Reformed Philosophy

I have been hired part-time as the Promotion and Event Manager for the James Gregory Lectures on Science and Religion. The next lecture is on April 17th, so if anyone is interested, I have included the particulars below; tell your friends!

The next James Gregory Lecture in Science and Religion (St Andrews University) is on

“Science and Islam”  by Professor Bruno Guiderdoni (Director of the Lyon Observatory and Muslim scholar).

When: 5.15 pm Thursday, 17 April 2008, followed by a Reception until 7.00pm

Where: Younger Hall, North Street, St Andrews

Who: This lecture is free of charge and open to any interested member of the public

Dr. Bruno Abd-al-Haqq Guiderdoni is the director of the Observatory of Lyon (France). His main research field is in galaxy formation and evolution. He has published more than 100 papers and has organized several international conferences on these issues. Guiderdoni is one of the referent experts on Islam in France and has published 50 papers on Islamic theology and mysticism. He was in charge of a French television program called ‘Knowing Islam’ and is also Director of the Islamic Institute for Advanced Studies.

Please see www.jamesgregory.org for more information.

Throughout history, beer has had strong sociological ties to both reformed theology (see Drinking With Calvin and Luther) and philosophy (see The Philosopher’s Drinking Song). As such, the ‘white whale’ for any Reformed Philosopher has to be Calvinus Beer. The bottle, though aesthetically pleasing in and of it self, also bears a very nice profile picture of John Calvin, which is going to carry profound aesthetic appeal for any (obsessively) Reformed individual (Do note: in my estimation the taste of the beer doesn’t even enter the picture; the appeal of Calvinus is almost solely found in the way a bottle of it would look on a given individual’s bookshelf.) Unfortunately, however, Calvinus Beer isn’t easy to come by; it can only be found in Geneva Switzerland. It is this combination of desirability and rarity that make a bottle of Calvinus beer a true novelty for any Reformed philosopher’s or theologian’s study.  

Now, if you are going to be around the Geneva area, you may ask: ‘Where can I find Calvinus beer?’ Since 1) someone can spend all day walking around Geneva without finding any and 2) I found it hard to find a straight answer anywhere else on the internet, let me briefly share where I found my bottles. If you are looking for the six-pack of the smaller Calvinus beer bottles, then nearly any large grocery story in Geneva will do. If, however, you are looking for one of the larger Calvinus bottles with the cool hinge top (I fully aware of how dorky this all is), the best or at least the most straightforward place to find it is the Reformation Museum right next the St Pierre Cathedral. I might add that the Reformation Museum and the cathedral are worth the time and money to visit; it would, after all, be quite silly to go to Geneva solely for the beer!

A couple days ago, I was fortunate enough to be able to walk around Geneva Switzerland (aka The Protestant Rome) and see the sights. Along with seeing all the places of Reformational significance, I saw the Reformation Wall. Needless to say, for someone who is deeply interested in Reformed philosophy and theology, it was very cool!

Being the dork that I am:, I had previous tried to find an image of the Reformation Wall for my computer desktop, but I was unable to find one large enough. If you too have wanted such an image wait no further, because here it is: reformation-wall.jpg

Pictured, from left to right, is Farel, Calvin, Beze and Knox. As you might have guessed, I currently have it as my desktop wallpaper

I am currently working on a paper involving Crispin Wright’s theory of entitlement, which has led to a decrease in the amount of posting I do on ReformedPhilosophy.com. Furthermore, what I do post will probably involve this aforementioned paper (see my last post, for example). Regardless, here is a snippet of my (very) rough draft that can, hopefully, coherently stand on its own. I talk quite a bit about ontology here, which I admittedly don’t know a whole lot about; hence, any feedback/criticism is deeply appreciated. I am afraid that I pass through some of these issues far too quickly.

Background information:

• Undermining Defeater: Blocks the justification/warrant in favor of a proposition.

Roughly sketching the position, Van Til saw the existence of God as epistemically and ontologically basic. All facts (a priori and empirical) rely on God.

‘God’s knowledge of the facts precedes…facts… It is…God’s comprehensive interpretation of the facts that makes the facts what they are.’[1]

Furthermore, given Van Til’s rendition of the Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God, his ontology sees logic, morality, aesthetics, etc. as so dependent on the proposition “(the Christian) God exists” that to deny this would be to ‘make nonsense of the human experience’.[2]

This view of ontology, though rarely held, is internally coherent, at least as far as I can tell. Furthermore, the nature of logic, morality, aesthetics, and so forth are not so firmly established as to dismiss this Reformed view out of hand. Since entitlement of cognitive project does not pick out a specific ontology, I see no reason why this Reformed view of ontology couldn’t be hypothetically considered alongside Wright’s theory.

Assuming Van Til’s ontology is at least internally viable, let us proceed and see if the proposition ‘God exists’ passes what I am taking as Wright’s criteria:

• Cornerstone Criterion: for any proposition, P, if P is to be deemed entitlement eligible, then P must be a cornerstone proposition of rationality itself.
• Revised First Criterion: We have no Undermining Defeater for P
•  (Slightly) Revised Second Criterion: The attempt to justify P would involve further presuppositions in turn of no more secure an epistemically prior standing…and so on without limit: so that someone pursuing the relevant enquiry who accepted that there is nevertheless an onus to justify P would implicitly undertake a commitment to an infinite regress of justificatory projects, each concerned to vindicate the presuppositions of its predecessor.

It is worth noting that from a more naturalistic ontology, the proposition “God exists” does not even get off the ground in terms of entitlement eligibility, since conceivably it would not be a cornerstone for rationality. From Van Til’s Reformed ontology, however, ‘God exists’ is indeed a cornerstone of rationality. In addition, there does not seem to be any Undermining Defeaters against it; how could there be if belief in God is epistemically foundational for Reformed Epistemology? Finally, what would happen if we were to ‘attempt to justify’ the proposition ‘God exists’? From Van Til’s perspective, we would simply run in circles; if working from Van Til’s ontology, we presuppose the supremacy of the presupposition ‘God exists’ at the outset.

So there you have it, without an outside reason to reject Van Til’s ontology, the proposition ‘God exists’ is eligible for entitlement of cognitive project according to what I understand to be Wright’s theory. Does this mean Wright’s theory supports Christianity or at least theistic belief? No. Wright understood that his theory lacked a certain ontological punch; all I have done so far is exploit that weakness.  Now, the mere fact that the proposition ‘God exists’ gains entitlement eligibility according to Wright’s theory is not necessary a strike against it. Some people, myself included, would welcome this result. Unfortunately, however, at this point the case of God’s existence gaining entitlement eligibility is simply the first strike that shows the insufficiency of Wright’s criteria.

Take the basic structure of Van Til’s ontology, if we substitute the terminology of ‘God’ with ‘The Flying Spaghetti Monster’ or ‘The Great Pumpkin’ or, even worse, ‘The Evil Demon (of the Cartesian sort) exists’, then what is to keep us from declaring that such propositions are entitlement eligible according to Wright’s criteria? Without an expressed means of picking one ontology over another, there does not seem to be any way to without entitlement status from such odd and wholly problematic propositions. As they stand, Wright’s criteria are at best helpful only for elucidating what propositions are entitlement eligible in each ontological theory, but this may have limited epistemic value if there are no means to champion an ontology that advocates ‘perceptual faculties are generally accurate’ over an ontology that advocates the existence of evil demons of the Cartesian sort.

In the paper “On Epistemic Entitlement” Crispin Wright takes steps toward developing a theory of claimable non-evidential warrant for certain cornerstone propositions, called entitlement of cognitive project. I am working on a paper in which I argue that Wright’s criteria for what propositions are entitlement-eligible are insufficient. As such, I need to try to be very sure of what Wright’s criteria are. Let me list Wright’s first criterion and then provide a brief analysis of what I think it means. Though I won’t be giving much background information, I hope that someone might be able to provide some feedback.

 Wright’s first criterion: For any cornerstone proposition P, P will be entitlement eligible if…

• ‘We have no sufficient reason to believe that P is untrue’

 How do we determine what counts as a ‘sufficient reason’ for believing a proposition is untrue? Furthermore, how is a sufficient reason for believing a proposition is untrue different from a sufficient reason for simply doubting a proposition? Since in previous work Wright used the latter terminology instead of former, the distinction is one worth making. To answer these questions we should examine the work Wright wants his criteria to do and then try to gleam from that how they are doing it. For example, Wright does not want us to have a sufficient reason to believe the proposition that ‘our perceptual faculties are generally accurate’ is untrue; there may be doubts against the accuracy of our perceptual faculties, but presumably not a reason to believe them untrue. On the other hand, Wright does want there to be a sufficient reason to believe the proposition that ‘the rolling dice is an accurate way to predict the future’ is untrue and not merely a reason to doubt it. What is doing the work in the criterion ‘‘We have no sufficient reason to believe that P is untrue’ that produces these results?  

Criterion 1 Proposal 1: Perhaps what determines whether we have a sufficient reason to believe a given proposition is untrue is how truth-apt it seems to be.[1] The accuracy of our perceptual faculties do seem to be generally truth-apt, while, in contrast, the accuracy of predicting the future with dice seems very far from truth-apt. Unfortunately, this reading of Wright’s first (explicit) criterion is far from generous; it seems to run into an immediate problem with arbitrariness. If our perceptual faculties have a truth-aptness level of 99 out of 100 and the truth-aptness of rolling dice to predict the future is 1, then at what truth-aptness level do we cross over from sufficient reason to doubt to sufficient reason to believe untrue? There doesn’t seem to be an easy non-arbitrary answer.

Criterion 1 Proposal 2: Perhaps, instead, what determines whether we have a sufficient reason to believe a given proposition is untrue is what kind of defeaters, if any, are against it. There are lots of ways of discerning and labeling the different sorts of defeaters, but let us try to divide them into the following two classes:

Counter Defeater: Provides justification/warrant contrary to a proposition.

Undermining Defeater: Blocks the justification/warrant in favor of a proposition.

For example, say that John was accused of committing a murder within the center of an amusement-park maze. A Counter Defeater to the proposition that John is the maze-murderer would be to point out that John has a profoundly awful sense of direction, thus making it quite a bit less likely that John is the maze-murderer, thus providing justification against thinking John is the murderer. An Undermining Defeater would be to point out that John, himself, died three days before the murder, thus undermining any justification that he is the murderer. Might it be that CDs merely provide reasons to doubt propositions, but UDs provide reason to believe propositions untrue? I think something like this is at work in Wright’s first criterion. We have a sufficient reason to believe the dice proposition is untrue because we can undermine it by simply showing that it is empirically false (since the dice proposition would hypothetically be based on empiricism it is undermined by pointing out that there is no empirical support).On the other hand, there does not seem to be an Undermining Defeater against our perceptual faculties’ accuracy. As Wright points out early-on in “On Epistemic Entitlement”, skepticism shows us we don’t have evidential-justification for our cornerstone propositions, but it does not show us that we don’t have any non-evidential justification (warrant), which is the lacuna/gap in which Wright finds room for his entitlement thesis to begin with. Skepticism, it seems, at best can only provide a Counter Defeater against the accuracy of our perceptual faculties. Not only does this conception of Wright’s first (explicit) criteria do what he needs to do without being internally problematic (like my first proposal), but it seems to fit the structure of the rest of “On Epistemic Entitlement”. To be clear, here is the revised version of Wright’s first criterion for determining entitlement eligibility: For any cornerstone proposition P, P is entitlement eligible if…

            Revised First Criterion: We have no Undermining Defeater for P