Some reflections on a form of cosmological argument for God's existence...

"You may find it hard to believe that God could make everything out of nothing, but the alternative is that nothing turned itself into everything. Which takes more faith to believe?" --Mark Cahill

I haven't done (or studied) any serious philosophy of religion in three years, but here goes. I was inspired by this quote and by recent debates with a friend; the quote is by a nobody who has no respectable academic standing, but the gist of it is popular enough to warrant discussion.

This is a cosmological argument, one which appeal to causality to prove the necessity of God's existence. This very bare-bone form, which I've also seen attributed to Newton (?!), asks us to compare two possibilities:

1) God turned nothing into everything

2) nothing turned into everything by itself

When put this way, the God option sounds much more appealing. Who in his sane mind would say that something can come out of nothing, spontaneously? So let's agree that nothing can come out of nothing, and if something exists it means it must have come from something else which already existed before.

The believer says that this something else is God... but then where did God come from? We said that something must come from something else, so since God is arguably a something (but see below), then God must have also come from something else. What's this something else that God comes from?

Aquinas' answer is that there's no such thing, nothing that created God. God always existed. God is the uncreated creator, the unmoved mover, eternal. But why couldn't we say the same about the universe? Can't the universe also have always existed? Well, surely not in the present form (what idiot would ever believe that?), but rather in a primordial and condensed form consistent with current cosmological theories. So the nonbeliever may say something like this: a primordial form of the universe has always existed and is itself uncaused and eternal.

The believer now must accept that the two answers are the same. She was willing to admit that something (= God) has always existed, or she would contradict herself. So there's no reason now for her to deny that the universe can have always existed.

That is, of course, unless there's a major difference between what kinds of "things" God and the universe are. Surely neither of them is nothing, and if they're not nothing, then they must be something. But that assumes that there's only one kind of substance which underlies all "somethings." I'm not quire sure of that, but I'm at a loss to think of another substance which is neither nothing nor something, or a "something" of a different type. Believers have come up with their own half-baked, ethereal, Holy-Spirit versions of this extra substance, but those sound ad hoc and there's often no evidence other than the supposition that such a substance "must exist" for things to make sense. Well, if it must exist it's only because the believer needs to justify the fact that God is a something, a feat which the unbeliever needn't face and whose need she can deny tout court.

Pending a deeper understanding of the varieties of substances, the two original options take exactly the same amount of "faith" to be believed, because both say the same thing: nothing can come from nothing and thus something must have always existed, call it "God" or "universe" or however you wish.

Then, of course, there are many other reasons to favor the nonbeliever over the believer, or vice-versa. But that's beside the point: the point here is simply that I don't think the question of God's existence can be resolved purely cosmologically with a pseudo-argument such as this (or other, somewhat similar varieties of the cosmological argument, which of course need to be taken up individually).

--end of post--

4/16 Virginia Tech massacre: "We Remember"... but who is "we"?

The slogan here is "We Remember." April 16 is Remembrance Day. The engraved stone at the VT Memorial reads "We will prevail. We are Virginia Tech," after Nikki Giovanni's poem. Yet, who is "we"?

Like most of us, I wasn't here on 4/16/2007 when Cho killed 33, including himself, causing the worst school shooting in U.S. history and forever scarring this community. Only part of this year's graduating senior class was there, plus many faculty, staff, and Blacksburg residents. I feel that they are "we" so much more than I or our students--we "newcomers"--are or ever could be.

Yes, maybe "when in Rome..." is true, and those who were there really do want to share, and once you've spent even just a year in Blacksburg you've soaked in this town and school's sense of community. Whenever you move to a new place, it changes you... unless you focus exclusively on your studies, in which case you've already failed. But I go to VT and VT goes to me, and so the memory of 4/16, even if not my own, is quickly acquired, a thing to know and feel, like the Hokie stone and the Highty Tighties.

But something doesn't feel right. I feel that we newcomers must hold a respectful double-mindedness about Remembrance Day.

On the one hand, it does feel as if I were here on 4/16/2007. I have chills each time I walk by Norris and West Ambler and I tear up when visiting the Memorial, which I do each month. And yet, on the other hand, I can't feel "just as if" I were there, because I wasn't, and neither were most of the people who are now here. Ain't no "just as if." Back then (I was a sophomore), I remember being critical of the day-after slogan "We Are All Hokies." I used to think, "hell no we're not." We may be supportive, but what right have we to hijack the grieving and healing of a community by retroactively forcing ourselves into it?

There is a tendency in people to parade pain (others' pain, be very sure) and celebrate it, and pity parties are so much easier to join when they're on national TV. And while we no doubt felt genuine grief and solidarity, just as surely there were also hints of fabrication, of hypocrisy, a "me too" bandwagon that is puerile and disrespectful. This is a common occurrence, from Columbine to Michael Jackson, and while it's good that people feel brought together, there is a tendency to disregard the true nature of the event and instead sensationalize a cheap, feel-good, Hallmark-card pretense of belonging and support.

So which one of two minds should prevail? How are we new Hokies (and everybody else) supposed to participate and to what extent are we instead allowed to?

Perhaps we can disambiguate two meanings of "we remember." Perhaps they who were here remember both in the sense of recall and in the sense of remind, of passing on the memory and the lesson while continuing to heal. But we newcomers can only remind, ourselves and others. We weren't here when the burden was placed on this community, and we've no place saying that it's "just as if" we were; but we can lend a hand carrying it.

Those are both worthy enterprises, and we must be careful to know which one we're in the business of doing. In a few years, no one will be left to recall, and "We Remember" will perforce take on the second meaning... so it's worth thinking about how to sensibly and responsibly fill that role instead of fooling ourselves that we're filling the one to which we are not entitled.

(end of post)

Wartburg: my little homecoming (part 1)

In two days it will have been exactly six months since graduation. Much has changed and much of it for the better. Yet today, as I returned to the Wartburg campus, I experienced a most unexpected feeling.

As I walked into campus from the south, between the CAC and the science center heading for the Konditorei (campus coffee shop; basically my home), I felt... normal. It's hard to describe, like qualia--what does it feel to perceive, say, the color "red" in your mind? What's the subjective feeling associated with it, that feeling that only I know in my own head, that you know in your own, and that we can only assume are similar? You must feel it to know it. The best I can do is this: if I were to vocalize my thoughts, I would have said something like "okay, I know this. This is my school. There's that bush. The bike rack. The skywalk shadow has exactly the shape that it should this time of day. I know this. No big deal." At times--a second is a very long time in your head--it even felt like "yeah, whatever" or even "so what?" It was all very underwhelming, as if I'd been there a million times before... which, after all, I had... and as if there were nothing special about this one time.

But seconds later it hit me. That I would feel like this is nothing short of amazing. Why? So much has changed that maybe I expected to feel joyous, ecstatic, euphoric, just as I had felt kidnapped when back in May I saw the red bricks of the Complex fade in the rear view mirror for the last time. Of course, the joy hit me in full when I set foot inside the K-dit and started seeing people I'd long missed, but the original feeling of utter and complete familiarity stayed with me the whole day. Not for a minute have I felt out of place or like a visitor. Nothing on this campus looks or feels new, old, smaller, bigger, or in any other way different. Everything is just normal; just itself.

In retrospect, now that I'm back at the Love Shack, feet up and a cup of herbal, this is the best thing that could have happened. Had I perceived Wartburg as new and different, as a thing of the past, exciting but far-removed, surely I would have felt more strongly... but, I think, it would not have affected me as deeply. I might have been tempted to ascribe the stronger feeling to "it's been a while after all" and I might not have grasped the heart of the matter. And the heart of the matter is that I feel as if I have never really left this place. As I walked around today, I didn't remember things; memories didn't come back; I didn't relive past events and places and conversations and smells and sounds. All those things just are again, as if I'd held a wary double-mindedness all this time, a Gollum brain of past and present. It's as if suddenly my mind would do its own thing and switch back to Wartburg mode, back to my May self, which was right there, alive and dormant, as if the previous six months had been erased in one stroke. It was rejuvenating in the most literal sense of the term, subtly and penetratingly so.

On a final note, I must say all of this only happened with places and not with people, whom I've been so completely happy to see again and for whom I've felt a genuine surge of "omg lol hi!" every single time. I've loved the attack-hugs and kisses, the familiar smells, the big grins, the awkward tell-me-your-last-six-months-in-two-minutes conversations, and so forth. That was exactly how I'd imagined it would be. It must be that our contact with people is relatively limited and more meaningful than that we have with places, and thus we cherish and miss it more and it evokes a stronger emotional response when we are reminded of it.

Whatever the case may be, I feel like I'm getting the best of both worlds, and I'm loving it. In the end, I was expecting to come here to jump-start myself, to find something that je ne sais quoi that for some reason I'm missing at Tech right now... and so far I think I find it here, in the squirrels and the stones and the steaming mugs.

Oh, and still no wireless for me at the K'dit. See? I never really left!

Peace,

Claudio

PS: much more happened that's worth noting, especially some really meaningful conversations that I'll cherish for a long time... but all that must wait, till at least the morrow...

(end of post)

Wave-town!

I'm in Waverly!

It was heartbreaking not to have been able to come for Homecoming back in October, but this more than makes up for it. At Homecoming it would have been a cramped, 24-hour visit with frantic get-togethers and too little time to process what's going on (yes, I operate slowly; so sue me). But like this I've five days and plenty of time and opportunities to do everything I would have wanted to do--minus, unfortunately seeing friends from my graduating class, although several of them are still around.

Flights went well and I got into Waverly in good time. Had gotten up at 3 a.m. to fly out of Roanoke but put off taking a nap once at Steph/Chels/Kate's house (nicknamed the Love Shack), which means the 9:30 p.m. party totally sneaked up on me. Ended up going to bed at 2, latest it's been for... uh, ever? But it's all good. This and more for my favorite people on Earth.

Today we hang out with MY MAN Eric G who's driving down from Decorah (famous, of course, for Sodom and Decorah... har har... Dr. Strickert's RE101 course from four years ago and I still remember this lame joke!) and tonight I'm crashing the SI staff meeting to let them know how awesome they are and how bad TA training sucked at Tech.

As much as I love Blacksburg, I want to move back here right now! How're those matter-energy transporters coming along? Are we there yet?.........

(end of post)

Things learned recently (for lack of a better title...)

A month and a half since the last post. Mamma told me there'd be days like this: you won't update your blog, you'll forget about it, etc. Ah, if only I'd listened. Whatever. 'Tis evidence that I'm taking grad school seriously. Another way to put it is that it is sucking my life.

In these two months (August 24 - October 20) I've discovered the following about grad school and life in general:

• I love teaching. A lot. I look forward to classroom time when I'm on the other side of the desk much more than to anything else. My kids are intelligent and engaged, within the limits of their generation, of course (nonexistent general culture due to abysmal secondary schooling, irritatingly short attention span, some holier-than-thou attitude, etc). Despite the anti-intellectual world they live in, they seem to take entry-level philosophy decently seriously, and that pleases me. I'd like to believe it's because I'm just that good, but I know better. I'm sure it's because they genuinely like to think, as every healthy kid does, and it pains me that they have been (and will be) pressured not to from almost every side. But that's a lamentation for another time.

• I don't like my own research so much anymore. It may be for a variety of reasons. (1) I don't have much time for it, what with TAing and the inordinate amounts of assigned class reading, often in the order of 150+ pages a week. (2) My two research seminars, if engaging, aren't totally up my alley. "Religion in the Public Sphere" has has very high highs when secularism and establishment are discussed and very low lows when... well, anywhen else, even if I just love Simon May's South African accent. "On Darwin's Origin" is schizo: the large lectures are excruciatingly boring forays in the history of biology, which good ol' Dr. Zemke drilled into my brain four years ago, so... catching some zzzs. But the Friday graduate discussion sections are enthralling thanks to Dick Burian, who surely has to be the most knowledgeable living biped (look up R.M. Burian). So even though this stuff is awesome and is helping me a lot in building a solid background, I'd still like to focus my work elsewhere. See below.

• There's no such thing as "meanwhile." I'm supposed to carry out my own research at the same time as I take seminars, both for submitting it to conferences and journals and prospectively toward my thesis. But in practice, this is nearly impossible. This term I'm writing 3 term papers around 20 pages each (one on Lakatosian falsification in evolution, one on whether a secular state is implicitly a nonreligious establishment, and one gods only know what about)... and in the midst of that, plus teaching, I'm supposed to research epistemic circularity, which is what really turns me on? It's just not happening, at least not right now. They tell me that this is to be expected, though, and that to some extent it gets better. One hopes.

• I feel, to some degree, unfulfilled. This might really be mostly because I can't work on what I want, even though one seminar this coming Spring might give me the chance to. But maybe it's simpler than that, a normal and predictable side effect of having to get used to new living patterns. And who knows if this isn't a co-cause or an effect of my messed-up emotional life right now (see below). Once again, it might be too early. Probably, like many others, I've romanced grad school as a purely-intellectual liberation from the daily-grind uselessness of college... but of course the key word there is "romanced." Duh, Claudio.

• Never have a crush when you can't afford it. It's bad, bad, bad. But then again, what's new there. FML, and for once I mean it.

• VT's philosophy department is a rocking place to study. As per the Leiter report (www.philosophicalgourmet.com), we are among the top five programs in the U.S. offering terminal MA degrees in philosophy. I have no terms of comparison, but it feels that the reputation is well-earned, and I'm not talking about the big names we have here or attract each time we host a conference, though that counts too. My #1 reason is the superb quality of the faculty. I am holding a wary, but pleasant, double-mindedness in my relationships with them. On the one hand, I'm awestruck by the impressive amount of knowledge. Some are authorities in their fields; others are somewhat known and very serious scholars. Not one isn't a very respectable expert in something or other (which, given the positions they hold, is no less than I should expect). On the other hand, they feel less like oracles and more like peers. It helps that in our department faculty and grad students are on a first-name basis by default, but it goes deeper than mere lack of formality. Those with whom I've taken the time to converse have taken the time to talk TO me rather than AT me, and point me in useful directions for my research and my studies in general. Perhaps this department, at this time, is striking a desirable balance between quality of research and quality of teaching, which might reflect the equally good balance of very seasoned and very young professors--roughly, experience and enthusiasm.

That's it. No, I'm sure there's more... but that's it for now. Each of the points made above needs elaboration, but that'll have to be some other time. Bed beckons. Ah, yes, THAT is an important point...

• If you don't get all the sleep that you need, you're DEAD!

Choosing Darwin, or, grad school has begun!

Who would've thought that with the start of school I'd've blogged less!... okay, everybody. It's a good sign. Means school is keeping me busy. But is it the "this is awesome-but damn is it challenging-but who cares it's awesome" kind of busy or the "this sucks-I hate it-FML-arrgghhh" kind of busy? Definitely the former.

The biggest problem to face was the choice of seminars. There are simply too many on offer here at VT that are amazingly interesting, which probably says something about the breadth of my philosophical interests and the lack of in-depth preference at this point (except perhaps a slight bias toward epistemology and history/philosophy of science, but those are very broad strokes themselves). So, with the DGS's consent, I signed up for four seminars, while the typical course load is three. I then had two weeks to decide which ones to keep and which one to drop. It was a difficult choice.

The original four seminars were about: (1) religion in the public sphere, focusing mostly on arguments for and against religious tolerance, from Locke to Rawls; (2) the epistemology and metaphysics of Locke and Berkeley, and of the pre-Humean modern period in general; (3) the life and work of Charles Darwin, in occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of the Species; (4) and symbolic logic.

Of these, the logic course had to stay, since it's mandatory for all new philosophy MAs. In retrospect, I should have tried to test out of it, since it covers 90% of the material I also studied as an undergraduate... but oh well: this will be a less stressful, more diluted refresher. Also the religion course wasn't in discussion, since it's a one-of-a-kind class with extremely interesting readings and a well-prepared professor (Simon May) that may not come up again while I'm at VT. So it was down to Darwin vs. Locke/Berkeley.

After two weeks of attendance, I've decided to drop Locke/Berkeley. I must confess it was intriguing, and the first week's writing assignment has been a lot of fun. Never before had it taken me ten hours to write a two-page paper, but it was the most original and better-reasoned paper I've written all year, barring my undergrad thesis, of course. As it turned out, Dr. Ott thought it was "very well done!", so chances are I would have done reasonably well in the course. That and the fact that it's the most strongly epistemological of all my choices made me reluctant to let it go. Dr. Ott is fun and a freakin' genius, class discussion was exciting... so nothing really tipped the scale against it.

But something tipped the scale in favor of Darwin. Three nights ago, I lay in bed reading myself to sleep with some of Darwin's field notes from the voyage of the Beagle, a class reading. I fell in love all over again. Some of my fondest memories of college date back to my freshman year, when the glorious Warren Zemke made us read Gould, Mayr, Shermer, Sagan, and of course Darwin himself for a course on history of science and scientific methodology. Those memories came back like a flood, reminding me of why I loved Darwin's lucid thinking, his poetic and yet strikingly accurate observations on geology and zoology, and the beauty of the story of the discovery of natural selection. To have re-read Peter Bowler's Evolution: The History of an Idea in the first week of class surely helped, too, as that had been among my favorite texts last year for a paper on the same topic.

In short, I chose with my heart and not with my brain. Sure, I can rationalize my choice all I want. I can say that the history of science will still be useful to me as a philosophy grad student, or that the course's instructor Dick Burian is both an awesome guy and a great philosopher (I remember him being cited as an authority on adaptationism in my textbooks, for chrissake), or that I will be able to focus not so much on the history of science and instead write a phil.bio term paper if I want to, or that the course will still count toward the philosophy degree as an elective. These are all good reasons, but they didn't tip the scale. The pleasure of reading about natural history did.

Whether that was a poor choice, time will tell. But for now I am confident it was the correct one, partly because there were no wrong choices, not really: when you work and study next door to such excellent philosophers and talented fellow grad students, you're doing the right thing by definition. So yeah, I might as well be wearing the infamous "I'm really excited to be here!" t-shirt. Phail much? Hmm. We'll see.

Reflections on TA-ing and other stuff coming soon... soon-ish... well, eventually!

(end of post)

TA training vs. SI training

I'm undergoing GTA (graduate teaching assistant) training at Virginia Tech, and after the first two days--4 sessions out of 6--my opinion is mixed. The presentations and workshops are well-delivered, entertaining, etc. Top-notch stuff. But they're sorely lacking in two important aspects.

One, presentations are mostly frontal-delivery, one-(wo)man shows with little interaction and no hands-on learning... which is pretty bad, since they're supposed to be shaping teachers. Two, the content of this TA workshop is aimed at people who have never been on the deep end of the classroom before. The first issue is endemic to academia and I won't discuss it. The latter is more of interest to me.

For the last two years of college at Wartburg I've served as a Supplemental Instructor for introductory courses in philosophy. The duties of a SI are quite similar to a TA's, minus the grading (though some SIs do that too). SIs lead discussion, help out students with difficult concepts and putting the material in perspective, assist the professor with scheduling and class communication, and re-lecture as needed. Heck, I've even taught two plenary sessions when the professor was sick. In general, SIs use their hybrid more-than-student, less-than-faculty post to serve as a bridge between faculty and students. The duties and image of TAs are much closer to the faculty side than to the student side, but from a practical standpoint their tasks are nearly identical to SIs. As a result, 95% of the material discussed in these GTA workshops was simply old stuff for me, with the few local differences peculiar to VT accounting for the rest.

I'm a (wannabe-) philosopher, so I name things and affix blame. For one, I blame Virginia Tech for not differentiating between those students with previous SI experience. SI is a national program and more than a few fellow GTAs I've met these days have been SI leaders. They, too, were more or less peeved, depending on the level of SI training they had received at their undergraduate insititution. There should have been some sort of pre-screening based on previous SI-ship experience or advanced sessions for former SIs--or even involvement of former SIs in training non-SI new TAs, just like SI peer mentors carried out a significant portion of SI training at Wartburg. You get my drift. There were countless options, but I feel that the human resources weren't properly utilized. Pity.

More importantly, I praise Wartburg for preparing me so well. The training I've received from (among others) my SI supervisors Jeff Beck and Michael Gleason and my SI peer mentor Lia Kampman was amazingly attuned with VT's declared expectations for their TAs, at least based on these workshops. Now perhaps in a couple months I'll find out I'm an awful TA, and if so I can blame both Wartburg and VT for all-around insufficient preparation--and/or myself, of course, for being a poor learner and not having done more.

Regardless, my point is that I'm very glad that the knowledge and experience I've accumulated in the last two years as a SI, easily the most rewarding part of my college life, is turning out to have been sound, poignant, and resting on solid pedagogical foundations. Whether or not I'm massively deluded, I'll find out. But for now it feels good.

(end of post)