A Few Shameless Plugs

Promoting a couple of very good friends of mine from college:

Justin Cross and I were at Southeastern together.  He is a fantastic musician, have seen him play at several shows in Birmingham.  Just recently he put out an album titled "Listening to Ghosts."  I highly recommend it!

Justin has also just put out a live album recorded at one of my favorite places in Birmingham, the UCF House.  Check out the live album here:

UCF (University Christian Fellowship) is a college ministry that I did a lot with, and their main building, essentially a student center/lounge that also doubled as a concert venue, was basically my home while I lived in Birmingham.  UCF is also the link to the second shameless plug.  The Director of UCF, Andy Byers, who is an awesome, excellent pastor, just wrote a book, which you can check out below!

The final bit of this string of shameless plugs is about an upcoming talk I will be giving at First Church of Christ in Clinton, CT.  I will be discussing the differences among Bible translations and translation philosophies on April 13 at 7:30.

A Critique of Compatibalism

Part of an ongoing conversation I am involved with on a friends blog got into the philosophy of free-will (can I ever escape this topic??) and I was asked to offer my thoughts on compatibalism.  Given that these thoughts are a little off-topic for that discussion I decided to post them here rather than there to avoid too many rabbit trails.

So here very briefly ("very" is a relative word in my vocabulary, be ye warned) is my critique of compatibalism:

Compatibalism purports to make the following two statements "compatible" with one another:

1. Determinism is true.
2. We have free will.

Truth be known, they have already lost me at statement one.  But we'll leave my more general critiques of determinism aside for now and talk about how compatibalists attempt to relate these two statements.  The claim is that so long as my "will" or "desires" correspond with the determined actions in which I take part, then I can still say that I am "free," at least in the way that really matters, which is the way that makes me morally responsible for what I do.

So what the compatibalist is doing, then, is proposing a division between our "will/desires" and our "actions."  Then they are arguing that so long as these two planes correspond with one another- so long as the "will/desires" side of the equation equals (or gives approval to or lines up with) the "actions" side then I am free in the sense of being morally responsible for my actions (because I at least condone my own actions even if I couldn't have chosen any other course of action).

I am going to offer two critiques here.  The first has to do with the relationship of the "will/desires" side of the equation to the "actions" side.  The second has to do with the origin of the "will/desires" side.

First, how do these two sides relate?  It seems like we have three options.  The first and the most commonsensical option is that the will causes our actions.  The second would be the opposite of that- that our actions have the epiphenomenal effect of causing our will- in other words, our "will" is really just a perception that is caused by our actions, but it doesn't exist independently of those actions.  The third option is that the two don't actually have any sort of causal relationship, they exist parallel to one another without interacting with one another.

For the claim of compatibalism to be distinct from that of strict determinism, it seems like the relationship between the "will/desires" side and the "actions" side of the equation is going to have to be such that they are not causally interconnected.  Basically the claim that correspondence between these two sides of the equation makes free will and determinism compatible is, I want to argue, compromised by any causal interrelatedness of the two.

To see this, lets start with epiphenomenalism.  If our will is actually the result of our actions then while the two will always coincide, this is not because the will is freely condoning our actions.  In this case, the will is every bit as determined as our actions are because of the causal relationship between the two.  In other words, while the two will always coincide on this scenario, that is at best a trivial observation and has no bearing on our "freedom" because the will is itself dependent on our actions and thus must coincide with them (is itself determined to coincide with them).  Something similar happens in the case of the will causing our actions.  In that scenario, we again have a causal dependence of one plane on the other.  If we want to maintain that our actions are determined then this interdependence will lead us to say that the will is likewise subject to determinism.  In both of these scenarios we end up with a will that is subject to the same determinations as we are positing for our actions.  While this certainly implies that our two planes will always line up with one another, it seems very difficult to say what value this has for making determinism compatible with free will.  In fact, in both of these scenarios we end up with strict determinism.  Compatibalists want to say something more than this- strict determinism is not enough, the will needs to be independent of our actions so that it can freely condone them and make us responsible for these actions.  If there is any causal relationship between the two planes, this independence is not possible.

This leaves us with the option that our will and our actions have no interaction with one another.  Thus, the "action" side of the equation could be determined and the "will/desires" side free and the two coincide with one another in a way that makes free-will and determinism compatible.  The problem with this scenario is that for our will and our actions to line up we are going to have to believe in a tremendous chain of cosmic coincidences, which strikes me as wildly unlikely.  Perhaps the compatibalist wants to bite that bullet, but I think there are probably simpler explanations in either the strict determinist or free-will camps than to claim that every free will that has ever existed has somehow magically lined up with every determined chain of actions performed by the bodies those free-wills were attached to.

Second, where does the "will" originate?  Here it seems we have two basic options: that the will is either "internal" to us, meaning it is in some sense generated by us, or that the will originates from some source "external" to us.  This question is more or less independent from the previous one- we could imagine a will that originated in either of these ways relating to our actions in any of the above considered ways (with the possible exception of matching an externally generated will with the epiphenomenal interaction scheme above), but when we ask this question in the context of  compatibalism we will discover some considerations that result in a bit of a dilemma.

Lets consider the "external" origin option first.  If we choose this option, I contend that we have to give up the notion of freedom altogether.  If our actions are determined and our "will" is imposed upon us from an outside source, then while our will may "condone" our actions, this is meaningless in so far as establishing our responsibility for these actions goes.  So if this is the angle we take, then the compatibalist goal of harmonizing free will and determinism has failed because we have entirely eliminated free will.

The "internal" option- where we ourselves generate our own will- poses its own challenges for compatibalism.  First, there is going to be a serious question of how this could happen and what it would look like without the first statement- that determinism is true- being undermined.  Second, this is going to connect back into the first critique: how can a will that we have ourselves generated (assuming this can be done and determinism still be true) interact with our (determined) actions?  My thought, for what its worth, is that the only way for the compatibalist to consistently do this is going to be very similar to the conclusion of the above argument- the will must come into existence on a metaphysical plane that has no interaction with the tangible (and determined) world, it must develop entirely on that plane, and experience the tangible world as a passive observer on that plain that coincidentally has condoned everything that it observes.  Any other solution, I think, is going to collapse back into a strict determinism.

Let me try and summarize all this and perhaps conclude with one succinct critique.  The often heard slogan of compatibalism, that we are free so long as we do what we desire/will, is not very helpful in my opinion.  This is because on any of the systems we have touched on here- either strict determinism, libertarian freedom, or compatibalism we could be said to do what we desire/will.  People act in accordance with their will (unless we want to postulate some sort of voo-doo principle of action).  What I have tried to demonstrate here is that without the compatibalist also arguing that the will must be independent of our determined actions then there is nothing separating their theory from that of a strict determinist.  The problem is that to make that kind of independence work we end up creating a metaphysical gap within people- we create what is known as an "interaction problem" where it is impossible for  one part of the person to interact with the other.  In this case, the result is what I think is the rather absurd conclusion that for compatibalism to work we have to believe in a cosmic chain of coincidences between what we will and what we actually do.  Here would be a good place to note this: I don't think Theism helps the compatibalist on this issue.  This is part of the point of the second objection- if God makes the coincidences work then this is either because God has imposed our will on us (thus eliminating freedom and collapsing back into strict determinism) or because God has planned history around our free will (the middle-knowledge hypothesis, which I also have some suspicions about but also think is the only version of compatibalism that works), a conclusion most compatibalists would want to adamantly deny.

Julius Wellhausen, the Academy, and the Church

Just read a significant chunk of Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel for a class I'm taking this semester.  The book mostly deals with the source hypothesis for the Pentateuch and is actually quite well written.  Wellhausen gets a lot of flack for being "anti-Catholic" in his rhetoric, I'm attempting here to give him a more charitable reading. 

Wellhausen lays out his hypothesis for the composition of the Pentateuch, which builds on the work of several earlier German scholars who had argued that various sources of material were worked together, probably sometime during the late Kingdom or after the exile, into a single canonical text that we now possess.  Wellhausen's main argument has to do with the nature of the source-texts.  One, known as "J" (from the German transliteration of the divine name YHWH as Jehovah) Wellhausen argues is the earliest and represents the earliest stage in Israelite religion in which religion is much more individualized and much less structured.  Wellhausen gives a preference for this form of religion.  A second source is Deuteronomy, which likely stood more or less as an independent text before its incorporation into the Pentateuch.  This represents a middle ground in the development of Israelite religion, Wellhausen argues, marking a movement toward centralization but not its completion.  The final source is the Priestly source, which Wellhausen claims is the latest because it demonstrates the most structural development, the most emphasis on ceremony and presupposes a centralized hierarchy.  This form of religion is stifling, Wellhausen claims, and destroys the moral and social fabric of Israelite culture embodied in the "J" source.

I'm simplifying Wellhausen a little, so two brief caveats.  Fist, Wellhausen is aware of a fourth source, "E" (from another name of God- "Elohim") but he thinks that this source has largely been combined with "J" and so separating the two is very difficult.  Second, while I am using the modern abbreviations for the sources, abbreviations that Wellhausen also uses, many of the source divisions are understood differently now.  My point in this post is not going to be to attempt to defend Wellhausen's theory about source divisions.  I am merely wanting to note something about Wellhausen's intentions that I think has been helpful for myself in terms of relating scholarship to my faith.

What I want to note is this: Wellhausen's book reads like a sermon.  Now, doubtless it is a Protestant sermon.  There seems to be little doubt that Wellhausen did really have the Catholic Church in mind when he wrote about the Priestly source and its stifling version of religion.  As I write this I am on a train coming back from a conference in which I might very well have been the only Protestant present, so there is a little bit of guilty pleasure in reading Wellhausen and his not-so veiled criticisms of Catholicism.  But putting aside my Protestant defensive mechanisms, I do think Wellhausen is being unfair to the Catholic faith.  So I'm not going to defend him on that count.  However, I think if we read him a bit differently, and I'm granting that on the level of "authorial intention" I think this is an incorrect reading, his sermonizing is actually quite valuable.  Wellhausen is worried about any form of religion that has become all ritual and that exists for the purpose of elevating the power of a particular priestly class.  He holds up instead a religion that is deeply connected to the social and especially the familial life of the community as the ideal.  To him that is a much more pure expression of religion, a much more true form of worship.  It lacks many of the rules of the later Priestly code- sacrifice is not restricted to Jerusalem, it need not be performed by a priest in any particular manner.  It can be done in the home as a familial act of worship and thanksgiving.  In that way, the worship becomes an extremely important aspect of these people's lives, it becomes much more personally meaningful and significant.

Whatever our agreements of disagreements with Wellhausen's scholarship, both on the point of the finer details of where to make the source divisions and on the more significant questions of his anti-Catholic bias, I think this reading provides a valuable model of how scholarship can interact with the life of the Church.  Scholarship does not need to exist in isolation from the questions that face the life of the Church.  Instead, it should address these problems.  This calls for a careful balance- we should not rewrite the history of Israel to support our particularly theological bias, which is what many accuse Wellhausen of doing (though interestingly, the basic outline of his theory is still the working model of most Old Testament scholarship today).  Neither, however, should studying the history of Israel be devoid of implications for how we view our own theology and worship as the contemporary Church.  Scholarship of the first kind tends toward some sort of fundamentalism- either on the right or the left end of he political spectrum.  Scholarship of the second kind tends toward isolation of the academy from the Church.  The goal should be to strike a balance between the two and do responsible scholarship that is still relevant to the Church of our day.

Publication Announcement

An updated version of a paper I presented at a conference last year has just been published by Glossolalia, a peer-reviewed student journal put out by Yale.  The article is entitled "Re-framing the Free-Will Debate: An Epistemological Perspective."  Check out some of the other articles (particularly the one right after mine, which was written by a very dear friend), there are several good ones!

Basic Beliefs

Our third axiom was that people communicate.  This is really not a very precise statement for a number of reasons.  To communicate seems to imply community- we need a recipient and a communicator.  We might be tempted to say that built into that axiom is the assumption that other people exist.  Built into that might be the assumption that a world beyond ourselves exists.  But for anyone who knows anything about the history of philosophy since the Enlightenment, these assumptions would be unacceptable because one of the principle questions since Descartes has been "on what basis can we claim to know these things?"  I'm going to give a whirlwind history of Modern Philosophy based on that question:

Rene Descartes marks the starting point of Modern Philosophy.  He argues that we can, via the rational process, move from a starting point of certain knowledge- that I exist- to the existence of everything else that we "know" to exist.  We can construct rational arguments that establish with certainty the existence of the material, external world and other persons with whom we communicate.  The problem is Descartes reasoning is circular and few have accepted his arguments.

Baruch Spinoza follows Descartes in claiming that we come to our knowledge by the "rational process" of constructing arguments.  But he modifies the conclusion a bit- we don't have knowledge of a world of matter existing outside our minds, we have knowledge of a world of ideas in our minds (think the Matrix).

John Locke isn't satisfied with Descartes.  He thinks we come to all our knowledge not by reasoning but through our empirical/sensory experiences.  But through those experiences we really do know the external, material world as it is.

George Berkeley offers a critique of Locke that ends up with a similar conclusion as that of Spinoza- our experience doesn't show us an external, material world, it shows us a world of ideas in our minds.

David Hume critiques this entire project by claiming that the categories necessary for us to put together our "knowledge" of the world cannot be demonstrated rationally or empirically.

Immanuel Kant responds to Hume by acknowledging that the categories cannot be demonstrated empirically to exist beyond our minds but then claims that they are part of our subjective experience- we understand the world through the grid our minds create using these categories.

Now, this whirlwind tour is based on a rigorously academic method called "squinting" (technical term given by Miroslav Volf).  There are a lot of details left out of this story and that's because for our purposes right now the details aren't as significant.  There are just a couple of things that I want to draw attention to.  First, I want to note the back and forth between "realism" and "idealism" that happens in this history- the claim that we can really, with certainty know what the material, external world is like using a particular method gives way each time to a weaker claim- we can know a world of ideas through that method.  Both Spinoza and Berkeley want to argue that this world of ideas is the real world, but with Kant we get a change: the world of ideas that our minds put together is not the same world as the external world that exists beyond us.  The difference between the two creates a "transcendental divide" between our experience and reality- we always know our experience, we do not know the world beyond our experience.  This has essentially gotten us back to the first axiom. 

Second, I want to notice what Kant suggests about the categories through which we understand the world.  First I have to acknowledge that there are some differences of interpretation here.  Some of Kant's followers, such as Hegel and many of a more analytic persuasion, want to extract from Kant a way of knowing what the "real world" is- Hegel by means of an idealism not entirely unlike that of Spinoza or Berkeley (at least on my best attempt at reading Hegel, who is a strong contender for most confusing philosopher ever), others by means of something like what Locke and Descartes wanted to do before Hume got a hold of them.  I think in both of these cases that the project is headed in the wrong direction and the essential insight Kant gives us has been missed, the first axiom ignored or overlooked.  Perhaps this is because on the basis of that axiom it does not really seem like we can know anything- my first person experience could be a complete illusion, like Descartes feared.  If I am only able to know my first person experience, how will I ever escape the possibility that it is an illusion?  I think what Kant says about the categories is actually extremely helpful in answering that question.  What Kant seems to suggest is that we cannot operate in a "world" in which that possibility is true.  In other words, there are some beliefs that are so central to our understanding of the world that we have to accept them even if there is no definitive (or empirical) proof of their being true.  By writing his Meditations, Descartes betrays that he believes an external world exists that contains people who can understand what he wrote.  He may hypothetically call that world into doubt, but he has not really doubted it so long as he continues to write for it.  That Hume picks up a pen to write his critique of causation betrays that he actually believes in causes, else why does he think that the ink will actually reach the page?  Before I am accused of a logical fallacy here, the point is not that such assumptions invalidate their arguments about our hypothetical doubt of these things.  The point is to give credence to the idea that we simply cannot do anything without these assumptions being present.

The conclusion of this is that while we are viewing the world subjectively, from a first person perspective that could in fact be an illusion, the possibility of it being an illusion, the possibility of it being completely false, is one that we need not entertain seriously.  There are certain beliefs, beliefs we might call basic beliefs, that are so central to our understanding of the world that we simply must believe them if we want to make sense of anything else.  So our third axiom can stand- we can believe that there is a world beyond us and that it contains people with whom we communicate because without such beliefs we simply cannot make sense of anything in the world.  It will be up to a later post to explore a bit more what the third axiom might imply and how we might use it.