Out of nothing, nothing comes, once again

Here's another topic I've talked about a few times now. I'm bringing it up again because I had a conversation about it with somebody recently, and it got me to thinking. The conversation was about the intuition that something can't come out of nothing without a cause. The person I talked to had told me once before that he did not have this intuition. In the conversation I had with him recently, he said one resaon he lacked this intuition is because he cannot conceive of "nothingness."

That has had me thinking about what it means to conceive of nothingness. When I try to conceive of things, I usually try to form some kind of picture in my head about them. Or, if it's an abstract thing, I imagine charts, graphs, and illustrations. In the case of "nothingness," it is hard for me to conceive of it in this way. If I think of a totally empty box, for example, I'm still imaginging the box. And if the box has any dimensions, then the "nothingness" I'm trying to imagine inside the box isn't really nothing. It has spacial dimensions and a size. So I'm not really conceiving of nothingness.

But suppose I try to imagine a possible world in which nothing at all exists, including any boxes. Well, in that case, I'm still thinking about a world. Even if it's totally black because there isn't anything there, it's hard for me to really picture it. If I try to picture it as an endless void, I'm still picturing it as three dimensional space. But if I try to elminate the space by picturing it as a dimensionless point, well, that is hard to imagine without also imagining the point existing in a space. After all, if I picture a point, I can picture that point growing into something three dimensional. Just calling it "a world" seems to suggest existence of some sort. Maybe that means there is no possible world in which nothing exists. If that were the case, it would be hard to deny the existence of some sort of necessary being.

Suppose we live in a closed universe and that the universe has a finite size. If it has a finite size, there must be an edge somewhere. But what would happen if you were at the edge and looked out? There would literally be nothing outside to look at. That is hard to conceive. From what I understand, though, if we lived in a closed universe, there wouldn't actually be an edge that one could travel to. It's just that if you went in a straight line in any direction, you'd eventually end up at the same spot or close to it. This, too, is hard for me to conceive, yet supposedly it's how a closed finite universe would be. So whether there is an outter edge to space or not, I'd have a conceptual difficulty either way. Even if space is infinite, that is hard for me to conceive.

I can sympathize with not being able to conceive of nothingness in the sense of picturing it. But this doesn't hinder my intution that it's impossible for something to come into being out of nothing. This intuition doesn't depend on my ability to form a picture of nothingness in my head. It just depends on me having an understanding of the meaning of nothingness and what it would mean for something to come into being out of nothing. In my recent conversation, I asked my friend to imagine a bird popping into existence right now without being made of previously existing material. In this scenario, you don't have to picture a "void" or a "nothing" preceding the existence of the bird. The whole universe exists already. But the bird has no material cause, so the bird came out of nothing. Or, to put it another way, the bird came into being, but it didn't come into being out of anything that already existed. To say it came out of nothing doesn't mean there was a void that preceded the bird. It just means the bird isn't composed of pre-existing material. When the bird came into being, all the material the bird is made out of came into being with it. This sense of something coming into being from nothing isn't hard for me to picture in my head, but I don't think it's possible for it to actually happen.

This impossibility is even more acute if I imagine the bird having a beginning to its existence without a whole universe in which it emerges. This is why I do not think it's impossible for something to be caused to come into being out of nothing. If I imagine the bird coming into being out of nothing within a universe that already exists, I can at least imagine there's something in the physical universe that explains it. While there's nothing in the universe from which the bird was made, the universe may nevertheless have somehow provided the necessary and sufficient conditions to bring about the existence of the bird. (Some people don't think it's even possible for something to be caused to come into being out of nothing.) If there were a God, but nothing else, then God could be the explanation of how the universe came into being out of nothing. But if there was nothing at all, neither a God nor a universe, then it would be utterly impossible for anything at all to come into being. I am certain of that. (This was a hard paragraph for me to write, and I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself clearly.)

My intuition is based more on what "out of nothing" means than it is on a mental picture of "nothing." And it isn't hard for me to conceive of nothingness in this sense. What do rocks dream about? Nothing. They don't dream at all. "Nothing" just means "not anything," so to say something came out of nothing means that it came into being, but it didn't come into being from something. It came out of nowhere. It didn't involve a rearrangement of previously existing material. It just popped into being from nothing or not from anything. It seems intuitively obvious to me that it's impossible for something to just spontaneously come into being without coming into being from something else.

As I've explained in several other posts (like this one), there are different kinds of things we know by intuition.

• Knowledge of our own subjective experience (e.g. what we are thinking, feeling, perceiving, etc.).
• Knowledge of necessary truths (e.g. math, logic, geometry, etc.).
• Knowledge of synthetic a priori truths (e.g. the external world, the past, induction, other minds, an enduring self, morality, etc.).

It is hard for me to decide whether my intuition about ex nihilo, nihil fit goes in the second category or the third category. On the one hand, I have a rational intuition about what appears to be an impossibility. That would suggest that it's a necessary truth and therfore belongs in the second category. But on the other hand, it isn't quite as obvious that it's a logical impossibility. I can form a coherent picture in my head of a bird popping into being without being made of previously existing material, but I can't form a coherent picture of a square circle or a scenario in which Jim is taller than Dan, Dan is taller than Bob, and Bob is taller than Jim. This suggests that ex nihilo, nihil fit belongs in the third category.

To belong to the second or third category, that doesn't tell you how certain one is of it. Of course we can be certain of some necessary truths, but there are other necessary truths we might be in doubt about. The reason is because we can rationally grasp the necessity of some truths more clearly than we can others. Concerning the second category, for example, it's more clear to me that 2+2=4 than it is that 128+603=731 even though both are equally necessary. And concerning the third category, it's more clear to me that there's an external world than it is that there are other minds (though admittedly the difference is miniscule, and I may change my mind tomorrow). If ex nihilo, nihil fit belongs in the third category, then it belongs at the very top because it is the most certain item of knowledge I would have in the third category. Since no other item of knowledge in the third category is certain, this makes me doubt it belongs in the third category at all. With every other item in the third category, it's at least possible that each of them is false, but it does not seem to me that it's possible for something to come into being out of nothing without a cause.

Since ex nihilo, nihil fit strikes me as being necessary, but not logically necessary, I tend to say it is metaphysically necessary. Maybe I just need to come up with a fourth category for metaphysically necessary truths (or impossibilities). To be honest, though, I'm not sure I can give you a good definition of what it means to be metaphysically necessary (or impossible). I only say that because while ex nihilo, nihil fit appears necessary, it doesn't appear logically necessary, so it must be necessary in some other sense. It isn't physically necessary either since that would mean it was a mere property of physical things, and since physical things are contingent, so are the laws that describe them. Metaphysical necessity would apply whether there was a physical world or not. Maybe that is how I should define metaphysical necessity. It's a necessity that applies, not just to how physical things happen to be but to how they must be. It's a necessity that holds even in the absense of anything physical.

What I wish I had asked during my conversation is if his inability to conceive of nothingness meant that he had no opinion one way or the other about whether it was possible for something to come into being out of nothing. At the time, I took him to just be saying that since he had no intuition telling him it was not possible, that meant he must have thought it was possible. But to allow for the possibility for something to come into existence out of nothing, wouldn't he have to conceive of nothingness just as much as he would if he thought it was impossible? It would seem that if his lack of intuition was due to his inability to conceive of nothingness that he would have to be completely agnostic about whether it was possible for something to come out of nothing or not. Maybe if he reads this he can say something about it in the comment section. I didn't want to bring his name up since it was a private conversation, but he's free to chime in if he wants to.

Two other questions I might ask: Can you conceive of a universe of finite size in which it had an edge that one could reach? Or, can you conceive of a universe that has a finite duration with a beginning and/or and end? If so, does this help you conceive of "nothing," since there would be nothing beyond the universe, either in space or in time? If it's just as difficult to conceive, can you at least see that it's nevetheless the case that there can't be anything beyond the universe in space or time if the universe is finite in size or duration? If I asked you what was before the beginning of the universe or what was beyond the edge of the universe, wouldn't you say, "Nothing"? And wouldn't it be clear to you what you meant by that?

For more reading on this topic, check out this post: Battle of intuitions: ex nihilo nihil fit

Knowledge by Intuition Again

I know I've talked about this a lot. The thing is, whenever I explain something, there's always this nagging feeling in the back of my head that I'm not being perfect clear. So when I explain something that I've explained before, I always try to do it a little differently. My hope is that the more ways I explains something, the more likely it is that I'll be understood. So I tend to say the same things over and over again in different ways. This is just one iteration of my defense of knowledge by intuition. I think it's an important topic in epistemology when it comes to debates about religion because arguments for God and for morality often rely on first principles that can't be proved but can only be known by intuition, which a lot of people don't trust. So, here ye go.

I originally wrote this in response to somebody who said he shared my intuition that it was impossible for something to spontaneously come into existence uncaused out of nothing, but he did not trust the intuition since he doubted intuition as a reliable source of justified belief.

If I can persuade you that intuitive obviousness is a good reason to believe something, will you concede that it's impossible for something to come into existence uncaused out of nothing?

First question would be, if something seems intuitively obvious to you, does that always mean that it is true in reality?

Not necessary. There are three different kinds of things we know by intuition. But first let me explain what is meant by "intuition" because there is a colloquial use of the word, and there is a philosophical use of the word. The colloquial use of the word indicates a hunch, feeling, suspicion, etc. that something is true. That is not what I mean by intuition. In the philosophical sense, intuition is immediate knowledge upon reflection. That means there are some things you can know immediately just by thinking about them. By "immediate," I mean the knowledge isn't arrived at through induction, deduction, or any kind of inference.

Intuitive knowledge sits at the foundation of everything we know. For anything you know, one can ask, "How do you know that?" For most of the things you know, you should be able to give a reason. You believe A because of B. But then somebody can ask, "How do you know B?" And for any reason you give, somebody can ask, "How do you know that?"

One of two things will happen if you continue this conversation. Either you will get yourself into an infinite regress, or else you will arrive at some foundational item of knowledge that is not based on some prior reason or inference. So how do you know those things at the foundation if you don't know them on the basis of inference? The answer is that you know them by intuition. Without intuition, it would be impossible to know anything at all.

As an example, how might one know that they had just dropped a brick on their foot? There are a couple of things that come to mind. One is that they saw the event happen. Another is that they remember having seen the event happen. Another is that they can feel the pain from the brick hitting their foot. But these raise other questions. How do they know they saw it, remember seeing it, and felt it? Well, they don't know this on the basis of anything else. You have direct and immediate access to the content of your own mental states. All you have to do is attend to your subjective awareness. You know you feel pain simply because you feel it. There's no deeper reason. This is knowledge by intuition.

As I said, there are three categories of things we know by intuition. The first category is what I just explained--knowledge of our first person subjective awareness. Right now, I'm looking at what I take to be a computer screen. I believe that computer screen is there because I can see it, and I have no reason to think it's not there. But I could be mistaken. It's possible I'm dreaming, hallucinating, or that I'm plugged into the matrix, or I'm a brain in a vat. But what I cannot be mistaken about is that I perceive what I take to be a computer. So our knowledge of our own mental states is incorrigible. You can know what you are thinking with certainty.

The second category is knowledge of necessary truths. This includes the basic laws of logic, the axioms of geometry, and basic math. If you knew that Jim was taller than Bob, and Bob was taller than Dan, you'd be able to figure out that Jim is taller than Dan. And you'd be able to figure this out just by thinking about it. You can see the logical necessity of the rule of inference that comes into play. And you can tell, just by thinking about it that if two straight lines intersect, their opposite angles will be equal. You don't have to measure the angles to figure this out. You can know that this is a universal necessary truth that's true in all possible worlds. This is how you know that 2 + 2 = 4. You don't have to test that by going out in the world, seeing if it works with apples, then seeing if it works with planets, then seeing if it works with bottles of beer on the wall. You can tell, just by thinking about it and "seeing" with your rational mind that it is a necessary truth that will hold anywhere in the universe.

The third category is knowledge of synthetic a priori truths. These includes your knowledge that your senses are giving you true information about a real external world, your knowledge that your memories are giving you true information about a past that actually happened, your knowledge that the future will resemble the past (i.e. the uniformity of nature), which is how you are able to learn anything from experience, engage in science, and extrapolate from the observed to the unobserved. This third category also includes your knowledge of morality, causation, Ockahm's razor, other minds, that "ought" implies "can," that time is real, that you are an enduring self, that your cognitive faculties are reliable, and object permanence.

What all three categories have in common is that they all sit at the foundation of our knowledge, that they can be known a priori, and they do not require proof or demonstration. The first category differs from the second and third in the fact that it is knowledge of the internal world (your subjective mind), and the others are knowledge of reality outside the mind. The second differs from the first and third in the fact that these items of knowledge express necessary truths, but the items in the first and third categories are contingent truths. The third category differs from the first and the second in the fact that one can have absolute certainty about the first and second, but not the third. Each item in the third category is possibly false, and we do sometimes make mistakes concerning them.

For example, it is possible that there is no external world, and sometimes our senses do deceive us. It's possible that we were created five minutes ago complete with memories of a past that never actually happened, and sometimes our memories do deceive us. It's possible that the future will not resemble the past, and the laws of nature will be different tomorrow, and we do sometimes make hasty generalizations.

But just because something is possible doesn't mean it's reasonable to believe. We are perfectly rational in believing in the past, the external world, and the uniformity of nature in spite of the fact that we make these mistakes, and in spite of the possibility that we are mistaken. The general rule of thumb that everybody uses, whether they realize it or not, is that it's always more reasonable to affirm the obvious than to deny the obvious, and we should believe that things are just as they appear to be unless we have good reason to think they're not. That is what justifies our belief in the past, the external world, and the uniformity of nature.

Intuitive knowledge is knowledge that's just built into us. Nobody has to be taught that their senses are giving them true information about the world. Nobody has to be taught that if somebody contradicts themselves, they're lying. Nobody has to be taught that their feeling of pain actually indicates that they are in pain. We can, of course, hone these items of knowledge. We can be mindful of math, logic, and geometry so that we see them more clearly and able to use them. But the basic knowledge is just built in. So intuition is immediate knowledge upon reflection. It's what everything we know is based on.

So to answer your question, if something is intuitively obvious, then whether that indicates that it's always true in reality or not depends on which of the three categories you're talking about. If you're talking about the first two categories, then yes, they will always necessarily be true. If you're talking about the third category, then it's at least possible that they are not true.

"Sky daddy," "magic sky fairy," and other pejoratives

If you are not a Christian, but you want to engage Christians in serious discussion or debate, don't refer to the Christian God as a "sky daddy." That is clearly meant to be an insult, and it's childish to behave that way. What you are communicating to me when you talk that way is that you have no interest in engaging with me in a serious discussion. You're just trolling, and you're being immature. If you want to be seen as an ill-mannered troll and not taken seriously, though, then have at it.

If you are a Christian, and somebody you are in conversation with behaves this way, I suggest ending the conversation. You are wasting your time. Continuing a conversation with somebody who behaves that way is precisely what Jesus meant about thowing your pearls before swine. Don't do it. Your time is better spent talking to somebody willing and able to have a civil adult conversation.

Harry Potter and the gospels

There's this argument I've seen come up whenever anybody attempts to use the gospels as a source of historical information about Jesus. The argument is that if we applied the same methods to Harry Potter as we do to the gospels to extract historical information, we could prove that people really do use magic wands and fly on magic brooms, which is absurd.

This argument is fallacious for at least a couple of reasons. Let me mention the minor reason first before going on to the major reason. The minor reason is because an historian doesn't naively cite the gospels as proof of what Jesus said or did. Instead, they apply "criteria of authenticity" or "historical methods" to extract accurate information. One of those criteria is multiple independent attestation where the same piece of information is reported by more than one author writing independently of each other. That obviously couldn't apply to Harry Potter since Harry Potter only has one author.

I vaguely remember being in a conversation in which somebody mockingly applied one of these historical criteria to Harry Potter in order to prove something absurd. I wish I could remember the specifics or find that conversation so I could use it as an illustration here, but I've been digging around for a while now, and I can't find it. But let's grant, for the sake of argument, that there is some criteria that, if applied to Harry Potter, would lead us to believe some absurdity about what happened in the real world.

The major problem with that and with any other argument from analogy with Harry Potter is that there is a confusion of genres. Harry Potter is a known work of fiction. That was J.K. Rowling's intention when writing the story.¹ The book is marketed as fiction, and if you found it in a book store or library, it would be in the fiction section. To compare Harry Potter to the gospels is to beg the question against the historicity of the gospels and merely presume that it belongs to the genre of fiction, which doesn't help in an argument about whether the gospels record history or not.

It is a mistake to make this comparison because the gospels definitely do not belong to the genre of fiction. That was not the intention of the authors. There has been some debate among scholars about what the genre of the gospels is, though. Some have said the gospels are a unique genre of their own. Some have said they are "faith documents" or "religious propoganda." Some have said they are midrash or pesher.² Marcus Borg once said the gospels are "history mythologized" or something like that. But since the publication of Richard Burridge's book, What Are the Gospels? in 1992, most scholars have come around to the belief that the gospels are "ancient biography" or "Greco-Roman biography." In the comment section of one of his blog posts Bart Ehrman said,

Yes, these are certainly fiction [Aesop’s Fables or Plato’s Allegory of the Cave]. I’m not saying that there was no fiction in the ancient world! The Greek novels are among my favorite pieces of ancient literature. And of course the plays of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, and — well lots and lots. But these are *genres* that are meant to be fiction: writers wrote them that way and readers (always) read them that way. And so the question is entirely one of genre. There is wide agreement today that the Gospels are, in terms of genre, ancient biographies. Biographies were not fictional pieces but are meant to be historical accounts. For full discussion of the Gospels as biographies, the best treatment is still Richard Burridge, What Are The Gospels: Comparison with Greco-Roman Biography.

I was recently digging around trying to find out what various scholars thought about the genre of the gospels, and a number of them cited Burridge's book as having been instrumental in bringing about wide agreement among scholars that the gospels are ancient biographies. I don't remember everybody who said that, but I do remember N.T. Wright being one of them, though I can't remember where I read it. Mike Licona recently wrote a book called Why Are There Differences In the Gospels? in which he argued that the gospels are ancient biographies by comparing them to the biographies written by Plutarch. There's been a big debate between Licona and Lydia McGrew about that, but Licona's view is representative of the majority of scholars from what I've been able to ascertain.

To me, there are some impressive similarities between the gospels and other ancient biographies. I haven't read Burridge's book yet, but I have read some other stuff, including Licona's book. But besides those comparisons, there is some internal evident suggesting that the genre of the gospels, whatever they may be, are certainly not fiction. For example, Luke writes in his prologue:

“Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus; so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught” (Luke 1:1-4).

Luke’s intention is clearly to report what actually happened. He claimed to be writing about “things accomplished among us,” saying they were passed down from eyewitnesses to those events.

The author of Acts is the same person as the author of Luke. In Acts, we get a history of the church from just after the resurrection to the early 60’s when Paul is under house arrest in Rome. Much of the material in Acts overlaps with what Paul wrote in his letters about his own travels and events in his life, so we know that at least some of it is historical. Since there is a seamless transition from the ministry of Jesus in Luke to the events in the life of Paul and the early church in Acts, it follows that Luke’s intention in writing his gospel was to record history.

Since Mark and Matthew fall under the same genre as Luke and contain much of the same material, it stands to reason that they intended to record history as well. However, they did not appear to give anything more than a very rough chronological account. The ministry comes before the crucifixion, and the crucifixion comes before the resurrection, but as far as events within the ministry, the order of the events differs from gospel to gospel.

In the case of John, we get a glimpse of the author’s purpose near the end. After narrating some of the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection, he says, “Many other signs therefore Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:30-31). At the end of the gospel, Jesus predicted the death of Peter, and Peter asked about the fate of another disciple who the author calls “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Then it says, “This is the disciple who bears witness of these things, and wrote these things; and we know that his witness is true. And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books which were written” (John 21:24-25). So the material in John is attributed to a close disciple of Jesus’ who the author of John took to reliably convey truths about Jesus.

Whether the gospels authors actually succeeded in writing accurate history is a different discussion. I only meant to say that their intention was to record history. The standards of historical precision are different in ancient biographies than they are in modern biographies, so as historians, one still must use historical methods to sift the gospels for information that is accurate by modern standards. But however accurate or inaccurate the gospels are, they are certainly not works of fiction like Harry Potter, so people should stop using Harry Potter as an analogy to undermine historical claims derived from the gospels. It's a bad argument because it's question-begging and it confuses genres.

NOTES
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1. Actually, I used to day dream that what was really going on was that Harry Potter was a true story except that some of the names were changed. J.K. Rowling was actually the same person as Hermione Granger. After all, she admitted in an interview one time that she based Hermione's character on herself. Rowling (aka Granger) didn't like this huge division between muggle society and wizard society and all the secrecy that was involved. She couldn't come right out and expose it all, so she wrote a "fictional" story about it in hopes of maybe easing people into it. Or maybe it was just to get it off her chest. I brought this theory up to somebody on a discussion forum somewhere, and they said they had a similar theory except that J.K. Rowling was the same person as Rita Skeeter.

2. Actually, I don't know if there are a whole lot of scholars who have said the gospels are midrash or pesher. Barbara Thiering thought the gospels were pesher and John Shelby Spong thought the gospels were midrash, but neither of them are New Testament scholars.

The Latter Day Saint view of grace

A long long time ago, I wrote a series on The Book of Mormon. In Part 17 I address a few things the Book of Mormon had to say on the subject of grace. In the comment section I got into a conversation with a person named Carl who was a Mormon. I tried to get Carl to explain how Mormons defined grace since my criticism of the BOM was based on my own understanding of grace. Eventually, he directed me to the Bible dictionary on the LDS web page where there was an entry on grace. I read it, and then wrote a comment on it. I thought the comment would make a good stand alone blog post, so here's what I said.

Thank you for the link to the Mormon definition of “grace.” I had already gone to yahoo answers before you posted and asked the Mormons there how they defined “grace,” and several of them referred me to that same entry. I’ve read the entry several times now and thought about it to make sure I understand what it’s saying. In some ways, it is similar to my view of grace, but there is some difference. I’ll quote it and then make my own comments.

The main idea of the word is divine means of help or strength, given through the bounteous mercy and love of Jesus Christ.

I do agree that it is because of the love and mercy of Jesus Christ that he bestows his grace on us. But there is an ambiguity in the first part. I could agree that grace helps us and gives us strength, but is there something we have to do before God will help us and strengthen us, or is grace something God gives us freely through no merit of our own? According to Paul, grace is, by definition, something that cannot be earned or merited in any way. He said, “But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace.” Grace is a gift, and a gift is, by definition, something that cannot be earned.

It is through the grace of the Lord Jesus, made possible by his atoning sacrifice, that mankind will be raised in immortality, every person receiving his body from the grave in a condition of everlasting life.

I do agree that it is through the grace of Jesus, made possible by the atonement, that people will be raised to eternal life. But not all who are raised are raised to “eternal life.” As Daniel 12:2 says, “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt.” “Eternal life,” in this context, does not appear to mean simply living forever since those who will be raised to everlasting contempt will also live forever. It seems, rather, to signify a certain quality of life. And that also seems to be the sense in which the new testament uses the phrase, “eternal life” (cf. Matthew 25:46, John 3:36, Acts 13:48). Being raised to shame and everlasting contempt hardly seems an act of grace in the sense of divine help or mercy.

It is likewise through the grace of the Lord that individuals, through faith in the atonement of Jesus Christ and repentance of their sins, receive strength and assistance to do good works that they otherwise would not be able to maintain if left to their own means.

I do agree that it is through grace that we receive strength and assistance to do good works that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. I do not agree that repentance is a requirement to get such grace. On the contrary, I think the strength and assistance necessary for us to repent also requires grace. It is through grace that we are enabled to repent. Repentance is something that God grants to people (Acts 5:31, Acts 11:18, 2 Timothy 2:25). According to Jesus, we would not even be able to come to him for salvation without the Father enabling us (John 6:44, 65). According to Paul, we were dead in our sins (Ephesians 2:1), but “God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)” (Ephesians 2:4-5). Since repentance requires the grace of God, it cannot be a condition that must be met before God bestows that grace. If it were, we’d all be doomed.

This grace is an enabling power that allows men and women to lay hold on eternal life and exaltation after they have expended their own best efforts.

I agree that it is because of grace that we are able to lay hold on eternal life. But I’m not sure what it means by “enabling power.” If it means we are enabled to live a life that is righteous enough to merit eternal life, of course I couldn’t agree with that. Paul explicitly says that works cannot merit eternal life. You can’t undo a wrong by doing a right. James said, “Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all” (James 2:10). A law breaker is a law breaker no matter how good they otherwise are, and they deserve to be punished for that violation. So there’s no way that anybody can merit eternal life by doing good works. I’m sure even a Mormon would agree that nobody lives completely without sin even when God enables us to do good works.

I’m not sure what is meant by “after they have expended their own best efforts.” If that means the same thing as “because they have expended their own best efforts,” then again, this would contradict Paul’s understanding of grace in Romans 11:6. According to Paul, none of our efforts can avail us of the grace of God. It is a gift, and a gift, by definition, cannot be earned.

Divine grace is needed by every soul in consequence of the fall of Adam and also because of man’s weaknesses and shortcomings.

I totally agree.

However, grace cannot suffice without total effort on the part of the recipient. Hence the explanation, “It is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do” (2 Ne. 25: 23).

Nobody does all they can do. Nobody exerts “total effort.” If this point of view is true, then grace is insufficient to save anybody. Carl, I want you to be honest with yourself about this. Do you exert total effort to do good at all times? Can you honestly say that you have done all that you can do? If you haven’t, then the Mormon gospel cannot save you.

But I would like to recommend to you the wonderful and liberating gospel of Jesus Christ that Paul taught. It begins with the unfortunate observation that “there is none righteous, not even one; there is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God; all have turned aside, together they have become useless; there is none who does good, there is not even one” (Romans 3:10-12). We are all dead in sins. But, by the grace of God that he bestows on those he loves, we are rescued from our deadness in sin. We are freed from our slavery to sin. We are enabled to come to Christ for salvation. God saves us completely. In doing so, he glorifies himself. The true gospel leaves no room for boasting on our part.

The Mormon gospel leaves plenty of room for boasting. A Mormon can boast that he has, by his own strength, repented of his sins in order to obtain God’s grace. A Mormon that actually has obtained God’s grace (if it’s even possible to do so under the Mormon system), can boast that he exerted all his effort and tried his hardest.

It is truly the grace of Jesus Christ that makes salvation possible.

Again, I totally agree.

This principle is expressed in Jesus’ parable of the vine and the branches (John 15: 1-11). See also John 1: 12-17; Eph. 2: 8-9; Philip. 4: 13; D&C 93: 11-14.

John 15:1-11 says that apart from Jesus, we can do nothing. I would submit that includes repenting, which Mormonism says is necessary to obtain God’s grace.

Ephesians 2:8-9 says that salvation by grace through faith is not a result of works, which explicitly negates the Mormon view that we obtain grace through our best efforts.

I’m not sure how Philippians 4:13 applies. This passage is about how God appoints offices in the church for the equipping of the saints (see the previous verse).

Objective morality and burden of proof

Aristotle once said that "not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education." Objective morality strikes me as being one of those things. We shouldn't need to demonstrate that there are objective morals before we're justified in believing them.

I mean think about it. It can't be the case that everything we believe has to be demonstrated because that would lead to an infinite regress. If I say I know P because of Q, then I'd have to say I know Q because of R, and R because of S, ad infinitum.

The only way to know anything at all is if there are some things we know without having to demonstrate them.

And there are plenty of things we seem to know, though it's impossible to demonstrate them. You can't demonstrate that you and the rest of the world didn't just pop into existence five seconds ago complete with memories of a past that never actually happened. You can't demonstrate that the future will resemble the past or that any of the laws and regularities of nature will continue to hold tomorrow. You can't demonstrate that there's a real tangible world that exists independently of your perceptions. You can't demonstrate that there are conscious minds besides your own.

But your inability to demonstrate these things is no reason to doubt them. And I mean seriously doubt them. Sure, you can rationally entertain the possiblity that there's no external world, no other minds, no regularities of nature that will continue tomorrow, and no past. But the mere possibility of something doesn't make it reasonable to believe.

Surely it's more reasonable to affirm whatever presents itself to the mind in a compelling way than it is to deny them. The burden of proof shouldn't be on those who affirm the existence of the external world, but on those who deny it.

I think the same thing is true of morality. We can no more prove morality than we can prove the past, the uniformity of nature, the external world, or other minds. But at the same time, morality presents itself to the mind in a very clear and compelling way.

This is evident when you just think about certain egregious examples of moral evil, like rape, torture, murder, etc. Pick your hot button issue, and be honest with yourself about whether you think those who disagree with you are just different or mistaken. It is wildly counter-intuitive to suppose that it makes no moral difference whether you help somebody or harm them.

To believe in objective morality, one doesn't need proof or demonstration. One only needs to affirm the obvious. It is those who deny the obvious who need to have a demonstration.

Physicalism, epiphenomenalism, and rationality

Physicalism is the view that as humans, all we are is physical stuff. Everything about us can be reduced to some physical state or process. That includes our mental life.

Epiphenomenalism is the view that the physical can give rise to the mental, but the direction of causation cannot go in the other direction. Mental states or processes cannot bring about or give rise to physical states.

Physicalism entail epiphenomenalism. If you can account for every event in your brain by appeal to the physical properties of your brain without any reference to mental properties, then there is nothing for mental properties to do.

Physical properties are entirely objective and third person. Mental properties are entirely subjective and first person. A third person property cannot be the same thing as a first person property. According to the indiscernibility of identicals, if A and B are the same thing, then whatever property A has, B also has, and vice versa. So if there is anything true about A that is not true about B, or vice versa, then A and B cannot be the same thing. So third person properties cannot be first person properties.

Since the physical activity in our brains can be exhaustively explained in terms of their third person properties, that means there is nothing for the first person properties to do. The third person properties can give rise to first person properties, but those first person properties cannot turn around and have causal influence over the third person properties.

Third person properties can be observed or measured by outsiders. But it is impossible to observe a first person property unless you are the person experiencing it. So, for example, you can apprehend your thoughts directly through introspection, but the best a brain scientist can do is look at your neurons. So if your first person properties actually do have causal influence over your brain, then there would have to be causes happening in your brain that were invisible to the neuroscientist. No amount of looking in your brain can reveal a first person property since only third person properties can be observed by third persons. But if physicalism is true, then all of the causes for any event in your brain would have to be third person causes. The neuroscientist could, in principle, observe all the physical states in your brain and apply the laws of physics to figure out what's going to happen next, and he should be able to do this without any reference to first person properties. That means that if physicalism is true, then epiphenomenalism is true.

There is a serious problem with affirming epiphenomenalism. If you deny that your conscious states affect your behavior, then you cannot appeal to evolution to explain how your cognitive faculties became reliable at producing true beliefs. You might be tempted to say that natural selection favored true beliefs over false beliefs, but if our beliefs don't affect our behavior, then our beliefs are irrelevant to natural selection. So natural selection would have no way to select for reliable belief-producing faculties.

With that being the case, the chances that our belief-producing faculties would be reliable is very small. It would be an unimaginable stroke of luck if they happened to be reliable.

If our belief-producing cognitive faculties are unreliable, then you cannot trust them to tell you that epiphenomenalism is true. So affirming epiphenomenalism undermines its own rational basis. So it's a self-defeating belief. And that means it's an irrational position to hold.

If physicalism entails epiphenomenalism, and if epiphenomenalism is an irrational belief, then to be rational, we must reject physicalism.

But let me take this a step further. Let's say that your beliefs somehow could affect your behavior, even if physicalism is true. If that were the case, then there would still be a problem. The problem is that your mental states could only give rise to your behavior by virtue of their underlying physical causes. If you want to equate the physical states of your brain somehow with your mental states, that would be fine under this scenario, but it wouldn't solve the problem. The reason is because although your mental states would, in that case, have causal influence over your brain states, they wouldn't do so by virtue of their semantic content, but by virtue of their underlying physical properties.

Let's say, for example, that there's some physical state of your brain let's call XYZ. As long as XYZ happens in your brain, then you will have a corresponding desire to drink a Dr. Pepper. So XYZ entails a thought that has intentionality. It's about Dr. Pepper and your desire to have it. But as far as your behavior is concerned, it doesn't matter what your thought is about. All that matters is that it has the necessary physical structure to cause you to drink Dr. Pepper.

Consider a philosophical zombie. A philosophical zombie is a human being that has all the exact same physical manifestations of an ordinary human except that there's nobody behind the wheel. If physicalism were true, then philosophical zombies would be conceivable. That means a philosophical zombie would have brain state XYZ, which would result in drinking Dr. Pepper, but there would be no desire, belief, or conscious state behind it whatsoever.

If XYZ fully explains the behavior of a person by virtue of its physical properties, then that behavior would be exactly the same whether XYZ gave rise to mental states or not. You might say that consciousness is the inevitable consequence of XYZ, and that may be true, but it doesn't matter. The thought experiment doesn't depend on whether mental states are the necessary consequence of physical states. It's only meant to illustrate why, under physicalism, the semantic content of mental states are superfluous.

So even if you deny epiphenomenalism by saying mental state can cause physical states in the brain, and therefore behavior, you would still be stuck with semantic epiphenomenalism--the view that mental states cannot have causal influence by virtue of their semantic content, i.e. what those mental states are about, but only by virtue of their underlying physical properties.

And that leaves you with the same problem. If it doesn't matter what your beliefs are about, as far as behavior is concerned, then it doesn't matter whether your beliefs are true, as far as behavior is concerned. And if it doesn't matter whether your beliefs are true, as far as behavior is concerned, then there is no way for natural selection to select for reliable belief-producing cognitive faculties.

So any way you look at it, physicalism is an irrational point of view. It undermines the necessary preconditions to make any of your beliefs rational. So to be rational, you must reject physicalism, and if you reject physicalism, you should be open to the supernatural.

Is religion irrational?

A person on the internet said that religion is irrational. This was my response:

When I say irrational, I usually have something very specific in mind. An irrational person is a person who openly embraces contradictions. By "openly," I meaning knowingly and willingly. Since none of us are infallible, it must be the case that all of us make mistakes in thinking sometimes. We draw the wrong conclusions about things which results in us holding false beliefs. But the mere holding of a false belief or making a mistake in thinking is not sufficient to say that somebody is irrational. If it were, then all of us would be irrational since none of us are infallible.

There are irrational people, though, and there are irrational worldviews. People who deny the law of excluded middle, for example, are irrational.

There's another class of people who are unreasonable. These are people who stubbornly refuse to follow an argument where it leads. They stick their head in the sand, so to speak. But that's being unreasonable, not irrational.

I get the impression you're using "irrational" in a much more loose way than I am, but I can't tell exactly what you mean by it. Maybe you mean "unreasonable." Or maybe you mean "silly" or "absurd."

But let me point out a few things we disagree about and try to change your view.

First, you appear to define a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature. That's why you find it irrational to believe in miracles. I think there are two mistakes in this argument (besides a misuse of the word, "irrational"). First, I don't think that's what a miracle is. A miracle is an event in the natural world whose cause is not natural. Let me unpack this a little.

According to Newton's law of gravity, there's a force of attraction between any two masses that's directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. So if there were a basketball ten feet in the air, there would be a force of attraction between the earth and the basket ball. In other words, the basketball would be pulled toward the earth.

Now, if something were holding it up, like the hand of a basketball player, you wouldn't think that Newton's law had been violated just because the basketball player was preventing the basketball from being pulled to the earth.

Well, a miracle is an effect in the natural world whose cause is not part of the natural world. So instead of a physical basketball player holding the basketball, you might have a God or an angel exerting causal influence on the basketball, preventing it from falling to the earth. Newton's law would not be violated in this case because there is still a force of attraction between the basketball and the earth. It's just that in this case, there's a supernatural being exerting a force in the opposite direction so that the basketball is suspended in the air.

And that's how it is with all miracles. Once a supernatural being initiates a causal chain within the natural world, the natural world accommodates that action according to the laws of nature. The laws of nature are never violated.

Now, if you didn't believe there was a supernatural realm, or that a supernatural being could have causal influence in the world, then it would stand to reason that miracles couldn't happen. So it would be understandable for you to think belief in miracles was unreasonable. But if you use naturalism as a premise in your argument against miracles in order to show that religion is irrational, then you're begging the question against religions. All three Abrahamic religions think there are supernatural beings who can have causal influence in the world. To just assume that these beings don't exist or can't have causal influence in the world in order to "prove" that miracles don't happen in order to prove that Abrahamic religions are irrational, is to beg the question against Abrahamic religions.

One does not have to be religious in order to believe or be justified in believing that there is something beyond the natural realm that has causal influence over the natural realm. Thomas Nagel is famous for being an atheist who thinks naturalism is false. He even has a book out about it. It's called Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Thomas Nagel isn't being irrational. He has good arguments for his view. Alvin Plantinga and C.S. Lewis are both Christians who have made similar arguments against naturalism/materialism.

Now, let me say something about "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." This claim is much too ambiguous to be useful. Whether a claim is extraordinary or not depends on what you already believe. The claim that water can become a solid would be an extraordinary claim to somebody who had never seen or heard of ice, for example, but it's not extraordinary to you because ice coheres with what you have already experienced. For somebody who already believes in God, the claim that a miracle happened would be less extraordinary than it would be for somebody who does not believe in God. There is no such thing as an "extraordinary claim" that's extraordinary independently of some background information.

And what does "extraordinary evidence" even mean? Is video evidence extraordinary? For example, suppose I told you that I saw a deer on my way to work today, and to prove it, I showed you a vide o. There's nothing extraordinary about seeing a deer in my part of the world, and I doubt you'd think a cell phone video was all that extraordinary either. But suppose, instead of seeing a deer, I told you that I ran into Kate Beckinsale, and she was so happy to see me that she kissed me. Now, you don't know who I am, so imagine it's a friend of yours. You'd probably think his claim was more extraordinary than merely claiming to have seen a deer. But suppose he showed you a video on his cell phone. Notice that this evidence is exactly the same evidence as the evidence for the deer. If it's not extraordinary in the case of the deer, then it's not extraordinary in the case of Kate Beckinsale, either. So what exactly does "extraordinary evidence" even mean?

A better maxim is that any claim you make requires adequate evidence. You may require more evidence of your friend kissing Kate Beckinsale than you would for your friend to have seen a deer, but that's because the incident with Kate Beckinsale seems, prima facie, less likely given your background information. So whatever evidence is adequate in each case would be different. Your friend's word, alone, would probably be sufficient evidence that he saw a deer, but you might not take his word for having kissed Kate Beckinsale.

In the same way, I can grant that a miracle claim would require more evidence than a mundane claim, such as seeing a deer. But it wouldn't require extraordinary evidence. It would only require adequate evidence. The amount and kind of evidence would depend on how prima facie unlikely you thought the miracle was, and that would depend on your background beliefs.

I have a lot more to say, but this has gotten too long already, so I'll stop here.