January 05, 2006
Of Universes, Tables, and Toenails
(Jimmy Akin)
A reader writes:
How can it be said that God created the universe if the universe already had an existence in the Mind of God before "creation?" Isn't the universe therefore an emanation of God?
Let's deal with the first question first.
The answer is that the universe DIDN'T exist prior to its creation by God. When we speak analogically of the universe "existing" in God's mind apart from creation (I prefer "apart from" to "before" since God is outside of time) we are speaking analogically. We aren't speaking of the same thing as existence but only something analogous to existence.
Specifically: There is a difference between something existing in the exterior world and a mind knowing that it could be created.
Consider: Suppose I think about building a table. Before I do so, there is an idea in my head of the table that I want to build. It has certain characteristics. Let's say that it's made of oak, is two feet high, five feet long, three feet wide, and has four legs.
Just to be unnecessarily mathematical, we'll call these properties T1, T2, T3, T4, and T5 (figure out which correspond to which if you're really interested).
So before I build the table, we can say that
There is an entity, J, who knows that he could build a table, T, with properties T1-T5.
Where J is your humble author.
Now at this point (before I build the table, you'll remember) the table does not exist. I just happen to know that I COULD build it.
In fact, we're at that moment RIGHT NOW, because I COULD build the table.
I just haven't.
So right now the table does not exist. What does exist is ME, who has a particular piece of knowledge concerning my table-buliding abilities.
If you want to speak analogically of the table existing "in my mind," okay, but you're using an analogy. What really exists is me. Not the table. To exist in the sense that counts (i.e., the sense in which I could stack coasters and coffetable books and assorted knicknacks on it) the table needs to exist OBJECTIVELY or OUTSIDE OF MY MIND. That kind of existence it AIN'T GOT as long as I haven't built it.
In the same way, apart from creation (you'll notice that I switched from "before" to "apart from" since I switched from talking about me--who exists IN time--to talking about God--who exists OUTSIDE OF time), God knows that he could create the universe. The difference he is omniscient and so can specify the universe he might create in infinite detail (whereas I got bored after only five characteristics). He also will come up with the universe ex nihilo (from nothing), where as I would have to go down to Dixieline to buy the lumber.
So, to be unnecessarily mathematical again, we can say that apart from creation,
There is an entity, G, who knows that he could create a universe, U, with characteristics U1-U(infinity).
Where G is God rather than me. (Please bear that last point in mind.)
Unless G chooses to act on his knowledge that he could create U and actually creates it then U does not exist.
You might be able to speak ANALOGICALLY of it existing "in God's mind," but the universe doesn't exist in the sense that counts (i.e., the sense in which God could stack coasters and coffetable books and assorted knicknacks on it). In other words, it doesn't exist OBJECTIVELY or OUTSIDE GOD'S MIND.
If God doesn't choose to create an objective universe then the only thing that exists (in the objective sense) is God himself, who happens to know that he could create the universe but didn't do so.
In fact, since God is omniscient and knows everything, he also knows EVERY POSSIBLE universe that he could create--and in infinite detail.
We know (or seem to know) that he did create THIS universe. Whether he created any other universes, we don't know. Maybe we'll find out someday.
So, to sum up: Coffee tables don't exist until you build them, and neither do universes.
(Also, in case you're wondering, you can't get what you need to build a universe at Dixieline, though they might be able to give you what you need to build a coffeetable.)
Now for the second question:
I'm afraid that the question is a little vague, but I'll try to answer it as best I can.
Something would be an emanation from God if he took something out of himself and used that to fashion the thing that he made.
For example, suppose that I decided that I wanted to start a toenail clipping collection composed entirely out of MY toenails. (In point of fact, I DON'T want to start such a collection--my toenail clippings go into the trash as soon as they're severed from my toes--but it's a relevant example.)
If--instead of throwing my toenail clippings into the trash--I started collecting them then my toenail clipping collection might in some sense be said to be an emanation from me in some sense.
But notice how this is different than the case of the table.
For the table, characteristic T1 was that it be made out of oak, and since my body is not composed of oak (though some of it is composed of toenails), the table would NOT BE an emanation from me because it was not made from me.
In the same way, the universe was created ex nihilo (out of nothing--God didn't go down to Dixieline, remember? I can't stress that enough that they just don't have what you need to build a universe down at Dixieline) and thus was NOT created out of God, meaning that it was not an emanation from him.
So: To sum up again: Toenail clipping collections might be emanations from you, but tables and universes are not.
(Also: Don't expect Dixieline to have toenail clippings that you can buy, either.)
Hope this helps!
Feel free to e-mail Plotinus a link to all this if Gmail has added a temporal addressing function yet!
P.S.
Here's another disproof of the idea that the universe is an emanation from God:
- The universe has rocks in it.
- God has never had rocks in his head.
- Therefore, the universe is not an emanation from God. QED.
Take it for what it's worth.
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July 07, 2005
Greatest Philosopher Voting
(Jimmy Akin)
The BBC is holding an Internet vote for the Greatest Philosopher.
Of the options listed, I voted for Thomas Aquinas--hands down (though others including Plato, Aristotle, Renee Descartes, and Ludwig Wittgenstein were also attractive)
Unfortunately, they don't tell you who is currently ahead in the voting, so I guess we'll have to wait until they announce the results of the survey.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)
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June 13, 2005
Logic Help
(Jimmy Akin)
A reader writes:
I have to write an essay about " why logic is important " in my philosophy class, but i donot have many ideas to write it. Can you help me or show me how to fine some informations online.
A) The basic reason why logic is important is that the rules of logic are the rules of good reasoning. Therefore, if you wanted to take a bit of a risk you could simply turn in the following as your essay:
- The rules of logic are the rules of good reasoning.
- It is important to use the rules of good reasoning.
- Therefore, it is important to use the rules of logic.
B) I suspect that your teacher may be looking for a bit more than that, though, and the most promising way to flesh out the paper, it seems to me, would be to talk about logical fallacies.
To emphasize the importance of logic, I'd give a bunch of examples (the more practical, the better) in which people commit logical fallacies and show how this harms them in important ways. (Thomas Sowell is a great source for exposing various fallacies and how they hurt the poor, but if your philosophy teacher is a rabid leftie, you might ought to stay away from using examples from him.)
C) If you want to grab for the brass ring, you might write a paper in which you yourself commit numerous fallacies one after the other in such a fashion that it is clear to your teacher that you not only know the fallacies, you understand them so well that you are committing them deliberately to illustrate the value of logic in a backhand way. That, however, is a risky strategy, for if you get the fallacies wrong or don't make it sufficiently clear that their use is tongue-in-cheek then you may get lower marks. If you can pull it off, though, your teacher will be delighted.
All told, I'd probably recommend the middle, pedestrian strategy (i.e., B).
Hope this helps!
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May 17, 2005
Emotivism
(Jimmy Akin)
A reader writes:
I love your blog! And apologetics articles by that James Akin guy were also very helpful when I was coming back to the faith - could you let him know?
Who's James Akin?
Anyway, a very quick email - I am having a dialogue with someone whose ethical philosophy is explicitly emotivist - they don't believe morality exists at all, it's just how people feel. Nobody ever does anything wrong, not even the Nazis, because 'wrong' is just a word we use to describe things we don't like. She's mentioned cost/benefit analysis and evolution, so I suspect she is planning to use these to try to explain away the existence of internal 'shoulds'. I've talked with moral relativists and rationalist atheists before, but this is new to me.
Do you have any suggestions for how to deal with emotivism?
Sure thing. It's been a number of years since I've interacted with emotivism in a serious way (it was back in grad school), but here goes . . .
For those who may not be familiar with the term, emotivism is a philosophical interpretation of moral utterances ("Killing is morally wrong," "Compassion is morally praiseworthy") as merely emotive expressions that lack cognitive value. In other words, they are not propositions that can be true or false, just expressions of emotions.
This is sometimes expressed as the "Boo! Hurrah! theory," according to which statements like 'Killing is wrong" can be understood as essentially "Boo, killing!" and statements like "Compassion is good" can be understood as essentially "Hurrah, compassion!"
"Boo, killing!" and "Hurrah, compassion!" are not propositions. As a result, they cannot be true or false. "Boo, killing" is no more a true proposition than "Hurrah, killing!" is a false one. They are simply expressions of attitudes.
(One should note, though, that one can express an attitude insincerely. For example, one might say "Hurrah, killing!" with gusto when among Cthulhu worshippers to make them think you are one of them and not raise suspicions even though "Boo, killing!" is your true attitude.)
Emotivism has always struck me as a remarkably weak interpretation of moral statements.
For a start, it's got grammar agin' it. If you look at statements like "Killing is wrong" or "Truth-telling is good" they do not fit the grammatical form that we normally use when we are merely making emotional expressions.
When we do the latter, we tend to simply use an interjection, coupled with a noun if needed to make the context of the interjection clear. For example, we might say, "Broccoli? Ugh!" or "Lakers, boo!" or "Cool! Payday!" or "Cthulhu! Aaaaagh!"--or, if the context is clear enough that we don't need the noun then we just use the interjection: "Ugh!" "Boo!" "Cool!" "Aaaaagh!"
So if moral statements were merely emotional utterances, why would we use the grammatical form of predication when we make them? If I say "Killing is wrong," I'm using a noun, a copula (the verb "to be"), and an adjective to predicate the quality of wrongness on killing.
I seem to be asserting the existence of wrongness no less than I am asserting the existence of greenness when I say "The grass is green." This does not mean that wrongness or greenness are things that can exist independently, as concrete objects on their own, but it does seem that I'm assering them as objectively real qualities.
So to restate the question: Why would we want to use one grammatical form (predication) to make emotional expressions when it comes to morals when we have a perfectly good grammatical way (interjection) of making these already?
You could suppose English-speakers just got into this habit and that it's just part of the idiom of English, but it ain't.
People do this in every language from what I can tell. Even languages that commonly use nominal sentences (sentences with a subject and a verb-less predicate) like Latin or Hebrew or Arabic still understand moral statements as involving predication rather than mere interjection.
So grammar definitely seems to count against emotivism as a theory of moral utterances. There seems to be something about human consciousness that regards moral utterances as different than mere emotive utterances.
Further, if moral utterances are just emotive utterances than how can one even tell which grammatical form to use for them? In the case of an individual working over well-trod ground, habit can certainly make this determination, but how did these cutoms even develop? Why are certain statements regarded as moral and some regarded as merely emotive?
Now, it is possible to use predication to make what seem to be emotional expressions. If one says "Ice cream is good" or "Jalapeno toothpaste is bad" then it is clear we are expressing something much more like "Hurrah, ice cream!" or "Boo, jalapeno toothpaste!" but we still recognize that, even though we are using predication to express our feelings, that we are not making moral statements when we do this. We recognize that "Ice cream is good" and "Not killing innocents is good" are different--the latter involves a different (and more important) kind of goodness than the first. In the same way, "Torturing babies is bad" seems to mean something different and more important than "Jalapeno toothpaste is bad."
Another problem with emotivism is that we often have emotions that are out of synch with our moral convictions. At a given moment, a person may feel emotionally numb yet still maintain that "Abortion is wrong" or "War is wrong" or whatever moral statement you might want to have him make at a moment of emotional numbness.
Further, our emotions may be directly contrary to our moral convictions. A young man looking at a pretty girl may maintain that "Sex outside of marriage is wrong!" even though at the moment his emotions at the moment are strongly urging him to violate his moral commitment.
The fact that our emotions may be absent or directly contrary to our moral convictions thus makes it seem doubly unlikely that when we utter our moral convictions we are merely expressing emotions.
Another problem is that emotivism is simply false in the case of many individuals. Myself, f'rinstance. When I say "Abortion is wrong" I mean that there is a moral quality known as "wrongness" that supervenes on acts of abortion the same way that greenness supervenes on well-watered grass. In other words, I mean that wrong things really are wrong.
I think most people fall into that category. Not having gone to grad school in philosophy, most folks may not have analyzed it to this extent or have the same vocabulary to express it, but I think that when most people say something is morally wrong that they mean it really is morally wrong and that they aren't simply venting their emotions.
You might suppose that they are incorrect about this, that there are no moral properties in the world, and so that people are simply wrong when they attribute moral properties to things, but that tells you nothing about what people mean when they make these attributions.
In the old days a good number of people believed that luckiness and unluckiness were objectively real properties. Thus they would say that certain numbers or animals or omens were "lucky" and others were "unlucky" and think that they were talking about objectively real properties that supervened on these things.
Today we may still use the words "lucky" and "unlucky," but the great majority of folks don't literally believe in the objective existence of luck-related properties (even if they may pretend for fun that they do when going to Vegas). If anyone today does have a naive belief in luck, we'd dismiss it as superstition, but we'd be wrong to try to tell him that he doesn't mean "My rabbit's foot is lucky" if he means that it really is lucky.
In the same way, I think emotivists (and other non-cognitivists) are simply mistaken when they say that folks don't mean what they say when they claim that something is morally right or wrong. The non-cognitivist may not believe in moral rightness or wrongness, but that tells him nothing about what ordinary folks do mean.
Most folks are, as fer as I kin tell, cognitivists.
But here's another issue: This is really an empirical question. Ever since grad school, I've thought that philosophers on both sides of the cognitivist divide have been spinning their wheels arguing about what moral statements "really" mean. They mean what people use them to mean! If you want to know what that is, analyze the possibilities (this has been done in spades) and then take a survey!
It'd have to be a very carefully worded survey to avoid biasing folks against one theory or another, but that's the real way to get at what they mean when they make moral utterances.
And my intuition, interaction with others, and my knowledge of the history of moral thought tells me: Most folks are cognitivists. That is, they believe moral statements are true or false.
An emotivist may not believe that any more than I believe that statements about luck describe objectively real qualities but it's a mistake to confuse a theory of what a class of utterance means with whether it describes the world.
It is thus a category mistake to try to substitute a theory about the existence of morals for a theory of the meaning of moral utterances. To use technical jargon, it's a category mistake confusing ontology with semantics.
Which is a pity since the folks who pioneered the non-cognitive theories of morals were folks who were very much concerned with avoiding category mistakes--or at least of accusing others of making them.
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February 11, 2005
The Burden of Proof
(Jimmy Akin)
Down yonder, I wrote:
I say the burden of proof is on them because I don't believe the claim (I think it's a myth), and the burden of proof is always on the person you disagree with.
Following, which a reader wrote:
Jimmy,
You wrote:
"the burden of proof is always on the person you disagree with."
Which struck me as being, well, simply wrong: if it were true, then in every disagreement (where both sides disagree with each other), both sides would have the burden of proof. So what did you mean?
And another reader wrote:
Jimmy, I think you might be being facetious here. But the real reason the burden of proof is on them, of course, is that they are making an accusation that the pope conspired with an industry and established binding laws of multitudes of Catholics in order to financially benefit that industry. The burden of proof is always on the people making an assertion of fact!
If someone accuses me of conspiring, the burden of proof better be on them! If not, I'll have to materialize some sort of proof that I *didn't conspire*! In most cases that wouldn't even be possible.
Sorry, guys.
I meant what I said and I said what I meant . . .
YOU SHOULDER THE BURDEN, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.
. . . if you're trying to convince someone who disagrees with you. The nature of the claim doesn't matter.
Kudos to the reader who took up and defended the proposition I was advancing!
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February 03, 2005
Aristotle On Youth
(Jimmy Akin)
Speaking of Aristotle's (blindingly obvious) observation that young people are reckless and like to have fun, here's his description of young men and their character. Sound like anybody you know (or may have been)?
Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they are most swayed and in which they show absence of self-control.
They are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent while they last, but quickly over: their impulses are keen but not deep-rooted, and are like sick people's attacks of hunger and thirst.
They are hot-tempered, and quick-tempered, and apt to give way to their anger; bad temper often gets the better of them, for owing to their love of honour they cannot bear being slighted, and are indignant if they imagine themselves unfairly treated.
While they love honour, they love victory still more; for youth is eager for superiority over others, and victory is one form of this.
They love both more than they love money, which indeed they love very little, not having yet learnt what it means to be without it -- this is the point of Pittacus' remark about Amphiaraus.
They look at the good side rather than the bad, not having yet witnessed many instances of wickedness. They trust others readily, because they have not yet often been cheated.
They are sanguine; nature warms their blood as though with excess of wine; and besides that, they have as yet met with few disappointments.
Their lives are mainly spent not in memory but in expectation; for expectation refers to the future, memory to the past, and youth has a long future before it and a short past behind it: on the first day of one's life one has nothing at all to remember, and can only look forward.
They are easily cheated, owing to the sanguine disposition just mentioned.
Their hot tempers and hopeful dispositions make them more courageous than older men are; the hot temper prevents fear, and the hopeful disposition creates confidence; we cannot feel fear so long as we are feeling angry, and any expectation of good makes us confident.
They are shy, accepting the rules of society in which they have been trained, and not yet believing in any other standard of honour.
They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things -- and that means having exalted notions.
They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning; and whereas reasoning leads us to choose what is useful, moral goodness leads us to choose what is noble.
They are fonder of their friends, intimates, and companions than older men are, because they like spending their days in the company of others, and have not yet come to value either their friends or anything else by their usefulness to themselves.
All their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They disobey Chilon's precept by overdoing everything, they love too much and hate too much, and the same thing with everything else.
They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it; this, in fact, is why they overdo everything.
If they do wrong to others, it is because they mean to insult them, not to do them actual harm.
They are ready to pity others, because they think every one an honest man, or anyhow better than he is: they judge their neighbour by their own harmless natures, and so cannot think he deserves to be treated in that way.
They are fond of fun and therefore witty, wit being well-bred insolence [Rhetoric II:12:1389a-b].
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December 15, 2004
A.J. Ayer's Pre-Death Near-Death Experience
(Jimmy Akin)
One of the things Gary Habermas asked Antony Flew about in their interview was what certain 20th century philosophers would have thought if they were still alive and had they seen modern apologetic advances and Flew's apparent acceptance of belief in God.
One of these philosophers was A. J. Ayer, who was one of the architects of logical positivism (which was so anti-religious that it claimed religious statements literally had no meaning at all) in the 1950s (before it was pointed out that judged by their own criteria, central positivist claims also appeared to be meaningless, contributing to the movement's collapse).
Ayer was venomously anti-religious, but before he died, he had a very unusual experience: In fact, he had a near-death experience. He choked on a piece of fish and was clinically dead for four minutes. When he came back, he reported his experience.
I'm not overly impressed with apologetic evidence allegedly offered by NDEs. In fact, I'm quite skeptical of them at this point.
Some of the press accounts of Ayer's experience sound really weird and implausible--more like a hallucination than a genuine experience of the afterlife (though the Church acknowledges that the consciousness of a subject can mix elements into a genuine experience of the supernatural in private revelation).
Still, it's a cosmic irony that Ayer--so long a proponent of the idea that talk about the afterlife was either meaningless or foolish--would have an NDE, following which he reported seeing the Supreme Being and saying that the event "weakened my conviction that death would be the end of me, though I continue to hope it will be."
His NDE made quite a splash in the press, both legitimate and illegitimate. After his experience was reported in an American tabloid (The Weekly World News, if I recall correctly), one of the professors in my philosophy department taped the story to his door and another (or possibly the same) professor wrote "Well, that's it for empiricism" in the margin.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS GREAT IRONY.
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December 12, 2004
STOP PRESSES! Flew Still An Atheist?
(Jimmy Akin)
Whoa!
According to Rationalist International, Antony Flew has issued a statement affirming atheism and appearing to suggest that, although he notes the advance of science-oriented arguments for the existence of God, he has not been convinced by them.
Something is rotten in Denmark (and, well, most of the rest of Europe, anyway).
Given the claims made in the ABC news story (which quoted a telephone interview with Flew) and the interview with Flew that Philosophia Chrisi is publishing (which quotes Flew responding to questions about his "theism" and describing his own views as "deistic"), I see four possibilities:
- The Rationalist International folks are to blame: They've hoaxed in some degree.
- ABC News and Philosophia Christi are to blame: ABC News turning out to be incompetent (not at all implausible) and Gary Habermas and/or the Philosophia Christi folks turning out to have hoaxed in some degree (not at all likely) or otherwise botched the interview.
- Flew is to blame: He has himself staged a hoax (not likely) or has flipped back to atheism and doesn't want to admit he previously accepted belief in God.
- No one is to blame: This is some colossally-implausible Rashomon-like misunderstanding.
Time will tell what is the case.
UPDATE!: It appears that option #1 may well be the case. Despite the fact that the R.I. bulletin is headlined in a way that conveys the impression the statement it reports was generated recently (it is headlined Bulletin #137 [12 December 2004]), a careful reading of the text accompanying Flew's statement indicating that it is an old statement, not one issued in response to the present reports. Rationalist International seems to have republished the statement in an attempt to create confusion regarding Flew's present position.
Be warned, as you may well encounter people passing off the Rationalist International statement as a recent one.
The bulletin also reports a quote dated October 2004 from Flew in which he appears to refuse to affirm the proposition "Probably God exists." There are two problems with this, however: (1) The quotation only includes Flew's response to a proposition put to him and does not include the proposition itself; we have to rely on R.I. for that. (2) Many philosophers for technical reasons might assert the impossibility of assessing the "probablity" (construed in a mathematical sense) of God's existence but still feel justified in believing in him for other reasons. Flew may fall into that category.
What is ultimately needed to settle the matter is a new statement from Flew, but it appears at this point that Rationalist International has acted in bad faith by republishing previous statements instead of contacting Flew directly and obtaining a new one.
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Excerpts From Flew
(Jimmy Akin)
Here are a few notable quotations from the Flew:Habermas interview for those who don't have time to read the whole thing. They indicate where Flew is now and contain significant signs of hope, as well as significant notes of caution.
I don’t believe in the God of any revelatory system, although I am open to that. But it seems to me that the case for an Aristotelian God who has the characteristics of power and also intelligence, is now much stronger than it ever was before.
Yes, absolutely right [i.e., "My views can be described as deistic"]. What Deists, such as the Mr. Jefferson who drafted the American Declaration of Independence, believed was that, while reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings.
Yes. I am open to it [the idea of special revelation], but not enthusiastic about potential revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder’s comments on Genesis 1. That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation.
It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.
I, too, having been brought up as a Methodist, have always been aware of this possible and in many times and places actual benefit of objective religious instruction. It is now several decades since I first tried to draw attention to the danger of relying on a modest amount of compulsory religious instruction in schools to meet the need for moral education, especially in a period of relentlessly declining religious belief. But all such warnings by individuals were, of course, ignored. So we now have in the UK a situation in which any mandatory requirements to instruct pupils in state funded schools in the teachings of the established or any other religion are widely ignored.
I must some time send you a copy of the final chapter of my latest and presumably last book, in which I offer a syllabus and a program for moral education in secular schools. This is relevant and important for both the US and the UK. To the US because the Supreme Court has utterly misinterpreted the clause in the Constitution about not establishing a religion: misunderstanding it as imposing a ban on all official reference to religion. In the UK any effective program of moral education has to be secular because unbelief is now very widespread.
Well, absent revelation, why should we perceive anything as objectively evil? The problem of evil is a problem only for Christians.
[HABERMAS: In your view, then, God hasn’t done anything about evil.]
No, not at all, other than producing a lot of it.
I think those who want to speak about an afterlife have got to meet the difficulty of formulating a concept of an incorporeal person.
I find the materials about near death experiences [some of which involve people during an NDE learning information that turns out to be true about affairs remote from their bodies] so challenging… . this evidence equally certainly weakens if it does not completely refute my argument against doctrines of a future life
An incorporeal being may be hypothesized, and hypothesized to possess a memory. But before we could rely on its memory even of its own experiences we should need to be able to provide an account of how this hypothesized incorporeal being could be identified in the first place and then—after what lawyers call an affluxion of time—reidentified even by himself or herself as one and the same individual spiritual being.
I still hope and believe there’s no possibility of an afterlife.
If all I knew or believed about God was what I might have learned from Aristotle, then I should have assumed that everything in the universe, including human conduct, was exactly as God wanted it to be. And this is indeed the case, in so far as both Christianity and Islam are predestinarian, a fundamental teaching of both religious systems. What was true of Christianity in the Middle Ages is certainly no longer equally true after the Reformation. But Islam has neither suffered nor enjoyed either a Reformation or an Enlightenment.
As for Islam, it is, I think, best described in a Marxian way as the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab imperialism. Between the New Testament and the Qur’an there is (as it is customary to say when making such comparisons) no comparison. Whereas markets can be found for books on reading the Bible as literature, to read the Qur’an is a penance rather than a pleasure. There is no order or development in its subject matter. All the chapters (the suras) are arranged in order of their length, with the longest at the beginning.
One point about the editing of the Qur’an is rarely made although it would appear to be of very substantial theological significance. For every sura is prefaced by the words “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.” Yet there are references to Hell on at least 255 of the 669 pages of Arberry’s rendering of the Qur’an and quite often pages have two such references.
Whereas St. Paul, who was the chief contributor to the New Testament, knew all the three relevant languages and obviously possessed a first class philosophical mind, the Prophet, though gifted in the arts of persuasion and clearly a considerable military leader, was both doubtfully literate and certainly ill-informed about the contents of the Old Testament and about several matters of which God, if not even the least informed of the Prophet’s contemporaries, must have been cognizant.
This raises the possibility of what my philosophical contemporaries in the heyday of Gilbert Ryle would have described as a knock-down falsification of Islam: something which is most certainly not possible in the case of Christianity. If I do eventually produce such a paper it will obviously have to be published anonymously.
The Bible is a work which someone who had not the slightest concern about the question of the truth or falsity of the Christian religion could read as people read the novels of the best novelists. It is an eminently readable book.
No, I don’t think so [i.e., "I am not closer to believing in the resurrection of Jesus"]. The evidence for the resurrection is better than for claimed miracles in any other religion. It’s outstandingly different in quality and quantity, I think, from the evidence offered for the occurrence of most other supposedly miraculous events.
[Regarding previous remarks he has made in debates that for a person who already is a Christian there is good reason to believe in the resurrection of Jesus:] This is an important matter about rationality which I have fairly recently come to appreciate. What it is rational for any individual to believe about some matter which is fresh to that individual’s consideration depends on what he or she rationally believed before they were confronted with this fresh situation. For suppose they rationally believed in the existence of a God of any revelation, then it would be entirely reasonable for them to see the fine tuning argument as providing substantial confirmation of their belief in the existence of that God.
The greatest thing is their [John and Charles Wesley] tremendous achievement of creating the Methodist movement mainly among the working class. Methodism made it impossible to build a really substantial Communist Party in Britain and provided the country with a generous supply of men and women of sterling moral character from mainly working class families. Its decline is a substantial part of the explosions both of unwanted motherhood and of crime in recent decades.
Certainly John Wesley was one of my country’s many great sons and daughters. One at least of the others was raised in a Methodist home with a father who was a local preacher. [NOTE: This is a wry joke. Flew himself was raised in a Methodist home with a father who was a local preacher.]
I think it’s very unlikely [that I would become a Christian], due to the problem of evil. But, if it did happen, I think it would be in some eccentric fit and doubtfully orthodox form: regular religious practice perhaps but without belief. If I wanted any sort of future life I should become a Jehovah’s Witness. But some things I am completely confident about. I would never regard Islam with anything but horror and fear because it is fundamentally committed to conquering the world for Islam.
Well, one thing I’ll say in this comparison is that, for goodness sake, Jesus is an enormously attractive charismatic figure, which the Prophet of Islam most emphatically is not.
READ THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW.
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Philosophy | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
December 11, 2004
More From Flew
(Jimmy Akin)
A commenter down yonder beat me to posting the link, but Philosophia Christi has an interview between Antony Flew and Christian apologist Gary Habermas about Flew's newfound belief in God.
READ THE INTERVIEW PAGE-BY-PAGE
READ THE WHOLE INTERVIEW (WARNING: Evil file format [.pdf]!)
(Cowboy hat tip: Southern Appeal.)
Before the facts of the case were known, Flew himself really set the cat among the pideons by publishing
THIS LETTER IN PHILOSOPHY NOW.
(Again, cowboy hat tip: Southern Appeal.)
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Philosophy | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
