Maverick Philosopher

We easily get used to our own faults, foibles, and fatuities . . .

. . . why not then also those of others?

Homage to Catatonia

That's right, Catatonia.

Are things really this bad, or does the author exaggerate?

Good Societies and Good Lives

A Substack post on state-run lotteries.

Is Belief in God Rationally Required? Response to a Critic

S. L. writes, 

I will just tell you three quick things about myself in an effort to get your kind response to my question.

 

1. I am a 70-year-old "evangelical", conservative (in every way), protestant, Christian believer. I put evangelical in quotes because I don't subscribe to all ideas that fit under the rubric of evangelicalism as it is known publicly today. I do believe that the true God has revealed Himself through creation/nature and human self-consciousness, and in the 66 "books" of the Old and New Testaments and supremely through Jesus Christ, sufficiently for man to understand and be accountable for that knowledge. 

 

2. I am not an intellectual by any stretch. I aspire to rigorous and valid thinking, but I am not terribly good at it. I do read, think, and investigate ideas in search for truth.

 

3. I found your website probably back in the nineties. I have been reading you ever since, because you help me think better.

 

Here is my question. I have gathered that your studied position is that belief in the existence of a personal, sovereign, and good God, and man's accountability to him, is not a necessary belief. Meaning the evidence for God is insufficient to rationally require anyone to believe in God. That is how I understand your thinking.

 

To me, the evidence of our senses together with common sense makes the existence of this God beyond question. In other words, the way reality is presented to and experienced self-consciously by every man makes the existence of God beyond dispute. By "common sense" I just mean the common human experience and understanding of reality as it presents itself to every man; which cannot be successfully denied because it is obviously true across all of reality.

 

These facts that "prove" this God's existence include common sense notions such as these:

1. Nothing in nature comes into being without the intentional action of a personal agent. Natural infinities cannot exist. Nothing comes into existence out of nothing.
2. In the natural world life cannot come from non-life. personality can only come from Personality.
3. The existence of personal, self-conscious beings requires a supernatural, self-conscious, personal, powerful being to account for that existence. 
4. Goodness, truth, beauty, order are fundamental facts of reality, seen in the observation that their opposites (evil, error, ugly, chaos) only exist as the negation of them, not as fundamental facts of their own. 
5. Since our existence had a beginning and that beginning had to find its source in this God (nothing else explains that existence), that means all of this creation has meaning and purpose. Again, a God that is good, true, beautiful, powerful, sovereign, and orderly would to create something for no good and meaningful purpose. Additionally, the kind of God the Creator must be, He would communicate with this creation He made in a way that was available, understandable, and universally reliable. Because they cannot know about their Creator unless He reveals Himself.

These above undeniable realities along with others, require the existence of a good, true, beautiful, orderly, sovereign, and powerful God. Additionally, they render any denial of this God's existence by a rational person as invalid and carrying culpability with it. The existence of this God is just part and parcel the reality that presents itself to every self-conscious, rational being, simply by his existing in this world. He can use reason to understand it, to explain it, to analyze it, and even to defend the existence of this God. But believe it He must, or he denies all reality.

 

You understand my position, S. L.  Using your words, but adding to them, I would put it like this: The evidence for God available to us in this life is insufficient rationally to require that God exists. Presumably angels and demons have sufficient evidence rationally to require belief that God exists, if they and he exist, and presumably this holds for us as well if we survive bodily death as conscious persons, and God exists.  The way I usually put it, however, is that here below there are rationally acceptable arguments both for and against the existence of God, but no rationally compelling arguments either way.

 

A rationally compelling argument is one that is rationally coercive or philosophically dispositive. It is an argument such that the consumer of the argument must accept the conclusion on pain of being positively irrational should he not accept it.  It is an argument that settles the matter once and for all beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt. Thus my position entails that one cannot prove or demonstrate the existence of God. Equally, however, one cannot prove or demonstrate the nonexistence of God.  By my lights, then, theism and atheism are both reasonable.  The ubiquity and depth of both natural and moral evil is the central consideration in support of the reasonableness of atheism. 

 

For you,  however, the existence of God is "beyond question" and "beyond dispute," and not just for you. You mean by these phrases that the existence of God cannot be reasonably or rationally questioned or disputed by anyone. You think that it is positively unreasonable to either doubt or deny the existence of God. Our disagreement on this point thus runs deep: you believe the exact opposite of what I believe.  We don't disagree about the existence of God -- we are both theists -- and I take it that we both mean (roughly) the same thing by 'God' which is to say that our concepts of God, which must never be confused with God, are basically the same.  (To the extent that our concepts differ, this discussion would take on added complexity. For the sake of this discussion, and to keep things simple, I will assume that you and I share the very same concept of God.)

 

In support of your position you invoke "the evidence of the senses" and "common sense."  If by the senses you mean the five outer senses, they do not reveal the existence of God, and this for the simple reason that God is neither a material thing nor the totality of material things, the physical universe.  God is nothing like Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot, or Edward Abbey's angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon.  You are old enough to remember cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's 1961 space flight and his report to his handlers that he saw no God up there.  I was eleven at the time and laughed at the stupidity of the remark. (In all charity to the cosmonaut, however, he was probably just spouting what he thought the commies at ground control wanted to hear.) And we will also agree that God, who is not a material thing, is also is not identical to the totality of material things, the physical universe.  

 

As for inner sense, God is not evident to a person when he introspects his mental states.  God is neither an object of sensible extrospection nor of sensible introspection.

 

Of course, there is what Calvin calls the  sensus divinitatus, the sense of the divine, which is a type of inner spiritual awareness which purports to be of, or about, a being distinct from the awareness, namely, God.  But there is also the sensus absurditatis, the sense of the absurd, which seems to reveal that the totality of what exists, the physical universe, exists without reason, cause, or purpose. It seems to reveal that the universe is just there as a factum brutum and is, in this sense, ab-surd. Clearly, these two senses cannot both be revelatory of the real. They might  both be false, but they cannot both be true.  One and only one of them can be veridical. Which one?  Some people have both senses (at different times). How would such a person know which was veridical and which wasn't? The point here is that there is nothing internal to the SD or the SA experience that guarantees either the existence of God or the absurdity of what exists. (If existence is absurd, then of course God as we are using the term, does not exist.)   

 

Your invocation of "common sense" does not help. The common sense of a majority of Westerners at the present time is that there is no God, and that the supposed sense of the divine is delusional.   Galen Strawson is representative in this regard. In any case, and apart from any sociological considerations, "common sense" is no sure guide to truth as could be shown by many examples since it varies with time, place, social class, race, age, sex, level of social suggestibility, level of education, and so on. Additivity of velocities is a well-known example from physics.

 

For you and I it is just common sense that the toleration of criminal behavior leads to more criminal behavior, and we are surely right about this; but we are not right because this reasonable view is common: it is not common among our political enemies, and so it is not common to all of us.  Imagine if  a  majority of Americans came to believe that the sex of a neonate is not biologically determined but is socially assignable at birth, or that a majority came to believe that eliminating penalties for shoplifting would lead to less shoplifting.  "Common sense," despite its commonality, would then obviously not be a  guide to truth.  Invocation of "common sense," therefore, cuts no ice in an intellectually serious discussion.

 

Let's now look at your "common sense notions" that supposedly prove the existence of God.

 

Ad (1). You say that nothing comes into existence without the intentional action of a personal agent. But this is plainly not the case. Suppose a storm dislodges some rocks that roll down a hillside and form a neat pile by a trail. The rock pile comes into existence, but no personal agent is involved, in the sense in which a personal agent would have been involved had a hiker stacked the rocks into a cairn so as to mark the direction of the trail.   You also say, rather more plausibly, that nothing comes into existence out of nothing. Ex nihilo nihil fit. But that proposition is not consistent with the theism you embrace. For you presumably believe that creatures (created entities) came into existence out of nothing. For you believe in divine creatio ex nihilo: God created the world of creatures out of nothing. Not out of a pre-existent stuff, nor out of  mere possibles, nor ex Deo, out of God, but out of nothing.  Coming into existence ex nihilo is not easy to understand either with or without a divine efficient cause. The point I am making is that Ex nihilo nihil fit is a highly problematic principle which is reasonably doubted, and that bringing God into the picture does nothing to make it less problematic. 

 

What you want to say, of course, is that the universe did not come into existence out of nothing by itself:  it had to have had a cause of its coming to exist at some past time if it is finite in the past direction, and, if it it did not, if it always existed, it still needs a cause of its existing at all ('in the first place') given that it contingently  exists, and thus might not have existed.   And this Cause must be transcendent of the universe and be of a personal nature.  

 

Well, suppose that, contrary to contemporary cosmology, the universe always existed.  How could you prove that it is contingent in the existential sense  of being dependent for its existence on something external to it, and not merely contingent in the merely modal sense of being possibly nonexistent? How could you prove (not merely argue for, but demonstrate or establish as objectively certain) that the existence of the universe is not a brute fact, where a brute fact is a fact that is modally contingent but without cause, reason, or explanation?

 

Ad (2).  You say, ". . . life cannot come from non-life; personality can only come from Personality."  Note first that life and personality are not the same since not every living thing is a person.  Cancer cells are alive but they are not persons; otherwise a man suffering from cancer has multiple-personality disorder.  I grant you, though, that it is very difficult to understand, and perhaps impossible for us to understand given our present cognitive architecture, how the biotic could emerge from a abiotic.  But if life did arise from non-life, if that arisal is actual, then it is possible, and if possible then possible whether or not a finite intellect (an ectypal intellect in Kant's terms)  can understand how it is possible.  That is to say: my inability to understand how it is possible does not show that it non-actual. On the other hand, my inability to understand how the biotic could emerge from the abiotic prevents me from dogmatically asserting that the emergence is actual, and gives me a good reason, though not a compelling or 'knock-down' reason, to believe that it does not occur.

 

Do you see what I am doing here? I am questioning both a dogmatic assertion and a dogmatic counter-assertion. I am questioning the dogmatic assertion that the biotic just had to arise naturally (without any intervention ab extra) from the abiotic, the assertion that, in Daniel Dennett's phrase, a "gradualist bridge" can be built from the first to the second.  I am also questioning the dogmatic assertion that there just had to be divine intervention to bring life out of mere matter. What I am saying is that both the assertion and the counter-assertion are reasonably believed. The are both rationally acceptable, but neither is rationally mandatory.

 

Ad (3).  Your third "common sense notion" is that the existence of finite persons logically requires the existence of a supernatural person.  How do you know that? You believe it, and you have reason to believe it, and you are probably better off believing it than not believing it, but you do not know it.  The same considerations that I brought to bear on the preceding point I bring to bear here.

 

Ad (4).  I myself have always believed something like your (4). Good and evil, for example, are not on an ontological par as equally real but mutually opposing principles: Good (goodness) is primary whereas  evil exists only as a negation of the good, as you say, or as privatio boni, a privation of the good as Aquinas says. This is a very large topic, but unless one is an unreconstructed dogmatist one should appreciate the difficulty of reducing evil to privatio boni as Augustine and Aquinas do. 

 

The Problem of Pain

How are we to think of animal and human pain, whether physical or mental? Pains are standardly cited as examples of natural or physical evils as opposed to moral evils that come into the world via a misuse of free will.  Suppose you have just slammed your knee against the leg of a table. Phenomenologically, the felt pain is something all-too-positive.  It is not a mere absence of well-being, but the presence of ill-being. Compare an absence of sensation in the knee with intense pain in the knee. An absence of sensation, as in a numb knee, is a mere lack; but a pain is not a mere lack, but something positive in its own right. This seems to show that not all evils can be privations.

The argument in nuce is that not all evils can be privations of good because a  felt pain is a positively evil sensation that is not an absence, lack, or privation of something good.  And so we cannot dismiss evil as privatio boni.  

The same seems to hold for mental pains such as an intense sadness. It is not merely an absence of happiness, but something positive in its own right. Hence, the evil of sadness is not merely a privation of the good of happiness.  Examples are easily multiplied: Angst, terror, clinical depression, etc.

Ad (5):  Here you are merely telling us what you believe. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. But you have done nothing to show that your beliefs are rationally required.

Your beliefs are, however, rationally acceptable.  And that is really all you need! Why the hankering for an objective certainty unattainable here below?  So my advice to you is: go on believing what you believe. You are within your epistemic rights in so doing.  And live your beliefs.

I suspect you will agree with me that orthopraxy trumps orthodoxy.  All the best to you.

The Insanity of the Left

A vote for Democrats is a vote for such leftist/'woke' insanity as this:

JK Rowling has thrown down the gauntlet to the Scottish police. On 1 April, the day the new Hate Crime Act came into force in Scotland, Rowling, who lives in Edinburgh, dared officers to arrest her. She posted a thread on X / Twitter in which she ‘misgendered’ various men who have pretended to be women, from a rapist who tried to be housed in a women’s prison to a balding footballer who cheated his way into a women’s team. ‘If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act’, she wrote, ‘I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment’.

There could hardly be a greater demonstration of the authoritarianism and absurdity of the SNP’s hate-speech law than the fact it could well lead to the arrest of the author of Harry Potter. The new law has the potential to turn this mild-mannered, left-liberal children’s author into a criminal hate-speaker. Not because she is a racist or a homophobe or a transphobe. But because, as a feminist, she believes in the material reality of biological sex. Because she believes that men cannot become women. Because she believes women’s sex-based rights must be protected. Because she believes in scientific truth.

Dissent is not hate. If I dissent from your VIEWS, it does not follow that I hate YOU. Even a 'liberal' should be able to make that distinction.

Old Commie Update

Remember Angela Davis? Here she links the 'war on Gaza' with the 'racist lynching of George Floyd.'

Multi-Racial but not Multi-Cultural: Self-Critique of a May 2017 Entry

In May of 2017, I wrote:

The USA cannot help but be a multi-racial society, but if we cannot agree on a common culture for public purposes with English as its official language and the values of the founding documents as its foundation, then the end is in sight. But collapse takes time and those of us in our mid-60s, assuming we don't live too long, should be able to weather the storm without too much stress. 

I am less sanguine now; things are far worse.

One problem is that we lack the collective will to demand the assimilation without which even legal immigration is a recipe for Balkanization.  Any sane person who does not intend the destruction of our republic should be able to see that the values of Sharia are incompatible with American values, and that no Muslims should be allowed to immigrate who are unwilling to accept and honor our values.  There is no right to immigrate, and immigration must be to the benefit of the host country.

But the problem just mentioned is minor compared to the problem that we don't even have the 'logically prior' collective will to enforce reasonable laws and put a stop to illegal immigration and the flouting of Federal immigration law by so-called 'sanctuary' cities and other jurisdictions. First, stop illegal immigration, then worry about assimilation in connection with legal immigration.

This unlikely to happen even if Trump gets a second term.

Once more: improper entry into the country is already a violation of the criminal code. When the mayor of a great city, New York, refuses to deport illegal aliens who commit such serious felonies as driving while intoxicated, then you know that there is precious little common ground left.

We cannot agree on this? Then what can we agree on?

We conservatives can blame ourselves to some extent. We lost ourselves in our private lives while the destructive Left had its way.  

Paradoxically, our appreciation that the political is a limited sphere has left us at a disadvantage over against leftists for whom the political is the only sphere. 

This is an ingredient in what I call The Conservative Disadvantage.

When Rand Met Oppenheimer

A Neglected Opportunity

Creative Play with the Race Card

This takes the cake!

Update 4/2:  The latest example. Routine, not creative.

The Christian 'Anatta Doctrine' of Lorenzo Scupoli

Buddhism and Christianity both enjoin what I will call moral self-denial. But Buddhism is more radical in that it connects moral self-denial with metaphysical self-denial. Thus Buddhism denies the very existence of the self, whereas Christianity in its orthodox versions presupposes the existence of the self: Christian self-purification falls short of eliminativism about the self. Nevertheless, there are points of comparison between the 'No Self' doctrine of Buddhism and the Christian doctrine of the self.  Just as the full appreciation of the mother tongue comes only to those who study foreign languages, the  full appreciation of the 'mother religion' comes only to those who study foreign religions.

In his Combattimento Spirituale (1589), Lorenzo Scupoli writes:

You my mind, are not mine: you were given me by God. Neither are the powers active within me -- will, with its energy -- mine. Nor does my feeling, my ability to enjoy life and all my surroundings belong to me. My body with all its functions and requirements, which determine our physical well-being, is not mine either . . . . And I myself belong not to me, but to God. (Unseen Warfare, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995, p. 172)

I'll hazard a gloss: I am not the master of my fate nor the captain of my soul. Everything I have I have from God who created me ex nihilo and sustains me  moment-by-moment. I am not my own man. I do not have property-rights in my body nor in any attribute or adjunct of what I take to be my self. For this very reason, suicide is a grave sin. If a substance is anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then I am not a substance: only God is a substance in the plenary sense of the term.  

Apart from the references to God, this meditation of Scupoli, of which the above is merely an excerpt, bears a striking resemblance to the  Anattalakkhana Sutta. Buddha there examines each of the khandas, body, feeling, perception, etc., and concludes with respect to each of them that "This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am." In Scupoli we encounter virtually the same litany: body, feeling, mind . . . of each of which it is true that "This is not mine," etc.  Of course, nothing depends on the exact taxonomy of the khandas or personality-constituents. The point is that however one classifies them, no one of them, nor any combination of them, is veridically identifiable as one's very self. I say 'veridically,' since we do as a matter of fact falsely identify ourselves with all manner of item both within us (feelings, memories, etc.) and without us (property, progeny, etc.) My house, my child, my brilliant insights.  A theologian might identify himself with his theology, when he must know that his theology could be light-years away from God's theology (God's self-knowledge).

These false self-identifications are part of what our ignorance/sinfulness consists in. (The forward slash in my typography stands for inclusive disjunction, the inclusive 'or.')

Thus Scupoli (whom I take to be a representative Christian, and who is of interest here only as such) and Buddha agree with respect to the (negative) thesis that nothing in one's outer or inner experience is veridically identifiable as one's very self. Thus nothing that we ordinarily take to be ourselves (our bodies, our thoughts, feelings, memories, etc.) can in truth be one's self. But there is also similarity in their reasoning. One way Buddha reasons is as follows.

If x (body, feeling, perception, etc.) were my very self, or were something that belonged to me, then I would have complete control over x. But it is evident that nothing is such that I have complete control over it. Therefore, no x is either my self or anything that belongs to me. This could be called the 'complete control argument' against the existence of the self.  Scupoli has something similar:

Let us remember that we can boast only of something which is a direct result of our own will and is done by us independently of anything else. But look how our actions proceed. How do they begin? Certain circumstances come together and lead to one action or another; or a thought comes to our mind to do something, and we do it. But the concurrence of circumstances does not come from us;  nor, obviously, is the thought to do something our own; somebody suggests it. Thus, in such cases, the origin or birth of the thought to do something cannot or should not be an object of self-praise. Yet how many actions are of this kind? If we examine them conscientiously, we shall find that they almost all start in this way. So we have nothing to boast of. (174)

This passage suggests the following argument: One cannot justifiably take credit for or take pride in anything (an action, a physical or mental attribute, etc.) unless one originates it "independently of anything else." But nothing is such that one originates it in sublime independence of all else. Therefore, one cannot justifiably take pride in anything. Here is a reason why pride is listed among the Seven Deadly Sins.

But does this amount to a metaphysical denial of the very existence of the self?  Not within Christian metaphysics. For that what is needed is the Buddhist assumption, crucial to the reasoning in the Anattalakkhana Sutta, that a self is an entity that has complete control over itself. Such a self could justifiably take pride in its actions and attributes. For it would be their fons et origo. So if one cannot justifiably take pride in any of one's actions or attributes, then one is not a self  in the sense in which this term is employed in the Anattalakkhana Sutta.  

In sum, both Buddha and Scupoli set the standard for selfhood very, and perhaps unattainably, high. Both claim that no one of us is a self for the reason than no one of us is in complete control of any of his actions or attributes. None of the things which one normally takes to be oneself or to belong to oneself (e.g., one's body, habits, brave decisions, brilliant insights, distinguished career, foolish mistakes, etc.) is such that one has originated it autonomously and independently.

Having set the standard for selfhood so high, Buddhism must deny that we are selves.  Christianity, however, is far less radical, holding as it does that we are selves all right, but ontologically derivative selves: we derive our being from the Creator, who is Being itself. (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.) We are creatures of the one and only Absolute Self who brought us into being and sustains us in being. On Buddhism, nothing at all has 'self nature' in the eminent and plenary sense; on Christianity, one thing does, God. For Buddhism, there is no Absolute Self, there is in reality nothing like the Hindu Atman. For Christianity, there is an, or rather, the uniquely unique Absolute Self, namely, God. 

What about us? One thing is clear to both Buddhists and Christians: no one of us is identical to the Absolute Self.  For Buddhists, there is no Absolute Self, and for Christians, while there is an the Absolute Self, no one of us, no finite self, is or ever becomes identical to it, not even in the Beatific Vision.  If the visio beata involves a participation in the divine life, this does not involve a total assimilation: the finite self never loses its self-identity or individuality. In the Beatific Vision, creator-creature duality is mitigated, but never wholly eliminated.   

The main difference between Buddha and Scupoli is that the latter maintains that God gives us what we do not have under our control, our derivatively real selves. Thus for Scupoli, what we do not have from ourselves, we have from another, and so have. But for Buddha, what we do not have from ourselves, we do not have at all.

So in what sense does Scupoli embrace a 'no self' (anatta, anatman) doctrine? In the sense that in orthodox -- miniscule 'o' -- Christian metaphysics no one of us enjoys selfhood in the plenary sense of the term.