Theological Zombies to the Rescue!

I was listening to Skydive Phil’s debate with Randal Rauser recently and it occurred to me that I have a solution to the Problem of Evil.

I went part of the way in Theological Zombies already, but in that I was mostly aiming at the problem associated with the absence of compossibility, or to put it less abstrusely, the problem of a supposedly good, all-knowing, all-powerful god creating this universe in which many of the sentient beings with whom god apparently wants to have a loving relationship (being saved) will end up being damned (being sent to hell, being extinguished or merely being set apart depending on the type of god).

Phil and Randal were talking specifically about the suffering of animals and how that is inconsistent with the existence of a tri-omni god.  They danced around some of the standard defences, that animals are simply fleshy automatons (Descartes’ solution) or that animals don’t feel pain as we do (WLC’s solution) or that demons might be to blame (Plantinga’s silly argument, but only as a possible defeater raised in order to avoid a logical problem) or that the suffering of animals is somehow necessary to achieve a greater good (as I recall Randal tended to lean this way).

Now, in the Theological Zombies argument I present a way in which everyone can be saved.  The fact that there are worlds in which you may be saved but others are cannot is resolved by observing that god is not limited to creating one single universe.  As many universes as are needed can be created and largely populated with zombies that act precisely like other people would in the same circumstances, people who would either be saved in a universe with less suffering or who need a universe with even more suffering in it to be saved.  Therefore, the only beings in this universe who are not zombies are those for whom salvation is compossible with all the other real, non-zombie inhabitants.

If that means that god needs to create billions and billions of universes, that’s ok, because god is not limited in power, or by time, or anything (except perhaps logic).  But it does mean that anyone in this particular universe who is real and is being saved in it is a bit of a scumbag by virtue of it not being possible to be saved in any universe with less pain and suffering in it.

While I was specifically focusing on how Theological Zombies could avoid the problem with consigning so many people to hell or whatever, I can see now that the same argument applies to animals.  For those humans being saved in this universe, it is not necessary that real animals need to suffer.  All that is needed is for there to be theological zombie animals which act precisely as a real animal would if it were to suffer.  Which makes the people who are being saved in this universe even worse scumbags since they need those animals to suffer in order to be saved.

The positive thing though is that for the relatively low cost of accepting that pretty much nothing in this universe is actually real, and that you are a total scumbag who needs innocent animals to suffer, you can believe in whatever god you like and avoid the Problem of Evil altogether.

Plantinga, if he wants, is welcome to use this as one of his defeaters – at least it’s a lot less silly than pain and suffering demons.

Return to BS5

Sometimes, you return to something that you worked hard on in the past and an obvious aspect leaps out at you that wasn't obvious at the time.  In The Fans of Plantinga's BS5, I was arguing against the claim:

This was primarily because this is used to claim that, since we cannot prove that (a maximally great) god does not exist, it is possible that (a maximally great) god does exist, furthermore since we cannot prove that (a maximally great) god is does not exist necessarily it is possible that (a maximally great) god does exist necessarily and it therefore follows that (a maximally great) god does exist (necessarily).  Sounds like BS, right?

Anyway, I also argued against a more complex version of the argument (raised by cpdavey):

1. ◊□A (Assumption for Conditional Proof (CP))

2. ~□A (Assumption for Reductio Ad Absurdum (RAA))

3. ~~◊~A (2 E2)

4. ◊~A (3 Double Negation (DN))

5. □| ◊~A (4 S5-reit)

6. □◊~A (5 nec intro)

7. □~□~~A (6 E1)

8. □~□A (7 DN)

9. ~◊~~□A (8 E2)

10. ~◊□A (9 DN)

11. ◊□A & ~◊□A (1,10 Conjunction)

12. ~~□A (1-11 RAA)

13. □A (12 DN)

14. ◊□A -> □A Q.E.D. (1-13 CP)

I concluded that the Reductio Ad Absurdum wasn't actually necessary, because you can do it like this:

1. ◊□A (Initial position)
2. A <--> ~B (Assumption for Logical Fiddle)

3. ◊□~B (Substitution of 2 into 1)

4. ~~◊~~□~B (3 double DN)

5. ~□~□~B (4 E2)

6. ~□~□A (Substitution of 2 into 5)

7. □A (6 n2)

8. ◊□A -> □A Q.E.D. (1-7)

But here we can see that the step between (6) and (7) is not valid (because it's reversed) - so there's a problem which is being disguised by the process of going through the Reductio Ad Absurdum.

I pretty much left it at that, inviting the reader to point out where the problem is, if they could see it.  That was five years ago.

So, what was the obvious thing that recently leaped out at me?  The proof put together, or at least presented by cpdavey relies rather heavily on the introduction of double negatives and swapping from ~□~ to ◊ and from ~◊~ to □.  Both of these latter two moves can be reversed (see Classical Modal Logic).  What it doesn't rely on, is the value of A.  Which means we can do this:

1. ◊~G (Initial weakish atheism position)
2. ~□~~G (1 classical modal logic)

3. ~~□~□~~G (2 n2, right way around)

4. □~□G (3 DN removed)

5. ~◊□G (4 classic modal logic)

This means we arrive at the same conclusion whether we assume that it is possible that there is no god (◊~G) or that it is not necessary that there is a god (~□G), namely that it is not possible that there is necessarily a god (~◊□G), which is precisely what we would expect.

Effectively all cpdavey was arguing was that if his presumption was correct, then assuming the truth of the opposite of his presumption would lead to a conclusion that his presumption was incorrect.  Which it did and which we would expect.  That's why there's no great problem within his "Reductio Ad Absurdum"  but there is when we run his proof with no RAA.  His whole argument came down to a "heads I'm right, tails you're wrong" sort of con.

The error is quite clear in Step 12 above, where cpdavey writes "12. ~~□A (1-11 RAA)".  Clearly the RAA started at Step 2, not Step 1.

Sometimes we just don't see things that are staring us in the face.  Perhaps I was trying too hard to be clever.  But then again, so was cpdavey, since the result that he needed to get his RAA to work was precisely the one he was aiming at, via use of the RAA, ie the fallacious claim that, given ◊□A, □A.

We Need to Talk about EAAN

(The title is a reference to "We need to talk about Kevin".  I'm using "EAAN" as if it sounded like "Ian".  I don't know if it does, but it's not relevant.  I’m just using a bit of a jokey title about the problems with the Evolutionary Argument Against Evolution.)

There is a relatively new take on Plantinga’s EAAN by Tyler McNabb.  While the original EAAN is certainly Plantinga's, there's not really too much between the two variants.  Fundamentally, the argument comes down to the claim that evolution doesn't "code" for truth or reality, that it only “codes” for survival.

In both variants, tigers are brought up as an example, so McNabb bravely continues to ignore the fact that tigers are from Asia (with a range that historically stretched as far as eastern Turkey) while humans are from Africa.  This is key, because while the illustrative use of tigers might be defended by saying "there were dangerous cats which would have taught humans to be wary of tigers" (particularly the cave lion which is thought to have been a species that specialised in killing humans, maybe more accurately hominids or perhaps just primates in general), this defence rips a hole in EEAN.

Both McNabb and Plantinga suggest that it is possible that an early human, let's call him Fred, might see a tiger and come up with all sorts of bizarre reasons for performing the adaptive behaviour necessary to avoid being eaten (McNabb adds the idea that Fred might think that the tiger is a witch and hence runs away because witches are dangerous).  Inherent in this idea is the presumption that any one of a wide range of cognitive processes (including patently faulty processes) might result in the adaptive behaviour.

What Plantinga and McNabb forget is that surviving once is not sufficient.  And having one generation survive is not sufficient.  For a genetic line to be successful, the carriers need to carry out the appropriate behaviour each and every time they come into close proximity with a tiger (or a lion, or a panther, or an elephant, or a hippopotamus, or a crocodile, or a snake, etc, etc).  At least until they've raised a child sufficiently long as to pass their genetic line on.

The most effective way for this to happen is not for random ideas to pop into the head of gene carriers when exposed to danger, but rather for the gene carriers to have the cognitive skills necessary to identify reality, understand the threats inherent in reality and the necessary action that, in reality, will optimise their survival chances (ie, like not jumping in a lake when chased by a tiger).

EAAN relies very heavily on both a misunderstanding about how important reality actually is to survival and a wild imagination as to how insane interpretations of reality might consistently lead to adaptive behaviour.  On the other hand, if the comprehension of reality is consistent with the survival of creatures that evolve, then it's no surprise that creatures that end up self-aware as a result of that process will be able to identify evolution as the mechanism that led to their success.

Planting Another Objection

In addition to the objections that I have detailed elsewhere (Planting a Demigod, Planting a Special Plea for Warrant

and Planting a Defeat), I reckon that Plantinga commits two equivocations.

First, he equivocates on the term belief.  I'm referring here to the types of beliefs that a pre-human, preverbal hominid might have, and the types of beliefs that modern human fully equipped with language might have.  The first set is an "animal" level of belief, which isn't going to be fully developed and isn't going to be affected by an existing world view that is shaped by cogitation.  Effectively, such a creature may think "potential threat" when confronted by a tiger but it isn't going to reason itself into thinking the sorts of things that Plantinga ascribes to Paul.  An example of "animal" level thinking is that of a horse.  A colt or a filly may be more curious than an adult horse, but it is still wary and all manners of things will scare it (ditto with an adult horse).

Even relatively small changes to a horse's environment will scare it, like a new bin, or a plastic bag rustling, or an unfamiliar human.  They spend most of their time afraid because, historically, being afraid of things and running away from them is a better survival option than being brave (that said, when in a paddock with wire fences, being pointlessly afraid is currently a worse option than being brave).  So what sorts of things are these horses believing when confronted with a new bin, or a plastic bag, or a new human?  Probably not much more than "this might be a threat".  A loud noise is a threat, wind is a threat, small birds are a threat, a hose is a threat (well, it might be a snake, and that’s a threat).  The other sort of beliefs that animals have are generally in the vicinity of "I might be able to eat/drink that" and "I should try to mate with/be mated by that".

The vast proportion of the evolution that resulted in humans, including the psychology of humans, happened well before we developed language.  Sure, our ability converse with each other and think about things might well have messed things up to the extent that someone like Paul might have lived on this planet for a very short time, but that's because his belief system was corrupted by too much thinking.  It's not really about evolution at all.  There's no reason to think that development of language should make humans better at comprehending reality.  It's entirely possible that we have become worse at it, but the ability to talk to each other has had such a huge positive impact that it counteracts any negative impact on reality comprehension and truth seeking.

Second, he equivocates on the term naturalism.  I think he is thinking of naturalism as an ideology which is clung to with the same fervour as a theist clings to her religion.  If naturalism were like that and held to like that by its adherents, then sure, "naturalism-plus" would likely be wrong.  But is there anyone who holds to that sort of naturalism in that way?  I think it's more generally true that those who align with naturalism could say something like "we're not 100% certain how everything works, we've got a good idea about a lot of it, but at the edges it's still quite vague and some of what we know today is provisional and might well be tossed out tomorrow as the result of a new scientific revolution just around the corner ... but that said, what we do know with considerable certainty is that it's not all down to some vaguely defined creator god - that simply doesn't make any sense and those championing the notion tend to be less than completely knowledgeable and completely reasonable, plus some of the god-related stories are frankly bizarre, so it’s not a stretch for us to not believe in that sort of thing".  Breathe, naturalist, breathe.

Deformed Epistemology

For some reason, there are some christians who find calling Plantinga’s “Reformed Epistemology” by another name, namely “Deformed Epistemology”, insulting.  They called it name-calling.  I think that’s a little unfair, so I’m going to put a little effort into defending the use of the term “deformed epistemology”.

First, we need to look at what is being either reformed or deformed – epistemology.  This is what Wikipedia has to say (I’ve tidied up the list though):

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge. Epistemology studies the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief. Much of the debate in epistemology centers on four areas: the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and how it relates to such concepts as truth, belief, and justification; various problems of scepticism; the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief; and the criteria for knowledge and justification.

Alternatively, there is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry:

Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one's own mind? Understood more broadly, epistemology is about issues having to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry.

There is also a Merriam-Webster dictionary entry:

the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity

Now I could go on adding text from the IEP (“Epistemology is the study of knowledge”), other dictionaries (like dictionary.com: “(epistemology is) a branch of philosophy that studies the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge”), other encyclopedias (like Britannica: “Epistemology (is) the study of the nature, origin and limits of human knowledge”) and papers on epistemology (JT Tennis in Epistemology, Theory, and Methodology in Knowledge Organization: “Epistemology is how we know”), but I think the point has been adequately made already – epistemology is about knowledge.

If we are going to reform (or deform) epistemology, then we are going to reform (or deform) something about how we interact with or think about knowledge. 

So, let’s look at Plantinga's deformed epistemology and specifically his "proper functionalist version of epistemic externalism" which he summarises in Warranted Christian Belief (p133):

Put in a nutshell, then, a belief has warrant for a person S only if that belief is produced in S by cognitive faculties functioning properly (subject to no dysfunction) in a cognitive environment that is appropriate for S’s kind of cognitive faculties, according to a design plan that is successfully aimed at truth. We must add, furthermore, that when a belief meets these conditions and does enjoy warrant, the degree of warrant it enjoys depends on the strength of the belief, the firmness with which S holds it

Note that, according to Plantinga, knowledge is warranted true belief rather than justified true belief:

That may not come as much of a surprise, given that this book is a sequel to Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function. In the first of those books I introduced the term ‘warrant’ as a name for that property—or better, quantity—enough of which is what makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief.

So ... is there a problem with Plantinga's deformed epistemology?

This might not come as a surprise, but I think there is.  Right off the bat, there is the assumption of a "design plan".  I understand that theists believe that there is, in some sense, a design plan to humans.  I do think it's possible to work backwards from a belief in a god, including a belief that one's belief in a god is a true belief and reach a belief that one has knowledge about the existence of a god.  Breaking it down a bit:

Is there a god?

  

 Do you believe there is a god?

Do you consider your belief to be a true belief?

Is there a truth (or god) detecting design plan in the human brain?

Is your brain working in accordance with the design plan (or is properly functioning)?

Does your belief with respect to god constitute knowledge?

Hopefully it can be seen that the only situation in which Plantinga's deformed epistemology both matters and works is one in which:

1) there is actually a god of the right sort,

2) there is actually a design plan for brains such that, when functioning properly, they seek and find truth (or detect the being that created the design plan),

3) the brain of the theist is actually functioning properly in accordance with that design plan, and

4) the believer does actually have the correct sort of belief about the god that exists.

If there is no god (or no god that fiddles with brains the way that it would have to in order to ensure that humans accurately and truthfully detect it), then Plantinga's argument falls in a big heap.  Remember that Plantinga’s
“reformed epistemology” involves warrant, that warrant is that which “makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief” and that a key element of warrant is that it involves “cognitive faculties functioning properly … according to a design plan”.

Now, it cannot be that a belief in a god (or a particular sort of god) is a “true belief” if there is no such god.  However, it is conceptually possible that that which “makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief” could exist even in the absence of a true belief so that a (false) belief that nevertheless has this quality (“warrant”) could be described as a “rational belief”.

Note that when you look for descriptions of “Reformed Epistemology”, you invariably get referred to Plantinga and his attempts to argue that religious belief may be rational.  IEP:

Reformed epistemology is a thesis about the rationality of religious belief.

A section on reformed epistemology appears in the SEP, but within the article on the Epistemology of Religion, an article which makes it clear that it is concentrating on questions of the justification of religious belief and ignoring questions as to whether “these beliefs count as knowledge or whether these beliefs are scientific”.

So, it seems, “reformed epistemology”, despite Plantinga’s protestations, isn’t about knowledge after all, but about the justification or rationality of belief.  It doesn’t really qualify as epistemology at all, or rather it would qualify as epistemology if and only if Plantinga’s god existed, which means he’s seriously begging the question with his terminology.

Note that a not uncommon defence by theists is that reformed epistemology is no more than the position that “belief in God, like belief in other persons, does not require the support of evidence or argument for it to be rational” (Kelly Clark, Without Evidence or Argument: A Defense of Reformed Epistemology).  So, when challenged, they are more than willing to step back from the appearance of any knowledge claim.  But what they are not stepping back from, and this is tricky bit, is the implication of a truth claim.

Reformed epistemology might claim that a belief in a god may be rational despite not having any evidence or argument in its support, but this is entirely contingent on there being a god and the belief in that god being true.  This is why I call this point of view deformed epistemology, it’s not really about knowledge at all, just about justifying (or warranting) belief in a god in the absence of evidence or convincing argument.  And, to the extent that it is an argument about knowledge (because Plantinga doesn’t step away from implying that warranted true belief is knowledge), it’s both begging the question and special pleading (because you can’t use the same approach on other things you might want to believe and claim as knowledge).

Is there anything about Plantinga's “deformed epistemology” that a person who is not already a committed believer should take seriously?  Does it do anything more than provide a fig leaf of rationality to someone who believes something that otherwise should not be believed without very good evidence and/or argument?

One God, Two Cups

If you want a headache then, so long as you are not a theist, a good destination is Craig-Land.  I was able to carry out a long meandering discussion on the nature of “objective moral values” over a period of more than three months and, while a little frustrating at times, this discussion was reasonably stable – we knew what we are talking about and we pretty much stayed on track.  Not so in another thread on the “Ontological Argument”, which took off a few weeks later.

My claim in this thread, a thread that I initiated, was that Craig continues on a cheat in the modal logic version Ontological Argument that is initially committed by Plantinga and I posed the questions: “Are there people who are seriously persuaded by this argument?  Surely some of you have worked out that something is not quite right in it?”

This claim attracted the attention of self-described logicians who wanted to prove to me that Plantinga’s BS5 is actually a logically valid argument.  Because this was not precisely what I was saying (remember I was claiming that Plantinga and Craig were cheating, not that the argument was not "a logically valid argument"), I claimed that this was a diversion and that, eventually, the argument broke down into counter claims of playing the “pea-and-cup game” - involving switches between claims of (in)validity and claims of (un)soundness.

There is some similarity between this discussion and that on “objective moral values” given that my theist opponents were trying to limit the discussion to a question of the “logical validity” of a specific theorem, namely BS5, (and they wanted to define that as meaning “internally consistent”, rather than applicable in the context in which it was being used) and were trying to avoid discussing whether the modal logic version Ontological Argument as a whole was “sound”.

I thought that I might share two things that stood out to me in these discussions, noting that these were “logicians” and thus apparently sophisticated theists.

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If I was presenting an argument about something as important as the existence of a god is to theists, I would be concerned if I could easily replace “god exists” with “my car is green” and I could logically show that my car is green when it is, in actual fact, blue.

Admittedly, in the excitement of finding an apparently brilliant argument to show that my car is green (when it's not), I might initially fail to notice that I can prove whatever the hell I wanted to prove with this argument (for example, one of the sophisticated theists used BS5 to prove that I don’t exist which, under the circumstances, I didn’t find threatening in the least).  But once it was pointed out that I could “prove” logically that I was the world’s best Morris dancer as easily as I could prove something that I actually wanted to prove, for example that spanking (as defined by my buddy, LNC) is bad, then as a rational person I would become very wary of such an argument.

Not so the sophisticated theist.  Instead, the sophisticated theist will zero in on the internal consistency of BS5 and ignore the fact that their argument (which makes use of BS5) is unsound.  This sounds like intellectual dishonesty to me, but I suppose theists are rarely accused of being intellectual.

Interestingly enough, I got challenged a couple of times on whether I was a logician, as if I wasn’t welcome to point out the fact that BS5 can be used to prove that the moon is made of green cheese when one so desires.  The reason I find it unnecessary to be a logician is that when Craig has presented this argument, he hasn’t carefully checked his audience to ensure that they are all logicians.  If he’s willing to present his argument to non-logicians, then I don’t see why non-logicians should be prevented from pointing out that an argument that relies on BS5 is bollocks (after all, the argument might work perfectly in a logician’s ivory tower and fail miserably when brought out into the real world).

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The second thing I noticed was a far more obvious case of intellectual dishonesty.  During my three weeks of discussion, the more coherent theist involved seemed to be cpdavey24.  This positive assessment of mine might be due to the halo effect given that he noted a few times that he didn’t consider Plantinga’s Ontological Argument to be particularly good.  However, the halo was tarnished somewhat by his last post.

From as early as reply #24 in our exchange, cpdavey24 began to admit that perhaps Plantinga’s and Craig’s arguments might not be good (“But look, I never said Plantinga’s or Craig’s OA was a good argument.”)  He maintained this position of strategic neutrality in replies #38, #56, #82, #117 (two mentions) and #120 (a staggering six mentions).  When I replied to #120, applauding him for effectively arguing my point, I quoted all six instances:

• If by "logic can't be used to show that it does" you mean that when "god exists" or "a maximally great being exists" is plugged in for A, the argument is unsound (though valid), then you may be right. But if by this you mean the logic itself is invalid, then this has yet to be shown

• As for for the second part of your statement, let me reiterate a fourth time that I am not arguing that God exists, nor am I arguing that Plantinga's argument is a good or "convincing" proof

• The reasoning is unsound given certain instances of A

• If by "dodgy" you mean unsound, then I agree with you; but, again, this is the case with all valid forms of reasoning

• So, again, if you want to retract your claim that Plantinga/Craig's argument is invalid, and simply hold that, like the argument above, it is a terrible and unconvincing argument (though valid), then that's fine

• First, I would never use the OA to try to save your soul, neopolitan, because it is a very complex argument and I'm not convinced it's a good argument anyway.  //  Second, I've never said the OA is the best argument one can present for the existence of God. Others on this thread might be making that claim, but I certainly am not

However, despite this, cpdavey24 had the gall to include in his reply (#130) not only further confirmation:

• First, if by “works” you mean is sound, then I’ve never said it works.

but also denial of that confirmation:

• If by “he argues my point” you mean that I have anywhere in this thread argued that Plantinga’s or Craig’s OA is unsound, then I am afraid you are simply mistaken.

His compatriot, Biep, also tried to argue that Plantinga himself wasn’t actually arguing that his Ontological Argument was sound (I’m not sure what the point of making that claim was).  When I posted Plantinga’s own words from the document in which he presented “A Victorious Modal Version”, in which Plantinga claimed that his argument was sound very clearly at least three times, Biep responded with:

• Indeed, those are not claims about the logic, but about the truth of the premises, especially the first one.

This reality realignment on the fly really makes it difficult to maintain interest in reasoned argument.  It certainly doesn’t indicate any willingness to work towards truth and understanding.

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Anyways, what I have learnt from this, yet again, is that theists are very resilient.  They will believe a ridiculous proof if it gives the answer they want, they will hide behind definitions and authority and they are more than willing to warp reality if they think it will aid their cause.  And while it just might be possible that they are not totally mad themselves, arguing with them can certainly drive a poor fellow to distraction.

A Warrant Against the Gettiest of Gettiers

In Getty Gettier Gettiest, I wrote about how the Gettier problems that I have seen don't present a problem to the notion of justified true belief, because they all involve fooling the subject into false believing something specific, having that subject infer something general from the false belief and then having the general inference proved to be true.

I want to expand a little in this article, having discussed the issue over at CraigLand in terms of "warrant" (more of "warrant" a bit later).

It's generally understood that to have knowledge, one must have justified true belief.  In other words, in order to know something, you must have sufficiently good reasons for believing something that is true.  What is built into this model, but apparently overlooked, is the idea that you can have good reasons for believing something that is not true.  So, you can have justified false belief.  Let's revisit the scenario of the faux-barns as an explanation (slightly complicated per Goldman 1976, as taken from EIP).

The fake barns (Goldman 1976). Henry is driving in the countryside, looking at objects in fields. He sees what looks exactly like a barn. Accordingly, he thinks that he is seeing a barn. Now, that is indeed what he is doing. But what he does not realize is that the neighborhood contains many fake barns - mere barn facades that look like real barns when viewed from the road. And if he had been looking at one of them, he would have been deceived into believing that he was seeing a barn. Luckily, he was not doing this. Consequently, his belief is justified and true.

So what we have here is an observer, Henry, whose eyes have received a configuration of photons which is consistent with having seen a barn.  The problem is that he could have received a functionally identical configuration of photons without having seen a barn, if he had been looking at a fake barn, rather than a real one.

So the question is, given that he could just as easily as been deceived as having been correctly informed about a barn in the field, does this constitute knowledge?  My instinct tells me that it does.  Henry has a good reason to believe that there's a barn there, there is a barn there and he believes that there's a barn there.

Those arguing that there is a problem will raise a few other related scenarios.

First, Henry looks into another field and receives a configuration of photons that is consistent with there being a barn in that field and as a consequence believes that there is a barn in the field.  However, it's not a barn, it's a faux-barn.  I don't think that this introduces a problem.  Henry merely has a justified false belief; he's made a completely understandable error and this does not constitute knowledge.

Second, say that when looking into the first field, Henry is actually aware that in the region it is reasonably common for fields to have fake barns in them.  He sees what looks like a barn, it is actually a barn, but now he does not know that there is a barn there.  This seems strange.  He's been given more information about the situation but the apparent effect of that is to make less knowledge available to him.  The reduction of available knowledge, however, is not real - the total knowledge has increased but is differently distributed.  Henry now has knowledge about other things that look like barns in fields and as a consequence of having that knowledge, he now will not form a belief that what he sees is necessarily a barn.  Instead, he's forced to believe something more general, that what he is seeing is something that looks like a barn - which constitutes knowledge because it's a justified true belief.  However, this more generalised knowledge will apply when he looks in other fields.  Note that without this information about fake barns, Henry would otherwise have held false beliefs about barns when he saw faux-barns and thus had no knowledge at all.

Third, say that Henry is looking in a third field, not knowing about fake barns despite looking right at one.  Hidden behind that barn, and thus not seen by him, is a real barn.  This is a scenario that I covered in Getty Gettier Gettiest and, per that article, my position is that Henry is being fooled into believing that there is a barn in the field.  He might actually be right in the general claim that there is "a barn" in the field, but believing that to be so is not justified by the information that is available to him.  He could know that he is looking at something that looks like a barn.  If he could justify believing that he is looking at a fake barn, then he could know that there is a fake barn in the field.  But there is no relevant justification for him to believe that there is an actual barn in the field.  The fact that there actually is a barn in the field is only "serendipitously" true.

Now, in Getty Gettier Gettiest, I raised the issue of sliding between specifics and generalities.  Henry saw what he thought to be a specific barn and in order for there to be a problem with justified true belief, it would have to be valid to make an inference from a specific false belief to a general true belief.  That's not logically sound.

At CraigLand, that was not precisely the approach that I took.  Instead I pointed out that for justified true belief to constitute knowledge, the justification involved must be relevant and that the belief cannot be merely serendipitously true.  In other words, the truth of the belief cannot be decoupled from the justification for the belief.

While the invalidity of inferring a general true belief from a specific false belief covers all the Gettier problems that I am currently aware of, I think that relevance of justification and absence of serendipity may be key in addressing a more generalised Gettier-like challenge to the notion of justified true belief as a basis for knowledge.

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Now, I did say that there would be more on "warrant".  In the discussion I was having at CraigLand, the definition of warrant was:

the quality or property that turns mere true belief into knowledge

This definition is very close to how Plantinga introduces it in Warranted Christian Belief (I have elsewhere challenged what Plantinga thinks warrant is (as opposed to what it is defined as)).

Think about it.  Warrant is being considered almost like an alchemical agent.  Not only that, it would appear that "warrant" only pertains to true beliefs.  Could you have a warranted false belief, if "warrant" is the "the quality or property that turns mere true belief into knowledge"?  Plantinga's theory is a dual plus theory of knowledge, masquerading as a tripartite theory of knowledge.

And, even worse, it's basically a theological approach to knowledge as one of the WLC fans at CraigLand wrote "I would say it has to be an actual interface with God".  Plantinga himself writes about how warrant is related to some sort of "design plan" - a cognitive system "working the way it ought to" (ie as designed).

Anyway, part of the motivation to look towards something like warrant is because some people think that the justified true belief theory of knowledge is somehow threatened by the Gettier problem.  Once it's realised that the Gettier problem doesn't affect justified true belief theory and that, at best, warrant is just a limited form of (relevant) justification for (non-serendiptiously) true belief, the justification for even considering "warrant" quickly dissipates.

Metaphysical Necessity

Yesterday, I asked whether it is a strict logical possibility that William Lane Craig is a lying doofus.  Today, I want to ask whether it is a metaphysical necessity that William Lane Craig is a lying doofus.

Some may be sad to learn that I think that the answer is a resounding "No", but please stay with me as I try to explain how I reach this conclusion.

When reading the Wikipedia page on "metaphysical necessity", we immediately come across words that are faintly familiar:

In philosophy, metaphysical necessity, sometimes called broad logical necessity, is one of many different kinds of necessity, which sits between logical necessity and nomological (or physical) necessity.

Compare this with the words of WLC:

… The answer is “metaphysical possibility.”  This is a modality in between physical possibility and strict logical possibility and is often called “broad logical possibility” by contemporary philosophers.

So, it would appear that WLC took the notion of "broad logical necessity" (likely coined by Plantinga in The Nature of Necessity in 1974), twisted it into a new form, that being "broad logical possibility", and claimed that contemporary philosophers were already talking about it.  I saw the term "metaphysical necessity" in one of the very early documents that refer to "broad logical possibility", the transcript of a talk by … yep, William Lane Craig (The Coherence of Theism).

In this document, you can see evidence of the switch from "broad logical necessity" to the new term "broad logical possibility":

Furthermore, the modality operative in possible worlds semantics is not strict logical necessity/possibility, but broad logical necessity/possibility. Strictly speaking there is no logical impossibility in the proposition The Prime Minister is a prime number; but we should not want to say, therefore, that there is a possible world in which this proposition is true.

It is true that people have been talking about metaphysical necessity for a very long time, but what exactly do we mean by "people" here?  Most of these people have been theists talking about god, or talking about Saul Kripke (who in turn was talking about what was referred to in Strict Logical Possibility as "metaphysical possibility").  Again, when we try to consider things that fall into this category, now considered in terms of necessity, rather than possibility, we can find only one thing that is claimed to be "metaphysically necessary" - and that is a god, most specifically the god of the ontological argument.  There's a neat little Venn diagram on this page that sums things up nicely.

Let us put Kripke's modal logic tautologies aside (ie put aside notions similar to it being "metaphysically necessary" that water is H₂O and vice versa (at which point we need to also put aside the confusion of people who don't accept that ice is also water, despite it having a different name and being a lattice rather than liquid form)).  Other than a god, what does anyone claim to be a "metaphysical necessity"?

When I first started developing the idea for what became Strict Logical Possibility, I was very much thinking about the awkward negation of "strict logical possibility".  People tend to get confused about how modals are negated and casual modern English (particularly as used by Americans) only makes the confusion worse.

For example, if I were to say that "not all" cats are grey, I am not suggesting direct opposite of "all cats are grey" - that is I am not say that all cats are not grey.  If I wanted to say that, I would say "no" cats are grey (or all cats are "not grey".  In clumsy usage, "all cats are not grey" is often meant to say "some cats are grey, but not all of them" - rather than "every single cat that exists is some colour other than grey".  (I'm somewhat ambivalent on the grey/gray divide, although I do see Gray as more of a surname than a colour.)

This confusion carries over to considerations of what is possible/necessary and not possible/necessary (see Plantinga and His BS5).  In brief: that which is not possible cannot be necessary, but that which is not necessary can be possible.  In other words, a lack of necessity is consistent with both possibility and impossibility.  WLC does not fall into the trap of saying explicitly that the non-existence of god is metaphysically impossible, but others certainly do:

William L. Rowe has challenged my claim that there are only two kinds of impossibility, logical and physical, by introducing the concept of metaphysical impossibility — the impossibility which obtains just in case nothing has the power to bring about an individual’s non-existence — and by maintaining that, though God’s non-existence is metaphysically impossible, it does not follow that it is logically impossible as well.

And the ontological argument is based very much on the notion that the non-existence of the god in question is metaphysically impossible - which is to claim that the existence of god is metaphysically necessary.  WLC certainly makes the claim that the existence of his god is a metaphysical necessity:

(blah blah blah, blah blah) … Thus, it is metaphysically necessary that God exists.

But now we are back to the question of what things are metaphysically necessary - if there is nothing else than god in this category (and possibly all those tautological claims that things are the things that they are), then surely the claim that god is "metaphysically necessary" has no teeth whatsoever.  God would have the precisely the sort of "metaphysically necessary" existence that god has (which could easily be no existence whatsoever) and god would have the precisely the same characteristics that god has (being spaceless, timeless, immaterial and non-existent).

WLC goes on in the article linked above to write:

We have here the germ of the ontological argument for God's existence. For if it is possible that God exists, there is a possible world in which God has necessary existence. But then He exists in every world, including this one. Thus, the atheist is thrust into the awkward position of having to say that God's existence is impossible. It is not enough to say that in fact God does not exist; the atheist must hold that it is impossible that God exists—a much more radical claim!

He's claiming here that, because the atheist disagrees with the claim that the existence of god is a (metaphysical) necessity, she needs to hold that existence of god is a (metaphysical) impossibility - perhaps even to the extent that the non-existence of god is a metaphysical necessity.  This is a false dilemma built on a(n implied) begged question - buried in the fact that the only object that is asserted to have a metaphysically necessary existence is a god.  The atheist is quite entitled to allow that gods are a metaphysical possibility, whatever is actually meant by that, while holding that none actually exist (for reasons other than metaphysical necessity/possibility).

Finally, I did say that I did not want to claim that is a metaphysical necessity that WLC is a lying doofus.  I think it's quite reasonable to be averse to putting the assertion "god exists" on a par with "WLC is a lying doofus".  After all, I am quite convinced that god does not exist.