the eleventy-sixth amendment

I've been staying out of the political fray this season, since I'm far too busy with far more pressing things. (Today in Debate: a half-hour skirmish on the meaning of history.) Why am I posting this, then? I don't know. I guess it's because I loathe confident ignorance.

I tried to watch Christine O'Donnell's dust-up with Chris Coons over the interpretation of the First Amendment, and whether it lays the groundwork for the separation of church and state. I was hoping to see if O'Donnell's reported ignorance ("The First Amendment?") was, in fact, an uncharitable fallacy of accent in interpretation. (Point. Counterpoint.)

I couldn't get that far. It took only 1 minute and 8 seconds to determine that O'Donnell's grasp of the Constitution is tenuous, if not fatuous. When Coons argues that schools shouldn't be allowed to teach religious doctrine, O'Donnell fires back,

"Public schools do not have the right to teach what they feel? [Turns to the audience.] Well there you go. Do you want a senator who would impose his beliefs? Talk about imposing your beliefs on the local school!

At this point, O'Donnell is at least courting an actual controversy. Local school boards have long wrestled with the First Amendment, and there are plenty of folks who want to keep the feds out of their schoolhouse. (Ironically, a lot of them are the same folks who voted for the president most responsible for the raging federalization of education, George W. Bush.)

But then, after reiterating her support of teaching Intelligent Design in the classroom, O'Donnell tries to hammer the point home:

You have just stated that you will impose your will on local school boards, and that is a blatant violation of the Constitution."

Which Constitution? The one that hides out in the National Archives makes no mention of education, leaving the matter entirely to the states. Nothing in the Constitution would prohibit the establishment of a national education system, which seems to be the trend these days.

So I never made it to the moments when O'Donnell reportedly was baffled by the placement of the establishment clause in the First Amendment. I was too astonished at her novel interpolation of the Eleventy-Sixth.

the vampire math fallacy in action, again

I don't understand the attraction of "vampire math." It's clearly fallacious, and it leads otherwise reasonable people to make goofy claims. Case in point: Joe Carter.

At first glance this seems so obvious as to be unworthy of notice. Since we humans do, in fact, continue to exist, it shouldn't be surprising that vampires (and other V-class objects) do not exist. But this begs the question of why humans exist and V-class objects do not. Their existence is, after all, as probable (or improbable) as the existence of humans. And the non-existence of any V-class objects is as statistically improbable as the aligning of dozens of independent physical constants that give rise to life.

The anthropic principle could therefore be restated as claiming that the existence of human life requires both (a) the alignment of several cosmological, chemical, and physical constants and (b) the non-existence of all V-class objects. The probability that each of these stochastically independent events could align precisely as they have, without any intervention, is roughly 0 -- in other words, it can't happen. The evidence therefore points to "fine-tuning" of these conditions.

As I point out on Joe's site, the range of conceivable V-class objects is infinite; thus, it's impossible to calculate their probability, or improbability.

Whenever you have the urge to invoke vampire math, resist it. Please.

leading exporters of first-rate comedy

Leave it to an Onion commentator to provide a perfect example of cherry-picking, a common intellectual sin.

AND THE WINNER IS...
by grapplepie

America: Dane Cook, Ben Stiller, "Brat Pack", Bill Cosby

Canada: Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Kids in the Hall

United Kingdom: Eddie Izzard, Monty Python crew, Ricky Gervais, Peter Kay, Edgar Wright & Simon Pegg

UK wins even if it does lose points for Rowan Atkinson

That's it, I'm moving

And leave it to another commentator to deliver the appropriate logical smackdown:

GRAPPLEPIE
by Hunsweasel

Sure, we can all play that game:

America: Richard Pryor, The Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce
Canada: Red Green, Royal Canadian Air Farce
UK: Benny Hill, Bernard Manning, Ken Dodd

Looks like the U.S. takes it! Alternate version:

America: Wayne Flowers and Madame, Larry the Cable Guy
Canada: John Candy, Phil Hartman, Martin Short
U.K.: Bob Monkhouse, Jimmy Tarbuck

Oh Canada!

And thank you, Onion commentators.

defining down the divine

Joe Carter, after Roy Clouser, makes an assertion that not only falls flat, but in doing so, makes a pedestal for a lovely pun. Just wait.

Carter, probably responding to the blogosphere buzz over John Allen Paulos' article on religiously-informed mathematics, writes,

A belief is a religious belief, says Clouser, provided that (1) It is a belief in something(s) or other as divine, or (2) It is a belief concerning how humans come to stand in relation to the divine. The divine, according to Clouser, is whatever is "just there." He contends that self-existence is the defining characteristic of divinity, so that the control of theories by a belief about what is self-existent is the same as control by a divinity belief and thus amounts to religious control of all theories.

Whether we refer to it as being self-existent, uncaused, radically independent, etc., it is the point beyond which nothing else can be reduced. Unless we posit an infinite regress of dependent existences, we must ultimately arrive at an entity that fits the criteria for the divine.

Different traditions, religions, and belief systems may disagree about what or who has divine status, or whether such an ontological concept should be considered a "religious belief." But what they all agree upon is that something has such a status. A theist, for instance, will say that the divine is God while a materialist will claim that matter is what fills the category of divine. Therefore, if we examine our concepts in enough detail, we discover that at a deeper level we're not agreeing on what the object is that we're talking about. Our explanations and theories about things will vary depending on what is presupposed as the ultimate explainer. And the ultimate explainer can only be the reality that has divine status.

I find it fascinating that Clouser and Carter don't see the slick rhetorical move in the definition. If the "divine" is defined into "what is 'just there,'" why use such a loaded word? The answer: it's just a more sophisticated way to say, "Atheism (or naturalism) is a religion." And, as others have famously pointed out, not-stamp-collecting is a hobby.

If Clouser were intellectually honest* I wish he'd use a more neutral term: Being, perhaps, or The Ground. I'd prefer the latter. Naturalists may love the universe, but they don't worship The Ground she walks on.

Don't say you weren't warned.



*See comments below.

LaFollette on Plantinga on free will and evil

I always graze through the offerings at Online Papers in Philosophy, which links to some wonderfully obscure work that professional philosophers post on their personal websites. It surprised and delighted me, then, to see that back in 1980, philosopher Hugh LaFollette subjected Alvin Plantinga's God, Freedom and Evil to the same scrutiny [pdf] I would give it a mere 14 years later--only in a less rigorous, less philosopherish way.

In fact, I'll show where LaFollette's thinking parallels mine, despite our utter intellectual independence.

LaFollette:

Thus, it would appear that Plantinga is guilty of an inconsistency here unless he can produce some general and relevant reason why God would have the ability to act morally without ever acting immorally, while humans can only produce moral good if they also produce moral evil. Now Plantinga might want to try to identify such a difference by appealing to the human 'essence'. But even if that response would allay this criticism, it would produce additional questions, namely, Plantinga would need to explain why it isn't possible that there are other, non-human possible creatures who are both rational and significantly free and always choose to do what is morally right. To avoid this criticism he would, it seems, be committed to arguing that:

16) It is necessarily true that: no significantly free possible creatures except God can produce moral good without also producing moral evil.

And such a claim seems clearly undemonstrable (if not preposterous).

Yours truly:

Even if we grant that truly free will exists, though, we must ask: if free will is inviolable, yet humans, thanks to transworld depravity, are continually prone to abuse it, how is heaven, a place free of pain, suffering and sin, logically possible?

Furthermore, if God is both morally good and sinless, and (presumably) the most "valuable" being in all possible worlds (since He is the object of reverence and worship), did He create beings greater than himself with respect to moral freedom? Remember, Plantinga claims that transworld depravity precludes an actual world where free beings always choose the good. There is but one way to exclude God from this without declaring His nonexistence: by removing God's moral freedom. To recap: if God freely always does the right thing, Plantinga's argument implodes. If God has freely chosen the wrong thing, He is not wholly good. If God cannot help but always do the right thing, then humans are more "valuable" than God.

reality will make sense if you just find the right topos

Goodbye, logic and all that. Hello, topoi. [sub. req.]

But there is a price to pay, and it is precisely what the Kochen-Specker theorem warned of: the demise of simple truth and falsity. For all its drawbacks, Boolean algebra does at least allow every statement about our universe to be either true or false. Yet this turns out to be the exception among all the different types of algebras - including the one underpinning quantum theory. The logic associated with quantum topoi encompasses true, false and many shades of grey in between.

Does that mean we must accept a universe that is real, but about which any question will receive myriad answers, all of them true? According to Isham and his colleagues, the answer - appropriately enough - is both yes and no. If we are content to view reality through the window of classical physics, then we can enjoy straightforward true/false answers to our questions - as long as we avoid the realm of atoms. But if we insist on making statements about atoms, we must use the logic of quantum topoi and accept the existence of a whole host of realities, all as valid as each other.

And that might just be the start; after all, there are more topoi than just the standard and quantum ones. In a series of papers unveiled last month, Isham proposes an even more mind-bending idea: there may be myriad ways of viewing reality, each based on its own topos. Together with Andreas Doering of Imperial, he has shown that every physical system - from an electron to the whole universe - has a unique mathematical identity that dictates how it will appear when viewed through the prism of a particular topos.

Seen via the topos of set theory, an atom takes on its classical appearance with nice, well-defined properties. Viewed through the topos associated with quantum theory, it becomes altogether fuzzier and strange.

We needn't stop there. Why not opt for another topos? It could lead to a view of reality even more astonishing and successful than quantum theory. "What we're hoping is that topos theory becomes the basis for a whole new way of constructing theories", says Isham.

Postmodern sciency mumbo-jumbo, or a radical revision of the way we understand--or is it construct--reality?

Yes‽

(Yes, that's an interrobang.)

taking rational basis to its rational conclusion

A while back I mentioned how the Washington State Supreme Court used "rational basis review" to uphold Washington's law limiting marriage to one man and one woman. Their reasoning: the state has a fundamental interest in procreation. After all, how else is it going to sustain its tax structure? Though I thought the Court's ruling was a bunch of bunk, I was roundly smacked down in the comments by a later anonymous interloper, who wrote,

Well, obviously you and Ms. Fairhurst are feeling rather smug about your superior talents in logic. Can you imagine? That entire legislature, along with five WSSC Justices, are nothing but morons! Irrational. In the words of Samuel Alito, in his criterion for the rational basis test, “stark raving mad.”

Oops… you should know better! “…there is no logical way…?” Big red flag there! Haven’t you ever worked a book of logic puzzles? A sucker bet to be sure.

A bisexual man is in love with another man. They want to settle down, get married. But they can’t get legal recognition for their marriage! Dreams smashed, they drift apart. Before long, the strapping young man meets a woman… love, marriage, sex, baby. The established definition of marriage has created a baby that otherwise wouldn’t have been.

A bittersweet outcome to be sure, but I think it is a decent logical refutation. Remember that the rational basis test does not require the legislators to be smart, it only requires them to have SOME RATIONAL BASIS for their belief that the legislation will advance a [state interest].

So maybe you aren’t such an exceptional logician? Maybe, just possibly, some of the legislators thought of other scenarios? That is why the rational basis claim is very, very rarely successful in overturning legislation. The legislature doesn’t need to have a GOOD plan, or a smart plan, they simply need a plan that is not 100% refutable by pure logic. Once you get past that, it is all a matter of opinion, and justices are forbidden from holding their opinions above those of the legislature.

Can't fight "pure logic." All would appear lost for the opponents of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Enter Gregory Gladow.

Proponents of same-sex marriage have introduced an initiative that would put a whole new twist on traditional unions between men and women: It would require heterosexual couples to have kids within three years or else have their marriages annulled.

Initiative 957 was filed by the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance, which was formed last summer after the state Supreme Court upheld Washington's ban on same-sex marriage. In that 5-4 ruling, the court found that state lawmakers were justified in passing the 1998 Defense of Marriage Act, which restricts marriage to unions between a man and woman.

Under I-957, marriage would be limited to men and women who are able to have children. Couples would be required to prove they can have children to get a marriage license, and if they did not have children within three years, their marriages would be subject to annulment.

All other marriages would be defined as "unrecognized" and people in them would be ineligible to receive any marriage benefits.

"Absurd? Very," the group says on its Web site, which adds it is planning two more initiatives involving marriage and procreation. "But there is a rational basis for this absurdity. By floating the initiatives, we hope to prompt discussion about the many misguided assumptions" underlying the Supreme Court's ruling....

Cheryl Haskins, executive director of Allies for Marriage & Children, agreed with Gadow's group on at least one point about the initiative: "It's absurd," she said.

Haskins said opponents of same-sex marriage "have never said that the sole purpose of marriage is procreation."

"When we talk about defending the institution of marriage, we're talking about the union of a man and a woman," she said. "Some of those unions produce children and some of them don't."

With I-957, "you're dictating people's choices in a way that is utterly ridiculous," she said.

However, Gadow noted that the Supreme Court's majority decision specifically mentioned procreation throughout.

The opinion written by Justice Barbara Madsen concluded that "limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers the state's interests in procreation and encouraging families with a mother and father and children biologically related to both."

To their credit, two of the staunchest supporters of gay rights in the Washington state legislature aren't backing the initiative, taking the polite and political way out and deferring to the rule of the legislature. But you've got to hand it to Gadow and crew for their Swiftian deconstruction of rational basis review.

All right, straight folks. Get procreatin'.


Update: As Ed finds, some people just don't appreciate irony.

you never know what that boulder might be thinking

Joe Carter thinks he's found the core bizarritude at the heart of materialism:

...we are unable to clearly determine whether our thoughts are being produced by our desk, our chair, our TV, or our brain. After all, they are all composed of matter and matter is one. It's weird but is it wrong?

This is a problem for materialism? Spiritual dualism posits the existence of disembodied psyches that can exist even after brain death. If the brain isn't a necessary component of the mind, then what's to stop a boulder from having memories, wishes, or desires? How does dualism exclude animists from the table, except by special pleading? Or, if dualists are able to refute animism, by what non-arbitrary standards?

in apprehension, how like a god!

David J. Chalmers and Alan Hájek prove that Shakespeare was right in a tidy little syllogism [pdf].

According to the Ramsey test, it follows that all instances of (1) and (2) are acceptable to a rational subject. But if one accepts all instances of (1), one should accept that one is omniscient. And if one accepts all instances of (2), one should accept that one is infallible. So the Ramsey test and Moorean reasoning entail that rational subjects should accept that they have the epistemic powers of a god.

Go ahead. Read it. Then try to prove them wrong.


[Link via Jonathan Ichikawa's great site, Online Papers in Philosophy.]

that's Dr. T: the appeal to authority

I have a perfect example now, thanks to that fool pitier, Mr. T.

“My show ain’t no Dr. Phil, where people sit around crying, ‘What’s wrong with me, Dr. Phil? What’s wrong with me, Dr. Phil?’ ” Mr. T said.

“You are a fool! That’s what’s wrong with you. ... My show is the Dr. Phil on wheels.”

“I ain’t no shrink,” Mr. T said, “but I don’t shrink from no challenge, neither.”

When I'm teaching my debaters about the Appeal to Authority and its abuses, I set it up like this:

Claim: I need to get real.
Evidence: Dr. Phil told me to.
Warrant: Dr. Phil knows what's best for me.
(Backing: After all, he has his own TV show.)

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. T, for the chance to make my example even more memorable.

argumentum ad consequentiam and the circumstantial ad hominem

School starts in a few weeks, and I'm revving up my intellectual engines, preparing material for the resurrected debate class. A necessary component: studying logical fallacies.

Joe Carter recently pointed out a fallacy called the Argumentum ad consequentiam, explaining,

The author points to the disagreeable consequences of holding a particular belief in order to show that this belief is false. (Ex. You can't agree that evolution is true, because if it were, then we would be no better than monkeys and apes.)

In the comments, Jon Rowe wonders what separates this from a reductio ad absurdum. The difference is whether the consequences are logical, and thus create an inconsistency (as in a reductio) or a red herring unrelated to the proposition's truth value.

For instance, a child's belief in Santa Claus may have good consequences in making the child happy and well-behaved, but these facts have nothing to do with whether there really is a Santa Claus.

Kissing cousin to the appeal to consequences is the argument to false motives: "You believe x only because it benefits you or permits you to do something objectionable." This is also known as a circumstantial ad hominem.

Both fallacies crop up inordinately in debates about evolution, personhood, or atheism (or, often, all three at once). The latter is especially pernicious. Consider Carter against a functionalist view of personhood:

The blatant attempts at rationalizing clearly immoral behavior is why Frank Beckwith and other scholars have been able to demolish the “functionalism” argument, that defends the killing of "non-person" humans.... If you want to kill certain groups of human beings, you can find a sufficient rationalization.

Or, as he's echoed elsewhere, "Also, isn't it odd that the only times people make distinctions about 'human being' and 'human person' is when they want to treat members of the human species as sub-human?" Strangely, this comes from the same writer who immediately before that (in the same comment thread!) made the same distinction, and previously was open to reconsidering whether life begins at conception, or, alternately, at implantation--presumably without wicked motives.

Watch out for the argumentum ad consequentiam and the circumstantial ad hominem. Their lure is powerful, even to those who are wise to their ways.

ontologically impossible

Right now there's an interesting discussion over on EvolutionBlog concerning Dembski's recent attempt at theodicy [pdf] Two posts--check 'em out.

My own thoughts on the subject:

evil and free will: an exploration

To recap: if God freely always does the right thing, Plantinga's argument implodes. If God has freely chosen the wrong thing, He is not wholly good. If God cannot help but always do the right thing, then humans are more "valuable" than God....

transcending infinite loops: theodical musings

Dembski is fond of (mis)using the "NFL theorems" to whack at evolution. But "transcendence," like "emergence," is its own form of ontological free lunch, raising far more questions than answers....

of mice and design

Why can fish and amphibians regrow organs and limbs, while mammals--never mind humans--can't? Is it an inscrutable whim, a design constraint, a purposeful omission?...

rainbow on your parade

Listen to your gut. No, you're not hungry--beauty implies design....

[ninety-eighth in a series]

logic question to ask random people

Question: Does a factive conception of knowability figure in ordinary use?

Ask it to everyone you meet. (Don't be alarmed if they're unsure of the answer.)

Oh, you want the answer, too?

Answer: There is some reason to think so.




[eighty-second in a series]

transcending infinite loops: theodical musings

William Dembski, in the latest of a long line of theodicies, appeals to Newcomb's Paradox [pdf] to "justify the ways of God to men."

For beings like us embedded in the causal nexus of nature, the logic of cause and effect is inviolable. In contrast, God, as an omnipotent and omniscient being, transcends the physical world and therefore is not bound by this causal-temporal logic. This is not to say that in acting in the world God violates this logic. To violate it, he would need to be under its jurisdiction. But as the creator of nature’s causal nexus and therefore as the originator of its causal-temporal logic, God perforce acts in ways that this logic cannot circumscribe. Indeed, if this logic did circumscribe divine action, then God would be part of nature and creation would be other than ex nihilo.

Dembski is fond of (mis)using the "NFL theorems" to whack at evolution. But "transcendence," like "emergence," is its own form of ontological free lunch, raising far more questions than answers. How does a being "transcend?" If God so neatly avoids the pitfalls of causal-temporal logic by transcending the physical world, how can we refer to this sort of God as "good?" Why limit God's transcendence to only one domain--the causal? Why does not God "transcend" morality as well, eradicating the need for theodicy?

Dembski's explanation of the "infinite dialectic" (BS-ometer spiking) doesn't fare much better.

Think of the infinite dialectic in this way: Suppose God acts to anticipate certain events. So long as divine action is not a hollow concept, God’s actions make a difference in the world and therefore must induce novel events (all change in the physical world being mediated through events). But this requires that God act preemptively to anticipate the novel events induced by God’s prior actions (priority here being conceived not temporally or causally [chronos] but in terms of the teleological-semantic logic [kairos] by which God orders the creation). And yet, such actions by God now induce still further novel events. And so on. This up and back between divine action and creaturely causation proceeds indefinitely. It constitutes an infinite dialectic. Because of the fragility of the world’s causal nexus, the infinite dialectic is ever in danger of spinning out of control, degenerating into a positive feedback loop in which divine preemption needs to rectify difficulties raised by prior acts of divine preemption.

And the way out of the infinite loop?

Consequently, only an infinitely powerful and infinitely wise God can pull off the infinite dialectic. The infinite dialectic renders divine action at once real-time and eternal. It bridges the immanent with the transcendent. In the infinite dialectic, God acts on the whole of creation at all times and in all places, acting not as a cause among other causes (God does not moonlight as a physical cause) but as a cause of causes (God causes physical causes to fulfill his purposes). As a cause of causes, God’s action in the infinite dialectic is not merely ontological, in the sense of giving being to the world (cf. Paul Tillich’s “ground of being”). Nor is it merely providential in some general sense, as might be subsumed under the regularities of nature (cf. God maintaining seasonal weather patterns).

Again, more questions: how is a cause of a cause efficacious? Can causes cross ontological "levels?" Can a non-physical entity cause physical actions? Is Dembski backing away from his "expanded ontology," and subscribing to a more standard form of dualism?

Dembski closes with two poor analogies.

In the infinite dialectic, God acts providentially to guide the world in its particulars, taking an active interest in the details of this world and making a difference at all levels of the created order. This is not to say that God is a micromanager. Good managers know the precise details of the system they are managing but intervene sparingly, giving the system as much autonomy as it needs to flourish. God is a good manager. In particular, he has not created a world that is his prosthesis or puppet.

Ah, but the very question is a matter of degree: just how much "micromanagement" is enough? Let's analogize right back at Dembski. The floor is littered with wrappers and french fries. The toilet is backed up and the toilet paper nowhere to be found. A fire rages in the kitchen. Meanwhile, the staff are too busy fighting with ketchup packets to notice. The manager hasn't been seen or heard from in hours. Now what?

At the same time, even though God has granted the world a measure of autonomy, the world’s autonomy is not absolute. Just as an orchestra cannot make do without the conductor’s continual guidance, so too does the world require God’s continual guidance. That guidance is neither oppressive nor coercive. It is real and powerful, and it takes the form of an infinite dialectic. Because of the infinite dialectic, Jesus can say that God knows our name, numbers the hairs on our head, and monitors the sparrow that falls to the ground.

Minor quibble: perhaps Dembski has never heard of the "conductorless orchestra," the kind that used to dazzle Soviet audiences back in the heyday of early Communism. But the weakness of argument from analogy becomes apparent here. If the universe isn't an orchestra, but is more like a machine... or an organism... then all the talk of continuous guidance is rigmarole.

Any potential problem can be solved by omnipotence when omnipotence is defined as infinite power. Yet other Christian thinkers are a little uncomfortable purporting the existence of "actual infinities."

But then, they're not mathematicians.

po-mo Lewis

An earlier post by my brother got me thinking about the postmodern crack in C.S. Lewis's modern edifice.

Look at Lewis's famous formulation that a Tash-worshipper's love for Aslan is authentic despite lacking the proper referent.

"Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me... Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him, for I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him..."

But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. "Beloved," said the Glorious One, "unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek."

Similarly, consider Lewis's response to a mother who was concerned her son loved Aslan "too much," perhaps even more than he loved Jesus. Lewis consoled:

"Laurence can’t really love Aslan more than Jesus, even if he feels that’s what he is doing.... For the things he loves Aslan for doing or saying are simply things that Jesus really did and said. So that when Laurence thinks he is loving Aslan, he is really loving Jesus; and perhaps loving him more than he ever did before."

Lewis does a po-mo jig with the word really. Love for Aslan is really love for Jesus, for Aslan literarily did all the things Jesus really did.

To see the silliness of Lewis's position, imagine a reply to a spouse stricken by the revelation of her husband's infidelity:

"Your hubby can't really love his new flame more than you.... For the things he loves his mistress for doing or saying are simply things that you did and said. So that when your hubby thinks he is loving his girlfriend, he is really loving you; and perhaps loving you more than he ever did before."

more on materialism, knowledge and question-begging

Joe Carter, attempting to declare materialism null and void, indulges in a little petitio principii. My responses are in the comments. (Maybe I'll post more here, when I have time.)

Read my previous thoughts on materialist aesthetics here.

I get the last word...

...here and here, sadly. I wish the conversation would continue.

Update: Here, too. And here.

Update II: No longer, here or here. And there'll be much more forthcoming here.

Jesus the logician? (redux)

[Joe Carter recycled his, so I've recycled mine.]

Joe Carter has put together an interesting project. In his words:

Earlier this year I encouraged my fellow godbloggers to analyze the Gospels and post examples of the way that Christ used various logical and rhetorical forms in his ministry. Listed below are links to the invaluable posts that I received on this project....

In his original post, Carter quotes extensively from Dallas Willard, who has a high view of Jesus's use of logical discourse and argumentation. Why shouldn't he? As Douglas Groothuis writes,

For all their honesty in recording the foibles of the disciples, the Gospel writers never narrated a situation in which Jesus was intellectually stymied or bettered in an argument; neither did Jesus ever encourage an irrational or ill-informed faith on the part of his disciples.

But wait. Let's parse the first claim: generally speaking, why would the Gospel writers want to show Jesus's foibles? (His disciples, foolish as they sometimes seem, are perfect foils for Jesus, literarily speaking.) There may have been situations where Jesus was in fact stymied, or took a long time thinking up an answer, that just aren't included. (If we think the Gospels are a "fair and balanced" presentation of Jesus's career and teachings, we assume too much.)

Jesus, no doubt, is a master of rhetoric. But rhetoric sometimes comes at the expense of logic. Even within the Gospels one can find examples of sloppy reasoning and obfuscation, many (if not most) in John, chief among the Gospels for its oracular density and maddening repetitiveness. I'll point out just a few examples.

First, look at Jesus's defense of his authority in the book of John, specifically chapters 5 and 8.
Jesus examines what constitutes valid evidence for a claim. First, he states,

"If I testify about myself, my testimony is not valid. There is another who testifies in my favor, and I know that his testimony about me is valid."

Seems fair enough; trumpeting one's own accomplishments is a pretty poor way to gain credibility. But three chapters later,

The Pharisees challenged him, "Here you are, appearing as your own witness; your testimony is not valid."

Jesus answered, "Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid, for I know where I came from and where I am going. But you have no idea where I come from or where I am going. You judge by human standards; I pass judgment on no one. But if I do judge, my decisions are right, because I am not alone. I stand with the Father, who sent me. In your own Law it is written that the testimony of two men is valid. I am one who testifies for myself; my other witness is the Father, who sent me."

In John, Jesus sounds very much like Walt Whitman. "Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

In Matthew 15 (paralleled in Mark 7 ), contra Groothuis, Jesus actually is bested in an argument.

Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is suffering terribly from demon possession.”

Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”

He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.

He replied, “It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs.”

“Yes, Lord,” she said, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table.”

Then Jesus answered, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.

(We may speculate as to why Mark's rendering doesn't include the line "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel," and makes no mention of "faith," and why Luke's Gospel entirely omits the story.)

Other logical fallacies are there for the finding. There's petitio principii, John 8:43:

Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say.

Denying the Antecedent, John 8:47:

He who belongs to God hears what God says. The reason that you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.

To sum up: there is no need to deny Jesus his greatness as an orator and profound thinker. But his logic is not perfect. In that respect, he's just like the rest of us.

de dominium tilde

[Cross-posted over at the evangelical outpost]

I'm reminded of a silly, sarcastic post over at IDtheFuture where Paul Nelson tried to ironically show that simply negating a statement shouldn't change its epistemological status. I always had a nagging suspicion he was wrong, and now I see why.

Contrast these statements:

(1) A designer intentionally designed creatures. (Scientific, according to Nelson, Dembski, Behe, et. al.)

~ (1), or, It is not the case that a designer intentionally designed creatures.
(Outside the bounds of science, according to Plantinga)

Hey, presto! Magic is indeed possible, thanks to the tilde.

Church-detested, Jesus-approved

I thought I'd pitch into the ongoing discussion--prompted by Ed Feser joined by Jon Rowe and Ed Brayton--about natural law, especially in its application to sexual activity.

I won't echo what's been said already, but I will point out that Biblical morality doesn't seem to square with natural law as Feser describes it. Feser writes,

For the same reason, not every human intervention in the natural order counts as "unnatural." Putting eyeglasses on doesn’t "interfere with nature" in a sense that traditional natural law theory would take exception to, because what glasses do is remedy a defect that keeps eyes from performing their natural function. The point of glasses is not to interfere with an organ’s performance of its natural function, but rather to aid it in performing that function. By contrast, the point of birth control devices is to stop an organ from performing its natural function. So such devices do "interfere with nature" in a sense that is illicit from the traditional natural law point of view.

I propose one example to disrupt the harmony between this and Biblical morality: the eunuch.

Jesus's words in Matthew 19:11-12 (KJV):

Jesus replied, "For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it."

If anything would be unnatural and contradictory to the function of sex, it would be castration, the severest form of male birth control. Yet it is approved by Jesus, perhaps echoing the text of Isaiah 56:4-5, which affirms that eunuchs have a special place in God's heart.

For this is what the LORD says:
"To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant-

to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will not be cut off.

Eunuchs, who cannot further their "name"--their progeny--are promised a name that will not be "cut off." Rather scintillating word play.

But compare the contradictory passage at Deuteronomy 23, wherein eunuchs--along with illegitimate children, Ammonites, and Moabites, sorry--are forbidden from entering "the assembly of the LORD."

The Catholic prohibition of self-sterilization, begun at the first Council of Nicaea and defended in Paul VI's Humanae Vitae, obviously takes the Deuteronomist position against Jesus's own words and Isaiah's promise.

"[W]e must once again declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun, and, above all, directly willed and procured abortion, even if for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as licit means of regulating birth. Equally to be excluded, as the teaching authority of the Church has frequently declared, is direct sterilization, whether perpetual or temporary, whether of the man or of the woman."

Anyone care to reconcile the contradiction?