The lottery paradox is as follows: Say I buy one Powerball ticket and there are 10 million tickets sold. Furthermore, let’s imagine that we know that one of the tickets is the winning ticket (of course, this is not be true of the Powerball since it is possible that none of the tickets is the winning ticket – that’s what gets us the rollover). The chance of my ticket being the winning ticket is one in ten million – poor odds by anyone’s estimation. It appears rational to think that one should believe a statement to be true if and only if one is sufficiently confident in the statement being…
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O’Donovan’s Love Dilemma
In The Resurrection and Moral Order Oliver O’Donovan asks us to consider what we mean by love as a rule for life. Do we mean, on the one hand, that love is a summary and includes the rest of moral law? Or, on the other hand, do we mean that love is a priority over all other laws? The latter involves responding to a moral dilemma by doing what is considered the most loving act even while an alternative action might be more justified on other grounds. The former may involve suggesting that a particular course of action is justified by a moral law and, though we might not like the…
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It Depends on What You Mean By “Marriage”
When marriage is debated the disagreement comes down to definition. I don’t mean what the definition of marriage is (that is what we disagree about). I mean how we get a definition in the first place. Is there some independent standard by which our definitions are proved good? Can we point at some authoritative definition and say, “see, there, that’s what marriage is.”? Can we look at a couple and say, “marriage is that”? Or is marriage something we purely stipulate? Does the Supreme Court have the power to construct a definition from scratch or should they merely recognize a preexisting entity and enshrine it in law? And is there any…
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Meaning and Material
Does matter have meaning? Aquinas thought that it is impossible to understand some instance of a material entity solely by the entity impinging on the senses. One needs to abstract sense data through the use of concepts. At the formation of concepts there is understanding. The object of understanding is an ‘intelligible species’ and resides within us. One understands a material entity, X, by understanding what it means to be X, but the object of knowledge is transformed from the material entity, X, to the mental entity, X: “a thing is knowable in so far as it is separated from matter” (De Veritate 2. 2.) Aquinas thought that only mental entities…
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Back to First Thoughts: Defending Davidson with Theism
Donald Davidson In an earlier post I looked at an argument by Donald Davidson that supported the idea that thought depends on language. Thought is possible through learning of the concepts of true and false through interpreting another person asserting something about an object in the world. Davidson calls this “triangulation.” I suggested that the problem with Davidson’s argument is that, from an non-theistic perspective, there appears no way for a “first thought” to emerge from non-thought. It only takes one person who has language, and therefore thought, to get the ball rolling. But if there is no language and therefore no thought then there can be no first thought.…
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How Does God Know?
God is never surprised by anything, never acquires knowledge and finds playing hide and seek quite dull. God has all the symptoms of omniscience. But how does God know what he knows? What counts as knowledge for God? Does he have justification for his beliefs? The following is a sketch of some options. What exactly do we mean by omniscience? First, God’s omniscience, in a propositional sense (and let’s confine ourselves to propositions for simplicity’s sake), means that for every proposition p, if p is true, then God knows p. Entailed in this view is the further feature of omniscience such that for every proposition p, if p is false,…
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Communitarian Epistemology: Why Humans Need Each Other to Think.
Two men “triangulating” Knowledge acquisition is the process of extracting and organizing knowledge from a given source. Some naturalistically inclined philosophers have argued that community—minimally speaking, more than one functioning person who shares a common language with another person—is a necessary condition for knowledge acquisition. I will argue in favor of this view but will suggest that, given naturalism, the view is flawed. However, the view is compatible with theism and theism holds a solution to the problem facing the naturalist. I will argue that human higher-level thought is a minimal requirement for knowledge, but that thought and language are not possible without one another. Furthermore, since it is not…
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Notes on Newbigin’s “Proper Confidence”
Newbigin argues that underlying the conflict between fundamentalism and liberalism is a common assumption. The assumption is derived from a distinctly modern perspective on the theory of knowledge and involves a species of Cartesian foundationalism that Newbigin believes should be challenged. Knowledge, according to Newbigin, is tradition/community constituted, grounded in personal commitment (faith). This is adequate grounds for Christian belief and is the same grounds for any kind of knowledge. Furthermore it is the best assumption for making sense of human experience. Faith is an act of obedience to a person (95). Belief, therefore, is grounded in a personal commitment to a person in his command to believe. Newbigin suggests…