Socrates and thinking for yourself

There is a popular picture of Socrates as someone inviting us to think for ourselves. I was just re-reading the Euthyphro, and realizing that the popular picture is severely incomplete.

Recall the setting. Euthyphro is prosecuting a murder case against his father. The case is fraught with complexity and which a typical Greek would think should not be brought for multiple reasons, the main one being that the accused is the prosecutor’s father and we have very strong duties towards parents, and a secondary one being that the killing was unintentional and by neglect. Socrates then says:

most men would not know how they could do this and be right. It is not the part of anyone to do this, but of one who is far advanced in wisdom. (4b)

We learn in the rest of the dialogue that Euthyphro is pompous, full of himself, needs simple distinctions to be explained, and, to understate the point, is far from “advanced in wisdom”. And he thinks for himself, doing that which the ordinary Greek thinks to be a quite bad idea.

The message we get seems to be that you should abide by cultural norms, unless you are “far advanced in wisdom”. And when we add the critiques of cultural elites and ordinary competent craftsmen from the Apology, we see that almost no one is “advanced in wisdom”. The consequence is that we should not depart significantly from cultural norms.

This reading fits well with the general message we get about the poets: they don’t know how to live well, but they have some kind of a connection with the gods, so presumably we should live by their message. Perhaps there is an exception for those sufficiently wise to figure things out for themselves, but those are extremely rare, while those who think themselves wise are extremely common. There is a great risk in significantly departing from the cultural norms enshrined in the poets—for one is much more likely to be one of those who think themselves wise than one of those who are genuinely wise.

I am not endorsing this kind of complacency. For one, those of us who are religious have two rich sets of cultural norms to draw on, a secular set and a religious one, and in our present Western setting the two tend to have sufficient disagreement that complacency is not possible—one must make a choice in many cases. And then there is grace.

Grace and theories of time

1. All grace received is given through Christ’s work of salvation.
2. Christ’s work of salvation happened in the first centuries AD and BC.
3. One cannot give something through something that does not exist.
4. Abraham received grace prior to the first century BC.
5. So, Abraham’s grace was given through Christ’s work of salvation.
6. So, it was true to say that Christ’s work of salvation exists even when it was yet in the future.
7. So, presentism and growing block are false.

The certainty of faith

There is a strong Christian tradition of seeing faith as involving certainty. Now, perhaps this certainty is just something like moral certainty (for a sophisticated account, see this) or what I call "security" or "sureness". But it is worth interesting to explore the possibility that faith involves certainty in the full sense of the word, requiring a probability equal to one to be assigned to those propositions that come under faith (this does not imply that faith is exhausted by believing propositions).

There are at least two problems with a certainty reading of faith. The first is with justification: How could someone be justified in assigning a probability of one to propositions as controversial as those of the Christian faith? The second starts with an empirical claim: Typical Christians do not have certainty. Given this, it follows that if faith requires certainty, then typical Christians do not have faith, which is definitely depressing and perhaps not so plausible.

But I think there is a way around both difficulties. The Christian tradition sees faith as a gift of the Holy Spirit. It does not seem problematic that the Holy Spirit would infuse someone with a certainty about a truth that the Holy Spirit himself knows with certainty. There are at least two possibilities here. First, it could be that the right kind of externalism (e.g., reliabilism or reformed epistemology) holds so that the certainty of the beliefs that come from such an infusion is epistemically justified. Second, it could be that there is nothing bad about having epistemically unjustified beliefs when they are in fact true and when the agent is not at fault for their formation and maintenance. It would be better to have justification as well, but it's better to have the true beliefs than to suspend judgment. And, plausibly, the story of the infusion of belief could be spelled out in a way that does not make the agent be at fault.

Regarding the empirical problem, here I am less confident. But here is a suggestion. What makes us think that typical Christians do not have certainty? Presumably that they so report it. Or so I'll assume for the sake of the argument, without spending time checking if there are any worldwide studies that check whether typical Christians report not having certainty.

Presumably, introspection is the primary reason why Christians report not having certainty. But I suspect that introspection is not a very reliable guide in a case like this. It seems to me that there are two primary ways by which we introspect the credence we have in a belief. The first is that we introspect to the evidence we take ourselves to have and assume that our credence matches the evidence. But when our certainty goes beyond the evidence, or at least goes beyond the evidence that we are aware of, this isn't going to be a reliable guide to the credence. The second is direct awareness (often comparative) of our credences. Often this is based on feelings of confidence. But such feelings are, I think, not all that reliable. They provide evidence as to actual confidence, but that evidence is not all that strong. While we should try to avoid error theories all other things being equal, it does not seem so bad to say that Christians tend to be wrong when they ascribe to themselves a credence lower than one.

I am inclined to take the best reading of the Christian tradition to be that faith comes with certainty. I also think that I have faith, but I do not in fact feel certain (at least not in the probability one sense). Given that my best reading of the Christian tradition is that faith comes with certainty, I conclude that probably I am certain, notwithstanding my feelings.

Apart from Christ there is no hope

The deep realization that Christ is our only hope has significant existential force for a lot of people in motivating Christian faith. It is interesting that there need be nothing irrational here. In fact, a clearly valid argument can be given:

1. Apart from Christ there is no hope.
2. There is hope.
3. If there is hope but apart from x there is no hope, then there is hope with x.
4. If there is hope with Christ, the central doctrines of Christianity are true.
5. So, there is hope with Christ. (1-3)
6. So, the central doctrines of Christianity are true. (4-5)

Clichéd as that sounds, premise (1) really is something that I come to realize more and more deeply the longer I live. (See also this book by one of my distinguished colleagues.) Premise (3) is some kind of "logical truth'. Premise (4) would, I think, take some defending. I think the central thought here is something like the idea that Christ is Lord, liar or lunatic, and in the latter two cases there is no hope with Christ.

Premise (2) is the crucial one. I suspect that accepting (2) in the relevant deep existential sense of "There is hope" usually, perhaps always, is a fruit of grace. There is darkness, but one sees that there is light shining in it even if one cannot identify the light.

One can perhaps, though this very rare, argue oneself by the light of natural reason into accepting that the central doctrines of Christianity are true. But without grace one cannot argue oneself into accepting the central doctrines of Christianity (it is one thing to think something is true and another to accept it; I think the latest theorem proved by my colleagues at the Mathematics Department is true, but I don't accept it—if only because I don't know what it is!), much less into having faith in them.

It may be that for some people the point where grace enters the process of gaining faith is precisely at premise (2). If grace enters the process at accpetance of (2), this is quite interesting. For (2) is not overtly Christian. Yet when someone comes to faith in this way, with grace entering the process in conjunction with an existentially rich acceptance of (2), it plausibly follows that at that stage they already have faith. For, plausibly, there is no way to get to faith from something that isn't faith without grace. So that means that a deep existential acceptance of (2) (and that's not just a light and breezy optimism) could itself be faith.

The reflections on grace and faith are simply speculation. But the argument I stand by.

Football excellence

I sent the following in an email to a former student. He knows a lot more about the subject—both first-order and second-order—than I do, and for some reason he found it hilarious, and perhaps true, so I'm posting it (with some typos fixed):

Jon K and Mike B were talking football. And I was finding their discourse very interesting. It was a mix of descriptive and evaluative language, with the two inseparable, in the way natural law theorists like. Understanding almost none of the first order content of their conversation, I wondered what sorts of claims they were making. My first thought was that the evaluative language could be reduced without remainder to means-end stuff: a criticism might be a claim that such and such an action did not contribute to winning, or was not likely to contribute to winning, etc.

But on reflection, no such reduction is possible. Suppose player x does not take an action A such that x's taking A would have increased the chance of victory. This is only a criticism if we add some further claims. For instance, it is not a criticism of a player that he did not run at 90% of the speed of light, though had he done so, it might have increased the chance of victory. Maybe we want to say: we criticize x for not doing A only when x could have done A. But while that may be the case for moral evaluation, it's not the case for sports evaluation. For instance, if I was due to some freak in a football game, it would be appropriate to criticize me for not doing all sorts of things that I am incapable of doing. For while I'm incapable of doing them, they're expected of a football player. The criticism might be phrased: "That Pruss guy shouldn't have been put on the team." But it could just be phrased: "He didn't run fast enough."
 
Moreover, some of the criticism is probably rather mild. The person isn't being criticized for falling short of what it takes to be a competent football player. The criticism is for falling short of excellence. Maybe that's not entirely fair, but maybe it is. So we need a concept of football excellence. Football excellence is a concept that goes beyond the empirical. [I]f all the players in the world were as incompetent as I'd be, we should say that even the best players fall short of excellence. There may be games like that, say newly invented games that no one is excellent [as] yet. So what measures excellence here? I can't help but think it's some kind of a notion of human nature. Football excellence is a kind of human excellence. Thus, it is not a part of football excellence to run at 90% of the speed of light or to throw a ball with millimeter accuracy at 100 meters. For that's asking for more than human nature can be expected to yield even in the truly excellent. That would be asking for the superhuman, and we don't ask for that (though in a way God does—but he also gives the grace for it). This means that the notion of football excellence depends on a notion of human nature. Moreover, this notion of human nature does not appear to be merely empirical: there is an irreducible normative component. 

This means that a naturalist can't consistently talk football. 

How's that sound? I may be fudging too much, since I didn't really understand many, or maybe any, of their first order claims.

Infinite culpability

It's time to defend something like Anselm's idea of infinite culpability.  I once expressed a hope that I'd eventually do so, but couldn't think of good things to say.  Anselm's idea was that there was an infinity in our sins, because they were sins against an  infinite God.  Here, I just want to defend the real possibility that a human being is infinitely culpable.

Case 1. Mason justifiedly believes (correctly or not) that the universe contains infinitely many inhabited planets, each of them with rational beings as deserving of respect as humans are.  Mason works as a janitor at the Large Hadron Collider, and also justifiedly (but incorrectly) believes that if he loosens some bolts, the Collider will malfunction in such a way that it will destroy the universe with all its rational beings.  Mason wants destructive power--he wants to outdo Hitler and Stalin in their destructiveness--and so he loosens these bolts so as to kill infinitely many rational beings.  In so doing, he commits attempted murder of an infinite number of people.

Now, in most nearby possible worlds where Mason does this, he is likely so insane as not to be fully culpable for his action.  But it is within the bounds of real possibility (causal possibility consistent with the basic structure of the world and humanity as we know it) that Mason is not so insane as to fail to be culpable.

Case 2. Lara justifiedly believes (correctly or not--I think correctly) that there is a heaven and a hell, and that hell involves eternal suffering and heaven involves infinite eternal bliss.  She hates Samantha and tempts her into a serious sin, in order that Samantha would suffer forever in hell and lose the infinite joy of heaven.

For evaluation of Lara's culpability, it doesn't much matter whether her belief about hell is correct or whether she succeeds in destroying Samantha's soul.  Lara has acted so as to make Samantha lose an infinite good, and that is an infinite culpability.

Case 3. Alex justifiedly believes (correctly or not--I think correctly) that memories of moral goods had in this life contribute to the joy of heaven on infinite numbers of occasions, adding an infinite amount of joy.  He acts in a way that makes someone lose a moral good in this life.  According to his beliefs, he has acted in such a way as to have made someone lose an infinite number of goods.  Assuming he was sufficiently aware of this when acting, he is apt to have an infinite culpability.

What is helpful about Cases 2 and 3 is that the beliefs in them have some chance of being correct.

Question: Are there flip-sides of these cases that show that we can gain infinite merit?

Answer: This is not as obvious as it may seem.  For while it is twice as morally wicked to commit an act that kills two innocents, it is not twice as morally good to commit an act that saves two innocents.  If by giving a dollar I can save one life, and I do so, I have shown a small amount of virtue.  But if by giving a dollar I can save two lives, and I do so, I have not shown any more virtue, since I did something that was more strongly required and at no greater cost.  On the other hand, had I refrained from giving the dollar, in the two-life case I would have done something about twice as bad.  So one does not generate cases of infinite merit simply by supposing beliefs about infinite goods.

Nonetheless, one can manufacture cases of infinite merit by supposing beliefs about infinite sacrifice:

Case 4. Chuck justifiedly believes that (a) if he helps a slave escape, he will suffer infinite pain in hell; but (b) it is his moral duty to help the slave escape.   In that case, there is a kind of infinity to the merit of Chuck's helping the slave escape.  (There will, of course, be questions about ulterior motives.  If he does it to have a self-righteous feeling, there may not be such merit.  So this suggestion does not do away with the idea that one needs grace for infinite merit.)

(I don't know how close the case of Chuck is to the much-discussed case of Huck.)

Loss of faith

Sometimes, Christians worry whether they might not have lost their faith. Here is a line of thought that might be comforting, though it is probably only acceptable to Catholics. Faith being a gift of grace, it is not possible to lose faith without losing sanctifying grace. It is not possible, however, to lose sanctifying grace but by committing a (formal) mortal sin. Therefore, faith can only be lost through committing a mortal sin. But in a serious Christian, mortal sin is very unlikely to be something done casually—it is a free and conscious rejection of God's love, after all. Faith is not, then, something one can "just lose". It is something one can reject, but only by a mortal sin.

Anti-pelagianism

Here are three levels of anti-Pelagianism:

1. No fallen human being can attain personal union (i.e., union of the relevant sort—such as the beatific vision) with God by his own powers.
2. No mere human being can attain personal union with God by his own powers.
3. No mere creature can attain personal union with God by his own powers.

Here, a "mere F" is a being that is an F and that has no nature other than the F-nature. The main point of this qualifier is to exclude cases where God is incarnate as an F. For in those cases we are dealing with an F, but not a mere F. Claim (3) entails claim (2), and claim (2) together with the plausible assumption that in fact every fallen human being is a mere human being entails claim (1).

An interesting difference at least of emphasis between Catholics and Protestants is that Protestants see Pelagianism primarily as a denial of (1), and focus on (1) in anti-Pelagian polemic, while Catholicism, I think, has an emphasis not just on (1), but also on (2)—grace is not only needed now for fallen man, but Adam and Eve needed grace, too, to attain the beatific vision. And even (3) is probably pretty common in Catholicism. E.g., Aquinas would surely endorse (3). His view of the fall of Satan, if my shaky memory serves me, was that Satan wanted to get by his own powers the good that God was going to give to him by grace—i.e., that Satan was a practical Pelagian.

Reformed Christianity and sufficient grace

Scripture promises that:

1. For any temptation, the faithful Christian will receive a grace sufficient to withstand that temptation.

The phrase "the faithful Christian" here has a meaning that differs depending on the interpretation of various texts, but suggests a Christian in God's good graces, as it were. In a Catholic setting, we can precisify this as: "a Christian in a state of grace." In a Reformed setting, we can take the phrase as coextensive with "one of the Elect after gaining faith". The following also seems true:

2. Some faithful Christians succumb to temptation.

There are some small groups of Christians that deny (2). I take the denial of (2) to be quite implausible, unless one just defines a "faithful Christian" as one who withstands temptation, in which case (1) is hard to make non-trivial sense of, or unless one has a very narrow notion of sin (e.g., transgression of one of the Ten Commandments, understood in a narrowly literal way).

But (1) and (2) are in apparent conflict. For it follows from (1) and (2) that:

3. Some faithful Christians fall to a temptation that they have received a grace sufficient to withstand.

This immediately implies that "a grace sufficient to do A" is not a grace the presence of which suffices to ensure that one does A. But now it is really puzzling what "sufficient" could mean in this context.

Incompatibilist Christians, such as many Catholics, have a story to tell here. They can say that what (1) says is that the faithful Christian receives a grace sufficient to make withstanding the temptation be within one's power or maybe even well within one's power (this could happen by supernaturally augmenting that power, or by decreasing the force of the temptation, or both). In other words, these Christians say that "sufficient" in "sufficient grace" does not mean "sufficient for withstanding" but "sufficient for the (reasonable?) possibility of withstanding". This is a perfectly fine use of the word "sufficient". It seems imaginable that the doctor gives me medication that is "sufficient" to remove a headache, but the effects of the medication are negated by the ingestion of alcohol. What we mean by saying that the medication is sufficient to remove a headache is that it puts the removal of the headache within one's power, if only one follows the doctor's instructions.

But the puzzle is greater for Christians of a more Reformed bent, who normally see a grace sufficient for A as in fact a grace that necessitates A. This is, after all, the standard Reformed view of salvific grace: anybody who has received the grace sufficient for salvation is one of the Elect, and because of the receipt of the grace is necessarily going to be saved.

The question now is whether a Reformed Christian can give a different story about sanctifying grace, so that a person can receive a grace sufficient to withstand temptation and yet fall to that temptation. If not, then Reformed Christianity is not tenable in the light of (1) and (2).

It is possible for a Reformed Christian to have the following moderate view: While salvation is a matter of divinely determined predestination, and faith is necessitated by grace, nonetheless faithful Christians have libertarian freedom in respect of things that do not affect whether they are saved. In particular, then, if the Reformed Christian does not think sins rule out salvation, she may then given the same account of how (1) and (2) can be both be true as more generally incompatibilist Christians do. She can say that we get a grace sufficient to make it possible for us to overcome temptation.

But what about a Reformed Christian who denies that we have any libertarian freedom, e.g., because of a strong view of divine sovereignty or because she is convinced by Jonathan Edwards' and Hume's arguments against libertarianism[note 1]? Then the problem presented by (1) and (2) may be insoluble. In what sense has God given George the grace to withstand the temptation to get drunk if God in his sovereignty has placed George in a position where George cannot but get drunk?

Perhaps, though, the determinist Reformed Christian can give the following story. Many compatibilists think that if we understand "capable" appropriately, we can still say that if George freely does A, he was capable of refraining from doing A. The sense of "capable" here would be a lack of physical or mental compulsion to do A, say (the details are hard to work out), a lack that is compatible with the claim that the agent's character determines the agent to do A. Maybe, then, the compatibilist can give the familiar answer above: God gives the faithful Christian a grace sufficient to make the Christian in this sense capable of withstanding the temptation. Except that now "capable" must be understood in the compatibilist sense. In other words, grace removes the physical and mental compulsion to fall prey to the temptation, but does not necessarily repair one's character in such a way that one would withstand the temptation.

But this answer, I think, fails. First of all, if we include threats of suffering and pain under the head of "physical compulsion", and a habitual attraction to something under the head of "mental compulsion", then on this broader reading of physical and mental compulsion, God's grace does not always remove the compulsion. On the contrary, in the cases of martyrs or people overcoming addictions, the threat of suffering or the habitual attraction remain present, and grace enables one to overcome the threat or habit.

So for the answer to have any hope of working, we must understand "compulsion" fairly narrowly. But then we have the following problem. If I am compelled, in that narrow sense, to do something, then I am not responsible for that action. If I am physically compelled in a narrow sense to throw a rock, e.g., by electrodes implanted in my brain, then I am not sinning by throwing the rock. But temptation in this context is, by definition, temptation to sin. So on this view, the grace to withstand temptation is what actually makes the sin possible, since without the grace one would be compelled, in the narrow sense, to do the bad thing, and while the action would be bad, it would not be a sin (technically speaking, it might be a material but not a formal sin). The view that the grace of withstanding temptation that faithful Christians are promised is what makes sin possible seems deeply unsatisfactory. Moreover, on such a view the grace is quite pointless, since without the grace one would be guaranteed not to sin, as one would be acting under compulsion.

Maybe there is some further story the determinist Reformed Christian can give that would reconcile (1) and (2). But at least absent such a story, we have good reason not to be determinist Reformed Christians.

Faith and works, and Pelagianism

I think sometimes, especially in popular discussion, the debate over Pelagianism is seen as the "faith versus works" debate. But that is incorrect. These are two separate, and almost orthogonal debates. The question of Pelagianism is whether

1. one can be saved by one's own efforts without grace

or whether

2. grace is necessary for salvation.

Pelagius thought it would be really hard to be saved without grace, but it could in principle be done. The faith versus works question is whether the human state that salvation is somehow based around and that ensures salvation (at least should one die in that state) is

3. faith

or

4. love or morally good actions.

There are four polar views possible:

	(1)	(2)
(3)	salvation is based on faith, and one can get attain this faith by one's own efforts without grace	salvation is based on faith, and faith requires grace
(4)	salvation is based on love or morally good actions, and one can attain this love or do these actions by one's own efforts without grace	salvation is based on love or morally good actions, and one needs grace to have love or do the actions

The position stereotypically ascribed to Protestants is, of course, the upper right corner, and the position stereotypically ascribed to Catholics is, of course, the lower left corner.

But note that it is quite possible to be a Pelagian and believe in sola fide: this is the upper left corner in the table. For instance, one might think that faith is an intellectual assent, and believe that one can come to this assent on the basis of apologetic arguments. Likewise, someone can believe that salvation is solely by works, and yet be in no way Pelagian, if she believes that these works are of such a nature that they cannot be done save by grace: this is the lower right corner.

Why is there an idea that there is a link between the two questions? Well, one line of thought takes "works" in a very thin sense, as bodily movements (placing a sandwich before a homeless person, etc.), without considering intentions and motivations. If so, then it seems quite likely that we could, by our own efforts, do whatever "works" would be specified as needed for salvation. But that is a magical view of salvation, and not really held by any serious thinker. Even those Catholic and Orthodox theologians who lay a greater emphasis on works than on faith understand the works in the light of intentions and motivations. But once one understands that a part of doing the right works is having the right intentions and motivations, the inference from salvation by works to Pelagianism fails—for it may well require grace to do have the right intentions and motivations.

The relative independence of the two questions should, I think, help to clarify our thinking on the issues.

I think the really interesting theological and philosophical questions here is to figure out (a) how faith and love are interconnected so that (3) and (4) are both true, and (b) see how there is a deeper form of (2) that ties together grace and our own efforts.