Theism and the absolute present

Some people believe in an absolute present. An absolute present would define a privileged absolute reference frame. Suppose that there is an absolute present. Would we have any reason to think that the privileged absolute reference frame is anywhere close to our reference frame? If not, then for all we know, the things around us have an absolute geometry quite different from the one we think they have: that clock on the wall isn’t absolutely a circle, but an oval, say.

If the reason for accepting an absolute present is doing justice to common sense, then we not only need an absolute presnet, but an absolute present that defines a frame close to our frame. And that would be almost literally a version of anthropocentrism.

Of course, if we are in the image and likeness of God, the anthropocentrism may be defensible. And maybe only then.

If this is right, then the A-theory of time (which seems to require an absolute present) makes a lot more sense on theism. (Anecdotally, there is a correlation between being a theist and accepting the A-theory of time.) But on the other hand, the A-theory of time requires God’s beliefs to be changing.

Fundamentality and anthropocentrism

Say an object is grue if it is observed before the year 2100 and green, or it is blue but not observed before 2100. Then it is reasonable to do induction with “green” but not with “grue”: our observations of emerald color fit equally well with the hypotheses that emeralds are green and that they are grue, but it is the green hypothesis that is reasonable.

A plausible story about the relevant difference between “green” and “grue” is that “green” is significantly closer to being a “perfectly natural” or “fundamental” property than “grue” is. If we try to define “green” and “grue” in fundamental scientific vocabulary, the definition of “grue” will be about twice as long. Thus, “green” is projectible but “grue” is not, to use Goodman’s term.

But this story has an interesting problem. Say that an object is pogatively charged if it is observed before Planck time 2ⁿ and positively charged or it negatively charged but not observed before Planck time 2ⁿ. By the “Planck time”, I mean the proper time from the beginning of the universe measured in Planck times, and I stipulate that n is the smallest integer such that 2ⁿ is in our future. Now, while “pogatively charged” is further from the fundamental than “positively charged”, nonetheless “pogatively charged” seems much more fundamental than “green”. Just think how hard it is to define “green” in fundamental terms: objects are green provided that their emissive/refractive/reflective spectral profile peaks in a particular way in a particular part of the visible spectrum. Defining the “particular way” and “particular part” will be complex—it will make make reference to details tied to our visual sensitivities—and defining “emissive/refractive/reflective”, and handling the complex interplay of these, is tough.

One move would be to draw a strong anti-reductionist conclusion from this: “green” is not to be defined in terms of spectral profiles, but is about as close to fundamentality as “positively charged”.

Another move would be to say that projectibility is not about distance to fundamentality, but is legitimately anthropocentric. I think kind of anthropocentrism is only plausible on the hypothesis that the world is made for us humans.

Monotheism and anthropomorphism

Xenophanes famously lambasted Greek religion for its anthropomorphism:

if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own-horses like horses, cattle like cattle.

Two and a half millenia later, accusations of anthropomorphism continue to be made against monotheistic religions, typically by naturalists.

I was thinking about this, and had an odd thought. According to monotheism, the root of all explanation is the activity of God. According to standard naturalism, the root of all explanation is the activity of the fundamental physical entities, either particles or fields. But humans are more like fundamental physical entities than like the God of the monotheistic religions. The difference between us and the fundamental physical entities is merely finite. The difference between us and God is infinite. Thus, in an important sense, it is standard naturalism that is more anthropomorphic in its fundamental explanatory agents than monotheism.

If we do not feel this—if we feel ourselves more God-like than electron-like—then we are infinitely elevating ourselves or infinitely demoting God or both.

That said, the three Western monotheistic religions do think that the physical universe is made for us. Thus, while the religions are not anthropomorphic, they do have an anthropocentric view of our physical universe. Interestingly, though, to some (albeit lesser) extent so does the most plausible current naturalist view, namely a multiverse theory together with the weak anthropic principle.

Epistemology, anthropocentrism and Natural Law

The central problem for Bayesian epistemology is where we get our prior probabilities from. Here are three solutions that have something in common:

1. Set our priors based on our common intuitions as to the priors.
2. Set our priors in such a way as to best model our human everyday and scientific inductive reasoning.
3. Use Solomonoff priors, using an idealization of the human mind as the Turing machine.

The obvious commonality in all three solutions is that they are anthropocentric. They just take for granted that our human ways of reasoning are in some way doxastically normative.

Is that bad? I was once teaching Philosophy of Love and Sex, and one of the students complained that the ethics we were talking about was only applicable to humans. I think his worry was that the ethics wouldn't apply to aliens. That's a Kantian concern. But it's off-base: of course sexual ethics will be different for asexually reproducing plasma beings. However, while it's off-base for sexual ethics, it sounds very reasonable to say that our epistemology should apply to all agents, or at least all embodied discursive agents. Unfortunately, there is little hope of solving the problem of priors subject to that assumption.

Let me try to soften you up in favor of anthropocentrism about priors with an ethics analogy. If sharks developed rationality, we wouldn't expect their flourishing to involve quite as much friendship as our flourishing does. Autonomy and friendship are both of value, and yet are in tension, and we would expect different species to resolve that tension differently based on the different ways that they are characteristically adapted to their environment. This is, indeed, an argument for a significant Natural Law component in ethics: even if values are kind-independent, the appropriate resolution of tensions between them is something that may well be relative to a kind.

But there are similar kinds of tensions in the doxastic life. For instance, there is a value to quickly grasping patterns in nature and generalizing them and a value to being more doxastically cautious. We can imagine that agents with one characteristic way of life might flourish in their doxastic lives better if they are eager patterners—they see three tigers and conclude all tigers are dangerous—and agents with a different characteristic way of life might do better to be more cautious in generalizing. Moreover, the appropriate resolution of the tension is likely to be dependent on the subject matter.

This particular tension is nicely modeled within the priors: the particular balance is determined by how the priors are for "nice patterns" (and what counts) versus how the priors are for "mess".

So one way of living with the anthropocentrism of proposals like (1)-(3) (which are not, of course, all of a piece: there is a spectrum there, with more and more idealization as one goes down the list) is to accept a Natural Law epistemology. For each kind of rational agent, there is a natural way for the minds of agents of that kind to think. This natural way yields decisions between competing doxastic values. In a Bayesian setting, this is most prominently embodied in the choice of priors. There are, literally, such things as natural and unnatural priors for a rational agent of a given kind.

There is, however, something disquieting. What about truth? Don't we want our reasoning to get us to truth? What if our kind-relative norms don't get us there?

Well, first of all, we want to both get to truth and avoid falsehood. As William James famously notes, the two desiderata are in tension—you can get all truth by believing every proposition and you can avoid all falsehood by believing none—and there are different ways of resolving the tension. James's own solution was to relativize to the individual. But my Natural Law suggestion is that the resolution of the tension is to be relativized to the kind (and perhaps subject matter). (There may be some absolute constraints, of course.)

But the worry remains. What if our priors are just not conducive to getting to the truth? (It won't help to say that in the limit we get convergence, because we don't want to wait for the limit!) What if our epistemic procedures, appropriate as they are to our kind, fail to get at the truth?

After all, we can imagine eager pattern identifiers in Humean worlds, where the patterns they identify are always spurious, and cautious agents in extremely nicely arranged worlds who keep on missing out on the order around them, as well as less extreme cases.

Here is where theism can help. God put us, with the natures we have, in a certain environment. It is reasonable to think that there would then be a fit between truth-conduciveness (and falsehood-avoidingness) and the characteristic ways of reasoning normative for our kind. This role for God in Natural Law epistemology is somewhat similar to the role of God in Kantian ethics. Kant has this deep concern: "What if in fact doing the right thing doesn't lead to happiness?" To feel the concern, make it a universal concern: "What if everybody's doing the right thing didn't actually lead to anybody being happy?" And although he thinks in a scenario like this people should still do the right thing, despite the cost for everyone, he thinks that we should postulate God to rule out such unhappy thoughts.

I suppose one might hope that evolution could help relieve the worry. Our characteristic doxastic ways of life evolved for our environment, so we would expect some fit between our priors and our environment (interesting question: if our individual priors have evolved, are they still priors?). I agree, but only in a limited way. The evolutionary argument is only going to help in those areas of doxastic life that were important to our fitness where the ways of life were evolving. It's not going to help us much in modern physics or metaphysics. It will help with those areas of doxastic life where the level of abstraction and complexity is much less.

While in the above I held out for a Natural Law epistemology (or metaepistemology), I could also see someone defending a Divine Command epistemology.