Help me out here ...

What, exactly, is the difference between a "prayer warrior" and just any old person who prays?

Ockham's Razor: A Probabilistic Justification

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time with probability and statistics, partly because we're about to make some significant decisions about our boy's treatment, and partly because I've been reading The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives, which, despite its overdone name, is really about -- you guessed it -- probability and statistics.

Anyhow, I was lying in bed the other night, and for some reason I was thinking about Ockham's Razor, which despite Wikipedia's protests to the contrary, is usefully summarized as "the simpler explanation is more likely the correct one." So if you imagine an explanation that rests on 5 propositions, and an explanation that rests on 10 propositions, you should give preference to the simpler argument. Sometimes this is justified in terms of "falsifiability": the longer argument is "more easily falsifiable" than the shorter argument, because it has more places it can break.

But that night, I was thinking that a slightly more interesting way of justifying the principle is in terms of probability.

Suppose you know nothing about the content of the propositions, or the quality of the argument. If it helps, think about this as being a situation where the content of the propositions is so arcane, you have no idea how to evaluate whether or not they are true. But even this little bit of information -- the number of propositions -- can help you choose an explanation, if you suppose that each proposition has an equal chance of being correct. And what else can you do, since you don't understand the argument? If that is the case, then the chance of all propositions being correct is the combination of the chances of each proposition being correct. You don't know exactly how to combine the chances, because you don't know how the propositions are related, but what you do know is that every proposition you add decreases the chances of all the propositions being correct.

To illustrate, let's look at our 5- and 10-proposition arguments and plug in some numbers. If we suppose that each proposition has a 50% chance of being correct, independently of any of the other propositions, we get:

10-proposition argument
1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/1024

5-proposition argument
1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/32

So there you go. Ockham's Razor is a good rule because every additional proposition decreases the chances of all the propositions being true.

Obviously, though, an actual analysis of the propositions is preferable to simply applying Ockham's Razor and taking that as proof. Right?

Well, probably. While this probability justification has the benefit of applying when we ourselves are too ignorant to analyze the argument, it also applies if we suppose that people in general are ignorant, and as likely to fail as to succeed when either composing or analyzing the truth of propositions. In that case, well, our best bet is just to guess ... and Ockham's Razor helps us make a better guess. I mean, unless I'm confused about the truth of that proposition. =)

Leukemia =(

I suppose, although I'm not entirely sure why, that I should tell you that my 5-year old was diagnosed several weeks ago with an acute leukemia. It's one that they have a lot of practice treating, which is good, and his prognosis is good, which is good, but it's still not as good as, say, the year of kindergarten or first basketball season we were hoping for.

Anyway, sympathetic comments aren't really necessary. I just wanted to let you all know what's up.

Real World FTW!

I want to post something about David Sosa's brief definition of happiness, but I can't figure out quite what I think about it.

I need a little goading, I think.

GOADER: Ya! Living in the Real World is obviously better than living in an Imaginary World! Real World FTW!

ME: [Rolls his eyes. Is not goaded.]

Oh well. Maybe tomorrow.

Some Philosophy-Slash-Literary Junk

In case any of you want to participate, Alex and I are reading through Thomas Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces and discussing it over on another blogspot blog. We're only a chapter or so in, so you could even read along with us if you wanted.

We may get tired of the blog and abandon it after a few sections, leaving you forever anxious about WHAT EXACTLY HAPPENS WHEN THE WORLD TREE MEETS THE WORLD NAVEL, but those are the kind of risks you take when you follow us around.

Farewell, Teaching Aspirations

I don't really know what I'm going to tell the Children's Ministry folks. They think they want me to help in my kids' classes at church, but I'm pretty sure they're mistaken.

STORY: NOAH'S ARK

ME: So, kids, what did you think of that story?

KIDS: YAYYY

ME: How do you think Noah felt while he was safe on that big boat? Pretty good, huh?

KIDS: YAYYY

ME: What about all those kids drowning in the flood? How do you think they felt?

Do you think they sank down and died pretty quickly? Do you think any of them hung onto trees for a few days before the trees got covered up and they drowned?

Do you think there were any sharks?

KIDS: *horror*


STORY: EXODUS

ME: So, kids, what did you think of that story? Frogs and hail and the river turning to blood? Our God is pretty awesome, right!?

KIDS: YAYYY

ME: And how about that plague on the firstborn, huh? I bet those were some pretty bad kids, for God to send the spooky Angel of Death to kill them all in their sleep.

What do you think those kids did wrong? Like, the babies for example? Do you think all those Egyptian babies cried too loud at night? Or maybe they didn't obey their parents right away? Yep, that was probably it. You don't ever do that, do you?

Oh, dear! Let's hope God doesn't kill you too, ha ha!

KIDS: *terror*


STORY: ...

Enh. You get the picture.

Your Life is Not a Story

Useful stuff in this sermon I heard on Sunday.

http://www.highlandchurch.org/audio/by/date/2010-06-13

And here's the Alan Watts video that the speaker used, via YouTube.



The difficult question that follows, I think, is: "If that's true, then why should we think there is a Story?"

The Very Angry Tea Party

J.M. Bernstein: "what all the events precipitating the Tea Party
movement share is that they ... undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency"

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/the-very-angry-tea-party/

Now with extra Hegel!

Pointed Question

Crystal recently posted about the death of Antony Flew, a British philosopher. In an excerpt from one of his books (Reason and Responsibility), he describes how people engage in a watering-down of the God assertion in the face of logic or evidence.

So, for example, he says, we say we believe that God loves us like a father. Then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat, his earthly father driven insane with grief, but his heavenly father (who ostensibly is able to do something about it) apparently unmoved.

"It's OK," says the theodicist. "this is because God's love is somehow different from human love, inscrutable or beyond human love or constrained by free will or somesuch."

And so our meaty and reassuring understanding of "God loves us like a father" is redefined and eroded, until it's not really the same thing we meant in the first place.

Then Flew asks this:

"What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?"


I'm interested in how people answer this question, because I'm not sure whether it condemns me (because I have "watered down" my definition of God in order to keep it) or justifies me (because my understanding of "God" has changed significantly in the face of this sort of evidence).

Two Poems

O hai. I really liked the first of these two poems on Crystal's blog, so I will link to it here.

Two Poems

Theodicy, Boston Edition

Well, the last 10 days or so have been chock-full of theodicy, which means that I may finally have enough original material to put together a blog post.

It started last week, when I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, unquestionably one of the most terrifying books I have ever encountered. It's a postapocalyptic tale wherein a father and young son are trying to survive, but the skies are black with ash, nothing will grow and people have turned to cannibalism. The tiny book is heavy with despair.

On Saturday, after finishing that bit of sunshine and rainbows, I attended synagogue (more specifically, "Havurah on the Hill") at the Vilna Shul, which turns out to be a wonderful little building with a sanctuary above and a museum below. If anyone knows anything about theodicy, it should be Jews, right?



The Vilna Shul is the only remaining immigrant synagogue in Boston and is partially restored. The walls of the sanctuary (there's got to be a better word for for it than "sanctuary") are covered in paintings that were recently covered in beige, but the clever paintings are peeking out in places, waiting to be fully exposed.

The prayerbook that we used for the service had the words of the psalms and songs in Hebrew on the right, with a fairly free interpretation of the psalms appearing to the left. As the service progressed, we arrived at Psalm 29:

4 The voice of the LORD is powerful;
the voice of the LORD is majestic.

5 The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars;
the LORD breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon.

The interpretation, however, went something like this:

The cedars break, and the sound is the voice of God,
and the sound is God's silence.

The Shul is right next door, so I'll have to drop by sometime this week and get the actual text. A helpful physics software guy named Dallas, who guided a couple of us gentiles through the service, said that the interpretations were provided by Reb Moshe Waldoks, a local rabbi and co-author of "The Big Book of Jewish Humor".

The interpretations have a distinctly Eastern flavor, and this tidbit was no different, except that for some reason it jumped out at me and slapped me around a little bit. When bad things happen, can we understand them both as the voice of God and God's silence? Is it enough, as it said a few paragraphs down, to suppose that God's business is to allow us to "reap what we sow"?

I don't think so ... but the paradox is still interesting to me.

Then, on Sunday, Scott preached on Job. Why anybody would go and do a thing like that is beyond me, but there you have it. Maybe it was a lectionary reading or something. Anyhow, he started with Job, and summarized some things about the book, and gave a few possibilities for how to understand what God says in responding to Job. Then he made an interesting move and went on to the New Testament and pointed to the apostles. His suggestion was that the apostles were in a safer place than Job, that we don't see the apostles asking a lot of questions about evil or grieving over their suffering and persecution because they had already given up all their things. In other words, he was advocating a sort of (basically Eastern) detachment from the material world and an attentiveness to one's task (basically Western) that might make suffering less philosophically troubling.

I'm drastically simplifying, of course, but that's how I understood the sermon.

Altogether I thought he did well, and that the sermon was well-tailored for its audience, and that we would be well advised to do less storing up wealth and pleasure for ourselves and give a little more to doing good. But like the sabbath service, something about it rings hollow. Job doesn't need a sermon about how he was too attached to his kids.

On Tuesday, Reepicheep, who has just returned from Kenya, posted about a Bible study in which a Kenyan church member asked him about why a good God would allow so much evil in the world. Reep didn't give his response, but if I know his libertarian tendencies it was some version of the free will defense. With which i am also dissatisfied.

This afternoon, I read Richard's post, which makes reference to W. Paul Jones's Theological Worlds, in which he mentions paired ideas of "obsessio" and "epiphania":

An obsessio is whatever functions deeply and pervasively in one’s life as a defining quandary, a conundrum, a boggling of the mind, a hemorrhaging of the soul, a wound that bewilders healing, a mystification than renders one’s life cryptic. Whatever inadequate words one might choose to describe it, an obsessio is that which so gets its teeth into a person that it establishes one’s life as plot. It is a memory which, as resident image, becomes so congealed as Question that all else in one’s experience is sifted in terms of its promise as Answer. Put another way, an obsessio is whatever threatens to deadlock Yeses with No. It is one horn that establishes life as dilemma…The etymology of the word says it well: obsessio means “to be besieged."

Well that sounds familiar.

And then tonight, I visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I saw an amazing exhibit of Venetian renaissance painting: Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto ... just spectacular stuff. I also ogled their impressionist collection and the egyptian collection, with statues more than 4000 years old. But the thing that will probably stay with me the longest is a crucified christ who hangs in the museum's Catalonian Chapel. (On the left, below. So far, this is the best picture I've been able to find.)



Fashioned from wood and painted darkly, the Christ is a pathetic figure, with skinny legs, a slightly distended belly and a downturned face. Looking up at that Christ, it hit me, all of a sudden, how formative it must be to belong to a faith whose central figure dies, and not in glorious battle, but as a powerless, pathetic and essentially nameless human being, tortured to death by his fellow human beings and then forgotten. How could protestants abandon the crucifix? What will we become without that image constantly in front of us?

And then, as I rode home on the train, an older man ... well, probably not more than 60 ... boarded the train and flung himself into a seat. His back was horribly hunched, his face not just turned down, but turned into his chest.

And so there we were, back to theodicy again.

Worth watching

Susan Boyle sings on "Britain's Got Talent"

(thanks, richard)

Gifts

My son just brought me a scruffy little dandilion flower.

He may as well have brought me the universe.

That Elusive More

In honor of my first visit to a UU congregation this Sunday, I'm linking you to a column by our friendly UU acquaintance Doug Muder. The column contains some of his thoughts about the "depth" of UUism, something I've been wondering about.

A Sad Dilemma

Maybe you can help.

The Sea of Faith

So, all you loyal Philosophy Bites podcast listeners ... what did you think of this one?

Don Cupitt on Non-Realism about God

I think I feel about Cupitt like I feel about other liberal theologians ... the deconstruction is spot on, but the reconstruction falls kind of flat. "God is life?" Meh.

What I'm going to do about those "God" billboards

Living in West Texas, I endure my fair share of church talk. Maybe more than my fair share. It's dry out here, but I float along quite pleasantly in a sea of "thank the Lord" and "Lord willing" and "God's in control" and "whatever the Lord puts on your heart". The problem is compounded by the fact that I work for a business that leans fairly heavily -- and, in the annual Christmas prayer, fairly explicitly -- toward jingoism.

But the church talk doesn't bother me all that much, because I figure that the proliferation of theologically loaded statements is more a cultural phenomenon than a theological one. When brother Fred Wilson tells me, "I just prayed about it, and the very next day I found my keys / recovered from cancer / turned straight / won the lottery", I can usually just smile and nod, translating his statement into something more theologically innocuous ... like, "Hooray!"

But the continual barrage of "God" billboards grates on my nerves. You know the billboards I'm talking about: white text on a black background, with a single witty saying attributed to "- God". Here are some actual pictures:





More generally, the problem that these billboards have is what I'd like to start calling the "naked theological statement". It's the more sinister partner of the "theologically loaded statement" that I mention above. Whereas the theologically loaded statement is a statement carrying some other message but has an implicitly theological rider ("Lord willin' and the creek don't rise"), the naked theological statement is an explicitly theological statement presented with almost no surrounding context. And the God billboards aren't the only bearers of naked theological statements ... no, indeed, church signs have served up similar fare for years.

A big part of my difficulty with nakedly theological signs is that they set up this painful resonance between the postmodern and modern sides of my psyche. When I read a sign like the ones above, my modern side immediately starts screaming about the various faults of the doctrines that the billboards imply. My postmodern side perks up in response, and the whole thing goes something like this:

MODERN: (muttering) ... think it's hot here ... say what? That billboard we just passed, what did it say?

POSTMOD: It said, "You think it's hot here?"

MOD: "hyphen God?"

POSTMOD: Well, yes, but I would have said "dash God".

MOD: You would have been wrong.

POSTMOD: Mm. (nods sagely)

MOD: (thinks) So are they really suggesting that God sends people to hell where they burn in fire for all eternity?

POSTMOD: Seems like they're saying something like that.

MOD: What trash. If they ever ... wait, what? Did you see that? What did that church sign say?

POSTMOD: Something like, "Big bang theory, you've got to be kidding."

MOD: With a comma up front? As if they were telling the big bang theory it must be kidding?

POSTMOD: If you read it according to standard rules for grammar and punctuation, then yes, I guess that's what it says.

MOD: Do these people live in caves?

POSTMOD: Obviously?

MOD: (drives a minute in silence) The thing that really gets me is how utterly inconsistent these people's theologies must be. I mean, how can you say God is good and also say that God tortures people with fire for all eternity? A three-year-old could see the contradictions with that. It's utterly inane.

POSTMOD: Consistency isn't everything. These sorts of doctrines have endured for quite a long time, so apparently people find them helpful. Maybe people accumulate the set of doctrines that they find most helpful in their lives, rather than the ones that offer the most internal consistency.

MOD: They should accumulate the doctrines that best reflect what actually happens in the real world, not the ones that make them happy. Some statements about God are just false and we have an obligation to say that they're false.

POSTMOD: Happiness is kind of a low bar to set. Even then, I'm not sure we can do any better than saying, "these are the doctrines that tend to help people live good lives".

MOD: But surely certain propositions about God are more true than others! "God is Love" and "God is hate" can't say equally true things about God, can they? And it seems like the propositions that are more accurate would tend to be the ones that were the most helpful.

POSTMOD: I'm not sure. The truth of any statement has to be judged inside a particular worldview, maybe inside a particular person. So it might be that a set of questionable statements about God actually produced in a given person's mind a more accurate image of God than a set of solid, internally consistent statements.

MOD: Well then what about "healthy"? Surely we can pick out a few doctrines that seem to have turned out to be pretty harmful. Surely we can take, say, anti-semitic interpretations of the New Testament and say, "those are bad"?

POSTMOD: Probably. But it's not like you're discussing an entire theology here, or even an entire person. You're dealing with a single, naked statement -- maybe a proposition, maybe not -- with almost no context.

MOD: So how should we discourage bad theology propagated via church signs?

POSTMOD: (wicked chuckle)



No!

No no! I really want to do this, but it is not the right way! Likewise, it isn't going to do much good to put up a "good theology" billboard across from each "bad theology" billboard. Symmetrical responses just won't work, if only because the answer to a naked theological statement has to be a complicated, embodied theological experience, the sort of thing that can't be put on a billboard or bumper sticker. We have to find a powerful asymmetrical response, something subversive that undermines the naked theologians before they even know what's going on. Something complex, like ... art.

As I was researching this topic, by which I mean having lunch with a friend, he mentioned the distinction between what he perceived to be "good" Christian art and what he thought of as "bad" Christian art. One of the characteristics of good Christian art is its complexity and ambiguity; its ability to be interpreted in a number of different ways, and its respect for the viewer's capability to create meaning. Bad Christian art, on the other hand, is bumper-sticker art, saccharine and simple, intended only to propagandize and evangelize.

I hope that this same paradigm works for theological messages as well: that complicated, narrative things are the right tools to counteract bad pop theology. So where the naked theologians sell bumper-stickers, I will tell stories. Where they sell rear-bumper Jesus fish, I will share paintings, sculptures and films. And where they give sound bites, I will ask people to come in, sit down, and share a meal.

MOD: That's so crazy.

POSTMOD: It just might work.

Proposition 8

The musical.

Not my blog

But it may turn out to be entertaining.

Will Blog for Food

Update: Nevermind.

Some Obama Things

In case you hadn't heard, Obama seems to have enough delegates to claim the Democratic presidental nomination. Yay. =)

Also a friend sent me a link to this deep and meaningful article about why Obama isn't a Christian. My immediate reaction is that it's fine and good if Cal Thomas wants to say Obama isn't a Christian, so long as he notices that he's not a Christian either, since he obviously worships the Bible instead of ... y'know ... God.