Martin S. Pribble on William Lane Craig

This post somewhat dissents from the common view that Craig is a master debater. Sample:

After watching a few of his debates, I’m sorry but I can’t take Craig seriously anymore. He sticks his fingers in his ears and says “But why? But why? But why?” without any intention of listening to a reasoned and rational response.

I don't really agree with this, insofar as I've watched a number of Craig's debates by now, and I think he's technically very good (i.e. very good in debating technique) ... but it's refreshing to see a different perspective. I certainly don't think that Craig is unbeatable - e.g. I think that John Shook got the better of him in a debate in Vancouver a couple of years ago. I haven't seen the Kagan debate that Pringle refers to, but by all accounts Kagan did well.

Udo comments on his Globe and Mail interview

A brief comment here.

Rowan Williams planning retirement ...

... according to this story. Who can blame him, as the Anglican Church continues to rip itself apart over such issues as the ordination and consecration of women and gays, and the blessing or otherwise of same-sex marriages?

Interview with Udo Schuklenk

The Globe and Mail also has a detailed interview with Udo.

Globe and Mail supports physician assisted suicide

Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper has published an editorial supporting a tightly-regulated system of physician assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. It concludes as follows:

Research shows that, in places where assisted suicide is legal, there is an initial spike in requests. However, the number then diminishes. “Many people, once they know that if all else fails, this is an option, they won’t make that call. The stress is gone,” says Udo Schuklenk, a Queen’s University professor who chairs the Royal Society’s committee on end-of-life decision-making in Canada. The committee will release a report this fall.

“Often when people talk about end-of-life decision-making, the assumption is, it’s about pain,” he adds. “But it’s not. The concern is more about losing control over the quality of their lives.”

As well as retooling the law on euthanasia, the government should expand the use of palliative care, so that people with terminal illnesses can be less fearful of an agonizing, protracted end, and less drawn to assisted suicide as a last option.

There must, however, be a way for society to grant the wishes of mentally competent adults who do not want to live with unspeakable pain, lose their ability to swallow, walk and talk, lose their selves. Surely this is the most compassionate way for them to end to their journey, and to have the good death they deserve.

Kudos and congratulations to Udo Schuklenk for his role in moving this issue so far forward. I don't need, I hope, to point out that this would be a change for the better in Canadian society, brought about in the face of resistance from religious groups. As usual, moving away from religion is necessary if we want improvements in the way our societies do things. The unfortunate fact is this: if we want more compassionate societies, they will have to be less religious societies. The only people who can make it otherwise are the religious leaders themselves, if they are prepared to let go of their empty moralising and look at issues in a more modern, liberal, and humane way.

All too often, religious morality puts otherworldly factors higher than such obvious secular goods as relief from suffering and the freedom to live a life that suits you; and thus it places barriers to a better morality (yes, "better" ... by very plausible standards of what we actually want our moral systems to deliver). Going by its record to date, religious morality is something to be overcome.

"Society is getting worse, therefore God exists."

The topic of last week's IQ2 debate was "Atheists are wrong" - and this was given a gloss as follows:

Having been persecuted as a dangerous minority for centuries, in recent years the champions of atheism have achieved celebrity status around the world. Atheists have been quick to point to the evils done in the name of religion and to claim that their criticism of religion is grounded in the demands of reason. Their opponents have championed faith as a source of inspiration and as an essential aspect of the human condition. However, beyond rhetorical skirmishes, in the end, just one fundamental question must be answered: does God exist?

One criticism that could be made of the speakers for the affirmative in the debate was that they didn't get past the rhetorical skirmishes and put any well-developed arguments that God (or a god of any kind) actually exists. That, I think, cost them with the audience.

But what is a fair argument that God exists? There seemed to be a view on the affirmative team that they could make their case by demonstrating that as modern Western and European societies have become more secular (in the sense that religion has increasingly become just an option) they have also become morally worse. This is supposedly shown by, for example, consumerism (whatever, exactly, that really means), greater acceptance of abortion, and the availability and common use of pornography.

We could have an interesting argument as to whether current societies really are worse, in some sense, than they were in the past. In particular, I think that greater acceptance of abortion is a good thing. In my view, most abortions merit neither legal penalties nor social condemnation. In fact, it is a censorious approach to girls and women who choose to have abortions that merits our condemnation. Trickier issues may arise with consumerism and pornography, but neither need necessarily be a bad thing, depending on exactly what is being picked out by these words.

More generally, it's unlikely that anyone could actually make out a claim to the effect that declining religiosity causes (or is even accompanied by) declining moral goodness. Judged by widely accepted standards of what we actually want in a society, things may even have been much worse in the past than they are now in Western and European societies. Violence is now less accepted than it was in past decades and centuries; people in most socio-economic strata are now less likely to experience it (at least as frequently); and we are certainly less likely than was once the case to die violent deaths at the hands of other human beings. Furthermore, we have moved somewhat beyond the old insistence that people conform to narrow roles and modes of self-expression based on sex. In general, we are far more tolerant of a diversity of thought, expression (including expressions of our sexuality), and life choices.

All in all, what we are seeing is better interpreted as the opposite of a moral decline. Based on quite plausible standards, our societies were actually worse in the past; based on quite plausible standards, things are slowly getting better. Sure, there may still be a long way to go; the process of getting there is gradual and often frustrating, with plenty of backward steps along the way; and, for example, there is no shortage of bigotry to go around. But in many ways, we've improved things. Some historical perspective is needed before we get too far into moralising about the evils of current societies, let alone about an overall decline.

I think most of us have a sense of this - whatever the faults of our current societies, it is facile, simplistic nonsense to imagine that they are morally worse than they were, say, a hundred years ago. For that reason alone, the argument that "Society is getting worse, therefore God exists" is nonsense. That's not a reason to give up on trying to make improvements: e.g., I support efforts to tackle global poverty and climate change, to go further in the acceptance of gay and bisexual people, and to rid ourselves of other irrational prejudices.

But we do need to keep our perspective on things. Consider, for example, the enormous difficulty as recently as the 1960s - and in some cases more recently still - in getting rid of criminal laws against homosexual conduct. That battle is now pretty much won, providing a foundation to take gay rights much further.

But even if our societies really were getting worse overall there could be many reasons for this other than declining religiosity: perhaps the effects of corporate capitalism, for example, or perhaps the impact of certain technologies. Since I don't believe that our societies actually are getting worse on balance - quite the opposite - I'm not interested in finding the cause of it. I.e., I'm not interested in tracking down the cause of what I take to be a non-existent phenomenon. Importantly, though, the argument, "Society is getting worse, therefore God exists" would still be very weak even if society actually was getting worse.

You'd think this would all go without saying. In fact, it probably does ... at least for most educated people. I said very little about it in the limited time that was available last Tuesday night, but I'm sure the audience grasped the point just fine. And yet, it's fascinating that this kind of argument gets run at all.

Sunday supervillainy - post-Schism X-Men line-ups

Both X-Men sides - blue and gold - are revealed here in this X-Men: Regenesis article on Marvel's site (h/t Rocket Stegosaurus), complete with the very villainous-looking core Uncanny X-Men team.

It appears Psylocke is playing on both sides of the fence. She's depicted on the covers (click images to expand) of both X-Men (one of the "blue" books apparently set on Utopia under Cyclops's overall leadership) and X-Force (one of the "gold" books set who knows where - maybe back in Westchester? - under Wolverine's). There must be a story to that.

Or is that not Psylocke on the cover of Uncanny X-Force? Surely it can't be a cross-dimensional counterpart, or even Revanche? Hmmm, I assume it's just Betsy sneaking off to do some black ops work for the other side.

As promised, we get family members, lovers, and ex-lovers finding themselves on opposing sides.

Cyclops is leading the blue side, but the gold side includes his brother Havok (shown in X-Factor), his sort-of daughter Rachel Grey (in X-Men Legacy), and his ex-lover (since, hey, some of those events "really" happened), Frenzy (also in X-Men Legacy); Colossus (currently looking like and wielding the power of Juggernaut) is on the core Uncanny team along with his sister, Magik, but his girlfriend, Kitty Pryde, is on the gold side hanging out with Wolverine; Magneto is on the blue side, and looks to be one of its core players, but his daugher, Polaris, is on the gold side, along with his lover, or perhaps ex-lover by the time we get to this point, Rogue; Domino is on the blue side, separated from her ex-lover, Wolverine.

Come to think of it, this split looks like giving the characters good opportunities to break up with unwanted lovers or get away from troublesome exes. OTOH, Cyclops is on the same book as Emma Frost; Rogue is on the same book as Gambit (so is Marvel going to put them back together?); and X-Factor now looks even more like a family orgy, with long-time lovers Havok and Polaris returning to a book that already had an incestuous quality to it.

These eight covers reveal only a relatively small proportion of the characters involved in the larger X-Men story, though most of the important ones are there. We see Storm on the blue side, but some of her best friends are on the gold side. Among the missing are Namor, the Stepford Cuckoos (who are teenage clones of Emma Frost - surely they'll be on the blue team?), Dazzler, and most or all of the New X-Men. Most importantly, Professor X himself appears nowhere, so what will be his role within the new scenario of a split within the X-Men?

Among the unexpected inclusions we find Sebastian Shaw posing bare-chested on the cover of Generation Hope (so is sinister young Hope going to adopt Shaw, of all people, as her new mentor?), while Toad appears on Wolverine's team.

The blue side looks villain-heavy, with Magneto, Emma, and Danger in the core team, but many members of the gold side started out as villains, come to the think of it, including such major X-Men characters as Wolverine and Rogue. As has been the case for many years now, X-Men continues to blur the line between heroic and villainous characters, with plenty of fanatics, narcissists, nutcases, and near-psychopaths running around managing to do good things to protect their world ... even though they are not especially nice people.

Exploring that blurred line continues to be a theme of the franchise, and surely that can only become more obvious, if one of the main plot points is (apparently) that the very powerful group who make up the core Uncanny group now wish to be both loved and feared by Earth's human population. That has already been revealed as Magneto's new political philosophy for mutants, and although he is not leading the team - Cyclops is - the others in the core group have apparently embraced some version of it. Potentially, it's an explosive approach for a supposed superhero team to take: it immediately makes them a team of anti-heroes, and it opens up the possibility for endless conflicts with more traditionally-inclined heroes.

There's scope for many personal and political tensions - what with opposed philosophies as well as all the complicated familial and erotic relationships that cross over the lines between the blue and gold line-ups. They don't have to be at each other's throats - this is a split over philosophies and strategies, not a violent struggle - but they'll inevitably find themselves disagreeing sharply, so we can expect to see plenty of family melodrama whenever, say, Cyclops and Magneto cross paths with Rachel and Rogue, or with Havok and Polaris. Christmas dinners are going to be a little edgy.

It's going to be fascinating seeing just how this split within the X-Men comes about, and then seeing how Marvel's writers fare in exploiting the possibilities. The Schism /Regenesis scenario has endless potential, so I hope it's realised in practice.

Conversion narratives, rational argument, and the life of the mind

One issue raised in the current debate about Joel Marks's shift ... conversion ... whatever you want to call it ... to moral error theory is the role played in argument and viewpoint-forming by autobiographical narrative. In this post, I'm not so much concerned about Marks's new metaethical position, although that substantive issue remains interesting, as in the kind of weight or trust we should accord this sort of narrative. In her post on the Marks piece over at In Living Color, Jean Kazez expresses scepticism:

...I think the genre is compelling but deceptive. The convert presents himself (or herself) as traveling from darkness into light, and the sheer drama makes us think--yes, yes, yes, that's the light! The story line of revelation is no substitute for good arguments.

In fact, this is one of many interesting observations made in the post and the resulting thread, and I may turn to others on another occasion - not so much in a spirit of disputing them (though I do in fact have difficulties with some) as in thinking that this debate created by Marks has been a rich one. In particular it has opened up questions about what some of our underlying commitments may be when we engage in philosophical analysis and argument.

For the moment, let's stick to the role of autobiographical narratives. Jean's comment expresses a rather austere scepticism about them ... which is a bit of a concern for someone like me who recently co-edited a book of essays that includes quite a large number of such narratives. Some of the essays in 50 Voices of Disbelief are fairly straightforward arguments or position statements, but most are, indeed, autobiographical. My own essay, "Unbelievable!", falls partly into this genre, even though it does contain some philosophical argument. Needless to say, I have operated here on the basis that such narratives are valuable, and that they do something legitimate that is enabled by their literary form.

It's true, no doubt, that they obtain a certain rhetorical power from their narrative structure and direction: the sense of conflict, as opposing ideas clash through the story; and the imaginative engagement in a journey that is partly, of course, an inward one, but is still, metaphorically, one of movement outwards into the light.

It's also true that an argument is only as good as its premises and the sort of deductive or inductive logic it displays. So how can any arguments that are embedded in these autobiographical conversion narratives thereby gain in power? If they do, surely that power is merely rhetorical - doesn't the literary form give an extra psychological force to an argument, without increasing the cogency of the argument itself? And isn't this somehow intellectually illegitimate?

Good questions. But there's a worry here. If we answer these questions affirmatively, are we thereby requesting that these narratives no longer be written and published? Perhaps we wouldn't want to ban them, since they are a natural way for people to express themselves, but we might think that they lack value for readers, who are, after all, being lured into taking arguments to be more cogent than they really are. Perhaps those of us who actually understand this issue should make a free choice to stop writing conversion narratives, editing them, trying to get them published, and so on? Or if not, why not, if they are deceptive in the way described? At the very least, perhaps we should stop reading them and letting ourselves come under the sway of their rhetorical power. Again ... if not, why not?

The concern goes further. Surely the same issues apply (even more?) to fictional conversion narratives. Once again, if we are shown a character as moving on an inward journey that is, metaphorically, one from darkness to light, this has a certain rhetorical power. The psychological force of the narrative structure may make the arguments for the character's ultimate position appear to be more cogent than they really are. Thus, readers are misled (are they not?). Once again, we might not ban such narratives, but shouldn't we stop writing/editing/publishing them if they are so misleading? At the very least, should we not stop reading them and letting ourselves come under the sway of their rhetorical power. If not, why not?

All of this might lead us to discount a great deal in the way of journalistic and philosophical writing, literary fiction, and more popular forms of fictional narrative (and note that the argument surely applies at least as strongly to plays, movies, TV programs, and so on, as to straightforward autobiographical journalism, novels, etc.). But if we do that, are we thereby giving up something of value? If so, what? After all, these narratives appear to be lending a spurious cogency to arguments that would not, otherwise, convince us.

At this point, I want to offer a suggestion. Before I do so, let me invite you to think seriously about these questions and contribute your own reactions to them. Might Jean Kazez be simply right? If so, what are the implications for the sorts of texts that we should write, edit, publish, read, take seriously, and so on? Or are there aspects that she hasn't considered and which I haven't picked up, either? Is there more to be said than what I'm going to say below?

My suggestion is that these narratives are, in fact, of great value (please don't tell me that nothing is really of great value; plenty of things are of great value to us, as long as we recognise that the "us" - and the "we" in this sentence - are, to some extent, a fiction; we can adjust to that easily enough).

It's true, of course, that an invalid argument cannot become valid simply because it is embedded in a conversion narrative. Nor can the false premises of an argument become true simply because they are embedded in such a narrative. So far, Jean is quite correct. But that does not make the use of narratives for persuasive purposes illegitimate. We are entitled to extract the embedded arguments and scrutinise them, but these narratives do more, and I think it is completely legitimate.

Often, resistance to an argument is not based on the fact that the premises are independently known to be false. Rather, it is that the premises are held to be false based on an intuitive, largely unconscious, reaction to them ... ultimately grounded in the hearer's socialisation and life experience.

Or it may be that the conclusion is held to be false on such a basis, with the result that the hearer will treat the argument as a reductio ad absurdum of its premises (even if she cannot identify which premise is false).

Again, if the argument is not deductive, there may be a resistance to it, based on an intuitive sense that it cannot be inductively cogent: e.g. it may be that its conclusion will not be accepted as the best explanation, or even as a good explanation, for facts contained in the premises ... even if the hearer can't explain why the conclusion is not a perfectly good and intellectually attractive explanation.

In short, we can and do reject arguments that may actually be quite strong - deductively or inductively - because of an ingrained prejudice against certain premises that (again) might actually be true, or else more directly against certain conclusions. These prejudices may make it futile for others to argue with us, even if their arguments are actually good ones. We may find that such prejudices prevent us from making intellectual progress.

Of course, they may be justifiable in some cases. Years of experience in certain aspects of life may have honed my intuitions in a way that makes them very reliable, even if I can't offer an analysis of how I formed them. Thus, a competent speaker of a language may have sound intuitions about its grammar, even if she cannot give good answers as to why she judges some sentences or other linguistic items to be grammatical and some not. An experienced lawyer working in a certain area of practice may be able to make intuitive judgments about the strength of a case far more quickly than she could justify them to anybody. Her intuitions may be highly reliable.

An experienced firefighter might sense that a building is about to collapse, though she has not thought it through consciously and could not, perhaps, explain exactly what factors her judgment is based on. Her experiences may have honed her intuitions to the point where they are very reliable - she is an accurate building-about-to-collapse detecting instrument.

I'm not denying that intuition can sometimes be useful and correct. If I'm ever caught in a burning building, I'll trust the intuitions of experienced firefighters, rather than demanding justification for them before I move to get out of there.

Nonetheless, intuitions can mislead. Often, things that seem obviously true to one person - God exists, there are objective moral properties, or whatever it might be - may not be obvious to others who are just as well situated, and may true at all. These intuitions have not been shaped by life experiences that make them reliable in the way that the firefighter's intuitions are reliable. Yet, I may find it very difficult to question my intuitions on these subjects - they just seem so "obviously" right. I may be resistant to what are actually deductively or inductively strong arguments.

This, I think, is where literary devices can be very useful. They can be enabling devices ... enabling us, or at least assisting us, to understand something of how the world looks to others. We can see the world, to an extent, through the eyes of someone with different intuitions; we can even gain some sense of how different intuitions from our own may be shaped, perhaps by experiences of life no less compelling than our own. If we can enter into something of the life experience of a person who is writing autobiographically, or even that of a fictional character, this can offer a check on our commitment to our own intuitions, which might be revealed as largely-unsupported prejudices.

We can, in short, get some distance from ourselves and our assumptions. We can't step out of all of them at once, but we can certainly gain some critical distance from certain of our assumptions that may be holding us back.

Indeed, we do philosophy best when we can gain some distance from our own intuitions and assumptions, even alienating ourselves from them to an extent. This is something that autobiographical and fictional narratives, with their powerful rhetorical structures, can help us do. The arguments won't actually be stronger - logically speaking - because of the way they are embedded in narratives, but the narratives can expand our imaginations and make us legitimately more open to persuasion. Thus, doubtful intutions that might be standing in the way of my acceptance of a position can be bracketed off - at least to an extent - enabling me to look at someone else's position and its supporting arguments in a new way.

For that reason, I think it's crucially important that we write such narratives, if we have the talent to do so, because we can help other people engage with the world in more imaginative, receptive ways, getting some valuable distance from their own intuitions, assumptions, and prejudices. It's also important that we read these sorts of narratives, created by others, as a way of getting some distance from our own starting points.

It's a dialectical process - to some extent we will inevitably measure these narratives against intuitions formed from our own experience (including the experience of other narratives that we've already encountered and which have helped shape us), as well against the facts obtained from ordinary observation or from science. There's no question of that, and there's always scope to approach narratives with a critical eye. But the narratives also stand as a measure of us.

In some cases, they may cast doubt on our intuitive certainties and on the processes by which they were formed. The richer and more convincing the narrative, the more it can challenge (and augment) our own experience.

And so, painfully, we make progress. Writers of conversion narratives can't be entirely trusted, but neither can anyone else, most especially our parents, our teachers, our peer groups, and ourselves. We desperately need these narratives to see the world from new angles, and we can't get by without them if we're intellectually serious. Whatever their limits as sources of knowledge, narratives, and specifically narratives of conversion to new ideas, have a legitimate role - an important, even essential role - in sustaining the life of the mind.

A Catholic leader in Scotland attacks same-sex marriage

Scotland is across the Irish Sea from the Dioceses of Dublin and Cloyne, but you'd think that Roman Catholic leaders all around that part of the world would keep quiet at the moment, except to express contrition and penitence on behalf of their severely discredited organisation. But no, here is the highest official of the Church in Scotland, Cardinal O'Brien, still wanting the state to enforce the Church's esoteric view of morality.

It's remarkable how Catholic spokespersons will claim to side with freedom of religion, separation of church and state, etc., when it suits them for public relations purposes. But it doesn't stop the likes of Cardinal O'Brien from agitating for the state to impose their specifically religious morality whenever they think they might succeed.

Again, you'd expect that maybe the Catholic Church would favour a live-and-let-live spirit these days, not meddling in politics, or in people's bedrooms, in return for us maybe going a bit easier on it. It could concentrate on what it sees as the spiritual welfare of its members. But no. The Church is still full of unpleasant moralists and theocrats.

Loss of faith - in the arguments for God

I've done a couple of debates with the godly this year: a (relatively) small one against Michael Jensen at Macquarie University back in March; and the big one on Tuesday night in which I joined with Tamas Pataki and Jane Caro against Archbishop Peter Jensen, Tracey Rowland, and Scott Stephens.

One point that I made in the latter, where I was the last speaker for the opposition, was the lack of faith shown by the Christian apologists in the traditional arguments for the existence of God. In fact, none of the four people I've debated this year has used these arguments in any concerted way.

On Tuesday night, there were, perhaps, some vague attempts to evoke (and I do mean evoke, not invoke) the traditional moral argument. These were never developed with any rigour, and didn't require rebuttal (our side would have had to do the other side's work to get the argument into a form worthy of rebutting). In fact, I think they came across more as complaints about the (supposed) moral malaise of secular societies.

Back in March, Michael Jensen did gesture at a transcendental argument based on the need to presume God in order to avoid radical scepticism, and we briefly skirmished about that. Generally, however, the Christian apologists I've encountered have abandoned philosophical arguments and concentrated on (a) the good things done for us by Christianity and (b) the supposed loss of value in societies without God. This is fairly weak, and I don't think it went down well with most of the audience the other night. It's really only going to appeal to people who already hold Christian organisations and moral views in high regard.

I assume that my interlocutors are just not convinced by philosophical arguments and have other reasons for their views, such as what they take to be the inherent plausibility of the gospel narratives. That's up to them, of course, but it weakens their position in debate. William Lane Craig is very formidable as a debater because he really seems to believe in the philosophical arguments, and is able to present them in a more-or-less logically valid form very concisely, quickly, and clearly, forcing his opponents to flounder around unpicking what's wrong with them, or else leave important parts of his presentations unrebutted.

Cardinal Pell relied almost entirely on a cosmic fine tuning argument in his debate against Dan Barker last year, and it didn't go well for him. But at least he had an argument for the existence of God. I went along on Tuesday night ready to debate the alleged cosmic fine tuning, but it wasn't required.

Apart from Pell, most of the Australian debaters don't seem to want to risk their positions on these sorts of arguments, even though it might be better for them tactically - it makes it look as if they don't actually have any good reasons to believe in God, which is pretty fundamental!

Again, it's up to the debaters what arguments they want to run. If they don't think these arguments are conclusive - which Peter Jensen seemed to concede in his summing up the other night - they are just being honest in not relying on them. I'm not saying they should change tack, and I'm certainly not trying to create a sort of witch hunt thread in which we pile on the individuals concerned. I'm just observing something that happened, or failed to happen, in a couple of debates that I've been involved in. Interesting ... or so it struck me.

Has anyone else had similar or contrasting experiences? How would you run the other side's case if you were handed the task?