1. My phone is disconnected. This is not because I haven't been able to pay the bill, it's just because I was too lazy to get my butt over to the bank to pay the bill, and I didn't know there was a deadline for me to pay up. (I checked past bills. Nothing said anything about a time-before-you-must-pay-or-we-disconnect-you, or what I have also heard referred to in a strange tongue as a "Dead Line".) Even though I paid the bill two and a half weeks ago, and even though I've been told they'll reconnect me 'any day', I'm still not connected. Hilarity/enragement has ensued from this state of affairs more than once. Here are two choice samples.

First, I emailed them to ask why the hell I'm not connected. I got the following reply: 'Hi John, thanks for your reply. I'm sorry about your disconnection. Unfortunately I can't answer your question over email. Please call 611. Thanks, Randy.' You're a damn bastard, Randy, and now it's ALL OVER THE INTERNET!!!!

Second, I just got a bill from them. They didn't say anything about reconnecting my phone, but they did tell me that got my payment and are charging me for time during which I don't have a connected phone. How queer.

2. I signed up for facebook because I was linked to some (apparently hilarious) facebook site or something. I didn't find the link, but they made me register, and so now I'm somewhere on facebook. So I've been getting 'x HAS ADDED YOU AS A FRIEND' emails. (in some cases, X is an obscure person I haven't talked to in years.) But I don't plan on using facebook, I just signed up to view the page. I swear. So please don't add me. (I'd delete my account if I could, but I can't.)

3. Two papers due tomorrow and an exam tomorrow. I wish I could blog about the inconsistent properties argument some more, but that will have to wait.

I'm taking this Aquinas course through the religions department, which involves a lot of people trying to do philosophy without actually having any philosophical skill. It makes me feel quite important actually.

Anyways, someone raised the question the other day of why God can't sin, if he is omnipotent. Whilst I smoked my cigarette during the break, I flesched the question out (Call this the Inconsistent Properties Argument):

1) If God exists, he has a conjunction of properties essentially, including (a) perfection, and (b) omnipotence.
2) If God is perfect, then he can't commit sin. (this is just the definition of perfection)
3) If God can't commit sin, then there's some act which he can't do.
4) If there's some act which God can't do, he's not omnipotent.
5) So if God's perfect, he's not omnipotent = God cannot be both perfect and omnipotent.
6) So God cannot exist. (5, 1)

Some scholar that someone read (I forget who) recommended denying (2). Here is his reason:
7) For any individual, if that individual is a moral agent, then it's possible for that moral agent to sin.
8) God is a moral agent.
9) So it's possible for God to sin.

I think the anti-2 argument is dumb, for a couple reasons.
1 - In metaphysics, the notion of 'can' is a notion about possibility. So a modal reading of (2) would yield: 'There is no possible world in which God commits sin'. This seems true. Denying (2), then, as this fellow wants to do, would yield something like - and this is just what (9) says: 'There is some possible world in which God sins.' Presumably the guy would take this line as follows: 'Look, it's true that God CAN or COULD sin. But in the actual world, he DOESN'T. And that's all that matters; that's all we're talking about.' So, we might think the anti-2 argument saves us from the Inconsistent Properties Argument because we don't say that God sins in the actual world. But then (in virtue of accepting the anti-2 argument) we're committed to saying God sins in some possible world, and that just seems wrong. Don't you think?* [NERD MORE: Furthermore, the (somewhat disputed) rule of modal logic S5 says: for any possibility, that possibility is necessary. So it's necessarily possible that God sins in some possible world. That's beginning to sound creepy at this point. It seems preferable to give up on the notion of God altogether.]
2 - Furthermore (and similarly to the first point), in metaphysics, most theories of personal identity are modally rigid: to have a property essentially just means you (or your counterpart) share that property across all possible worlds. If we accept that it's possible for God to sin in some worlds, as the anti-2 argument tells us, then we accept that the property of perfection is a non-essential property for God, and that seems equally wrong. (really, if this is the line the anti-2ist takes, she's actually an anti-1ist.)

3 - Finally, I'm not completely sure we should consider God to be a moral agent. If you accept that, say, x is right iff God does or recommends x, then anything God does just is a moral action, and he's not responsible to anyone for HIS moral actions. Since you need to be responsible to someone/something to be a moral agent, and since God isn't responsible to anyone/thing, he's not a moral agent. So I think the author, whoever this guy is, needs to give motivation for us to accept (8).

One thing the anti-2ist can say at this point is that we should say that God just doesn't have these properties essentially, and we shouldn't be relying so heavily on our intuitions. But it seems that, whatever God is, it just is part of the traditional definition of God that he has these properties essentially. If you're giving up on God's having these properties essentially, then you're giving up on the traditional sort of God anyways. And that might be fine for you, but the original idea here was to try to attack/save the traditional notion of God. The first argument, then, seems to have worked anyways.

The Inconsistent Properties argument never bothered me before (especially when you hear kids at the playground banter things like: "oh yeah tommy? well if God can do anything, why can't he SIN?!?!), but when you put properties and possible worlds into the mix it begins to look pretty foreboding. I'll be thinking about this one in the days to come.

*Furthermore, I think if we talk about omnipotence at least - maybe not perfection - we're almost talking about a modal property anyways: God CAN do anything. So the actual solution seems pretty impotent at this point. When the anti-2ist says, 'nonono, i just mean the actual world' it seems like what she really means is 'nonono, i've got this wussy notion about omnipotence that isn't like the omnipotence we usually take god to have (and isn't what YOU mean by omnipotence)'.

Gold!

It's been so warm here lately that I walk around the neighbourhood like twice a day. (Kind of like Belle in Beauty and the Beast. Shopkeeps open their doors, yell bonjour, and join me in choruses.) And living in this awesome jiveass neighbourhood, the coolness/popularity factor jumps up like five thousand per cent when it gets warm out and everyone wants to hang in the village. So it's a hopping place.

The other day at the local used CD store I found a bunch of Miles CD's, and ended up bringing four of them back to my place (Relaxin', Walkin', Workin', etc). What ensued at home that night was by far the best fivesome I've ever had. I paid for them and everything, though, so it's all good.

I finished a paper last night defending a dubitable thesis about what Aquinas thinks about the noetic (epistemic) effects of sin (he doesn't really think they exist, score for the philosophers!). Now I have to go prepare to present some awesome crap on whether, if you believe only currently existing things exist (you know you do), you should believe that you can travel through time. (given that the past isn't real on the view you just accepted, it seems at first that you shouldn't think time travel is possible - but you'd be wrong, bitches!)

It's super cold here. Like it's been below -30 (celsius, american friends) for one or three weeks now, and it's supposed to keep up for a few more weeks. With the wind chill, it's getting up to -50 at nights, on an almost nightly basis. But everything still has to go on as normal, so it doesn't seem as though the cold weather changes things that much. Basically the only difference all that makes (excepting the difference to your pain receptors) is that the weather even more the subject of conversation than usual.

I guess it also affects the music I listen to. When I'm out in the cold and I have the iPod on, I like to listen to raw, hardcore music like bluegrass Thile-style, hard-bop jazz Miles-style (that rhymes nicely), or Bach. Hardcore music, of whatever sort, helps you deal with the cold when you're freezing your arse off. And then when I'm at home I like to listen to comfort music like legends/giants of the softcore adult contemporary music scene (you weren't expecting the words 'contemporary' and 'music', were you) Norah Jones or Madeleine Peyroux, or alternately other comfort music like Colin Hay or the Shins or Debussy. And that's good therapy for the cold when it's not immediate. So I guess that's positive.

On the negative side, though, I'm sooooo sick of marking exams.

In lots of movies and TV shows there are lines that go something like this.

(A and B are romantically linked.)
A: 'Don't you like me anymore?'
B: 'No...' (pause while the audience gets disappointed, then:) '... I love you!!'

Or:
B: 'It's not that I hate state of affairs S. It's that I really hate S.'

I know I've seen a few recently, I just can't remember. If anyone does remember one of these situations, let me know.

I think this is retarded. Here's why.

If you love something, then you like it. So, character B shouldn't deny liking something but affirm loving that thing. Liking something is not a sufficient condition for loving something; you can like something without loving it. But liking something is a necessary condition for loving something (or someone); you can't love X without liking X. To go where it's possible to love X without liking X, we would have to go to some world where 'love' and 'like' have totally different definitions than they do here, since liking something is an essential part of loving something. Similarly to deal with the second example, and more obviously, you have to hate something in order to really hate something. Hating something is a necessary condition for really hating something.

The problem is that in both instances, character B is both affirming S and affirming the negation of necessary conditions for S. Affirming the negation of necessary conditions for S amounts to affirming the negation of S, since if any necessary conditions for state of affairs S are unfulfilled then the negation of S holds. (In normalese: if you don't like someone, then you can't love them.) So the character B is affirming a contradiction: both S and ~S. So sad the way screenwriters give up logical fluidity to maintain tension, isn't it?

Adam Gopnik is one of my favourite essayists. He's one of the best from the New Yorker these days, that's for sure: he's so witty and clever, and insightful, and (what's coolest) in a cheerful and happy way, but not immaturely so. Jonathan Franzen's also really good, but he lacks cheerfulness and optimism, so while his wit and candor and insight is momentarily appreciated, it's something you usually try to forget within a few hours of reading. Like a fine but really disturbing painting, say, that you enjoy, but it's not something you want to keep in mind lots. Unless you like being depressed a lot.

Anyways, Gopnik just released a new book last fall, which is mostly a collection of essays which appeared in the New Yorker since 2000, called Through the Children's Gate, about raising a family in modern-day (cleaned up, yuppyized, family-ized, trendy-ized) Manhattan. It's a great book - even better, I think, than his earlier collection, Paris to the Moon.

Anyways, most of that is besides the point. Since the focus of most of the essays is New York as it stands, and since on 9/11 some of it has fallen in between there, and since that really shook New York as a city in all kinds of ways, that event obviously plays a pretty large role in his book. In a few essays he mentions the kind of terror-sex or fear sex that New York couples start having post-9/11 (at least, couples without children, he notes, pointing out that he and his family had terror moments rather than he and his wife having terror sex).

And I just found that kind of weird, because earlier in the week I bought the Dave Matthews Band 2001 CD Everyday, which includes the song When the World Ends. Take a look at some of these lines:

...The day the world is over
We'll be lying in bed

I'm gonna rock you like a baby when the cities fall
We will rise as the buildings crumble
Float there and watch it all
Amidst the burning, we'll be churning
You know, love will be our wings
The passion rises up from the ashes
When the world ends

These seem like lyrics describing exactly that situation: terror-sex in post 9/11 NY. Maybe prophetic lyrics, too, considering the CD was rolled out in February of 2001, well before the attacks. Weird.

a little polemic

Alright, so I'm not too in-the-loop with respect to this Federal Vision stuff that's going around conservative presbyterian circles these days. Part of the reason for that is that I'm not going to a presbyterian church right now, and part of the reason is that I think both sides can get pretty assinine.

But I was reading Doug Wilson's blog the other day, and he says something like this:
1. Postmillenials have an optimistic theology.
2. They are not wary and suspicious of many doctrines (ie, high importance for the church, high place for the sacraments, etc).
.:. 3. So, there's a causal connection. If you have an optimistic theology, you won't be wary and suspicious of many doctrines

This is a dumb argument, because (2) is clearly false, and thus Wilson can't establish the causal connection. (2) is false because Postmils are picky with respect to theology. In fact it might even seem like they're more suspicious about Christianity than those who hold any other sort of eschatology. Examples: Neo-Covenanter seperatists are extremely suspicious. Van Tillians, which are mostly postmils, are extremely suspicious of other ways of doing apologetics. In the nineties, Rushdoonyites, who were postmils, were extremely critical of anything short of theocratic politics. Postmil proponents of the Federal Vision were motivated because they're pessimistic about the current state of presbyterianism. They're cautious about the possibility of doing systematic theology, and watch out for the flames that come from their nostrils when you try to tell them that the current state of evangelical liturgy is really not so bad. Postmils are bad at doing inner-city mission work (not because what they do is done in a bad way, but because they do so little of it), maybe because they're suspicious about the poor, or about the goodness of helping the poor? I don't know.

They're very good at living in the suburbs, though. Or maybe even in the hip part of downtown, if they're brave. So maybe Wilson means that they're optimistic with respect to real estate.

I guess you might try to save the argument by changing (2) to say that Postmils are only optimistic with respect to some specific doctrines (ie, high view of church and sacraments). But that doesn't establish the causal connection between Postmils and optimism. It only establishes a limited connection (with respect to optimism about a couple of specific doctrines) that doesn't seem too interesting.