An interview with Hud Hudson: analytic theology and metaphysics

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Part One - segments
https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/from-t...mes-series

INTRO: Hud Hudson is a philosopher of religion and metaphysics. Here he discusses philosophical pessimism, obedience, sloth, Christian virtues, the problem of evil, Nietzsche, religion and compatibility with science, hyperime, hyperspace, composition, decomposition and Universality, materialist metaphysics and the human, and Kant's compatibility.

(EXCERPTS) 3:16:  In your analytical theology/philosophy mode you have an interest in pessimism and its theological, Christian expression but think that independently of religious considerations philosophical pessimism is a powerful challenge. So could you explain what you take the main components of philosophical pessimism to be that you think even the non-religious should take seriously?

HH: The philosophy of pessimism is remarkably well grounded, quite independently of any particular religious orientation. [...] the all-too-frequently unhappy lives of its inhabitants to be found nearly everywhere and everywhen provide clear and compelling evidence in favor of a thesis of pessimism. Then again, no real reason to set religious considerations aside, since religion plays such a central role on the world’s stage and since much of religious thought and characterization of the human condition is uniformly pessimistic, as well.

[...] pessimism has its share of champions affiliated with and informed by Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and any number of other religious orientations, as well. To be clear the philosophy of pessimism need not be construed as the claim that the world is unrelentingly awful and all of its creatures irredeemable miscreants, and the philosopher of pessimism need not walk around in despair all the four seasons dampening everyone’s day and chasing children off lawns. The pessimism hypothesis does not have to engender any particular psychological profile in its adherents. Rather, at its core, the philosophy of pessimism simply offers (on the whole) dismal predictions about what nearly all of us can expect to experience in our private lives and interpersonal relationships, about the welfare of our fellow creatures, about the character of our social institutions and global politics, and about our prospects for progress on these matters in the future.

The philosopher of pessimism articulates and advances reasons in favor of or refutes reasons opposed to this general worldview [...] Many of history’s most eloquent poets and philosophers, tragedians and theologians, aphorists and political theorists have endorsed such a pessimism, and yet the view seems to me seriously underrepresented and underappreciated. I have come to suspect that the reasons for its unpopularity involve unflattering claims about human nature which place it at a disadvantage given our natural tendencies and learned talents for keeping such criticisms of ourselves at a safe distance...

3:16:  In your novel you not only write about sloth but also the question of evil. It’s hard for me to disagree with the Karamazov brother who sees the torture and death of a child as reasons for atheism. What’s your response to the challenge of terrible horror existing in a world governed by a being who could stop it but doesn’t?

[...] HH: My own view is that if divine silence and divine hiddenness are evils or in tension with God’s being perfectly good or perfectly loving, then there exists a compensating good or morally justifying reason among God’s divine purposes for permitting those states of affairs. I plead ignorance about what it is, and I turn once again to the position known as skeptical theism to block the move from that admission of ignorance to the quite distinct thesis that there is no such compensating good or morally justifying reason. Tesque isn’t as cautious as I am, though, and would like to add some speculations to that answer...

[...] 3:16: Nietzsche is a formidable proponent of opposite values required for secular wellbeing. I wonder whether he is actually a bigger challenge to your position than secular well-being and happiness proponents – he’d agree with you that trying to keep the religious virtues without God is not going to work – which is basically your argument too isn’t it – but then he goes elsewhere and says we need to find value in things that acknowledge the post-God existential state. So he thinks self-deceit useful, and selfishness too. And cruelty. And hatred. How do you respond to this different challenge?

HH: A quick clarification first: my own view is not just that religiously oriented goods deserve a place on an objective list of the goods that make for human flourishing, and not even that some relation to God play a dominating role of a superordinate good on such a list, but rather that it plays a unique role with respect to the subjective side of the equation when the subjective conditions of readiness to flourish meet the objective ingredients for well-being. That is, in addition to contributing to well-being on their own, the religiously oriented conditions of flourishing also serve a kind of priming function which permits the other welfare goods to express their full range of value in a subject. This priming role of the virtue of obedience is the thesis I defend in Fallenness and Flourishing in response to what I take to be the astonishingly well-documented, widespread failure of secular attempts to achieve happiness and well-being.

But then again, perhaps those approaches have failed because their subjects haven’t attended carefully enough to Nietzsche and his lessons on the usefulness of self-deceit, selfishness, cruelty, and hatred. For the record, I know very little about Nietzsche, but a number of people whose intellectual judgment I respect immensely do know his work and think quite highly of him. So, what follows isn’t even an attempt at amateurish engaging of Nietzsche, but it does contain some observations about the four alleged lessons just mentioned. I find it hard to look about and think that my fellow human beings aren’t doing an adequate job of deceiving themselves and exhibiting selfishness, cruelty, and hatred – really throwing themselves into the part you might say. If happiness and well-being were to be had by those means, our world would be a happy place indeed. That’s a bit unfair, though. Surely, the view is that only the proper reforming of values and the judicious exercise of those traits can yield happiness and well-being in this – “our post-God existential state.” But even on this more charitable reading, I have two complaints.

The first is unsurprising and contentious: We don’t live in a post-God state. Theorizing about how to achieve happiness and well-being in an atheistic world is nevertheless fascinating, and I’m all for it – especially, since there are so many intriguing puzzles then on the table, given the vastly different views of ourselves and the world consistent with atheism. Similarly, it would be interesting to ask how we might best travel from New York to Washington State, given a post-land waterworld, despite the fact that we don’t live in a post-land waterworld either...

[...] the worry must be that this particular belief about what there is fails to be justified or plausible or intelligible or whatever – and in fact so much so as to infect whatever discussions it intrudes into with the same feature. That’s a debate worth having, and I suspect it is a debate that can’t be dodged in the present context, given the centrality of theism in the particular theory of well-being in question. Accordingly, the first criticism more or less amounts to an invitation to revisit that old debate – we don’t live in a post-God state. The second complaint is more in the spirit of things. Suppose we did. Then the reasonable procedure, I would assume, would be to seek out the most satisfactory accounts of happiness and well-being ... and then inquire (perhaps with Nietzsche’s guidance) how well-suited the tools of self-deceit, selfishness, cruelty, and hatred are to get us there. We can, of course, assemble a team in opposition ... for a less optimistic view about whether even a shrewd and astute use of these strategies can lead to anything grander than the (apparent) increase of one’s own being at the (real) expense of another’s... (MORE - missing details)

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Part TWO - segments
https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/from-t...mes-series

INTRO: Hud Hudson is a philosopher of religion and metaphysics. Here he discusses philosophical pessimism, obedience, sloth, Christian virtues, the problem of evil, Nietzsche, religion and compatibility with science, hyperime, hyperspace, composition, decomposition and Universality, materialist metaphysics and the human, and Kant's compatibility.

(EXCERPTS) [...] 3:16: You make an argument that concludes that if we want to reject a religious commitment to taking the Garden of Eden, the Fall and Original Sin literally then we would need to reject certain metaphysical conclusions rather than point to scientific discoveries. Can you explain this, and is this a point that can be generalised to religious literalism?  I wonder if this approach does actually capture what the apparently irreconcilable conflicts between science and religion are – I’d have thought the nonreligious challenge to religion is that the literal claims of religion happen to be false, not that they couldn’t have been true in another world?

HH: First, the generalizing point: Many of the alleged irreconcilable conflicts between religion and science are represented as akin to a match between a toddler and an 800-pound gorilla, with the suggestion that religion is about to be trounced once again and would be well advised to hang its head and slink away. Yet it seems to me that these conflicts invariably require supplementation by way of a piece of metaphysics that has not been adequately defended or even acknowledged. Absent the additional metaphysical thesis (which can usually be spotted doing some heavy lifting and masquerading as a bit of well-established science), it is usually possible to reconcile after all, and to do so without encroaching on the authority of genuine scientific discoveries or expertise. Once the controversial metaphysical underpinnings of the alleged irreconcilable conflict are identified, the gorilla disappears and the match turns out really to be a contest of metaphysics against metaphysics (or, if you like, toddler against toddler).

My book The Fall and Hypertime is an extended illustration of that claim whose centerpiece is a religious view I do not endorse – Genesiac literalism. Why that one? Because its dismissal has become so contemptuous that one is now informed only the most incurable rubes could believe in it [...] I thought that was a bit high-handed, and that here (as elsewhere) unearned credit was being lavished on science alone while metaphysics stood offstage unrecognized. Allow me to say again that I don’t endorse such literalism ... but the strategy was to show that if a respectable case for such reconciliation could be achieved even here ... then prospects for similar reconciliations that critically explored the metaphysics with which contemporary science and its deliverances are shot through would be promising, including debates, perhaps, where there is much more at stake.

That said, I did not regard the metaphysical adventures of that book as in any way frivolous. Its central moverests on the Hypertime Hypothesis, a hypothesis according to which there is a time-like series composed of hyperinstants each of which hosts a spacetime block. That is to say, a single hypermoment would be quite sufficient to contain the entirety of the four-dimensional spacetime (past, present, and future) in which we live and move and have our being, whereas hyperearlier and hyperlater hypermoments may contain remarkably diverse spacetime blocks of their own. Thus, the Hypertime Hypothesis, at first approximation, is something like a second temporal dimension, and the book is a serious exploration of the metaphysics, epistemology, and religious applications of this novel theory of time.

Accordingly, just as we take ourselves (from some given orientation) to have a left and right, a front and back, a top and bottom, a past and future . . . so too, on the Hypertime Hypothesis (and on the assumption that we can persist across a hyperinterval), we can entertain the thought that we also have a hyperpast and a hyperfuture. And once the distinctions between past and hyperpast, future and hyperfuture are on the table, the observation that makes the Hypertime Hypothesis so potentially fruitful in the discussions in which it has been invoked is quite simply that whereas for each instant of hypertime, claims about what is true in the past and in the future (relative to some given moment) are fixed by facts about the single spacetime block present at that hypertime (i.e., by facts about the contents of its hyperplanes and their relative positions to one another) – claims about what is true in the hyperpast and the hyperfuture (relative to some hypermoment) are fixed by facts about the plurality of spacetime blocks spread out along a hyperinterval (i.e., by facts about their respective contents and their relative positions to one another).

It turns out that with that piece of metaphysical machinery in hand a reconciliation can be achieved that not only can be rendered theologically acceptable but also sports the extraordinary and delightful feature of being thoroughly consistent with the reigning scientific orthodoxy and with the current deliverances of astronomy, physics, geology, paleoanthropology, genetics, and evolutionary biology. Surprisingly – especially given what seems like its metaphysical extravagance at first glance – the primary advantages of the Hypertime Hypothesis are to be found in its  metaphysical neutrality in a wide range of philosophical debates. Better yet, it is in a position to respond concessively to the deliverances of contemporary science without thereby losing any ground whatsoever. That is, even more impressive than its neutrality with respect to a wide range of metaphysical considerations is the Hypertime Hypothesis’s remarkable  scientific flexibility which is prepared to countenance nearly any current feature or future development in science.

Your question noted that it would not be an adequate reply to an alleged conflict that the religious claims could merely have been true in another world. But for the record, that’s not what’s on offer. Like Lewisian Modal Realism, the Hypertime Hypothesis is significant largely in virtue of what it proposes to add to reality as opposed to contesting what this or that subfield of science has to say about the local (i.e., this spacetime’s) characteristics... (MORE - missing details)

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Part three - segments
https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/from-t...mes-series

INTRO: Hud Hudson is a philosopher of religion and metaphysics. Here he discusses philosophical pessimism, obedience, sloth, Christian virtues, the problem of evil, Nietzsche, religion and compatibility with science, hyperime, hyperspace, composition, decomposition and Universality, materialist metaphysics and the human, and Kant's compatibility.

(EXCERPTS) 3:16: When talking about composition and decomposition of objects, why is Universalism so important to you? (And what are simples and gunk?)

HH: The terms ‘simple’ and ‘gunk’ are commonly used in the discussion of the mereology of material objects. A material simple would be a material object which does not have any proper parts, whereas (a hunk of) material gunk would be a material object each of whose proper parts has further proper parts. Accordingly, if some material item is gunky (as they say), then it doesn’t contain any simples among its parts. Questions such as “Are there any material simples?” or “Are there only material simples?” or “Are hunks of material gunk so much as metaphysically possible?” may sound like they have obvious answers (until you start learning about the objections to the so-called obvious answers) or may sound like they have answers that couldn’t make much of a difference to anything that might concern you (until you start learning about just how many debates are intertwined with mereological metaphysics). You may think you’ve signed up for one discussion, but in no time at all you’re immersed in a dozen.

You ask about Universalism, which is the name of a thesis about composition, another subfield of inquiry in the mereological metaphysics. Ask the innocent question – “When do a plurality of objects have a fusion (or, more informally, under what conditions are things parts of some further thing)?” The answers range from ‘always’, to ‘never’, to ‘whenever condition F is satisfied, which it is by some pluralities but not by others’ (with lots of creative suggestions for substitutions on ‘F’). Universalism is the ‘always’ answer: Roughly, it doesn’t matter what spatiotemporal or causal or other relations some things happen to satisfy, so long as they co-exist, there is always a least inclusive thing that has each of them among its parts.

I hadn’t really thought about the question “Why is Universalism so important to you?” before this exchange. If I hadn’t been writing down an answer, I probably would have just replied that it was no less or no more important to me than other theses that upon reflection and investigation seem to me to be true in metaphysics. But after spending a little time on it, one reason it stands out as special in my judgment is that it furnishes such a crystal-clear case of the following observation. There are some areas in metaphysics where the questions are relatively easy to formulate and get your head around, yet all of the most promising responses to those questions have consequences that appear to be simply outrageous. This is true, for example, of The Problem of the Many, of the nature of vagueness, of the metaphysics of persistence, and of the question to which Universalism is an answer, the question of composition.

Endorsing Universalism is a kind of glass-house position; it’s unwise to take up residence there and then lob the complaint against someone else’s metaphysics that it’s surely false because of its ridiculous and counterintuitive implications. Every significant metaphysical view seems to win that award when subjected to careful scrutiny, an observation which complicates (to say the least) the process of selecting among philosophical views or, if selecting is the wrong model, of critically evaluating the views one finds oneself believing... (MORE - missing details)