In a recent post, among other things, I presented the case that Gangadean's argument (given towards the end of this talk) for why the human soul could not possibly be eternal, is unsound. At least two of the premises are unproven, and one of them is outright false. It seems a discussion in the comments of that video has begun, and Anderson is playing defense. I want to note just a few things.
The very top comment as of now, is by a person named "Samuel." It's very likely to be a long time member of Westminster Fellowship (Gangadean's church). But you wouldn't know that from the comment. Frequently Gangadeanians, who are members of the church, will post positive reviews (including amazon book reviews and google reviews of the church), without disclosing that they are card carrying members. Maybe this isn't technically lying, but I find something disingenuous about the practice. That's part of the reason why I disclose some details about my personal dealings with Gangadean and his people in the introduction of this blog.
Secondly, I noticed that when Spencer (who reads this blog) presented a version of my criticism of Gangadean's argument (that the human soul is not possibly eternal), Anderson doesn't defend the original argument. To do so would be to defend the truth of the premise that I attacked (namely, premise 3 of the original argument which states that an eternal being would necessarily be all-knowing). Instead he defends the conclusion. Anderson wonders whether an eternal being must have the greatest amount of power. That suggests that Gangadean's argument as it is is defecient. Anderson's hints at an entirely different argument which purports to make a connection between eternal existence and power (rather than knowledge). That's to concede my original point that Gangadean's argument is unsound because at least one of the premises is false.
Of course, it's not enough for Anderson to ask questions as he frequently does. He needs to present the arguments since he's on the side that is making substantive claims that he can definitively prove that God exists (among others). So the question then becomes can Anderson/Gangadean provide a proof for the claim that "necessarily, if X is eternal, then X is the highest power"? I suspect this is the most promising approach in attempting to patch Gangadean's shoddy argument and we'll have to wait to hear what they come up with, assuming that they do--I wouldn't hold my breathe though.
Wherever that conversation leads, I think there's a non trivial gain that we've made, if my analysis so far is right. The payoff is this: Gangadean has been presenting an argument (for many years, if not decades) with an obvious flaw. And that means he's either known about it, but ignored it in which case he's been dishonest ("bearing false witness" as he would put it) or he's not known about it and he's shown a rather large lapse in philosophical judgment (and this for many years!). Like I said, the mistake is a rather obvious one. In the case of the latter, this is a symptom of a larger problem--Gangadean's way of doing philosophy, the isolation, the intellectual incest (bouncing ideas off of only those that are under your authority), is bound to lead to problems. Neither is this an isolated incident---if you poke around my blog, you'll see that there are a plethora of problems with Gangadean's arguments, and many of them are the result of rather elementary mistakes in reasoning.
Finally, I noticed that Anderson gets lost at some point in the conversation. After one relevant question (noted above), he somehow finds it pertinent to raise the following questions.
1. Can we know anything outside of our experiences?
2. What does the coppolla 'I' in my construal of Gangadean's original argument refers to?
(I'm omitting 3 because that was addressed above).
also,
4. Does memory lapse affect my ability to know if I am eternal?
5. Do I have to know everything in order to know anything?
6. Can we know that 'a is a' outside of experience?
Sometimes in conversing with a Gangadeanian, I feel like I'm speaking with a bot that would fail the turing test. These are simply the wrong sorts of questions--it's as if Anderson is trying to change the subject. This smells an awful lot like a red-herring (sorry, I couldn't resist). My point (and what I take to be Spencer's) is not about whether we can know anything, neither is it about whether or not empiricism is true. In fact, my answer to Anderson's questions about whether we can know anything beyond our experiences (including that 'a is a'), even if memory lapses are possible, is an emphatic, YES!! The irony is that as I have argued before, Anderson and Gangadean, if they are going to be consistent in demanding proof, should probably answer, with an emphatic, NO! (Don't forget we think of the nature of knowledge or define 'knowledge' in very different ways). In any case, none of this is germane to whether or not Gangadean's argument for why any human soul is not eternal, is unsound. It's unsound and Anderson seems to admit this much. Let's move on and talk about whether it can be fixed by way of a sub-proof for the contentious premise(s) or not.
Finally, just in case you're curious, I'm not claiming that the human soul is in fact, eternal--I take that to be an incredible claim (of course, I don't pretend I can prove that it's false nor do I believe I need to). So that's not what my recent line of criticisms is about. I'm merely pointing out that this is yet another case where Gangadean fails to prove one of his most fundamental claims despite claiming that he can and should do so (i.e., it's among the "most basic things" which he takes to be clear to reason).
Saturday, October 27, 2018
Friday, October 26, 2018
A Gangadeanian on the Problem of Evil: An ironic problem for the ironic solution.
Here's another video from the Gangadeanian organization called the Clarity Fund in which one of their own (Greg Malloy) presents Gangadean's theodicy (a purported answer to the problem of evil). As you can see in Anderson's introduction, this talk was part of a series at ASU west, where they invite outside speakers. I find it peculiar (and perhaps in bad faith) that Anderson invited Malloy to give the talk because he believes precisely all of the same things that Anderson does --and this by no accident! Malloy is both a student of Gangadean (Anderson's mentor) as well as Anderson himself--and they all belong to the questionable religious organization called Westminster Fellowship. Further, Malloy is basically reading out of Gangadean's book (which Anderson frequently does in his own courses) as opposed to presenting any of his own ideas. As such, Anderson might has well given the talk himself--that would have at least been more honest. I wonder if this is a frequent occurrence and if so, there's probably a conflict of interest.
Anyway, on to the substance. I've tackled the Gangadeanian "answer" to problem of evil before, so some of what I will have to say will be a recapitulation, but this video has again made the related issues salient. Malloy is attempting to provide an answer to the question, "if God is perfectly good and powerful, then whence is there evil?" He faults common theistic responses like the free will theodicy. I won't rehearse those here except to point out that he seems to be leaving out more sophisticated versions of the free will accounts like that of Alvin Plantinga who aims only to show that it is logically possible that God and evil co-exist (that is to say, there's no contradiction between the two states of affairs). Of course, as with any philosophical argument, there are problems, but it isn't obvious that the problems are in the end, decisive despite how Malloy and Gangadean before him present things.
As to Malloy's presentation of Gangadean's theodicy: there is a lot of hand-waviness going on from the start. "The good for a thing is said to be in accordance with the nature of a thing." "The nature of humans is to be rational." "Thus, Evil (moral evil) is contrary to the nature of a rational being which is not knowing God (what is clear and most basic)." There are no arguments given in this presentation for each of these very weighty premises. On several occasions, I've noted that Gangadean is far too quick in taking for granted his claim that the good for humans is to know that God exists. I keep laboring this point because it plays such an essential role in many of his arguments and his theodicy in particular. If he hasn't proven beyond all doubt that the core moral evil is not knowing that God exists, then his theodicy is a non-starter. How does he argue that good for humans is to know that God exists? Well, he depends on more controversial and unproven claims. For instance, that knowledge of God is knowledge of the "most basic." And that humans are essentially rational beings which just means they are the sorts of beings that ought to know what is most basic. And of course the big whopper, that God's existence is clear to reason. If any of these claims is not proven, then the theodicy is simply a non-starter (more on this point below).
Malloy presents the idea that moral evil has a particular purpose which justifies God in creating the world so that it inevitably would have such evil in it. What is that purpose? It's an intellectual good that only some of creation gets to reap, namely, revelation of God's nature, in particular, his divine justice and mercy. But Malloy (and Gangadean) fails to take care in appreciating just how contentious this is. It's far from trivial that God is in fact morally justified in permitting things like the holocaust just so some of his creation can have true beliefs about his nature. That sounds outright monstrous. Neither is it trivial that God who is all knowing and all powerful, couldn't have come up with a different way to reveal his attributes to his creation. Gangadean must maintain that it's logically impossible for God to reveal his divine attributes to his creatures without creating the conditions for moral evil and that seems like an incredible claim. For one thing, why can't God reveal facts to his creation, directly (either by creating us differently or by making such knowledge innate)? Further, there doesn't have to be evil for us to know how God *would* deal with it---we could come to know counterfactuals about what God would do in certain situations--and that would also count as knowledge about God's nature (i.e., information about the dispositions of a being is important information about that being). You might think that knowledge of what a being actually does is somehow more valuable than what a being would do, but is this difference enough to outweigh all the harms that come from all the countless instances of moral evil that we actually find in our world? An affirmative answer is also far from trivial. Moreover, as the philosopher David Lewis once wondered about, couldn't God have placed us in "playpens" so that the evils we commit are ones that do not bring about harms? For instance, it seems possible for God to have enabled Stalin to think evil thoughts and have evil desires, without also enabling him to exterminate 20 million people. The problems amplify when we incorporate Gangadean's committment to Calvinism, which includes the doctrine of limited atonement (only some receive the revelation that comes at the cost of all the moral evil in the world).
To sum up then, Gangadean's/Malloy's God permits moral evil which leads to countless harms/victims, so that only some people get to realize some intellectual goods, namely knowledge of some of God's attributes. Somehow this is supposed to be a satisfying answer to the question, how can a perfectly good, all powerful being permit moral evil? Where the theodicy flounders is that it doesn't present an argument (let alone a proof) for the essential claim that this revelation, which only some enjoy, justifies God in permitting moral evil (as well as the harms that follow). As I've argued before, Ganagdean's book does no better in this respect--he asks rhetorically, "is it worth it?" And then takes for granted what the bible says about the matter which is question begging in the current context. Likewise, the theodicy fails to provide an argument for why God could not have achieved his end of revealing himself, without moral evil or at least without the harms that follow from moral evil in our world. Notice that God isn't supposed to be limited by the laws of nature or the causal regularities we find in our world--so for Gangadean's theodicy to have a leg to stand on, he's got to prove to us that it's logically or metaphysically impossible for God to reveal his nature without moral evil and the attendant harms that (as a matter of causal regularities) follow. A very tall order indeed.
Let me close by saying something about Gangadean's so called "ironic solution" to the problem of evil. Here is the argument.
Anyway, on to the substance. I've tackled the Gangadeanian "answer" to problem of evil before, so some of what I will have to say will be a recapitulation, but this video has again made the related issues salient. Malloy is attempting to provide an answer to the question, "if God is perfectly good and powerful, then whence is there evil?" He faults common theistic responses like the free will theodicy. I won't rehearse those here except to point out that he seems to be leaving out more sophisticated versions of the free will accounts like that of Alvin Plantinga who aims only to show that it is logically possible that God and evil co-exist (that is to say, there's no contradiction between the two states of affairs). Of course, as with any philosophical argument, there are problems, but it isn't obvious that the problems are in the end, decisive despite how Malloy and Gangadean before him present things.
As to Malloy's presentation of Gangadean's theodicy: there is a lot of hand-waviness going on from the start. "The good for a thing is said to be in accordance with the nature of a thing." "The nature of humans is to be rational." "Thus, Evil (moral evil) is contrary to the nature of a rational being which is not knowing God (what is clear and most basic)." There are no arguments given in this presentation for each of these very weighty premises. On several occasions, I've noted that Gangadean is far too quick in taking for granted his claim that the good for humans is to know that God exists. I keep laboring this point because it plays such an essential role in many of his arguments and his theodicy in particular. If he hasn't proven beyond all doubt that the core moral evil is not knowing that God exists, then his theodicy is a non-starter. How does he argue that good for humans is to know that God exists? Well, he depends on more controversial and unproven claims. For instance, that knowledge of God is knowledge of the "most basic." And that humans are essentially rational beings which just means they are the sorts of beings that ought to know what is most basic. And of course the big whopper, that God's existence is clear to reason. If any of these claims is not proven, then the theodicy is simply a non-starter (more on this point below).
Malloy presents the idea that moral evil has a particular purpose which justifies God in creating the world so that it inevitably would have such evil in it. What is that purpose? It's an intellectual good that only some of creation gets to reap, namely, revelation of God's nature, in particular, his divine justice and mercy. But Malloy (and Gangadean) fails to take care in appreciating just how contentious this is. It's far from trivial that God is in fact morally justified in permitting things like the holocaust just so some of his creation can have true beliefs about his nature. That sounds outright monstrous. Neither is it trivial that God who is all knowing and all powerful, couldn't have come up with a different way to reveal his attributes to his creation. Gangadean must maintain that it's logically impossible for God to reveal his divine attributes to his creatures without creating the conditions for moral evil and that seems like an incredible claim. For one thing, why can't God reveal facts to his creation, directly (either by creating us differently or by making such knowledge innate)? Further, there doesn't have to be evil for us to know how God *would* deal with it---we could come to know counterfactuals about what God would do in certain situations--and that would also count as knowledge about God's nature (i.e., information about the dispositions of a being is important information about that being). You might think that knowledge of what a being actually does is somehow more valuable than what a being would do, but is this difference enough to outweigh all the harms that come from all the countless instances of moral evil that we actually find in our world? An affirmative answer is also far from trivial. Moreover, as the philosopher David Lewis once wondered about, couldn't God have placed us in "playpens" so that the evils we commit are ones that do not bring about harms? For instance, it seems possible for God to have enabled Stalin to think evil thoughts and have evil desires, without also enabling him to exterminate 20 million people. The problems amplify when we incorporate Gangadean's committment to Calvinism, which includes the doctrine of limited atonement (only some receive the revelation that comes at the cost of all the moral evil in the world).
To sum up then, Gangadean's/Malloy's God permits moral evil which leads to countless harms/victims, so that only some people get to realize some intellectual goods, namely knowledge of some of God's attributes. Somehow this is supposed to be a satisfying answer to the question, how can a perfectly good, all powerful being permit moral evil? Where the theodicy flounders is that it doesn't present an argument (let alone a proof) for the essential claim that this revelation, which only some enjoy, justifies God in permitting moral evil (as well as the harms that follow). As I've argued before, Ganagdean's book does no better in this respect--he asks rhetorically, "is it worth it?" And then takes for granted what the bible says about the matter which is question begging in the current context. Likewise, the theodicy fails to provide an argument for why God could not have achieved his end of revealing himself, without moral evil or at least without the harms that follow from moral evil in our world. Notice that God isn't supposed to be limited by the laws of nature or the causal regularities we find in our world--so for Gangadean's theodicy to have a leg to stand on, he's got to prove to us that it's logically or metaphysically impossible for God to reveal his nature without moral evil and the attendant harms that (as a matter of causal regularities) follow. A very tall order indeed.
Let me close by saying something about Gangadean's so called "ironic solution" to the problem of evil. Here is the argument.
The Ironic Solution:
(1) Because of all the evil in the world, I cannot see how it can be said that God is all good and powerful.
(2) Because of all the unbelief in the world, I cannot see how it can be said that God is all good and powerful.
(3) Because of all the unbelief in me, I cannot see how it can be said that God is all good and all powerful.
(4) Because I have neglected and avoided the use of reason, I cannot see what is clear about God.Where's the irony? Well, the thought seems to be that if you assume (1), then it follows that (4), but since (4) is supposed to be an absurdity that gives you reason to deny (1). I hinted above that the argument takes many liberties about the nature of good, about what is clear and the like. Here's Gangadean's own words on the matter (lifted from his book).
The solution to the problem of evil has certain assumptions...that there is a clear general revelation that only some is eternal, that God the creator exists. It assumes clarity and inexcusability (113).The problem that I noted before is that it's clearly question begging in the current context. The problem of evil is a problem that aims to show that God cannot exist insofar as evil does (i.e., that there's a contradiction or tension between the thesis that evil exists and that God exists). But as Gangadean notes, this argument assumes that (among other things) "it's clear to reason that God exists." In other words, that there is a watertight proof for the existence of God so that it's impossible for God not to exist. That's just what (4) says. Of course, that's the very thing at issue! It's no good to answer the problem of evil with an argument that presupposes that it's clear to reason that God exists. If it's clear to reason that God exists, according to Gangadean that means it's impossible for God not to exist. But of course, the theist can't legitimately help herself to this claim because that's the very thing under dispute! In fact, if we allow Gangadean this assumption, then there really is no problem of evil or any other problem against theism, rendering the "ironic solution" entirely superfluous. Ironically, we now have a reductio against the purported reductio--an ironic problem for the ironic solution.
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Gangadean at Grand Canyon University, Part 3
This is the last part of my series on Gangadean's recent talk. If you want to get to the "juicy stuff," I'd suggest you skip down to points 12 and 13 where I discuss how his argument that the human soul is not eternal is bad, and also that his argument for why natural evil is not inherent in creation, leads to serious difficulties for his worldview. Of course, I think all of the other points are important, too, but they may not be of interest to all my readers.
9. At around 51:00, Gangadean cites "common ground" as a source of unity within the church. What is supposed to be the content of common ground? I spoke about this some in my last post (Part 2, point 6), but I'll develop my thoughts on the matter a bit further.
a. Reason as the laws of thought.
b. Integrity/concern for consistency.
c. Rational presuppositionalism (as the method of critical thinking).
d. The principle of clarity (that the basic things about god, man, good and evil are clear to reason) and the need for clarity in connection to inexcusability.
Gangadean will often cite differences concerning a. through d. as grounds for discontinuing discussions with his disputants. The trouble is, Gangadean doesn't seem open to the possibility that he may be mistaken about what is required for intelligible discussions. In place of tight arguments that such common ground of this particular sort must be in place for conversations to make sense, he merely presupposes a number of principles (more on this below). But I'll shed light on some of these and suggest why they are no good.
As it concerns "reason as the laws of thought," I don't disagree that for instance, 'a is a' (the law of identity)--that's just saying a thing is what it is (and not something else). The same with the law of contradiction, and excluded middle (although I'm a bit more hesitant about this one due to problems of vagueness as well as the conditional form of excluded middle). Gangadeanians often have the mistaken view that I deny the so called, "laws of the thought." Now, I don't necessarily agree with the further identity claim that Gangadean makes---that reason is to be identified with the laws of thought--but that's because I don't quite understand what it means or even what the point of that is supposed to be. Still, I affirm the rather trivial metaphysical claim that a thing is what it is, and that two contradictory statements or propositions can't both be true. Where Gangadean and I differ is in what each of us professes as the reasons for believing these claims and the certainty with which we affirm them. For Gangadean these are so called "self-attesting" and "self-evident" principles and as such can be known with absolute certainty (such that one can't possibly be mistaken in believing them because they can't possible be other than true). In contrast, I don't really know whether or not a proposition can be "self-evident" or "self-attesting" (or how one goes about coming to know that something is), unless all we mean by that is that it strikes us as rather obvious.
Sometimes I'm tempted by the thought that there's a sense in which we must assume some propositions if we're going to do any amount of theorizing. That's because every argument needs premises or starting points. Some philosophers think something like this is right and speak of some claims as "axiomiatic" or i"ndispensible", but none of them are after certainty or clarity to begin with and Gangadean likes the eschew talk of axioms in this regard. The reason I mention the last bit is because there's something unsatisfying about counting a proposition as true simply because it serves our aims/purposes in theorizing or arguing. The natural question is why the fact that something must be assumed if we are to say present any arguments makes the former true. How would we go about proving a thing like this? And it feels an awful like a pragmatic reason to believe something is true (because it's suits our needs/goals/purposes) as opposed to a truth-relevant reason. Finally, I underlined 'assume' above because we can further fuss about what we mean by the word. Does assuming in the relevant sense amount to believing (and if so, to what degree)? Or does it mean simply holding fixed for the purposes of a particular line of inquiry?
When I've pressed Gangadeanian in the past about how they know when something is self-attesting or self-evident (and thus maximally clear to reason), they've responded that such propositions have a peculiar property--they make questioning possible. And that's similar to what I've just talked about (it's something like "transcendental reasoning"). I pointed out in my last post (point 6) that this seems to merely push the problem back a step because we now need for Gangadean to tell us how we know (with certainty) when a proposition makes questioning possible. After all, it seems logically possible that Gangadean and his clan are merely mistaken about their judgments in this respect so that what they believe makes questioning possible only appears to them to be that way. I think an appeal to intuition or common sense at this point is unavoidable and thus a problem for Gangadean's entire worldview. But there's more. As I hinted at above, we need an argument for why "a proposition makes questioning possible" entails that "it can't be questioned" and "it is true." Here again, I think Gangadean is banking on intuitions or common sense--but we shouldn't let him get away with that given his professed standards for clarity at the basic level.
Returning again to the point that Gangadean and I agree on say the law of identity, but disagree about the reasons for which we accept it and the certainty with which we do: I don't understand why I need to affirm these principles ("the laws of thought") with absolute certainty in the first place. I don't find myself questioning their veracity, but I also wouldn't take the following bet if an evil demon offered it to me: If i'm wrong about their truth, then everyone I know dies a grueling slow death and if I'm right, I get a quarter. So I can't say in sincerity that I'm absolutely certain (nor can I just make myself certain of them as if belief is within our voluntary control). Gangadean on the other hand, would be forced to take such a bet, since by his lights, it's literally impossible for him to be wrong about them (or for him to gain any more evidence of either their truth or falsity).
Do these differences between our positions matter upon final analysis? Depends who you ask. Gangadean and his followers certainly seem to think so although again, it's possible that they don't quite understand my position. Does it matter for whether we can have intelligible conversations? I don't see how---but again, Gangadean seems to think so (though he is without an argument for why that is). Does it matter for unity within the church? Once again, I don't see why or how--this is something in need of an argument and I'm skeptical that one will be forthcoming.
As to the last item on the list of "common ground principles" i.e., the principle of clarity, I wrote quite a bit about problems with the twin principles of clarity and inexcusability in part 1 of this series, so I won't rehearse those considerations here. Instead, we can again ask whether it matters for unity within the church or whether it can be grounds for exclusion either from the church or from intelligible conversation/engagement. Gangadean takes it for granted that the answer to both questions is, yes. But again, I simply don't see why. Notice that what he's resting his claim on is the following. That agreement on the most basic things will yield agreement on the less basic---and he's taking his doctrine of clarity as among the more basic. One thing to note is that even if it's true that by agreeing on the more basic, we will agree on the less basic (which I doubt), that doesn't rule out the possibility of coming to agreement on the less basic, another way. After all, Gangadean isn't claiming "if and only if we agree on the more basic, we will agree on the less basic."
Returning again to our disagreement about how certain we must be about say the laws of thought: I've also noted in the past that Gangadean thinks of this whole idea of clarity in a very special way. He thinks that for some proposition to be clear, is for it to be knowable with absolute certainty. It's a status reserved for those claims, which you couldn't possibly be wrong/mistaken about. But again, why must some things have this status in the first place? What if we can't have that kind of certainty about anything? What is supposed to follow from that? What's the downside? Gangadean usually argues that if we can't be absolutely certain about anything, then we can't know anything (skepticism). And that sounds really bad since knowledge is a desirable thing. Or else he tells you that there's no point in having discussions. But as I've noted before, what he doesn't tell you at this juncture is that he's assuming (without argument) that knowledge requires absolute certainty/clarity and that conversations are intelligible only if we have certainty. Neither of these very substantive claims is obvious. Nor can I see how he would argue that they are "self-attesting" or "self-evident." So it's yet another Gangadeanian article of faith. Once we are careful in drawing out some of Gangadean's presuppositions, we see that there is no necessary obstacle to disunity within the church, from those that fail to agree with the claim that we can be absolutely certain about some claims (principle of clarity).
10. At 53:00, Gangadean starts to talk about various passages in the bible like the first three chapters of Genesis. He'll also talk about the preface to the gospel of John (where the world/logos is said to be God and with God). I want to make a very general point that I've been hinting at throughout this series. Gangadean, like anyone approaching the text, is interpreting it. If you know about the many disputes that exist within the church you'll know that there are many ways to interpret a particular passage--though I'm not at all suggesting that "anything goes." I think there are better and worse interpretations and that we have to consider the reasons for and against interpreting a passage one way over another and make our best judgments. Strangely, Gangadean often presents his interpretations of scripture as ultimately authoritative and if you press him on it, he'll actually tell you that the "correct interpretations" are clear to reason (though I've also heard mixed reports from other Gangadeanians--one in particular, once told me that we can't expect to know what the bible says, with the same clarity as we can of basic things). That is to say, once the more basic stuff from reason alone is in place, you can via "good and necessary consequences" (deductive inference) figure out how to interpret special revelation (the bible). I recall once sitting in on a discussion session that Gangadean held (then called Logos Seminary) where he interpreted a particular passage one way and it wasn't obvious to many of us that that was the only way despite what he insisted--but he refused to move on until certain persons professed full agreement. I say all of this to provide one place to push back in your interactions with Gangadeanians when in the context of theological/hermeneutical discussions. Don't let them simply take liberties to interpret any given passage to fit their philosophical needs---instead ask them for decisive arguments for why the particular interpretation they provide is the only suitable one (also, can they rule out the possibility that there's an interpretation which none of us has yet to consider?). If they concede that we can't know with certainty what the text says, then that opens the door for questioning believers for instance, need certainty about other "more basic" matters.
11. At 54:00, Gangadean starts to talk about the "historic Christian faith" or sometimes what he speaks of as "historic Christianity." If you've encountered Gangadeanians, they are quick to bring up this notion and it does a great deal of work in their defense of their worldview. Gangadean sums up historic Christianity as reflected in the major creeds as many Christians, do. But he also importantly takes the Westminster Confession of faith as the "high water mark" of historic Christianity. Now reformed presbyterians tend to love the Westminster Confession of faith (because it has a strong Calvinist bent), but to say that it best reflects Christianity is a very substantive claim for which we need an argument. So we shouldn't let him or any Gangadeanian get away with merely asserting that this is so--again he needs to prove that this is so which is going to involve proving lots and lots of reformed interpretations of scripture. This last point made me think that during my many years under Gangadean's ministry, I never once learned how to prove these things--and I doubt any other Gangadeanians did, either. Instead, we were taught merely to agree with the claim that the WF confession of faith had got it all right. It would seem that fideism (as Gangadean defines it) is quite rampant in his church.
Q&A
12. At 1:09:00, a member of the audience asks Gangadean to explain "how the [human] soul is not eternal." Here's the basic argument Gangadean gives.
(1) I have one thought after another.
(2) If (1) and my soul were eternal, then I would be eternal in time.
(3) If I were eternal in time, then I would be all knowing.
(4) I am not all knowing.
(5) So, I am not eternal in time.
This is a bad argument. For one thing, Gangadean had better not help himself to the first premise on pain of violating his own principles. To reiterate, he's after clarity/certainty! In which case, he can't appeal to the common sense of the questioner (as he does in giving his answer). So what would a proof of premise (1) look like? I'm not sure it's possible to give a proof of the temporal ordering of thoughts. I know that Gangadeanians are with Kant in thinking that the reality of time is something of a transcendental (it's a precondition for the possibility of experience). But even granting this, it's of no help. Notice--I'm not asking how we know that there's such a thing as time. I'm asking how we can know (with absolute certainty) when particular phenomena (our thoughts) are ordered in time. Again, I think this is something that is ultimately going to have to resolve into an appeal to common sense or intuition which is no good for Gangadean's worldview.
More importantly, premise (3) is false. There's no contradiction in thinking of a being like me who exists eternally within time, but who fails to have all knowledge. As I've pointed out before, it's possible that I'm unmotivated to gain knowledge so that no matter how much time I have, I don't grow in knowledge (let alone the full extent of it)--this is because gaining knowledge takes work--it's a process and not something that merely happens to us! Another possibility is that I lose knowledge even as I gain it. For example, since knowledge entails belief, if I lose a belief that I once had, then I don't have it as a piece of knowledge. And there are lots of ways that a person might lose their beliefs in the pertinent sense. One might simply forget the proposition, for one thing. Or one might encounter misleading evidence which makes one doubt what one previously believed. In either case, one can lose knowledge by losing the relevant belief. As such, eternal existence within time doesn't entail omniscience by any stretch of the imagination.
Finally, if there are an infinite number of propositions, then it seems impossible to know them all regardless of how long you've been around--at least by successive addition. Regardless of how long you've been picking apples, if the set of apples in the universe were infinite, it's literally impossible for you to ever run out of apples to pick which means you won't ever have the set of all the apples. So the mere fact that you don't have all the apples, doesn't entail that you haven't been around eternally within time. It just means you can't get exhaust an infinite set in that way. The same with knowledge of an infinite number of propositions.
The upshot is that at least two of the five premises is questionable in which case the argument is unsound hence, it's not clear to reason that the (human) soul is not eternal.
13. At 1:10:00, an audience member asked Gangadean to clarify his claim that while spiritual death is inherent in sin (not seeking, not knowing what is clear), physical death was imposed later as a call back from sin. As Gangadean notes, the relevant issue here is the problem of natural evil. He first presents what he deems a "general revelation argument that physical death was not original in creation." Basically it's the Humean argument from evil which goes like this.
Humean Argument:
(1) If God is all powerful, then he could prevent natural evil.
(2) If God is all good, then he would prevent natural evil.
(3) If God could and would, then he must have prevented natural evil.
(4) Hence, he did prevent natural evil.
Most theists don't take this argument to be sound (I'll say more about that later). But, strangely, Gangadean, here takes it to be sound--i.e,. he takes it as proof that physical death/natural evil is not inherent in creation (though Hume intended it to be an argument against God's existence because he thought premise (4) to be false). But what he fails to appreciate is that taking that line is bad news for his view in that it proves too much. To see why note how the premises seem no less true if you replace each instance of 'natural evil' with 'moral evil.' This seems then to suggest that Gangadean would have to (on pain of inconsistency) deny that moral evil was inherent in creation. Maybe that's not so bad in itself because Gangadean might say that while natural evil isn't inherent in creation, the potential for it is inherent. But this won't quite work out because he's a soft-determinist meaning he thinks that every event is the necessary result of prior causes and that means the sin committed by Adam and Eve was determined by temporally prior facts about the creation event including how God created Adam and Eve. So, Gangadean cannot (on pain of inconsistency) hide behind the subterfuge of mere "potential to sin"--because it does violence to Gangadean's views about how every event is causally determined by prior causes which ultimately start with the creation event by God. That is, on Gangadean's view it can't be that God created Adam and Eve to have an equal probability of sinning and not sinning. If he did, according to Gangadean, this would undermine the very notion of God as creator and ruler as well as the notion of causality. So what really should stand in for 'natural evil' is not 'the potential for moral evil,' but rather something like 'the conditions sufficient for bringing about moral evil' or 'the conditions that guarantee the existence of moral evil.' Once we replace each occurrence of 'natural evil' with what I have suggested, we get a serious problem for Gangadean's position. This is because these new premises seem no less true than their counterparts in the original argument (so that if one accepts the Humean argument as sound as Gangadean does, then one ought to accept this new argument as sound). Consider:
Argument II:
(1)' If God is all powerful, then he could prevent the initial conditions which guarantee the presence of moral evil from ever obtaining.
(2)' If God is all good, then he would prevent the conditions which guarantee the presence of moral evil from ever obtaining.
(3)' If God could and would, then he must...
(4) Hence, he did prevent the initial conditions which guarantee the presence of moral evil conditions from ever obtaining.
If this argument is sound (as it should be according to Gangadean), then we have a serious problem for his worldview because it would entail that there is actually no moral evil in the world. The conclusion (4)' is in obvious tension with his views about human free will (compatibilism/soft-determinism) and the divine providence of God and so consistency demands that he deny this argument is sound. The rub is that in trying to deny any of the premises, it seems like he'll end up supplying us reasons to deny the analogue premises of the original Hume-inspired argument which he affirms. And that threatens his proof for why physical evil is not original in creation.
Not only that but we can run the very same kind of argument about natural evil. Not only did God, on Gangadean's view create the initial conditions which guaranteed that there would be moral evil, but given what he thinks about the relationship between moral evil and natural evil, he also created the initial conditions which guaranteed the presence of physical/natural evil. So we can create yet another equally problematic argument for Gangadean by replacing each appearance of 'moral evil' with 'natural evil' in argument II.
As I said most theists will deny premise (2) of the Humean argument and thus consistency would have them deny the analogues in the other versions. They have the resources to do so because they think that God might have morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil as well as the initial conditions which bring about evil. Of course, if you're a free will theodicist, then you are likely to assume a libertarian theory of free will, in which case you don't believe that God is ultimately the cause of evil because humans have a special kind of self-sufficiency. But none of these resources are available for Gangadean and so what I'm arguing is that there's a unique problem for his worldview. This is because he takes the Humean argument to be sound and is also committed to a form of determinism (soft) about events.
14. Gangadean then presents his theodicy. And I have a series of posts dedicated to raising problems for his theodicy (I charge that it's really bad and it's even question begging against the atheist).
Sometimes I'm tempted by the thought that there's a sense in which we must assume some propositions if we're going to do any amount of theorizing. That's because every argument needs premises or starting points. Some philosophers think something like this is right and speak of some claims as "axiomiatic" or i"ndispensible", but none of them are after certainty or clarity to begin with and Gangadean likes the eschew talk of axioms in this regard. The reason I mention the last bit is because there's something unsatisfying about counting a proposition as true simply because it serves our aims/purposes in theorizing or arguing. The natural question is why the fact that something must be assumed if we are to say present any arguments makes the former true. How would we go about proving a thing like this? And it feels an awful like a pragmatic reason to believe something is true (because it's suits our needs/goals/purposes) as opposed to a truth-relevant reason. Finally, I underlined 'assume' above because we can further fuss about what we mean by the word. Does assuming in the relevant sense amount to believing (and if so, to what degree)? Or does it mean simply holding fixed for the purposes of a particular line of inquiry?
When I've pressed Gangadeanian in the past about how they know when something is self-attesting or self-evident (and thus maximally clear to reason), they've responded that such propositions have a peculiar property--they make questioning possible. And that's similar to what I've just talked about (it's something like "transcendental reasoning"). I pointed out in my last post (point 6) that this seems to merely push the problem back a step because we now need for Gangadean to tell us how we know (with certainty) when a proposition makes questioning possible. After all, it seems logically possible that Gangadean and his clan are merely mistaken about their judgments in this respect so that what they believe makes questioning possible only appears to them to be that way. I think an appeal to intuition or common sense at this point is unavoidable and thus a problem for Gangadean's entire worldview. But there's more. As I hinted at above, we need an argument for why "a proposition makes questioning possible" entails that "it can't be questioned" and "it is true." Here again, I think Gangadean is banking on intuitions or common sense--but we shouldn't let him get away with that given his professed standards for clarity at the basic level.
Returning again to the point that Gangadean and I agree on say the law of identity, but disagree about the reasons for which we accept it and the certainty with which we do: I don't understand why I need to affirm these principles ("the laws of thought") with absolute certainty in the first place. I don't find myself questioning their veracity, but I also wouldn't take the following bet if an evil demon offered it to me: If i'm wrong about their truth, then everyone I know dies a grueling slow death and if I'm right, I get a quarter. So I can't say in sincerity that I'm absolutely certain (nor can I just make myself certain of them as if belief is within our voluntary control). Gangadean on the other hand, would be forced to take such a bet, since by his lights, it's literally impossible for him to be wrong about them (or for him to gain any more evidence of either their truth or falsity).
Do these differences between our positions matter upon final analysis? Depends who you ask. Gangadean and his followers certainly seem to think so although again, it's possible that they don't quite understand my position. Does it matter for whether we can have intelligible conversations? I don't see how---but again, Gangadean seems to think so (though he is without an argument for why that is). Does it matter for unity within the church? Once again, I don't see why or how--this is something in need of an argument and I'm skeptical that one will be forthcoming.
As to the last item on the list of "common ground principles" i.e., the principle of clarity, I wrote quite a bit about problems with the twin principles of clarity and inexcusability in part 1 of this series, so I won't rehearse those considerations here. Instead, we can again ask whether it matters for unity within the church or whether it can be grounds for exclusion either from the church or from intelligible conversation/engagement. Gangadean takes it for granted that the answer to both questions is, yes. But again, I simply don't see why. Notice that what he's resting his claim on is the following. That agreement on the most basic things will yield agreement on the less basic---and he's taking his doctrine of clarity as among the more basic. One thing to note is that even if it's true that by agreeing on the more basic, we will agree on the less basic (which I doubt), that doesn't rule out the possibility of coming to agreement on the less basic, another way. After all, Gangadean isn't claiming "if and only if we agree on the more basic, we will agree on the less basic."
Returning again to our disagreement about how certain we must be about say the laws of thought: I've also noted in the past that Gangadean thinks of this whole idea of clarity in a very special way. He thinks that for some proposition to be clear, is for it to be knowable with absolute certainty. It's a status reserved for those claims, which you couldn't possibly be wrong/mistaken about. But again, why must some things have this status in the first place? What if we can't have that kind of certainty about anything? What is supposed to follow from that? What's the downside? Gangadean usually argues that if we can't be absolutely certain about anything, then we can't know anything (skepticism). And that sounds really bad since knowledge is a desirable thing. Or else he tells you that there's no point in having discussions. But as I've noted before, what he doesn't tell you at this juncture is that he's assuming (without argument) that knowledge requires absolute certainty/clarity and that conversations are intelligible only if we have certainty. Neither of these very substantive claims is obvious. Nor can I see how he would argue that they are "self-attesting" or "self-evident." So it's yet another Gangadeanian article of faith. Once we are careful in drawing out some of Gangadean's presuppositions, we see that there is no necessary obstacle to disunity within the church, from those that fail to agree with the claim that we can be absolutely certain about some claims (principle of clarity).
10. At 53:00, Gangadean starts to talk about various passages in the bible like the first three chapters of Genesis. He'll also talk about the preface to the gospel of John (where the world/logos is said to be God and with God). I want to make a very general point that I've been hinting at throughout this series. Gangadean, like anyone approaching the text, is interpreting it. If you know about the many disputes that exist within the church you'll know that there are many ways to interpret a particular passage--though I'm not at all suggesting that "anything goes." I think there are better and worse interpretations and that we have to consider the reasons for and against interpreting a passage one way over another and make our best judgments. Strangely, Gangadean often presents his interpretations of scripture as ultimately authoritative and if you press him on it, he'll actually tell you that the "correct interpretations" are clear to reason (though I've also heard mixed reports from other Gangadeanians--one in particular, once told me that we can't expect to know what the bible says, with the same clarity as we can of basic things). That is to say, once the more basic stuff from reason alone is in place, you can via "good and necessary consequences" (deductive inference) figure out how to interpret special revelation (the bible). I recall once sitting in on a discussion session that Gangadean held (then called Logos Seminary) where he interpreted a particular passage one way and it wasn't obvious to many of us that that was the only way despite what he insisted--but he refused to move on until certain persons professed full agreement. I say all of this to provide one place to push back in your interactions with Gangadeanians when in the context of theological/hermeneutical discussions. Don't let them simply take liberties to interpret any given passage to fit their philosophical needs---instead ask them for decisive arguments for why the particular interpretation they provide is the only suitable one (also, can they rule out the possibility that there's an interpretation which none of us has yet to consider?). If they concede that we can't know with certainty what the text says, then that opens the door for questioning believers for instance, need certainty about other "more basic" matters.
11. At 54:00, Gangadean starts to talk about the "historic Christian faith" or sometimes what he speaks of as "historic Christianity." If you've encountered Gangadeanians, they are quick to bring up this notion and it does a great deal of work in their defense of their worldview. Gangadean sums up historic Christianity as reflected in the major creeds as many Christians, do. But he also importantly takes the Westminster Confession of faith as the "high water mark" of historic Christianity. Now reformed presbyterians tend to love the Westminster Confession of faith (because it has a strong Calvinist bent), but to say that it best reflects Christianity is a very substantive claim for which we need an argument. So we shouldn't let him or any Gangadeanian get away with merely asserting that this is so--again he needs to prove that this is so which is going to involve proving lots and lots of reformed interpretations of scripture. This last point made me think that during my many years under Gangadean's ministry, I never once learned how to prove these things--and I doubt any other Gangadeanians did, either. Instead, we were taught merely to agree with the claim that the WF confession of faith had got it all right. It would seem that fideism (as Gangadean defines it) is quite rampant in his church.
Q&A
12. At 1:09:00, a member of the audience asks Gangadean to explain "how the [human] soul is not eternal." Here's the basic argument Gangadean gives.
(1) I have one thought after another.
(2) If (1) and my soul were eternal, then I would be eternal in time.
(3) If I were eternal in time, then I would be all knowing.
(4) I am not all knowing.
(5) So, I am not eternal in time.
This is a bad argument. For one thing, Gangadean had better not help himself to the first premise on pain of violating his own principles. To reiterate, he's after clarity/certainty! In which case, he can't appeal to the common sense of the questioner (as he does in giving his answer). So what would a proof of premise (1) look like? I'm not sure it's possible to give a proof of the temporal ordering of thoughts. I know that Gangadeanians are with Kant in thinking that the reality of time is something of a transcendental (it's a precondition for the possibility of experience). But even granting this, it's of no help. Notice--I'm not asking how we know that there's such a thing as time. I'm asking how we can know (with absolute certainty) when particular phenomena (our thoughts) are ordered in time. Again, I think this is something that is ultimately going to have to resolve into an appeal to common sense or intuition which is no good for Gangadean's worldview.
More importantly, premise (3) is false. There's no contradiction in thinking of a being like me who exists eternally within time, but who fails to have all knowledge. As I've pointed out before, it's possible that I'm unmotivated to gain knowledge so that no matter how much time I have, I don't grow in knowledge (let alone the full extent of it)--this is because gaining knowledge takes work--it's a process and not something that merely happens to us! Another possibility is that I lose knowledge even as I gain it. For example, since knowledge entails belief, if I lose a belief that I once had, then I don't have it as a piece of knowledge. And there are lots of ways that a person might lose their beliefs in the pertinent sense. One might simply forget the proposition, for one thing. Or one might encounter misleading evidence which makes one doubt what one previously believed. In either case, one can lose knowledge by losing the relevant belief. As such, eternal existence within time doesn't entail omniscience by any stretch of the imagination.
Finally, if there are an infinite number of propositions, then it seems impossible to know them all regardless of how long you've been around--at least by successive addition. Regardless of how long you've been picking apples, if the set of apples in the universe were infinite, it's literally impossible for you to ever run out of apples to pick which means you won't ever have the set of all the apples. So the mere fact that you don't have all the apples, doesn't entail that you haven't been around eternally within time. It just means you can't get exhaust an infinite set in that way. The same with knowledge of an infinite number of propositions.
The upshot is that at least two of the five premises is questionable in which case the argument is unsound hence, it's not clear to reason that the (human) soul is not eternal.
13. At 1:10:00, an audience member asked Gangadean to clarify his claim that while spiritual death is inherent in sin (not seeking, not knowing what is clear), physical death was imposed later as a call back from sin. As Gangadean notes, the relevant issue here is the problem of natural evil. He first presents what he deems a "general revelation argument that physical death was not original in creation." Basically it's the Humean argument from evil which goes like this.
Humean Argument:
(1) If God is all powerful, then he could prevent natural evil.
(2) If God is all good, then he would prevent natural evil.
(3) If God could and would, then he must have prevented natural evil.
(4) Hence, he did prevent natural evil.
Most theists don't take this argument to be sound (I'll say more about that later). But, strangely, Gangadean, here takes it to be sound--i.e,. he takes it as proof that physical death/natural evil is not inherent in creation (though Hume intended it to be an argument against God's existence because he thought premise (4) to be false). But what he fails to appreciate is that taking that line is bad news for his view in that it proves too much. To see why note how the premises seem no less true if you replace each instance of 'natural evil' with 'moral evil.' This seems then to suggest that Gangadean would have to (on pain of inconsistency) deny that moral evil was inherent in creation. Maybe that's not so bad in itself because Gangadean might say that while natural evil isn't inherent in creation, the potential for it is inherent. But this won't quite work out because he's a soft-determinist meaning he thinks that every event is the necessary result of prior causes and that means the sin committed by Adam and Eve was determined by temporally prior facts about the creation event including how God created Adam and Eve. So, Gangadean cannot (on pain of inconsistency) hide behind the subterfuge of mere "potential to sin"--because it does violence to Gangadean's views about how every event is causally determined by prior causes which ultimately start with the creation event by God. That is, on Gangadean's view it can't be that God created Adam and Eve to have an equal probability of sinning and not sinning. If he did, according to Gangadean, this would undermine the very notion of God as creator and ruler as well as the notion of causality. So what really should stand in for 'natural evil' is not 'the potential for moral evil,' but rather something like 'the conditions sufficient for bringing about moral evil' or 'the conditions that guarantee the existence of moral evil.' Once we replace each occurrence of 'natural evil' with what I have suggested, we get a serious problem for Gangadean's position. This is because these new premises seem no less true than their counterparts in the original argument (so that if one accepts the Humean argument as sound as Gangadean does, then one ought to accept this new argument as sound). Consider:
Argument II:
(1)' If God is all powerful, then he could prevent the initial conditions which guarantee the presence of moral evil from ever obtaining.
(2)' If God is all good, then he would prevent the conditions which guarantee the presence of moral evil from ever obtaining.
(3)' If God could and would, then he must...
(4) Hence, he did prevent the initial conditions which guarantee the presence of moral evil conditions from ever obtaining.
If this argument is sound (as it should be according to Gangadean), then we have a serious problem for his worldview because it would entail that there is actually no moral evil in the world. The conclusion (4)' is in obvious tension with his views about human free will (compatibilism/soft-determinism) and the divine providence of God and so consistency demands that he deny this argument is sound. The rub is that in trying to deny any of the premises, it seems like he'll end up supplying us reasons to deny the analogue premises of the original Hume-inspired argument which he affirms. And that threatens his proof for why physical evil is not original in creation.
Not only that but we can run the very same kind of argument about natural evil. Not only did God, on Gangadean's view create the initial conditions which guaranteed that there would be moral evil, but given what he thinks about the relationship between moral evil and natural evil, he also created the initial conditions which guaranteed the presence of physical/natural evil. So we can create yet another equally problematic argument for Gangadean by replacing each appearance of 'moral evil' with 'natural evil' in argument II.
As I said most theists will deny premise (2) of the Humean argument and thus consistency would have them deny the analogues in the other versions. They have the resources to do so because they think that God might have morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil as well as the initial conditions which bring about evil. Of course, if you're a free will theodicist, then you are likely to assume a libertarian theory of free will, in which case you don't believe that God is ultimately the cause of evil because humans have a special kind of self-sufficiency. But none of these resources are available for Gangadean and so what I'm arguing is that there's a unique problem for his worldview. This is because he takes the Humean argument to be sound and is also committed to a form of determinism (soft) about events.
14. Gangadean then presents his theodicy. And I have a series of posts dedicated to raising problems for his theodicy (I charge that it's really bad and it's even question begging against the atheist).
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