is that it's the home of the Australiana collection, and people leave the most fascinating books lying around. Yesterday's discovery was James Cockinston's Mondo Bizarro: Australia in the Seventies (Port Melbourne, VIC: Mandarin, 1994). I suppose most of the western world was pretty bizarro in the 70s; Australia was no exception.Thought I'd share with you the "One Recipe From the Seventies" the author thought worth listing. (A friend of mine assures me it's really an adaptation of Welsh rarebit.)
The Beer Fondue serves 3-4
1 cup beer • 2 cups (8 oz.) cheddar cheese, grated • 1 clove garlic, crushed
1 oz. butter • 1/2 tsp dry mustard • 2 Tbsp cornflour • a little extra beer • French bread
Place beer, cheese and garlic in fondue pot. Cook over a low heat,
stirring constantly, until cheese has melted. Stir in butter.
Blend mustard, cornflour with a little extra beer.
Add to fondue, and stir until thickened.
Serve with French bread cut into one-inch cubes.
But that wasn't actually the most bizarre holdover from the 1970s I saw yesterday. I went to a talk at the Philosophy Department at Melbourne Uni. A veteran philosopher of religion tried to demonstrate that William Rowe's "evidential argument" for atheism from the existence of evils (first stated in 1979) is less conclusive than it might seem. Rowe only considers two incidents of evil, but our philosopher showed that even if you added in all the evils in the world you would not be able to get someone who started out thinking the odds of God's existing to be 0.2 down to something approximating 0.1 cup beer • 2 cups (8 oz.) cheddar cheese, grated • 1 clove garlic, crushed
1 oz. butter • 1/2 tsp dry mustard • 2 Tbsp cornflour • a little extra beer • French bread
Place beer, cheese and garlic in fondue pot. Cook over a low heat,
stirring constantly, until cheese has melted. Stir in butter.
Blend mustard, cornflour with a little extra beer.
Add to fondue, and stir until thickened.
Serve with French bread cut into one-inch cubes.
Through a complicated set of propositions, all abbreviated as letters and pronounced à l'australienne as djooey (for G: God exists), kye (for K: all background knowledge of evils), pooey (for P: no good we know of could justify a God in permitting a given evil), pooey-staa (an elaboration of P, P*), and culminating in eeaye:
Let Ea list all known instances of evil, and providing just enough
empirical information about each instance to enable the instances
to be roughly ordered via the axiological relation worse than;
and let Ea say that it lists all known instances of evil.
empirical information about each instance to enable the instances
to be roughly ordered via the axiological relation worse than;
and let Ea say that it lists all known instances of evil.
and pooey-wahn:
No combination of goods, each of which we know of,
justifies God in allowing Ea to be true.
justifies God in allowing Ea to be true.
he arrived at this formula, which you'll have to sound out for yourselves. [Pr(x/y) means the probability of x given y]
Pr(G/P1&Ea&K) = Pr(G/Ea&K) X Pr(P1/G&Ea&K) / Pr(P1/Ea&K)
He then factored in what he thought were values Rowe would accept (he thinks they're arguable but these were "freebies" to Rowe), and came to a result of 0.2 X 0.8 / 0.99 = 0.162. While there's a false specificity about this number, he admitted smiling, the point is that it's not as far from the posited 0.2 as Rowe's argument would seem to require.
And he beamed like a child who'd just made "fondue" in his toy kitchen with root beer and velveeta.
I am soooo over analytic philosophy of religion!
