Gutenbergian Emblazoning

Began to randomly re-read Surprised by Joy. Almost at the part where Lewis goes to serve in The Great War, as it's called. It's amazing to me how much of this autobiography I had forgotten: the interesting details that occasioned his experience of Joy, the 'fagging system', the abuse and bullying he endured, the captivating descriptions of the Irish and English countryside, the jaunts, the advice he gives when going through the walking trails, the unfortunate relationship he had with his dad (though it ended well), the meeting of key friends, the bittersweet ups and downs of his relationship with Warnie (his brother), the life-changing encounters with Wagner and Norse Mythology, William Morris, George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, and so much more. 

One sentiment that stands out that I can really relate to is Lewis' confession of feigning interest in things for the sake of social acceptance (which partially lead him to be a prig, or getting that 'new look', as he called it). He would fake like he didn't like the things he loved to 'fit in' with the social groups he was trying to ingratiate himself into, and would (note) deliberately downplay his natural vocabulary (which he cultivated without noticing it as a 'vocabulary' at all from the books he loved to read as a child) to 'fit in' with the way the social groups talked. When he found out that there were other people that talked like he did (effortlessly, not out of any kind of insincere affectation), and valued the things he already had a taste for (he notes that he had no idea that people valued George Bernard Shaw the way 'the Bloods' valued 'games' at Wyvern), he had a kind of shock (even though it opened the door to priggishness). He could finally be himself, even though Lewis admitted that when this academically oriented' life (in the chapter 'Fortune's Smile', I think: when he talks about the 'Epicurean Life') was completely catered to, when he had the freedom to organize his schedule to perfectly serve all his loves and interests (at one point, Lewis outlined his actual, daily schedule!), it was ultimately a selfish life, or that was his own assessment. 

I finally did a video on Daniel Howard-Synder's critique of Plantinga's logical problem of evil and touched on some of the issues I was having with the concept of Intraworld plentitude. I don't have the will or the memory to recreate what I rambled on about for almost two hours. 

I've had new or perhaps recurring thoughts about why it is my mind can't be bothered to be affected by paganism (pre-Christian paganism). I know the kernel of this intransigency lies somewhere in the bowels of that labyrinthine mess that lurks in the shadows of that dreadful sounding thing called Bayes' Theorem. This has always gone to reinforce a metaphor that forces its way into my imagination every single time any question resurfaces that has to do with one or another kind of threat to my belief in the Christian metaphysic. Am I storming someone else's castle or am I attempting to explain to a potential raider of my own castle why an alleged 'weak-point' is actually a non-starter because of this or that hidden trip-wire that happens to be my ever-present, always-lingering background beliefs, beliefs that my critic doesn't seem to care about, but which are all-important if his aim is to persuade me to take leave of my castle, right? If my castle, as it is, can't be stormed because of the structural integrity of the interlocking instances of dialectical fit and epistemic consistency, then, what ought my critic's goals be in conversing with me about the fine points of my castle, if not those parts of the castle that are most responsible for my perception of the 'glue' that's responsible for the aforesaid structural integrity? Once I start to zoom in on this, while recognizing that my critic's cognitive architecture is roughly the same, give or take an intellectual virtue here or there, I begin to experience a sort of vertigo, the first, inchoate glimpse into what Kierkegaard's Climacus was talking about when he made mention of the idea of 'endless approximations'. Is this the root of what Plantinga was talking about: regarding being saved from an epistemic predicament by grace, and not works (the context of that pesky Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism that it seems that everyone loves to jeer at, even though it's incredibly difficult for the more audacious to explain in detail what it is exactly that warrants the jeering)? That was vague but I'm moving on. 

There is a huge lacuna in my thinking: one expressed by books like Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, or Arnold Toynbee's The Story of History, or Jean Gebser's Ever-present Origin (the table of contents itself looks like a goldmine of meaning!), or even more contemporary thinkers of this type, like Jason Reza Jorjani and John David Ebert. This is one of broad, cultural critique, world-historical analysis, analysis of the origin, development, decay, and extinction of civilizations (I guess Jared Diamond fits this category sometimes). I confess I was introduced to this type of analysis though Ebert; he was the one that directed my attention to how analyses like these are connected in certain ways to the Germans and the French of the Continental and Postmodern traditions; but in other ways, it isn't at all; Ebert is radically opposed to the Postmoderns (his nemesis is nihilism), and for the Western mythos (though he's hard to pin down because he's also enamored of Eastern mythos - or elements of it: I remember he really piqued my interest when he mentioned some Indian epic that was supposed to dwarf the epic pretentions of Homer, an idea I find intoxicatingly mysterious). There's also other domains that these islands have commerce with: notably, myth studies (particularly, Joseph Campbell) and psychoanalysis. Ebert rails against the shallowness of Jung, for example (Ebert admire's Jung's advance over Freud and Jung's skill as a psychoanalyst, but Ebert chide's Jung's scientistic approach to the Archetypes; I think he sees Jung as being too reductionistic, that they manifest themselves within particular, perennial consciousness-structures, but that they shouldn't be identified as such). But when myth studies is applied in the context of civilizational analysis, I notice that my imagination is stretched to its utmost; I find that an excessive preoccupation with strictly analytical issues in philosophy is actually extremely Procrustean and narrow. Mystical sounding (but not mystical in themselves, mind you!) utterances like those talking about the presiding gods that seem to describe motivational structures, and the cosmogonic perceptions (or conditions under which these vast, systemic structures undergo, experience, or withstand internal or external revolutionary upheavals), of any particular civilization. I'm not well-versed on this enough to be precise, but it's something along these lines: it'll involve debates whether Western Civilization is primarily Promethean or Faustian. I find this infinitely more interesting than the question of whether Quine was right in his interpretation of the Existential Quantifier (though both questions are interesting relative to the parameters of your beloved research project). 

I've been thinking about Tjump's analysis of the 'the best of all possible worlds'. I have been advised by both my past experience and the testimony of others that Tjump's glibness is his worst enemy, and that it tends to cast an ugly pall over what would otherwise be a gem of an idea, or the kernel of something with ideational potential. If I understand him, the idea eerily overlaps with a similar idea I ran across in C.S. Lewis' chapter on Divine Omnipotence in The Problem of Pain (I might also add that both Tjump and Lewis share this disdain for so-called 'involuntary impositions': one could argue that Lewis takes this theme to the next level by being angry with God for creating him without his consent! - as far as I am aware, being 'thrust into existence', as I think Heidegger had said, isn't a part of what Tjump is talking about when he mentions such impositions). There may be more ingredients, but I think we can safely say that a necessary ingredient is that the best possible world has to, at least, contain no instances of involuntary impositions of 'will'. Once this ingredient is shoved into theoremhood, nothing contrary to such a theorem can hope to assail it. I can't tell the reader how many times I've heard, in response to some criticism of his theory, the riposte: well, I don't definite good and bad that way, I define it this way. This procedural force-field gives the illusion of invincibility; and so it is, in the same sense that you can't refute the invincible consistency of a lunatic regarding all the redefinitions and reasons also raised to unassailable theoremhood. These games can be played forever. The benefits are a social enclave, but what is that to those who are actual philosophers? As to actual intellectual merits, Tjump's theory is very opaque to me and sometimes I think it continues to thrive under the very cover of its vagueness. I've heard the comparison made to voluntary choices made in the context of video games. This shines a tiny light on a pitch black background, but I wonder how to compare the state just prior to choosing the video game to what the best possible world would include regarding our pre-game stage-setting, so to speak? 

I'm growing tired of the narrowness of analytic philosophy. (It's a narrowness of scope combined with a pretension of universal scope.) Imagine you're in an empty room. All around you are swirling, undulating intensities (Deleuze), and over there in the corner is an opalescent density whose spatial dimensions are comparably tiny compared to other swirling intensities in other parts of the room, alighting on you, passing through you, dazzling before you, beckoning you to give them your attention. The tiny intensity has an incredibly complex structure, a structure you could get lost in and think about forever. But the structure has an upper limit regarding imaginative meaning; the imagination is satiated long before ratiocination is surfeited. That tiny intensity is analytic philosophy, I'm beginning to think. 

A Thought on Divine Hiddenness

It seems to me that we do something interesting when relaying to each other stories of valor, and that we can apply such things to various strategies undertaken in arguments from Divine Hiddenness. What I have in mind is a story of the following sort. Centuries ago (or long ago or an unspecified amount of time ago) a group of people are terrorized by some cruel, more powerful tribe. (You could tell any story involving valor: a WW2 story or any story about any kind of victim of any kind of oppression.) Suppose we narrow our focus to tribesman X who rebels against his oppressors and leads his people to freedom. I can't tell you how many times something like following conversation happens after such stories like this are told:

Jones: Wow, how brave X was!

Susan: Indeed! Do you think you'd be able to do something like that if you were in X's position back then?

Jones: I'd like to think I would, but until I actually go through something like that, I'm not sure I know myself well enough to say with any degree of confidence what I would or wouldn't (or might or might not) do. 

What's happening here? Jones is doing something that I think is humble and admirable: he's admitting that he hasn't the slightest clue about what he would or wouldn't do in a situation as  inimitable or unknown as that. I think a family resemblance of sorts could be fuzzily built up out of stories like these.

Now, it seems to me that there's an a fortiori argument lurking in here. Consider a typical abstract you might read by a philosopher in an argument against God's existence on the basis of Divine Hiddenness (from The Argument From Divine Hiddenness. Daniel Howard-Snyder - 1996 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26 (3):433 - 453.):

Do we rightly expect a perfectly loving God to bring it about that, right now, we reasonably believe that He exists? It seems so. For love at its best desires the well-being of the beloved, not from a distance, but up close, explicitly participating in her life in a personal fashion, allowing her to draw from that relationship what she may need to flourish. But why suppose that we would be significantly better off were God to engage in an explicit, personal relationship with us? Well, first, there would be broadly moral benefits. We would be able to draw on the resources of that relationship to overcome seemingly everpresent flaws in our character. And we would be more likely to emulate the self-giving love with which we were loved. So loved, we would be more likely to flourish as human beings. Secondly, there would be experiential benefits. We would be, for example, more likely to experience peace and joy stemming from the strong conviction that we were properly related to our Maker, security in suffering knowing that, ultimately, all shall be well, and there would be the sheer pleasure of God's loving presence. As a consequence of these moral and experiential benefits, our relationships with others would likely improve. Thirdly, to be personally related to God is intrinsically valuable, indeed, according to the Christian tradition, the greatest intrinsic good. In these ways our well-being would be enhanced if God were to relate personally to us. Moreover, the best love does not seek a personal relationship only for the sake of the beloved. As Robert Adams rightly notes, "It is an abuse of the word 'love' to say that one loves a person, or any other object, if one does not care, except instrumentally, about one's relation to that object."1 Thus, God would want a personal relationship with us not only for the benefit we would receive from it but for its own sake as well. So, if a perfectly loving God exists, He wants a personal relationship with us, or more accurately, every capable creature, those cognitively and affectively equipped to relate personally with Him

Notice the confidence that Howard-Snyder has in telling his readers what would or wouldn't follow from God's bringing it about that he believes that God exists. Howard-Snyder isn't speculating like Jones was above, but then my question is this: isn't God's bringing it about that he believes that He exists an event or state of affairs that is just as, if not more, momentous than any experience of the type Jones is talking about? 

(Expanding: God, being who He is, and Howard-Snyder, being who he is - If God were to reveal Himself with just as much unveiled awesomeness as He did, say, to Isaiah and Jeremiah, how does Howard-Snyder know how he would or wouldn't act upon interfacing with such unalloyed holiness for the first time? How does Howard-Snyder - or anyone! - know for sure, or have any degree of high, prior probability about how they would or wouldn't act if such a momentous occasion were to happen? When I think about it, I have no idea how I'd react. I really don't. I'm inclined to say that I'd fall on my face out of sheer terror, and that even after I'm reassured - in some unspecified way - I'm not sure whether I'd even like it. I'm not sure whether an experience like the one I'm doing my best to imagine would be one where I can like it instantaneously, or it could or couldn't be that its pleasurability might depend on factors outside my control or in factors that have to do with my uncleanness that can only be removed gradually, incrementally, and so diachronically. Thus, I find myself at an even further remove, epistemically, to how I'm suppose to know whether I would or wouldn't act in this or that way had God done something, the exact nature of which is presently, and probably permanently, inexplicable, in this present mode of spatiotemporal existence.) 

And if Jones can't speak with confidence about the counterfactual regarding how he would or wouldn't act in the types of experiences noted above, then why do we think that Howard-Snyder should be any more confident about how he thinks he would or wouldn't act or emulate or draw or flourish or experience (even if he's confident about the consequences of what he thinks would or wouldn't happen if those other things were to happen) if God were to bring it about that Howard-Snyder believes he exists - especially if the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom that are true of Howard-Snyder's essence don't, in fact, fall out the way they need to so that God's providential decisions can take those counterfactuals into account in His decision so to reveal himself? 

Contra Tyler Vela's anti-Molinism - Part 1

In preparing to talk with Vela, I suppose it would be pertinent to interact with what he's written on Molinism (since that's bound to come up - along with issues surrounding libertarian free will). You can find what I'm responding to here (which is part of a 27 part series against Molinism you can find here). If there isn't repetition, I'll make the series I'm doing here respond to the other parts of Vela's critique. 

Vela begins with some definitions of the logical moments of God's omniscience (as understood by the Molinist). I'll put direct quotes of Vela in bold for easy reference (the quotation function for blogger.com only indents and I don't find that clear enough). 

1. Natural Knowledge – This is the kind of knowledge that God has of necessary truths that are true independent of God’s will or decree.  Examples: 1+1=2, “All bachelors are unmarried,” “no squares are circles,” etc.

It's true that natural knowledge is knowledge of necessary truths, but Vela's examples may give the wrong impression. Mathematical truths and analytic truths are necessary, of course. But by S5 (system 5 for short) in modal logic, for any contingent (true and possibly false) and possible truth, those truths are necessarily contingent or necessarily possible. So, if it's possible that there are purple elephants, then it's necessarily possible that there are purple elements - and so it's an element of God's natural knowledge. And if it's contingent that I was born in the USA, then it's necessarily contingent that I was born in the USA - and so also an element of God's natural knowledge. (It goes without saying that if these are examples of necessary truths, then these truths also are independent of God's will or decree.)

Vela's definition of free knowledge is problematic as well - Free Knowledge – This is the kind of knowledge that God has of contingent truths, that is, propositions that are true given God’s will/decree in the actual world. Examples: “The sky is blue,” “the universe was created by God,” etc. I wouldn't make the differentia of free knowledge the kind that is of contingent truths. God's middle knowledge (we'll get to that next) is also knowledge of contingent truths - and yet those truths aren't true given God's will/decree in the actual world. The contingent truths God's middle knowledge grasps are independent of God's will/decree in the actual world. The counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are all contingently true - even though they're independent of God's will/decree. Put the conceptual taxonomy thus: free knowledge is knowledge of contingent truths dependent of decree/God's will; middle knowledge is knowledge of contingent truths independent of decree/God's will; natural knowledge is knowledge of necessary truths independent of decree/God's will. 

There are some further caveats with middle knowledge (I believe), but let's first see what Vela says about it: 3. Middle Knowledge (MK) – This is the kind of knowledge that God has of counterfactuals of worlds that he could have created but did not create. These are facts that could have been but are not. Examples, “Had Tyler been born with two X chromosomes, then he would have been born female,” “had Mozart died at birth, we would not have his music,” etc.

This analysis needs more precision. I've never seen middle knowledge defined in terms of a 'counterfactual of worlds' alone; even in the places I have, it is usually considered and rejected (Zigzabski - she calls them counterfactuals of world actualization). But even if we stay with this locution, Vela's examples don't seem illustrate the concept. Counterfactuals of worlds aren't counterfactuals of isolated subjunctive conditionals - in Vela's examples, the antecedents are merely counterfacts concerning differences in the actual past (what would have happened if those differences were actual). Worlds are maximally consistent sets of propositions. An example of a counterfactual of a world (in the sense I just gave) is a counterfactual involving what states of affairs would obtain if a maximally consistent set of propositions (a world) were actualized (not created). (The actualization/creation distinction is especially important if we're A-theorists: if we're presentists (for example), even though our world has been actualized, the obtainment of tensed states of affairs takes time as temporal becoming creates more and more of Reality - an essential aspect of which is the concrete totality of everything that was, is, and will be the case).  

There is then the ambiguity involved with: These are facts that could have been but are not. This isn't precise enough (the imprecision here gets to the heart of one of Vela's main concerns with feasibility - an issue I'll address when it comes up): there are facts that could have been, but can't be actualized - these are a subset of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (Vela brings up these next). These facts 'could have been' in the sense that these facts obtain in a possible world (a world that's maximally consistent). Making them obtain in an actualized world is a whole different story - and involves an entirely different sort of modality. The semantics for this involve a set of maximally consistent set of propositions, of course. But it also involves the idea that there would be no indicative counterpart of that maximally consistent set (of subjunctive conditionals with consequents having only broad logical modality) - and so this possible world 'wouldn't' have satisfied truth conditions if it were actualized - thus, its infeasibility. (Caveat: not all metaphysicians identify broad logical modality with metaphysical modality, even though everything that has metaphysical modality also has broad logical modality - motivating the distinction here would take us too far afield, however.)  

It's important to notice that there are two different kinds of modality at play here (contrary to popular belief, it wasn't Craig that invented the feasibility/possibility distinction - it was Thomas Flint): the intrinsic possibility of a world (characterized by that world's maximal consistency) and the possibility of actualization (maximal consistency plus actualizability). We're really quick to read into the concept of 'possible world' the extra modality of actualizability because we're really quick to read into the concept of actualizability the modality of intrinsic possibility. 

In other words, if we're told that a world isn't actualizable, we're really quick to think that it means it is intrinsically impossible. But it is impossible only in a sense! To be precise, unactualizable worlds are impossible in the sense that they can't obtain. But they're not impossible in the sense that they're not maximally consistent. They would be maximally consistent! So, regardless of what we think about the plausibility of this metaphysical distinction, we have to first be clear about the conceptual distinction - for there definitely is one. 

Think about this modality in a finite context with a variable outside of a creature's control (this will be loosely analogous with God having a variable outside of His control: the truth of counterfactuals of freedom if God sovereignly decides to make a world taking this variable into account (He didn't have to do this, of course)). 

Van Inwagen brings up an example somewhere of an accomplished pianist stranded on an island without a piano. Can he play the piano or not? He can in a sense and he can't in a sense. He can in the sense that if there were a piano on the island, he would be able to play it. He can't in the sense that there is no piano on the island. The variable outside of his control is that he is trapped on an island without the instrument required to actualize the state of affairs playing the piano. Now consider counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (CCFs). Consider: 

1. If Jones were in C, then Jones would freely P. 

Suppose 1 is true in the actual world A (and it's true at a time T: which includes A's 'initial world segment' IWS and all the rest of it). Now consider:

2. If Jones were in C, then Jones could freely ~P. 

This is also true in A: Jones has this modal property in A. Now, where is it true that Jones freely ~P? It would be in some other possible world W* (W* is where it possibly obtains; A is where it actually does not obtain). So far, so good. 

Consider:

3. If Jones were in C, then Jones would freely ~P. 

This is different than 2 because the consequent has 'would' not 'could'. But there's a problem. 1 is true (we supposed it to be true in the actual world). This means that 3 is false (1 and 3 are contradictories). It not only means that 3 is false in A; it also means that when God strongly actualizes C, 3 will always turn out false (because 1 is true) in any world whose IWS includes C (again, because 1 is true). 

The problem is that 2's truth is irrelevant to 3's ever being true. It appears that 3 is true because we say that it is true in W*. But it is only an appearance - the semantics for 3's being true in W* just means that 3 is a member of a maximally consistent set of propositions M (which is just to say that 3 is possible in the broad sense: recall the distinction that metaphysicians of modality quarrel about when it comes to the distinction between broad logical modality and metaphysical modality) - and that if M were actualizable, then M would have been feasible (this subjunctive conditional has a metaphysically impossible antecedent - and so does not have actualizable truth conditions for its indicative counterpart). (None of this takes away from 3's being 'true' in W* having a meaning.) 

The next issue is whether or not 3's truth in W* can actually obtain when God strongly actualizes C: it won't because (again) 1 is true and 3 is false (if Jones were left free in C, Jones would freely P). Thus, God's piano (so to speak) is not on His island for actualizing 3 - even though God "actualizes" 3 in W* in the sense that, if W* were actualizable (metaphysically impossible antecedent), and God chose to actualize W*, then God would have actualized 3 (that's the semantics we have for giving it a meaning). But since 1 is true, the antecedent of that conditional is metaphysically impossible - even though it remains a possible world in the sense that it's maximally consistent. 

With these distinctions in mind, let's see Vela's definition of 'Counterfactuals of Creaturely Freedom': Counterfactuals of Creaturely Freedom (CCFs) – propositional facts about what free creatures would have done in other possible worlds. The 'would have done' part of the definition is crucial here - it qualifies 'propositional facts' semantically so that the kind of propositions considered are in the subjunctive mood. It also winnows down the possible worlds to that subset of possible worlds that are able to be actualized (the feasible ones: in other words, CCFs includes propositions like 1, not 3 - for God can't have knowledge of false propositions).  

Vela then moves into the 'claimed benefits' of Molinism:

Preserves some version of Libertarian Free Choice without substantially sacrificing Divine Sovereignty. - If it doesn't substantially sacrifice such sovereignty, I'm wondering how it sacrifices it in any other relevant sense. This is one of the reasons I'm fond of this model: it's implicit that God choose to do things a certain way even though He didn't have to if He didn't want to (He could have chosen a compatibilist world, a hard determinist world, no world at all, a world with a different number of creatures, a world where all are saved (which might involve a different number), etc . . . ). (Update: Vela has recently posted a blog arguing that if incompatibilism is committed to the thesis that free will is, in principle, incompatible with determinism, then that would make it impossible for God to create a world where determinism is true, including compatibilism. This is very confused, it seems to me. Of course, in all the worlds where creatures have libertarian free will, hard determinism and compatibilism will be false. But how in the world does that imply that there aren't worlds where determinism and compatibilism are true, and libertarianism false? That thesis is entirely compossible with the thesis of incompatibilism since in no possible world are they compatible!)

Next: Due to A, that Molinism preserves substantive human responsibility. - Since Vela has numbered these points, 'A' refers to the first point above. If this first point is contested, the dialectic veers into a discussion of those theories of free will that commit themselves to the compatibility of determinism and moral responsibility (one theory of which is John Martin Fischer's semi-compatibilism, if I'm not mistaken). Next: Due to A and B, can give the most robust solutions to the problem of evil/suffering without blame shift to God. (Again, 'A' and 'B' refer to the above 'two' points). This point is closely related to the second point; the second point is about creaturely responsibility, the third, divine responsibility. Next: Preserves God’s unfulfilled yet genuine desire that all humanity should be saved apart from the Reformed scheme of the two wills of God. Here this is God’s only will and is defeated by the free choice of man to freely reject God. Thus God saves the most that he can without violating their will. - I'm not sure I'm fully understanding this point: Molinism has to be committed to the idea of 'two wills' in some sense. God would have a decretive will (the willing into being of a particular order of things, the actualization of a particular world, and so all the events, states of affairs, and creatures obtain/are created in that world) and a sort of salvific will (a will that doesn't desire what such an ordination involves: it's a desire that provides necessary and sufficient grace to the will of a creature, a desire rooted in God being Love, a desire that involves God drenching the multitude of circumstances engulfing every creature (He is not far from each one of us) with oceans of Divine-wrought Meaning and General (if not Special) Revelation in Nature and Conscience, etc.). 

(The meaning of this kind of beauty can probably only be glimpsed in metaphor or poetic diction: but it will have to involve unswerving passion in the face of the implacable, like the violinists on the deck of the sinking Titanic, or (supposing that the Prodigal remained a Prodigal) the endless pacing of the Father on his porch, scanning the horizon for his lost son (even after reports of the son's possible demise), etc.) 

(These images will, no doubt, be distasteful to the Reformed conception of God's efficacious grace - they have their own metaphors to make such a conception attractive: the Prince kissing the sleeping Princess, the caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, etc. My only purpose in bringing up my particular images was to flesh out the meaning of how a particular kind of desire could 'play out' in the face of something implacable.).  

I also have social-scientific reasons (from what has come to be called The Context Group) for not understanding spurned grace in terms of a 'defeated' will: optional sources here are David deSilva's Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity and Zeba Crook's Reconceptualizing Conversion. I can't get into all the details here, but it'll be sufficient to point out that the concepts of grace and faith should be understood (so argue Crook and deSilva) within the context of a client-patron relationship, where we are God's clients and God is the patron. I'm leaving out a lot but the take-away point in this social-scientific context is that the honor and glory and the so-called success of grace is in the very act of offering it (even if all of it was rejected); all dishonor and shame came on those who spurned the grace (ungrateful clients). So, the negative connotations involved in the adjective 'defeated' (in Vela's wording) are contextually misplaced here. It would be like saying: the face 'defeated' the forward movement of the fist (when the fist knocked the person - with the face - out). 

9. A better explanation for the “problem of the unevangelized” where God could have arranged all those who would not believe in any possible world to be born in areas and times where the gospel would never be preached in their life time – where the pearls would never be cast before swine so to speak. (This is not universal to all Molinists, especially those prior to the work of Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig (WLC), but is a common view among current Molinists). - I don't think that this is Craig and Plantinga's position (I'll have to verify this). The best I can remember is that there are creaturely essences that (because of their world-sets) wouldn't have accepted the Gospel even if it had been given to them. So, God sovereignly uses this implacability as an ingredient in the maximization of salvation on which it will then be counterfactually dependent. 

There's then a transition to Vela's critique of the way Tim Stratton (a Molinist) spells out what it takes - the minimum requirements you have to fulfill - to be what's called a 'mere Molinist'. At first, Stratton lands on Middle Knowledge and Libertarian Free Will; then, Vela tells us that a change occurs with the latter - that we sometimes have Libertarian Free Will. Before that, Stratton also thinks the Sovereignty of God is important, a point that Vela cynically interprets as 'rhetorical hedging' (I don't know Stratton so I don't know his history as Vela might - but I agree with Stratton here and this isn't hedging at all: it's built into the theory, as calculus is built into the movement of a baseball), a point with which I also agree. But Vela objects that, ". . . this would still not get us to the fully developed Molinism that would be helpful in apologetical issues." 

Vela argues that, ". . . Absent is the concept of God choosing to actualize from a list of feasible worlds, the one that maximizes human salvation while mitigating the amount of suffering and evil. This kind of Most Salvific World should not be confused with Best Possible World semantics, as WLC and others have ably argued against BPW conceptions. Other features missing are issues surrounding Transworld Depravity and why there is condemnation to the unevangelized, the attempts to ground MK not in prescience or foresight but as immediate knowledge, and even how this would relate to issues like regeneration (for Stratton and others have argued that God could suspend LLF in the case of monergistic salvation). There is much Molinism, as employed by apologists who are the main driving force in the advance of Molinism, that is not subsumed under MM."

I see all of this as extremely misguided. Let's go through these one at a time. First, the idea of 'feasible worlds' is already built into the concept of it being true that God has middle knowledge and that creatures have libertarian free will, and so to list it alongside the 'minimum requirements' would be needlessly pedantic for such purposes. It would come out later in response to various 'apologetic issues' or when further specifying the modal detail of the theory. The same goes for the idea of a 'Most Salvific World', an idea that's entailed by God's goodness and the idea of feasibility, and so doesn't have to be included in the minimum requirements; it's already conceptually latent in the requirements already listed. (Analogy: it would be like listing the requirement that I be a rational animal for being made in the image of God, but then objecting that I haven't yet fleshed out my imaginative capacities and how they relate to the potential for artistic creation: all of that is already conceptually latent in what's entailed by being rational, and so it's pedantic to list out all the implications of this modal mapping when your only goal is to list the minimum requirements.). 

Second, just a correction. Possible World Semantics and the idea of a Most Salvific World are not in competition and so you don't have to pick one over the other; it would be like saying that I can either choose Calculus or hitting a home-run to win the baseball game. But if you hit the home-run, that's just a phenomena that can be fully described using Calculus. So, you can't be in a position to choose one over the other, because they are in two different domains, and those domains are related to each other in a certain mode of descriptive dependence. In discussing counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (which are conceptually intertwined with a so-called Most Salvific World: God's goodness would actualize a world of free creatures - creatures that have counterfactuals true about what they would or would not freely do - where that world involves the counterfactuals leading to a world with the maximal number of essences freely becoming saved, the greatest good for a creature), Plantinga uses Possible World Semantics to cash out the meaning of (or the truth-conditions for) counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. There is no other semantics that I am aware of that explicates the meaning of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. The idea that such a semantics gives us the truth-conditions for another possible world where everyone is saved and where the population of such a world is sustained is irrelevant because (as I already said above) the modalities of realizability (bring about ability, feasibility) and mere possibility are completely distinct, and so you can't use the latter to make the former play by the latter's modal rules (they are in two modal domains due to their partial non-overlap).   

Third, we can subsume the rest of the 'package' of requirements that Vela takes to be minimum and put them all in the same boat. All of these so-called requirements (transworld depravity, condemnation of the unevangelized 'properly understood') are already latent in the minimum requirements already listed and would become explicit after you fill out the modal detail of what's already entailed by the theory itself. (I'd have to read Stratton's thoughts on God's ability to suspend libertarian freedom to save someone because that would clash with what's entailed by what we would expect to see if that ability were an expression of, or motivated by, God's goodness - why not suspend everyone's? - If God is essentially good, then there's no world where that goodness isn't equally expressed; and if there could be worlds where God suspends libertarian freedom to save all, with the numbered saved are equinumerous, then that's the world we'd expect to be living in!) 

But this leads Vela to say: This means that we can argue that while the MMi who is making such an MM argument may not be dishonest, the rhetorical strategy is that of a “bait and switch” where the full substance if [sic] Molinism and its strategic use in questions of evil and suffering, is smuggled in through the lexical backdoor. It is trying to get the reader to swallow far more than they would be willing to chew.

It might be my lack of imagination, but I don't see a difference between being dishonest and deploying a rhetorical strategy of 'bait and switch'. The bait is no more switched than when, say, a human body is presented in response what the minimum requirement might be to do human biology: just because a human body involves body temperature, a circulatory system, a reproductive system, a skeleton, an endocrine system, an immune system, or a respiratory system doesn't mean my presentation of the 'minimum requirement' switched to all these extremely complicated areas of study (all of these areas of study are entailed by what's involved biologically with the presentation of a human body). If the 'reader' feels like they're swallowing more than what they'd be willing to chew, then they're not chewing what they thought they put in their mouth! Theology is like a box of chocolates . . . 

Vela's Theonomy illustration is opaque to me. He argues that a similar bait and switch happens if a Theonomist were to say that, ". . . anyone who loves God’s law and thinks it should have any role in the thoughtlife of the Christian in the public sphere is thus a Theonomist." 

Vela goes on: "Here we can see that while many of us think that the Mosaic law has a role to play (especially Reformed Christians who employ the triplicate use of the law for the church and the Christian in our private and public lives), it does not follow that we hold the Theonomic position that the Mosaic law, including the penology, ought be the law of “Christian” nations today. It would be a massive bait and switch to try and say that anyone who loves God’s law and thinks it should serve some function in the church age, that they are de facto Theonomists merely because the Theonomist can lexically pare down their position to loving God’s law and thinking it should play a role in “Christian” nations. This difference we can represent between the Theonomy and theonomy." 

So, what's the point of comparison here with so-called 'Mere-Molinism'? The only part of this that would be applicable (so far as I can see) is with the stipulation of God's sovereignty, the meaning and mode of which will be different depending on whether you're a Molinist or a Calvinist. Of course! If a Molinist were to argue like the Theonomist here, they'd be wrong. But that's not how the Molinist is arguing at all, it seems to me. From the way Vela represents the Theonomist above, it appears as though this is a simple case of misplaced verbal essentialism on the Theonomist's part (what Vela calls 'lexically paring down'), and all we need is the simple pointing out that this is a verbal dispute, the making of some relevant semantic distinctions, and then the arguing for or against the positions delineated by the aforesaid distinctions. It's as simple as that, it seems to me. 

Vela makes it sound like the Molinist is doing the same thing when all the Molinist is doing is filling out the modal detail already latent within the minimum requirements of her theory (recall my analogy with the Human Body: wouldn't we think it sounded weird if someone were to say, "I hadn't a clue that when I asked about the minimum requirements for human biology that the simple presentation of a human body would involve all those complex biological systems! That's a bait and switch! I'm swallowing more than I'm willing to chew!"). 

Vela's Theonomist isn't doing this at all. The Theonomist is engaging in lexical imperialism or unwarranted verbal essentialism and colonizing anyone who lays claim to a word to be, de facto, an adherent of their position. That's crazy! And the Theonomist that does this should be called out! But the Molinist isn't doing this at all, so far as I can see. The Molinist is merely filling out the modal detail already latent in the minimum requirements of the theory itself. If there's substantive semantic considerations that need to be taken into account (e.g. with the 'word' Sovereignty), the Molinist (I believe) would be more than willing to 'not' co-opt the very existence of the 'word' (engage in lexical tyranny) and merely point out their particular usage of the word (in accordance with the relevant concept they have in mind). 

Figuring out Zagzebski's take on Molinism

In this blog, I discuss the first couple sections of Zagzebski's chapter on Molinism in her book The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (1991). 

Zagzebski admits that middle knowledge is a powerful theory (I've never understood objections from the likes of John Martin Fischer that middle knowledge doesn't do anything to explain the foreknowledge/free will issue). And let's be honest. Theological squabbles aside, the theory, the model, taken on its own, looked at conceptually, is amazingly elegant. Even though I realize there's a degree of annoyance critics of a view feel when they're constantly being told that they've misunderstood the view (a charge Calvinists often level against their critics), I believe there's something to this. It's very hard to find a solid criticism of Molinism, on a purely philosophical level, that hasn't (to some degree) misunderstood some element of Molinism itself. (And it goes without saying that I would never take the view that merely understanding a view is sufficient to make that view true - the closest I get to saying something like that is in considering the concept of God in the context of ontological arguments). I attribute it to the idea that the metaphysics of modality is really hard to do and think about oftentimes. 

(Also, as an aside, I'll try to do a blog on Zagzebski's take on Ockhamism - that God's past beliefs aren't accidentally necessary because they're soft facts about the past. There were some parts of the chapter I found a little murky, but it would be worth the effort to try and write out what I think is the takeaway. I will say that there was not a little surprise in how Zagzebski burst my bubble a little. The glib way with which I understood Ockhamism is now something I better understand. Each presentation of an analysis of 'soft fact' was something I was nodding my head in agreement only to have Zagzebski clearly and decisively show me that there was something fundamentally wrong with it. So, I'm grateful for that.)

Zagzebski argues that middle knowledge aims to demonstrate the logical consistency, and the coplausibility, of foreknowledge (with all of Zagzebski's qualifications: Divine, Provident, Essential Infallibility and Omniscience) and libertarian free will, the compatibility of the doctrine with Aquinas's theory of God's mode of knowing, and how God can know what I freely do by knowing His own essence (that last part is the part that often get neglected: there's always some parenthetical remarks about God knowing these things conceptually, as opposed to perceptually, and we're left to our own devices to pin down what that means analytically on our own). Molina explicitly mentions the "knowing His own essence" qualification and Zagzebski is sure to provide that quotation. 

Mention is made of Plantinga's now famous, accidental excavation of the doctrine when crafting his response to Mackie's version of the logical problem of evil (which I find puzzling a little: Zagzebski contrasts Ockhamism and Molinism - and they do seem to be conceptually distinct - but I find Plantinga using middle knowledge with the problem of evil and Ockhamism with the problem of foreknowledge and free will: looking forward to reading Christopher J. Kosciuk dissertation blending the two to see some sort of reconciliation here). 

There is new, exciting breakthrough explanations of the possibility/feasibility distinction usually only talked about in the way William Lane Craig has presented the distinction. Craig will often tell his listeners/readers to go to Thomas Flint's book (Divine Providence: The Molinist Account) to get a better, fuller investigation of the distinction, and I wonder how many people actually take Craig's advice. Flint's book is a wonderful philosophical exploration of the doctrine. You'll find very interesting meditations on the concept of feasibility, but also on a concept that Flint calls a "galaxy". I had thought that was a locution that Flint coined, but his book was published in 1998. I'll have to do some further investigation to see if Flint was using this earlier, but my point is that Zagzebski's book was published in 1991 (!) and she begins a discussion of the concept of a "galaxy" alongside what she calls "world-germs" seven years before Flint's book: and this is all in the context of fleshing out the concept of "feasibility" (she doesn't use the word "feasibility": she uses the word "realizable", which harkens back to Robert Adams). (Once again, the point is, if you're willing to dig beneath the surface a bit, you'll see an entire conceptual genealogy, with a family history, and that these concepts don't sprout out of some ahistorical void.)

To understand what a galaxy is we have to first understand what a world germ is. A world germ 

probably contains certain substances and laws and the results of any direct action by God on these substances. We need not settle just how far God's direct action goes in the creation, since the point is that whatever God does, he does not bring about a complete world. His creative activity is compatible with a great number of possible worlds, probably an infinite number of them. What makes the actual world this particular world rather than some other one compatible with what God has created is determined by both God's direct action in the world subsequent to the creation and by the free action of the creatures God has made (p. 129). 

The "results of any direct action by God" on the substances are called counterfactuals of divine freedom (there's concordance with how Plantinga uses the term "counterfactuals of divine freedom" in his Methodological Naturalism essay (1997): "Perhaps the demand for law cannot be met. Perhaps there are regularities, but no laws; perhaps there is nothing like the necessity allegedly attaching to laws. Perhaps the best way to think of these alleged laws is as universally or nearly universally quantified counterfactuals of divine freedom." Then, in footnote 11: "That is, propositions that state how God (freely) treats the things he has made, and how he would have treated them had things been relevantly different. Nearly universally quantified: if we think of them this way, we can think of miracles as going contrary to law without thinking of them (inconsistently) as exceptions to some universal and necessary proposition."). 

There "is a set of possible worlds compatible with that world-germ. Let us call each such set of worlds a galaxy" (129). She then represents this "diagrammatically":

1. world-germ 1: world w1.1, w1.2, w1.3, w1. . . . GALAXY 1
2. world-germ 2: world w2.1, w2.2, w2.3, w2. . . . GALAXY 2
3. world-germ n: world wn.1, wn.2, wn.3, wn. . . . GALAXY n

Zagzebski broaches the question: Why doesn't God actualize a world where everyone chooses the good and no one chooses evil? 

Now suppose that there are possible worlds that contain free creatures who always choose good. Why doesn't God just create those worlds? The short answer is that it is possible that there are true propositions such as the following:

(i) If God created world-germ 1, world w1.2 would be actual, (ii) If God created world-germ 2, world w2.4 would be actual, (iii) If God created world-germ 3, world w3.1 would be actual,

where in each case the world that would have resulted given God's creative activity would have been one containing evil (perhaps very great evil).

So even if, say, worlds w1.1, w2.3, and w3.2 have no evil in them, they would not result even if God did his part in bringing them about. It is not God's fault, then, that there is evil, even if there are possible worlds with free creatures and no evil. Such worlds are unrealizable (p. 130).

This is very interesting and I think critics are on the wrong methodological foot when they leap immediately into a critique here. Let's try to understand the modal point being made. We are to believe in the possibility of these counterfactuals of world actualization. Presumably, individual counterfactuals of creaturely freedom constitute (in some way) these counterfactuals of world actualization. We can incorporate the strong/weak actualization distinction in this context as well. It looks as though God strongly actualizes world-germs, along with that "determined by both God's direct action in the world subsequent to the creation", and that God softly actualizes "the free action of the creatures God has made" (p. 129) - the creature strongly actualizes their own free actions 'once they are made': the 'being made' an additional instance of strong actualization, along with their being continually conserved in existence. 

In section 1.2 (The Middle Knowledge Solution), Zagzebski admits that if Middle Knowledge is true, then it provides a way out of the Foreknowledge/Freedom dilemma, because the accidental necessity of God's infallible beliefs (distinct from logical and causal necessity) doesn't transfer to our choices (which involves denying Transfer of Necessity Principles), and so our choices remain contingent even if implied by, entailed by, or strictly equivalent to, God's infallible, past beliefs. If such necessity doesn't transfer, then saying we have power over whether or not we do something doesn't say anything about whether we have power over the truth of counterfactuals or the truth of God's past beliefs. 

In section 2 (Conditional Excluded Middle and the Asymmetry of Time), Zagzebski argues (against the theory of Middle Knowledge) that it's rational to deny that Conditional Excluded Middle applies to counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (CEM-CCF), but that since Middle Knowledge requires CEM-CCF, Middle Knowledge doesn't explain how God knows the truth of CCFs prevolitionally. If one affirms CEM-CCF, then one denies the asymmetry of past and future time. It's in this section that I completely disagree with Zagzebski here (or, at least, I should say that, based on what I've read, what she says here doesn't do anything to move me). 

Let me explain. First, Zagzebski seems to be making the same move that Gregory Boyd makes in interpreting the Counterfactual Square of Opposition (hereafter, just 'Square'). Zagzebski and Boyd seem to be saying that we should construct the Square such that might and might-not counterfactuals are not contraries (contraries are such that they can't both be true, even if they can both be false), and the reason they seem to be saying this is that they're semantically equating 'could' with 'might'. Based on this equation, since it's perfectly sensible to say that something could and could not be the case, they see conjoined might/might-not counterfactuals as perfectly legitimate. But this isn't how the counterfactual square of opposition is understood at all (1. 'might' and 'might-not' counterfactuals are contraries. 2. 'would' and 'would-not' counterfactuals are contraries. 3. 'would' is logically prior to 'might' and contradictory to 'might-not'. 4. 'would-not' is logically prior to 'might-not' and contradictory to 'might'.), and semantically equating 'coulds' and 'mights' just obfuscates things worse. 

Let's take a quick look at William Lane Craig's Question of the Week (#89), Gregory Boyd’s Neo-Molinism., and also some points made in response to Boyd in the book, Four Views on Divine Providence (2011), specifically Craig's rebuttal to Boyd's chapter, God Limits His Control. (I'll only list what I think are the relevant points, not every point)

1. Question of the Week: First, "there is an important difference between what a person can do and what he might do in any given set of circumstances." Second, "on the Molinist view would-counterfactuals logically imply might-counterfactuals, so that both are true and known to God." Third, "on the traditional semantics for counterfactual conditionals, might-counterfactuals are simply defined—contrary to their usage in ordinary language—to be the negations of would not-counterfactuals." 
2. Response to God Limits His Control: First, "Boyd proposes a reform of the English language" (this one is the most important: for the sake of brevity here, I only include this point as a thesis sentence - I'll unpack this more in response to Zagzebski). Second, "one can embrace a tensed theory of time and causal indeterminism without sacrificing the bivalence of future contingent statements". 

By my lights, these five points completely undercut some of Zagzebski's key points in her case. For example, she says: 

the openness of the future means that the totality of states of affairs in the past and present is not sufficient to determine that the future be what it is going to be. So The totality of present and past > actual future is false. That is, it is false that if the past and present were just as it is, the actual future would follow. Alternative futures might follow instead.

Here Zagzebski unjustifiably equates what might follow with what could follow and uses that equation to negate the truth of what will or would follow. That equation is supposed to justify the move that since it's perfectly sensible to say that something 'could and could not' happen, it's perfectly sensible to say that something 'might and might not' happen; and if something 'might and might not' happen, it's false that something 'would or would not' happen (since she - and Boyd, it seems - are making the 'mights' logically prior to the 'woulds', and then making 'might not' contradictory to 'would', and 'might' contradictory to 'would not'. All of this is semantically catastrophic because, while the 'could and could-not' propositions are perfectly compatible (there's nothing wrong with alternative possibilities), 'might and might-not' propositions are contraries! Therefore, they can't be doing what Zagzebski is trying to say they're doing. 

What's baffling to me is that it seems like Zagzebski is aware of all this in discussing her examples of foward-looking counterfactuals (one whose antecedent is about the past/present and the consequent is about the future). She cites Lewis/Pollock as supporting what I've been saying but then disagrees with them on the basis of her semantic equation of 'mights' and 'coulds'. Let me quote her at length here (emphasis in bold is mine): 

To take a particular example, consider the following subjunctive conditional, where the antecedent is about the actual present and past and the consequent is about the future:

(4) If I lived my life the way I have up to now (May 1988), I would be living in Chicago in 1999.

It seems to me that (4) is false. Defining the might-counterfactual in terms of the would- counterfactual, as Lewis and Pollock do, (4) is equivalent to the following.

(5) ~ (If I lived my life the way I have up to now (May 1988), I might not be living in Chicago in 1999).

But (5) is surely false, and it seems false because it seems true instead that the following:

(6) If I lived my life the way I have up to now (May 1988), I might be living in Chicago in 1999.

(7) If I lived my life the way I have up to now (May 1988), I might not be living in Chicago in 1999).

I have not proposed an account of counterfactuals in this book, but it is clear to me that there is a large class of paradigm cases of the might-counterfactual in which the antecedent is about the actual past or present and the consequent about the future. In these cases we think that both A > might B and A > might not B are true. This means that the principle of Conditional Excluded Middle (CEM), (A > B) or (A >-B), is false when A is about the actual past and present and B is about either the actual or possible future. CEM fails in these cases because one mark of the difference between the future and the past is just that the future is such that there is more than one alternative that might be the future, whereas there is only one alternative that (now) might be the past. The ordinary notion of time explained in Chapter 1, then, supports the rejection of CEM for propositions in this category.

End quote. Notice that Lewis and Pollock (and Stalnaker, by the way) support my view of the Square: the 'would' contradictory to the 'might not', and therefore, if it's true that I would do something, it's not true that I might not do something (since 'woulds' logically imply 'mights', not 'might-nots'). But Zagzebski is forced to disagree with this because it 'seems true' that some conjoined might/might-not counterfactual is true. But the only reason (that I can see) why she would think this is because she's semantically equating 'mights' with 'coulds' and 'might-nots' with 'could-nots', an equation that is semantically forbidden. This equation leads her into thinking that there is this 'large class of paradigm cases of might-counterfactuals' that just don't exist! Also, notice why she thinks this in the last bold emphasis: there is more than one alternative that might be the future. This is not true. If something S will/would be, then it's not true that S 'might not' be, even though it will continue to be true that S could and could not be. 

On the other hand, Zagzebski thinks that Molinist are correct to say that some CCFs are true. But she believes that citing examples of true CCFs isn't sufficient for demonstrating the truth/plausibility of the theory of Middle Knowledge. If "many free choices are not counterfactually implied by even the totality of the past up to the time of the choice", then "God cannot know these choices by knowing counterfactuals and his own will" (pg. 141). But the problem is that Zagzebski's entire case for thinking that many free choices are not counterfactually implied by the past up to the time of the choice is based on inferences drawn from semantic conflations. If the semantics, properly understood, forbid those conflations, then there's no such obstacle to the truth/plausibility of the theory of Middle Knowledge. Therefore, if you accept Middle Knowledge, and Middle Knowledge implies CEM, that's perfectly okay, since CEM doesn't have the consequences that Zagzebski seems to think it has. 

Conceptual Loomings

Currently drafting a response to Tyler Vela's take on Molinism. He's got a series here for anyone interested. Either I am being a pedantic rube or Vela and I have read completely different material on the subject. I'm finding myself offering (what I think are substantive) correction after correction and I'm beginning to wonder if I've misunderstood what I thought I had a pretty good handle on. Perhaps this is the nature of engaging in a controversy where each party has brought to that controversy two different, non-overlapping sets of books and essays they've read. 

Just read through the SEP article on Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will. Very good! Learned a lot. There's a rigid, logical space in this debate, and it's very interesting slowly finding its contours. I used to think I had this figured out to some extent, but (as with anything, I suppose) I have a lot to learn. I'm still undecided about whether theological fatalism reduces to logical fatalism and I'm not sure whether or not accidental necessity applies to the truth of past tense propositions or the obtainment of past events or states of affairs (a debate I didn't realize existed): the past event or state of affairs of having a belief, or (more specifically) God's having a belief. I did learn that there's a distinction between Okhamism and Molinism in terms of how they handle the foreknowledge/free-will dilemma: Okhamism thinks that the relevant accidental necessities are 'soft' facts and so counterfactually dependent on future, free will decisions; Molinism thinks that accidental necessity isn't closed under entailment. I had thought that these could go together, and, lo and behold, I found a dissertation that goes to show just that: Human Freedom in a World Full of Providence: An Ockhamist- Molinist Account of the Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Creaturely Free Will by Christopher J. Kosciuk. (I've started it today.) It has been tortuous trying to understand the semantics of counterfactuals, with David Lewis, Robert Stalnaker, and others, giving different twists (I don't pretend to fully understand them yet); also, some of the concepts are still too murky for me, so murky that I can't satisfactorily explain them yet: concepts like, forward-looking and backward-looking (sometimes called back-tracking) counterfactuals, the special and standard resolutions for vagueness for determining which worlds are more similar to the actual world than other worlds, how this plays out when you have the same past and a different present, or different pasts with the same present: there's so many knots to disentangle. The nature of the knot might be due to mistaken of interpretation on my part, which comes with the territory of reading without the presence of the author. I'll find that I think I have a handle on a concept, and then I'm met a paragraph later with a sentence that contradicts the helpful principle I conjured for myself, but which still makes sense relative to the original context in which it was conjured! I don't know. I press on. 

Started to get into the Great Courses. These are great resources. Going through one on Classical Mythology, The Peloponnesian War, The Divine Comedy, Becoming a Great Essayist, Classics of American Literature, and Philosophy of Science. 

Working my through Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Princess and the Goblin, Bleak House, 1984, Brave New World, and the Collected Essays of C.S. Lewis. I'll be working my way through the chapter on Ockham in The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge by Linda Zagzebski tomorrow morning. I find this a most satisfying alternative to binge watching TV shows on Netflix. There's a parallel, of course, but this alternative is so much more imaginatively enriching. You whisk back and forth, from this chapter in that world to another chapter in another world, from the foggy, sublimely haunted world of Transylvania (Dracula has been the most surprising to me as to how gripping the story is and how well Stoker's descriptions are crafted) to riding on board the Pequod, the foam of the sea spraying in my face, the smell of the salty ocean, with a crazed, monomaniacal Captain on his quest for revenge against the iconic, white whale. Each experience is illimitable; each transition is thrilling. I remember thinking how my imaginative experience would be spoiled if I had already seen the movie based on the books. How wrong I was! Ahab is neither Peck nor Stewart in my imagination; he is someone with qualities I've never met in the world of extra-imaginary experience. I thought this would have been especially true of Mr. Hyde, but no! His grotesqueness isn't terrifying, though I understand why it is for those in that world; it is, on the other hand, eerie, anchored as it is in a perennial existential condition that can be described with a certain degree of dread. I'm having the most trouble with Bleak House, but I think it will be good exercise to push through - the literary guides summarizing each chapter are lots of help. I'll be sure to blog my impressions as I (without rushing!) go through the books. (As an aside, I've finished Is Theology Poetry? and The Funeral of a Great Myth so far in Lewis' collected essays.) 

I've been trying to get to chapter 2 in Bright Shadow of Reality by Corbin Scott Carnell, but I've been getting interrupted. I got through a page of it but had to attend to other things. He made a claim I found peculiar though. He called Lewis' critique of 'The Personal Heresy' an 'overstated corrective' and something along the lines of Lewis not abiding by that corrective in writing his autobiography. I think Carnell completely missed the point of the corrective. It's not supposed to make it impossible to talk about oneself. It's that in 'talking about oneself', you're supposed to attend to what is being said, the Reality that the uttered propositions are about, rather than analyzing the subject behind the utterances (especially when reading those utterances in a specific, written, or spoken context). It's a delightful book so far and I can't wait to see where Carnell's exploration takes me. 

Blake Watkins and Modified Divine Command Theory

The following is a brief, meandering response to ‘Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins’, an atheist who keeps abreast of analytic philosophy of religion and profitable to follow on Twitter to get a feel for ‘the other side’, so to speak. He gave me access to a Google Doc, which is a brief summary of his views regarding his criticisms of modified divine command theory. 

MODIFIED DIVINE COMMAND THEORY

Truths about moral values are informatively identical with facts about God’s nature.

Moral truths about obligation are informatively identical with facts about God’s will or commands.

Thus, if God does not exist, then[...]

[...]nothing is morally good nor bad because there is no objective standard of goodness.

[...]there are no morally right nor wrong acts as there are no divine commands.

THE LOGICAL SPACE OF REASONS

When we characterize the property of being a wrong act, we are placing it in the logical space of reasons. Moral properties are abstract and irreducibly normative.

THE LOGICAL SPACE OF CAUSES

But when we characterize the property of being forbidden by God we are placing it in the logical space of causes. What God has willed or commanded would be concrete and non-normative properties.

ETHICAL NON-NATURALISM

These two kinds of properties could not be informatively identical because they are in different, non-overlapping categories. For the same reasons rivers cannot be identical with sonnets, moral properties cannot be identical with psychological, behavioral, or otherwise causal properties.

I think the dichotomy between reasons and causes is a good one, but I don’t think it’s doing the work it needs to do (and I think that ‘causes’ might be two unwieldy of a concept to use in this context: are all grounding relations causal relations?). I agree that ‘being a wrong act’ is in the logical space of reasons from the standpoint of Normative Ethics. That is, an action’s being wrong can serve as a reason for why I ought not to do it. But it’s a completely separate question to ask what ‘grounds’ moral truths about obligations. Grounding considerations may never figure into the normative reasons for why I ought to do something, or why I think I ought to do something, just as considerations of photons may never figure into the reasons I have for having you point your flashlight in a particular direction. Why, you ask? Because I need to see where I’m going, I answer. All this assumes light is going to help me see where I’m going. But I knew this before I found out about photons. Before I knew that photons cause/constitute/ground light, or light’s appearance, or light’s effects in terms of increased visibility, I knew that having your flashlight pointed in the desired direction helped me see where I was going. The ‘reason’ had nothing to do with photons. These two logical spaces would exclude each other only if they operated at the same level of description. But they don’t. 

Here’s another way to say it. The Morning Star has the property ‘rising in the morning but not the evening’ and ‘being Phosphorus in Greek Mythology’. Venus has the property of ‘rising in the morning and also in the evening.’ and ‘not being Phosphorus in Greek Mythology’. The former is in the logical space of Mythology and the latter is in the logical space of Astronomy. But these two logical spaces don’t exclude each other because they operate on two varying, non-exclusionary levels of description. Not only that, but unbeknownst to the ancient Greeks, the astronomical object later discovered to be Venus, an object that’s also Hesperus, ‘grounds’ the existence of their phenomenal experience of Phosphorus, the means by which they conceived of the mythological being. 

In any case of ‘informative identity’ I can think of, the two things being identified are going to have different properties relative to a level of description. Clark Kent is a terrible investigative journalist; Superman is a Herculean kryptonian. Bruce Wayne is a narcissistic, billionaire playboy; Batman is a martial artist who is also a criminal detective. Phosphorus is the son of Astraeus and Eos (per Hesiod); Venus is the third planet from the Sun. The Good is a concrete particular, a Person that falls under the description ‘perfectly good being’; the predicate ‘is good’ (in the moral sense) is ascribed to persons that are appropriately approximated to virtues The Good has to a maximal degree; the normative reason ‘because it is good’ can be used by moral agents as a normative reason for thinking a particular moral proposition is true or false, or for thinking that a particular morally relevant state of affairs is objectively good, or for thinking that undertaking a morally relevant course of action is morally justified. All these logical spaces (metaphysical, semantic, and normative) pick out varying, non-exclusionary levels of description of some informatively identical object. They are non-exclusionary because the semantic and the normative spaces (per the theory) are grounded by the metaphysical space. It being a case of ‘informative identity’ means moral agents can use the semantic and the normative spaces without even knowing about the metaphysical space, just like I can use ‘illumination-speech-acts’ without knowing about the ‘physics-speech-acts’ regarding photons. Informative identity always uses two, non-exclusionary ‘logical spaces’ at different levels of description.  

THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY

When we are characterizing a moral truth we are giving neither a causal nor empirical description of it. Instead, we are placing it in the logical space of reasons i.e. justifying how one thinks or acts by reason. The idea that moral facts can be analyzed without remainder, even in principle, into non-normative facts such as psychological, behavioral, or otherwise causal facts is a radical mistake. Any attempt to reduce the logical space of reasons to the logical space of causes will commit the naturalistic fallacy.

The naturalistic fallacy (per Moore) is a fallacy that’s guilty of identifying a non-natural property with a natural one. Naturalness and normativity are two different things. Ethical non-naturalism is a position that can be held by Robert Adams or an atheist like Eric Wielenberg or Michael Heumer. Adams does not identify a non-natural property with a natural one. God is non-natural! An Alstonian particularist takes the structure of Plato’s metaethics and substitutes a Person in for the Form of The Good, making the Person The Good. All of this is axiological through and through. Interestingly, Plato’s Form of The Good had causal powers! The non-normative facts listed above are only non-normative when they refer to finite, imperfect moral agents or states in those agents, not when they refer to an infinite, perfect being, The Good Himself. The target of this criticism is wide of the mark. Moreover, it’s false to say that the two noted, non-exclusionary sets of descriptions can be ‘reduced’ to each other. They can’t. That’s not the nature of their non-exclusionary status. Levels of description are semantically irreducible, even if metaphysically reducible. How moral agents unpack what they mean by the predicate ‘is good’, or what moral agents do when they morally deliberate about courses of action they deem themselves to have morally sufficient reasons to undertake, may make no reference to, or may be completely oblivious of, what these levels of description are informatively identical to, metaphysically speaking. Light is informatively identical to photons; what I mean by ‘light’ may be semantically irreducible to what I would mean by ‘photons’ even if perhaps I don’t know that photons exist, or even if I’d confess (after I found out that they exist) that what the physicists mean by ‘photon’ isn’t what I mean by ‘light’. Frege’s distinction between sense and reference is indispensable to me. 

Randal Rouser, Trump, and William Lane Craig (second draft)

[As a confession, this is the second draft of my response to Randal Rauser. My first draft was written in the wrong spirit and was more of a disrespectful screed than a levelheaded criticism. Rauser indirectly brought this to my attention by noting the ‘inflammatory’ and ‘insulting’ nature of the blog. After considering this criticism, I took down the entire blog. Rauser responded in good spirits by encouraging me that taking down the entire blog wasn’t necessary, that I only needed to edit out the inflammatory parts, which seemed to be a good call. If my entire ethos has been harmed to some (or all), I can only blame myself; but here goes what I hope to be mostly logos with some pathos sprinkled on top.]

This is a response to a (to my eyes) cynical take by Christian apologist and writer Randal Rauser on his blog regarding the politics of William Lane Craig. Up front I should inform the reader that I voted for Donald Trump twice, I consider myself a Christian, and that my politics are probably diametrically opposed to Rauser’s. This will be born out by Rauser’s choice of sources, the perspective he takes on the political issues he raises, and a seeming failure to appreciate the fact that good, practicing Christians can take more than one perspective on a certain subset of issues - another sort of meta-debate to be had here (and a theme that will come up a lot below) is the debate about what criteria determines which issues are non-negotiable for Christians qua Christians and which are not. 

[I guess I should add that I really like Rauser's perspective when it comes to apologetics. He has good stuff when he talks about his theory of inspiration. - edit: Rauser’s reaction to my first screed was actually very measured and spiritual mature, which bespeakes a cultivated character . . . ]

Rauser's Two-Point Critique of Craig

Rauser's blog is a two-point response to this transcription of Craig's ReasonFaith Podcast:

And he’s also, I think, inaccurately characterizing me. I have never endorsed Donald Trump or Republicanism. I have tried to stay out of politics except when it concerns an issue of ethical importance. I am unabashedly pro-life, for example, and in favor of heterosexual marriage because I think those are biblical values and ethical issues that Christians need to stand for. But I stay out of politics and the sorts of things that Randal is talking about there. I don’t even regard those things that he had on his list there as being relevant to my task.

Before I get to Rauser’s ‘two-point critique’, let me unpack what I think this quote means. When Craig says he never endorsed Trump or Repulicanism, I’m taking it as axiomatic that Craig is telling the truth and that there’s nothing nefarious lurking beneath the surface. In other words, this confession is, for me, part of my ‘evidence-base’, that subset of my epistemic priors that’ll be used to assess everything that comes after. In order to convince me otherwise, Rauser will need to bring up evidence otherwise, or present an argument against the adequacy of my entire approach. 

The third sentence here - to me - is a general statement whose precise meaning is fleshed out more in the fourth sentence. It generality lies in the potential ambiguity of the phrase ‘issue of ethical importance’. Making it the main, clear, unambiguous sentence by which to interpret the rest leads Rauser to bring up a series of other ‘issues of ethical importance’ and complain about Craig’s silence about these matters. But, for me, I interpret the phrase in light of the fourth sentence, specifically, the part where Craig provides a reason for why he considers being pro-life and for heterosexual marriage are ‘issues of ethical importance’: ‘ethical issues that Christians need to stand for’. This puts a new light on the phrase. It says that Craig isn’t only talking about issues of ethical importance generally; he is talking about those issues of ethical importance for which we, just by virtue of being a Christian, ‘need to stand for’. This presupposes a distinction between those issues of ethical importance for which good, consistent, practicing Christians can disagree about and those issues of ethical importance for which good, consistent, practicing Christians cannot disagree about. 

This may be the crux of the disagreement I have with Rauser. I think I can make a case for the fact that all the ‘issues of ethical importance’ Rauser lists are issues about which good, consistent, practicing Christians can disagree, whereas Rauser sees these issues as ones about which Christians cannot disagree. Unfortunately, it’ll be impossible for me to unpack all the reasons I have for thinking that Rauser’s list of issues fall into the former category, reasons that will be completely insufficient to convince Rauser. But hopefully Rauser can see that there is another interpretive framework through which to see the interrelationship this distinction has to the issues Craig brings up, the issues he brings up, and why those issues are brought up in the context they’re brought up in, rather than other issues. 

The last sentence supports my case. When Craig says that the things on ‘his’ (Rauser’s) list aren’t ‘relevant to my task’, my interpretation of Craig seems to fit perfectly. What is relevant to Craig’s task and what is this task? Well, it seems that part of what’s relevant to Craig’s task is to make a stand for Biblical values and ethical issues we need to stand for, just by virtue of being a Christian (meaning, not by virtue of being a member of a political party). But there is an indirect catch. It doesn’t seem inconceivable to think that there are ethical issues endorsed by one or another political party that may overlap contingently with those ‘issues of ethical importance’ that are non-negotiable for Christians, issues about which good, practicing, consistent Christians cannot disagree. It’s at this contingent overlap that Rauser will begin to speculate about underlying, non-obvious connections to the party affiliations of the ReasonableFaith ministry, threatening the ministry’s guidelines for legally remaining tax-exempt, a speculation I personally found distasteful and based on overreaching generalizations from an insufficient evidence-base.  

So, reader, this is where I’m coming from. In light of all of this, let’s see Rauser's two-point critique. 

1. Rauser's First Point: Issues of Ethical Importance

So, let me start quoting Rauser from his blog and comment briefly. Bold is mine. 

Craig says that he only involves himself in politics when it concern issues of “ethical importance.” He then gives two examples: a pro-life stance and an, er, “pro heterosexual marriage” stance. While I’m admittedly not entirely sure what the latter is supposed to mean, I assume that is a roundabout way of saying that Craig doesn’t think same-sex marital unions should be recognized by the state. Those are the examples of issues that Craig thinks are of “ethical importance” such that they warrant a Christian apologist to speak out. 

Rauser misinterprets what Craig meant by the qualification ‘Christians need to stand for’. Rauser takes this to mean ‘such that they warrant a Christian apologist to speak out’. I did not interpret it this way and I don’t think there’s warrant to opt for this interpretation. What Craig seems to mean (for me) by ‘Christians need to stand for’ is this: there are certain non-negotiable issues of ethical importance that good, practicing, consistent Christians cannot disagree about. He’s not specifically talking about Christian apologists here, or ‘the warrant’ an ethical issue might provide such an apologist to ‘speak out’. Craig is making a general qualification that applies to all Christians, a qualification that applies to Craig, not insofar as he is an apologist, but insofar as he is a Christian. Perhaps Rauser meant to emphasize ‘Christian’ rather than ‘apologist’, but no such emphasis was provided. If my interpretation is correct, we can bring in the distinction I mentioned above to explain why Craig opted for the two issues of ethical importance he chose to mention. 

As for what Craig means when he stands by heterosexual marriage, we’d have to ask him. Rauser’s interpretation is probably close to the truth. 

With all of this in mind, we can see why Rauser is so confused at this point. My explanation is that Rauser has launched into his critique based upon a faulty interpretation of what Craig meant, where Craig’s meaning has the distinction I mentioned. 

Rauser says: 

But what about public, not-for-profit healthcare that guarantees medical coverage to the least of these? Isn’t that an ethical issue? What about gun control? Surely that is an ethical issue, isn’t it? What about climate change and environmental laws to protect ecosystems including vulnerable animal and human populations? Isn’t that ethical? What about a program like DACA that would allow children of some illegal immigrants to have a path to citizenship? Isn’t that an ethical issue? What about a living wage and the growing chasm between the uber-rich and everyone else? Isn’t that an ethical issue? Why, of all the possible issues Craig could talk about, does he only opine on abortion and, um, “heterosexual marriage”?

The explanation I provide seems to answer that final question there. It explains why Craig mentioned the two issues he did. Not only were they issues of ethical importance, they were non-negotiable issues of ethical importance about which good, practicing, consistent Christians cannot disagree. There are more issues, of course, But these two issues have contingent overlap with politics and are hot-button issues that polarize along party lines. Remember, Craig tries to ‘stay out of politics’ except insofar as his non-negotiable Christian principles contingently overlap with politics (for which ‘Christians need to stand for’), not by virtue of party affiliation, but by virtue of Christian conviction, which conviction may or may not overlap with the ever-shifting views of political parties. 

I’m not sure what Rauser means when he inserts ‘um’ prior to the issue of heterosexual marraige. I can only speculate that he disagrees here? If so, then Craig-types and Rauser-types need to supplement that debate with another debate about whether being for or against this issue is one of the non-negotiables. I believe it is. 

The explanation also undermines any concern Rauser may have about ‘Craig’s apologetic’. 

This brings me back to my concern about Craig’s apologetic. When skeptics of Christianity rightly recognize the enormous ethical import of issues like gun control, climate change, wealth inequality, and refugees, and they see that none of these issues are of sufficient concern that they warrant a mention from Craig, when they see, rather, that the two issues he mentions here are abortion and “heterosexual marriage,” that speaks volumes. It speaks about an impoverished moral vision, one tied to partisan party politics. And that effectively weakens the force of Craig’s apologetic overall.

For all we know, Craig (as a private, American, concerned, politically-conscious citizen) has a view about all the issues of ‘ethical import’ Rauser mentions. When Rauser uses the phrases ‘issues of sufficient concern’ and ‘warrant a mention from Craig’, one wonders, ‘what kinds of issues of sufficient concern?’, ‘sufficient relative to what?’, ‘concern for whom?’, ‘warrant relative to what?’, ‘mention from Craig qua concerned American citizen, Christian apologist, or Christian simpliciter?’. The first question needs to be answered in terms of the distinction above, the second question needs to be specified in light of that distinction (Craig may find such issues as sufficient concern in another context of discussion, a discussion where explicit political stances can be confessed and argued about openly and consistently, outside the purpose/scope of ReasonableFaith ministries), the third question is cleared up by the distinction (Craig qua American citizen or Craig qua Christian or Craig qua Christian apologist ‘outside’ the purpose/scope of RF ministries or Craig qua Christian apologist ‘inside’ such a purpose/scope), and so applies directly to the fourth. 

Without any of these nuances in mind, as explained by the distinction, you’ll have an impoverished perspective on Craig’s blurb. My interpretation explains why Craig said the issues he did, didn’t mention any of the issues Rauser is wondering about, and why mentioning the two that Craig did doesn’t imply ‘an impoverished moral vision’ ‘tied to partisan politics’, an implication that is just unfounded to me. If there is incidental, contingent overlap between the two issues and party politics, you shouldn’t understand this relationship as some kind of tethering or rigid designation. It’s completely accidental. To read into this relationship anything nefarious or surreptitious is unwarranted. And there’s no warrant for thinking that Craig has an impoverished moral vision. Rauser is conceptually plucking Craig as understood in a certain capacity in a certain context, generalizing to Craig as a whole, and faulting Craig as a whole for not living up to standards that only apply if Craig is understood in a different capacity.  

At this point, and on the basis of his erroneous interpretation, Rausal will now begin to bring up specific political issues of ethical importance from a particular political perspective such that if you take that perspective, then the moral outrage, the condemnatory adjectives, the cartoonishly evil descriptions of the political policies, and their horrific and tragic consequences are all brought into descriptive relief. 

Consider one of the most wicked and vicious policies of the Trump era. Beginning in April 2018, the Trump administration instituted a new family separation policy to deter new refugee claimants. According to this policy, children (even infants) would be separated from their parents and placed in shelters while the parents waited in detention facilities for their claims to be processed. The purpose of this policy was to deter future refugee claimants with the threat that they would lose their children. The policy resulted in hundreds of children being separated from parents for months and even years. As of May 2021, the Biden administration was still working to reunite children that had been separated from their parents by the Trump administration.

In my first draft, I briefly (too briefly) weighed into (for better or worse) what a politically conservative perspective might be on this issue, but I now see that this would distract me. All it would do is open a series of mini-debates on particular political issues of ethical importance. But that would almost play by the rules of the game as Rauser has set it up. All I think I need to do here is make an overall dialectical point. If Craig (again, we’d have to ask him) agrees with Rauser, he’ll agree with his analysis, description, and moral outrage here. As for myself, I disagree with his analysis, would give a different description, and so any moral outrage I have will be directed elsewhere. But I want to ask a different question, a question that I think lies at (or near) the heart of political discourse in this country. What do we think of the people that disagree with us on political issues of ethical importance? 

In answering that question, I find myself disagreeing with Rauser’s approach here. His approach disagrees with the distinction I had above by collapsing it into a whole array of non-negotiable political issues of ethical importance about which Christians cannot disagree. When you collapse it this way, it’s also important to notice another distinction just in case one of the issues Rauser does raise happens to be a non-negotiable within the context of not collapsing my distinction: that between understanding your moral outrage as you’ve described an issue and disagreeing with the way in which you’ve described an issue, or, understanding your moral outrage on the basis of the cogency of your analysis and disagreeing with the cogency of your analysis.  

If I disagree with the cogency of your analysis or the accuracy of your description, then, other things being equal, this isn’t necessarily because of some moral defect on my part. If it is, this will have to come out later and on other grounds. At the outset, all we have here are two parties disagreeing in good faith, both parties thinking that they’re reasoning successfully from Christian, or at least moral, principles. Now, if you're reasoning from Christian/moral principles, that assumes both parties have Christian/moral principles. If both parties have Christian/moral principles, then both parties are arguing about an issue for which Christians can disagree. People on both sides can believe that good, practicing, consistent Christians are on the other side. 

But this introduces a point about debate etiquette. I submit that it’s a point of etiquette, in this context, to not provide an analysis or a description without admitting your political biases up front, and to not express moral outrage without first making explicit that the moral legitimacy of such an outrage (in any particular case) is tied to whether or not someone sees the cogency of your analysis and the accuracy of your description. This prevents you from looking wide-eyed at your political opposition as an object of harsh moral opprobrium if they don’t agree with your descriptions and/or analysis. It prevents me from saying something like, “If you don’t agree with my take on Trump’s border policy, you are a bad person or morally blind or what have you.” 

So, to circle back to my question about what we should think about people that disagree with us on political issues of ethical importance, Rauser is doing something that isn’t maximally profitable here. In opening up a can of worms (Trump’s border policy), he’s positioning Craig (and people like myself) into an unfair position. He’s luring Craig into what is most certainly going to turn into an interminable debate about the pros and cons of the policy specifically, the accuracy/cogency of Rauser’s description/analysis, the accuracy/cogency of some counter-description/counter-analysis, and all the while, there will be this unmentioned, but weird feeling in the back of the minds of people on both sides of the issue that one’s opposition on an issue means that the opposition is morally defective in some way. All of this is a bad way to begin to talk about these types of issues.  

Let’s be clear about something: torture is the punitive infliction of severe physical and/or psychological/emotional suffering. When the Trump administration separated parents from their children for crossing the border and claiming refugee status, they were engaged in a policy of psychological and emotional torture. When my daughter was four years old, she went missing for 45 minutes. I still tear up recalling the anguish I experienced at that time. Now try to imagine what it would be like to have your four-year-old taken away and you are not reunited for months or years. That was a policy of the Trump administration. It was a wicked, cruel policy that violated international law.

This illustrates some of the points I made above very well. All good, practicing, consistent Christians can agree on the definition of torture Rauser provides (even though words like ‘severe’ and ‘suffering’ need to be finessed more). This seems to be a bedrock concept on which moral axioms or principles, parts of the Toa C.S. Lewis talks about in The Abolition of Man, can be understood, axioms like ‘you ought not torture’ or ‘you ought not to inflict morally abhorrent suffering’, and such like. And, indeed, if Trump separated kids from their parents claiming refugee status, and they really were refugees, then, other things being equal, I might agree that Trump’s policy involved torture, making the policy and Trump immoral. That is, if Rauser’s description and analysis are correct, or - at the very lease - if I agree with it, then, other things being equal, I ought to agree that the policy and anyone supporting the policy (knowing it involves torture) are immoral. 

The problem is that Rauser’s opposition aren’t going to understand the situation strictly in these terms. Thus, Rauser’s opposition can agree with the parts of the Toa Rauser points out, but disagree with the way he applies those parts to the issue of ethical importance under discussion. At this stage, there needs to be a space where issues can be discussed and debated in good faith without framing things in such a way that you paint all opposition in a way that makes them immoral just by virtue of their disagreement. I’ll return this favor to Rauser himself. Though I think his description is off, his analysis flawed, and therefore his moral outrage misguided, I don’t think this makes Rauser a bad person at all. He is a principled person courageously standing by what he thinks to be bedrock morally non-negotiable, Christian positions in politics. I also think some positions can be debated and argued about without casting the opposition in terms that make them immoral just because they disagree. 

More could be said but I think that should suffice. Let’s move on to Rauser’s second point. 

2. Craig's non-support for Trump/Republican party

Rauser starts off: 

There’s an old saying: don’t spit on my boots and tell me it’s raining. I thought of that when I heard Craig say “I have never endorsed Donald Trump or Republicanism.” For Exhibit A, I would invite folks to listen to the May 31, 2020 episode of Reasonable Faith titled “Will there be a backlash against evangelicals?” in which Craig addresses the evangelical support for Trump and the Republican party. Keep in mind, this podcast was released during the election season and I think it can fairly be described as an extended apologetic for Donald Trump and the GOP.

It’s tricky basing your thesis on insinuation so let us see if it fares well. I confess I didn’t understand what this ‘old saying’ meant. I Googled it and landed here. I’ll leave it to the reader to determine if these quotes accurately capture the cliche’s meaning, but both quotes reveal that Rauser seems to be accusing Craig of lying, a claim that is extremely hard to believe, a claim that needs to meet a hefty burden of proof, a claim that shouldn’t even be insinuated if you aren’t absolutely certain of what you’re talking about, or if you don’t have evidence that all but makes your conclusion nearly unassailable, all of which I don’t think Rauser can deliver on. Here are the quotes interpreting the meaning of the cliche: 

Quote 1: “​​It suggests that the person you're upset with is harming you, making an unbelievably brazen claim that they are not, and that you have seen through their meagre attempt at deception.”

This suggests that Craig is engaged in deception, harming Rauser, and making brazen claims. 

Quote 2: “The nuance of the expression is that something bad is being presented as something good, and the speaker is aware of this. – The Raven Jul 21 '11 at 13:11”. 

This suggests that Craig is presenting something bad as being good, and that Craig is ‘aware of this’, insinuating again that Craig is maliciously lying about something.

I must confess that when I first read these insinuations I got angry. I’ve met Craig, sat under Craig in three classes for graduate school, went out to eat with him and his wife with all the students, talked with him privately, followed him for the better part of two decades, and when I hear accusations like this leveled at someone I respect, this makes me angry, which lead to the first draft of this blog, a draft that lashed out - wrongly, of course. 

So, what evidence does Rauser have that Craig is intentionally lying to his audience, what unbelievably brazen claim is Craig making, how is Craig engaging in meager attempts at deception, what is Craig presenting that Craig knows is bad but presents as good? The claim is that you should vote for Donald Trump and support the GOP and Rauser’s evidence for this claim is that the ReasonableFaith podcast from which the above transcription was lifted ‘. . . can fairly be described as an extended apologetic for Donald Trump and the GOP.’

For me, this evidence is highly dubious and ambiguous. Rauser’s use of ‘can fairly be described’ and ‘extended apologetic’ have to take on meanings so narrow that any other interpretation is off the rails. To see this point, we have to assess Rauser’s evidence for why he thinks we can ‘fairly describe’ the podcast this way. He begins by almost paraphrasing his original thesis: 

Nonetheless, throughout the podcast episode, Craig provides a robust defense for Trump and his unflagging evangelical support. Craig says that Trump is pro-life, against gay marriage (our two big-ticket ethical topics) and he supports conservative Supreme Court justices and allegedly stands for religious freedom around the world.

The second sentence is nearly synonymous with the ‘extended apologetic’ sentence above, so it can’t be used as evidence of the latter, but Rauser does mention Trump’s policy positions on Craig’s ‘two big-ticket ethical topics’ (with the added conceptual nuance I brought to your attention above), the Supreme Court justices, and religious freedom around the world. Fair enough. The problem is that merely mentioning these policy positions in no way implies that Craig is providing an extended apologetic for Donald Trump and the GOP, that it can be fairly described as such, or that Craig provides a robust defense for Trump, or a robust defense for why evangelicals should give Trump and the GOP their unflagging support. That’s one interpretation, for sure, one competing explanation for why Craig’s podcast has the content it has, but it definitely is not the only explanation or the only interpretation. 

An alternative interpretation - based on the idea that Craig is not lying or deceiving us - is that Craig is providing an explanation for why ‘evangelicals by-and-large support’ Trump. This is where things can go in wildly different directions depending on whether you think Craig is lying. Since I don’t think Craig is lying, I think there’s huge difference between providing an explanation for something (which may involve a rehearsal of the apologetics used by individuals or groups for why they believe you should do something, or why they support something) and providing a robust defense of/extended apologetic for supporting Trump/GOP. Not only are these conceptually distinct, they have entirely different purposes. The first is to merely inform you about why some phenomenon is probably the case (which may involve a description of the arguments individuals/groups use to justify their actions); the second is to persuade/convince you of something. It’s entirely plausible to suggest that (on the supposition that Craig is not lying) Craig is doing the former through the duration of the podcast, not the latter, which perfectly explains Keven Harris’ question before Craig launches into this supposedly ‘extended apologetic’: ‘Why do you think it is that evangelicals by-and-large really do support him?’, he asks. This is a perfect example of an opportunity to explain why some phenomenon is probably the case. Craig does not launch into an apologetic himself, and because of the framing of Harris’ question, I do not think it is fair description to call what Craig is doing an extended apologetic for Trump or a robust defence of Trump, which is in an entirely different domain of discourse, and which is based on the, as yet, dubious proposition that Craig is a secret Trump supporter surreptitiously dog whistling to his audience that they should vote for Trump, in other words, that Craig is deceiving them, or, at the very least, deceitfully saying one thing on a surface level but saying something else under the surface. 

A possible explanation for why Rauser opts for the incorrect, uncharitable interpretation is that Rauser is so exercised by what he believes are the unadulterated evils that Trump is so clearly guilty of (which, if you don’t see them, you’re either morally blind or morally egregious yourself) that the mere observation of reasons folks might justifiably have for voting for Trump triggers in his mind the absolute outlandish supposition that there ever can be any such reasons at all, that such reasons could ever convince anyone claiming to be a Christian, and that the presentation of such reasons in any context whatsoever automatically means the presenter is engaging in deceitful polemics on behalf of, or in support of, Trump/GOP. In other words, the mere observation of such reasons in any context whatsoever - even a context of explanation of phenomenon - implies, or plausibly suggests, that whoever has the gull to search for these reasons to provide them in any mode of presentation is itself guilty of platforming what any rationally moral person could see as justification for unadulterated evil, similar to perhaps a fair rehearsal of the reasons bone-headed historians might have for suggesting that the Holocaust didn’t happen.

The Holocaust-example is an apt one. What are we to make of a historian who seeks to explain the phenomenon of why there are Holocaust deniers? In one kind of context of presentation, such a historian may provide the utterly bogus reasons such deniers marshal to justify their case for why the Holocaust didn’t happen. This would be a context wherein the historian is providing an interpretative framework for understanding why some looney subgroup believes the way they do. But it in no way follows that the historian is, therefore, providing an extended apologetic of, or a robust defense for, the Holocaust. However, it would explain why someone who survived the Holocaust, or someone who was a close relative of someone who had survived, or lost someone to, the Holocaust, may read this historian’s exposition (of why a subgroup believes the way they do) and invalidly infer that the historian secretly believes the Holocaust didn’t happen, since these types of people (survivors) are so scarred by what this horrific event is (or what it had done to them personally), that to platform, in any way, any reasons, in any context, to any purpose (even the purpose of historical exposition), plausibly suggests to them that the historian is, on some level, conscious or unconscious, sympathetic to such reasons, displaying too charitable a take on what should be unequivocally condemned, giving to such deniers too much of a semblance of possible rationality in relation to denying one of the worst events of human history. And, therefore, it would explain the extremely easy conflation of someone explaining why something is the case for other people and defending something herself as to why something should be the case.   

I believe this kind of explanation applies to Rauser himself, or anyone of his type, who has an absolute disgust, justified or otherwise, for what they are convinced of as Trump’s evils and the selling out of the GOP’s soul in support of him. Rauser acts out, and writes, in perfect consistency from his ethical convictions, or what he believes are valid inferences therefrom, thus applying such convictions and inferences to ethical instances of Trump’s moral shortcomings, in word, deed, and character. 

I, and perhaps Craig, would not make the conflation that Rauser is making here, and would not base the claim that Craig is engaged in deception on the basis of this conflation. I believe there is a distinct conceptual difference between providing an explanation of a phenomenon (which involves rehearsing reasons descriptively) and personally endorsing those reasons for the purposes of persuasion. Of course, one is still attempting to persuade someone in the context of explanation for phenomena, but it’s going on on a completely different level, the level of explaining the existence of the phenomenon on the basis of the reasons, not an endorsement of the reasons with the purpose of persuading you to believe as the persons described in the phenomenon believe. 

So, Rauser is missing the overall point when he begins to list what he deems are unassailable reasons why Trump is horrid. I’ll quote this section in full because I think the following is just ‘variations on a theme’: 

Never mind his defense and praise of dictators (e.g. Putin, Duterte, Xi Jinping), his defense of his good friend MBS who ordered the killing and dismemberment of a US-based journalist, his determined attempts to subvert democratic elections, his demonization of Muslims and defense of white supremacists.

No wait, I’m going to stop myself. If I start enumerating all the examples of how horrible Donald Trump was and what an amoral decrepit shell the GOP that supports him has become, we’ll be here all day. (Side note: the GOP has a handful of morally courageous politicians like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney: may their tribe increase.)

Instead, I’ll simply note that a recent C-Span survey of US historians ranks Trump as the fourth worst president in US history. And there are many reasons that Trump’s reputation is not likely to improve in the future including the following:

• the SDNY investigation of the Trump organization beginning with the tax fraud scheme involving CFO Allen Weisselberg; 

• the multitude of lawsuits against Trump including the Summer Zervos and E. Jean Carroll defamation suits regarding Trump’s denial of sexual assault allegations; 

• the investigation of the Capitol insurrection; 

• Trump’s increasingly erratic, vile, and despicable comments, such as his recent statement that he is “the greatest star maker of all time” but that some of his stars “are actually made of garbage” (source); 

• further shocking accounts of Trump’s utter ineptitude, ignorance, and volatility during his presidency such as the books published just this past week outlining such gems as his praise for Hitler, his desire that John Bolton would die of COVID, and the concern of General Mark Milley that Trump would attempt to use the military in a coup. 

First, let me say that none of these instances actually goes to what Craig was attempting to do in his podcast. Craig was attempting to explain the existence of a particular phenomenon, the phenomenon of why evangelicals support Trump/GOP. Rauser’s list of reasons for why Trump is horrid don’t do anything to explain this. If he thinks they do explain it - which is scary - that would imply that it’s probably the case that the majority of evangelicals voted for Trump because of the reasons Rauser listed, which is sheer midsummer madness. Thus, Rauser can’t fault Craig for not mentioning these reasons since these reasons don’t figure into an explanation of the phenomenon that Harris asked about. 

But again, it would be unwise of me to begin to address these instances, one-by-one, as it would just commence an interminable debate with both sides walking away exasperated and unmoved. It suffices to say that there is, in existence, a debate about Rauser’s interpretation of these instances, with the conservatives (by and large) taking one side, and liberals taking another. It is important to note that the degree to which one side is convinced of their interpretation may overlap with the degree to which that side thinks the other side is being dishonest or guilty of rank ignorance. But this is a phenomenon that can happen in the context of any heated quarrel. One of the main problems in political discourse today (of which I’ve been guilty of myself as evidenced by my first draft) is that we don’t talk to each other in good faith anymore. We’ve allowed the already high temperature in the room to justify ourselves turning up the temperature even more or fighting fire with fire, meeting the intensity of what one sees as an evil and fighting it with an equal or disportionate intensity of passion motivated by intentions to quash that evil as ruthlessly and as quickly as possible. 

With the evangelicals that support Trump, my guess is they might do a couple general things with these instances, or any possible instances that Rauser may bring up (this is off the top of my head and by no means exhaustive). They might enter into debate with Rauser about his interpretation. They might list out what they believe are more egregious instances involved with voting for democrats that make voting the other way, or for a third party, more egregious. They might accept Rauser’s list of instances but think that the good outweighs the bad in terms of their support, tentative or otherwise. Now, Rauser may disagree with the entire case of such evangelicals, in any context where instances are discussed, and think the people that are convinced by such a case are looney or morally bankrupt. But the point is that the people themselves don’t think this, that they sincerely believe what they believe, and interpret themselves as acting in accordance with conscience, acting in accordance with Christian principles. What are such evangelicals to do? Vote contrary to their conscience? I find the contrary hypothesis, that they’re lying or moral idiots, way more outlandish than the hypothesis that these are good people, convinced in their hearts and minds about what they think is the moral thing to do, and that they have authentic convictions in their hearts about what they think is good and right that doesn’t make them moral idiots.  

It isn’t surprising why Rauser concludes his blog the way he does. If Craig is lying, if Craig is being deceitful in the podcast, then there is no distinction between (1) presenting explanations for why reasons are endorsed by a group to motivate belief in something for the purpose of description and (2) endorsing the reasons yourself to persuade someone to believe what the reasons suggest. Rauser’s conflation of the two explains why he thinks Craig’s ministry violated the conditions for its tax-exempt status:

William Lane Craig may say that he doesn’t support Trump and the Republican Party. But that appears merely to be a perfunctory attempt to retain the tax-exempt status of his 501(c)(3) organization. Craig’s defense of Trump and the GOP in his May 31, 2020 podcast clearly illustrates practical support for Trump, even if it is technically not recognized as such by the IRS. With Trump already ranked the fourth worst president in US history by historians and with his horrid reputation all but certain to spiral further into the future, we can offer the following conclusion: Craig’s practical support for the man has greatly damaged his apologetic with a skeptical, and morally incensed generation who are appalled by the legacy of the narcissist-in-chief and the evangelical support he has received.

This makes perfect sense only if we already have good reason to think that Craig is being deceitful, but we don’t have good reasons, at least, to me. But it does explain why Rauser believes as he does in this case, which illustrates my point above: if I attempt to explain why Rauser finds Trump horrid, my listing of his reasons for Trump’s evils doesn’t imply that I endorse those reasons myself, or that I’m appropriating those reasons in order to convince or persuade you to despise Trump, or that I’m offering ‘practical support’ for Rauser’s views on Trump, or that I’ve offering a robust apologetic for, or extended defense of, Rauser’s views on Trump. This is the main point. You could only think that if I was being deceitful, if I was being ‘perfunctory’ in my disbelief in whatever Rauser’s reasons are attempting to suggest. If this doesn’t follow as it relates to my explanation for Rauser’s denunciations, then it doesn’t follow with Craig’s explanation for evangelical support for Trump. 

Oh, one more thing. At the bottom of the Reasonable Faith website, we read this: “Website design and development by Parscale Digital.“ In case you were wondering, that’s the same Brad Parscale that worked for the Trump campaign. The statement includes a link to the website for Parscale Strategy which features the following quote: “‘[Parscale] absolutely has the Trump campaign on a much more advanced digital footing than I think any other presidential campaign in history.’ Politico.” That aged well, didn’t it?

But more to the point: of all the possible web developers in the country that one could use, why would Reasonable Faith employ the services of Brad Parscale?

Of course, we can only speculate until we ask Craig himself, but in the meantime, let’s speculate and see how our epistemic priors color the data. In this case, so far as I can see, this is another example of Rauser interpreting a piece of data through an interpretive lens that we’ve seen to be groundless: there’s no reason to think that Craig is being deceitful, that Craig has offered practical support of Trump in the relevant sense, that Craig has provided an extended apologetic or robust defense of Trump, that Craig's denials to that effect are ‘perfunctory’, or any of that. There seemed to be a lot of assumption, posturing, and grandstanding. 

So, let’s look at it another way. If Craig isn’t lying or being perfunctory, what explains why Brad Parscale is the web designer and developer of the Reasonable Faith website? It’s probable that a substantial demographic of Reasonable Faith viewers are Christian theists, and it’s probable that a substantial demographic of Christian theists are Republican in their politics. It’s probable that of those Republican Christian theists, one of them happened to work for the Trump campaign in 2016. It’s also probable, for all we know, that Parscale reached out to RF ministries to offer his services (we’ll have to ask). But even if he didn’t and they reached out to him, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that what motivated RF ministries to reach out to him was that he was a good web designer/developer, that RF ministries was informed of his skills by someone, that Parscale was probably within earshot of RF-ministries’ reach in terms of possible contacts via that ‘someone’ (due to Parscale’s image as being conservative in his politics, Republican, that he also offered his services to, or was hired by, the Trump campaign, a Republican campaign, a campaign standing up for those non-negotiable principles mentioned above, etc). Who knows? Again, we’ll have to ask Craig. The point is that there is absolutely no reason to think that Craig secretly supports Trump, that he makes perfunctory statements about his non-support for Trump to not violate his tax-exempt status, on the basis of hiring Parscale in his capacity as the website’s web designer/developer for goodness sakes. There’s just no necessary or probable connection established at all. It’s all suggestion, innuendo, and insinuation. Hiring someone who supports a political candidate of their choice (Trump in this case) to be a web designer/developer is perfectly copasetic in this context, and it’s only if you already have Rauser’s background beliefs, or have good reason to appropriate them here, that you’d be at all suspicious or queasy about this irrelevant piece of data.