Actually, Craig Keener is writing a book on miracles, inclusing those infamous africa miracles missionarys often talk about.

(http://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-New-Testament-Accounts/dp/0801039525).

It would be nice to see what you have to say about it…

But before I respond, an announcement: various things were not going as well as planned with Reasonable Press, the tiny upstart publisher with which published my book, and as a result the book is now out of print. I’m currently mulling over whether to make it available via Lulu. I’m leaning towards “no” – in large part because I’m already working on another book, which will include a discussion of resurrection apologetics, but a much shorter one. And I’ve come to feel feel like a short discussion is all the apologists deserve (now watch me segue into the main topic of this post).

When I wrote the book, I more or less took the arguments of Christian apologists at face value and just tried to cover all the halfway decent ones, without thinking much about the audience of the apologists. But now, I think that Christians who are convinced there’s good evidence for miracles are best thought of as falling into one of three groups (though there’s some overlap between the groups.)

The first group is the people who’ve been mislead about Biblical scholarship. What critics of apologetics need to do with them is make them better informed, explain why the apologists’ arguments are misleading, and get them to see that they can’t trust the people the Evangelical community presents as “experts.”

The second group is people who aren’t necessarily under any illusions about Biblical scholarship, and are generally skeptical of supernatural claims, but don’t apply that skepticism to Biblical miracles. Thus they end up convinced the Bible is great evidence for its own claims. The solution here is to direct them to something like this Richard Carrier essay.

My book was, in a sense, directed at the first two groups. But there’s a third group, the people who aren’t especially skeptical of supernatural claims in general, whether they’re in the Bible or elsewhere. These people, if they’d believe a friend about something funny that happened on a vacation, they’ll believe a friend who claims to have witnessed a miraculous healing. Other religions’ miracles? Hey, could be demons.

This this group is going to strike a lot of people, including Christians, as gullible. I have a certain amount of respect for them, though. They’re not guilty of the sort of inconsistency you see in the second group. And they tend to be interested in modern miracle claims, which is smart. The evidence for Biblical miracles is flimsy to non-existent, and with the alleged witnesses being dead for close to two millennia or more, it’s not like we can go re-interview them. But with modern miracle claims, we can at least hope to investigate and document them thoroughly.

So from what I’ve heard about Craig Keener’s book, part of me is thinking, “yeah, this is what Christian apologists should be doing.” At first, though, I was extremely reluctant to order it from Amazon. I’m kind of suffering from apologetics fatigue right now. That is, lately, whenever I’m told “hey, there’s this great book you need to read,” I pick it up, skim it, realize it doesn’t actually contain anything new, and then it just takes up space on my bookshelf.

The last book this happened with was Mike Licona’s The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach. But I could never find where he explains what’s’ so “new,” about his approach. As far as I could tell, he just recycled the arguments of Gary Habermas and William Lane Craig. In fact, when he tries to rebut Michael Goulder, he leans pretty heavily on quotations from Craig, and then in his rebuttal of Gerd Ludemann he refers you back to his reply to Goulder.

In spite of this, I just ordered Keener’s book on Amazon.com. Why? Because of one paragraph from one of the reviews:

I cannot offer any remotely plausible natural explanations for many of the events mentioned in this book. I am talking about body parts regrowing quickly in public view, goiters disappearing quickly in public view, blindness cured, deafness cured, broken bones being healed nearly instantly and being confirmed by X-rays, and the raising of the dead. And this does not appear to be due to my (or Keener’s) medical ignorance. Fifty-five percent of physicians claimed to have seen treatment results in their patients that they would consider miraculous (p. 721).

Body parts regrowing quickly in public view? Think about that. If that really happened, any intelligent group of witnesses could get that story on Fox and the front page of the New York Times. Document that the body part was missing, document that it was regrown shortly thereafter, and you barely need witnesses to the actual regrowing. Similarly, if a majority of physicians have witnessed miraculous recoveries, you’d think at least one of these recoveries would be impressive enough to write up for a medical journal.

If Keener really did pass on these claims without thinking these thoughts, it’s a massive critical thinking fail on his part. And a massive critical thinking fail on the part of the Evangelicals who enthusiastically blurbed the books cover. Now I’m really anticipating this Amazon order like I’ve never anticipated an Amazon order before. Most fail is boring, but Keener may have found new and exciting ways to fail.

Robin thinks that if we had better IP law, we’d put way more effort into innovation. He’s gotten a lot of criticism for this, I think the most important argument comes from Matt Yglesias, who writes:

My own ideas on this particular subject (and of course other subjects) are deeply indebted to the thinking of others, and I like to think that in my work I’ve also influenced other people’s thinking. It’s all to the good that this pattern of mutual influence occurs without licensing agreements. The lack of “incentive” to innovate with new ideas isn’t holding me back nearly as much as I would be held back by inability to borrow ideas from other people.

In other words, if you make people pay for innovation, you make it hard to build new innovations on top of existing innovations, so IP can actually inhibit innovation. Go through the archives of Yglesias’ blog, and you’ll find a fair number of examples of how IP law creates inefficiency. (See also Will Wilkinson).

As best I can tell, Robin’s response is best summarized as follows: “Maybe my critics are right about the present and near-term situation. But we’d still be better off if we put more effort into innovation, and that means we’d be better off if we gave better incentives for innovation. And probably we could do that through some kind of stronger IP law. I don’t know how exactly we’d do that, but we’ll probably find a way eventually.”

To respond, I’d start by noticing that it’s counter-intuitive, but still probably correct, to strongly link innovation to IP. It’s tempting to think that “real” innovation is only a fraction of IP–after all, we’d think it was silly if a company bragged about being “innovative” every time one of its engineers or programmers made a tiny tweak to one of its products. But on reflection, when I think about what “innovation” really means, I think even tiny tweaks are a kind of innovation.

Similarly, there may be, somewhere, there may be a piece of genre fiction so utterly derivative that it fails to innovate in the slightest. But it’s clear that artistic types innovate all the time. If you decide that in your vampire novels, vampires are going to sparkle in sunlight rather than burn up, that’s a kind of innovation, even if it’s a stupid one.

If you wanted to count all the people in the US who are involved in some kind of innovation, you’d have to count most if not all of the engineers and computer programmers (even ones not doing anything glamorous), most if not all of the academics (who are expected to do innovative things in their research), most if not all of the writer and movie directors, and so on. You should also probably count the people who don’t innovate themselves, but who support innovators: the software testers and the university fund raisers and so on.

Counted that way, you’ve got a pretty good portion of the US economy dedicated to innovation. (I’d be interested to see someone estimate what percentage.) In fact, even relative to Western Europe the US economy is arguably pretty innovation-centric. We aren’t a big manufacturing country, but we’re a world leader in a number of kinds of IP, including summer blockbusters and new drugs.

Of course, the sort of innovations I’m discussing aren’t what Robin has in mind. So I think the observation that’s driving Robin here isn’t really “we don’t put enough effort into innovation.” Rather, it’s more, “we aren’t moving full speed ahead into a future world radically transformed by technology.” So the real question is why we aren’t moving full speed ahead into the future.

The answer, I think, is that there’s no money in moving int the future. As Robin has argued repeatedly, huge amounts of human behavior aren’t about their official purpose. Politics isn’t about policy. Rather, they’re about “status signaling” – in layman’s terms, being cool.

This seems to be true of innovation, even in the case of the our best-known tech companies. Google+ is innovative, but does it really represent an improvement in our standard of living? Maybe not, but at least it’s cooler than Facebook. Or, I’m not sure if my iPhone really benefits me on a practical level, but I’m still glad I have it because it’s so darn cool.

So in short, a pretty good chunk of the US economy is dedicated to innovation, but we’re not progressing as fast as we could, because we don’t care so much about progress. Innovation isn’t about progress. What we really want is for our innovations to be cool.

The few sections I’ve read basically try to show that certain objections to Aquinas’ views (including the assumptions that support Aquinas’ Five Ways) fail. Certainly if you’re enthusiastic about Aquinas, that’s going to interest you.

But showing that objections to a view fail is different than showing the view is correct, and as far as I can tell Feser isn’t even trying to do the second thing, at least in the bits of Aquinas I’ve read. That means that, personally, I don’t find the book very interesting, and I suspect most readers of this blog wouldn’t be terribly interested in a detailed critique (but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about that.)

On its own, this is a fairly mild criticism of Aquinas. It doesn’t show Feser is wrong to care about the stuff he talks about in the book. Where his writing gets ridiculous, though, is in his attacks on people who don’t care so much about Aquinas. (Exhibit A: the “brutal fact” that Keith Parsons’ work focused on people like Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga.) Because he doesn’t even try to show Aquinas was right, Feser can’t expect atheists to be very interested in his book.

I could say more about this, but I’d basically be repeating stuff I’ve said here and here. I’ll finish just by mentioning that this is the second time in recent memory that I bought a book because I heard a theist say that as an atheist, I absolutely had to read it, and then found the book didn’t look like it had any arguments that both (1) pertained to something important and (2) were new to me (the first time this happened was with Mike Licona’s book on the resurrection).

If you want more comments on academic philosophy specifically, you should probably read this comment of mine if you haven’t already. It talks about possible solutions to philosophy’s problems, David Lewis, Alvin Plantinga, and compatibilism.

Anyway, where I left off, I had argued that academic philosophers put too much effort into being clever and too little into being right, because that’s what they’re given incentives to do.

This, though, treats philosophers as black boxes, things you can give incentives to and magically get behaviors out of. But what’s going on from their perspective? What, you might ask, is it like to be an academic philosopher?

In many cases, I actually think academic philosophers are at least partly aware of what they’re doing. When I was at Notre Dame, I heard some of my fellow grad students joke about just writing whatever they thought their professors wanted to hear in their term papers.

This was always said in a (semi-) joking way, but I’d bet there was a lot of truth to it, and I’d further bet that people don’t become magically more virtuous when they make the jump from “grad student worrying about making professors happy” to “young professor worrying about making hypothetical future tenure committee happy.”

Other things reinforce this. An adjunct professor (who had just gotten his Ph.D.) giving me tips on who you shouldn’t cite because they’d lost status lately. Rumors that so-and-so had privately admitted to not believing what he said in that one book. Rumors that some entire departments had a culture of just “playing around” in your academic work, and not necessarily saying what you really think.

So I’m fairly sure that academic philosophers sometimes do consciously focus on impressing other academics at the expense of other things. But I don’t think the tendencies I complained about in “Philosophy is dysfunctional” are always conscious. Rather, I think there’s often another explanation: being clever, being sophisticated, and thinking about how much more clever and sophisticated you are than other people, feel good.

I’m embarrassed to say that this fact about humans is something I’m intimately familiar with.* Though I never intended to specialize in philosophy of religion, my examples will come from there, because I’m still fairly sure I have something interesting to say about the subject.

First (specific) confession: I’ve long thought about writing my own “atheist book.” This is something I may actually finish doing, but when I used to think about doing it, I would imagine writing a book a good deal like the God Delusion, except that I would do this once I had gotten a ways into my career as an academic philosopher.

The goal would be to write a philosophical version of a popular science book. And as long as I could avoid being boring like J. L. Mackie, then obviously the book would be better than The God Delusion because it would have been written by a philosopher.

Now, that’s sounds like a pretty silly thing to believe. And like many things I used to believe, I’m no longer sure why I believed it. But I seem to remember thinking, “if what I believe about the benefits of studying philosophy is true, then some philosopher somewhere ought to be able to write a better version of The God Delusion, and I’m going to try to do that.”

In retrospect, I should have worried more about whether the “if” clause of that “if-then” was really true. I think the reason I didn’t is that believing that philosophers are more rational and sophisticated than ordinary people felt good.

To give a more minor, but possibly more embarrassing example, I have a handful of memories of hearing some atheist say how terrible William Lane Craig’s arguments are, and feeling superior to said atheist. I don’t think my inner monologue ever spelled things out so carefully, but on some level I think I was thinking, “Craig’s arguments may not work, but a sophisticated person, one who really understood them, would give them more credit before refuting them, so I must be superior to this atheist who’s dismissing them.”

Funny thing is, even when I thought this, I thought an awful lot of Craig’s arguments were terrible. And now I’ve gone on to thinking they’re pretty much all terrible. Worse, when I re-read criticisms of Craig by the sort of atheists I used to go around feeling superior to, say this piece by Dan Barker (president of the FFRF, but also a college dropout), I find their objections are actually pretty similar to the ones I’ve had all along.

I’ve had a similar experience with Plantinga. When I first saw Luke Muehlhauser’s rather dismissive attitude towards Plantinga’s epistemology, part of my reaction–even if I never said so in a blog post–was to think “even though I think Plantinga is wrong about his ultimate conclusions, a sophisticated person would acknowledge that he makes some legitimate points along the way.”

When this first happened, I blogged criticizing Luke, Luke responded, and then I was forced to pause, spend some time re-reading Plantinga, and try to figure out what those legitimate points made along the way were. And I honestly couldn’t find them, I had just sort of assumed they were there.

Um, I feel like I should draw some sort of lesson from this. And since I’m in a confessional mood, I’ll admit I’m not 100% sure what the lesson is. But I’ll give it a go: Beware feeling good about how much more sophisticated you are than the other guy. Beware noticing reasons why you are so much more sophisticated than people whose views are basically the same as yours. Beware just assuming that subtle differences between your views and other people’s views are proof of your sophistication.

And… I’m not sure this is so much something I’ve fallen victim to, as much as something I’ve noticed in other people, but I’d also recommend watching yourself to make sure your criticisms of others’ views actually have something to do with being right or reasonable. The fact that something is an old point, or an unoriginal point, or an obvious point, or a banal point, doesn’t make it wrong or unreasonable. Even if making those other criticisms feels good.

*Note: when I went to look up old blog posts in the course of writing this one, I noticed that I said plenty of harsh things about Craig and Plantinga around my junior year of undergrad. That was when I was also thinking, “this philosophy stuff is really interesting, but I’m not sure I want to make a career out of it.” I didn’t really decide to go to graduate school in philosophy until summer or fall of ’08, and the thoughts I’m fessing up to here probably mainly date from there onwards.

Feel free to send this to whoever you want. In fact, if you’re graphically talented, you have my permission to take the text (unaltered) and make a prettier-looking version and distribute that. If you do the latter, please send it to me. I won’t send you cease-and-desist notices for not telling me about your work, but it would be nice for me to be able to point people towards any prettier versions people come up with.

I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps Hirsi Ali’s family is dysfunctional simply because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another.

[snip]

Her memoir suggests that she never quite outgrew her rebellious teenager phase, but also that she would be a terrific conversationalist at a dinner party.

I’m unsure what to make of Kristof’s brag that he knows what he’s talking about because he’s “traveled widely in Africa and Asia.” On the one hand, I do realize my understanding of life outside the richer countries of the world is limited, envy Kristof’s travel experiences, and think he’s written some genuinely insightful things on life in other countries. On the other hand, his line here is “subjugation of women is as bad as Hirsi Ali says it is in many countries, but Muslims are nice people.” WTF, mate?

I haven’t mentioned this before, but Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza are debating on campus in about half an hour, so now I’m off to that. I’ll return with a full report.

The more I read discussions of things like reductionism, emergence, and the nature of the mind, the more I’m bugged by how confused these debates are, both in terms of different writers not connecting with each other and different writers not connecting with the major scientific developments of the 20th century. There’s a vague sense that reductionism is bad and emergence is nice. There’s a vague sense that there are some broad constraints on what kind of views we can have while being consistent with modern science; sophisticated writers in academic philosophy will call these constraints “physicalism.” What any of these ideas really mean, though, is generally unclear. But I think a lot of the confusion could be cleared up if we accepted as a defining feature of the scientific, “physicalist” world view the following principle:

In-principle probabilistic predictability from physics: Given a complete description of an isolated physical system, complete knowledge of the laws of physics, and unlimited calculating power, we could in principle know every way the system could evolve within the laws of nature, and the probability of each possible evolution.

This is intended as a variant on an idea expressed in the early 19th century by Pierre-Simon Laplace as follows:

An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

The key difference between the the principle I have just formulated and Laplace’s principle is that my principle allows that the laws of physics may, ultimately, be probablistic rather than deterministic. The way most people think about Laplace, this destroys the point of his idea, which was just supposed to be a formulation of determinism. But there is another equally important idea in there, the idea that everything that happens is covered by the laws of physics.

As far as I can tell, IPPPFP is widely accepted both among scientists and among the philosophers who have become our standard sources for physicalism. On the former point, it seems to capture talk of explaining chemistry through physics and biology through chemistry, as well as ruling out some historically important ideas that have ended up in the dustbin of science: IPPFP rules out the idea that there are special chemical laws which only come into play specific arrangements of atomcs, an idea advocated by C. D. Broad of the early 20th-century “British emergentists.” On the latter point, IPPPFP seems to capture what Jerry Fodor meant when he talked about “the generality of Physics vis a vis the special science: roughly, the view that all events which fall under the laws of any special science are physical events and hence fall under the laws of physics.” Or, there is a discussion by Hilary Putnam where Putnam asks if you could explain the behavior of a simple physical system in terms of physics, and says he is willing to allow that “One could compute all possible trajectories of system A… and perhaps one could deduce from just the laws of particle mechanics or quantum electrodynamics that system A could never pass through region 1, but that there is at least one trajectory which enables it to pass through region 2.”

On the other hand, IPPPFP saves us from having to worry too much, at the very start, about notions such as explanation, causation, identity, composition, constitution, realizaion, properties, and events. All of these things cause headaches for philosophers trying to understand the relationship between the domain of the physical and other domains. In the Putnam paper I quoted above, for example, Putnam ends up arguing that the predictability or deduction that he allows for is does not amount to an explanation, that an explanation is something more than that. Similarly, IPPPFP seems to capture talk about the “causal closure of physics” defined as the idea that every event has a physical cause, while allowing us to temporarily set aside worries raised by “causal closure” about whether psychological entities really cause anything.

One important point here is that IPPPFP says nothing about whether facts in domains other than physics are deducible from physics. A neo-Laplacian demon, given a complete physical description of the world, a complete set of (possibly probabilistic) physical laws, and unlimited calculating power, would not necessarily be able to tell you anything at all about, say, the behavior of cats, even if cats are nothing above and beyond the physical. The reason for this is simply that we haven’t granted our demon any knowledge about what physical things count as cats (here, substitute for “count as” your preferred understanding of the “nothing above and beyond” idea–identity, composition, constitution, realization, supervenience, whatever). So it’s a mistake to make the idea of deducing facts in other domains from physical facts central to our understanding of physicalism. You can know certain things aren’t anything above and beyond physics without knowing much of anything else about them. On the other hand, once you sort out the “what counts as what” questions, the relationship between the physical and the chemical, biological, and psychological will be very strong indeed.

All advertisements must meet acceptable community standards of good taste, quality and appearance. Furthermore, the ads will not be considered discriminatory, or objectionable to any race creed or moral standard.

Hemant points out how ridiculous this is, since strictly read it should ban everything from ads for hamburgers to chocolate hearts to congressional candidates. But I think there are plenty of people who half-believe that there is something evil in contradicting other people.