Right Reason

The blog of Dr Glenn Andrew Peoples on Theology, Philosophy, and Social Issues

Yo Blair!

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On July 18, 2006

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I saw it on TV tonight – Tony Blair and George W. Bush talking candidly at the G8 summit, with a microphone accidentally left on. The whole world got to hear Bush say “Yo Blair” as he greeted the British Prime Minister. They also got to hear that Blair had given Bush a sweater as a gift, which he claimed to have knitted. Interesting.

But of course the real highlight is that Bush said the s word! Okay, so it won’t get him into the kind of trouble it got Nixon into. In fact, most internet news sources aren’t even editing it like Nixon’s [EXPLETIVE DELETED] comments. But it was a little unexpected, even if he was talking about Assyria getting Hezbollah to “stop that s**t.” I suppose somebody could always splice it up a little and have Bush saying “Yo Blair, thanks for the threads. When are Hezbollah gonna stop wit dat s**t?”

But that aside, I can’t see what the fuss is about. They are saying to each other exactly what they say to the world about their views on the middle east. Check out the poll on the CNN page at the link above. The question is asked – whose reputation is damaged more by the incident? So far, the majority of people have voted for the fourth option – the reputations of both were enhanced! Well I guess if anything it shows that right or wrong, they aren’t duplicitous.

Dennett. Yawn, says Jack Miles.

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On July 2, 2006

In atheism, religion

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Apparently, people other than conservative Christian scholars have noticed that Daniel Dennett’s analysis of the divide between religion and skepticism is shallow. See Jack Miles’ Review here.

Dennett sets out to tell us all that we need to break the spell of religion, and break it now. But so much of what he says ends up being more sauce than meat. For example, says Miles:

[I]ntellectual outbursts emotionally akin to “Let’s step outside and settle this, shall we?” keep intruding. Thus we read: “If theists would be so kind as to make a short list of all the concepts of God they renounce as balderdash before proceeding further, we atheists would know just which topics were still on the table, but, out of a mixture of caution, loyalty, and unwillingness to offend anyone ‘on their side,’ theists typically decline to do this.” Perhaps so, but then is Dennett prepared to perform a comparable triage for the favorite topics of his fellow atheists? Where do “we atheists” stand, for example, with regard to fellow atheist Howard Stern? We theists would like to know, if Dennett would be so kind, though we fear that out of a mixture of caution, loyalty and unwillingness to offend, he may pass over America’s most influential single atheist in silence.Truth to tell, this kind of game is depressingly easy to play just like the no.slotzo.com/kortspill games, and it’s a rare student of religion who really wants to be drawn into it.

What’s got Dennett so riled up? Miles suggests that it’s because while skepticism has better arguments, it’s dying out anyway. That may well be how Dennett would choose to describe the state of philosophical affairs, but in light of the recent upsurge in religious belief rather than skepticism in philosophers of religion, this charge is more than a little difficult to maintain without serious misgivings. One sociological fact, however, is much harder to deny:

Fertility rates in the relatively secular blue states are 12 percent lower than in the relatively religious red states, according to Philip Longman in the March/April issue of Foreign Policy. In Europe, a similar correlation holds. As Longman writes: “Do you seldom, if ever, attend church? For whatever reason, people answering affirmatively . . . are far more likely to live alone, or in childless, cohabitating unions, than those who answer negatively.” For the most secular cultures in the world, Longman predicts a temporary drop in absolute population as secular liberals die out and a concomitant cultural transformation as, “by a process similar to survival of the fittest,” they are demographically replaced by religious conservatives.

It’s almost enough to make you believe in Dominion Theology!

Peter Singer. He’s not just wrong, he tells fibs, apparently.

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On June 25, 2006

In Uncategorized

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Read about it here. Apparently some ethicists don’t always tell the truth.

Peter Singer is a writer I’ve had some interest in over the last few years as I’ve written on ethics. He’s a fairly notorious ethicist at Princeton University who advocates feticide for the purpose of organ harvesting or on the grounds of mental handicap or more minor problems, necrophilia, bestiality and a bunch of other peachy things like that. He’s a respected academic, mind you, who thrives on the controversy. It’s publicity you can’t buy.

Robert George is also a writer I’ve had some interest in over the last few years. He’s a philosopher who writes on ethics, especially on natural law and related issues. He also teaches at Princeton University, but he’s not nearly as notorious as Peter Singer.

A magazine called The Nation published a story recently suggesting that Robert George and others were on a mission to promote their philosophy as correct and influence Princeton and the world of academia in a conservative direction. How shocking. But Peter Singer came to the defence, explaining that he values the diversity on a campus like Princeton, and it’s a great place to debate issues like those on which he and Dr George differ. He’s been hoping for a debate with George, but alas, George always declines, and Singer always accepts.

Peter Singer obviously wasn’t counting on the mild mannered conservative Robert George to be so uppity as to actually complain about being impugned in this way.

As Robert George explains in First Things magazine, the impression given by Dr Singer is misleading in the extreme. In fact, in response to a request for a debate, George suggested to Singer that the best approach would be for the two of them to go toe to toe and teach graduate seminar together. They could present their views and respond to one another in an academic format for all to see. The course would run for twelve weeks, and all the contentious issues could be well and truly hashed out.

Dr Singer never replied to the proposal, and then implied, publicly, that Dr George was too afraid to face him.

Dr Singer fibbeth.

The Simpsons as Philosophy? Easy to say when your philosophy stinks.

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On June 25, 2006

In atheism

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According to Juilan Baggini, the cartoon show The Simpsons wrestles with serious philosophy, and does it well. What?

No, it’s true, apparently. Here’s an example:

We now know we’re just a bunch of naked apes trying to get on as best we can, usually messing things up, but somehow finding life can be sweet all the same. All delusions of a significance that we do not really have need to be stripped away, and nothing can do this better that the great deflater: comedy.

The Simpsons does this brilliantly, especially when it comes to religion. It’s not that the Simpsons is atheist propaganda; its main target is not belief in God or the supernatural, but the arrogance of particular organised religions that they, amazingly, know the will of the creator.

For example, in the episode Homer the Heretic, Homer gives up church and decides to follow God in his own way: by watching the TV, slobbing about and dancing in his underpants.

Throughout the episode he justifies himself in a number of ways.

  • “What’s the big deal about going to some building every Sunday, I mean, isn’t God everywhere?”
  • “Don’t you think the almighty has better things to worry about than where one little guy spends one measly hour of his week?”
  • “And what if we’ve picked the wrong religion? Every week we’re just making God madder and madder?”

Homer’s protests do not merely allude to much subtler arguments that proper philosophers make. The basic points really are that simple, which is why they can be stated simply.

Of course, there is more that can and should be said about them, but when we make decisions about whether or not to follow one particular religion, the reasons that really matter to us are closer to the simple truths of the Simpsons than the complex mental machinations of academic philosophers of religion.

I guess this explains why Baggini thinks The Simpsons is good philosophy. It takes the kind of prejudices he happens to hold, namely the prejudice against religious faith, and states them in a way that he likes, even though no philosopher of religion or theologian would ever utter them with the hope of feeling any sense of intellectual satisfaction.

In other words – this is crap philosophy, but since real philosophers don’t say the things I want them to, I’m going to say that this crap philosophy is good philosophy. Search around until some fat yellow cartoon bozo says what you’re thinking, and it’s good philosophy. It’s a bit like the guy who says “dude, my drunk neighbour who always rants about politics is actually brilliant. Send all them illegals back, put up border fences a mile high and string up all them non-patriots! He says what the political scientists are afraid to say!”

Yeah…. there may be a reason they’re not saying it.

Glenn Peoples

Ed hits it on the head

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On June 6, 2006

In political philosophy, religion

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I like Ed Feser. I discovered fairly recently that he has written a number of pieces on the topic of my current PhD research, namely religious convictions in public life.

One issue that I’m writing on at the moment is the following claim: We should only advocate policies in public that rest entirely on assumptions and convictions that can be defended in such a way that we could reasonably expect that our fellow citizen should take those assumptions and convictions seriously, and if we cannot defend those assumptions and convictions, then we should not support those policies. Therefore, we should not advocate any policies that depend on religious beliefs.

That’s it, premise and conclusion. I could comment on the premise, but that would be a different subject altogether for now. I want to ask, is there anything missing from the above argument? Well yes, there’s a second premise which is apparently so obvious that it doesn’t even need to be stated, let alone defended. here it is: “no religious assumptions and convictions are such that they could be defended in such a way that we could reasonably expect that our fellow citizen should take those assumptions and convictions seriously.”

So there you have it, religious citizens. In order to be good citizens, a number of left leaning liberals tell us (e.g. Rawls, Gaus, Macedo, and to an extent Robert Audi) , you just have to accept that your religious beliefs are indefensible.

When writing a PhD, I have a tendency to not be too scathing if I can help it. Thankfully I get to quote people like Ed Feser, who do not have such tendencies.

The problem, in the view of many liberals, is that religious considerations are matters of faith, where “faith” connotes in their minds a kind of groundless commitment, a will to believe that for which there is no objective evidence. Opinions on matters of public policy, they would say, can only appropriately be arrived at via methods of argument assessable by all members of the political community, not by reference to the idiosyncratic and subjective feelings of a minority. If religious arguments were in general really like this, then I would agree with the liberal that they ought to be kept out of the public square. But in fact this liberal depiction of religion is a ludicrous caricature, and manifests just the sort of ignorance and bigotry of which liberals frequently accuse others.

Turnabout on the "actual infinite" argument?

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On May 30, 2006

In apologetics, argument, philosophy of religion

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In an interesting turnabout, Fancois Tremblay has sought to turn William Lane Craig’s use of the kalam Cosmological argument against him.

Part of the argument, namely premise 2: “The universe began to exist,” draws on, among other things, Craig’s argument against the possibility of an actual infinite (it also draws on the empirical scientific evidence that the universe did begin to exist). Basically, the argument is that if the past is infinite in duration, then an infinitely large number of days (or months, or years, take your pick) has been traversed. But since an infinite number of things cannot actually be traversed, the past cannot be infinite.

Temblay has accepted this premise, but he thinks it is damaging to the Christian faith traditionally expressed, or to a number of faiths, I suppose. Why? Because, says Francois,

This is where I must now part ways with William Craig. While his argument against infinite regress is reasonable, we also have to contend with his belief in an infinite god. And we have to ask, what does it mean for a god’s knowledge, power, benevolence, and presence to be qualified by “infinite”?

Since an actual infinite cannot exist, says Francois, an infinite God cannot exist either, and so if there is a God, he must be finite.

The main question I would want to ask is who the argument is supposed to be directed against. Are there any philosophers of religion who defend a concept of Theism whereby God’s knowledge is said to consist of an infinite number of propositions? And if there are, does it do any harm to traditional Christian theism to show that they are wrong? After all, all it takes is a simple internet search for the words “God,” “knowledge,” “propositional” and “intuitive” to find out that omniscience doesn’t have to be viewed as having an infinitely large collection of true beliefs. God’s knowledge, as Aquinas noted, can be (and should be) construed as intuitive, rather than propositional or discursive. Likewise, omnipresence need not be defined in terms of being present in an infinite number of places (in fact if God is literally not extended in space, it is just obvious that this is not what it means), and so forth.

Turnabout is fair play, but in this case it did not pay off.

Glenn Peoples

James, the brother of Jesus and son of Joseph

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On May 25, 2006

In discoveries, New Testament, news

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Call me slow, but until today I had never heard of the ossuary of James. The what? It’s an ornate box that contains pieces of bone from deceased love ones. This one dates to around AD sixty something, and features the inscription “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.”

It’s fairly obvious why this ruffles some Catholic feathers. Mary, Joseph’s wife, is said to have been a virgin her whole life by the Catholic Church, and James, one of Jesus’ “brothers,” is said to have been a cousin. Some Catholics have chimed in with anyone who says that it is a forgery, but the evidence doesn’t look good for them here, and here the claim of a forgery is debunked. I guess Mary’s first name isn’t “The Virgin” after all. But then, a lot of people have been saying that for a while. They’re called Protestants.

Welcome to my blog

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On May 3, 2006

In announcements

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This is just the beginning. 🙂

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