1. Friday’s New York Times ran two op-eds about Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est” or “God Is Love.” People are leery of Benedict (né Joseph Ratzinger) for any number of reasons, not least of which are his remarks before the convocation of cardinals that was to elect him Pope. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger declared, “we are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism . . . that recognizes nothing definite and leaves only one’s own ego and one’s own desires as the final measure.”
Ratzinger is something of a hard-liner and a traditionalist, seen by many as the continuation of John Paul II’s rollback of the Vatican II reforms in Roman Catholic theology and praxis. So if you buy the stereotype, his first encyclical sounds awfully warm and fuzzy: “God Is Love”? What does that have to do with relativism, with culture wars?
The first of the Times‘s two pieces offered an answer. Written by Lorenzo Albacete, a Catholic priest closely associated with the reactionary Communion and Liberation movement, the piece cast the encyclical in the best possible light. Benedict is concerned about the apparent “clash of civilizations,” says Albacete, and sees secularists worrying about religion leading to bad things like suicide bombings. But he’s a thoughtful guy at heart and really wants to understand why secularists don’t like religion. What secularists worry about, Benedict thinks, is when religion makes truth claims that come into conflict with non-religious truth claims. For nonbelievers,
what makes Christianity potentially dangerous as a source of conflict and intolerance in a pluralistic society is its insistence that faith is reasonable — that is, that it is the source of knowledge about this world and that, therefore, its teaching should apply to all, believers and nonbelievers alike.
Albacete acknowledges that Christianity’s claim to have true knowledge about the world has resulted in very bad behavior in times past; religious wars are among the most extreme expression of this general orientation. And not just Christianity: “The events of Sept. 11, 2001, reminded us that this unhappy tendency was not limited to the Christian faith, but seems inherent in religious belief.”
Luckily, Albacete says, Benedict has assured us that God is love. Because he loves us, he wouldn’t wish vengeance or hatred upon us. And because “the church is informed by the blief that human and divine love are inseparable, . . . the church can be trusted not to impose its social teaching on ‘political life.’” Basically, we can trust the church because God is love.
2. I went to grad school in philosophy for three years. During one tipsy, late-night discussion or other, my friends and I came up with a phrase that continues to serve us well: “One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.” Let me explain.
In propositional logic, you have various rules that allow you to infer one thing from some other things. These rules have names, and sometimes the names are a bit fancy. There’s one rule that allows you to take a simple if . . . then statement:
If P then Q
and add an affirmation of the first term (the part before the “if”):
P
and conclude that the second term is true:
Therefore, Q
This rule is called modus ponens, or affirming the antecedent. But there’s another rule that’s a bit counterintuitive at first, at least to many students. Just think about it if it doesn’t seem right — it really is. This rule allows you to start with the same if . . . then statement:
If P then Q
but in this case, the second term, the part after the “if,” is false:
Not Q
And this rule, known as modus tollens or denying the antecedent, allows you to infer that the first term is also false:
Therefore, not P
Our cute little saying, then, applies in situations like this: People think some sort of if . . . then statement is true, like “If the Republicans care about the country, they won’t enact irresponsible policies.” They then take the first term to be true: “Well, we know that of course the Republicans care about the country.” And they infer the consequent: “So we know that the policies they are enacting are not irresponsible. Are you accusing them of not caring about the country?” But one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. If the Republicans care about the country, they won’t enact irresponsible policies, sure. But their policies are manifestly irresponsible. I am compelled to conclude that the Republicans do not, in fact, care about the country.
3. The Times published a counterpoint piece to Albacete by a secularist who argued contra Benedict that
the important contrast is not between absolutism and relativism, as the pontiff would have it, but between secular values and their traditional religious alternatives.
Quite so. And secular values can provide an adequate ground for moral action — maybe even a better ground than religion can, though this possibility has been rejected by frightened religious types for centuries.
But I just want to make a smaller point. Albacete argues that, if God is love, we can trust him to act for our benefit. And if the church is infused with God’s love, we can trust it “not to impose its social teaching on ‘political life.’”
Well, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, as they say. I won’t attempt to resolve whether God acts for our benefit in this little essay, but a review of the headlines of just the last 12 months or so ought to raise doubts about that.
But is the church, “informed by the belief that human and divine love are inseparable,” staying away from the troubling imposition of its views of truth on our political life? The evidence says no: from its participation in the abortion wars, the debates over stem cells and Terri Schiavo, to the declarations that John Kerry shouldn’t take Communion and Communion-taking Catholics shouldn’t vote fore Kerry, to the ferocious opposition to same-sex marriage, the Catholic Church doesn’t hesitate to impose its peculiar views on the political debate in any nation where there are enough Catholics to listen.
So how should we take Albacete’s (and Benedict’s?) conditional statement? The second term is false. It looks then like the church’s relationship with divine love is not as straightforward as Albacete suggests. Good ol’ modus tollens opens up the possibility that motives other than love are behind the church’s actions, especially in the political realm.
No matter how much Benedict preaches about love, the actions of his church (and, to be fair, of other churches) don’t appear motivated by anything like the love preached by the guy whose Vicar Benedict is supposed to be. And when we ignore the rhetoric and examine the actions, we sucularists are not reassured — by Catholicism or any other religion acting in the public sphere from the firm belief that God has shown them the truth.
Thomas Hirshhorn’s show at Barbara Gladstone is all the rage right now. This observation from the Times (K. Johnson) caught my attention in light of Dave’s post:
“Mr. Hirschhorn thinks we need to pay more attention to the surfaces of things. “Superficial engagement is not nonengagement!” he writes. “Let’s keep things on the surface, let’s take the surface seriously!” It is a persuasive argument. All too often, ideologies, metaphysics and religions that find truths above, below or beyond observable surface realities cause trouble and pain because they so easily justify bad behavior toward nonbelievers and other inconvenient populations.”
The other point this post made me think of was a quote by Thoreau or Jefferson or some other dead white guy : “Any matter of public virtue must first be tested on the anvil of private happiness.”
Nice post
IF P THEN Q seems like it can function only as a sort of tautology, or an attempt to reformulate P in Q. So it makes sense that its falseness is challenged in either direction. But as such, the statement acts sort of more as an assertion: P=Q. The logical “problem” is unraveling the nature of the statements P and Q, and deciding what the assertion of equivalence means, and then evaluating the assertion. Since there are at least three points where the statement can be “broken” (both statements and the assertion of equivalence), there’s lots of room for slippage (or for rhetoric to worm its way into logic, if you will). What does this mean for your statement? Only that the modus tollens provides just as much room for error (or various forms of the persuasive arts) as the modus ponens. Just a thought.
I’m enjoying your new blog, by the way. It’s superior to your old blog in at least one very important way: it has content. Hehe. Keep up the good work.
Robert:
Statements of the form “If P then Q” do have something in common with statments of the form “P is (or equals) Q,” but they’re not always the same. (Keep in mind that I’m no logician.)
Take a proposition that is typically analyzed in “propositional calculus” as “if P then Q”: “If it’s raining, then the weather forecast is wrong.” In that sentence, “it’s raining” can be represented as a proposition, P, and “the weather forecast is wrong” as another proposition, Q. The relationship between these two propositions that the sentence postulates is the conditional: If P, then Q.
Now, if this conditional is true, then if P is true, Q follows by modus ponens. This makes sense. Suppose the weather forecast predicted a dry day. So before you look outside at the weather, you say, “If it’s raining, the weather forecast will have turned out to be false.” And you look outside and it’s raining. So the weather forecast is false. Likewise, if Q is false, you can infer by modus tollens that P is false. So if your main squeeze tells you, before you look outside, “I can assure you that the weather forecast hasn’t turned out to be false,” then unless you have reason to doubt your main squeeze, you can infer that it isn’t raining.
“Is” statements get a bit trickier. Statements of the form “a is b” would be analyzed in propositional calculus as simply a capital letter, like P. But you can look within the logical structure of the statement with a more powerful formalism: first-order predicate calculus. “Joseph Ratzinger is Pope Benedict XVI” gets analyzed as “for all x, if x is Joseph Ratzinger, then for all y, if y is Pope Benedict XVI, then x=y”. So there’s an if-then statement in there, but it’s trickier to get at. (You can also argue about whether the English sentence “Joseph Ratzinger is Pope Benedict XVI” also implies that Joseph Ratzinger exists.)
Anyway, maybe all of that is unnecessary. You might be pointing at the difference between validity and soundness — that is, whether the logical form is correct (validity) and whether the form is correct and the premises happen to be true. Albacete says, “If P then Q, P, therefore Q.” I suggest that even if his “if P then Q” is true (and I have my doubts), the evidence is strongly against Q; therefore, P is false. So yes, we disagree about the truthfulness of the premises, the facts. Most arguments can’t be resolved by resorting to logical tricks. I just like my friends’ little catchphrase because it reminds you not to take arguments like Albacete’s as the “sure thing” they often purport to be. You can often turn the other side’s conditionals against them.
I guess there are probably a variety of ways that IF/THEN statements can work. I was thinking of your example about Republicans. If Republicans care about the country, then they won’t enact irresponsible policies. In that case, “won’t enact irresponsible policies” is basically a reformulation of “care about the country.” So I was just pointing out that in statements that broad, the devil is in the details, or in how you define your Ps and Qs (what does it mean to enact irresponsible policies?), and that’s where there’s so much “wiggle” room, so to speak. So anyway, I guess I wasn’t so much trying to criticize the logic side of things, as I’m much further from being a logician than you are, but suggesting that logic (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) can easily be made to serve the ends of rhetoric, and often is thus employed. Not that I disagree with your particular rhetoric. Don’t get me wrong.
very interesting post on a catholic artist. “Sister Cortina”
http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/002315.html#002315