Logic - comic (graphic novel with Bertrand Russell)

A few weeks back, my Wesley Seminary colleague Brannon Hancock mentioned a couple of graphic novels to me, one largely focused on Bertrand Russell and the second on Richard Feynman. I finished the one on Russell yesterday and wanted to report.

1. The one on Russell is called Logicomix. It's a whopping 352 pages. It gives you a taste of Russell, along with an important collection of others working on logic in the late 1800s and first part of the twentieth century: Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, Kurt Gödel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, etc. One theme that runs throughout the novel is the frequent connection between the obsession of some of these for logic and a certain madness many of them skirted with.

Russell's family itself had a fair amount of schizophrenia in it. Georg Cantor and Kurt Gödel both had serious mental health issues. Frege turned out to have horrible Nazi sympathies. Wittgenstein himself, like Russell, had seriously obsessive tendencies.

The setting of the graphic novel is the writers of the novel writing the novel, in Greece, nonetheless. This allows the narrators to step into the story at various points to explain things and to reflect on the overall themes. An interesting backdrop is that one of them is also in a play being performed from Greek tragedy, the Oresteia. This is a series of blood obligations started when one Greek king killed the children of another.

Then ensues a series of revenge obligations that ends with Orestes on trial before Athens with Athena arguing that the blood debt needs to stop and the Furies insisting that he must die for killing his mother. This backdrop fits with the madness theme.

2. The setting of the story itself is Russell giving a lecture in America in 1939 while America is on the brink of war. He had taken a pacifist stance on WW1 and the group to which he was speaking was hoping he would do so again with WW2. In response, he presents his life story.

The story is largely one of his obsession and the obsession of others to ground mathematics on a firm basis. He and Alfred North Whitehead spend 10 years writing volumes meant to ground mathematics firmly on logic. Russell considered the work a failure. But as an example, they spend some 250 pages proving that 1 + 1 = 2.

Wittgenstein enters the scene as someone who undermines Russell's whole enterprise. "Whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent," and Wittgenstein would include the ultimate foundations of logic and math in that category. The climax of the novel, it seems to me, is Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem, which demonstrated that you could not ultimately prove anything as a self-contained system. Nothing can be completely grounded in itself.

(This is a major qualification to sola scriptura--the meaning of the Bible as a whole cannot hold together without some axioms which are ultimately outside of the Bible itself.)

3. The tortured point of the novel seems to be that extreme positions and obsessions--on logic, on war, on communism or capitalism--all seem to invite madness and insanity. Russell wrestles with how Frege could be so brilliant and yet froth at the mouth at the murder of Jews or how Hilbert could completely disown his schizophrenic son. Not long after Gödel's breakthrough, Moritz Schlick was gunned down by a Nazi in Vienna (1936).

In the graphic novel, Russell tells the pacifist crowd that they would have to make up their own minds about World War 2. In the novel he says, "The thought of Hitler and Stalin taking over Europe is too hard to bear" (296), despite his distaste for war. This doesn't seem to be a completely accurate picture of Russell, since he supported Chamberlain's appeasement policy.

4. I would say that as a graphic novel on such heady topics, it held my attention. It shows that there is a market for such things. This collection of eccentrics were, more or less, the founders of analytic philosophy. I have some admiration for them, whose goals were clarity and certainty. Gödel took the latter away from them, but I am nonetheless thankful for these accountants of philosophy.

I believe that the thinking of the world right now, including America, could use some serious house cleaning. I would love to break down our thinking into "atoms of principle" and try to help us find clarity on the most important issues of the day.

It remains as hard as ever to do that, though, because of the politics of knowledge and the persistence of our individual intuitions. The "preaching" I hear in person, page, and social media often seems oh so irrelevant, destined to continue the marginalization of Christianity within society. The rich and powerful play jacks with each other while the world burns. Their resources have nothing to do with truth, only perpetuating self-interest. But they have the power to make it happen. The public runs rampant with madness, convinced that its ignorance is true insight.

Who will free us from this body of death?

6. Social and Political Philosophy

Here's the final piece of my Philosophy in Bullet Points, celebrating my new philosophy textbook (also see my theology bullet points). Unlike the textbook, which tries to present all basic positions fairly, these posts give my personal, philosophical inklings.

1. Epistemology and Metaphysics.
2. Philosophies of God and Science
3. Philosophies of History and Art
4. Logic and Philosophy of Person
5. Ethics

Social Contract

• Social philosophy is ethical philosophy written large, on the societal level.
• "Man is a political animal" (Aristotle). We are a herd animal that travels in tribes.
• People live together on the basis of "social contracts" (Locke, Rousseau). We trade off some of the freedom we might have alone in order to gain potential advantages from living together.
• (One of the complications of American identity is that our past involves a significant element of frontier isolation and the "Wild West." But that level of freedom is indicative of the primitive, initial stages of a society's existence and is increasingly unsustainable as a society enlarges and develops.)
• Rousseau's idea of a noble savage is nonsense. Human, animal nature doesn't change no matter what its default context.
• The ideal society lives between the utilitarian principle of "the greatest good for the greatest number" and certain fundamental human rights (e.g., Bill of Rights), human freedom within the limits of harm.
• "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" (Spock). Or, perhaps better, the good of the many takes priority over the pleasure or benefit of a few.
• The United States Constitution is a social contract in which "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," we agree to live within certain boundaries while respecting certain fundamental "rights" of others.
• If we live here, we give "tacit consent" to this contract (Locke).
• The Christian goal for a society is that it would be as "loving" a context as possible to all of the people within its sphere of influence, legal or illegal, at home or abroad.
• An Arminian Christian goal for society is that it motivate but allow humans to choose a virtuous life rather than to force one. Nevertheless, it will work to discourage self-destructiveness and work against structures that do harm to others. An Arminian approach to government thus does not try to legislate or force morality except insofar as such legislation prevents harm to others and intensely self-destructive behavior. 
• A truly Wesleyan goal for society is egalitarian in every respect, promoting a society that equally values and provides equal opportunities for every individual regardless of gender, race, or social status.
• The most crucial part of a social contract, indeed the primary motivation behind most social contracts, is the safety of those within the contract, both from within and without. I agree not to kill you if you agree not to kill me. I agree to defend you if you agree to defend me.
• A nation should not go to war unless "1) the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; 2) all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; 3) there must be serious prospects of success; 4) the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated." (Catholic Catechism).
• "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" encapsulates the basic principle of justice. From a Christian standpoint, love and mercy trump justice, but the good of the overall structure of justice can be a greater good than individual mercy. 
• In general, you can only force people to do the right thing within limits, and it takes massive amounts of energy and resources to do so. More efficient is to incentivize and motivate a society to be good. 
• The use of force to compel the good is often as effective as stomping on an ant hill. In some cases, the amount of force necessary exceeds a certain limit, and the one pursuing justice becomes themselves the evil monster. 
• A society that ignores its most discontent or disempowered elements is destined for revolution and crime. The feet of a society that only pays attention to rewarding the "meritorious" (the "haves") will disintegrate and undermine the stability of the society as a whole.
• In order for a society to be truly great, it must have a place for the more human dimensions of existence, not merely the pragmatic. A great society will have a significant space in which the arts and the pursuit of truth for its own sake thrive.

Political philosophy

• A Christian can be content in God, regardless of political context (Phil. 4:11). "A man can live with any 'how' if he has a 'why'" (Victor Frankl).
• "That government governs best that governs least" (often attributed to Jefferson). Yes, but as with Einstein's quote ("A good scientific theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler"), "least governance" remains huge the more sophisticated a society becomes. 
• Anarchy or no government simply allows those who can to do whatever they want. Default human nature wants pleasure and, without the checks of government, those who can will increase themselves at the expense of others. Government is thus necessary for the happiness of the majority.
• No form of government is perfect, because humans are involved. Without great care in the structuring of government, the majority of people in a society will inevitably suffer as they would under anarchy. 
• A theocracy sounds good, but humans inevitably mediate revelation from the deity (reducing theocracy to monarchy or oligarchy). A benevolent monarchy with a gifted and informed administration might be ideal but it often has the half life of one king. 
• A representational democracy, within the limits of certain "inalienable rights," remains the most stable, sustainable, and potentially just form of government, combining in itself the efficiency of an executive, the pressure of the majority (ideally mediated through the most gifted), with the checks and balances of a judiciary.
• A balance of power is thus ideal (Montesquieu): executive, legislative, judicial.
• It is human nature for the majority to oppress the minority. Accordingly, the power of the majority must always be kept within the boundaries of the fundamental rights of others. Despite the fact that tolerance of others is a fundamental principle of a democracy, for democracy to succeed, it must ultimately be intolerant of intolerance, when it comes to the fundamental boundaries of democracy.

Economic philosophy

• The economic structure of a society is a substructure of its social contract.
• The way a society is economically structured has everything to do with the accumulation of resources and possessions, especially in a large society. It is not simply the case that a person "owns" x amount. The economic structure of a society has everything to do with how resources flow and accumulate, and massive wealth can only be accumulated off the back of a societal structure.
• An excessive concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of a few is just as dangerous to the health of a democracy as entrusting official power in the hands of a few. Formally, the society may still be called a democracy but, informally, such a society is really an oligarchy if there aren't serious checks against the power of wealth.
• The economic resources of a successful democracy must potentially (real potential) be available in significant quantities to everyone within that society. 
• Anarchic communism as an economic system is a complete failure. The default incentive of most human beings is not to work for the good of others but to do what they have to for their own pleasure. While it is a noble, even Christian dream to have a society where everyone does as much as they can with the results flowing to those in need, regardless of their contribution, the twentieth century has demonstrated in the most emphatic of terms that this approach doesn't achieve its goals and actually demoralizes and impoverishes a society. (contra Marx)
• The most sound basis for human economics is self-interest. (Adam Smith) The fundamental principle of capitalism is sound--people will work to attain a desired amount of pleasure, like a rabbit chasing a carrot. 
• There is something inherently just and rewarding about working in relation to receiving. Grace--unearned benefit--is virtuous on the part of the giver and exceedingly Christian. However, the value of grace is undermined if a person feels entitled to it ("cheap grace"--Bonhoeffer). A person should have to do something in response to grace, even though it is disproportionate to the grace bestowed. (This is a very Wesleyan and New Testament understanding of grace).
• The goal of capitalism as an economic structure is the maximal happiness of the members of a society. (Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham) This goal coheres well with Christian values, even if the means plays to fallen human nature.
• However, capitalism does not function to this end without significant regulation. (J. S. Mill) The default trajectory of unbridled, anarchic capitalism is to concentrate the resources of a society in the hands of a few with a resulting oppression of those who do the work for the few, sometimes ending in bloody revolution. (Marx)
• In order for capitalism to work as it was initially intended, competition must potentially be possible between any member of a society. This speaks to the necessity of anti-trust laws and other regulations.
• Self-interest in the pursuit of individual pleasure will always find new ways to work against the true goal of capitalism, which is the empowerment of the many. Whenever new ways to undermine this goal arise, appropriate new structures have to arise to keep the underlying goal in place.
• So as with government in general, that capitalism functions best that is regulated least, but "least" does not mean none. It may have to be quite extensive for capitalism to achieve its underlying goal of maximal societal happiness in relation to resources.

5. Ethics in Bullet Points

Almost done with my Philosophy in Bullet Points in celebration of my new philosophy textbook (also see my theology bullet points). Unlike the textbook, which tries to present all basic positions fairly, these posts give my personal, philosophical inklings.

1. Epistemology and Metaphysics.
2. Philosophies of God and Science
3. Philosophies of History and Art
4. Logic and Philosophy of Person

Ethics
Virtue

• God is the ultimate value and benchmark for righteousness.
• The ultimate Christian standard for living consists in the twin love command: love God and love neighbor.
• Loving God implies ceasing to be the center of value. The goal of life is thus not egoistic (what's in it for me) but putting God's purposes above my individual desires, putting virtue above personal pleasure, putting others above myself. 
• God's goals, however, are not onerous. I demonstrate my love of God most when I am loving others, and the love of others never contradicts my love of God.
• To love others is to act in a way that promotes their good, which goes beyond pleasure to promoting their wholeness as a human being made in God's image in a loving way. 
• To "do wrong" is thus, primarily, to act in a way that is unloving either toward God or others (or not to do good when I have a clear opportunity to do so). This implies intent, an intentional wrong, knowingly done toward God or others. To do wrong is to act self-centeredly in a way that dishonors God or harms others.
• Since I am also created in God's image, I deserve respect and dignity as well, and there is a time to honor myself as an honor to God, even over and against potential good I could do for others.
• One can also wrong God or others unintentionally. From a moral perspective, such wrongdoing is less significant but, since God loves everyone, is ultimately significant.
• Virtue honors God--love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, wisdom, courage, justice, and so forth.
• Virtue is a pattern of choice, which can become a disposition by habitual choice (a version of Aristotle). 
• Goodness is a matter of our choices, not our feelings. The cumulative weight of our choices is our character. 

Acts

• No physical act is intrinsically wrong. ("No food is unclean of itself") Acts are right are wrong depending on the intention of the person acting and the consequence of the action. ("Whatever is not of faith is sin")  
• One can act in mind as well as body. (You have heard it said... but I say to you.)
• The twin love command is the ultimate ethical absolute, and it is a standard of intention. There is no situation when it would be right not to love God, others, or to respect myself as a human being.
• Other rights and wrongs are derivative of these absolutes and play out contextually.
• So killing other human beings is almost always wrong, but there are exceptions. Such exceptions can include self-defense, just war, and final justice. Therefore, by definition, killing is not an absolute wrong but a wrong that is universal, with exceptions.
• Most specific wrongs fall into this category--universally wrong with exceptions. Some wrongs, however, are a matter of personal conviction or derive from the cultural significance of actions. ("If anyone thinks it is unclean, it is unclean.")
• Those few ethical norms that are absolute (universal and exceptionless) are so because there is no circumstance in which there is an exception (e.g., adultery). Universal significance to action is an aggregate of all particular instances of an action having a similar significance.
• One cannot dismiss an ethical claim by labeling it "relativistic" or "situational ethics." It is overwhelmingly obvious that the core value of love plays out differently in different situations, as well as that some norms are cultural or personal. Such "dismissal by categorization" is not only for the feeble minded but is a tool of injustice and oppression.
• We inevitably operate with a hierarchy of values. For example, the value of saving life takes precedence over the value of obeying the speed limit. Making ethical decisions typically involves weighing legitimate values against each other in the light of the consequences of various courses of action.

4. Logic and the Philosophy of Person

Continuing my Philosophy in Bullet Points in celebration of my new philosophy textbook (also see my theology bullet points). Unlike the textbook, which tries to present all basic positions fairly, these posts give my personal philosophical inklings.

1. Epistemology and Metaphysics.
2. Philosophies of God and Science
3. Philosophies of History and Art

Logic

• Philosophy is the meta-discipline to all disciplines. It is the discipline that asks questions about all other subjects of knowledge and inquiry. It is the domain of assumptions and presuppositions. It should play the most foundational role in a "liberating" arts education.
• All disciplines logically originate in philosophy and, with the notable exception of religion, most of the domains of modern study arguably originated historically in philosophy. Science began with metaphysics. For Pythagoras, math and philosophy were one and the same, and the foundations of modern math are philosophical. Psychology began as philosophy.
• All deductive thinking reduces to axioms, premises, and consequent inferences.
• I have already treated inductive thinking under epistemology.

Philosophy of Person

• While the whole creation is valued by God, Christians believe that humanity stands in a unique position within the creation as the image of God. We respect all human individuals and invest them with a certain dignity because they are created in the image of God.
• Human beings are also biological machines, although they are much more than machines. They are much more than mere animals but they are animals at base. 
• Many, many humans do not live as if they are more than animals. In an existential sense, most human beings do not really exist. Some exist for a few moments, particularly in moments of great sorrow or tenderness. We then return to the Bacchanalia, to the mindless pursuit of pleasure--eating, drinking, drugging, orgying, warring. "There is none righteous, no not one" is hyperbole, but it is oh so fitting.
• Humanity is a herd animal (Aristotle called us a political animal). Despite the introverts and free thinkers among us, the default state of humanity is within tribes and herds. Our default is "group think" and a group identity. Western culture, in that sense, is a deviation from the human norm, although it bears numerous marks of the default.
• "Man is condemned to be free... once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does" (Sartre). We define ourselves by our choices. We choose an identity. Despite all the deterministic forces on us, we have the final say in who we are. "You must be born again."
• Our actions and thoughts as humans are far more determined than free. This is obviously the case with those who are under addictions of various sorts. However, to be unreflective is to be a slave to your default impulses and the views you have inherited. We are all "pre-moderns" to some degree or another, unreflective "knowers."
• One of the most noble goals of education is to liberate a person from such slavery, to free them up to chose their ideas and actions more freely, through self-awareness and awareness of the great options understood throughout the ages. Philosophy thus, once again, ideally stands at the heart of the most noble goals of education and at the center of the "liberating" arts.
• By faith I believe that God "lightens everyone coming into the world" to make at least one truly free choice--toward him. "Man is most like God when he creates."
• The soul is at least a metaphor for the essence of a person--one's most individual and enduring identity. Of course "each man in his time plays many roles." I am not the person I was thirty years ago, although I hope for some continuity. Whether literal or metaphorical, the soul is that part of us that lives forever, that part of us that reflects our one most important free choice for or against God, our most basic identity as a person.
• Other metaphors capture human identity as well. What I have just called the "soul" is perhaps more like what Philo would call the spirit, the "soul's soul." For him, the soul was the point where body and spirit overlapped and met, where animal and spiritual touched.
• We are, by abstraction, intellect, emotion, and will. Our minds relate to the abstracted models by which we manipulate the world. Our emotions are our reactions to events and the fuels that motivate us to action. The will is the center of our identity. "We are what we choose." "Emotions are neither good or bad. They just are" ... unless of course we feed them.

Philosophies of History and Art

My Philosophy in Bullet Points continues, in celebration of my new philosophy textbook (also see my theology bullet points). Unlike the textbook, which tries to present all basic positions fairly, these posts give my philosophical quippage.

1. Epistemology and Metaphysics.
2. Philosophies of God and Science

Philosophy of History

• Proper historical method is very similar to scientific method. You take a given amount of data. You formulate hypotheses in relation to the data. Historians offer their competing hypotheses to see which best account for the most data in the simplest and most elegant way possible.
• The difference between historical method and scientific method consists in the limitations of the amount of data and the difficulty of "repeating the experiment."
• However, there is a sense in which you can test a historical hypothesis driven by one portion of the data in another. There is also a sense in which the fundamental patterns of cause and effect are repeated every day of history.
• The fundamental assumption of reconstructing history is that of cause and effect. Troeltsch does not exhaust historical method for a Christian, but his principles are the default mode: 1) assume normal operations of cause and effect, 2) with explanations similar to how we would explain similar events today, and 3) with the sense that conclusions are always potentially revisable.
• The key difference for a Christian reconstructing history is the assumption that the supernatural can happen, although this should not be the default explanation for past events.
• All historical reconstruction requires selection, emphasis, and interpretation. There is no such thing as telling history "exactly as it happened" (von Ranke). No "exegesis" is  presuppositionless (Bultmann).
• Primary sources should be more central to historical investigation than secondary ones. The historian must ask what the interpretive angle of every source is.
• The books of the Bible that interact with history also approach history from a perspective. Some are more theological in presentation than others (e.g., John). We should not assume that the model of history writing today is the same as the models of yesterday.
• Historical reconstruction should aim at a "thick" description (Geertz), one that takes into account socio-cultural paradigms.
• The one who controls the past, controls the present, and the one who controls the present, controls the future. (Orwell) History is told by the winners. The vast majority of ideological artifacts that have survived from the past come from the literary elite, who were the smallest subset of the past and not representative.
• Grands recits of history tend to skew history fundamentally. The most accurate reconstructions of the past usually relate to small sets of data.
• The default mode of human historical interpretation is cyclical. Apocalyptic Judaism is fairly unusual in its linear sense of history, and one could argue that it only shifted to linear in times of intense social pressure. Christianity inherited this intensely linear sense of history.
• Most of history is neither getting better and better or worse and worse. Each generation tends to involve multiple paths of deterioration and improvement.
• Christ will come again and reset history in a fundamental way, eliminating evil and restoring the intended glory of creation.

Philosophy of Art

• Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Yes, there are probably some common human intuitions in this regard, but they are overwhelmed by the cultural and individual. 
• The only thing that has intrinsic value is God. Art is any metaphor that expresses something of personal significance to a person. It is thus something that stands for something to someone.
• Creation is the artwork of God.
• Art can represent reality as seen through the eyes of an artist or "surrogate" and can aim to be representational. (Aristotle)
• Art can embody the emotion of an individual artist or surrogate. (Romantics)
• Art can embody universal feeling or religious value. (Tolstoy)
• Art can express repressed emotion. (Marcuse)

Philosophies of God and Science

In celebration of my philosophy textbook, which took about 10 years to get published (now down to $64), I started doing my philosophy in bullet points, as I had done my theology. Unlike the textbook, which tries to present all basic positions fairly, my last post gave my sense of most appropriate positions on epistemology and metaphysics.

So here is a second installment, treating the philosophy of God and the philosophy of science. I consider the first to be a subset of metaphysics and the second a subset of epistemology. Since I had largely done my philosophy of religion in the previous post, I have mostly just repeated it here.

Philosophy of Religion
Faith and Reason

• The best working epistemology for a Christian is, "faith seeking understanding" (fides quaerens intellectum, credo ut intelligam). Begin with faith and pursue further understanding from there. Given the epistemological predicament in which we find ourselves, however, such faith should be potentially revisable.
• Belief in God is reasonable, although from our current capacity of understanding, it does not seem provable. Abelard was not completely wrong (intellego ut credam) but not entirely correct either.
• Items of faith in general are, in principle, reasonable to believe. They may not be obvious and certainly may not be provable (that is to say, the evidence will rarely "demand" the verdict of faith). Christian thinkers like Aquinas were overconfident in how much about Christian faith is more or less provable. 
• At the same time, items of faith are not, in general, irrational. God is not a trickster with evidence. Christian thinkers like Tertullian and Kierkegaard go too far in their sense of "blind faith" (credo quia absurdam). Similarly, presuppositionalists like van Til and even Barth give us the impression that Christianity can't survive in an evidentiary world, which seems problematic for the long term survival of Christianity. Christian epistemologies that cannot survive the Enlightenment have the whiff of failure.

Arguments for the Existence of God

• The idea that a Being as powerful as the universe created it is as reasonable as to suggest as that some other unobserved material reality beyond this universe as generated the universe as we know it. (cosmological argument). If so, he would thereby be all powerful in relation to this creation (omnipotence).
• The idea that the universe was designed and initiated by an Intelligence is as reasonable as the notion that some other unobserved material reality beyond this universe has generated the universe as we know it. (argument from design or teleological argument) If so, he would thereby at least know all the possibilities of this creation (full middle knowledge)
• The idea that, amid the contingency of existence as we know it, there is an entity with necessary existence seems reasonable. This line of thinking may actually prove God's existence as a Necessary Being, but we are not intelligent/informed enough to know it at this time. (argument from necessity, Aquinas, a form of ontological argument).
• Anselm's formulation of the ontological argument is nonsense (I can conceive of a greatest Being, but he wouldn't be greatest if he didn't actually exist. Therefore he exists.).
• Other arguments for the existence of God are less convincing (moral argument). Arguments from miracles and personal experience of God tend to be more individually convincing.

Problem of Evil and Suffering

• The biggest challenge for faith in a benevolent God is the question of evil and suffering. Why does a good God allow the righteous to suffer?
• The best suggestions are the free will theodicy and the soul making theodicy. The soul making theodicy (Irenaeus) suggests that suffering provides a context in which we can grow morally and become mature people. 
• The free will theodicy (Augustine) suggests that a world in which we can choose between good and evil is a better world than one in which we all choose good by nature. But if God allows us to choose, some will choose badly and, thus, we will have evil in the world.
• Others, such as Pascal or Kierkegaard would suggest that we cannot hope to fully understand such things. Lack of clarity creates a context in which faith can thrive.
• It seems likely that many things that we think of as contradictory to goodness (e.g., death, suffering) are actually not and should not be thought of as incompatible with a good God.

Philosophy of Science
Cause and Effect

• As a heuristic tool, we might say that God has created the world to run like a machine according to certain "natural laws." 
• The "natural" refers to the universe as it runs apart from God's intervention. "Miracles," then, properly so called, are when God or some other spiritual agent with the ability to circumvent natural law, interrupts the natural cause and effect flow of events. We might call such an event a "supernatural" event.
• At present, there would seem to be a certain fundamental indeterminacy on the atomic level, where the normal understanding of cause and effect may not fully apply. Nature, on its most fundamental level, may therefore be more indeterminate rather than determined.
• Nevertheless, the law of cause and effect seems thoroughly dependable on the macro-level of reality.

Scientific Method

• Scientific theories are ultimately not about explaining the world as it is (das Ding an sich, Kant) but are very precise "myths" that express how nature appears to work under certain circumstances.
• The scientific method remains without question the most appropriate evidentiary approach to truth. Gather evidence. Formulate a hypothesis. Test the hypothesis. Establish a theory. Continue to modify the theory as appropriate.
• The simplest explanation, without being too simple, is the most reasonable explanation (Occam's Razor, Einstein form). A good hypothesis accounts for most of the data in the simplest way conceivable.
• A good scientific theory often has an "elegance" to it and often results in unexpected convergences with other scientific problems.
• Inductive thinking, such as scientific reasoning, tends to be open-ended when one cannot (as is usually the case) account for all the data. In that sense, inductive reasoning in particular is almost always revisable in the light of new data that does not fit the existing hypothesis ("naughty data").

Scientific Paradigms

• In all areas of life, we function by way of certain paradigms or ways of organizing data in particular domains.
• No one can be completely objective. There is always prioritization and selection of data, as an expression of the operating paradigms.
• All paradigms involve assumptions. There is no such thing as a purely evidentiary framework of thinking. Fundamental presuppositions are always involved in the organization of the data of reality. However, some presuppositions are more basic than others. The most appropriate evidentiary assumptions should be "atomic" in size, rather than whole systems.
• Worldviews are our collective paradigms. Usually there are harmonies between our individual paradigms such that you might say that we broadly have a certain "worldview." However, most worldview rhetoric smacks of extreme oversimplification and tends to be particularly "violent" in relation to particulars.
• Most of our paradigms are inherited from our environment, although one might argue, I suppose, that some are genetically inherent to the human brain. We do not see the world as it is (das Ding an sich, Kant) but the world as our paradigms organize it.
• Most of our paradigms are thus a product of our cultures and subcultures, with a strong element of our individual personality at work in the mix as well.
• Given the nature of inductive hypothesis, almost all paradigms, if not all, are potentially revisable in the light of new data or better hypotheses on how to organize the data.
• The history of science is thus a story of ongoing paradigm shifts (Thomas Kuhn). Normal science is what Kuhn called the inherited scientific paradigm, which he argued tended to be persistent.
• A paradigm shift occurs when someone suggests a significantly different way of accounting for what I call "naughty data" that existing paradigms do not as easily account for ("The Devil is in the details.").
• Such shifts are often resisted by more entrenched scholars of the standing paradigm. They eventually die off. Scientific "progress" thus has a significant element of sociology and is not just about objective truth.

My Metaphysic and Epistemology in Bullet Points

My philosophy textbook is out. It is, as far as I know, perhaps the only Christian philosophy textbook out there that privileges a Wesleyan-Arminian perspective (although normally the Nazarenes quickly copy Wesleyan ideas like this once they learn of them... give it a year ;-). It of course tries to present the gamut of philosophical voices fairly without undo bias.

Because it is primarily being used as an e-text, there are only 1000 paperback copies at an unfortunate price...


I thought I might do here, over a few posts, what I have done before with theology: my philosophy in bullet points. Again, the book is written to present options and is not like what I'm about to do, which is present my specific inklings as a quasi-philosopher.

So here is my epistemological and metaphyical sense of things...

Epistemology 1

• From a standpoint of absolute, rational proof, the only thing of which we can be 100% certain is the fact that something exists (a modified form of Descartes' cogito ergo sum).
• Everything we think we know, therefore, is based on some degree of faith. We cannot prove that we are not a "brain in a vat" or a computer program. We cannot prove that the world outside us is real.
• Nevertheless, some constructs of knowledge "work" better than others. Most of the time, it works to assume that the things I sense around me are real (except when it doesn't). It works to step out of the way of moving traffic. It is a sort of pragmatic realism.

Metaphysics 1

• "Critical realism" is a pragmatic working hypothesis. That is to say, it works to assume that the world outside of my subjective mind is real apart from my perception of it. Yet it also works to assume that my apprehension of that world outside myself is not objective and is likely to be skewed in ways of which I am not aware. We are all unreflective "pre-moderns" in ways we don't know (because if we knew them, we would not be unreflective about them).

(Pragmatic) Epistemology 2

• Strictly speaking, therefore, all tests for truth reduce to the pragmatic test. Good truth "models" are those that predict future events under certain circumstances and thus, "work."
• In this sense, the correspondence test more or less reduces to the pragmatic test. The correspondence test "works" if a truth model seems to account for past, present, and especially future events and the data of realia in an "elegant" and useful way.
• A truth model is an ideological model that means to account for the realia or sense data of the world. These work best in relation to small pockets of realia rather than as large systems. They are abstractions of realia.
• Large ideological systems tend to be overly simplistic and reductionistic and tend to deconstruct upon detailed examination. Universals can be useful if they are aggregates of particulars. Otherwise, presuppositionalism and typological thinking are particularly "violent" epistemologies.
• The coherence test is thus of limited value when it comes to large systems. It is most helpful when it extends a useful model into other areas that "cohere" with the model and prove to work in those new areas.
• The most useful truth models conform to Occam's Razor, that are "as simple as possible without being too simple" (Einstein). Truth models are technically heuristic devices.
• We do not experience the world-in-itself, but our minds organize our sense experiences (Kant) according to certain patterns that are part of the structure of the human brain. These patterns were built to work in the world. That is to say, the innate categories of our brain are designed to operate according to pragmatic criteria. They are not arbitrary.
• Ideological systems and paradigms tend to change over time and are significantly impacted by culture and sub-culture. (Kuhn) We absorb a certain way of looking at the world growing up and are unaware that individuals from other cultures see the world differently. The default state of a human being is as an unreflective pre-modern and to a large extent we inevitably remain pre-modern.
• Even "modern" paradigms tend to deconstruct and change. Scientific paradigms also have a tendency to shift over time as "naughty data" gives rise to major shifts in theories (Kuhn).
• Divine revelation does not by-pass human paradigms (unless one would hypothesize some pre-verbal, unreflected intuition), but God reveals himself within human categories. Otherwise we would not understand him. Revelation is "incarnated truth." The notion of a "biblical worldview" is largely a pre-modern ideological construct that almost always involves the significant impact of a cultural viewpoint at a particular time and place.
• The Bible is not an independent path to truth in the sense that "inputting" the content of the Bible does not by-pass human reason. Our reason and experience are inevitably involved in our processing of biblical content. Like our senses, the Bible provides content that is inevitably organized by (and thus limited by) the patterns of our minds as interpreters.
• The meanings of words are a function of the way they are used (their language game) in a particular form of life (Wittgenstein). Past meanings of words have no necessary connection to present meaning. One meaning of a word has no necessary connection to another. 
• In keeping with pragmatic epistemology, the primary function of words is not to represent things in the world. Rather, words do things (Austin). 
• The best working epistemology for a Christian is, "faith seeking understanding." Begin with faith and pursue further understanding from there. Given the epistemological predicament in which we find ourselves, however, such faith should be potentially revisable.
• By faith, I believe that God knows what is true and what is real in an absolute sense. God knows all the data, all the realia of existence and non-existence. He knows all the relationships between all the data and realia. 
• An appropriate Christian working model for exploring what "works" in terms of knowledge is thus, "All truth is God's truth."

Metaphysics 2

• Belief in God is reasonable, although from our current capacity of understanding, it does not seem provable.
• The idea that the universe was designed and initiated by an Intelligence is as reasonable as the notion that some other unobserved material reality beyond this universe has generated the universe as we know it.
• The idea that, amid the contingency of existence as we know it, there is an entity with necessary existence seems reasonable. This line of thinking may actually prove God's existence as a Necessary Being, but we are not intelligent/informed enough to know it at this time.
• While at the time of Newton, scientific thinking seemed to point toward a determined universe, the current climate seems to imply a "freedom" or indeterminism to the universe.
• The biggest challenge for faith in a benevolent God is the question of evil and suffering. Why does a good God allow the righteous to suffer?
• The best suggestions are the free will theodicy and the soul making theodicy. The soul making theodicy (Irenaeus) suggests that suffering provides a context in which we can grow morally and become mature people. 
• The free will theodicy (Augustine) suggests that a world in which we can choose between good and evil is a better world than one in which we all choose good by nature. But if God allows us to choose, some will choose badly and, thus, we will have evil in the world.
• Others, such as Pascal or Kierkegaard would suggest that we cannot hope to fully understand such things. Lack of clarity creates a context in which faith can thrive.
• It seems likely that many things that we think of as contradictory to goodness (e.g., death, suffering) are actually not and should not be thought of as incompatible with a good God.

Epistemology 3

• Items of faith are, in principle, reasonable to believe. They may not be obvious and certainly may not be provable (that is to say, the evidence will rarely "demand" the verdict of faith). Christian thinkers like Aquinas were overconfident in how much about Christian faith is more or less provable. 
• At the same time, items of faith are not, in general, irrational. God is not a trickster with evidence. Christian thinkers like Tertullian and Kierkegaard go too far in their sense of "blind faith." Similarly, presuppositionalists like van Til and even Barth give us the impression that Christianity can't survive in an evidentiary world, which seems problematic for the long term survival of Christianity. 
• Therefore, Christian epistemologies that cannot survive the Enlightenment have the whiff of failure.

More to come some other day...