It is a simple point of logic that if propositions p and q are both true, then they are collectively logically consistent, though not conversely. So if God exists and Evil exists are both (objectively) true, then they are collectively logically consistent, whence it follows that it is possible that they be collectively logically consistent. This is so whether or not anyone, any finite or ectypal intellect, is in a position to explain how it is possible that they be logically consistent. It is presumably otherwise with the intellectus archetypus.
For if such-and-such is the case, then, by the time-honored principle ab esse ad posse valet illatio, it is possible that it be the case, and my inability, or any mortal's inability, to explain how it is possible that it be the case cannot count as a good reason for thinking that it is not the case. There is no valid move from ignorance as to how something is possible to its not being possible. Such an inferential move would be tantamount to the ad ignorantiam fallacy. So if it is the case that God exists and Evil exists are collectively logically consistent, then this is possibly the case, and a theist's inability to explain how God and evil can coexist is not a good reason for him to abandon his theism — or his belief in the existence of objective evil.
The logical point I have just made is rock-solid. I now apply it to two disparate subject-matters. The one is the well-known problem of evil faced by theists, the problem of reconciling the belief that God exists with the belief that evil exists. The other is the equally well-known 'problem of mind' that materialists face, namely, the problem of reconciling the existence of the phenomena of mind with the belief that everything concrete is material.
The theist is rationally entitled to stand pat in the face of the 'problem of evil' and point to his array of arguments for the existence of God whose cumulative force renders rational his belief that God exists. Of course, he should try to answer the atheist who urges the inconsistency of God exists and Evil exists; but his failure to provide a satisfactory answer is not a reason for him to abandon his theism. A defensible attitude would be: "This is something we theists need to work on." Or he could simply repeat (something like) what I said above, namely, "True propositions are (collectively) logically consistent; this is so whether or not a mortal man can explain how they are jointly true; I have good grounds for believing both that God exists and that evil exists; I am therefore under no doxastic obligation to surrender my theism."
Atheists and materialists ought not object to this standing pat since they do the same. What materialist about the mind abandons his materialism in the face of the various arguments (from intentionality, from qualia, from the unity of consciousness, from the psychological relevance of logical laws, etc.) that we anti-materialists marshal? Does the materialist give in? Hell no, he stands pat, pointing to his array of arguments and considerations in favor of materialism, and when you try to budge him with the irreconcilability of intentionality and materialism, or qualia and materialism, or the unity of consciousness with materialism, he replies, "This is something we materialists need to work on."
Or he could proffer a structural analog of what I put in the mouth of theist: "True propositions are (collectively) logically consistent; this is so whether or not a mortal man can explain how they are jointly true; I have good grounds for believing both that intrinsic intentionality exists and that everything concrete is material in nature; I am therefore under no doxastic obligation to surrender either my belief that there are genuine intentional states or my materialism about the mental."
Both theist and materialist could take a more extreme tack. They could 'go mysterian.' They could say, "Look, it's just beyond our ken and will remain so. Our cognitive architecture is such as to disallow insight into how apparently contradictory propositions are in reality non-contradictory."
The theist might say that is is not given to us to understand how God and evil are both real; it's a mystery! The materialist about the mind might say that it is not possible for us to understand how intentionality (and the other phenomena of mind) are real given that everything concrete is physical. It's a mystery!
The ultimate extreme would be to 'go dialetheic' and embrace true contradictions. Some argue that the Incarnation is a true contradiction. If so, why couldn't the incarnation of mind in matter be a true contradiction? I myself fight shy of this extreme. I cleave to the law of non-contradiction and embrace solubility skepticism -- not warmly but coolly, tentatively and skeptically. And therefore self-consistently.
Friedrich Nietzsche was born on this date in 1844. He died on 25 August 1900. You must attend to him if you would understand our current spiritual/cultural situation. His great aphorism, "Some men are born posthumously" applies to him, and I am sure that when he penned it he was thinking of himself.
What makes it a great aphorism? Economy of expression; penetrating insight; literary quality. An aphorism must be short, but not merely clever: it has to set a truth before us. And it has to do that in an arresting and memorable way.
My
Some men die before they are dead
is good but does not achieve quite the same level. For one thing, it is derivative as the converse of the Nietzschean saying.
Aphoristic discourse is not argumentative discourse. Like a thunderbolt that does not bring in its train any explanation, a good aphorism is an assertion bare of reasons. It is fitting that Nietzsche should aphorize given his aversion to dialectics:
With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of dialectics. What really happened there? Above all, a noble taste is thus vanquished; with dialectics the plebs come to the top. Before Socrates, dialectic manners were repudiated in good society: they were considered bad manners, they were compromising. The young were warned against them. Furthermore, all such presentations of one's reasons were distrusted. Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons in their hands like that. It is indecent to show all five fingers. What must first be proved is worth little. Wherever authority still forms part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?
One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this. It can only be self-defense for those who no longer have other weapons. One must have to enforce one's right: until one reaches that point, one makes no use of it. The Jews were dialecticians for that reason; Reynard the Fox was one -- and Socrates too? (Twilight of the Idols, "The Problem of Socrates.")
In a criminal case the probative bar is set very high: the accused has to be shown guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Here too there seems to be a legitimate appeal to ignorance: if it has not been shown that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the conclusion to be drawn is that he is not guilty.
We will have to examine this more carefully in a separate post.
Herewith, the separate post. Plainly, the following is an invalid argument:
1. It was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Smith who killed Jones.
ergo
2. Smith did not kill Jones.
Examples like this appear to support the idea that some appeals to ignorance (or arguments from ignorance) are reasonable and non-fallacious. According to Douglas N. Walton,
. . . the criminal law presumes that a person is not guilty if he has not been shown to be guilty. This is an ad ignorantiam form of argument, but it can be reasonable in the context of the rules of argument in the criminal law. (Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation, Cambridge UP, 2007, 20th ed., p. 47)
I wonder if this is right. Which better represents a criminal process that terminates in an acquittal? Is it the above argument or the following argument?
1. It was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Smith who killed Jones.
ergo
3. The presumption of Jones' innocence has not been defeated and Jones is in the eyes of the law not guilty.
I now think it is the second argument. But note that (i) the second argument is valid, and (ii) there is no appeal to ignorance in the second argument. The validity of the second, enthymematic, argument is obvious when we make explicit the tacit assumption, namely, that
4. If the accused in a criminal proceeding has not been proven to be guilty of the crime with which he is charged beyond a reasonable doubt, then the presumption of innocence has not been defeated and the accused is in the eyes of the law not guilty.
So the second argument is (formally) valid. It also does not represent an appeal to ignorance. One is not arguing that: Jones is not guilty in reality (as opposed to in the eyes of the law) because it has not been proven that he is not guilty. One is arguing that the presumption of innocence has not been defeated. The following are different propositions:
a. Jones is not guilty
b. Jones' presumption of innocence (POI) has not been defeated.
It ought to be obvious that they are different. They are logically independent. Each is consistent with the negation of the other. Thus the following sets are consistent dyads: {Jones is guilty; Jones' POI has not been defeated}, {Jones is not guilty; Jones' POI has been defeated}.
Conclusion
According to Walton, ". . . the criminal law presumes that a person is not guilty if he has not been shown to be guilty. This is an ad ignorantiam form of argument . . ." I think this betrays a misunderstanding of the notion of presumption, and in particular, presumption of innocence.
The presumption is not that a person is not guilty if he has not be shown to be guilty; the presumption is that he is to be treated as if not guilty, if he has not been shown to be guilty. In the case of O. J. Simpson, almost everyone agrees that he is guilty of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Yet he was found not guilty. Obviously, there is a difference between being not guilty (being not guilty in fact) and being found not guilty (being not guilty in the eyes of the law). The presumption of innocence was not defeated in that trial. But that is consistent, as I argued above, with the accused's being guilty.
It is therefore a mistake to think that the POI procedural rule embodies an appeal to ignorance. And since there is no appeal to ignorance here, there is no reasonable or non-fallacious appeal to ignorance.
UPDATE: Dave Bagwill writes,
My grand-dad did not mince words, nor did he suffer fools. When I tried to trick him with verbal technicalities, he would accuse me of "trying to pick the fly shit out of the pepper".
He would have said that about your latest post 'On Ad Ignorantiam and the Law', but he would have been wrong. You made some very fine, fine distinctions in that post that really cut to the heart of the matter. Thanks, and well done. (I've used that book by Walton for years and generally found it useful.)
You're welcome, Dave. My response to your grandfather would be to make yet another distinction, one between hairsplitting and the drawing of necessary distinctions, and then distinguish different kinds of hairsplitting.
One sort of hairsplitting is to make distinctions that correspond to nothing real, distinctions that are merely verbal. The 'distinction' between a glow bug and a fire fly, for example, is merely verbal: there is no distinction in reality. A glow bug just is a firefly. Similarly there is no distinction in reality between a bottle's being half-full and being half-empty. The only possible difference is in the attitude of someone, a drunk perhaps, who is elated at the bottle's being half-full and depressed at its being half-empty.
But this is not what people usually mean by the charge of hairsplitting. What they seem to mean is the drawing of distinctions that don't make a practical difference. But whether a distinction makes a practical difference depends on the context and on one's purposes. The truth of the matter is that there are very few occasions on which the charge of hairsplitting is justly made. On almost all occasions, the accuser is simply advertising his inability to grasp a distinction that the subject-matter requires.
Walton may be the premier writer on informal logic. His book is apparently well-thought-of. 2007 saw the 20th edition. I'd guess there have been editions since then.
Firearms instructors sometimes say that every gun is loaded. That is plainly false as it stands, but a wise saying nonetheless if interpreted to mean: every gun is to be presumed loaded until proven unloaded. Presumptions are procedural rules. To presume every gun to be loaded is to adopt a procedural rule to treat every gun as if it is loaded regardless of how antecedently likely it is that it is loaded. Suppose the likelihood is near zero: I examined the gun carefully an hour ago and I found it to be unloaded. Nevertheless, the presumption that it is loaded remains in force. I continue to behave as if it is loaded. For example, I don't point the gun at anything unless I want to destroy it.
I conclude that to presume that p is not to assert that p is true, nor to assert that p is probably true, nor to assume that p is true, but to decide to act as if p is true. A presumption, then, is not a proposition, although it embeds one. A presumption is something like a decision. More precisely, a presumption is the accusative of an act of presuming, an accusative that is not itself a proposition, but embeds one.
A presumption is not like a belief in the following important respect. To presume that a gun is loaded or that a man is innocent is not to believe that it is or that he is. To believe that p is to believe that p is true. But to presume that p is not to presume that p is true; it is to act as if p is true without either accepting or rejecting p. To presume that Jones is innocent until proven guilty is not to believe that he is innocent until proven guilty; it is to suspend judgment as to guilt or innocence until sufficient evidence is presented by the prosecution to warrant a verdict one way or the other. When I presume that p, I take no stand as to the truth-value of p -- I neither accept nor reject p -- what I do is decide to act as if p is true.
Presumptions must be defeasible. (I suspect that an indefeasible presumption is no presumption at all.) The presumption of being loaded is defeated in a particular case by carefully examining the gun and showing that it is unloaded. So while a presumption is not a proposition, it embeds a proposition that can be shown to be false. Defeasible presumption and burden-of-proof are correlative notions. (They are like rights and duties in this respect but also in that both are normative notions.) In a court of law, for example, if the accused enjoys a presumption of innocence, as he does in the Anglosphere, then the accuser bears a burden of proof, a burden which, if properly discharged, defeats the presumption.
Appeal to Ignorance?
So if person A claims to person B that a certain gun is unloaded, the burden of proof is on A to show that it is unloaded; person B does not bear the burden of proving that it is loaded. It is not just that he bears a lesser burden'; he bears no burden. Indeed it seems that B would be within his epistemic rights were he to claim that his ignorance of whether or not the gun is loaded is good evidence of its being loaded. But this is an appeal to ignorance. It has not been shown that the gun is unloaded; ergo, the gun is loaded.
It has not been shown that ~p; therefore p gives us the form of the ad ignorantiam 'fallacy.' Construed as a deductive argument, it is clearly invalid. Construed as an inductive argument, it will be in many cases weak. For example, suppose the gun is straight from the manufacturer and right out of the box. Then the probability of its being loaded is very low, and the argument: This gun out of the box has not been shown to be unloaded; ergo, this gun is loaded is very weak.
Nevertheless, safety considerations dictate a defeasible presumption in favor of every gun's being loaded, whether out of the box or not, a presumption that places the onus probandi on the one who maintains the opposite. So one might conclude that the appeal to ignorance in this case is reasonable even though the argument is deductively invalid and inductively weak.
The situation is similar to that in a court of law. The defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty, so the burden of proof rests on either the state in a criminal proceeding, or on the plaintiff in a civil trial. In a criminal case the probative bar is set very high: the accused has to be shown guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Here too there seems to be a legitimate appeal to ignorance: if it has not been shown that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the conclusion to be drawn is that he is not guilty.
We will have to examine this more carefully in a separate post.
Safety Considerations
There are 'safety' considerations in both the gun example and the law example. It is because we want to be on the safe side -- and not get shot -- that we presume every gun to be loaded. "Better that a hundred guns be unnecessarily examined than that one sentient being be accidentally shot."
And it is because we want to be on the safe side -- and not sentence an innocent person -- that we presume the accused to be innocent until proven guilty. "Better that a hundred guilty people go free than that one innocent person be wrongly convicted."
But now what about God? Don't safety considerations apply here as well? If God exists, then our ultimate happiness depends on getting into right relation with him. So why can't one make a legitimate appeal to ignorance here? Now of course from the fact that no one has proven that God does not exist, it does not follow that God exists. That is an invalid deductive argument. That would be a truly fallacious instance of ad ignorantiam. But it is also invalid to infer than a gun is loaded because it hasn't been proven to be unloaded, or that a man is innocent because he hasn't been proven to be guilty. It just doesn't follow in any of these cases. And yet we reasonably consider the gun loaded and we reasonably find the accused to be innocent. And so why can't we reasonably presume God to exist on the basis of the fact that he hasn't been shown not to exist? If the burden of proof rests on the one who claims that gun is unloaded, why doesn't the burden of proof rest on the one who claims that God is nonexistent? We don't want to get shot, but we also don't want to lose our ultimate beatitude -- if ultimate beatitude there be.
You can't say that that the burden of proof rests on the theist because he is making a positive claim; for there are positive claims that need no proof. And you can't say that the burden of proof rests on the theist because he is making an existential claim; for there are existential claims that need no proof. If you claim that extraterrestrial intelligent beings exist, then the burden is on you. But if you claim that there are Saguaro cacti in Arizona, then the burden of proof is not on you but on the one who denies it. Nor can you say that the burden rests on the theist because he is controverting the widely-accepted; the consensus gentium is that God exists.
Earlier I argued that we shouldn't bring BOP considerations into the God discussion at all. But if we do, why doesn't the BOP rest on the atheist?
Pigliucci's Confusion
Massimo Pigliucci thinks that if one understands who bears the burden of proof in a trial, then one ought to see right away that the burden of proof rests on the theist. For, "the burden of proof is always on the party making a positive claim, not on the one making a negative one." This strikes me as confused. It is true that the party making a complaint or bringing a charge is making a positive claim, but this is not the reason why the BOP rests on the accuser. It rests on the accuser because of the presumption of innocence that the accused enjoys. The BOP rests on the accuser not because his claim is positive but because of the procedural rule enshrined in our system of law according to which one is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
It is not true that the BOP is always on the one who makes a positive claim. 'That hillside is studded with Saguaro cacti' said to my hiking companion needs no proof. I shoulder no probative burden when I make a commonplace observation such as that. Therefore, the following is an unsound argument:
Everyone who make a positive claim bears a BOP. The theist makes a positive claim. ergo The theist bears the BOP in his debate with the atheist.
I argued above that if BOP considerations are relevant to the God debate, then the BOP is on the atheist. To appreciate the argument I gave, you have to realize that the God question is not merely theoretical. It is a practical question. In that respect it is like the gun safety and court room cases. My interest in whether or not a particular firearm is loaded or unloaded is not merely theoretical, or I should say, not at all theoretical. It is a practical interest in maintaining the health and physical integrity of myself and the people around me. Similarly with the law. If you are accused of homicide you are in deep trouble and face the loss of your liberty or your life. Arguably, the God question is in the same boat.
So I invite you to accept one or the other of the following conclusions. The BOP is borne by the atheist. BOP considerations should be kept out of the theist-atheist debate altogether.
A: The law of noncontradiction (LNC) is a law of thought merely.
B: I dispute your claim. LNC is not a law of thought merely; it is also a law of extramental reality.
In this example, B disputes what A says by making a counter-claim, a counter-assertion. Both are asserting. It strikes me as foolish to ask who has the burden of proof (BOP). How decide such a question? I assume that in a dialectical situation like the above, if BOP considerations are relevant at all, then the BOP is on one side or the other, but not on both, and not on neither. But there is no non-arbitrary way to place the onus probandi on one side or the other. Therefore, BOP considerations are a useless detour. Why not go straight to the question and evaluate the arguments pro et contra?
Suppose you say that the BOP rests on the one who opposes the received or traditional view. Then the BOP would be on A. But if you say that the BOP rests on the one who makes the stronger claim, the more committal claim, then the BOP would be on B. I don't see how there could be a non-arbitrary assignment of BOP in a dialectical situation like this. Correlatively, I don't see how it could be non-arbitrarily claimed that there is a defeasible presumption (DP) in favor of A's assertion or of B's. So I suggest we drop the BOP talk!
Concerning your dialogue: In my opinion, both A and B bear a burden of proof here. For that reason, it is an unlucky start of a dispute - because it is in fact the start of two disputes at once, and a dialectical confusion is likely to arise. In order that the dialogue be fruitful, B should not have put forward a negation of A's claim as his own claim, but simply refuse to accept A's claim until proved (this is the meaning of the rule Necessitas probandi incumbit ei qui dicit non ei qui negat - "negare" here has the technical meaning of "to refuse to concede until proved", according to the rules of disputation). If A failed to produce a proof, his case would fail. If he produced one, his case would succeed unless and until B attacked that proof, thus prompting another argument to "restore" the former one. And so on, until one of the parties failed to do their duty. Only if A was the one who so failed, would it be in place for B to state his opposite meaning as a claim, if he wishes, with the burden of proof incumbent on him
There are three, not two possible dialectical states of a proposition: (i) proved (ii) disproved (iii) neither. The "burden of proof" just means that the default state is (iii).
Perhaps our difference boils down to this: you think that a dispute is about truth or falsity of a proposition, whereas I think that it is about validity or invalidity of rational support of a proposition. Whereas from the former point of view the dialectical situation comes out as symmetric, in the latter view it is inherently asymmetric.
Reply to Novak
Part of our difference here may be due to a different understanding of 'dispute.' I think Lukas may be using it is a technical way similarly as he uses negare in a technical way. And perhaps these technical meanings are the same. When I used 'dispute' in the little dialog above I was using it to mean 'disagree with.' Lukas seems to be using it to mean 'refuse to concede until argument is provided.'
Lukas seems just to be assuming that the BOP rests on A who must "produce a proof" otherwise his "case would fail." I take that to mean that A is obliged to give an argument for the claim he has made. (In my book, an argument is not the same as a proof, although every proof is an argument.) But, by my lights, if so, then the same goes for B: he too must give an argument for his counterclaim. B cannot just cross his arms across his chest and say, "I don't have to give an argument for my assertion; it suffices for me to poke holes in your argument. The BOP is on you, not on me." This is precisely what I reject. Otherwise, there would be a presumption in favor of B's claim. But there isn't. And to insist that there is, is to beg a philosophical question.
I think Lukas is right when he says that, for me, the dialectical situation is symmetric, at least in the example given above, while for him it is asymmetric.
Lukas is also right when he says that, for me, the dispute (disagreement) is about the truth-value of a proposition: Is it true or is it false that LNC is a law of thought merely? He says that, for him, the disagreement is "about validity or invalidity of rational support of a proposition."
But this needs explaining. Validity and invalidity are technical concepts from formal logic. Our present topic, however, is not formal logic, but dialectics. Lukas seems to think that there are certain procedural rules that govern the conduct of a discussion, and that these rules induce certain rights and duties in the interlocutors. Thus, he who makes an assertion puts himself under a dialectical obligation to support his assertion with one or more arguments, while the one to whom the assertion is made is under no obligation to support the negation of the asserted proposition: he has the right to do no more than find fault with the arguments for the asserted proposition.
I am skeptical of this entire adversarial model which has its provenience in the court-room situation and makes perfect sense there, but seems to me not appropriate in philosophy which, by my lights, is not a matter of debate or disputation but one of dialogue in which the interlocutors are not out to prove propositions they antecedently accept and do not question, but who aim at arriving at the truth together, a truth that they do not claim to possess, but are seeking.
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