My apologies for my absence as of late--my days have been quite busy. Anyway, today I found myself perusing the page of the Tempe, AZ chapter of Ratio Christi (which is run by a Gangadeanian) and I encountered the following argument.
1. God’s existence and God’s moral law are clear to reason.
2. Humans have failed to know God and obey the moral law.
3. God cannot forgive without atonement.
4. Only the Bible shows how sin is atoned for.
5. Therefore, the Bible is true.
In my view, the Gangadeanian worldview is fraught with bad arguments. But this one is particularly offensive. In fact, it was this very bad argument that was sort of the "last straw" for me when I was still a member of the congregation. That is, it was this very issue concerning how it is that we could know (with Gangadeanian certainty) that the bible was the word of God (i.e., genuine special revelation) which eventually got me kicked out of the church. It was this issue initially which lead to discussions with Gangadean and others where I was able to see just how spurious Gangadean's reasoning really is and how closed off he is to having his basic beliefs examined critically. In a way, I owe a lot to this bad argument.
So onto the content. The main issue that arises is that Gangadean's impossible epistemic standards for knowledge, held consistently, leads to skepticism. One area that this skepticism will be most strongly felt for the Christian is on the matter of the veracity of scripture. So the Gangadeanian offers an argument to show how we can come to know (with Gangadeanian certainty) that the bible contains only truths. Note, I'm setting aside the complicated question about what all is entailed by the claim that the bible is "special revelation" or "divinely inspired." After all, it isn't obvious that divinely inspired text needs to be infallible or inerrant--likewise, infallibility and inerrancy of a particular text is also not sufficient to make it "divinely inspired." For now let's just focus on the infallibility claim.
My claim is that the Gangadeanian argument above, call it the egregious argument for the veracity of the bible (or the EAVB for short) is both invalid and also such that a Gangadeanian ought not to accept any of the premises as true, based Gangadean's own professed epistemic standards.
If you've been around these parts you know that premise 1) is false. God's existence is not "clear to reason". Perhaps it seems subjectively obvious to Gangadeanians, but that's not enough. Gangadean simply fails to prove that the God of Christian theism exists at least according to his own standards of proof. I won't get into much detail on this point since I've already written about it, but basically he takes for granted the assumption that reality is composed only of 2 possible substances, matter and spirit. He argues against the eternality of matter and, by way of disjunctive syllogism, he "deduces" that what is eternal must be spirit. But he never bothers to prove the dichotomy (all is either spirit or matter and nothing else) to begin with. Furthermore, his argument against the eternality of matter (really he's got to show that it's logically impossible for matter to be eternal) are also bad. He appeals to empirical findings which by their very nature are not going to provide proofs in the sense that he demands. He merely claims that we lack positive reason to believe that matter is eternal which isn't the same as having shown that matter can't possibly be eternal (compare: I don't have any evidence to believe that bigfoot exists vs. it's logically impossible for bigfoot to exist). So much for premise 1).
At the risk of being pedantic, let me note that premise 2) is clumsily stated. It reads, 'Humans have failed to know God and obey the moral law.' Philosophers and linguists call that a generic statement and this is an issue about quantification. What premise 2 doesn't say is "All humans have failed to know God". Nor does it say "at least one human has failed to know God...". All generics like, 'Dogs have four legs' are weird because they don't fit nicely within the scheme of quantifiers in standard logic. Just ask yourself how many dogs need to have 4 legs in order for the statement, 'Dogs have four legs' to be true? Half? 1 more than half? 1/3? Who knows...
Surely, though, the Gangadeanians believe that "All humans have failed to know God..." I know this not only from personal conversations, but also because being the Calvinists that they are, they believe in doctrine of total depravity. But this gives way to a problem. If the argument above (EAVB) is given in order to prove that the Bible contains only truths, then we can't assume any of its teachings to be true in giving the argument--that would be to assume what you need to prove. Now Calvinists generally adopt the 5 points of Calvinism based on a certain reading of the bible which presupposes the bible is true (at least the pertinent "proof texts"). What this means is that for a Gangadeanian to believe that all humans have failed to know God, they must have independent (non-scripture based) proof that all humans (present, past, future) will fail/have failed to know God and to obey the moral law. But how can Gangadean, his followers, or anyone for that matter come to prove a thing like that?
Notice what won't work. I can already hear a Gangadeanian appealing to the presence of natural evil in particular, in the form of physical death. If we can know that all humans are mortal (assuming we could know a thing like that with Gangadeanian certainty), then we can know that all humans are afflicted by natural evil, and this shows that they are basically sinners which is failing to obey the law and further this is fundamentally failing to know God despite its being clear that God exists.
There are at least two problems with this approach. As I flagged above, they would need to prove that all humans are mortal (past, present, and future). I'm not saying I doubt this claim. I assign a very high credence to the proposition that all humans are mortal. That's not the point. All I'm saying is that my grounds for believing this (induction or some presumption that it's part of the concept of a biological entity that it is mortal) doesn't satisfy the Gangadean's demands for certainty. So I'd press Gangadean for a proof from indubitable premises to the conclusion that all humans are mortal (i.e., a proof for the claim that all humans are afflicted by natural evil as a call back from moral evil).
Second, and more substantially, as I've already shown, Gangadean helps himself to lots of assumptions when he speaks of the function and nature of natural evil (and it's relation to moral evil) in his failed attempt at giving a theodicy. These assumptions are load-bearing, but they remain unsupported assumptions and so ultimately fall under pressure. So to move from 'all humans get old and die' to 'all humans have sinned' is tenuous at best. Of course, premise 2) could be true (we can say that about a lot of propositions), but the point is Gangadean and his standards for justified belief and knowledge require that he prove its truth beyond all doubt. So the Gangadeanian ought not to accept premise 2).
Premise 3) God cannot forgive without atonement.
I've called into question this premise before as well. What I noticed is that Gangadean "supports" claims like this on the basis of some mysterious lexicon of the English language. Basically, Gangadean has in mind a particular (and quirky) notion of justice. But as I've shown elsewhere, there's no way for him to prove that his concept or definition of 'justice' is the correct one. He can indoctrinate his followers with his special dictionary till the cows come home, but surely he doesn't get to decide the meaning of a word in a given language or the content of a concept by fiat! Nor should we assume he has some privileged access to the "correct concept" or "correct definition."
More importantly, his views on the nature of divine justice are simply confused. As I've already argued elsewhere, a priori, there's no reason why God cannot forgive without atonement. The whole Christian idea of divine grace via the passion of Christ is anything but the kind of justice that Gangadean has in mind which is basically "treating things according to their kind" or "treating like with like." As I've posed before, how can the sins of the world be "justly" taken on by a single person (Jesus) who is without sin? That is far from "treating like with like." So premise 3) likewise seems false. One thing to keep in mind in thinking through the appropriateness of this premise (and the others) is this: in the current dialectic Gangadean can't dip into the bible as proof texts to support it--that would be question begging since the truth of the claims that make up the bible is the very thing at issue.
Premise 4) Only the Bible shows how sin is atoned for.
This is just plain silly. How on earth can anybody know that the bible is the only written text in the entire world/universe (both past, present, and future) which shows how "sins are atoned for"? Remember Gangadean requires certainty for knowledge. On this standard, it's hard to see how anyone could know that premise 4). I'm merely asking him to make good on his own requirements! The answer of course is that there's simply no way to know premise 4) with any amount of certainty because it's an empirical claim!
Furthermore, as I've raised before, there's a problem of criteria. On Gangadean's worldview, we need the bible (or special revelation) to tell us how divine mercy interacts with divine justice--that's the whole bit about "how our sins are atoned for". The idea is that we can't possibly figure this stuff out by reason alone. It was not possible for us to connect the dots from general revelation (what we know from reason alone) to the contents of the gospel message and that's why we have the good news given to us via divine revelation. Otherwise, if we could reason to it all, we wouldn't need a message from God in the first place! But if we can't reason to the correct account of how we are to be forgiven of our sins, how are we to know (with certainty) what it is that we're looking for? That is, how are we to recognize the correct account as the correct one? It seems like we need to know what makes for a correct account of the atonement of our sins in order to recognize the correct one as such, but if we know what makes for a correct account, then we don't need special revelation.
Finally, the argument above is simply invalid. That is to say, the premises, even if they were true wouldn't entail the truth of the conclusion. For one thing, "the bible is true" is again a kind of generic statement. Presumably, what the author of the EAVB intends is that every claim in the bible is true. But it's not clear how the truth of the premises would entail that. See here where I discuss this point and others I've raised above in more detail. Since validity is necessary for soundness, the argument is unsound. So what you have here is the worst kind of argument--sort of the "opposite" of a sound argument. It's invalid and all the premises are false.
Tuesday, June 6, 2017
Sunday, May 22, 2016
Gangadean and Calvinism
A friend of mine recently posted a good article on why Calvinism is a troublesome doctrine. Gangadeanians are 5-point Calvinists and believe in theological (soft) determinism. According to them, God is the "primary cause" of all things and humans exercise a kind of "secondary causation" in which their freedom (a genuine freedom, they insist) consists. Importantly, God has created humans to inevitably sin (that's the determinism part) and those that are predestined to hell, to never realize his grace. Here are some of my own thoughts.
For many, there's a real tension between a God that is supposed to be all-good (all-just) and all-powerful on the one hand and his determining persons to commit moral evil on the other. What's worse, is that on Calvinism, he also determines that some are saved and others will face spiritual death forevermore. I don't really know what to say to people that don't immediately see the incoherence here--to me it's akin to insisting in the existence of a circle-square. Still, Gangadeanians try to get around this tension by employing certain euphemisms. God isn't the "source" of sin/moral evil they say, but merely "permits it". That X is the source of sin requires that X is the secondary cause of sin rather than the primary cause, they insist. And humans are responsible for their sins because they are the "secondary causes" of such immorality. But I'm convinced that this is nothing but word play. When pressed on the matter, sometimes Gangadeanians will respond with something like the following.
For one, no human has created another human to sin. We don't have that kind of creative power, only God does. He started the whole shebang. God is the ultimate source of everything, but no human is. So the question about whether the practice of one human holding another human morally responsible is different from the question of whether it makes sense for God to hold humans responsible. Humans are roughly on a level playing field because all of us are determined to sin and only ever exercise secondary causation. Now I think there is a way to make sense of the rationality of holding one another morally responsible for good and bad actions in light of a deterministic world that does require some revision of our current practices. Instead of thinking about people deserving praise and blame for actions in the traditional sense (which requires that the actions are "up to" them in some robust sense), perhaps we should view things in a reformative light. We "punish" and "reward" people in an effort to condition one another to be better people not because persons "have it coming", but because we recognize that all of us are better off (including the agent in question) if people perform certain actions and abstain from others. Reformative justice here seeks the good of all. Determinism then doesn't threaten the rationality of our practice of holding one another morally responsible wholesale, even if it requires that we rethink and revise our current practices and attitudes. As long as there is some causal relationship between the "rewards" and "punishments" we dole out and the desired results, we can think of our holding one another morally responsible for certain actions as aimed at reformation of each individual. Insofar as seeking the good of all people and society as a whole is a desirable thing, it's perfectly rational to do so even in a deterministic world.
The trouble is, we can't apply these considerations when we consider the matter of God holding humans responsible. Again, on Gangadean's deterministic view, God created humans to inevitably not seek and so to sin and instantiate spiritual death. Some are chosen and regenerated (not because they deserve it in any sense) and others are not. The question to ask then is whether it makes sense for God to hold persons morally responsible for their actions when God played the ultimate role in the bringing about of these very actions. This should feel like an iteration of the problem of evil. More specifically, we're focusing on the matter of whether humans can rationally hold one another responsible in a deterministic world, and also how this bears on whether God can do so. I've just suggested how it could make sense for humans to hold one another culpable in a deterministic world. But the story I told was one where humans didn't play the ultimate role in determining one another to sin in the first place. Would it make sense for one human A to "reform" another human B, if A was the ultimate cause of B's sinning? Well, I'm inclined to think that in such a case, B isn't the only one in need of reforming A is, too. Remember for Gangadean to sin is to live contrary to one's very nature. So we're not talking about some minor hiccup in B's situation which A is ultimately the cause of. Presumably on Gangadean's view, B does considerable harm to himself and perhaps to others in living contrary to his very nature. And the trick is to square this with A's involvement in getting the ball rolling as it were. Now I see two options in explaining A's involvement in being the ultimate cause of B's sin.
1) It's equally compatible with A's nature that she ultimately cause B to sin and that she ultimately cause B not to sin.
2) It is only compatible with A's nature that she ultimately cause B to sin.
If 1), then A did something wrong in choosing to create the former and not the latter (again given the seriousness of sin on Gangadean's worldview). If 2), then there's something questionable about A's very nature. Either way, there's a real tension. That's sort of what we're dealing with when we consider God's system of holding persons morally responsible in a theologically deterministic world. At the very least, it's far from clear that it would make sense for B to need reforming, and not A. Moreover, since the Gangadeanians probably disagree with my reformative notion of justice and moral responsibility, we should also say that it's far from obvious that B could "deserve" anything that A doesn't also deserve. After all, A seems to be the mastermind behind B's sin. Indeed B wouldn't have even existed had A not created her, let alone committed any sin.
But it gets worse! Here's the second disanalogy between humans holding one another culpable on the one hand and God doing so for humans. What's at stake is not just whether a person like B does harm to himself or others. For Gangadean, God determines each of our ultimate destinies (everlasting spiritual live vs. everlasting spiritual death). And just as humans don't create one another to inevitably sin, no human determines the ultimate destiny of another. Again, we don't have that kind of power. But on Gangadean's view, that's just what God does. He regenerates some, and leaves others in the inevitable moral evil and spiritual death that they were, by God's own decree, created into (or at least created to realize).
So again trying to apply my reformative account of how the practice of holding one another morally responsible for sin in a deterministic world might make sense, won't work here. It would be one thing if God merely determined people would sin, but he was in the unrestricted redeeming business (as in universal salvation). As I suggested earlier, perhaps we can make sense of our moral practices in light of determinism if we thought about our purpose in giving out rewards and punishments as reformative. That is, in recognizing that we are not ultimately responsible, we wouldn't treat one another as if we "deserve" punishment for wrong doings, or "rewards" for good actions at least not in the traditional sense of 'deserve'. Instead we'd try to seek the good for all persons and figure out how best to promote it. That's what moral responsibility would consist of. I then noted that a real tension arises when we include the idea that the one doing the reforming of the sinner turns out to be the ultimate cause of the sin. But now I'm suggesting that if the person doing the reforming of the other, were also discriminatory, then that too would be unjust. To not only be the ultimate cause of the existence of all sinners (and a fortiori all sin), but further to seek the good of only some sinners and not others indicates that the reformer needs moral reforming.
When I've pointed this stuff out to Gangadeanians in the past some have resorted to suggesting that I've got a faulty notion of justice in mind. That I'm trying to apply my limited understanding of justice to God's doings and that just won't work. In effect, they are choosing to define 'justice' in one way and favoring their own account over mine which is a common practice as noted here. But it didn't occur to them that they are guilty of the very same thing. They too have a proposal of what divine justice should look like, but it isn't argued for, but rather presupposed to be the "right" one. On other occasions some Gangadeanians have suggested that God's justice consists in "treating equals as equals". I guess this is their intuitive notion of justice and divine justice exemplifies this perfectly. But they overlook the fact that God's justice is nothing like that at least if we turn to the bible, which they affirm. Calvinism is the very opposite of "treating equals as equals". The unregenerate don't deserve salvation. According to Gangadean, all have sinned, no one seeks not one and so all persons were at one time reaping the consequences of not seeking--i.e., spiritual death. God's grace in the act of regeneration then is by definition an unmerited gift. To apply this grace to some and not others is far from treating "equals as equals." The upshot: we can deny that God's goodness is compatible with God holding humans ultimately culpable for sin in light of the fact that he is the ultimate cause of their sin. But that need not undermine the rationality of humans holding one another morally responsible if we adopt a reformative approach. So you can deny that Gangadean's Calvinism is compatible with the thesis that a perfectly good God exists, that it to say you can deny that it would be consonant with God's perfect justice to hold persons responsible for merely being secondary causes while also affirm that it makes sense for humans to hold each other morally responsible. No nihilism follows.
In the article I've linked above, the author speaks about God's will (as well as his exercise of it in creation) as not only causally, but also logically prior to any and all human agency (including the performing of any and all moral evil/sin). All this noise about "primary vs. secondary causes" and "merely permitting vs. being the author of" doesn't get around the fact that God's will (and the exercise of his will in the act of creation) is both causally and logically prior to all moral evil in a deterministic universe according to Gangadean.
For many, there's a real tension between a God that is supposed to be all-good (all-just) and all-powerful on the one hand and his determining persons to commit moral evil on the other. What's worse, is that on Calvinism, he also determines that some are saved and others will face spiritual death forevermore. I don't really know what to say to people that don't immediately see the incoherence here--to me it's akin to insisting in the existence of a circle-square. Still, Gangadeanians try to get around this tension by employing certain euphemisms. God isn't the "source" of sin/moral evil they say, but merely "permits it". That X is the source of sin requires that X is the secondary cause of sin rather than the primary cause, they insist. And humans are responsible for their sins because they are the "secondary causes" of such immorality. But I'm convinced that this is nothing but word play. When pressed on the matter, sometimes Gangadeanians will respond with something like the following.
Look, if we can't be held responsible for our actions because we are only secondary causes of them (and determinism is true), then the whole practice of holding each other morally responsible is senseless. But that's absurd. So it must be the case that we are morally responsible for our actions even if we are merely the secondary causes of them. It then follows that it must be compatible with God's perfect goodness that he hold us responsible for our sins too, despite our being merely secondary causes.This argument is no good. In the first place it presupposes that determinism is true. I'm not convinced by the arguments they present against libertarian free will, but I'll grant it for the time being. Still, another more serious problem remains. The reasoning above also presupposes that whatever it is that makes sense of humans holding each other morally responsible also accounts for its being compatible for God to hold humans responsible. But that's dubious. After all, there are serious differences between human-to-human relationships and God-to-human. I'll explore two of them. (Keep in mind that much of this is closely linked to the problem of evil which we've explored in recent posts. But I want to deal more specifically with the Gangadeanian response above).
For one, no human has created another human to sin. We don't have that kind of creative power, only God does. He started the whole shebang. God is the ultimate source of everything, but no human is. So the question about whether the practice of one human holding another human morally responsible is different from the question of whether it makes sense for God to hold humans responsible. Humans are roughly on a level playing field because all of us are determined to sin and only ever exercise secondary causation. Now I think there is a way to make sense of the rationality of holding one another morally responsible for good and bad actions in light of a deterministic world that does require some revision of our current practices. Instead of thinking about people deserving praise and blame for actions in the traditional sense (which requires that the actions are "up to" them in some robust sense), perhaps we should view things in a reformative light. We "punish" and "reward" people in an effort to condition one another to be better people not because persons "have it coming", but because we recognize that all of us are better off (including the agent in question) if people perform certain actions and abstain from others. Reformative justice here seeks the good of all. Determinism then doesn't threaten the rationality of our practice of holding one another morally responsible wholesale, even if it requires that we rethink and revise our current practices and attitudes. As long as there is some causal relationship between the "rewards" and "punishments" we dole out and the desired results, we can think of our holding one another morally responsible for certain actions as aimed at reformation of each individual. Insofar as seeking the good of all people and society as a whole is a desirable thing, it's perfectly rational to do so even in a deterministic world.
The trouble is, we can't apply these considerations when we consider the matter of God holding humans responsible. Again, on Gangadean's deterministic view, God created humans to inevitably not seek and so to sin and instantiate spiritual death. Some are chosen and regenerated (not because they deserve it in any sense) and others are not. The question to ask then is whether it makes sense for God to hold persons morally responsible for their actions when God played the ultimate role in the bringing about of these very actions. This should feel like an iteration of the problem of evil. More specifically, we're focusing on the matter of whether humans can rationally hold one another responsible in a deterministic world, and also how this bears on whether God can do so. I've just suggested how it could make sense for humans to hold one another culpable in a deterministic world. But the story I told was one where humans didn't play the ultimate role in determining one another to sin in the first place. Would it make sense for one human A to "reform" another human B, if A was the ultimate cause of B's sinning? Well, I'm inclined to think that in such a case, B isn't the only one in need of reforming A is, too. Remember for Gangadean to sin is to live contrary to one's very nature. So we're not talking about some minor hiccup in B's situation which A is ultimately the cause of. Presumably on Gangadean's view, B does considerable harm to himself and perhaps to others in living contrary to his very nature. And the trick is to square this with A's involvement in getting the ball rolling as it were. Now I see two options in explaining A's involvement in being the ultimate cause of B's sin.
1) It's equally compatible with A's nature that she ultimately cause B to sin and that she ultimately cause B not to sin.
2) It is only compatible with A's nature that she ultimately cause B to sin.
If 1), then A did something wrong in choosing to create the former and not the latter (again given the seriousness of sin on Gangadean's worldview). If 2), then there's something questionable about A's very nature. Either way, there's a real tension. That's sort of what we're dealing with when we consider God's system of holding persons morally responsible in a theologically deterministic world. At the very least, it's far from clear that it would make sense for B to need reforming, and not A. Moreover, since the Gangadeanians probably disagree with my reformative notion of justice and moral responsibility, we should also say that it's far from obvious that B could "deserve" anything that A doesn't also deserve. After all, A seems to be the mastermind behind B's sin. Indeed B wouldn't have even existed had A not created her, let alone committed any sin.
But it gets worse! Here's the second disanalogy between humans holding one another culpable on the one hand and God doing so for humans. What's at stake is not just whether a person like B does harm to himself or others. For Gangadean, God determines each of our ultimate destinies (everlasting spiritual live vs. everlasting spiritual death). And just as humans don't create one another to inevitably sin, no human determines the ultimate destiny of another. Again, we don't have that kind of power. But on Gangadean's view, that's just what God does. He regenerates some, and leaves others in the inevitable moral evil and spiritual death that they were, by God's own decree, created into (or at least created to realize).
So again trying to apply my reformative account of how the practice of holding one another morally responsible for sin in a deterministic world might make sense, won't work here. It would be one thing if God merely determined people would sin, but he was in the unrestricted redeeming business (as in universal salvation). As I suggested earlier, perhaps we can make sense of our moral practices in light of determinism if we thought about our purpose in giving out rewards and punishments as reformative. That is, in recognizing that we are not ultimately responsible, we wouldn't treat one another as if we "deserve" punishment for wrong doings, or "rewards" for good actions at least not in the traditional sense of 'deserve'. Instead we'd try to seek the good for all persons and figure out how best to promote it. That's what moral responsibility would consist of. I then noted that a real tension arises when we include the idea that the one doing the reforming of the sinner turns out to be the ultimate cause of the sin. But now I'm suggesting that if the person doing the reforming of the other, were also discriminatory, then that too would be unjust. To not only be the ultimate cause of the existence of all sinners (and a fortiori all sin), but further to seek the good of only some sinners and not others indicates that the reformer needs moral reforming.
When I've pointed this stuff out to Gangadeanians in the past some have resorted to suggesting that I've got a faulty notion of justice in mind. That I'm trying to apply my limited understanding of justice to God's doings and that just won't work. In effect, they are choosing to define 'justice' in one way and favoring their own account over mine which is a common practice as noted here. But it didn't occur to them that they are guilty of the very same thing. They too have a proposal of what divine justice should look like, but it isn't argued for, but rather presupposed to be the "right" one. On other occasions some Gangadeanians have suggested that God's justice consists in "treating equals as equals". I guess this is their intuitive notion of justice and divine justice exemplifies this perfectly. But they overlook the fact that God's justice is nothing like that at least if we turn to the bible, which they affirm. Calvinism is the very opposite of "treating equals as equals". The unregenerate don't deserve salvation. According to Gangadean, all have sinned, no one seeks not one and so all persons were at one time reaping the consequences of not seeking--i.e., spiritual death. God's grace in the act of regeneration then is by definition an unmerited gift. To apply this grace to some and not others is far from treating "equals as equals." The upshot: we can deny that God's goodness is compatible with God holding humans ultimately culpable for sin in light of the fact that he is the ultimate cause of their sin. But that need not undermine the rationality of humans holding one another morally responsible if we adopt a reformative approach. So you can deny that Gangadean's Calvinism is compatible with the thesis that a perfectly good God exists, that it to say you can deny that it would be consonant with God's perfect justice to hold persons responsible for merely being secondary causes while also affirm that it makes sense for humans to hold each other morally responsible. No nihilism follows.
In the article I've linked above, the author speaks about God's will (as well as his exercise of it in creation) as not only causally, but also logically prior to any and all human agency (including the performing of any and all moral evil/sin). All this noise about "primary vs. secondary causes" and "merely permitting vs. being the author of" doesn't get around the fact that God's will (and the exercise of his will in the act of creation) is both causally and logically prior to all moral evil in a deterministic universe according to Gangadean.
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Doxological focus vs. Soteriological focus?
The people at WF often distinguish their church from others in their profession of the view that "the knowledge of God filling the earth like water to the seas." They fault other christian bodies for being so focused on getting persons into heaven (and a particular view of heaven as an Edenic paradise). Instead of getting caught up in all this talk about what a person must do to get to heaven (or what a church must do to get a lot of people into heaven--again heaven as paradise), we as believers, should be focused on what we need to do to encourage the coming of the kindgom of God, to earth--which is essentially, the knowledge of God filling the earth. What does it mean that the knowledge of God fill the earth? Well, since knowledge is intimately linked with "knowers," the knowledge of God fills the earth only when all the living inhabitants of the earth have come to know God. This knowledge of God is to share in spiritual life according to Gangadean. They site John 17:3, that eternal [perhaps more accurately, 'everlasting'] life is knowing Him (God). It isn't getting to heaven, it is knowing the creator.
One motivation for this way of thinking about matters is that it is supposed to avoid some of the major philosophical/theological problems plaguing the idea that spiritual life consists of being "saved." Worrying about how to get people "saved" is to be focused soteriology, and brings up issues about what the minimum requirements are of achieving this status. For sure, this is a difficult problem to address insofar as one gets caught up in it and I don't think anyone has a successful answer. So Gangadeanians have sometimes said that one can avoid getting into such thorny territory, by adopting their view, namely, to frame spiritual life in terms of a doxological focus. (I don't mean to say that adopting a doxological focus is motivated solely by the need to avoid the above problems, but it has been stated to me as a real one nonetheless).
Unfortunately, I've never seen how this is supposed to escape the problem that plagues a soteriological view of salvation. Notice that the same problem or at least an analogous one will arise for those that are doxologically focused. Suppose we accept that everlasting life in the per Christianity is knowing God. But then what exactly does it mean to know God? I mean clearly if one could know everything there is to know about God, then one would count as knowing God. Unfortunately, that seems out of reach presuming of course that we are finite in our capacities to know and that there are an infinite number of propositions to know about God. So that won't do. Nor does it seem right to say that I know God just in case I know one true proposition about God (say that he exists). Certainly that can't be the extent of spiritual life or salvation in any Christian sense! (The demons know that God exist and shudder at his name!) So then what counts as knowing God qua spiritual life? And more generally speaking (doxologically) what counts as the world being filled with this knowledge of God? Must I know one or a thousand propositions about God? Is the earth filled with the knowledge of God when everyone living knows at least one true proposition about God? Two? A dozen? A hundred? And which ones? The problem at this point should be obvious. We want to know what it means to be saved and what it requires (else you might spend your whole life thinking you are living spiritually, while actually dead in your trespasses). But how can one be sure? Well, it would seem to depend in large part on what it means to be spiritually alive. But it turns out there is no non arbitrary account that is forthcoming. Note that things look even worse for Gangadean and his followers given their idiosyncratic views about knowledge, clarity and inexcusability. If one is able to know that one is spiritually alive, then one must know the conditions under which such obtains. But if one knows these conditions, one should be able to spell them out.
So it seems, that in this respect, the Gangadeanians are no better off than those that might have the issue of debating about what it takes to get to heaven on the more traditional evangelical view. My point is not that this thus favors the soteriological focus (as Gangadeans call it) over the doxological one, I just mean that avoiding the problem of vagueness can't count as a point for the view that Gangadeanians push since they too have a similar problem.
One motivation for this way of thinking about matters is that it is supposed to avoid some of the major philosophical/theological problems plaguing the idea that spiritual life consists of being "saved." Worrying about how to get people "saved" is to be focused soteriology, and brings up issues about what the minimum requirements are of achieving this status. For sure, this is a difficult problem to address insofar as one gets caught up in it and I don't think anyone has a successful answer. So Gangadeanians have sometimes said that one can avoid getting into such thorny territory, by adopting their view, namely, to frame spiritual life in terms of a doxological focus. (I don't mean to say that adopting a doxological focus is motivated solely by the need to avoid the above problems, but it has been stated to me as a real one nonetheless).
Unfortunately, I've never seen how this is supposed to escape the problem that plagues a soteriological view of salvation. Notice that the same problem or at least an analogous one will arise for those that are doxologically focused. Suppose we accept that everlasting life in the per Christianity is knowing God. But then what exactly does it mean to know God? I mean clearly if one could know everything there is to know about God, then one would count as knowing God. Unfortunately, that seems out of reach presuming of course that we are finite in our capacities to know and that there are an infinite number of propositions to know about God. So that won't do. Nor does it seem right to say that I know God just in case I know one true proposition about God (say that he exists). Certainly that can't be the extent of spiritual life or salvation in any Christian sense! (The demons know that God exist and shudder at his name!) So then what counts as knowing God qua spiritual life? And more generally speaking (doxologically) what counts as the world being filled with this knowledge of God? Must I know one or a thousand propositions about God? Is the earth filled with the knowledge of God when everyone living knows at least one true proposition about God? Two? A dozen? A hundred? And which ones? The problem at this point should be obvious. We want to know what it means to be saved and what it requires (else you might spend your whole life thinking you are living spiritually, while actually dead in your trespasses). But how can one be sure? Well, it would seem to depend in large part on what it means to be spiritually alive. But it turns out there is no non arbitrary account that is forthcoming. Note that things look even worse for Gangadean and his followers given their idiosyncratic views about knowledge, clarity and inexcusability. If one is able to know that one is spiritually alive, then one must know the conditions under which such obtains. But if one knows these conditions, one should be able to spell them out.
So it seems, that in this respect, the Gangadeanians are no better off than those that might have the issue of debating about what it takes to get to heaven on the more traditional evangelical view. My point is not that this thus favors the soteriological focus (as Gangadeans call it) over the doxological one, I just mean that avoiding the problem of vagueness can't count as a point for the view that Gangadeanians push since they too have a similar problem.
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
No SR from GR (Certainty and the Bible)
In a previous post I raised problems for Gangadean and Anderson's view that maximal consequences (of unbelief in God) requires maximal clarity (regarding God's existence). The thrust of that post was that there are a number of other beliefs that most Christians (including Gangadean and his kin) would accept to be essential for spiritual life (or salvation), that do not seem maximally clear. Thus, the edict that maximal consequences imply maximal clarity would seem to be in tension with Gangandean's own views (unless of course they want to argue that all that is necessary for spiritual life is maximally clear).
That the bible is the word of God (special revelation) is a central part of the Christian faith. Gangadean affirms that the bible is the word of God and further that it is infallible, wholly true, and the means by which the the holy spirit leads the church into all truth. It isn't clear whether he thinks that there is some special portion of scripture that one must accept in order to realize spiritual life. In conversation I have heard Anderson and others speak as if spiritual life is not a binary notion, but rather something that obtains as a matter of degrees. Other times I have heard them speak of spiritual life as if some are in fact, spiritually dead (at one time all people) and then have come to be awakened by God's grace---which makes me think it might be a binary matter. Perhaps it's both binary and degreed (there's a number of propositions which you are required to know if you are going to be spiritually alive, but after that threshold, you can increase in spiritual life based on what you come to understand). Whatever the view, let's say that some part of scripture (or knowing some portion of scripture) is necessary for spiritual life. So one might think that if this is the case, and if maximal consequences implies maximal clarity, then it is going to be maximally clear that scripture is the word of God (at least some portion of it). In fact, from what I understand Gangadean makes an even stronger claim that we can come to know that the bible (as a whole) is in fact the word of God (or special revelation). This has to do with the fact that there is more than one holy book purporting to be revelation from God. Thus any thinking person will need to work through the epistemological issue of how one knows when one such book is really the word of God.
Now I want to present an argument that one cannot be absolutely certain that the bible (as a whole) is the word of God. That is to say, there is no sound deductive argument proving that the bible is actually the word of God. My point is not to call the bible into question so much as to show that Gangadean, given his idiosyncratic epistemological views, cannot affirm that he knows (as he defines it) that the bible (the canon as a whole) is the word of God. I hope that this gestures towards a reductio against those that want to affirm that it is rational to both believe the bible is the word of God and accept Gangadean's quirky epistemological views.
It will be important to keep in mind that Gangadean believes the following claims.
1) Knowing some proposition p, is equivalent to having a maximally justified, true belief in p. In short, you know something if and only if, you truly believe it and could not possibly be wrong about it.
2) A person can know (with certainty) that the bible (as a whole) is in fact, special revelation from God. This of course, means that one can know (with certainty) that the bible contains only true propositions.
Now the bible contains a plethora of claims. The bible makes mentions of kings and kingdoms, of persons that lived to be hundreds of years old, of Jonah living in the belly of a whale, of the dead rising at Jesus' command, of water turning into wine and the red sea splitting. It also includes detailed genealogies and testifies of the Christ being crucified for our sins and rising again. It also presents claims about what is yet to occur, for instance, the imminent return of Christ. In short, there are number of historical and even future claims made by scripture. The question I want to raise is, what deductive argument can be given to confirm that all of these claims are actually true?
Gangadean essentially believes that using what we know from General Revelation (those claims that we can be certain about via the use of reason alone) we can deduce a criteria for special revelation, which we can then use to determine the clear winner among the available options. I am going to argue that this is simply not enough if one is after epistemic certainty.
The problem can be seen by considering how there is nothing we can deduce from General Revelation (hence forth, GR) to a claim like, "there was once a man named King David who defeated a giant Goliath." Now as I have written before, I doubt that we can know (on Gangadean's concept of knowledge) that the God of Theism exists, but I'm willing to grant that for the sake of argument here. Further, I'm going to grant even more of Gangadean's views (again not because I think they are correct, but for the sake of the point I'm trying to make, here). You see, Ganagdean takes it that we can know (with certainty) that God is infinitely just and infinitely merciful (that is to say, that there is a deductive argument or series of arguments from "Whatever is eternal is spirit" to "the eternal spirit is at least infinitely just and infinitely merciful." Further, Gangadean takes it that there are deductive arguments for the claim that we are in sin and that we need to be redeemed. Let's grant all of this (though they are highly contentious arguments). From this it is supposed that we can come up with a criteria by which we look at the various purported holy books and determine that the Bible must be the word of God. Whatever is in fact the the word of God must be entirely consistent with what we know from GR. For instance, it should affirm that there is only one God the creator, that man is in sin (fails to seek and know the clearly knowable God), and that God is infinitely just and merciful, and crucially it should explain just how infinite justice can be fulfilled in light of sin, while God's infinite mercy is exemplified (infinite justice cannot merely be set apart, but must be fully realized). Finally, the claim is that no other purported holy book, or parchment or whatever, besides the bible is able to satisfy all these conditions. Hence, the bible must exclusively be the true word of God.
This is a terrible argument. To reiterate, this is because the bible contains so much more in addition to what we can deduce from GR. Take again the claim about King David's existence and his defeat of the giant. This is not something that is deducible from GR. So what are we to make of such claims? What are we to make of all the stories in the old and new testament that do not logically follow from the aforementioned criteria? If we reduce the bible to merely an account of God, sin (and therein good vs. evil), justice and mercy, we lose a lot. We lose all those details from the various narratives, so much of the advice that the epistles provide about how to run a church, and the lessons we draw from the lives of various figures like David, Solomon, and the prophets of old. Further, what are we to make of the book of Revelation? Remember on Gangadean's account of knowledge, we can't know any of this stuff unless it is deducible from GR.
Now curiously, Gangadean's approach is that all of these additional claims in the bible are consistent with what we know in GR. But this won't do. Consistency is too weak a relation between propositions. At the moment, it is raining outside. It is consistent with this fact that as a result I got wet. But it is equally consistent with the fact of rain outside that I did not get wet. What this shows us is that consistency doesn't rule out much. You can't know with certainty some proposition solely on the basis of the fact that it is consistent with a known proposition. There are any number of claims that are consistent with any given set of facts, and as my lame examples shows, some of these are going to be mutually exclusive. So to say that these additional claims in the bible are consistent with what we know in GR does not make them true (that simply doesn't follow). It is perfectly consistent with all of the assumptions we started with (that there is one God the creator that is infinitely just and merciful, that there is sin, evil, the need for redemption, etc) that there once lived a King named David, that defeated a giant, but our starting assumptions are equally consistent with the claim that there was no such King. So consistency with what is known in GR is necessary but not sufficient for claims being truly the word of God.
A second worry has to do with the issue of the criteria of "the word of God". I stated earlier that on Gangadean's view, GR provides us with a certain kind of criteria by which we determine whether a book is really the word of God. One crucial issue on Gangadean's view is that whatever is in fact the word of God must present how infinite justice is satisfied by infinite mercy (on the Christian picture, this is the son of God dying for the sins of the world). Now we run into a problem here. Ask yourself, "how would I know whether some narrative explains how infinite justice is satisfied by infinite mercy?" That is, when you read the bible, how can you know (with certainty) that Jesus dying for the sins of the world actually achieves both the instantiation of God's infinite justice and his mercy? This is something like the problem of criterion in epistemology. Philosophers ask how we can know what knowledge is. How will we know when we have the right theory, without already knowing what it is? Similarly, how can we know that in fact, the bible's account is the correct account of the satisfaction of divine justice and mercy? Don't you have to already know what you're looking for in order to recognize it as such? And if you already know what it takes for divine justice to be satisfied by divine mercy, then you no longer need special revelation to show you.
In response one might argue that what we know from GR can provide us a way to deduce everything in the bible---and hence all the contents of the bible are entailed by what is known from GR. In fact, this is exactly what Gangadean needs for certainty that the bible as a whole is the word of God. Unfortunately, it's false. You simply can't deduce the kinds of empirical claims (e.g., that their existed a Jesus of Nazareth, or much of Paul's teachings that go beyond GR, or the stories that line the old and new testament). You may have good reasons to believe it, but it won't be via a deductive proof. So on Gangadean's view of knowledge, you can't know the bible as the word of God.
In speaking with Anderson about these issues, he essentially argued that what is known from GR is found in the bible alone. This gives us proof that the bible, but no other text, is the word of God. He said that this was "enough" of a test. This is truly a puzzling response!
Remember we wanted a deductive proof that the bible is the word of God. That is to say, a way of being absolutely certain that the bible (as a whole) is the one and only word of God. Even if Anderson is right that the relevant details from GR are found only in the bible and not in any other texts, we still don't get a proof that the rest of the contents of the bible are true. Again consistency is not enough. Consistency is necessary but not sufficient for this task.
And it gets even worse for Anderson and company. His response requires that he first prove that there is no other holy book that gets the relevant details of GR right, but he would have to show that no other such book (that will diverge on other details form the bible) is even possible. This is an incredibly strong claim and I don't see how he can motivate it. Putting all of these considerations together, we have an extremely idiosyncratic view of knowledge which requires epistemic certainty (ultimately, we know only those things we can deduce). But the contents of bible as a whole cannot be deduced. So we can't know that the contents of the bible as a whole are true.
That the bible is the word of God (special revelation) is a central part of the Christian faith. Gangadean affirms that the bible is the word of God and further that it is infallible, wholly true, and the means by which the the holy spirit leads the church into all truth. It isn't clear whether he thinks that there is some special portion of scripture that one must accept in order to realize spiritual life. In conversation I have heard Anderson and others speak as if spiritual life is not a binary notion, but rather something that obtains as a matter of degrees. Other times I have heard them speak of spiritual life as if some are in fact, spiritually dead (at one time all people) and then have come to be awakened by God's grace---which makes me think it might be a binary matter. Perhaps it's both binary and degreed (there's a number of propositions which you are required to know if you are going to be spiritually alive, but after that threshold, you can increase in spiritual life based on what you come to understand). Whatever the view, let's say that some part of scripture (or knowing some portion of scripture) is necessary for spiritual life. So one might think that if this is the case, and if maximal consequences implies maximal clarity, then it is going to be maximally clear that scripture is the word of God (at least some portion of it). In fact, from what I understand Gangadean makes an even stronger claim that we can come to know that the bible (as a whole) is in fact the word of God (or special revelation). This has to do with the fact that there is more than one holy book purporting to be revelation from God. Thus any thinking person will need to work through the epistemological issue of how one knows when one such book is really the word of God.
Now I want to present an argument that one cannot be absolutely certain that the bible (as a whole) is the word of God. That is to say, there is no sound deductive argument proving that the bible is actually the word of God. My point is not to call the bible into question so much as to show that Gangadean, given his idiosyncratic epistemological views, cannot affirm that he knows (as he defines it) that the bible (the canon as a whole) is the word of God. I hope that this gestures towards a reductio against those that want to affirm that it is rational to both believe the bible is the word of God and accept Gangadean's quirky epistemological views.
It will be important to keep in mind that Gangadean believes the following claims.
1) Knowing some proposition p, is equivalent to having a maximally justified, true belief in p. In short, you know something if and only if, you truly believe it and could not possibly be wrong about it.
2) A person can know (with certainty) that the bible (as a whole) is in fact, special revelation from God. This of course, means that one can know (with certainty) that the bible contains only true propositions.
Now the bible contains a plethora of claims. The bible makes mentions of kings and kingdoms, of persons that lived to be hundreds of years old, of Jonah living in the belly of a whale, of the dead rising at Jesus' command, of water turning into wine and the red sea splitting. It also includes detailed genealogies and testifies of the Christ being crucified for our sins and rising again. It also presents claims about what is yet to occur, for instance, the imminent return of Christ. In short, there are number of historical and even future claims made by scripture. The question I want to raise is, what deductive argument can be given to confirm that all of these claims are actually true?
Gangadean essentially believes that using what we know from General Revelation (those claims that we can be certain about via the use of reason alone) we can deduce a criteria for special revelation, which we can then use to determine the clear winner among the available options. I am going to argue that this is simply not enough if one is after epistemic certainty.
The problem can be seen by considering how there is nothing we can deduce from General Revelation (hence forth, GR) to a claim like, "there was once a man named King David who defeated a giant Goliath." Now as I have written before, I doubt that we can know (on Gangadean's concept of knowledge) that the God of Theism exists, but I'm willing to grant that for the sake of argument here. Further, I'm going to grant even more of Gangadean's views (again not because I think they are correct, but for the sake of the point I'm trying to make, here). You see, Ganagdean takes it that we can know (with certainty) that God is infinitely just and infinitely merciful (that is to say, that there is a deductive argument or series of arguments from "Whatever is eternal is spirit" to "the eternal spirit is at least infinitely just and infinitely merciful." Further, Gangadean takes it that there are deductive arguments for the claim that we are in sin and that we need to be redeemed. Let's grant all of this (though they are highly contentious arguments). From this it is supposed that we can come up with a criteria by which we look at the various purported holy books and determine that the Bible must be the word of God. Whatever is in fact the the word of God must be entirely consistent with what we know from GR. For instance, it should affirm that there is only one God the creator, that man is in sin (fails to seek and know the clearly knowable God), and that God is infinitely just and merciful, and crucially it should explain just how infinite justice can be fulfilled in light of sin, while God's infinite mercy is exemplified (infinite justice cannot merely be set apart, but must be fully realized). Finally, the claim is that no other purported holy book, or parchment or whatever, besides the bible is able to satisfy all these conditions. Hence, the bible must exclusively be the true word of God.
This is a terrible argument. To reiterate, this is because the bible contains so much more in addition to what we can deduce from GR. Take again the claim about King David's existence and his defeat of the giant. This is not something that is deducible from GR. So what are we to make of such claims? What are we to make of all the stories in the old and new testament that do not logically follow from the aforementioned criteria? If we reduce the bible to merely an account of God, sin (and therein good vs. evil), justice and mercy, we lose a lot. We lose all those details from the various narratives, so much of the advice that the epistles provide about how to run a church, and the lessons we draw from the lives of various figures like David, Solomon, and the prophets of old. Further, what are we to make of the book of Revelation? Remember on Gangadean's account of knowledge, we can't know any of this stuff unless it is deducible from GR.
Now curiously, Gangadean's approach is that all of these additional claims in the bible are consistent with what we know in GR. But this won't do. Consistency is too weak a relation between propositions. At the moment, it is raining outside. It is consistent with this fact that as a result I got wet. But it is equally consistent with the fact of rain outside that I did not get wet. What this shows us is that consistency doesn't rule out much. You can't know with certainty some proposition solely on the basis of the fact that it is consistent with a known proposition. There are any number of claims that are consistent with any given set of facts, and as my lame examples shows, some of these are going to be mutually exclusive. So to say that these additional claims in the bible are consistent with what we know in GR does not make them true (that simply doesn't follow). It is perfectly consistent with all of the assumptions we started with (that there is one God the creator that is infinitely just and merciful, that there is sin, evil, the need for redemption, etc) that there once lived a King named David, that defeated a giant, but our starting assumptions are equally consistent with the claim that there was no such King. So consistency with what is known in GR is necessary but not sufficient for claims being truly the word of God.
A second worry has to do with the issue of the criteria of "the word of God". I stated earlier that on Gangadean's view, GR provides us with a certain kind of criteria by which we determine whether a book is really the word of God. One crucial issue on Gangadean's view is that whatever is in fact the word of God must present how infinite justice is satisfied by infinite mercy (on the Christian picture, this is the son of God dying for the sins of the world). Now we run into a problem here. Ask yourself, "how would I know whether some narrative explains how infinite justice is satisfied by infinite mercy?" That is, when you read the bible, how can you know (with certainty) that Jesus dying for the sins of the world actually achieves both the instantiation of God's infinite justice and his mercy? This is something like the problem of criterion in epistemology. Philosophers ask how we can know what knowledge is. How will we know when we have the right theory, without already knowing what it is? Similarly, how can we know that in fact, the bible's account is the correct account of the satisfaction of divine justice and mercy? Don't you have to already know what you're looking for in order to recognize it as such? And if you already know what it takes for divine justice to be satisfied by divine mercy, then you no longer need special revelation to show you.
In response one might argue that what we know from GR can provide us a way to deduce everything in the bible---and hence all the contents of the bible are entailed by what is known from GR. In fact, this is exactly what Gangadean needs for certainty that the bible as a whole is the word of God. Unfortunately, it's false. You simply can't deduce the kinds of empirical claims (e.g., that their existed a Jesus of Nazareth, or much of Paul's teachings that go beyond GR, or the stories that line the old and new testament). You may have good reasons to believe it, but it won't be via a deductive proof. So on Gangadean's view of knowledge, you can't know the bible as the word of God.
In speaking with Anderson about these issues, he essentially argued that what is known from GR is found in the bible alone. This gives us proof that the bible, but no other text, is the word of God. He said that this was "enough" of a test. This is truly a puzzling response!
Remember we wanted a deductive proof that the bible is the word of God. That is to say, a way of being absolutely certain that the bible (as a whole) is the one and only word of God. Even if Anderson is right that the relevant details from GR are found only in the bible and not in any other texts, we still don't get a proof that the rest of the contents of the bible are true. Again consistency is not enough. Consistency is necessary but not sufficient for this task.
And it gets even worse for Anderson and company. His response requires that he first prove that there is no other holy book that gets the relevant details of GR right, but he would have to show that no other such book (that will diverge on other details form the bible) is even possible. This is an incredibly strong claim and I don't see how he can motivate it. Putting all of these considerations together, we have an extremely idiosyncratic view of knowledge which requires epistemic certainty (ultimately, we know only those things we can deduce). But the contents of bible as a whole cannot be deduced. So we can't know that the contents of the bible as a whole are true.
Saturday, July 26, 2014
Proper Function vs. Proper Desire
Part I
I've been thinking about Owen Anderson's article found here, where he raises some objections against Plantinga. He rehearses much of these considerations in his book, The Clarity of God's Existence.
Briefly, Plantinga's view is that unbelief in God might be due to improper functioning of one's belief forming apparatuses which are the result of the fall. We don't see what we otherwise might (including God's glory) because we are negatively affected (in particular, with respect to our cognition) by our sin. Anderson's main focus in the article is to show that if the Plantingan picture is correct (i.e., unbelief in God is the result of improper functioning), then the unbeliever cannot be held inexcusable/responsible for their unbelief. That is to say, the unbeliever, who lacks belief in God on the basis of improper functioning, has an excuse.
There is something initially plausible about this picture. I mean how can a just God condemn persons for failing to do something that they cannot possibly do? Now I have my doubts about understanding notions of divine justice, but I will table those and related concerns for the moment. Anderson's main objections to Plantinga trade centrally on the old "ought-implies-can" principle of responsibility. Stated simply, if I ought to do something, then it must be the case that I can, call this OIC.
Now many philosophers have rejected OIC despite it's initially, intuitive appeal. Indeed there are a number of counterexamples to the principle both in the realm of morality and in epistemology. I won't have time to speak of those here.
So grant (for the purposes of discussion) that OIC is true in all cases. What I want to focus on is how even Anderson's view seems to violate the principle at one level. This is because Anderson is also a compatibilist about free will and determinism. Moreover he is reformed in his theology and accepts the calvinistic notion of total depravity which is the view that man cannot possibly seek God save a change in his mind/heart. This change is not self-caused but rather must come from without and so is external to the agent. That is to say, the nonbeliever on this view simply will not (and cannot) seek God left to herself.
Now suppose all of this is correct, again, for the sake of discussion. One might ask how the unbeliever can be thought to be without excuse? After all, if ought implies can, but man is born totally depraved such that they cannot seek God (save a change instituted from without), then in what sense ought man to know God?
Perhaps aware of this problem Anderson takes liberties to revise the OIC principle in the following way:
OIC-R: if person S wants to seek the Lord, then S can.
So on this picture, the problem with the unbeliever is that he desires not to seek God and if and only if he wanted to seek God, then he could. This is meant to preserve the ought-implies-can principle of seeking/knowing God, but again, it is a revised form of OIC so we''ll refer to Anderson's principle as OIC-R from here on out.
The first problem is a question about philosophical motivation. Why should we accept this as a legitimate move? He is basically coming up with a principle that serves his thesis, but that excludes Plantinga's. Indeed Plantinga cannot use the same exact maneuver since even if person P wanted to know, if person P had a jacked up belief forming apparatus, he still couldn't know God.
But now Anderson's principle (the revision of the original OIC) seems self-serving and ad hoc and Just because it helps his theory doesn't mean that it is the correct theory.
Relatedly, why can't Plantinga make a similar manuever? In light of Anderson's criticisms Plantinga could come up with his own revision of the ought-implies-can principle. He might for example argue that while it's true that man in sin has their belief forming apparatuses all messed up (so as not to believe in God), the following conditional is true:
"If God delivers person X and restores their apparatus then they can know God".
So on this revision, it's consistent to insist that all men should know God, even though man knowing God depends on some act of God.
Of course, one might think there is still an important difference between Anderson's and the proposed Plantingan revision of the ought-implies-can. Anderson's seems not to deal with the unbelievers reasoning faculties, but rather the unbelievers desire to seek/know God while Plantinga's involves the belief forming processes. But the crucial question is whether we should think this is a relevant difference to the matter of the inexcusability of unbelief. I don't see how it could be. I mean, what should it matter of the precise mechanism that keeps an unbeliever from seeking/knowing God? Whether it's because unbeliever A lacks the desire to seek God, or whether A doesn't have the properly functioning abilities to know God, if both necessarily keep person A from knowing/seeking what is clear (and both are ultimately up to God not A), then why think this difference is salient to the matter at hand? This gives rise to a further issue with Anderson's account.
We can criticize Anderson's account as not making sense of OIC regarding the desire to seek the Lord. That is to contend that Anderson's account actually violates OIC (just at a different level).
Just as Anderson faults Plantinga's view for not respecting the OIC regarding belief in God, we can, by parity, fault Anderson's view for failing to maintain OIC regarding man's fundamental desire to seek.
For example, consider the following, "If I ought to desire to seek God, then it must be the case that I can".
Anderson's reformed theological views and compatibilism violate this principle. Since man is born into total depravity, the nonbeliever fundamentally desires not to seek God save an act of God. So the unbeliever cannot know God, because the unbeliever cannot make it so that the necessary requisite states of affairs (e.g., desiring to seek) obtain.
If OIC is categorically true (as Anderson wants to insist), then how can it be true of the unbeliever that she ought to know God and thus that unbelief is inexcusable? Notice, if the unbeliever can be excused for her failing to have the desire to seek, then this also would get her off the hook for her unbelief.
The point is, it seems to me that whatever move is open to Anderson, a parallel manuever will be available to Plantinga. What is more, we can revise the OIC regarding inexcusability of unbelief with all kinds of antecedent clauses. For instance, one might insist that God can only be known via special revelation and then adjust the OIC accordingly: "Look, God can be known by anyone and all that that means is, 'if one has special revelation, then one can know him.' The question is whether this move or Anderson's move is a legitimate one.
---------------------------------
Part II
Anderson, in his article, also considers how it must be clear to reason that God exists, if man is to be held responsible for unbelief. But now suppose that it is knowable to reason as Anderson wants to argue (that is, suppose that "if person A wants to know then they can"), but add that it is not up to the unbeliever whether she will desire to know or not. As noted previously, desiring to know is thought to be at least necessary in order to know on Anderson's view.
But then what good is it that it is clear to reason (as he conceives it) if people are still prevented from knowing God due to reasons beyond their ultimate control? Perhaps to Anderson this is perfectly consistent with the inexcusability of unbelief, but I just don't see it. That is, the nonbeliever despite not being able to determine whether they have one of the necessary conditions for knowing God, is still inexcusable in their unbelief. In fact in conversations Anderson often cites that you will never find a case where a person in unbelief will sincerely say, "well I want to know God, but I can't." I've never been sure what this is meant to show. Nevermind what these persons can legitimately say. We as appraisers of the situation can on their behalf say that they never had a shot at knowing God (in fact, they were necessarily prevented from belief) and think that this is unfair or isn't consistent with the legitimacy of the inexcusability thesis.
On the other hand, Anderson seems to find the inexcusability of unbelief to be obviously inconsistent with the thesis that God's existence is "unclear." But why does he find this inconsistent but not the above? Perhaps it's just intuitive to him. Say it's not clear to person B that God exists because despite there being evidence for God's existence, B does not cognitively function properly. But then it also seems true that we would never find such a person who can properly assert, "I want to know God, but I can't". Why? Because they wouldn't know what they were missing (namely, knowing God) since they don't have a proper function to get that far. So again it appears that Anderson's view and Plantinga's view merely differ on certain details of mechanics but I don't see the philosophical importance of these differences. I contend that whatever can be a form of criticism for Plantinga's view can with little work be construed as one for Owen's.
I've been thinking about Owen Anderson's article found here, where he raises some objections against Plantinga. He rehearses much of these considerations in his book, The Clarity of God's Existence.
Briefly, Plantinga's view is that unbelief in God might be due to improper functioning of one's belief forming apparatuses which are the result of the fall. We don't see what we otherwise might (including God's glory) because we are negatively affected (in particular, with respect to our cognition) by our sin. Anderson's main focus in the article is to show that if the Plantingan picture is correct (i.e., unbelief in God is the result of improper functioning), then the unbeliever cannot be held inexcusable/responsible for their unbelief. That is to say, the unbeliever, who lacks belief in God on the basis of improper functioning, has an excuse.
There is something initially plausible about this picture. I mean how can a just God condemn persons for failing to do something that they cannot possibly do? Now I have my doubts about understanding notions of divine justice, but I will table those and related concerns for the moment. Anderson's main objections to Plantinga trade centrally on the old "ought-implies-can" principle of responsibility. Stated simply, if I ought to do something, then it must be the case that I can, call this OIC.
Now many philosophers have rejected OIC despite it's initially, intuitive appeal. Indeed there are a number of counterexamples to the principle both in the realm of morality and in epistemology. I won't have time to speak of those here.
So grant (for the purposes of discussion) that OIC is true in all cases. What I want to focus on is how even Anderson's view seems to violate the principle at one level. This is because Anderson is also a compatibilist about free will and determinism. Moreover he is reformed in his theology and accepts the calvinistic notion of total depravity which is the view that man cannot possibly seek God save a change in his mind/heart. This change is not self-caused but rather must come from without and so is external to the agent. That is to say, the nonbeliever on this view simply will not (and cannot) seek God left to herself.
Now suppose all of this is correct, again, for the sake of discussion. One might ask how the unbeliever can be thought to be without excuse? After all, if ought implies can, but man is born totally depraved such that they cannot seek God (save a change instituted from without), then in what sense ought man to know God?
Perhaps aware of this problem Anderson takes liberties to revise the OIC principle in the following way:
OIC-R: if person S wants to seek the Lord, then S can.
So on this picture, the problem with the unbeliever is that he desires not to seek God and if and only if he wanted to seek God, then he could. This is meant to preserve the ought-implies-can principle of seeking/knowing God, but again, it is a revised form of OIC so we''ll refer to Anderson's principle as OIC-R from here on out.
The first problem is a question about philosophical motivation. Why should we accept this as a legitimate move? He is basically coming up with a principle that serves his thesis, but that excludes Plantinga's. Indeed Plantinga cannot use the same exact maneuver since even if person P wanted to know, if person P had a jacked up belief forming apparatus, he still couldn't know God.
But now Anderson's principle (the revision of the original OIC) seems self-serving and ad hoc and Just because it helps his theory doesn't mean that it is the correct theory.
Relatedly, why can't Plantinga make a similar manuever? In light of Anderson's criticisms Plantinga could come up with his own revision of the ought-implies-can principle. He might for example argue that while it's true that man in sin has their belief forming apparatuses all messed up (so as not to believe in God), the following conditional is true:
"If God delivers person X and restores their apparatus then they can know God".
So on this revision, it's consistent to insist that all men should know God, even though man knowing God depends on some act of God.
Of course, one might think there is still an important difference between Anderson's and the proposed Plantingan revision of the ought-implies-can. Anderson's seems not to deal with the unbelievers reasoning faculties, but rather the unbelievers desire to seek/know God while Plantinga's involves the belief forming processes. But the crucial question is whether we should think this is a relevant difference to the matter of the inexcusability of unbelief. I don't see how it could be. I mean, what should it matter of the precise mechanism that keeps an unbeliever from seeking/knowing God? Whether it's because unbeliever A lacks the desire to seek God, or whether A doesn't have the properly functioning abilities to know God, if both necessarily keep person A from knowing/seeking what is clear (and both are ultimately up to God not A), then why think this difference is salient to the matter at hand? This gives rise to a further issue with Anderson's account.
We can criticize Anderson's account as not making sense of OIC regarding the desire to seek the Lord. That is to contend that Anderson's account actually violates OIC (just at a different level).
Just as Anderson faults Plantinga's view for not respecting the OIC regarding belief in God, we can, by parity, fault Anderson's view for failing to maintain OIC regarding man's fundamental desire to seek.
For example, consider the following, "If I ought to desire to seek God, then it must be the case that I can".
Anderson's reformed theological views and compatibilism violate this principle. Since man is born into total depravity, the nonbeliever fundamentally desires not to seek God save an act of God. So the unbeliever cannot know God, because the unbeliever cannot make it so that the necessary requisite states of affairs (e.g., desiring to seek) obtain.
If OIC is categorically true (as Anderson wants to insist), then how can it be true of the unbeliever that she ought to know God and thus that unbelief is inexcusable? Notice, if the unbeliever can be excused for her failing to have the desire to seek, then this also would get her off the hook for her unbelief.
The point is, it seems to me that whatever move is open to Anderson, a parallel manuever will be available to Plantinga. What is more, we can revise the OIC regarding inexcusability of unbelief with all kinds of antecedent clauses. For instance, one might insist that God can only be known via special revelation and then adjust the OIC accordingly: "Look, God can be known by anyone and all that that means is, 'if one has special revelation, then one can know him.' The question is whether this move or Anderson's move is a legitimate one.
---------------------------------
Part II
Anderson, in his article, also considers how it must be clear to reason that God exists, if man is to be held responsible for unbelief. But now suppose that it is knowable to reason as Anderson wants to argue (that is, suppose that "if person A wants to know then they can"), but add that it is not up to the unbeliever whether she will desire to know or not. As noted previously, desiring to know is thought to be at least necessary in order to know on Anderson's view.
But then what good is it that it is clear to reason (as he conceives it) if people are still prevented from knowing God due to reasons beyond their ultimate control? Perhaps to Anderson this is perfectly consistent with the inexcusability of unbelief, but I just don't see it. That is, the nonbeliever despite not being able to determine whether they have one of the necessary conditions for knowing God, is still inexcusable in their unbelief. In fact in conversations Anderson often cites that you will never find a case where a person in unbelief will sincerely say, "well I want to know God, but I can't." I've never been sure what this is meant to show. Nevermind what these persons can legitimately say. We as appraisers of the situation can on their behalf say that they never had a shot at knowing God (in fact, they were necessarily prevented from belief) and think that this is unfair or isn't consistent with the legitimacy of the inexcusability thesis.
On the other hand, Anderson seems to find the inexcusability of unbelief to be obviously inconsistent with the thesis that God's existence is "unclear." But why does he find this inconsistent but not the above? Perhaps it's just intuitive to him. Say it's not clear to person B that God exists because despite there being evidence for God's existence, B does not cognitively function properly. But then it also seems true that we would never find such a person who can properly assert, "I want to know God, but I can't". Why? Because they wouldn't know what they were missing (namely, knowing God) since they don't have a proper function to get that far. So again it appears that Anderson's view and Plantinga's view merely differ on certain details of mechanics but I don't see the philosophical importance of these differences. I contend that whatever can be a form of criticism for Plantinga's view can with little work be construed as one for Owen's.
Maximal Consequences and Maximal Clarity: Between a Rock and a Hard Place.
Shifting gears a bit, I want to raise, what I think is a serious issue that arises from the dictum often presented by Gangadean and Anderson and company. The line is, "maximal consequences requires maximal clarity."
Anderson and Gangadean are two theists who argue that the God of Christianity is knowable with absolute certainty. They argue that it is central to Christianity that unbelief in this God is inexcusable and if so, God's existence must be "maximally clear." Why must it be maximally clear? Because Anderson asserts (but doesn't argue) that maximal consequences imply maximal clarity.
First off, it isn't obvious that inexcusability is central to Christianity at least in the way that they have in mind. Anderson for instance will cite Romans 1:20 as a sort of proof text for this notion. Paul does say that man (in unbelief) is without excuse because God's eternal power and divine nature are clearly seen by what is made. As a side note, it seems that unbelief, not the lack of knowledge is inexcusable, but I think that Andreson and Surrendra require of the believer and unbeliever, knowledge of God (further they take knowledge to entail Cartesian certainty).
Anyway, as I've mentioned before, there are various intelligible meanings to "clear" and "without excuse." Indeed we use "clear" or "clarity" often in our expressions without intending to mean absolute certainty. For instance, it's clear that I am in Arizona at the moment (this is in fact, true). It's evident by everything I see. And you might say there is no excuse for me believing that I was in Canada dreaming that I am in Arizona. Suppose that it is somehow a crime for me to be in Arizona at the moment (maybe I am an illegal immigrant from Canada). Now it's remotely possible, that I only think I am in Arizona right now (that is, my evidence doesn't perfectly rule out the possibility that I'm in Canada right now, but subject to an extremely convincing hallucination that I am in Arizona at the moment). So suppose I actually believe that I am not in Arizona right now. Now suppose that I am arrested and charged with being in Arizona illegally. It's no excuse for me to cite the fact that I wasn't absolutely certain that I was in Arizona. If I told the authorities that I thought it a possible that I was actually in Canada right now, but merely hallucinating that I was in Arizona, they wouldn't (with good reason) excuse my illegal residence. So I have no excuse for failing to believe that I am in Arizona right now, even though it isn't absolutely clear or certain that I am in Arizona. These seem to be perfectly accessible ways of using the words 'clear' and 'inexcusable' that depart from the way that Anderson wants to privilege. So it seems to me that Anderson, if he depends on Paul's writing to support his intentions of the terms "clear" and "inexcusable" needs to give us an indubitable reason to accept that Paul was using the words in the way that he, (Anderson) is using them. Otherwise, it's just a case of semantic bullying.
As we noted above, Anderson and Gangadean argue that God's existence must be maximally clear. But why? Because unbelief (either according to scripture or reason) in God leads to maximal consequences i.e., spiritual death. One of the corollaries of this line of thinking is that whenever failure to know a proposition leads to maximal consequences (spiritual death), that proposition must be maximally clear. More formally:
Now supposing that belief in God is requisite for one to avoid the maximal consequences, the question to ask is whether there are other beliefs that are also necessary to avoid the them? In other words, given the above MCRME, we should be asking whether are there any other beliefs that per Christianity (or even Surrendra and Owen's favored theology) that failing to have leads to maximal consequences?
Take the belief in the life, death and the resurrection of Jesus (as a means of atonement for our sins). We'll call this "the set of beliefs about Jesus." I think a Christian would be hard pressed to deny the fact that belief in Jesus of this sort is required in order to avoid maximal consequences (eternal separation from God, hell, spiritual death, or whatever). So combining this with MCRME, we can conclude that the set of beliefs associated with Jesus' redemptive work must be maximally clear.
That is, if maximal consequences implies maximal clarity, and unbelief in Jesus implies maximal consequences, then it must be maximally clear that Jesus lived and died, was the messiah, and also actually took the sins of the world. But this causes problems for Gangadean.
As I see it, Gangadean et al. are now faced with 3 unsavory options.
1) Agree that there must be (and is) maximal clarity of the set of beliefs associated with Jesus' redemptive work.
2) Deny that such beliefs are required for (or part of realizing) spiritual life/salvation.
3) Deny that maximal consequences requires maximal clarity.
Unfortunately, I find none of these options palatable for Gangadean and Anderson and discuss why below.
1) The set of beliefs about Jesus are maximally clear: The problem here is that we can't even in principle have absolute certainty about such matters. Don't we, today, believe in the life and work of Jesus based on testimonial evidence (e.g., the scriptures, purported historical records)? Moreover, at best, the early believers had empirical evidence (i.e., they observed the life, teaching, death of the risen Christ). How can one have absolute certainty of any of this since one's senses or how one interprets one's sense experiences may fail to correspond to reality.
A second difficulty of this route is that one needs to demarcate those propositions about Jesus that are necessary for avoiding the maximal consequences from those that are not-- of course it shouldn't be an arbitrary matter.
2) The set of beliefs about Jesus are not required for spiritual life: If having certain beliefs about Jesus is not necessary to avoid the maximal consequences (spiritual death), then even granting MCRME, those beliefs need not be maximally clear. Unfortunately, this is to allow that Theists that do not accept any beliefs about Jesus (indeed they may even believe that Jesus never existed) are avoiding the maximal consequences. I take this to be hardly inviting for reformed believers like Gangadean and Anderson.
3) Maximal Consequences do not imply Maximal Clarity: Perhaps maximal consequences does not require maximal clarity (MCRME is false). But then, why are Gangadean and Anderson pressing this point about the maximal clarity of God's existence as requisite for maximal consequences as it pertains to unbelief about God?
Anderson and Gangadean are two theists who argue that the God of Christianity is knowable with absolute certainty. They argue that it is central to Christianity that unbelief in this God is inexcusable and if so, God's existence must be "maximally clear." Why must it be maximally clear? Because Anderson asserts (but doesn't argue) that maximal consequences imply maximal clarity.
First off, it isn't obvious that inexcusability is central to Christianity at least in the way that they have in mind. Anderson for instance will cite Romans 1:20 as a sort of proof text for this notion. Paul does say that man (in unbelief) is without excuse because God's eternal power and divine nature are clearly seen by what is made. As a side note, it seems that unbelief, not the lack of knowledge is inexcusable, but I think that Andreson and Surrendra require of the believer and unbeliever, knowledge of God (further they take knowledge to entail Cartesian certainty).
Anyway, as I've mentioned before, there are various intelligible meanings to "clear" and "without excuse." Indeed we use "clear" or "clarity" often in our expressions without intending to mean absolute certainty. For instance, it's clear that I am in Arizona at the moment (this is in fact, true). It's evident by everything I see. And you might say there is no excuse for me believing that I was in Canada dreaming that I am in Arizona. Suppose that it is somehow a crime for me to be in Arizona at the moment (maybe I am an illegal immigrant from Canada). Now it's remotely possible, that I only think I am in Arizona right now (that is, my evidence doesn't perfectly rule out the possibility that I'm in Canada right now, but subject to an extremely convincing hallucination that I am in Arizona at the moment). So suppose I actually believe that I am not in Arizona right now. Now suppose that I am arrested and charged with being in Arizona illegally. It's no excuse for me to cite the fact that I wasn't absolutely certain that I was in Arizona. If I told the authorities that I thought it a possible that I was actually in Canada right now, but merely hallucinating that I was in Arizona, they wouldn't (with good reason) excuse my illegal residence. So I have no excuse for failing to believe that I am in Arizona right now, even though it isn't absolutely clear or certain that I am in Arizona. These seem to be perfectly accessible ways of using the words 'clear' and 'inexcusable' that depart from the way that Anderson wants to privilege. So it seems to me that Anderson, if he depends on Paul's writing to support his intentions of the terms "clear" and "inexcusable" needs to give us an indubitable reason to accept that Paul was using the words in the way that he, (Anderson) is using them. Otherwise, it's just a case of semantic bullying.
As we noted above, Anderson and Gangadean argue that God's existence must be maximally clear. But why? Because unbelief (either according to scripture or reason) in God leads to maximal consequences i.e., spiritual death. One of the corollaries of this line of thinking is that whenever failure to know a proposition leads to maximal consequences (spiritual death), that proposition must be maximally clear. More formally:
Max Consequences Requires Max Clarity Equivalence (MCRME):
Where P = any proposition and S = any subject (potential knower).
If unbelief in P entails maximal consequences for S, then P must be maximally clear to S.
Now supposing that belief in God is requisite for one to avoid the maximal consequences, the question to ask is whether there are other beliefs that are also necessary to avoid the them? In other words, given the above MCRME, we should be asking whether are there any other beliefs that per Christianity (or even Surrendra and Owen's favored theology) that failing to have leads to maximal consequences?
Take the belief in the life, death and the resurrection of Jesus (as a means of atonement for our sins). We'll call this "the set of beliefs about Jesus." I think a Christian would be hard pressed to deny the fact that belief in Jesus of this sort is required in order to avoid maximal consequences (eternal separation from God, hell, spiritual death, or whatever). So combining this with MCRME, we can conclude that the set of beliefs associated with Jesus' redemptive work must be maximally clear.
That is, if maximal consequences implies maximal clarity, and unbelief in Jesus implies maximal consequences, then it must be maximally clear that Jesus lived and died, was the messiah, and also actually took the sins of the world. But this causes problems for Gangadean.
As I see it, Gangadean et al. are now faced with 3 unsavory options.
1) Agree that there must be (and is) maximal clarity of the set of beliefs associated with Jesus' redemptive work.
2) Deny that such beliefs are required for (or part of realizing) spiritual life/salvation.
3) Deny that maximal consequences requires maximal clarity.
Unfortunately, I find none of these options palatable for Gangadean and Anderson and discuss why below.
1) The set of beliefs about Jesus are maximally clear: The problem here is that we can't even in principle have absolute certainty about such matters. Don't we, today, believe in the life and work of Jesus based on testimonial evidence (e.g., the scriptures, purported historical records)? Moreover, at best, the early believers had empirical evidence (i.e., they observed the life, teaching, death of the risen Christ). How can one have absolute certainty of any of this since one's senses or how one interprets one's sense experiences may fail to correspond to reality.
A second difficulty of this route is that one needs to demarcate those propositions about Jesus that are necessary for avoiding the maximal consequences from those that are not-- of course it shouldn't be an arbitrary matter.
2) The set of beliefs about Jesus are not required for spiritual life: If having certain beliefs about Jesus is not necessary to avoid the maximal consequences (spiritual death), then even granting MCRME, those beliefs need not be maximally clear. Unfortunately, this is to allow that Theists that do not accept any beliefs about Jesus (indeed they may even believe that Jesus never existed) are avoiding the maximal consequences. I take this to be hardly inviting for reformed believers like Gangadean and Anderson.
3) Maximal Consequences do not imply Maximal Clarity: Perhaps maximal consequences does not require maximal clarity (MCRME is false). But then, why are Gangadean and Anderson pressing this point about the maximal clarity of God's existence as requisite for maximal consequences as it pertains to unbelief about God?
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