More trinity

There's been some good comments on my last post. This is a continuation of that discussion.

In my original post, I treated "God" as a name, referring to a unique individual. The proposal on the table is that we treat "God" instead as a predicate (in the logical sense, not the grammatical sense): basically, "Jesus is God" does not mean "Jesus = God", but instead it means "Jesus is divine." It's a description, not an equation.

(This is not to say that "God" can't also function as a name; just that it isn't a name the way it's used in claim T1.)

On this reading, T1 could be paraphrased like this:

T1'.	(a) The Father is divine, (b) Jesus is divine, and (c) the H.S. is divine.

This is a sensible move, which smites both of my arguments in a single blow--because both of them treat "God" as referring to an individual. On this reading, the intermediate step "God is Jesus" (or "God is the Father", etc.) doesn't even mean anything--it's like saying "Human is Jeff".

So I agree that on this interpretation T1 and T2 are consistent. By T1, the Father, Jesus, and the H.S. are each divine. By T2, no two of these people (or "persons", if you prefer) are the same. So far so good.

But not so fast: the trinitarian also wants to make a third claim (which Eric was getting at):

T3.	There is exactly one God.

(This assumption was latent in my previous use of "God" as a name. But if "God" is a predicate, claim T3 needs to be made explicit.)

If we're using "God" in the same way as in T1, then we should be able to rephrase it:

T3'.	There is exactly one divine entity.

Now we have problems again. Let's give a name to that divine entity; say "Theo". Then we can conclude from T3':

P4.	If any entity is divine, then that entity is Theo.

And this "is" is identity--the equals sign. For any entity X, if X is divine, then X = Theo. But if I'm right so far, we can rewrite my first argument from before:

1.	The Father is divine	T1'(a)
2.	The Father = Theo	By P4
3.	Jesus is divine	T1'(b)
4.	Jesus = Theo	By P4
5.	Jesus = the Father	Identity is transitive and symmetric

We can also redo the second argument from before, provided that there are properties we can ascribe to Theo (like being a trinity) that don't apply to Jesus (or to one of the other two, for that matter).

So where might these arguments have gone wrong? What are our options?

1. We can deny T3: There are, in fact, three or more Gods.
2. We can deny that T3' is a good paraphrase of T3. There is only one God, but there are, in fact, three divine entities. In this case we need to tell a good story about what T3 really means.
3. We can deny that P4 follows from T3'. That is, we can deny the interpretation I gave to "There is exactly one". In this case we need to tell a good story about what "There is exactly one" really means here.
4. As with the original arguments, we can deny the transitive or symmetric properties of identity.
5. Or we can give up on T1 or T2, and either (a) become unitarians or (b) start over with our description of the trinity.

Now, options 2 or 3 seem feasible within the context of orthodox Christianity. Not easy, but feasible. Then again, nobody ever tried to say the trinity was easy.

Discuss.


[Footnote. Rebecca brought up an interesting point about Peter Geach's idea of "relative identity", which she represents as denying that identity is transitive. Here's my general position on that kind of move.

"Identity" is an abstract relation that philosophers and mathematicians introduced for speaking about things technically. As such, its defining properties are conventional. Now, you can say, "But wait! The conventions are bad! Here's a more useful set of conventions." There can be a lot of merit to an argument like that, but I don't think it's the best way of putting the point. Thing is, the conventions are very, very entrenched, and changing them is like trying to get people to use the "+" symbol to mean division--confusing.

That doesn't mean Geach's points are a waste of time, though: what is up for grabs is the semantics of non-technical ordinary language expressions like "Bush is the president", or "That is a good argument." There may be good reasons to think that the meanings of these sentences don't satisfy the formal conditions we conventionally put on identity. Now, one way to put that kind of complaint is to say something like "identity isn't transitive"; I would much rather say, "we don't actually mean identity (though we may mean something similar)".

(In fact, I haven't actually read Geach, but I think this is basically what he says; though he also adds the stronger claim that in fact we couldn't mean (absolute) identity, because its conventional properties aren't even coherent.)]

[PPS. I just found out that Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe were married! Crazy.]

Two trinity problems

There's been some discussion of the trinity over at Mickey's place, among other places. My profound ignorance on the subject doesn't stop me from being interested. Or from making a few (probably ill-conceived) comments.

Up front: I'm a little leery of this whole "trinity" thing.

1.

Let's start with two claims:

T1.	(a) The Father is God. (b) Jesus is God. (c) The Holy Spirit is God.
T2.	Jesus is not the Father, and similarly for every other pair.

I'm pretty sure this is a bad start. At least, if we can replace the "is" with "=" (denoting the relation that philosophers call "identity"), then we get a clear contradiction. It goes like this:

1.	The Father = God	From T1(a)
2.	God = the Father	Identity is symmetric.
3.	Jesus = God	From T1(b)
4.	Jesus = the Father	Identity is transitive.

But step 4 contradicts T2. Oh no!

So you have three options:

1. You can say we goofed on the properties of identity: either symmetry or transitivity breaks down.
2. You can say that in claims T1 and T2, "is" does not mean "=".
3. You can give up and say, yep, it's contradictory: T1 or T2 is false.

I'm probably gonna have to go with 2 or 3, myself. If you go with 2 then you're gonna have to (Clintonianly) resolve what the meaning of 'is' is. If you go with 3, then you have to either (a) become a unitarian, or (b) start over with your description of the trinity.

2.

Here's a separate problem with T1. If we gloss "Jesus is God" as "Jesus = God", then arguments like this one would be valid:

1. God does not change.
2. Since Jesus = God, Jesus does not change.
3. Dying and rising from the dead are changes.
4. Therefore Jesus did not die or rise from the dead.

(If you don't like premise 1 (or premise 3), you can redo the argument with some other property of God that you think is true. God doesn't have a body; but Jesus has a body. God "never sleeps nor slumbers", but Jesus slept. God is a trinity, but Jesus is not a trinity.)

This is kind of a ridiculous argument. But all it really uses is the fact that if X=Y then any property of X is a property of Y (philosophers call this "indiscernibility of identicals"). If X and Y are the same, then they aren't different.

But Jesus does not have all of the properties that God has. Either I'm wrong about that, or indiscernibility of identicals is false, or else Jesus = God is false. I'm afraid my vote is probably going to have to go to the last option.

So if "Jesus is God" is a true statement, it means something different from "Jesus = God". (What does it mean, then? Ummm, still working on that.) But even if the statement is true in some other sense, it's one we should be very careful with, to keep from inadvertently making bad arguments like the one that proves Jesus didn't rise from the dead.

That's as far as I've got. Thoughts?


(By the way, Shieva (whose blog I linked to at the top of this post) is a soon-to-be-fellow-student at Rutgers. Which is to say, she's already a student there, but not yet a fellow student, because I'm not yet a student. Is there a better way of saying what she is to me?)

(Also by the way, I'm sure neither of these arguments are remotely original, so please don't give me credit for them. If you know which ancient dude I should give credit to, please let me know.)

Meaningless, meaningless

[a friend asked me for my take on the book of ecclesiastes. i thought it worth sharing with the rest of you.]

have i told you that ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the bible? i've lapsed a bit in this tradition, but i used to make a point of reading it at the beginning of every school year. i need this: the Teacher launches a full-scale assault on the values that we ambitious types are always pulled toward.

i say, "become great!" and the teacher says, "i became great and surpassed all who were before me...and again, all was vanity and a chasing after the wind."

i say, "work harder!" and the teacher says, "what gain have the workers from their toil?"

i say, "study harder!" and the teacher says, "of making books there is no end."

i say, "party!" and the teacher says, "pleasure...was also vanity."

i say, "create something novel!" and the teacher says, "there is nothing new under the sun."

i say, "know more!" and the teacher says, "those who increase knowledge increase sorrow."

i say, "communicate!" and the teacher says, "the more the words, the less the meaning."

i say, "understand the world!" and the teacher says, "no one can find out what is happening under the sun."

i say, "leave a legacy!" and the teacher says, "in the days to come all will have been long forgotten."

i say, "change the world!" and the teacher says, "a generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever."

the teacher puts every shred of my shallow idealism to shame. all of those things i would love to find meaning, purpose, and identity in are meaningless, chasing after the wind.

ecclesiastes is basically destructive, not constructive: it destroys illusions, but does almost nothing to replace them with the right view of things. that's in keeping with what the teacher says--"a time to break down, and a time to build up". but how does one go about rebuilding, after this book so utterly lays to waste?

the teacher gives just a few small clues--the refrain to enjoy what god gives us, and finally: "remember your creator."

Improbable pronunciation

"By the way, from a linguistic point of view it looks like Proof's big mistake was allowing himself to be pronounced upon, and if I were you, I'd never let anyone pronounce you anything. Based on Google counts, you're over 5000 times more likely to be pronounced dead than pronounced alive. More optimistically, you have a better than 1 in 100 chance of being pronounced husband and wife rather than dead. Can marriage really merit such a risk?"
(David Beaver, Language Log)

exercise for the reader: work out a probabilistic account for this delightful fallacy.

Telephones

So i was talking about christianity with this philosopher at NYU (yeah, i know--pretty cool, huh?) and he mentioned offhandlike that he didn't see how any reasonable person could put much confidence in scriptures, knowing where they came from. "What do you mean by that?" i asked. I mean, "where they come from" could be getting at all sorts of different issues, some of which have some real merits. But i was shocked by the naivete of his answer. The basis for this smart professional thinker's dismissal of biblical texts apparently came down to (1) it's very old, and (2) it's written in foreign languages. Seriously, that's what it amounted to. (Is he similarly skeptical about Aristotle? He's not really into history of philosophy, so he might be, for all i know.)

Anyway, to support his distrust of ancient translated texts, he pulled out the old analogy of the telephone game. You know: one kid makes up a message and whispers it to a second kid, who whispers what she hears to a third, and so on, and the last kid announces the utterly garbled message, and everybody laughs. Aren't really old, many-times copied and translated manuscripts just as ridiculous?

Here's a new telephone game that I think is a better analogy. The first kid writes down her message on a slip of paper, along with the time. She then hands this off to two other kids, who each copy down the message as faithfully as they can on new slips of paper, and write down the time. Each of them passes their copy on to one or two more kids. They keep this up for a while, until you've got hundreds or thousands of timestamped slips of paper. If you picked one of these slips at random and read it out loud, you might get something people could laugh at. But that's not how this game works.

First, you randomly choose maybe one in every twenty slips of paper, and throw all the others into an incinerator. Then you take all of the dozens or hundreds of surviving slips, and you hand them to a bunch of folks with a lot of practice playing this game. They line everything up, and compare the different versions and their timestamps, and they do their best to reconstruct the original message (and in the few places where they really can't tell, they add footnotes). Finally, you take the version these folks come up with, and you read it out loud to everybody.

Unless the original message was a joke, i don't think you'll hear a whole lot of laughter.

And the winner is...

just got off the phone with dean zimmerman, and now it's official: i'm starting in the fall as a phd candidate in philosophy at Rutgers The State University Of New Jersey. it's a little scary.

Live on-the-scene coverage

i'm at the tail end of a Grand Whirlwind Graduate-School-Visiting Adventure (i think disneyland may be basing a ride on it). i'm on my fifth state and counting, running through a montage of airplanes, trains (note: even though train lines back east are basically the same as the caltrain, they have much more romantic signage, saying things like "South Shore Line" and "Northeast Corridor", and much, much more impressive train stations), buses, subways, cars, and an Authentic New York City Taxi Cab.

interspersed with the travel, i've been visiting friends, strangers, and philosophy departments. if you can overlook the sleeping on floors and futons for two weeks (i certainly can), it pretty much rocks. i ran around chicago with michele a bit, and in new york (where i stayed for a couple days with a friend of a friend of a friend of somebody who used to go to my church--score.) i got to traipse about central park and see really big buildings and help serve dinner at a soup kitchen.

as for the schools--well, for the first time i have a really good sense of what it means to be wined and dined. oh, the dining. and oh, the wining.

(though i've been told by several people: enjoy it. this is the last time in a philosopher's career when they are sought after. ever.)

while we're on the subject, here are three things that seem to be much more common among philosophy grad students (and faculty, too) than they are among the greater population: (1) alcohol. (2) gossip. (3) facial hair. so there you have it.