Ataraxia, Eudaimonia, and Natalism

Natalism is the belief that it's permissible for anyone to have children. A slightly more sophisticated natalism says that it's okay for anyone to have children provided certain obvious conditions have been met. Probably, two people who both have the recessive gene for some terrible disease, like cystic fibrosis, should not have children. Probably, the person who suffers from a debilitating brain disorder or mental illness, like schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, or autism, that would make them unfit to parent should not have children. Probably, those who cannot afford a child should not have children.

 

One version of natalism says that given ideal conditions, parents are obligated to have children. Another version says given ideal conditions and a declining or stagnant birthrate, parents are obligated to have children. Another version says that parents are never obligated to have children, and so, in theory, it's permissible to let the human race die out.

 

Anti-natalism is the view that it's never, under any circumstances, okay to have children; we are obligated to let the human race die out.

 

A very obvious argument against anti-natalism is that flourishing is undeniably a good thing, with flourishing being something like:

 

A human is flourishing when:

 

1) Their basic needs are met, such as food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.

 

2) Their more advanced psychological needs are met, including feeling accepted by and well-integrated into a community.

 

3) They experience happiness on a regular basis.

 

4) They do not experience pain on a regular basis.

 

5) The pains they do experience are instrumentally good, such as the natural pains that accompany self-improvement and the establishing and maintaining of a eudaimonic system. The instrumental goodness easily outweighs the intrinsic badness of these pains. In other words, they do not experience higher-order pain, only lower-order pain.

6) The happiness experienced is instrumentally good and not instrumentally bad. In other words, they experience higher-order happiness, not just lower-order happiness.

 

Basically, flourishing, or eudaimonia, is when a person experiences happiness that is contextualized by a well-structured system that enables happiness to be maximized over time for the most amount of people. Eudaimonia is, in gamer terms, min-maxed happiness – optimal happiness. So 'eudaimonia' is a kind of happiness; or, more generally, a state of being or system in which something like the above criteria have been met.

 

This is important, because it's obvious that there are all kinds of happiness out there that are not good for us in the long term, or take place within a disturbing context. If someone is very happy playing a video game, but they are playing that game as an escape mechanism because of depression, and time spent playing that video game would be better spent coming up with ways to change the circumstances causing that depression, then that happiness is not instrumentally good; it doesn't take place within a good context. Some kinds of happiness actually prevent eudaimonia, and some kinds of pain are necessary for eudaimonia. That's why a naive utilitarianism of simply maximizing any pleasures over any pains could never work. But utilitarianism needn't be naive. Eudaimonism is a utilitarianism that rejects naive utilitarianism in favor of a wiser goal. Of course, if utilitarianism is defined simply as "maximizing pleasure over pain, whatever that takes", and if what that takes is eudaimonia, then eudaimonism is the corollary of utilitarianism.

 

Obviously eudaimonia is nearly impossible to achieve, and even then can only last a brief amount of time because humans age and die. Any entropy threatens the system, and entropy grows over time. Just as the human body naturally breaks down, and just as civilizations naturally break down, so too do eudaimonic systems, and that's even if the system is ever able to get up and running in the first place. Most of the time, even when life is going relatively well, it only ever achieves a simulacrum of eudaimonia.

 

And yet, eudaimonia is so good that even a rough approximation of it is extremely good. A roughly eudaimonic life seems totally worth living, and in fact missing out on the chance to experience eudaimonia seems tragic. And the more rough the approximation is, the easier it is to achieve. So there might be something of a sweet spot between eudaimonia at the unobtainable utopia level and eudaimonia at the practically possible level.

Practicable eudaimonia is so good, and so obtainable, and so worth trying for, that it's hard to fault anyone for having children when they have practicable eudaimonia in mind when having children. (Basically no one has practicable eudaimonia in mind when having children, and certainly not when it comes to accidental pregnancies. But maybe on some unconscious level, something like that is what people have in mind when they try for a child. But they might have something more basic in mind, like social pressure from relatives and societal expectations and/or internal pressure from biology.)

 

But a problem arises with eudaimonia, and that is the problem of the absurdity of life and existential pain. Even if you achieve eudaimonia, it's no use if each member of the eudaimonic community feels a deep-seated unease, unsatisfaction, unwholeness, incompleteness, emptiness, malaise, ennui, depression, or despair—that existential agony that comes with a recognition that you will one day die, and a recognition of the absurdity of life bringing you about, as if your existence is so important, only to take you out as if your existence is entirely unnecessary. Which is it? If my existence is so unnecessary, then why bring me about in the first place? If my existence is so important, then why take me out at the end? What arbitrary madness is this, that I ought to live for exactly 79 years, 8 months, 2 weeks, 1 day, 13 hours, 12 minutes, and 49 seconds? (Or whatever my numbers end up being.)

 

And so there is an advanced psychological need that some people have, which is the need to understand their place in the grand scheme of things. If my existence is ultimately pointless, then why go through all the trouble of trying to survive, or of trying to endure a period of my life that contains great suffering, if on the other side all I will find is more pointless existence?

 

While it sounds nice to say that the point of life is to drink and be merry, and to make some friends along the way, for some people it's impossible to be happy because existential pain gets in the way. These people need existential completion, or a deep-seated peace with themselves and their place in the world, and with the fact that they will die someday. This deep peace, and lack of existential pain, is ataraxia.

 

Not everyone experiences this need for existential completion. For all I know, it might be a tiny minority that do. Or, it may be that everyone experiences it on some level, with some more conscious of it than most. It's hard for me to believe that everyone is totally cool with the fact that they are going to die one day. It's hard for me to believe that the absurdity of life doesn't affect everyone at least to some degree, some slight discomfort in the background, like a kind of existential chronic pain.

 

Maybe everyone has, to reference The Matrix, a splinter in their mind, driving them mad, and maybe it's exactly this madness that manifests itself as depression, coping mechanisms, addictions, mental illness, and the sorts of insane behaviors humans get up to, including the scramble for success, ego, legacy, and anything to achieve the faintest glimmer of immortality.

 

Eudaimonia is not worth it if in the end we cannot remove the splinter from our minds. Eudaimonia is not worth it without ataraxia. If you achieve all the success anyone could ever want, and yet still feel a gnawing, aching hole in your heart, a deep sadness over the nature of reality itself, and a crippling terror at thought of the endless void that awaits, like how feel when you peer over a height and your legs give out and you slump to the ground, then what does that success really mean, in the end? Is it not worthless?

 

How terrifying is the thought that even in utopia, we would not be happy, and everything would not be alright? Even if we somehow achieve eudaimonia, it still might not make life worth living.

 

So you see the connection to anti-natalism: if our inevitable fate is one of deep dissatisfaction, a splinter in our minds, driving us mad, then having children is not right. And that's a best case scenario.

 

I suppose a best case scenario would be to achieve eudaimonia without feeling existential pain, but it's hard for me to imagine a species intelligent enough to achieve eudaimonia without being intelligent enough to experience existential pain. (This assumes that it is in fact intelligence, and not stupidity, that leads to existential pain. But do smarter people feel despair more deeply, or more often? That's an empirical question for which I have no data.)

 

If eudaimonia requires the satisfying of advanced psychological needs, which include ataraxia, then true eudaimonia includes ataraxia. And if eudaimonia without ataraxia is empty, then it's really the ataraxia, moreso than the eudaimonia, that is the highest goal of life.

 

Though, it may be that, at least for some people, ataraxia, or the closest thing to it that a particular individual can achieve, can only be achieved through eudaimonia, or the closest thing to it that that particular individual can achieve. This would be because this particular person's reasoning goes like this: There's no reason to worry about death when you have done your best to maximize flourishing while you are lucky enough to be alive, and, because I have done so by achieving eudaimonia, I need not worry about death.

 

Then, it's some kind of achievement, perhaps the greatest achievement you could imagine yourself achieving, that grants ataraxia. But while eudaimonia will be that achievement for some people, it won't be for others. And so it may be that eudaimonia is largely an incidental achievement made on the way to the highest achievement of all, ataraxia. In fact, it seems likely that this would be the case, because it's likely that eudaimonia, or practicable eudaimonia, is needed to fulfill the potential of community members, and it's probably the case that ataraxia requires for the individual to fulfill their potential and reach a kind of self-actualization.

 

Bringing this back to the natalism / anti-natalism debate, while the opportunity for practicable eudaimonia gives, it seems to me, a strong argument in favor of natalism, the difficulty of achieving ataraxia gives, it seems to me, a strong argument against natalism.

 

By having children, you are setting them up to experience existential agony, to experience that splinter in their mind, driving them mad.

 

You place upon them this enormous pressure to alleviate the pain of this splinter, which can only be done by achieving ataraxia, which might be impossible to achieve in most circumstances.

 

So if eudaimonia includes ataraxia, then eudaimonia is (nearly) impossible, and so cannot be a good argument in favor of natalism. You're just setting your child up for existential incompleteness in the best of cases. If eudaimonia does not include ataraxia, then it's not good enough to satisfy the deepest, most urgent psychological need that some humans experience vividly, and perhaps all humans experience on some level. In that case, the opportunity for eudaimonia is also not a good argument for natalism.

So the Argument from Eudaimonia for natalism is not a good argument, unless you can show that ataraxia is not that difficult to achieve, or show that ataraxia is not needed for life to be worth living.

You could also argue that having children is an essential part of eudaimonia, and perhaps in some cases in achieving ataraxia. Insofar as you cannot fault someone for trying to achieve eudaimonia and/or ataraxia, and insofar as having children is necessary for that for a particular person, then you cannot fault that person for having children.

Follow up: All Possible Persons Theodicy

One objection to the all possible persons theodicy is that once a person has been created, there is no reason to allow them to experience horrendous evils, unless their experiencing horrendous evils somehow gives rise to the existence of other persons.

But the systems, mechanisms, events, and so on needed to bring you (and others) about also happen to bring about all the bad things that will happen to you.

Someone might wonder why doesn't God just appear to reassure us that the horrendous evils we witness and/or experience are necessary for our existence, and eventually we will enjoy living a fundamentally good life.

The idea is that God does appear and reassures you, just not in this universe. The entire spectrum of divine hiddenness is implemented across all possible worlds. There are worlds where not a single person believes in God, and there are worlds where every single person believes in God, and there are worlds in between covering every shade of God revealing himself.

Our world is roughly in the middle, which makes sense because the large majority of worlds will be moderate, and so it's no surprise that we find ourselves in the most probable kind of world. (Though maybe that's wrong; because there are an infinite number of possible worlds, there isn't a bell curve; it's just flat. There are an infinite number of variations of a near-heaven world, just as there are an infinite number of variations of a near-hell world, just as there are an infinite number of variations of a moderate world. But if we allow infinities of different sizes, and if the infinities in the middle are greater than the ones at the extremes because the number of moderate permutations is exponentially greater, then maybe it's coherent to say that the world distribution has a bell curve.)

That means there is a nearby possible world that is an actual world in which a person arbitrarily similar to you, but not exactly you, exists, and in that world this person lives a life identical to yours except God does reveal himself to that person and reassures him.

This multiverse picture of the world is undignifying to the individual, because for every individual there are endless clones of this person. These clones are not exactly like you—they are, after all, their own person—but they are so similar to you that any other human would easily mistake you for them.

Call this the 'cloning problem.'

On one hand, God may wish to (or even be obligated to) create all possible persons as a way to maximize goodness and to minimize worst possible depriving evils (assuming that non-existent-but-possible persons are truly deprived of goods if they are not created).

On the other hand, it might be unloving to reduce someone's uniqueness to zero by creating an endless number of clones of them.

But that's not fair; each "clone" is in fact unique; they have their own unique soul / self / first-person subject. It is this uniqueness that makes the happiness of one person incommensurable with the happiness of another person, and it is in this sense that we are all equal (though in another real sense, some people are more valuable than others because they generate more happiness in both quantity and quality).

So I don't see how the cloning problem is a real problem for the theodicy. Maybe it's creepy that there are an endless number of clones of you out there, but what's the alternative? The alternative would be all those people missing out on (eventually) living a fundamentally good life.

A much worse problem is the following:

There are possible worlds that involve horrendous evils that take unimaginable amounts of time. So someone might suffer for trillions of years just so that they, or someone else, are born.

The promise of an infinite good of heaven is not enough to justify just any evil, even when heaven depends on that evil.

But is there a non-arbitrary stopping point between when an existence is too horrible for too long before it's not worth the eventual benefit of living a fundamentally good life?

A variation on this problem is that we could imagine that there are certain persons who could not be born without the very specific input of God himself performing heinous actions. But God cannot perform these actions, and so God is constrained when creating all possible persons (rather, those persons are not possible after all).

Another problem is that we could imagine there being an infinite number of people who could be created by people who are already living a fundamentally good life. So why not just opt for those infinities? We might say it's impossible for an actual infinity of persons to be created, so the next best thing is to create a potential infinite of persons. As long as there are more and more persons being created, ad infinitum, then the best possible world has been created. There are other best possible worlds with other sets of potentially infinite persons, but given that intrinsic values are incommensurably good across unique persons, one potential infinite is not better, or worse, than another. When choosing between which set of potentially infinite persons to create, you might as well start with the set where everyone begins and retains, at all times, a fundamentally good existence; that is, to start with the set that does not include unbearable suffering. The set of potentially infinite persons that doesn't include unbearable suffering is the least arbitrary set.

But there's an even more fundamental problem: if it's true that my ensoulment depends on this exact sequence of physical events leading to the exact brain that gives rise to my soul or that enables my ensoulment, then how could God recreate me after my death?

If I can't trust God to create me de novo with the exact specifications of my brain needed for my ensoulment without all the physical events leading up to my existence, then how could I trust God to create me with the exact specifications of my brain needed for my ensoulment in the afterlife?

If God can create me in heaven, then by that same power God should be able to create me without horrendous evils.

What is it about the actual events of our world that makes them necessary to create us? And if there is an answer, then how could I be recreated after my death without those events taking place all over again?

A theodicy even better than the Grand Story Theodicy? The All Possible Persons theodicy

I had thought that the Grand Story theodicy was the best theodicy available. But maybe something along the following lines is even better:

• God is obligated to prevent worst possible depriving evils.
• So God is obligated to create all possible persons and to give them all fundamentally good lives. (Lives that are totally consciousness-affirming, meaning that every person loves being alive to the point of strongly preferring being alive to not, this preference is fixed and never wavers, and they always get what they want, namely, to live.)
• It would be such a shame to miss out on living a fundamentally good life. In fact, it would be a worst possible depriving evil. God knows this about you, and me, and about every possible person. So God has no choice but to create every possible person and give them a best possible life, which really is any life in which the person wants to live and gets to live. (Thus, a person on this view is minimally something that has the ability to prefer living to not living.)
• Here's the problem. The only possible way for certain persons to be created is through really complex, messy systems like our universe. In fact, all possible universes must be created across all possible levels of complexity, so that the entire range of all possible persons, from the most to the least complex, will eventually be created.
• This requires an infinite amount of time, and there will never be a time such that an infinite amount of time has passed, so there will never be a time at which all possible persons have been created, and so God has no choice but to create a potentially infinite number of persons in an unfolding manner requiring space and time. (Maybe some possible persons do not require space and time to exist.)
• But you couldn't exist without evolution being exactly the way it is, and without all the evils of the world being exactly the way they are.
• We are but one of a potentially infinite number of universes carving out person-space out of the infinite ocean of possible persons. Think of a child scooping up a cup of seawater. Our universe's job is to be that cup and scoop up its share of possible persons.
  
• So evils, even horrendous evils, are necessary to create all possible persons. Then, either all at once at some later time in a mass resurrection, or immediately after death, each person's fundamentally good life starts. God explains to that person that the reason why all the evils they faced (and/or witnessed other people face) were necessary to create them and others.
• You could even have a temporary hell where some individuals don't have their fundamentally good life starting immediately upon resurrection, but only after they've been through a rehabilitation process (or, in the case that we have free will, retributive punishment).
• For any evil whatsoever, the answer to "Why did God allow that?" is "Because if God didn't, a possible person wouldn't have been born, and that possible person would have been deprived of eventually getting to live a fundamentally good life."

This combines the "metaphysical necessity" theodicy with the "heaven" theodicy. In short, God is obligated to prevent all worst possible depriving evils, which means preventing any possible person from being deprived of the best possible good of living a fundamentally good life. But creating all possible persons requires allowing, temporarily, even horrendous evils, as you can only exist if certain physical events happen to generate the complex neurobiological system that gives rise to your exact subjective consciousness. So God is forced (by obligation) to force us a trade: experience horrendous evils in a temporary life so that we can be created (and so that other possible persons can be created), so that you can then eventually live a fundamentally good life. Being deprived of the fundamentally good life is infinitely worse than suffering finite horrendous evils. So, it's a good trade.

A few problems:

1) Usually theists want to say that before creation, reality is already perfect and maximally good, because God is maximally good. So to say that God is obligated to create to maximize value would seem to imply that God alone is not maximally good.

My response to this is that it seems self-evident that a world with more happiness is a better world than a world with less, and that a world with my happiness in it (or your happiness in it) is a world with greater happiness than a world without my happiness (or without yours), ceteris paribus. So basically, I don't understand why people say a world with only God is maximally good; that just seems self-evidently false. 

However, God himself is maximally good in the sense that God himself is the greatest possible extrinsic good, because God gives rise to all fundamentally good lives.

This is a bit tricky because I also want to say that a fundamentally good life is a best possible extrinsic good with respect to an individual.

We might distinguish between degrees of extrinsicality. A best possible extrinsic good (degree 1) is a fundamentally good life, and God is a best possible extrinsic good (degree 2). Being "deprived of God" doesn't exactly make sense, but being deprived of a fundamentally good life does. We might also say that degrees are tied to individuals versus groups. A degree 1 best possible extrinsic good is a best possible extrinsic good with respect to an individual. A degree 2 best possible good is a best possible extrinsic good with respect to a group of people.

We might think of it this way: When we ask what is the best possible thing that could happen to a person, it would be strange to say, "The best possible thing that could happen to you is God," because that demands an immediate question, why is God the best possible thing that could happen to you? The obvious answer: because God will give you a fundamentally good life. So while technically God is the ultimate greatest possible extrinsic good, that's only because of how value is ultimately cashed out, which is through maximizing intrinsically positive states (both in quality and quantity). And so we can trace God's value, just as we can trace our own value (or the value of anything), to the phenomenal value that that thing produces.

In fact, due to considerations of eudaimonia, what counts as a fundamentally good life for an individual might not allow for the best possible life for a group of people. So we might say that there are further and further degrees of best possible goods as we zoom out to cover larger and larger groups of individuals. This brings us to problem 2 below:

2) There are possible individuals for whom living a fundamentally good life (you always prefer to live and you always do) entails living a profoundly evil (or mediocre) life. It stands to reason that God would not want to sustain these lives despite the fact that they are fundamentally good. Consider a person who lives all by themselves, and their psychology is such that they are happy to live alone and do nothing but watch obscene images and videos (fill in the blank). No one else exists in this world but them, so it's not like they are hurting anyone. But it seems clear that this is a massively impoverished life, and one with no virtue. It's hardly a good life despite this individual strongly preferring to live over not living and getting to live forever. In fact, the fact that their disturbing existence goes on forever seems to just add to the problem. So it cannot be the case that consciousness-affirmation is the only meaningful consideration.

Here's a potential solution to this problem: There is a distinction to be made between someone's subjectivity and the quality of their consciousness. The example I like to give is the math genius who sustains a brain injury and loses their math skills. They remain the same person after the injury; they have the same first-person subjective experience. But the quality of that experience, what it is like to be them, has changed. So when we go to heaven, we retain our subjectivity, and thus our personhood, but the quality of that subjectivity is significantly enhanced.

This might require a stint in hell or purgatory for rehabilitation purposes. The renewal of one's mind needn't be an instantaneous, pain-free experience. In fact, the increasing of the quality of one's consciousness could take place over an infinite amount of time; we are always improving the quality of our consciousness.

What matters is not only what we affirm, but what we would affirm were our consciousness to be of high quality. The man who is happy to live alone doing nothing but watching obscene material would not be happy for long. Once his mind had been renewed to an extent, he would be profoundly unhappy with his existence, in which case God would again be obligated to move him to a better world. (And so God would perhaps move him to heaven from the beginning, anticipating this change of heart and mind. Or we might say that these bad worlds that include solitary disturbed individuals (or whatever disturbing features) are the exact hells and purgatories people exist in until their minds have been renewed to the point that they can now fit in heaven.)

This also provides an important resource when it comes to disability theology. It seems cruel of God to keep someone's severe mental disability forever in heaven. And yet, at the same time, it seems cruel to just annihilate these persons out of existence. The solution is to keep their souls, but improve them over time (or all at once; or to improve them to a degree all at once (an initial boost) and then improve them thereafter slowly over time).

So we must modify our understanding of a fundamentally good life. Consciousness-affirmation alone is not enough; it's something more like: consciousness-affirmation when the quality of your consciousness is high (or ever-improving). This makes sense, because if happiness is how value is cashed out, then the quality of that happiness matters greatly. Greater quality of happiness is a greater degree of happiness. So God could never settle for creatures living lives of diminished quality of happiness, as that would fail to maximize happiness.

So if someone could experience eternal consciousness-affirmation without living a fundamentally good life, does this imply that someone could experience eternal consciousness-denial without living a fundamentally bad life?

I don't think so, and here's why. In the former case, you need higher degrees of consciousness in order to maximize happiness. God is disturbed by the happy evil individual (which, incidentally, makes God unable to maximize his own happiness) because God knows how this person would feel about their own choices were the quality of their consciousness leveled up. God knows that this person would be horrified and ashamed, exactly because a deeper understanding of things comes with a recognition of what is good and what is bad. Only a fully recognition of what is good and bad can result in a full appreciation of good and bad, right and wrong, and thus a full instantiation of phenomenal value.

This does suggest that the feeling of ought-to-be-ness that comes with phenomenal value is highly misleading; we might never know whether our happiness is the kind of happiness we would approve of were our consciousness of a higher quality (unless God tells us).

But in the case of living a fundamentally bad life, quality of consciousness doesn't seem relevant. Someone could experience unbearable suffering for a time, as long as it's required for this person to eventually live a fundamentally good life (either due to necessity or rehabilitation). But no one could ever experience consciousness-denial forever without that person's existence being unjustified. So while living a fundamentally good life requires high (or ever-increasing) quality of consciousness, living a fundamentally bad life remains a worst possible evil regardless of the quality of your consciousness. 

This is a categorical worst possible evil; we can imagine God increasing one's capacity for pain, thus causing their torture to be ever-increasing. This high-fidelity fundamentally bad life would be far worse than a low-fidelity fundamentally bad life. So we might be tempted to say it's really the high (or ever-increasing) fidelity bad life that is the worst possible extrinsic evil, but any fundamentally bad life is a categorically worst possible extrinsic evil.

An analogy would be this: Imagine being overdrafted is a worst possible evil. In that case, it makes no difference if someone overdrafts by a dollar or by a thousand dollars; either way, a worst possible evil has occurred, and the fact that one is a greater degree doesn't make a relevant difference to the permissibility of the lesser degree worst possible evil. (It does sound strange to speak of degrees of worst possible evils. But again, if we allow 'worst possible evil' to be categorical, then degrees shouldn't be problematic.)

If consciousness-denial is what makes life not worth living, then maximal consciousness-denial is what makes life maximally not worth living. Not-worth-living-ness is thus the measure of badness that can befall an individual. Once that measure has crossed a threshold where life is officially not worth living for the individual, then it's not relevant (as far as justification is concerned) to what degree beyond that threshold that life is not worth living.

If maximizing phenomenal value depends on quality of consciousness, then the maximizing of phenomenal disvalue depends on the quality of consciousness. But when it comes to whether evils are justifiable or not, there is an asymmetry between living a fundamentally good life, which requires consciousness-affirmation of a high or ever-increasing degree, and living a fundamentally bad life, which requires eternal unbearable suffering regardless of the quality of that suffering.

So perhaps more simply we could just say that a life not worth living in the long run is a categorical worst possible evil (regardless of the details of its not-worth-living-ness), which generates a categorical best possible saving good with respect to that evil, and so God cannot allow for anyone to live a life not worth living in the long run, as that would be to allow an unjustifiable evil (an evil which cannot possibly generate outweighing good). The best possible good grounded by such an evil would be to be fully saved from that evil, either by annihilation, by being sent to a fundamentally good life, or by being sent to a fundamentally neutral life.

But because God is obligated to give us fundamentally good lives anyway, it follows that God could not allow worst possible evils anyway.

3) Another problem is a matter of power. Why would God be limited to creating us only by specific physical inputs? Why couldn't God create us wholecloth out of nothing? The question of how God could create a person at all, or how a person could possibly exist in the first place, is one of the deepest questions in philosophy. It may be that God does in fact create all possible persons he can ex-nihilo or de novo. Presumably, in Christianity the angels are like this. But if God is obligated to create all possible persons, then again it's hard for us to wrap our minds around the fact that this involves God creating trillions upon trillions upon trillions (really, approaching infinity) of persons. It's all possible persons, after all. This would involve any coherent account of person-generation, and that just so happens to include persons that are created through a DNA, RNA, evolution, biological process brought about by the laws of chemistry and physics we observe in our universe. Maybe there are countless persons God can create that don't require all these things, but that doesn't change the fact that we require these things to exist, and God must create us lest we are deprived of a best possible good, which would indict God on charges of allowing worst possible depriving evils.

Reaction to Capturing Christianity on Rhett

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9xVN-5qLCs

 

I left the following comment on Capturing Christianity's reaction to Rhett's interview with Alex O'Connor. I saw that interview and I think Rhett has the spirit of a truthseeker, cares about deeply important things, and isn't willing to just believe at face value. So Cameron Bertuzzi's response, which fails to acknowledge Rhett's intellectual virtue, is frustrating.

 

In Islam, Allah mistakes the doctrine of the Trinity to be the Father, the Son, and Mary. If Allah were all-knowing, he wouldn't make such a silly mistake. So Christians should point to this and say: If Islam were true, would we expect these kinds of mistakes?

Christians being confidently incorrect about evolution gives us some reason to think that Christians are confidently incorrect about other things. Absolutely naturalism predicts that Christians would be confidently incorrect about things that are deeply important. Christianity does not, and even if it did then this wouldn't be evidence for Christianity over naturalism as the data would be predicted by both worldviews. Why think Christianity predicts that Christians would not be confidently wrong about important things?

Because 1) God, knowing human psychology, would know that this would make Christians and Christianity look bad, and God doesn't want that.

2) If the Holy Spirit is meant to be efficacious at all in guiding Christians to the truth, including the truth about important doctrines, then we would expect Christians to be supernaturally accurate in their articulation, convergence, and truth about important doctrines (maybe Christians can be wrong about the small stuff. But even that comes at a cost: See previous point).

But Christians cannot articulate what they believe and why (without running into contradictions and challenges to their belief), they do not converge onto doctrines (instead splitting into denominations), and they have to give up the truth of previously held doctrines, demonstrating their own tradition to be an unreliable source of truth, even the kinds of truths that they should have an authority on, which are biblical and theological truths.

So when non-Christians are confidently incorrect, that's because their worldviews are false and unreliable, but when Christians are confidently incorrect, that's because Christianity is true and reliable?? This is epistemic hypocrisy, where you apply epistemic standards to others and not yourself.

Case in point, Protestants laugh at Mormons and Catholics for their silly beliefs (proverbially speaking; practically speaking they may take a respectful stance). Catholics laugh at Protestants and Mormons for their silly beliefs (again proverbially speaking; practically speaking they may take a respectful stance). This proverbial laughter explains why Protestants hate the idea of being Catholic ("how could I ever believe such silly things as purgatory, transubstantiationism...etc?"), Catholics hate the idea of being Protestant ("how could I ever believe such silly things as sui-magisteria, sola scriptura...etc?")

They're all right; it's all silly. Christianity would be dead overnight if Christians scrutinized their own brand of Christianity in the same way as other brands of Christianity. When Christians are at their most intellectually honest, they admit that they want it to be true more than anything. (Confession: I do too; why wouldn't I want there to be ultimate love, justice, and eternal life? I totally get it. In a strange way, I am still a Christian, in the sense that I retain affective and conative attitudes of faith, if not so much the cognitive attitude of faith.)

But to admit you want something to be true more than anything is to admit enormous bias; you will do whatever it takes to believe, which is why trying to shake Christians awake is nearly impossible. In my case, my extreme bias to believe what is true barely won out against my extreme bias to believe in Christianity.

Challenge to Christian Belief: From Psychology, Personality, and Aesthetics

Anyone who understands human psychology knows there is no "one-size fits all" model for... just about anything. There is no one house that all humans would enjoy living in. There is no one style of clothing all humans would want to wear. There is no one diet that all humans would want to eat. And so on.

This applies to every single facet of human life. This especially applies to personality, aesthetics, and taste. We cannot help but like the things we like, to be attracted to the things we are attracted to, and to be compelled by what we find compelling. Different shapes and colors appeal to different people. Different sounds and genres of music appeal to different people. One person loves an outfit, another person hates it. One person loves a song, another person hates it. One person loves a movie, another person hates it. And that's okay. Different things fit better or worse with other things. Beauty and aesthetics involve, maybe more than thing, cohesion. Cohesion and aptness. There are also connections between aesthetics and truth, function, and usefulness. Things can be beautiful because they are rich and complex. Things can be beautiful because they are simple and efficient. Style and taste is all about being able to recognize what fits with what, with how cohesive, apt, or appropriate things are. A provocative outfit might be in order for a red carpet photo shoot. That same outfit would be a crime at a funeral. A song about nostalgia should sound dissonant and sweet, capturing the ambivalent bittersweetness of the feeling. If someone composed a song, called it Nostalgia, and it was funky jazz pop or angsty screamo metal, we would naturally be confused.

Christianity is one religion. Christianity demands a one-size fits all. Even worse, per Christians, you're not allowed to choose a denomination; each denomination insists that they are the exact right one and all the others are deeply mistaken. So God, being all-wise and knowing how human psychology works, and understands how aesthetically- and personality-driven humans are, knows that by setting up a One True Religion he is excluding millions if not billions of humans poorly on the basis of psychology, personality, and aesthetics, which are things we cannot control.

The Christian will protest: Of course the truth is a "one-size fits all." It's the truth after all.

But this is missing the point. Badly. Religion is very aesthetically driven, because religion is, well, mythology, and mythology is related to fiction, and fiction is aesthetic. Whereas fictions are explicitly imaginary, mythologies are "accidental fictions," meaning imagination-based speculations on the way things really work. The difference between mythology and fiction is that people really believe in the former, but not the latter.

But the boundary between mythology and fiction gets fuzzy when it comes to ritual, performance, and the backdrop of scientific knowledge. If mythologies and fictions reveal metaphorical truths that we believe in, then in some sense there is belief in the myth.

We enjoy the aesthetics of Arthurian legends, of Norse mythology, of Greek and Roman mythology, and of Egyptian and Asian mythologies. Christianity and Islam can be very aesthetically satisfying as well, with their grand battles between angels and demons, like Michael versus Satan, with striking imagery like the burning sword at the Garden of Eden. Our fictions constantly borrow from myths.

Lord of the Rings takes the aesthetics of Christianity and the aesthetics of Celtic druidism and fashions a kind of Christian paganism. Gandalf dies and rises again, more powerful than ever, like Jesus. And Lord of the Rings is very aesthetically compelling to a lot of people. It's a good blend. But some people feel disconnected to it, and that's fine. Star Wars achieved something similar by combining samurai, Buddhist, and Christian concepts using the Force and the Dark Side versus the Light Side. (I just realized that Gandalf is the same character as Obi-wan Kenobi! They are both wise wizards that set the main character on their journey only to die and come back later in a more powerful form. Is that a coincidence, or...?)

If God were truly wise, then, he would give us a true substructure, which can be grounded in science, philosophy, logic, history, and all the bits about objective truth. Those things tend to be aesthetically lacking, and lacking in terms of helping us find our personalities, styles, and which communities we best fit in.

I think it's not a coincidence that astrological signs are so popular. People desperately need personality tests. It gives us a way to categorize people and to adjust our expectations of their behavior, and how well they will be compatible with us. Given our social nature, social success is a precious commodity, and social failure, loneliness, and the inability to connect to others is a dreadful problem. Anything that aids us in achieving social success, and avoiding social failure, is a precious tool, and personality tests are an essential part of that. Astrological signs are not accurate. Myers-Briggs, from what I hear, is not accurate either. The problem is that personality systems tend to massively oversimplify things. But trying to develop more accurate personality systems requires increasing their complexity, which makes them more difficult to communicate, which defeats their purpose of being able to quickly and easily communicate social expectations. I bet Myers-Briggs is more accurate than astrology, but it's less popular perhaps for aesthetic reasons.

If God wanted to truly wow me with his wisdom, he would have set things out by creating the optimal personality system that balances simplicity and aesthetics with accuracy and comprehensiveness. Then, God would give us many different religions to choose from corresponding to those personality types. This would achieve a beautiful balance between individualism and collectivism. Overemphasize collectivism and you end up with conformity, homogeneity, a lack of creativity and self-expression, an aesthetic dullness, the excruciating death of the individual, and the destruction of originality and novelty. Overemphasize individualism and you have division, instability, the fracturing of community, the loss of a sense of unity, and a lonely, every-man-for-himself, empty, meaningless life. There is an aesthetic loss too, as all the responsibility to find an aesthetic, and to find one's path, is placed entirely on the individual, and there is a loss of a shared aesthetic which brings warmth and a sense of belonging.

By giving us an optimal personality test, and an optimal list of religions to choose from, God would achieve that balance between the individual and the collective. On the individual side, we would have known and communicable personality types, and we would have a choice as to which religion we fit best with according to that personality. Religions could be divided according to which types work best with each other, ensuring optimal social success and sense of belonging for each member. We enjoy the feeling of belonging and being a part of something bigger than ourselves, and of participating in a shared aesthetic and shared way of life by joining the religion of our choice.

The religions would differ in their mythologies and aesthetics and lifestyles, but they would not differ in their adherence to the truth. The mythologies are surface structures that exist on top of the deeper structure. Just as religions currently co-exist with science, logic, and philosophy, these religions would too exist with these things. So all religions would share in the objective truth of things. But science, logic, and philosophy give us basically nothing in terms of community, personality, and aesthetics. That's where mythology and religion come in and provide these deep-seated psychological needs. These myths, as ritualized fictions, would be entirely compatible with objective truth, as they would be understood by all inhabitants as entered fictions. (The work of Kathleen Stock might be relevant here, as she has written on fiction and on the usefulness and necessity of participating in fictions.) This is really no different than what we already do in fandoms. Fans of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and so on, often write fan-fiction and participate in these imaginary worlds. These are deeply creatively and aesthetically satisfying experiences. Some of my favorite gaming experiences have been playing Star Wars games like Dark Forces and the Jedi Knight games. So aesthetic! And some of my most powerful aesthetic experiences have come from playing classic World of Warcraft, a game so powerful and compelling that it was brought back in 2019, fifteen years after its release. I played it in 2005, 2006, starting at the age of ten. Imagine playing a game that powerful at that young of an age! It was mindblowing. Playing these games and exploring these worlds is an aesthetic, quasi-religious participation of its own, especially when gamers play together or bond over their shared experiences. It's difficult for me to separate out these kinds of powerful aesthetic, social, shared gaming experiences with the religious experiences of Christianity and church.

And yet God doesn't give us any of this. Instead, we get a single religion: Christianity, and we are demanded to contort ourselves and throw away our psychologies, individualities, personalities, and aesthetic preferences, and conform to a homogeneous system. There are so many problems with this! First, Christians are not remotely on the same page as to where Christianity mythology begins and ends, and to what extent exactly it's supposed to be myth versus something like science, history, or philosophy. So there is a gross "muddiness" to Christian belief. Some Christians believe that Genesis 1–11 is literal history and that denying this excludes you from the group. Other Christians believe Genesis 1–11 is basically myth, largely borrowed from Ancient Near-Eastern creations myths around at the time. There is no absolute canon, either of scripture or doctrine. There is too much division. Catholics complain about how ugly Protestant churches are, which Protestants find hilarious, as they find Catholic doctrines to be hideous and they see the beauty in doctrine and community as being a much higher priority than something as shallow and unimportant as buildings. The truth is that the beauty of the teachings, lifestyles, and yes, the buildings, all matter. We should be free to choose different options according to our personalities, and inevitably that is exactly what humans do because that is exactly how human psychology works, and apparently God is clueless as to how human psychology works.

But if religion is man-made, then we would expect exactly the chaos and disorder that we see. There is no fine-tuning for human lifestyles, for human psychology, personality, or aesthetics. If there were fine-tuning of that sort, that would be extremely powerful evidence of God. But as is, things are exactly how we would expect them to be if there were no God wise in the ways of human psychology.

Sartre - Existentialism is a Humanism

Sartre says that ‘existentialism’ refers to the idea that for us humans, existence precedes essence, or in other words, “subjectivity must be the starting point.”[1] (34) He says:

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. (36)

I disagree. Just because there is no God to create a human nature, it doesn’t follow that there isn’t a human nature waiting to be discovered. I would say exactly that: Humans must discover what they really are. There are obvious constraints on what we can be; we cannot will ourselves to be just anything. Isn’t existentialism as a view supposed to acknowledge our “human condition”, which surely includes acknowledging the chasm between what we can imagine ourselves to be, and what we are forced to be? What we will is not what we get.

We are all too good at creating false narratives around ourselves. We see this in the Old Testament, where the main characters paint themselves as the good guys, chosen by God himself, and the enemy tribes as the bad guys. (There are times the Israelites are painted in a bad light too. The point remains that we tend to see ourselves, and our tribes, as special and others as ordinary, lesser, or depraved.)

We fail to be honest with ourselves about ourselves, because discovering the truth of oneself can be the most difficult and painful thing one can do. What “man makes of himself” is often a fiction convenient for his ego and survival.

I suppose Sartre has it in mind that there is no objective truth (that we have access to anyway) as to what we really are. But if that’s right, then why do some people reject their old identity as false? It's undeniable that some people will believe something about themselves, their family, their community, or their tribe, and reject those beliefs when the evidence—combined with a certain sensitivity to evidence and a certain concern for accepting the truth regardless of its cost—forces them to give up those beliefs. Often the greatest critics of Christianity, for example, are ex-Christians.

Case in point, I once believed that Christians were more moral than non-Christians, because of God’s judgment. But then I learned about the challenges to Christian belief, and about the nature of morality, and discovered that if anything Christians are specially primed to moral ignorance. Often Christians have good intentions in that they intend to follow reality’s rules. It’s just that they’ve got reality all wrong, and so deep problems emerge. (In history Christians have used their beliefs to justify slavery, racism, homophobia, misogyny, burning people at the stake, selling indulgences, covering up for abusers, forgiving abuses all too easily and pressuring victims to forgive abusers, promoted policies of forced birth despite the lack of biblical support for this, supported, and still support, the moral horrors of hell, atonement, and God’s allowing of horrendous evils, and, in recent history, many Christians have aligned themselves with Trump, an obvious non-Christian, demonstrating that for them Christianity was never about truth but about tribalism and power.) 

I discovered the falsity of my beliefs. I didn't invent anything. I discovered the falsity of Christianity, and the falsity of the idea that Christians were somehow more moral or more worthy of God's approval than non-Christians. Surely Sartre, as someone who rejects religion, would understand what I am saying? Or would Sartre seriously affirm the following contradiction?:

(A) There are some people who view themselves as Children of God who are saved by Jesus and will end up in heaven.

(A2) So, there really are some people who are Children of God who are saved by Jesus and will end up in heaven. (And so, God really exists.)

(B) There are some people who view themselves as conscious organisms sprung from an evolutionary process resulting from laws of nature that are brutely contingent or brutely necessary. They see themselves as ceasing to exist when they die because there is no God.

(B2) So, there really are some people who are conscious organisms sprung from an evolutionary process resulting from laws of nature that are brutely contingent or brutely necessary and who will cease to exist when they die because there is no God. (And so, God really does not exist.)

Of course, Sartre would not affirm this contradiction. I imagine Sartre would deny that his view entails that A2 follows from A and that B2 follows from B. To suggest that is to suggest that our self-perceptions create some external, objective reality when the whole point is that there is no external, objective reality (not one accessible by us anyway), and so we have no choice but to live through a subjective lens. “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” means not that we create something real, but that all we have is our self-perceptions. And thus, we are radically free to perceive ourselves one way or another.

But this quickly turns into an epistemology debate as to the nature of knowledge and our access to it. Anything that is too skeptical runs the risk of self-contradiction. By what method does Sartre discover the truth that “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself”? If the method is unreliable, then we have no reason to agree with Sartre. If the method is reliable, then we do have reliable methods by which to discover truths of human nature. And if we have reliable methods by which to discover truths of human nature, then it’s not the case that all we have is our self-perceptions. We can use these methods to discover truths about ourselves.

EJ Lowe makes a similar point within the context of metaphysics:[2]

Some people believe that the age of metaphysics is past and that what metaphysicians aspire to achieve is an impossible dream. They claim that it is an illusion to suppose that human beings can formulate and justify an undistorted picture of the fundamental structure of reality – either because reality is inaccessible to us or else because it is a myth to suppose that a reality independent of our beliefs exists at all. To these sceptics I reply that the pursuit of metaphysics is inescapable for any rational being and that they themselves demonstrate this in the objections which they raise against it. To say that reality is inaccessible to us or that there is no reality independent of our beliefs is just to make a metaphysical claim. And if they reply by admitting this while at the same time denying that they or any one else can justify metaphysical claims by reasoned argument, then my response is twofold. First, unless they can give me some reason for thinking that metaphysical claims are never justifiable, I do not see why I should accept what they say about this. Secondly, if they mean to abandon reasoned argument altogether, even in defence of their own position, then I have nothing more to say to them because they have excluded themselves from further debate.

Returning to Sartre:

“To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil.” (37)

I agree that no one deliberately does wrong. I think this view fits nicely on free will skepticism, though Sartre takes it that it increases our moral responsibility, because by affirming what we take to be good, we affirm what we take to be good for everyone. And so, one not only takes responsibility for themselves, but for all humankind. Consider: 

If . . . existence precedes essence, and if we grant that we exist and fashion our image at one and the same time, the image is valid for everybody and for our whole age. Thus, our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed. . . . my action has involved all humanity. To take a more individual matter, if I want to marry, to have children; even if this marriage depends solely on my own circumstances or passion or wish, I am involving all humanity in monogamy and not merely myself. Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man. (37)

Response (1): Is it true that existence precedes essence?

On one reading, I disagree with this statement. On another reading, I agree with it. First, on the reading in which I disagree: Essence refers to essential properties. You can’t have essential properties without having properties. You can’t have properties without existence. And thus, essence and existence are simultaneous, and it’s false that existence precedes essence.

On the reading in which I agree that existence precedes essence: While it's true that the properties of an object we consider to be essential to that object are simultaneous with the existence of that object, and indeed we cannot even understand the very notion of existence without said properties, the consideration of what counts as essential is up to us.

We couldn’t have the experiences we do without real properties causing those experiences. We then bundle those properties under labels so we can communicate with others about our environment. I’m happy to say that our notions of ordinary objects, just like the words we use to label them, are made up as useful social constructs, and that there really are no objects over and above the properties that describe them. It’s up to us to include or exclude properties and property bundles under each label. What excludes something from a particular label is its failure to have the properties deemed essential to that label, and what counts as essential is purely a human construct.

The existence of properties precedes their bundling by us, and in that sense existence precedes essence. But this does not remotely give us free license to choose what essences things have. We are bound by rules of convention, practicality, and common sense.

Consider two objects, a mountain and a lake. Mountains and lakes have different properties. We climb mountains and swim in lakes. We do not swim in mountains or climb in lakes. Mountains are large, rocky geological formations, and lakes are bodies of water. And so on. It’s not clear at first what counts as a mountain or what counts as a lake. That is, it’s not clear what the essential properties of these things are. If the mountain gets small enough, at some point it becomes a hill. If the lake gets small enough, at some point it becomes a pond. 

The problem of vagueness is one of the main reasons to think that objects are just social constructs. If objects exist over and above their properties, then mountains and hills as such truly exist, and there would be an exact moment the mountain becomes a hill were we to shrink it. But what could that exact moment possibly be? There’s no non-arbitrary answer. It makes more sense to say that there is no objective truth of the matter of when a mountain becomes a hill or when a lake becomes a pond; it’s just a matter of the social convention surrounding how these words are used and the general intuitions we form by these conventions.

There is a fact of the matter about those conventions, which is why I say we do not have free license to choose what properties count as essential for any given bundle of properties. It’s not up to a single person. If I pointed at a creek and said to someone, “I will jump into that lake over there”, the person I’m speaking with will look confused and say, “‘Lake’?! That's not a lake!” If my interlocutor cannot come up with a precise definition of lake, that is irrelevant. We just use our intuition. Essences need not be precisely known to be there. If there weren’t an essence to ‘lake’, then my interlocutor would not have said “That's not a lake” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

We bundle so automatically, effortlessly, and instantly, that it’s impossible for us not to bundle as soon as we are capable of understanding our physical environment. So psychologically speaking, even bundling happens at the same time the properties cause us to experience them. (The only exception perhaps being when we are infants, right before we’ve developed basic language abilities. But the moment we have labels, we have bundles.) Of course, many properties existed before humans did, and in that sense existence precedes essence in that the existence of properties precedes humans assigning essences to bundles. The properties that make up mountains and lakes existed before humans bundled them under the labels ‘mountain’ and ‘lake.’

Response (2): I don't see how anything can be “valid for everybody” if we are what we make ourselves to be. Why would Sartre deny absolute truth only to affirm it?

Perhaps Sartre is saying that it would be hypocritical of us to make ourselves an exception to rules we live by, and thus, if we want to avoid the irrationality of hypocrisy, we have no choice but to include everyone under our rules. How Kantian! But a problem with Kant’s universalization applies here too, which brings me to Response 3:

Response (3): It’s clearly false that if I marry, then I am involving all of humanity in my marriage. When a gay couple gets married, does that mean they are involving all of humanity in the sense that they believe only gay marriage should be allowed? I trust that Sartre isn’t saying something so silly. But recall what Sartre says:

To take a more individual matter, if I want to marry, to have children; even if this marriage depends solely on my own circumstances or passion or wish, I am involving all humanity in monogamy and not merely myself. (37)

This sounds clearly false to me. Obviously when we make decisions for ourselves, we very much do not include all of humanity. We include only those people who exist in circumstances relevantly similar to our own (or even only exactly our own). We may consider, and rightly consider, our own circumstances to be so unique that while we rightly approve of a decision we make, we rightly condemn anyone else making the same decision, because, after all, it’s not the same decision.

We tend to abstract out actions and universalize them, when in reality actions are never universal. No one ever merely “gets an abortion”; instead, it’s always this person getting this abortion in these circumstances and for these reasons. There will always be at least slight differences from one story to the next.

With that said, universalizing actions isn’t always wrong, as it is often the case that the details between two stories are morally equivalent such that the reasons to refrain from the action in one story will apply just as well to the next. But we always run the risk of misapplying things when we do this. It would be a misapplication, for instance, to think that someone must believe that all abortions of all kinds are justified regardless of circumstances just because they had an abortion. (Not to mention, we universalize actions because it would be way too complicated not to. We cannot come up with endless versions of the word “theft” to include all imaginable variations of morally significant circumstances in which someone commits theft.)

So first, we have the epistemic aspect of existentialism, which appears to make existentialism a form of skepticism with respect to our ability to access the truth about human nature. I’m more optimistic of our ability to access truth, and I would want to steer clear from the kind of skepticism that becomes self-defeating.

Then second, we have the metaphysical aspect of existentialism of “existence precedes essence.” If we read that as saying “Properties precede essential properties”, then I have mixed feelings. Psychologically, properties are simultaneous with essential properties in the sense that humans bundle properties under labels as soon as they start learning language. 

Ontologically, properties and essential properties exist simultaneously, as essential properties are a social carve-out of the properties already there.

Though I’m happy to say that properties exist prior to our bundling them under labels, and in that sense properties exist prior to their essentializing by us. But that doesn’t mean we can choose which properties are essential; that’s up to the complex confluence of sociolinguistic influences. All we can do is try to identify the essential properties of things.

So I don't see us as radically free to self-determine what we are. We are locked into what we are, and it’s up to us to discover and accept what we are or fail to discover or fail to accept what we are.

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[1] Sarte, Jean-Paul. Essays in Existentialism. Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1965.

[2] Lowe, E.J. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.