Ciceronian Review

Just So

van Inwagen's discussion of the problems of evil does not end as well as it began, but still worth having read.  I think the heart of the argument against atheism is at 85-87.  There are interesting preliminaries, discussed in earlier posts, and some following material raises a question or two, but the real argument stops after about 90.  The central part of the argument is all about free will -- the (on the surface) very odd views about omniscience and omnipotence come about in the discussion of free will.  (God knows everything but does not know what choice an agent with free will will make, or, as van Inwagen prefers it, does not have a belief about what that agent will do.  That solution strikes me as no help and even weirder - what does the step from knowledge to belief possibly do, and how could God have beliefs which are not knowledge if God is omniscient?  Does the free agent, in every sense a lesser bing, then actually create part of the universe?  How could that be, and how could it be that God does not know already what the choice will be as God is not time-bound?  Anyway...)

Here is the center of the free will argument, as I see it, from van Inwagen:
For all we know, it could be that God guided evolution on the planet up to a point a few hundred thousand years ago when He elevated some small group of primates and miraculously gave them rationality, i.e., language, abstract thought, disinterested love, and free will.  And God took these fellows into a union with Him, the folk living in perfect harmony with one another, and had preternatural powers -- to tame beasts with a look, avoid injury ot themselves, avoid disease and natural disasters, etc.  So no evil in the world.  Nevertheless, somehow, they chose to end this arrangement and separated from God.  And so evil in the world.

This is possible for all we know, he says.  Really?  If it is, then, for all we know there used to be fairies and magicians, as the fossil record does not preclude such things.  Dragons too, if a bit on the rare side.  For all we know, which is ultimately the standard van Inwagen is using, turns out a very low hurdle.  It seems to mean that the story is not completely and directly barred by the evidence at hand.  Which would mean here that we had something like a fossil record accounting for the development of language and abstract thought, etc.  So, you get the story. 

I had hoped for better.  Better is to be found, I suspect. 

On the other hand (two being so convenient), the book is clearly written, moves along well, and the arguments are transparent. 

HV - Still Wrong

It is now forty years on from Humana Vitae in which Pope somebody wrote the encyclical condemning contraceptives.  For a defense of that bit of argument, go here.  The same argument shows up other places -- even the libertarians at Volokh go in for a bit of defense.  It would be nice if there were more than armchair fantasy to support the claim, say an effort to examine the actual historical contexts and changes.  Contraceptives will lead to the devaluing of women.  How is that possible?  On what measure are women now worse off than forty years ago in the parts of the world where contraceptives are available and the Church has a voice?  Fact is that women are not worse off.  Fact is forty years ago women were not so highly regarded.  Sexual practices have changed, but there is no defensible account by which those changes have made women worse-off as a group, unless it is that sex itself is bad when not part of procreation.  Fact is, women get more choices and make more choices and more of the choices are choices they make for their own reasons. 

But then if you think that Internet access to pornography is a function of access to contraceptives, as the First Thing thinks, evidence is of no moment.  And you might also think that the it si access to contraceptives that mattered most to the social policies of those good Christian catholics in the Chinese Communist party. 

Here in Zion, of course, choice expands with fifteen kids.  Or is that Texas....

Meander

I gave up on the Lincoln/Douglas book.  The writing was not good, and it took far too long to get to any point.  I mention this because I normally finish up non-fiction even when very poorly written.  The aim is usual to learn something and I am more tolerant of bad presentation when there is something I want from the text.  This time, no.  Not that the writing was notably bad -- it wasn't.  Maybe the stack of other books is weighing on me. The standard which led to ending that book prematurely is close to the standard I use for fiction (excepting airports when I am desperate for something, then it is a book in hand is a book read).  As a result of the book, I am thinking of re-reading the LOA volumes of Lincoln writings, or selection anyway.  The fall in quality of speech since Lincoln is scandalous.  When I watched West Wing, it seemed even that made-up land of oratory and posturing could not offer up a moderately well-written speech.  Certainly not the President or McCain.  The point not being about Republicans ("Republicans Make Good Barbie -- Throw One on Today") but about speeches.  Clinton did not give very interesting speeches.  Seems the country is not much interested in oratory, at least outside the church. 

Or maybe a sour mood.  van Inwagen's book, a nice piece of writing, but ultimately a disappointment.  he arguments really came to a very thin couple of reeds, unbound.  Free will and what looks to me a version of compossibility, which ends up being some special pleading or pleading for faith at key points.  Omnipotence that isn't really, and the secret plan. 

News and News

All week I have been seeing stories about complaints that the press is giving too much coverage to Obama's trip.  Must be the broadcast media.  The newspapers I read have not justified any such complaint -- the NYT and WSJ have given McCain more coverage this week than Obama, including a very long and favorable analysis piece in the Sunday Times.  It is an illustration of the way local conditions can alter focus and story.  Based on what I see, the complaint is ridiculous.  But maybe it is all in the broadcast, which I do not watch.
Another example:
Remember the Titans is running (on what seems and endless loop) on one of the movie channels.  I was in Northern Virginia at the time, and recall none of the story.  My high school was in the same league I think -- at least, played a number of the same schools.  Integration issues were around, but not at all high on the list of conflicts.  I don't remember any particular noise on that subject in the papers, etc. (which is not to say that aspect of the movie is wrong).  What I do remember is that there was a great deal of conflict in school over the war, and between suburban and rural students.  It is likely a local condition -- where I was living was dominated by military families and federal workers, so the war was a big issue.  The development of tracts of housing led to conflicts between different lifestyles.  For economic reasons, race was not the big issue at my school.  The superficially odd role of the military kids in the movie is consistent with my memory.  Race issues worked somewhat differently for them, as did some other things. 
Spouse's time in Virginia was quite different than mine.

Don't Know No Will

I think that the crux of van Inwagen's discussion of free will as a response to the global problem of evil is that God does not know how a creature with free will will choose.  Omniscience has a more limited meaning than expected.  As van Inwagen puts it, God has no belief about what the free fellow will do.  The time line is gnarly.  God does not have a belief about what free fellow will do but surely God has belief about what free fellow is doing and what free fellow chose to do.  I understand how that could be true of an ant-like fellow such as me, but it makes no sense to me that omniscient God does not know. God has no belief and so does not bring it about that...is that the story?  It looks awfully like there are states of affairs which God cannot being about. 

It is tied to the moral evaluation of the Deltas and Epsilons in Brave New World.  We are to think that the state of affairs in which they are conditioned to love their circumstance is morally deficient (or worse).  I don't entirely share the intuition -- well, not today -- whatever is bad there must have to do with having a free will which is somehow thwarted or stunted (else the birds are a terrible blemish on the world).  There are times when the work is redolent of Sartre and Beauvoir and Camus. 

See Q

"if it is such a good thing for a creature to have free will, why did God make so many creatures that lack free will?"
van Inwagen does not address this issue, at least as far as i have read (which is most of the way through the book) -- but he does suggest that what creatures have free will is not easily decided.  But I think that he can easily make some points concerning the limits on what creatures have free will.  I would expect that free will, whatever it is, must have a set of preconditions so to speak, i.e. and e.g., reason.  Entities which are not reasoning and rational probably are without free will.  Whether that is so will require reading another and a different book; pretty standard conditions, however.

I am disinclined in that direction -- because it is does nothing to help explain how free will gets into the causal chain, or to explain how free will is free from causation.  But those are separate debates.

It is a mistake to think of what van Inwagen is up to is theodicy; that is my fault I think.  I have not explained the project well.  van Inwagen has set his work up in a way which lays the burden of argument (persuasion) on the atheist.  His aim is not to show that we should believe in God, but that the problems of evil do not provide sufficient argument to show that there is no God -- or that it is not unreasonable to believe in God.  Even that may be misleading.  To be discussed in a bit is that van Inwagen thinks that, for all we know, the Eden story could be true -- it is not precluded by archeology and paleontology and biology.  I had to stop reading for a bit at that point.  I do not understand what he means by saying that Eden could have been true for all we know.  But whatever it is, that is the standard here for the theist.  If you can swallow that, then the arguments do what van Inwagen wants. 

I will need to hunt up a different approach to the topics are van Inwagen, something that sets the bar a bit higher.

More Will Without Charge

Back to Problem of Evil.  So, in answer to the global point that the world has plenty of evil in it, van Inwagen tells us that free will is an answer and explanation.  Evil comes into the world through free will, or the choices made under free will.  The good of free will is a great good, so we are told.  I suppose it might be.  Van Inwagen does not explain how free will is a great good, he just says it is.  One would think that if free will is a great good and great enough to offset or overweigh some or all evil in the world, there would be some explanation of how free will is so good, and an explanation of some sort explaining how it is that free will being good outweighs evil of any kind.  (I am not sure that the sides need be commensurate, but still there has to be something to say about the balancing.)  The question is how could free will outweigh evil, either in the sense that it overbalances evil, as it were, or in the sense that it looks a might close to consequentialism of a sort. 

If free will is a good that outweighs evil, what is the measure, what is the balancing?  It is not at all obvious that it possible to say anything useful or intelligent on this point.  What is it about free will that is so good?  Which is to ask what is the good there at all.  I suppose one might wave at Kant (or the like).  He thought a good will was the only unconditional good - a view that is both creepy and wrong.  (Look, what sense is there to a good will standing alone?  What is the sense of talking about will, unembodied, having any kind of value?  There just is not any way in which a person could will good without willing something in particular in the particulars of the world, and that, sad to say, is not at all what Kant had in mind.  Of course, as he was a solipsist, there isn't any world for him anyway and the whole ethics is in a pail.  Digressing.) 

On the other side, doesn't the argument make God into a consequentialist?  Otherwise, what is the point of the great good of free will, and the necessity of imbuing some with it?  If free will is to do work in the argument, then it must not be in the mystery cloud but a set of concepts we little ant fellows can grasp and make use of.  Which ties the two sides together -- how does it balance and what is it that is being balanced. 

For myself I do not really understand what van Inwagen has in mind with the talk of free will.  I do not see how it gets into the causal chains without getting into the causal chains, which he tells us it does not.  Maybe I should get his book on free will -- I doubt very much it will solve these problems for me, but maybe I will have a better sense of what he is trying to do.   

Next, return to the standard of success in this work for the theist. 

Evil Will

I have been reading van Inwagen's Problem of Evil, listed to the side. The aim of the book is to show that the arguments from evil are not sufficient to show that there is no God.  The work is divided into section (lectures, as they are the Griffith lectures) on various general forms of the problems of evil.  The first is consideration of the general or global problem of evil, i.e., the existence of evil at all.  van Inwagen's argument here is based on free will.  (He assumes the existence of free will.)  The first version of the argument seems to come this:  God created the world (or universe, if you prefer), and so doing created a world that was good.  Part of the creation is the gift of free will (to rational or sapient agents).  Free will is a good thing, but that is not the point.  It is that free will entails choice by the agent, and choice that is free with respect to the agent.  But free will also means that God does not know how the agent will choose (whent he agent chooses).  God cannot make people such that the choices will turn out in a particular way, i.e., be known in advance by God.  (If God knows how the choices will turn out, then there is something about the agent which dictates the outcomes and then the choices are not free, at least I think that is what is going on.) 

The argument is a little puzzling to me.  Why is it that God cannot make people such that, in particular circumstances, the choices are reliably predictable (or knowable to God even if not predictable)?  We know as to any actual agent or class of agents that they are not perfect and not perfectly reasonable.  There is lots of evidence that choices can be guided, and that choice must have some physical basis or nature.  The choices are physically embodied.  Why is that not enough to make the choices knowable (to God)? Which I suppose is just a way of asking about the connection between free will and embodiment.  (It is also one of the ways in which Kant was wrong -- a good will is not good at all because a will considered in itself cannot have such a property at all; but that is also because a will is not anything considered in itself.)

This is the preliminary step.  The next steps make the argument look a bit as if God is a vaporous Bentham.  But that is another day.

Uncle Milt

The University of Chicago is working on founding a research institute in economics to be named for Milton Friedman.  Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics back in the the seventies.  (Friedman was a fairly nice guy, but no matter.)  Not surprising, the idea has encountered some resistance.  The opposition seems focused on the likelihood that the institute will be seen as a University endorsement of a certain brand of right wing politics and economics, the sort Friedman himself was long associated with, e.g., Chile, etc.  The supporters offer this as explanation of the aim of the Institute:

Mr. Hansen said that the primary connection between Friedman’s approach and the institute’s is the idea that research ought to be empirically grounded or based in real-world experiments. “We want the best research out there,” no matter what someone’s personal views are, he said.

That description may not mollify the critics, because it a research program a bit distant from Friedman's.  He had no interest in empirical research,; he consistently rejected any notion that empirical results mattered to the validity of economic theory; his own account of economic theory is about as anti-empirical as it could be.  Maybe he had a death bed conversion?  Or better, like Friedman himself, we ignore the evidence and just go forward as convenient.  

Catch-22 Is Still Good

The GitMo trials continue to produce curiosities, as this story in today's NYT attests.  Detainees who represent themselves create many problems for the trials.  The detainees have limited access to the evidence, and in some cases only to classified evidence that is introduced against them, even in capital cases.  The integrity of such a process is doubtful.  If you read through to the end of the story, you find the following:

But when it came his turn on Thursday, Mr. Mohammed, known as K.S.M., dwelled on the challenges. He said he had asked the guards for paper so that he could begin to draw up legal motions. The answer, he told the judge, was that paper was not authorized.

Judge Kohlmann seemed to acknowledge the challenge of writing a motion without paper. Nevertheless, he told Mr. Mohammed, even such a small thing as a request for a pad of paper had to follow procedure.

“There’s going to have to be a motion,” the judge said, “in accordance with our rules."

KSM must file a motion to get paper.  To file a motion, he must write a motion, which requires the paper he can only get if he first files a motion.  It is hard to tell if the report is accurate -- one hopes the reporter has made some error rather than that the judge is a broken brick.