Parableman

I was glancing through the new issue of Themelios to see which articles to save to read later, and I noticed a review of a new book on time and timelessness that included a nice summary of a common confusion in many online conversations I've had about the B-theory of time, which is often (and in this review) called the tenseless theory of time:

What is often misunderstood is that the tenseless theory of time is, in fact, a theory on time and change. Holland, like most others, treats the tenseless theory of time as if it were about timelessness. The idea seems to be that a tenseless theory of time gives us a world where all moments are equally, wholly, simultaneously, and timelessly present to God. But the tenseless theory of time does not give us this. All it gives us is a theory about what is true at certain times without any reference to tense. An example of a tenseless truth is <Wipf & Stock publish Richard Holland's book on February 20, 2012 at 8:00am>. Granted, this proposition does not change its truth-value like <Wipf & Stock will publish Holland's book tomorrow> does. But the tenseless proposition still gives us a proposition about what is true at a particular time. Even if the tenseless theory did entail a particular ontology of time whereby the past, present, and future all exist, it would not give us a state of affairs where all moments of time are simultaneously present to God. This is because all moments of time are not simultaneous together, even on a tenseless theory of time.

The reviewer goes on to explain how this problem occurred in the book being reviewed.

There are two other problems I've encountered with people arguing against the tenseless theory of time, involving confusions of a different sort. I think the most common is the pretense that the tenseless theory of time amounts to the view that nothing changes, that all objects at each time are always at those times, that there is no succession of moments, and so on. The B-theory, static view of time, or tenseless view of time says nothing of sort. All it says is that time consists of moments in a succession of before, after, and simultaneity and that none of those relationships are reducible to tensed propositions. Rather, tensed propositions are grounded in the relations before, after, and simultaneous. There is no objective present, past, or future. Those terms are relative to what moment in time you're speaking of (or speaking at). But there's never any denial of change, of ordering in time, or of anything like that. And adding a timeless God to the picture doesn't change any of that. It's still true for God that the moments in time happen in an order and that the things in time change. It's just that God's own experience of those moments in time isn't temporally ordered (but that doesn't mean God is unaware of the order of the events in time, as a number of my students have wrongly taken the idea of atemporality to imply).

The other problem I see regularly is confusing this theory of time with a completely different theory about persistence of objects through time, namely the four-dimensionalist or temporal parts view. The latter view is a theory about how an object persists through time, whether it is by enduring through time, being wholly present at each moment it exists at or being spread out across time as a four-dimensional object with parts at times. In fact, most people who hold to the tenseless theory (or B-theory) of time are not four-dimensionalists. But many people who try to argue for an alternative theory of time, in my experience, want to start with arguments against four-dimensionalism, which is a view about an entirely separate issue.

Update: I should say that there's a fourth, which is where the review starts, which is to distinguish between ontologies of time (i.e. whether only the present exists, the present and the past, or the past, present, and future) and theories about how tensed and tenseless propositions relate. Philosophers have been tying these issues together, and it's only very recently that metaphysicians have begun to tease them apart. Several top philosophers of time still don't understand that these are separate issues. The above issues involve distinctions that most philosophers get right but that undergraduates in my classes or people discussing philosophy or theology online, outside the academic context of formal training in philosophy, often get wrong. I blame people less for the fourth error, since top metaphysicians still don't see that distinction.

The introductory and preaching schedule for this unit of teaching is here. I will add links to sermons as they are preached and available.

1. Ezra 1 "The LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia." (Jeremy Jackson) 4-14-13
2. Ezra 2 "These were the people who came up out of captivity." (Stefan Matzal) 4-21-13
3. Ezra 3 "For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever." (John Hartung) 4-28-13
4. Ezra 4 "The work on the house of God ... stopped." (Nathaniel Jackson) 5-5-13
5. Ezra 5:1-6:14a "The eye of their God was on the elders of the Jews." (Stefan Matzal) 5-12-13
6. Ezra 6:14b-22 "The LORD ... turned the heart of the king." (Stefan Matzal) 5-19-13
7. Ezra 7 "To study the law of the LORD, and to do it and to teach." (Jeremy Jackson) 5-26-13
8. Ezra 8 "The hand of our God is for good on all who seek him." (Stefan Matzal) 6-2-13
9. Ezra 9 "We are before you in our guilt." (Nathaniel Jackson) 6-9-13
10. Ezra 10 "Make confession to the LORD ... and do his will." (Jeremy Jackson) 6-16-13

Blog posts to go with this sermon series:

1. Past, Present, and Future Restoration 4-13-13
2. graphic for 4-21-13 sermon 4-28-13
3: Ezra 4-6 (post 1): Bookends 5-4-13
4. Ezra 4-6 (post 2): Parallel Panels 5-7-13
5. Ezra 4-6 (post 3): Mirrored Words 5-10-13
6. Ezra 4-6 (post 4): Covenant Relationship 5-14-13
7. Ezra 4-6 (post 5): Persecution 5-17-13

For more sermons, see here.

I've been thinking about the concept of tokenism and why we find it problematic, given that virtually everyone who complains about tokenism thinks there is some good in having representation by those who are underrepresented in a particular sphere. What makes the difference between the cases where we find it unproblematic to try to get people more represented and those where we consider it tokenism? A few considerations come to mind:

The most obvious cases of tokenism are when someone just wants to appear forward-thinking and progressive by selecting people of an underrepresented group without really being concerned at all about the underlying ethical issues. If a college's admissions literature and website are littered with pictures of non-white students when such students are only 1% of the college's population, we might cry foul and wonder why they think they can pretend the school is more diverse than it is just to make themselves look good.

We should be careful here, of course. An institution might not be doing this just to look good. They might be thinking that portraying the student body in such an inaccurate manner will help attract students in those very groups, and they might have good motivations for wanting such a change. But it still seems wrong in such a case, even though it's not merely to generate a false view of the school to garner a better reputation. The dishonesty in the portrayal seems like a kind of tokenism. We might select people out of underrepresented groups to make it look like our institution is better than it is, or we might do so for purer motives, namely to try to make it better than it is, but either way the dishonesty of portraying it that way seems to fall under our concept of tokenism.

So is it basically a kind of dishonesty that makes something a case of tokenism? I don't think it's as simply as that. Consider a TV show that has their one token black in a mainly white cast. That black character might display all the stereotypes of black characters, in which case it might be criticized for stereotyping. On the other hand, it might display no such stereotypes, in which case it might be accused of sanitizing the character to make them more white-friendly. You might then think the critics are unfair. You can't win, no matter what you do? Actually, I don't think that's the problem. I think the no-win situation is set up because you don't have enough black characters both (a) on TV in general and (b) on the show in question. Even having two black characters, one of each type, is better than having one token black who fits either mold. The solution seems to me to be to have a diversity of black characters, some of whom display some stereotypical characteristics but who nonetheless are real characters, some of whom display fewer stereotypical characteristics but who nonetheless are real characters. What saves the day for a show that might be accused of tokenism is to have a variety of real characters showing a diversity of real-life traits from real people. Portray them so that the audience cares about them. Portray real inner conflict, hard choices, and so on. Make your characters of color as interesting and developed as all the other characters, and have enough of them across the variety of TV shows that we create, and you're a lot less susceptible to be accused of tokenism.

What does that suggest about what tokenism is? It's not just plain honesty, because there's plenty of room in there for trying to have as many characters as you can that don't fit well with the actual percentages of which black people have which traits. You don't need to have your black characters have children out of wedlock at exactly the rate that happens among black people in real life. You don't need to have them like hip-hop at the same percentages. You don't need to have them attending college or being incarcerated at the same rates. You need some level of honesty there to the point where you're not ignoring realities in society too much, but you can steer stereotypes by having lots of counter-stereotypical characters, and of course a lot of what you can do will be affected by what kind of show it is. Game of Thrones won't have anyone listening to hip-hop or being incarcerated in American prisons. The core problem seems to be, rather, that tokenism doesn't care about the people or characters enough to do much more than trot them out for the appearance. A character on a superhero show who is a token black might be stereotypical or might not be, but we won't care about the character very much, because the person isn't fleshed out very much. Tokens in college promotional literature are there for the appearance, and in a sense so are the undeveloped characters who are there just to have representation.

Now how does this relate to the use of tokenism-language in the context of affirmative action? Some conservative critics of affirmative action see it as harmful to those it's intended to help, partly because it isn't concerned with their success in college but just wants to have diversity as an element of its student body. It isn't concerned with finding students who will be as prepared to succeed, because it's more interested in showing off its diverse composition. In that sense, it would be like the case of admissions literature. But this isn't the only way to conceive of affirmative action. Even with the diversity rationale, one can be engaged with affirmative action policies in order to promote diversity, where there's a further goal for that diversity, and that can be to promote further racial justice for the sake of those who would be benefited by their being such racial policies. That motivation strikes me as not tokenist, even though the actions would seem to have roughly the same outcome with either motivation. So tokenism is not just about consequences. It's about why you engage in the actions you engage in to begin with.

I can imagine a student group at a college, maybe a religious or political group, that wants to seek more diversity. They might undertake efforts to promote their group among groups that are not well represented in their group at present. They might change their methods or approach to be more culturally acceptable to such groups. They might change their focus to include things people in those groups would care about. Is this tokenism? It seems to me that the answer depends on why they're doing it. If they want the people they're targeting merely because they want it to be true that their group is more diverse, I think it is tokenism. If they want them to be present because they think they themselves will be enriched by the experience, and the newcomers will benefit as well, then it seems to me not to be tokenism.

The same goes for inclusion in an academic conference or in high governmental positions. If a president seriously would like cabinet or judicial nominees to come from underrepresented groups, as both the last two presidents have (at least at times) shown concern for, then the crucial question is why. Is it to make the party or the administration look good, or is it out of a genuine concern for having diversity in that sphere of government? If I tried to put a conference together, and someone pointed out that none of the invited speakers were women, I might try to remedy that. Am I remedying it because I committed a faux pas and am embarrassed, or am I doing it because I think we all benefit by having more women presenting at philosophy conferences and because I think we have a systematic implicit bias against thinking first of women when thinking of the movers and shakers in a discipline like philosophy? The former might be tokenism. The latter seems not to be. But the actions are exactly the same.

This is a first attempt to think through this carefully. A number of questions remain in my mind. Are there any examples of what seems like tokenism that doesn't fit the kind of thing I'm saying here? Are there any examples that don't seem like tokenism that do have some of the characteristics I've been trying to identify tokenism with? It may well be that there's more complexity to what we typically call tokenism, and it might be that I'll need to figure out what to do when there are disagreements over what counts as tokenism. There's also the possible complication of whether tokenism is always wrong. Are there cases that we would call tokenism where we wouldn't find it morally problematic, or is it a term like 'racism' or 'murder' where we'd only use the term if we thought there was something problematic going on?

The introductory and preaching schedule for this unit of teaching is here.

1. Mark 1:1-11 "You are my beloved Son." (Stefan Matzal) 1-6-13
2. Mark 1:12-20 "The kingdom of God is at hand." (Jeremy Jackson) 1-13-13
3. Mark 1:21-34 "A new teaching with authority." (Nathaniel Jackson) 1-20-13
4. Mark 1:35-45 "A desolate place, and there he prayed." (Stefan Matzal) 1-27-13
5. Mark 2:1-12 "The Son of Man has authority to forgive." (Jeremy Jackson) 2-3-13
6. Mark 2:13-22 "I come not to call the righteous." (Stefan Matzal) 2-10-13
7. Mark 2:23-3:6 "The Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath." (Jeremy Jackson) 2-17-13
8. Mark 3:7-21 "Called to him those whom he denied" (Nathaniel Jackson) 2-24-13
9. Mark 3:22-35 "Whoever blasphemes ... the Holy Spirit." (Stefan Matzal) 3-3-13
10. Mark 4:1-9,13-20 "A sower went out to sow." (Jeremy Jackson) 3-10-13
11. Mark 4:26-32 "Like a grain of mustard seed" (Stefan Matzal) 3-17-13
12. Mark 4:10-12,21-25,33-34 "See but not perceive" (Nathaniel Jackson) 3-24-13 [Palm Sunday]
13. Mark 4:35-41 "Who then is this?" (Jeremy Jackson) 3-31-13 [Easter Sunday]

Stefan's blog posts to go along with this series;

1. Repentance is Multifaceted (1-10-13)
2. Tax Collectors & Sinners Transformed Today (2-10-13)
3. Background Information about the Gospel of Mark (2-18-13)
4. 'Sandwich Construction' in Mark's Gospel (3-6-13)
5. Jesus' Sisters (3-14-13)

See also the sermons from the 1982 and 1992 sermon series that covered these chapters.

For more sermons, see here.

I haven't submitted to the Christian Carnival in a long time. For those who don't know, the Christian Carnival is a monthly self-selected compilation of Christian bloggers' best posts of the previous month. I did manage to get something in to the December edition at à la mode de les Muses. There's a special Christmas section this month, but it has the usual wide range of topics from a variety of Christian blogs.

Here's an interesting analysis by D.A. Carson of three recent cases of what he calls the intolerence of tolerance that happened after his book on the subject came out: the Chick fil-A ban issue, a case of a liberal seminary trying to discipline a very respected faculty member for including a theologically-traditional book on homosexuality in the curriculum, and the HHS contraception mandate.

I'm not sure I have anything interesting to say about the first two cases he discusses that hasn't already been said ad nauseam. But he says something very interesting about the third case he discusses, the HHS mandate.
If Carson is right in his analysis of the HSS mandate, the government is willing to allow a lot of exceptions to the HHS mandate that have nothing to do with religious opposition to contraception or drugs with unintended abortifacient effects. But they won't allow a religious exception to this mandate on either of those two grounds. And they're arguing not that there should be no freedom of religion as an exception to government mandates nor that the drugs in question do not have an abortifacient effect (as some do argue). Instead, they argue that we should take taking 'religion' narrowly to include things like public gatherings for worship but not to include things like views on ethics.

What strikes me as extremely interesting about that is that would raise some serious questions about a lot of fairly common practices of excluding religion or seeking to exclude religion from the public sphere. If religion has to do with corporate gatherings of worship but not individual beliefs, then a lone science teacher who wants to include some discussion of philosophical arguments about design in a science classroom is not engaging in religion. I would have thought that patently obvious, but courts seem not to agree. The interesting question here is whether the Obama Administration's view of religion with respect to the HHS mandate can be made consistent with that practice of excluding long-standing philosophical discussions from science classrooms on the ground that such philosophical discussions are religion. They are not, on any sane analysis. They are philosophy. But that should be so much clearer if other philosophical views such as ethical views are not religion. Metaphysics surely is not either. If it is, I'd like to see the argument why one and not the other should count as religion or why we should have different standards for what counts as religion in the two cases.

Another place religion is often excluded is in the contention among many on the left that it's immoral for voters to decide who they should vote for or which policies to prefer if their reasons are based on their religious views (or politicians to decide which policies to support based on their own or their constituents' views). The same inconsistency would apply if the government's position on HHS is correct. If someone opposes abortion for purely religious reasons (which I think is true of some but certainly not all and probably not most pro-lifers), then it's not religion according to this approach, and those who resist anyone's attempt to vote pro-life on such grounds as thoroughly immoral cannot do so consistently with claiming that Wheaton College's resistance to the HHS mandate is not religion. This isn't even two different branches of philosophy, as the above example of metaphysics and ethics is. Here we have two examples of not just ethical views but of the very same ethical view, so there's no arguing that one case is religion and the other not. We'd have to argue that different standards for what counts as religion should apply in the two different cases, and I have no idea how that argument would go.

So assuming Carson is right on how the government is pursuing these cases (and I admit to not looking into them as carefully as he has), those who want to do either of the things I've pointed to have a real problem on their hands if they also want to defend the enforcement of the HHS mandate in these cases in the way the government seems to be doing it. I'm not sure how a consistent approach to all these questions can end up agreeing with the Obama Administration on this case that these ethical beliefs are not religion while still opposing the two things I've identified as religion.

Henry Imler retweeted a post today giving a defense of hell from the Arminian point of view. Randal Rauser argues that Calvinism means God isn't all-good, because in Calvinism there's no possibility of the reprobate (i.e. those predestined to hell) avoiding hell.

This strikes me as extremely odd reasoning. The idea is that Arminianism is better than Calvinism because of what happens in non-existent possible worlds, rather than having anything to say about the justice of hell in the actual world. Arminians believe that all the people going to hell have non-existent counterparts in non-existent possible worlds who didn't go to hell. Calvinists believe there are no possible worlds where those people avoid hell. So on one view you have non-existent people in non-existent worlds going to hell, and in the other view you have the same non-existent people in some (but not all) non-existent worlds not going to hell. I guess somehow the non-existent people in some of the worlds that don't exist not going to hell makes the view better than if the non-existent people were in hell in those non-existent worlds. I'm not getting it. Wouldn't be better just to argue for the justice of hell in the actual world?

That's even ignoring my huge quibble with how compatibilism is often framed as not allowing alternative possibilities. I'm perfectly fine with talking about contra-causal possibilities. If my free actions are fully explainable in terms of things in this world, I can still speak of possible worlds where things go differently because of different causes, and it's not as if it wouldn't have been me if the explanations for what I do had been different and I did different things. So why couldn't a Calvinist believe someone actually reprobate could have been elect and someone actually elect could have been reprobate? I would expect most Calvinists to say exactly that, in fact.

I also have problems with the use of James Rachels. Rachels thinks the following two cases are morally equivalent:

1. Planning out a murder, arriving on the scene, and killing the person.
2. Planning out a murder, arriving on the scene, finding them dying a preventable death, and standing their grinning watching them die.

I'm not sure how that distinction is relevant, because this is being compared to:

3.The hyper-Calvinist view where God actually delights in the person's eternal suffering itself and wants no good for them
4. The Calvinist view where God doesn't delight in the death of the wicked but has reasons for allowing the natural consequences of their wickedness to take their course in not regenerating them and letting them be wicked for eternity around other wicked people and not around God and his moderating influence. (This is not the only conception of hell, but I think it's the best one, and it has a pretty prominent proponent in Augustine.) Their own choices lead to their destruction, even if it's also true that those choices were part of God's plan. And God has motives for allowing it (just as God does on the Arminian model; you need open theism to avoid this, but open theism hardly solves the problem of evil).

Notice that 3 and 4 have contrary motivations, where 1 and 2 do not.

Police reports need to be descriptive. I think they try to include as much information as they can, and when they release information to the public they try to include as much as they have in order to aid anyone helping out the investigation. But when you have a report here or there of a robbery, and the only information the witnesses bother to give to the police of any consequence is that the robber was black, I have to wonder if it does more harm than good to include it in news reports.

Syracuse University regularly sends out notifications to the entire university community whenever a robbery or assault has taken place in my neighborhood. I don't get these anymore, but I used to get them several times a week. The reports usually described the suspect. They usually said something vague about the person's height, occasionally mentioned a not-very-distinctive aspect of the person's dress (e.g. wearing a hoodie, wearing a baseball cap). They almost always gave the person's race, which was usually black. They almost never described what the person actually looked like in any more helpful way. Often it was less than that, just the race and maybe an indication that the person was tall or something that's true of lots of people.

Knowing that some black dude robbed a house nearby recently doesn't do a whole lot more than knowing someone robbed a house nearby recently, in terms of safety and awareness, and it can foster racial stereotypes and lead people who have all the good will in the world racially speaking to suspect black people in their neighborhood dressed a certain way, which is unfortunate. Implicit bias has been demonstrated to occur in people who have zero racial prejudice in any explicit and knowing way, and all it takes to have it is merely knowing that there is a stereotype. It affects non-verbal behavior even among well-meaning people. It can lead to unconscious effects in how someone is evaluated.

I can understand how a description of a thief or assailant who is known to be currently roaming a neighborhood looking for victims can help people aid the police in finding the person, but it has to be actually descriptive to make a lot of difference. If it isn't, but it does include the person's race, we might wonder if we're doing more harm than good in notifying thousands of people the next day that the previous night it was a black guy who robbed someone's house two roads down. I wouldn't suggest leaving it out of police reports, but notifications sent out to a huge community that don't actually help in finding the person but include the person's race entirely on the ground that it might help someone find the person seem to me to be a waste of time while contributing toward some of the more hidden aspects of racial bias.

California has outlawed so-called ex-gay conversion therapy. Social conservatives who might want to express outrage at this law need to make sure they're going to be consistent with their own views on other matters. Also, surprising as it may be to some, there are reasons for those with more liberal views on these matters to worry about a law like this.

I'll start with the second point. Those who recognize homosexuality as a social construction should at least be open to a worry about this law. Most experts nowadays consider our notion of being gay as socially constructed. There have been different ways of conceiving of people with same-sex desires over history. In ancient Greece, for example, it was relatively accepted for older men to favor a sexual relationship with boys over that of their wives, not because they had some notion of people who have an orientation toward people of the same sex but because they didn't think they could have as deep an intellectual relationship with women, and they thought relationships that we would now count as pedophilia were a deeper form of love because they could involve intellectual conversations.

We now have a notion that there's a phenomenon called homosexuality, where a small minority among the population has sexual desires for people of their own sex rather than for people of the opposite sex. But most people recognize now, whether they approve of such desires or not, that it's more complicated than that. There are people who have both kinds of desires, relatively in equal proportion. There are people who have more one than the other. There are people who have one predominant at one time in their life but move to a point at another time where it's the other way around. There are people who move toward same-sex sexual interaction primarily for political purposes rather than because of some already-existing inner state of being primarily attracted along same-sex lines. But our social narrative primarily divides human beings into the binary of gay and straight, with some allowance for bisexual when we're feeling a desire for more precision. The variety isn't remotely captured by that, never mind the phenomenon of trans-sexuality, and the idea that being in one of the two categories of the binary is simply a matter of how someone was born isn't exactly borne out by science, even if there is some evidence that the underlying state of how one's desires are directly can be partially influenced by genetic factors.

Many on the left on these issues push for alternative conceptions of homosexuality, including allowing those who see their same-sex attraction in a way that resists being considered gay in the usual sense, and if same-sex attraction is much more complex than just being straight or gay, as many who might be inclined to favor a law like this might think, then shouldn't we be interested in allowing therapists to encourage moving away from the homo/hetero binary? But it seems to me that this law might ban therapists from doing that, because it would be helping move someone with same-sex attraction away from thinking of themselves as gay. Many on the left on these issues should see that as highly problematic.

It's less surprising to many to see social conservatives resisting a law like this, but such resistance isn't as easy to formulate as it sounds, because the grounds for it might conflict with other conservative views. For example, if we don't have a right to health insurance covering exactly the things we think are medically necessary, then we don't have a right to health insurance covering a particular therapy that we happen to want covered. If we don't have a right to doctors performing a particular procedure that we happen to want performed, then we don't have a right to this therapy if we want it.

That being said, conservatives can consistently hold that the government shouldn't interfere with what private counselors can do, even if what they want to do is disapproved of by the main professional organization. But most people do think medical services can be licensed, and certain things done by doctors can make them lose their license. So this is, at least in principle, something that is within the government's traditional range of control. But I'd have to see the law, because if the guy NPR had on opposing it is correct then it sounds like they outlawed a good deal more than what careful study has shown to be both ineffective and psychologically harmful (i.e. the conversion therapy itself) and will not even allow a therapist to help someone who has unwanted same-sex desires to live a life that avoids what they see as sinful and unwanted (which is not remotely the same as converting them away from a sexual orientation). I'm not sure there's any scientific ground for taking it to be harmful to choose a celibate life over fulfilling one's sexual desires, and therefore the normal licensing standards shouldn't require it to be banned.

There may also be a religious issue. They did apparently include a religious exemption. But not exactly. They included an exemption for counselors who are practicing religious officials of some sort but who are not licensed counselors. A pastor, priest, or other religious leader who happens to counsel is exempt. But a nun working as a licensed counselor in a more medically-oriented psychological practice is not exempt. And a licensed counselor operating a business not being run as a religious non-profit is not exempt. Is this a violation of free exercise? I suspect it is, at least in terms of the aspects that are banned that aren't demonstrated as harmful (such as helping someone to find a counselor who can help them live a celibate life or referring them to a therapist who will encourage them to think outside the gay/straight binary or allow them to think of themselves in a way that is more about having same-sex desires than about belonging to some supposedly-scientific category of being gay, which really involves more politically than many think, and someone who opposes those politics but does have same-sex desires may well not be gay in every sense). Again, this is assuming the opponent of the law on NPR represented it accurately, but the state senator who supported the bill on that show didn't offer any correction on the matter.

There's also the issue of viewpoint-neutral endorsement. This is another place where conservatives will have a harder time making their case. They tend to think there's no problem with the government or government employees endorsing statements of religious content, because the establishment clause only prohibits the setting up of an official government-run religion, and many conservatives don't even think this applies to states. After all, several states had official religions when they entered the union. So it's going to be hard to press this argument if you hold that sort of view on the establishment clause. You might, however, make an argument involving inconsistency among those who do think it's unconstitutional for the state to endorse religious content (or rule out religious content). And you might easily make the argument on policy grounds, rather than as a constitutional problem that courts can then deal with.

On the consistency issue, I think there's some case to be made, but it's because there's already serious inconsistency. If we take seriously the prohibition of even mentioning classic philosophical arguments like design arguments in a science classroom, on the ground that it's somehow endorsement of religion, then we already are banning lots of stuff that isn't remotely religion. Because the design argument need depend in no way on any controversial religious premise, it's not as if someone who endorses such an argument has to be following any religion at all. It could be a purely secular theist who endorses a design argument. And merely teaching the argument, rather than endorsing it, is certainly not endorsement of religion. So those who claim that that's importing religion into the science classroom have such a broad view of what counts as religion that it might well be very hard to see this law as not endorsing a claim that speaks to a religious issue. It's on such grounds that a federal court has ruled that it's unconstitutional to present the arguments against intelligent design in a state-run science classroom, because it took that to violate the establishment clause.

But a much more reasonable position would be that intelligent design is not necessarily religion, even if it's also not strictly speaking science (although I would argue, and have argued, that it's not any less science than the metaphysics that commonly gets done by physicists working on cosmology, quantum-theory, and space-time). Someone who holds this more reasonable position might nonetheless not hold the conservative view on the establishment clause and therefore think that President Obama shouldn't be invoking God the way he does or that it's unconstitutional to endorse actual religious content in a public school science classroom, such as endorsing six-day creationism because the Bible teaches it. On that sort of view, it's still easy to present an unconstitutionality argument for this law. After all, the legal issues are the same as the above cases, but without the ridiculous claim that philosophical arguments are somehow automatically religious just because a lot of religious people accept them (which would make most of our beliefs religious). Then all you need to do is recognize that the value of at least some of the therapy falling under this broad ban is both (1) not as clearly harmful as some of the therapy it bans and (2) something religious people can endorse because of their religion. In that case, the government is not remaining viewpoint-neutral on a religious matter without the strong argument that the therapy is harmful.

And even someone who does hold the conservative view on the establishment clause (or who isn't willing to argue a case base on existing but wrongly-decided precedent) can give a policy argument against this at the legislative level. It's not unconstitutional, on this view, but it's compatible with that to think that as a policy matter the government should remain viewpoint-neutral on controversial matters of religious disagreement that aren't demonstrably harmful the way medical professionals do take ex-gay therapy proper to be demonstrably harmful. The result is that this is just poor policy and should be opposed as bad law. And that's something that someone pretty far on the left on same-sex issues should be all right with. The government shouldn't tell us what to think about such matters, and it shouldn't stop us from getting counseling that fits with what sort of life we want for ourselves, and if a minor happens to want this sort of therapy it shouldn't be illegal for a counselor who is willing to do it or to refer someone to someone who will out of respect for the client's wishes as long as it isn't one of those demonstrably-harmful methods that the ban doesn't limit itself to.

So I think a lot of the conservative arguments against this ban need to be very carefully done to succeed, but I think there are arguments, and some of them might appeal to those more toward the left. But those are more against the law as it stands, rather than against a different ban that could have been enacted. I do think there are real tensions on the left in how these issues are thought of, and I'm not sure it's as easy to justify this broad a ban as I assume many on the left would think.

The introduction and preaching schedule for this unit of teaching is here.

1. Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 "What does man gain by all the toil by which he toils?" (Stefan Matzal) 9-9-12
2. Ecclesiastes 1:12-2:26 "He should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil." (Stefan Matzal) 9-16-12
3. Ecclesiastes 3:1-15 "He has made everything beautiful in its time." (Jeremy Jackson) 9-23-12
4. Ecclesiastes 3:16-22 "A man should rejoice in his work." (Nathaniel Jackson) 9-30-12
5. Ecclesiastes 4 "This also is vanity and an unhappy business." (Stefan Matzal) 10-7-12
6. Ecclesiastes 5:1-7 "God is the one you must fear." (Jeremy Jackson) 10-14-12
7. Ecclesiastes 5:8-6:9 "God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart." (Stefan Matzal) 10-21-12
8. Ecclesiastes 6:10-7:14 "Who can make straight what he has made crooked?" (Jeremy Jackson) 11-4-12
9. Ecclesiastes 7:15-29 "Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise." (Stefan Matzal) 11-11-12
10. Ecclesiastes 8 "Man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun." (Nathaniel Jackson) 11-18-12
11. Ecclesiastes 9:1-10 "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might." ( Stefan Matzal) 11-25-12
12. Ecclesiastes 9:11-10:4 "Wisdom is better ... but one sinner destroys much good." (Jeremy Jackson) 12-2-12
13. Ecclesiastes 10:5-11:6 "You do not know the work of God who makes everything." (Stefan Matzal) 12-9-12
14. Ecclesiastes 11:7-12:14 "Remember your Creator in the days of your youth." (John Hartung) 12-16-12

In addition, here are some blog posts from Stefan Matzal on some of these passages:

1. Ecclesiastes and Busyness (10-3-12)
2. The Structure of Ecclesiastes 4 (10-4-12)
3. The Structure of Ecclesiastes 5:8-6:9 (10-18-12) with graphical representation
4. Ecclesiastes and Busyness, Part 2 (10-19-12)
5. Graphic for Structure of Ecclesiastes 7:19-29 (11-13-12)
6. Why Do We Have to Die? (11-27-12)
7. Moral Proximity; Responsibilities versus Concerns (11-30-12)

For more sermons, see here.

Interesting post at the Feminist Philosophers blog about Ann Romney's speech last night, where she recognizes systemic inequality between men and women, with women doing a lot more of the work on average than the men who share responsibilities with them. Is Ann Romney saying such structural and systemic inequality is just fine? I'm not so sure, and I'm repeating my comment on that post here. [Caveat: I didn't hear the speech or read the transcript of the whole thing, just what appears on that post.]

It's not clear to me that she's saying it's fine for women to have to work harder than men. I think she might just be saying that it's fine that life is isn't easy.

There's actually a little speech in the biblical book of I Peter that directs people in subordinate positions to do good to those over them, not because they deserve it or because anything unjust that they might do is legitimate, but because the more important goal is to win them over by good deeds. Feminism gets complicated when you're more concerned about the eternal salvation of those participating in oppressive structures than you are about the often-small ways that those structures manifest themselves on a day-to-day basis for those who happen to be affected by them in more minor ways.

It would mean, then, that you don't have to think those structures are perfectly all right to think that women should put up with them, because the putting-up with them is for a higher purpose. There's much of this kind of thinking in Augustine, who would accept any form of government for keeping order in this society, and how just it is isn't as important to him as going along with the laws Socrates-style but for the sake of winning over by good behavior those he sees as heading in the wrong direction spiritually. It allows him to think certain ways of ruling are intrinsically bad but are not worth resisting (and thus he has very mixed feelings about slavery, seeing something wrong with it and worth resisting on one level but also as an institution that Christians can work within to do a more important task of being a light to the darkness of the slaveowners. It's love for their enemy.

I don't how much of this approach would be manifest among Mormons, but I have to wonder if that's the kind of thinking that lies behind Ann Romney's speech. If I heard this kind of thing from an evangelical, it's how I'd take it, and evangelicals and Mormons are at least culturally very similar, even if they're worlds apart theologically.

A common theme in the last few days is the tying of Romney's Birther joke to race. He joked, in his hometown, that no one had ever asked him to prove that he was born in the U.S. The idea is that Romney was playing to the deep suspicion that people inclined to accept Birtherism have of Obama, and the suspicion they have is basically racism. So Romney was deliberately invoking racist ideas in potential supporters in order to get fringe Americans who already hate Obama onto his side, while knowingly alienating the swing voters he's been desperately trying to get onto his side by trying to be as mainstream as possible without sacrificing the essentials the rightward base needs him to keep.

In furtherance of this narrative, there was a #FutureMittJokes Twitter hashtag game that trended pretty high that consisted of people inventing jokes where Romney took great delight in the privileges that come from being white, at the cost of others' having their rights violated or at least being mistreated. So Romney was projected to be likely to make jokes like the following:

"No one ever burnt a cross on *my* lawn."
"It's called the *White* House for a reason!"
"People never joke about me planting a watermelon patch on the White House lawn!"
"Nobody ever told me I couldn't attend that all White high school!"
"no one ever asked me if i was sure i was in the right place"
"No one ever told me to sit at the back of the bus. wht is a bus anyway"
"No one ever told ME I couldn't marry a White woman."
"I never get pulled over when driving one of Ann's Cadillacs"
"When the police pulls me over, they're only asking me for directions."
"No one ever burnt a cross on *my* lawn."

I'm not buying it. Romney was certainly making a jab about Obama. Anyone who denies that is being disingenuous. But what was the critique? I would have thought it had mostly to do with the repeated criticism of Obama on foreign relations. Obama bowed to foreign leaders. He accepted a Nobel Prize for not having done anything but replace Bush. He undermined national security by fighting dead battles about policies Bush abandoned in 2003. He leaked top secret information for electoral gain. He often favors our enemies over our allies. He criticizes us abroad. He is unwilling to acknowledge Muslim terrorists as terrorists or as Muslims. And so on. The list is quite long, and it's full of actual content that has nothing to do with race.

Those sorts of themes strike me as what feeds the idea that Obama doesn't have American interests at the center of his motivating structure. It's about how he behaves when dealing with other nations. I don't myself buy that entire picture. He's not always very wise in some of things he does, and it does endanger national security and embarrass the U.S. at times, but I think some of those criticisms are simply unfair. But there are those who are convinced that the U.S. president does not always have a significant concern for U.S. interests driving his foreign policy or his relations with other nations. That's completely undeniable. And there is plenty of content to the charge, particular things he's done or has been believed to have done, that does not have anything to do with his race or the fact that he was raised abroad for part of his childhood or that he was raised living as if a Muslim for some of that time. Any white dude with similar experiences and actions would arouse the same suspicion from the same people.

It's easy to see race driving this if you don't think there's any substance to those criticisms, but the fact is that a lot of people do believe there's substance to them, and it's not because Obama is black. It's because they see such behavior as unfitting of a U.S. president. They would have worried about Clinton doing any of it as much as they do Obama. It's not his race but his leftward orientation, his past as a community organizer, his privileged, elite education, and how he actually behaved when traveling abroad during his first presidential campaign that drove the suspicion that motivates people who see him as a sort of traitor to American values. And I think that, together with his Muslim influence from childhood, is what drives the Birther narrative, and it would do so even if he had been a white guy with a white, French father whose mother married a white American convert to Islam in the U.S. and then moved to Canada for a while to be enrolled in a Muslim school with extremist ties. The whole thing could just as easily have happened without the African or Indonesian elements, which means it's not race that's central. I'm sure there are some who are suspicious of him just because of his race, but I think it's been pretty clear that that's a thin sliver of those who disagree with him on policy matters. The fact that the conservative base, including the Tea Party people, could be happy with Herman Cain during the primaries seems to me to be about as close to proof as you get on such matters.

I imagine Romney agrees with a good deal of the foreign relations complaint I've outlined above, and it makes complete sense that he would make a joke at the expense of the Birthers, whom he has consistently criticized and distanced himself from. The idea is that Obama is the sort of person that crazy people can make crazy conspiracy theories about, because he fits the profile that feeds the narrative. This is because of his policies, language, and behavior toward other nations. That he was implicitly hinting at a racial narrative is not very likely. The way the story is told assumes that he was playing to the Birthers' own racism, when he was instead making fun of Birthers and invoking something that Obama's opponents take to be a serious, non-racial critique that the racial-accusers don't seem to recognize as even being part of it. The racial-narrative claim is possible if you don't think Romney could be referencing the actual content behind why people see Obama as anti-American. That a good deal of those arguments seem implausible to many on the left, I think, is what leads them to turn to other explanations. But it's poor reasoning to attribute an extreme, and psychologically unlikely, view to someone just because the more psychologically plausible view for them to be holding is one you disagree with.

Romney is not stupid enough to be doing what these critics are claiming he is doing. If he knew that people would interpret the joke the way the FutureMittJokes hashtag did, he would have considered it at the very least politically stupid (and I think he would recognize its moral offensiveness). So I'm sure he couldn't have even imagined that someone might reasonably take it to be about Obama's race. I would have a hard time imagining that if I hadn't seen people doing that and then claiming that any intelligent person must agree.

Furthermore, the joke wouldn't have had even a chance of humor if he expected people to be taking him seriously in criticizing Obama as not born in America. He has to have been making fun of Birthers for the attempt at humor even to have worked. Otherwise it would not have even been a joke. For it to be a joke, he has to be not recognizing the validity of the Birther charge and in fact making the joke at Birthers' expense.

Accusations of racism when it is not obviously present are the biggest reason so many conservatives think racism is a thing of the past, and they'll continue to fail to see the systemic and structural elements that have disparate racial effects if they're constantly made to be on the defense about issues where they are fully aware that the left is fabricating racist motives. Sometimes this is an understandable but unfortunate psychological response when there in fact is genuinely a racial element, and those who see it need to point it out, which is what some of these critics think they're doing here. But that very enterprise gets frustrated when it gets extended to situations where there's a highly plausible, even a more likely, explanation of someone's motives, as there clearly is in this case. Anyone who understands the implicit critique of Obama here is going to recognize that and will see the attempts to call it racist as shallow fabrications, which will prevent them from even recognizing racialized elements in the cases where they really are there. That's no way to further racial understanding, and that's why I think Newt Gingrich is right to see this kind of critique of Romney as frustrating racial progress, even if he's wrong in claiming that those who are making the criticism are therefore racist in doing so.

[Update 8/29: I saw a tweet today that well captures the attitude that Obama is anti-American in ways that don't rely on his race at all. It said, "Question for liberals: Why does Obama give money, guns, and oil to Mexicans but wants to take all away from Americans?"]

Trinity Fellowship sermons typically work through books or sections of books at a time. Occasionally there will be a topical series, which list as separate series. But individual sermons do occur, usually between series or on special days (most frequently Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, Reformation Sunday, Christmas, and New Years).

This list of sermons contains topical sermons preached since the Spring 2012 topical series on Marriage, Singleness, and Parenting (until the next topical series, which is still undetermined). I will continue to update it as new topical sermons are scheduled and preached.

1. II Cor 6:1-14 Labor (Jeremy Jackson) 9-2-12
2. II Peter 1:16-21 The Nature of Scripture (Bernie Elliot) 10-28-12 (Reformation Sunday Pulpit Exchange)
3. John 2:1-12 (Stefan Matzal) 10-28-12 (preached at Missio Church)
4. John 1 Christmas (Nathaniel Jackson) 12-23-12
5. Psalm 89 On Not Accusing God (Jeremy Jackson) 12-30-12
6. Genesis 3:19-24; John 11:17-44 Death: An Unacceptable Reality (Nathaniel Jackson) 4-7-12
7. Topical sermon (Jeremy Jackson) 8-4-12
8. Topical sermon (Stefan Matzal) 8-11-12
9. Topical sermon (Stefan Matzal) 8-18-12
10. Topical sermon (Nathaniel Jackson) 8-25-12
11. Reformation Sunday Pulpit Exchange (TBA) 10-27-12

For more sermons, see here.

The Los Angeles Times has an editorial up about the upcoming Supreme Court case that will revisit affirmative action. It argues several things, but one claim it makes strikes me as wrong. It points out that the Supreme Court has affirmed affirmative action as constitutional in a limited way, by saying:

1. Outright quotas, which reserve special spots for one group and only that group, violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
2. Less absolute ways of giving preference to under-represented groups pass constitutional muster, provided they have the right justification and are narrowly-tailored to meet that justification.
3. The right justification is the compelling state interest of increasing diversity, not reparations for past maltreatment, overcoming the persistent lingering effects of past maltreatment, or counterbalancing for any current discrimination.

This is right as far as it goes, but I think the editorial's way of framing what Justice O'Connor's framework allows and doesn't allow as justifications is not quite right, because it doesn't take into account one of the most important recent diversity arguments, which brings together diversity with some of the other considerations. Here is how the editorial separates the justifications:

One of the most persuasive arguments for some racial preferences is that the underrepresentation of African Americans in the ranks of the highest-achieving college applicants is inseparable from this country's legacy of racial discrimination. Far from offending the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the laws, such policies are consistent with that amendment's paramount objective of overcoming the effects of slavery.

The problem is that, beginning with the court's 1978 decision in the Bakke case from California, affirmative action has been based on a different rationale: that including students from different backgrounds enhances everyone's educational experience. That "diversity" justification, which looms large in the administration's brief, is valid as far as it goes. But it gives insufficient weight to the persistent racial disparities in income and education that continue to put minority applicants at a disadvantage.

The most significant development in the affirmative action discussion since the 2003 Supreme Court decisions is Elizabeth Anderson's work on integration, most supremely in her 2010 book The Imperative of Integration, which I consider a game-changer both in the moral debate about affirmative action and in how the legal issue of the diversity justification can fit together with the argument of the first paragraph I quoted above.

Anderson argues for a diversity justification that doesn't sound much like diversity simply enhancing the educational experience. What she argues is that increased interaction across racial lines is in fact the best way to overcome the effects of slavery, because the most entrenched structures that continue disparate racial effects stem from forces that are shown to diminish when there is more racial interaction, particularly at more intimate social levels, and one of the best ways to foster such increased social interaction is to get better representation at formative social institutions like schools, including dormitory housing assignments. Increased integration for the sake of better serving the educational purpose of these institutions is in fact what the Supreme Court's diversity justification allows for as a motive, and it doesn't limit itself to classroom experience. But Anderson argues that it is that very increased diversity and systematically more social interaction between races that will lead to the effects the first paragraph quoted above says should be the real justification for affirmative action.

So we can no longer say that these are separate issues. It's not that there are these separate justifications for affirmative action, and one justification is deemed by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional, while the other, less-convincing, one is deemed constitutional. What Anderson has argued, rightly in my view, is that the one the Los Angeles Times editorial says is less convincing (but that the Supreme Court has endorsed) actually does meet the purposes of the first one that they find more convincing (but that the Supreme Court precludes). And it strikes me that this is the best and most convincing reason for wanting to increase diversity and promote higher levels of integration at the college and university level.

What strikes me as the most important countervailing argument is not the legal question of the 14th Amendment, as the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito seem to think. The 14th Amendment was crafted by people who had no problem with interracial marriage bans, so an original-intent justification won't work to ban affirmative action. Perhaps an original public meaning argument would, but 14th-Amendment jurisprudence has long accepted at least some cases where other considerations trump equal protection. The standard it has to meet varies for different groups, but discrimination of various sorts can be morally and legally justified in certain settings, provided the right criteria are met. The question is whether the diversity rationale or some other rationale can be strong enough to justify giving some (but not absolute) preference for having a more integrated incoming class in a university or college.

But there's another question that gets much less attention, and that's how that integration or diversity gets achieved. The 1978 Supreme Court case ruled out absolute quotas, because they reserved spots for specific under-represented groups no matter what. So even if the only applicants were grossly underqualified and would fail out in one semester, they couldn't give those spots to others. That's been recognized by the Supreme Court since 1978 to be too far. The 2003 cases established another way that the methodology can go awry. The University of Michigan's undergraduate admission program assigned specific numerical values to different under-represented groups, and there was a certain percentage increase or decrease in the numerical value assigned to those candidates for admission because of their demographic. That's not as absolute as reserving spots for certain groups and never giving them to anyone else, but it was too absolute for Justices O'Connor and Breyer, who joined the more conservative contingent on that case (whereas they joined the more liberal contingent on the law school case that established the diversity rationale as constitutional). So both those methods went too far, according to enough votes on the Supreme Court to get it established as precedent.

What I wish would get more attention is another matter of what might go too far. Assuming it's perfectly fine to want to increase the number of representatives of an under-represented group, one way to go too far in bringing them in is to bring in people who will be unable to do the college-level work expected of them at an institute of higher learning. It was easy for me to see the disvalue in students unable to do college-level work when I tutored for the Syracuse University football team. Some of the team members I tutored needed some extra help but could do fine with that help. (One in particular was a stellar student.) But a few really had either very low ability or severe under-preparation and needed to be at a community college. There's a low enough retention rate on major athletic programs that admissions offices need to do a better job at resisting some of the candidates team coaches try to bring in.

Why can't the same true of affirmative action admissions? So even if race-consciousness is an important consideration in college admissions, many of the arguments against affirmative action would still have some moral force in leading admissions offices to be more careful in who they give a leg up to on their diversity justification. It seems too quota-like if they're just trying to achieve a certain percentage (which I'm sure they are -- the numbers bear that out, as Justice Thomas' dissent to the 2003 cases substantiated). Not being absolute makes it not an absolute quota. But not being absolute doesn't make it not a non-absolute quota. If they have a goal of a certain percentage, and they try to achieve it by bring in candidates who really aren't best served by being there, then they're morally failing, even if they have some wiggle room and aren't reserving an absolute number of spots for certain groups. It seems to me that this is what is in fact going on in most university and college affirmative action programs, and I don't think it serves the groups it's aiming to help. The populations who are under-prepared are not best served by bringing them to institutions they're not prepared for. They're best served by programs that help them before they get to college, as states where affirmative action has been outlawed have been able to do in order to do a back-door kind of affirmative action to get their quota goals met without allowing admissions to be race-conscious in any overt way.

Also, there's the issue of blindness to important diversity issues while focusing only on mere racial assignment. The important concern should be getting more integration with populations who really have barriers to integration. If you look at race and ignore other factors, then the children of immigrants and middle-class under-represented populations tend to get the benefit of those policies, when the most needy non-immigrant descendants of American slaves are not getting the help they need to achieve and get accepted to higher-learning institutions. Even when affirmative action helps the individuals it's intended to help, which I've already argued is not always the case, it's not usually helping those who most need it. Specifically targeting it to help them won't help them either. It's the other programs that help them earlier that really need the most effort. This is indeed something that even Justice Thomas, one of the strongest opponents of affirmative action on the Supreme Court, would be delighted to support. A key component of his resistance to affirmative action is recognizing how little it does to help the people who most need help and how much it might in fact harm some of them. There seems to me to be something right about that, and affirmative action simply isn't the answer to that problem.

So what would I conclude about all this? I do think an integrative purpose for some race-awareness in admissions can be perfectly fine and compatible with the equal protection concern of the 14th Amendment. I also think those who engage in such admissions policies need to be really careful that they're doing it in a way that achieves that goal well, and I suspect most of them do not. I also think what colleges and universities do with them once they arrive matters significantly, and it's important that they not foster so much of a tie among under-represented students that they form less-significant social ties with over-represented groups, as happened every single year at Brown University when I was there, because of a well-meaning program that happened before the bulk of other students arrived that allowed minority and international students to form social ties that lasted them their entire four-year Brown experience in ways that, for many, led them not to form as many ties with other groups. (This can happen in non-racial ways too. The evangelical Christian groups can lead evangelical students to do that.)

There was a legitimate purpose for such things. Consolidation and solidarity can provide those with similar experiences to unite over them and realize that they are not alone in their experiences. Community within an identity group can be a very good thing. Nonetheless, integration (particularly a kind of social integration that doesn't ignore difference but allows different people to recognize and understand their differences) is the best means to overcoming racial problems, and I think those who use the diversity justification for affirmative action have a moral obligation to ensure that they actually foster integration rather than fostering segregation once the under-represented students are there. That takes walking a fine line and being concerned about two things at once, things that seem hard to seek both together. You have to balance out various considerations. This is a more complex issue than either side usually presents it as. I'd like to see the Supreme Court recognize that when they revisit it this coming term, but I suspect we'll instead continue with two sides who each see only half the picture.

This is the 60th post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series.  The most recent posts covered the main views of personal identity and then turned to some more unorthodox accounts to handle some of the problems of personal identity, beginning in the last post with four-dimensionalism and its doctrine of temporal parts.

Another unorthodox view is conventionalism (sometimes called conceptualism, although some would want to reserve that term for something else). The basic idea behind conventionalism starts with something uncontroversial. Our language consists of a bunch of conventions. We use certain words to refer to certain things, and we adopt various conventions about when to apply certain terms, use certain tenses or grammatical constructions, and so on. Different governments and societies have different conventions about various matters, such as whether you drive on the left or right side of the road, whether it's appropriate to wear shoes in the house, or whether your leaders come to office by popular vote or some other method. In the case of language, however, these conventions don't determine what you should do but what your words mean. For example, the word 'quite' in British English can mean something opposite what it means in American English. In British English, you can apparently say something is "quite good" and mean that it's only a little good but not very good. I can't for the life of me hear that expression that way. In American English it means pretty much that it's very good. So the different linguistic conventions in the UK and in the US mean that the same expression in the mouths of different people can mean different things. That's uncontroversial, even if it's not something a lot of people think about every day. 

he conventionalist's controversial use of that phenomenon in the personal identity debate is to claim that our concept of person is like that, and it's like that even without one linguistic community, not when comparing two as my example did. The idea is that the meanings of our terms are determined by how we use them, and different societies could refer to different things by their terms. We haven't yet settled how the relevant terms are used in our society, and so our language hasn't settled what it is to say that a person has survived some massive change or which person remains when it's unclear, in these various science fiction cases that we don't normally think about. The reason is because we don't normally consider these cases. Our concept of a person is settled enough in ordinary cases, but we just haven't decided if we're going to consider the brain-recipient the same person as the one who had the original brain or the one whose body it went into. We haven't settled whether someone survives a Star Trek transporter. We haven't settled whether I'm still alive if my brain gets destroyed and my body kept alive artificially.

To be clear about what's required here, this isn't just saying that the word 'person' is unsettled. This is much more radical. On this view, it isn't even clear what prounouns like 'I' or 'she' refer to to or whether it's true to say that I will survive a certain procedure even given that we're entirely in agreement about the facts of what takes place. According to conventionalism, there is no right answer to such questions. I've seen the view described in such a way that would allow for the U.S. Supreme Court to make some decision deciding who is married to whom, who is responsible for whose crimes and whose children, who owns whose property and so on for some of these disputed matters, and that would settle the question, but it's not necessarily that simple. The Supreme Court's opinions would certainly be a factor in what determines the meaning of the relevant terms. But ordinary people's opinions would have a large part in it, since it's their usage of terms that settles what language does mean in cases where it is settled. If a Supreme Court decision led people to stop using language in certain ways and start using it in other ways, but that sort of thing doesn't always happen. Consider what happened when our best scientific experts on planetary classification declared Pluto not a planet. Virtually no one would go along with it. In that case, the word 'planet' simply became ambiguous, as is the case with 'fruit' (tomatoes are fruit according to biologists' classifications but not according to nutritionists' or horticulturists', and most people's usage fits with the latter two more than the first.

A psychological view says I continue if my personality continues. If my mind gets wiped and my brain is reprogrammed with new memories and a new personality, then I stop existing and someone else continues in my body. On the bodily view, I'm still there but think I'm someone else. A conventionalist can say that there's no fact of the matter. If I anticipate having this happen to me, I can wonder whether it would be self-interested or altruistic take some pain medication to cut down on the post-operative headache, given that I don't know if I'll be the one occupying this body after the procedure. Can matters of how we use our language settle whether it's self-interested or altruistic? They can settle what words mean, but are words like 'self' so undefined that there is simply no fact about whose self it is afterward? That's exactly what the conventionalist is saying, and it's a pretty hard bite to swallow for some people. Conventionalism dismisses the problems of personal identity by simply saying that there's no right answer. It's not that there's no such thing as a continuing person. I'll turn to that view in the next post. It's that there's simply no truth about which person is the same one as the earlier one. And if we change how we think and speak, there could come to be such an answer, but right now there's no fact of the matter.

I think the best alternative to conventionalism comes from recognizing that we often have false beliefs or differing opinions from others around us about difficult matters, and it doesn't stop our words from having a definitive meaning. And some concepts re particularly good candidates for reference because they are especially natural sorts of things to refer to. In science, we often get things wrong and later discover it and then continue using the same term we always did. Atoms were supposed to be indivisible, but we didn't stop calling them atoms when we found out that the things we were calling atoms were divisible. We could still refer to those things by calling them atoms. Something similar happened with heat when we realized there isn't some substance (being called caloric) that explains why things are warmer. We stopped talking about caloric, but we didn't stop talking about heat. That's because, in both cases, there was a natural-enough entity that our terms were able to latch on to, even if some of what we believed about those entities was wrong. Is there a natural-enough entity for terms like 'me' and 'same person' to latch on to, even if people have competing intuitions on the science fiction personal identity cases? There certainly is if dualism is true. It's less so with the other candidates, such as continued psychological continuity (an inherently vague notion) and continued biological continuity or brain continuity (a less-vague notion than psychological continuity but certainly not less vague than dualist minds). I suspect a lot of intuitions about whether our concepts are settled enough will depend on whether you think there's a natural-enough candidate for personal identity that closely-enough matches our concept or competing concepts of personhood and selfhood.

The next post will look at another unconventional approach, nihilism, which is really more like a cluster of related views that deny the existence or persistence of something-or-other (but the different views do it differently).

I just saw the pilot for Perception. I like the idea that they're trying to portray a schizophrenic crime-solver sympathetically, in the mold of Monk for OCD but without the comedic elements. It's intriguing enough to want to see the other episodes that have aired. I like the main character and several supporting cast members. There was a nice moment during his neuroscience class when he presented an argument for skepticism pretty much the way a philosopher would, a reminder schizophrenic author Philip K. Dick had skeptical philosophical themes in his writing, partly from his neurological condition and the impossibility to detect from within a hallucinatory experience that it is not reality, since it appears just as real as anything else. This is what schizophrenia really is like for many who experience it. I liked that he has to have a handler who lives with him and follows him around on campus to tell him when someone he's interacting with is real or not. (But they don't raise the question, at least yet, of what happens if he hallucinates the handler's response to his questions.)

But two things bothered me. One is that they're trying to portray a schizophrenic's hallucinations as his subconscious mind trying to make sense of things his conscious mind can't make sense of. I know it's popular to emphasize the increased abilities that sometimes come with a disability, and these increased abilities are genuinely present in some cases with some disabilities (sometimes often present, sometimes very rarely). This is true with diminished senses and increased other senses, and it's true of some increased cognitive abilities for some with autism, But this looks like a wholly-concocted special ability for schizophrenia, which as far as I've been able to discern is not a "different" neurological condition with some pros and many cons but is in fact simply a mental illness, with no pros. I may be wrong about that, and experts can feel free to correct me if I am, but I've never even heard of something like this, and it does an injustice to what is good in the neurodiversity movement to pretend there are good elements to a condition where there aren't any, while bolstering what's insidious about that movement by acting like every neurological condition has to have positive features, when that's hardly the truth.

But there was one scene that struck me as being even more ridiculous, and I very nearly stopped the episode and refused to give the show another chance. I stuck it out, and I do intend to watch more episodes, but if they keep this sort of thing up I may not continue. They had a character who was aphasic, which is a varied condition involving brain damage and various linguistic inabilities. Sometimes it's extreme enough to involve a total inability to recognize others' attempts to communicate with language, and this character had that kind of aphasia. But apparently in the Perception universe people with extreme aphasia can tell when someone is lying, even though they have no idea what they're saying, and they find it extremely humorous. So this character was basically a human lie detector who never knew what the lies being spoken were (and may not have even known they were lies, just the the non-verbals involved, or something about the pattern of sounds maybe, was very, very funny.

Not only is this totally absurd, but they even had to bring out the tired example of Bush's 16-words State of the Union moment, where the political left successfully recast his accurate reporting of the conclusions of British intelligence about Saddam Hussein's attempt to get uranium from the West African nation of Niger as an outright lie by Bush. Factcheck.org argued that Bush had indeed not lied, even if something he had said was wrong, and that there was even evidence (which I consider much stronger than they seem to take it to be) to suggest that Saddam Hussein had made such an attempt (from the very reports of Joe Wilson, who was one of most prominent accusers of Bush as a liar). Putting this example next to Bill Clinton's moments of denying his affair with Monica Lewinski is pretty low, especially at a time when there's no political gain to be had by continuing this false narrative about Bush as a liar.

I was hoping that a show intending to portray a schizophrenic genius crime solver would provide a nice guide to what schizophrenia is really like, without the fantasy elements they seem to want to add. It doesn't help that they're immune to critical evaluation of what their political group-think partners tell them. That doesn't give me as high hopes as I'd had when I first heard of the show, but I will continue to give it

This is the 59th post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. The last post looked at the final view of what I consider the standard accounts of personal identity (the dualist, psychological, bodily, and brain views). As I said at the end of the last post, it's pretty common for people to look at all the difficulties raised against those views and then opt for something more unconventional. The next few posts will look at three such unconventional views: temporal parts (or four-dimensionalism), conventionalism, and nihilism.

The temporal parts view is sometimes called four-dimensionalism, because it takes persisting objects to be spread out across time rather than being wholly present at a time. The three-dimensionalist view takes me to be fully present at every moment of my existence. It's not as if there are parts of me at past and future times, with just some small part of me here right now. I'm fully present at this moment. I was fully present at each past moment of my existence, and I will be fully present at each future moment of my existence. Three-dimensionalists call this kind of persistence through time endurance.

Four-dimensionalism, on the other hand, takes us to be spread out across time, and at each moment it's only the part of me at that time that's present. My current temporal part is here now, and I have past and future temporal parts. All my spatial parts are here right now (at least all the ones that parts of me at this time). But I have temporal parts in the past and future. The whole object across time that is me is called a space-time worm (taking the analogy from a worm composed of segments as its spatial parts). The shorter segments are called stages of that worm, with the smallest stages perhaps being instantaneous stages, which would be infinite in number if time is infinitely divisible. Four-dimensionalists call this kind of persistence through time perdurance.

Although it might not be the most intuitive view to think of me as spread out across time, we do think four-dimensionally about some things, in particular events. Take an event like a baseball game. It is composed of temporal parts. We call them innings. Each inning has two temporal parts (except sometimes the last inning of the game), the top and bottom. A presidential race is an event that is composed of several phases, the primary stage, the general election campaign, and the election day itself. Each of those sub-events is a stage of the entire four-dimensional event that we call an election season. We could say the same thing of any event, such as the War of 1812, the Reformation, an episode of your favorite TV show, or my composing of this post for my blog. Each event has parts that occur for part of the period of time that the event is going on. The four-dimensionalist is just saying that we are also composed of temporal parts in a similar way. There is a part of me that corresponds to the event of my pre-natal existence. Another part of me corresponds to the event of my time in middle school. Another, longer, part of me corresponds to my entire childhood. Another part of me is the instantaneous stage of me at the very instant this post will be online. Another part of me corresponds to my entire adulthood (much of which, I expect, has not occurred yet).

I noticed something odd yesterday in the transcript for NPR's Political Junkie. At the beginning of every week's episode, they play a bunch of clips from famous politicians. Here is the list from the transcript:

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: There you go again.

VICE PRESIDENT WALTER MONDALE: When I hear your new ideas, I'm reminded of that ad: Where's the beef?

SENATOR BARRY GOLDWATER: Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

SENATOR LLOYD BENTSON: Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.

PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore.

SARAH PALIN: Lipstick.

GOVERNOR RICK PERRY: Oops.

PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH: But I'm the decider.

(SOUNDBITE OF SCREAM)

Two things are strange. The first is that Sarah Palin is listed with no honorific title, as all the men who are listed are given. The second is that Howard Dean isn't listed at all for his scream. The second might be because whoever did the transcript amazingly doesn't know about Dean's famous "I have a scream" moment. I'm not sure. But everyone else has names listed, and the only one with a name listed who is just listed by name is Governor Sarah Palin. The other governor, Rick Perry, is listed as Governor Rick Perry. Palin is just Sarah Palin, as if her achievement of being governor is not important in her case. The senators, presidents, and vice-president all have their titles. But Sarah Palin is just Sarah Palin.

Is that implicit sexism on the part of whoever does the transcript? Is it part of a more specific bias against conservative women? Is it simply bias against Palin herself? I'm not sure we should speculate on exactly what leads the trasncriptionist to discount the title of her elected office, but it's certainly irresponsible, and this is not something limited to just this week's transcript. The last few weeks do it this way. I checked randomly in a number of other Wednesdays to see if it's consistent. The first older one I tried just listed her as Palin, while the others had full names and titles. But this does seem to be a common feature of their weekly transcript. Most of them had just the pattern I see in this week's transcript, and the fact that the higher-ups don't seem to notice it over a lengthy period of time, and presumably no one has pointed it out to them, or they would have done something about it, suggests that the implicit bias at work here is more than just one person's.

[I did find one in 2010 that lists Howard Dean. Interestingly, it lists him as Mr. Howard Dean, despite his being both a former governor and a medical doctor. Sarah Palin is listed as Ms. Sarah Palin in that one. This is before Rick Perry was added, so there are no governors in the lineup except Palin and Dean. Nevertheless, it's still odd that she would be listed as Ms. and Dean as Mr., when the others are all listed as senators, presidents, and vice-president.

I also found one that did get Palin right, calling her a former governor. Some of the formers are formers in that one. Some of them are not. That's odd, but it's the only one I found that didn't fit the pattern at all, suggesting someone else did that transcript. But the next week gets rid of the formers and still lists titles for Dean and Palin. So it's not a completely consistent pattern, but it does seem to me to be much more often than an occasional mistake.]

NPR had a story last night talking about how the narrative of a partisan Supreme Court is undermined by this week's decisions. On one level, it doesn't go remotely far enough. A much larger portion of Supreme Court decisions than is usually recognized are unanimous, and quite a number far along not-remotely-partisan lines, with lineups that would strike anyone who believes the narrative as unusual, but it's not that unusual for it to happen. There are certainly general trends, with the justices appointed by Democrats tending to vote together more often and the justices appointed by Republicans tending to vote together more often, but the lineups on issues that aren't political hot-button issues are often odd from that perspective. Some of the justices on both sides of the usual division are more textualist and inclined to read laws narrowly (Scalia, Thomas, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, formerly Souter), and some on both sides are more pragmatist and inclined to read laws more expansively (Roberts, Kennedy, Breyer, Alito, formerly Stevens, O'Connor). I remember a particular decision from a few years ago that was precisely on those lines. Then there are the free-speech decisions, where the justices don't line up along political lines at all. Earlier this month, one decision had Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy aligned with Sotomayor and Kagan. The dissent was Roberts, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Alito.

The health care decision did have an interesting lineup, but what's most interesting about it is that there were actually several lineups on separate parts of the decision. Here are several issues and the lineup on each:

1. Is the individual mandate a tax? Yes: Roberts, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan; No: Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito

2. Is the individual mandate, if conceived of as a federal law requiring people to buy health insurance, constitutional? No: Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito; No: Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan [this one does fall according to one common partisan voting pattern]

3. Is the Medicaid expansion constitutional? Yes: same lineup as 1 above.

4. Is it constitutional for the federal government to penalize states for resisting the Medicaid expansion by taking away their previous Medicaid funding? No: Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Breyer, Alito, Kagan; Yes: Ginsburg, Sotomayor

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Update: Here are three further questions that I left out.

5. Does the Anti-Injunction Act apply (which would make it impossible to challenge the law until someone has to pay the penalty)?  The Court was unanimous in saying that it does not apply.

6. Does the Anti-Injunction Law apply to all taxes, including de facto taxes declared not to be taxes by the legislature and president signing the tax into legislation?  No: the #1 majority justices; Yes: the #1 dissenting justices

7. Does the entire health care law fall if it the mandate is unconstitutional?  No answer on this question: the #1 majority; Yes: the #1 dissent

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One thing that was particularly interesting is that on questions 1 and 3 the Chief Justice joined the four liberals, while swing voter Anthony Kennedy, who is usually more willing than the Chief to join those four, remained with the three conservatives in the dissent. Another was the fact that seven justices agreed on question 4. These two facts, I think especially the second, was what led the NPR reporter to notice that this decision really breaks from the narrative.

What struck me was how similar this is to what actually happened with one decision that the usual narrative takes to be one of the most bitter partisan divisions, decided for purely political reasons. That decision is 2000's Bush v. Gore, which had three questions that had different lineups.

1. Was the Florida Supreme Court's handling of the 2000 election compatible with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment? No: Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, Breyer; Yes: Stevens, Ginsburg

2. Is Dec 12 the date recounts need to be settled, and thus the best remedy is to go with the original vote count rather than allow recounts beyond Florida's final date? Yes: Rehnquist, O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas; No: Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer (this was the part along typical partisan lines)

3. Did the Florida Supreme Court violate Florida law? No: Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer; Yes: Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy; uncommitted: O'Connor, Kennedy

Seven justices agreed that there was an equal protection violation, and five agreed that Florida had set a date for recounts to be ended, a date that wasn't met. Four disagreed with the latter majority and wanted a recount to go beyond the date the majority had recognized as Florida's required date. But the important constitutional question of a violation of equal protection rights was supported by seven justices, and this is just about never recognized in those who put forward the usual narrative on this case. I've long thought that if anyone was being judicially activist here, it was the two justices who saw the constitutional problem but who refused to recognize Florida's deadline for recounts to be done by. But the conservatives and moderates usually instead get blamed for deciding the case based on their poltical views. It's an interesting case of two liberal justices recognizing that the conservatives had the constitutional question right, just like in the Medicaid part of the health care cases. It's refreshing to see a mainstream media reporter recognize it with the health care case. It would be nice if those who put forward the usual narrative would recognize something similar with cases like Bush v. Gore.

When Jeremy Jackson covered the book of Job in his Tuesday night Bible study from 1995-1996, the studies were not recorded, but he did produce a three-page, single-spaced set of typed notes as a result of those studies. It occurred to me recently that I could make those available alongside the audio for the studies that I have been able to put online, so here they are.

For more Trinity Fellowship sermons and Bible studies, see here.

This morning I was listening to yesterday's segment of Tell Me More on NPR on whether same-sex marriage would legally require allowing multiple marriage. The correct answer, of course, depends on which arguments are used for same-sex marriage, because some of them do require allowing multiple marriage, and some of them don't. If you argue that people should be able to marry whoever they want, as long as it's consensual, then there seems to be nothing to rule out multiple partners at once. If you argue that it's a violation of gay people's rights to prevent them from marrying someone they have an orientation toward when straight people get to marry someone they have an orientation toward, that sort of argument doesn't easily translate to marrying more than one person at a time. You're trying to give equal rights to everyone, and the rights you give might restrict it to one partner per person.

Jonathan Rauch was one of the guests on that segment. His overall argument is that same-sex marriage doesn't threaten traditional marriage but adds to it, since it doesn't actually detract from anyone's traditional marriage. It doesn't subtract marriages but adds them, and we need more marriage, so same-sex marriage can only help. His argument isn't sensitive at all to the lines of thought involving natural purposes, as traditionally marriage has been thought of, so it doesn't touch some of the more common arguments against same-sex marriage. But his dismissal of that kind of argument isn't new. He's written much of the subject and standardly argues that way. Here's he's assuming there's no such argument without actually arguing against it, but I think he has spent time arguing against it elsewhere.

But here's an interesting argument that's new to me:

Remember, fundamentally what I tell people is when straights get the right to marry three people or their dog or a toaster, gay people should have that too. But until then, that's not what we're talking about. We just want to be able to marry someone instead of no one.

On one level, this argument is silly. There's no ban on gay people marrying anyone, and there's no ban on them marrying anyone that other people of their sex can marry. In that respect, they have the same rights as straight people of their sex in a location where there's no legally-recognized same-sex marriage. What they don't have is the rights that people of the opposite sex have, namely to marry someone of their sex. So you can't argue for same-sex marriage by saying that a gay man doesn't have the same right I have to marry a man. As a heterosexual man, I don't have that right either. A gay man has the same rights I do with respect to the class of people we can marry. (Well, technically, that's true only if he's married. If he's not, then he has a much larger group he can marry, since it's above zero. So, to be more careful, an unmarried gay man can marry anyone of the same class of people that an unmarried straight man can marry.)

But what Rauch really means is that a gay person can't marry anyone in the class of people they'd want to marry, while straight people can. He's arguing for that right for gay people too. Given that he wouldn't want to marry a woman, giving him that right doesn't help him with the actual goals he might have for himself in marriage, which would be to be married to a man.

This argument, interestingly, would not help with interracial-marriage bans. Rauch's resistance to multiple marriages from a same-sex marriage perspective is that only allowing some options is enough. It's not violating his rights if you prevent him from marrying dogs, toasters, and so on, as long as you're doing that with straight people too. By the same reasoning, though, it's not violating his rights to prevent him from marrying black people, as long as you're doing that with straight people too. He's allowed for the compatibility of same-sex marriage with opposing multiple marriage on one level, but you have to look at all the moral positions and arguments he endorses to see if his view really allows for it. You have to bring in other moral premises to see why interracial-marriage bans are wrong, for example, because his argument doesn't get you that far. The question is whether other arguments he'd agree with can supply the necessary resources to argue against interracial-marriage bans. But then there's also the possibility that moral arguments he gives for same-sex marriage would also provide resources to argue against banning multiple marriages.

So his argument here doesn't show that he can resist multiple marriage consistently. It shows that someone could support same-sex marriage and reject multiple marriage. Whether he could depends entirely on the arguments he uses for same-sex marriage, some of which do require recognizing multiple marriage and some of which don't. I do think quite a lot of them do, and many of those are presented by people who want to avoid legal recognition of multiple marriage. This issue will eventually reach the courts, and it's one that those who deal in the business of moral and legal arguments should think about more carefully.

This is the 58th post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. The last post looked at bodily accounts of personal identity. As a quick refresher, here is that post's summary of the personal identity views up to this point:

According to the dualist account of personal identity, being the same person is having the same immaterial mind or soul. According to the psychological account of personal identity, being the same person is having a continuation of the same set of psychological properties such as memories, desires, beliefs, personality traits, moral character, and so on. The main contender to those two approaches would be biological accounts, which base personal identity in some biological facts. The most common versions of biological accounts are the bodily account and the brain account. The bodily account takes someone to be the same person just in case they have same continuing body.

The brain view, like the bodily view, looks to biological continuity but not of the entire body, just the brain. One major advantage of this view is that it fits better with the intuition a lot of people have that a brain transplant is not really a brain transplant but a body transplant. If my brain got put into your body, a lot of people would take the resulting person to be me in your body, not you with my brain. A psychological view would give the same result, but psychological views face duplication problems too easily. You can have two candidates for who it is to be me if you continue my memory and personality in two different places, and in certain cases it's too hard to find a decent answer as to why one or the other is a better candidate for being me (such as a Star Trek transporter accident using new matter to reconstruct me, but it creates two of me, and each duplicate is intrinsically just like the other).

The introductory and preaching schedule for this unit of teaching is here.

1. Colossians 1:1-8 "We always thank God ... for you" (Jeremy Jackson) 6-3-12
2. Colossians 1:9-14 "The inheritance of the saints in light" (Stefan Matzal) 6-10-12
3. Colossians 1:15-20 "The image of the invisible God" (Nathaniel Jackson) 6-17-12
4. Colossians 1:21-29 "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Stefan Matzal) 6-24-12
5. Colossians 2:1-7 "God's mystery, which is Christ" (Jeremy Jackson) 7-1-12
6. Colossians 2:8-15 "Philosophy and empty deceit" (John Hartung) 7-8-12
7. Colossians 2:16-23 "The substance belongs to Christ" (Nathaniel Jackson) 7-15-12
8. Colossians 3:1-4 "Your life is hidden with Christ" (Stefan Matzal) 7-22-12
9. Colossians 3:5-11 "Put to death ... what is earthly" (Jeremy Jackson) 7-29-12
10. Colossians 3:12-17 "Put on love ... and let ... Christ rule" (Jeremy Jackson) 8-5-12
11. Colossians 3:18-4:1 "Wives submit ... husbands love ..." (Nathaniel Jackson) 8-12-12
12. Colossians 4:2-6 "Continue steadfastly in love" (Stefan Matzal) 8-19-12
13. Colossians 4:7-18 "Fully assured in all the will of God" (Stefan Matzal) 8-26-12

For more sermons, see here.

There is a lot of audio (and some video) material on Revelation online from Don Carson. I'm listing these in as close to chronological order as I can.

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CICCU talk (Cambridge University organization for Christian students):
Apocalypse Now (Nov 9, 1986)

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1994 Carey Conference, Wales (The Doctrine of Last Things) [all talks found at this link]

Rev 4 Vision of a Transcendent God (August 28, 1994)
Rev 5 Vision of a Redeeming God (August 29, 1994)
Rev 12 Rage, Rage Against the Church (August 30, 1994) [this link is to a Gospel Coalition listing that I think is the same talk)
Rev 13 Anti-Christ and the False Prophet (August 31, 1994)
Rev 21-22 Triumph of the Lamb (September 1, 1994)

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The audio for Don Carson's entire seminary class on Revelation is online at The Gospel Coalition website. These are numbered out of order. The numbering was wrong before The Gospel Coalition got hold of the files, but they made it worse by listing the last six under numbers that aren't the same as the numbers the files themselves have (and they still weren't the right numbers). I spent some time a while back listening to the beginnings and ends of each file to see the proper order, and I'm reproducing my conclusions here. Because the lectures are already numbered (in some cases inconsistently), and because there happen to be 26 audio files, I will use letters to indicate the correct order to avoid confusion. (My first attempt to put these in the proper order got completely messed up because I used numbers.) This class was probably in 1995, given that he says The Gagging of God was coming out the next summer.

A. 1:1-3 (#1)
B. 1:4-15 (#2)
C. 1:16-2:7 (#3)
D. 2:8-11 (#4)
E. 2:12-28 (#5)
F. ch.3 (#6) starts with slides on cities, ends chs.2-3
G. ch.4pt1 (#9) right before #7 -- talking about elders at end
H. ch.4pt2 (#7) talking about elders at beginning
I. ch.5 (#8)
J. 6:1-6 or so (#10) new class, quiz then begins at 6:1
K. 6:6-ch.7 (#13) right after #10
L. 7:4ff. (#12)
M. 8:1ff (#14) new class starts, hands back quiz, begins ch.8 after 5 min intro
N. 10:1ff. (#11) interlude before 7th trumpet
O. 11.1ff. (#15)
P. ch.12 (#16) fills in 11:4 stuff he missed; eventually gets to ch.12
Q. 13:1-17 (#17) starts new class on 13-14,parts of 17
R. 13:17-into ch.14 (#18) class ends but didn't finish ch.14
S. ch.14 (#19) new class:rest of ch.14 some. ch.20 then ch.17, ends with children saved
T. ch.17 (#20) starts with Jews saved, continues children saved, ch.18 by end
U. ch.19 pt1(#21) new class,systematic issues,ch.19 ends with amill problem #1
V. ch.19 pt2 (#24) begins 2nd problem with amill, ends on imminent return [TGC lists as 24. Filename says 25.]
W. 19pt3 (#22) begins postmill prob: imminent Christ's return, end 19.8; class over [TGC lists as 22. Filename says 23.]
X. 20.1-6 (#25) last class, begins with ch.20 [TGC lists as 25. Filename says 26.]
Y. 20.7-21.8 (#26) starts 20.7, ends around 21.8 [TGC lists as 26. Filename says 22.]
Z. 21.9-22.21 (#23) begins 21.9 ends by reading to end of book [TGC lists as 23. Filename says 24.]

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1995 EMW Aberystwyth Conference:

Rev 12:1-13:1 (August 8, 1995)
Rev 13:1-10 (August 9, 1995)
Rev 13:11-18 (August 10, 1995)
Rev 14 (August 11, 1995)

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Reformed Theological Seminary (Jackson, MS) 2004 Missions Conference: Missions as the Triumph of the Lamb

[note: this is the same set as the ones labeled June 26, 2005 at The Gospel Coalition site, but RTS clearly labels it 2004]

Rev 4
Rev 5
Rev 21:1-8
Rev 21:9-22:6
Rev 12
Rev 13
Rev 14

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June 1, 2004 (Summer at the Castle in Northern Ireland):

Rev 4
Rev 5
Rev 12
Rev 13, pt 1
Rev 13, pt 2
Rev 14
Rev 21:1-22:6
Q&A

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ch.6 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse unknown date, unknown if series (TGC lists as Jan 1, 2008)
ch.12 Rage, Rage Against the Church unknown date, unknown if series (TGC lists as Jan 1, 2008)
21:1-22:6 Even So, Come, Lord Jesus! unknown date, unknown if series (TGC lists as Jan 1, 2008)

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Rev 12 The Strange Triumph of a Slaughtered Lamb (Dec 6, 2008 at Mars Hill Church in Seattle) video and audio

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Rev 14:6-20 The God Who is Very Angry (Feb 28, 2009 according to TGC: part of The God Who is There series)
Rev 21:1-22:5 The God Who Triumphs (Feb 28, 2009 according to TGC: part of The God Who is There series)

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Rev 21:1-22:5 The Unqualified Joy of the God-Centered New Heaven and New Earth (July 24, 2009)

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Rev 21:1-22:5 What is the Gospel and How Does It Work, Part 3 (Gospel Coalition Regional Conference Los Angeles, Nov 6, 2010)

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Rev 21-22 (unsure extent but probably through 22:5) Home at Last (Gospel Coalition National Women's Conference, Orlando, FL June 22, 2012)

Most New Testament scholars agree nowadays that Mark 16:9ff. is not the original ending of Mark. Either it ended with v.8, or there was an original ending that's been lost (sometimes thought to be something like Matthew's ending but with differences similar to how Mark normally is different from Matthew). A certain breed of skeptic often found on History Channel or Discovery Channel Easter specials will sometimes use this to claim that Mark doesn't actually report the resurrection, with the insinuation that Mark is the earliest gospel and therefore the most reliable reporting of events. Therefore, we might be expected to include, Christians invented the resurrection after Mark's gospel was fully composed.

Mark Heath nicely presents several reasons why such skeptics have to be ignoring what the Gospel of Mark really says and what else is in the New Testament. According to standard dating of Mark (by scholars across the theological spectrum), Paul's first letter to the Corinthians church is earlier than Mark, and chapter 15 of that letter is the lengthiest discussion of the resurrection in the entire New Testament. Furthermore, the entire gospel of Mark forecasts the resurrection and leads to its expectation, even explaining elements of it long before it gets to the actual events. But most importantly, the resurrection is the very last event reported in the section of Mark 16 that most scholars consider authentic. The disciples are told that he has been raised and told that they will see him. There aren't chronicles of what Jesus did after the resurrection, as there are in all three other gospels and in the book of Acts, but the resurrection is very clearly reported right there in the section that no one questions.

I'm less convinced on the fourth reason, so I'm not mentioning that here, but you can see Mark's post for it and my comment for my response.

[cross-posted at Evangel]

:Trinity Fellowship normally preaches through books of the Bible, but topical sermon series sometimes fill breaks between books. This series on marriage, singleness, and parenting is the current series. I will add links to audio each week as it becomes available.

The intro and preaching schedule for this unit of teaching is here.

1. The Heart of Marriage (Jeremy Jackson) 4-15-12
2. Ephesians 5:25-33a Husbands, Love Your Wives (Doug Weeks) 4-22-12 [text available for this sermon]
3. 1 Peter 3:1-7 Wives, Submit to Your Husbands (Stefan Matzal) 4-29-12
4. Ecclesiastes 4:7-12; Matthew 19:10-12 To the Unmarried: Singleness for God's Glory (Jeremy Jackson) 5-6-12
5. Approaching Marriage (Nathaniel Jackson) 5-13-12
6. Genesis 1:27-28; Psalm 127 Parenting: General Principles (Jeremy Jackson) 5-20-12
7. Ephesians 4:22-23; 5:18-21; 6:4; 6:10-13a; Colossians 3:1; Deuteronomy 4:9a; 5:2-3; 6:4-7; Proverbs 13:24; 22:15; 29:17; Hebrews 12:11 Parenting: Specific Practices -- "Do not provoke ... but bring them up" (Stefan Matzal) 5-27-12

There are also discussion guides, produced by the elders, on this series:

The Heart of Marriage
Husbands, Love Your Wives
Wives, Submit to Your Husbands
Singleness for God's Glory
Approaching Marriage

The discussion guides for the parenting sermons have not yet been released.

For more sermons, see here.

This post collects the Trinity Fellowship studies from the Tuesday Night Bible Study on Romans from 1987-1989. All of these studies are by Jeremy Jackson.

Sept-Dec 1987 (Romans 1-5):

9/15/87 Rom 1:1-7
9/22/87 Rom 1:8-17
10/6/87 Rom 1:18-32
10/13/87 Rom 2:1-16
10/20/87 Rom 2:17-29
10/27/87 Rom 3:1-20
11/3/87 Rom 3:21-31
11/10/87 Rom 4:1-12
11/17/87 Rom 4:13-25
12/8/87 Rom 5:1-11
12/15/87 Rom 5:12-21

Jan-June 1988 (Romans 6-11):

1/5/88 Rom 6:1-5
1/12/88 Rom 6:6-14
1/19/88 Rom 6:15-23
1/26/88 Rom 7:1-6
2/2/88 Rom 7:7-12
2/9/88 Rom 7:13-25
2/23/88 Rom 8:1-11
3/1/88 Rom 8:12-21
3/8/88 Rom 8:22-28
3/15/88 Rom 8:29-39
3/22/88 Rom 9:1-13
4/5/88 Rom 9:14-29
4/12/88 Rom 9:30-10:4
5/3/88 Rom 10:5-13
5/10/88 Rom 10:14-21
5/17/88 Rom 11:1-12
5/24/88 Rom 11:13-24
5/31/88 Rom 11:25-36
6/14/88 God's foreknowledge in Rom 9-11 part 1 
6/21/88 God's foreknowledge in Rom 9-11 part 2

Sept 1988-Jan 1989 (Romans 12-16): 

9/13/88 Rom 12:1-2
9/20/88 Rom 12:3-8
9/27/88 Rom 12:9-13
10/11/88 Rom 12:14-21
10/18/88 Rom 13:1-3
10/25/88 Rom 13:4-7
11/1/88 Rom 13:8-14
11/8/88 Rom 14:1-12
11/15/88 Rom 14:13-23
11/22/88 Rom 15:1-13
11/19/88 Rom 15:14-22
12/6/88 Rom 15:23-33
12/13/88 Rom 16:1-16
1/3/89 Rom 16:17-27
1/10/89 The Theology of Romans

See here for more Bible studies and sermons.

The Ninth Circuit has overturned Proposition 8 in California, which reinstated a ban on same-sex marriage as part of the California Constitution when the California Supreme Court had interpreted the California Constitution as requiring the state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples seeking them. Eugene Volokh has one of the better explanations of the reasoning that I've yet seen (but I haven't looked around too much yet). I have two immediate thoughts:

1. It seems clear that the Ninth Circuit is using a rational basis test, which is the strongest test the Supreme Court has been willing to give for sexual-orientation discrimination. As I've argued before, I think this is a mistake on the part of the opponents of Proposition 8. If they want the analogy with Loving v. Virginia and the overturning of bans on interracial marriage, they ought to be presenting this as a case of sex discrimination, not sexual-orientation discrimination. A black person under Virginia's law could marry a black person but not a white person. A white person could marry a white person but not a black person. So the marriage rights of a black person differed from the marriage rights of a white person in terms of who they could marry. That's race discrimination, which faces a strict scrutiny test, the strongest test the Supreme Court recognizes for discrimination cases.

Similarly, a restriction on marriage to opposite-sex couples does treat one group differently from another group. But those groups are not gays and straights. A straight man can marry the same people as a gay man. The discrimination is along sex lines. A man can't marry the same people as a woman. That's sex discrimination, by the same sort of reasoning that you find in Loving v. Virginia. It's not sexual-orientation discrimination. Sex discrimination faces intermediate scrutiny, the middle-level test of the three the Supreme Court recognizes for discrimination cases. Sexual-orientation faces only rational basis scrutiny, which is the weakest of the tests. So by Supreme Court precedent, the opponents of Proposition 8 would be better suited to pursue their arguments in terms of sex discrimination, which would be both more analogous to Loving v. Virginia and more difficult to get a law past it because of the higher scrutiny. But they continue to push it as a sexual-orientation discrimination claim, which I think helps their purposes much less.

2. The basic claim of the opinion is that there is no rational basis for a law like this, a claim that I think is obviously false. To pass rational basis scrutiny, all there needs to be is some sort of reason-based argument for the law or provision in question, not one that the Court even needs to think is a very good argument, just one that a rational person could support with some reasoning. It has to be a pretty grossly-awful argument to fail rational basis review. The Supreme Court has consistently upheld that stupid laws can pass rational basis review. The Ninth Circuit's opinion in this case says exactly that. Proposition 8 fails rational basis review because it doesn't even have a stupid but somewhat rational connection between the law and some hypothetical government interest. And the key point they were addressing was not same-sex marriage bans in general but just ones in states where there are already civil unions. The decision is silent on whether there's a rational basis for same-sex marriage bans themselves. Their argument is that there's nothing to a same-sex marriage ban when all the rights of marriage are already present. It's a symbolic law, and there's no rational basis for symbolic laws.

Basically what they're saying is that there's no even minimally-rational basis for reserving the word 'marriage' for opposite-sex couples while observing civil unions for the issues of rights. But I can think of several, and even if they're not very good arguments they might pass the rational-basis test as long as they're not such awful arguments that the reasoning is utterly unconnected with the law itself. Here are a few. Some people want to keep government out of marriage. Passing civil-union laws is fine, according to this view, but having the government recognize more marriages rather than fewer marriages is the wrong direction. I have a lot of sympathy for this view, and the reasoning strikes me as certainly passing rational-basis review.

Another basis is preferring an honorific title for traditional marriage because of its historic role and greater natural connection with childrearing. This is not a non-sequitur, since there is a greater connection between traditional marriage and childrearing than there is with same-sex marriage, and it doesn't have to pass the test of rigorous and careful argumentation to be a rational basis. The mere historical connection makes it not completely arbitrary, and that's enough to pass rational-basis review. So one could favor civil unions for actual rights while wanting to reserve the word 'marriage' for something that recognizes the traditional institution for its contribution to childrearing that the new-fangled same-sex marriage concept is not able to convey, and this is so even if it's not a very good ethical argument to reserve that word for traditional marriage. All that there needs to be is some non-arbitrary connection, and there's at least that.

A third argument I've heard sometimes is that same-sex marriage encourages legitimizing sexual relationships that are much more prone to divorce or breakup than opposite-sex marriages, and that result would undermine marriage as an institution. Again, this doesn't have to be a very good argument. It might well be a terrible argument. It might be that affirming same-sex relationships as marriages would actually have the opposite effect. But all that matters for rational-basis review is that a legitimate argument can be put forward that isn't completely unrelated to the state interest in question, and that condition seems to be met. You'd need to do some empirical study to show whether this is a good argument, but on the face of it it's not so stupid that it's irrelevant to the issue at stake. Some reasoning is put forward, and it's reasoning that has to be evaluated, reasoning that's not so obviously bad that you can dismiss it out of hand, and that's the test that the Ninth Circuit claims to be using.

As I've said, I don't think it's in the best interest of opponents of Proposition 8 to use rational-basis review when they can use intermediate scrutiny for sex-discrimination. Intermediate scrutiny requires that the basis being presented is substantially related to the legitimate government purpose, and I'm not sure all the above arguments would pass that. The third almost certainly wouldn't, in my view. I think the second might, and I'm not sure you can get out of the first one even with strict scrutiny. But my point is that they'd have an easier time of it if they didn't insist on treating this as sexual-orientation discrimination, which isn't the most accurate way to go anyway if they want to propose a parallel with Loving v. Virginia. I suspect it will all come down to Justice Anthony Kennedy anyway, though, and he's already on record saying that he thinks same-sex marriage is not required by previous Supreme Court decisions, so he'd have to think there's some new argument here that changes everything he's already written.

There's a relatively new movement in the communities of people who deal regularly with autism and related conditions that's assigned themselves the term "neurodiversity" as a shorthand reference to their commitment to affirming atypical neurological conditions as equally legitimate. This movement shuns the terms 'normal' and 'abnormal' and instead prefers to speak of those who are neurotypical and those who are not. The neurodiversity movement seeks to identify various traits common with autism as neither better nor worse but simply different.

This movement should be praised for its recognition that respecting people with autism requires taking into account how differently they take in information, process it, use it, and produce various responses. They rightly emphasize that an atypical neurological state need not be thought of as a disease that needs a medical cure or treatment or a disability that requires taking the person to be deficient. They recommend supporting a person for who they are rather than trying to "fix" them to conform to the standards everyone else has. Some autism advocates on the autistic spectrum insist that they wouldn't want to be made "normal" if a "cure" were ever found. They like being the way they are.

There's something obviously right about most of that. The more I read stuff from this movement, however, the more disturbed I get that there's something they're just not seeing, and the good in what I just wrote is blinding a lot of well-meaning people to a serious philosophical error lying behind much of what the neurodiversity movement produces. Consider this story by Karen Kaplan of the Los Angeles Times. She is right to point out that, just because autistic people do badly on certain standardized tests, it doesn't mean they're cognitively deficient. It may well be that the reason a certain person scores low on a certain test is because the test is relying on typical patterns of language use, and someone with autism may be using a different pattern of language use. The underlying cognitive ability being tested for may be stronger than the test shows. That's all correct. But in her rush to make this point, Kaplan completely ignores the fact that the reason someone is scoring low on the test is because of a genuine deficiency in the kind of language use that most people are much better able to engage in. That means there is a lack of ability that comes with autism, even if its manifestation will be different from person to person.

Again, Kaplan speaks of those who emphasize "training kids with autism to behave like typical kids instead of allowing them to make the most of their differently wired brains." That's especially helpful, because allowing autistic people to make the most of their differently-operating brain is certainly the right goal. But that's perfectly compatible with taking their differently-wired brain to be operating at a deficient level with respect to certain cognitive skills, even if it's also operating at a higher level with regard to other cognitive skills. Some in the neurodiversity movement are willing to recognize that differences between neurotypicals and autistic people involve autism conveying certain strengths and weaknesses. But the language of "not better or worse but just different" disallows any such recognition and smacks of crude relativism, whereby we cannot recognize any difference as being better or worse. When taken to its logical implication, we'd have to say that someone who is not intelligent enough to read is not less smart in any respect than the norm, just different. I submit that such a statement is nonsense. There's a particular cognitive ability that allows for reading that most people have, and someone who doesn't have that ability (assuming they genuinely don't) is lacking a cognitive skill. Why can't we just accept that?

Similarly, there is a seeming refusal to recognize any medical condition that can be spoken of in terms of being made worse off. In some respects this strikes me as a general problem among disability communities that stems from crudely relativistic thinking. The deaf community is largely unsupportive of cochlear implants, because it gives children the ability to hear, and they take their lack of hearing not to be a genuine disability. There's nothing wrong with not hearing, so why should they support giving deaf children the ability to hear the way most people can?

If we really took this line of reasoning seriously, we'd have to apply it to other conditions that virtually no one wants to see as perfectly normal. For example, one could argue that pedophilia is just a different way of being, and we should respect it. After all, it's caused by a brain condition, and all brain conditions are equally good. In terms of the arguments I see from the neurodiversity movement, I see no way to say the things they say while avoiding such a conclusion. There are plenty of ways to distinguish between the two cases, but I don't see how those are available given the extreme sorts of statements that I regularly see among neurodiversity advocates.

People who have serious cognitive deficiencies often have serious problems seeing their own intrinsic worth. It's important to affirm that. It's important to help them see that their very existence is not wrong in the sense that we should blame them for being the way they are. It's important to help them see that their preferences may seem weird to others but that in many cases perfectly all right for them to have them. But some voices advocating for neurodiversity want us to say that someone with autism is not messed up in any sense. The fact is that we're all messed up. We're all distorted. We're all flawed. No one is the way we ought to be. Autism is one way to have various deficiencies, one that also happens in many cases to have plenty of strengths above the level typical of most people. To say that we can never evaluate being less good at something or more good at something with such value-laden language would be to overreact to a genuine problem in how many people look at people with disabilities.

But on one level, I can't blame the neurodiversity movement (and the more general relativistic outlook among other disability communities). After all, their view follows fairly easily from a particular version of secularized naturalistic thinking. Different neurological conditions stem from natural variation, and there's no other level of explanation but natural variation. There's no God who designed human beings to have certain capabilities. There are no natural purposes according to which organisms have a nature, and certain capacities are part of what a well-functioning member of their species will be able to do. There's no notion of well-functioning if your worldview doesn't allow for higher-level explanations about purposes and design, other than perhaps simply asking whether a particular organism fits into the way most members of its species are or whether it fits the patterns members of its species typically desire for themselves. There's nothing objective about what a healthy member of that species or a well-functioning member of that species would be like. There is no way we can have a notion of the way we ought to be if there's no ground for what it would be to be the way we ought to be. But such a conclusion seems to me to be so obviously false that perhaps we should just question the metaphysical underpinning of the neurodiversity movement, rather than giving in to that metaphysical picture's logical implications.

[cross-posted at Evangel and the Neurodiversity Consulting blog]

I was thinking last night about the new show Once Upon a Time, and it occurred to me that it might provide a really good illustration of the difference between externalism and internalism in epistemology. (I haven't seen last night's episode yet, so please no one spoil it for me.)

Internalism holds that what justifies our beliefs or makes them rational or what grounds our knowledge must be something internal to our thinking, in other words something where the reasons why it is justified, rational, or grounded are accessible to our conscious thought. We have to be able to see why our beliefs are grounded for those beliefs to be grounded. We have to be aware of what makes it a good belief for it to be a good belief. It wouldn't be enough to have reliable belief-forming mechanisms (such as senses that reliably give me the right information).

Externalism holds that there might be things make our beliefs justified or rational or grounding our knowledge that are not accessible to our conscious thought. We don't have to be aware of what justifies us in thinking something for it to be a justified belief. For it to be well-grounded knowledge, we don't have to know that our knowledge is grounded in reliable practices and thus why it is well-grounded knowledge. It just has to be grounded in the right sort of ways.

Perhaps the biggest place of disagreement comes over how to respond to skepticism. If internalism is true, I would have to prove that my senses are reliable for them to ground my knowledge, which of course I can't do, because I might be in a virtual reality for all I can know by internalist standards. There are internalists would would disagree, but a lot of philosophers have concluded that internalism leads hopelessly to skepticism, because I can't prove that my senses are reliable, and just having reliable senses isn't enough. I'd have to be able to prove it, which I can't do. But externalism can handle skeptical arguments by pointing out that I can know all sorts of stuff even without being able to prove it. It doesn't mean I can prove I know things. It just means that skeptical arguments fail, because the skeptic has to show that my senses are unreliable to show that I don't know things. With internalism, all the skeptic has to show is that I don't know if my senses are unreliable. With externalism, the skeptic has to show that they are in fact unreliable. So the burden of proof on the skeptic is higher with externalism.

Once Upon a Time provides a nice illustration of externalist epistemology. The basic premise of the show is that the Evil Queen has cursed all the characters in the Enchanted Forest by bringing them to a terrible place where there are no happy endings except for her. That terrible place is Storybrooke, Maine, in a world otherwise very much like our current day. The Evil Queen is the mayor. The story shifts back and forth between events in the characters' lives back in the Enchanted Forest and events in their lives now in Storybrooke, where no one is supposed to remember their previous lives except the Evil Queen.

Snow White and Prince Charming are the Evil Queen's primary targets. She wants revenge against Snow White for something we haven't seen yet (as least as of last week's episode). She wants to ensure that they are not together. They have no memory of each other, certainly not of having been married to each other. He was in a coma when the show began, and apparently he had been since the curse began. She has no memory of him. When he awakes from his coma, he has no memory, until the Evil Queen at some point seems to have interfered to give him memories of being married to someone else, someone who turns out to have been engaged to him in the Enchanted Forest before he broke it off to marry Snow White. But when they meet up, they feel such a longing for each other, as if they have always been meant to be together.

Prince Charming tries to rebuild his marriage, but he can't ignore his feelings for Snow White. This woman whom he (falsely) thinks is his wife brings out no current feelings, but he seems to have memories of feelings for her, and he tries to make it work. Technically, he's living in an adulterous relationship with her while thinking his feelings for Snow White are the adulterous ones. But Snow White is really his wife, and some process within him is leading him to think he should be with her. But he has no access to what would be leading him to that. An externalist would say that he has some process within him that he can't understand that's leading him to know that Snow White is the one for him, and his false beliefs about his past do not interfere with that knowledge. An internalist has to say that his most justified beliefs are the false ones.

So suppose there's some reliable process whereby his body's memories of his love for Snow White are leading him to know that she's really the one he's supposed to be with. His resistance to this woman who isn't his wife, whom he believes is his wife, is then grounded in processes that he has no access to. An externalist could say that his belief that he should be with Snow White (whom he knows now by another name, of course) is justified by these processes he's unaware of, and it's bogus to rely on his memories for the belief that he's married to the other woman. An internalist would say that his belief that he is married to the other woman is in fact false but is justified. Which belief is justified, then, depends on which epistemology is correct.

Which view you adopt would seem to have significant moral implications. He's doing something clearly wrong, according to internalism, by having clandestine romantic interactions with Snow White. But what if he has knowledge on some level that can somehow cancel his seeming knowledge (that isn't knowledge at all) that this is adultery? Those are false beliefs, based on false memories. If he doesn't know those things but falsely believes them, and he also knows on some level that Snow White is his true love, is it enough to remove the wrongness of the adultery? Perhaps that's too much, but it does seem to be ethically different in some ways.

I want to announce that I've signed a book contract with Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, to publish a revised and expanded version of my dissertation. My current plan is to send them the manuscript by the end of April, followed by a review process and then revisions to be due by the end of June or early July, which they say will allow them to have it in print by December. The title (for now, although it might change) is A Realist Metaphysics of Race: A Context-Sensitive, Short-Term Retentionist, Long-Term Revisionist Account.

General Overview: There are three main metaphysical positions on race. Anti-realists deny that there are races. Natural-kind positions find sub-groups of homo sapiens with scientific importance and call them races. Social-kind views consider races to exist because of contingent social practices. I argue for a view closest to the third camp, with a few wrinkles. Three distinctives of my approach are:

(a) I self-consciously argue as an analytic metaphysician, taking this to be a work of applied metaphysics in the same sense that looking at questions regarding abortion, just war theory, or the ethics of lying count as applied ethics, and its relation to theoretical metaphysics (what is most commonly called metaphysics among analytic philosophers) is analogous to how applied ethics relates to ethical theory (e.g. utilitarian, deontological, virtue, natural law, or other theoretical approaches, which was what ethics was largely restricted to until the applied ethics revolution of the late 20th century). Part of my aim is to remove the bias against seeing this sort of subject as part of what metaphysicians should be doing.

(b) I argue that race is highly context-sensitive, in more ways than most race theorists mean when they speak of themselves as holding views they call contextualist.

(c) My overall conclusion by the end is that we should not abandon race-talk, race-theorizing, or race-classification, at least not in the short-term. We need to be able to speak of such social realities to address real racial problems. However, we ought to find ways to challenge some of the social forces that work to make racial groups racialized and to form the social realities that surround race, some of which are not the way we should want them to be.

Here is the chapter breakdown:

1. Natural Kinds and the Analogy of Species:

There's a debate in the philosophy of biology about whether species are natural kinds. This chapter looks closely at that debate to argue that it is meaningful to speak of natural kinds, although species are not natural kinds in the strong sense that Aristotle might have taken them to be.

2. Natural Kinds and Race

I look at three conceptions of race as what I call minimalist natural kinds, two from philosophers and one from biologists. Al three views have potential to pick out groups useful for categorizing people according to scientific purposes but all three have problems if we want to identify the groups they point to as the same groups that we ordinarily call races.

3. Classic Anti-Realism

I argue in this chapter against certain of the traditional anti-realist arguments (especially Naomi Zack and Kwame Anthony Appiah), especially emphasizing ordinary use (as opposed to the language of experts) and changes is race-language.

4. Glasgow's Revisionism

Joshua Glasgow develops an anti-realism that takes the groups we call races to exist as social constructions, but he doesn't think those groups should be called races. I resist his arguments and argue that some of his evidence actually support a social kind view like the one I end up adopting.

5. Social-Construction and Biological Constructionism

The contingency of the racial categories, the fact that arbitrary socially-determined facts determine the structure of racial classification, and the instability of racial categories are all good evidence that races are social constructions. I conclude that races are social kinds that take their basis in biologically-identified traits, but the selection of which biological traits we use to identify races are biologically-arbitrary.

6. Races and the Metaphysics of Objects and Groups

My view is that races exist as socially-constructed entities but that they might just as well have existed without being races. Social facts don't bring races into existence but rather make existing groups into races. This chapter looks to contemporary metaphysics to see arguments that nihilists and coincident-entity theorists might make against my view. I argue against those conceptions, but even if those views were correct, much of what I say would still follow.

7. Context-Sensitive Features of Racial Assignment

This chapter argues for context-sensitivity in racial constructions, with fluidity from one context to another even for the same person. Different factors might be relevant in different settings to change which racial labels might apply.This context-sensitivity is much more diverse in terms of ways of being context-sensitive than I find in most of the philosophy of race literature. The particular ways this works will support my eventual revisionism in the next chapter.

8. The Ethics of the Metaphysics of Race

Here I argue that we should use existing racial categories to identify problems within the social constructions of race, rather than seeking to eliminate the categories in any direct way, but we should also make efforts to change the conditions that generate those problematic elements, so we can retain only the unproblematic aspects, and some elements of racial identity-formation can be good.

9. Implicit Bias and the Argument for Elimination

Recent work in psychology and cognitive science shows that our patterns of forming race-judgments rely on a more general pattern in child development that leads to implicit racial bias of an invisible but harmful sort, even among people who are explicitly anti-racist in their reflective views. I argue that there is evidence in the psychology and cognitive science literature that shows that we need to retain our racial categories to address existing implicit bias, but there is also evidence that we should rethink how we speak of racial issues with small children, to reduce the perpetuation of implicit bias in further generations, and this result fits well with (and gives further details to flesh out) the conclusion of the previous chapter.

The introduction and outline for this sermon series is here.

1. Matthew 26:1-16 She has done a beautiful thing (Jeremy Jackson) 1-8-12
2. Matthew 26:17-29 I will keep the Passover (John Hartung) 1-15-12
3. Matthew 26:30-46 Your will be done (Nathaniel Jackson) 1-29-12
4. Matthew 26:47-56 That the Scriptures ... be fulfilled (Stefan Matzal)  2-5-12
5. Matthew 26:57-68 He has uttered blasphemy (Stefan Matzal) 2-12-12
6. Matthew 26:69-75 Peter ... went out and wept bitterly (Nathaniel Jackson) 2-19-12
7. Matthew 27:1-10 Thirty pieces ... the price of him (Jeremy Jackson) 2-26-12
8. Matthew 27:11-26 His blood be on us and our children (Doug Weeks) 3-4-12
9. Matthew 27:27-44 He saved others; he cannot ... himself (Stefan Matzal) 3-11-12
10. Matthew 27:45-56 My God ... why have you forsaken me? (Jeremy Jackson) 3-18-12
11. Matthew 27:57-66 They went and made the tomb secure (Nathaniel Jackson) 3-25-12
12. Matthew 28:1-10 He is not here for he has risen (Stefan Matzal) 4-1-12
13. Matthew 28:11-20 I am with you always (Jeremy Jackson) 4-8-12 (Easter Sunday)

Doug Weeks preached on Matthew 27:50-28:20 in the 1981 Matthew series.
Bill Finch preached on Matthew 26 in 1982. See this topical series.
These chapters were all previously covered in 1985.
They were also again covered in 1998.

For more sermons, see here.

This is worth next to nothing. I'm not generally very good at predictions (although I did correctly predict who would be the final Cylon, nine months in advance). But here's my suspicion of what will happen in the GOP primary for the 2012 race for U.S. president.

Currently Newt Gingrich has been enjoying his brief turn at the top as the non-Romney candidate, as Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain have done. Like the others, he will soon drop. Indications are strong that Ron Paul will briefly occupy the top spot, perhaps even winning the Iowa caucuses and the NH primary. During this time, he'll finally get the exposure his fans have wanted. Moderate and mainstream conservatives will see how significantly he wants to dismantle the federal government. Libertarian Republicans will see that he isn't really one of them but is just an extreme federalist who doesn't want the federal government doing much, but his social conservatism will turn them off. Social conservatives will stop being fooled by his pro-life and other socially-conservative positions when they see that he has no backbone to stand of for such concerns on the federal level. Non-isolationists will be offended at his unwillingness to engage in any ventures of foreign policy to help around the world, and anyone concerned about national security will be scared to death of his willingness to dismiss Iran by saying we just need to be nice to them. To many, he will make Obama look like Dick Cheney. Most important, people of any moral conscience will see his willingness to pal around with racists and tolerate the use of their publications for political gain.

That will leave Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum as the two unvetted candidates. Each will have a turn as the non-Romney, for perhaps a couple weeks each. Huntsman will probably be first. His willingness to work in the Obama Administration and his out-of-context quotes that have wrongly led many to see him as a moderate instead of the genuine conservative that he is will lead Santorum to have a brief time in the spotlight. He is mostly untested. He's known as a social conservative. The left has successfully portrayed him as an extremist, despite the fact that his views are pretty mainstream for social conservatism. That will all occur in an extreme way, and he'll be given the Sarah Palin treatment, as Bachmann was. His statements will be taken out of context. Some of his views that are quite mainstream will be made fun of as neanderthal and called beyond the pale. He does have some strange notions of the Constitution that might or might not become the main issues. I tend to think they won't, because the focus from the left will be not on his odd views but on his mainstream once, which they will portray as ridiculous. But I think his views of foreign policy will be his undoing. GOP primary-goers will dismiss the left's hand-waving on those issues and will worry about views of his that just don't sound reasonable to most Republicans. I know only a little about his views on such matters (I haven't had time to watch more than bits and pieces of the debates, and he's not getting much attention), but being in the room when one debate focusing on those issues early on happened to be playing led me to think that he was making Ron Paul sound mainstream.

What will happen after that is wide open. At this point we'll be getting to a number of bigger states, and the early states will have been all over the map, leading each one (and several are simultaneous) to go in different directions. Candidates with strengths in certain regions will win more states in those regions. It's possible there will be a consensus. The non-Romney supporters will eventually concede and go with Romney, or the Romney supporters may eventually settle on some other candidate. But I'm guessing this will go on for a while, perhaps with no candidate receiving enough delegates to have a clear candidate by the time of the convention. This may well be the first brokered convention in decades. Just four years ago, pundits were claiming that we could never have such a thing again. I'm not so sure. This year looks like a really good chance for it. My suspicion is that Romney will eventually win, although I wouldn't rule out Huntsman, and Gingrich may still have a chance. I don't think Paul, Gingrich, or Santorum will be the nominee. But I can't even really be sure of that. I'd be a little surprised if the first few states turn out to settle things as quickly as they usually do, however.

If this is all right, the GOP will have a harder time using the convention to promote their candidate, which will help Obama a bit. But at the same time he'll have a harder time crafting his own campaign with an opponent in mind, which will mean he won't be able to craft his public image or message in contrast to anyone in particular. There might be some advantage in that, because he'll continue to be able to run against the House Republicans, as he's been doing so far. But I suspect it will frustrate him greatly, and it will play to his weaknesses as a president rather than his strengths as a campaigner.

As to who will win, my prediction is that if Romney gets the nomination he'll have a strong chance of winning the presidency. I think the same is true of Hunstman. Perhaps he would have an even easier time, because he doesn't have a record of changing his mind on one big issue, like Romney has, with every other minor statement being misused out-of-context to pretend he can't take a stand on anything. Perry could pull it off but would have a much tougher time of it, and I think he would more likely lose than win. I don't think Gingrich, Paul, Bachmann, or Santorum could have much chance against Obama unless he tanks much more than he has so far (and he's just gotten a bit of a boost, actually). Gingrich would clean house in the debates, of course. But all four figures have lower positives and as-high negatives as Obama. Even Obama's negatives would, therefore, not help them.

If GOP voters want to make Obama a one-term president, their best shot will be to focus on Romney or Huntsman. They'll have to learn to be more charitable than people largely have so far in interpreting what they've said, and they'll have to settle for the inevitable conclusion that they won't like everything about their candidate. I suspect any other path is likely to lead to another term for Obama, and GOP efforts at some notion of ideological purity would end up leading to what it led to in 2010, this time with the presidency at stake rather than the control of the Senate (if Colorado, Delaware, and New Mexico had nominated more mainstream candidates we might have ended up with a Republican Senate at present).

This post collects those few Trinity Fellowship topical studies that have been preserved from the Tuesday Night Bible Study. All of these studies are by Jeremy Jackson.

8/14/79 How a Church Can Avoid Becoming a Jonestown: Revelation 13
6/18/85 Christians & Elect Angels
6/25/85 Christians & Fallen Angels
7/2/85 Christians & Angels: Distortions of Scripture
8/7/85 How Christ's Death Applies to Us (tape says 8/9, but that's not a Tuesday)
8/20/85 The Lord's Supper
8/27/85 Witnessing and Worshiping
9/3/85 The Law and Love for the Christian
9/10/85 Authority of Scripture II Samuel 6:1-15
6/24/86 Meaning of Corporate Prayer
7/1/86 Prayer & Intercession
7/8/86 Baptism
7/15/86 Marriage: Divorce and Remarriage
7/22/86 Life After Death I
7/29/86 Life After Death II
8/5/86 Judgement
8/12/86 Judgement II (only first 12 minutes)
9/9/86 Authority of Scripture II Peter 1:20-21
9/19/89 Authority of Scripture Revelation 1:1
9/11/90 Authority of Scripture Joshua 3:7-13
9/12/95 Authority of Scripture Acts 1:1-11

See here for more Bible studies and sermons.

I've discovered the need to adopt a new way of speaking about people who are recently-descended from Africans. We've learned in the last couple decades that we ought to emphasize someone's personhood above any other characteristic, and thus it's thoroughly immoral to use any adjective in front of 'person'. We need to use predicate nouns instead. We no longer have sad people, for example. We simply have people with sadness. We no longer have short people. We have people with shortness. We don't want to define people with sadness as if their sadness is more important than their personhood, so we have a moral obligation to put the noun form after the word 'person'. Grammar does always indicate metaphysics, after all.

One sphere of language in which this lesson has never been properly applied is in the area of race. Why are we still talking about black people, for instance? Do we really want to define people solely in terms of their race? Do we really want to signal that their blackness is so central to who they are that we're going to pretend that people with blackness aren't people? If we call them black people, then we are treating their blackness as if it's a greater part of our conception of people with blackness than their personhood is. People with person-firstness have instructed us that we should never put disability-related adjectives in front of a noun or pronoun referring to a person, because we don't want them identified with that condition. But we've also learned from the same people that having a disability is not negative, which means this policy is not because disabilities are bad. Therefore, we ought to apply it to other cases when something is not bad but might wrongly be taken by someone to be bad, just as we would apply it to things that are genuinely bad. If race is not to be a negative, then I am not a white person. I'm a person with whiteness. It does make it a little awkward to speak of people with Asianness or people with Australian-first-people-ness (i.e. what used to be called aboriginalness). But it's worth the awkwardness of expression to avoid any chance of identifying them with the racial or ethnic group whose membership they possess.

Even worse, it's especially pernicious to say that someone is black (or African-American or whatever racial term we might choose). After all, using predicate adjectives amounts to making identity statements rather than merely ascribing a property to someone the way we would have thought that adjectives in English, even predicate adjectives, do. It's much more preferable to say that someone has blackness than to say that she is black. People aren't anything except persons. I'm not philosophical. I have philosophicalness. Glenn Beck is not unfair to his political adversaries. He has unfairness to the people who have political adversariness with him. President Obama is not bad at speaking without a teleprompter. He has badness at speaking without a teleprompter. I shouldn't say that I am Christian. I'm a person who has Christianity. I shouldn't be identified with my faith. I should claim, rather, to possess the entirety of Christianity, as if it belongs to me. We need to avoid identifying people with any property ascribed to them other than personhood. It's much better to say that they possess the entirety of the thing that formerly we would have used to describe them.

For more explanation, please see here (except you can ignore the sections explaining how people with blindness and people with deafness have offendedness at the obviously-correct way to refer to them, and you certainly shouldn't read person-with-autism Jim Sinclair's reasons for disliking person-first language).

This continues the Trinity Fellowship chronological sermon archive, from the 1978-2000 listing.

This is the chronological archive for sermons from Trinity Fellowship in Syracuse, New York. Most of the current sermons are preached by the elders of the congregation: Jeremy Jackson, Stefan Matzal, Doug Weeks, and Nathaniel Jackson (with Al Gurley preaching a lot of the earlier ones, as one of the three founding elders). Audio for other sermons by current members, former members, and guest preachers is included only if I have permission from the preacher.

With some exceptions, Trinity Fellowship preaches from the gospels in the winter, historical books in the spring, epistles in the summer, and prophets in the fall. In earlier years, the schedule was slightly different, and topical series sometimes occur in place of one of the others (but only once in place of a gospel) during a break between books.

This archive is ordered chronologically. To see them ordered by section of the Bible, see here. I've left out retreat talks and other recorded messages unless they were given on a Sunday or they were given in a series that included a Sunday morning sermon. Some of those left out can be found among the topical sermons at the link earlier in this paragraph.

Because of a post-length limit that I never knew this blog had, I had to split the archive into two pieces. I could have split it anywhere from 1999-2002 or so, and given that range it seemed best to split it at the century marker, so this post covers the 20th century, and the next post covers the 21st.