Some Misunderstandings about Socialism

I hear a lot of arguments about socialism mostly based on right-wing "purposeful misunderstandings" of what is intended. These right-wing "purposeful misunderstandings" exist fundamentally to prevent rational evaluation of the value of socialism and the role it -does actually- play in the American Economy and the role it -ought- to play in said economy. Socialism has its roots in pre-marxian communal living strategies that are common to humans in reaction to the stresses of living in industrial capitalist societies, recognizing that the fundamental feature of the industrial (and now post-industrial) capitalist society is the concentration of wealth and power and the protection of the concentration of that wealth and power by the political body. So misunderstanding #1 - socialism is not marxist or communist essentially, but rather just the recognition that societies are communal living. The essential character of socialism, thus, is that it regards the function of the state finally to be the benefit of the humans that make up that state, and it is thus closely related to communal-ism in that the State is by definition an aspect of communal living. In the United States, for instance, the stated purpose of the existence of the Federal Government is written into our constitution, to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. So misunderstanding #2 - socialism is not anti-amercian. In fact, the United States of America was founded as a socialist state. What distinguishes socialism from viz. Capitalism, is that the broad class of all citizens is considered "the important class" and that laws that are made are intended to benefit that broad class of "important people" viz - everyone equally, rather than, e.g. in the case of Royalism where laws benefit primarily the Royalty or Oligarchy where laws benefit primarily the Oligarchs, or, of course, Capitalism where laws benefit primarily the rich. So misunderstanding #3 - socialism isn't opposed to freedom, but it is opposed to allowing the government to be used to benefit specific sub-groups of people, again, as the United States constitution says. In truth, then, the United States has its roots in socialism which shouldn't be any surprise to any real student of history. Our revolution overthrowing the imperialist royalist British empire with a People's revolution replacing that colonial rule with a government formed "By the People, for the people" was the quintessential People's Revolution and this should never be forgotten. In modern times one defining aspect of socialism has been the application of social science and economic science to governance. While we do this all the time in terms of safety rules, equal opportunity rules, environmental hazards and other such scientifically informed aspects of governance, application of science to Economics generally, in the United States, has been lacking because the people who are most likely to benefit from the application of economic science to governance are the poor and middle classes because the Oligarchical and Capitalist classes (that is, the people who currently control the vast proportion of money and property in the country) are currently benefiting extremely from the laws designed by them to effectively benefit them through years of propagandizing about the evils of socialism! So misunderstanding #4 - socialism is not about the redistribution of wealth. That has been done by capitalism for centuries. Socialism is about ensuring a level playing field for all citizens. Some notable exceptions to the corporate-capitalist system that is the backbone of the United States economic oligarchy come to mind, namely Social Security and Medicaid wherein the body politic takes responsibility for the ongoing well-being of our older citizens because they are to a significant extent disadvantaged by the nature of being members of a labor-class but no longer able to labor. Thus, without the benefits of property of their own and the ability to labor to gain the necessities of life, the government takes on that responsibility to ensure the well-being of those older laborers that can not any longer so labor. This method of benefiting the vast majority of people with a means of retirement at the cost of our own labor is a classical aspect of socialistic systems, that is, taking care of people. Other systems, however, that Americans have massively failed to socialize to our detriment are Food, Housing, Health Care, Education and Transportation. While we do -to some extent- offer socialized education (in fact, George Bush's "no child left behind" program is a great example of an attempt at a social program gone wrong), the fact that we only offer sufficient education for free to the public to learn to take orders and do jobs is telling as to the final beneficiary of those programs, namely Corporate America. So then, socialism, really, is the application of economic science to the job of governance in order to benefit the vast majority of people in a state. That is, socialism is -the only sensible way to govern- since science is the only systematic attempt at objective knowledge we have. Rejecting socialism, then, is like rejecting global warming, something you can do only if you have a specific personal benefit to preventing it. As such, everybody in the world should be a socialist, and every politician in the world -does- claim to be one when they talk about their campaign promises. It's only when delivering their policies that they are likely to do less than benefit the public as accurately as possible.

Biblical Interpretation and the Problem of Evil

Biblical interpretation and the problem of evil

Someone asked me what is my method of biblical interpretation. And while I am not a “Methodist” when it comes to epistemology in general, the question is like asking “how do you know what God is really saying”.

The Bible itself gives an outline for how this is to be done, that is, in accord with the Bible.

The first thing that is required is the assumption that the Bible is True. Any interpretation of the Bible that makes some parts of it true but not other parts makes what whole thing false.

Of course there are places where this will seem impossible to the reader. This is the generally either due to the fault of the translation (since few read it in original language) or interpretation. For the most part faults of translation can be traced back to the earliest manuscripts we have of Hebrew and Greek originals, and resolved by exegesis and interpretive analysis from that original text, so we should focus interpretive analysis as the harder topic.

When two passages of text differ in their content but are both true, normally these can be attributed to differences in perspective. Either the author is different, or the intent and manner of their descripti n is different.

Thus I may describe to you my mother as a woman of great moral character or as a woman who was deeply flawed. Both can be true without contradiction, only on the assumption that no deeply flawed people can have high moral character can these be considered a contradiction.

That is, in the assertion of any reductio ad absurdum argument, the premises of the argument need to be made clear. For the sake of interpreting the Bible as true, it is necessary to flush out the premises in a supposed reductio and acknowledge that the Bible is inexplicitly (though often explicitly also) proposing that the hidden assumption is 5e false one.

In many ways this is the point of the regenerative power of the Bible, to flush out these hidden false beliefs and show them false, by changing the readers mind about them (that is, in the act of repentance), the reader comes to understand what God intends.

So in many ways a great place to start studying the Bible is in seeking out the points you think must be contradictory and seeing why the Bible says they are not!

Probably the most often proposed contradiction in the Bible is known as the problem of evil. God says that he is effectively omnipotent , “with god all things are possible”. And the Bible says that god is perfectly good, there is no forward ness in Him. And it says that god created the world.

Yet we see that there is in fact evil in the world. The naive conclusion is that the three premises can’t all be true:

God is omnipotent
God is good
There is evil in the world.

Of course, the Bible does address this specific problem but not in syllogistic format, and finding that resolution while not impossible is often more work that people are willing to put in.

This is an error, for as it is written “it is for god to conceal a matter but for Kings to search a matter out!”

The hidden premise where is that if god is good and all powerful then there can’t be any evil because god would either not allow it or destroy it as it arose.

Since we know that god does not do this, we think, god must not be powerful enough or not good enough.

But this is not what the Bible asserts. The Bible asserts that we ourselves are evil “how is it that you, being evil, know how to give your children good gifts....”

Of course accepting our fallen state is among the hardest things for most people to do (especially people who call themselves Christians!) , but this is the crux of the matter.

God allows the existence of evil for our benefit, because he loves us despite the fact that we are evil. Otherwise we would all be destroyed or never come into being.

But god in his infinite wisdom and kindness and patience has allowed us to come to Him for mercy!

Thus the reader is then left with a choice between two premises:

God allows evil because it is good to do so, or, god should immediately destroy me and all of humanity.

But God says that he loves us, because god is love. So is god wrong to love the wicked!?

No, mercy which is the grand expression of who god is as love, is good, and I thank god for the mercy he has shown me every day.

There are many other such examples of interpretive dissonance being the point of apparent biblical contradictions but the reader is encouraged to find them for themselves!

For we have one teacher, God!

Nothing or Something, To be or not to be, ...

Let us imagine there is a simple ">" relationship between varieties of goods and evils without regard to how it is calculated.

For instance, many of us would suffer a blow to the toe in exchange for $1,000,000.  Some might not.  The calculation is not important, the important thing is that some evils might be tolerable in the face of some goods.

And let us imagine similarly, the simple absence of Any Good At all.

The absence of Any Good At All is as bad or worse than the presence of some Good with an admixture of Evil.  I will attempt to show you that in what follows.

The calculation of the good of a good is not as simple as how many.

Puppy love is good, a Great Love is better and qualitatively different.  The establishment of a home is good, the population of that home with love and kindness is immeasurably better.

Hegel describes this difference of size becoming a difference of quality (and Marx photocopies badly from him). Some evils are of such magnitude that they are unthinkable.  Some goods are of such magnitude that they are indispensable.

If the creator were as evil as possible I suppose we'd all be drinking our own excrement for all eternity.  Let's call this evil OMEGA-EVIL.  -the set of all equally evil things that an evil creator could have done that would have been qualitatively and quantitatively more evil than this world.-  Such a being we would refuse to call God.

Now let us imagine another set of worlds, where God makes them impossibly good - say where no pain and only pleasure, honor, love and charity takes place.  Call those worlds Aleph-Null Good.  This is the traditional picture of heaven and the Angels there - each doing what God has ordained for them and living in His Full Presence at all times, where none use their freedom to harm others, etc.

Call the conglomeration of those ideas Heaven and Hell.

Is any world in which there is an admixture of evil better than every world in which there is no admixture of evil or any world in which there is no good or evil?

Here it's more complicated.  Imagine if God, being Good, decided to make a world in which there were no good or evil, per impossible God would have to unmake God which is absurd.

So God, being good, had to make a world in which there was good.

God cold not have made anything more valuable to me personally than freedom - even the appearance of it. I would prefer my freedom to nearly every other physical comfort and the story of that fact about humans is decorated with the bloody messes we call history.  That's not to say there aren't better things, but that the absence of it is intolerably evil.

According to the Bible, the Angels felt the same way and rebelled.  You can see why they would - who would want to have control over the oceans and a keen intellect but no ability to use it except under strict orders?  They were made 'as free as possible' given their duties.

So also us, we humans, being given three responsibilities in toto all have the freedom required to make a life, even a good life, even in the face of adversity.  A thing which people choose over and over throughout history over any other kind of existence.  Of course much of the world exists to prevent the establishment of that good free life, call that the Evil In The World.  That is caused by Humans, not God.

But could God have made a world without free beings -at all-.  Perhaps a world in which there were only glass beads, for instance.  Given the existence of the Glory of God, no.  Such a world would be of no value, and the World which God has planned is a world of Ultimate Value.  His not building a world in which there was true value would be one of the OMEGA-EVIL worlds, a torture of immense pain.  Even a minute restriction in freedom is enough to drive most people to violence, the idea of removing it altogether is not only cruel but nobody once having tasted of it, could likely let it go.

We in fact try to do this - restrict our freedoms - we build our governments and systems to protect ourselves from the consequences of our open freedom, but in the end, even they are just expressions of our freedom folding back upon us as the natural consequences of our actions, the act of war of the powerful upon the weak.

With Much Love

Many Possible Worlds

Some notes on Possibilia and Contingent truths.

It seems to me that there are two main lines of dealing with hypotheticals and contingently-false propositions - rhetorically or ontologically.

On the "metaphysical" side you have the idea of possibilia - the proposed facts that correspond to counterfactuals, hypotheticals and suppositional propositions are real, just not "here in this world".  Of the possibilia solutions you have Lewis' multiverse or Leibniz's "ideas in the mind of God" - where the truth of an hypothetical depends on whether or not there is -in fact- this other kind of thing and whether or not it can be arranged as proposed.

On the other side you have a rhetorical or irrealist view of the matter where hypotheticals and the contingently false propositions are dealt with as pure words and where the assert-ability of such a proposition depends on the rules of the language in which they are asserted rather than on whether or not any such thing is "actually possible".  

One difference between these two approaches is best seen in examples, take this one:

(a) There might be nothing but shrimp.

An ontological approach might take this to be demonstrably false.  (As follows: If everything were shrimp, there would be no propositions, and so the proposition "everything is shrimp" is not true and therefore false in every possible world.)  Similarly with Leibniz's god-ideas, God can not conceive a world in which necessary existents do not exist, and some of those are not shrimp.

A rhetorical approach might take this proposition to be true.  It might be that there were nothing but shrimp.  Why not?  We understand what the sentence says, and while we know that -in fact- there are non-shrimp-things, it might have been the case that there weren't.  Such an approach would be unimpressed by the idea that there would be no proposition to express the shrimp-world's possibility nor that shrimp in the shrimp world would have to be simple or made up of shrimp.  

Both sides have weaknesses it seems to me.  The rhetorical approach's weakness is that we can change the rules of the discourse to make -anything possible-.  Dogs might be chickens or the number three as long as we allow ourselves to talk that way.  And it seems to me that this is obviously false - no matter how we talk, it seems to me, dogs can not be the number 3.  

The ontological approach, at the same time, has us postulating the existence of alternate universes, platonic heavens or god-thought-realms which seems to me miss the point of many counterfactuals, viz:

(b) I might have been born in Africa.

It seems to me that the "I" in (b) refers to ME, Robert Lindauer, in fact born in Burbank, California, and that if some other person in some other world was born in africa it is irrelevant to whether or not that proposition is true, even if that person is my doppleganger.  We have a way of expressing that fact:

(c) There is an alternate world where another person named Robert Lindauer was born in africa and he's very like you in many other respects.

And (c) seems expressible but straightforwardly false, or at least clearly irrelevant to (b) which is about Me whereas (c) is about someone else.

A platonic or quasi-platonic solution like Leibniz's which postulates the existence of a realm of possibilia seems to equally miss the point.  Even if there were an "ideal robbie that was born in ideal africa" that Robbie is clearly not me, and again, we have a way of expressing that kind of thing which is still not equivalent to proposing that I might have been born in africa, viz:

(d) God imagined Robbie being born in africa.

or 

(e) there is a platonic form corresponding to robbie having been born in africa.

Now we might imagine God imagining anything we like and so as far as differentiating between true and false I think (d) will not do.  Nor will a modified "God thought that there might have been a world in which Robbie was born in africa" which comes to the even worse problem which is what we are trying to define is -the-what- that God would have been entertaining about the proposition in question.   That is, the counterfactual nature of my birthplace being what we are trying to define, we can not therefore identify it as a thought in God's mind without first having defined what kind of thought it was for which we were looking.

The last one (e) is a more serious contender.   The Platonic form or "Proposition" that "I might have been born in Africa" is at least partially the same as that expressed by the expression ("Robbie might have been born in Africa, and I am Robbie.") even though they might have different meanings or intended interpretations.   The -fact- that makes it true would have been the same (viz, me being born in africa) and the arbitrariness of making -all- things possible similarly goes away.  I could have been born in Africa is true, ONLY IF, there exists a proposition P such that P is false but P is not self contradictory or self-defeating and P implies that I could have been born in africa.

Solution To Puzzle

Can God make a Weight so Heavy He can not lift it?  This puzzle is meant to demonstrate that the idea of God's omnipotence is incoherent.  In Leibniz's system, the puzzle is troubling, surely God could imagine such a weight, why could He not make it?  In Lewis' system the problem is doubly-troubling.  In worlds in which there is a God, some of them God is not omnipotent, and in the worlds in which God is Omnipotent we are given no help.   A rhetorical approach scoffs at the question and so for them it is irrelevant.  But for the Platonist, surely the question of what God is being asked to do is relevant, for if what He is being asked to do is simply impossible or nonsensical or even, for that matter, contradictory with the Dictates of God Himself, the question of whether or not He can do it is absurd, equivalent to asking whether 2 plus 2 could be 17.

In conclusion:

The possible worlds approach doesn't cover relevant cases correctly, in particular the ontological structure required to support the possible worlds mechanism makes simple cases of seeming possibilities trivially false.  It is, therefore, simply an inadequate analysis of our use of counterfactuals.   It may be an analysis of some concept, but it is NOT our concept of a counterfactual conditional.  Purely syntactical or rhetorical versions are equally poor but for the opposition reason, they are too liberal with their attribution of possibility.  Endowing even the most obscenely and obviously impossible statements to seem possible.  The Platonic version - the existence of coherent sets of propositions about the way the world might have been configured but is not, is perfectly clear and correctly captures our notion of counterfactual conditional.  

Let's Do Better - 'Mericans, Philosophy, philosophy and philo sophia. Lindauer/Varnado 2016

We measure years by conflicts, generations by wars, eras by conquests, empires by dominance and ages by evolutionary supremacy.   We have one universe to conquer.

Ants also have cities and queens and expand without horizon, but when they vie for the same resource they have no civil means of resolving the dispute, they can only either kill or be killed.

Humans though not much further evolved, have evolved one excellent survival technique which is conflict avoidance.   We, normally, despise war and death and destruction and prefer to make peace rather than war, unlike our insecta friends.   "Normally" I mean only in the American/British sense of the modern non-poor western person.   Having piled most of our capacity for conflict avoidance into the nearly forgotten slogan "Mutually Assured Destruction", we are not required to occupy ourselves day-to-day, hour-to-hour with the primary driving force for evolution in higher animals - Competition.

At the same time, we must confess that we have paid a great price for this luxury.  The morally vacuous position that what our armies do in order to guarantee our quality of life is justified by the fact that -we personally- do not do them.  We pay people to do our dirty work, call it "taxes" and put someone else in charge of what's done with it.

Occasionally there is this respite in cultures that are otherwise strewn with violence.  Consider what might be thought if I'd suggested humans were less violent circa 1812 or 1862.   No, what we've done is such an amazing feat of social engineering that it is near unimaginable that a civilization could have as its final goal the ability to get beer and pizza on friday nights.

But we are as the prophet suggested, poor though we think ourselves wealthy.   Even the wealthiest among us are confined within the bounds of what they can defend.  The rest of us within our countries or rooms or jobs or relationships or dreams, our desires and fears.  The traps within which we capture ourselves are the release of the power of governance - of deciding what to do for ourselves.   That is, the trap of luxury is the lack of freedom required to organize a civilization so that only a small percentage of us must professionally entertain ourselves with violence.

This lack of freedom is palpable, but still invisible.  It is sometimes filed under the rubric "The Social Contract", a contract to which few people could be convicted of having willfully consented.  You may not have a fence too high, or drive your car too slow, or have bare legs above your knees, and worst of all you sometimes have to do -whatever those bozos in congress- decide we have to do.

I am not a fan of this system, but I have hope.   I hope we can do better.

Holy smokes 'Mericans, what a great idea.  Let's Do Better.

Really - LET'S DO BETTER.

Why Not?

Unfortunately, that's a reasonable question.  There is a good reasonable answer too, as you may or may not know.  In the olden days we used to call it Institutionalized Evil.  It was the reason that Moses got the order to go free his people, the reason the americans had to join world war ii and the reason that the North and the South warred.   Institutionalized evil is different from other evil.  Other evil is "willy-nilly" - like a random killer.  Institutionalized Evil is studied, packaged, traded, shipped, and squeezed.  Brokered by Lucifer himself in a suit and tie.  "Why let a pawn eat a king's meal", he says to himself.

'Merica's institutionalized evil comes in the lowest saddest form - forced ignorance on an unsuspecting population brought on by generations of purposeful neglect of eduction as a fundamental condition of a true democracy in the hands of an all-too-aware intelligentsia and ruling class.  It's not bad, better than many alternatives no doubt.

But Can We Do Better?

Of course in many ways we really are doing better.  Every day a new report comes out showing how much better everything is.  But can anything we do stave off the inevitable collapse of human civilization due to neglect, conflict and the fallout?

Yes.

What?

Star Trek.

WTF are you shitting me, robbie, seriously did you just say that?

Yes, yes I did.

Ladies in gentlemen in all seriousness we need to be up on mars like last week.  We need replicators and holo-decks and energizers and warp-drive like a month ago.

Lindauer/Varnado 2016

A slightly less terse semi-formal proof of the existence of G

Several Years Ago I published a semi-formal proof of the existence of G or God.  That little essay is here: (link).  It does not cover the Character of God - that is the question: "what is God like?"  It does, however, answer the question "Is there a God?"  It did it in such a way that it was a) new and b) preserved the intent of ancient proofs and c) was formalizable and sound in first order logic with identity and modal operators (necessity and contingency).  

The third requirement was the most interesting (and drove most of the answer to (a)).  Formalizability is a feature lacking in most demonstrations of God's existence.  The Ontological Proof is a stunning exception to this rule, essentially stating that because the definition of God is possession of every perfection, and existence is a necessary perfection, God exists by definition.  This proof however fell short in a few famous ways (in my mind, the proposition that Existence is a necessary perfection is questionable).    That is, the Ontological Argument has the feature that it is formalizable, but not the feature that it is formalizable using only provable statements from pure logic.  For instance, the notion of "perfection" is not a notion from first order logic and it is hard to see how it could be.   The requirement that my logical proof have only premises that were definitive of logic and science and only statements in it that were provable for those two disciplines was essential.  This was because the rhetorical form of the argument is roughly that since the existence of God is provable by pure logic, the only way to deny the existence of God is to deny the soundness of pure logic, that is, to be purely irrational.  One can't expect an irrational person to believe anything on the basis of reason, and thus they are exempted from this proof being interesting to them.  

However, the formalizability requirement made the argument terse and somewhat inapproachable to those without formal logic training.  The result is this reluctant essay in which I will try to present that same argument in a less formal way that my previous semi-formal presentation.  Unfortunately because part of the argument IS it's formalizability, it is impossible to do away with the symbolism of first order modal logic altogether.  There are plenty of good textbooks on the subject, but I have attempted to clearly state what each formal statement means in english and to try to present my derivations of propositions in english rather than formally in order to make the whole thing more readable.  This has had the unfortunate side-effect of making this whole subject much longer and less dense.   I personally prefer the density of information when it is purely information, and I regard what is contained in this as pure information, summarized by the statement "The existence of God is demonstrable in First Order Logic with Identity and Modality (I will refer to this as CORE LOGIC in what follows) which is itself fundamental to all science and human knowledge in general."  That is, that any rational person should accept that God exists is proved and provable.  I provide this information as a service to both God and Humankind in order that you all may know and love each other.  

The breadth of people who -should- be interested in this argument is extremely broad.  People who believe that mathematics expresses truths, that science discovers truths, that CORE LOGIC is valid, or that anything at all can be known by reason should be very interested in this proof.  That is, all of modern western academia should regard this proof as demanding their rational assent.  First Order Logic with Identity and Model extensions is -in fact- the language of science and reason.  

The proof starts by expounding on definitions.  In particular definitions of symbols used in CORE LOGIC so that it is extremely clear what is being proved.  

The most important definition and distinction for the proof is the definition of Necessity and Contingency.  That is, the unique operators of modal logic.   Necessity is, naively, the notion that some particular thing MUST be the case - can not possibly not be the case no matter what.  It is distinct from very high probabilities (there is a very high chance that the sun will come up tomorrow, but it is -possible- that a fast moving small black hole could collide with the earth tonight making sunrise impossible, for instance) in that some not-provably false statement could be true that would make the statement possibly false if it was true.    And here I don't just mean -physically- provably false.  I mean -logically provably false-.  That is, statements that break the first law of logic, namely that no pair of contradictory statements are true, the law of Non-Contradiction.  

Now, there are schools of thought that believe that -all of reality- is made up only of necessary facts - what I term Hard Determinism - the idea that everything that is the case must be the case and couldn't be any other way.  They deny this distinction between possibility and necessity.   Now I don't have a conclusive argument -against- Hard Determinism per se, but only considerations on why no person should accept Hard Determinism as factual.  The first, and most obvious, is that a Hard Determinist must regard every statement of a possibility as false.  That is, they can't even -consider the possibility- that something is true since that would be -for them- an extra-logical "possibility" for which they could not account in their core syntax.  They couldn't express the possibility in their language, that is.  But obviously, we all can all potentially express and understand possibilities, (in particular, that one) and I conclude that therefore the case for Hard Determinism can't be made in English, but some restricted language (I assume boolean logic with primitive arithmetic extensions might be the preferred language here).  But that language is not sufficiently expressive to be -our language- (we couldn't express fear or regret in that language) nor is it sufficiently powerful to express its own consistency  and therefore would be open to the basic attack of being inconsistent.  Simultaneously, Hard Determinism is a direct contradiction of Quantum Mechanics and is therefore anti-scientific (as I said, this doesn't make it false, just very hard to justify believing it).  That is, in short, Hard Determinism is very unlikely to be true and thus not part of my range of proof subjects.  Unfortunately I think this leaves Hegelian, Marxian and Spinozan historical determinists out of the conversation though I think their positions are very hard to defend in general anyway (though they are three of my favorite philosophers).  

Simultaneously, there are schools of thought that believe that there are no necessary truths.  This one is pretty simple to show is false.  If there are no necessary truths, then it is possible that there are no necessary truths and therefore possible that there are necessary truths.  If it is possible that there are necessary truths, it is possible that the possibility of the necessity of any of those truths is necessary.  If this were not the case, then it would be necessary that the truth in question was not possible, contradicting our previous supposition that it was possible, thereby contradicting the supposition that all truths are merely contingent.    (For those that don't know, a contingent truth is just a fact that could have been the case but is not or a fact that could is the case but might not have been).  

Thus are our core definitions established of Necessity and Contingency.  A necessary truth is one that could not fail to be the case no matter what.  A contingent truth is one that might not have been the case but is.  Now I've been loose on the question of Platonic Realism about any of this.  That is, whether or not real possibilities exist or whether they are just rhetorical or psychological objects of some kind, or whether or not numbers exist or whether or not Propositions exist.  These questions are beyond the scope of the current document and I hope you will forgive me for simply not addressing them except to say that I am in fact a Realist about platonic entities but that I intend for anything said here to not rely on the assumption of the existence of those platonic entities in any way so that the rhetorical position with regard to that question is effective either way and neutral with respect to either.  

With those preliminary distinctions and caveats in mind, we are ready to begin the proof itself.  

Proposition 1:  "Every set of contingent truths is also contingent."

Formally this is expressed : "Ax, y:  if !(x -> !y) & !(y -> !x), Pos(!x) & Pos(!y) <-> Pos(! x & !y)"

(where "Pos" is the contingency operator and stands -roughly-  for the english expression "Is possible" ).

Translating that formal statement into rough english: For all x and y, if x does not imply y and y does not imply x and if it is possible that x is false and possible that y is false, then it is possible that the group or set of x and y is false.    That is, formally it is affirming that the Contingency Mode is a distributive property.  So let's say you have two statements "The dog is in the yard" and "The dog is not in the yard" and both are contingent, it is therefore also contingent that "The dog is in the yard and the cat is in the yard" then it is possible that "The dog is in the yard and the cat is in the yard".    The requirement that x and y do not imply each other's falsity is there to catch cases like "the dog is in the yard and the dog is not in the yard" where the two together form a contradiction.  This is obviated by the negative case formation of the rule but is there just to make the expression clear for those who might think they've found a great exception (which they did!).

The proof of proposition 1 is pretty simple.   It is a proof by reductio ad absurdum - that is to show that the contrary supposition implies a contradiction.  Suppose the opposite, that there are two possibly false statements who's resultant set is not possibly false, that is, the set of them is necessary (since if something is not possibly false, it is necessarily true.)    Since necessity is Distributive (if it is necessary that a pair of statements is true, then it is necessary that each of them is true is a theorem of CORE LOGIC), it is easy to show that this supposition implies that is both necessary that both propositions are true and that it is possible that they are false, breaching our definition of possibility and necessity and resulting in a contradiction.  

Proposition 2:   "Every contingent proposition has a sufficient explanation for its truth"

Formally this expressed "A( P ): if  Con( P ) -> E(G): G -> P and G"

That is For every proposition, if that proposition is contingent then there exists some other proposition G such that G is true and G implies P.  This is equivalent to Lebniz's Law (The Principle of Sufficient Reason) in latin "ex nihil nihil fit" or "nothing comes from nothing".   Empirical science is -in fact- the expression of Leibniz's law in action in human society.  That is, science is the search for explanations and answers to the question "Why ?".  Anything -without- an answer to the question "Why?" is regarded as miraculous and suspect - the provenance of the spiritual if you will.  For example, the "Standard Model" in physics is the story of the big bang coupled with evolution to produce us humans here now alongside the laws of physics, chemistry and biology.  That is, all of it is just an answer to the question "Why?"   Now the further questions "Why are there laws of physics?" or "Why is there evolution?" or "Why was there a big bang?" are -out of line- for physicists.  This is not accidental I think, but in general if you want to make a physics professor happy, ask them why there is anything at all.  Now, given that we have restricted our audience further to "People who think science is relevant for producing knowledge", the existence of a BARE FACT - that is, one with no explanation for its existence at all, is absurd.  And for those people, I present the following proof:

Suppose that there is some proposition P such that no proposition G implies it.  But POSSIBLY, G is P - that is, G implies P because G = P.  Such truths we regard as NECESSARY TRUTHS, contradicting the supposition that P is contingent in our Proposition 2.  But since if P  and G are identical, if P exists, G exists and therefore our proposition would be fulfilled but by a NECESSARY proposition.  But suppose G is not P, then we regard G as P's explanation - why P?  G.     That is, in every case there exists some G such that G implies P, but in some cases P is not contingent but necessary.    That is, Leibniz's law is always true.  

Proposition 3:  "The set W of all contingent propositions exists"

Formally, EW: AP, Con( P ) -> P in W

Slightly less tersely: there is a set or group of things W such that if P is a contingent proposition, then P is a member of W.  Here I'm using the letter W to evoke the idea of World, but that is not the necessary meaning.  There are obviously MANY contingent propositions that are not members of this world (e.g. the statement that Santa Claus doesn't live in Manhattan is true (likely) but is not a fact about this world (since there is also no santa claus in this world).  That is - the W above is much more comprehensive than simply our universe or world, but rather includes ALL POSSIBILITIES WITHOUT RESTRICTION.  That is, anything that is possible and not necessary is a member of W.  I say this to encompass a variety of theories of possibilia, including classical, semantical theories, the possible worlds interpretation, platonic idealism, etc.  This is just to make sure that I'm not restricting the rhetorical reach of the argument by interpretation of modality.  

Now the rest is pretty simple and even obvious.  We know by proposition 3 that there is a set of all contingent truths.  We know by proposition 1 that if W is a set of only contingent propositions that W itself is contingent.  We know by proposition 2 that there exists some G such that G -> W.  Now suppose G = W, then W is necessary, contradicting proposition 1.  But suppose G is a MEMBER of W.  But then W is necessary, contradicting the supposing that W is the set of contingent propositions (since obviously W -> (… , W , …) where the "…" stand for arbitrary sets of true propositions).  Therefore we know that G is not W and G is not a MEMBER of W.  Since G is not W or a member of W we know that G is necessary (otherwise it would be a member of W).  

Hence we know the following:

Proposition 4: There exists some G such that G is necessary and G is the sufficient explanation of all contingent facts, W.  

That is, formally:

EG: Nec(G) & G -> W

(There exists an object G such that G implies the existence of the set of contingent truths).  

Now this G is not equivalent to Aristotle's Prime Mover though I think the intent is very similar.   The existence of MOTION is not necessary (it might be that nothing ever moved).  So the existence of a prime mover is contingent on there being motion (and all motion being dependent on a single source).  Neither is it equivalent to the G of the Ontological Argument since there is no attribution of perfection to G (yet).  Nor the Cosmological argument (essentially, since there is a world, there must be a God) although this is closest in intent.  The difference here being that the existence of G is deeper than the existence of the cosmos (since there might not be a cosmos and that fact, too, must be sufficiently explained by G).  I know the word "deeper" is vague, I intend roughly that the cosmological argument presupposes a specific model of this universe and derives, I think correctly, the existence of a sufficient explanation for this universe.  But it may be that there are multiple universes or none, or that there is no correct model of this universe, etc.  The existence of the set of contingent facts is definitive and without restriction making some of the standard objections to the cosmological argument fail against this argument.  

Thus I believe myself to have accomplished my three goals of having a formalizable, new, yet preserving the intent of the ancient proofs of God's existence.  This third requirement is important because I do not wish to attribute to St. Anselm or St. Aquinas an irrational belief in God, but rather just a different language in which they expressed this similar idea.  Which is to say, that I believe this argument to be an answer to the objections to the previous proofs of God's existence.  

It is important to note that this G who's existence I have just proved is not characterized by the argument - that is G might be anything -for all we know-.  It could, of course, be the beardy white man of middle-age artwork, or maybe a field mouse or the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or Siva, or a kind of mathematical fact or something.   This will produce in the kind reader the desire to express the response to the argument presented that whatever I have proved the existence of, it is not God.  This will come from those religious folks who's faith have led them to a deeper understanding of God than I have described.  To them I can say only that the intent of this proof is to edify and encourage  - for those who's faith is weak to have stronger faith, and for those who have no faith to find it.  For those who's faith is already strong, this proof must be something you've known for a long time and have not thought it important enough to bring to the surface.  

FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS ON THE CHARACTER OF GOD

For those who have not faith and who desire knowledge of what G is, I have the following considerations in other blog posts which you will find on the web in various places:

ATTRIBUTION OF CHOICE AND POWER TO GOD

First, G CHOSE to build this world, these facts, the way you are, all of it, exactly the way it is and could easily have chosen otherwise.  That is, G is "all powerful" in that it -in fact- made this world, but could have made another.  This fact has a proof which I presented in my earlier work:

We define choice as follows:

Proposition 5: A fact P is "chosen" if and only if it is possible that P might not have been the case and there exists some N such that N implies P but not necessary N.

More formally:

X:{ AP: Con ( P ) & EN: N -> P}

That is N sufficiently explains P but P is not necessary.  Thus the sufficient explanation of P -could have- not been a sufficient explanation for P.  Now it should be easy to see that the set defined as X is -almost- equivalent to the set W above.  I say -almost- since in Proposition 5, N the explanans might be necessary since we are defining the concept of choice.  N is neutral with respect to modality.   We see here that in applications of the law of sufficient reason that the notion of implication of a contingent fact is unproblematic as long as its explanandum is contingent.  However, if we are talking about the set W of (4) above, the explanans G is necessary.  But if G is necessary and G implies W then W is necessary, contradicting the supposition that W is contingent.  Thus it is not the case that Explanation is always IMPLICATION.  This is why the negative form of Leibniz's law is preferred.  Here an example is in order:

Suppose a door closes as a result of a child siting there and deciding to close it.  Now, the child -might not- we think, have decided to close it.   Therefore, the decision in the child to close the door is the 

(a) insufficient but necessary part of the unnecessary but sufficient reason

 for the door closing (using Mackie's analysis of causation).  That is, something else could have closed the door, but didn't, and if the child had not decided to close the door, then this -most likely- would not have happened.  Simliarly, if the child's deciding to close the door is nowhere near an implication that the door is therefore closed.  LOTS of things could have gotten in the way of the decision to do X and X's being done.  Thus for the purposes of our proposition 2 above, the conditional -CAN- be implication but also -CAN- be this causation.  

There are further fine-grained senses of conditionality that further refine the kinds of things that can -count- as sufficient explanations for the purpose of (2) above.  They are restricted by the same logical requirements that any sets of propositions would be restricted to (something can't both be and not-be a sufficient explanation).  The sense of explanation which we are interested for this particular purpose is one where the explanans is necessary and the explanandum is contingent.  This would seem to some to be initially contradictory but only because they are thinking of the strict conditional not the sufficient explanation requirement we asked for in 2 above.  

I propose the following for this particular case:

(b) a necessary part of a necessary and sufficient condition

Now the question is whether or not G's conditionality (b) above is more like (a) or more like ( c ) -pure- conditionality:

  ( c ) a necessary and sufficient condition

I say this because in the -spectrum- of kinds of conditionality I suggest that (b) being closer to (a) than ( c) in character (that is, by being severally complicated by necessity and sufficiency) makes the condition of G's conditionality on W closer to the child pushing the door than to the number 1 being required to exist before 1 + 1 could be 2.    That qualitative and quantitative closeness is sufficient to treat the action of G on W as a CHOICE rather than a mere condition.  Consider, does the -decision- to do X always result in X happening?  No, so it is not sufficient.  Is X's being chosen always a condition of X's happening?  No, so it is not necessary.  BUT if your choice to do something was necessitated (e.g. by brainwashing) it would still not imply that it would happen.  

The choice of God to create this world (out of all the other possibilities that might have been or might yet be) is thus very similar to the choice of a person to do something except that God might not have been able to fail (we don't know) and might have not done anything at all -at all- (that is, a person must always do something as long as they exist in some ways.  However, God might not have made anything contingent happen at all, and thus nothing -ever- would have happened, a choice us mere mortals do not have as far as I know).   It is also very dissimilar to that of a boulder rolling down a hill and hitting something in that the boulder was completely constrained by a large set of contingent facts.  The choice to create the world however, could not have been constrained by contingent facts in the sense of cause, but only by the existence of possibilities, that is, unrealized options.  But what is an unrealized option but the idea in a person's mind or perhaps a whole world?

ATTRIBUTION OF GOODNESS TO GOD

We have seen from above that God Exists and God was Capable of Choosing this world from among all options and Did choose this world from among all options.  What we have yet to know is whether or not that was a GOOD THING.  A traditional attribute of God is God's Goodness.  While some people have worshiped as gods things that are not the creator of all things, among those that do worship the creator of all things, the common notion for all of them is that God is Good.  If the creator of all things were not Good, it would not be worthy of worship.  But the question is, is it good?

This part of the question is further complicated by the problem that an attribution of Goodness to God will require that Goodness be well defined as a predicate since, obviously, many people don't believe in Goodness per se at all.  Such people believe that Goodness is a culturally relative term, etc.   

I have found this attitude untenable in the face of the obvious evil that is in the world, and the great goodness often used to subdue it.  But is there a logical argument that would allow the introduction of the term "Good" to our purely logical vocabulary so as to remain within the confines of our requirement of formalizability?  

I suggest the following definitions:

If X exists it is good.

If Y causes X not to exist, Y is bad.

If Y causes X to exist, Y is good.  

If -on balance- Y causes more things to exist and for those things to continue to exist and produce things, etc., Y is, ON THE WHOLE, Good.

If -on balance- Y causes more things to cease to exist and for the things it causes to exist to cause other things to cease to exist, etc., Y is ON THE WHOLE Bad.

That is, existence and the spread of existence is good.  Nullification and the spread of nullification is bad.  That is, existence and goodness are co-extensive.   Salting the field so that nothing can ever grow is evil, but cutting the grass so that more things can grow is good. 

For choices, a Good Choice is something that causes, on the whole, more things to exist than it destroys.   A bad one does the opposite.  An intention is Good if it is the intention to make a good choice.  

To be beneficial is to cause, on average, more good than bad.

A choice is PERFECT if there is no other thing that could have been done that would have been more beneficial.

Now there is a very important one that is a bit harder to define and complicated to build up from smaller terms, so we'll jump ahead a bit - suffering.  Suffering is when a conscious being is the subject of a slow cessation of existence to the point of dread and death and pain.   The suffering of conscious beings is -worse- than the suffering of non-conscious beings for several logical and obvious reasons.  Firstly, a conscious being is capable of choosing and creating, something that non-conscious beings do not do (for whatever reasons).  As a result their potential for goodness is much greater than non-conscious beings (which can only do what they can do without choice).  For a conscious being can choose to improve the existence of others and thus multiply the overall potential for goodness whereas a non-conscious being can only serve as designated.  For instance, I am hoping to be doing a good thing by creating this essay to enrich your life so that you can also enrich the lives of others.  

Now since God, on the whole, has caused more existence than any other thing, it is the most beneficial thing in all of existence.  Could God have chosen to make a -better- world than this one?   Possibly.  But there is no reason to assume that God didn't do (or will not do) just that.  That is, this world as existing now is as close to infinite as we care to imagine, but even then there may be other worlds which are more or less close to perfect than ours, in terms of simply more existing things.    Now, I'm not sure if this is exactly right, but if God were to make the BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE DECISIONS - it would be to include everything that could potentially exist that -on the whole- caused the least suffering.  

Now, is this world, that world?  That is the problem of evil.  Could this world be the world that maximizes goodness and minimizes suffering, making it -the perfect choice-?

I'm hoping that that is the -strongest- formulation of the problem of evil possible.   The job in answering it is to decide exactly how the suffering to goodness ratio could be best optimized.  Consider that God could have made -every possible world- including those in which all people continually suffer at all times and those in which all people are free and happy and safe, etc., at all times.  I suggest that this world is -not- a world in which all people continually suffer (though I have heard something like this from some Buddhist friends).  I admit that I don't suffer much (I have a reasonable amount of pain and sorrow I think, but how would I know how much was normal?), but that many other people do -and have- suffered a lot throughout time.  

There are several debates and several possibilities here.  First is that God may have -in fact- made eternal life the reward for faith, in which case, no amount of pain leads to death, making all perceived suffering null and void for the faithful.  Second is that -just existing- the ability to feel anything at all, think, choose, be aware, is a precious gift.  And -percentage wise- the number of people who -on the whole for the duration of their lives- would rather have never existed is small, I think.  The price for the suffering in the world is all of the good that there is too - all of the happiness, all of the fish, all of the stars and galaxies, love, mystery, romance, and in some ways most importantly to me, freedom.   Third is that God -may be- in the process of creating every possible thing that can exist without being too much an admixture of evil and our observational context of -here and now- is simply unable to see that we are just a point in the great space of what is possible and thus something on the list of things to be done by God.  (The God of Spinoza, I think).  

Personally I think God only makes one world at a time - the group of coherent facts at any given time.  And this world changes as a result of God's desire to create as many good worlds as possible.  That is, I believe in the procession of time but only one "world".  I have great expectations for the future as a result.  For that reason I am very pleased to have been a part of this world and look forward to being part of those to come.  

In any case, I think that it is -very likely- that God took into consideration the possibility that all of us might like to exist and try it for a while even if we ultimately fail or fail in an untimely way.  We like being allowed to play -at all-.  

In short, I don't know that this is the best of all possible worlds, but it clearly might be and that is enough to answer the problem of evil as a logical problem.  As an emotional problem, in my opinion, the best thing to do is to be grateful for who and where you are at all times and to do your best to be as good as possible at all times, or, in the words of Our Savior, Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy mind and love thy neighbor as thyself.   If you are suffering, I can only say I'm very sorry and I'm trying to help in what ways I can.

  

Ideological Evolution - a Preface

The -most effective ideologies- are those that are psychologically effective for the most people.  Ideologies, thus, have a kind of Evolution - a survival of the fittest for human programming if you will.

It's important to rehearse first "what ideology is for".  Ideology is, essentially, the unproved background theory in which judgements regarding specific events and issues are couched.  Thus, for instance, religions are ideologies - providing a background of lore, vocabulary and value by which religious persons couch all of their thoughts about the world.  Scientism is also an ideology - the unproved assumptions in scientism being the epistemological foundational issues that remain undecided in all of science.  Obviously Marxism, Capitalism, Imperialism and Socialism are also ideologies.  If we inquire as to the source of the existence of these ideologies we find that in many cases they were invented or promulgated by a single source (e.g. Marx, Christ, Weber, etc.) and/or evolved from prior ideologies due to historical and cultural trends, generally themselves reactions to other ideologies.

As with biological evolution, ideological evolution can't be vacuous - that is, there must be some specific aspects of an ideology that make some survive and others fail in the context of the events described.  Survival is to be measured by adoption and rejection rates in the overall population.  This will also be a clue for predicting ideological evolution - which ideologies will survive, etc.  - and thus will constitute a science with testable results.  Indeed, I would say, a science that has been in practice though non-explicitly for centuries, viz the science of political rhetoric.

Research into this will be essentially a survey of ideologies of the past and present as well as the historical events that dominated the changes of those ideological systems over time - as well as to see what survived and what did not.

Thus, e.g., Capitalism evolved from earlier Mercantilism and Imperialism whereas, e.g. Marxism came into existence as a reaction to the then dominant imperialism and Capitalism.  So also Catholicism evolved out of a melange of early christian sects and the then-dominant Roman Empirialism, and Protestantism came into existence as a reaction to that Catholicism.  So we have essentially an evolutionary system - competition, mutation, survival of the fittest.

Some lesser ideologies remain in the world, e.g., "politically correct speech" or "theosophy".  These "lesser ideologies" don't -necessarily- present entire world-views (though some do) but rather are parasitic upon or grow in a niche where the more dominant world-views fail to take hold (in the human mind).  These lesser ideologies include everything from simple "internet memes" to large-scale political ideologies that are simply not adopted by large numbers of people (Libertarianism, e.g.).

One clue, of course, to the differentiation between surviving and non-surviving ideologies is therefore to take a look at relative adoption and rejection rates and the changes over time.

And here we would have to look at case studies which I intend to do in follow-up blog posts.

But we can provide a preliminary overview of some criteria:

a) Exposure - an ideology, in order to spread, needs access to people's minds.  A mind can not adopt an ideology of which it is simply not aware, and this often requires MEDIA and ADVERTISING in the current sense, or some kind of socialization system.  Sometimes these socialization systems are built-in (like Amway - to get ahead in the Amway system, you MUST invite others).  Other ideologies are spread using modern advertising techniques ("buy american") or ("buy organic") - finding and appealing to an audience based on their media preferences, etc.   In addition to raw exposure, many ideologies never achieve widespread acceptance because their audience is essentially limited, either because the ideology itself is limiting (racial purity ideologies, for instance, limit themselves in some ways to the races for which they were designed.  Given that the world is multi-racial, they are essentially limited, therefore, and as opposed to trans-racial ideologies.)

b) Appeal - an ideology must make a psychological appeal to the intended adopters.  Ideologies that are less appealing or less obviously appealing have a tendency to not achieve high adoption rates.  Thus an ideology of, say, pure self-denial, will have a relatively lower adoption rate than, say, an ideology of pure hedonism simply because "there's nothing in it" for the adopter.  Ideologies that subtly postpone the reward for the work required have a tendency, it seems, to do very well, likely.  That is, carrots help.

c) Fear - ideologies that appeal to fears have another sort of appeal.  Fear of death, fear of loneliness, etc.  Ideologies that promise assuage those fears have an appeal.  Some ideologies can get away with having no other appeal than the alleviation of fears.

d) Ease of Adoption.  Some ideologies are -hard to understand- or require too much investment on the part of the potential adoptee.  Other ideologies are simple-to-understand and require -at least seemingly- little investment on the part of the potential adoptee.

e) Competition.  Some ideologies are dangerous to other ideologies - either because they threaten to take their ideological potential adoptees or because they sometimes literally, destroy the adoptees of another ideology.  Romain Imperialism (e.g.) was essentially opposed to early Christianity and sought to literally destroy it because it realized that the Roman Ideology based on the God-hood of the Emperor was called into question by the rising christian ideology.  Thus the Romans killed christians by the thousands.  Protestantism took entire countries of dedicated catholics and removed them from their dominant ideology (with relatively less force required).  Ideologies that have a built-in ability to defend from competition have a better chance of surviving (viz, Capitalism and Imperialism have excellent competition prevention systems, whereas, e.g., Southern Baptist Christianity versus, say, the Southwide Baptist Fellowship where little obvious reason to choose one over the other is given and no obvious way to prevent ideological shift among its membership other than brand loyalty).

d) Momentum.  Ideologies are sometimes as fundamental as language itself.  Thus adoption of a different ideology itself requires energy even if the original ideology is itself in some ways unsuitable (e.g. being to costly or not making enough sense, etc.).  Thus an ideology can survive on bulk and momentum - and ideologies that capitalize on this by, e.g., promoting early education in the ideology and procreation among its members, (Mormonism, Catholicism, Capitalism, Lenninism, etc.), have an edge over ideologies that require adoption from outside (e.g. the Shakers).  Similarly ideologies with large followings have literal physical force to apply in competition versus other ideologies with smaller followings if necessary.