It’s not exactly a hot take to say that academic standards in philosophy of religion are quite poor, at least by comparison with other areas of academia, and to other areas of philosophy more generally. Sometimes it is just bad arguments, or bad research practices, etc. But there is one type of issue I see quite a lot, which is just straight up bad writing. Even calling it ‘bad writing’ fails to quite capture what I mean. Indeed, one of the difficulties I want to bring out is how traditional methods of philosophical analysis are not really appropriate to police this, and I’m finding it hard to even describe the issue properly.
An example – Tim Stratton
So let’s look at an example. It’s not an example I’ve picked because it is particularly important, or that it shows some great philosophical mistake. In a sense it’s quite trivial. But that’s how these sorts of bad writing fall through the academic cracks. Academics are not trained to find and remedy this sort of thing, so me bringing it up will seem weird. But hear me out.
A few years ago, I debated Tim Stratton on the Unbelievable show. Following that, he wrote a blog post about the exchange. I’m not going to examine his arguments there in this post. Instead, I just want to highlight one example of bad writing on his part, because it’s the sort of thing I see a lot. His idea is that if determinism is true, then our beliefs are caused by external forces beyond our control, and hence we shouldn’t trust them. In explaining this point, he says the following:
…as Joshua Rasmussen would say, ‘mindless stuff’ that knows nothing about metaphysics.
All I want to point out is how strange it is to quote Rasmussen simply saying “mindless stuff”. Why is this strange? Well, it’s hard to provide a completely watertight explanation, but let’s have a go.
Firstly, it’s not a distinctive phrase that Rasmussen is known for. It’s just two words, so it hardly communicates a distinct idea that Rasmussen has introduced into the philosophical lexicon. It’s not a new term of art that is associated with Rasmussen, in the way that “language game” is associated with Wittgenstein, or “will to power” is with Nietzsche, etc. It’s just the sort of phrase I would imagine I could find in any book covering this sort of topic. Just as one example off the top of my head, on page 210 of God’s Undertaker (2009), John Lennox says:
“Either human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a Creator.”
‘Mindless matter’ and ‘mindless stuff’ are basically the same exact idea, showing that Rasmussen isn’t introducing anything new here. You could probably find an example of me saying the two-word phrase “mindless stuff” or some synonym for it online if you looked for it. So the problem is that it is a quote, in the sense that Rasmussen did say that, but it is weird to use it as a quote because it’s not a distinctive phrase at all. It’s like saying “as Trump would say ‘the'”. Yes, I’m sure Trump has used the word ‘the’ on countless recorded occasions, so in a sense you could quote him saying it, but it would be a very strange thing to do. It’s not a fallacy, nor is it some other kind of philosophical mistake. It’s just bad writing.
Secondly, there is something oddly self referential about how this is all presented. If you look at the full context of the quote I presented above, you will see that in the blog post Stratton is actually quoting himself in the debate quoting Rasmussen:
As I pointed out in the debate, this means that all of a person’s metaphysical beliefs are determined by “consciousness-lacking, intelligence-lacking, wisdom-lacking, reason-lacking, morality-lacking, and, as Joshua Rasmussen would say, ‘mindless stuff’ that knows nothing about metaphysics.”
So I’m quoting Stratton, who is quoting Stratton, who is quoting Rasmussen. And at the end of this chain of Russian dolls, all we get to is a non-distinct two word phrase.
Though disappointing to get to, it may just about qualify as a quote in a technical sense; after all, Rasmussen did say those words. But it’s not really a citation as such. That’s because he doesn’t provide the location of the original where it comes from. He could have just said that it’s from Rasmussen’s 2023 book Who are you, really? and provided the page reference. Of course, this is just a blog post I guess. He could just give the quote without the ability for readers to see the source. But, Rasmussen’s name is a hyperlink in the sentence in which Stratton quotes him, so there is something like a citation there. But it isn’t a link to Rasmussen’s book on Amazon, or something like that. It’s link back to a video of Stratton reviewing the book.
So in the blog post he quotes himself talking in the debate, in which he quoted Rasmussen, and he provides a link which also references himself talking about Rasmussen. This isn’t normal.
Conclusion
My diagnosis of what Stratton is doing is that he peppers quotes from people like Rasmussen in his work not because he is using them to make wider points or connections to surrounding literature. It’s just there to make what he is saying sound more authoritative. Knowing that Rasmussen used the phrase ‘mindless stuff’ doesn’t shed any light onto anything Stratton was saying. He isn’t arguing for anything distinctive that Rasmussen says. It’s just a name-drop for the sake of it.
He doesn’t provide any real citation for the reference, and it is tempting to think that this is because there’s nothing to see if you were to go and look up the source. It would be like going to find the video of that Trump speech to check if he did say the word ‘the’ at some point. So instead of a proper citation, he uses the veneer of a citation to promote his own YouTube channel. Academics do cite their own work, but they should do so only when it is relevant. Otherwise it looks commercial.
Part of the problem is that this sort of writing violates norms of academic practice that are not written down, and not explicitly taught to academics. We are not trained to fight these sorts of battles. It’s like being trained to operate a telescope that’s used to focus on things very far away, and then someone making you use it to try to find their keys they dropped on the floor right in front of you. The tools of academic analysis are not well-suited to the job. And my worry is that this sort of bad writing hides multiple terrible research practices and poor reasoning, but that it is slipping in under the radar nonetheless. This is part of the problem with the philosophy of religion. Actual people produce stuff that’s the academic equivalent of AI slop. It sort of looks just like the genuine article when you first see it, but the more you look at it the weirder it starts to seem.
Humility) Whatever the ultimate nature of everything is at the deepest possible level (if that even makes sense), it’s probably not what you were thinking. You are probably wrong.
Ok, as a statement of intellectual humility, it’s not that interesting I guess. But let’s push it a little bit further.
It’s a simple anthropological observation that people tend to project ideas onto this existential canvas that are ‘parochial’. That is, people tend to project things about their local experience and blow them up to metaphysical importance. A classic example of this would be how typical it is in times of war for religious authorities to assure the army that God is on their side, or even that the war itself will decide something of cosmic significance. What this is doing is saying that God, the deepest metaphysical explanation for absolutely everything there is, is interested in how you do on a particular day in a fight.
Here is another example. Maybe you think that the deepest level of reality happens to be mental (maybe you think God is a mind, or maybe you are an idealist, etc). Assuming you take yourself to (at least partly) be a mind, this means you are saying that the deepest level of reality happens to be just like you.
Here’s another example. Suppose you are not a nihilist about value, but you think (as many atheists do), that values are all in the head, specifically in the heads of humans. This again puts us at the centre of things, assuming that there’s no more to value than how it relates to us. This is (perhaps) another form of parochialism.
What’s the significance of this? Well, what it does (I think) is establish a mild sort of epistemic tilt away from such ideas. Sure, maybe the deepest level of reality happens to care a lot about how your tribe does in a given conflict, but it seems quite unlikely. After all, there are limitless possibilities. Maybe there is nobody out there at all (atheism), or maybe there is a god but he doesn’t care about humans at all, or maybe something I can’t even begin to imagine. It’s impossible to quantify. But it starts to seem like a coincidence if it happened to be parochial.
Perhaps the best way to think about it is like Hume’s argument about miracles. I can think of lots of parochial (human-centred) reasons why people might claim that, for instance, god is on our side in a battle. Maybe it makes me feel more confident. Maybe it makes me more prepared to kill my fellow man if I feel I have cosmic permission, etc. But those sorts of considerations are patently not truth tracking. How many times in history did the priestly caste announce before a battle that after doing rigorous checking that god actually was on the other side? I’m guessing not often. And that goes for both sides of every battle.
So we have reason to think that people have a tendency to project parochial things, and that this tendency isn’t epistemically well grounded. This mirrors Hume’s observation that people have many diverse reasons for claiming to have witnessed miracles, including simply lying or otherwise being mistaken. And that this tilts our expectations away from their claims. We have a starting point of scepticism towards them.
The tilt that parochialism induces could be overcome. It’s not decisive. Just because people tend to project a protective all powerful backer when they go off to war doesn’t mean that on this occasion right now that he isn’t on our side. But what it does is mean it’s reasonable to raise an eyebrow if that’s what you are being told on the eve of war. ‘Of course that’s what they are saying. That’s what they always say,’ etc.
As I said at the start, this is an underdeveloped thought. But it rings true with me. One of the reasons I don’t believe in Christianity, or anything like that, is that it seems to be exactly the sort of thing I would expect people to project. It’s parochial. Of course you want there to be a super powerful protector out there that agrees with your specific political and social views and has your interests at heart. Who wouldn’t want that? But we shouldn’t promote that above other, less psychologically appealing, or just less familiar sounding, possibilities.
Here is just one very sketchy application of the idea. Take the fine tuning argument. As Standardly presented, it argues that the fine tuning of the constants of nature strongly favours theism over atheism. Seeing this through the lens of my parochial analysis, I want to say that the right conclusion is that the evidence strongly favours ‘non-randomness’ about those constants over ‘randomness’. Something is making the constants take those values, rather than it just being pure chance. But that leaves open so many possibilities. A benevolent god is one of them. But so is a god who is interested in something other than us. Maybe we are an otherwise uninteresting side product of this universe, which is actually fine tuned for some other reason. Maybe there is some naturalistic disposition (for lack of a better word) that is the reason they take those values. Maybe it’s something non-random that I can’t imagine.
it’s only unchecked (rampant!) parochialism that would lead you to think that the FTA is an argument for anything like us, or like the sort of thing we tend to project for social or psychological (etc) reasons.
So this parochial analysis is a fruitful new lens to revisit some familiar territory through.
I’m still thinking it all through, so feel free to tell me if I’m being thick somehow. I usually am.
In presuppositional apologetics, you often hear people using the term ‘worldview’, as in ‘x is true on the Christian worldview’ or ‘on the atheist worldview you can’t say that’ etc. But what is a worldview?
Here I’m going to present a simple dilemma. There seem to be two plausible options for what a worldview could be, but on either route there are problems for the presuppositionalist. Perhaps there is a third option, but I suspect proposals will likely collapse back into one of the two options I gave (but have a go at coming up with your own).
The dilemma
My idea is that the notion of ‘worldview’ is most plausibly one of two things:
The set of everything believed by a given person, or
Beliefs about things like metaphysics, epistemology, and morality (etc), which are coherent and collectively offer a ‘big picture’ explanation of everything around us.
Analysis
The first horn of the dilemma fits nicely with some things that presuppositionalists say. For instance, they often insist that “everyone has a worldview”. And that’s correct if a worldview just is the set of all beliefs a person has. Clearly, everyone believes something, and if all a worldview consists in is this set of beliefs, then everyone has that. But notice that there are no constraints on this. Beliefs in this sense can be about anything, such as what day of the week it is, what your favourite colour is, etc. And there is no expectation that this set is coherent or comprehensive. Perhaps two beliefs contradict one another. Perhaps there are topics about which someone has never formed any belief whatsoever.
And this is where it causes issues for the presuppositionalist. They will typically try to show you that your worldview is incoherent, or lacks the resources to explain a given phenomenon. But that’s not really a criticism of this notion of worldview. I would think that any person whatsoever that we consider would have some inconsistencies in their beliefs. Who among us can genuinely say they know they have no hidden conflicts between any two beliefs? I discover such confusions in my own beliefs all the time. Maybe you have transcended to a perfectly consistent sphere, but clearly most people are not at that level. And if all ‘worldview’ means is all my beliefs, then it’s not completely coherent or completely comprehensive. And that’s ok. You don’t get any prizes for showing me that I don’t have everything worked out. I’ll admit that if you ask me, and I’m pretty confident the same applies to you, whoever you are. Pretending that points can be scored by merely showing that someone’s ‘worldview’ harbours some incoherence or lacks some explanatory power is no big achievement.
So the first horn looks good for a presuppositionalist, as they are correct that everyone has a ‘worldview’ in the first sense. But then it backfires because it’s not interesting to show that these are typically somewhat incoherent and not comprehensive.
So let’s consider the other option. Now ‘worldview’ means something like a big philosophical or religious system. Think about how a sect in a religion might define itself by how they answer various philosophical or theological questions. Calvinists believe in sola scriptura, but catholics don’t, etc. We can imagine a ‘worldview’ as being a fully consistent and comprehensive system. One that has answers for every question and where every belief is consistent with every other belief.
This seems to me to be the target concept for a lot of presuppositionalist questioning. For one thing, it makes more sense of phrases like “the atheist worldview”, as opposed to ‘John’s worldview’, as if it is a non-personal system that anyone could adopt. Secondly it makes more sense of the demand that explanations be given for things, such as “what is logic on the atheist worldview?”, etc. This ‘big system’ idea of a worldview is the sort of thing that is required to have an answer for all questions like this. And that makes the attack at least somewhat plausible as a result if you can’t explain what logic is, etc.
The problem now is that it’s not at all plausible to suppose that everyone has such a worldview. Perhaps a professional philosopher who has spent their life trying to develop such a system might have one (although I know plenty, and I know plenty who say they don’t have big systems like this in the background of how they approach philosophical analysis, or just life generally). A person adhering to the doctrines of a religion might have one (although most religions don’t explicitly provide explanations of every obscure metaphysical question you can dream up). Put simply, it’s ok if you don’t have a ‘big system’ that answers all questions for you. Thinking that you need such a system is kind of already a bias that people who are in very controlling and toxic forms of religion display. Sure, they will claim to have an answer to every question, but that can be seen as a mechanism the institution they belong to uses to control them, and perhaps they have internalised that mechanism and mistake it for a commonplace observation about worldviews. Surely everyone interprets absolutely everything through a similar totalising system, they might think. Well, no. That’s a weird way to look at it.
So the upshot is that the second notion of worldview (‘big system’) looks like the sort of thing that could be criticised if it is incoherent in some way or fails to provide an answer to a given question. But the downside is that there’s no obligation to have such a worldview. It’s certainly not true that “everyone has a worldview” on this understanding.
Conclusion
I’ve sketched out two accounts of what a worldview is. On the first, a worldview is just everything you believe. Of course, you have such a worldview (trivially). But there’s no reason to expect it to be completely consistent or comprehensive. I might like to try to make it more coherent and comprehensive, but it’s probably not like that now and may never be so (you will feel better when you accept this). On the second horn of the dilemma, a worldview is a big system that is maximally consistent and comprehensive. Now it should answer every question and not harbour any contradictions. But it’s not something that everyone has. If a cultish religious person (like a presuppositionalist) can’t understand why not everyone adheres to a big system like that, that’s a them problem. You do you.
Andrew Loke recently published a paper in which he responds to me and Wes Morriston‘s paper Endless and Infinite. In this post, I’ll explain one fatal flaw in his new argument.
Firstly, here is his new thought experiment:
“Suppose there is a HH with an actual infinite number of (similar) rooms, an actual infinite number of (similar) guests checking in, each room can only accommodate one guest, and there is a meal in each room enough for one guest for 1 day. Suppose the guests have been assigned natural numbers g1, g2…, and that the rooms have been assigned natural numbers r1, r2…, and the guests are assigned the corresponding numbered rooms, that is, g1 assigned to r1, g2–r2, etc. If each guest checks into the assigned room and eats up the meal, there would be no extra meal available for the next day. (Note: “extra” is defined as meal(s) that are available for the guests to collect and eat again after all the guests have already eaten their meals, resulting in each guest having more material in her body the next day).”
Here is the argument that goes with it:
“1.1 Necessarily, the causal power of a group of x (where x = an action) for causing extra y depends on x having the relevant causal power to cause extra y.
1.2 Necessarily, if x has no relevant causal power for causing extra y, then an infinite number of x would have no relevant causal power for causing extra y. (From 1.1).
1.3 A guest checking into one room rather than the other has no relevant causal power to cause extra meals.
1.4 Therefore, necessarily, an infinite number of guests, each of whom checks into one room rather than the other, would have no relevant causal power for causing extra meals. (From 1.2 and 1.3).”
Firstly, there’s something confusing about the causal powers of actions. It’s much more standard to talk about the causal powers of objects (my car has the ability to go fast, etc) or of events (the assassination of Franz Ferdinand caused World War One, etc). Talking about actions seems contrived to me. But let’s play along anyway.
Secondly, there’s something confusing about talking of the uneaten meals as “extra” meals that might be “caused” by the actions of the guests. The meals exist independently of what the guests do. A meal in a room that no guests check into isn’t in any kind of causal relation to any guest. Saying that the actions of the guests ‘cause extra meals’ is just a confusing way of saying that some meals won’t get eaten if nobody checks in to that room. I don’t know why he gets so wrapped up in these weird ways of writing about stuff, but again let’s play along.
Here is one way into the problem. I don’t have the “causal powers” to make it true that there is an even number of people in the world (because there’s only one of me), but a group of people could be evenly numbered. Maybe the actions of a given individual guest can’t ensure there is an uneaten meal, but clearly the group can. And it’s no more mysterious than the even number case above.
Let’s set aside the meals for now, as that’s basically irrelevant logically. Does an individual guest have the causal powers, just by herself, to ensure that there is an unoccupied room, just by checking into a given room? No. But clearly the distribution of guests in Hilbert hotel does determine if there are any unoccupied rooms after they have all been given a unique room. If guest n gets room n, then no room is unoccupied. If guest n gets room 2n, then there are infinitely many “extra rooms”.
The infinite group of guests has this ability (that’s the whole point of the hilbert’s hotel thought experiment). And that’s true even though none of the individuals can on their own. Premise 1.2 is false. The counterexample (if it wasn’t already painfully obvious) is that an individual guest can’t make it that there’s a spare uneaten meal after each guest is given a unique room just by checking into a room, but the infinite group of guests can.
Basic Theism generates no expectations over what the parameters of physics end up being. If there are a million different ways the parameters could be set supernaturally, then our expectations of any one in particular becoming actual should be one in a million. It is a flat probability distribution.
Basic Naturalism =
There is no supernatural a creator of the universe
The parameters for physics are determined naturally
Basic Naturalism generates no expectations over what the parameters of physics end up being. If there are a million different ways the parameters could be set naturally, then our expectations of any one in particular becoming actual should be one in a million. It is a flat probability distribution.
The fact that the basic parameters of physics are finely tuned for life is not evidence for Basic Theism over Basic Naturalism. They generate exactly the same predictions, and so the evidence of fine tuning is completely neutral between them.
Enriched Stuff
Enriched Theism =
There is a supernatural a creator of the universe
They set the parameters for physics
They desire for there to be life
The standard idea here is that Enriched Theism generates a non-flat probability distribution across all the possible ways the parameters of physics could be set. Because they desire for life, the enriched god is more likely to pick worlds where there could be life; that is, she would be more likely to pick worlds where the laws of nature allow life to exist. For any pair of worlds, w1 and w2, if the parameters of physics allow for life in w1 and not in w2, then (on Enriched Theism) we should expect w1 more than we do for w2.
Enriched Naturalism =
There is no supernatural a creator of the universe
The parameters for physics are determined naturally
Nature has a metaphysically necessary disposition (somehow) towards setting values for the parameters of physics that allow for life
It seems to me that Enriched Naturalism generates exactly the same expectations as does Enriched Theism. Let’s just specify that the disposition assigns exactly the same probabilities as does the desire in Enriched Theism. For any pair of worlds, w1 and w2, if the parameters of physics allow for life in w1 and not in w2, then (on Enriched Naturalism) we should expect w1 more than we do for w2.
The fact that the basic parameters of physics are finely tuned for life is not evidence for Enriched Theism over Enriched Naturalism. They generate exactly the same predictions, and so the evidence of fine tuning is completely neutral between them. It’s still a tie.
Breaking the tie
We could, of course, try to break the tie by comparing something basic with something enriched. For example, compare Basic Natualism and Enriched Theism. Now the evidence that the parameters of physics are finely tuned for life does favour Enriched Theism (over Basic Naturalism). Basic Naturalism assigns each possible way the parameters could be set an equal probability to every other. Enriched Theism favours worlds where there could be life (like worlds where the parameters are finely tuned for life), and assigns them a higher expectation value.
But that’s not interesting. We could equally well say that the evidence favours Enriched Naturalism over Basic Theism. After all, Enriched Naturalism generates exactly the same expectations as Enriched Theism. It’s a perfect symmetry. When we compare apples with oranges, the one simpler theory predicts less and so it loses out. When we compare oranges with oranges, it’s a tie.
Stalking horse hypothesis
Let the ‘stalking horse hypothesis’ just be the hypothesis that for any possible enrichment of Basic Theism (by adding auxiliary assumptions), there is a mirror version of enriched naturalism which generates exactly the same predictions. If so, there’s never going to be an oranges to oranges comparison of the type considered here where fine tuning favours theism over naturalism. There will always be a suitable orange ready at hand to be the relevant comparison, guaranteeing the tie.
Is it possible to prove this hypothesis? Not sure at the moment. It’s an interesting idea though, I think.
There has been much discussion online recently of Philip Goff’s apparent conversion to Christianity. This was somewhat hyped up by Cameron Bertuzzi, who interviewed Goff in a sort of religious version of a ‘gender reveal’ video. In that video, Goff explained his views informally, and a few days later he published a blog about summarising it as well. In both of these, Goff explained that he still dislikes the penal theory of substitution, but has come see a different view of the atonement as much more plausible. That theory is the ‘participatory theory of the atonement’ (PTA). In his blog post, he cites a paper, by Greg Restall and Tim Bayne, called (no surprise) ‘A Participatory Theory of the Atonement‘.
In this post, I am going to take a look at that paper, and outline some lines of criticism against the view. The paper is made up of two parts. In part one the authors advance several lines of criticism against the standard theories of the atonement (penal substitution, exemplary, and merit). In part two, they argue that the PTA avoids these difficulties. I’ll stick to their positive case for the PTA in what follows.
The PTA
Restall and Bayne begin by distinguishing between three different accounts of sin; deontic, relationally and ontologically. According to the deontic account, sin is “a failure to fulfil our moral obligations”. According to the relational account, sin is a broken relationship; “our relationship with God and each other is not what it ought to be”. And according to the ontological view, sin is “a feature or element of human nature”, “something from which we suffer” and a kind of “sickness” (p. 2).
The PTA takes its inspiration from certain passages of Paul, such as:
For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God.I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
(Galatians 19-20)
Restall & Bayne quote New Testament scholar Mary Hooker, who says:
The sin of Adam was reversed and the possibility of restoration opened up when Christ lived and died in obedience and was raised from life to death. Those who are ‘baptized’ into him are able to share his death to sin (Rom. 6: 4-11) and his status of righteousness before God (2 Cor. 5: 21).
(Hooker, 2000, p. 522)
Clearly, the idea is that believers can be ‘transformed’ in some sense. She goes on:
To do this, however, Christians must share in his death and Resurrection, dying to the realm of flesh and rising to life in the Spirit. Thus Paul speaks of being crucified with Christ in order that Christ may live in him (Gal. 2: 19-20). The process of death and resurrection is symbolized by baptism (Rom. 6: 3-4). By baptism ‘into Christ’, believers are united ‘with him’, so that they now live ‘in him’.
(ibid)
By participating in baptism, believers can be transformed, so that ‘Christ may live in him’. Restall & Bayne go on to develop the thought like this:
Christ’s death is not presented as something we must emulate, nor is it presented as persuading God to forgive us, as constituting restitution for our debts, as punishment for our misdeeds.
(Restall & Bayne, p. 15)
According to the PTA, the atonement isn’t about being forgiven by God etc. This is because the PTA presupposes an ontological account of sin, according to which sin is a kind of sickness. They say that “we are quite literally born again in the sense that we are literally new creatures” (ibid). They say that:
…our change of identity liberates us from sin: since we are no longer bound by (or under the sway of ) sin, we are free to participate in a restored relationship with God.
(Restall & Bayne, p. 16)
Key to the PTA then are the ideas that Christ died in order to instigate the rites of baptism and the Eucharist, and that future Christians participating these rituals transforms Christians into “literally new creatures”, ones that are cured of the human ‘pathology’ or ‘sickness’ that they were afflicted with previously.
Objections
The first objection we shall consider is raised by Restall and Bayne in the paper. They are keen to stress how the PTA does not presuppose a ‘deontic’ model of sin. Jesus’ death on the cross (and our participation in rituals) is not an action which itself resets the moral ledger. Rather, it instigates the rituals of baptism and the Eucharist, the participation of which can transform us so that we do not suffer from the sickness of sin. However, there is still the lingering feeling that something important about sin is being ignored here. They pose this thought as some questions:
“…isn’t there some sense in which sin is a deontic problem? How does the participatory model deal with sin as a problem of moral culpability?”
(p. 16).
The problem is like this. Suppose I do something morally wrong, like murdering someone. I am now morally culpable because of my past action. But how does participating in a ritual change that? If it doesn’t, then how does that fit with the central Christian idea that Jesus died for our sins? It seems like the PTA is in danger of changing the focus of the atonement so far away from traditional deontic notions that it is no longer a plausible candidate.
Although Restall and Bayne say they are not entirely sure how best to answer such questions, they do pose an interesting idea as a response:
The moral debt we owe to God (if such there be) is not punished or forgiven, nor is satisfaction or reparation made for it. Instead, it is dealt with by changing the identity of the sinner: strictly speaking, the person who is in the wrong before God no longer exists.
(p. 16)
So person A might commit a murder, but then go and get baptised, and literally become a new creature. This new creature, person B, is not identical to person A, and so they do not inherit the culpability of person A.
So here are a few issues with this proposal. Firstly, a change of identity sounds like the sort of thing that would be a sharp boundary chance. But if so, when does that actually take place? The moment of baptism? If so, then what role does the Eucharist play? The mechanics are obscure, to say the least.
Secondly, it’s not clear that it fits with our experience. No doubt, many people who undergo baptism feel like they have gone through an experience which changes them forever. However, undoubtedly there are others who do not have this experience. Hitler was baptised as a child, for example. Perhaps he was ‘liberated from sin’ temporarily, but if anything happened, it didn’t last that long. Clearly then, the PTA has to introduce something ad hoc to deal with these sorts of cases. Maybe they have to sincerely want to be saved, or something, for the transformation to take place. It feels to me that this sort of move is ad hoc, as it is introduced merely to fit with the data that wasn’t otherwise predicted by the theory.
Thirdly, the transformation from one person into a new one doesn’t sound plausible. Consider how Restall and Bayne motivate the thought; they distinguish between numerical identity and ‘moral identity’. Numerical identity involves things like the causal theory, or the memory theory, etc. As they note: “The question these accounts attempt to answer is this: what, fundamentally, are we?” (p. 19). In contrast to this we have moral identity: “One’s moral identity is one’s identity as a moral agent, as an entity that is responsible for its actions” (ibid). We are a new ‘moral agent’ after the transformation of the baptism. And this new agent is not responsible for the sins of the old one.
Restall and Bayne ask us to consider “actions performed while asleep, or under the influence of a drug, or in a fugue state, and so on” (ibid). If you sleepwalk downstairs and punch your father in the face, is it really you who is responsible for it?
In some sense these are things that one has done – and some feeling of [causal?] responsibility for them might be appropriate. … But at the same time we might want to distance ourselves from such actions in a certain way, and such distancing seems defensible. Such actions are not a part of one’s real self: they are not expressive of one’s identity as a moral agent.
(p. 19)
But such talk seems metaphorical at best. It isn’t literally a second agent who sleepwalked downstairs last night. Rather, it really was you. The simple reason you weren’t necessarily responsible for what you did is that you weren’t conscious at the time; you were asleep. We can adopt the language of ‘moral identity’ if we want, but it seems clear that it is a metaphor, and in actual fact just one agent is present, with the difference between which actions they are culpable for and those they are not having to do with standard features like being in possession of their faculties, being conscious, etc.
The talk of becoming “literally new creatures” surely needs something more robust than this metaphor of ‘moral identity’. After all, we can understand the difference between me being awake and sleepwalking, and how that bears on questions of culpability. But in the pre-/post-baptism case, which side is supposed to be the sleepwalker? The obvious thought is that it would be the pre-baptism person (they are sleepwalking through life, only to be awakened by the baptism, etc). But even if their judgement was clouded by the pathology of sin, we nonetheless hold people in that state straightforwardly morally accountable; sinners can be morally culpable, unlike sleepwalkers. But if not that way round, then are post-baptism agents supposed to be like the sleepwalkers? That also doesn’t seem right. If so the analogy should be that if you punch your father in the face while awake, are you still morally responsible while sleepwalking the next day? But the point is just that sleepwalkers are not morally responsible for anything they do, because they are no conscious at the time. But this isn’t analogous to people who have had baptisms. You can have a baptism and then go on to do something that you are morally culpable for. Surely, Hitler was morally responsible for things.
So if person A commits a murder, and then undergoes a baptism, it seems unintelligible how this can make any relevant difference to their culpability. Whatever else it might mean, it isn’t going to indicate a difference between someone having full possession of their faculties and someone who is not. In fact, it just seems like it has no moral relevance whatsoever.
Consider how flimsy the case is for being a new creature entirely. You will retain all your past memories. You will be causally continuous with your pre-baptism self. Legal judgements will remain the same (you don’t get let out of prison just for getting baptised). It certainly seems to me that whatever justification there was for holding you morally culpable remain. Yet, in the eyes of God you are (somehow) now not blameworthy for past sins that you committed. Why? Because you participated in a ritual. The whole thing is utterly bizarre.
Conclusion
My view of the PTA then is that it is basically just “metaphorical at best, and unintelligible at worst” (p. 18). Even if you think that sincerely participating in rituals makes an ontological difference to people, it is wildly implausible to suppose that doing so makes any relevant impact on whether you are morally culpable for past actions. You might feel like your life has changed for the better, but even if that’s true, you are not literally a new creature.
[I originally posted this on the prosblogion blog, but that is no longer available, so I’m reposting here]
In his 2014 paper, ‘A New Kalam Argument: Revenge of the Grim Reaper’, Rob Koons presents what is surely the canonical version of the Grim Reaper Paradox (GRP). Here I want to outline a quick, but I think novel, objection to that argument. I’m still thinking it through, so welcome comments. It’s quite likely I’ve overlooked something, and someone will point that out.
Here is the thought. The argument has a premise that is objectionable to Humeans, and another premise that is objectionable to anti-Humeans. Since the Humean / anti-Humean distinction is dichotomous, the argument has premises that are acceptable to no-one.
There are lots of ways to set the argument up, and a lot relies on the precise details of the particular version that is being articulated. However, Koons rightly stresses a few core premises, and for our purposes we can merely think about two of them:
The possibility of an individual reaper
The patchwork principle
I think 1 is objectionable to a Humean, and 2 is objectionable to an anti-Humean. But what do I mean exactly by Humean and anti-Humean here? Broadly, I’m following Loewer (2012), who says:
Humeans claim that there is no fundamental necessity in nature connecting spatio-temporally non-overlapping events in non-overlapping portions of space–time. … In contrast, non-Humeans think that there is fundamental necessity in nature.Loewer, 2012, p. 116
Humeans think that reality is just a bunch of ‘categorical’ (non-modal) matters of fact, which is often referred to as the ‘Humean mosaic’, whereas anti-Humeans think there are also ‘thick’ modal properties, like potentialities, or capacities, or dispositions, etc.
So why think that anti-Humeans would object to the patchwork principle? Well, the patchwork principle, and in particular Koon’s version of it, says that we can ‘cut and paste’ together non-overlapping regions of spacetime (providing they have compatible topological and metrical structures – we can’t cut and paste together slice of 11-dimensional spacetime with a slice of regular 4-dimensional spacetime, etc). In conventional cases, this principle is intuitive. As Lewis says, if a dragon is possible, and a unicorn is possible, both a dragon and a unicorn together is possible. But this conflicts with the notion of thick modal properties in the following way. Take a wine glass and its thick modal property of being fragile. This means that it has a disposition to smash in the right circumstances, such as being knocked off the table at a dinner party, etc. But the patchwork principle says we can paste in together a region of spacetime where the glass is knocked off the table with one where it lies unbroken on the floor. But if this is possible, it cannot also be that it would necessarily smash if knocked off the table. Thick modal properties therefore restrict what combinations of spacetime regions we can cut and paste together. Anti-Humeans might still like to use a restricted version of the patchwork principle when reasoning about modality, or they might just abandon it altogether. But they will reject the unrestricted version because it’s incompatible with thick modal properties. Thus, they will reject the premise that requires an unrestricted patchwork principle (like we find in Koons’ version of the argument).
Why do I say that Humeans should reject the possibility of individual reapers? Well, this is quite simple. They have thick modal properties. According to Koons, a reaper just is something that has “the power and disposition” (Koons, 2014, p. 257) to do the relevant action (e.g. killing Fred, etc) iff the relevant condition obtains (e.g. if none of the prior reapers has already killed Fred, etc). But powers and dispositions are most straightforwardly construed as thick modal properties. Koons himself rejects ‘neo-Humeanism’ later on in that paper, indicating he doesn’t have a Humean reading of powers and dispositions in mind here. But if reapers have thick modal properties, then this goes beyond what the Humean allows in her metaphysics. They are not simply categorical properties, but types of necessary relations between objects. Thus, Humeans would deny that any objects have properties like this, and thus also that reapers do.
In conclusion then, it seems to me that the GRP requires a Humean premise (the patchwork principle) and an anti-Humean premise (the thick modal properties of reapers). As such it is not acceptable to either Humeans or anti-Humeans, and so is an argument for no-one.
What sort of pushback might my argument above generate? Well, I can see two broad approaches. One could try to build the argument without using thick modal properties and thus avoid the Humean objection (making an GRP argument for Humeans). Or one could try to build the argument with a suitably restricted patchwork principle (making a GRP argument for anti-Humeans). If this is right, then we have split the argument in two, and one might have better fortunes than the other. Or they both can be shown to be absolutely fine. Or both might be shown to be problematic. In any case, it seems to me to be an interesting development in the dialectic.
In this post, I will outline an argument against Christianity. It’s not an argument for atheism, or against theism as such. It’s just aimed specifically at showing that Christianity is false.
The argument
Here is the argument:
If Christianity is true, then a perfect being exists
But if a perfect being exists, then Christianity is false
Therefore, Christianity is false.
This argument is logically valid. If the premises are true, then the conclusion has to be true. The argument is just ‘if p, then q’, ‘if q then not-p’, ‘therefore, not-p’. This is easy to check using truth tables (and will leave it as an exercise for the interested reader).
Premise 1 is relatively uncontroversial. By ‘perfect being’, I just mean a morally perfect, omnipotent, omniscient creator of the universe. This is the standard view of God in mainstream Christianity. (For the purposes of this argument, I think I don’t even need omniscient.) If your view of God is that he isn’t morally perfect, or not all powerful, etc, then this argument won’t apply to you. But it does apply to most mainstream Christian views of God.
Given that the argument is valid and the first premise is uncontroversial among mainstream Christianity, the action is really all about premise 2. I’ll devote the rest of this post to defending premise 2. Specifically, I have three lines of defence for premise 2, each of which involves a different key tenet of Christianity; original sin, the atonement, and salvation.
original sin
Original sin, supposedly incurred when Eve are from the forbidden tree in the garden of Eden, means that every subsequent person inherits some degree of moral culpability as a consequence. That is, everyone is morally blameworthy for the actions of someone who existed before they were born.
However, it is unjust to blame someone for something that another person did. In court cases where someone gets sent to prison for crimes that they did not commit, we readily recognise that this is unjust. This is independent of any particular theory of justice. It’s merely a datum that any theory of justice worthy or the name needs to take into account (like the way any theory of morality needs to account for things like torturing babies for fun being morally wrong).
The problem for Christianity is that original sin just is a punishment for a crime that nobody but Eve committed. Holding anyone else to blame for it is to deviate from where the moral responsibility really lies. So original sin is unjust. And surely a morally perfect being wouldn’t set up a system like that. A perfect being would set up a just system, where people would get punished or rewarded according to what they actually do in life, and not what other people do. Thus, if there were a perfect being, there would be no original sin. But original sin is crucial to Christianity. Thus, if there were a perfect being, then Christianity would be false. And that is premise 2 of the argument.
Atonement
The central story of the New Testament is about the life and death of Jesus. Whatever else we might say about Jesus, it is clear enough that he was a first century Palestinian Jew, who was a religious leader that was killed by the Romans while he was in his early 30’s. Subsequent generations of Christians developed many theories regarding his death, and it ultimately came to be seen as not a tragic thwarting of a man in his prime, but as the central and most important event in history. In the eyes of mainstream Christianity, the death of Jesus has enormous metaphysical consequences.
Typically, this is cashed out as Jesus ‘dying for our sins’. But what does this ‘atonement’ mean? There are many theories of atonement, including the ransom theory, the satisfaction theory, the penal substitutionary theory, etc. What most of these have in common is the notion that our moral culpability can be transferred, specifically from us to Jesus. In one way or another, Jesus stands in for humanity, receiving a punishment we deserve, in order to save us.
However, this is also unjust because moral culpability cannot be transferred from one person to another. Consider the following example:
Suppose a gangster murders your best friend. He then gets arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. But then one of his cronies volunteers to do the prison time in the gangster’s place, and the judge agrees. The gangster walks free from the courtroom while the crony gets lead in handcuffs into the jail.
In such a scenario, justice has not been done. The problem is glaring: the moral failing remains with the gangster, no matter what anyone else does (such as try to stand in for them at a trial, etc). So the imposition of the punishment for that moral failing on someone innocent is another deviation from where the responsibility really lies. Therein lies the injustice.
A perfect being would not have as the centrepiece of their metaphysical system a blatantly unjust action like this. Yet that is crucial for mainstream Christianity. Therefore, if a perfect being exists, Christianity is false, and we have our second premise again.
Salvation
Christianity involves the notion of salvation through faith or acceptance of Jesus as your saviour. There are two aspects of this which are problematic. Firstly, it severs their connection between action and culpability. According to Christianity, one can be a murderous warlord (like Constantine), but repent on one’s deathbed, and thereby be forgiven and accepted into heaven. All the while, someone who lived a morally perfect life, but didn’t believe in Jesus, could end up being the recipient of eternal punishment.
This is blatantly unjust. The wrong people, from a moral perspective, are being rewarded and punished. Constantine’s deathbed repentance did not alter his moral responsibility. Him being rewarded is another deviation from what justice requires. Thus, this is also something that a perfect being would not do. A perfectly just being would reward people for morally good things and punish them for morally bad things. But this is not what we get with Christianity. Therefore, if a perfect being exists, Christianity is false.
Lastly, this theory of salvation rewards or blames people on the basis of their doxastic states. But doxastic states are not the sorts of things that have moral significance. By contrast, consider desires. Plausibly, the possession of certain desires can be immoral. Of course, the act of torture is immoral, but maybe so is the desire to do it. Either way, doxastic states are not like this. Believing that you tortured someone is not immoral. Even believing that you desire to torture is not immoral. No belief is moral or immoral to hold. They are completely neutral.
Yet the possession or lack of a belief makes all the difference in Christianity. Merely believing in the right propositions is rewarded by heaven, and not believing them is punished by hell.
Thus we have another deviation from justice. Punishing someone for something that has no moral significance is itself unjust. Actions (and perhaps desires) are the proper subject of moral culpability, but not beliefs. Punishing someone for holding a belief (or not) is unjust, and not something a perfect being would do. Perfect beings would punish and reward in proportion to what people do (and maybe what they desire to do). Yet this is not what we see with Christianity, where eternal punishment and reward is dished out in relation to holding beliefs. Therefore, if there is a perfect being, Christianity is false.
It has been exactly one year since I had my discussion with William Lane Craig on Capturing Christianity. Following that exchange, I wrote up my thoughts into a paper, and got it published in Mind (I posted a link to it here). This took a long time, partly because of the peer review process, and partly because the copy editing at Oxford University Press seems to be struggling over lockdown (that’s what it seemed like to me anyway). Craig was much quicker to publish his thoughts, which came out on his blog just a month after the discussion. You can read what he put here. At the time, Craig alluded to a ‘five point response’ that he had to the argument I was making. However, he didn’t get the chance to fully express those in the stream. Fortunately for us, he managed to explain them in more depth in his post.
Here I’m going to explain what each of his five points are, and respond to each of them.
2. The context
The discussion centred mainly on the argument I made with my friend Wes Morriston in our joint paper Endless and Infinite (which you can read here). The issue is whether the Hilbert’s Hotel argument, which is supposed to show that the past must have a beginning, can be used to show that the future must have an end. We gave a ‘symmetry argument’, which is just the Hilbert’s hotel argument, but ‘re-tensed’ so that it is about the future not the past.
We think the situation is perfectly symmetrical. If the past had no beginning, then the number of past events (the number of past days, if you like), will be equal to the cardinality of the natural numbers. You could assign each one a unique number, and have none left unassigned. Having this property makes it an ‘actual infinite’ for Craig; or at least, having this property makes it problematic for Craig (the ‘actual infinite’ is the problematic one for Craig). The thing is that this cardinality behaves weirdly, as it can have proper parts that are equivalent to the whole. Craig brings this out with his Hilbert’s Hotel examples, each of which involves things like there being both more guests and also the same number of guests after a new guest checks in to the hotel, etc. This is too much for Craig, who says that this shows that anything actually infinite cannot exist concretely in reality, in the same sort of way as hotels or library books. Given that there would be just as many, say, past even days as the total number of past days, the beginningless past has the problematic property that got Hilbert’s hotel into trouble. Thus the past must be finite. So his argument goes.
All we are pointing out is that this property applies to future events just as much as past ones. If the future never ends, then the number of future events (the number of future days, if you like), will be equal to the cardinality of the natural numbers. You could assign each one a unique number, and have none left unassigned. As each day passes there is the same number of days left to go as there was previously. As such the endless future is just as similar to Hilbert’s hotel as the beginningless past. There is a very obvious, at least prima facie, symmetry here. If you accept that Hilbert’s hotel is intolerably absurd, such that nothing having that property could exist, then this bars the beginningless past and the endless future equally. This is the symmetry argument in a nutshell.
But this is quite tricky if you want to hold, like Craig does, that the endless future is possible, but the beginningless past is not. At least, if you also hold that the reason to think that the beginningless past is impossible is because of these Hilbert’s hotel examples. Such a person needs to provide some kind of ‘symmetry breaker’ according to which the past and future can be treated differently with respect to Hilbert’s hotel argument.
We looked at what we took to be the various symmetry breakers that Craig has proposed in the literature, and explained why each one is insufficient. The first was his central claim, which is that the beginningless past is an actual infinite, but the endless future is merely a potential infinite. The second is that there are no future events at all; the third is that the future is pure potentialities, etc, etc. You can read it for yourself to see all the details.
I think all of Craig’s symmetry breakers obviously fail. In particular, the potential vs actual infinite is I consider to be completely dead as a response to this question. Anyway, this was the context for the discussion. Craig told me he had read the paper in advance of the discussion, so I expected these specific arguments to be addressed. Spoiler, I don’t think he read the paper very carefully. That’s the only way I can explain the following.
3. The Five Point Response: point one
Craig’s first point is about the ad hominem nature of the argument. Here is how he puts it on his blog:
The objection is either ad hominem or question-begging. As Alex recognized, the objection tends to be ad hominem, not in the abusive sense, but in the sense that it has force only against particular people, e.g., those who believe in personal immortality or, in the case of Andrew Loke’s formulation of the argument (see (4) below), against theists. If one tries to avoid this ad hominem feature by claiming that it’s clear that the series of future events can be infinite, then one seems to beg the question. For the objection does nothing to expose a flaw in the reasoning in support of a beginning of the series of past events. It allows that there is a sound argument against the infinitude of the past that also applies to the infinitude of the future. Without refuting this argument, it just assumes that an infinite future is possible, which begs the question against the argument. So the objection is both question-begging and/or ad hominem
This response is itself split into two halves. The first half is everything up to “If one tries to avoid…”. He is right that there is something of an ad hominem about this discussion. The idea is that if someone advanced the Hilbert’s hotel argument as a way of showing that the past necessarily had a beginning, and also believes that the future at least could be (if not actually is) endless, then they have some explaining to do. They have to show how they are not committed to an inconsistent set of assumptions. And let it be clear, this description accurately describes Craig. So he has some explaining to do.
On the other hand, let’s also be clear about the consequences if we were to be right. What it would show would be that Craig has to figure out how to square his beliefs so that they are consistent. But there are various ways he could do that. For instance, he could do that by biting the bullet and holding that the future must come to an end. And this means that he could accept the symmetry argument without that in any way undermining the original Hilbert’s hotel argument, and the role that this plays in the Kalam. So in some sense then, the symmetry argument is not aimed at the Kalam directly. And it is only fair to be open about this. You could rationally buy the symmetry argument, and still think that Hilbert’s hotel establishes that the universe had a beginning (by biting the bullet about the future coming to an end).
But the point remains, even after we are super clear about this, that Craig in particular has to respond in some way. And he has done, in multiple places and in differing ways, and he doesn’t bite the bullet. Rather, he provides purported symmetry breakers to show how the future is not like the past with respect of the Hilbert’s hotel argument. So he is not giving up his belief in the endless future, nor the efficacy of the Hilbert’s hotel argument. And this requires some explaining.
But it being an ad hominem wasn’t itself an objection to the symmetry argument. It’s just a classification of the type of argument that it is, and not a marker that the argument is improper as such. So the first half of this response is really just signposting that the argument has this ad hominem aspect to it, but this isn’t really a response to the symmetry argument as such. It’s just a comment about it. So there’s not a lot more to say about it than that.
The second half of the quote makes the case that the symmetry argument (or at least the person making it) might themselves be guilty of begging the question at hand. He says that one could avoid it being an ad hominem by claiming that the future just could be endless. It’s like you could put the argument by saying ‘this is a problem for all those people who believe A, B and C’, and this would be ad hominem against those people. But you could avoid this by saying ‘this is a problem if A, B and C are true, and A, B and C actually are true’. In the second way of putting it, the emphasis isn’t on those people who believe certain things, but is just about how the contents of those beliefs are inconsistent. And you might want to put the argument like this if you have some prior commitment (maybe you think that it is just obvious, or perhaps highly intuitive) that the future could be endless. In that case, you might think that any theory that ends up meaning that this is impossible (like if you bite the bullet against the symmetry argument) is itself implausible, because it ends up deeming an obviously possible thing impossible.
I’m not so sure about this. Wes and Landon Hedrick seem to see it the second way; they think it is quite plausible that the future could be endless. I think that I’m unsure what I think about the possibility of the endless future. It is certainly epistemically possible – that is, consistent with what I take myself to know about the world. But then I’m quite open to my knowledge not extending very far towards possibilities like this. I’m at least as confident in the idea that we can never know whether the future is endless as I am in the proposition that it is metaphysically possible that it is endless. So I guess my own personal view is that I’m non-committal about whether it really is possible, or if it just seems to me like it is possible. Perhaps Wes and Landon agree with this as well. Either way, I don’t think I could reasonably be said to be begging the question here, because I’m not strongly committed to the possibility of the endless future; rather, I’m agnostic about it.
But that just makes me think that this first point just amounts to a statement about how the problem is particularly acute for people who hold Craig’s combination of beliefs, and an accusation that someone could (although I don’t think I do) beg the question by assuming that it is obvious that the endless future is metaphysically possible. And I honestly don’t see where an objection to anything is supposed to be found here.
4. Point two
In his second point, Craig gives a proposal for a symmetry breaker, saying “It is plausible that the past and future series of events are not perfectly symmetrical”. He goes on:
“On a tensed theory of time, according to which temporal becoming is an objective feature of reality, there are no events later than the present event and, hence, no future events. So a tensed theory of time entails that an actually infinite number of future events does not exist; indeed, the number of future events is 0.”
But this is exactly one of the symmetry breakers that Wes and I addressed in the paper. It’s as if he didn’t read what we put, because his response makes no mention of it. As we pointed out, the idea that there are no future events on a tensed theory of time is ambiguous, and when disambiguating Craig himself shows why this isn’t a symmetry breaker. What I mean is that we need to distinguish between how many future events there are, and how many there will be. Fair enough, a presentist wants to deny that any non-present events exist. So for them, there are no future events. However, even a presentist wants to say that there will be future events (unless she thinks that she is at the very final moment of time, which is obviously not what someone like Craig, who thinks time doesn’t have an end, would want to say).
And as we pointed out in the paper, Craig himself makes this distinction in print. Consider the following lines:
Thus, there really are no past or future events, except in the sense that there have been certain events and there will be certain others
Craig, 2001, p. 148
It’s all good to say that for a presentist there are no future events. But if you think that there will be future events (as Craig does, look up), then the question becomes: ‘how many future events will there be, if the future is endless?’ Given the distinction, it is no good to try to claim that the answer is still ‘zero’, because that means that time is coming to an end right now, and isn’t just the innocent presentist commitment to no non-present events. So this part of the response just feels a step behind the dialectic. Craig already made this point, and we already responded to it. Craig is just repeating the point and not engaging with the response. He isn’t explaining how the disambiguation doesn’t apply, or how it does apply but the answer is still zero, or anything like that. He is just not engaging.
He goes on to develop this point, and brings up what I think is a different symmetry breaker, but which Wes and I also extensively engaged with in our paper. He says the following:
The series of events later than any event in time, including the initial cosmological singularity, is always finite and always increasing toward infinity as a limit. In other words, such a series is potentially infinite. Georg Cantor called the potential infinite “a variable finite.” If the series of future events is potentially infinite, then the series of future events is finite but endless.
This is a somewhat obscure notion, but can be made totally clear. He is saying that the ‘series of events later than any event in time’ is ‘always finite and always increasing toward infinity as a limit’. But this is just wrong. Consider a mundane case. Suppose I’m going to count from one to ten. Before I start, how many future counting events will there be? The answer is ten. Now suppose I’ve already counted five numbers. How many future counting events are there now? The answer is five. I’ve counted 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, and I still have 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 to go. So the amount of future counting events is might be finite, but its not increasing over time. It’s clearly decreasing.
Suppose an angel starts counting now and never stops, and that time is endless. How many numbers will she count? Well, at the start of her count she has all of the natural numbers left to count; so ℵ0-many numbers left to count. But after she has counted, say, five numbers, she still has ℵ0-many numbers left to count. The amount of numbers left to count is neither increasing nor decreasing, but staying exactly the same. In a very straightforward way then, when the future is endless the ‘series of events later than any event in time’ is NOT ‘always finite and always increasing toward infinity as a limit’. Rather, it is never finite, and remains the same size forever. In short, it is not a potential infinity at all, but an actual infinity.
How come Craig sees things so differently? Well, it has to do with the weird way that Craig is using the term ‘the future’. In his paper with Sinclair, he puts it like this:
For as a result of the arrow of time, the series of events later than any arbitrarily selected past event is properly to be regarded as a limit.
Craig & Sinclair, 2009, p. 116
We are looking at the ‘events later than any arbitrarily selected past event’. Why this and not just events in the future of the present? It’s because if you look at it like this, then you get something that it much more like a potential infinite (that is, always finite but ever increasing, etc). Consider the following picture, which visualises what Craig is saying:
If we think about the length of the interval marked ‘some finite amount’, then obviously it is only finitely long. Now imagine that the point marked ‘now’ slides off towards the right as time passes. Clearly, the interval between it and the arbitrarily selected past event is going to increase but never be anything other than finite. This is obviously what Craig has in mind when he says that the future is a potential infinite.
But this is where the distinction between the simple future tense and the future perfect tense comes in. Notice that the interval in question is (always) behind the now point. It marks the bit between a past event and the present. It is as if we are at the arbitrary past point and wondering how much time will have passed as of some future point. The answer to this question is that it is always finite, but ever increasing as time passes. And I totally agree that this is a potential, and not actual, infinite. Totally. But the thing that cannot be ignored is that we are not talking about the simple number of future events any more. We are talking about how many days will be past in the future. That’s super obviously not the same thing. As Wes and I put it in the paper: “…that simply isn’t an answer to the question of ‘how many events will there be?’ It is just to answer a different question”. Again, by simply repeating this line, rather than responding to the extensive critique offered in the paper, Craig just seems to be one step behind in the dialectic.
So far, point 2 merely repeats Craig’s positions without interacting with the critiques of them. Again, it’s not really a response. It’s the thing that we originally responded to, and which still stands without a response.
Craig ends this section with the following:
Consider Alex’s premise:
1. If a beginningless series of past events is impossible, then an endless series of future events is impossible.
That commits Alex to the view that there is no possible world in which the series of events has a beginning but no end. In other words, he has to say that the view that the series of events is potentially infinite is not just false but impossible. That is a radical thesis carrying a heavy burden of proof.
This premise leaves out a very important caveat. The whole point here is that if you think Hilbert’s hotel is a good argument for the past having a beginning, then the future must have an end. I don’t buy the antecedent condition here; I don’t think Hilbert’s hotel is a good argument. All I’m saying is that if you do, then you need to explain how to avoid the seemingly obvious symmetry when applying it to the future. Remember how this has an ad hominem aspect to it.
Far from me endorsing a ‘radical thesis’, I’m highlighting how Craig, and people who share his views, need to do some explaining. One way they could do that is by biting the bullet and accepting that the future comes to an end. Another way is to give up Hilbert’s hotel as applied to the past, and say that both future and past could be infinite. What they cannot do, at least without successful symmetry breaker, is maintain an asymmetrical view, where Hilbert’s hotel shows the past is finite, but not that the future is finite. I think that advocates of the Hilbert’s hotel argument (a group I’m not in) cannot maintain an asymmetrical view, because I think all the symmetry breakers fail. Again, Craig seems one step behind the debate if he thinks that I personally believe that the ontology of time has to be symmetrical. I’m making no such claim, because I don’t buy the Hilbet’s hotel argument in the first place.
5. Point 3.
Here Craig brings up an argument discussed (though not endorsed) by my friend Landon Hedrick. Here is what Craig says:
Landon Hedrick, himself no friend of the kalām cosmological argument, has offered a version of the argument for the finitude of the past that is not susceptible to the symmetry objection. It goes as follows:
(1) There cannot be a world in which an actually infinite number of things have been actualized.
(2) If the actual world is one in which the universe is past-eternal, then there is a world in which an actually infinite number of things have been actualized.
(3) Therefore, the actual world cannot be one in which the universe is past-eternal.
This version of the argument for the finitude of the past avoids any alleged parallelism with the future.
It’s strange to me to think that this argument ‘avoids any alleged parallelism with the future’. Here is an obvious re-tensing of the argument:
(1) There cannot be a world in which an actually infinite number of things will be actualized.
(2) If the actual world is one in which the universe is future-eternal, then there is a world in which an actually infinite number of things will be actualized.
(3) Therefore, the actual world cannot be one in which the universe is future-eternal.
This argument obviously has the same logical structure as the original. The reasons for thinking that the second premise are true are exactly the same in both cases. If there are an infinite number of days, either past or future, then these days constitute a set of things that is infinite each of which either will be or was actualised.
The only real place I can imagine Craig objecting is to the first premise. Here, presumably he will say that the future things are never all actualised; rather they each become actualised but the overall number of actualised future things remains finite. But now we are just back to the simple future vs future perfect thing again. I quite agree that the number of currently future events will never have been completely actualised, but that’s a future perfect thing again. It’s just the same as thinking about the interval between a random past event and the present. What matters is not this issue, but the simple question of how many events are in the future of the moving now; not how many will be between it and some random past event.
So, not only do I think there is an obvious way that this argument can be re-tensed to make it about the future, but when it is done I think it puts us right back where we started. Again, I can only think that Craig is a step behind in the dialectic here.
6. Point 4.
Here, Craig brings up Loke’s hotel room builder argument, which was also addressed at length in my paper with Wes. Craig makes the following comments:
Alex’s response to Loke involves an illicit modal operator shift. Alex thinks that if God can bring about the existence of every future room in an endless series of events, then He can bring about the existence of all of them in the present moment. This is a mistake. It does not follow from God’s ability to bring about the present existence of any particular future room that He is able to bring about the present existence of all the future rooms. So to reason is modally logically fallacious. Thus, Loke is quite justified in denying that the possibility of an endless future implies the possibility of the existence of an actually infinite number of things, as does the possibility of a beginningless past.
Again, this seems to be clear evidence that Craig isn’t tracking the dialectic clearly. It is true that in the paper we said: “If an omnipotent God had completely unrestricted power, then he would have the ability to make a HH appear all in one go.” (p. 15). However, we went on to discuss what the consequences are for the argument when the theist insists that “God has the ability do anything metaphysically possible, but nothing metaphysically impossible” (p. 16). Given the metaphysical impossibility of Hilbert’s hotel (granted for the sake of the argument), this restriction on omnipotence has the precise consequence that “for each natural number n, it is possible that God made a hotel with n many rooms in total”, but not “it is possible that God made a hotel so big that there is a hotel room for every natural number n” (p. 16).
Basically, we made precisely the distinction that Craig drew. We are saying: assume that God could make any natural number of hotel rooms in one go, but not infinitely many. It is strange to think that you could carefully read our paper, and the response to Loke, and think that we are arguing with the assumption that because God could make any number of hotel rooms, that he could make infinitely many. I don’t know how to have been more clear about the assumptions we were working with, and how we were presuming the restricted omnipotence that blocks the idea of God making Hilbert’s hotel all in one go. Needless to say, Craig is clearly wrong in his charge here. He doesn’t begin to engage properly with the response to Loke, and so is far too premature to say that Loke is justified in making his argument.
7. Point 5.
Finally, Craig brings up “Alexander Pruss’ version of the argument for the finitude of the past”, by which he means the grim reaper paradox. Now, it might be true that there is no temporal mirror of the GRP. Perhaps. Cohen’s paper ‘Endless Future: A Persistent Thorn in the Kalam Cosmological Argument’ presents a version of this, and I developed a similar one in my post on the Dry Eternity Paradox (which I keep meaning to write up properly). So I don’t accept that it is obvious that no temporal mirror version of this argument could be made to show that the future must have an end. I think it is basically an open question, and that the various responses and counter responses have not been explored enough in the literature.
But, as Craig noted in point 1, and as I have been explicit about here, the symmetry argument wasn’t ever supposed to show that there is no successful argument for the beginning of the universe. It is not even required to defend the thesis that any such argument can be mirrored into an argument for the finitude of the future. Rather, the thought is just that the Hilbert’s hotel argument does apply to both past and future equally. Let’s suppose the GRP is asymmetrical in a way that Hilbert’s hotel is not. What would the significance of this be for the symmetry argument? It seems to me nothing. The GRP isn’t another version of the Hilbert’s hotel argument (and Pruss isn’t an advocate of the Hilbert’s hotel argument). So it would just be that an independent argument supports the second premise of the Kalam. This is basically irrelevant when it comes to assessing the merits of the symmetry argument, which is all about whether there is a symmetry breaker with respect to the Hilbert’s hotel argument to prevent it being applied to the future.
At this point, Craig’s appeal to the GRP seems like he is just appealing to another argument than the Hilbert’s hotel argument altogether. And that is fine, I’m happy to talk about the GRP instead of Hilbert’s hotel, but changing topic isn’t a response to the symmetry argument.
8. Conclusion.
I have no beef with Craig. In fact, I enjoy engaging with his published philosophy, even if I am critical of it. I wouldn’t engage with it if I thought it was low-tier material. He isn’t an idiot, nor do I think he is in bad faith (as it were). But I genuinely struggle to see how he carefully read the paper, or internalised the responses we gave to his arguments, given the contents of this five point response. The things he brings up are basically irrelevant (the ad hominem classification, or the comments about the GRP), or are just behind the discussion (as with his gesture to the asymmetry of time on the dynamic theory, or Loke’s theory). I genuinely think he skim read the paper and thought to himself “oh, this stuff again; I’ve already seen this sort of thing before” and didn’t pause to engage with it deeply. Otherwise it is hard to explain how his responses here are so superficial.
Perhaps one day he will spend some time going through it in more detail, or perhaps someone else will take up the challenge to defend him from the critiques. But his five point response really does nothing to advance the dialectic.
UseOfReason 
