Introducing Students to the Subjectivist Fallacy

Warren Dunes State Park, Southwest Michigan

In my MCCC philosophy classes I am introducing students to, among other things, the "subjectivist fallacy." Viz., to the idee of "subjective truth." This is a hard concept for students to grasp, since they have been baby-boomed into being subjective relativists.

The subjectivist fallacy makes its appearance in statements like this: "X is true for me, but not for you." Or, for me it is true that X, but for you it is not true that X." Nonsense. Because if something, anything, is true, it is true for everyone past, present, and future.

But what if I like Coke better than Pepsi, and Linda likes Pepsi better than Coke (which she does)? No matter. Consider the statement (a statement is a sentence that is either true or false, that either affirms that a certain state of affairs obtains or does not obtain) John likes Coke better than Pepsi. That is a statement. If it is true, it is true for everyone; if false, it is false for everyone. If it's true, than what is it that is true? It is: John likes Coke better than Pepsi. What this statement is not claiming is that Coke is better than Pepsi. That's an entirely different claim, and one that seems much harder to logically arrive at.

In logic there are no such things as "true for me" or "false for you" or vice versa. I am now typing on my laptop. That is true. For all (though this surely is a trivial truth).

The logic text I use is Lewis Vaughn's The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning About Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims. Vaughn exposes and debunks the subjectivist fallacy on pp. 50-51. Pay attention.

• "The truth of a claim does not depend on what a person thinks." (Such, as e.g., John thinks Coke is better than Pepsi.) "That is, your believing that something is true does not make it true."
• 'The idea that truth depends on what someone believes is called subjective relativism, and if you accept this notion or use it to try to support a claim, you're said to commit the subjectivist fallacy. This view says that truth depends not on the way things are but solely on what someone believes. Truth, in other words, is relative to persons. Truth is a matter of what a person believes - not a matter of how the world is."
• "You've probably encountered subjective relativism more often than you realize. You may have heard someone (maybe even yourself!) say, "This is my truth, and that's your truth," or, "This statement is true for me."
• Logic, and critical thinking, on the other hand, "is about determining whether statements are true or false. But if we can make a statement true or false just by believing it to be true, then critical thinking would seem to be unnecessary."
• Critical thinking is used "to find out whether a statement is true or false - objectively true or false." Which mean, if a statement is true, it is true for everybody, and if it is false, it is flase for everybody." Consider the statement Hindus believe there are 330,000,000 gods/avatars. That statement is true, and can be argued for sociologically. But philosophers are more interested in the statement There are 330,000,000 gods/avatars. If that statement is true, it is true for everyone, theists and atheists alike. If it is false, it is false for everyone, even though Hindus believe it to be true.
• Yes, some things about ourselves "are relative because they are one way for us and another way for someone else." You may like Coke, but someone else may not. Your liking of Coke is then relative to you. "But the truth about these states of affairs is not relative."

Vaughn says subjective relativism is implausible for two reasons.

1. If we could make a statement true just by believing it to be true, we would be infallible. We could not be wrong about anything. But "personal infallibility is, of course, absurd."
2. Subjective relativism is self-defeating. "It defeats itself because its truth implies its falsity. The relativist says 'All truth is relative." If this statement is objectively true, then it refutes itself because if it is objectively true that 'All truth is relative, then the statement itself is an example of an objective truth. So if 'All truth is relative' is objectively true, then it is objectively false." Which is, of course, absurd.

It will be a bit of a battle trying to get this across to my students, since most are (unknowingly) subjective relativists.

My Favorite Atheists to read

With Joe LaRoy in Bangkok

A friend asked me, "Who is your favorite atheist to read?"

What a great question!

Here are a few, in no particular order:

• Friedrich Nietzsche (One must read Nietzsche to understand Western atheism, and where it often goes wrong.)
• John Gray
• Julian Barnes
• Ronald Dworkin 
• Peter Singer (One of the few atheists i know of who takes the statement There is no God to its logical conclusions, especially in ethics. Of course I don't agree with Singer. But, given atheism, he is mostly correct.)
• John Searle (I read Speech Acts while doing my doctoral work. It's an essay in the philosophy of language, not atheistic in tone, and influential in linguistic philosophy.)
• David Chalmers (The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory - anyone who can formulate a "zombie argument against physicalism" is a friend of mine.)
• Thomas Nagel (In Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Nagel the atheist presents himself as a non-physicalist. See his outrageously influential essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?")

Note: I've read the infamous, declining-in-influence "Four Horsemen" (Dawkins/Dennett/Harris/Hitchens), and find them tedious, sophomoric, rhetorical, and boring (except for Hitchens, whose rhetoric is always funny and interesting, even if his God Is Not Great is poor thinking).

In Solitude Demons Manifest Themselves

Downtown Monroe

When I go alone to pray, sitting quietly by Lake Erie or on the river bank in my back yard, it often happens that a worry, a fear, or anger concerning some situation or person, enters my mind. In extended times of solitude demons show their faces. This is why it is hard for some to enter into aloneness with God. This is why Satan took Jesus into the Judean wilderness to tempt him. This is why Henri Nouwen describes solitude as the furnace of spiritual transformation.

Nouwen writes:

"Even though we may have a deep desire for real solitude, we also experience a certain apprehension as we approach that solitary place and time. As soon as we are alone, without people to talk with, books to read, TV to watch, or phone calls to make, an inner chaos opens up in us. This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. Entering a private room and shutting the door, therefore, does not mean that we immediately shut out all our inner doubts, anxieties, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings, and impulsive desires. On the contrary, when we have removed our outer distractions, we often find that our inner distractions manifest themselves to us in full force." (Nouwen, The Spiritual Life: Eight Essential Titles by Henri Nouwen, Kindle Locations 640-644)

Spiritual growth requires coming face to face with such things. Living in denial of them won't work. Covering them up with things or busyness won't help. A cancerous tumor won't be healed until identified. Outer distractions will not protect us from inner noise.

Nouwen says, "This makes the discipline of solitude all the more important." (Ib.)

In solitary times with God demons manifest, are confronted, are dealt with and cast out, like dross and chaff are burned away to leave gold and grain. In solitude God restores my soul.

Holy Nothingness as the Precondition for Divine Everythingness

Downtown Monroe

In his second letter to the Corinthian church Paul defends his credentials as an apostle and a messenger sent from God. The new Corinthian Jesus-followers look at him and find it hard to believe he is who he says he is. They thought, writes N.T. Wright, that “an apostle needs to be a showy leader, a flowery and entertaining speaker, with personal charm and flattery, like the kind they were used to in their culture. What Paul ultimately wants to say to them is that all these things are nothing…  compared with the lifestyle which embodies the gospel of Jesus.” (N. T. Wright, Paul For Everyone: 2 Corinthians, 32-33) 

Paul, by his own estimation, is unimpressive. He writes:  I have made a fool of myself, but you drove me to it. I ought to have been commended by you, for I am not in the least inferior to the “super-apostles,” even though I am nothing. (2 Cor. 12:11) 

How can someone who is a "nothing" not be inferior to everyone? The answer is that Paul's "nothingness" is a holy nothingness, a sacred insufficiency. This nothingness and insufficiency is a necessary precondition for divine everythingness.

Paul views himself as unqualified to minister in Jesus' name. But Christ, in Paul, is sufficient. He writes: Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. (2 Cor. 3:5) Christ, he writes, has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant. (2 Cor. 3:6)

The reality of the new covenant is that God has placed his desires, not on tablets of stone (the old covenant), but within the hearts of all who embrace Christ. Now, amazingly, Christ-followers "partake of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). As Paul writes in 2 Cor. 5:17: if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 

All this is in fulfillment of God's promise of a new covenant, as expressed in Ezekiel 36:26: I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. God's Holy Spirit, in us, is the reason we have confidence and are sufficient.

In Paul we see this pattern:

1. I am nothing
2. This drives me to rely on God
3. I can do all thing in Christ, who dwells in me and strengthens me

Years ago Linda, Dan, and Josh went with me to Singapore, where I taught at a Chinese seminary for 20 days. Good friends of connected us with David and Sue Pickard of Overseas Missionary Fellowship. David was the director of OMF, which used to be China Inland Mission, founded by Hudson Taylor. 

David and Sue had us over for dinner. It was Josh's birthday, and they hosted a party for him. 

David showed us Hudson Taylor's Bible. That was an awesome moment. Taylor was taken out of his comfort zone and used of God, even though he was out of his depths. How was this possible? Taylor wrote: “God chose me because I was weak enough. God does not do his work by large committees. He trains somebody to be quiet enough, and little enough, and then uses him.”

I love how Oswald Chambers expresses this truth: “God can achieve his purpose either through the absence of human power and resources, or the abandonment of reliance on them. All through history God has chosen and used nobodies, because their unusual dependence on him made possible the unique display of his power and grace. He chose and used somebodies only when they renounced dependence on their natural abilities and resources.”

I must become a nobody so that Christ can become Somebody in me.

Real Believers Meet Alone with God

Downtown Monroe

Henri Nouwen writes:

"Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. Solitude begins with a time and place for God, and him alone." (Nouwen, The Spiritual Life: Eight Essential Titles by Henri Nouwen, Kindle Locations 635-636)

Jesus went alone to solitary places and prayed. He instructs us to do the same. Go to your private room and, when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in that secret place (Matthew 6:6).

Those who believe do this. Do you believe that there is a God who is actively present in your life in healing, teaching, and guiding? If you do, you will meet with him. Because you love him, and because you see the absurdity and irrationality of not meeting with him.

This is why Nouwen says you cannot have a spiritual life without solitude, since that would be going it alone, which would be a type of practical atheism.

Pastors - if you need help with this I strongly recommend purchasing and using A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants (I used this for two years).

The Danger of Glorifying the Past

The good old days - playing with guitarist extraordinaire Jeff Jaskowiak (thanks Julie!)

One thing that can destroy community and fill it with guilt and condemnation is misrepresenting the past by inflating it. Over the years I have met Christians who, rather than serving and ministering with God’s love and power in the now, critique the church by pointing to the past as glory days that need to be recreated. The further one gets from those "good old days," the better they look.

But, truthfully, the "good old days" had their problems too. 19th-century Dutch historian Johan Huizinga said “there is not a more dangerous tendency in history than that of representing the past as if it were a rational whole and dictated by clearly defined interest.”[1]

In the glorification of the past, the past gets distorted. People who enshrine and worship their history live illusory lives rooted in falsehood.

As for me, I find myself rarely (if ever) wanting to go back to the past. It's true that I have good memories. I sometimes think of Linda and I, living in East Lansing, with our two little boys. We did not have a lot of money (that was hard). We did have one another (that was good). Sometimes I think of those days, but I never want to go back and do them again. My desire is not to recapitulate the past.

My heart aligns with the apostle Paul's view, which is: one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.[2] 

Moving forward and finishing well - that's what I am praying for. Pressing forward, not backwards. With this viewpoint I am freed from the guilt-producing tyranny of an often-distorted past, and released to love God and move with His Spirit now, today.

The Word does not say "Yesterday was the day that the Lord had made," but...

"This, today, is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it!"

---

[1] Quoted by Thomas Merton. A Year with Thomas Merton, Kindle Locations 2389-2390

[2] Philippians 3:13-14

The Love of Bondage and the Fear of Freedom

Lamp, in our house

As counterintuitive and irrational as this sounds, the truth is that many people love their bondage. It has become their place of familiarity, their zone of comfort. They return to it like dogs to their vomit.

The abused wife divorces and marries another abuser. The incarcerated drug felon is released, only to return to heroin, and prison, again. The careless spender becomes financially free, only to return to economic bondage.

Thomas Merton wrote:

"How can I receive the seeds of freedom if I am in love with slavery and how can I cherish the desire of God if I am filled with another and an opposite desire? God cannot plant His liberty in me because I am a prisoner and I do not even desire to be free. I love my captivity and I imprison myself in the desire for the things that I hate, and I have hardened my heart against true love. (Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 16)

To stay free one must hate bondage, and choose and act from this hatred. "I must learn therefore to let go of the familiar and the usual and consent to what is new and unknown to me." (Ib.)

Freedom is the place of unfamiliarity. When Jesus says ,"Behold, I make all things new," he inspires fear. (Think of the character Brooks in "The Shawshank Redemption.") Newness requires change and faith. Change means newness of being; faith is stepping into the new unknown.

Spiritual transformation is constant movement from familiarity to unfamiliarity, from bondage to freedom. The transformation is, among other things, the morphing of desire. The love/hate relationship between bondage and freedom inverts, slowly, to a hate/love relationship between the same. When this happens (I have seen it happen in many people) one never returns to the old, familiar chains.

Merton concludes: "If these seeds would take root in my liberty, and if His will would grow from my freedom, I would become the love that He is, and my harvest would be His glory and my own joy." (Ib., 17)

One-Thing Resolution

Downtown Monroe

I don't make New Year's resolutions. But I do resolve to do one thing, and not just on New Year's day.

In Psalm 27 David expresses his One-Thing Resolution. He sings,

One thing I ask from the LORD,

this only do I seek:

that I may dwell in the house of the LORD

all the days of my life,

to gaze on the beauty of the LORD

and to seek him in his temple.

To be in God's presence. This is life's greatest thing.

The apostle Paul expresses One-Thing Resolution like this:

For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you

except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Pauline knowledge is personal knowledge. It is virgin knowledge, unpolluted by the coming Cartesian dualism that will alienate the knowing subject from the object to be known. When Augustine wrote, "God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you," this is a claim and a desire for intimacy.

Resolve to "be absolutely His," said Oswald Chambers.

“The more we get what we now call ourselves out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become,” wrote C.S. Lewis. This is the Davidic desire to be taken over by God, to be consumed and reified in His presence.

Don't resolve to "be all that you can be." Rather, be all that He can be in you.  

Resolve to live in God's presence.

Resolve to know Him.

***
My recent book is Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.

I'm teaching a five-month class on prayer, beginning Sat., Jan. 7, at Redeemer.

I'm currently writing Leading the Presence-Driven Church.

Servant Listening

Our sanctuary - Jan. 1, 2017 - a great place for listening.

I received some new books for Christmas. One is The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness In a World of Distraction, by Adam McHugh. I read books like this slowly, like a steady rain soaks the receptive earth. As I read, I listen.

Listening always preceded evaluating. The fool evaluates without listening.

Most people cannot listen. McHugh writes:

"We love to talk about listening. It’s easier than actually listening. There is much lip service paid to listening, but listening is a service of the ear, the mind and the heart. Listening is an act of servanthood, and serving is hard. There are no accolades in serving. When a servant is doing his job, no one notices. If we wish to imitate Jesus and become servants, we must learn how to listen." (McHugh, Kindle Locations 206-208)

This is the core of being a follower of Jesus; viz., servanthood. Real servants listen, and discern. McHugh calls this "servant listening." He writes:

"Servant listening is an act of surrender, in which we lay down our verbal weapons, our preconceived notions, our quick advice and our desire to steer the conversation toward ourselves. We release our grasp on the terms and direction of the conversation." (Kindle Locations 204-205)

Servant listening is an act of freedom. Only a free person who trusts in God can let go of the fallen tendency to evaluate without a clue.

***
My recent book is Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.

I'm teaching a five-month class on prayer, beginning Sat., Jan. 7, at Redeemer.

Immaterial Consciousness Leads Me to Think About God

I study, among other things, human consciousness.
In my doctoral dissertation on metaphor theory and philosophy of language I spent time looking at how the physical brain processes figurative language. (One main text at the time was Cognition and Figurative Language, by Honeck and Hoffman.) "Metaphor" is not, as Aristotle and others thought, an elliptical simile (i.e., a simile minus the word 'like'). (For recent research on how the brain processes literal and nonliteral language, see The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, Raymond Gibbs, ed.)

One of my doctoral advisors was Dr. James Ashbrook, a neuro-psyschologist/theologian. I will never forget Dr. Ashbrook sharing the time when he began to do neuro-studies and held in his hands, for the first time, a physical human brain. He was filled with awe and wonder that this 3-pound blob of jellylike goo processed language and contained consciousness. How could this crazy thing called the "mind" emerge from, supervene upon, and causally effect the physical brain?

Today, these questions have not gone away. See Oliver Burkeman's well-written essay "Why can't the world's greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?" Consciousness is real, and seems to be nonphysical.

As neuro-philosopher David Chalmers says, “I’m talking to you now, and I can see how you’re behaving; I could do a brain scan, and find out exactly what’s going on in your brain – yet it seems it could be consistent with all that evidence that you have no consciousness at all.” If you were approached by me and my doppelgänger, not knowing which was which, not even the most powerful brain scanner in existence could tell us apart." ("Doppelganger" = a point-for-point physical equivalent to myself, except without consciousness.) This is called "the Hard Problem of consciousness." That is, there is a qualitative difference between feeling an emotion such as love, and the pure physical examination of neurons.

Sheer physical studies can locate and examine neural activity, but they cannot tell us that a certain firing neuron in a particular human brain is experienced as a thought, or as a pain. Some think the Hard Problem is in principle unsolvable, since one would, it seems, have to posit consciousness in order to theorize about it. 

Burkemann writes:

"[Perhaps] we’re just constitutionally incapable of ever solving the Hard Problem? After all, our brains evolved to help us solve down-to-earth problems of survival and reproduction; there is no particular reason to assume they should be capable of cracking every big philosophical puzzle we happen to throw at them. This stance has become known as “mysterianism” – after the 1960s Michigan rock’n’roll band ? and the Mysterians, who themselves borrowed the name from a work of Japanese sci-fi – but the essence of it is that there’s actually no mystery to why consciousness hasn’t been explained: it’s that humans aren’t up to the job. If we struggle to understand what it could possibly mean for the mind to be physical, maybe that’s because we are, to quote the American philosopher Josh Weisberg, in the position of “squirrels trying to understand quantum mechanics”. In other words: “It’s just not going to happen.”"

Perhaps the fault is not that humans are not up to the job, but because humans are looking for physical explanations when consciousness is, as others think, non-physical. (See a host of literature that argues against physicalism, such as J.P. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Image: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism.)

If consciousness is non-physical, then it is irreducible to physical causes. If consciousness is irreducible to physical causes, then the cause of consciousness is best understood to be non-physical. These ideas form Moreland's Argument from Consciousness for the Existence of God. It looks like this.

1) Irreducible consciousness exists.
2) The best explanation for irreducible consciousness is either theism or naturalism.
3) It's not naturalism.
4) Therefore, theism is the most probable explanation for the existence of irreducible consciousness.

Those who marvel at the existence of consciousness often think about God, such as my professor James Ashbrook, philosopher J.P. Moreland, and myself. I'm thinking about God now, something that could never be known by physical observations.