippery prior probabilities

 

There are no slippery prior probabilities

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

For the present let it suffice to bear in mind that there is no limit to the strength of working, as distinguished from abstract, certainty, to which probable evidence may not lead us along its gently ascending paths.

W.E. Gladstone, Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Joseph Butler, 1896, p. 349.

In our article on the resurrection in this volume from Blackwell, my husband and I discuss a confusion that has dogged historical apologetics for hundreds of years: The idea that a person who has "too low" of a prior probability for the miraculous is justified in dismissing evidence for a specific miracle out of hand and accepting any other explanation instead.

David Hume made famous capital out of this confusion in his claim to have delivered an "everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion." Atheists run back to the prior probabilities as a rabbit runs to its hole. Never mind the concrete evidence! If I don't already believe that God exists, why should I even listen to your concrete evidence? There must be some other explanation for it, and that's all!

One of the reasons that an understanding of probability is valuable is that it can dispel persistent errors--the intellectual equivalent of urban legends that crop up again and again.

This is such an error. And it is a case where, unfortunately, some Christian writers agree with David Hume. In the relevant section of our article we instance a quotation from the Protestant writers R.C. Sproul, Arthur Lindsley, and John Gerstner, in which they say that "only on the prior evidence that God exists is a miracle even possible" and that therefore "miracles cannot prove God."

This idea of a prior probability that is "too low" gives impetus to an extremely rigid form of classical apologetics that asserts not merely that it is a strategically good idea but that it is an absolute epistemic necessity to convince a person first that God exists, using the arguments of natural theology, before he can be reasonably expected to receive the specific evidence for a miracle such as the resurrection.

The contemporary probability theorist John Earman has done much, building on the work of 19th century thinker Charles Babbage, to demonstrate the falsity of this view. (Earman, to be clear, is not a Christian nor even, as far as I know, a theist.) Briefly, the problem with the Humean view is this: It fails to recognize that any non-zero probability, however low, can be overcome by sufficiently strong probabilistic evidence. This is simply a fact of probability theory. There is no such thing as a prior probability that is "slippery," such that one could never rationally overcome it. Therefore, it is simply false to say that, if one doesn't already believe that God exists, one should "understandably" dismiss the evidence for any miracle. For, if that evidence were sufficiently strong, it would show that, contrary to what one had previously thought, God does indeed exist!

It's important to distinguish strategy from epistemology. For sociological and psychological reasons, it may be quite reasonable in talking with a particular person to present one's arguments in stages--arguing first that God exists on the basis of natural theology and then moving on from there. The arch-probabilist among philosophers of religion, Richard Swinburne, proceeds in exactly this way. It is also probabilistically tidy to do so, because Jesus didn't walk on earth in Palestine unless life exists, and life doesn't exist unless the universe is life-permitting, so it is perfectly reasonable to present these other items as evidence for the existence of God first if one has such arguments.

But those considerations are a far cry from insisting that the evidence for a miracle such as the resurrection literally does not count as evidence or literally cannot be assimilated as evidence unless one already believes in the existence of God. That strong position is simply and flatly false and can be shown to be false by even a rudimentary understanding of how probabilistic arguments work.

In layman's terms, we can isolate the impact of an item of evidence upon an hypothesis from the prior probability of that hypothesis. We can then look at that evidential impact and at least estimate how low of a prior probability could be overcome by that evidential force. That is the strategy that Tim and I employ in our article about the resurrection.

Here is an important point: The strength of the evidence can often be seen by looking at the lengths to which the skeptic must go to explain away that evidence rather than taking seriously the hypothesis that springs to mind. Hence, rather than take seriously the possibility of the resurrection, the skeptic must hypothesize that the women went to the wrong tomb and the persecutor Paul had some inexplicable fit on the road to Damascus that just happened to make him think Jesus was talking to him and that the Christians were right and the eleven disciples all just happened to have a coordinated mass hallucination of Jesus eating, being tangible, and talking to all of them at once, repeatedly, over a forty day period and James just happened to have a similar hallucination and...You get the picture.

A major problem with saying that it is reasonable or understandable for the skeptic (who doesn't already accept the arguments of natural theology) to dismiss the evidence for a miracle is that one is in that case endorsing massively ad hoc hypothesizing on the part of the skeptic. And that is not reasonable.

One could perhaps respond that the skeptic might might simply not know about the details of the evidence for the resurrection. Perhaps he is simply ignorant. In that case he wouldn't be making such ad hoc arguments because he would just vaguely think that "scholars have shown" that the gospels are a bunch of legends made up long after the fact. But in that case, why should the only trigger, the one absolutely necessary trigger, for his finding out more be his coming to believe that God exists by being taken through a prolegomenon of natural theology? Surely we can think of other things that might make him think again--meeting a smart, respected friend or colleague who is a Christian, for example, and wondering why in the world so-and-so believes such a cockamamie tale.

It is important for Christians wanting to think clearly not to become tied to a particular, rigid order for apologetic arguments. This is important first of all because such a rigid order requirement is not defensible. We should want to know the truth, including the truth at the metalevel about how apologetics "has to" go.

Relatedly, it is important not to become tied to such a rigid order because we shouldn't be encouraging people to throw out or ignore strong evidence. We shouldn't even be encouraging them to ignore evidence until and unless they believe some umbrella hypothesis, such as theism, on independent grounds. That is poor philosophical practice. It is one thing to say that it may be helpful to show them first, on other grounds, that God exists. It is quite another to tell them that they needn't bother about the evidence for the resurrection right now, unless they already believe that God exists, because, if they do not have the proper theistic beliefs already in place, it's perfectly understandable that that evidence looks weak to them. No, it shouldn't look weak to them, and no, that isn't understandable.

There are also concerns about eternity involved here; these are matters of ultimate moment. If an unbeliever is simply ignorant of the strength of the available evidence for a miracle, the important thing is to inform him about the evidence, which speaks for itself. To say instead that it is understandable for him to dismiss any miracle claim if he doesn't already believe in the existence of God is to give him an excuse for not looking through the telescope.

We shouldn't be handing out such "get out of jail free" cards readily, because I can tell you one thing: They won't get anybody out of hell.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on May 22, 2014 11:30 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (apologetics) (evidentialism) (miracles) (philosophy of religion)

Some philosophy of religion for your week

Some philosophy of religion for your week

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

I've been doing a little debating over on Facebook recently regarding divine timelessness, and it seemed that W4 readers might like to get in on the discussion. My own position is the Boethian position--namely, that God is timeless, except insofar as God the Son was made man.

I've always been a Boethian, ever since I understood the issue. It seems to fit well with much of Scripture, though not to be absolutely necessitated by Scripture. The position fits exceptionally well with the Einsteinian intertwining of space and time, since obviously God, as a spirit, is not essentially a spatial being. It provides a good way to comprehend divine omniscience regarding the future, and it is consonant with the general idea that God transcends all created things. The position has a lot of advantages.

However, I know that not everyone agrees. William Lane Craig, for example, holds that God has been timeless aside from creation, but that with the creation of the world God came to be "in time," a position that I admit I don't really understand.
One argument for divine temporality, at least "since" creation, goes approximately like this:

1. Any cause must either precede or be simultaneous with its effect.

2. The act of God's will that brings about a miracle is a cause of the miracle.

3. God sometimes does miracles.

Therefore,

4. The act of God's will that brings about a miracle must either precede or be simultaneous with the miracle.

Therefore,

5. The act of God's will that brings about a miracle must be in time.

6. If an act of God's will is in time, then God is in time.

Therefore,

7. God is in time.

I can think of a couple of places at which one could question this argument. Here is an analogy that seems to me to raise doubts about premise 1.

Suppose that I am writing a story that includes a car accident. Thinking about my car accident scene one evening, I decide that I will add to the story and have one of my characters, Joe, get a sudden craving for Starbucks coffee, which will motivate him to go to a certain part of town, thus bringing him to the accident scene in time to be a witness of the accident. I get up, go to my computer, and write in this addition to the story.

I have just caused Joe, in my story, to come to the Starbucks and be a witness of the accident. Did my causal act precede or come simultaneously with Joe's sudden urge to buy a Starbucks coffee? It seems to me that the obvious answer is that it did neither. To say that it did would be to put me in the story and to put my acts into the timeline of the story. In terms of my timelessness vis a vis the story, that would be to assume what is to be proved. But it also simply seems an incorrect analysis. I, as author, am not carrying out my authorial acts within the world of the story at all but rather within my own world. Hence it is meaningless to say that my act of causing Joe to have a desire for coffee came before or didn't come before his desire, as that desire is imagined to occur in the story. The question simply makes no sense, because my acts in my own mind and even my acts on the computer are strictly non-comparable to the timeline of events in Joe's story.

Premise 1 seems to be intended to rule out backwards causation in time, which I'm quite willing to grant is impossible. But if we revised premise 1 to say instead merely, "No cause may come after its effect," we wouldn't be able to get the argument off the ground, for the Boethian isn't claiming that God's causal acts come after their effects in the created world.

So it seems to me that the possibility remains open that acts from an infinite, transcendent being upon a finite universe are an exception to the usual rule expressed in premise 1, though that rule may well be correct for finite-finite causal events.

Have fun, chaps.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on January 14, 2013 3:47 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (God) (philosophy)

C.S. Lewis on personalism and God

This talk of "meeting" is, no doubt, anthropomorphic; as if God and I could be face to face, like two fellow-creatures, when in reality He is above me and within me and below me and all about me. That is why it must be balanced by all manner of metaphysical and theological abstractions. But never, here or anywhere else, let us think that while anthropomorphic images are a concession to our weakness, the abstractions are the literal truth. Both are equally concessions; each singly misleading, and the two together mutually corrective. Unless you sit to it very tightly, continually murmuring "Not thus, not thus, neither is this Thou," the abstraction is fatal. It will make the life of lives inanimate and the love of loves impersonal. The naif image is mischievous chiefly in so far as it holds unbelievers back from conversion. It does believers, even at its crudest, no harm. What soul ever perished for believing that God the Father really has a beard?

Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, pp. 21-22.

Special agent intention as an explanation

In the course of my discussion with Ed Feser, below, and also in the course of re-reading this old thread from What's Wrong With the World, it's occurred to me that the following points might be useful:

All Christians believe that God made the universe and sustains the universe. All Christians also believe that God sometimes does things that in some sense "go beyond" making and sustaining the universe. We usually call those miracles. Some have argued that, if a particular "going beyond" was "front-loaded" into the initial conditions of the Big Bang, it shouldn't be considered a miracle. I'm rather against front-loading talk, because I'm inclined to think that it would look like an intervention whenever it came up anyway. ("Hey, God front-loaded the change from water to wine at Cana into the Big Bang so that it happened at the very moment that Jesus intended it to!") But either way, Christians are committed to believing that there are things that God does by special intention that goes beyond, "God continually sustains everything at every moment" or "God made the whole world, somehow."

This is why all Christians that I know of have some notion of the natural order or of what are usually called secondary causes. There is some sense in which it is true to say that the weather in my town today is probably not the result of special divine intention but rather of the secondary causes according to which God has built the world but that the voice from the sky at Jesus' baptism was definitely the result of special divine intention.

When someone promoting an ID argument says that it is probable that such-and-such a particular phenomenon (say, the visual biochemical cascade in some animals) was the result of intelligent design, he need not be saying that the cosmological argument (or some other version of the teleological argument) doesn't work, that God isn't a necessary being, that it is not the case that everything in the universe depends on God for its existence, that God doesn't sustain the whole world, that God didn't create the whole universe, or anything of the kind. He can be prescinding from addressing all of those heavier metaphysical questions. What he is saying is that it is probable that this particular phenomenon (not everything in the universe indiscriminately) was the result of special agent intention. And special agent intention just isn't what we mean by any of those other things. It isn't included in God's sustaining the universe or God's being the Ultimate Cause or any of that. Suppose that a philosopher claims that, even if only one electron existed in the universe, it would have teleology and would necessarily require that God sustain that teleology. Whatever force that claim or an argument for that claim has, that argument isn't an argument for special agent intention. The old Gilbert and Sullivan song says, "If everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody." If we restrict ourselves to some sense in which everything is, of necessity, "the result of" God, then we just aren't talking about God's special intention, and ID arguments proceed from particular noticed facts and the explanation of special intention for those particular facts.

However one parses God's ways of working out His special intentions, Christians have to have a distinction between God's creating and sustaining everything and God's acts of special intention, because without it, we can't talk about miracles.

So when someone making an intelligent design argument says that it is probable that x was the result of intelligent design, he is saying that it is probable that x was the result of special agent intention. And whatever one believes about God as the Necessary First Cause and so forth, one is completely free to regard it as merely probable that some given phenomenon in the world is a result of God's special intention and special act to bring about that intention.

Hence, an ID argument does not involve postulating a God who is not the necessary ground of being or anything of the kind. As I said, the ID arguments just don't have to enter into those ultimate metaphysical questions at all. An ID argument involves postulating that we can examine probabilistically whether some given phenomenon is the result of special agent intention--which, if God is in fact the Agent in question, means special divine intention. What is being treated as merely probable is not God's relationship to Everything That Is but some agent's (or Agent's) special intention, and acting to bring about that special intention, with regard to this particular arrangement or event.

It will be observed that in making these last two points I am explicitly rejecting any hermetic seal or wall between the creation of, say, animals and Biblical miracles. That is correct. I do emphatically reject any absolute claim to the effect that "creation is different." Our conclusions about whether some animal or aspect of biological life is a result of special divine intention should be drawn on the basis of all available evidence, and in many cases (as discussed in the voice in the sky example in the previous post) that evidence will be similar in kind to the evidence that allows us to conclude special divine intention and action in the case of miracles within human history. The "creating parts of nature, such as animals, in the distant past has to be special" insistence is simply not, in my view, supportable. People often attempt to say that it must be different on the basis of various philosophical assumptions, but I simply do not find those arguments convincing. Evidence is evidence, and is all of a piece.

In any event, from a metaphysical point of view, I think it is enlightening to hold that in some sense special agent intention and action constitute the merely probable explanation in ID arguments. This should lay to rest any objection that ID is rejecting a God who necessarily is the Cause of all things.

Things God can do to reveal Himself

As my vast readership already knows, I've been researching the issue of God and time lately, coming down squarely on the Boethian side according to which God is strictly timeless.

I'm not sure precisely where that places me vis a vis the category of "theistic personalism," against which philosopher Edward Feser has written so much, but it is certainly a move in the "perfect being" direction and away from the idea that God must be fully comprehensible or that God's mode of existence is like that of a super-being or demigod.

If you also have read What's Wrong With the World for a few years, you know that Ed was my blog colleague there for a time and that he and I had many bouts there over the theory of intelligent design (here is just one) and whether it is contrary to right philosophy and theology and to be rejected out of hand, aside from a consideration of the empirical facts discussed by ID theorists. (Digression: Let it be said right here that I have great respect for Ed and for that reason even hesitated to write this post or to bring up the issue yet again myself. I've done so for three reasons. 1) My work on God and time over the last few months has made me appreciate more some of Ed's own concerns about theistic personalism. 2) I've noticed that Ed is making quite a few comments against ID recently. 3) I just now thought of the argument contained in this post.) As I understand Ed's position, he does reject intelligent design arguments in just exactly that way, because he holds that Thomism and classical theism are demonstrably true and are in irreconcilable conflict with the nature and premises of the arguments brought by intelligent design theorists.

Now, without rehashing all of that, I want to address here just one part of that controversy--namely, the concept of God. Ed has written:

[W]e are necessarily left with a designer conceived of in anthropomorphic terms – essentially a human being, or at least a Cartesian immaterial substance, with the limitations abstracted away. The result is the “theistic personalism” (as Brian Davies has labeled it) which has displaced classical theism in the thinking of many contemporary philosophers of religion. [Snip]

Suppose you are a Christian, and suppose I gave you a powerful argument for the existence of Zeus, or of Quetzalcoatl. Would you run out and wave it defiantly in the faces of your New Atheist friends? Presumably not; it would be less a vindication than an embarrassment. To be sure, such an argument wouldn’t necessarily be incompatible with Christianity. You could always interpret Zeus or Quetzalcoatl as merely an unusually impressive created being – a demon, say, or an extraterrestrial. Indeed, that’s how you should interpret them if they are real, because whatever Zeus or Quetzalcoatl would be if they existed, they would not be divine in the classical theistic sense of “divine.” On classical theism, there doesn’t simply happen to be one God, as if only one applicant bothered responding to the "Creator needed; long hours but good benefits" job ad; there couldn’t possibly be more than one God, given what God is. Anything less than Being Itself or Pure Act, anything less than That Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived, anything less than that which is absolute divine simplicity, absolutely incomparable, would simply not be God. There is no such thing as “almost” being God; it’s all or nothing. But precisely for that reason, while to prove the existence of Zeus or Quetzalcoatl would not be to disprove God’s existence, neither would it advance you one inch to proving it. It would be completely irrelevant.

In some recent posts he again takes swipes at intelligent design on similar grounds. For example, here he facetiously envisages a semi-blasphemous movie about God that includes treating God as the designer:

Fade in: We meet God, a divine person who’s at the top of the game. Think Olivier in Clash of the Titans, but invisible and with something even cooler than the Kraken: we call it ‘maximal greatness.’ I think we can get Anthony Hopkins, though maybe he’ll worry about typecasting after the Thor movies. Anyway, God’s an Intelligent Designer too, like Downey, Jr. in Iron Man but with angels. We’ll show him making bacterial flagella and stuff -- CGI’s pretty good now, so it’ll look realistic.

I want to argue that an argument parallel in form to Ed's argument against ID from classical theism could be made against using several of the actions attributed to God in Scripture to conclude that in fact God was speaking and that the events did not arise from natural (secondary) causes. I consider this to be a real problem for the accusation that ID must be based on a faulty concept of God, since Christians are bound to accept that God did in fact engage in these revelatory actions in Scripture and that people were supposed to take those events for signs. Note that the value of these events as signs would have been completely lost if one concluded that they were like the weather and that God's only relationship to them was the same as God's relationship to everything in nature--e.g., that of First Cause and sustainer. The whole point was supposed to be that these events stood out from the background, that they were not like the weather, not like the existence of a rock, not like "nature in general."

Now, the interesting thing is that these events reveal the actions of God in ways that it is logically possible were the result of the action of some being who was not God and therefore, by definition, less than God. I want to stress that by "it is logically possible" I do not mean "would have been reasonable to conclude." It would have been unreasonable to conclude that these events were caused by a demigod or an angel or alien. The point merely is that that possibility is not excluded, by the nature of the event itself, as an absolute logical impossibility.

Moreover, part of the argument that these events were caused specially by God passes through premises such as that they were not the result of secondary causes, that they were done intentionally and for a purpose against the background of a regular order of nature, that they were the acts of an Intelligence. An intelligent agent. And it just is the case that at any point where we start referring to an "intelligent agent," a "mind," and the like, we will end up using terms like "a being" and "a person." It is nearly unavoidable. Now, these are exactly the terms and concepts that Ed Feser objects to in the ID arguments. He considers that they smack of, or even entail, the theistic personalism that he considers wrong-headed. If  ID involves arguing that God is an "intelligent agent," a "designer" who makes things by deliberate acts that involve "tinkering" within nature, why then, according to Ed, ID entails a concept of God that is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

The problem is that we have several biblical examples that, if analyzed, would incline us to use very much the same types of "theistic personalist" terms Ed objects to. Note that by this I am not saying that theistic personalism is just plain right, that God really is a person just like ourselves with the exception of being bigger, better, and stronger. What I am pointing out, rather, is that if we are Christians and believe that God has revealed Himself in the ways recorded in Scripture, we have to be willing to accept this fact: God sometimes reveals Himself in ways such that, when the argument is spelled out, it is very difficult to eliminate inferring that the event was done by "a person," because it is by thinking of the act as being performed by a person, or at a minimum, by someone relevantly like the persons we are acquainted with, that we infer that it was not the result of natural causes but rather a deliberate act. It appears that God reveals Himself in these ways because we are persons, because God is personal, and because this is a way, perhaps the only way, in which our minds are able to understand that we are receiving a message, a revelation, a Word, a sign. For the Infinite to give us a sign, He must reveal Himself insofar as He is sufficiently like ourselves for us to hear Him. It is therefore not wrong to make arguments for special divine action that pass through premises about God's doing things such as using language, purposely making things happen that would not otherwise have happened by natural causes, deliberately arranging things in a pattern, acting like a person rather than only acting as the Sustainer of All Things, Being Itself, etc. And the ID arguments fit this description.

Let's look at some of the examples from Scripture. When Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to a contest, each side has a sacrifice and prays for the sacrifice to be consumed by fire from heaven. Every Sunday School child knows what happened: The prophets of Baal ran around their altar for hours freaking out and slashing themselves with knives and other interesting behaviors while Elijah sat back and made fun of them and nothing happened. Then Elijah prayed, and God sent down fire from heaven that consumed Elijah's sacrifice and all the water that Elijah (just to make it more fun) had poured on and all around the altar. Then Elijah killed the prophets. There was also a major rainstorm, but that came a little later.

Think about this for a minute: Sending fire from heaven is the kind of thing that one can easily conceive it to be possible for a mere demigod to do. There is nothing per se about sending down fire from heaven that reveals that God is Being Itself or is "not a person" but rather "beyond personality," etc. In fact, the prophets of Baal had some reason to hope, since they believed that Baal was real, that Baal would send down fire and consume their sacrifice. It didn't happen because there is no real god Baal, not because sending fire out of the sky is the kind of thing that is logically impossible for a mere god (small g), a mere super-being, to do.

Could we not then say that the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal "portrays" God as a mere super-being? Should we get facetious and scoff at the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal by envisaging a movie portraying God as a Zeus-like being who hurls fire from heaven? Well, no. If we believe that in fact God is not a mere super-being, and if the story was in fact true and was a true revelation of God, then presumably it doesn't teach that God is a mere super-being. Nor are we to conclude from the story that an angel or other finite being, rather than the true God, sent the fire. Of course we are supposed to conclude that God Himself sent the fire! Presumably someone who holds to the kind of extremely transcendent concept of God that Ed Feser holds can readily reconcile this story with his theology by saying that here God was revealing merely part of the truth about Himself, revealing His power, revealing that He is the only true God, that Baal is not a true God, and so forth. All of which is completely correct. But the exact same thing could be said about ID: If we believe that God is indeed the designer, we are not therefore concluding that God is merely a being like ourselves, only stronger and greater. We are using an argument in which, we think, it looks like God did something that could in strict logical principle have been done by a lesser being or finite designer, just as fire from heaven could in strict logic possibility be sent down by some lesser being. But that doesn't make it reasonable to conclude that the one who sent down fire or made the intricate workings of the cell is a mere demigod. God sometimes reveals Himself by doing things that a lesser being could in strict logic do. He does them in such a way and in such an historical context that it would not be reasonable to conclude that they were in fact done by anyone other than God.

In the evidence pointed to by ID theorists, it seems that the One True God reveals characteristics such as His wisdom, His glory, and the awesomeness of His thoughts. At that point, if our philosophy or theology, or other parts of Scripture, tell us all these other transcendent things about the nature of the One True God, we will conclude that it was that transcendent God who designed the living organism.

O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom thou hast made them all. The earth is full of thy riches! (Psalm 104:24)

I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvellous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well. (Psalm 139:14)

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. (Psalm 19:1-2)

Another type of example, perhaps even better: In the New Testament, God the Father several times uses human language to speak from above, from the sky, to convey a message. God the Father does this to endorse Jesus Christ, the Son. At Jesus' baptism, the Father spoke and said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." At Jesus' Transfiguration, the Father said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear him." Shortly before Jesus' death (John 12:28ff) Jesus said, "Father, glorify thy name." In response a voice came from above saying, "I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again." Jesus explicitly tells the people (vs. 30) that the voice came for their sake.

Let's be clear: It would be caviling (and false) to say that such events of God's speaking from the heavens provided evidence for God's existence and activity only in the same sense that and to the same extent that the existence of the wind, weather, and rocks provide evidence. Clearly, God intended to show that He was acting right there in a special way that goes beyond His activity in sustaining all of creation. God wanted to communicate a message, and to do that, God used human language in the form of an audible voice. Among other things, the people who heard the voice inferred, probably without thinking twice about it, that this was not a merely natural event and that an Intelligent Being was communicating meaningful content by arranging linguistic units (morphemes, words, etc.) deliberately according to patterns known to human beings. This provided a special type of evidence for a special type of activity by God--communicating to mankind.

But now see what language I ended up using, just there, or that we would normally use to discuss what people could know when they heard the voice from heaven: An intelligent being. A mind. Even a person, a personal being, an agent. The type of being who is capable of using language! What, then? Should we say that it is wrong or was wrong for those present to infer that God spoke from the heavens and endorsed Jesus as His beloved Son? (Note that if God spoke from the heavens, then God must exist. There is no hermetic seal that separates evidence for God's existence from evidence for God's actions. Evidence for God's actions is ipso facto evidence for God's existence.) Such an inference was precisely what God intended people to make! And God justified that inference by acting like a person, by acting in ways that only a personal being acts, and by doing things that nature does not do on its own. He did it, moreover, despite the "danger" (if we must call it that) that people would, in describing what they thought, say things like, "A person spoke from the sky." Oh, no! They might call God a person in thinking about what happened that day! They might think of Him as a person! But God is not (so we are told) a person. To think of Him as such is to succumb to theistic personalism, to have a wrong concept of God! Etc., etc. It seems undeniable that the argument to God's actions from a voice in the sky "encourages" such a picture of God. Hence, isn't there a problem? To argue from God's use of language to the existence of God could be thought, just as much as the ID argument, to be teaching us or encouraging or implying a wrong concept of God. If one took the Feser approach to this event, it seems that one ought to say that the argument from the voice would lead to the conclusion that some mere demigod or angel, someone other than the true God, spoke from heaven. Why? Because that argument must pass through a fairly strong analogy to the actions of a person, of a being in some fairly important ways like ourselves. But evidently God Himself didn't think that this was a problem. To put it bluntly, Christians are committed to believing that God really did speak aloud, just like A Person In the Sky, in order to reveal Himself and give man a specific message.

One can go farther: in the case in John some of the bystanders actually thought that an angel was talking with Jesus (vs. 29). Indeed, from Luke we know that on the night of Jesus' birth angels did speak from the sky. It is by no means logically impossible that a voice coming out of the sky giving audible words should come from a lesser being than God, from an angel or some other finite but super-powerful being. As a matter of fact, sometimes apparently angels do speak out of the sky! Hence, should we not be concerned that, by revealing Himself in this way, God was risking being thought of as a mere super-being? But that doesn't seem to have bothered God.

In these incidents, God revealed Himself as one who speaks from the heavens. In the intricate design of the cell (for example) or the DNA code (for example), or a million other incredible examples, God reveals Himself as a designer. It is true that He is more than one who speaks from the heavens and more than a designer, but just as God did not disdain to reveal Himself as one who speaks in language from the heavens, so we are not bound to think that it would be impossible for God to reveal Himself as a designer.

Let me emphasize that I do not consider these to be mere analogies. I would say that for us to find the kind of computer code and nano-technology that we do find in the cell and in organisms is as much a signature of the Divine Mind as it would be for us to find written language in the cell. Indeed, much that we do find in living organisms is far more astounding and epistemically powerful a revelation of the activity of a real Intelligence than a piece of natural language would be.

I therefore completely disagree with Ed Feser's claim that the design argument cannot get you one whit closer to the existence of the true God, that in the nature of the case it cannot be positively relevant, evidentially, to the existence of the true God. In the quotation above, he literally likens it to an argument for the existence of Zeus. This claim is apparently based on the premise that the design argument as made by ID must be arguing for someone who could not be the real God. But the above comparisons to God's speaking from the sky (or from a burning bush) or to God's sending fire from heaven show that this claim is incorrect. God can reveal Himself in actions that could be attributed to a "mere being," someone less than God, but it does not follow that arguments from those results must be arguments for a being who must be someone other than the real God. And this is true even though those arguments rely on a strong analogy between the one who carried out those actions and ourselves. This is true even though parts of those arguments, in the nature of the case, are most naturally going to be expressed by saying that the one who did the action is "a person." There is nothing about the ID argument that requires theistic personalism in any way that could not equally be said about the voice from heaven argument.

Consider how it would go if some foolish skeptic, hearing the voice from the sky, tried to claim in all seriousness that the event was merely the result of natural processes and did not convey any actual message, was not deliberate, was not a self-revelation of a personal being of any kind. It would be completely correct to point out that thunder doesn't sound like language, that natural explanations are woefully inadequate, and, furthermore, that the arrangement of sound waves in syllables, words, and sentences that sound exactly like meaningful portions of the Aramaic or Greek language (or whatever language the Voice used) is far better explained by the deliberate action of a personal being than by natural causes. Note, too (again), that this argument is different from saying that God sustains all things and underlies all causal processes, including the wind. That's all very well and good, but the point about the voice from the sky was that it was not the wind nor the thunder nor any other natural process, that the Speaker's relation to the sounds in the air was something more than or other than God's relation to everything else in the whole world, and that this special organization of (dare I say "tinkering with"?) the sound waves, going beyond the mere behavior of natural processes, was what made the sounds convey meaning.

This would be a good argument, a rational argument, and the only possible response to make to someone who was such a fool as to try to attribute the language from the sky to secondary causes. And it would not be an "argument for the existence of Zeus" merely because one did not take care at every moment and every point to say "personal being (who really is Being itself, so let's be super-duper careful here)" instead of "a person." Nor would it be tantamount to an argument for the existence of Zeus if one admitted that Zeus, if he existed, or an angel, or an alien, could in principle cause a voice from the sky. The nature of the argument itself requires one to make a strong analogy between the One who caused the voice and persons that we know around us and their arrangement of parts (in this case, the sounds and syllables) for certain ends (in this case, the conveyance of meaning). It would not follow that one was arguing for the existence of a being that could not be the true God, Being itself, etc. The fact of the matter is that God deliberately chose to reveal Himself in exactly that way--by using language, by going against what would otherwise have happened by natural law, and even by in some sense looking like a Big Man in the Sky speaking loudly so that people could hear His message! Christians have to deal with this fact, whether or not they are Thomists or classical theists. Apparently it is possible for an argument for a Person Who Talks From the Sky to be an argument for the action (and therefore ipso facto the existence) of the true God. And if the true God is indeed Being Itself and all those other things the Thomist says He is, then that's just the way it is--an argument for the can indeed be an argument for the other. Therefore, an argument for God's action that depends on a strong analogy with finite persons need not thereby be an argument that limits the One whose existence the argument supports to being a mere finite person.

If one is a Christian, one doesn't have the option of sticking to a God who doesn't do things like that, because the Christian God does do things like that.

I contend that any analysis of the evidential force of the evidence of divine self-revelation using natural language uttered by apparently supernatural means (e.g., a voice from the sky or from a burning bush) will in the nature of the case be similar to an analysis of the evidential force of the argument from design. Since the classical theist who is also a Christian must accept that God does reveal Himself in these ways that might seem crude, that can be said to make Him look like "a person," and that depend for their force upon a comparison between the actions of the Being involved and finite persons, the Christian classical theist should not claim that the argument from design supports the existence of a being who cannot be the true God.

I say all of this as someone at least somewhat sympathetic to aspects of classical theism. While doing research lately on God and time, I have frequently reflected that it is a mistake to insist that we must know what it is like to be God. Heck, many philosophers seriously doubt that we even know what it is like to be a bat, so why should we assume that we must know what it is like to be God! I think Christians should take seriously the Scriptural statement that God's ways are not our ways. I think that God's causality is not related to time in the same way that our causality is related to time. I think that God's mode of being is probably to a large extent not imaginable or visualizable by us. I think that a lot of harm has been done by a theological approach that insists that we must be able to tell the history of God, as it were, and get a clear and distinct idea of what that means at every step. It is no wonder that so many of that bent have ended up as open theists. (Though I give credit to William Lane Craig for not being an open theist.) We should be willing to admit that in many cases we are using analogical language when we compare God's consciousness, knowledge, love, will, planning, etc., to the parallel properties of finite creatures. I can't, for that matter, think of any reason to resist the proposition that we are using analogical language when we speak of God as being like ourselves.

All of this doesn't necessarily make me a card-carrying classical theist, but it does clear me of any suspicion of being a card-carrying theistic personalist. But classical theism should not become a straitjacket that blocks us from admitting the force of evidence. Evidence is evidence. If I can put it this way, evidence doesn't care about labels. And the evidence from design, particularly in biology, is what it is, just as the evidence of the voices and fire from heaven were what they were. If our theory keeps us from looking through the telescope, our theory is too rigid and is at fault. Our concept of God must be able to handle God's own choices as to how to reveal Himself. If those appear crude or likely to lead to faulty concepts of God according to your theory, take it up with God. Meanwhile, I say: Take or leave the personal self-revelations of God, but you can't pick and choose. God has revealed Himself personally, by audible language, in incidents in Scripture. We know that. There is therefore no reason in principle why God could not reveal Himself personally, by the language of programmed code and intricate nanotechnology, in biology.

Theory must accommodate fact, or it is bad theory. It is my hope that classical theism can rise to the occasion.

Yet more in answer to Presentism

After a discussion on Facebook (c'mon, guys, put these great comments here and give my poor little personal blog a bit o' traffic), I've decided to say a bit more about the "Jesus is forever hanging on the cross" criticism of the B theory of time.

William Lane Craig's discussion of this alleged problem is worded very strongly indeed. Here is the most pertinent passage:

[T]he idea that God and creation tenselessly co-exist seems to negate God's triumph over evil. On the static theory of time, evil is never really vanquished from the world: It exists just as sturdily as ever at its various locations in space-time, even if those locations are all earlier than some point in cosmic time (for example, Judgement Day). Creation is never really purged of evil on this view; at most it can be said that evil only infects those parts of creation which are earlier than certain other events. But the stain is indelible. What this implies for events such as the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ is very troubling. In a sense Christ hangs permanently on the cross, for the dreadful events of A.D. 30 never fade away or transpire. The victory of the resurrection becomes a hollow triumph, for the spatio-temporal parts of Jesus that were crucified and buried remain dying and dead and are never raised to new life. It is unclear how we can say with Paul, “Death is swallowed up in victory!” (I Cor. 15:54) when, on a static theory of time, death is never really done away with. Time and Eternity, p. 214.

I already discussed in the previous entry the fact that the language here seems to suggest, erroneously, that the B theorist holds all times to be present tense. Evil "exists just as sturdily as ever at its various locations in space-time." That is a misunderstanding of the B theory. To say that there are tenseless truths about the past is not to say that the events those truths describe are happening now.

Another possible interpretation of the passage is that Craig is treating the B series block as if it exists within some higher-order time. If that were the case, then one might accuse the B theorist of holding that our B series is eternal (endures infinitely in both the past and the future) within this higher-order time. But that, of course, is not what the B theory says at all. An event on the B series that takes one hour takes one hour. The fact that the event does not become strictly unreal and nonexistent as some reality-creating Now moves past it (a concept that is extraordinarily hard to give meaning to, as I argued in the previous post) does not mean that the event takes more than one hour. There is no sense in which the B theory says that Jesus literally endures his sufferings through an eternity of time. The whole point about tenseless truths is that they are tenseless, not that they make the things they describe go on forever! Temporary events do not "last forever" on the B theory. That would be a complete misunderstanding of the B series.

Further: Ponder for a minute what Craig is asserting here about the alleged superiority of his own presentist view. He is saying that evil is really "vanquished from the world" on his view, but not on the B theory, why? Because evil events, such as the crucifixion, "fade away or transpire" on his view but do not "fade away or transpire" in the sense he wishes to assert (whatever exactly his sense means) on a different theory of time such as the B theory. But that is not victory anyway! The alleged superiority of presentism suggested here is that evil is annihilated from the world by the mere passage of time. The presentism Craig is promoting here would make Jesus' crucifixion just as much gone, done away with, no longer part of reality, even if Jesus had never risen from the dead! Pace Craig's Biblical language about death swallowed up in victory and evil purged and vanquished, presentism as a position in the philosophy of time tells us nothing whatsoever about such triumphal goings on.

Consider: Suppose that an evil man tortures a child for one hour, grows bored, stops, and never does it again. Now suppose, instead, that a good man comes along after an hour, finds the evil man torturing the child, and fights and kills him. In the latter case we could rightly say that evil has been vanquished. In the former case, not. But presentism tells us that the evil of the torture passes into unreality as it becomes past just the same in both cases. Presentism doesn't give us a glorious rescue any more than any other theory of time. Glorious rescues either happen or don't happen contingently within history. On presentism, the events of that hour "fade away or transpire" in some strong metaphysical sense whether evil is vanquished or not.

Given that sort of "victory," evil could be just as surely "vanquished" if evil men went on doing evil unopposed throughout human history, the sun went nova, and (if we are the only intelligent life in the universe) all intelligent life ceased to exist (except for God). The end. Maybe all souls are annihilated in this scenario, or maybe they go on existing in some vague and boring mental state throughout all eternity. Whatever. But no more actual evil acts occur. And the evil acts that have already occurred, according to presentism, have become utterly nonexistent in virtue of being past.

Given that notion of "victory," God could be "victorious" over evil simply by deliberately killing all rational beings, good and evil alike. Salvation of souls, redemption, and heaven, which is what Christians usually have in mind when they talk about God's ultimate victory over evil, need not enter the picture at all.

Craig seems to be confusing the unreality of the past, given presentism, which is not in itself what anyone means by "victory over evil," with actual victory over evil, which comes from victorious events themselves and their causal effects. But of course the B theorist can affirm the reality of such victorious events and of their effects just as strongly as the presentist. If anything, the B theorist can affirm the reality of victorious events and their effects even more strongly, since many wonderful and victorious events (such as Jesus' resurrection) are now in our own past, and the B theorist does not have to say that those events, along with the evils they overcame, have passed into unreality as the Now moves inexorably onward.

This criticism, worded eloquently as Craig words it, may seem to have some rhetorical pull, but it simply does not stand up upon philosophical scrutiny.

"Grace Has a Face"

This is a very good, relatively new Christmas song by the southern gospel trio Greater Vision:



I especially like the lyrics of the chorus:

Hope has hands.
Freedom has feet.
Truth will stand.
The Word will speak.
The Holy and lowly will finally embrace,
For Love has a heartbeat, and Grace has a face.

It takes a special kind of philosophy of religion geekery to take an interest in this dispute between Ed Feser and Dale Tuggy about Perfect Being theology and its relationship both to logic and to Scripture. I confess that I take some interest in it, enough to have read all of Ed's most recent (as usual, lucid, well-written, carefully argued, and altogether classy) post on the subject, but not enough to keep up with it from day to day and week to week. I do think it relevant, as Ed has pointed out, that Tuggy is not a Trinitarian. That's got to be a count at some level against Tuggy's rather robust dismissal of classical theism.

At the same time, I have something of a tendency in Tuggy's direction (though needless to say, not in the direction of his loosy-goosey approach to the Trinity), as evidenced by the mere fact that I can't get into the debate over Perfect Being theology all that deeply. If I agreed entirely with Ed, I would doubtless think the debate a good deal more crucial than I can find it in my heart to think it. Moreover, a long time ago Ed and I had a collegial but intense and long debate over the design argument in which Ed vigorously rejected the types of arguments made by intelligent design writers in science as, allegedly, incompatible with Perfect Being theology. And if that's really the case, then I'm inclined to say, "The heck with Perfect Being theology, because the evidence is what it is, and it says what it says." The more stratospheric flights of Perfect Being theology leave me gasping for air, and when I'm quite sure that I won't know what I'm talking about if I take a definite position, I'm just not going to take a definite position.

Okay, that all sounds like a rather strange paragraph either to follow or to precede a discussion of a Christmas song. Here's the connection: One point Tuggy brings up that Ed doesn't have time to address (Ed's post being quite long, careful, and detailed enough as a response to Tuggy already) is that, whatever we say about God aside from the Incarnation, Jesus was an individual man with a real human nature. Hence Jesus was undeniably a specific self among other selves, which is exactly what Perfect Being theology says God cannot be.

I knew already that Perfect Being theology has to make a big bracket anyway for the Incarnation, because Jesus underwent change (growing, for example, from a child to a man, weeping and then ceasing to weep, and so forth), whereas the changelessness of God, who has "no potentialities to actualize," is a linchpin of Perfect Being theology. So a lot of this is going to have to be "apart from the Incarnation" no matter what. That actually makes sense to me and doesn't seem to me to vitiate Perfect Being theology in itself. After all, even a non-philosopher should say, "God does not have literal hands, aside from the Incarnation." So it needn't be too much of a problem to say the same about God's having literal emotions or undergoing literal change, and I suppose there is some perfectly precise locution the theologian can use for a similar point concerning God's "not being a self among other selves"...aside from the Incarnation.

Hence the connection with the song: Even if one is committed to Perfect Being theology, the Incarnation forces one to admit that all those abstract and perfect Divine attributes which go beyond personhood--Truth itself, Being itself, Intelligence itself, Holiness itself--came down to us and became one particular person, one baby, one child, one man, with a particular face. Somehow, if God really is all those superpersonal and abstract things, this must be possible, for it is the core of our Christian faith that God became a man. Love has a heartbeat, and Grace has a face.

On this, it seems, the classical theist and the less philosophical or at least less classical theist must agree, if they are both Christians. God became man, and in becoming man, did not cease to be God. God, who sustains all the universe by the word of His power, did not take a break from sustaining the universe, a time-out while he went down for a little thirty-three-year episode of being a man. No, the Eternal Son could not cease to be the Eternal Son. (There's something for the one who wants to scoff at Perfect Being theology to ponder.) On the other hand, the Eternal Son, by whom and from whom and for whom are all things, really became a person with a particular personality, a Jewish baby in a manger, a child playing with other children, a boy talking with the rabbis in the Temple, a man weeping over Jerusalem, a man dying on a cross. This is a great mystery, one of the central mysteries of our revealed religion.

Someday, when we are in heaven, we will not only kneel and adore but perhaps also talk together: "Of course. It must have been this way. I understand it all so much better now." Not that our minds, being finite, will ever be able to understand it all. But since we are assured that then we shall know even as also we are known (I Corinthians 13), there is some hope of those conversations. In those heavenly philosophy get-togethers, I trust that Ed and I, and hopefully Dale Tuggy, too (if he gets his heretical views on the Trinity knocked out of him in some purgatorial fashion here on earth or beyond), can raise a glass of some heavenly wine and together love, with our minds, the God who is Perfect and who also, for us men and for our salvation, became a man.

A reply to a question

A reader has attempted to post an entirely off-topic question in a recent post. The question concerns probability theory and the resurrection. After some consideration, I've decided to recast the question a bit more clearly and answer it here rather than either ignoring it or publishing it in a thread where it does not belong. (Had the reader left an e-mail address, I might have replied that way, but he didn't.)

The reader's question, reworded by me, runs approximately like this:

It seems to the reader that the prior probability of the resurrection is an exception to the law of total probability. The reader asserts that P(R|~G) = 0. He also correctly points out that, on the assumption that P(R|~G) = 0, we should calculate P(R) = P(G) x P(R|G). The problem, the reader claims, is that multiplying the prior probability of God's existence by the probability that the resurrection takes place given God's existence appears to produce a probabilistic error. The reader produces a modus ponens argument:

p1= If God doesn't exist, then the resurrection is impossible.(The reader takes this to be analytically true.)

p2= God doesn't exist.

c= Therefore, the resurrection is impossible.

If premise 1 is analytic, one must deny premise 2 to deny the conclusion. But, says the reader, premise 2 need only be more plausible than not to be assertable. That would seem to mean that if P(G)<50%, the probability of the resurrection is 0, which, however, is not what we would get if we calculated the prior probability of the resurrection as we should using the law of total probability--that is P(R) = P(G) x P(R|G).

I'm going to waive the question of whether it is analytically true that the resurrection is impossible if God doesn't exist, because that either is simply a definitional matter (e.g., if you define "the resurrection" as an act of God) or involves a near-zero probability of a naturalistic resurrection.

The error in the reader's reasoning arises from his putting the wrong kind of weight--specifically, probabilistic weight--on the claim that one is justified in asserting that God doesn't exist if the probability of God's existence is less than .5. Even supposing that we grant that, that has no weight whatsoever for calculating the prior probability of the resurrection. You cannot go from, "'God does not exist' can be asserted justifiably if it is more probable than not" to "We should do our calculations of the probability of other propositions based on treating the probability of God's existence as 0 whenever the probability of God's existence is less than .5."

In essence, the above argument is a completely confused attempt to combine deductive and probabilistic reasoning. There would be no probabilistic inconsistency if the atheist were to say, viewing the prior probabilities, that probably the resurrection could not happen, or something like that. But that would have to be carefully spelled out by adding the word "probably" after "therefore" in the conclusion. (Compare "If John [defined by some definite description] doesn't exist, it is impossible for John to speak to me. John [defined by that definite description] doesn't exist. Therefore, it is impossible for John to speak to me.) The prior probability of R just is what it is. Nothing magical happens if the prior probability of G is below .5. Whatever the prior probability of G might be, you just plug that into the total probability calculation for the prior of R, and that's it. The modus ponens argument given simply doesn't tell us what the prior probability of R is.

Another way to put this is that you have already taken into account the assumption that the resurrection is impossible if God does not exist in the very act of reducing the prior probability of R to P(G) x P(R|G). Nothing more is required to take that assumption into account. The attempt to take it into account (somehow) more seriously by the modus ponens argument and the worry about what happens if the prior for G is less than .5 only darkens counsel.

The moral of the story: Don't mix apples and oranges, at least unless you're well-trained in the art of making apple-orange preserves. When you do probability, do probability. When you do deductive logic, do deductive logic. If you insist on mixing them, be verry, verry careful, or you could get yourself very, very confused.

God's limitations

Recently my attention has been drawn to the controversy over whether or not God is in time. Always having been a convinced Boethian on this topic, I've been interested to see what the arguments on the other side are. Some of them appear to stem from what are known as "A-series time" intuitions which I simply do not share--for example, that there is a "real now" that is objective, not relative to any individual or any particular object, and that really does "move," so that in some sense independent of my location in time or the location in time of any other finite being or entity it really is "after Christmas now" but really was "before Christmas three weeks ago." This just seems incorrect to me, so any argument that God must be in time that starts with this as a premise is not going to move me.

Another argument is that, if God is not in time, God cannot enjoy the experience of listening to music, and this would be a lack of some kind in God. (The music argument is given in one of these two interview parts, though at the moment I don't have time to listen to them again and figure out which one it's in.) The idea is that listening to music is irreducibly a temporally ordered experience. I'm willing to grant that that is true, though I would hesitate to define "listening to music" as being identical with "knowing music" or "understanding music." It seems to me entirely plausible that there could be some sort of "all at once" comprehension of music that would not require listening to it temporally. But I'll grant that the experience of listening to a song or a sonata is a temporal experience.

It seems to me that this argument proves too much. There are many pleasant and joyful experiences that we have as human beings that depend crucially on our limitations. The experience, for example, of not knowing what happens at the end of a story and of gradually figuring it out depends upon our not being omniscient. The experience of being surprised depends on a lack of omniscience. The experience of traveling along a road and seeing a gorgeous vista open gradually before one's eyes depends on the ability to travel in space, or at least to experience as-if traveling in space. (But those who believe that God is in time typically, as I understand it, agree that God is not in space.) The experience of normal sexual love between man and woman depends upon the limitation of being just one of these--either a man or a woman--and being limited to that unique set of feelings and experiences.

It would be entirely possible to respond to the argument that a Boethian God cannot know what it is like to listen to music by pointing out that the Christian God also, presumably, does not know what it is like to hate God, to sin, and the like. I would guess that the anti-Boethian would reply that these would be bad things to experience, but that the experience of listening to music is a good experience.

So I think the set of examples above provide an even better argument. One of the things about being human is that we have not only the sorrows but also the joys and pleasures we have because God has given us a unique human nature, and that unique nature depends upon our being limited. To say that God (not incarnate--I'll say something about the incarnation in a moment) must be missing some perfection because he does not share those experiences of ours that depend upon our being limited seems perverse. It seems that we will then have to insist upon lowering the divine nature to the level of our own in order to allow God to experience our distinctly human pleasures. If we can insist on this for temporal limitation and listening to music temporally, why not for any of the other things named? Would we not also have to insist that God must be able to suspend his omniscience in order to have the great pleasure of some wonderful surprise? (And some surprises are truly great and truly wonderful.) Or that God would have to be able to avoid "reading the end of the book" in order to have the pleasure of finding out what happens "for the first time" when he gets to the end of a book?

The pleasure of listening to music temporally involves, crucially, the limitation of not hearing some parts of the music while one is hearing others. Even if one has heard the piece before, so that the rest of the piece is not exactly a surprise, when one listens again the pleasure requires that one set aside, to some degree, the previous memory of what comes next, that one experience only part of the music at a time and see it unfold in order. This is obviously a pleasure of limitation. Interestingly, those who disagree with the Boethian view apparently do affirm divine omniscience, which makes it extremely difficult to know what it would be like for God, even on their view, to listen to music sequentially. It would seem that God as they conceive him cannot be simultaneously knowing what it is like to hear the second movement (or the second measure) while he is knowing what it is like to hear the first movement (or the first measure). How is this compatible with omniscience?

To a very large degree we who believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent God must accept that we do not know what it is like to be God. This is true of Boethians and non-Boethians alike. Since it is true, and since there seems to be no principled reason to stop at requiring God to have some, but not all, of our limitations (such as being in time) in order to share our innocent and valuable pleasures, I do not see a good reason to start making such requirements in the first place, even for the sake of music.

It also seems to me that the music argument for placing God in time tends to downplay the importance of the incarnation. One of the points of the incarnation is that in it God took upon himself our human nature. By that means, it came to pass that God had our experiences of limitation and also many of our uniquely human experiences of enjoyment. (Though not all the particular ones, of course; Jesus never was married, never listened to Mozart, and so forth.) It seems to me that to a very great extent we are supposed to defer questions of "does God know exactly what it's like to feel x" (the wind on his face, the pleasure of sleep after fatigue, the experience of listening to music) to the incarnation and to say that sharing our nature in those ways was one of the reasons cur deus homo. Why anticipate that by making the divine nature temporal apart from the incarnation?