Page 115 – CrossExamined

Tomar el tiempo en serio para diferenciar el pasado y el futuro: una respuesta a Wes Morriston

Por William Lane Craig

RESUMEN

Wes Morriston argumenta que, si incluso consideramos que una serie interminable de eventos es meramente potencial, en lugar de actualmente infinita, aún no se ha establecido una distinción entre una serie de eventos sin comienzo y una serie interminable, que es relevante para los argumentos en contra de la posibilidad metafísica de un número infinito actual de cosas: si una serie sin comienzo es imposible, también lo es una serie sin fin. El éxito del argumento de Morriston, sin embargo, depende de rechazar la caracterización de una serie interminable de eventos como un infinito potencial. Resulta que, según su propio análisis, es de vital importancia si la serie de eventos es potencial a diferencia de actualmente infinita. Si es razonable mantener que una serie infinita de eventos es potencialmente infinita, mientras que una serie sin comienzo es actualmente infinita, entonces se ha establecido una distinción relevante para cualquier persona que piense que un infinito actual no puede existir.

Según Wes Morriston, el corazón de su paper[i] se refiere a dos afirmaciones:

(i.) que una serie interminable de eventos es meramente un potencial infinito.

(ii.) que esto establece una distinción relevante entre el pasado sin comienzo (que supuestamente es imposible) y un futuro sin fin (que es claramente posible).

Nos dice que “argumentaré que no se ha establecido una distinción relevante”. La declaración de Morriston hace evidente que su crítica se dirigirá a la segunda afirmación expuesta arriba. Para tener éxito, tal crítica debe otorgar (i), al menos por el bien del argumento. Morriston debe mostrar que incluso si una serie interminable de eventos es meramente potencial, en lugar de actualmente infinita, entonces no se ha establecido una distinción relevante entre las dos series.

Una lectura cuidadosa del artículo de Morriston revela, sin embargo, que fracasa en su objetivo, a mitad de su trabajo, comenzando en la sección titulada “¿Un infinito meramente potencial?”, Morriston pasa a atacar (i) en lugar de concederlo. El éxito de su argumento viene a depender de rechazar la caracterización de (i) como una serie infinita de eventos siendo un infinito potencial. Resulta que, según su propio análisis, es de vital importancia si la serie de eventos es potencial a diferencia de actualmente infinita. Si es razonable mantener que una serie infinita de eventos es potencialmente infinita, mientras que una serie sin comienzo es en actualmente infinita, entonces se ha establecido una distinción relevante para cualquier persona que piense que un infinito actual no puede existir.

El ataque de Morriston a la infinitud potencial de una serie interminable de eventos es, por lo tanto, de un interés mucho más amplio que las preocupaciones de la teología natural, ya que virtualmente todos los filósofos que defienden una teoría del tiempo dinámica o A, sostienen que la serie de sucesivamente ordenada e isócrona de eventos posteriores a algún evento denominado es potencialmente infinita.

El argumento de Morriston, antes del cambio crucial mencionado anteriormente, es fatalmente ambiguo.[ii] Hay dos formas en que una serie temporal de eventos isócronos que tiene un comienzo puede ser interminable: (i) podría ser actualmente infinita, es decir, compuesta de un número infinito actual de eventos; (ii) podría ser potencialmente infinita, es decir, compuesto por un finito, pero siempre creciente número de eventos con el infinito como límite. La segunda respuesta implica una teoría A del tiempo según la cual el devenir temporal es una característica objetiva de la realidad, mientras que la primera respuesta está asociada, naturalmente, con una teoría B según la cual todos los eventos en el tiempo están a la par de los factores ontológicos.

Entonces, con respecto a la ilustración de Morriston de dos ángeles que comienzan a alabar a Dios para siempre, un teórico A coincidirá de todo corazón con su afirmación: “Si preguntas: ‘¿Cuántas alabanzas se expresarán?’, la única respuesta sensata es infinitamente muchas”—es decir, muchas, pero potencialmente infinitas. Si esta respuesta es permitida por el teórico A, entonces los argumentos supuestamente paralelos de Morriston colapsan. Dios podría haber dejado espacio para un número infinito de alabanzas potencialmente infinitas por parte de un tercer ángel, en cuyo caso se “agregarán” infinitamente muchas alabanzas, y las alabanzas de los tres ángeles se dirán en la misma cantidad de tiempo potencialmente infinita. No hay absurdo allí, ya que el número de alabanzas dichas por los ángeles siempre será finito, aunque aumente hacia el infinito como límite. O, de nuevo, si Dios determinó que los ángeles se detuvieran después de la cuarta alabanza o si un ángel fuese silenciado, se podrían evitar muchas alabanzas infinitas potencialmente, pero en un caso solo expresarán cuatro alabanzas mientras que en la otra se dirán infinitas potencialmente. De nuevo, no hay absurdo, ya que el infinito es simplemente potencial. No se puede decir nada paralelo de una serie de eventos sin principio, ya que, dada la asimetría de lo temporal, el pasado no puede ser potencialmente infinito, porque entonces tendría que ser finito, pero creciendo en una dirección hacia atrás.

Si se permite tal respuesta, el teórico A—como debe ser si Morriston tiene éxito en demostrar que interpretar una serie interminable de eventos como potencialmente infinitos no es relevante para el argumento—está claro que los casos de Morriston no están completamente paralelos a una serie de eventos sin principio. A medida que se aclara aún más en los argumentos del kalam para la finitud del pasado basada en la imposibilidad de formar un infinito actual mediante una adición sucesiva,[iii] la asimetría del tiempo marca una enorme diferencia metafísica entre el pasado y el futuro en una teoría A del tiempo. Quizás la oración más reveladora en el artículo de Morriston sea su desconcertada pregunta: “¿Qué diferencia podría hacer un simple cambio de tiempo?”

III

Al darse cuenta de que el teórico A insistirá en que una serie interminable de eventos es propiamente un potencial en lugar de un infinito actual, Morriston, en la segunda parte de su artículo, recurre, en contra de su propósito declarado, a desafiar la afirmación de que una serie interminable de eventos es simplemente potencialmente infinita. Él pregunta: “¿Está claro que la serie interminable de alabanzas futuras previstas es un potencial, en lugar de un infinito actual?” “Dada la realidad del devenir temporal, ¿deberíamos decir que la serie interminable de eventos que he previsto es un infinito meramente potencial?”

Para justificar una respuesta negativa a esas preguntas, Morriston malinterpreta el punto de vista del teórico A de una manera perversa pero interesante. Cuando el Teórico A expresa la afirmación (i) arriba antes mencionada, la serie interminable de eventos de la que está hablando es la serie actual de eventos que han ocurrido. Pero como Morriston deja en claro, está hablando de una serie que, en la teoría A, no existe en ningún sentido, es decir, la serie de eventos que aún no han sucedido. Así que Morriston dice:

Como lo he previsto, la serie de alabanzas futuras no está “creciendo” en absoluto. A medida que cada alabanza se hace presente, se elimina de la “colección” de aquellas que aún están por venir. La colección de alabanzas futuras es, por así decirlo, miembros perdidos.

Esto golpeará a un teórico A como una extraña ontología, al menos a la que el teórico A no está comprometido de ninguna manera. No existe una serie como la que Morriston imagina, como tampoco existe una serie de eventos que se previnieron, que aumenta constantemente a medida que pasa el tiempo. Morriston no ha demostrado que la afirmación (i) sea falsa con respecto a la serie que el teórico A tiene en mente, porque el referente de la frase “una serie interminable de eventos” y “un futuro sin fin” en las afirmaciones (i) y (ii) es una serie diferente de la serie que Morriston está considerando.

Morriston niega que esté hablando de ontología. Él dice que podría reformular su afirmación de que la colección de verdades temporales futuras sobre las alabanzas de los ángeles está perdiendo miembros. Pero luego está hablando de ontología, ya que tal reformulación parece presuponer que las verdades son objetos abstractos, lo que no ha sido justificado. Morriston necesita encontrar algo que sea parte de la realidad que sea actualmente infinita en cantidad para hacer una analogía con una serie sin comienzo de eventos pasados. Morriston luego vuelve a su sugerencia de que, en lugar de eventos futuros, que en una teoría A del tiempo no son parte de la realidad, consideramos verdades temporales en el futuro o hechos temporales correspondientes. Pero este movimiento hace dos suposiciones injustificadas: primero, el platonismo con respecto a las proposiciones y, segundo, la infinitud actual de proposiciones o hechos. Si aceptamos estas suposiciones, no hay necesidad de apelar a verdades temporales en el futuro para designar una infinitud actual de proposiciones, ya que para cada proposición p existe la proposición adicional de que Tp, o que es verdad que p. El finitista, por lo tanto, negará el platonismo con respecto a las proposiciones, considerándolas como ficciones útiles, o negará que haya un número infinito de proposiciones, ya que, dado que el conocimiento de Dios no es proposicional, las proposiciones son el subproducto de la intelección humana y, por lo tanto, potencialmente infinitas en número, ya que llegamos a expresar de manera proposicional lo que Dios sabe de una manera no proposicional.

Morriston reitera su intuición de que el número de alabanzas angelicales que se dirán en una serie interminable es actualmente infinito. Pero las únicas alabanzas que son actuales son las que se dicen, y siempre serán finitas en número. No se dirá un número actualmente infinito de alabanzas. Considere los ejemplos más familiares del potencial infinito en la división espacial y la suma. Hay una enorme diferencia entre tomar una línea espacial como una composición de puntos densamente ordenada y tomarla como no compuesta de puntos, sino potencial e infinitamente divisible. En la segunda postura, se puede continuar dividiendo una línea sin fin, pero no se puede hacer un número actualmente infinito de divisiones. Estas son posturas completamente distintas de la naturaleza del espacio, y una no puede colapsarse en la otra. O, de nuevo, si el universo es finito (debido a que el espacio tiene una curvatura positiva) pero se expande sin cesar, el volumen del universo es potencialmente infinito, pero no se volverá actualmente infinito. Hay un mundo de diferencia entre los modelos del universo en los que el espacio es actualmente infinito en extensión y los modelos en los que el espacio se expande constantemente pero siempre es finito.

Del mismo modo, en las ilustraciones de Morriston, lo que es real o actual siempre es finito. Entonces, en respuesta a la pregunta de Morriston, “¿Cuántas alabanzas se dirán?”, Debemos responder, “Potencialmente infinitas,” y distinguir esto de la pregunta, “¿Cuál es el número de alabanzas en la serie de alabanzas futuras?”, la respuesta a la cual es “Ninguno”.

Morriston insiste en que, en una teoría A del tiempo, los eventos pasados tampoco existen, por lo que la no existencia de eventos futuros no hace ninguna diferencia real. Pero a pesar de confesar un poco de perplejidad sobre el concepto del potencial infinito como límite,[iv] Morriston parece preparado para admitir que la serie de eventos que han sucedido es solo potencialmente infinita en la dirección después que (later than). Además, está claro que nada paralelo puede decirse con sinceridad sobre la serie de eventos que han sucedido en la dirección antes que (earlier than). El número de eventos que ocurrieron antes que cualquier evento dado, por lo tanto, solo puede ser finito o actualmente infinito. En una teoría A del tiempo, la serie temporal de eventos comprende todo lo que ha sucedido y nada más. Note bien el uso del tiempo pretérito perfecto en esta caracterización. El tiempo verbal pretérito perfecto de “ha sucedido” cubre cada vez hasta el presente y, por lo tanto, incluye cada evento pasado y presente. Todo lo que ha sucedido se ha actualizado. Como lo expresaron los medievales, estos eventos han salido de sus causas y, por lo tanto, ya no tienen potencial. El mundo actual incluye tanto lo que existe como lo que existió. Pero los eventos que aún no han tenido lugar, siendo pura potencialidad, no son, en una visión dinámica del tiempo, parte del mundo actual.[v]

La distinción ontológica entre el pasado y el presente, por un lado, y el futuro, por el otro, es especialmente evidente en los puntos de vista “bloque creciente” del tiempo, como el enunciado por el medio (middle) C. D. Broad y defendido por el colega de Morriston, Michael Tooley. Un defensor del argumento kalam que acepta la visión de bloque creciente no tiene dificultad en diferenciar la actualidad del pasado de la potencialidad del futuro. Mi afirmación es que la existencia sin tiempo del bloque pasado de eventos no es una condición necesaria de la actualidad del pasado. Incluso si los eventos pasados no existen, siguen siendo parte del mundo real de una manera que los eventos futuros no lo son, ya que el mundo real comprende todo lo que ha sucedido.

En conclusión, parece claro que Morriston no ha tenido éxito en el propósito central de su artículo, a saber, mostrar que incluso si una serie interminable de eventos es solo potencialmente infinita, ese hecho no establece una distinción relevante entre el pasado sin principio y un futuro sin fin. En cambio, se vio obligado a pasar a argumentar que una serie interminable de eventos no puede considerarse potencialmente infinita. Pero su argumento malinterpretó seriamente la Teoría A del tiempo, sustituyendo una serie imaginaria de eventos por la serie de eventos en curso que realmente han sucedido.

Notas:

[i] Wes Morriston, “Beginningless Past, Endless Future, and the Actual Infinite,” Faith and Philosophy.

[ii] Aunque no estoy completamente contento con la reconstrucción de Morriston de mi argumento a favor del finitismo, lo dejé pasar. En lugar de hablar de mundos alternativos posibles, debería hablar en términos de condicionales contrafácticos. Si todos los demás huéspedes en el Hotel Hilbert se fueran, ¿cuántos quedarían? El experimento mental no depende de la verdad del antecedente. Creo que hay contrafácticos no trivialmente verdaderos con antecedentes imposibles, por ejemplo, “Si Dios no existiera, el universo no existiría”.

[iii] La diferencia entre la potencialidad del futuro y la actualidad del pasado emerge con especial claridad en los argumentos del Kalam para el comienzo del universo, basados en la imposibilidad de formar un infinito actual mediante sumas sucesivas. Por ejemplo, al-Ghazali nos invita a suponer que Júpiter y Saturno orbitan alrededor del Sol de tal manera que por cada órbita que Saturno completa, Júpiter completa dos. Cuanto más orbitan, más se queda atrás Saturno. Si continúan orbitando para siempre, se acercarán a un límite en el que Saturno está infinitamente lejos de Júpiter. Por supuesto, nunca llegarán a este límite. Pero ahora cambie la historia: suponga que Júpiter y Saturno han estado orbitando el Sol desde la eternidad pasada. ¿Cuál habrá completado la mayor cantidad de órbitas? La respuesta es que el número de sus órbitas es exactamente el mismo, es decir, ¡infinito! Eso puede parecer absurdo, pero parece ser el resultado inevitable de la actualidad del pasado en oposición a la potencialidad del futuro.

[iv] Los límites juegan un papel esencial en el proceso matemático de diferenciación, uno de los pilares del cálculo. El límite de una determinada función f (x) es el valor de esa función cuando x se acerca a un número dado. Esto está escrito:

lim f (x) = L

x → a

que se lee, “A medida que x se acerca a a, el límite de f (x) es L.” A veces uno está interesado en encontrar el límite de una función a medida que el valor de a aumenta indefinidamente, en cuyo caso se sustituye a por el signo del potencial infinito “∞”:

lim f (x) = L

x → ∞

En tales casos, se dice que estamos determinando el límite “al” infinito. A veces, el valor de una función aumenta indefinidamente a medida que las entradas se acercan a un cierto número, en cuyo caso el límite de la función es infinito:

lim f (x) = ∞

x → a

En ninguno de los casos el infinito es un número, como lo es ℵ₀. En las ilustraciones de Morriston, tanto el valor de a como el límite de la función f (x) son ∞. Entonces, por ejemplo, si por cada alabanza pronunciada por un ángel hay dos pronunciadas por el otro,

lim f (x) = 2x = ∞

x → ∞

A medida que x se aproxima al infinito, también lo hace la salida de la función 2x. Significativamente, el valor de la función f (a) no tiene relación alguna con el valor o incluso con la existencia de un límite a medida que x se acerca a a, es decir, “a” a. Por lo tanto, en la ilustración de Morriston no estamos hablando del valor f (∞). El infinito es simplemente acercado, no alcanzado. Entonces, si comparamos el número de alabanzas ofrecidas por los ángeles, encontramos que cada vez más divergen:

lim g (x) = 2x – x = ∞

x → ∞

Pero ahora contrasta el caso de dos ángeles que alaban a Dios en una proporción de 2: 1 desde la eternidad pasada. En este caso, como en el caso de Saturno y Júpiter en la ilustración de al-Ghazali mencionada en la nota 3, se ha alcanzado el infinito; se ha pronunciado un número actualmente infinito de alabanzas. En este caso, de hecho, nos preocupa el valor f (a), y solo puede ser 2⋅ℵ₀ = ℵ₀.

[v] La lección de la paradoja de McTaggart es que, si nos tomamos el tiempo en serio, no puede haber una descripción máxima de la realidad como se imagina en la semántica de los mundos posibles, que proporcionan descripciones puramente atemporales de cómo podría ser el mundo. Para un intento de introducir el tiempo en la semántica de mundos posibles, ver William Lane Craig, The Tensed Theory of Time: A Critical Examination, Synthese Library 293 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 208-10.

William Lane Craig es un filósofo analítico y teólogo cristiano bautista estadounidense. El trabajo filosófico de Craig se enfoca en la filosofía de la religión, la metafísica y la filosofía del tiempo. Su interés teológico se encuentra en los estudios del Jesús histórico y en la teología filosófica.

Blog Original: http://bit.ly/2Tbzwid

Traducido por Jairo Izquierdo

January 13, 2020/by Guest

How Jeremiah 29:11 is Far Better When You Properly Interpret It

Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Brian Chilton

Certain verses in the Bible have become so popularized that they are often removed from their context. In so doing, the biblical passage loses the impact that it holds. Worse yet, the text may be given a message that it never intended to carry. Jeremiah 29:11 is one such example.

The verse is a promise of God which states, “For I know the plans I have for you’—this is the Lord’s declaration—‘plans for your well-being, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope’” (Jer. 29:11, CSB). The verse has been often misapplied as it has become a staple for graduation Hallmark cards, plaques, and knick-knacks. For some, the verse holds a promise that God will never allow the person to suffer bad experiences or trouble. The graduate who receives such things may think that God will only bring good things to his or her life. But is that really what the passage says? Proper biblical interpretation unveils three theological truths that exceed the kitschy cliché that the verse has become.

Jeremiah 29:11 Indicates that God Can Be Found in Difficult Days. It is critically important to note that Jeremiah 29:11 is part of Jeremiah’s letter to the Israelites who would become Babylonian exiles. This is key to understanding the context of the verse. If the interpreter misses this point, he or she will not comprehend the nature of the verse. Quite frankly, I do not know that anyone would want this to be their graduation theme because God is telling the nation that they are about to experience difficult days ahead.

Living in an era of self-entitlement and luxury, it is easy to think that God will only bring good things to our lives. We almost view God as if he is a self-improvement coach rather than a Heavenly Father. Perhaps some would even like God better if God were the former rather than the latter. Nevertheless, God never promises that a believer’s walk will be easy. Rather, God promises us that God’s presence will never leave us in good times or bad. If you continue reading the text, God tells those who are about to suffer the exile, “You will call me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart” (Jer. 29:12–13, CSB). God’s presence is always with his children (Matt. 28:20).

Jeremiah 29:11 Indicates that God is Sovereign Over the Good Times and Bad. Jeremiah 29:11 is comparable to Romans 8:28 in the fact that the prophet holds that God is sovereign over all times and occasions. Why does God allow evil to occur? This issue, otherwise called theodicy, is beyond the scope of this present article. However, it must be understood that God may allow bad things to occur to bring about a greater end.

I spoke with a church member today about the book of Job and the primary theological theme of the book. God tells Job that he must trust him because he set everything in motion since the beginning of creation. Life and the operation of the universe are far more complex than anyone could imagine. In a similar fashion, God is telling the soon-to-be Babylonian exiles the same, saying, “Trust me.” The author of Hebrews notes that one should not “take the Lord’s discipline lightly or lose heart when you are reproved by him, the Lord disciplines the one he loves and punishes every son he receives. Endure suffering as discipline: God is dealing with you as sons” (Heb. 12:5–7, CSB). When divine discipline comes, it is never to harm us. But rather, God’s discipline is always to make us better. Psalm 94 notes that a person is blessed when they receive the Lord’s discipline because they are being taught how to keep the law (Ps. 94:12, ESV). God even tells Jacob, “Fear not … for I am with you. I will make a full end of all the nations to which I have driven you, but of you, I will not make a full end. I will discipline you in just measure, and I will by no means leave you unpunished” (Ps. 118:18, ESV). The people of Jeremiah’s day had not been faithful which led to God’s disciplinary actions. However, God notes that God is still sovereign in the bad times as he is in the good times. He is telling the people, “Trust me.”

Jeremiah 29:11 Indicates that God Will Bless His Faithful Children in the End. Here again, Jeremiah 29:11 can be likened to Romans 8:28 which states, “We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28, CSB). In like manner, God tells those who would be exiled, “I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and places where I banished you … I will restore you to the place from which I deported you” (Jer. 29:14, CSB). While the people would face severe difficulty in their days ahead, they could live with the assurance that God would restore the fortunes of their people and their land. Similarly, we are part of the community of God’s people. We do not always get things right. Quite honestly, we probably mess up more than do right. Nonetheless, God has a better day coming for his children—a day where there will be no more tears, no more pain, no more heartache, no more divisions, and no more death (Rev. 21:3–4). Most importantly, that day will be a time where there will be no more separation from God (Rev. 22:4–5). Our faith will be sight (2 Cor. 5:7).

Jeremiah 29:11 is a wonderful verse. But the depth of its theological mines cannot be dug unless one takes the time to understand the verse in its proper context. While it may not be that this verse will be as desirable to place on graduation cards as it once was, the verse becomes more intense and stronger especially when troubles come. God’s ultimate plan for our lives is to bring great blessings. But those blessings may often become shrouded in the heartaches of life. By placing us in the pressures of life, God makes us into diamonds.

Living In A Post-Truth Culture

1. Does Truth Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Bob Perry

I’ve made the case that truth, goodness, and beauty are objective features of the world we live in. Hopefully, you’ve found that to be interesting. But please don’t think this is just an esoteric triviality. It’s not. We are living in a post-truth culture. But it’s a place where the objective nature of truth, goodness, and beauty are deeply relevant. Our view of objective truth affects everything about how we live our lives. It’s the antidote to moral relativism. Truth matters. And understanding the profundity of that simple fact will revolutionize the way you interact with our world.

Here’s why.

The Assumptions of the Culture

Consider the three topics I’ve been talking about. And think about how you’re used to hearing about them:

Truth — “That may be true for you, but it’s not for me.”

Goodness — “Don’t impose your morality on me!”

Beauty — “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Despite thousands of years of human knowledge and experience, our contemporary culture has made every one of these subjective. Suddenly, they’ve each become things we decide for ourselves.

In fact, if you were to express the notion that anyone of these is not subjective, you would be considered arrogant. Oppressive. A Neanderthal who wants to impose your personal values on the rest of the world.

Who are you to do that?!

The World Turned Upside Down

This is cultural relativism. A place where we are supposed to accept the idea that everyone’s opinion about every topic is equally valid.

And remember that pesky definition of truth as: “correspondence to reality”? That’s out the window. The new normal tells us that our highest calling is to “be true to ourselves.”

But what does that mean, exactly?

Follow Your Heart

When your standard for truth and virtue is the person you see in the bathroom mirror, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see what’s coming. Feelings rule. You are encouraged to “follow your heart.” And following your heart means you evaluate reality based on emotion instead of reason and logic.

If it feels good, you do it.

“If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad …”

Sheryl Crow

Conforming to reality becomes passé. An archaic inconvenience.

But there is a problem with that. And the problem is that the “persistent belief in something that does not conform to reality” is called a delusion.

Our culture has elevated delusion to an art form.

Philosophy Is About The Real World

It turns out that the whole discussion of truth, goodness, and beauty is more than the hobby of navel-gazing philosophers. These things have real-world consequences. Ideas always do. Good or bad, we live in a world where those ideas will play themselves out.

And so, we see the consequences of bad thinking in our politics and in the family and community relationships on which our politics depend. We read about them in the news — and in the “fake news” generated at both ends of the political spectrum. We suffer the repercussions of denying reality in our economics. And our children and grandchildren will — quite literally — pay the price for those willful delusions.

Most of all, we see it in the glorification of sexual autonomy that has infiltrated every corner of our culture. Denying reality is at the core of issues like abortion, sexual libertinism, transgenderism, and same-sex behavior. Defending each of them is nothing but a persistent delusion.

Faith Communities Are Not Immune

The Church is most certainly not immune to the corrosive acid of bad thinking. The vacuous nonsense you can find in the Word-Faith Movement, Universalism, and so-called “Progressive” Christianity is proof enough of that. And every societal ill listed above has also found its way into the church.

But when you boil it all down, the problems we see in our culture are nothing new. In fact, they’re as old as mankind. The denial of truth, goodness, and beauty started soon after we came on the scene. The Fall of Man was simply the first instance where human beings made the free-will decision to exchange the truth of God for a lie. Since then, we’ve only pushed the limits of that futile exercise even further.

The good news is that the antidote to bad thinking has always been the same. Seek truth in all its forms. Then align your life with it.

The Church should never be a safe space for bad ideas. It must be a place where people are treated with gentleness and respect, but also a place where corrupted thinking goes to die.

Does The “Legacy of Slavery” Explain Black Women’s 72% Out-Of-Wedlock Birth Rate?

Legislating Morality, Culture & Politics, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Wintery Knight

James White asks: does the Bible apply to black women?

I don’t like Calvinist theologian James White at all, but at least he’s willing to defend the moral teachings of the Bible against the woke identity politics that is taking over Christian churches. A few months ago, he tweeted something very controversial (see above), and got into a lot of hot water with fake Christians. In this post, I’ll explain why he is right.

So, as you can see above, James is concerned that black women are having so many abortions, and he thinks that the solution to this is to encourage black women to take the Bible’s advice on sexual morality. Shocking, I know.

If you read the replies to his tweet on Twitter, you’ll see millions and millions of comments calling him a racist, and telling him that slavery is to blame for EVERYTHING that black women do wrong. Basically, James haters say that black women can do anything they want and should never be told that it’s wrong according to the Bible because their bad choices are all the fault of slavery. So, the Bible doesn’t even apply to them, or something.

Here is an example from a radical feminist progressive named Karen Swallow Prior:

Karen Swallow Prior says that unlike whites, blacks have no moral agency

According to the fake Christians, it’s not that black women make poor choices with sex, it’s that the ghosts of white slavers who raped their great-great-great grandmothers reach through time with magic and force them to have sex with hunky bad boys who won’t commit to them before sex. It’s not rap music calling black women hoes! It’s the ghosts of slavery past. And even if this ghost theory isn’t true, we shouldn’t tell black women not to sin, because…it would hurt their feelings. After all, the Bible isn’t a book that’s designed to set boundaries to prevent self-destructive behaviors. It encourages us to listen to our hearts, be reckless, and sin as much as we can.

So, when did black community problems with sex and abortion start? Did it start with slavery times? Actually, blacks were doing GREAT at marriage and sexual matters just 50 years ago.

This reply to James White explained:

Blacks married at rates comparable to whites before the welfare

That’s true. Black children weren’t fatherless, so they weren’t having early sex outside of marriage, and so they weren’t getting abortions.

Children born to blacks were just as likely to be born in a married home as children born to whites, up until the 1960s:

Black women were more likely to be married before single mother welfare programs

(Source)

The reason that the graph is going upward is because daughters raised in fatherless homes tend to engage in sexual activity at younger ages because they are seeking approval from a man which their (single) mother cannot give them. It’s a tragic downwards spiral, and it affects all races. The only way to stop it is to tell women to choose marriage-minded men (not hot bad boys) and marry before having sex like the Bible says. But woke fake Christians think the Bible is too mean, and better to allow sin by saying that sin is inevitable because slavery ghosts or something.

What’s neat is that black men who take Christianity seriously are totally on board with the facts:

Black man here. Can confirm that the Bible applies to black women.

On this blog, I don’t talk about my ethnicity myself, for confidentiality reasons, but I have said that my skin is darker than Barack Obama. I’m not white or Asian. And the reason that I don’t fall into this trap of causing babies to be born out of wedlock is because I think that when the Bible says that sex outside of marriage is a sin, that this is true. I don’t make excuses or shift blame. It’s incumbent on me to obey since I claim to be a follower of Jesus. I’m not interested in identity politics. I’m not interested in racial divisions. I’m not interested in blame-shifting. The rules are the rules. And my following of the rules caused me to not cause abortions, according to Christian specifications. Period.

When it comes to sex outside of marriage, the answer of every Bible-believing Christian is simple: I’m against it. That is the correct answer, and anything more or less than this answer is demonic. If you are a Christian, sex outside of marriage is always morally wrong. And if you try to justify it, or blame someone else, in order to excuse it, then you’re not a Christian at all. If you try to make excuses for why someone did it, you’re not a Christian. Whether you have had it and been forgiven, or never had it, the answer is always the same: it’s morally wrong. Don’t do it. Never do it.

What I am seeing from people who are critical of James White’s tweet is that they are basically trying to attack those who make moral judgments based on what the Bible says. They want to make room for sinners to sin. The root of abortion sin is sexual sin. Real Christians discourage sexual sin and therefore protect unborn children. Fake Christians want to be liked by appearing compassionate, so they make excuses for sexual sin. If you take the Bible seriously on morality, you won’t be liked. Those who try to excuse sin do so because their need to be liked is more important than their need to promote what the Bible teaches.

Some fake Christians will say, “oh, but I do think the Bible is right about sex and marriage, but we have to care about slavery reparations and global warming and refugees and illegal immigrants and transgender rights, too.” Baloney. An authentic Christian is concerned about the things that the Bible teaches are “major” things. Drunkenness is a major thing. Sexual immorality is a major thing. Divorce is a major thing. Homosexuality is a major thing. If you meet a Christian who treats those issues as minor issues, and instead majors in what the secular left tells them are major issues, then you’re talking to a fake Christian.

Christianity isn’t a brain-dead faith. You get your priorities from the Bible, and you argue those priorities using facts. The facts about marriage rates are clear, and they show that the problems in the black community aren’t caused by slavery. They’re caused by single mother welfare programs. Those welfare programs taught women of all races that they didn’t have to listen to their fathers when choosing men. Those welfare programs taught women that feelings were a better guide in relationships than the Bible. Those welfare programs taught women that their eyes were a better judge of character than the performance of traditional marriage roles. Those welfare programs taught women that recreational sex was a way to get a man to commit and stop being a bad boy. We need to go back to the root cause of the problem. The root cause of the problem was making excuses for disobedience to the Bible and transferring money from married homes to out-of-control women. Of all races.

La Verdad Proposicional—¿Quién La Necesita?

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By William Lane Craig

SUMMARY

On a deflationary view of truth, the truth predicate does not attribute a property of explanatory meaning to assertions. The truth predicate is simply a semantic ascent device, by means of which we talk about an assertion rather than assert that assertion. Such a device is useful for blind truth claims to statements that we cannot state explicitly. Such a view is compatible with truth as correspondence, and thus does not entail postmodern anti-realism, since the assertions directly asserted are descriptive of the world as it actually is. Getting rid of propositional truth has the advantage of ridding us of abstract truth bearers, which God has not created.

A central element of biblical theism is the conception of God as the only self-existent being, the Creator of all reality apart from Himself. God alone exists a se ; everything else exists ab alio . God alone exists necessarily and eternally; everything else has been created by God and is therefore contingently and temporally finite in its being.

The classical theist doctrine of divine aseity faces its most significant challenge in the form of Platonism, the view that there are uncreated, indeed uncreable, abstract objects, such as mathematical objects, properties, and propositions. In the absence of the formulation of a defensible form of absolute creationism, which has not so far occurred, the orthodox theist will want to rid his ontology of such abstract objects. [1]

One of the hardest to avoid is probably propositions. The orthodox theist is committed to objective truths about the world such as “God exists,” “The world was created by God,” “Salvation is available only through the atoning death of Christ,” and so on. Any postmodern or nihilistic denial of truth is theologically unacceptable. But if there are objective truths, then there must, it seems, be something that is true. But what could this be? The anti-Platonist can happily admit the existence of instances (tokens) of statements as truth-bearers, since these are concrete and clearly created objects. But what about a statement like “No human beings exist?” Wasn’t that true during the Jurassic Period? But how could it be true if there were no instances of statements at that time? And what about necessary truths like “No bachelor is married?” Isn’t that true in all possible worlds, even worlds in which only God exists? Tarski’s T-schema which establishes a material condition on any theory of truth

T. ” S ” is true if S ,

even if it has been established for a language L , it cannot reasonably be thought to take case statements of L as substitutes for S because the right-left implication of Tarski’s biconditionals seems clearly false: it is not the case, for example, that if the tyrannosaurus at time t and place l is eating a tracodont, then it is true that “The tyrannosaurus at t , l is eating a tracodont”, where it is a case (token) statement that is true. Considerations such as these might lead us to posit abstract propositions as our truth-bearers.

A neutralist view of quantification and reference can help us resist any ontological implications that such a move might seem to entail. [2] Neutralism challenges the traditional Quinean criterion of ontological commitment, according to which the values of the variables bound by the first-order existential quantifier or the referents of the singular terms in statements taken to be true must exist. Neutralism undermines the traditional indispensability argument for abstract objects by denying that quantification or reference to the abstract word in true statements commits its user to the reality of those objects.

Neutralism, therefore, eliminates much of the justification for Platonism with respect to abstract objects. For a neutral theory of reference allows us to assert truths about things that do not exist, that is, to assert claims about singular terms for which there are no corresponding objects, e.g.,

Next Wednesday is the day of the faculty meeting.
The whereabouts of the Prime Minister remain unknown.
My doubts about the plan remain unassailable.

So even if we take clauses like “that snow is white” to be singular terms referring to entities to which truth is attributed, as in “It is true that snow is white” or alternatively, “That snow is white is true,” [3] we have not committed ourselves to the reality of the propositions. The neutralist can help himself with equanimity to judgments like “it was true during the Jurassic Period that there were no human beings” and “that no bachelor is married is necessarily true.”

It has been thought that a neutral theory of reference entails a denial of a correspondence theory of truth. For example, the most prominent proponent of neutralism, Jody Azzouni, thinks that to claim that mathematical statements are true even though mathematical objects do not exist entails a rejection of a correspondence view of truth. On a nominalist view, he thinks that since there are no mathematical objects, there can be no correspondence between mathematical truths and the world. So the success of mathematical theories, as well as their truth, must be due to something other than their correspondence to the world. He holds that “there is no property—relational or otherwise—that can be described as what all true statements have in common (apart from, of course, that they are all ‘true’).” [4]

But is that, in fact, the case? It seems to me that taking truth as a property of corresponding to reality does not require the kind of word-world relation that Azzouni assumes. [5] Too many philosophers, I think, are still in the thrall of a kind of picture theory of language according to which singular terms in true statements must have corresponding objects in the world. [6] I have argued elsewhere that such a view is quite mistaken. [7] The unit of correspondence, so to speak, need not be thought of as individual words or other subsentential expressions. [8] Rather one can take correspondence as obtaining between a statement as a whole (or the proposition expressed by it) and the world. Such a holistic correspondence is given by Tarski’s biconditionals. A deflationary view of truth, as Azzouni asserts it, need not be understood as anything other than the notion of truth as correspondence of the kind ” that S ” is true (or corresponds to reality) if and only if S. That is all there is to truth as correspondence, and it is wrong to look for correlates in reality for all the singular terms presented in S. [9]

Correspondence, so understood, need not commit us to the view that truth is a substantial property possessed by truth-bearers, even given its universal applicability to true claims. The key to this claim is obviously the adjective “substantial.” It is easy to think of insubstantial properties that all true claims have in virtue of being true—for example, being believed by God . As an omniscient being, God has the property of knowing only and all truths, so that every true claim has the property known by God . But that should not be taken to be a substantial property of true claims in the sense that it does no explanatory work. Similarly, every true claim has the property of corresponding to reality in the sense mentioned above, but that hardly seems like a substantial property of such claims. It is trivial that it is true that S if and only if S. In light of a neutral theory of reference, it seems to me that Azzouni needs to complement his deflationary view of truth with an equally deflationary view of correspondence.

Similarly, in a neutral logic, the quantification of objects in a postulated domain is not ontologically committed. For example,

There have been 44 US presidents.

from this point of view, it does not commit us to a static theory of time according to which objects of the past exist in reality like present objects. Nor does the truth of

Some Greek gods were also worshipped by the Romans, although under different names.

does not commit us to the reality of the gods. Nor does the truth of

There’s a hole in your shirt.

It commits us ontologically to another object besides the shirt, namely, the hole in it.

From the fact that, for some proposition p , it is true that p , the neutralist is happy to infer that therefore “Some proposition is true” or “There is at least one true proposition,” because these existential generalizations carry no ontological commitment. Similarly, the neutralist can claim that “There are true propositions” and “Some propositions have never been expressed in language” without being committed to an ontology that includes propositions.

So neutrality about quantification and reference goes a long way toward removing any grounds for Platonism about propositions. Still, the neutralist who is an orthodox theorist, if pressed by an ontologist to say what he thinks about the existence of propositions in a fundamental sense [10] will confess that he thinks propositions do not exist, that there really are no propositions. Therefore, there really are no true propositions. How are we to understand such a denial in light of his previous claim that some propositions are true?

Here I think we can benefit from paying attention to Rudolf Carnap’s distinction between what he called “internal questions,” i.e. questions about the existence of certain entities questioned within a given linguistic framework, and “external questions,” i.e. questions about the existence of the system of entities posed from a point of view outside that framework. [11] Carnap does not explain what he means by a linguistic framework, but he characterizes it as “a certain form of language” or “way of speaking” that includes “rules for forming statements and for testing, accepting, or rejecting them.” [12] Accordingly, a linguistic framework can be taken to be a formalized language (or fragment thereof) with semantic rules interpreting its utterances and assigning truth conditions to its statements. [13] It is a way of speaking that assumes the meaningful use of certain singular terms governed by rules of reference.

Carnap illustrates his distinction by appealing to what he calls the “thing” frame or language. Once we have adopted the thing language of a spatiotemporally ordered system of observable things, we can ask internal questions like “How many things are on my desk?” or “Is the Moon a thing?” From such internal questions one must distinguish the external question of the reality of things. Someone who rejects the thing frame may choose to speak instead of sense data and other merely phenomenal entities. When we ask about the reality of things in a scientific sense, we are asking an internal question in the language of things, and such a question will be answered by empirical evidence. When we ask the external question of whether there really is a world of things, we are, Carnap insisted, asking a merely practical question of whether or not to use the forms of expression presented in the thing frame.

Carnap then applies his distinction to systems of a logical rather than empirical nature, that is, frameworks involving terminology for abstract objects such as numbers, propositions, and properties. Consider, for example, the natural number system. In this case, our language will include numerical variables along with their rules for usage. If we were to ask, “Is there a prime number greater than 100?” we should be asking an internal question, the answer to which is to be found not by empirical evidence but by logical analysis based on the rules for new expressions. Since a statement like “5 is a number” is necessarily true, and by existential generalization implies that “There is n such that n is a number,” the existence of numbers is logically necessary within the numerical framework. No one who asks the internal question “Are there numbers?” would seriously consider a negative answer. In contrast, ontologists who ask this question in an external sense are, in Carnap’s view, asking a meaningless question. No one, he claims, has ever succeeded in giving cognitive content to such an external question. The same would be said of questions about propositions and properties: in an external sense, such questions lack cognitive content. For Carnap, the question of realism versus nominalism is, as the Vienna Circle agreed, “a pseudo-question.” [14] Whether one adopts a given linguistic framework is simply a matter of convention.

Virtually no one today would accept the verificationist theory of meaning that motivated Carnap’s claim that external questions lack cognitive content. Conventionalism about abstract objects is not at all an option for the classical theist. For there is no possible world in which uncreated, abstract objects exist, because God exists in all possible worlds and is the Creator of any extra se reality in any world in which he exists. Therefore, it is a metaphysically necessary truth that there are no uncreated abstract objects. Therefore, there is a fact of the matter about whether abstract objects of the sort we are concerned with exist: they do not and cannot exist. Therefore, conventionalism about existence claims regarding abstract objects is necessarily false.

This negative verdict on a conventionalist solution does not imply, however, that Carnap’s analysis is without foundation. Despite the widespread rejection of conventionalism, Carnap’s distinction between external and internal questions continually reappears in contemporary discussions and strikes many philosophers as intuitive and useful. [15] Linnebo puts his finger on Carnap’s fundamental insight when he writes,

In fact, many nominalists endorse truth-value realism, at least about more basic branches of mathematics, such as arithmetic. Nominalists of this sort are committed to the slightly odd view that although the ordinary mathematical statement

There are prime numbers between 10 and 20.

It is true, in fact, that there are no mathematical objects, and in particular there are no numbers. But there is no contradiction here. We must distinguish between the language L _M in which mathematicians make their statements and the language _LP in which nominalists and other philosophers make theirs. The statement (1) is made in L _M . But the nominalist’s claim that (1) is true but that there are no abstract objects is made in LP _. The nominalist’s claim is therefore perfectly coherent provided that (1) is translated non-homophonically from L _M to _LP . And indeed, when the nominalist claims that the truth values of statements in L _M are fixed in a way that does not appeal to mathematical objects, it is precisely this kind of non-homophonic translation that she has in mind. [16]

Statements made in LM _correspond to Carnap’s internal questions; statements made in LP _correspond to external questions. External questions are now to be regarded as meaningful and to have objective answers, but those answers may be quite different from the answers to homophonic questions posed internally. Linnebo unfortunately limits the range of nominalist positions unnecessarily by stipulating that external questions sound different (are not homophonic) compared to the relevant internal questions. Linnebo has in mind Geoffrey Hellman’s translations of mathematical statements into counterfactual conditionals, [17] so that mathematical truths asserted in LP _will look or sound quite different from those truths as asserted in LM _. That leaves aside nominalisms such as fictionalism, [18] which asserts truth-value realism, but regards statements in LM _as fictionally true and homophonic statements in LP _as false. If the claim “There are propositions” is stated in L _M , then anti-Platonists could accept the claim as stated in L _M while denying, in _LP , that there are propositions.

Now, since both properties and propositions are abstract objects, the anti-realist will also claim, when not speaking within the linguistic framework that includes talk of properties and propositions, that, from an external point of view, not only are there no propositions, but there are no properties either. Therefore, there really is no such property as truth. This is not as alarming as it may sound. For there is still the truth predicate “is true,” and predications need not be understood as literal ascriptions of properties. The truth predicate is simply a semantic ascent device that allows us to talk about a proposition rather than asserting the proposition itself. For example, instead of saying that God is triune , we can semantically ascend and say that it is true that God is triune . Similarly, whenever the truth predicate is employed, we can semantically descend and simply assert the proposition that is said to be true. For example, instead of saying that it is necessarily true that God exists by himself , we can descend semantically and simply state that, necessarily, God exists by himself . Nothing is gained or lost through such semantic ascent and descent.

Viewing the truth predicate as a semantic ascent device is the key to Arvid Båve’s nominalist deflationary theory of truth, which is a purely semantic theory of truth. [19] The challenge he addresses in formulating a deflationary theory is how to generalize the particular fact that it is true that snow is white iff snow is white . Båve opts for a metalinguistic solution whose basic thesis is

D. Every statement of the form “It is true that p ” is S-equivalent to the corresponding statement ” p “

where any two expressions e and e¢ are S-equivalent iff for any statement context S (), S( e ) and S( e¢ ) are mutually inferable. [20] For example, “It is true that snow is white” entails and is implied by “Snow is white,” so these statements are S-equivalent. Båve’s theory does not require a truth property, but simply lays down a usage rule for the truth predicate. The sole purpose of the truth predicate—says Båve—is the expressive strengthening of language gained by semantic ascent.

Båve emphasizes that (D) satisfies the nominalist constraint

RN. There must be no quantification over, or reference to, propositions and no use of notions defined primarily for propositions.

Because (D) does not quantify or refer to propositions, but simply declares an equivalence between certain forms of statements. [21] On the other hand, (D) does not use, but simply mentions notions related to truth, so it does not conflict with (RN).

Båve’s postulation of the (RN) makes it evident that his theory presupposes something close to the traditional criterion of ontological commitment, which those sympathetic to neutralism, such as myself, reject. [22] A necessity neutralist has no qualms about quantifying or referring to propositions, unless some ontologist stipulates that an existentially charged or metaphysically strong sense is intended. On Båve’s view, despite the fact that propositions do not exist, propositional truth ascriptions can be true because (i) singular terms (such as “that”) need not refer in order for statements featuring them to be true (e.g., statements true about the average American), and (ii) quantification over propositions must be construed substitutively, not objectively. [23] A neutralist perspective renders both of these moves superfluous, since reference and quantification are ontologically neutral.

Why is a semantic ascent device useful or necessary in natural language? Why not simply embrace a Redundancy Theory of truth, which treats the truth predicate as superfluous? The answer is that the truth predicate serves the purpose of blind truth ascriptions. In many cases we find ourselves unable to affirm the proposition or propositions that are said to be true because we are unable to enumerate them due to their sheer number, as in “Everything I told you has come true,” or because we are ignorant of the relevant propositions, as in “Everything stated in the documents is true.” In theory, even blind truth ascriptions are dispensable if we replace them with infinite disjunctions or conjunctions such as “Whether b o q o r o …”. While such infinite disjunctions and conjunctions are unknowable to us, they are known to an omniscient deity, so God has no need of blind truth ascriptions. Therefore, it has no need for a semantic ascent and therefore does not need the truth predicate.

So, in answer to our question, “Propositional Truth—Who Needs It?”, the answer is: certainly not God! In fact, we don’t need propositional truth either. All we need to truly describe the world as it is is the truth predicate, and that won’t saddle us with Platonistic commitments.

Grades:

[1] For an articulation of absolute creationism, a.k.a. theistic activism, see the seminal work by Thomas V. Morris and Christopher Menzel, “Absolute Creation,” American Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1986): 353-362. Morris and Menzel did not clearly differentiate their absolute creationism from a form of non-Platonic realism that we can call divine conceptualism, which replaces concrete mental events in the mind of God with a realm of abstract objects. For a defense of divine conceptualism with respect to propositions and possible worlds, see Greg Welty, “Theistic Conceptual Realism,” in Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects, ed. Paul Gould, with articles, responses, and counter-responses by K. Yandell, R. Davis, P. Gould, G. Welty, Wm. L. Craig, S. Shalkowski, and G. Oppy (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Note well that even the divine conceptualist, although a realist, wants to free his ontology from abstract objects.

[2] For a reference-neutralist account of quantification, see Jody Azzouni, “On ‘On what there is’,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (1998): 1–18; idem, Deflating Existential Consequence: A Case for Nominalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For a reference-neutral account, see Arvid Båve, “A Deflationary Theory of Reference,” Synthèse 169 (2009): 51–73.

[3] The reification of a “that” clause seems to me an excellent example of an empty nominalization. See A. N. Prior, Objects of Thought , ed. P. T. Geach and A. J. P. Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 16-30, which rejects “the whole game of ‘nominalizing’ what are not really names of objects at all.” Prior points out that when we say that John fears that such-and-such, we do not mean that John fears a proposition. Rather, expressions like “____ fears that ____” have the function of forming statements out of other expressions, the first of which is a name and the second of which is a statement. They are, as he rightly says, predicates at one end and sentential connectives at the other. So an expression like “It is true that ____” is a sentential connective, not an ascription of property to an object. Mackie notes the similarity of Prior’s solution to substitution quantification; while in Tarski’s scheme “p” is true iff p , the first occurrence of p is in the language of objects and the second in the metalanguage, for Prior in “It is true that p iff p ” both occurrences are in the language of objects (J. L. Mackie, Truth, Probability, and Paradox , Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973], pp. 58–61; see William P. Alston, A Realist conception of Truth [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996], pp. 28–9). For Prior’s view of truth ascriptions to “what is said” see C. J. F. Williams, What is Truth ? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 32–60.

[4] Jody Azzouni, “Deflationist Truth,” in Handbook on Truth, ed. Michael Glanzberg, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming), sec. VI.

[5] For a particularly clear statement of this assumption, see Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth , 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 28:

Consider a true statement with a very simple structure: the predication ‘ a is F. ‘ This statement is true in virtue of the fact that there exists an object which ‘ a ‘ designates and which is among the objects to which ‘ F ‘ applies. So this statement is true because it has a predicative structure containing words which stand in certain referential relations to parts of reality and because of the way reality is. As long as reality is objective and mind-independent, then the statement is correspondence -true: its truth has all the features we have just abstracted from classical discussions.

Cf. Michael Devitt, Designation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 7; Michael Devitt and Kim Stanley, Language and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 17–18; Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy , s.v. “Reference,” by Michael Devitt. According to Devitt, a statement x has correspondence-truth iff statements of type x are true in virtue of (i) its structure; (ii) the referential relations between its parts and reality; and (iii) the objective, mind-independent nature of that reality. Surprisingly, Devitt seems to think that some statements, e.g. ethical statements, are true even if they do not have correspondence truth (idem, Realism and Truth, 2d ed. [Oxford: Blackwell, 1991], p. 29), which seems to trivialize the question of whether statements with singular terms that lack corresponding real-world objects have correspondence truth.

[6] Searle sees the picture theory as based on a misreading of the correspondence theory of truth, “a classic example of how the surface grammar of words and statements deceives us” (John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality [New York: Free Press, 1995], p. 214; see p. 205). John Heil observes that although most analytic philosophers would agree that the picture theory—whose central idea is that the character of reality can be “subtracted” from our (suitably regimented) linguistic representations of reality—is useless, it remains widely influential (John Heil, From an Ontological Point of View [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003]. pp. 5-6). Such thinkers have not digested J. L. Austin’s protest,

The words used to make a true statement need not in any way ‘reflect’, however indirectly, some feature of the situation or event; a statement need no more, in order to be true, reproduce the ‘multiplicity’, for example, or the ‘structure’ or ‘form’ of reality, than a word must be echoic or a writing pictographic. To suppose that it does is to fall back into the error of reading back into the world the features of language (J. L. Austin, ‘Truth’, in Philosophical Papers [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], p. ***).

See also Heather Dyke, Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy , Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2008, p.21).

[7] “A Nominalist Perspective on God and Abstract Objects,” Philosophia Christi 13 (2011): 305-18.

[8] Gottlob Frege held that only in the context of a statement does a word refer to something. But I want to suggest that not even in the context of a (true) statement must a word (or singular term) refer to something, i.e. have a real-world referent. This may not be so different from Frege’s view, if a weak Platonist like Michael Dummett is right. According to Dummett, Frege’s Context Principle required merely that only in the context of a statement do some words become singular terms, so that “the substance of the existential claim eventually seems to dissolve away altogether” (Michael Dummett, “Platonism,” in Truth and Other Enigmas [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978], p. 212; cf. idem, “Nominalism,” in Truth and Other Enigmas , pp. 38–41; idem, “Preface,” in Truth and Other Enigmas , pp. xlii–xliv). Dummett is right, I think, that the real problem is the truth of mathematical statements, not those about mathematical terms, not because truth conditions can be given to such statements without the use of such terms, but because the truth of a statement does not require that there be objects corresponding to all the singular terms of a statement. See below, Bob Hale, “Realism and its Oppositions,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Language , ed. Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy 10 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 271-308.

[9] Azzouni himself acknowledges that “some philosophers use instances of the T-schema to argue that the truth property is a correspondence property. However, there are many theories about what truth as correspondence amounts to” (Azzouni, “Deflationist Truth”). Some, he notes, interpret the right-hand side of biconditionals to describe a fact or a state of affairs. These theories are at least examples of less robust understandings of correspondence than the word-object interpretation. Later in the same piece, Azzouni muses, “if indeed all true statements share some property, such as a correspondence property… it returns to the kinds of considerations that an earlier tradition in philosophy supposed: the nature of the accounts (if any) of the terms of the statements described as true and false” (ibid., section V). Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons observe that no one denies the truism that a true proposition corresponds to the facts or tells it like it is; the issue is the kind of fact, a proposition or correspondence (Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons, “Introduction,” in Truth , ed. Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons, Oxford Readings in Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], pp. 1, 7). R. C. S. Walker points out that although a correspondence theory can construe truth as a relation between a proposition and something in the world, there is no reason to say anything more than that a proposition is true if things are as it claims to be, which does not commit one even to an ontology of facts. Such an “uninteresting” correspondence theory is quite consistent, he notes, with a redundancy theory of the truth predicate (Ralph C. S. Walker, “Theories of Truth,” in Companion to the Philosophy of Language , pp. 313, 321–3, 328).

[10] See Theodore Sider, Writing the Book of the World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011), pp. 170–2. Sider assumes that “fundamental ontological claims are quantifiable.” He acknowledges that this is stipulative. “Ontological realism should not claim that ordinary quantifiers carve at the joints, or that disputes over ordinary quantifiers are substantive. All that matters is that one can introduce a fundamental quantifier, which can then be used to pose substantive ontological questions.” When one does so, one no longer speaks ordinary English, but “a new language—‘Ontologese’—whose quantifiers are stipulated to carve at the joints.” It should be noted that for Sider to understand “there are” to have a fundamental sense does not entail that the objects said to exist are themselves considered fundamental in the sense of irreducibility. It is merely to identify existence claims with quantificational claims. “On my view, accepting an ontology of tables and chairs does not mean that tables and chairs are ‘fundamental entities’, but rather that there are, in the fundamental sense of ‘there are’, tables and chairs.” Such a view would allow non-fundamental entities to actually exist as well.

[11] Rudolf Carnap, “Meaning and Necessity:” A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 206.

[12] Ibid., pp. 208, 214.

[13] See Scott Soames, “Ontology, Analyticity, and Meaning: the Quine-Carnap Dispute,” in Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology , ed. David Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman (Oxford: Clarendon, 2009) , p. 428.

[14] Carnap, “Meaning and Necessity,” p. 215.

[15] See, for example, Thomas Hofweber, “Ontology and Objectivity,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1999), §§1.4-5; 2.3.1; Stephen Yablo, “Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 72 (1998): 229-61; Arvid Båve, Deflationism: A Use-Theoretic Analysis of the Truth-Predicate , Stockholm Studies in Philosophy 29 (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2006), pp. 153-4.

[16] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, sv “Platonism in the Philosophy of Mathematics” by Øystein Linnebo, (July 18, 2009), §1.4. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/ .

[17] See Geoffrey Hellman, Mathematics without Numbers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). For an entertaining account of Hellman’s progress toward his modal structuralism, see idem, “Infinite Possibilities and Possibility of Infinity,” in The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam , ed. R. Auxier (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, forthcoming), pp. 1–5.

[18] See, for example, Mark Balaguer, Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy s.v. “Fictionalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics”, by Mark Balaguer, April 22, 2008, http://plato.stanford.edu/entires/fictioanlism-mathematics/ ). Strictly speaking, Balaguer is not a fictionalist, because he thinks that the case for fictionalism and the case for Platonism have comparable weight.

[19] Defended in Båve, Deflationism . Båve has recently addressed a non-nominalist deflationary theory of truth that involves the traditional scheme

(Q) (Pp) (⟨p⟩ is true iff p),

where “P” is a propositional quantifier and instances of ⟨p⟩ are those-clauses that refer to propositions (Arvid Båve, “Formulating Deflationism”, Synthèse [forthcoming]). Since instances of (Q) have singular terms that refer to propositions, Båve takes the theory to commit us to the reality of propositions. But see note 22 below. Båve rejects his earlier metalinguistic theory because (D) does not allow us to infer instances of Tarski’s T-schema for truth (nor was it intended). Whether that is a serious deficiency depends on the desires of a theory of truth. The nominalist is content with a theory for the use of the truth predicate.

[20] Båve, Deflationism, p. 128.

[21] Ibid., pp. 150-2.

[22] It is ironic that Båve himself articulated a Deflationary Theory of Reference that undermines the logic of (NC). See Arvid Båve, “A Deflationary Theory of Reference,” Synthèse 169 (2009): 51–73.

[23] Båve, Deflationism, pp. 158-80.

William Lane Craig is an American Baptist Christian analytic philosopher and theologian. Craig’s philosophical work focuses on the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and philosophy of time. His theological interests lie in historical Jesus studies and philosophical theology.

Original Blog: http://bit.ly/39xufHz

Translated by Jairo Izquierdo

January 6, 2020/by Guest

The Problem of Evil

Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Al Serrato

One of the most common challenges to the Christian worldview is the problem of evil. We see evil all around us; we need to do little more than pick up a newspaper or watch the nightly news to have our sensibilities assaulted with countless acts of senseless violence and suffering. Many are man-made and some a product of an indifferent Mother Nature; whatever the source, at times, it feels as if the world is awash in wickedness.

How, the challenger entreats, can your good and loving God create such things? Why did he imbue man with such capacity for wickedness? The Christian responds that God did not create evil. No, they claim, evil is the product of man’s twisted free will. How well does this claim hold up?

The challenger seems to have logic on their side. Reduced to a simple syllogism, the challenge goes something like this: 1) God created all things; 2) evil is a thing; 3) therefore, God created evil. Though raised anew in every generation, the challenge itself is not new. In the 4^th century, St. Augustine tackled it, as did St. Thomas Aquinas centuries later. What we call evil, they explained, is in fact a deprivation of the good and is therefore not really a “thing” at all. Like the “hole” in a donut, it describes what is not there, what is missing. But this does not always satisfy the challenger. Often, they may counter: an all-powerful, all-loving God would not have allowed deprivations any more than he would have created evil.

This response seems to accept the difference between deprivation and a thing and confronts the believer with the same challenge: a good God would never have allowed such deprivations, such departures, from the good. But this challenge actually misses the point of the distinction that Augustine and Aquinas drew; through sloppy thinking, it continues to view evil as a thing, even though it adopts the language of deprivation.

Consider: what we see as evil, whether a thought or an act, can only be gauged if we first hold in our minds what the good would be. For example, using a knife to cut someone is evil when done by the assailant but not by the surgeon. Setting off an explosion is evil when used to harm others but not when used to carve out a tunnel. The knife and the cutting; the bomb and the blast – these may be “things’ in a manner of speaking, but any measure of evil in their use depends not on what they are, but on the extent to which their use deviated from God’s perfect will.

We know this intuitively. And because some of us are better at knowing God’s will than others, we may mistakenly call something evil when in truth it is not. For example, a law prohibiting abortions would be viewed as “evil” by those who believe that a woman has the right to choose; they would view the act of stopping a woman from aborting her unborn child to be a departure from the “good” of free choice. This, of course, would be wrong. It would not be evil at all, but instead good, because such a law would comport with, and not defy God’s will.

Those who reject Augustine’s approach will insist that these are examples of things – namely acts that are being done: stopping the woman by force of law, setting off the explosive, cutting into a person. They will insist that a good God would not have created them. This misunderstands the point: what constitutes evil is not the action or the thing, but the use to which it is put. God, as the infinite expression and definition of good, is by necessity the ultimate standard of what is good. Consequently, what we describe as evil is, in reality, a rough gauge of the extent to which the thought or act in question departs from God’s nature or will, or at least what we view that nature or will to be.

So, why does God allow evil? Because when he gave us free will, he meant for us to have, well, free will. The opposite of free will would be directed will. Whatever actions we took would be controlled, the way a robot’s or computer’s would be. In such a world, there would be no abortions, no stabbings, no hidden minefields. But such a world would not know freedom. God allows evil, even though he never created it, because if He does not allow us to depart from His perfect will, then free will would be an illusion.

The Elephant in the Room isn’t Trump

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A couple of listeners wrote emails to express their disagreement with some of what Frank said in the show “Why Did Evangelicals Vote for Trump?” In this show Frank responds by investigating Jesus’s rebuke of the Pharisees (the politicians of Israel) in Matthew 23:23 and then by asking three questions:

What is the purpose of government?
What is your primary reason for choosing a president?
Who, of the available candidates, will best fulfill that purpose?

As you’ll hear the elephant in the room isn’t Trump and his personality. The primary reason we choose a president has to do with a policy, not personality (although personality is still important). Frank responds to other objections from the emails, and also answers this question from a parent: How do I respond to a child who claims not to believe in God anymore?

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January 4, 2020/by Guest

What is the Bible all About?

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What is the Bible all about? Sometimes we get too close to it and can’t see the big picture. Join Frank as he takes you on a grand overview of the Bible using the acronym CRIME: Creation, Rebellion, Intervention, Mission, Eternity. This will help you see how the Bible fits together to tell one overarching story of the Savior, who comes to save the very creatures who rebelled against him. So, while the Bible starts with a CRIME, it ends with redemption in Eternity for those who want it. That’s why we all have an important mission right now.

To get visual and more in-depth teaching on this topic and many others, get the complete 17 part series on DVD called Jesus, You and the Essentials of Christianity (instructor and student workbooks are also available).

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January 2, 2020/by Guest

The Christmas Story – Beyond Apologetics

Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Mikel Del Rosario

Experiencing the Christmas Story

Every December, I see a couple of approaches to Jesus’ birth on Christian blogs: Articles that approach the Christmas story from the perspective of “How Jesus came to Earth,” looking at it in light of what the Gospels tell about who Jesus turns out to be. Or, you get an apologetics approach that engages naturalistic objections to miracles like the virgin birth.

If you’re like me, you’ve often talked about the possibility of miracles or the historicity of the Bible around Christmas time. But what we don’t often realize, is that we can get so distracted by historical or philosophical questions in our 21st-century context, that we can miss out on what the Gospel authors are saying through the infancy narratives.

Beyond Apologetics

This year, I want to do something different and go beyond apologetics. What’s the message of the infancy materials? In this post, I’ll share one key thing everyone should know about Christmas—something that’s often overlooked: The Christmas story communicates that God keeps his promises. [1]

First, I’ll highlight Elizabeth’s story in the Gospel, according to Luke. Then, I’ll focus in on Mary’s story in the same Gospel. Finally, I want to give you two video resources that will help you dive deeper and better experience the Christmas story afresh this year.

But try something with me before we move on: Set any skepticism about miracles (or even ideas about Jesus’ deity) to the side for a moment and imagine what it would be like for two unsuspecting people to see the Christmas story unfolding around them. What would they be thinking?

God Keeps His Promises

An old woman gets pregnant–even though she never had kids before (Luke 1:5-25)

Most first-century Jews believed God created everything and interacted with people. So, to them, an old woman getting pregnant or a virgin conceiving a child apart from modern medical techniques were just minor miracles compared to the creation of the universe out of nothing. In other words: If God’s real, miracles are possible.

And that’s how the Christmas story begins; with miracles. An angel tells a priest named Zachariah that his wife, Elizabeth, would have a kid–even though she was way too old to have kids naturally. I recently had a conversation with my mentor, Darrell Bock, who explained what you’re supposed to get from the story of Zachariah’s skepticism. He put it like this:

Basically the angel says, “Well, you’re going to be quiet until you see God pull off his word. It’s designed to be a lesson to say, “If God promised this if God says this is gonna happen, this is gonna happen…You’re gonna watch it happen. You’re not gonna be able to speak or hear. You can have a little time to reflect on the fact that when God says it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen.

Don’t miss Elizabeth’s faith in contrast to her husband. She was marginalized in society because she couldn’t have kids, but then she says with confidence: “This is what the Lord has done for me at the time when he has been gracious to me, to take away my disgrace among people” (Luke 1:25).

After the baby’s born, they name him “John” (that was culturally weird since no one else in the family was named John), and Zachariah can finally talk again. He sings a song about John the Baptist’s role, pointing people to Jesus—the central figure of God’s plan to redeem and restore his people (Luke 1:67–79). But a bigger miracle’s about to happen.

A young teen gets pregnant–even though she never had sex before (Luke 1:26-36)

Mary was probably way younger than most nativity scenes make her seem. First-century Jewish girls were usually betrothed between the ages of 12 and 14! Guys were betrothed between the ages of 18 and 25 but the girls got married pretty young.

And Jesus’ conception was pretty unusual, too. The angel tells Mary her baby will reign forever; he’ll be called the Son of God. Most Christians immediately go, “I get it. Jesus is divine.” But what about people who don’t know the end of the story? What did Mary think when she heard what her baby was gonna be called?

She probably thought, “My baby’s the promised Messiah who’ll deliver God’s people.” In the Jewish Scriptures, “Son of God” often referred to kings (2 Samuel 7:14). Mary’s going, “Somehow, my son’s gonna be a king.” Her big takeaway was, “God’s keeping his promise to Israel through me!” But she still had a lot to learn about who Jesus would turn out to be.

Luke 1 is kind of like a musical in some ways because then, Mary sings her own song—a song that’s got Old Testament language all over it (Luke 1:46–56). And the lyrics are all about how God’s gonna restore Israel and defeat the people who are oppressing them. Don’t miss Mary’s example of faith. She probably didn’t think her baby was “Little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes” (Not sure what Mary would think about that Christmas song)! Yet, she willingly took up the challenge of bearing a very unique child in very unusual circumstances.

So an angel predicted Elizabeth, an old woman who wasn’t able to have kids her whole life, would get pregnant–and she does. Then the angel told Mary, a young girl who’s never had sex, that she’ll conceive a child supernaturally–and she does. Strange stuff is afoot. Strange stuff pointing to a pretty unique baby–a pretty unique way for God to fulfill his promises to Israel and bless the world.

A key message of the Christmas story that’s often overlooked is God keeps his promises. This is one reason Christianity isn’t about blind faith. It’s reasonable to put your trust in someone who is trustworthy.

Here’s the Point

The Christmas story is meant to show God keeps his promises–even if he ends up doing it in unexpected and unusual ways. Weird stuff happening told ancient readers God was up to something special. Experiencing this unfolding drama in the Gospels is part of the wonder of the season. You look at Mary and Elizabeth, and you see their faith. They trust God and recognize his grace to them. May we do the same. Merry Christmas!

[1] THESE INSIGHTS CAME FROM A SERIES OF CONVERSATIONS WITH MY MENTOR, DARRELL BOCK, AND A COUPLE OF OTHER NEW TESTAMENT SCHOLARS AT DALLAS THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY. SEE THE VIDEOS BELOW.

[hr]

Videos on Experiencing the Christmas Story

Here are two video resources that can help you go deeper and experience the Christmas story afresh. The first is a chapel discussion I facilitated, and the second is a podcast I hosted. A transcript is available for the podcast here. Both videos are brought to you by Dallas Theological Seminary.

Experiencing the Christmas Story – Chapel

Top Ten Ways to Advance the Gospel

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Are you dreading those awkward family dinners this Christmas season? Unsure about how to tactfully bring up the real reason for Christmas? Join Frank as he reveals the Top Ten Ways to Advance the Gospel, not only at Holiday dinners but at any event. These are some very practical ideas and can be used at any time during the year.

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December 24, 2019/by Guest

Tomar el tiempo en serio para diferenciar el pasado y el futuro: una respuesta a Wes Morriston

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