{"id":36168,"date":"2015-09-02T14:05:20","date_gmt":"2015-09-02T18:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=36168"},"modified":"2015-09-04T13:58:34","modified_gmt":"2015-09-04T17:58:34","slug":"surrejoinder-on-divine-deception","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/surrejoinder-on-divine-deception\/","title":{"rendered":"Surrejoinder on Divine Deception"},"content":{"rendered":"

I dropped two nukes on Dale’s divine deception argument in two previous posts, which I dubbed Fat Boy and Little Man<\/a>, respectively. From the ashes Dale returned desperate and feeble fire<\/a>. Out of respect for my worthy friend<\/del> foe, I now respond with some a fallout clean up and hereafter promise ceasefire.<\/p>\n

Dale’s Response to Little Boy<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Little<\/a>In answer to my skeptical theist response to Dale\u2019s divine deception argument, Dale says he\u2019s not a fan of skeptical theist responses to the problem of evil. Ok, but that doesn\u2019t tell us how the the noseeum inference in Dale’s argument is any good. This is a problem, for if the inference is no good, the \u201cseems claim\u201d that Dale acknowledges is crucial to his argument\u2014i.e., that it seems<\/em> that the Father, Son, and Spirit wrongfully deceived the ancients\u2014loses probative force. To spell this out more clearly, Dale reasons as follows:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. If it seems that ~p, then, probably, ~p.<\/li>\n
  2. It seems<\/em> that the Father, Son, and Spirit had no morally sufficient reason for deceiving the ancients.<\/li>\n
  3. So, probably, the Father, Son, and Spirit had no morally sufficient reason for deceiving the ancients.<\/li>\n
  4. If it seems<\/em> that there is no morally sufficient reason for an act of deception, that deception seems<\/em> wrong.<\/li>\n
  5. So, the Father, Son, and Spirit\u2019s act of deception seems<\/em> wrong.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Premise (1) is the general form of a noseeum inference, and the inference from (2) to (3) is the particular instance of the noseeum inference in Dale\u2019s argument. And for reasons I explained before, it is a bad instance. Once you realize that if the Father, Son, and Spirit did have morally sufficient reasons for deceiving the ancients, such reasons would not be obvious or transparent to us, it should no longer seem<\/em> to you that there are no such reasons. You ought to update your background knowledge in light of lurking defeaters. A circular tabletop might at first seem<\/em> ovular at an angle, but once you realize it is the angle at which you view the tabletop responsible for its seeming ovular, the tabletop should no longer really seem ovular to you at that angle. Dale makes an enthymematic leap from (2) to (5), but I take it that (4) is a reasonable enough bridge. But because the seems claim in (2) is undermined, the seems claim in (5) goes with it.<\/p>\n

    Dale’s Response to Fat Man<\/a>
    \n<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \"Fat<\/a>Dale doubts there could be group persons, but grants the possibility for the sake of argument. Even so, Dale thinks the ancients did not in fact view God as a group person. He punts to passages in the Bible where it seems to be implied that the ancients believed God to be a person in the modern sense; i.e., an individual, private self\u2014the kind of person that cannot be a group person.<\/p>\n

    Because we have a fairly fixed concept of what a person is, I admit that an interpretation where that concept appears to be held by the ancients too recommends itself as natural and plausible to us. But there is an important difference between us and the ancients that demands a more cautious approach to interpreting such passages. To illustrate the difference, consider a tale of two cultures. In \"MEoverWE\"<\/a>one, the individual is prior to the group. There are abstractions made about the group as a whole, but it is the individual person that is the fundamental social unit. People of this culture will find it convenient for practical reasons to speak as if<\/em> there were group persons, but whether there really are or really could be group persons would be a largely foreign consideration to them. In the other culture, things are reversed: the group, not the individual, is \"WEoverME\"<\/a>seen as the fundamental social unit. It is the individual person that is an abstraction, for his identity depends on the group of which he is a part. People of this culture will find it convenient for practical reasons to speak as if<\/em> there were individual, private selves, but whether there really are or really could be private selves would be a largely foreign consideration to them.<\/p>\n

    The first culture in the tale should sound most familiar, as we today are good representatives of it. The ancients, on the other hand, were good representatives of a \u201ccollectivist\u201d culture more like the second. There is a huge literature on this, one good example being Bruce Malina and Jerome Neyrey\u2019s Portraits of Paul: An Archaeology of Ancient Personality<\/em>\u00a0(Louisville, KY: Westminster Knox Press). If they and other scholars are right, we cannot interpret the passages Dale cites at face value for risk of reading our<\/em> modern concept of personhood off their surface. The safest conclusion is that, at most, the ancients spoke of God at times as if<\/em> He were an individual, private self, for practical reasons, not because they really believed he was such a self. As collectivists, the question of whether they believed there were or could be such selves was likely foreign to them. After all, we as good individualists take that stance with respect to groups. Is it so hard to imagine that good collectivists might take that stance with respect to the individual?<\/p>\n

    So I still think Dale is not being appreciably sensitive to the epistemic gap between the ancients and us with regard to concepts of personhood. Our concept of a person as a private self\u2014an autonomous, individual center of consciousness\u2014began to appear in nascent form in Augustine and Boethius, developed in the reflective womb of Western theology and philosophy, came to full term in Descartes, and was midwifed during the Enlightenment. There may have been germs (sperms?) of the concept at earlier times (if not just \u2018as if\u2019ery talk), but the caution against anachronistically reading our modern concept of personhood\u2014a concept that had a gestation period of over two millenia\u2014back into the minds of the ancients cannot be overemphasized.<\/p>\n

    To summarize, then: there is enough evidence that our individualistic concept of personhood was foreign to the ancients that Dale\u2019s divine deception argument doesn\u2019t work. This is true even if the ancients did not in fact believe God was a group person (and I never claimed that God revealed himself as a group person). All that matters is that their concept of personhood did not exclude the possibility that God be a group person. And to insist that it did\u2014on the grounds that ours<\/em> does, or that the concept of personhood is analytic\u2014is sound hermeneutics only to an analytic philosopher!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I dropped two nukes on Dale’s divine deception argument in two previous posts, which I dubbed Fat Boy and Little Man, respectively. From the ashes Dale returned desperate and feeble fire. Out of respect for my worthy friend foe, I now respond with some a fallout clean up and hereafter promise ceasefire. Dale’s Response to… Read More »Surrejoinder on Divine Deception<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":36181,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-theories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36168"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36209,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36168\/revisions\/36209"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}