C.S. Lewis' argument in his "Miracles"

"To call the act of knowing -- the act, not of remembering that something was so in the past, but of 'seeing' that it must be so always and in any possible world -- to call this act 'supernatural,' is some violence to our ordinary linguistic usage. But of course we do not mean by this that it is spooky, or sensational, or even (in any religious sense) 'spiritual.' We mean only that it 'won't fit in;' that such an act, to be what it claims to be -- and if it is not, all our thinking is discredited -- cannot be merely the exhibition at a particular place and time of that total, and largely mindless, system of events called 'Nature.' It must break sufficiently free from that universal chain in order to be determined by what it knows. ... The description we have to give of thought as an evolutionary phenomenon always makes a tacit exception in favor of the thinking which we ourselves perform at that moment." -- C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Collier Books), 1960, p. 23.

Dr. Houston A. Craighead of Winthrop University has a paper available on-line ("C. S. Lewis' Teleological Argument", Encounter, vol. 57.2 (Spring, 1996), 171-185) which defends Lewis' revised argument against Naturalism from his book "Miracles" from contemporary objections such those from Beversluis and evaluates other related arguments by Richard Purtill and Richard Taylor. He argues that the argument, construed as a teleological argument from analogy, fails to demonstrate the existence of God but nonetheless provides a legitmate and compelling reason for believing in God. He also argues that Lewis' corrections to his earlier version of the argument as a result of losing his debate with G.E.M. Anscombe have made the argument stronger and postively valuable. Rather than being utterly defeated in his apologetic hopes and ambitions, the encounter with Anscombe brought him closer to realizing them.

Before reading this paper, I had been re-reading the book and came to a similar conclusion. Although Lewis' views and argument take him out of the mainstream of professional analytic philosophy, they remain represented in it by able philosophers and may also provide a ground for a reasonable theism that should satisfy the ordinary folk who may understand him here. Once Lewis' point and the nature of the force of his argument is understood recent objections to it can be seen to miss the point. (Objecting that naturalism is not committed to physical determinism and allows for quantum indeterminism certainly does.)

The argument is not, as Lewis originally thought, that the truth and validity of an inference to Naturalism was inconsistent with Naturalism's causal account of thought, but rather that the claim for the existence of a basis to provide the prior probability for true beliefs and valid inference processes is inconsistent with the claims that Naturalism is true and is a reasonable belief based on evidence and inference. So if we want to claim that beliefs based on evidence and inference are rational beliefs, then we are caliming that the world is such that such a claim is well motivated. Naturalism is not enough to satisfy that further claim. Lewis' strategy also speaks against one usual reply, that any naturalistic explanation, however remote or so far unimagined, is better than a non-naturalistic explanation. If this claim is also to be supported by inference, it begs the question since the motivation for holding to the validity of inference itself is being questioned by naturalism.

New Link Posted

I added a link to free on-line games in the Gnu things to do section. Thanks, Aaron Williams.

Evangelical Atheism

I ran accross the phrase "evangelical atheist" in an article as a descriptor of a certain type of believer who not only thinks that atheism is true but that it is good news and is active in persuading others to discover and apply it. It reminded me that I once met a brilliant undergraduate student in philosophy who told me that she was an evangelical atheist. I have also met students who were devoted, active followers of Ayn Rand. Atheism is not just an opinion, its a message.

In this post I am not going to quibble much about the atheist/agnostic distinction. In practice, it involves only a difference in degree of belief and circumspection. Academic agnosticism may not know if God exists but it remains convinced the theistic philosophy is a waste of time and an abuse of reason. So I will use "evangelical atheists" to cover active self-styled agnostics as well.
What is an evangelical atheism (hence forth 'EA')? Clearly there are fundamentalist atheists around (often they are the "foaming at the mouth" or "village" atheists for whom atheism is doing other work than providing a rational framework or philosophy of life. And they usually are atheists fully, rejecting even the agnostic view of religion. This is atheism in obvious unhealthiness.

In contrast, EA is robustly healthy. It captures the highest powers of the human psyche and focuses them in productive ways. It is associated with, but not exclusively with, youth and captures the interest of those aspiring in society who have the greatest intellectual and aesthetic potential, as well as moral passion in behalf of liberty and human rights. EA is not ionly naturalistic in ideology but is pulled into the intelectual aesthticism and contemplative mysticism of the idea of a world completely homogenuous. One recalls the picture of Watson and Crick, in the PBS movie adaptation of Watson's account of the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule; that of the two young 'scientists' jumping back on their heels saying "No, no, no! Nature is beautiful, harmonmious" where the issue was beauty of the algorithmic pattern of a crystal. In such a state they are swept away out of themselves in raptuous contemplation as much as the mystic beholding the Beatific Vision.

The also have a palpable sense of Epicurius' discovery of the relief from oppressive guilt one receives if one gives up the notion of the gods and of immortality. If death is the end, there is no need to be weighted down with the oppressive sense of an impending judgement beyond life whether of a personal throne of judgement or a rational principle of karma. We need only tend to the wise cultivation of all our pleasures as whatever workd best. This is the atheist counterpart to justification by faith in protestantism -- a doctrine which removes the sting of death by removing the guilt of sin, which only has power when it is accepted and internalized.

There is also the zeal of a moral crusade. The leveredge of atheism provides the foundation of extracting all the balliwick of dogma that keeps mankind bound and gagged. Sure traditional morality is removed but that is a good thing. What remains are the minimalist obligations on us that impose themselves in virtue of there not being any real power to choose otherwise such as doing things that seek ultimately our own happiness. Consequently, things that stand in the way of this, like anti-sodomy laws or scruples, or ant-abortion laws, etc. get scraped off with a strong new broom. On the other hand no scruple keeps us from using force to redistribute wealth to everyone egalitarianly. Sure quibbles are still possible about what the best way to promote pleasure is, but once the arbirary dictates of tradition are either set aside or muted through complete parity of cultures, there is nothing stopping us from getting down to the buisness of doing the only thing we could possible be attracted to.

So we should try to discover if we can even more exotic and traditionally transgressive pleasures if we can, but yet there is also a sacred canon of truth which cannot be violated, namely science. And science is the excercise of construing our concept of the universe to as much as possible conform to the image of a homogenious aggregated unit, absolutely and explicitly intelligible to our concept forming abilities and data aquiring capacities. Whatever satisfies Ockham's Razor (wielded with Sweeney-Todd-like fury) is what we settle on as truth. Of course, we must have solid research to establish any particular point but in the meantime, the most remote unsupported explanation that conforms to the homogenuous concept of the universe as a closed system is better than any otherwise plausible and sense-making one that does not.

Summing up, it seems that point for point we can come up with an evangelical model of atheism that resembles an evangelical model of Christianity. Both have their sacred canon; Christianity has the Holy Scripture, atheism has Science. Both have their Messiah; Christianity has Christ, atheism has Matter. Both have their proclamation; Christianity has justification by faith in Christ, atheism has the insight that sin and judgement are not possible in the first place. Both have their spirituality; Christianity has absolute dependence on the Power of the Holy Spirit, atheism has the self-distancing and mystical encounter of the idea of homegenuous nature. Both have their ideas of the necessity of conversion; Christianity has the necessity of turning from sin and trusting in Christ, atheism has the necessity of turning from dogma and trusting in human calculation. Finally, both have their mission; Christianity to preach the good news of forgiveness of sins to all nations, atheism to liberate all mankind from the throes of prejudice and tradition.

This seems to show that the differentiation between fundamentalist, evangelical, and mainline not only applies to Christianity and other religions, it also applies to secular philosophies as philosophies of life. It seems clear that we can abstract the form of life called evangelical from its particular instances in Christianity, other religions, and atheism for consideration in its own right. For starters, the evangelical mood is one that combines sincere activistic commitment and belief with a healthy commitment to reason, balance and tolerance. It also represents humanity in one of its most productive modes, it is reform minded but not unduly violent and it is effective. Everybody should be an evangelical version of something or another, all other things being equal and we have good reason to aspire to an evangelical mood for its own sake.

But evangelicalism has its problems. Since one could be an evangelical Christian, or an evangelical Hindu, or an evangelical atheist, or an evangelical communist. Such exclusive commitments will necessarily come to loggerheads in society, they will fight for their views in the courts, they will insist on their rights to fair hearing and fair treatment. It may be necessary for different sides to recognize the "evangelical character" of the other side as a point of sympathetic contact.

But the most crucial implication of such an analysis is this; Being an evangelical is not a sufficient condition for being a Christian, it is possible to be evangelical robustly and not be a Christian. Further, if we admit that at least some Fundamentalists and Mainliners are geneuinely saved and Christian, then being an evangelical is not a necessary condition of being a Christian either. Christianity is not evangelicalism.

The Gnu

Armitage the ad hoc RPG

GAME ENGINE:
"Talk about your simple programs!"

Here is an RPG based on the premise of the animes "Armitage the Third: Poly-Matrix" and its sequel "Armitage: Dual-Matrix". It uses the game engine, All Outta Bubblegum, copyrighted by Michael Sullivan and Jeffrey Grant and linked to the title of this post. The rules and discussion of this engine are linked to this post. For an introduction and links to source material for this game, see the links under "The Armitage Syllabus" in the sidebar of this blog. The rules use some strong language. I am going to assume familiarity with standard RPG notations (d6, NPC, GM, etc.) This a fan tribute work to the Armitage storyline and its creators and developers and not intended for commercial profit. Be sure to give the OAV and two movies a chance. You can see my review of the films under "the Armitage Syllabus" heading in the left column under "Yes, Yoko! There is an Armitage!"

CONCEPT:
"Hope is a human feeling, isn't it?"

The time is the near future and the place is a city on the colonial and partially terraformed planet Mars. The Martian government has taken an ambivalent attitude to the idea of Martian independence from Earth. At first, the desire for independence was strong and efforts were made to facilitate it. The chief obstacle has been the small population of Mars and the decline in immigration. A provisional solution has been to proliferate robots who are able to fulfill most service jobs. Robot technology is quite well developed and has advanced in several stages. Besides various automatons, including monstrously sized and idiosyncratically designed "gadgets", the most sophisticated robot the general public is aware of and which is widely used is the series called "Seconds". Seconds are user friendly robots capable of interacting with humans in various straightforward ways. These robots are designed to resemble humans in appearance (their distinguishing features are the control knobs on their foreheads) and to fulfill various service functions (waitress, stewardess, receptionist, even personal use for entertainment). However, because of their ready availability, they are easier and cheaper to employ than humans. This has lead to uprisings by the general populace over lack of employment and to strong anti-robot activism and pro-robot activism of both a civil and uncivil sort.

What the general public does not know is that the Martian government has attempted a secret robot development project, the Thirds. Originally intended to be super soldiers and assassins designed to operate in complete secrecy by perfectly blending unnoticed into human society, the project was redirected to producing a female humanoid robot with the remarkable ability of reproducing human children. This was in order to increase the Martian population without having to rely as much on further immigration from Earth to do it. In order for this project to succeed, it was necessary to make the Thirds as human-like as possible, resembling them not only in alluring appearance, but also emotionally and intellectually. In fact, Thirds typically have the ability to produce original creations like artists. They often take up creative professions like art, theatre, and dance. Further, they are designed, unlike Seconds, to function autonomously according to their own personal judgment. Structurally, Thirds are covered with a bio-engineered tissue surface as well as some tissue and organ functions (they can bleed when hurt) which resemble human tissue, while their interior structure remains engineered machinery, hydraulics, and circuitry, including a very sophisticated AI system and CPU. This makes them almost perfectly indistinguishable from humans. The only way to identify them on sight with certainty is by damaging them and exposing their electro-mechanical structures.

Some acquainted with the project, as well as some Thirds themselves, wonder if the Thirds are the first robots with souls.

The project was successful in producing several members of the series. However, the Martian government abandoned its Third project when it seemed to them that they would not be successful in their bid for independence. Switching canoes in mid-stream, the government began to seek a reconciliatory strategy with Earth. This required dismantling the Third project and terminating the Thirds. To do this, the government commissioned the original assassin-robot project to hunt, expose, and destroy all the Third types that had successfully mingled into society. The personality of the assassin-robots allows them to mingle in human society but only enough to perform their function. Consequently, they seem to be more simple and more psychotic than the female Thirds. All the old assassin robots are male and all the other Thirds are female.

The Martian government has destroyed all the research facilities of the Third Project, including some of the scientists who engineered it, and made all robot models beyond the Seconds illegal. The secret to Third robot design is mysterious and appears to be lost. This has not kept interested parties from trying to reproduce this research on their own, both on Mars and on Earth. But the Martian government assumes that the Thirds are all destroyed. This may be far from the truth. Those Thirds that remain, stay in hiding and seek to live indistinct human lives. However, because of the innate ability that each has to network and telecommunicate with each other, the cannot avoid being aware of the existence and well-being of other Thirds. The troubling question of who they really are drives them again and again to risk their lives to find an answer.

SOCIAL CONTRACT:
"I'll try to keep that in mind, Ms. Armitage."

This RPG can be played in the traditional style by assigning one person to be the Game Master and having her determine the setting, characters, and objectives for the players as well as being the interface between the players and the game world. But the linked game engine allows for other possible negotiations concerning arrangements between players as to who has the authority to determine the world and narrative, including quick and dirty one-offs between players. Make sure you settle such questions before playing this game.

CHARACTER DESIGN:
"The List of Thirds."

Every Player Character (PC) is a Third. PCs have only one attribute -- Humanity, which is represented by "Bubblegum" in the "All Outta Bubblegum" game engine. The only other type of character that has Humanity are assassin-robots. Thirds generally start with 8 Humanity according to the rules but some may start with 7 or 6 if they are in military or police occupations rather than creative ones. Assassin-robots are non-player characters and may start with much less Humanity, say 3 or 4, because of their psychotic drive to terminate all Thirds. All other characters are either all human or all robot for game purposes. Non-player characters may be normal humans, cyberneticly repaired or enhanced humans, "gadgets", simple robots, Seconds, assassin-robots, or other Thirds (or Fourths).

Besides Humanity, all Thirds have the following; a cover identity and a husband and perhaps family who shares their identity. The other family members may or may not know at any given time that mom is a robot. Other qualities that Thirds possess but which are not quantified for game purposes are a devotion to the welfare of other Thirds and a sense of shame in the knowledge that at some level they are "just another robot". These affections may be suppressed, kept reserved, or openly shared and acted on. Discuss your characters story with your Game Master or other players if no Game Master is being used.

TASK RESOLUTION - NON-COMBAT:
"Making children takes more than just a female form."

There are two type of tasks; non-combat and combat. These are resolved as per the linked game engine. The sense of Humanity is preserved through successful integration of the Third in ordinary human life. For most mundane tasks, there is no need to roll. But if one's identity is on the line, roll as per the rules. These situation involve conceiving a child, persuading someone, especially a human, to be a friend, colleague, or lover, crucial tasks involved in investigating your origins, etc.

A special power that all Thirds have is tele-presence, the ability to communicate their "ego" into cyberspace through the air or through computer and communication networks. This allows them to communicate with one another and with assassin-robots. Because of the uniqueness of this ability to Third types and thus its closeness to their shame in their identity, when not used for combat purposes, this requires a non-combat roll to be successful. However, tele-presence can also be used to turn off safeties in weapons hardware or detonate or overheat weapons causing them to explode. These are handled as combat tasks are (see below). In some cases, like shutting off alarm systems or opening security doors, it may not be immediately clear whether the task is combat or non-combat. As a general rule of thumb, anything that results in something destructive and pyrotechnic that does immediate damage to an enemy the character is aware of should be considered to be more likely a combat task.

TASK RESOLUTION - COMBAT:
"'Heaven's Door'!"

In seeking her goals, a Third may run into a combat situation with another Third, an assassin-robot, or regular robots or gadgets. Because the Third prototype is based on the original assassin-robot design, Thirds are super skilled, super-strong, and devastatingly destructive. But since most Thirds start in creative and non-military occupations, it may take them awhile to get in touch with their "inner assassin" before they can perform combat maneuvers very effectively.

Any successful hit to an ordinary robot or gadget is enough to destroy it. To score a hit, the player must describe in cinematic detail (weapons, acrobatics, martial arts) what she is doing and roll for success according to the rules of the game engine. However, when fighting another character with the Humanity attribute, the character cannot be destroyed by a successful hit until their humanity is reduced to zero. Generally speaking, because of the original interest of the Martian government, most of the combat soldiers, security guards, and special police tactical forces will be robots.

Thirds are not fatally damaged while they have any Humanity left. However, any fight may involve some non-fatal physical damage to either the surface texture or the interior frame of a Third's body. It is possible that the Third may not even be aware of the first type of damage, although others may see it and realize that she is a Third. Any Third detected this way will initially alienate most any human witnessing it, which the Third may discover is difficult to recover from, especially in the case of such a discovery being made by family members. She will have to roll for a non-combat resolution to try to persuade them of her humanness in spite of being a robot. If there is any structural damage, she may find it difficult to find a source of maintenance without exposing her existence to the government or the police. All this kind of damage is worked out narratively.

LOSING THE GAME:
"'Kill' robots? You mean 'destroy', don't you?"

The player's general objective is to obtain all of her goals and restore a sense of integration into the human community before her Humanity reduces to zero. The degree of victory depends on how well she does this. When any character's Humanity is reduced to zero, they are "dead" and are treated like a pure killing machine for purposes of task resolution and become an non-player character as far as the contract between the players and the Game Master is concerned.

Whether it is possible to recover lost Humanity is up to the Game Master and the players. The original project members are gone and the secret to their technology is deeply mysterious. It is not enough for any scientist to know the hardware and software features of Third program design and mere reverse engineering will not reveal it. If Humanity is to be recovered, it will be an extremely difficult mission.

TWEAK OPTIONS:
"It's a little too angelic for my taste."

Tweak #1 - Other dice: the linked game engine uses a ten-sided die mechanic. For longer durability, you might try a twelve (d12) or twenty sided (d20) die. This will also allow you to set higher levels of Humanity. You may also consider rolling three six sided dice (3d6), regarding the sixes as zero points and having Thirds start out at 10 Humanity and assasin robots start out at 5 humanity. This produces a number between 0 and 15 along a probability curve emphasizing how difficult it is for a Third to reconnect with her assassin programming and how easy it becomes to lose her humanity in a cascading fashion. It is possible to still win a non-combat skill check. Players may decide to allow that or simply say that at zero the character is "dead".

Tweak #2 - Saving Throws: At a significantly low number of Humanity, say 2 or 3, a Third runs a risk of reverting to her old programming and functionally becoming an assassin-robot, targeting only other Thirds. The GM or another player may call for a saving through when the number of Humanity is that low. The player must successfully make a non-combat roll in order to not become an assassin-robot. One could also simply confine this option to Thirds that are non-player characters.

Tweak #3 - Degrees of Success/Failure: Allowing degrees of success or failure to have different relative values fits well with the narrative style of the setting, even if it complicates things a little. For the basic d10 version of the rules, there are different lists for non-combat and for combat rolls. Roll the dice, determine degree of success or failure according to the following lists, and narrate events to justify the rolled degree description. Let TN be the target number, based on the number of Humanity left, that you must roll equal to or less for non-combat rolls and higher than for combat rolls. For Non-Combat rolls: TN = incomplete success, TN - 1 = adequate success, TN - 2 = good success, TN - 3 = great success, TN - 4> = outstanding performance, while TN +1 = failure, TN +2 = terrible failure, and TN +3> = abyssmal disaster, as well as -1 to Humanity. For Combat rolls: TN = non-stunning damaging hit, TN - 1 = mere grazing hit, TN - 2 = distructive but still a miss, TN - 3 = clean miss, TN - 4> = self-destructive misfire, while TN +1 = solid hit on the money, TN +2 = significantly davastating hit, and TN +3> = brilliantly davastating hit, as well as -1 to the opponent's humanity.

Tweak #4 - Cyberpoints: You may want to introduce another set of counters (spearmint gum as well as bubble gum) to provide more strategy in the game, especially if you are using the traditional GM/PC type of social contract. Because Thirds are connected with one another through telepresence abilities in cyberspace, they can often provide a kind of ambient community support to one another in times of need. Of course, if Thirds can do this so can assassin robots. This form of "grace" is represented by "cyberpoints" (CPs). At character development, every character belonging to a player receives two cyberpoints ( two alternate counters). Players also receive an additional CP whenever they roll a 1 and lose a CP (if they have it to lose -- there are no cyberpoint deficits) if they roll a 10 on a non-combat roll, and conversly for combat rolls (+1 CP for 10, -1 CP for 1 if they have any CP). If a player character wants to re-roll a non-combat or combat result they do not want, they can 'spend' a CP before rolling again if they have it. But the player must go by the results and lose the spent CP even if they are not happy with the new result (but they can spend another CP and roll again if they have it). GMs may reward players for exemplary performance along some aspect or another of roleplaying by giving them additional CPs at their own discretion.

Tweak #5 - 1D6 version: (For those who want a little more Sullivan in their game engine.) If all you can find is a six-sided die, this tweak adjusts the rules to allow the use of one six sided die and uses a mechanic suggested by Stephan O'Sullivan, the creator of the Fudge system (a.k.a. the "pop-o-matic" mechanic). It also uses the descriptor ladder like Fudge but this is clearly another way of doing "All Outta Bubblegum". All rolls use one six sided die and each roll is a kind of open ended roll. For any roll, the player or GM rolls the die and rerolls it if the result is a 1 or a 6. The result is a number between +3 and -3 according to the following chart:

(+3) : 1st roll=6, 2nd roll=5 or 6
(+2) : 1st roll=6, 2nd roll=1,2,3, or 4
(+1) : 1st roll=5, no 2nd roll
(+0) : 1st roll=3 or 4, no 2nd roll
(-1) : 1st roll=2, no 2nd roll
(-2) : 1st roll=1, 2nd roll=3,4,5, or 6
(-3) : 1st roll=1, 2nd roll=1 or 2

The values are also assigned a comparative descriptor word according to the following table:

(+3) Superb
(+2) Great
(+1) Good
(+0) Fair
(-1) Mediocre
(-2) Poor
(-3) Terrible

Each Third starts with ten counters for Humanity but arranges them in five rows ("levels") of two counters each from top row to bottom. Each row is also assigned a value each for non-combat actions and for combat actions:

Level 1: (+1 for non-combat)(-1 for combat)...OO
Level 2: (+0 for non-combat)(+0 for combat)...OO
Level 3: (-1 for non-combat)(+1 for combat)...OO
Level 4: (-2 for non-combat)(+2 for combat)...OO
Level 5: (-3 for non-combat)(+3 for combat)...OO

This represents the following formulae; Non-combat value = Humanity/2 - 4 (rounded up), Combat value = 0 - Non-combat value. You can also determine the values by writing the above descriptor ladder on a buisness or index card and setting it alongside of the rows of your Humanity counters with the bottom level of the ladder indexed to the bottom row of counters. Then identify and use the value assigned to the level corresponding to top-most row of your remaining counters. Use the card right side up for non-combat actions and upside down for combat actions, until you can assign the values in your head.

Whenever a player loses a point of Humanity, a counter is taken off the the top-most row. The values assigned for action resolution are the ones assigned for the top-most row that the player still has counters on. So at the begining of the game, a Third has +1 for non-combat actions and -1 for for combat actions. When she loses three Humanity, she has +0 for non-combat and +0 for combat. An assassin robot starts like a Third who has lost 5 Humanity already.

To resolve an action, determine which value your current amount of Humanity assigns for actions of that type. Once you have determined the value assigned for your character's Humanity for that type of action, roll the six-sided die according to the procedure above, add the result to the assigned value, and then narrate the situation to justify the comparative descriptor assigned to the adjusted result. (Example; Trish has three Humanity and must fight an assassin robot. Her assigned value for a combat roll at this point is +1. She rolls a -2 making a total result of -1 which is Mediocre. She flinches and manages just to knock the smile off the robot's face.) If the adjusted non-combat roll is 'Mediocre' or worse, the player character loses one point of Humanity. If the adjusted combat roll is 'Good' or better, remove one Humanity point from the player character's enemy. When a point of Humanity is removed, one counter is taken off that character's top-most row. When Humanity is all gone the character is "dead" as understood in the regular rules. You will probably want to add the Cyberpoint tweak to this (awarding a CP for every natural +3 die roll and taking a CP for every -3 die roll).

THANKS:

"Tell 'em Eddie says, 'What's up'!"

Thanks to Michael Sullivan and Jeffrey Grant for permission to mention and use their game engine and Takuya Sato, Chiaki Konaka, Katsuhito Akiyama, Naoko Hasegawa, and Hideki Kakinuma and associates for the Armitage films. Be sure to examine the referred links for all the credits for the real work on this. Thanks also to the inspiration of Stephan O'Sullivan.

The (non-) Emergent (or non-) Church?

D.A. Carson has as good but critical introduction to the emergent church movement as you can find on the web so far.

(Copied from ABC) Here is my own take on this. The assumption that seems to be put forth by the emergent church is that we are shifting from a modernist culture to a post modernist culture and therefore we need to shift from a modernist church to a postmodernist church. The perception of a cultural shift is the main grounds for altering not only the practice of the church but the formulation and presentation of doctrine as part of that practice. But this assumption is open to evaluation.

My own assessment is that the evidence that the culture is shifting from one paradigm to another is largely false and may even be wishful thinking on the part of certain evangelicals. If one is relying on high culture in the USA (the Big City-Big University-Big Media complex) to be the bellweather for cultural change, there is no real evidence for any substantial change in the basic mindset of that high culture since the pre-twentieth century inductrial age. The fact is that such culture has gotten more "conservative" and more effcient in globalizing itself and there is no logical end to its bootstrapping. The new boss is the same as the old boss.

Rather than think of pomo as the response and reaction to mo, I find that it makes better sense to distinguish between what I call "Hard Modernism" (HM) and "Soft Modernism" (SM) and also between "Hard Postmodernism" (HP) and "Soft Postmodernism" (SP). Modernism emphasizes disciplines of research (complexly structured skills with measurable performance, Gessellschaften), such as (paradigmaticly) the natural sciences, ideal frameworks (math and logic), and conventional social structures (social psychology, economics, technology, and contracts). Postmodernism emphasizes fields of research (contiguously related topics of study approached open endedly and more informally, Geimenschaften), such as culture, art, anthropolgy, religion, material culture, subjectivity, etc. "Hard" or "soft" refers to the radicalness of the application of the program and more specificly to the two possible responses to scepticism within and among the disciplines. The Hard approach embraces scepticism and confines meaningful discourse to whatever may be trivially true, incorrigibly known, or empirically verified. The Soft approach, while admittedly indicating that it cannot refute scepticism adopts the policy of rebuting and resisting it and preserves in its discourse what the Hard side discounts. In practice this distinction can be vague but not so much so that it cannot be relevent and useful, I think.

Therefore HM is reductionistic about science and all other disciplines. Only those things that can receive empirically verifiable formulation are true and whatever else is true is only true because it can be exactly paraphrased by something that is verifiable. Consequently except fro some narrow formal principles (if even those) ordinary discourse, morality, first person psychology, and religion are all something like pure fiction. Further, HP is relativistic and diverse, not only in the sense that there are diverse cultures but even in the sense that diversity and intranslatibility are created with every novel point of view anyone anywhere takes so that there is no personal identity over time since all of your current thoughts must be seen as radicaly equivocal to any of your previous thoughts. It also accepts that there is no truth value that can be assigned to these perspectives and that they are mere constructs after all. As you can see, in spite of the squabbles between them HP presupposes HM and is the implication of it to human experience.

On the other hand, SM returns to the phenomena and ordinary language and is aware of all the discrepancies between the naturalistic account of the world and the appearance of the world. While acknowledging the appearance/reality distinction, they also recognize the need for an adequate account of the world to answer all the relevent questions experience raises. SM is not automaticly hostile to experience or ordinary language and finds analogies to scientific ways of knowing to other ways of knowing (like aesthetic, moral, or religious experience) such that they stand or fall together. SP recognizes that there are other functions of reason besides scientific ones and that there are diverse systems of values, but that there is no reason to suppose that this makes all candidates for a function of reason or a system of value acceptible or intranslatable and that cross cultural moral criticism is possible. Further to say that there are a plurality of diverse and legitimate values is not to say that there are no objective values. There is more than one way things could be good. There is nothing necessarily that makes SM at any way incompatible with SP.

So my contention is that the Hard/Soft distinction is more relevnt than the modern/postmodern distinction. And my further contention is that if we have to ask what respect traditional evangelicalism (the evangelical protestant conservative movement of the 19th and 20th centuries in Britian and the USA as well as elsewhere) is a modernist movement, the answer seems clearly to be that by and large it was a movement of SM, both in Jonathan Edwards adoption of a system of thought like Berkeley's, in the dependence on the Old Reformed Scholastics, in Butler's reply to the deists, and the over all commitment of North American theology on the Scottish Common Sense Tradition and its resistance to Humean scepticism, as well as for the reason that a HM "version" of evangelicalism would be an oxymoron. Capitulation to HM gives you the Liberalism of the mainline churches. It's in this light that I think questions of the "modernism" involved in Warfield's doctrine of inerrancy should be understood.

Turning to the emergent church, we can ask a similar question with respect to postmodernism. And the problem is that the movement is so new that we have no clear idea if the attention to the difference between Hard and Soft is being given suffcient weight. Some things some of the leaders say seem to be reasonable adoption of SP such as their embracing of the work of Alistair MacIntyre. But as Basil Mitchell points out, MacIntyre is working out the thesis defended by C.S. Lewis in "the Abolition of Man", not known to be a tract for pomo. So such an enbrace seems hardly a radical shift implied by the word "emergent". On the other hand, where the emergent church seems to be its most "faddish" is in its "using relativism to balance out absolutism" and similar gestures. Here we don't know what is being accepted and what is being rejected.

We can at least say this, either the emergent church movement is an expression of HP or SP (or at least is heading toward the embracing of one or the other). If it enbraces HP, it is truly radical but also something other than evangelical Christianity. Rather than augmenting the ability of Chritianity to have a witness in contemporary society, it winds up embracing the absolute impossibility of such a witness even between members in the association called "church". But if it is moving in an SP direction, then it is embracing what may prove to be worthwhile features of contempory thought to faciliate its witness but these same features hardly put it at odds with traditional evangelicalism. The better view would be to argue how catholic traditional evangelicalism is to be able to enbrace these more reasonable currents of thought without giving up its original features (in the spirit of traditonal evangelical theologian, James Orr). But then its claim to be "radically emergent" is really empty. There is nothing Copernican or Galilean going on here. The emerging church movement has to decide whether its going not be emergent or not be the church.

However, if the emergent church is more tempered that some of the rhetoric, all it could be saying is that the church is having to make a shift in emphasis on some themes (say the SM themes) to an emphasis on other themes (say the SP themes). This is a change of thema which while not a Copernican shift is still fairly consistent with cultural shifts that the church has adopted in the past over time as it carried out its missionary program. But if the church changes its emphasis this way, its more like not because the culture is becoming morepost modern but that our part of western culture is remaining adamantly modernistic, as in HM, and forcing the church to adopt SP themes in order to oppose principle for principle. That is, the church is defending say a pluralistic account of moral values precisely to oppose the view that there is only one way the world is, the reductionist way. It may also be adopting a reasonable person standard of warrant pricely to oppose that restriction of legitmate certainty to either deductive or quantifiable inductive standards. In doing so and in claiming that "we are all postmodernists now" the church is appealing to the authority of an existing but non-expert culture. But against the program of HM, the ordinary average person on the street looks more SP-ish anyway, and this may be what is being construed as a "cultural movement toward postmodernism".

If the emergent church movement were in Europe rather than the USA, one expects that it would lose its motivation altogether, because Europe is adamantly unreconstructed HP, and the church remains looking like SM in contrast to it. Which means that church continues to maintain the image of Victorian Evangelical "fundamentalism". The emergent church may not be a strategy that makes sense in all parts of Western culture, on this less radical and more defensible view of it.

So at best, the emergent church, rather than picking out a Coperincan revoltion may just be marking a fairly typical sea change in the church in light of its history and geography. And these changes are often worthwhile.

Grab your dice!

Its not that hard to find free games on the net (see link). I tend to be fascinated with RPG rules systems so I like to explore the mechanics. But I decided to go ahead and link the free RPGs that I've found with some real street cred (see sidebar), hopefully to make it easier for people to act on the mood of trying to organize a game with few resources. Most of the games can support most any genre and they are all well supported themselves. "Brickquest" is specific but is designed to help use something around the house for miniture gaming. The systems span the continuum of play complexity. Some just require six-sided dice.

Paul Czege's "Nicotine Girls" is highly reviewed and brilliant. Czege's work is valuable for getting you to rethink the possibilities of RPG design. Be sure to look at his other work.

What's your excuse now? Grab some dice and play!

David Hume: Mysterion?

The famous Scottish Skeptic David Hume, starting with the fundamental principles of Brittish Empiricism in the tradition of Locke and Berkeley, seems to undermine many of the motivations for the modern turn in philosophy, one of which is to provide a philosophical rational for science by following science as a model for philosophical justification. He seems to show that rather than succeeding at this, Brittish philosophy in principle cannot provide any warrant for science or common sense. But to relieve ourselves of this, he says "Nature" leads us where wisdom fails us and appeals to "custom" to account for our continued efforts at scientific induction and other things, including morality and religion.

It is hard for me to understand what he is doing here. Surely after sustaining such crititicism on Berkeleyan though for postulating "spirit" as the fundamental substance and saying that this is as unmotivated empirically as Locke's substratum -- his "something I know not what", such an appeal to "nature" is also unmotivated. What could we really say about nature and custom now when we couldn't say anything before?

This is especially puzzling when he talks about society as being something determined by a kind of evolutionary selection process. He seems to prefer the views of his fellow Scot Adam Smith who gives an evolutionary account based on natural egoism; socially benefiting institutions supervene of self-interested activities by the "invisible hand" of natural economic selection. But what this invisible hand is is not clear. Supposedly we might assume that the process refered to by the phrase 'invisible hand" is a completely socially natural process. On this view, Smith's account is just an extension of Hobbesian materialism and mechanism. We will have to say that apparently altruistic behavior is ultimately to be explained in terms of natural survival and self-regard.

But if that's right, it seems Hume is guilty of a kind of "bait and switch", appealing to skepticism to remove from the table views he does not like such as Berkeleyan Theism, in order to appeal to "nature" to re-introduce views he likes such as Hobbesian social materialism. But then Hume would be guilty of a double standard in his appealing to a skepticism which rules out both equally while supposedly appealing to one account of nature as opposed to another for reasons that skepticism is just not applied to. But if that is the case, Berkeley is at least prima facie legitimate in offering his own reasons for his preferences (a point that I think is not lost on Berkeley and is precisely what he does do in his three dialogues).

But what if Adam Smith is not offering a strictly Hobbesian account (see link) but simply asserting that there are both survival oriented but also genuinely self-disinterested motives in human nature but that both happened products of natural evolution, then human altruism appears mysterious against any sort of Hobbesian account. The view would be that "evolution" is just a name for the "that whatever it is" that produces the various moral affections in humans, some of which are egoistic and some of which are not. If that is the case, then all the method does is document what we do in fact place our affections on withou offering any prefered way of dealing with the paradoxes. But this is just to take such affection with equal seriousness. If this is what Hume is appropriating in his account of nature, Hume seems to be a kind of 18th century counterpart to those "mysterions" in contemporary philosophy that find reductionistic accounts of human nature to materialist sources inadequate but find nothing yet to replace them with.

A Night at the Roddenberry

Not my generation on either source but I know a good joke when I see one. Thanks to Aaron Williams for pointing this out.

Dilbert on ID

I will join the many recommending Scott Adam's comments of Intelligent Design Theory. See the link to his blog.

I think that Mr. Adams restrictions on who should count as a credible authority on ID are too strong. As to the criterion that science must not be based on pre-conceived notions, this seems to elliminate a lot of good science. Crick and Watson (according to Watson's account, "The Double Helix") were lead directly to the DNA model from the data because they had the pre-conceived notion that "nature is beautiful", that it is harmonious, symetrical, resonant, or whatever depending on the aspect of nature you were studying. In general, to the extent that scientists don't know they have only intuitive pre-conceptions to guide them in research and part of being an experienced scientist is aquiring good jusgement about what pre-conceptions to go with. So one can be a good authority in science and be guided by pre-conceptions. Concerning the criterion that a credible authority will not have any career or financial interests involved, it is difficult to imagine that there could be a good scientist in who we would invest trust in her authority if she was not fully employed in the work of science by a professional institution of research. We are not likely to listen to or even hear from the isolated bayou pond researcher who pays for his livelyhood through aligator poaching and does his research on the side, no matter how good he is. Consequently, any prima facie candidate for authoratative opnions is ruled out by his career and financial connections.

One expects that he needs to have such a strong criterion because it has to be strong enough to eliminate attaching credibility to ID scientists who are as much employed research professionals with different but educated pre-conceptions as those scientists who aren't. He says that he does not deny that there is knock down evidence for blind evolution, just that there are reliable competent people who can identify this evidence for him. he might say the same thing about the existence of knockdown evidence for ID theory. One wonders what he would say about Dr. David Berlinski who wrote a very competent and "Dilbert friendly" book, A Tour of the Calculus, and who also, in an article for Commentary magazine, wrote that he could not even find probable evidence for either one much less knockdown evidence.

Yes, Yoko, there is an Armitage!

WARNING! This post contains spoilers for the anime films "Armitage III: Poly-Matrix" and "Armitage: Dual-Matrix". These films contain strong language, some nudity, sexual references, violent images, and continuity problems and are not recommended for everyone.

I am currently going through a phase where it seems to me that there are anime productions that live somewhat up to their promised potential. More specificly, I can't seem to get enough stuff related to the anime hit films in the "Armitage" storyline. I was thrown off of course because of ignorance and picked up "Dual Matrix" first, mostly because it gets a higher profile at my FLGS, but also because "Armitage III" sounds like a sequal. (Of course, I couldn't help but wonder what happened to the availability of "Armitage II".) Both films, and epecially the second film ("Dual Matrix") deserve high praise for the outstanding production values, not only in the art and story development but also in the voice talent casting for Anglophonic audiences (thank you, thank you, thank you) and in the outstanding incidental music in both films.

But more importantly than that, the storyline and depiction were valuable to me both philosophically and religiously, which is what I want to focus on. In general, anime has always fascinated me in its consitent attempt to try to picture the humane and mystical into the space of science and technology -- and here we have a fine example of that conceptually. What I want to do is summarize the plot in both films and then reflect on it from a philosophical point of view.

In the near future, the Earth has carried out a more or less successful colonization of Mars but part of what has made this reasonably possible is the development of robot technology. However, this has led to the formation of new frontiers of crime. Ross Sylabus is a detective from the Chicago police force who transfers to the Mars police department after his partner is killed by an assassin robot. In general the proliferation of robots in society, ones which closely resemble humans and mainly serve in service capacities, are becoming quite controversal in general, and especially so in the case of Earth/Mars political and economic relations. But Sylabus is especially pained by robots because of the death of his partner. Mars PD is less orthodox than Earth police and he is assigned a partner, a feisty, petite, but aggressive women detecteve named Naomi Armitage, who tends to shoot first and ask questions later.

Ross's role in the MPD is to investigate crimes involving technology. No sooner does he get there but he becomes involved neck deep in a series of altercations involving the shooting of robots. But these robots are not standard service robots (called 'Seconds' to indicate the series of robots they are the members of). These robot terminations are of robots that have effectively assimulated themselves into society so as to be indistinguishable from humans. They tend to function with complete autonomy and to occupy creative roles such as artists, writers, and musicians. Apart from the damage of being shot, they were assumed to be normal members of the human race. In fact, the purpose of the shootings seems to be to expose their presence and infiltration into human society. Another disturbing fact is that they seem to be all female. This series of robots (called 'Thirds') is off the books and seems to be an illegal underground production line to the police. Since these altercations involve terminating robots, it is not clear that there is even being a crime committed, even though it seems like the police are hunting a serial killer.

Ross is warned that there is no room for sympathy with robots on Mars, since many Martians are struggling with the loss of jobs due to the availability of robots as cheap labor. Ross is already with them based on his own experience. But he eventually discovers that his partner Armitage is also a Third. At first it seemed that she was a robot rights sympathisizer, but her position becomes more clear after getting shot up going against the assassin. "I feel like some grotesque puppet. I can walk and talk and I can laugh and I can cry. But I'm only a monsterous doll!" Strikingly, Armitage is filled with shame at her true nature, she sees herself as a mere instrument though she tries to hide this from everyone. But the police department is beginning to suspect her connection to the Thirds. Ross finds himself faced with the dilemma of whether to help Armitage solve the mystery of what she is for or to do his duty to help bring her into police custody. When Armitage asks why he has decided to help her and become a rogue cop, Ross becomes angry and frustrated. "'Why? How come? You sound like a child. There is no reason at all!" Ross seems frustrated by his inability to make clear his motivations for risking so much in order to help her.

Armitage discovers that the government of Mars originally designed the Thirds as assassins for military use and that the shootist is actually one of many of these series of robots. But the series agenda was changed to deal with the Martian interest to obtain a political identity distinct from Earth. Since the population of Mars was in remission after colonization, the Thirds were developed to be robots that could bear live human children and consequently were designed to possess artficial intelligence, emotional responsiveness, and creative autonomy as a human woman (a variation of the 'Mars needs women' plotline). But in a change of policy, the Mars government abandoned the repopulation project in order to have a more stable reunion with Earth and in order for this to be acceptible to Earth government, Mars had to terminate its aspirations of autonomy and the project of the thirds. This move is what was in progress when the assassin robots were activated to kill and expose the presence of Thirds in society.

Ross is faced with the further dilemma now of becoming a fugative from Martian justice and defend Armitage's life from the now uniform will on all levels to terminate her. At this point, in the story Ross has been so badly damaged in the line of duty that more and more of his body has been replaced with cybernetic parts so that the line between him and Armitage becomes more and more blurry. He finally decides to give up everything and assaults the Martian military in order to go into hiding with Armitage and the two become husband and wife. According to Ross, "I know a true heart when I've met one."

In the second film, "Dual Matrix", time has passed and the two have successfally altered their identities and assumed a non-descript place in Martian society. In this period, Armitage has given birth to a daughter, now four years old named Roko, but they have labored to keep Armitage's nature as a robot a secret from her so that to her Armitage is like any human mom. Unfortunately, an illegal attempt to ressurrect the project of developing the Thirds brings Armitage back into her investigative work in behalf of new Thirds. Further, a successful attempt to thwart a terrorist attack on the company that Ross is serving as a security guard brings Ross and his family out in the open to interested parties and forces him to serve the cause of robot rights. The villian who is responsible for both reviving and then terminating the new Thirds project is trying to corner the market and discover the secret of producing robots that procreate. He seems to assume that the humans born to such will be human but be complete tools, instances of Aristotle's natural slaves. But all of his attempts to discover the secret of reproduction fail since even though coming to possess full details on both Armitage's hardware and software, he can find nothing in them that will show him how to produce a child. Armitage's explanation of the mystery does nothing to clarify it; "Being able to bear a child takes more than just a female form. The secret is of child bearing is in her heart!" But the villian is unconvinced; "The answer is in the software. I know that's it."

He captures Yoko and holds her hostage, forcing her parents to attempt to rescue her from his own high tech weapons and robots. The family makes an attempt to escape but not before the damage done to Armitage exposes to her daughter her robotic systems through her flesh. At that point the daughter (at four) is put in the same position Ross Sylabus was in years earlier, faced with the dilemma of whether to accept her mother knowing that she is a robot. At this point the little girl clings to her father and refuses to talk to her mother/that robot, confused and frightened. In her eyes, Armitage rediscovers the sense of shame of what she is again, this time not in the eyes of society in general but in the eyes of her precious daughter and fears that she has lost her forever even if they escape. It takes a long time but Armitage's defense of her family to the point of near self-sacrifice and self-destruction finally draws out the child who begs her mommy to stop because if she keeps going on she will die. In the end, the villian is exposed and the family escapes back to Mars, to a planet seeing a brand new day. The family is now fully intergrated and fully established in Martian society like a typical human family but with the full consent and understanding of all of its members. Armitage is now completely identified as human and free. (But we are not allowed to just leave things there without being further disturbed. Be sure to catch the redivus at the end of the credits.)

In the movie-world, the characters including Armitage herself, are faced with the dilemma of deiciding what Armitage is. Everyone who looks at her sees to things simultaneously; (1) a creative and autonomous agent with concerns and values and the feelings and emotions that go with them and with the capacity to reason, to be aware, and form intentions to think about things and more particularly about people, and (2) a machine whose componantry can be completely described and analyzed with precision, an artifical apparatus, an instrument or tool. The movies make it clear that the assumption that Armitage is nothing but a machine is not safe no matter how well we understand her make-up. Is Armitage just the machine or is she a soul within the machine? This point is underscored in several ways, in the larger debate about robot rights that forms the cultural backdrop, in the personal dilemmas that confront the human characters who know her personally, and in the symbol of childbearing as an evidence of life that cannot be cashed out from the software. The basic dilemma that all face is whether Armitage should be treated as a mere means as the Seconds are and as we take it that any robot would and should be or should Armitage be treated as an end in herself. She especially needs to know that Ross will perfect in his own attitude and with full awareness the vision of Naomi as an end in the relation of covenantal partner love. What will the man do when he hears, "Oh Ross, I love you so much!"?

The basic problem is, even given what we know about Armitage in the hard science, we are confronted with a conflict of metaphysical visions about her, that these visions underlie the moral dilemma about how to treat her, and that this choice is not one that can be made abstractly since she herself plays a role in the decision by our characters always being in communication and relationship with her. Once the decision is made and one makes a commitment, one can begin to cultivate the relationship; the commitment opens up communication and interaction, especially in the case of Yoko for whom the decision to accept her mother as her mother is simutaneously expressed in her resuming commincation with her to plead with her to stop. Were Ross and Yoko (especially Ross of course) rational in the fictional future world to wholey commit 'heart and soul' to the autonomous agency and personal devotion of Armitage, which is to ask if they were rational to accept the existence of Armitage as something other than a mere machine? The decision called for was one of total commitment on metaphysically desputable premises and yet the decision carried with it finally kind of intelligible certainty as to what to do. Is it really the cas that no explicit reason counts as having "no reason at all"?

But this dilemma in the Armitage world is directly analogous to our real situation with each other. It is not possible for us to take each other seriously as mere machines but that is the picture that science puts forward as most credible -- that there is waiting some complete description of human nature along Hobbesian materialist lines. But if we must pause at the idea of a robot being nothing but a machine when exhibiting such characteristic traits of personal agency we must also pause at the same phenomena with regard to each other. The question Ross faces as to whether to take Armitage to wife is faced in a similar way to any of us taking anyone as our spouse. This is made much weaker if the typical understanding of marriage is of the no-fault divorce type of contract, but this model fails to capture the profound need for personal devotion in the case of Ross and Armitage. The decison is as to whether we treat each other as ends (humans) rather than mere means (robots). I think that we have demonstrated that we have faced the dilemma and are committed to the existence of a world of 'non-natural' persons by our actions. Armitage is a way into metaphysics.

Finally, this not only applies to the issue of personhood but to the universe as a whole. Through an evolutionary account we seem to have a completely full potential description of the universe as a lucky machine. But the phenomenology of the universe may suggest something more if anything strikes us about its design and complex functionality or even the commitment to the existence of rational relational agents. If evolution were true there could be no geneuinely altruistic conduct by any person and we would have to treat appearances to the contrary as needing further explanation of their true selfish roots. But we are in no better position to deny the existence of love as we are to deny the existence of the lover. The question remains open and the sKeptical and suspicious appraoch remains rebuttable even though not refutable. We may make as deep a commitment to the existence of an agapistic theism if we were to discover one in history as we are to one another in marriage with full communication practices fully in place, such as prayer and worship. Thus, there is a philsophical approach to legitmate faith to which Armitage points, a way which shows that religious belief and practice need not be motivated by mere sentiment or convenience, a kind of "existential rationalism".

Troubles with Comments

A friend of mine indicated IRL with me that he was having a hard time leaving comments on the comment system. If you are finding it impossible to leave a comment, please leave a comment. Thanks.

New Articles linked

Check out some of the added links to articles. Since I am working on a review of Namcy Pearcey's book, Total Truth, which in part tries to revive the presuppositionalist (in the inclusivistic and inductivistic sense of Dooyeweerd, Carnell, Henry, and Schaeffer, and not Van Til) approach to theology and apologetics that was characteristic of much of early to middle twentieth century British-American Evangelical thought, it is good to find some links trying to forward the neglected discussion (see the David Naugle links). It shows that evangelicals, departing from the supernaturalis vulgaris of 19th century Evangelical theology (and also demonstrating some of our typical "Johnny-come-a-generation-too-lately" behavior toward academic fads -- in this case Neo-Kantianism), had a prior claim to be contributing to the interest in Post-modernism of the non-hardcore and somewhat constructive sort.

Because of the great personal debt I owe to the life and ministry to the late Francis Schaeffer on the plus side, and because such an approach proved to be almost totally unworkable in an actual professional university enviroment of academic philosophy and religion on the minus side, I have a special interest in Pearcey's work. However, it seems to me that it's a case of many soldiers trying to siege a castle with an impressive looking wooden battering ram against a solid metal door, failing to make a dent and knocking themselves senseless in the process, staggereing around dazed for a significant length of time, and then finally coming to themselves asking "What was it that we were doing? Oh yes, we were taking this castle with this battering ram" completely oblivious to the results of their first try, and thus trying again.

Christians tend to miscalculate the current fashion for post-modernity as lightening of the standards of scepticism and a return to the situatedness of knowledge, and thus expect that since they also have a perspective, the Christian scholar will finally get a place at the table. But academic post-modernity is not essentially different from modernity in its foundational premises (dispite all the talk about "anti-foundationalism". One can see this in Neitzche's three senses of truth (1) "truth" means that everyone is necessarily commited to reductionistic and naturalistic account of the world, (2) therefore "truth" means that there is no truth about persons, art, morals,God, anything of the huamities sort, (3) therefore "truth" is only what we will with absolute intrepidity to be true in the areas just mentioned. Modernity focuses on (1), post-modernity on (3). They get into fights but it is fraternal warfare. There really is no dawning tolerance of a plurality of views. Post-modernity is as materialistic as modernity is. The gate-keepers remain vigilent against Christian softness on worldviews.

This is not completly true. People were suprised to find a genuinely Kierkegaardian element in Derrida (just as in the case of Wittgenstein's Tractatus 7) but he died before his membership in good standing could be revoked. But it is generally true enough that alert Christians graduating college are already being wisely made leary by experienced advisors to avoid no-win situations in higher academics. This is true enough that Alister McGraith is starting to suggest that Christians invest more in "organic scholarship", scholarship outside the usual institutions and accreditations. This works for Nancy Pearcy whose main educational institutions are Christian hot houses, to be sure very nice and prestigous ones in Christian circles, but hot houses all the same.

I want to give everyone another chance and not give up yet. There is always something I missed.

The 'Quirk' Problem

In my "keeping it real" post below, I raised some objections to a standard presentation of the sort of kalam cosmological argument at someone else's site. The argument has as a crucial premise that an actual infinite in time cannot exist. The premise is supported by refering to some standard paradoxes of infinity. But since we have a well worked out system of transfinite mathemetics, it seemed ridiculous now to say that we cannot conceive of such an actual infinite consistently.

However, at Peter Suber's educational site, he makes reference to a problem for transfinite math which he calls the 'quirk' problem. His presentation is so clear I won't add anything to it. Just see the link. This problem is a problem which suggests that transfinite math is inconsistent. So it seems that defenders of the kalam argument are not on bad ground by resisting objections based on the conceivability of an actual infinite.

If he's right, at least I'll be able to rebut demands to eat an aleph-null amount of crow.

Welcome to international visitors.

This blog has a device which indicates the parts of the world which recent visitors may hail from. At this time among the last 100 visits we have had guests from China, the Phillipines, Cyprus, Austria, Hungary, Brazil, Argentina, Britian, Jamaica, Australia, and the Carribean Islands. All though no doubt many of these are just "passing through" for all I know, it excites me to have any contact at all with folks from around the world. I honestly hope you find something useful to you here.

At this time, I am leading an adult study group on the history of the Christian Missionary Movement in the world. We are about to finish up the 19th century, the great missionary century for Protestant missions. We have already looked at the 16th century, the great missionary century of Jesuit missions and the day of great missionary expansion through Russia and into North America by the Orthodox church. We are taking a friendly approach to all the great Christian traditions and trying to learn from the mistakes of the past in order to form equitable mission strategy and practices. As a part of a congregation of a local church, we are trying to do our part as a sending organization to learn to think critically but act faithfully.

It is difficult on a format like this to demonstrate one's willingness to appreciate the local culture and positive goods each tribe of humanity has to offer. And I am especially handicaped by the usual American arrogance of knowing only English (I do know a little Spanish and Hebrew, but otherwise only Koine Greek). At least, anyone who has the skill to play on the internet partakes somewhat of its common salad bar style culture and that the skill requirement to enter into the Internet world is relatively low. Still, with the arrival of the Internet, the world is digitally divided into the "haves" and "have nots" -- large portions of the population of the world are without access to educational and employment opportunities. To reach out and form contacts with internationals via the Internet amounts still to a default "silk strategy". (I teach a course on the ethics of technology and cyberspace which is exceedingly helpful in raising moral sensetivity to the ethical concerns of the Internet as well as the ethical concerns of missions.)

Another problem with missions via internet is that true missionary activity and non-violent evangelism depends on being able to identify and stand shoulder to shoulder with the host culture in their own struggles as far as it is ethically possible to do so. Through patience and friendship and common cause, the host culture is in a position to appreciate a point of view through appreciating those who hold it. However, the Internet makes such identification systematically dificult. On the one hand, it involves constant tradeoffs between intimacy on the one hand and security on the other. One cannot risk disclosing oneself to another without simultaneously disclosing oneself to a million faceless and some even hostile contacts. A Christian's faith may lead him to make extraordinary risks but such risks should still be carefully calculated. One of the proven dangers of blogging is that one comes to know too much too fast about a person. Therefore, the important first step is to secure anonymity in the begining and release from that gradually through prudent disclosures.

But on the other hand, since it is so easy to inadvertantly or intentionally misrepresent oneself on the Internet, no one can think that they have a reliable picture of the character of the poster or blogger from their Internet presence. According to Aristotle, true friendship is based on the ability of each person to perceive the character and virtue of the other, but the remoteness of the representation of ourselves and the fact that such a representation is so much under our control rather than secured by fixed and reliable associations, makes all such presentations significantly ineffective. So even setting aside the common occurance of hypocracy by Christians, it may just as well be the case that you don't ever really get to meet true Christians on the 'net.

Still, it is possible to make too much of this. We feel confident in other print media that we can glean something of the character of the source. For example, we would not likely want to say that we know nothing of the real Dickens or the real Doestyevsky from reading their works. In a certain sense we are confronted with a dilemma of faith whenever we face the internet, the great disinformazia highway. It is a risk whether or not and to what extent we put any credit in material on the 'net. The dilemma of faith a 'net source is analogous to the dilemma of faith in Christ. Walker Percy described the gospel as being like a message in a bottle. By this he meant the Christianity was not knowledge in the scientific sense but more like news (evangelion = good news), more specificly like someone stranded on an island getting a message in a bottle that a ship is coming to rescue him. If a stranded person were to receive such a message, he would be faced with the dilemma of beliving it and getting his hopes up which would do him a lot of good by increasing his chances for survival, but at the same time risking the possibility that he might be wrong, that he might be believing something false, and that he will be disapointed later, or not believe the message, and thus not risk being in error but also remaining unhealthily discouraged about his prospects.

The Internet with all of its information/disinformation is one huge message in a bottle. The same medium brings us both treasures of useful information as well as piles of unmitigated rubbish. We make decisions almost tacitly about what to accept and what to reject on the internet. It would be interesting to compare our belief policies on different occasions to see if they are all consistent and whether there isn't a general set of criteria thatwe rely on to decide whether to accept what we read. How would reading the New Testament say be affected by that criteria?

The Gnu keeping it real on the web.

Dr. Steven Cowan, fellow Mississipian, was kind enough to reply to my objections to the Craig Kalam Argument's denial of an actual infinite in time. (It's my fondness for Leibniz, I promise.)

The Syracuse Comic Book Expo: Remarks

Your beloved Gnu was at our first really successful comic book convention in Syracuse NY. Syracuse has been trying to have such a gathering for a long time but this one finally pulled it off. Our town has become a real center for comic book and game hobbies especiall for upstate NY. A new store opened up just in time to participate in the weekends festivities. This convention was held in the newly restored local landmark, the Palace.

I proved to be a real comic addict and wound up staying until the closing of the tables. Unfortunately, I talked my friend into coming with me and it turned out to be a real waste of time and money for him. The fee was ten bucks which is not to terrible for a convention except that your basicly paying for the priviledge of spending more money. (Oh the money I spent!) But it was my birthday week so there's your rationale, right?

The best thing about the con was just being a trip down memory lane. I was more interested in recovering issues from past days about comic storylines that I really cared about at the time. I found some cheap old Marvel Amazing Adventures, featuring Killraven, a kind futuristic Sparticus who seeks to free human kind from the evil tyranny of the Martians. There was a run in recent history trying to ressurect the Kilraven line but seemed toi me to fail to get the vibe right. I also picked up Starlin's "Dreadstar and Company" run from the newbie Epic comics, even though I've already read that years ago. Also some "Howard the Duck" from Steve "born out of time comics-wise" Gerber. And also some Mike Baron titles; "Magnus", "Nexus", and the Badger story line where we finally meet "Larry".

I also got my money's worth in celebrity conversations. I got to speak with Scott Beatty ("Nightwing Year One") which was interesting since I manged to fit Kurt Busiek into the conversation. But the highlight was certainly getting to shake the hand of Russell Streiner and meet John Russo who both have producer and screenwriter credit for Romero's "Night of the Living Dead". Mr. Streiner also played "Johnny" the first casuality of the zombie attack at the begining of the movie but who still manages to return to take his girlfriend out for dinner. Finally, I met a guy who claimed that he knew Mike Baron before he began to write comics. he told me that one day they were both in an office together and Mike said, "The comics they put out these days are crap. They should put out something that is more intelligent." And the guy said, "If that's what you think, then you should go out there and write your own comics". And Mike said, "Alright, I will!". I shook the guy's hand. Just in case he was telling the truth, we owe him a huge debt.

I also spoke with the wife of the individual who arranged the whole thing. They were not a local shop owner, just a couple with a huge stack of comic books in their garage that her husband faithfully collected over the years and who do most of their comic trade on-line. Thank you for your support of the hobby in Syracuse.

Finally, I got to talk with the owner and operator of the local SRS (formerly Sub Rosa) productions, a local film company that does trade in the distribution of tons of B-movie hack and slash films but also makes some of his own original movies through the company right here in town. A lot of this work is not necessarily of any redeeming value, some of it was straight up porn, but I was interested in local enterprises and he cast a very useful perspective on the scene. I picked up a disc for one of his original pictures that he filmed here and told me was aimed at a higher standard of entertainment than some of his other works.

Except for the new store, every shop with which I was already aquainted with had a stand at the con, and also just some people dealing outr of their garage. There were suprisingly few costumes. I wore my "Dr. Doom" tie. I also picked up some very cheap copies of Gary Gygax material.

Was it fun? Well, it was nostalgic, enticing, and distracting, but not necessarily the full joi de vie. It was a lot of beat up old guys like me with fond ten-year old memories we rarely take out and l;ook at. I think it was more the male fellowship over our geekyness that was working for me.

The role of personal commitments in moral dilemmas

I was explaining my cirriculum to my good friend and supervisor and was suprised by his apparently alarmed reaction. In turns he was wondering out loud whether I was advocating something like relativism, dogmatizing my students, or not teaching only possibilities without subtlty. I was suprised at his reaction which forced me to want to say more clearly what I wanted to say. He must of thought I turned into Richard Rorty. I was at a loss to know why he had such a bad take on my presentation.

Here goes. There are cases where we seem to confront situations where our moral convictions come into conflict forcing us to reflect more deeply on our moral reasoning and beliefs. One direction that often proves helpful when there does not appear to be a false dilemma or a lack of information relevent to the case is to examine and clarify our moral concepts. It is helpful here to have an understanding of various moral theories -- utilitarianism, deontology, justics as fairness, virtue ethics -- in order to understands better the moral terms and their possible exsception cases.

Now suppose that even after doing all that you still have conflicts remaining. This is probably because the competing alternatives represent incommensurable goods that cannot be both satisfied under the conditions of the choice being made. In such a case the choice is going to come down to us or even me and what we or I think is personally important. This presupposes that we or I have a set of personal commitments -- to self, certain others, certain communities, or ideals, or religious commentments -- that guide me in my choices. But then here is an argument, in order to be fully equiped to deal with situation of moral dilemmas, we ought to have some personal commitments, some vision of the good life.

Of course, this argument assumes that such cases are possible in the first place but it seems to me that one might be impressed about how common such cases really are even though most cases can be handled without resorting to personal commitments just by appealing to whatever other moral framework is most appropriate. Consider the following textbook case:

An engineer is invited to work with a company that is developing groundbreaking surface to ground automated tracking. It is a great opportunity for the engineer to be on the ground floor of cutting edge research, not to mention the extra money will make it more easy to meet his financial obligations. However, the technology is being developed for a missle guidance system. What should the engineer do? It is not clear that other moral theories will be of enough help to him once one goes into the details.

If the engineer is a pacifist, he certainly will refuse the option. But if the engineer is a "political realist" who favors developing the best national defence, he may be inclined to accept the offer. But neither decision seems to be right while the other is wrong. The realist cannot complain that the pacifist is morally warped for desiring a world without war and advocating universal disarmament, nor can the pacifist complain that realist is wrong to want the means of self-defense from possible attacks from others. They both express morally approbationary views. But one is going to have to decide based on their own beliefs and values.

Both options respect the libertarian rights and actual liberty duties of society. Both views have a pro-attitude to respect for their obligations to society whether properly moral, legal, or contractual. Both have varios virtues characteristicly related to them. But they both cannot be co-realized.

Such personal commitments are not mere desires but intelligible and sustained choices. They are not mere private sentiment but serve as a basis for the formation of communities or at least parties. And they both express good will and appeal to objective goods. So my view is not saying that all personal commitments are acceptible, only those that exhibit certain good making features: they have to be rational preferences that express a systematicly ordered set of values that are consistent with basic duties, rights, and fairness to others and with respect for keeping promises, etc.

Such a personal commitment is necessary in order for moral people to act as autonomous rational agents in cases of moral indecision where common frameworks prove insufficient. Rather than ceasing to be moral because it goes out of bounds of the legitmate demands of society on us, not only does it motivate action in accord with those moral demands (because ex hypothesi all availble options are consistent with keeping such demands) but it assures that such demands will be met no matter what. Consequently, we have a moral imperitive to stand for something.

This view is not relativistic but admits the possibility of an objective plurality of goods that cannot all be realized. One way to say it is that there is more than one legitmate version of a good life and we have to decide which one is most appropriate for us. Nor then does tis view advocate dogmatic absolutism, the claim that there is one and only one way of living or doing well.

Finally I am not doing anything more than stating the view. Perhaps there is good reason not to expect exception cases for the sake of holding a good theory or perhaps the idea of incomensurable goods is somehow incoherent. But by making such a view available to my students, it seems to me that I am fulfilling a public trust not just by informing my students of all the possibilities but also going the extra step to make sure my students are exposed to all the resources available to them to make sure they have all they need to make good moral decisions in real life.

Datrina and the Liche Lord explained (finally)

Some were a bit mystified as to the point of the "Datrina and the Liche Lord" story experiment (see link). After giving a more than adequate amount of time for everyone to puzzle over it and then lose interest, I now offer an explanation.

Here's the point. Many people think that the case for intellegent design is inconclusive. The reason is that there are evolutionary stories that explain the phenonema picked out for design as well as the design inference and since that is true there is no basis for prefering one view over the other.

More specificly, the necessary conditions for any kind of life on any planet in the universe are extremely narrow; life contains vastly more information in it than is constained in the universe itself. Accordingly, it seems that life is a significant outcome and thus the best explanation is that it came about by intelligent design. However, it may be that this universe is but one of an infinite many universes expressing all the possible original conditions. Consequently most of them have no life in them and we happen to be in the one that does. Of course by hypothesis we have no contact with other such universes experimentally but we cannot rule out the possibility that such is the case.

Or can we? Can we at least come up with some reason or another that gives us a rational basis for prefering the intelligent design scenario to the multiple universe scenario?

Some philosophers think that we can based on the following analogy. Suppose an all powerful god exists. This god calls into his presence two angels, call them Gabe and Mike. To both angels he says the following: "I'm going to flip a coin. If it lands on heads, I will create one world. Then I will roll a ten-sided die and if it lands on a '1', then I will create life on that world. However, if the coin lands on tails, I will create ten worlds. Then I will roll a ten-sided die once for each world until I roll a '1' and for that world and no other of the ten I will create life." Then he sends Gabe and Mike away to go about their business telling them nothing more. The two go their seperate ways.

Later, a reliable messenger comes to Gabe and tells him, "There is a world with life on it." Suppose Gabe asks himself whether the coin toss came out heads or tails. He will reasonably conclude that it is more likely that it came out to be tails since the tails procedure was more likely to produce a world with life on it then the heads procedure.

However, instead of being told anything, Mike is put to sleep. When Mike comes to, he wakes up on the surface of a world with life on it. Suppose Mike asks himself whether the coin landed heads or tails. He will reasonably conclude that it is more likely that it came out to be heads since if it were tails, it is more likely that Mike would have come to on a planet without life on it.

Of course, the heads result is analogous to the intelligent design hypothesis and the tails result is analogous to the multiple universe hypothesis. The a priori plausibility of both hypotheses is analogous to the condition of being informed of two possibilities equally likely (that is, having no other evidence besides conceivability for their plausibility). The critic assumes that all we have to work with is the mere fact of life and thus thinks that our situation is most similar to Gabe's in the story and thus concludes that the the multiple worlds hypothesis is more reasonable to hold. But the intelligent design theorist responds that it is just as important how we come to the fact that life exists as the fact itself. And the fact is something we discover by being there to discover it. So our situation is more analogous to Mike's situation in the story than it is to Gabe's. Consequently, we ought to think that the intelligent design hypothesis is more reasonable. So in spite of belief otherwise, we do have a reason to prefer intelligent design to the multiple worlds hypothesis.

What the story does is it gives us an analogy like the Mike and Gabe analogy and seeks to pump people's intuitions about this. If there are several fights going on, its no suprise if one of them has a fighter with a bad ticker and thus no reason to think that there was any design behind it. But if there is only one contest and the fighter collapses from a heart attack, it is more reasonable to think there had been some design in bringing that about. But the dwarf's only evidence was that she was there when it happened. If you thank then that this is a reason for thinking that there was to be only one contest and that thus the Liche Lord assisted in the escape, you would also think that this is a reason to think that the sword had been taken in payment by the Liche Lord and further that the sword that appeared in the grotto was not really the Sword of Shanana but most likely the Liche Lord himself up to his old polymorhing tricks. Thus, Datrina shouldn't take the sword.

(Of course, one could not mistake the reference to the "Invisible Gardner", a classic case in the literature on intelligent design and verifiability.)

I don't have an original bone in my body. Thanks to Dr. Dean Zimmerman for introducing and explaining this to me though the errors in presentation are mine.

What is lacking in Presuppositionalism

Philosophaster, a sincerely inquiring non-Christian, asked me (the Gnu) why I didn't accept the Protestant form of apologetics known as Van Tillianism or presuppositionalism. Since I amaze myself so easily I thought that others might be interested in this response. One can find the full context and a presuppositonalists reply at the link in the title.

Here are some things I find lacking in presuppositional apologetics. I have some historical objections such as that I don't think presuppositionalist expositions of either the Bible or the history of theology in general of of the Reformation era in particular avoids special pleading. But setting those sorts of objections aside, I think that I can defer to your post for some of the main ones.

Presuppositionalism is meant to be understood as a substantive ideology of how to argue, rather than just an introduction of perhaps new or underconsidered types of arguments. You are not merely logically or evidentially mistaken if you neglect the presuppositionalist argument (also known as the Transcendental Argument for the existence of God, or TAG for short), you are morally wrong (you are starting a tleast tacitly with an affirmation of your self-sufficiency without God) and it is not clear why this is so. Presuppostionalists claim that previous approaches to theistic proofs (such as Aquinas, Descartes, or Paley) reflect this moral error and the TAG does not, but is seems clear that TAG is not really different from arguments like the cosmological argument. (E.g A frequent illustration that Van Til uses to illustrate the difference between TAGs and traditonal arguments is this: The presuppositonalist does not argue for the existence of floorboards under the floor by compiling facts about furniture in the room. The presupposionalist notes that the very existence of furniture in the room presupposes the existence of floorboards in the floor. But this exactly illustrates a causal argument as one finds in traditional proofs.) If it were just about identifying another type of argument such as TAG, there would be no in principle debate between presuppositonalists and evidentialists. Any good argument is a good argument.

Another set of problems are the claims that there is no nuetrality between the believer and the unbeliever and that all reasoning is circular reasoning. This thesis is typically understood in terms of a strong holism about the meanings of concepts in propositions, a kind of uber-Quineanism. Another example from Van Til's writing is his claim that the non-believer takes the evidences offered by the theist and throws them on top of his own presupposition of the ultimacy of chance and concludes that evidence for the ressurection only shows that wierd things happen from time to time. If this claim is to be sufficiently weighty and merely trivially obvious, there must be some strong basis for asserting that itr leads to the claim that there is no nuetrality. Since claims are thrown back upon different presupposed worldviews, their interpretation in one worldview is incomensurable with the interpretation of the same clain in another worldview and so the appearance of identical claims being made is false. This incomensuarbility extends even to claims about the canons of logic and evidence so that what counts as logical and evident to one does not count as such to another. Consequently, there is no common ground whatsoever between the believer and the unbeliever.

This creates a problem for presentations of TAG which assume a common agreement about the premises and the validity of the conclusion that comes from them. The sincere offering of TAG as an argument is just as problematic as offering a deductive cosmological or Baysean argument. So it seems that the approach itself contradicts its supposed foundations.

It turns out then that the real approach of presuppostionalism is to push each divergent system of thought to its fullest logical implication, and then ask each reasoner to adopt all of them as holistic webs of belief for the sake of argument, and argue that only the Christian web of belief does not run into self-defeat. Now this proposal seems to assume that there is a higher order neutrality; we cannot be neutral about beliefs within webs but we can be neutral about the webs. But this seems arbirary to me, why is there not a higher order web about webs of belief and if so does not that mean that the nuetrality problem reiterate itself? Secondly, the approach is not in principle unavailable to traditional ways of understanding Christian argument. The impossibility of the contrary argument, if sound, is yet another available candidate to the traditional theist, so the approach does not add to the case for presuppositionalism as an argumentative ideology. This is bolstered by the many instances of non-presuppositonalists employing this kind of reasoning, like CS Lewis in his book on miracles. Thirdly, the task seems infinite, since besides looking at the the concretely available worldviews, we need also to look at all the logically possible worldviews and that seems to be an unfinishable task for people who need to argue today for the Christian worldview claim. Christians will have to be happy for a "Christianity is true as far as we can tell but the inquiry remains open" result, which may not be such a bad thing (e.g. Nuerath's ship). But finally, I think we already know enough to realize that the argument is not sound. The main rival that this argument attacks is philosophical naturalism but as Elizibeth Anscombe demonstrated in her debate with CS Lewis about the afore mentioned book, the claim that naturalism is self-defeating is false, and therefore the impossibility of the contrary argument is unsound (in spite of whatever existential difficulties naturalists might run into in ordinary life, such us worries that they might be making love to a zombie).

Finally, the final metaphysical view of presuppositonalism is a version of objective Idealism, which in itself I am not too uncomfortable with. But it seems to me that the presuppositionalist position is logically unstable between the metaphysical objective idealism that Van Til really wants and a kind of ontological relativism that some of his followers have drifted into. My theory is that the development of presuppositonalism from Van Til on parallels the development of 19th century German Idealism from Hegel into both right wing uber-reichtists and left wing relativists in history, which may point to a concrete expression of that instability. This also raises the question of whether or not Van Til qua ontological relativist who insists on his own version of ontology isn't just a fideist after all.

Perhaps a more charitiable way of thinking of the claim that all reasoning is circular reasoning is to say that this is drawing attention to commonly observed philosophical problem, namely it seems that in questioning about the issues that seem most important to us, the best we have been able to do is come up with deductive arguments that are valid and may be sound but which remain unconvincing since eventhough they are not explicitly circular they still beg the question by posing a premise which is just as controverted by the opponant as the conclusion is, or with inductive arguments where one of the canons of "best explanation" or "relevant analogy" or "prior probability" is just as controverted by the opponant as the conclusion is. In fact, this seems to be the actual reason qua philosophy that some people give for being attracted to Van Til as offering a way to negotiate this deadlock. Unfortunately, Van Til explains this deadlock as being due to sin, but none of the features described seem to have much to do with morality and seem to have more to do with the common features of thought whether of the believer or of the unbeliever. One possible way of relating the two is to say that it is precisely our morally qualified dispositions that make us reject the premises or canons because we refuse to accept the conclusion and reasoning permits this. For example, Thomas Nagel suggests in his book "The Last Word" that one reason philosophers generally reason as the do is that they succumb to much to a fear of religion and he admits that he too is afraid and even troubled by his brilliant colleagues who remian faithful to some religious tradition or another. He says its not just that he thinks that theistic proofs are unconvincing, the thought that there exists an absolute being that may legitimately dictate to him what he must and must not do is postively abhorent to him. So moral dispositions may explain utlimately why some people embrace some pictures or the world and not others and why it remains true that some are wrong and some are right. So rather than being a gateway to metaphysical relativism it might be the only alternative to it. But this suggestion works for unbeliever as well as the believer since it could well be the willful ignorance and self-imposed blindness of the beliver or his fear that life is ultimately meaningless without God that makes him resist the truth. As a Christian, I may accept such a radical view as consistent with my account of depravity and to preserve the metaphysical realism my view needs, but I admit that it is not philosophically satisfying. So I keep looking for more.

So my conclusion is that presuppostionalism claims way too much for itself and may in fact prove too much for itself. I tend to think of it in the same way as the comment a professor might make on a student's paper; "What you have written is both good and original, but what is good is not original and what is original is not good."