Me want

The Otis frame is absolutely beautiful. Smack a rear rack and basket on it, and it's my suburban travel machine. Me want. Must save money...

Things unsaid, now written

From Josh Claybourn, the following question:

What is something you feel you can't say in church, or around other Christians?

My answers:

1. Youth ministries that: (1) effectively separate the youth off from the congregation as a whole, thus encouraging a "hive" mentality; (2) spend most of their energy trying to program "fun" events to bring in the masses; (3) spend little energy trying to disciple the kids already there; (4) don't speak honestly about sex; (5) teach the faith without any regard for the 2000 years behind it; (6) reduce the faith to a bunch of nice sounding moral platitudes; (7) fail to be a safe place to ask tough questions; (8) are run by some young guy with a cool goatee but no brain—suck. Really suck. Not only that, but they wreck the kids their supposed to help.
2. Where are all the attractive and intelligent Christian single girls?
3. Please don't ply me with your bullshit pop psychology in your sermons. If I want Oprah, I'll watch daytime TV. But I don't want Oprah.
4. Most hymns written in the 20th century absolutely blow, both musically and lyrically. The tunes are hard to sing and the lyrics are namby-pamby.
5. How come God feels so distant all the time?
6. Please, if you're gonna do anything contemporary-sounding in church, get people who know how to play their instruments.
7. We should celebrate the Eucharist every freakin' week, and we should invite the kiddos to the table to partake too.
8. Why does the church's coffee and lemonade have to taste so bad?
9. And (for the CRC people I worship with) there are colleges other than Calvin and Hope. I know it's hard to believe, but there are. Get your kids out of the weird Dutch bubble/Grand Rapids enclave.

Quickie show review: Thrice et alia

The bands, in order of appearance, that I saw at the Metro Smart Bar off N. Clark in Chicago:

1. Pelican—Like Explosions in the Sky, but metal. Very cool music, although the songs started to sound all the same towards the end of the set.
2. Circa Survive—I would like this band more if their singer didn't have such a nasally voice. That said, Circa Survive is still a bit generic-sounding: you get your pretty guitar effects mixed in with some breakdowns. The girls in the crowd loved the band's singer. I don't understand why. He is quite unremarkable-looking. Perhaps it is for his sensitive lyrics.
3. Thrice—Awesome. Everything was awesome. The whole experience was ineffable.

Theological skepticism

I've been reading some Pierre Bayle lately (in case you didn't gather that from my last post). I feel a kinship with the guy: he was a Calvinist who despaired at the ability of reason to do anything high-powered, including speculative theology; I'm a (quasi? ex? sort-of?) Calvinist who despairs at the ability of reason to do anything high-powered, including speculative theology. It's sorta nice to know that there are other theological skeptics out there.

Allow me to clarify my theological skepticism. First, it's source: my reasons for being a somewhat skeptical about theology arise from a general conviction I have to the effect that when it comes to matters having to do with the deep structure of reality (e.g., cosmology, human origins, metaphysics properly-speaking, most of systematic theology, etc.), our cognitive abilities are working at the very edge of (if not beyond) their capacities. As a result, any warrant we have for beliefs in these matters of inquiry is tenuous at best; it certainly doesn't reach the level necessary for knowledge. Now, I certainly have beliefs about the various topics listed above (I believe that the Big Bang happened, that evolutionary theory (partially?) explains human origins, that there aren't any composite objects, that Hell is probably more like separation from God rather than eternal conscious torment), but I am very hesitant to say that these beliefs constitute knowledge for me. And I'm inclined that if others believe these things, their believings don't constitute knowledge either. (This generalization step may be problematic, but forget about it for now.)

Second, one must be careful to distinguish the sort of skepticism I am advocating from a sort that I utterly reject, that which goes by the labels "Cartesian skepticism" or "external-world skepticism." (This was the sort of skepticism Moore undertook to refute by noting that he had hands.) I think that the usual arguments for Cartesian skepticism fail (hence, the moniker for this blog), and that I have a ton of knowledge about the external world.

Perhaps it may help to get at the distinction between Cartesian skepticism and what I have called "higher-level" skepticism by appealing to a distinction made implicitly by Descartes himself. We should distinguish between cognitio and scientia; we may translate these roughly as "animal knowledge" and "scientific knowledge," respectively. Now, do not confuse this distinction with Ernest Sosa's distinction between animal knowledge and reflective knowledge. I suspect that the sides of our distinctions perhaps overlap (in the case of animal knowledge perhaps exactly), but reflective knowledge in Sosa's epistemology has a much narrower scope: with reflective knowledge, Sosa intends to show that our animal knowledge is reflectively defensible. Scientific knowledge, as I mean it, is not intended as a kind of defensible animal knowledge; it is instead knowledge that goes beyond animal knowledge. For what animal could have knowledge of such marvelous things as quarks and leptons, or the causes of the Industrial Revolution, or the Immaculate Conception? (Perhaps possession of animal knowledge is a necessary condition on the possession of scientific knowledge. Ipse fiat.) So, my Christian skepticism derives from a more general skepticism about scientific knowledge in general.

Third, I should probably say something about the scope of my theological skepticism. As I mean it, theological skepticism is not meant to encompass the things expressed by the Nicene Creed, those things which characterize "mere" Christianity. I'd contend that those things may very well constitute animal knowledge for most (if not all) Christians. (Thank you Alvin Plantinga and William Alston for this handy li'l move.) But other things: the doctrine of condign merit, the doctrine of justification by faith (alone?), transubstantiation, double asymmetric predestination, the government theory of atonement, the inerrancy of Scripture, papal infallibility, speaking in tongues, dispensational premillenialism—I could go on forever here—are theories. Mere theories. Like String Theory is a mere theory. Things like I have just listed are things accessible only at the edge of our cognitive abilities (and perhaps accessible only beyond them).

There are a few problems with the view. I will mention them only to shrug my shoulders at them (for the time being).

First problem: it seems like you, O Silly Skeptic, have no principled distinction between Christian animal knowledge and Christian scientific (not to be confused with Christian Scientific, of course) knowledge.

Response: if what you mean by "principled distinction" is "no set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a claim to be a candidate for animal or scientific knowledge," then you're probably right. But maybe this is okay. Maybe Quine was right when he said that science and common sense are located along a continuum, with no clear division between the two. I'd say something similar: animal and scientific knowledge (including that of the Christian type) lie along a continuum, no clear break obtaining between the two. I would also say, however, that I know a bit of Christian scientific knowledge when I see one (hence, my examples above).

A more serious problem is this: you might think that the Holy Spirit guides our theologizing. But if this is the case, if He will lead us into all Truth, then your Christian skepticism fizzles. (No thank you to Alvin Plantinga and William Alston for this handy li'l move.)

Maybe you're right. I'd like to see a more explicit formulation of the argument. But here's a response to the one sketched. At best, what this objection gets to is this: if the Holy Spirit wants to teach us that p, where p expresses some heavyweight theological doctrine (say, the doctrine of transubstantiation), then He will work His influence on our cognitive abilities so that we acquire warrant for our belief in the doctrine of transubstantiation. Now, I'm willing to grant the conditional. I'm unwilling to grant the antecedent. And that's what you need to run a successful objection; unfortunately, you're modus ponens has nothing to ponens.

Whew. I've been wanting to get that off my chest for a while.

Anyway, tomorrow I'm in Chicago for THRICE. I'm gonna get my post-hardcore on.

Pierre Bayle on reason

"...our reason is only suitable for making everything perplexing and raising doubts about everything. No sooner has it built something than it provides the means for destroying it. Reason is a veritable Penelope, unraveling during the night what she had been weaving during the day." — "Bunel, Pierre"

The unfit for college

The Atlantic Monthly is featuring a poignant, anonymous article, "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower," noting that some people are just not fit for a university education. The author seems to attribute this fact to a matter of constitution: as it stands, a person's unfittingness for college is matter of that person's innate capacity (or lack thereof). This may be right; but my suspicion (having taught fresh-faced freshpeople how to write and think "philosophically") is that many people are unfit for college because the American system of secondary education has failed them. Some of my students—accepted into a top university no less!—can barely write a coherent paragraph, let alone a coherent philosophy paper. And I don't blame them. I blame their wacky high school English curriculum.

Pentecost

There is a manner of speaking common to many evangelicals. When recounting decisions made in the past (especially ones they regard as significant), evangelicals will say things like "I felt God leading to me to decide to do x", or "The Holy Spirit told me to do x" and so on. For the longest time, I've hated this manner of speaking. I have epistemic reasons for hating it: I've always wondered how in God's name someone could know that God wants her to go to the College of Musical Knowledge, or that the Holy Spirit is leading her to date so-and-so. I, for one, have never felt the requisite certainty to attribute any of my decisions to some direct communication from the Lord. So call me skeptical.

Today, the sermon was on this very subject, and it was the occasion for me to acquire some theological reasons to hate this manner of speaking. Today, I realized that this manner of speaking is born of twin motives: (1) on the one hand, people speak this way (and think this way) out of a sincere desire to honor God's will; and yet (2) people speak this way (and think this way) in order to rationalize certain decisions (past or present) to themselves or others. They look for a rubber stamp, so to speak, and what better rubber stamp than that of Almighty God?

The first reason, God-honoring as it seeks to be, is born of a certain neurosis that evangelicals have inherited from the Puritans. This neurosis derives from the view of God's sovereignty that makes Him out to be a kind of micro-manager. According to this view, God has a definitive desire about every single piddling thing, from what clothes I should wear today, to where I should go to school. Supposing that this is correct (and I doubt that), the neurosis arises when people begin to think that if they screw up one little thing, then the whole machine will collapse, that they will somehow find themselves outside of "God's will." Funny enough, this neurosis doesn't take into account the other half of the sovereignty equation that Calvinists love to trumpet: that God's will cannot be resisted. But neuroses rarely respond to reason anyway.

I needn't say much about the second reason. People who use God's name to validate their own peculiar agendas are violating the 3rd Commandment; they employ God's name for empty endeavors. Without repentance, they are vessels of wrath.

Today in the sermon, I realized that I don't believe that God has a definitive desire about every piddling thing. He has deigned to give me choice in certain matters; He has given me freedom to live my life as a I please, so long as I do one thing: follow Jesus.

I used to worry about what God wanted me to do with my life. The answer has always been the same: follow Jesus. Goodbye evangelical neurosis.

What is disjunctivism?

Disjunctivism is a strategy for resisting a step in the Argument from Hallucination. As Professor Snowdon has noted, the Argument from Hallucination contains two steps: (1) establishing that in hallucination, we are aware of a nonphysical, mental entity and (2) arguing that whatever is the case in hallucination, is also the case in veridical perception. Professor Snowdon calls this latter step the spreading step. The reason why a spreading step is needed is to license the ascription of certain properties (those properties that characterize hallucination) to every instance of veridical perception.

Something akin to the spreading step occurs in inductive inference. I note that this raven is black, and that moreover every raven I've seen is black; I then spread the property of being black to every raven. But there is another place where the spreading step can happen. Suppose that you believe in natural kinds; moreover, suppose you believe that things falling under a natural kind K share certain of their properties—the one's that characterize their kind—essentially. I note that Timmy the Tiger falls under a kind—panthera tigris altaica, say— and that P is a property that characterizes the kind panthera tigris altaica. I then note that Tanya the Tiger also falls under panthera tigris altaica, and infer that she also has P.

Reasoning of this latter sort undergirds the spreading step of the Argument from Hallucination. And disjunctivism's characteristic claim is this: the reasoning that undergirds the spreading step is unsound, precisely because veridical perceptions and hallucinations do not fall under the same experiential kind. So, disjunctivism involves itself in some heavy-duty metaphysics.

I intend to write a paper containing an in-depth analysis of the Argument from Hallucination sometime this summer. I'll post my results as they arise.

2 Dinar

I recently stumbled upon 2 Dinar, a blog where military veterans weigh-in on the salient foreign policy issues of the day. I submit their writing for your perusal.

The general theme of most of their posts is this: civilians just don't get the complexity of foreign policy issues. This ignorance contributes to bad policy decisions, which in turn get good men and women in the armed services killed or maimed.

And no, I'm not going to complain that the so-called "war" in Iraq is an imperialist pig-dog adventure, which has succeeded only in alienating the world against us, inspiring nascent terrorists to fulfill their radical Islamofascist dream, increasing government spending to astronomical levels, and getting a bunch of good men and women killed.