Catching up with the Present in Presentist Time?

Presentists hold that only one time exists. Obviously, since there are no other times, this time is the only one that can be correctly referred to as "the present", absolutely speaking. Previous times, however - "the past" - do not exist or at least are not real times in the same sense as the present.

Now consider the scientific fact that it takes time to perceive things. It takes time for light to bounce off a surface and enter into my eye, or for the signals from any one or more of my senses to travel along my neural pathways and make their way to my brain. It likely takes time for my brain to process any kind of input prior to it even becoming conscious. Conscious experience is likely itself spread across a period of time. What this means, then, is (at the least) that what is perceived (or at least those particular conditions or slices of life of whatever objects are perceived) is always in the past relative to your perception of it.

So if the past is unreal as the presentist claims, the world you perceive is also not real and hence your perception is, in a sense, illusory since it is presented as real and existing - the conditions of it presented as actually obtaining. The world you perceive has no real existence - your perceptions are of the ghosts of another world allowed to slip into the actual world, the present, and not of the actual world itself.

Perhaps you can try to infer what the real world is like from what is presented in experience, but this also takes time. Our perceptions and our mental faculties in general have difficulty in "keeping up" with what is real as everything we try to grasp is swiftly swept away into oblivion.

In the presentist's world, then, we are disconnected from reality in a much stronger way than one would have otherwise thought, contrary to many presentists' claims that presentism is somehow the "common sense" view (a claim I would reject for many reasons - see my dissertation, for examples). A real past, however, one that exists and is fully actualized in the actual world we live in (and I think this actually fits common sense a bit better), renders our perceptions true, with us really perceiving and in touch with reality as it is and exists. Including what we see when we gaze out into the stars...

Vaccination is NOT a "Personal Decision"

I have seen many times recently where someone posts an article, a comment, or whatever about how vaccination of children is the moral thing to do and then all sorts of people chime in with bad science and bad reasoning.  It drives me crazy and, frankly, makes me a bit angry at all the innocent people, especially kids, who will get horrible diseases as a result of the perpetuation of this latest bit of American gullibility, scientific ignorance and anti-intellectualism.  (So apologies if this post comes across more strongly worded than usual) But what irks me the most (well, one of the things at least) is when people trivialize or dismiss the issue by saying things like "it's a personal decision" or "every family must decide for themselves", etc. 

Now, let's back up for a second.  There are five basic groups (here's where I'll probably get in trouble!) of which I think most anti-vaccine folks fall into at least one (often more): 1) Charlatans; 2) quacks; 3) people with poor reasoning skills; 4) people who, as a result of poor reasoning skills (thus making this a subset of 3), think that faith in God is incompatible with modern medicine; 5) people who have been deceived by any or all of the above.  It's really a very similar phenomena to snake oil, superstitions, and all manner of popularly spread falsehoods that have polluted society from its very beginning.  It's really all in the same boat.

So when people say the sorts of things I listed at the end of the first paragraph, I can't stand it. Seriously, it's only a personal decision in the same sense in which it is a personal decision whether to fire a gun into a crowded room is a personal decision.  And every family must decide for themselves, yes, but in the same sense in which every family must decide for themselves whether to commit murder (thankfully, most choose not to).  These attempts to sidestep the issue or ward off the ethical duties associated with it are perilously close to a lapse into utter ethical or even factual relativism - the whole vaccine thing might be true for you, but not for me! Such attempts make it seem like it's a matter of taste whether we ought to vaccinate or how safe vaccines are, rather than a matter of objective fact.  They make it seem like the issue is unclear in some way or that reasonable people, reasoning well, with the same facts available, would disagree with each other.  But, of course, none of that is remotely true.  Nor is it true that it is strictly personal, since the effects of such decisions affect others and society as a whole.

I think it is telling that the issue is often spoken of in terms of "my beliefs" or "personal beliefs" and other language usually reserved for matters of taste, "philosophies of life", or weakly-held religious convictions, as opposed to the language of scientific fact, evidence, or objective ethical realities.  The latter kind of language is appropriate here, not the former.  Yet I think the former actually does capture how this opposition to vaccines actually functions in many people, even though it shouldn't.  It is a quasi-religious belief held dogmatically and immune to actual evidence or reasoning (and not based on any good evidence or reasoning and certainly anti-scientific authority).  Whereas I think religious beliefs can in fact be justified, being responsive to evidence and reasons, and, if true, can have adequate epistemic grounding, this anti-vaccine position does not have the benefit of being a central node in a foundational world view or being even supposedly divinely revealed. Whereas religious beliefs, for instance, can at least make claims to divine authority, anti-vaccine positions do not have anything close going for them - there is no real claim to authority here and hence no reason to treat it in the way it gets treated by its proponents.

Ultimately, there should not be "sides" as to whether most children should be vaccinated - any more than there should be sides over whether we should let toddlers play alone in a pool with a live handgrenade and a family of water moccasins.  And, what's more, these "sides" matter - lives, health, and economy are all on the line here - but people do not think properly about them; they do not actually look at the evidence objectively and without resorting to logical fallacy.  People should stop merely "feeling strongly" about the issue and start thinking strongly (and, more importantly, thinking well).  Perhaps critical thinking classes or classes on scientific reasoning would be useful, assuming people would pay attention or actually absorb what they were taught.  At the end of the day, I would make vaccinations mandatory for everyone for whom there was no special health risk associated with them.  That way, people can be ignorant, deluded, and so on all they want without it hurting others. But then, that's why, in America, I'd probably never be elected for office in the first place!

A Philosophical Take on Van Til

Actually, this is a very brief take on apologist/theologian/philosopher Cornelius Van Til's work as contained in the readings and interpretation found in Greg Bahnsen's massive tome, Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis.  All in all, I'm very sympathetic with a lot of Van Til's ideas.  I think he gets better than most apologists how the way we react to, interpret, experience, filter, and reason about ourselves and the world around us is in large part dependent on what we already believe (philosopher W.V.O. Quine and others have made some headwork with this idea), particularly our most fundamental beliefs or assumptions - and that Christians and non-Christians come to the world with different sets of these.  I also appreciate the idea that sin affects this set - it has real consequences for the way our minds work - and that our knowledge of God is based not primarily on reasoning or experience but on God's own testimony (we have, as made in the image of God, a sensus divinitas). 

So far so good - when Van Til (and Bahnsen, who substantially agrees with Van Til) goes beyond all this, however, it hard to follow what the reasoning is supposed to be.  Van Til thinks that the only appropriate apologetic method is to use a transcendental argument to the effect that only on the presupposition of Christianity is reasoning or pretty much anything else possible at all.  Here's where things start to get messy.  Sometimes it seems like Van Til is saying that unless a person already assumes Christianity, they cannot make sense of any of this stuff.  Other times, it seems like he is saying that unless Christianity is true, none of this stuff would be possible.  These are two distinct claims, but he seems to slide back and forth between the two without noticing and this creates a lot of problems with some of the arguments in favor of his method and against other apologetic methods.  Most often, he seems to slide back and forth, equivocating between metaphysical and epistemological senses of various terms or concepts, again making for potentially fallacious argumentation.  There also seems to be some equivocation relating to other terms such as "authority" or "primacy".  Then there's the claim that there are no neutral beliefs - one either presupposes Christianity or its opposite.  His claim is that to the extent that a non-Christian agrees with Christianity on some fact, he or she is unwittingly (and inconsistently with his or her own position) presupposing Christianity, an idea which seems to depend on the successful implementation of his transcendental argument (and which, unfortunately, inherits the same ambiguity which then affects his arguments against opponents). 

Unfortunately, Van Til (and Bahnsen) does not do a lot to actually show that the transcendental argument works.  Simply saying that only on the presupposition of Christianity is, say, reasoning possible does not show that it is so.  We need more argumentation.  Unfortunately, not much is forthcoming, and what is provided tends to contain gaps in reasoning that are (again, unfortunately) not filled.  Over and over again, claims are made as to what the non-Christian is committed to with little in the way of proof that he or she is actually so-committed.  This also infects arguments against other methodologies (not to mention some of the mistaken or at least controversial interpretations of various historical philosophers).  To take but one instance (my own comments are in brackets), Van Til claims that traditional methods are "allowing for an ultimate realm of 'chance' out of which might come 'facts' such as are wholly new for God and for man. [Where do they do this?  How?  Is this really a good interpretation?]  Such 'facts' would be uninterpreted and unexplainable in terms of the general or special revelation of God. [Why?  How does this follow?]" I won't even start on the claim that the use of logic in traditional methods of defending Christianity puts logic above God or in control of God or makes God not God, etc. (There are many things wrong here, one being that Van Til seems to assume without argument that the facts of logic are things out there to which God might be subordinated, whereas many philosophers (not all) would deny that such that there are facts of logic at all in a metaphysical sense - the law of non-contradiction is, on such a view, necessarily true but without some unique entity out there making it true since describing substantive reality is not even what the statement is supposed to do in the first place)

I sometimes had similar problems with the other presupposionalist book I read recently, Vern Poythress's book on logic, which, in its statements and arguments, pretty clearly confused logic with reasoning over and over again and explicitly stated that logic is something like a codification of rationality, which it is not.  In any case, I was a bit dissapointed with the argumentation of the presuppositionalist writings I have read so far, despite agreeing with a fair bit as well.  I have some other books along the same vein lined up to read (including more Van Til and Bahnsen), so I am hoping that there is more to some of these arguments than I have already seen.

Short Science and God Presentation Notes

Some brief working notes I used to put together my 10 minute presentation I gave at Cornerstone Fellowship's Faith and Doubt event.  Fitting these sorts of things into 10 minutes is pretty difficult and, obviously, a lot has to be left out:

*“Science has disproven the existence of God”

Usually the idea is that we have no use for God.  Laplace: “I have no use for that hypothesis”.  The Big Bang gives us the origin of the universe and evolution the origin of living things.  So no room for God – we can explain the existence of things using only physical stuff and natural laws.

Several responses:

1)      Suppose the Big Bang and evolution are correct explanations of the universe and life.  God could still be the Creator since he could have used the Big Bang and evolution to create.  Just because someone uses a tool to make something doesn’t mean that they aren’t the one who made it.  Big Bang/evolution could be the tools God used.

2)      There are some things science cannot explain using only natural things (physical stuff and natural laws).  For example, natural things might not have existed and so need an explanation outside of themselves.  Science, then, cannot explain why there are any natural things at all by appealing to more natural things since those are part of what needs explaining – you can explain some natural things in terms of others, but not why there are any at all in the first place.  (Like trying to explain why there is any cereal in your house by saying you got the cereal in your bowl from the box in your cupboard – you’ve explained how some of the cereal got in your bowl, but not how any cereal got in your house in the first place)   Natural things cannot explain this, but God can.

3)      Science actually offers us evidence of God.  There is evidence everywhere that the universe was designed to support complex life.  If any of the most basic laws of physics, for example, or the basic values that show up in their equations, were slightly off, life would not be possible.  Without electromagnetic forces, for instance, we could not have chemistry and without chemistry, there could be no life.  Since the universe is so exactly fit for life and this is much more likely if it was designed than if not, we have good evidence for design.

Notes on ideas that didn't make it into the presentation:

* God is not, for the Christian, a theoretical postulate!  We don’t think up God merely in order to fill in some gap in our understanding of the world.  God is a person with whom we have a relationship – a someone we know, not a something we know about.  Ex: My mom is not some entity I posit to explain certain bizarre phenomena such as cell phone transmissions, birthday cards, past experiences, etc.  Not something I know about merely as an inference based on evidence but someone I know through my relationship with them.

* Suppose we did, however, explain how something in the physical universe works only in terms of physical stuff and natural laws.  Is there now no room for God in explaining it?  No – a fully physical explanations and a divine one are not mutually exclusive. 

Ordinary Christian thought: No contradiction between “The doctor saved my life” and “God saved my life” (contrast with some faith healing groups).  Bible accounts with same idea . 

* Not only are there tons of events which have no predetermined physical explanation and are not determined by natural laws (quantum mechanics), but even if there weren’t, we must remember that God is the creator and sustainer of everything that is not God – he not only created space, time, matter, etc. but every second, every event, every natural law, everything that is, is directly dependent for its existence on God.  God is the source of natural laws and the one who sustains them in place.  Anytime any physical things interact by virtue of natural laws, God is there.  Colossians – all things held together by him.  Acts – in him, we live and move and have our being.  When the doctor saves the patient, God is there sustaining the natural laws and physical interactions that will make that a success, even if everything is just going according to physics.  God works under and through natural processes.

* (1) Science cannot use God in its theories (methodological naturalism).  (2) Science gives/will give/can give a complete, unified, fully accurate picture of the whole world.  BUT: If 2 and there IS a God, science must include God, so 1 is only true if no God.  And so if 1, 2 is true only if no God.  So cannot accept BOTH 1 and 2 without already showing God does not exist – at most, can accept one of these.  2 wildly optimistic anyway.

A Divine Memorial to the Past? Memories in Presentist Truthmaking

An older, unpublished paper of mine I wrote in grad school, no longer quite up-to-date:

In A Treatise on Time and Space, J R Lucas suggests the theory that it is God's memories that ground purported truths about the past. More recently, Alan Rhoda has argued at length for this view, noting that it is common fair among process theists. There are some troubles for this theory, though, which show that such a theory needs to be radically restructured and restated if it is to be at all viable. In this paper, I explore these problems and, in doing so, the question of how exactly to formulate the divine memories theory in a plausible way. It turns out that producing a version of the theory that preserves all of its purported strengths and yet still avoids the problems of the other versions is much more difficult than it seems – and, indeed, we seem to have very good reason to be skeptical that such an ideal version will ever see the light of day.

Presentists take it that everything which exists is present and exists at the present. The past, in a very strong sense, is no longer and the future, correspondingly, is not yet. This creates a problem, however, with accounting for truths purportedly about the past. If only present things exist on the presentist view, in what are presentists supposed to ground past-tensed truths? This ‘Grounding Problem’, as it is sometimes called, has elicited numerous responses, almost all of them attempting to point out some present entities or facts that are supposed to be doing the grounding of past-tensed truths. Some appeal to primitive or brute past-tensed states of affairs or properties, others to arrangements of abstract maximal propositions, and still others to temporally distributional properties (among other things).[1]

Despite such varied responses, many of them have met a number of objections – that they are metaphysically ‘cheating’, that they do not really guarantee the truths they are meant to ground, that they have implausible logical consequences, and so on.[2] One view that might be put forward as an ideal solution to all of these problems is to suppose that all the grounding work for past-tensed truths is done by God’s memories – so that God’s remembering my past trip to Maui grounds the truth of the past-tensed statement that I went to Maui. J. R. Lucas (1973) has suggested such a view, as does Alan Rhoda (draft), who notes that this view is common fair among process theists such as Hartshorne (1984). Such a theory appears initially to have many advantages over the other theories. Among them, it seems to accord well with a general theistic perspective, particularly the general idea of a kind of ‘metaphysical supremacy’ for God. When in doubt about what grounds a certain fact or about whether to postulate additional entities to explain something, why not just turn to God for our full explanatory needs instead? And what more grand version of the dependence of the world on God than that where the very past itself exists only in and because of the divine mind?

At first blush, the statement of such a view appears rather straightforward:

GMem1: It was the case that p iff God remembers that it was the case that p.

But we quickly run into a problem here – is the content of God’s memories past-tensed or present-tensed? From ordinary memory statements like “God remembers that I went to Maui” or “God has a memory of me having gone to Maui” one might think that the contents of memories are in general past-tensed, or at least that they are so when dealing with wholly past objects or states of affairs. Indeed, Rhoda (draft) seems to write at times as if this was his view. If this is correct, we could put GMem1 more clearly as follows:

GMem2: It was the case that p iff God has a memory whose content is that it was the case that p.

I think, however, that we ought to reject GMem2 and instead assign the past-tense involved in ordinary memory-statements not to the content of the memory state itself but rather to the temporal perspective of the speaker on the content. So “Sam remembers that he hit the ball” tells us (at least) that (1) Sam has a memory whose content is normally expressed with the present-tensed “I am hitting the ball”; and (2) the content of that memory is ascribed to a time earlier than the memory. This situation is similar to that involving statements such as “At one time, Sam believed he was the tallest man in the Communist Party”, where the “was” does not indicate that Sam once believed some past-tensed statement about his comparative height in the Communist Party but rather indicates the speaker’s own current, shifted temporal perspective on the purported obtaining of that content. So the analysis of GMem1 should, perhaps, more exactly read as follows:

GMem3: It was the case that p iff God has a memory whose content is that p.

But why is GMem3 needed by the divine memory theorist as opposed to GMem2 in the first place? Well, consider what would happen if we regarded the content of a memory to be past-tensed as in GMem2. The right-hand side of the biconditional in GMem2 contains exactly what we needed to find grounding conditions for in the first place (that is, its having been the case that p). Because of this fact, GMem2 is simply not a successful statement of the grounding conditions for it having been the case that p – it is plainly circular, since whatever grounds the right side is a function of what does so for the left. The sentence ‘it was the case that p’, even though it is used all on its own on the left-hand side and, arguably, appears in an intensional context on the right, still appears on both sides in a manner objectionable enough to defeat the account. To put it in a different way – to give the right-hand side of the biconditional content requires that we are already independently able to give content to the left (since the content of the right incorporates – or at least is a function of – the content of the left). And doing this for the left-hand side will, among other things, require giving it grounding conditions. But this is just what we cannot do since it is precisely the right-hand side of the biconditional which is meant to do that job for the left-hand side in the first place. As a statement of grounding conditions, GMem2, then, simply fails. So the divine memories theorist should formulate their view as GMem3 has it, not as it is in GMem2. The content of God’s memory must be present-tensed (or even maybe tenseless), not past-tensed as GMem2 would have it.

Now that we have GMem3, do we have yet a perfect formulation of the divine memories view? Unfortunately not – we are instead faced with a brand new problem that needs solving. After all, what makes something a memory in the first place? What seems to make something a memory with the content that p – as opposed to some other attitude towards p – is, at least partly, that it is true that it was the case that p. Additionally, for episodic memory, we would also require both that one has a past (perhaps causal) acquaintance with its being the case that p and that this past acquaintance is the cause of the current memory. If Rhoda (draft) is right that God’s acquaintance with facts is direct and that his current memories are a result of these past acquaintances, this additional condition may be required on all of these divine memories which are meant to be doing the grounding of past truths.

But now there is trouble – as just mentioned, the fact that it was the case that p is one of the grounds for the fact that God has a memory with the content that p. And not just that, if we apply the conditions for episodic memory to God’s memories, then all sorts of past-tensed truths will be involved in grounding the fact that God has a memory with the content that p – including the fact that it was the case that p itself. But, on GMem3, the fact that God has a memory with the content that p is itself supposed to ground the fact that it was the case that p! We clearly have a vicious circle that we somehow must break out of. If we want to keep something like the divine memories view of presentism, I take it that the only option is to come up with some other way of picking out the appropriate mental states which are supposed to be doing the grounding work – that is, other than as memories – and in such a way that we do not already presuppose what we are supposed to be explaining – that is, the truth of things like its having been the case that p.

So, where we let ‘M’ designate some type of mental state of God’s which is supposed to meet these criteria just mentioned, the divine memories view should really be formulated something like as follows:

GM: It was the case that p iff God has a mental state of type M with the content that p.

But, having been forced into GM, the divine memories presentist is now faced with challenges they did not formerly seem to face. Many presentist accounts of the grounding of past truths, for instance, are susceptible to conceivability arguments against their proposed truthmakers. Consider a verificationist account, for instance, on which past truths are grounded in present evidence.[3] If this account were correct then, given the current evidence, it would necessarily follow that we have exactly the past truths we in fact have. But this does not seem right. It is certainly conceivable that our universe have the evidence it in fact has yet have a completely different past (say, because God decided to miraculously make it so at this particular point in time, with no taking into account anything that came before). So it seems false that evidence is what grounds past truths since the two seem to be only contingently related.

Now, one virtue of cashing out divine memories presentism in terms of memories (as it was done in GMem1-3) was that it logically guaranteed the truth that it was the case that p – no conceivability argument was possible against it.[4] But now that we cannot specify M in GM in terms of memories, it looks like the view is probably going to be susceptible to conceivability arguments after all – it seems likely that it will indeed be conceivable that God have a state M with the content that p and yet it fail to be true that it was the case that p. Indeed, it will be conceivable precisely because of this that M is not a memory at all, since (as was already mentioned) to be a memory is at least in part to have some content that p which was formerly the case.

But if one cannot already assume that M is a memory, it is not clear there is any other way of specifying M such that it will logically guarantee the truth that p was the case. M cannot be some kind of belief or knowledge since, unless p is still true, that would imply that God knows or believes something false, which is impossible given divine infallibility. Perhaps it is a kind of perceptual state; but if such a state is to account for cases where p is presently false, it cannot be of the sort that guarantees the veridicality of its content. We cannot appeal to causal facts either, since causal facts, on a presentist view, will be partly about the past and hence in need of the same grounding as the truth that it was the case that p. Rhoda (draft), in his argument for the divine memories view, puts it this way:

This dual reference—to a predecessor state and a successor state—naturally requires our analysis of “c caused e” to quantify over both c and e. The presentist, however, will insist on placing at least one of those quantifiers within the scope of a tense operator. Thus, if “c caused e” then either e exists and it was the case that c exists, or e existed and it was then the case that c had existed.

The only way to save such attempts at typing M seems to be to regard the content of M not as p but as its having been the case that p. But once we do this, we are again faced with the same problem as that which plagued GMem2 since we are explaining its having been the case that p in terms of God having some mental state with the content of its having been the case that p. GMem2 is, in fact, just one particular instance of this class of doomed views. But if, as seems obvious now, such a way is blocked, it does not seem that any way of typing M can get out of the conceivability problem without either running into the problems faced by GMem2 or those faced by GMem3.

So once we properly formulate the divine memories view, one of the main virtues it had over other presentist views seems to evaporate. The divine memory view, as formulated in GM, seems to lack any resources to block conceivability arguments against it. It appears to be possible that God have such states and yet the past be different than it in fact was. But the only alternatives to this version seem to be versions like GMem2 and GMem3 which seem to be plainly unviable. So GM seems to be the only remaining version of the divine memories view left on the table, problems and all. But if the presence of such problems is taken to be good evidence against a version of presentism, as well it should, that means we have good reason to look elsewhere for an appropriate theory of time and persistence – either to a non-presentist view or to some presentist theory which can in fact do better. Despite whatever initial appeal it might have had, it seems then that the divine memories constitute little more than a divine memorial to the past and are simply not the presentist truthmakers some presentist-leaning theists may wish them to be. God may be ultimate or exalted and much may depend on him for its existence, but just not in this particular way in this particular case.

WORKS CITED

Bigelow, John (1996) “Presentism and Properties” in Tomberlin, James (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives 10: Metaphysics. Oxford: Blackwell, 35–52.

Bourne, Craig (2006) A Future for Presentism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cameron, Ross (draft) “Truthmaking for Presentists”

Craig, William Lance (2000a) The Tensed Theory of Time: A Critical Examination. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

_____ (2000b) The Tenseless Theory of Time: A Critical Examination. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Crisp, Thomas (2007) “Presentism and the Grounding Objection” Noûs 41.1: 90-109.

Hartshorne, Charles (1984) Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. Albany: SUNY Press.

Keller, Simon (2004) “Presentism and Truthmaking” in Zimmerman, Dean (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 83–104.

Lucas, J. R. (1973) A Treatise on Time and Space. London: Methuen & Co.

Ludlow, Peter (1999) Semantics, Tense, and Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Parsons, Josh (2005) “Truthmakers, the Past, and the Future” in Beebee and Dodd (eds.), Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate. Oxford: Oxford University Press,161-174.

Rhoda, Alan (draft) “Presentism, Truthmakers, and God”

Sider, Theodore (2003) Four Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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[1] See Bigelow 1996, Bourne 2006, Cameron draft, Craig 2000a and 2000b, Crisp 2007, Keller 2004, and Ludlow 1999 for various presentist options.

[2] For various criticisms see, for instance, Cameron draft, Sider 2003, and Rhoda draft.

[3] See, for some brief discussion, Parsons 2005.

[4] Rhoda draft says something similar in favor of the divine memories view over and against many other presentist views.

Self-formation, Aristotle, Augustine, and Kierkegaard

In a previous post, I've listed some thoughts on true freedom as self-formation. It's interesting to note some of the connections or insights that flow between this sort of view and the views of philosophers such as Aristotle, Augustine and Kierkegaard. In particular, my view owes a lot to Aristotle. On Aristotle's view, one becomes virtuous or acquires virtue by habituation. That is, one becomes courageous by doing courageous sorts of things and abstaining from non-courageous sorts of things and one becomes generous by doing generous sorts of things and staying away from miserly sorts of things, etc. Of course, at first one will not be doing such virtuous actions virtuously. For that, one must have a steady character - that is, a virtuous one - from which the virtuous action is flowing, one must have knowledge of the action, and must choose the virtuous action for its own sake.

Being virtuous means not merely doing the appropriate actions but having the appropriate feelings in the correct proportions and with regard to the correct things, having appropriate motives, and taking pleasure and pain from the appropriate things in the appropriate amount. If one is not vicious, one's feelings will not always be appropriate, nor will one's actions or the apportionment of pleasure or pain. Pleasure (and pain) are not our sole goals we strive for (or against), for we can shape our character to take pleasure or pain in all sorts of things. Pleasure is the natural response to getting what we most want or from doing what is most natural to us and pain the opposite. The bad person will take great pleasure in bad things and will be pained by good things (or at least find them boring or unexciting compared to bad things) precisely because they are bad and their character is off. This is part of the reason why, the more firmly a vice is entrenched, the harder it is to get rid of it - one's character, actions, feelings, etc. get formed around and by performing these vicious deeds. And the more one's character, etc. gets formed as a vicious one, the more one will be vicious and the more vicious one is the more one will form a vicious character, and so on. Both virtue and vice in this sense are self-perpetuating cycles. The further along you are on a certain path, the harder it is to jump from one cycle to another. This is why it is so important to seek virtue early and to never, even once go down the path to vice - each vicious action forms one's character and actions for the future and begins or renews or firms up a cycle of viciousness that will destroy a person morally.

This has interesting connections with Augustine, according to whom there are certain things of which it always must be true that "I believe in order to understand" - that is, belief or initial knowledge must come before true understanding or the knowledge of why this is true can come. Certain things can only be understood from the inside. Morality is one subject like this - the person who doesn't already believe in right and wrong won't understand morality or see how or why certain moral judgments are true. They won't see what the big deal is or why one should be moral. The truths of Christianity are another subject like this - one must assent to believe before one can really understand them or see how they are true. The person who has not internalized such things simply will not have a mind appropriately formed to handle such things in the appropriate manner.

And this takes us to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard held that there are three stages of life. In the initial one, one is not an ethical person and one does not grasp ethical truths or seek to be ethical. To get to the ethical stage of life requires a leap of faith. In that next stage, one seeks the ethical and can now have some understanding. Another leap of faith is required to get to the last stage of human fulfillment - the pinnacle of human life - the religious life, how our lives were meant to be. Here we now seek the religious and have some understanding of it - our life is now organized under a single guiding light, it is focused, free, and unified and not divided or enslaved by all the various goals or external goods which vie for attention. In this stage you "become who you are" - that is, your most important identities line up in a single true identity (see this previous post for more on the different kinds of identity). To tie all of these threads together, to become who you really are requires making yourself a virtuous, religious person, slowly progressing in understanding and knowledge but driven along initially in the faith that things will work out. (Further exercise: compare all these ideas with Bonhoeffer's advice that if one is short on faith, one ought to obey more, and if one is short on obedience, one ought to have more faith)

Divine Hiddenness and the Problem of Evil

The problem of divine hiddenness, roughly, is this - if God's so keen on us believing in him, even to the point of possibly staking our salvation at least partly on it, why does he remain so hidden from us? In other words, how can a reasonable person be blamed for not believing in God if God hasn't made it as obvious to that person as it could possibly be?

For the purposes of this post, I'll leave aside the objection that God's existence is immediately obvious to everyone and so nonbelief is indeed always blameworthy in that sense. What I want to discuss is how distinct this problem really is - is this a problem that's somehow uniquely troublesome to Christians and similar sorts of theists? My answer is no. I'm not really sure what all the fuss has been about surrounding this issue of late (of course, I'm not as up to date on the literature on this topic as I'd like) - in my mind, the problem of divine hiddenness just seems to be one particular case of the problem of evil, albeit a somewhat striking one. Any answer to the problem of evil, it seems to me, will generally do just as well or just as badly as a response to the problem of divine hiddenness.

Now, why do I think this? Well, for one thing, divine hiddenness is just one example of the bad stuff that exists in our world - we were made for direct, "face-to-face" relationships with and knowledge of God and that lack is a bad thing. In that sense, divine hiddenness is just one more evil which God allows and yet which also perhaps results in people being punished, just like God's allowal of murder or rape. The connection with evil becomes even stronger if we take the biblical stance that sin has damaged and does damage our abilities to clearly perceive God or to assent our will to him or his truths. If that's so, and without sin we would in fact perceive God clearly and wonderfully, then the explanation for divine hiddenness lies in part in the explanation of sin and fallen, sinful state - that is, a solution to the general problem of evil. And if we're responsible for that bad stuff and it's that bad stuff that prevents us from knowing God then perhaps we are in fact responsible for any divine hiddenness we experience since it is brought upon us by ourselves.

This seems to me a much better way of approaching the topic than the well-worn answer I've heard some Christians give. According to some, God remains hidden because otherwise, (if, say, he started really obviously revealing himself to people, writing the gospel in the clouds in English, etc.) people would have to believe in him and so would have no free will. There's a couple things people could mean by this. If God revealed himself in this way then...

1. People would have no choice but to believe that God exists and so would have no free will.
OR 2. People would have no choice but to follow God and so would have no free will.

Now 1 is simply not true. Maybe people wouldn't have any choice but to believe that God exists, but that doesn't mean they have no free will. Free will pertains to willing to do something, not necessarily willing to believe something. There are all kinds of things we don't seem to have any choice (or at least very little) but to believe in it yet we still are free. Besides, believing that God exists doesn't necessarily change anyone's behavior - as James says, after all, even the demons believe - and shudder.

But neither is 2 necessarily true either. Why think that this would follow? Adam and Eve were in direct contact and fellowship with God and yet they still chose to disobey God and not follow him. So clearly the obviousness of God doesn't necessarily hinder our will in any way and still allows for us to reject him. Maybe there are some kinds of revelations that would do this, but I'm not sure what that would be or that anyone has ever experienced it (Paul perhaps?) and clearly God can be very obvious without things being like this (he walked with and had direct fellowship with Adam and Eve after all). So in either case - 1 or 2 - I think this sort of objection fails and that a better strategy would be to subsume the divine hiddenness problem under the problem of evil in general.