An Argument Against The Argument from Religious Experience

Richard Brown 19 Comments

In the comments on an earlier post I voiced the beginnings of an argument against religious experience as a legitimate source of knowledge about God. The basic idea behind the argument is that the idea that God would selectively reveal Himself is incompatible with his being a perfectly moral Being. Here is how I put it then,

It seems to me that if there really were a God he would make it clearer…the Old testament seems to have it right…He is constantly involved in teh affairs of His people…True, he reveals himself only to a select few, but everyone can see that he is acting in the world (e.g. the plauges in Egypt are witnessed by many, many people). But this doesn’t happen any more…furthermore why would a God who loved me not reveal Himself to me? The existence of God is clearly one of the most important questions that Mankind has ever pondered…doesn’t it seem immoral of Him to reveal the Truth to you but not to me?

[I mean, s]uppose that I love you and that I know everything about you. Also suppose that one of your deepest desire is to know whether I am alive or not. You don’t think that that would give me some reason for letting you know that I am alive? Now imagine an infinitely loving being. What possible reason could that being have for staying hidden? I claim none. So if God selectively reveals himself then He acts immorally

Enigman recently pointed me to a recent post at Siris which is from the autobiography of a 19th Century Saint who seems to voice similar concerns as I do. Here is teh brief passage;

I often asked myself why God had preferences, why all souls did not receive an equal measure of grace. I was filled with wonder when I saw extraordinary favours showered on great sinners like St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Mary Magdalen, and many others, whom He forced, so to speak, to receive His grace….

Our Lord has deigned to explain this mystery to me. He showed me the book of nature, and I understood that every flower created by Him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would lose its springtide beauty, and the fields would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord’s living garden. He has been pleased to create great Saints who may be compared to the lily and the rose, but He has also created lesser ones, who must be content to be daisies or simple violets flowering at His Feet, and whose mission it is to gladden His Divine Eyes when He deigns to look down on them. And the more gladly they do His Will the greater is their perfection.

I can’t seem to tell if he is here addressing the same issue as I am or not. The talk about the roses and daiseys makes me think that it has something to do with some of us not being as blessed as others, but then again maybe it is the case that His revealing Himself is a blessing and so he really is addressing the same issue as I am. At anyrate, his answer doesn’t seem that convincing. His argument seems to be that a world in which God revealed Himself to everyone would be a world that was in some sense not as good as a world where he only selectively revealed Himself…but how could that be?

Fuck You, You Fucking Fuck

Richard Brown 23 Comments

As anyone who knows me knows, I am extremely fond of swearing. I have never understood whyt some words are considered bad (aside from racial slurs that is); I don’t see anything morally wrong with using ‘foul’ language in any context…but that is another story…

One of the best swear words is ‘fuck,’ in part because it is considered one of the worst swears, but also because of its versatility. In fact I have long thought that it can be used as any part of speech, as the title of the post suggests (this is actually from a T-shirt I own 🙂 )…I haven’t ever really thought about this seriously, but recently when I mentioned this to someone they said that it couldn’t be used as a preposition. But that is clearly not the case. Consider (in response to ‘where’s the book’)

1. The book is right fucking there

this can be said quite naturally after one has already said “the book is right over there” a couple of times to no avail. Since ‘fucking’ is here taking the place of ‘over’ it is a preposition.

In fact I noticed the other night that the “fucking there!” locution is used a lot by chef Gordon Ramsey.

I also recently discovered that it can be used as a quantifier/determiner, as in “he knows fuck-all about philosophy”

Fuckin’ A!

09/19/07 -Devitt on Meaning

Richard Brown 1 Comment

I am continuing my series of posts on the Meaning course I am auditing co-taught by Devitt and Neale (previous posts here, here, and here).

One thing that I, and others, have been pressing Devitt on is his treatment of semantic types. As he has admitted in class, he is primarily concerned with token sentences as a way of evaluating  the thoughts that those tokens are taken to be representitive of (confirming his commitment to P-semantics). This is what leads him to say that something is a meaning if and only if it plays a semantic role, which means that it can be used to explain bevaior and as a guide to reality.

When it was pointed out that this seems to indicate that sentence types, or for that matter word types,  don’t have any meaning Devitt appealed to the distinction between physical types and semantic types. This wasn’t a suprise since he had said the same thing to me after he read Kripke, Devitt, Bach. By physical type Devit means the physical structure that all tokens of ‘Aristotle’ share. The physical type ‘Aristotle’ is ambiguous for him. There is a distinct semantic type for each thing named Aristotle (which is a collection of all the tokens that are causally related to the particular object that they name), though only on physical type (at this point Neale asked if utterances and sentences could belong to the same physical type or not, to which Devitt said ‘I haven’t thought a lot about types!’).

He then offered the following tentative definition of the meaning of types

A property of a physical expression type is a meaning if and only if that property, together with the context, determines a meaning for all of its tokens

The second occurence of meaning here is supposed to be the P-semantic one, the one he defined in Comming. He says ‘ a meaning for all its tokens’ because he thinks that tokens can have more than one meaning. According to this definition, then, for the physical type ‘Aristotle’ to have a meaning is for it to have a property which determines a meaning for all of its tokens.

But this is itself ambiguous. It could mean

1. The property of the physical type determines a single meaning that all of the tokens share (though there may be other meanings that all the tokens share)

2. The property of the physical type determines a meaning for each token that may vary from token to token.

If 1 is the case then it will turn out that every token of ‘Aristotle’ will have the property of picking out Aristotle the philosopher no matter who the token actually refers to. This in effect means that every name token refers to every bearer of the name…wierd!

If 2 is the case then there must be some property that the name type has that acts as a function that when applied to a name token, in a given context, will give us the refferent of that name. What could such a property be? The natural candidate is something like NDT (being the theory that a name N is semantically equivelent to the description ‘the bearer of “N”‘). Who the bearer of “N” is will be determined by the causal relation that some object has to the thought that is being expressed by the sentence in which the token occurs. So it looks like Devitt should endorse frigidity as an L-semantic theory…though I somehow doubt that he would agree. When I brought this up in class, he said ‘perhaps names are a bad example…’

The Tri-State Cog Blog

Richard Brown Leave a comment

I have just become a contributor to The Tri-State Cog Blog, which

is a group weblog about cognitive science, intended to foster a community of cognitive science researchers based in the Northeastern USA. We post content on a wide range of issues in all areas of cognitive science. We particularly welcome content pertaining to cognitive science research in the Tri-State area, such as:
-Information about upcoming talks and conferences in the area

-Discussion of the views and research of cognitive scientists in the area

Sounds cool, no? So if you are a cogsci researcher in the NorthEastern USA, or plan to be, then check it out!

Metaethics and Cognitive Science

Richard Brown Leave a comment

There has been some discussion over at Brains about what the ideal cognitive science program would look like which got me to thinking. I am writing my dissertation in metaethics and I have always thought that my project was a cogsci project. I don’t mean merely that my metaethical theory is informed by research in cognitive science. I mean that metaethical theorizing is itself part of cognitive science, or at least should be.

 Now I am not trying to critisize Eric for not including metaethics in his ideal program, though I don’t know if I share his idea that mathematics is essential for study in cognitive science and that philosophy can be ‘picked up’ later, but I guess I am more just curious about what people think. Is metaethics a part of cognitive science?

God, Reason, and Morality

Richard Brown 8 Comments

The previous post brings up a question which I have thought about a lot: Can God act immorally?

It seems to me that the answer to this question is ‘yes’…and in fact I think we have clear examples of God’s immorality in the Bible (I am thinking in particular about Job). How is this possible?

Here is an argument

1. Causing unnecessary suffering is wrong

2. God causes unnecessary suffering (e.g. Job)

3. Therefore God (sometimes) acts immorally

What is wrong witht his arguement? I have heard some poeple say that it is a mistake to apply morality to God as He is not the right kind of object for moral evaluation, but why? He is rational, and so can see that ceratin actions are contradictory (or can’t be universalized, or whatever) and so should be bound by morality just like all other rational agents.