Epistemically paternalistic lies

Suppose Alice and Bob are students and co-religionists. Alice is struggling with a subject and asks Bob to pray that she might do fine on the exam. She gets 91%. Alice also knows that Bob’s credence in their religion is a bit lower than her own. When Bob asks her how she did, she lies that she got 94%, in order to boost Bob’s credence in their religion a bit more.

Whether a religion is correct is very epistemically important to Bob. But whether Alice got 91% or 94% is not at all epistemically important to Bob except as evidence for whether the religion is correct. The case can be so set up that by Alice’s lights—remember, she is more confident that the religion is correct than Bob is—Bob can be expected to be better off epistemically for boosting his credence in the religion. Moreover, we can suppose that there is no plausible way for Bob to find out that Alice lied. Thus, this is an epistemically paternalistic lie expected to make Bob be better off epistemically.

And this lie is clearly morally wrong. Thus, our communicative behavior is not merely governed by maximization of epistemic utility.

I contributed to all the evils of the world

1. If doing A would have foreseeably been a contribution to decreasing the probability of an evil E, and I culpably did not do A, then I contributed to E.
2. Praying more for the good of all would have foreseeably been a contribution to decreasing the probability of each individual evil E in the world.
3. I culpably failed to pray more for the good of all.
4. So, I contributed to each individual evil in the world.

Mea culpa.

Evidence that prayer works

There is some evidence that prayer works (PW)—and I mean this in the straightforward naive sense. Here is that evidence: Lots of people believe that prayer works (BPW). It is more likely that lots people would believe that prayer works if it worked than that they would believe that it works if it didn't work, i.e., P(BPW|PW)>P(BPW|~PW), and so BPW is evidence for PW.

There are at least two reasons why people are more likely to believe that prayer works on the hypothesis that it actually works than on the hypothesis that it does not work.

The first reason is that if prayer works for you, then that's likely to increase your degree of belief that prayer works, as well as the degree of belief in this among your friends.

The second reason is that if prayer works, then that's likely to increase the survival of communities that pray, leading to mimetic selection for prayer. And at the community level, prayer typically doesn't come for free. First, there tends to be a dedicated class of people who pray and teach how to pray—say, a clergy. Second, prayer is often attached to material outlays, whether those of sacrificing cattle or of building temples. Third, prayer takes time and maybe mental energy (though the last one is balanced by the fact that it may be restful). Of course, prayer may also have community cohesiveness benefits independent of whether prayer works in the naive sense. These benefits may be balanced by the costs. But these benefits are also available if prayer works in the naive sense, and are themselves accentuated then (it brings a community together if their prayers are fulfilled). So although the existence of such benefits makes P(BPW|~PW) higher than we might otherwise think, nonetheless P(BPW|PW) will be even higher, both due to a greater degree of these benefits, and due to the obvious benefits of prayer working.

Of course it's a hard question to say just how much evidence the widespread belief in the efficacy of prayer provides for that efficacy. But it's clear that it provides some.

More on global nuclear war

The most surprising and important event of the second half of the 20th century was the nonoccurrence of a global nuclear war. In an earlier post, I suggested that the probability of such a war was fairly high given naturalism and fairly low given theism, and hence the nonoccurrence of such a war is evidence for theism. I want to add one more thing to that line of thought: the nonoccurrence of a global nuclear war was probably the most prayed-for event of the second half of the 20th century. All the prayers for world peace were first and foremost prayers for peace between East and West, prayers that there be no global nuclear war. And there is peace between East and West, and there was no global nuclear war.

Divine omnirationality, reward and punishment

Omnirationality is the divine attribute in virtue of which when God does A, he does it for all the non-preempted reasons that in fact favor his doing A. (Here is an example of a reason preempted by a higher order reason: God promises me that as a punishment, he won't hear my prayers for the next hour; then that I ask God for something creates a preempted reason for him.) He does not choose only some of the relevant reasons and act on those, in the way a human being might.

One consequence of omnirationality is that when I pray for an event F, and F is good and in fact takes place, then I can safely conclude that F took place in part as a result of prayer. For a request is always a good reason to do something good, and while in principle the reason could be preempted, in fact it seems very unlikely that there was a preempting reason in this case. At this same time, in this case we cannot say that the good took place entirely as a result of prayer, because the very fact that it was a good was also, presumably, a non-preempted reason for God to bring it about.

Here is another example. Suppose Job leads a virtuous life in such a way that there is good reason for Job to have good things bestowed on him as a reward for the virtuous life. And suppose that, in fact, good things befall Job. Then we can confidently say that they befell Job in part in order to reward Job. For by hypothesis, God has a reason (not a conclusive one, as we learn from the Book of Job!) to bless Job, and the reason seems unlikely to be preempted, so when he blesses Job, he does so in part because it rewards Job.

The flip side of this is that, by omnirationality, if a sinner who has not been forgiven for a sin has a bad thing happen to her whose magnitude is not disproportionate to the sin, that bad thing happens to her at least in part as a divine punishment, unless some sort of preemption applies, since God has a reason to punish.

Forgiveness, of course, would preempt. But I assumed here the sin was unforgiven. Maybe one could claim that the redemptive events of the New Testament changed everything, preempting all of God's reasons to punish, but that does not seem to be the message of the New Testament. It really does seem that God's reasons to punish unforgiven sin are not preempted even in New Testament times. This does not, of course, mean that all evils that happen to people are best seen as divine punishments. First of all, forgiveness of a sin preempts, and probably annuls, the reasons of justice. Second, even when the justice of the matter is a non-preempted reason for God to allow the evil to befall, it need not be the most important one. God's desire to use the evil to reform the sinner or to glorify himself in a deeper way, may be a more important reason, sometimes to the point where it would be misleading, and maybe even false, to say that the evil befell because the person sinned—we could only say that the evil befell in small part because the person sinned.

Finally, as Jesus himself warns, that an evil befalls A and does not befall B does not imply that A was more worthy of the evil than B. For God may have had many additional reasons for allowing the evil to befall A and keeping it from B besides the merits of the wo.

We can try to probe more deeply by asking counterfactual questions: Would God still have had the evil befall A had A not sinned? But I think such counterfactual questions tend not to have answers.

As in heaven so on earth

Here are some thoughts on St Matthew's version of the Lord's Prayer, many taken from or loosely inspired by things people said at our Department Bible study yesterday (though what I say should not be taken as representing anything like a consensus). First, my translation:

⁹Our father, who art in heaven:
    Thy name be sanctified,
    ¹⁰thy kingdom come,
    thy will come to pass,
        as in heaven so on earth.
    ¹¹Give us daily our supersubstantial [epiousion] bread.
    ¹²And forgive us our debts
        as we forgive our debtors.
    ¹³Do not bring us to a trial,
        but instead deliver us from the evil one [tou ponerou]. (Matthew 6:9-13)

The overall theme is that of the earthly and the heavenly, with the earthly being brought in conformity with the heavenly, by our own activity and that of our father. "As in heaven so on earth", I take it, applies to each: "thy name be sanctified", "thy kingdom come" and "thy will come to pass." Each of these three is simultaneously a request and a personal commitment to the indicated task, and in each case the act of praying is already partly constitutive of the prayed-for result: by praying these we sanctify our Father's name, make his kingdom present and do his will.

Implicit behind all three requests is an image of the majesty of God enthroned above the heavenly hosts who sanctify his name and bring his will to pass--and yet this King of the Universe is also our father.

The prayer is enveloped between the "father" (the first word in the Greek--while in Aramaic and Hebrew, "our father" would be one word) and "the evil one" at the end. This involves reading tou ponerou as "the evil one" (masculine) rather than as generically "evil" (neuter). This is supported the neatness of the resulting envelope structure, the central focus in the prayer on the beyond-earthly significance of our actions, as well as the implicit imagery of the angels of the heavenly host.

The central request is for our epiousios bread. We really don't know how to translate the word. A leading view is that it is the bread for the day to come. But it could also be the bread needed for our existence or ousia, the bread for the life to come, or, following St Jerome's Latin calque, the supersubstantial bread. In any case, the Church has traditionally taken a Eucharistic reading of the text, and such a reading makes the tendency of the earthly towards the heavens come to a head here: we sanctify his name and do his will just as the angels do, and here we boldly ask for the bread of angels, the new manna, the earthly bread made into the body of him who became flesh for us, the bread that is literally the Logos of God on which man lives (cf. Jesus' struggles with the evil one two chapters back in Matthew). At the same time, this reading should not rule out--and indeed the heavenly-earthly parallelism structure is very friendly to it--that this is also a request for what we need for our earthly lives from our heavenly royal father.

In verse 12, we have a switch from the positive to the negative aspects of transforming the earthly into the heavenly. The debt of our sin to God imposes on us an obligation we cannot pay and yet paying which is essential to the coming of his kingdom on earth. We boldly ask that it be forgiven, because (seemingly a non sequitur, but yet God in love for our children makes it follow) of our forgiving the debts of our debtors. It is neither good to be debtor nor creditor, and here by ceasing to be creditors we cease to be debtors. The forgiveness here is in the first instance a loosing or a release. The essential effect is normative, that the debtor is quit of the debt. Of course, when we forgive another, the essential effect is not all that we are called to: we are called to an affective component--we should feel as if the person who sinned against us is no longer in debt to us--and sometimes to a concrete reaching out to heal the relationship. Likewise, God's forgiveness heals us, and gives us the grace to avoid incurring further indebtedness, as indicated by the next verse.

The trials of verse 13 may well include ordinary temptations, but it is also plausible that the text is specifically talking of the trials of persecution and torture. We pray that our father not bring us there, and at the same time we should not deliberately take ourselves there either (there is the scary story in Eusebius about the early Christian who from bravado turned himself in to the Romans--and then broke down and apostasized). Finally, we are reminded that we do not struggle against mere flesh and blood, but that persecutions and temptations are the work of infernal intelligence, like the devil that Jesus fought two chapters back.

A puzzle about prayer

Consider x's faithful Christian prayer that y would always avoid some sin. (Perhaps x=y, and perhaps they are distinct.) Such prayers are indeed offered, and yet it does indeed happen that sometimes y does commit that sin. This is more puzzling than cases where x prays that y be healed of some physical ailment, because sin is much worse, perhaps "incomparably worse", than any physical ailment.

Libertarians have the beginning of a story about cases like that. For God to ensure the literal fulfillment of such a prayer would require God either to take away from y the opportunity to commit the sin or to take away y's freedom, and in both cases God would be depriving y of a good. God won't give us a serpent when we ask for a fish, and he may well not give us a serpent even if we ask for a serpent. I am inclined to think that God always gives us a gift that is in some sense at least as worth getting as the one we asked for, and it may well be that it is better to get the opportunity and freedom to sin, together with the grace to resist temptation if one rejects not the grace, than to get none of these, but avoid the risk of sin.

Compatibilists have a little bit more difficulty with the puzzle, I think. I think they will say a story about how God is glorified by y's punishment and/or redemption after the sin. I think this works better if one is a universalist (I really think that in the end a Calvinist view of grace forces one into universalism), since the universalist can at least say that there is always redemption, and hence while x doesn't get exactly what x prayed for, y's redemption, which is what x presumably really wanted most of all, is still assured by other means. But it is tougher if one is not a universalist.

Devotional use of fantasy and science fiction

The kind of fantasy and science fiction that I like describes a possible world as it were from the inside (i.e., the sentences are to be interpreted relative to that world, as if that world were actual, in the sense of two-dimensional semantics—this makes it possible for the stories to have alternate origins for "the human race" and so on). Some of these possible worlds are fairly close to ours (realistic kinds of science fiction) and some are quite far from ours. Besides the kinds of values that every kind of literature can have, such as giving us a richer picture of moral deliberation, imaginative fiction of the sort I like also performs a devotional service—it gives us a richer picture of the power of God. There perhaps are no hobbits, probably there are no vast plasma-based intelligent beings in the sun, perhaps we do not live in a multiverse, almost surely there are no vampire-like unconscious but sophisticatedly cognitive beings, and probably God did not become incarnate as a lion; but all these things might have been so, by the power of God.

That does not mean that the fiction has to be overtly theistic or by a theistic author. Any picture of a genuinely possible world is a picture of a world in which God would exist, since God exists necessarily, in all worlds (and in the case of "God", the two-dimensional intension is constant, so we don't need to distinguish between conceivability and possibility). If the story is not compatible with the existence of God—for instance, if it contains a story of the ultimate origination of the cosmos incompatible with theism, or if it contains innocents suffering for eternity, vel caetera—then the story fails to describe a possible world.

Personally, I am made uncomfortable by imaginative fiction that does not describe a possible world. Besides rare cases of stories that appear to be clearly incompatible with theism, an offender is time travel stories that often violate metaphysical strictures against causal loops and circular explanation. I was also made uncomfortable by a Greg Egan story where mathematics itself is changed by human activity. (I think I am also made a bit uncomfortable by stories that strongly imply that what is happening is in our world—this world we live in—whereas the content of the story is metaphysically incompatible with how things are up to now. For instance, stories that give an alternate account of how "we humans" came into existence. But that is easily taken care of by reinterpreting the story without the rigidity of "our world"—that's what two-dimensional semantics is for.)

A confession

I am partly responsible for every sin anybody has committed at least during my lifetime.

Here's why. I have sinfully acted in ways that made my prayers less deep, less frequent and less effective. But chief amongst the things I should be praying for is that God rescue me and my neighbor from sin. When my neighbor sins and I did not pray for my neighbor as I ought to have, I am partly responsible for my neighbor's sin—I have at least negligently failed to do something that, as far as I know, would have decreased the probability of my neighbor's sinning.

There are two general ways this has happened. First, there are the many cases where I directly failed to pray as deeply or frequently as I should have. Second, there are many cases where I sinned through something other than neglect of prayer. In the latter cases, I made myself more wicked through the sins, and hence made my prayers less effective—it is the prayer of the righteous that, it is promised, avails much—and made myself be less good at prayer. Besides, often, I could have spent in prayer the time during which I was sinning.

This is the communion of sinners. But we have a merciful God who became one of us and has made the communion of the saints possible.

Two kinds of professions

Compare the metalworker and the swordsmith. The metalworker's profession is defined by a particular technique for achieving human ends: the production and modification of items made of metal. The swordsmith's profession, on the other hand, is not defined by any particular technique. It is, instead, defined by an end: the existence of a sword. The two sets of skills may overlap: both a swordsmith and an metalworker can make a sword of metal, and in so doing remain within their professional competency. But a swordsmith can remain within her professional discipline in producing a sword of horn, wood and flint (say, in an emergency when metals are unavailable), while the metalworker who made such a sword would not be working within her profession. On the other hand, the metalworker remains within her professional competency when she makes a metal spoon, while the swordsmith is not working as a swordsmith when she makes a spoon—even though she may be as qualified to produce a spoon as any metalworker, and more so than some.

We can in general distinguish means-defined professions and end-defined ones. Examples of means-defined ones: software engineer, electrical engineer, chemical engineer, metalworker, woodworker, machinist, applied mathematician, lawyer. Examples of end-defined ones: civil engineer, aviation engineer, swordsmith, bowyer, cabinet maker, physicist, pure mathematician, biologist, legislator. There will also be cases of professions defined both by and end means. Some of these result from specializations within a means-defined or an end-defined profession—and sometimes it will be unclear which way is the better way to look at it. Is a biomathematician an applied mathematician (means-defined) who uses mathematical methods for the sake of gaining biological knowledge, or is a biomathematician a biologist (end-defined) who uses mathematical methods to pursue the end distinctive of her biological profession (namely, biological knowledge)?

It may be that in all cases of end-defined professions there are some constraints on which means count as part of the distinctive activity of the profession. Thus, it may be argued not be a part of the civil engineer's profession to pray that the bridge not collapse, even though doing so promotes the end that defines her profession. However, it is not clear that this is so. It may be a prejudice to say that the civil engineer does not pray qua engineer.

Nonetheless, despite borderline cases, a basic division into professions primarily defined by a means or set of means, and those defined by an end or set of ends, seems helpful.

Does any of this matter? I think it can. For instance, consider this question: Is it the job of the physician, qua physician, to execute criminals? Assume that the case is one of the rare cases where capital punishment is morally permissible. As has been noted at least since the time of Plato, the physician's professional knowledge makes her the most effective person at both preserving life and taking away life. Moreover, her skills may particularly enable the taking away of life to be reliably painless. If the physicians's profession is primarily defined by means or techniques, then to execute painlessly falls under her profession just as much as to heal. If, on the other hand, her profession is defined in terms of ends, presumably the relevant end is something like the good functioning of the body, and this goal is not promoted by killing. And euthanasia is also not something that falls to the role of a physician.

I think our concept of a physician is a mix. When we talk of the crime of practicing medicine without a license, we are thinking of medicine as in part defined by a particular set of techniques. One does not count as practicing medicine without a license if one suggests to someone that she refrain from eating too many cheeseburgers or if one prays for her health. But only in part. If someone who is not a medical professional intentionally stabs someone else to death with a surgical knife, she would not, I suspect, be charged with practicing medicine without a license in addition to murder, no matter if she had pored anatomy books to figure out how to do the deed.

Still, I think, the primary focus in the medical profession is on the end. Consider that the physician remains within her medical role if the means she recommends to promote end of health involve pharmaceuticals, surgery, physical exercises, psychological exercises, the taking of a placebo, etc. Almost anything that in a morally acceptable way promotes health—with the possible exception of the supernatural—can legitimately fall within the scope of her medical recommendations. She might even diagnose that the patient's headaches are due to financial worries and recommend that the patient come up with a good budget. She would be going beyond her medical competence, I suppose, if she recommended a particular set of safe investments, but that may only be because recommending investments is not a skill that physicians typically have. (A particular practitioner of profession will not have all the skills that can fall under the professional role—the bowyer who cannot work in fiberglass can still be a competent bowyer.)

Moreover, most of the subdivisions within medicine, with the most obvious exception being surgeon, are end-based: the neurologist, the psychiatrist, the gastroenterologist and the pediatrician are each defined by which instances of the goal of health it is their special task to promote.

The pharmacist, on the other hand, is equally defined by means and by end. She does not act within her role if she prepares medication for an execution. It is, after all, her job to take solicitude for the health of the patient, ensure that she is not allergic to the drugs, etc. But she also does not act within her role if she performs surgery.

The prodigal son

I was yesterday struck by a dimension of the parable of the prodigal son that I hadn't noticed before: prayer. The younger son asks for two outrageous things—his inheritance ahead of time and being received back—and in both cases his requests are granted (in the latter case, he gets more than he asked for, since he is not asking for his sonship). The older son complains that he never got a young goat to eat with his friends. But it is clear that he never bothered to ask for one. After all, the father says: "all that is mine is yours." (The younger son reminds me a little of Mrs. Fidget in C. S. Lewis's Four Loves, who quietly works her fingers to the bone, suffering for others in ways that they don't want her to. Mrs. Fidget, too, would not bother asking you to come back by a certain time—she would just stay up and wait.)

Maybe the older son could try to complain: "But didn't you know that I wanted a goat?" However, a request is not just the expression of a desire: a request has normative effects that a mere desire does not.

How to ever tell that your prayers have been answered?

Can we Christians ever tell that our prayers have been answered? I pray for E and E occurs. Can I ever know that God acted on my prayer rather than E occurring completely independently of my prayer? It turns out that the answer is simpler than one might think, and that we can know this much more often than one might think.

Consider the property of Reasons Maximalism (RM) that an agent might have. An agent has RM if and only if whenever she chooses an action A, she chooses it on account of all the unexcluded reasons she is aware of in favor of A. Suppose, for instance, that I have a duty to visit a sick friend and I enjoy her company even when she is sick, but, on the other hand, it's a long drive and the hospital is depressing. Nonetheless, I do visit her. If I don't have RM, I might be visiting her only out of duty or only for pleasant companionship. But if I have RM, I am visiting her because of both duty and pleasant companionship. And if I have RM and decide not to visit her, then I will decide to do that because of both the long drive and the depressingness of the hospital.

I submit that God has RM. Being perfectly morally good and perfectly rational, in every decision God takes into consideration all the unexcluded reasons he has. Of course, in the end, it may not be possible for him to act on all the reasons, because some of the reasons will pull in different ways. But his choice will have been made on the basis of all the reasons he is aware of in favor of it. Moreover, in the case of an omniscient being, the reasons she is aware of in favor of A is the same as the reasons she has in favor of A. Thus, God chooses A on the basis of all the unexcluded reasons he has that favor A.

Now, that I've requested something good and grantable is always a reason to grant the request. In rare cases, it will be an excluded reason—perhaps I earlier authoritatively commanded the person to stop granting my requests for a day. But I cannot think of an exclusionary reason God might have against considering our requests for good things. (If God promised not to hear our requests, that would be an exclusionary reason, but he made no such promise.)

I don't know exactly how to analyze "grantable". One class of non-grantables are states of affairs ruled out by divine promises. Another class of non-grantables are states of affairs that cannot be brought about, whether because they are metaphysically impossible or because they are metaphysically necessary. It may also be that people's free choices are non-grantables. However, perhaps when we pray that x (where x is not God) might freely do A, God reinterprets our prayer charitably as a prayer that x be given lots of reason to do A, and that is a grantable. I do not know whether things that God has already promised are grantables, but I am inclined to think they are (cf. the sick friend visit case).

So, our requests for grantable good things are always an unexcluded reason for God to grant the request, and God being omniscient is aware of this. Moreover, God is a concurrent cause in all good events (in fact, in all events, because evil is a mere privation, but nevermind that), so that all good events count as caused by God. Therefore, by RM, if I pray for grantable good, and God brings about the request, then God produces the good in part because of the request. So, a sufficient condition for my knowing that an event has happened as a result of my request is that (a) I prayed for it, (b) it was good, (c) it was grantable and (d) it occurred.

In particular cases, these conditions are very commonly satisfied. If you pray for someone's safety during a trip, and she returns safely, she does so in part because of your prayers. If you pray that you find a lost object, and you do find it, you find it in part because of your prayers. If you pray that a friend might recover from an illness, and she recovers, she recovers in part because of your prayers.

Now, you might say that because of the "in part" this is unsatisfying. You might want to know when it is that God grants it solely on account of your prayers. Assuming the thing you prayed for was good, the answer is: never. If it was good, then God had a reason to bring it about, and by RM if he brought it about, he brought it about in part because it was good. The one exception would be if there were an exclusionary reason, such as a divine promise that he will only bring this good about as a result of prayer. But Revelation does not, I think, tell us that god has such exclusionary reasons, and we can presume he doesn't. So it is never the case that a good you prayed for was granted solely because you prayed for it.

But perhaps you want to know something else: You want to know if it is the case that the good would not have been granted had you not prayed for it? Well, sorry: this can only be known if Molinism is true and God reveals it to you. But I think Molinism is false. Given the falsity of Molinism, there will be no facts of the form: The good would not have been given had you not prayed for it. For had you not prayed for it, God would still have had the reason in favor of it given by the fact that it was good, and he still might have acted on the reason. That said, sometimes you can know that the event would still have been given—for instance, when the event was promised by God. However, you can never know that the event would not have been produced had you not prayed for it, when the event is good. (I leave open some questions about praying for neutral and bad things.)

Can we ever know that our prayers have not been granted? Maybe not. For it seems reasonable for God to grant our prayers by giving us something greater than what we prayed for, something we weren't wise enough or knowledgeable enough to ask for. Suppose George has a flu he knows about an undiagnosed cancer he doesn't know about. He prays to be cured of the flu, but instead God cures the cancer. That's better than what George asked for, and George cannot complain that his prayer has been unanswered. Any substantive good in curing the flu is there in the curing of the cancer, and if George had known he had the cancer and had any sense, that is what he would have prayed for the healing of. In that case, George's prayer was, arguably, answered, but George cannot know how it has been answered. Though if he is a Christian and reflects on Scripture, he can know that it has been answered somehow. And of, course, healing faults in the soul would be even better than curing the flu or healing a cancer.

A method of prayer

I just got a letter from my Aquinas teacher. It ends with a postscript that, I think, he will not mind my quoting:

A method of prayer: Meditate on a mystery of religion so as to be penetrated with the knowledge that God loves us. Then remain in His presence.