Can you baptize yourself, if necessary? The answer is quite clearly yes, at least when no valid other baptizer is available.
The Argument
I don’t wanna turn this into a round of Inerrantist “To the Bible!”. Let’s try an actual argument instead.
I will argue that none of the features of baptism need another person present, assuming none is available. A correct (but minimalistic) baptism proceeds as follows:
- The baptizer intends to do the same as the Church does (i.e. to perform the ritual accurately, even though they might screw it up).
- The recipient of the baptism desires to be baptised.
- The recipient is repentant for their sins, denounces Satan and embraces God.
- Water is poured over the recipient’s head (or the recipient is submersed in water).
- With the water still flowing / while submersed, the words are spoken: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” (Or some equivalent paraphrase.)
- 4) and 5) are repeated two more times. (May be skipped if necessary.)
- The recipient is now correctly baptized.
Steps 2), 3), 6) and 7) are obviously independent from a baptizer and are to be performed by the recipient themselves. I will only need to argue that 1), 4) and 5) can be performed by the recipient themselves, if necessary.
Of those, 4) and 5) do not seem to rely on the baptizer at all. In the case of a necessity (say if the priest is wounded and unable to move), surely anyone may handle the water, even the recipient themselves. As the water can be poured, the recipient also remains able to speak the words during the ritual. None of this necessitates a separate baptizer.
Finally, consider 1). Note right away the importance of the intention, not of credentials. In an emergency, anyone is capable of performing a valid baptism. The Catechism of the Church says so explicitly:
In case of necessity, anyone, even a non-baptized person, with the required intention, can baptize, by using the Trinitarian baptismal formula. The intention required is to will to do what the Church does when she baptizes. The Church finds the reason for this possibility in the universal saving will of God and the necessity of Baptism for salvation.
Furthermore, the purpose of baptism is the purification of the recipient, to wash away sin. This is a supernatural transformation caused by the Holy Spirit, not the baptizer. Therefore, even a Non-Christian can perform the baptism. This makes it clear that priests aren’t special in some way. They don’t possess some inherent unusual skill or gift, they themselves do not transform the recipient. Thus, they ought not to be necessary at all.
As additional support, consider the case of bootstrapping. Say you and a friend are stranded on an island. You’re both still not baptized, but had intended to join the Church right after your disastrous journey. You do happen to have the Catechism with you, so your friend baptizes you, intended to “do what the Church does”, speaks the right words and so on. Then you do the same to him. You are now both correctly baptized. It seems very implausible that your friend is of any causal relevance in this ritual, therefore this should also work when you are stranded alone.
Finally, consider the case of someone who has never heard of the Church or salvation, say a Chinese intellectual living in 400BCE. Salvation is universal, therefore even this person must be to receive God’s grace. They obviously can’t be baptized, so what are they supposed to do?
The Catechism says:
For catechumens who die before their Baptism, their explicit desire to receive it, together with repentance for their sins, and charity, assures them the salvation that they were not able to receive through the sacrament.
This seems straightforward. The recipient’s desire for salvation saves them, not the specific procedure. The ritual merely facilitates this process. Therefore, even if the self-baptism were invalid, it would still include a repentance for sins, an acceptance of the Triune God, and the intention to receive salvation and perform a correct baptism. Worst case, they are saved anyway.
The Purpose of the Argument
Alright, so they can perform something as good as normal baptism, so why not do both? When necessary, baptize yourself, then seek out a priest asap?
This Pascalian argument fails because baptism is unique. It is inherently an unrepeatable ritual and causes a permanent change. Therefore, you can’t baptize someone again. So if your self-baptism was invalid, you could just perform a correct baptism afterwards. But if it wasn’t, then the “second” baptism would be an impure ritual, itself unacceptable.
One solution to this is the conditional baptism. Instead of speaking the normal words, the baptizer says: “If you are not yet baptized, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Alright, so you can pull off Pascal’s Baptism - simply always use the conditional form. There’s one problem with this, though. Using the conditional baptism explicitly states that the baptizer doubts the validity of the formal ritual(s).
This clearly violates step 1). You can’t simultaneously intend to perform correctly and doubt you intended to perform correctly. Similarly, if you are baptized by someone else and you later perform a conditional baptism, you are doubting them as well. There are circumstances where this may be justified (if you underwent emergency baptism by a Non-Christian, for example, or a heretic church), but those are unusual.
This is therefore a standard game-theoretical problem. Under normal circumstances, you can only perform a baptism if you intend to do it correctly, but a conditional baptism contradicts this intention.
The Relevance of the Argument
Does this matter? After all, we are not stranded (I hope). We have access to the Church, we can get baptized the normal way just fine. Why care if self-baptism is valid?
Consider two things. First, the Church may not be valid itself. It could have been corrupted by Satan, for example. Deception is clearly possible, just think of the Cartesian Demon. Furthermore, the Church has undergone several major transformation, like the Council of Trent or Second Vatican Council. Any of those could have made the sacraments invalid by leading the intentions of the priesthood away from the Will of God (and the Communion of Saints).
If you do not trust the existent Church, then you can’t receive baptism from them (as you can’t be baptized “just to be sure”).
But second, knowing what I just told you, you can’t default to the position of the Chinese philosopher anymore. You are not ignorant any longer, you know about baptism and the Triune God, and you are not hindered from performing the ritual. Mere desire will not save you.
- If you self-baptize, you will explicitly affirm that the Church in its present state is unable to perform the sacraments.
- If you do rely on the Church, you will not be saved in case it truly is corrupt.
- If the Church is corrupt, is it so corrupt that it contradicts the expressed and potentially sincere intention? Does the baptizing priest still refer to the same thing?
- You can’t do both baptisms as this contradicts the intentions of at least one of the two.
- You can’t do neither or you won’t be saved at all.
So what do you do?
(Behold, a moral basilisk. Do not be turned off by the Catholic framing - consider its general form, and the fundamental problem how knowing the right thing to do can force you to solve even harder problems. Also note that a solution exists. All basilisks can be slain.)
Is this an actual problem for you, Muflax, in the sense of seeking salvation through Catholicism, or is it being used as an illustrative example of a certain kind of dilemma?
Well, it's complicated. There are a variety of reasons.
I think the Catholic Church is right (or at least less wrong than most) on a surprisingly wide range of topics, and their theology is much more sophisticated and insightful than I ever imagined just a year ago, so I'm currently spending a large amount of time thinking about it. The main problem is one of language. Once you re-frame the Church's ideas in terms of decision theory, ontology, computation and so on, they become much clearer (to me at least).
(I blame the false dichotomy of "atheism vs. theism" and (not intentionally) misleading Protestant language, and simply not growing up under any significant Catholic influence (former East German here) for that.)
The main aspect I was thinking through when I wrote this was the idea of timeless cooperation, i.e. the idea of unifying a large amount of individuals (from a wide range of worlds) into one big decision-theoretical "voting block" (or botnet, as someone called it).
This seems to be exactly what the Church is trying to accomplish in the form of the Communion of Saints and Church Militant / Triumphant / Expectant.
This cooperation requires rallying around Schelling points and so some compromise. The Church doesn't reflect the exact values and beliefs of all (or likely any) of its members, but is still sufficiently powerful that joining it anyway can be the smart thing to do.
(And the Church has been careful not to impose harmful doctrines, merely inconsequential ones or the bare minimum required to keep the Church operating. There has been and still is a large amount of accepted dissent in the Church, and that's a really good thing.)
There are two problems to figure out.
First, are the timeless Church (i.e. every member in every world) and the temporal Church (i.e. the dudes we're stuck with) really aligned? I don't state this too explicitly, but several events, especially Vatican II and the failed Counter-Reformation, really make me wonder. There seems to be some massive corruption going on (more in the theological "They are becoming Protestants! Satan has hijacked the Church!" sense, not the financial / minor scandals one.)
So if the temporal Church isn't trustworthy, how would one join the timeless Church? Or more generally (and why this isn't only about baptism), how do you ally yourself with distant agents whose motives and skills you're unsure about?
Or in catholic language, how do you get a correct baptism when you're not sure if the dudes currently offering it are really acting with the right intentions?
And following Taleb's ideas, how fragile is the temporal Church? Assume they actually have been "hijacked by Satan" (i.e. lost their purpose) or are otherwise destroyed, how would one rebuild it?
Buddhists are aware that the correct teachings do eventually get lost and will be rediscovered (and have some techniques in place to account for that), but they are largely decentralized anyway.
If baptism has become invalid, how do we make it valid again? As far as I can tell (and I'm definitely still a newb), the temporal Church *doesn't* have any plans for that.
Their main argument for validity seems to be the line of succession, which I find fairly implausible, given that I don't believe Jesus, Paul etc. are actually historical people. Should we lose the temporal Church, it seems, then only a miracle can save us. That looks like some shitty design to me.
(There might be ways to fix it, especially in the form of rigid designators, Schelling points, converging game-theoretical strategies, using a universal prior and so on. Basically, using strategies that work in all worlds and with all agents, and don't rely on "actual" information too much. And to some degree, the Church actually does use those tricks already, as far as I can tell.)
That's the dilemma in the post. I was curious if the Church has some mechanism in place to use if you don't have valid baptizers around (and can bootstrap it again if necessary), and wanted to illustrate how two strategies (blindly following the Church and redundant self-baptism "just in case") don't really work.
Variants of this problem are (and why this isn't just about the Church), how do you cooperate with future-you? How do you know it's trustworthy? *Which* future-you? And because "future" is somewhat of an arbitrary selection in a timeless multiverse, what about past-you and parallel-you? Or agents running similar algorithms to you?
Without making any major ontological commitments (like, are persons continuous or slices of person-moments?), it seems like present-you and future-you often have conflicting values, like in the form of hyperbolic discounting. That makes it uncertain whether cooperation is really desirable, or even possible. (We'd like to join the timeless Church, but don't know if we can trust the temporal Church.)
There are some practical "fixes" like pre-commitments, but those seems very non-consensual to me, almost like attempted enslavement. If future-you has different values, why? Does it become corrupted along the way? (If so, how do we correct this? And how does it happen?) If the value-drift is valid and predictable (as many seem to assume), why don't we change *our* values right away? If we already know the destination, why wait?
"I'm just doing whatever my values are right now" is like blind trust in the temporal Church. "I'm fulfilling both sets of values, just in case" is redundant self-baptism. Neither seems like a good idea.
(There are also further variations, but those are the two important ones, I think.)
The second issue is if the timeless Church (i.e. the Communion of Saints ) really is a good thing to ally with. That's a much trickier problem, one I don't have an answer to (yet). I currently consider them benevolent, but I'm still fairly skeptical.
This is a bunch of random thoughts, so forgive the incoherence.
Any step such as baptism involves a gamble for which there can never be assurance, so it may well be a case of just taking the 'leap' at some point. Establishing whether the church is 'corrupt' or not strikes me as essentially an impossible task. As you say, it does appear to be the only plausible vehicle to hitch one's wagon to if that's the road you're going to go down.
On a more general note, I too have only lately begun to appreciate the impressiveness of the Catholic church. I was raised as a Catholic and when I lost my faith at 18 or thereabouts it was a massive deal for me, as I realised no god = being stuck in a morality-less, indifferent universe with no ethics and no redemption and/or payback for suffering. Unlike many atheists I wasn't/ am not happy to be in that position. (In fact, I wrote a somewhat ranting and bilious blog post about it yesterday: http://saynotolife.blogspot.co...
I've also finally realised that no system of rational/objective ethics can ever be devised. Only something like Divine Command Theory seems fully coherent to me. And even if a rational/objective ethical system were devised, so what? It still couldn't answer for/redeem the misery of the world.
And I've also noticed that religious writers such as Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard and so on have far greater insight into the human condition than any self-proclaimed rational atheists, which makes me wary of entirely dismissing the tradition.
By the way, may find this of interest. An interview with Alan Dawrst re. Pascal's wager. I think it may touch on some of the issues at hand:
http://hooverhog.typepad.com/h...
A possibly-vaguely-interesting analogy: King Mongkut, who reinvented Theravada in the mid-1800s, faced this problem. As far as he could determine, there was no valid line of monastic succession, since the sangha had become so corrupt. ("Corrupt" here was his legal opinion under the fussy rules of vinaya, not just a moral one.) Therefore, there were no authentically ordained monks in the world. He thought it was terribly important for him to *really* be a monk, not just what people loosely *called* a monk. (Here "really" was defined again by the elaborate legalism of vinaya ordination procedure.)
My recollection of the details are hazy, but I think he eventually discovered a loophole in the rules, whereby he could have a valid de novo ordination so long as it was not conducted in any country. So he got himself re-ordained on a barge on a river separating Thailand and Burma.
It's possible that I just totally made that up. I can't remember.
I find Catholicism very impressive too, in that the Jesuits have ironed out all the nit-picky objections. So long as you are willing to swallow camels whole, they can promise that you do not need to gulp down any gnats.
Camels seem unhygenic to me, so I'll pass.
( I am going to believe this story now because it's so cute.)
But that's not exactly the point. I wasn't trying to argue for essentialism, but whether the reference of what I think the timeless Church is and what the Vatican (and more so, some random priest) thinks it is, are really the same.
Assume the Church has been corrupted. For example, and I actually do have an unhealthy grudge about that, assume that the conflict between Petrine and Pauline theology *can't* be glossed over, and you have to pick one (or neither), but not *both*, as the Gospel of Luke does.
Assume for the sake of the argument that Peter is right and correct ritual observance is strictly necessary, and Paul is the Deceiver of Nations. (This is genuine early Christian criticism, though I don't agree with it.)
The temporal Church nonetheless asserts it represents both branches, so if you followed it, you'd not be saved. They claim their sacraments are valid, but they ain't, cause they don't follow full Torah law. (And maybe more, 'cause who's to say the Torah is itself complete.)
Then baptism by the temporal Church is worthless, and you need to figure out how to get those correct rituals back. Which might be tricky if you don't trust the Torah either.
Similarly, instead of lost teachings, we could be faced with wrong alliances. Maybe "Satan" (not necessarily the dude with horns, just some evil process/agent) is actually running the temporal Church (a problem I almost never see Christians deal with, even though most of them should consider this the Most Important Issue In The World). Of course, not every single priest would be mind-controlled. So you (not evil) go to your local priest (not evil) for baptism, which is supposed to unite you with the timeless Church of Christ (not evil), but the temporal Church the priest belongs to, and which the ritual comes from, is the Church of Satan. Is that still valid, or have you just unknowingly sold your soul to the Devil?
So basically, the theological Gettier problem, and something rigid designators etc. are supposed to solve.
(Though "this shit don't matter" is perfectly valid criticism, but I think there's enough to it (at least tangentially) that dismissing it early isn't a good idea. It might not solve the initial problem in the end, but some other, but still important one.)
Well... I doubt argument is productive... but offhand it seems that the analogy may be better than you think.
Lots of Buddhists would say that there is The One True Sangha, which has a direct lineage back to Gautama, and the other leading brands are fake sanghas. They have broken lineage, and wrong theology. And it's common for Buddhist sectarians to explicitly say that the other leading brands are led by evil men who are possessed by demons. And if you follow their advice, you will definitely go to hell. Buddhism hasn't got a Satan equivalent, but that's pretty similar.
Now, if you think that unbroken lineage matters, or that correct Buddhist theology matters, and you don't accept the local Poobah's say-so, you've got a problem. 'Cuz the evidence is extremely sketchy, and it probably says that no one's lineage is intact and no one knows anything about what Gautama said (if anything).
I think it's worth taking these things seriously, although I think the only possible conclusions are "lineage is no use in evaluating this stuff" and "we badly need better ways" and "they'd better be empirically grounded, because you can't do this stuff a priori."
Rigid designators: good luck with that. "Justified true belief" substituted three bad ideas for one bad idea. Throw modal stuff in the pot and your stew has more bad ideas than you can shake a dead bat at.
[I'm avoid Something I'm Supposed To Be Doing, in case that isn't obvious!]
I agree about the history of pretty much any tradition being extremely sketchy, and lineage arguments being bullshit. Reconstructing "the Buddha" from early Buddhist writing is like reconstructing 19th century German history from Wolfenstein 3D.
(And don't even try "what the Buddha meant".)
(Only the Erisian lineage is true because it is the only lineage consistent with the fact that it started as a joke, and because I say so as an Erisian Pope, and I'm a valid Pope because it says so on my Pope Card, which is valid because I, an Erisian Pope, say so.)
I also agree about empirical, Outside View kind of evaluations. Regardless of where Theravada (or anyone) got its ideas from, we can see how they work out, and if the claims about arhats etc. it makes actually do come true. (Like, arhats not being subject to the Ten Fetters.)
But I don't think that a priori reasoning doesn't work or is doomed.
Advanced decision theory comes to the conclusion that for sufficiently powerful agents, "beliefs" and "preferences" are actually the same thing, and any kind of prediction is always also an expression of some values.
Sufficiently powerful agents determine logical facts (in the most extreme case, the bits in Chaitin's constant), and so logical uncertainty and empirical uncertainty are the same problem, and a priori reasoning and empirical reasoning essentially merge.
So the issue is that previously, "knowledge" has been constructed as some weird, supernatural kind of thing, detached from preferences and actions.
"Yes, but is X *true*?" is only puzzling if you think about statements having built-in truth, as if the Liar Paradox *really* is true, or false, or something, we just can't figure it out.
And being really obsessed about that leads to Dialetheism, where you just say, fuck it, it's true and false at the same time! It has to have *some* truth-value, and so I better assign one.
But if you follow a Constructivist framework, in which statements don't have truth-values, but there are agents who prove things (using some algorithms), then the whole thing makes a lot more sense.
"Is it really true?" becomes "Will this algorithm evaluate as "accept" or "reject", given this input?", and it's perfectly sensible to notice that some algorithms won't return an answer for some input. And instead of asking yourself what is "justified" or "true", you ask what kind of classification you want from your algorithm, what inputs you're dealing with, and what other algorithms depend on your evaluation and how that relates to your values.
(I just noticed that Constructivism is the mathematical equivalent of
Moral Anti-Realism. Statements aren't "true", but are proven true by
some algorithm. Actions aren't "good", but are evaluated as good by some
agent (following some algorithm).)
If something is "true" or not depends on what you want to do, and you shouldn't ask "but what is real knowledge", but "I'm trying to do X, how should I treat statements to get there".
And my worry about rigid designators is, existing rituals classify wrong under certain circumstances. They rely too much on contingent information, and so in some worlds (with some input), they'd point to the wrong thing.
That doesn't mean no correct reference is possible, just that you have to be clever about it.
(Which, I think, Catholic theology is already trying to do, but not nearly enough. It's truly remarkable that Catholic baptism is the only one that can be administered by Non-Christians because the inherent ritual (tries to) correctly dereference to the Holy Spirit, so that the priest could be a filthy heathen working for Satan personally for all that you know, it still works.
And similarly, the ontological argument, first mover argument and so on, are all (attempted) proofs of God that, if they worked, would point to a unique god. The ontological argument, if it leads anywhere, always yields the same God, not Zeus for Gree and Amaterasu for Japanese philosophers.
They are not about "our shit is authentic yo", like fundamentalists are trying to argue, but about picking out the unique optimal solution from god-space, and hope that it exists.)
But maybe I'm awfully naive about the Gettier rabbit-hole.
(And now the thread has become awfully narrow and I see what you mean. (Fixing it right away.) Curse you, Satan, for leading us away from the Holy Land that was Usenet!)
(So I switched to flat comments now. Disqus still allows replies to specific comments, and I don't have much traffic with many concurrent discussions anyway, so that should work well enough. Chapman-sensei, I bow to your wisdom.)
Regarding Peter, and of course this is absurdly nitpicky and stupid, but you're thinking of James. Peter was a waffler, just like the author of the Gospel of Luke. (Or at least that's what the author of the Gospel of Luke says.)
No, I meant Peter, though his side isn't represented much in the canonical texts. But James would count too, yes. The two have fairly similar positions, as far as this argument is concerned. They're both good Jews, after all.
The author of Luke isn't on Peter's side, and only doesn't slander him like Mark because he's trying to unite the Petrine and Pauline sects. The author also doesn't understand either side, which is why I have a strong grudge against this gospel. It's entirely rubbish.
I got my Erisian Pope card before you were born...
Lots of very interesting stuff here; too much to reply to properly.
I agree that a priori reasoning is useful; I was sloppy and overstated that. We need all the epistemological help we can get. It works best in conjunction with empirical stuff, of course.
You understand that "sufficiently powerful agents" in that stuff—Chaitin e.g.—have to solve uncomputable problems, and so are (presumably) not physically realizable? Cool math is cool, but this hasn't got anything to do with the real world... I think the same is true for Kripke semantics. It can sometimes be a useful tool for thinking clearly, but we can't know which worlds are possible (if that even means anything), so it has no purchase on physical problems.
Credit Sabio Lantz, not me!
So, reply is still nesting. I think you may only have flattened the existing comments, rather than changing the functionality. I can't even find a flat reply-to-thread [rather than reply-to-comment] button.
When you reply to a comment, you'll still see it as indented for convenience sake until you reload / leave. (Can't change that behavior, but it confused me too.)
Also moved the general reply box to the bottom. Should be more intuitive that way.
About uncomputability / physical realization. Yeah, I know that. But I'm not sure it matters.
Arithmetic isn't computable either, in the general sense, but I wouldn't say that it's just a helpful tool. There's some fundamental connection to reality *somewhere* in there, I just don't know where.
Basically, it's like we have pieces of a really intricate and elegant map, and I can almost-but-not-quite see how they can be united into one coherent map, but I have no clue what it's a map *of*.
(And saying it's not a map of anything, that there isn't a territory, seems just as nonsensical. Not that I haven't tried that option.)
But obviously, I'm still very confused about this, and to some degree, I'm talking out of my ass here, but I still have the impression that all of this can be assembled into a coherent whole.
Gotta get back to you once I have solved metaphysics. (Now that I have this Buddha thing off my list, I'm sure I can do that before lunch.)