When I posted the video lecture on chapter 3 of the Critical Thinking textbook, I neglected to discuss the fallacies of composition and division. Both involve attributions of properties with regard to wholes and their parts.

There are some properties such that, if the parts of something have those properties, then the whole thing will also have them. An example is weighing more than ten pounds. If every piece of a wall weighs more than ten pounds, then the entire wall must weigh more than ten pounds. On the other hand, weighing less than ten pounds is not like that. If each part weighs less than ten pounds, there is no guarantee that the whole weighs less than ten pounds. When we attribute a property of the parts to the whole, and that property is not one that can be so attributed, then we commit the fallacy of composition.

The fallacy of division involves wrongly attributing properties of the whole to the parts. Our previous example, weighing more than ten pounds, can be used to commit the fallacy of division.

God’s forgiveness falls like rain but yet we can barely squeeze out a drop for each other.

This quote from Annie Hagans, a student in Introduction to Philosophy last year, prompted an interesting discussion on Facebook yesterday. What does it mean to forgive someone? To what extent are we obligated to forgive?

As I wrote recently, everything in existence is permanently impermanent.

I detect shades of Heraclitus here.

Question: is this a paradox? Answer: probably not, unless Rhone is committed to the belief that nothing at all, even impermanence, is permanent. It is a good opportunity to do some analytic philosophy, though.

What is permanence? Is it a real property, or is it a derivative analyzed in terms of the real properties of an object? What’s the status of self-predication; must permanence itself be permanent? If there is nothing in existence that is permanent, then does that mean that abstract objects (numbers, sets, etc.) do not exist? Does that commit us to something like subsistence for abstract entities? Does permanence mean simply that an object always exists, or does it also mean that an object never changes? If the first, then most, if not all, theists would reject the claim that nothing in existence is permanent. If the second, then we would have to at least reject the doctrine fo the immutability of God.

Here’s my first attempt to symbolize permance, attempting to say that that an object is permanent just in case for any property that the object has any time, it has that property at all times.

Robin Hanson, an economist who writes overcomingbias.com, reports the results of a recent Swedish survey.

The survey:

The survey was mailed to 2,450 randomly selected adults above the age of 18 years in Sweden during the spring of 2004; the overall response rate was 45%.

The main answer distribution:

How bad an action is, from an ethical point of view, depends primarily on:
5.3% How bad the consequences of the action are for myself
62.7% How bad the consequences of the action are for other people and for society  17.5% The extent to which the action infringes upon someone else’s natural rights
10.6% The extent to which the action violates what is natural
3.7% The extent to which the action violates Christianity according to the New Testament in the Bible
0.3% The extent to which the action violates the rules given by any other religion (such as Islam or Buddhism)

It would be interesting to see the full report of the survey and results, although I’m not sure that I’m interested enough to pay for a copy. The choices seem too limited from an ethicist’s point of view. The first two options force a choice between radical egoism and radical altruism, but most people are neither. The options don’t discriminate between various kinds of consequentialism in that none specify any particular consequences, such as happiness or welfare. It’s also difficult to know how a Kantian should respond. So, it could be that the majority of people don’t fit into any of those categories, but feel for various reasons that the second is the one that is closest to their position.

One of my favorite things about this Christmas was discovering Ave Maria by Franz Biebl. Here is a perfomance by Chanticleer (Adobe Flash):

Latin Text of the Ave Maria

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.
Benedicta tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

John Gruber recently posted this interesting quote from Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame:

There is no god and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

There is a lot to think about here. Keep in mind that I haven’t read the book, but have only seen this single paragraph. Here are my initial thoughts in no particular order.

The argument seems to be this: imagine that a body of belief were somehow completely eradicated from human minds. If humans were somehow to replicate this body of belief, then such replication would be evidence in favor of its truth. Failure to replicate the body of belief would be evidence in favor of its falsity.

Now, as I often say in class, it’s a bit more complicated than this. First, science itself is not a body of belief. It is instead a method of producing beliefs. So, the proposal must be not to “wipe out science” but instead to eradicate all belief in and memory of all propositions that we consider part of science, that is, claims in physics, biology, chemistry, etc. Then, we should ask if these beliefs would eventually be replicated.

I assume that Jillette requires only that current scientific beliefs be replicated. There’s no reason why he should require Galen’s ideas about physiology and anatomy or Aristotle’s physics to be replicated, since they are false. Why believe that current scientific beliefs would be replicated? I guess because Jillette assumes that they are true. Now, only the most radical antirealist would assume that nothing in current science is true, so I’ll grant that we have good reason for believing that at least much of current science is in fact true. How much of current scientific beliefs is true, though? Surely not all of it. As Newtonian mechanics was eventually replaced with relativity theory and quantum mechanics, might there at some point be another theoretical framework that replaces current physics? There’s no reason to think that everything science asserts now is true, so there’s no reason to think that it would be exactly replicated. So, what is true of religion is also true of science - “There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense.”

So, if we won’t demand exact replication in science, then we shouldn’t demand exact replication for religion either. Does that mean that those religious beliefs that would be replicated then should be considered true? I don’t find it difficult to believe that the belief that a god exists would find its way back into the human psyche, along with other beliefs about the god’s role in causing the universe to be, the demands that the god makes on humans, etc.

I suppose that the reply would be that these are individual religious beliefs, what must be replicated is a system of religious belief, and that there’s no reason to believe that any current system of religious thought would be replicated. Surely though, there are bodies of religious belief that could easily be replicated. Some minimal deism, for instance, is very likely to be replicated.

There is reason why one would think that, if scientific knowledge were somehow eradicated, that we would come to discover those scientific truths again. That is because we think that the method of science is truth-conducive. That is, the scientific method, in the long run, will produce true beliefs and eliminate false beliefs. This is something famously argued by the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914).¹ Now, that doesn’t mean that every use of the scientific method produces true belief or eliminates false beliefs. Some people may just not be very good scientists. In other cases, the particular scientists may be very good, but simply have some false background assumptions.² The particular beliefs that are true, though, would be replicated if science is truth-conducive. So, would religious beliefs be eventually replicated if they were eradicated? That depends on the means by which such beliefs were produced. If religious beliefs are formed by a truth-conducive method, then there is every reason that they would be. What could be the method that produced my religious beliefs? One possibility is that God gave them to me, and surely that’s a truth-conducive method.

So, in the end, Jillette’s argument begs the question. That is, he hasn’t given us a successful argument that religious belief is false because religious belief would not be replicated. Instead, if he argues successfully for anything, it is that religious belief would not be replicated if all religious belief is false. I grant that the conditional is true, but I haven’t been shown any reason why I should grant that all religious belief is false. If one paragraph was this thought-provoking, I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book.

This was a prayer I delivered at NorthHaven Church in Norman for the Christmas Day service on December 25, 2011.

Gracious Father,

We gather here in this place to celebrate the day the world changed.
On that day, one who was pure spirit became incarnate;
The eternal Word became clothed in a frail human body;
That which no human had ever touched was laid by a gentle mother’s hand into a simple manger;
The eternal and timeless now had a beginning;
The infinite became finite;
On that day, God became human.

While still in the garden, we began to build a wall;
A wall that separated ourselves from you;
A wall which we built, but could never tear down.

You tore down the wall when you brought your firstborn into the world,
and said to that babe in the manger,

“You are my son; this day I have begotten you.”

You have spoken to us in many ways, through the prophets, through the beauty of nature, and through the voice of conscience.

On that first Christmas day, though, you spoke has you had never spoken before.

Lord, here we are,
Help us to listen,
Help us to hear.

Amen

I’m trying out MathJax for displaying math formulas on the web. The formula is written using standard LaTeX. Here is an example:

Bayes’ Theorem

I have to admit, it’s much better than anything I could do with HTML. I’ll have to work on the vertical line in the conditional probabilities. It needs just a bit more space to be easily legible.

UPDATE

Davide Cervone suggested below that I use \mid instead of \vert. Here’s how it looks with \mid:

Bayes’ Theorem

For comparison, I rendered both formulas with the application LaTeXiT and saved them as png files.

Here is the formula using \mid:

Here’s the same formula using \vert:

I think I prefer \vert In LaTeX, notice that there is some space between the vertical line and the letters next to it, but not too much space. When MathJax renders the same formula, that space is removed by the extra slant to the letters. In other posts, I’ve taken out the extra slant using \textrm, but that’s not very convenient.

Using \mid for MathJax looks like a good solution. It’s easy enough to change occurences of “\vert” to “\mid” with a quick find and replace.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

Another version, equally good, that is often attributed to Chesterton is

Stop making your religion a theology and start making it a love affair.

I ocassionally happen upon a blog that pulls me in so deeply that I have to read all the prior posts. The Rebel God is the latest instance. I especially liked the recent post, “The Real War on Christmas”