Hume’s critique of the Design Argument in the First Enquiry

Section XI of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding sets out Hume's critique of the Design Argument in the form of a dialogue between Hume and a friend. The ostensible reason for the dialogue is to determine whether someone who denies that there will be reward or punishment in a future life for deeds and misdeeds in this one will undermine morality, but within the course of the discussion, it becomes clear that the (or at least a) primary target of Hume's discussion is the traditional design argument for the existence of God. Hume's goal is not to refute the argument outright; it is rather to limit the scope of what someone ought to claim on the basis of having established the existence of God through this argument.

Hume's friend starts out by reviewing the argument from design. It is ‘an argument drawn from effects to causes.’ Advocates of the design argument claim that it establishes no more than is warranted by the facts.

The friend then lays out rules for inference from effects to cause: (1) the cause must be proportional to the effect; no qualities may be assigned to the cause beyond what are necessary and sufficient to bring about the observed effect. Anything more is conjecture. (2) No further effects may be inferred from the cause beyond what is already known. The existence and order of the universe shows the power, intelligence and benevolence of God only to the degree that those qualities are displayed in his creation. Any further attribution of qualities is hypothesis. We cannot ‘mount up to Jupiter’ from effects to causes and then ‘descend downwards’ to new effects. Any attribution of other qualities or effects has no foundation either in reason or experience. In other words, an inductive argument of this sort for the existence of God can establish no more facts about the purported deity than are necessary to account for those features of the world that the positing of God is needed to explain.

So, even granting that the existence of the universe requires a cause of some kind, is it reasonable to look at the world and contend that it demonstrates any of the qualities that should lead us to believe that the creator (whatever it was) was an intelligent, benevolent designer as we're instructed by traditional religion to believe? There is no prima facie reason to believe that the world is just—injustice is clearly all around us, in fact.

The defender of the ultimate justice of the universe might point to future reward and punishment as evidence of the justice of the world, and thus to the existence and justice of its creator. The idea here would be that although justice does not obtain in the present world, God will balance the books in the future. However, the rules of inference from effect to cause only give us the right to attribute the justice of the visible world to its creator. The friend poses this question: is there distributive justice in this world? If not, then the absence of justice in the world does not give us warrant to expect it in the future; in fact, it should lead us to the opposite conclusion.

Experience serves as the only standard by which to judge a claim about the world; any inference beyond what experience provides is unwarranted. Having found these limits unacceptable, some have allowed speculation and imagination to carry them to concepts beyond what experience provides. One of these, that there is an intelligent, benevolent cause of the universe, is ‘uncertain’ and ‘useless,’ in the words of Hume's friend. It is uncertain because it lies beyond experience, and it is useless because the inference to an intelligent cause will not allow us to infer anything further than its mere existence.

Hume puts forward a possible objection that an advocate of the Design Argument might raise, though. Is it truly the case that we cannot infer anything further about the creator than simply that he created the world? We are certainly permitted to infer the existence of a builder if we happen upon a house partially built, and once we infer a builder, are there not many things that we can also affirm about the builder? There are many things that we know about builders, after all. It is interesting here that Hume's objection anticipates the sort of claim that is often made by advocates of the Design Argument and other arguments for the existence of God. If, once we've established a creator, we can come to knowledge of the other properties of that creator (by reason, revelation, etc.) then we can build upon the foundation of the inductive Design Argument. Perhaps we can indeed 'mount up to Jupiter' and come back down again.

The friend replies that the difference is that in the case of the house we are familiar with men as builders from other experiences, and have seen that houses are built by men. If we had no such experience of builders, then we would not be able to make the inference from the existence of a house to existence of a builder. In that case the situations would be analogous, but we could not argue from effect to cause and then make inferences about the other properties of that cause.

Once again, for Hume experience is the sole foundation for knowledge, and any attempts to put flesh on the skeleton of the notion of a creator arrived at through the Design Argument is merely speculation. We have no independent experience of the deity, who is known only by his products, so we cannot infer any further attributes beyond those necessary for the creation of the world. We have no license to suppose the deity possess qualities like goodness or justice in any measure beyond what is observable in the world.

Anything further is speculative, and the source of our tendency to attribute additional qualities to God is a projection of our own qualities, and our belief that God will reward and punish in a future life is derived from this anthropomorphic projection. In reality, we cannot say anything more about that deity’s nature than is included in his works. No new fact can be inferred from the ‘religious hypothesis’ beyond what is given in experience.

An implication that Hume's argument carries, but which he does not bring to the surface explicitly (probably for political reasons) is this: if Hume is right about the limits of the Design Argument that served as the centerpiece for natural theology's attempts to establish the truth of traditional religion, then if we accept Hume's attack on revealed religion in his discussion of miracles in the prior section of the first Enquiry, the foundations of traditional religious belief are destroyed.

Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1772), ed. Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Hume on Miracles

Hume’s argument against the rationality of believing in miracles (found in Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (EHU) section X) is simple, elegant, and to my judgment, decisive.

According to Hume, all knowledge of matters of fact comes from experience. A matter of fact on his view is basically anything that isn’t a mathematical or analytical truth. However, Hume acknowledges that though experience is the only guide in reasonings regarding matters of fact, it is not infallible; experience in some cases is less than uniform. ‘A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence’ in cases where experience is not uniform (EHU, 170). A man should weigh the opposing evidence as if evaluating conflicting ‘experiments’ and judge more probable the results that occur more frequently.

Hume considers testimony as it relates to these epistemic norms. Experience provides the basis of our belief in human testimony (a consequence of experience providing us with the basis of all of our beliefs). We feel testimony to be reliable because we have experience with people as truth-tellers, and know by experience what psychological and social factors cause people to tell the truth, such as the general human inclination to tell the truth and the desire to avoid the shame of being exposed as a liar. Since testimony is founded on experience, its reliability should subject to the same measures of proof and probability as all other experimental evidence gathered from experience.

Testimonial reports of marvelous [which for Hume are unlikely but not impossible] and miraculous events are one source of positive evidence for their occurrence; in fact, since authority and tradition amount to forms of testimonial evidence, testimony is really the sole evidential ground for miracles for any person who has not witnessed a miracle herself. However, against the testimony in favor of a miracle we have our uniform experience of the world operating according to fixed laws; this experience serves as counterevidence to the possibility that the miraculous event reported might have occurred. Here we have two sources of evidence, both grounded in experience, in conflict. Our belief should side with the body of evidence that is more probable based on our experience.

Hume is making the empirical bet that in every case the evidence that the universe operates according to laws which prohibit the miraculous event will overwhelm the positive evidence for the miracle, which should be considered against the possibility that the story of the event is contrived, misunderstood, or misreported. Hume offers a maxim by which to evaluate miracle claims: the falsehood of the miracle report must be more miraculous than the miracle reported in order to warrant belief.

When we hear a report of a miracle, say, a man rising from the dead, we should weigh the probability of this occurrence against the probability that the testimony is false, and apportion our belief accordingly, which is to say, reject the miracle report as false.

Hume’s argument has not destroyed the possibility of miracles, of course. He has only shown that it’s irrational to believe in one if one takes the view that we ought to base our beliefs on the preponderance of evidence.

Claiming that the miracle is an act of God doesn’t increase its probability or weigh in its favor, according to Hume, since all we can know of God is known via nature, which speaks uniformly against the miraculous. The testimony of miracles is insufficient to found a religion, given that what grounds testimony in general also refutes it in the case of miracles. So the miraculous nature of any religion cannot be given as a defense of its veracity. Given that Christianity cannot be believed without at least one miracle, it is only faith that might compel assent to it, and this faith must be affirmed in opposition to reason, understanding, and experience.

References:
Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1772), ed. Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Mental Causation II: Nonreductive Physicalism

I. A Version of Nonreductive Physicalism
The exclusion argument works because if token physicalism is true and microdeterminism is true, any causal properties possessed by mental events are possessed in virtue of their physical properties, not in virtue of their mental properties. For physicalists such as Jaegwon Kim (see also 1984, 1993a) there are ontological as well as epistemological consequences to the exclusion argument. The ontological consequence is that mental properties have no independent causal powers of their own. The epistemological consequence is that invoking mental properties in explanation is superfluous.

Robert Van Gulick (1993) draws two main conclusions from his discussion of the exclusion argument. First, he provides an argument to the effect that causal relevance is distinct from causal potency (basically, the idea is that the ontological and epistemological consequences of the exclusion argument are distinct). He argues that if the causal relevance of a mental property is determined by having a useful role in causal explanation, then it is not clear that we should count mental properties as causally irrelevant simply on the basis of their lack of independent causal powers (242-5). Discussion of Van Gulick’s view of causation will follow, but suffice here to note that this conclusion regards epistemology, and is distinct from any ontological consequences Van Gulick draws.

Second, he argues that although the events and objects picked out by the special sciences are composites of physical constituents, it is not the case that their causal powers are determined solely by the physical properties of the constituents of those organized processes; rather, the organization of those constituents into patterns also plays a role in the determination of causal powers. Those organizational patterns turn out to be the referents of the predicates of the special sciences (250). It is unclear exactly what these patterns are supposed to be, and in what sense they should be considered “higher order” than physical properties. However that is resolved, Van Gulick appears to be moving from his thesis about the relevance of higher order properties to causal explanations to a thesis about the causal efficacy of those higher order properties; he is drawing substantive ontological conclusions from his epistemological considerations. He argues for the reality and causal potency of the organizational patterns based on the following:

(1) Organizational patterns are recurrent and stable features of the world.
(2) Many patterns are stable despite variation in or exchange of constituents.
(3) Many patterns are self-sustaining despite physical forces that might disturb them.
(4) Patterns may affect which causal powers of their constituents are likely to be activated. The constituent may have many different causal powers, but only a subset will be active in a given situation.
(5) The selective activation in (4) may contribute to the maintenance of the pattern itself.

On this view, higher order properties act by selective activation of physical powers, not by their alteration (250-2).

Van Gulick argues that even the properties of the lowest levels of the physical organization of things are in fact “stable self-sustaining recurrent states of the quantum flux of an irreducibly probabilistic and statistical reality.” He gives as examples of these recurrent states the property of being a proton or the property of being an electron with ½ positive spin. The fact that the interactions of objects at the lowest level approximate deterministic regularities seduces us into believing that these objects and interactions have a privileged role in determining the organization of the world. Van Gulick sees the exclusion argument as weakened by these considerations in the following ways, then. The complete physical description of the world will have to include specifications of boundary conditions, since the higher order properties and organizations play a role in which causal properties of the constituents of higher order properties are active. But looking exclusively at the lower level constituents and their properties will not reveal the higher level organization. There are no complete translation functions from one level to the other. In addition, special sciences are able to refer to these higher order property instantiations and elucidate the way in which the temporal sequence of events is determined by the interaction of higher level properties (254-5). For Van Gulick this inability of lower level explanations to account for higher level phenomena does not appear to be merely an epistemic limitation; it is blocked in principle by the real causal powers of higher level phenomena.

II. The Problem with Van Gulick’s Response to the Problem

Part of Van Gulick’s objection is that the properties picked out by physics as the basic entities are every bit as abstracted as the higher order patterns and properties picked out by the special sciences. At bottom, how is the property of ‘being a proton’ categorically different than the property of ‘being a belief’? Both are abstractions, so ultimately they have the same ontological status on Van Gulick’s analysis. I am inclined to agree with him. But I think that where Van Gulick goes wrong is in his assertion that properties like ‘being a proton’ constitute actually constitute the lowest level of reality. This I think is incorrect. It is not the properties of protons, electrons, and whatever other entities make up the domain of quantum physics that comprise the basic level of reality (and therefore analysis) on the assumptions of the exclusion argument, but rather the protons, electrons, and other basic elements themselves that do. It is useful to talk about the properties of quantum entities in descriptions of their interactions, but those properties are abstractions, as Van Gulick points out. But the ultimate constituents of higher level properties are not themselves abstractions, but rather entities. If there is a distinction between the entities that occupy the lowest level and the properties that are abstracted over them, then Van Gulick cannot slide so easily from epistemology to ontology.

Without a parallel between physics and the special sciences, Van Gulick loses the analogy that provides his model for how higher order properties can have causal powers independent of their constituents. His argument hinged on being able to move from the epistemic viability of higher order properties to their viability as independent causal agents. If the objects of the special sciences are not in fact at the same level of abstraction as the objects of physics, then Van Gulick’s claim that the organized patterns of high level properties are independent of their constituents cannot gain purchase from physics being in the same boat.

It might be useful to look at an example of the sort of higher level process that is supposed to be causally independent and capable of downward causation. Van Gulick’s article is light on examples, but I think the sort of thing he has in mind is something like the developmental processes studied in biology. Developmental systems theorists often point to the interaction and complexity of developmental systems as an indication that genetic reductionism is a flawed perspective from which to analyze what’s going on in the production of phenotypes or other biological processes. Developmental systems are composed of a multiplicity of entities and processes and their interactions, including codons, noncoding DNA sequences, epigenetic and regulatory machinery, etc., each of which plays a role in the production of phenotypic effects. Some biologists argue that it is not practically possible to functionally decompose the developmental system into discrete parts and predict the behavior of the system on the basis of the properties of the individual constituents. Developmental systems theorists might also talk about the role developmental systems play in higher level processes; many evolutionary biologists consider the changes that take place in lineages of developmental systems to be a key (or even “the” key) unit in phylogenetic change over evolutionary time (Sterelny and Griffiths 1999: 94-100).

These then would seem to be prime candidates to serve as examples for Van Gulick. However, none of this implies that there are higher level system properties that exercise downward causal force to determine what is going on in the biochemical reactions that comprise the system. For each element of the system there is a mechanism that is, at least in principle, specifiable in terms of the basic constituents of the system and their interactions; there is no top-down pressure required to explain what is going within the system. There is broad agreement within biology about metaphysical reduction and the idea that higher level systematic properties and processes are determined by lower level, physical ones. Debate in biology about reduction is about the epistemological aspects of theory reduction and explanation (Rosenberg 2007: 120-121). Ultimately, it may not be possible to have a useful developmental theory that refers only to atoms and molecules, but that does not indicate that the pragmatics of explanation dictate the positing of higher level phenomena with independent causal powers. The pragmatic requirements of explanation do not dictate the ontological commitments of biology.

In the same way, nothing Van Gulick has given us should prompt us to abandon the metaphysical consequences of the exclusion argument. His failure to recognize a distinction between the constituents of higher level properties and the abstracted properties of those constituents has forced him to blur the boundaries between metaphysics and epistemology, and he has taken his epistemological conclusions to have substantive consequences for ontology. I suspect that despite explicitly recognizing that pragmatics should drive our explanatory frameworks, he fails to notice that the coarseness of the grain of our explanations does not have ontological consequences. What Van Gulick is seeing is the variety and complexity in the lower level systems which produce higher level properties that can be productively grouped into multiply realizeable kinds for the purpose of analysis and that the details of the physical systems that exhibit that complexity do not directly contribute to special science explanations and takes from that a real gap in the actual causal properties of the higher and lower levels. The differences he notices that seem to indicate an incongruity between the causal properties of the low level processes and entities that constitute higher level properties and those of the macrolevel patterns that are analyzed by the special sciences are in reality epistemological distinctions that need not indicate a real metaphysical divide. What Van Gulick has done is mistake a mismatch in grain of different types of explanations of one event or process for a true ontological divide that requires the positing of downward causation to make the world intelligible.

References
Kim, J. 1984. “Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation.” In Kim 1993, pp. 92-108.
Kim, J. 1993. Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge Press.
Kim, J. 1993a. “The nonreductivist’s troubles with mental causation.” In Kim 1993, pp. 336-57.
Rosenberg, A. 2007. “Reductionism (and Antireductionism) in Biology.” In D. Hull and M. Ruse (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Sterelny K. and P. Griffiths. 1999. Sex and Death: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Van Gulick, R. 1993. “Who’s in Charge Here? And Who’s Doing All the Work?” in J. Heil and A. Mele (eds.) Mental Causation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 233-56.

Mental Causation I: The Exclusion Problem and Supervenience

Our commonsense intuitions and folk psychology point to the efficacy of mental properties. It seems that nothing could be more obvious than that things like beliefs and desires cause things to happen in the world. Analysis of the causal role of beliefs, desires, and other mental properties leads quickly to questions about this commonsense picture. Are beliefs and desires physical entities? Are they identical to neurological states? If they are not identical to neurological states, which should be considered the true cause of the effects claimed for mental causes, mental properties or brain properties? These sorts of considerations are at the heart of the exclusion argument put forward by Jaegwon Kim in a variety of versions over the last 30 years.

The basic issue that the exclusion argument attempts to elucidate is the following: if we are realists about mental causation and physicalism, then any mental event m that causes physical event p does so in virtue of m and p falling under mental kind M and physical kind P respectively. Does p have a physical cause as well as a mental cause? If p does not have a physical cause, in other words if m is a strictly nonphysical property, then m’s having causal efficacy is a violation of causal closure of the physical, which is at the heart of physicalism. Allowing nonphysical causes moves the discourse into Cartesian dualism with all the unsolved mysteries surrounding the relation of physical to nonphysical properties that accompany it. If we add another restriction to our interpretation of the causal sequence, that if p is a physical event it must have a physical cause, then the question becomes, if p has a physical cause, then what role would the purported mental cause play? The physical cause seems to exclude the mental cause (Kim 1998: 37-8).

So, what sort of options are there to deal with this exclusion?

I see four options for dealing with the problem, which I plan to deal with in later posts: reductionism, eliminitivism, nonreductive physicalism, and epistemic compatibilism. Here, though, I'll briefly follow Kim's argument showing why an appeal to supervenience is a nonstarter as a solution to the problem.

The claim that mental states supervene on physical states means that for any mental event m that instantiates mental property M at time t, there is some physical property P such that m has P at t and anything that has P has M. If supervenience fails, then the intelligibility of mental causation fails as well. The conjunction of supervenience with the causal closure of the physical provides the possibility of explaining mental causation within the general account of physical causation, but only if mental causation can be reconciled with causal closure and supervenience. Supervenience brings mental causation under the purview of physical causation. So mental causation without supervenience is unintelligible from the perspective of physicalism (Kim 1998: 37-41).

Unfortunately, mental causation is unintelligible if supervenience holds as well. Consider some mental property M that is purported to cause another mental property M*. In this case if supervenience holds, then M and M* each supervene on physical properties, say P and P* respectively. If this is the case then there are two potential explanations for why M* obtains, M and P*. This can be alleviated by claiming that M causes P*, but that solution only provides a new difficulty, namely, how to explain the downward causal powers of M. Or alternatively, we could claim instead that P causes P* granting causal power to M in a derivative or dependent sense. This however, brings us right back to the exclusion argument. Kim contends that the most natural way of viewing the relation of M to M* in this case is to say instead that P causes P*, M supervenes on P and M* supervenes on P*. On this view the mental properties depend for their existence on the physical subvenient properties, and all of the causal activity takes place on the physical level. The regularity between the mental properties is not an accidental one, though; there is a real causal regularity that explains the connection between these properties, and is able to do so without violating the causal closure of the physical or leading to overdetermination. But on the supervenience model the real causal action takes place at the physical level, not the mental level, and thus supervenience doesn't really offer an alternative that avoids the exclusion problem (Kim 1998: 41-7).

Kim, J. 1998. Mind in a Physical World. Cambridge: MIT Press.

I Put the "Super" in Supervenience

So, I'm taking a course in contemporary metaphysics this term, and I feel a bit like I've wandered into a foreign land of nonsense and speculation. For the most part, I am interested in the history of philosophy or philosophy of science and so my study of philosophy has to this point been fairly bereft of bizarre arguments about possible worlds, multiple realization, and some of the other arcane theoretical entities and relations that stalk the pages of philosophy journals.

I think I prefer it that way. We're into week 3 on "supervenience" and I still have no idea what that term is supposed to mean. The slogan version is simple enough: if property A "supervenes" on property B, then any two entities that are exactly the same in respect to their B-properties will be identical in respect of their A-properties. If mental properties supervene on neurophysiological properties, then any two identical brains will have identical thoughts.

Ok. So far, so good. The problem comes when you try to say anything further. Saying that mental properties supervene on neurophysiological properties doesn't tell us much at all about either set of properties, and it tells us absolutely nothing about the relation between the two sets of properties.

The way I read it, a supervenience claim is either an uninformative claim that the two sets of properties show covariance or an incomplete claim that one set of properties depends on the other. Either way, just saying that A supervenes on B is not saying much.

Maybe I don't really understand the philosophical import of this notion. Let's hope so, because otherwise it's going to be a long quarter.

Natural Grace

I was hipped to Bill Callahan's album Sometimes I wish we were an eagle by Matt at why birds don't talk, and it's one of the most beautiful albums I've heard in a long time. The instrumentation on all the songs is terrific, and even though the vocals are, let's say, not exactly ordinary, everything works together really well. You can sample the songs at the link above, and I would absolutely recommend it. A terrific conceptual theme runs through the album too, which is that there is beauty and meaning in ordinary life and in the natural world.


The first song on the album, "Jim Cain," is written from the perspective of noir fiction author James M. Cain, who wrote, among other things, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. The first line of the song, "I started out in search of ordinary things," reminds me of the opening passage of Mildred Pierce in which Cain describes with terrific detail Mildred's husband Bert hanging nets to support the weight of the fruit on their avocado trees; an everyday event, which becomes charged with meaning as you read on and find out that their marriage is ending. This act winds up being his last real act as Mildred's husband.


"Eid Ma Clack Shaw" follows, with notions of love, memory, and dreams entangled throughout. This sparks interest in the philosophy student in me; all three of these phenomena share a similar ontological profile. Essentially, all three are events which occur only within the minds of people-- there are no dreams, memories, or love "out there" in the world independent of the experiencers, and yet all three are nonetheless entirely natural and meaningful. In the song the narrator "dreams the perfect song" and writes it down in a half-sleep state, only to find that when he awakes what he has written is nonsense. Are we supposed to infer that love and memory also share a disconnect with the waking world?


"The Wind and the Dove" is (as far as can make out) about the interconnectedness of the natural world as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of people: "Somewhere between the wind and the dove/Lies all I sought in you/And when the wind just dies, when the wind just dies/And the dove won't rise/From your window sill."


"Rococo Zephyr" pursues the theme of natural grace most explicitly, and does so beautifully. It's my favorite song on the album; the music is fantastic, and the lyrics are light and thoughtful at the same time. Natural metaphors for human relationships abound: "She lay beside me/Like a branch from, a tender willow tree/I was as still/As still as a river could be/When a rococo zephyr/Swept over her and me." The end of the song ("I used to be sort of blind/Now I can sort of see") apes the words of "Amazing Grace" but without the certainty that religious sentiment provides. The natural is beautiful, but beautifully imperfect as well.

"Too Many Birds": reminds me of a Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams poem. The lyrics are spare and descriptive of an object of perception (in this case a bird) but there is an implicit parallel being drawn between the object and the perceiver.

"My Friend" departs from the theme discussed here, but has a terrific line: "Now I'm not saying we're cut from the same tree/But like two pieces of the gallows/The pillar and the beam."

"All Thoughts are Prey to Some Beast" is another use of natural metaphors for the human experience: "The leafless tree looked like a brain/The birds within were all the thoughts and desires within me."

"Invocation of Ratiocination" is a (sort of strange) instrumental, but anyone familiar with church services will think "prayer" when they see "invocation," only what's being invoked here is not a deity or spirit, but human reason.

This emphasis on reason over faith is borne out further in "Faith/Void," the last track on the album. The sparse lyrical structure, musical simplicity and the repetition of the phrase "It's time to put God away," reminds me of the repetitive choruses used in Evangelical Church services, but the content is the opposite: here is not summoning the presence of a god, but recognizing the absence of one. The song doesn't argue against the concept of god (although it does make an oblique reference to the problem of evil), but instead is the expression of a conclusion already reached: "This is the end of faith, no more must I strive/To find my peace, to find my peace in a lie."

Amen, Bill.

My kind of expedition

Not too long ago I bought myself a single bottle of Bell's Expedition Stout. At $20/6-pack it was out of my self-stipulated price range for a beer I've never tried, but I was willing to cough up $3.50 for a single. I wish I had purchased a case. It is a phenomenal beer.

It was probably the darkest beer I've seen; it was almost black in the glass. It had a really distinct coffee aroma on the pour, and there was next to no foam. The first thing I tasted was a hint of coffee, then a little bit of chocolate flavor, and then the aftertaste was almost like caramel. All of this was the undertone for the very good, strong roasted flavor you expect from a stout. It was also unbelievably smooth for a beer with a 10.5% alcohol content.

I don't normally drink stouts or porters in the summertime; I usually opt for more hoppy beers when the weather is hot, but this is one stout I would drink in the middle of the desert.

Thankful for Colonialism

Okay, so not everything about Colonialism was good, but at least it gave us India Pale Ale. I have recently tried a really good one: Dogfish Head 90 Minute Imperial IPA. It has a really nice deep reddish color, and has a pleasant citrusy smell. Since it's an IPA it's extremely hoppy, but there is enough of a malty taste to balance it out. It has a pretty high alcohol content (9%) and as it got warmer in the glass, I thought the alcohol taste came through more and almost dominated the malt flavor in the aftertaste, but the initial hoppy bite is terrific.

It's a really good beer. It's a little on the pricey side for me ($11/4-pack), but it was worth it.

I give it 4 staggers out of 5.