The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is posted for the day with 2 papers from the “Philosophy of Science Archive”:http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/ being the only news.

Jonathan discusses “his favourite solution to the problem of evil”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/Archives/004449.html, so I’ll take that as a reason to also discuss my favourite solution. It’s modal realism, of a sort, to the rescue.

Before I start, I should note that nothing I say here is going to be original. But what with it being Sunday night, and this being a blog not a journal, I’m not actually going to footnote anything. (UPDATE: For the proper citations, see Ned Markosian’s comment below.) Just don’t credit me for anything here – I’m merely repeating my favourite solution. Do, however, blame me for mistakes in presentation. (In general, if you want to read real scholarly work online on the problem of evil, I’d recommend not reading this blog and instead reading “Daniel Howard-Snyder’s writings”:http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~howardd/papersandbooks.html.)

OK onto the solution. Let’s assume the following metaphysical claims are all true.

* There is a class of abstract possible worlds W. (I’m not going to say what abstract and concrete amount to in any of this – on this distinction see “Gideon Rosen’s SEP entry”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abstract-objects/.) In other words, weak modal realism is true.
* God cannot _change_ any of those worlds without destroying it – what happens in a world is essential to its nature.
* What God can do is make any of them that He chooses concrete. Abstract possible worlds have no moral value, but concrete worlds do have value, or disvalue if they are bad, so this choice is morally loaded.
* God’s creation is timeless, so He can’t create one and then tinker with it. For each world He faces a take-it-or-leave-it choice.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying these are true. I’m just saying they are a plausible set of views about the nature of modality and the nature of God’s powers. Note that the only ‘restriction’ on God’s powers here are of the form “God can’t do this metaphysically impossible thing”, i.e. make something lack one of its essential properties, so in that respect this isn’t meant to be a revisionary theology. (It’s revisionary metaphysics, not revisionary theology.)

If all this is true, what should God do? Well, I think He should create all and only the worlds such that it is better that they exist than that they not exist. And that will include worlds, like this one, that are not perfect but that contain more goodness than suffering. So the existence of this world as concrete entity is compatible with God’s existence, and indeed His omnipotence and benevolence.

To repair the argument from evil at this stage, the atheist has to do one of three things. First, she can argue that the metaphysics presented is implausible. She might have a point. Second, she can argue that the metaphysics doesn’t really stop God making a world concrete then tinkering with it. I sort of mean to rule that out by stipulation, but that does make the first problem somewhat worse. Third, she can argue that it would be better that the world not exist than it exist. Some days thinking about how awful things are for most animals in the wild I can almost believe this. (There’s a reason they call a really bad situation Law of the Jungle.) But I can never really believe this, and I bet even the most dedicated proponent of the Argument from Evil can’t either. So I think all the action is at the level of metaphysics, which is a nice place to locate the disagreement.

By the way, I feel like I’ve written this post before sometime, but a quick Google of the archives reveals nothing, so maybe I never got around to posting it or something. Apologies if I really am just repeating myself.

I only just found out that PPR is accessible online. The link is “here”:http://zerlina.ingentaselect.com/vl=1669820/cl=22/nw=1/rpsv/cw/ips/00318205/contp1.htm. It’s subscriber only, but if you are reading this on a university computer, or are logged in to a university network, it might work.

Some genius called Keith Burgess-Jackson, who frequently complains about the lack of civility in public discourse, has “called me an illiterate idiot”:http://analphilosopher.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_analphilosopher_archive.html#108293340865578311 for saying that his blog doesn’t contain much good philosophy.

I can’t even think of a funny joke about the illiteracy (am I the infiniteth monkey?) but I will admit that I’ve done one or two things that show less than optimal intelligence. (Probably even some that stretch to idiocy, but I wouldn’t say them here, would I?)

It probably isn’t smart to have as much of my emotional well-being tied up in the fates of the Boston Red Sox. It’s working well for now, if spending time every day with stress levels of a fighter pilot could count as working well. And a utility maximiser wouldn’t have had quite as many PBR’s at the Paradise over the weekend as I did. And it was wrong, or at least misleading, to say there isn’t much good philosophy on Burgess-Jackson’s blog. There isn’t, as far as I can see, any.[1]

Speaking of the Paradise, Saturday night there was great.

In the front room they had various bands playing Smiths covers of varying quality. Much fun. I was reminded that one day I have to write a vagueness paper called “Some Sentences are Truer than Others”. That’s not just because it would be a funny allusion – I’m pretty sure that that Smiths song was partially causally responsible for my thinking about ‘truer’ in the first place, so it would be just a kind of acknowledgement.

In the main room Mason Jennings was playing, and it was a great show. I was worried how an acoustic act would carry in that venue, but he (wisely I think) had a bassist and drummer accompanying him, which helped a lot. Either he responded really well to our called out requests, or we were channelling the playlist. I guess the latter, but who knows? The crowd loved all the songs from his first album, and was relatively lukewarm about the later stuff. If I was in his position, I’d be a little bit annoyed by that. I certainly wouldn’t want to go around delivering a paper I did years and years ago everywhere because that’s what the crowd wanted. It’s times like this you’d wish you’d been the one to write “I like your old stuff better than your new stuff”:http://www.lyricsdepot.com/regurgitator/i-like-your-old-stuff-better-than-your-new-stuff.html. Alternatively, he could just try writing an album as good as his first album, but I suspect that may be beyond him, just like it is certainly beyond most of us.

fn1. My methodology here possibly leaves a little to be decided. Wading through Burgess-Jackson’s tripe for more than a few days worth was beyond even my celebrated powers of tolerance.[2] So the conclusion in the text is an inductive inference based on a small sample. Still, we rely on such samples to conclude that I’m probably not going to get many votes at the next Presidential election, so it’s not like sampling can never lead to reasonable conclusions. But like a stopped calendar, maybe he’s right once a year, and I’m not going to be the one to check this rigorously.

fn2. And yeah, I know it’s been a while since _I_ posted anything really substantive here. Thank God for the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ or people couldn’t even be indirectly linked to philosophical work here.

No papers blog today because there is nothing to report. So I get to talk about sports instead.

I didn’t recognise it at the time, but yesterday three of my favourite teams were playing big rivalry games, in every case on the road. The Red Sox were in New York, Liverpool in Manchester, and the ACT Brumbies in Sydney. And between them they got 2 wins, which was fairly good all things considered. Of course, all this sporting activity wasn’t excellent for my productivity yesterday, so I better work a little harder today to clear out the to-be-done list.

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ is posted for the day with two new sites being the news. The sites belong to “David Braddon-Mitchell”:http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/weslake/phil2213/ and “Brad Weslake”:http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/weslake/. (DBM’s site is the course site for a seminar he’s running, but it includes some forthcoming papers of his so it goes onto the list.)

The other day Allan Hazlett argued that “truth in basketball statistics is radically response-dependent”:http://www.cassetteradio.com/useandmisuse/2004_04_01_useandmisuse_archive.html#108258544370762884. I assume his argument is meant to carry across to baseball as well. Allan’s point is that although we may dispute whether the officials got a call right at the time, eventually no one will dispute the call. So Allan concludes that the truth of basketball stats claims depends on what the referees do. But that doesn’t follow from the data. All that follows is that eventually the referees’ calls will cease being disputed.

Here’s a nice case of that. In the 8th inning of tonight’s Red Sox-Yankees game, Jason Varitek hit a bloop into shallow right. Enrique Wilson, the second baseman, and Gary Sheffield, the right fielder, ran towards it. Eventually Sheffield called Wilson off and Wilson peeled away, leaving Sheffield with a clean play on the ball, and a perfect view of the ball bouncing off his left wrist onto the turf. Since Wilson makes the minimum and Sheffield over $12 million, naturally an error was charged to Wilson.

Now Allan may argue that in ten years no one will dispute that it was an error on Wilson, and that may be true. But that just means that everyone will be wrong. In ten years it will be an error on Sheffield, just like it was at the time.

By the way, apparently the official scorer’s explanation is that it’s an error on Wilson because he “caused the error” by running out for the ball and affecting Sheffield’s concentration or something. Of course the pitcher also caused the error by not throwing the ball past Varitek’s bat, so I think this one should really have been E-1. Jerry Remy suggested that Wilson might have caused the error by yelling out “Drop it! Drop it!” as the play developed. That seems like the most charitable explanation of the scorer’s decision.

Footnote: It isn’t clear that fouls are like errors in this respect. I think in the disputes Allan talks about ‘foul’ is ambiguous. In one sense a foul is just whatever is called by the refs. In another sense, it’s the kind of thing that can be disputed after the call is made. In the second sense, it’s a normative claim and the referees don’t get to determine what is and isn’t a foul. I think this is a simpler explanation of what’s going on in the basketball case than what Allan suggests.

The “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ post for the day is up, with “Greg Restall’s”:http://consequently.org/writing/ paper on “the knowability thesis”:http://consequently.org/papers/notevery.pdf being the most interesting news to me. There are lots of other papers too though to check out.

A small announcement. The talk by Alison Simmons that was scheduled to be held at Brown on Monday has been cancelled and will be rescheduled in the next academic year.

I saw “The Waifs”:http://www.thewaifs.com/ play in Boston last night, which was a wonderful show. If you get a chance to see them I highly recommend it. The tour dates are “here”:http://www.thewaifs.com/tourdates.htm, with the next show being tonight in New York. And now that I check that schedule, it seems they are playing in San Francisco when I’ll next be in San Francisco.

I can’t tell just what category this site fits into – preprint archive, refereed electronic publication, departmental paper site? It has elements of all of these. But it looks to have lots of interesting content.

bq. “CLE e-prints: Centre for Logic, Epistemology and the History of Science”:http://www.cle.unicamp.br/e-prints/

It’s based out of the State University of Campinas, in Campinas, São Paulo, and looks like another entry for the papers blog.

I can’t tell just what category this site fits into – preprint archive, refereed electronic publication, departmental paper site? It has elements of all of these. But it looks to have lots of interesting content.

bq. “CLE e-prints: Centre for Logic, Epistemology and the History of Science”:http://www.cle.unicamp.br/e-prints/

It’s based out of the State University of Campinas, in Campinas, São Paulo, and looks like another entry for the papers blog.