Correspondence with JC Beall - the absurdity of life without God

In May 2021 I sent an email to JC Beall asking him if he had found any contradictions within atheism. I gave the following argument as a suggestion:

1) Seeking truth is the most important thing I could do.

2) Seeking truth is about reconciling myself to reality.

3) Therefore, reconciling myself to reality is the most important thing I could do.

4) Ultimate reality is nothingness.

5) Therefore, reconciling myself to reality is to reconcile myself to nothingness.

6) Therefore, the most important thing I could do is reconcile myself to nothingness.

7) Therefore, the most important thing I could do is choose death.

And yet atheists choose life. Contradiction!

This is similar to the (alleged) contradiction I talked about in my post on Yujin Nagasawa's new book. That (alleged) contradiction says that atheists must be optimists given their choosing to live, and yet their worldview entails pessimism. I argued that this argument doesn't work because an atheist can be optimist in a narrow sense (e.g., I am optimistic that I can live a life that is worth living) while pessimistic in a broad sense (e.g., I am pessimistic about the fundamental goodness of life). It seems perfectly reasonable for someone to choose to live when their life has more flourishing than suffering, and this distinction between kinds of pessimism helps explain that intuition in combination with the intuition that life is fundamentally tragic (= not fundamentally good) on naturalism.

Anyway, back to the email. I contrasted the above with the following Christian equivalent:

1) Seeking truth is the most important thing I could do.

2) Seeking truth is about reconciling myself to reality.

3) Therefore, reconciling myself to reality is the most important thing I could do.

4) Ultimate reality is God.

5) Therefore, reconciling myself to reality is to reconcile myself to God.

6) Therefore, the most important thing I could do is reconcile myself to God.

7) Therefore, the most important thing I could do is put my faith in Jesus and thereby allow Jesus to reconcile me to God.

JC Beall responded and did not answer my question as to whether there are any contradictions out there plaguing atheists. He just said my argument is interesting, he hadn't heard it before, and he suspects the atheist would deny step 4, which I also thought was the weakest step.

A couple immediate notes:

Step 5 can be deleted from both arguments for concision.

"Ultimate reality" is such an unhelpful phrase. I think I was thinking about what you will eventually run into. On Christianity, you will ultimately run into God, and you will have to answer to God. On naturalism, you will ultimately run into... an existential blank; pure nothingness. So it's about your ultimate fate. But this calls for some heavy modifications:

1) My ultimate fate is the most important guide to my life.

2) My ultimate fate is an existential blank (or: being judged by God).

3) Therefore, the existential blank (or: being judged by God) is the most important guide to my life.

I think this is pretty agreeable; I've long suspected that most people live as if this is their one life on earth and then that's it. And that explains the great urgency by which most people live their lives. You gotta get while the getting is good. And this also explains the religious urgency to get right with God before it's too late.

But what follows from this? It's not clear what having the existential blank as your guide entails. It's not clear at all that this entails despair or a rational obligation to choose death. In fact it might entail the opposite: you better do as much good in the world as you can while you still have time. The Christian urgency to do good is not because there's a shortage of time—there's an afterlife full of the stuff—but because you want to be in God's favor (think of the Parable of the Talents). So both worldviews instill in their adherents an urgency to do as much good as possible with their mortal life.

If the existential blank entailed that life was not worth living, then yes there would be a problem. But why think that? The fact all lives eventually cease to exist forever does not entail that all lives are bad. It does entail that all lives are not fundamentally good, and therefore life is fundamentally tragic (and especially disappointing to those who were brought up believing in eternal life), but tragic lives are worth living as long as their flourishing outweighs their suffering.

And so the absurdity of life without God argument, contra my younger self, fails.

***

The word "fundamental" might cause problems. Here's a way to cash out the surrounding terminology without it:

Good life = a life worth living; a life with more flourishing than suffering.

Bad life = a life not worth living; a life with less flourishing than suffering.

Mixed life = a life as much worth living as not; a life with equal flourishing and suffering.

Good world = a world in which everyone is guaranteed to live a good life.

Bad world = a world in which everyone is guaranteed to live a bad life.

Neutral world = a world in which there is no guarantee whether your life will be good or bad.

We can imagine a broad spectrum of good lives where some are vastly better than others, and we can imagine a broad spectrum of good worlds where some guarantee vastly better lives than others.

e.g., Compare a life that features periods of despair where suffering outweighs flourishing, but the life as a whole has greater total flourishing (say, a soldier who goes through hell in WW1 but returns home and lives an overall good life) to a life where flourishing always outweighs suffering.

We can also imagine different types of neutral worlds. For example, there's obviously the actual world, but then we can imagine the traditional Christian afterlife where you have some people in heaven and some in hell.

It doesn't seem fitting for a perfect being to create a neutral world over a good world, so we have here another intuition against infernalism.

The Bundle Theory of Objects - Solving the Ship of Theseus

"Many philosophers right through to today have worried about the concept of thing; we can enumerate all the properties of a thing, they have thought, but how should we understand the thing that has the properties? One popular answer to this says that no separate thing has the properties, because things are bundles of properties, nothing more. In one version of this theory, a thing is a bundle of universals; in a different version—less fraught with difficulties—it is a bundle of property-instances."

-Jonathan Bennett ("What Events Are", 2002)

Part 1: Objects as social constructs - the core idea

• I will refer to this view as “bundle theory.”
• Properties exist objectively.
• Properties are the only things that exist.
• Objects reduce to their properties.
• We can eliminate from our ontology that which reduces to something more fundamental.
• Therefore, we can eliminate objects from our ontology.
• Therefore, there is a real sense in which objects do not exist. Objects do not exist above and beyond the properties they denote.
• However, there is a real sense in which objects do exist: the properties objects denote are real (with the exception of fictional objects, which do not denote real properties or real combinations of properties).
• Bundle theory is similar to mereological nihilism in that tables, chairs, and buildings do not exist in and of themselves. See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/material-constitution/
• However, bundle theory conserves the common sense idea that tables, chairs, and buildings are real, because the properties denoted by those words are real. Mereological nihilism doesn't have access to real properties.
• Another difference is that bundle theory would not say simples exist, unless we understand simples to be properties.
• So bundle theory has the best of both worlds: the simplicity of mereological nihilism and the dissolving of object-based puzzles by eliminating objects, and yet there is a very real sense in which tables, chairs, and buildings do exist.
• I’m not sure whether this view is heading towards trope theory. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tropes/
• Are these bundles of universals or property-instances? I'm not sure, but in any case I don't see the need to use the word 'trope' when the distinction between 'property' and 'universal' is right there. If I wanted to talk about abstract particulars I would just use 'property' and if I wanted to talk about abstract universals I would use 'universal.' But on bundle theory properties are not always abstract.
• What it means to exist is to be a real property. Real properties are those properties we cannot dispense with due to our “bumping” into them through observation, empirical investigation, or a priori apprehension.
• So we discover what properties exist by 1) A priori methods like logic and conceptual grasping (by our linguistic, semantic faculties), and by 2) A posteriori methods of empirical observation and scientific experiment.
• For example, I understand the difference between wanting cake or ice cream and wanting cake and ice cream. I see that ‘or’ and ‘and’ are two different concepts. So these are two different properties, the property of disjunction versus the property of conjunction. I am committed to these properties not due to science, but due to the a priori conceptual grasping of ‘and’ versus ‘or.’
• Contrast that with the property of being ductile. This is a property of materials to be stretched out without breaking. Copper is highly ductile, making it suitable for fashioning into wire. This is a property that cannot be grasped purely by semantic ability; one must observe the behavior of materials.
• Objects are social constructs, semi-arbitrary carve-outs of properties.
• When a spider crawls on my guitar, it doesn’t perceive the guitar as a guitar. Guitars are meaningful to us by what they represent. And when a spider crawls into a box, it probably makes no distinction between the box and the floor the box rests on. But we do make this distinction. We grow up and learn what the objects are by our parents and community. Canons and traditions form around those objects that are meaningful to us and we operate within those traditions. Birds, cats, lizards, and what have you, do not carve out properties in the way we do because they have different interests and different faculties. So what’s a piano or a bookcase or a dollar bill to us is just some random object to other creatures.
• Properties just so happen to concatenate and coalesce and form limited boundaries of shape and size, making it effortless for us (those of us who have the faculty of sight) to perceive those boundaries and name those distinct patches of properties. In fact we must do this, as otherwise we would not be able to tell apart, or understand, or communicate among ourselves one relevant bundle of properties from another.
• It is presumably exactly sight’s ability to give us access to the properties of the world, thereby helping us navigate it and survive, that explains how we evolved it. Of course, because our survival is a highly specific goal that comes with highly specific tasks and interests, we will find certain bundles of properties of greater or lesser interest to us and we will label those bundles accordingly.

Part 2: Testing the theory

• Does the number 2 exist? Yes, in the sense that there is the property of being prime and being even (and being one less than three, two less than four, and so on), and 2 is the set of those properties. Those properties exist; we bump into them.
• Usually, we discover properties through empirical methods of observation and science. But mathematical properties are discovered through reason itself (perhaps some mathematical properties are understood through the aid of empirical observation, such as counting objects for children).
• Does Pegasus exist? To answer that we have to look at the properties of Pegasus and ask ourselves if those properties exist. Do the combination of properties that make up a horse exist? Yes, which is why we have the word 'horse.' Do the combination of properties that make up wings exist? Yes, which is why we have the word 'wing.' Do winged horses exist? No, there is no empirical evidence for that object that includes both the properties that go into being a horse (or something that looks just like a horse but is technically a different animal) as well as the property of having wings.
• Fictional objects are impossible combinations of possible properties (e.g., David Hume's 'golden mountain'; or 'winged horse') or combinations of properties that include one or more impossible properties (e.g., Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter, Unicorns, God).
• Golden mountains and winged horses are logically possible, which is why we can imagine them. But they are physically impossible.
• Some properties are contingent (they come into being and go out of being) and some properties are necessary (they do not come into being or go out of being).
• For example, the combination of properties that make up a table comes into being and can go out of being. Tables are contingent objects.
• The combination of properties that make up the number 2 do not come into being and cannot go out of being. The number 2 is a necessary object.
• Do words exist? Yes, in the sense that the properties of words exist. Words are references to objects ('mountain' refers to mountains and 'lake' refers to lakes). Even more abstract words like 'or' refer to properties, in this case the property of disjunction. Words themselves are objects. There are spoken and written words, and each kind has its own properties. The written word 'mountain' has the property of containing eight letters, having a certain etymology, etc., while the spoken equivalent has two syllables, certain vowel sounds, etc.
• (You might want to say the written word 'mountain' has two syllables, but if you put your knowledge of how the word sounds aside we can imagine 'mountain' sounding like the word 'main,' with silent letters in the middle. The symbols alone do not tell us the syllables. It's tricky to separate in our minds written words from their verbal equivalents!)
• Do shapes exist? Yes, the properties that make up a shape exist. The property of having four angles exists, as we find squares and rectangles having that property.
• Do letters exist? Yes, letters are shapes.
• Do drawings of shapes and letters exist? Yes, drawings of shapes and letters exist. Without these drawings, we wouldn't know what shapes and letters looked like. The letters on this screen are drawings. Visual properties, therefore, are only knowable by those who have the faculty of sight. (I'm sure folks blind from birth can have an image of squareness by feeling a square object. But this image is, I'm assuming, not visual, but more tactile, like the "image" you have of what soft fabric feels like.)
• Do sentences exist? Yes, the properties that 'sentence' refers to are real. These are properties pertaining to words and syntax.
• Do propositions exist? I have read a little bit of the work by Josh Rasmussen in this area (See his book Defending the Correspondence Theory of Truth). But I'm not super familiar with this literature (or for that matter the literature surrounding any of these ideas).
• I take propositions to be those things that take on truth values. So is being true or being false a real property? Are there true and false things? I don't see how I could avoid being committed to the property of being true. It's true that 2 + 2 = 4. It's true that I exist.

• There are all sorts of things that we take to be true. Being true is perhaps a strange property, because it's abstract and non-empirical. But if it's not a real property, then it's very mysterious to me how it is we bump into it.

• However, a proposition contains more than just the property of being true or false. Propositions are true or false in light of their content. This quickly gets into some very tricky discussions surrounding the correspondence theory of truth.

• Let's take the proposition "Bellerophon, riding Pegasus, defeated the Chimera." This sentence contains identifiable properties pertaining to words and syntax. But does the proposition expressed by the sentence contain real properties?

• There are fictional objects here. Does affirming the existence of the proposition affirm the existence of the fictional objects?

• One reason to think yes is because propositions, like all other objects, are sets of properties. So to say the proposition exists is to say the properties it contains are real. But then propositions that contain fictional objects couldn't be real.

• However, it doesn't seem to me propositions commit one to fictional properties, because propositions don't really contain those properties. Rather, propositions contain words (? - propositions are abstract, but words are concrete, so it can't be quite right to say propositions contain words...) that refer to fictional objects, and propositions contain certain logical, spatial, temporal, etc. relations to describe the relationship between objects.

• Whether the proposition is true depends on whether there are facts (states of affairs) that match the description of the objects and relations contained in the proposition.

• So let's take the proposition as expressed by the sentence: "Mars revolves around the Sun."

• This proposition contains properties pertaining to aboutness. This proposition is about Mars and about the Sun.

• This proposition contains properties pertaining to the relationship of revolving around. Does empirical observation validate the property of one thing revolving around another? Yes, so this property exists.

• Next, the proposition contains the property of being true. The fact that Mars does indeed revolve around the Sun makes true the proposition.

• It seems like this proposition is a bundle of properties that are all real. So it seems like this proposition exists. Importantly, this proposition names Mars and the Sun but is only about them. A proposition about Mars is not the same thing as Mars. So propositions can be about fictional objects and still exist.

• Science and philosophy are about discovering the existing true propositions of the world.

• Do thoughts exist? To answer this we must ask what it means for something to be a thought. From there we get the properties of thoughts, and then we can ask whether those properties are real according to either empirical investigation or a priori apprehension.

• The properties associated with thoughts include, among others: qualia (feeling; experience; first-person imagery), propositional / linguistic properties, and aboutness.

• These properties are real, and indeed are self-evidently real. So yes, thoughts exist (or really, the properties denoted by 'thought' exist). Introspective observation gives us direct a priori access to these properties.

• Do fictional objects exist? Think of these properties: Being a man. Being a wizard. Having the name 'Harry Potter.' Defeated Voldemort. Is there anything that has these properties? Yes, Harry Potter. So, these properties are real.

• But of course this combination of properties is not real. So what's going on here?

• What's going on is that there are thoughts about these properties, and these thoughts are real.

• Imagination allows us to generate thoughts about impossible properties, or thoughts about impossible combinations of properties.

• (Boredom can supply the impetus for why we do this... I also think this happens to us automatically. From an evolutionary standpoint, being able to imagine future scenarios is incredibly powerful, as it allows us to avoid taking undue risks. The ability to consciously deceive or speak ironically also requires imagination and gives us survival advantages. But the same power that allows us to imagine counterfactual scenarios also causes counterfactual characters and stories to pop into our minds.)

• Okay, so then how do we tell whether a given set of properties are real, or whether we simply have thoughts about them that are real?

• The answer is that it depends on where thoughts about the properties come from. Can we trace the thoughts about the properties to an author's mind, or do we need to posit the properties themselves to explain thoughts about them?

• In the case of Harry Potter, we can trace thoughts about Harry Potter to an author's mind.

• For Harry Potter's properties to be real, certain events would have to have occurred in the real world. Real parents would have had to have given birth to Harry Potter. Hogwarts would had to have been constructed. But those events never took place.

• Likewise, with Pegasus, we would expect there to be an evolutionary history of winged horses, for there to be fossils, photographs, DNA evidence, and whatnot. But we don't have any of that. So our thoughts about these properties cannot be coming from what they would need to be coming from in order for the properties to be real. We can conclude then that these properties (or combination of properties) are from someone's imagination.

• It doesn't seem like this applies to numbers or shapes; we can't trace them to an author's imagination (can we?), so calling numbers 'useful fictions' is not accurate.

• Do abstract and concrete objects exist? The real question is whether abstract vs concrete properties exist. I'm not sure.

• We think of the number 2 as being an abstract object. But on the view in question we must look first to properties, not objects. The properties of being prime or divisible by 2 without a remainder seem abstract. These properties do not exist in space or time; they are immaterial, and they exist necessarily. If that's all that abstract means, then 2 is abstract.

• But we typically think something is abstract if it plays no causal role. But the properties of being prime, even, one less than three, etc., do cause thoughts about them to exist. How else could I think about the number 2 besides the properties of 2 causing me to think about those properties?

• But then do the properties of Harry Potter cause me to think about the properties of Harry Potter? That can't be, because those properties don't exist. It's the stories and sentences about the non-existent properties of Harry Potter that cause us to think about those properties.

• We can trace the properties of Harry Potter to the imagination, but we cannot trace the properties of 2 to the imagination in the same way.

• So are impossible properties abstract, like the property of being a wizard? These properties, being not real, cannot be caused by anything or have any causal influence on anything. There is nothing that can bring about being a wizard, and being a wizard cannot bring anything about.

• So yes, these are abstract. But how can thoughts about wizards be about wizards? How is it that the imagination can do this? How can something be about a non-real thing?

• This is where abstraction comes into play. Abstraction is the act of generating thoughts about isolated properties or groups of properties without any particulars in mind.

• We can abstract out from particular humans the idea of being a human. We can abstract out from particular desires the abstract notion of desire. We can abstract out from particular instances of fire to the idea of fire. We can abstract out from particular projectile events the idea of shooting.

• We can then combine, using imagination, these abstractions to create a further abstraction: A human who has the desire to shoot fire and does so.

• We call this ability to trump the laws of nature by your desire, combined with your imagination, 'magic.'

• Magic is not real because we cannot trump the laws of nature with desire plus imagination.

• A wizard is a human (or other race) with the power of magic.

• So we have properties versus thoughts about properties. Thoughts about real properties are caused by the properties, and thoughts about fictional properties are caused by abstraction.

• Abstraction depends on first having thoughts about real properties. So fictional objects depend on real ones.

• This idea of dependence is like David Hume's idea that ideas (less vivid, more abstract thoughts) are grounded in impressions (vivid thoughts). We have impressions of real properties, like the properties of being human, of fire, etc. We can combine these vivid thoughts to form a less vivid thought of a wizard.

• Is the number 2 a concrete object? No, in the sense that the properties of 2 are immaterial properties. But yes in the sense that the properties of 2 cause thoughts about them.

• Is Harry Potter a concrete object? No, because the non-real properties of Harry Potter cannot cause thoughts about those properties. Rather, the real properties of the thoughts (and sentences) about Harry Potter cause thoughts about Harry Potter. The properties of Harry Potter would be concrete (standing in causal relations) if they were real.

• Do immaterial and material objects exist? The real question is whether immaterial and material properties exist. Mental properties and mathematical properties are immaterial, and yet they exist, so yes both immaterial and material (third-person) properties exist. So bundle theory commits you to aspect dualism; both first-person and third-person properties are real and one does not reduce to the other.

• Do persons exist? Yes, people exist. The essential properties that make up a person are first-person properties pertaining to conscious experience and the first-person perspective.

• The puzzle of existence is the question of how do you get contingent properties; or, why are there some properties rather than no properties? If these properties don't need to exist, then why do they? This leads to the contingency argument from God's existence; we need necessary properties to ground contingent ones, and God, as the argument will go, is the best candidate for the foundation of necessary properties that explain contingent properties.

• The hard problem of consciousness is the question of how do we get mental properties? How could mental properties emerge from non-mental properties? Or how could minds be made out of mindless particles? But if mental properties do not emerge from non-mental properties, and are instead fundamental to reality, then this suggests the existence of a fundamental layer of consciousness. Again, this is suggestive of an argument for God's existence.

As always, many, many questions remain. How does cause and effect work on bundle theory? What are events? What are facts? How does this tie into correspondence theory? What grounds properties? What allows them to come into being and go out of being? How do properties relate to other properties? How do properties survive through time? (Can a property get older? But then does that mean properties have properties?)

But even with this rough articulation of bundle theory, we can apply it to the Ship of Theseus and produce a satisfying solution.

Part 3: The Ship of Theseus

Recall the following options:

Option 1: S1 = S2, S1 =/= S3.

The ship retains its identity after having every part replaced, and the second ship built out of the old parts is a new ship.

Option 2: S1 = S3, but S1 =/= S2.

The original ship is destroyed when its parts are replaced, and resurrected when reconstructed out of its old parts.

Option 3: S1 = S2 and S1 = S3 (therefore, S2 = S3).

Both ships are the original ship.

Option 4: S1 =/= S2 and S1 =/= S3.

Neither ship is the original ship.

Option 3 is easily ruled out. For two objects to be identical, they must share identical properties, as Leibniz's Law states. But the two ships have different properties.

Technically, the Ship of Theseus problem is dissolved by the bundle theory in similar fashion to how mereological nihilism dissolves the problem. There is no Ship of Theseus and there never was. Rather, there are only properties, and it's up to us to label different bundles of properties differently. So to answer the question "Which ship is the Ship of Theseus?", the answer is "It depends on how we carve up the properties and it depends on what we consider the essential properties to be."

Technically, properties are changing with every moment that passes. Properties come into being, go out of being, and change in their relations to other properties. My vacuum gets a bit older with each moment (i.e., each material property that makes up the vacuum changes in its relation to temporal properties), and its history, where it has been, what has happened to it, changes over time. The dust particles on it change.

But clearly, these properties are not essential to what it means to us for something to be my vacuum. When it comes to being a vacuum, we don't care how old it is, how many dust particles are on it, and so on. Again, objects are social constructs, so the essential properties of an object will be those of greatest relevance to us.

So option 4 follows if we allow non-essential properties to change the identity of an object. But we don't allow this, so option 4 is out.

It seems there are three essential properties when it comes to my vacuum: history, function, and ownership. No matter how old the vacuum gets, it's still the same vacuum because the object always shares a kind of history, a kind of function (at least intended function), and ownership.

There's another property that is important: what the vacuum looks like, the general shape and color of it. When we teach a kid what a vacuum is, it's by sensory experience that the kid learns what it is. It's that thing that has that shape and makes that noise. How essential this is is hard to say. If I painted the vacuum over, changing what it looks like, that's not enough to change the identity of the object in the essential sense. But if I somehow changed the appearance of the vacuum enough, in another sense it would be unrecognizable as my vacuum.

The original ship designates a bundle of properties, but that bundle is constantly changing. Old properties cease to exist and new properties emerge. The property of being one year old ceases and the new property of being two years old begins. Temporal properties change with each moment. Relations to other properties change each moment. But it seems like, just as with my vacuum, the essential properties that we care about when we talk about the ship are the properties of history, function, and ownership (and again, perhaps to some degree, sensory properties). Ship one and two share the same history (especially, the same beginning), the same function (giving Theseus the ability to travel on water), and the same ownership (Theseus is not stealing the ship by using it. He built it or purchased it himself. And if someone else were to use the ship without Theseus' permission, they would be stealing.)

Ship 3 has more in common with Ship 1 than Ship 2 when it comes to material composition. But Ship 3 does not share the same history with 1. Ship 3 shares some history with Ship 1 by sharing parts, but Ship 3 was built at a different time and did not have its parts replaced one by one. Ship 3 also does not have the ownership property if the parts were given or sold off to someone else who built the ship.

On option 2, it's unclear when the original ship was destroyed – after the first part was replaced, or only after every part was? In any case, if we think the Ship of Theseus survives through time, then we have to look at those essential properties that survive through time. The properties of having a certain history, function, and ownership survive through time (as well as generally having certain sensory properties such as how the ship looks and feels). Those are the properties that explain why it feels like the Ship of Theseus survives through time, and those properties survive from Ship 1 to Ship 2, making Ship 2 identical in its essential properties to Ship 1. And so option 1 is the winner.

Philosophy Stream of Consciousness - Truth, Power, and Human Nature

Part I: The Right Kind of Person

The right kind of person is the person who cares about truth and cares about being a good person. The person who cares about truth is the same person who cares about being good, and vice versa. Both reduce to the same desire to be reconciled to reality. This desire is the love of God. When I say I love God, I mean that I feel an overwhelming desire to be reconciled to reality. Christians are familiar with this weight of getting right with God. For the Christian, to lack a love for God is to lack the desire to be reconciled to reality, and thus to fail to be the right kind of person. (A lack of love for God coincides with the sin of pride, the failure to humble yourself by acknowledging that you need reconciliation.) The fear of God is the fear of what happens when you fail to be the right kind of person. The love of wisdom is the love of that which reconciles you to God. You cannot love that which reconciles you to God unless you first fear what happens when you fail to be so reconciled. This is why the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, is the practice of reconciling oneself to reality. This practice consists in reading, writing, thinking, and wrestling with the deepest and most important questions humans can wrestle with. Ultimately, this practice involves killing the parts of you that are out of step with reality. Philosophy is a highly personal project that looks different for everyone brave enough to embark on a truth-seeking journey.

It might sound strange for me to say I love God when I’ve lost faith. But we can still invoke God metaphorically, poetically, emotionally, or rhetorically when we need to. For me, loving God refers to a collection of ideas; one is a running away from that terrible feeling of being out of step with reality, a feeling that has always haunted me; another is that Stoic resolution and acceptance of life come what may – that Nietzschean embrace of reality despite its horrors. To love God is to love life and death and everything in between, to celebrate agony for its realness, and to mourn agony for its evil all the same.

Part II: Intellectual Virtue

The person who cares about truth will possess intellectual virtues. It is no surprise that the person who cares about intellectual virtue would be the kind of person to care about virtue more generally; so again, caring about truth and caring about morality go hand-in-hand. The right kind of person is the person who possesses virtue, both intellectual and general.

If you care about truth, you will have a passion for truth.

You will be humble, admitting that you do not already have all the answers.

You will be honest about what exactly you believe and exactly why you believe it.

You will be brave about pursuing the truth, willing to undergo that painful process of changing one’s mind, even giving up your deepest sense of yourself, in the event that your most cherished beliefs turn out false.

You will be disciplined, not generalizing in a hasty manner or jumping to conclusions. You will put in the work needed to become well-informed in your beliefs, always testing your theories for weaknesses.

You will be empathetic to those who hold different views from yours, and seek first to understand competing theories before trying to tear them down, steelmanning rather than strawmanning, building up opposing views to their strongest version so that defeating them is as meaningful as possible. Who knows, maybe in your practice of building up competing theories you will realize that the view you were prepared to argue against is really the better view.

You will be kind when discussing these matters with others, never engaging in character attacks or expressions of hatred, judgment, or blame. Instead you will demonstrate patience, understanding, and gentile correction, always seeking to highlight the insights of others, always seeking your own correction – always celebrating the joy of philosophy and inspiring that joy in others.

Part III: Truth and Power Come Apart

You will notice that most people are not intellectually virtuous. This is not their fault. Where would they get the idea of intellectual virtue from? It’s not taught to us by our parents, or in school, or in media or entertainment or even college.

The only reason why I know about it is thanks to the internet, which exposed me to certain books and videos that discuss these things. (To give myself some credit, I did come up with the "signs of the truthseeker" in college; though even that was thanks to a helpful professor's nudging me in the right direction. It was later that I discovered these "signs" have a name: virtues.) I did not learn these things from my community or culture or education.

However, growing up Christian, I did inherit the attitude that what you believe is what matters most. For the Christian, believing in the truth is the most important thing, a matter of life and death – even more than that, a matter of salvation and damnation. Though I have lost my faith, I cannot shake the habit of viewing true belief as the most important thing. Say what you will about Christianity, it did give me my passion for truth, and from that the rest followed. Christianity, in this way, provides the tools for its own destruction. Christianity demands us to take it seriously, but when we do we discover challenges to Christian belief that render it impossible to be Christian.

So we cannot fault folks for their failure to be intellectually virtuous, because one must be taught intellectual virtue or to have the right kind of inputs that cause someone to become intellectually virtuous, and most never get a chance to be taught it or to be exposed to those inputs. Speaking of inputs, another reason why we can’t fault folks for their failure to be intellectually virtuous is because they are not paid to be intellectually virtuous. Very few jobs require intellectual virtue or build up one's intellectual virtue by working that job.

People go where the money is, and culture is shaped by that which makes money. People admire and respect that which survives, and they take pity on that which doesn’t. Philosophy doesn’t make money, and so it is to be pitied by ordinary folks. If a high-effort activity doesn’t make money, then it’s not worth it, says our culture. They are correct. If at the end of the day you cannot pay your bills and survive, then what’s the point? Poverty causes great misery. No amount of virtue is worth misery, our culture has spoken. Or rather, you can’t be virtuous when you’re dead. So survival is the more urgent need.

If people go where the money is, and there is no money in virtue, then people will naturally end up away from virtue. That’s how you end up with a rotten culture. And yet, this is all necessary, because society is shaped by the most common and powerful biological pressures. Food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, social pressures, and so on, are the common needs and the most urgent pressures. There is little if any biological pressure to be a virtuous person, especially when being virtuous entails going against the values of your community – the very people who help you survive. Being anti-racist, though a virtue, would be socially costly in the Antebellum South.

If you wish to shape culture in a certain way, then you must implement survival pressures to create that shape. If people received money from the government or tax breaks by passing a yearly BMI test, then people would be more motivated to maintain a healthy weight. If you want people to be a certain way, pay them to be that way. If you want people to not be a certain way, then pay them to be something else.

Power validates things, and the most fundamental power is to exist and to keep existing. Imagine an invincible human who could not die, and could teleport anywhere he wanted to. He could not be captured or killed. He could criticize Russia in Russia, and instead of disappearing instantly like the others, he would remain. He could go against the wealthy elites of the world without ending up dead. His existence would become like a law of nature, with everyone forced to live with him and to look upon him. While dead men are forgotten, the invincible man who speaks truth to power would be impossible to ignore.

There is only a tenuous connection between virtue and survival, and between vice and death. Often, the connections are reversed, with virtue leading to failure and vice leading to success. This is why CEOs and kings and emperors are tyrants and dictators – ruthless, evil, insane. "When you play the game of thrones you win, or you die." Virtue has everything to do with being a good person, but little to do with being a person who survives. Was it virtue that enabled the man to become a model? It was his looks. Was it kindness that landed the actor a million dollar role? It was her skill. It doesn’t matter how good of a person you are; if you sing off-key, they boo you off the stage. There is a deep meanness to life because survival itself is mean. Death is mean. So of course there will be a meanness to power structures; of course the most powerful people will be, in general, the most evil.

The problem of injustice is exactly this problem of the disconnection between truth and power. When a man is sentenced to prison on a false conviction, does his knowledge of the truth have any power? Or when the Armenians were attacked by the Ottomans, did their sheer desire to escape violence stop the attack? Did their sheer certainty in the wrongness of the genocide have any effect?

Wanting something has no necessary connection to obtaining it, no matter how virtuous the desire or how better off the world would be. And wanting something has no necessary connection to preventing you from obtaining it, no matter how vicious the desire or how worse off the world would be.

The government then, as the enforcer of the social contract and the upholder of justice, is meant to play the role of that connection. The government must act like a predator introduced to an ecosystem to cull the population of a vermin, in this case greed, corruption, and vice. Ideally, laws would enable the good and rational to get what they want while the evil and irrational do not. 

Unfortunately, the government itself is governed by survival pressures, and so conflict of interest is built in. The laws are made and sustained by those in power, and so naturally the laws serve the powerful. And if power and truth naturally come apart, then there is no necessary connection between laws and justice. Nothing could be more obvious than that – how often do we see states commit atrocities? But then this means the government can never fulfill the role of providing the connection between virtue and power needed to ensure justice. Injustice is as much a built-in feature of life as gravity or entropy.

Notice that God also does not provide that connection in this life. Losing faith involves losing, among other things, that optimism that comes with the belief that justice is built into things with God in control. Without God setting things straight in the end, the injustices of this world are in a sense permanent, replacing our optimism with pessimism. This is one reason why pro-theism (the view that we ought to want God to exist) is obviously true. If God wants to fix the sinfulness of the world (as he apparently did when he sent the flood), all he has to do is establish that connection between virtue and power (and vice and weakness) and overnight the world would turn into a heavenly place.

Part IV: Social Structures are Power Structures

Humans are biologically contextualized creatures. Non-human animals are not interested in seeking truth beyond survival, and humans are not categorically different from the other animals. In the face of suffering and death, humans and the other animals share the same interests. Humans are very interested in not suffering and in not dying.

So it's no surprise that just as the non-human animals are more interested in survival than truth, humans too are forced to be more interested in survival than truth. Philosophy then is the most inhuman activity, as it's an activity that disregards survival and pursues truth. And yet, in another sense it's the most human activity, because, as Aristotle would say, exercising our rationality is what makes humans unique among animals. Because humans should always strive to evolve, they should always look for that activity which is both totally human and totally inhuman, as that is an activity that is at the edge of humanity. These activities are superhuman, and it is by engaging in them that we stand a chance in going beyond the limitations of our present species.

As biological creatures, humans reproduce sexually. Sexuality itself is a survival structure (the human race goes extinct without it), and sexuality is social in nature (it takes two to tango). Humans are forced to come together to keep the human race going. And it's just as well, because co-operation is essential to human survival anyway. So social structures are survival structures because 1) Humanity relies on sexuality for its survival, and 2) Individual humans rely on their communities for access to resources.

Social success is a matter of life and death, which is why we have evolved to find humiliation (social failure) to be one of the most painful feelings. Social pressures become immensely influential on us, because resisting social pressure risks humiliation. 

If power and truth comes apart (one can have truth but lack power), and social structures are power structures, then the social way of being comes apart from the truthseeking way of being (being a genuine truthseeker does not guarantee social success and can even entail social failure).

As we've already discussed, speaking truth to power can get you killed, or at least harassed, bullied, mocked, labeled a heretic, ostracized, excommunicated, disfellowshipped, and so on. While it's painfully obvious to us now how stupid and evil racism is, there have been cultural settings where being anti-racist would have meant your social failure. If you can convince a group of people that something is weird, then you can turn them all against it no matter how good that thing is. In a world where being normal is the greatest virtue, being normal and evil is better than being weird and good. Being a Nazi was normal in Nazi Germany, and opposing Nazism was weird.

I have told this story but I'll reproduce it here briefly. At a Bible study a long time ago I asked the following question: Does prayer change the mind of God? If not, why pray? If yes, then is God's mind in need of changing? I was hoping for a rich theological discussion to follow. Instead all that followed was awkward silence, and I was quickly made to feel unwelcome in the group.

In a church setting, it is weird to challenge Christianity. But is it wrong, or evil, or stupid? No. It's right, virtuous, and smart to ask those kinds of questions. But that rightness, virtuousness, and intelligence didn't prevent social failure. More broadly, being a genuine truthseeker is weird. People go where the money is, and there is, usually, no money in being a genuine truthseeker. People go where social success is, and there is, usually, no social success in being a genuine truthseeker. This is why it's not a coincidence that philosophers have a poor reputation as far as their social affinity is concerned.

But as the quote goes, attributed to J. Krishnamurti, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

For the truthseeker, no amount of social success is worth the cost if the cost is believing in truth. This is the archetype of the martyr, to pursue truth even in the face of persecution.

The observation that society is woefully (but understandably) lacking in intellectual virtue brings us to an important ingredient to the understanding of human nature: the surface layer vs the deep layer.

The surface layer is of heuristics while the deep layer is of understanding. The surface layer is fast, the deep layer is slow. The surface layer represents simplicity, survival, feeling, impulsivity, first impressions, knee-jerk, instant gratification, basic needs, socializing, outsourcing your worldview to others, and so on. The deep layer represents complexity, truthseeking, thinking, calculation, deliberation, investigation, delayed gratification, higher-order needs, introspection, soul-searching, thinking for yourself, and so on. The surface is the what, the deep is the why. I may know how to use a mathematical formula, but do I understand why the formula works?

A great deal of society exists on the surface. Most people most of the time live on the surface, because this is the layer of survival, and because a great deal of the population is young, and younger people, especially kids and teenagers, are most likely to live on the surface most of the time. We may think of these as ways of being. Humans, as they develop their critical thinking skills and abilities, gain access into the deep way of being. It’s not accurate to think humans are always in one way of being or another. Humans can drift in and out between the layers throughout the days and years of their life. Even children can have moments of insight, and adults can fail to think for themselves.

An example of this concept playing out in real life is with trolling. Trolling exploits the surface layer for one's own amusement. To troll is to say something or do something as a way to test people and elicit a funny, exaggerated response. For example, "Islam is right about women." On the surface layer, this is a vaguely racist remark. But on the deep layer, it's a dilemma. Either you admit Islam is wrong about something – a violation of our multicultural beliefs – or you admit regressive views about women, which is misogynistic.

Those on the surface have a knee-jerk, emotional, antagonistic reaction. They have not researched or put any real thought into what Islam teaches about women. You could do the same with "Islam is right about gay people." Again, the "surface-dweller" has to choose between their values of multiculturalism and pro-LGBTQ.

If you say "Islam is false" at the wrong time, with the wrong people, you will receive nasty looks. Ironically, those nasty looks will come from people, probably white women, who are themselves not Muslim. They are living on the surface, which is the layer of social stability. Saying things like “Islam is false” is not conducive to social stability. Acts of social instability are met with social punishment, even when they are virtuous and accurate. Is it inaccurate to say Islam is false? No. Is it important for us to be able to have a mature conversation about the truth of Islam? Yes. Can we have that conversation? Maybe not. Maybe the social pressure to avoid certain topics is too strong. Repeat for other controversial topics.

The truthseeker does not admire this burying of one's head in the sand. She admires those who bravely tackle difficult, important topics, and who bring kindness, sophistication, nuance, and the indisputable tools of reason to bear on them.

People say that politicians are all liars – politicians dodge questions in a dishonest way. But politicians are doing what normal people do every day—navigating social situations in a strategic way—just on a bigger scale. Everyone masks. Carl Jung wrote about the persona and the shadow. The persona is the mask, the facade, the front-facing shield that gives one access to the surface layer and allows one to achieve social success. The shadow is composed of those parts of you that are hidden to avoid social failure. Some parts of you are truly bad and should be burned away, but other parts are neutral or good that are suppressed purely because of social risk. Integrating the shadow is that process of discerning the unhealthy and healthy shadows, starving the unhealthy parts while strategically bringing the healthy parts up into the persona at the right time. Ideally, a balance is achieved between authenticity and social success. In some cases, like the gay rights movement, an acceptable degree of both authenticity and social success is only possible for a group after a great deal of effort is made to reform society.

End

Life, just like a conversation, has a flow to it. You must let go of yourself and go with the flow. When the universe sends you a message, you must listen to it. Don’t be like Jonah who ran away from Nineveh. We must be like Nietzsche who promoted amor fati, the love of fate – the radical resignation to the Real – we must be like Jesus who prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, "Not my will, but yours be done" – we must go to Nineveh, to Golgotha, even if it means going to our death. The love of truth entails giving up all that’s false, even if that means giving up what we want most. Only the one who loses his life finds it (Matthew 10:39), and only the one who hates his life can follow the truth (Luke 14:26). When truth and survival come apart, the disciple of truth disregards survival, and thus disregards their own self. When Truth calls a man, she bids him come and die. Only then is he ready for reconciliation.