Category: Metaphysics

As discussed in the previous essays, Trump and some of his followers claimed that God intervened to save Trump from being killed. If this is true, then it would follow that God decided to let one person die and two others get critically injured when He could have intervened. This raises the classic problem of evil, a stock Atheism 101 argument.

The simple version of the argument is that if God is all good, all powerful and all knowing, then there should be no evil. But there is evil, so God does not exist. A slightly more sophisticated version concludes that either God does not exist, or He is lacking in at least one of those three attributes. Much more sophisticated versions consider, in depth, how to reconcile God’s qualities with the existence of evil. I will look at each of these three attributes and how they might be reconciled with evil.

Philosophers usually present God as being omnipotent, but there is debate about what it means to be all powerful. The famous question of whether God can create a rock He cannot lift is part of this discussion. Some philosophers, the Intellectualists, claim that God’s intellect is his primary quality and that He either will not or cannot do the impossible. On this view, God can do anything that is possible, but His omnipotence is thus limited.  For example, God cannot make a triangle that has 4 sides. Those accepting this view often try to use this logical limit to solve the problem of evil. For example, God cannot create a perfect world and hence the world must be imperfect. One version of this reasoning points out that if God created a second perfect being, that being would also be God. But there cannot be two perfect beings (because each being would lack what the other has and for various other reasons) and this is why there can only be one God and why the world must be imperfect. On this view, evil (imperfection) is a necessary part of the world and that is why God saved Trump but lets other people die. The usual response to this is to point out that the world is worse than imperfect, and God could make things better while the world remained imperfect.

People also try to explain evil by limiting God’s powers in other ways. A classic move is to embrace a form of polytheism and attribute evil to the Devil. But this requires accepting that God and the Devil are comparable in power or coming up with some explanation as to why God lets the Devil cause evil. Another classic gambit is to invoke free will and use that to explain human caused evil. Free will limits God’s power and that is how evil can occur. The challenge is explaining how free will works and then explaining why God could not allow free will but mitigate the evil it is alleged to cause. Others also speak of God’s plan; that the evil that occurs is necessary for His plan. This also postulates a limit on God’s power, since He cannot reach His goal without allowing evil.

 Reducing God’s power in various ways to explain evil is an option that can solve the problem of evil, but it comes with the obvious cost of diminishing God. On this view, God could save Trump, but because of whatever limits His omnipotence, He could not have prevented the other people from being shot.

There are other philosophers, the Voluntarists, who claim that God’s will is supreme and He can will anything, even the impossible. This means the logically impossible and not just things that are very difficult. For example, God could will that triangles have 4 sides while still being triangle. It is not that we would call squares triangles, it is that the necessarily three-sided figure would be four-sided but still a triangle. He could also make all contradictions true and all tautologies false. He could make it so that if A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, then A is smaller than C. None of this makes any sense to our mortal minds, but a God that can do the impossible can do all that and infinitely more impossible things. It might initially seem that being a Voluntarist would make it more difficult to solve the problem of evil. After all, the Voluntarist would have to accept that God could create a perfect world. But one consequence of God being all powerful in this sense is that He also defines morality, so He can make anything good or evil, even if it made no sense to us. This moral view is called divine command theory, on this view what God commands is good and what He forbids is evil. People who like divine command theory tend to think that God commands what they themselves want and forbids what they dislike, but that is not how the theory works. God could, at any moment, chose anything to be good or bad and He can obviously lie about it. So, for all we know, God just decided that being a woke transgender vegan advocate of renewable energy is the very best thing to be. Or maybe it was that way all along. Given that God can change logic and truth at will, our reason is useless in sorting any of this out. Or anything at all, since God’s will also applies to physics, chemistry and so on.  On the plus side, the problem of evil is solved: whatever God wills is good, so everything that happens is good. On the minus side, reason is useless. On this view, God saved Trump, killed one person and let two people be critically injured. But maybe this is all good? We do not and cannot know. While most thinkers focus on God’s power, His knowledge can also be relevant to the problem.

As with God being all powerful, philosophers debate what it means for God to be all knowing. Does this mean that God has all possible knowledge or that He even has impossible knowledge? In terms of the problem of evil, it could be argued that evil occurs because God does not know that it is occurring. On this view, perhaps God suddenly knew that Trump was in danger and acted just in time to save him. As might be guessed, free will could also figure in here: because humans have free will, God does not know what we might do. So, God did not know that the shooter was going to shoot until he started shooting. God will also need to require time to gain knowledge and act on it, otherwise He could just intervene instantly, which would raise the question of why He did not act. While claiming that God has epistemic limitation would explain evil, it does create its own problems in terms of diminishing God and making prophecy more difficult to explain.

The easiest solution to the problem of evil is to abandon the idea that God is all good. The two usual options are to simply reject that God is all good or to argue that our conceptions of good and evil are wrong. Rejecting that God is all good, that evil also comes from God, solves the problem. Evil exists because God is not all good. For Trump’s followers, God did a good thing in saving Trump but letting the other people get shot is not a problem because God does or allows evil as well.

If it is argued that our conceptions of good and evil are wrong, then the problem is solved because we are wrong about there being any evil. On this view, everything that happens is good, but we might not realize this. This is sometimes explained in terms of God’s plan (which ties back to limiting God’s power) or the big picture argument. The big picture argument often uses an analogy to looking at a beautiful painting by pressing it against your face. It will look awful. But if you move back from the painting, you will see its beauty. So, while the person dying at Trump’s event seems bad, it would be seen as good once one sees the big picture. This view might also involve accepting that God has a limit on His power since His big picture must apparently be made with a lot of events that seem evil up close. This approach is appealing to many since it explains away any evil that occurs, which is the solution most look for.

 

Trump and some of his followers are claiming that he survived the shooting because of divine intervention. Some even claim that this proves he is chosen by God. In the previous essay I looked at the metaphysics of God’s causal relation with the world in general terms. In this essay, I will focus on the metaphysics of God protecting chosen people.

For some, divine protection is described in terms of the armor of God. While this is not literal magical armor (like +3 plate), it is an appealing way to describe divine protection. While there are various theological views on this matter, my concern is with the metaphysics of how God’s armor might protect those chosen to wear it, such as Trump (according to some of his followers). In more general terms, this is an exploration of divine protection.

Throughout human history people have told stories of gods offering supernatural protection to mortals. A well-known example is when the goddess Thetis magically protected her son Achilles. This protection was imperfect, and Achilles was slain at the battle of Troy. Prior to the concept of a perfect monotheistic God, the gods of the polytheistic faiths were usually limited in their powers and subject to opposition from other supernatural beings (and even mortals). They were not omniscient or omnipotent and they tended to be portrayed as very powerful human-like beings, complete with human flaws. So, if a god protected a mortal (such as a child, spouse or favored one) this protection could be overcome or defeated, and it would make sense for a protected mortal to still be cautious. But things are rather different with God.

On the usual philosophical conception of God, God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. He is sometimes presented as having character defects, such as being jealous or wrathful (although some people see these as virtues and not vices). But being all knowing, God would be aware of any threat to those He has chosen to protect. Being all powerful, there is no threat that God could not neutralize. Being all good, God would want to protect His chosen from evil. As such, if Trump is wearing God’s armor, then he would seem to be immune to all harm. After all, God knows of every threat to Trump and can prevent them all. He presumably also wants to prevent them, given that it is claimed that He intervened to save Trump because Trump is chosen, and God has a purpose for him. Conveniently, this provides the basis for an empirical test for whether Trump is chosen or whether God has a purpose for him that will ensure divine protection. If Trump has God’s protection, then Trump should be unkillable until he fulfils God’s purpose. Since God is all powerful, Trump could open the door of his jet at 10,000 feet and leap out or crash it into a mountain and be fine. He could go into the lion exhibit at a zoo and hug the lions and they would be like kittens. He could drink a gallon of bleach and it would be like drinking Diet Coke and so on. After all, keeping Trump alive through all this would not even be inconvenient for an omnipotent being. But, of course, Trump will do none of these things and his followers would probably be angry at my proposed test.

As criticisms, some might say that to put divine protection to the test would be arrogant and disrespectful to God. It would be like Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane doing something intentionally dangerous to prove that Superman is protecting them. While this does have some appeal, it does seem to be a way of avoiding testing the claim of God’s protection under the pretense of it being disrespectful. After all, God presumably would not get pissed off and just decide to let Trump die if Trump has a purpose to God and is Chosen. But maybe God would do just that, so those protected by God must take care to remain protected. That is, God could decide to withdraw His protection if He is disrespected. But if God could pick a new chosen one and replace Trump, then Trump is not very special. Fortunately, there are tests that do not require that Trump try to harm himself.

If Trump is protected by God’s armor and God will, for example, deflect bullets away from him, then Trump does not need mortal protectors. If Superman is guarding Lois Lane, she does not need a cop with a gun to protect her. If Trump and his followers truly believe that God is protecting Trump, then he should forgo the protection of the Secret Service and law enforcement. These mortals are not all knowing or all powerful, so they provide infinitely inferior protection. And adding them to God’s armor would do nothing and they cannot make Trump any safer. So, he could save a lot of taxpayer money and forgo the protection.

Trump’s followers could argue that this would, once again, be arrogant and disrespectful to God. But that is absurd, since insisting on the protection of mortals when one has divine protection would be what would insult God. Trump’s followers might try to argue that God’s protection is fallible, which would require accepting a limited and fallible God. They could also argue that someone trying to harm Trump might be aided by the devil and hence Trump needs the mortal protection. There are two obvious problems with the devil gambit. One is that the devil cannot do anything that God does not allow, unless God is not omniscient (so the devil can be sneaky) or not omnipotent (so the devil can overpower God). The other is that if the devil can beat God, he can easily beat any mortal guardians of Trump. So, he and his followers face the dilemma of rejecting protection or admitting that God’s protection is not adequate.

Trump and his followers do have one good argument they could use, and this is to argue that the protection needs to be present not for Trump but for all the unfortunate souls who God does not care about. Those people can, as we have seen, be wounded or killed and God will not do anything to save them. While this does have some appeal, this would entail that the approach at Trump events would need to change; they should ignore any threats aimed directly at Trump and focus entirely on protecting everyone else. In fact, it would be best for Trump to be on stage alone, with clear paths in front of and behind him. As God will save Trump, this will make it less likely that divinely deflected bullets will kill or injure bystanders.

One might be wondering what his followers would think if Trump was killed. I suspect that it would be claimed that this was God’s plan and purpose, perhaps to allow J.D. Vance to become president. From a practical standpoint, there is probably nothing that would disprove beliefs about God’s plans, who He has chosen or what His purpose might be. Since Trump survived the attack (by someone believed to have really bad aim), this was attributed to divine intervention. If Trump gets killed or dies, this would presumably also be attributed to God’s plan.

 

Trump and some of his followers are claiming that he survived the shooting because of divine intervention. Some of his followers are also taking this as evidence that God has chosen him. In the previous essay in this series about the epistemic issue, I argued that there is no evidence of divine intervention. The gist of this argument is that explaining Trump’s survival does not require a divine element because the fact that shooters can miss their target suffices. I now turn to the metaphysics of divine intervention.

Many philosophers have attempted to discern the nature of God and how He interacts with the world. Some, like Spinoza, claim that there is no chance and no choice in the world. Each event that occurs must occur and could not be otherwise. God does what He does because He is what He is and He cannot do otherwise. On this sort of view the world is deterministic.

While Leibniz rejects Spinoza’s pantheism (that everything is God and God is everything), he also embraces a metaphysics devoid of chance. On his view, God chooses to create the best of all possible worlds because He is good. He knows which world is best and has the power to make it so. God also decides what people will exist in this best of all possible worlds. Interestingly, everything a person will think, feel, do and experience is already part of them—their existence will unfold in accord with this. After all, this must unfold as the best of all possible worlds.

While a somewhat crude analogy, all things and people are running their pre-written scripts, and they operate without chance or choice. On these sorts of deterministic (or pre-determined) views, then no divine intervention was needed to save Trump. There was no more chance of him dying than there is for a triangle to have twelve sides. It can, of course, be argued that God did save Trump. On this view, that would be true, but there would be nothing special about Trump in this regard since God is the cause of everything that occurs. So, he “saved” Trump, but also killed Corey Comperatore. Leibniz would not say that Trump living and Corey Comperatore dying were the best individual outcomes, since he argues that the best of all possible worlds is different from a world in which everything is the best. As such, Trump living is part of the best of all possible worlds, but it must be noted that Hitler, Stalin, earthquakes, tuberculosis, cancer and mosquitoes are also part of the best of all possible worlds. The point is that just because something occurred or exists in the best of all possible worlds it does not follow that it is therefore the best. This causal model of the world does entail that whatever occurs is caused by God. While this entails that God is the cause of all that is good, it also seems to entail He is on the hook for all the evil, which I’ll discuss in that essay.

George Berkeley, in addition to owning slaves, tried to defeat the atheists and deists with his metaphysics. One of his concerns about deism is that it does not give God much of a role in the world. On one form of deism, God is seen as creating a clockwork world and then walking away. On this sort of view, while God created the world in which Trump survived, God did not intervene to save Trump; it was just the machinery of reality operating like clockwork. Berkeley worried that this conception of God was a threat to piety and morality, so he had a different notion of God.

Berkeley’s conception of God is that He must be constantly active in the world. Rather than having a clockwork world that takes care of itself, Berkeley’s world is “manually operated” by God. For him, God “watches over our conduct and takes care of our minutest actions and designs” and “directs incessantly in a most evident and sensible manner.” Berkely also holds that this conception of God allows for miracles to be easily explained: all natural events are directly caused by God so He can deviate from the usual order as He wills, which is something Spinoza and Leibniz reject.

On Berkeley’s conception of God, then God did save Trump. But this conception of God entails that God has also saved everyone in every situation in which they did not die, which would make Trump just one among billions and nothing special. But one could argue, Trump not dying was a miracle because it deviated “from the usual order.” The challenge would be to prove this deviation, since people surviving being shot at because the shooter fails to score a fatal hit happens relatively often. One the downside, while this view does allow one to argue that God saved Trump, this view also entails that God killed everyone who has died or at least let them die. So, to claim that God saved Trump is to claim that God killed Corey Comperatore. While Berkeley believed that his “hands on” God solved various problems for his theory, this conception of God leads into the problem of evil. After all, God could have saved everyone at the Trump event but did not.

Berkeley’s conception of God seems to be close to how those who claim God saved Trump might think of God. After all, their claim is that God had to intervene to save Trump and that it was a miracle because, one must infer, God had to “deviate from the usual order.” This seems to entail that God chose to leave the “usual order” in place for everyone else and hence chose to allow one person to die and others to be badly injured. This entails that God could always intervene, but usually choses to not do so. This leads to the moral aspect of the issue, which I will examine in the  essay on the problem of evil

 

While philosophers and religious thinkers have taken past lives seriously, it is usually assumed that serious scientists are happy to leave them to it. But the University of Virginia School of Medicine has applied the scientific method to this matter and has found interesting evidence that cannot be dismissed out of hand. Recently, the Washington Post did a thoughtful piece on this subject, looking at the evidence in a critical but balanced manner.

The method of testing the possibility of a past life, or at least the possession of memories from before a person was born goes back at least to Socrates. In the Meno, Socrates endeavors to argue for his doctrine of recollection. He claims that knowledge of such things as geometry and the Forms are acquired by the soul before it is embodied. People forget that they have this knowledge, but it can be restored by philosophical discussion. This, as I tell my students, can be seen as like losing files on your PC due to some corruption and then restoring them with a utility.

In the dialogue, Socrates walks Meno’s slave through a geometric exercise Because, according to Socrates, the slave did not learn geometry in this life, he must have learned it before he was born—while his soul was communing with the forms.

This, then, is the test for past lives: if a person has knowledge of a past life that they could not have acquired in this life, then that counts as evidence for a past life. Other factors, such as behavioral changes, can also serve as evidence. The Washington Post article does provide examples of cases that seem to provide evidence of such knowledge and behavior. Perhaps the best-known case is that of James Leininger. Dr. Jim Tucker provides a detailed analysis of the evidence and considers alternative explanations.

Going back to Socrates, critics respond to his argument by claiming he guided the slave through the exercise and is thus supplying the knowledge in a way that does not require any prior existence. The same concern applies to evidence of past lives: a person could be asked leading or guiding questions that make it appear that they have such knowledge. This is not to accuse people of deceit; this could happen without any such intention. But, of course, fraud is also a matter of concern. The credible investigations consider both these possibilities, and they should be given due consideration. As Hume said about miracles, we know that people lie and that can often be the most plausible explanation. Less harshly, we also know that people can unintentionally ask leading and guiding questions while we don’t know if people have past lives. So that explanation is, by default, the favored explanation until it is overturned.

Another obvious concern is that with the internet, a child could learn information that they present in a way that might seem like they are recalling a past life. Children also often pretend they are other people, be it a type of person or a specific person. The challenge is determining whether the child could have plausibly found the information and whether the behavior that seems to indicate a different personality is a matter of play or something else. By Occam’s Razor, the explanations that do not require metaphysical commitments have an initial advantage. But there are certainly metaphysical matters to consider.

Socrates presents what could be considered the standard version of reincarnation: a person is a soul, and the soul has a means of storing memories across lives. When a soul is reborn, it (might) recall some of these memories. While Socrates focused on things like the Forms, these could be mundane memories from a past life. As there are many competing accounts of the metaphysics of personhood, memory, and identity, these would all need to be considered and assessed. For example, Hume dispenses with the soul in favor of the idea that the self is a bundle of perceptions (before he concludes this matter is just a dispute over grammar). Memories are just stored perceptions, and these presumably could end up being part of a new person (or a continuation of the old).

John Locke explicitly talks about consciousness persisting or not doing so, so his theory would allow for the possibility of reincarnation. Buddhism also has a metaphysics that allows for reincarnation, albeit in a way that involves no self.

Interestingly, Dr. Tucker’s paper presents “thought bundles” or “thought pools” as possible explanations of these past life memories. The idea is that a living person connects to these bundles or pools and somehow taps the information in them. In terms of a metaphysical foundation, these could be Hume’s bundles or perhaps the remnants of a Lockean consciousness. These bundles or pools do raise many questions, such as what they are, how they would persist and how a person would access them. That said, the human brain is a known storage system for such information, and we routinely transfer information—you are experiencing this right now as you read this. But due skepticism is wise here and the idea of thought bundles existing like lost smartphones and being accessed by a mental 5G is one that should only be accepted based on adequate evidence. After all, this would seem to require that people have a form of psionics that allows them to access such information. While not impossible, since we know information can be transmitted, there does not seem to be much credible evidence for this.

In closing, as there is some credible evidence of this sort of special knowledge and metaphysical theories advanced by philosophers that would allow past lives, then this matter is worthy of due consideration.

 

While lab-grown meat is a staple chow in science fiction, researchers are working hard to make it a commercially viable product. While there are many controversial aspects to lab grown meat, one matter of dispute is whether it is meat.

As lab-grown meat startups arose, the beef industry rushed to argue that lab-grown meat should not be labeled as meat. Interestingly, legal definitions of food types do not need to correspond to ways chemists or nutritionists would define them. For example, since high fructose corn syrup has a bad reputation among consumers, the industry tried to get the name changed to “corn sugar.” To the chemist and nutritionist, high fructose corn syrup is a sugar; but the sugar industry rejects this definition—they presumably see a financial advantage in fighting this legal label. While the legal wrangling over how foods should be categorized can be interesting, it does not solve the problem of, metaphysically, what it is to be meat. This is because the legal answer is easy and obvious: it is whatever the law says, and this need have no rational foundation at all. My concern, as a philosopher, is with the issue of whether lab-grown meat is real meat.

While philosophers are often accused of lacking common sense, some philosophers think this is where philosophy should begin. That is, when trying to define what something is, a good starting point is where we already are in terms of common sense. J.S. Mill took this approach in his discussion of poetry, electing to start with the generally accepted view of poetry and working from there. This seems to be a sensible approach and will be applied to the matter of meat.

The common-sense definition of “meat” is that it is the edible flesh of an animal, most commonly the muscle tissue. While people do refer to the kernel of a nut as “nut meat”, common sense divides this sort of meat from animal meats. To illustrate, a vegan will not say, “I do not eat coconut because that is meat.” But a vegan would refuse to eat a turkey leg—because that is the meat they do not eat. As such, I will stick with animal-based meats and ignore the other uses of the term “meat.” This does mean that I am rejecting all plant-based meats. They are not, on the face of it, real meat.

On the face of it, synthetic meat would not seem to meet the common-sense definition. It is not cut from an animal since it is grown in a vat (or whatever). Thus, it would fail to be meat. On this view, it is the origin of the meat that defines it as meat. At this point, one could raise a weird sci-fi scenario: what if scientists created an animal whose body also included vegetable matter, such as potatoes growing as part of a genetically modified cow? The potatoes would be part of the animal, but they would not seem to be meat. As such, the composition of the material also matters and to be meat something must have the right composition (typically muscle tissue). On this view, composition would be a necessary condition for being meat (so cow-potatoes would not be meat). But composition would not be a sufficient condition. On this view, synthetic meat that was not cut from an animal would not be meat. While this quick and easy solution is appealing, it does not seem to be the final word.

Suppose that a cut of muscles cells is taken from a cow. This would obviously be a steak. Now suppose these meat cells were cultivated in a lab and grown into a massive slab. These cells originated from steak and are the same. As such, it would seem to be hard to claim the slab is not meat. To us an analogy, if someone took a plant cutting and grew a slab of the plant cells in the lab, it would seem undeniable that the slab would be plant. The same should also apply to meat.

There are two replies to this analogy. One is to argue that plants lack the individuality of animals and hence plant material works differently from meat. If potato was grown as a slab in the lab, it would still be potato. But meat must come from an individual animal, or it is not meat. The second reply is that the “plant” slab is not plant (to use “plant” like “meat”) since it is not coming from a plant. A slab grown from potato cells is not a potato plant and hence is not plant.

The counter to these replies is to focus on the question of what the discernible difference would be between the slabs and the plants and animals. Obviously enough, looking at them in the lab would be a dead giveaway, but that would be an unfair comparison. After all, a living cow does not look like a steak. A fair comparison would be to put a steak cut from a cow against a synthetic steak in a series of tests. Some would relate to food, such as taste testing. Some would be chemical and genetic, to see what the material is. Naturally, the tests would have to avoid being rigged. So, a test that was aimed only at telling if the meat was grown in an animal would be an example of a rigged test. If synthetic meat passed these test (it tastes like meat, has the texture of meat, looks like meat, has the amino acids of meat and so on), then it would be hard to deny that it is meat.

So far, I have only been discussing synthetic meat that can trace its origin back to non-controversial meat. But there is also the problem of completely synthetic meat. This is meat that is completely synthetic and has no causal chain linking it back to an actual animal. In the ideal, it would be chemically engineered protein that duplicates the qualities of meat. To use a science fiction example, think of the replicator from Star Trek. This fictional machine could create a perfect steak by assembling it from raw materials, no cow involved. Unless someone insists that an animal must die (or at least be cut) for meat to be meat, it would be difficult to argue that replicator meat or properly engineered protein would not be meat. After all, unless one knew that it did not come from an animal, it would pass all the empirical tests for being meat.

This does point to the obvious counter—someone could draw a line and insist that meat must, by definition, come directly from an animal to be meat. Anything else could be meat-like but would need to be distinguished from meat. This, of course, nicely mirrors what Locke said in the context of personal identity regarding the use of words, “And indeed every one will always have a liberty to speak as he pleases, and to apply what articulate sounds to what ideas he thinks fit, and change them as often as he pleases.” As such, the problem of meat could be solved by having multiple terms for various meat and meat-like things. Or we could follow the lead of Hume and conclude that “…all the nice and subtle questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties.” In this case, “meat” is merely a matter of language, which is to say that the problem remains unsolved