church visit #2

So after the big ole' mega church, wewent to the local UCC church in our neighborhood, The congregation is "open and affirming" and had a nice supportive GLBT bumper sticker next to the entrance. It was a pretty small church, with maybe 40 people in attendance on this day. The people looked pretty diverse for this university town, with older and younger people, some african amercans, a few gay couples, a nice assortment of children, and the obligatory middle aged guy with a pony tail.

Instead of Christian Rock, there was a violinist playing the pre-service music. the service was also more traditional with an actual liturgy with readings from the bible, responsive readings, and a sermon that was for some reason called a "message." Like the mega church, this church seemed to want to seem "modern" and the first two hymn were taking from a hymn book that consisted mostly of songs written after 1970. The first song was pretty dorky, the second better, and I was pleased the last one was an old favorite of mine from the more traditional hymn book.

I was impressed at how well the congregation sang! I was a member of a much larger UCC congregation before and , appart from the choir, it seemed everyone just stood and mouthed the words. This place was too small for a choir, but made up for it with singing which, while not baptist like enthusiasm, filled the room nicely.

The day we chose to visit was the fiftieth aniversery of the church, we we were in for a bunch of inside church baseball. People came up and talked about how this church affected them, how it started out with only 5 people. I was impressed that apparently the group went door to door to find members (most mainline protestants are just too uptight for that). The service was not overly formal, with people joking around with each other. The Rev. seemed to know everyone personally called people out by name several times. He did not dance around like the mega church guy but he spoke clearly and with definite commitment and enthusiasm. The "message" used the parable of the mustard seed to illuminate both the growth of this little church and the role of the church in influencing the surrounding community.

After church, there was cake and coffee, and we hung around a bit. My dug in with gusto, and I had three cups of coffee. The people were nice, the food was good, and the coffee was caffienated. Everything the spiritual pilgrim needs.

Going to a mega church

Since I have moved back to Iowa City, I have been a wastrel with respect to church going. But last Sunday after going out to breakfast I saw this "mega church" and was curious. So I cajoled my kids into going inside and checking it out.

I knew I was in for something different when I saw some guy in bright clothes directing traffic in the parking lot. Lots and lots of cars and I wondered if mine was the only one with an Obama bumper sticker. As we walked in, there were these people standing behind some sort of booth. It reminded me of a movie theartre and I wondered if we would need to buy tickets. (Really it was "family check in" for sunday school). The first part of the service was all music. There was a band on stage that played some rockified hymns. I liked some of it but wished they did not modify the lyrics of an old hymn--it just did not sound right. My youngest son thought it was way too loud. This music part lasted for a long time.

Finally the minister comes out and does his spiel. The guy was good. He moved. He shaked. He made some jokes. He made some good points as he discussed the dangers of idolizing wealth. (Personally I think we can read more into the "consider the lilies...." stuff than he did, but you can't expect everyone to be a hippy). But he did some weird things too. At one point he refered to the crowd Jesus was talking to as "christians" and even said these 'christians' were being persecuted by "the jews." He seemed not to care about about chronology, making it sound as if the pre-conversion Paul was hanging around at the Sermon on the Mount, ready to strike. As we walked back to my car I talked to my kids about this and decided to back and talk to the minister. I just chatted briefly and he was nice but it was apparent that he did not think it was a big deal. In the sermon he also tended to pick bible verses out of the air without context. So he is talking about Luke, and more or less sticks to the text there and then BAM its some random quote for Daniel just thrown in to spice it up.

Another thing which my kids noticed was that, while there was coffee and ice water.. none of the other typical post-chuch yummies were there (that we saw anyway, it was a big place)

Epistemological and Ontological Idealism

Arguments for idealism generally come in to forms. There are epistemological arguments that attempt to show that the world as it is known to us is essentially mind dependent. Kantian arguments are the most famous example of this sort of a approach. So too are some of Berkeley's arguments for idealism, such as the arguments presented with such force in the _Dialogues_ showing that the only empirically defensible concept of a material thing is one that identifies matter with a system of ideas. Ontological arguments for idealism, on the other hand, attempt to show that there is something about the nature of reality that requires that it be of a spiritual or mind dependent character. Thus McTaggart argues that the world must consist of substances and that the only candidate for substance that we have available is that which we find when we reflect on our own minds. Berkeley too presented an ontological argument for idealism when he argued that the very conception of a mind independent entity was incoherent. The famous master argument was not intended as a claim about merely knowable reality, it was intended, it seems to be a claim about reality as such whether known by us our not. This last claim of Berkeley's has always struck me as tendentious because it appears to attempt to prove a negative: How can we know that the only thing that is real is minds, unless we presuppose that our knowledge exhausts all that is real? And how can any non-omniscient being make that claim?
An answer to this last question can be made by those who endorse a non-realist theory of truth. To take a cheap and easy example, if verificationism is true, then the claim that there is a reality utterly independent of our mode of cognition is not false but meaningless. On these sorts of views the sentence, "There is a reality that is impossible for us to experience" has no cognitive content at all. And this brings out another feature of the distinction between ontological and epistemological idealism. Ontological idealism is perfectly compatible with a realist theory of truth. Thus Berkeley is perfectly happy claiming that, at least when we are "thinking with the learn'd," the literal truth of statements depends on the existence of some reality "out there" that corresponds to it. The difference between Berkeley and metaphysical realists is not with respect to what makes a statement true, but rather with respect to the sorts of things are truthmakers for propositions, to wit, minds and ideas.
Personally I have never really understood the various sorts of non-realist theories of truth. Coherentist and pragmatic theories of truth seem to me to be either obviously false, or really just disquised theories of justification or knowlege. Yet it does seem to me that any variety of idealism is going to be in one limited sense epistemic. Whatever claims about reality we may make, we can only really justify them with respect to the reality that we have some conception of. Kantian things in themselves can never be disproven. The best one can hope to do with respect to such hypothetical entities is to show that such an hypothesis is superfluous, not that necessarily, such things do not exist.
So my own argument for idealism, grounded as it is in the claim that existence is an essential property of consciousness, is an ontological idealism. My claim is that the epistemic claim of the cogito requires an ontological ground. I can only know I exist if there is a necessary connection between existence itself and consciousness or the self. Otherwise I may know I am thinking, and yet not recognize that this thinking must be existent thinking. So the essential premise, the pivotal claim is (1) Consciousness essentially exists. But this claim only gets us to idealism if we can also claim (2) Nothing else exhibits this characteristic of existence. And it is here that the epistemological caveat appears--I can only speak of what I can think of. I can confirm as a phenomenological datum that no perceived object exhibits the characteristic of consciousness. I can even go further and in Berkleian manner argue that no conceivable material thing has the property of existence. Its not just that in fact I am not perceiving material things. but I cannot even in imagination combine the property of existence (which I am aware of in the cogito) with the material things. This shows that at least of those concrete particulars I am aware of (minds and material objects) it is only the mind that exists. Not only do I affirm with Meinong that there are non-existent objects. I affirm the stronger claim that all material things are non-existent objects. But the epistemological limitation remains. The objects that I claim cannot exist are perceivable objects. I cannot by this method show that there is nothing else that also has this property. In fact I may have to admit that there are some things, universals for example, which actually do exhibit existence even though they are not of the character of consciousness or the mind. The idealist claim,though ontological, is thus limited. It is not reality as such, but only reality insofar as I can conceive of it (that is, the concrete particular reality, ignoring universals for the moment), which necessarily does not exist. This may be an "apparently outrageous view" as one reviewer called it, but it is also limited to reality as conceived. Kantian things in themselves may exist even if they are not conscious, but if there are any such "things" they also must not have the character of the material world that is actually conceived and thought of.

dualism vs. idealism

Those of us who agree that both the qualitative and intentional character of consciousness is irreducible to so-called matter have a choice, we can be either dualists or idealists. Dualism is more popular than idealism (though their numbers are smaller than the hordes of materialists), but is this really the best approach to take if we want to affirm the reality of the mental? Dualists have a problem of reconciling the mind with the assumed pre-existence of dead matter. Dualists therefore feel dialectical pressure to make the mind into some sort of appendage to the body. For dualists, the problem of how mind and matter interact is a real problem--if we take materialist causation as our paradigm, then it *is* hard to see how the non-material mind fits in. This is why so many contemporary dualists feel driven to weird ass epiphenomenalism.but if mind is really essential to reality, then there is no mind/matter gap. We get all the advantages of materialist monism without its obvious drawbacks

negative facts

Assume that every true proposition needs a truthmaker. A truthmaker is something that renders a statemetn true. So "deer exist" is true in virtue of some deer existing somewhere. "Barack Obama exists' in virtue of the fact that that there is this one person, Barack Obama.

But what about "Bilbo does not exist" or "Hobbits do not exist"

Well, if Bilbo exists were true, we would say it was made true in virtue of Bilbo actually existing.

what is wrong with saying that "Bilbo does not exist" is just made true by the fact or state of affairs that Bilbo does not exist, that is, Bilbo does not have the property of existence.

Almost all defenders of the view that true propositions require truthmakers reject this move. Instead they make arcane suggestions, e.g. "the universe has the property of lacking hobbits"

Once again,, the prejudice in favor of the actual wrecks havoc on metaphysics.

consequentialism

Has anyone else noticed that, among Christian philosophers, Utilitarianism is a definite minority position EXCEPT when dealing with the problem of evil. Suffering is bad in itself, but a necessary condition for character development or a necessary byproduct of the goodness of free will.

What is especially strange about this is, if anything, utilitarian cost/benefit analyses make less sense from "God's perspective" so to speak, than from ours. For us, we live in a world with many difficult situations and forced choices. War is hell, but if the alternative is Nazi domination of Europe--what are you going to do?

But God is in no such situation. To be sure, Plantinga et al may insist that God is restricted in creation by those mysterious "counterfactuals of freedom," and others hold that God's ignorance of future contingents and respect for free will is likewize restrictive. But the crucial differences remain. God makes these moral calculations before creation (on traditional views of omniscience, God fine tunes everything before creation)

Isn't there a moral distinction between (1) finding yourself in a lifeboat forced to thow some over to save the rest and (2) creating the lifeboat scenerio itself when there is the alternative not to?

I may be, in some circumstances justified in sacrificing some for the greater good, but if this is true it is only because I am forced to-I have to pick the 'lesser of two evils'. But God could have chosen not to create at all. For us, life being what it is, there are hard choices that are forced on us. God, too, has to choose, but the choices are not forced in the same way since God always has the option not to create at all.

Animal souls

The problem of evil is most forceful when we consider an individual whoose life, on balance, is a bad thing. Assuming God loves his creatures, it would seem to follow that God would not allow any of God's creatures to suffer to such an extent that it would literally be better for them not to exist. For example, a child who dies at age 2 and has lived a lifeconsisting of constant hunger and brutality. One is naturally compelled to think that such a circumstance is one that no loving God could permit.

But the Christian has an out here, in the form of the afterlife. If our human lives are really just a small subset of a much greater existence, it may still be true that the aforementioned toddler does have a life that, overall, is better for him or her.

But the problem is deeper than this, for suffering is not limited to human beings, but also non-human animals. And it is generally recognized that animal pain provides one of the most forceful examples in support of the inductive argument from evil (e.g Rowe's deer).

My question is what would be wrong with supposing that non-human animals also have an extra-mundane existence, as Bishop Butler and John Wesley both held. I don't know what the theologial consensus is on this point. But it seems an obvious position to hold if one really believes in a God that loves all creatures. Futhermore, such a position conforms well with what has been recently learned about the intellectual capacities of non-humans. Holding that there is a firm distinction between human and non-human has been on empirically shakey grounds ever since Jane Goodall's observations of the chimpanzees.