NOTES 39124 Obviously, there are other scenarios that involve mixed internal-and-external causes;
some of these will come up for consideration shortly.
25 A Libertarian can hold the same thing regarding Jon’s simply smiling – that this is
a basic action that Jon can be categorically free in performing. The slightly more
complicated case (decision to smile, then smiling) is helpful in bringing out the
details of a deterministic perspective.
26 By determinism’s being true, I mean that for any time T at which there is a created
universe, determinism is true regarding the universe at that time.
27 Strictly, perhaps God can cause things that God did not intend to cause (for their
own sake) but which simply follow from what God does intend to cause for its own
sake; God might intentionally cause a yellow cab to exist and thereby cause there to
exist tires with a certain size even though God did not care that the cab’s tires were
that particular size as opposed to various other sizes they might have been. God
might decide to produce the tires by some random process that might equally well
produce tires of any of hundreds of slightly different sizes. Still, God will not have
caused something to exist without knowing it.
28 Arguably, Mary no longer thinks or acts; Ann thinks or acts “in Mary” as well as “in
Ann.” But we need not get into that here.
29 The temptation to think so arises from noting that if S lives in a deterministic world,
then what S does is both non-probabilistically predictable and unfree, so if what S
does is free then it is probabilistically predictable. But the reasoning is fallacious. It
is exactly parallel to this. Consider a world in which this is a law: S eats chocolate at
time T if and only if S eats peanut butter at time T. Let this be a Reese’s World (RW).
If S lives in a Reese’s World, and S eats peanut butter at T then S eats chocolate at T.
Suppose that S moves from a Reese’s World to a non-Reese’s World (one where it is
not a law that one eats peanut butter at a time if and only if one also eats chocolate
at that time). Then S can eat chocolate without also eating peanut butter (and
conversely). What temptation there was to deny this would go as follows. Let the
law whose presence makes a world be a Reese’s World be LCPB. Let eating chocolate
at T be CT and eating peanut butter at T be PBT. Then the reasoning would be: since
when LCPB holds, every CT is also a PBT, every CT is a PBT whether LCPB holds or
not. But of course this is fallacious. Having moved, S can now eat her chocolate by
itself.
30 This claim should be distinguished from the false claim that A proposition that says
that X will obtain at T can be true even if A does not obtain at T.
15 Faith and reason
1 Curiously, officially taking this stance regarding religion and morality does not
prevent those who do so from treating at least certain of their own moral concerns
as proper bases for law or from being sure that, if there is a God, then God will either
approve of their lifestyle or at least be decent enough to suspend judgment.
2 “Contingent” here just means “non-necessary.” It does not have the meaning of
“dependent for existence on,” which is another meaning of the word.
3 Philosophers often call such beliefs incorrigible; one cannot go wrong in having them.
4 If the ontological argument has a true conclusion, then God exists is a necessary
truth. So Anselmians will disagree with the claim that no religious beliefs are
unbreakable. This will be something to worry about if and when we have a sound
and valid ontological argument that extends our knowledge.