Working on Living—through philosophy

If we can be certain of anything, then it is of death (of course) and……not taxes (for one might live where there are no taxes)…..but suffering: death and suffering confront us as part of what it is to be human.  Just as we must eat and drink to live, so too we must suffer and eventually die.  Much may come between birth and death—real love and fulfillment would be “nice”—but two of the most important questions we should ask ourselves in our role as humans concern what our attitude toward death and suffering should be.  Here I will talk only about suffering.  There are, I suggest, three main possibilities for our attitude toward suffering.  I will refer to them as Buddhist, Christian, and Affirmative.

What I am calling the “Buddhist attitude” is not meant to be true to all the subtleties of the various forms of Buddhism.  Nevertheless it is a kind of distillation of a key aspect of the Buddhist world view. The key idea is that happiness (I will speak of happiness instead of Nirvana) results from escaping suffering; and suffering is caused by incorrect views and actions in regard to our habitual desires, especially the desire to control how things are.  We don’t want to wait in line; we wish the line would move faster; and what happens?  We suffer.  We don’t have enough cash, but we don’t want to wait to buy an Ipod; so either we suffer or we buy one on credit, putting off the suffering.  If we remove the desire and accept how things are, then we remove the suffering.  It is only through such relinquishing of desire that we can avoid suffering; and it is only through avoiding suffering that we can truly be happy.  There is, of course, much more to Buddhism than this.  But central to the Buddhist view for our purposes is the idea that suffering is an impediment to happiness.

Just as with the Buddhist attitude, what I am calling the “Christian attitude” is not meant to be true to all of the subtleties of the various forms of Christianity.  Nevertheless it is a kind of distillation of a key aspect of the Christian world view.  The key idea is that happiness results from transcending the physical world and achieving some kind of union with the divine.  Hell is separation from God; heaven is union with God.  As long as we are on this earth we are separate from God, despite how close we may feel at certain moments of prayer or ecstasy.  Further, and importantly, we are fallen creatures who are destined to sin no matter how hard we try.  And it is through our sinning that we bring suffering upon ourselves and those we love.  So we are to blame for our suffering; the best we can do to be happy is to focus on God and following God’s commandments, all the while hoping to transcend this world to one much better.

What I am calling the “Affirmative attitude” owes much to ideas found in the writings of Nietzsche.  The fundamental insight is that happiness of the kind that we should be concerned with is not to be equated with a lack of suffering or some merely positive, fleeting feeling.  Rather, happiness, a life worth living, demands a certain kind of action and creativity that is only possible through suffering.  Suffering, or at least certain types, is valuable as a means.  We must either actually suffer or risk great suffering if we are to create a life that is valuable.

For the moment I am going to remain vague on the kinds of suffering I am talking about.  Instead I want to note that there is the problem of the suffering that does not seem to contribute to such lofty goals.  For example, the quotidian suffering from headaches, hangnails, and hangovers.  But more importantly, the suffering of illness that is either debilitating or (inclusive “or”) terminal.  The “quotidian” suffering may be justified along the lines that if we cannot bear such suffering, then how can we hope to bear the more profound kinds of suffering needed to live well?  So that suffering is a kind of “practice.”  But the suffering from debilitating/terminal illness cannot necessarily be handled in the same way.  We may in the end simply have to say that not all suffering is of value.

And that leads to the point that, of course, the three attitudes above need not be, nor are they in real life, separate.  Anyone growing up in some kind of Judeo-Christian (Muslim?) society will have imbibed aspects of all three.  We naturally seek to avoid suffering (Buddhist attitude), we learn to blame ourselves for certain kinds of suffering and hope for a better life, if not in “heaven,” then in the future (Christian attitude), and we pay lip service, at least, to the idea that greatness doesn’t come easy (Affirmative attitude).  The question is which of them should prevail over the others—not necessarily to the full exclusion of the others.  We can, after all, adopt the affirmative attitude and still seek to avoid getting cancer or wish that we didn’t have some debilitating neuro-muscular disorder or debilitating migraines.

The point to all of this is that “western” cultures/societies uncritically, and without any sort of awareness of what they are doing, adopt a combination of the Buddhist and Christian attitudes.  In general the Affirmative attitude is relegated to those few necessary evils we must do to get that promotion, buy the house, go on the nice vacation, etc.; and then the Affirmative attitude isn’t affirmative at all, but full of resentment:  “Why can’t this be easier?”  Without giving any reason here, now, I will simply assert that those of us who can (and I am not saying I could) should adopt more fully and with full awareness the Affirmative attitude.

A song from Modest Mouse begins with these lyrics:  ”I was in heaven - I was in hell - Believe in neither - But fear them as well.”  Subtract the claim of having been to both and just consider the claim, “I believe in neither heaven nor hell, but I fear them.”  Further, suppose someone asserts this with the utmost sincerity.  Is there anything strange about that assertion?  Is it at all like “Moore’s Paradox”:  ”It’s raining but I don’t believe it.”  ?

A person sincerely making the claim about fearing heaven and hell seems to be saying that X doesn’t exist but I fear X.  Perhaps that is not strange after all, since we fear things that don’t exist yet, e.g., the last moments of life as we are dying, and things that may never exist, e.g., getting fired from our jobs, going bankrupt, etc.  But while those things are feared and do not exist, they are believed to exist in the future (or it is believed that they will exist) or believed to be possibilities.  But presumably anyone who doesn’t believe in heaven or hell doesn’t believe that they will come to exist or that they are possibilities in the same way that losing one’s job is a possibility.

Perhaps one could not believe in heaven or hell, but fear them because one fears that one is wrong about there not being either.  Insofar as one fears being wrong, one can fear that which one is wrong about.

But I wonder if we couldn’t approach it from another direction viz. looking at the ways in which one might believe in neither.  That is, we can distinguish between a mere lack of belief in X and a “positive” disbelief in X.  So a person who merely lacks belief in heaven and hell might sensibly fear them in a way that a person who holds a positive disbelief in them could not.  I may be building something out of nothing here (or perhaps nothing out of something).  But part of the joy of doing philosophy is to start wondering about something and see where it leads, even if it often leads nowhere.

Let us define the number i as equal to the square root of -1.  So i cannot be positive or negative, but all real numbers are positive or negative—so i is imaginary.  I am pretty much the farthest thing from a mathematician, but i strikes me as being something that we think we have some understanding of, but we really don’t, similar to saying “There is either a red square-circle or there is not a red square-circle.”

But the funny thing is, we can perform operations with i:

(2i)(4i) = (2 · 4)(ii), which equals (8)( i²), which equals (8)(-1), which equals -8.

So from something that doesn’t really make sense, namely “i = the square root of -1,” we get something that makes perfect sense.  How much of philosophy is like this?

Before talking about the nature of arguments in my Intro to Logic class, I start off talking about inferential relationships between statements more generally.  So I ask them to consider what else must be true , e.g., if “Todd is dead” is true and if “Bob loves Jill” is true.

Two of the claims that people said followed from “Todd is dead” were:

1) There is at least one dead person.

2) There is a reason for Todd’s death.

I used this opportunity to talk about the difference between logical and causal possibility.  I take it that 1) is logically necessary in relation to “Todd is dead” and that 2) is causally necessary.  We can imagine a world in which people die for no reason, or something like that.

This led to the students’ asking about whether claims following from “Bob loves Jill” were causally or logically implied.  Someone asked whether it could be possible for someone not  to be able to love someone else and if so whether it would be causal or logical.  I said we could imagine a person having some kind of chemical imbalance or the like such that it would be causally impossible for him to love anyone.  But this led me to ask the class whether my water bottle’s not being able to love anyone is a causal or logical impossibility.  It is not so clear, is it?

This reminds me of an interesting but difficult passage in “Part II” of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, where he writes:

“A new-born child has no teeth.”—”A goose has no teeth.”—”A rose has no teeth.”—This last at any rate—one would like to say—is obviously true!  It is even surer than that a goose has none.—And yet it is none so clear. For where should a rose’s teeth have been? The goose has none in its jaw. And neither, of course, has it any in its wings; but no one means that when he says it has no teeth.—Why, suppose one were to say: the cow chews its food and then dungs the rose with it, so the rose has teeth in the mouth of a beast. This would not be absurd, because one has no notion in advance where to look for teeth in a rose. ((Connexion with ‘pain in someone else’s body’.))

So, we might say that it is obviously true that my water bottle cannot love anyone, but is that not more than just odd sounding?  Is it a causal impossibility that makes us say this?  We might imagine the water bottle imbued with a spirit by a magician or god mightn’t we?

What about these three statements:

A) Either it is raining or it is not raining.
B) Either there is a black unicorn or there is not a black unicorn.
C) Either there is a red square-circle or there is not a red square-circle.

In the context of asking about immediate inferences, we might say that you can’t infer anything about the world, so to speak, by the truth of A) and B).  But should we say the same about C)?  If the idea of a square-circle is incoherent, then what could C) possibly mean?  Is C) true?  If it is false, is it necessarily false?  Is it nonsense?

I like a look of agony,
Because I know it’s true;
Men do not sham convulsion
Nor simulate a throe.

The eyes glaze once, and that is death.
Impossible to feign
The beads upon the forehead
By homely anguish strung.

(Emily Dickinson)

An important part of seeing what Wittgenstein is up to is to recognize that his starting point when “doing philosophy” is that there are all of these phenomena of life:  we talk meaningfully about dreams, the future, sensations, chairs, music, numbers, good and bad; we follow rules; we recognize the feelings of others, though sometimes people are good at hiding them; and much, much more.  We succeed in doing all of these things.

We are tempted to say “How is all of that possible?”

We then hypothesize things like intentionality of the mind, hidden mechanisms underlying meaning, reference, and feeling, and much more—ways of trying to explain how all the other stuff is possible, how it works.

Wittgenstein wants to expose the limitations of many of these theories and their pictures.  He employs various methods, e.g., the method of §2 mentioned in §48 of PI (all section references are to PI unless otherwise noted).  Part of that method, I think, is the trying out of what it would mean if X were true.  So, e.g., what if sensations were really private in the super strong sense of §243?

Since our sensation talk is intimately connected with sensation/feeling behavior (groaning, sighing, smiling, laughing, wincing, etc.), and it is through such behavior that we often know others are in pain (or happy, sad, bored, etc.), then a private sensation language would have to be one without sensation behavior (as Wittgenstein says in §256).

Part of what is going on with the consideration of a private language is that Wittgenstein wants to reorient us so that we see the vital importance that our natural expressions of feeling/sensations play in language’s being meaningful.  What are some examples of natural expressions?

Think of the behaviors and the appearances of the body/face when we feel:  tired, angry, happy, surprised, joyous, nauseous, annoyed, ill, wired, distant, etc.

Now let us consider a case that might show the importance of the natural expressions of feeling/sensations.  What if there were beings who had no natural expressions of feeling, who didn’t do or have any of the behaviors and appearances characteristic of the feelings mentioned above?

Can we really imagine the lives of such beings?

What would their language be like?  Could they talk about their feelings and sensations?

We can perhaps imagine them talking about having physical objects, e.g., books, clothes, etc., in their possession and they could describe their properties.

Would they still avoid fire with quick movements backward?

Couldn’t one move away quickly from a fire and another ask why he is doing that?  What could the other one say?  “When my hand is in the fire I have something—something like I have when I smash my thumb under a rock.”  Couldn’t the other reply:  “Ah, I also have similar things when my hand is in the fire and when my thumb is smashed by a rock.”  “Well, let’s call what we are both having in these cases ‘pain’”?

Isn’t the above possible?  Well consider:  with what right can we say of two such beings that they really have the same sensation when their hands are in the fire?

Well, they both back away from the fire and avoid smashing their thumbs.

But what if one did those things because of pain and the other because they cause too intense a sensation of pleasure (worse than being tickled say)?

But wouldn’t the difference come out somewhere?  One remarks that the hand in the fire gives him too much of what he has during sex.  The other says “What do you mean?  They are nothing alike!”  (And we couldn’t say that the one who says sex and fire give different things might possibly be feeling pain instead of pleasure during sex, since he doesn’t avoid sex.)

But can they properly speak of “like” and “unlike” things here?

Well they presumably take these concepts of “like” and “unlike” from their experiences of talking about physical objects—so why not give them “like” and “unlike” for what they have “on the inside”?

Perhaps part of the problem with the above line of thought is that we didn’t count the behaviors of avoidance and fleeing, and preference and embracing as natural expressions of feeling/sensations, but we should have.

So what about beings who have absolutely no behaviors or appearances that express feelings/sensations or that could mark differences of feeling, sensations, etc.?  Even though none would ever see in another’s face any feeling, couldn’t one who feels pain when his hand is in fire and when smashing his thumb ask another if he also has something similar in both cases, and then ask about other similarities and differences?

What if they agreed about all such similarities and differences of “what they have” in all the different cases?  Couldn’t they agree to call the fire and thumb smashing things they have “pain” and the sex and good food things they have “pleasure”?

Well is it possible that they could agree on all the similarities and differences (thumb smashed is similar to a hand in fire, both are different from sex and good food, etc.) and yet still have very different sensations from each other (In the same way we might wonder if whether all the things I see as blue you see as green)?  In which case, it is not the sensations that are important but their relationships of similarity and difference to each other, and that fact that they agree about these.

But couldn’t they say that they want more of what they have during sex and less of what they have when their hands are in fire?

Remember that we said they couldn’t reflect these preferences and aversions in their behavior.  Given that, how much sense would it make to say they want more of that which they have during sex than that which they have from their hand in fire?

And we should also consider what their form of life would really be like.  How would they behave toward each other?  How would a parent know when to feed a baby?  Could such beings actually evolve as a species over time from simpler organisms?  Could they evolve as a social species capable of speaking any language at all?  (What are some of the reasons that groups of social creatures evolve into language users?)

In our imagined case of the beings who could express nothing through non-verbal behavior, have we perhaps encountered a form of life that is so different from our own that we cannot, with justification, draw implications from it to our own?  If that is so, what does it say about language, pain talk, etc., and the place of natural expressions, and a private language?

Well we said that natural expression would keep a language from being private.  So in order to try to make sense of the possibility of a super private language, we imagined beings with no natural expressions.  But two things resulted:

1) Insofar as they could talk about their sensations, they had to use the public language—so they didn’t create a private language of sensation talk.

2) Their form of life is so different from ours that it seems irrelevant to our own.

Now because of 1), we are left to make sense of a private language along the lines of §258, where there are no natural expressions of sensation, nor some other language that can be used to help “create” the private language.  And in §258 there is the problem that one cannot name anything since there is no way to disambiguate the concentration of attention.

But couldn’t one point out now that Wittgenstein was wrong when he insisted that natural expressions were the only way to “connect” words with sensations?

Well, first, we should note that Wittgenstein does not say that natural expressions are necessary for speaking meaningfully about sensations.  Rather, he says that it is one possibility for connecting them (§244).  Second, it happens to be the case that for us (humans), natural expressions play an important role. Wittgenstein need not be seen as offering up the necessary and sufficient conditions for language’s being meaningful.  And moreover, it is just not clear at all in what sense the beings without any natural expressions are a real possibility.  (If they aren’t possible, is it a causal or logical impossibility?  Why should it matter?  Perhaps only insofar as philosophers tend to think they deal only with the “logical must.”)

Lastly, as in §§288-290 (and elsewhere), Wittgenstein seems to say that without natural expressions for sensations we would need a criterion of identity for our sensations, for talking about them, identifying them as the same at different times.  If that is true, then our imaginary beings would face that problem as well.

Regarding this issue of criteria of identity, it seems Wittgenstein wants to suggest that it so happens that we use the natural expressions of sensations to connect the sensations up with language.  We are trained to do so as we learn the language.

Hence we get in §290 the claim:  “It is not, of course, that I identify my sensations by means of criteria; it is rather that I use the same expression.”  By “expression” he means “linguistic expression” I take it.  This passage makes sense when we bring to bear §238:  “The rule can only seem to me to produce all its consequences in advance if I draw them as a matter of course.  As much as it is a matter of course for me to call this colour ‘blue’.  (Criteria for ‘its being a matter of course’ for me.)”  We “identify” our sensations as a matter of course; we don’t need to identify them and then name them just as we don’t identify a color and then say its name:  we just see that it is blue; we just feel that this is pain.  But this relies on the idea he mentions in §244, where the child is taught new pain behavior by replacing the natural expression of pain with pain talk.  This training is what makes it a matter of course that this is pain.

In this post I will argue that libertarianism cannot actually explain or make rational why an agent chooses one course of action over another.  I will do this by arguing that though libertarianism seems to be able to explain why an agent acts the way she does at some given moment in time, even though the action is not causally determined, libertarianism cannot explain why the agent does that action instead of some other action.  I find this troubling, since I believe humans have free will and I believe that compatibilism is not a tenable position on free will because it collapses into hard determinism.

The main issue in the free will debate is whether or not and in what sense humans have free will.  That is, are human choices or actions free, and if so, in what sense are they free?  Both the hard and soft determinists endorse determinism, which is the view that all events (including human choices) are causally determined (necessitated) by antecedent conditions.  Humans do what they do, make the choices they do, according to both these views because of factors outside of the agent’s control, e.g., upbringing, physiology, and interactions with others.  On both views, if time were rolled back any amount and allowed to play forward again, the exact same events would occur.  The hard determinist takes this to imply that there is no free no; the soft determinist says that free will is compatible with determinism.  The libertarian position, on the other hand, denies that determinism applies to the realm of human agency.  A person’s will is causally undetermined.  According to libertarianism, if the clock were rolled back, then radically different things could happen than what happened the first time.  This is because humans could choose differently the next time around even though all antecedent conditions including beliefs and desires remained the same.

One objection that libertarianism faces is that if our wills are causally undetermined, then how can we make sense of the choices that a person makes?  The hard and soft determinists both make sense of human choice in relation to the desires and beliefs of an agent.  Bob desires to read a book and he believes there are books on the bookshelf; so he goes over to the bookshelf.  On both determinist views Bob’s desires and beliefs cause him to go to the bookshelf; the same goes for all of his other choices.  But the libertarian denies that Bob’s will is causally determined by anything; so how do we explain why Bob chose to go the bookshelf?  For we want to maintain that Bob’s choices and actions are rational—they don’t occur for no reason or randomly or arbitrarily.

The libertarian response is to say that Bob’s actions are explicable in terms of his reasons.  Here the libertarian makes a distinction between reasons as causes and reasons as goal directed intentions.  We can ask for the reason the rock fell off the cliff and we expect a causal explanation.  But we can also speak of a person’s reasons for acting in terms of her goals.  Bob goes to the book shelf in order to fulfill the purpose or goal of getting a book to read.  Nevertheless, Bob could have also chosen to ignore the goal of getting a book to read.

However, the above response does not really save libertarianism.  Imagine two parallel worlds: W₁ and W₂.  At time T₁ both worlds are exactly the same in all respects, e.g., same histories, same people, objects, etc.  Bob exists in both worlds; so we have Bob₁ and Bob₂.  Assume libertarianism is true.  At time T₂ Bob₁ goes to the bookshelf and gets a book.  We explain that choice by saying that Bob₁ had the goal of reading a book and believed books were on the bookshelf.  At time T₂, Bob₂ goes to the kitchen and gets a glass of water.  We explain that choice by saying that Bob₂ had the goal of quenching his thirst and believed water was available in the kitchen.  So Bob₁’s and Bob₂’s actions are seemingly explainable under libertarianism, despite the fact that they aren’t causally explainable, since the actions were not causally determined.

Despite the above appearance of libertarianism being able to adequately explain a person’s actions, there is the following problem for libertarianism.  We cannot make sense of why Bob₁ went to the bookshelf at time T₂ and not the kitchen, and Bob₂ went to the kitchen at time T₂ and not the bookshelf.  At time T₁ both Bobs have the same exact set of beliefs, desires, emotions, etc.  Now we can appeal to Bob₁’s goal of reading a book to explain why he went to the bookshelf and Bob₂’s goal of quenching his thirst to explain why he went to the kitchen.  However, given the details of the example, Bob₁ must also have the goal to quench his thirst at time T₁ and Bob₂ must also have the goal to read a book at time T₁.  According to libertarianism, each Bob is free to choose which goal to try to achieve.  However, since Bob₁ and Bob₂ have all of the same goals, beliefs, etc., there is nothing different between them to which we can appeal to explain why Bob₁ chose to go the bookshelf at time T₂ and Bob₂ chose to go the kitchen at time T₂.  Their individual actions are explainable, but libertarianism cannot explain why one choice is made instead of another.

The libertarian might say that Bob₂ decided that quenching his thirst was more important than reading a book, and vice versa for Bob₁.  But in virtue of what did Bob₂ make that decision?  And the same question applies to Bob₁?  Their beliefs, goals, desires, etc., are all the same.  So, neither Bob can appeal to beliefs, desires, etc., that the other does not have in order to explain the different weight given to the goals chosen, goals which are meant to explain their actions.  So under libertarianism, the decision to do one action over the other ends up being arbitrary after all.  Therefore, libertarianism cannot actually explain or make rational why an agent chooses one course of action over another.

What follows is that outline considering possible reasons for endorsing some kind of theism. Importantly, it is just an outline; so its details need to be filled in. Were that filling in to occur, I’m sure that certain points might get modified, added, or rejected. Further, a lot of it is based on things I have written about more extensively in my notebooks and as such a number of things will be presented that might not make sense or for which I will not offer arguments. I hope to elaborate on and present arguments for those claims later on.

In Experiments in Ethics, Kwame Anthony Appiah writes:

Now, in real life reasonable people will not hold most of their beliefs with the level of conviction that we call certainty. Most of us, most of the time, will allow that most of what we believe about the world could turn out to be wrong. So our actual reasoning is not from certainties to certainties but from the probable to the probable. (pp.51-52)

I believe Appiah is right about the above; so, I am not looking for certainty here, but rather what is reasonable to believe. All of the reasons given below may not be strong individually, but perhaps they add up to a strong argument, particularly when taken in conjunction with the objections and replies.  For that to make sense, the arguments need to be interpreted as inductive; a large number of invalid deductive arguments won’t add up to a strong argument.

Before getting to the reasons themselves, I want to distinguish between causes of belief, epistemic reasons for belief, and pragmatic reasons for belief. Roughly, the cause of belief is that which brings it about that a person holds the belief she holds. For example, Carol believes in God(s) because she was raised in a Hindu home. An epistemic reason for believing something is a reason that is supposed to make probable the truth of that which is believed. For example, Bob believes he will get over the infection because of the known efficacy of antibiotics for treating his kind of infection. That known efficacy is a reason for believing, it makes it probably true, that Bob will get well; and thus it justifies his believing that he will get well. A pragmatic reason for believing something is a reason based on a desired end and the idea that holding the belief in question will make more probable the achievement of that end. That is, for example, if a person has an epistemic reason to believe that if she believes she can make a particular jump across a chasm, then she will most likely be able to make the jump, then even if she doesn’t have an epistemic reason to believe she can make the jump, she may have a pragmatic reason. Almost all of the reasons considered below are epistemic reasons for and against affirmation of theism.

Reasons for believing in God:

1) The testimony of people, e.g., Gandhi, who are intelligent, sincere, and willing to explore and challenge religious dogma, and yet believe in God(s).

2) Cosmological reasons concerning an explanation of either the origin of the universe or a reason for its existing at all even if it has no origin per se.

3) Teleological reasons concerning the fine-tuned nature of the observable universe for the existence of life.

4) Connected to 3, the idea that the universe is morally valuable because of its fitness for life and that it actually contains conscious and self-conscious life; and that this indicates that if there is a God, that that God is in some way good. Further, we might think that a good universe is more likely the outcome of creation by a good God than by other means or reasons. So not only is a universe fit for life improbable given all the other possibilities, it is even more improbable that a good universe would arise “randomly.”

5) The wonder of nature, all life, and the fact that nature is not only conscious of itself (experiences itself, as animals do) but also conscious of itself as nature and conscious of itself as conscious of itself.

6) [This perhaps should be a part of objections and replies. It is not properly speaking a reason for belief in God] Regarding science and faith, Robert Pollack writes:

Science makes the following claim for itself, legitimately: most of what is knowable is unknown at this moment, and most of what is unknown will be knowable eventually through science. The faith of science makes a further claim: all that is unknown will be knowable through science. The distinction between the two turns on the question: Is there anything unknown now, whether or not it lies on the outer edge of what is knowable, that will never be understood, anything that is ultimately unknowable? No one denies that science will push the margin ever closer to full knowledge. The issue is whether some unknown will always remain. That question about science is by its very nature not answerable by science. Therefore to claim there is nothing unknowable is an act of faith, and to affirm this statement makes science into a faith. [From Practicing Science, Living Faith, Eds. P. Clayton and J. Schaal. Page 229]

Importantly, he goes on to make clear that he does not think that all scientists make the claim that “all that is unknown will be knowable through science.” And that may simply be because there are questions that science cannot answer as a result of contingent human limitations (e.g., whether there are extraterrestrials). Thus he is not claiming that the practicing of science necessarily requires faith. Rather, his claim is that a certain way of viewing science and knowledge requires faith. The crucial move in Pollack’s argument is “The issue is whether some unknown will always remain. That question about science is by its very nature not answerable by science. Therefore to claim there is nothing unknowable is an act of faith, and to affirm this statement makes science into a faith.”

“Science,” of course, might “say” that its “faith” is justified by the progress that science has and continues to make. However, against this we might point out that since the questions “Is all knowledge scientific knowledge?” and “Is there anything that will remain unknowable to science?” cannot be answered by science, and since their answers seem to be that no, not all knowledge is scientific knowledge and thus yes there are things that are unknowable to science—the latter may include things unknowable to any human—such faith in science is not only misplaced but simply wrong. And if science’s purview is the physical world and it cannot know everything, then it follows that there may be some things about the physical world it cannot know, e.g., its origin or reason for being, or that there may be something beyond the physical world that it cannot know simply because it is transcends the physical world.
Therefore, despite science’s successes, it is neither the keeper of all knowledge, nor the judge of all that can be known. Thus there is room open for God and science.

7) In the way that William James seems to argue in “The Will to Believe,” we might risk belief in God because once we do open ourselves to such a belief, new, religious/spiritual kinds of experiences may be opened up. So this is not an epistemic reason to believe in God; rather it is a pragmatic reason that may lead to epistemic reasons.

Reasons Against Believing in God and Replies:

1) God seems conspicuously absent from the world.

Reply: Well it depends on what one means by “absent.” There is no booming voice from the sky; there is no “person” making an appearance and saying, “Hey I’m God. Nice to meet you.” However, we might say first that God’s nature is so other that it does not make sense to think of God as being present or absent in the way that a person is present or absent in one’s life. Second, we might think that God is indeed present through God’s very creation—but this presence through nature is not necessarily one that can be seen unless the idea of God is given a chance. We, of course, have to be careful about the problem of seeing what we want to see (For example, when a spouse wants to believe that the marriage is working and so “doesn’t see” the evidence of infidelity). That is, seeing God’s presence may require an openness to God, but we have to be vigilant about not simply thinking we see God’s presence because we believe in God. How to distinguish the two in actual circumstances is surely difficult.

2) Sense cannot be made of God’s characteristics or attributes. What could it mean to say that God is conscious and outside of time? Doesn’t consciousness as we know it require successive conscious states of awareness? What could it mean to say that God acts, when God transcends space-time?

Reply: These are indeed troubling conceptual problems; ones that are difficult to sort out. Further, it is difficult to know whether they indicate the nonexistence of God or the limitations of our reason. We might notice that there are a number of conceptual problems in physics, particularly, quantum mechanics, ones that seem contradictory to reason, and yet they are not taken as evidence of the failure of quantum mechanics. One might reply to that by saying that quantum mechanics can be used to make true predictions, which give it credence; but the same cannot be said of God. That is indeed true, however, it might miss the point that in and of themselves, conceptual problems do not necessarily give us reason to reject a view. Further, one might say that the other reasons for believing in God are analogous to the true predictions made by quantum mechanics. That is, just as there are those predictions that keep us from rejecting quantum mechanics even though it seems to involve conceptual impossibilities, we might say that even though the idea of a transcendent God involves conceptual “impossibilities,” the other reasons given above mitigate the conceptual problems so that they do not give us reason to reject God solely on their basis.

Further, we might, and perhaps reasonably should, acknowledge that the human mind is capable of only so much, and is formed and limited in its thinking by the nature of the physical world. So we might not be too surprised if there is something incomprehensible about the idea of a God who transcends the physical world.

3) The world contains a great deal of evil, pain, and suffering; why would a good God allow such things? A good God wouldn’t; therefore, there is not a good God.

Reply: We might argue that while the world (the universe) contains much suffering, it is on the whole a good world in that it allows for conscious and self-conscious life, which are intrinsically valuable, and whose existence allows for still further goods.

Secondly, we needn’t conceive of God as omnibenevolent. God could be good in virtue of having created the universe and fine-tuned it for the evolution of life without being all-good such that we should expect there to be no suffering. Further, the existence of suffering might in some cases be seen as a good (Nietzsche), and secondly, in some cases it is the result of human free will (itself a good).

4) Belief in God is leftover from prescientific times. It was the result of earlier people’s attempts to explain the universe, its origin and workings.

Reply: Aside from committing the genetic fallacy (which in this case means claiming that the origins of belief in God count against the truth of God’s existence–in a sense the genetic fallacy takes the causes of a belief to count as epistemic reasons for denying the belief; and that doesn’t necessarily always follow), this objection assumes that the only role of God in prescientific times was as an explanation of the physical world. That seems to be simply false. God has and does play a number of different roles in people’s lives.

5) Belief in God is the result of not being able to accept that the world is meaningless without God.

Reply: Aside from committing the genetic fallacy, it is not at all clear that without God the world is meaningless. Even if there is not a God, conscious and self-conscious life is intrinsically valuable. I take this to mean that the universe itself is valuable and as such can “contain” a great deal of meaning.

6) Belief in God is the result of not being able to accept our or our loved ones’ deaths.

Reply: Aside from committing the genetic fallacy, belief in God does not necessarily involve a belief in an afterlife.

7) Science can or will be able to satisfactorily explain the origin of the universe.

Reply: That is questionable given the limitations of our instruments to probe the depths of what we take to be the origin of the universe, i.e., the big bang. So it may not be possible to do more than offer speculative theories that defy confirmation or disconfirmation. Further, it is doubtful that science can offer a reason for why there is something rather than nothing, since that does not seem to be a scientific question; and it is not clear that science can explain the fine-tuned nature of the universe (multiverse theories are rather controversial, and there is always the rejoinder that a multiverse needs to be fine-tuned itself in some way).

8) Look at all of the atrocities done in the name of God. How could God permit such evil in his/her name?

Reply: Again, God need not be all-good to be good. Secondly, what humans do is what humans do. Presumably we act from free will; and our actions often stem from our nature, which is not through and through good—but that does not mean that we are fallen or full of sin. Religion does not equal God; evils done in the name of religion do not give us reason to think that God doesn’t exist—it gives us reason to think that people are often misguided, wrong, and at times evil.

9) You appeal to God as an explanation of the universe’s existence and for its fine-tuned nature; but how can you explain God’s existence?

Reply: This is a difficult question. I’m not entirely satisfied with the idea that God is some sort of necessarily existent being such that God could not have not existed. So, to this objection I don’t have a very good reply. I can only say that it makes more sense to me (even if I cannot explain exactly why) to say that God is in need of no explanation (God just is) in a way that it doesn’t make sense to me to say that the universe is in need of no explanation (it just is). That may well be the biggest lacuna in all of the above.

Conclusion:
I am by no means convinced by the above lines of argument for theism, though all of the above does get me closer to believing in God. However, even if the above were convincing, we ought to be left wondering what kind of God we have been given reason to believe in. I don’t think it is the God of any of the major world religions. But that, as with so much else, will have to wait for another time.

My friend Jennie and I used to argue often about the different ways that poetry and philosophy go about examining the world and attempting to speak truly about it.  She always claimed that there were certain truths, usually of a spiritual nature, or if not spiritual, then about particular deep aspects of life and nature, that poetry was better at investigating and expressing than philosophy.  I’m not in a position to give her reasons for these claims.  And I don’t think she was right in the way that she thought she was.  However, I do think that there is perhaps an important difference between poetry and philosophy concerning access to truth (a general difference, and not one that is meant to admit of no exceptions); I will try to articulate it below.

First, I do not have much patience for the idea of ineffable truths, simply because I take it that truth is a property of sentences used in particular contexts, and therefore if something is ineffable, then it cannot be formulated into sentences, and it therefore cannot admit of truth or falsity.  So I don’t think that it is the business of philosophy or poetry to try to show or gesture at ineffable truths.

I do not think that philosophy and poetry are necessarily separated by reason or argument; that is, I do not think that reason and argument belong to philosophy but not to poetry.  That is not to say, of course, that every poem presents an argument.  And it seems likely to me that the argument of a poem does not consist of the same kind of moves found in a philosophical argument.  Some poetry (I certainly won’t speak for all poetry) seems to me to work because of the way it directs one’s thoughts, attitudes, and emotions, often directing them toward ordinary “objects” in subtly new ways and in such a way that one arrives at new thoughts, attitudes, and emotions.  Through a serious of such movements, each of which draws on the reader’s background of ideas, emotions, dispositions, desires, experiences, etc., in order to draw the reader forward and in, a poem might present a kind of argument for seeing something in a particular way; that new insight, or whatever it should be called, is a kind of conclusion.

Insofar as philosophy operates on a more singular plain of categorical, propositional, predicate logic, philosophical arguments can typically be reconstructed explicitly from their texts.  Importantly, this reconstruction can be done without injury to the argument.  I don’t mean to deny the power of persuasion that might come with a style of writing.  But I think that many philosophers would recognize a distinction between a well reasoned argument and a persuasive one.  I can imagine a philosopher saying, “I see that the argument is valid and the premises appear to all be true, but I’m still not inclined to accept the conclusion.”

An important result that comes out of the above differences between philosophy and poetry is that poetry might allow one to arrive at a certain conclusion that could not be arrived at in the same way through philosophical reasoning.  That is, while we might be able to explicitly restate the point of a poem in paraphrase, we will not—or perhaps the weaker “may not”—be moved to accept the point as true if all we have access to is the paraphrase.  The “logic” or “reasoning” of the poem itself is required if one is to have access to the truth in such a way that one is moved to accept it.  I’m not ruling out the possibility that some of the “conclusions” of poems could be argued for in an explicitly philosophical manner.  But even then, such reasoning may not provide the right kind of epistemic access to the truth.

All of that is in the abstract.  I will try to look for an example to illustrate my point.

In my last blog post, I indicated that I believed that the religious extremes that dominate public discussion of religion are dangerous. Here I will briefly give reasons for thinking that is true. To begin, I consider atheism and agnosticism to both be religious perspectives simply because they concern religion or religious issues. So one can be an atheist and still be a religious extremist. In my last post I wrote:

“On the one hand, there are those who openly, inwardly, or both, mock or simply dismiss the very ideas of God, religion, and man’s need and yearning for the two. What I call the radical atheists, e.g., Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, are typified but such dismissiveness,  though it is not just the radical atheists who mock and deride God and religion. On the other hand, there are those devotees of religion who are overly and non-critically zealous and accepting of religious dogma, while at the same time seemingly ignorant of the inherent fallibility of all humans.”

I take it that both poles, both sides, are dangerous for the same kinds of reasons. Nothing I say here is meant to apply without exception, but here they are:

1) Both sides are closed to the possibility that the other might have something important to contribute to the discussion of what it is to live well (which,  I believe, requires contemplation of, and engagement with, God and/or spiritual issues). That is, the mocking atheist identifies the religious life with the extreme forms of religion, e.g., versions of Christianity and Islam, that one finds in the news and thereby dismisses the possibility that there are more sophisticated forms of not only Christianity, Islam, and other religions, but also non-denominational theisms. The religious fundamentalist, on the other hand, is often unwilling and unable to consider the possibility that some of the tenants and dogma of his/her religion may be flawed such that they should be reexamined, possibly altered or discarded.

2) The above is due, in part, to a failure of those involved to fully acknowledge and embrace their own fallibility as humans. Each side is convinced that they have accurately apprehended the true nature of the other side and the Truth in general about religion. And each side reinforces the other: the vitriolic and, at times, unreasonable proclamations from each side cause the other to hunker down more deeply into dogma and closed-mindedness.

3) The first two points are further problematic because they remove the possibility of affirming a reflectively religious life that minimizes dogma as far as possible. I take such a life to involve an appreciation of the value of a religious/spiritual life, while acknowledging all of the difficulties of comprehending what such a life should be, and whether there even is a God or what the role of God is in a religious/spiritual life.

The mocking atheist denies the value of a religious or spiritual life, whether of the reflective kind that I am advocating or the unreflective, dogmatic kind I have mentioned. The dogmatic believer denies that the dogma that rules his/her life may be flawed and refuses to take seriously the possibility that God does not exist or does not exist in the way he/she imagines. And again, I take it that many on both sides are operating with overly simplistic ideas about God and religion.

Thus, the two religious extremes I have canvassed are dangerous because they lesson the likelihood of finding the truth, and they foster an environment hostile to the kind of reflective theology that I see as being vital to living a fully good life.  Note that a “reflective theology” need not come with a god, but requires simply an openness to, and appreciation for, the possibility and value of a spiritual/religious life in a reflectively sophisticated form.