Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) writing in 1962 about his experiences as a student at the Sorbonne circa 1900:
. . . instead of resorting to philosophy for a better understanding of their religious faith, as Christian philosophers do, the Jews I have known have used philosophy to liberate themselves from their religion. Christians philosophize to identify themselves more intimately with their Christianity; our masters philosophized in order to run away from the synagogue. The illustrious example of Spinoza is a typical instance of what I mean. After the Theologico-Political Treatise, written as a farewell to the Law, its commands and it rites, came the Ethica, whose purpose was to create a mental universe in which reason was liberated from all contact with any religious revelation, Jewish or Christian. It would seem that the philosophical conversion of such children of Israel consists in turning their backs on their religion. (The Philosopher and Theology, Cluny Media, 2020, p. 6)
Gilson is of course speaking of his experiences with his teachers at the Sorbonne circa 1900. What he says, however, suggests a follow-up question I am not competent to answer.
Consider Jews of all times and places who (i) became professional philosophers and who (ii) were brought up in Judaism and who (iii) have used philosophy to liberate themselves from their religion. Is their number greater than the number of cradle Christians who became professional philosophers and then used philosophy to liberate themselves from their religion? My guess is the answer is in the affirmative. If so, why?
Elliot in a comment from an earlier thread writes,
. . . I mentioned negligence about the truth. Something similar seems to be the case regarding reasons and arguments. Folks might be interested in them (and even in weak ones) if they support a belief already held. But the same folks might turn away from good arguments in disgust if those arguments undermine their beliefs.
What’s happening here? Confirmation bias? Something like Sartrean bad faith or Heideggerian inauthenticity? Pauline suppression of the truth? (Romans 1:18) Intellectual laziness? Doxastic rigidity? Indifference to intellectual virtue?
Something else?
Elliot is here touching upon a problem that not only fascinates me intellectually, but vexes me existentially. It is the old problem of Athens and Jerusalem: given their tension, does one have final authority over the other, and if so, which? Must philosophy be assigned a merely ancillary status? Is philosophy the handmaiden of theology (philosophia ancilla theologiae)? Must philosophy listen and submit when (revelation-based) theology speaks? Or must the putative revelations of a religion satisfy the exigencies of autonomous reason in order to be credible (worthy of belief) in the first place? Many moderns would argue that Trinity and Incarnation, for example, flout norms of rationality, or even worse, norms of morality, and for one or the other or both of these reasons, ought not be accepted.
When the mind of a Christian begins to take an interest in metaphysics, the faith of his childhood has already provided him with the true answers to most of these questions. He still may well wonder how they are true, but he knows that they are true. As to the how, Christian philosophers investigate it when they they look for a rational justification of all the revealed truths accessible to the natural light of understanding. Only, when they set to work, the game is already over. [. . .] In any case, speaking for myself, I have never conceived the possibility of a split conscience divided between faith and philosophy. The Creed of the catechism of Paris has held all the key positions that have dominated, since early childhood, my interpretation of the world. What I believed then, I still believe. And without in any way confusing it with my faith, whose essence must be kept pure, I know that the philosophy I have today is wholly encompassed within the sphere of my religious belief. (The Philosopher and Theology, Cluny Media, 2020, p. 5, bolding added, italics in original)
I have bolded the main points. Gilson holds that the faith he uncritically imbibed as a child is true. But he does not merely believe it is true, he knows that it is true. Knowledge, however, entails objective certainty, not mere subjective certitude. So we may justly attribute to Gilson the claim that he is objectively certain that the main traditional Catholic tenets are true, and that therefore it is impossible that he be mistaken about them.
And so the game is over before it begins. Which game? The very serious 'game' of rational examination, of critical evaluation, the Socratic 'game.' ("The unexamined life is not worth living.") And so for Gilson there is simply no genuine problem of faith versus reason, no serious question whether reason has any legitimate role to play in the evaluation of the putative truths of revelation. From the point of view of an arch-dogmatist such as Gilson, there is nothing 'putative' about them. They are objectively, absolutely, certain such that:
Whatever philosophy may have to say will come later, and since it will not be permitted to add anything to the articles of faith, any more than to curtail them, [i. e., subtract anything from them] it can well be said that in the order of saving truth philosophy will come, not only late, but too late. (p. 4, italics added)
I hope we can agree that what a true philosopher, a serious philosopher, is after is the "saving truth," although what salvation is, and what it involves, are matters of controversy, whether one is operating within the ambit of philosophy or of theology. Don't make the mistake of supposing that salvation is solely the concern of religionists. After all, Plato, Plotinus, and Spinoza, to mention just these three, were all concerned with a truth that saves.
Gilson is asserting that he and others like him who were brought up at a certain time, in a certain place, in a particular version of Christianity, the traditional Roman Catholic version, possess for all eternity the saving truth, a truth that stands fast and is known (with objective certainty) to stand fast, regardless of what any other religion (including a competing version of Christianity) or wisdom tradition has to say. He is also asserting that philosophy can neither add anything to nor subtract anything from the substance of the salvific truth that Gilson and others like him firmly possess. And so philosophy's role can only be ancillary, preambulatory (as in, e.g., the preambulum fidei of Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica), expository, and clarifying, but never critical or evaluative. That is to say, on Gilson's conception (which of course is not just his) philosophy will not be permitted (see quotation immediately above) to have veto power, i.e., power to reject any tenet of the depositum fidei as codified and transmitted by the one, true, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic church.
To cap it all off, Gilson reports that he himself is psychologically incapable of admitting even the possibility of a "split conscience," or perhaps 'split consciousness,' that is, a conscience/consciousness that is "divided between faith and philosophy" and is thus pulled in opposite directions, the one Athenian, the other Hierosolymitan.
This confession of incapacity shows that Gilson has no personal, existential grasp of the problem of faith versus reason. To understand the problem, one must live the tension between the autonomy of reason and the heteronomy of obedient faith. One cannot appreciate the problem without feeling that tension; Gilson fails to feel the tension; he therefore has no existential appreciation of the problem.
To take the tension seriously and existentially, one must appreciate the legitimacy of the claims made by the two 'cities.' One cannot simply dismiss one or the other of them. The 'Four Horsemen' of the now passé New Atheism, Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris, two of whom are now dead,* dismissed the claims of Jerusalem; Gilson dismisses the claims of Athens, unless Athens is willing to accept a subaltern status at once ancillary, preambulatory, expository, and clarifying. I trust the reader understands that Gilson is not taking a Tertullian tack: he is not saying that the two cities have nothing to do with one another. They have something to do with one another, all right, in the way that a handmaiden and her mistress have something to do with one another. For a Thomist such as Gilson, revelation supplements reason without contradicting it; equally, however, revelation is under no obligation to satisfy the exigencies of reason: it needn't be rationally acceptable to be true.
For example, Trinity and Incarnation are truths whether or not reason can make sense of them or explain how they could be true. These items of revelation are true despite their apparently contradictory status. If reason can explain how they could be true, fine and dandy; if reason cannot explain how they could be true, no matter: they remain true nonetheless as truths beyond our ken as mysteries. What is paradoxical for us need not be contradictory in itself. Reason in us has no veto power over revelational disclosures.
Insofar as Gilson dismisses Athens and its claims, he privileges his own position, and finds nothing either rationally or morally unacceptable in his doing so. Thus the diametrical disagreement of others equally intelligent, equally well-informed, and in equal possession of the moral and intellectual virtues, does not give him pause: it does not appear to him to be a good reason to question the supposed truth he was brought up to believe.
I find this privileging of one's position to be a dubious affair. Surely my position cannot be privileged just because it is mine. After all, my opponent who we are assuming is my epistemic peer, can do the same: he can privilege his position and announce that disagreement with him gives him no good reason to question his position. Suppose our positions are diametrically opposed: each logically excludes the other. If he is justified in privileging his position just because it is his, and I am justified in privileging my position just because it is mine, then we are both justified in privileging our respective positions, and I have no more reason to accept mine than he has to accept his. I would have just as good a reason to accept his as he would have to accept mine. Logically, we would be in the same boat.
I conclude that a person cannot justify his privileging of his position simply because it is his. What then justifies such privileging? Gilson might just announce that his position is justified because it is true and it is true regardless of who holds it. But then how does he know that? He says: philosophy has no veto power over the deliverances of any divine revelation. His opponent says: Philosophy does have veto power over the deliverances of divine revelations that either are or entail logical contradictions. These proposition are contradictory: only one of them can be true. Which? Gilson cannot reasonably maintain that he knows that what he was brought up to believe is true because he was brought up to believe it.
Contra Gilson, my view is that, if you and I are epistemic peers, then your disagreement with me gives me good reason to question and doubt the position I take. So, by my lights, Gilson has no rational right to make the claims he makes in the passages quoted. He ought not dogmatically claim that his view is absolutely true; he ought to admit that he has freely decided to accept as true the doctrine that he was brought up to believe and live in accordance with it. That is what intellectual honesty demands.
Getting back to Elliot, and in agreement with him, I agree that a good (bad) argument cannot be defined as one that leads to a conclusion that one is antecedently inclined to accept (reject). That is no way to evaluate arguments! So why do so may people proceed that way? I agree with all of Elliot's explanations for different cases.
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*Philosophy department graffiti: "God is dead." -- Nietzsche. "Nietzsche is dead." -- God
As for the tension between faith and reason (philosophy), I am reminded of a famous passage from Goethe's Faust:
Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust, die eine will sich von der andern trennen: Die eine hält in derber Liebeslust sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen; die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.
A reader of this blog recently opined, "And there isn't any "Judeo-Christian" anything: there is just Christian and Jew, and ne'er the twain shall meet." This provocative comment ignited some animated push-back from other commenters. And so it was serendipitous that I should stumble this morning upon Jews and Christians Together by Ian Speir. If my reader seeks to decouple the Christian from the Hebraic, Speir and those he quotes aim to bring them together, but in a way that seems to favor the Hebraic over the Christian. Here is a taste (bolding added):
Those ideas and values—mediated through the Bible, accelerated by the rise of the Christian West, and strained through the filter of the Reformation and the Enlightenment—found good soil in America. They are at the root of some of our country’s most fundamental convictions, like [such as] human dignity and ordered liberty, the necessity of freedom of conscience, and the insistence that the common good is best secured when men and women are free to pursue lives of virtue.
These civilization-shaping ideas do not depend upon the Constitution; they predate it. The Declaration calls them rights—though they are equally responsibilities—that are “endowed by [our] Creator.” They are more than a frame of government or a social contract. They form a civilizational covenant, transcending the ebb and flow of history and the politics of a particular moment.
At times these values have been called “Judeo-Christian.” The better descriptor is “Hebraic,” a term that simultaneously captures their worldview significance and their biblical source.
In his lecture, Cohen insists that the “Hebraic spirit” of America and of the West is now at stake.
I will leave it for you to decide whether the thought in the bolded passage goes too far in the direction opposite to that of my reader.
How should we characterize the spirit of America and the West? Off the top of my head, here are four options that may serve as a menu for further rumination:
a) The spirit of America and the West is not Hebraic but Christian with Christianity decoupled from Judaism. (The extreme view of my reader which is nonetheless useful as a foil against which to contrast more plausible views.)
b) The spirit of America and the West is Hebraic-Christian with primary emphasis on Judaism. (This seems to be the view of Speir and those he cites.)
c) The spirit of America and the West is Hebraic-Christian with primary emphasis on Christianity which, while in continuity with Judaism, supersedes and perfects it.
d) The spirit of America and the West is the spirit expressed in (c), and thus the spirit of Jerusalem but a Jerusalem supplemented and where necessary corrected and held back from fanaticism and 'enthusiasm' (Schwärmerei) by the enlightenment values of Athens (philosophy) both ancient and modern. (This, I want to suggest, comes fairly close to the classically liberal spirit of the Founders who were men of the 18th century Enlightenment.)
This schema does not cover all the options, but may be of some use. Of the four, I prefer (d).
This morning I preach on James 1:5-8. Of all the epistles, this, the most philosophical, is my favorite. There we read that he who is wanting in wisdom should ask it of God. But one must ask in faith without doubt or hesitation. "For he who hesitates/doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and carried about by the wind." While I do not deny that doubt can close us off from the help we need, I wonder whether doubt has a positive role to play in religion.
Doubt is the engine of rational inquiry, and thus of philosophy and science, as I have said many times, but I think it also plays a salutary role in religion. Here are six reasons why.
The bliss of the bios theoretikos as described by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics is the model for the Beatific Vision as described by Thomas Aquinas. The ultimate salvific state is a contemplative state. Monasticism is an institutional expression of this root commitment. The monk's life is decidedly biased toward the intellectual and the theoretical. As opposed to what? As opposed to a life in which praxis is paramount.
Question: Is the life of the monk the highest life for the Christian? Is the monastic life the highest form of imitatio Christi? Christ was no anchorite. He did not flee from the agitation of the cities and from the people except for relatively short periods. He associated with the canaille, with publicans and prostitutes. His ministry was among them where he risked everything and in human terms lost everything.
Despite their drastic differences, Socrates too moved among the people and met a predictable fate. He lived in no ivory tower where he could think and write in peace and in leisurely retirement. He wrote nothing. His academy was the agora. His was the dialectic of the streets, not that of the learned essay. A battle-hardened soldier, he knew how to translate military valor into civil courage. Among his interlocutors were powerful and vicious men. He took risks, offended them, and was executed by the State. But back to Christ. Let us hear St. Neilos the Ascetic. This is from his Ascetic Discourse in the Philokalia, that marvellous compendium of Patristic teachings.
For philosophy is a state of moral integrity combined with a doctrine of true knowledge concerning reality. Both Jews and Greeks fell short of this, for they rejected the Wisdom that is from heaven and tried to philosophize without Christ, who alone has revealed the true philosophy in both His life and His teaching. For by the purity of His life He was the first to establish the way of true philosophy. He always held His soul above the passions of the body, and in the end, when His death was required by His design for man's salvation. He laid down even His soul. In this He taught us that the true philosopher must renounce all life's pleasures, mastering pains and passions, and paying scant attention to the body: he must not overvalue even his soul, but must readily lay it down when holiness demands.
The apostles received this way of life from Christ and made it their own, renouncing the world in response to His call, disregarding fatherland, relatives and possessions. At once they adopted a harsh and strenuous way of life, facing every kind of adversity, afflicted, tormented, harassed, naked, lacking even necessities; and finally they met death boldly, imitating their Teacher faithfully in all things. Thus through their actions they left behind a true image of the highest way of life.
Although all Christians should have modeled their own life on this image, most of them either lacked the will to do so or else made only feeble efforts. There were, however, a few who had the Strength to rise above the turmoil of the world and to flee from the agitation of cities. Having escaped from this turbulence, they embraced the monastic life and reproduced in themselves the pattern of apostolic virtue. They preferred voluntary poverty to possessions, because this freed them from distraction, and so as to control the passions, they satisfied their bodily needs with food that was readily available and simply prepared, rather than with richly dressed dishes. Soft and unnecessary clothing they rejected as an invention of human luxury, and they wore only such plain garments as are required for the body. It seemed to them a betrayal of philosophy to turn their attention from heavenly things to earthly concerns more appropriate to animals. They ignored the world, being above human passions.
I draw your attention to the third paragraph. Christ did not flee from the agitation of the cities. He did not ignore the world and its turmoil. He was not above human passions. The God-Man was fully human. He did not die like a Stoic sage. He experienced to the full the brutality of the brutal Romans, dying like a man in utter agony of body and in despair of spirit, abandoned.
So the question is: Is the monastic way a way to evade true imitation of Christ? I myself am of the monkish disposition and not at all inclined to go into the agora like Socrates or into the temple with its moneychangers like Christ. Luther I find repellent; the anti-rational but also anti-mystical Kierkegaard fascinating but wrongheaded; the Roman church wishy-washy despite its deep depths of mysticism; it is the East and the mystical depths of Orthodox Christianity that attract me. Athens is closer to Constantinople than to Rome.
And so I ask my question in the spirit of Socratic self-examination. I do not have an answer. The unexamined life is not worth living, and the highest examination is the examination of one's own life.
I argued earlier that besides its salutary role in philosophy, doubt also has a salutary role to play in religion. But I left something out, and Vito Caiati caught it:
I have been thinking about your recent post “A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and Religion” and would like to pose a question to you: While it is certainly true that the religionist “doubts the teachings of other religions,” does he not do the same with some or many of the teachings of his own religion? In raising this question, I have in mind the intellectual believer, imbued with an inherent religious sensibility and inclination, desirous of affirming the foundational propositions of his faith, including those that appear illogical or contradictory, but who, however much he wills it, is often suffused with doubt about their veracity. I would go so far as to argue, speaking as a Christian and Roman Catholic, that certain dogmas and doctrines by their very nature engender such doubts. None of this necessarily entails the abandonment of belief, but it renders the faith of the religionist more tenuous and unstable than many would like to admit. His struggle to uphold one or more members of a set of beliefs is, at least for those not gifted with special grace, a characteristic property of his faith. At best, he should acknowledge the tension and understand that he will repeatedly transverse an arc between belief and doubt and that the warm convictions of one moment will often dissipate in the cold misgivings of another. The gap between what is affirmed and what is consistently believed is for the religionist of this type never entirely closed.
That is a very fine statement and I cannot disagree with it. Religious believers who are both sincere and intellectually sophisticated will in the main, and as a matter of fact, question the truth of their beliefs and the efficacy of their practices. Dr. Caiati doesn't quite say it, but he does suggest that this is as it ought to be. Whether or not he would commit himself to the further step from the factual to the normative, I will commit myself to it: one ought to, at least sometimes, question truth and efficacy of beliefs and practices. It has always seemed to me that a living faith, as opposed to a convenience and a soporific, must maintain itself in the teeth of doubt. A vital faith, a living faith is animated in part by doubt and a spirit of inquiry. He who finds first had to seek; but here below the finding is never secure and final and so must be renewed by further seeking.
Vito speaks of certain doctrines and dogmas that by their very nature engender doubts. Some of these are harder to believe than others. The hardest to believe are those that demand or seem to demand the "crucifixion of the intellect." Trinity and Incarnation are the two main main examples. One cannot be a Christian and deny them* (in the way one could be a Christian and deny Transubstantiation). It is, however, difficult to make logical sense of them (in the way that it is not difficult to make logical sense of the Resurrection.) See my Trinity and Incarnation category for details, and this relatively short and precise entry in particular: The Logic of the Trinity Revisited.
Religious faith here below must remain "tenuous and unstable" to the intellectually awake. The tenets we hold to must remain tentative and thus "tenuous." Doxastic 'grip,' like physical grip is subject to the world's loosening. No one's grip is absolutely secure. There is no helping that unless you want to sink into the somnambulance of the worldling who has the world and its pleasures and "fire insurance" to boot.
Religious faith is a faith seeking understanding. It is not a blind faith without understanding, but neither is it a faith that goes beyond a clear understanding, superadding intellectual assent to a clearly conceived proposition. Perhaps the Pauline image is apt: religious faith is a seeing through a glass darkly. The glass of the discursive intellect is a distorting lens through which the Incarnation must appear logically impossible even though in truth it is actual.
Let me put the question to myself directly: Do you or do you not accept Jesus Christ as the way, the truth, and the life, as your only hope for salvation? My acceptance takes the form, not of an acceptance of a ready-made proposition or set of propositions, but the acceptance of a task to be pursued in all seriousness, the task of investigating the matter in all its ramifications via reasoning, prayer, meditation, examination of conscience, study of all relevant literary sources, including scripture, commentaries thereon, the works of the great and not-so-great philosophers of all times and places, with no slighting of Athens, or Jerusalem, or Benares, or Alexandria, and seeking out the few living who may have been vouchsafed a higher degree of insight than that which I find in myself.
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*I spew from my mouth those miserable 'liberals' who would remake Christianity in their own stunted image. They are free to reject the doctrine, and I defend their right to do so; but they ought not be allowed to change it to suit themselves. Christianity is what it is; its definatory tenets are essential to it and cannot be jettisoned without jettisoning the whole thing.
Addendum (6 February 2022):
Malcolm Pollack comments on the above here. In an e-mail he writes,
I hope you are well. I set off in 2022 imagining I was going to write a lot more (I'd been tapering off lately), but things are now so completely insane that I hardly know what to say. How does one analyze, or comment productively on, what goes on in a madhouse? Why even bother? And why continue to elaborate the various and infinitely detailed breakdowns and malfunctions of a system that's going over a cliff? I can hardly bring myself, any longer, to raise a pen.
There is indeed something absurd about continuing to add to the analytical literature on our social and political collapse. For example, what is the point of this excellent article by Anthony Esolen? It will not be read by those who need its instruction, and even if they did read it, it would do them no good. You cannot appeal to the reason of those bereft of reason, or to the consciences of those who either lack a conscience or whose conscience was never properly formed.
So why do I continue to think about and write about these things? The short answer is that I have a theoretical bent. I enjoy figuring things out. "All men by nature desire to know." (Aristotle). This is so even if few live up to their (normative) nature. The bios theoretikos and all that. Intellectual types derive intense pleasure from reading, study, thinking, and all cognate activities.
Even if the subject-matter is disgusting as is that of the medical and social pathologists, the pleasure of understanding is a delight. The feculent can be fascinating.
Theory has its escapist joys. But in the end we would prefer to act upon the world and its recalcitrant denizens and bring about improvement. But even if we know what needs to be done to bring about, not mere change, but improvement, the tasks are formidable and perhaps insurmountable especially since we who oppose the current madness are divided among ourselves, which is the topic of this article which explains the Boomer versus 'Based' generation gap on the Right. Excerpt:
Do you hate America and want it to fail?
A lot of younger right-wingers would say yes . . . in a certain sense, they do. And they have reasons for saying that. What young man with any sense wants to die for the Joe Biden regime in the Ukraine? Who wants to pay taxes so Kamala Harris can shower money on illegal immigrants and left-wing shock troops?
That’s a hard message to hear for anyone who lived through the 1960s and the Cold War. For a long time, to be on the Right—to defend liberty and morality and decency—meant to be a patriot and to love America. And it still does. But the enemies of freedom and decency who hate America are no longer godless communists abroad, they are the godless leftists at home who are currently in power.
If America means transgender rights and suffocating biomedical security measures, then those who love freedom will come to hate America—or, to be more specific, the current regime that has taken control of what used to be America.
Young people on the Right don’t hate liberty and morality and decency; they despise woke ideology. The older idea of “America” that the Boomers love is gone, as far as the younger generation is concerned. Most Boomers will never share this antipathy, but they must learn to distinguish between America the nation and America the state. The American state—as the COVID lockdowns, Russiagate hoax, and the political prosecution of the January 6 protestors show—is at war with the American people. (Many older conservatives recognized this distinction and gave Rush Limbaugh a pass when he famously remarked on air that he hoped Barack Obama would fail.)
This Sunday morning I preach on James 1:5-8. Of all the epistles, this, the most philosophical, is my favorite. There we read that he who is wanting in wisdom should ask it of God. But one must ask in faith without doubt or hesitation. "For he who hesitates/doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and carried about by the wind." While I do not deny that doubt can close us off from the help we need, I wonder whether doubt has a positive role to play in religion.
Doubt is the engine of inquiry, as I have said many times, but I think it also plays a salutary role in religion.
The religious doubt the world and its values. What I mean by 'world' here is the fifth entry in my catalog of the twelve senses of 'world':
5) In the Christian-existential (existenziell) sense, 'world' refers to a certain attitude or mentality. My reader well describes it as follows:
But there is another sense of the term 'world' — Christians talk of dying to the world and being in the world but not of it. This world they speak of could not be reduced to the world of black holes and dark matter, of collapsing stars and expanding nebulae. This is the social and moral world that they want to die to. It is the world of spiritual distraction and moral fog, the world of status-seeking and reputation.
To which wonderful formulation I add that worldlings or the worldly live for the here and now alone with its fleeting pleasures and precarious perquisites. They worship idolatrously at the shrine of the Mighty Tetrad: money, power, sex, and recognition. They are blind to the Unseen Order and speak of it only to deny it. They are the Cave dwellers of Plato who take shadow for substance, and the dimly descried for the optimally illuminated. They do not seek, nor do they find. They are not questers. They live as if they will live forever in a world they regard as the ne plus ultra of reality, repeating the same paltry pleasures and believing them to be the summum bonum.
Crucial to being religious is doubting the ultimacy and value of the world in this acceptation of the term. The religious person is skeptical of secular teachings, secular 'authorities,' and secular suggestions. He is keenly aware of the infernal and ovine suggestibility of humanity. That's my first point.
Second, the religious man doubts his own goodness and his ability to improve himself. He cultivates a deep skepticism about his own probity and moral worth, not out of a perverse need for self-denigration, but out of honest insight into self. He follows the Socratic injunction to know oneself and he is not afraid to take a hard and unsparing look into his own (foul) heart, (disordered) soul, and (dark) mind. He does not avert his eyes from the dreck and dross he inevitably discovers but catalogs it clinically and objectively as best he can. Reason is weak, but not so weak that it cannot come to know and bemoan its own weakness and its susceptibility to subornation by the lusts of the flesh.
And of course the religious train their moral skepticism upon their dear fellow mortals as well.
Fourth, the religionist doubts the philosophers. Well aware that philosophy is magnificent in aspiration, one of the finest flowers in man's quest for the Absolute, the savvy religionist knows that it is miserable in execution. The philosophers contradict one another on all points, always have, and presumably always will. Their guidance must not be ignored, but cannot be blindly trusted.
Fifth, he doubts the teachings of other religions and the probity of their teachers.
Sixth, he doubts the probity of the teachers of his own religion. Surely this is an obvious point, even if it does not extend to the founder of the religion. Doubt here can lead to denial and denunciation, and rightly so. (Does not Bergoglio the Benighted deserve denunciation?)
Finally, a point about reason in relation to doubt. There is is no critical reasoning without doubt which is not only the engine of inquiry but also the blade of critique which severs the true from the false, the meaningful from the meaningless, the justified from the unjustified, the plausible from the implausible, the probable from the improbable. Critical reasoning and thus doubt have a legitimate role to play not only in theology but also in scriptural exegesis.
Philosophy and religion are opposed and in fruitful tension as are reason and faith, but each is involved with the other and needs the other for correction and balance, as Athens needs Jerusalem, and Jerusalem Athens.
I'm re-reading Boethius' Consolation. Boethius does have a foot in Athens and one in Jerusalem, it seems to me. Now you sir are a Christian, and argue your positions in a blog subtitled Footnotes to Plato . . . . Would it be fair torefer to you, as I would to Boethius, as a Christian Platonist?
As for whether I am a Platonist, all of us who uphold the Western (Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman) tradition are Platonists broadly construed if Alfred North Whitehead is right in his observation that:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)
So in that general sense I am a Platonist. And I also like the modesty conveyed by "footnotes to Plato." Some say the whole of philosophy is a battle between Plato and Aristotle. That is not bad as simplifications go, and if you forced me to choose, I would throw in my lot with Plato and the Platonists. So that is a more specific sense in which I provide "footnotes to Plato."
As for Platonism and Christianity, you could refer to me fairly as a Christian Platonist. But what does that come to?
Part of what it means for me is that a de-Hellenized Christianity is of no interest. Christianity is a type of monotheism. The monotheistic claim is not merely that there is one god as opposed to many gods. Monotheism as I see it overturns the entire pantheon; it does not reduce its membership to one god, the tribal god of the Jews. Monotheism does of course imply that there is exactly one God, but it also implies that God is the One, and that therefore God is unique, and indeed uniquely unique. To understand that you will have to follow the link and study the entry to which it leads. Now if God is uniquely unique, then God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. He is not an ens among entia, but esse: ipsum esse subsistens. Kein Seiendes, sondern das Sein selbst.
Now we are well up into the Platonic stratosphere. Jerusalem needs Athens if theism is not to degenerate into a tribal mythology. (That Athens needs Jerusalem is also true, but not my present theme.)
I don't believe I am saying anything different from what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) says in his Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius, 2004, orig. publ. in German in 1968). Here is one relevant quotation among several:
The Christian faith opted, we have seen, against the gods of the various religions and in favor of the God of the philosophers, that is, against the myth of custom and in favor of the truth of Being itself and nothing else. (142)
Writing of the unity of belief and thought, Ratzinger tells us that
. . . the Fathers of the Church believed that they had discovered here the deepest unity between philosophy and faith, Plato and Moses, the Greek mind and the biblical mind. (118)
Plato and Moses! The God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are one and the same.
The problematic is rich and many-sided. More later.
"Prayer is when night descends on thought." (Alain, as quoted by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.) Knowing Alain, he must have intended his aphorism as a denigration of prayer. I see it the other way around. We cannot think our way out of our predicament; thinking merely allows us to map the terrain and discover the impasses. It is merely a means of "consolidating our perplexities." (E. Cioran). It is the failure of thinking that leads us to pray, and the limitations of prayer that lead us to meditate and wait, like Weil, in silence. (Curious it is that Simone Weil was a student of Alain.)
So I say: Prayer is when night descends on thought, and meditation is when night descends on (discursive) prayer. But all three are needed for a complete human life. Each of us should aspire to be a thinker, a believer, and a mystic with triple citizenship in Athens, Jerusalem, and Benares.
Sir Roger wrote several times about his political maturation, most fully, perhaps, in “Why I became a conservative,” in The New Criterion in 2003. There were two answers, one negative, one positive. The negative answer was the visceral repudiation of civilization he witnessed in Paris in 1968: slogans defacing walls, shattered shop windows, and spoiled radicals. The positive element was the philosophy of Edmund Burke, that apostle of tradition, authority, and prejudice. Prejudice? How awful that word sounds to enlightened ears. But Sir Roger reminds us that prejudice, far from being synonymous with bigotry, can be a prime resource in freedom’s armory. “Our most necessary beliefs,” he wrote, “may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and . . . the attempt to justify them will lead merely to their loss.”
A necessary belief, I take it, is one that we need to live well. And it may be that the beliefs we need the most to flourish are ones that we cannot justify if our standards are exacting. It is also true that a failure to justify a belief can lead to skepticism and to a loss of belief. But which prejudices should we live by? The ones that we were brought up to have? Should we adopt them without examination?
Here is where the problem lies. Should we live an unexamined life, simply taking for granted what was handed down? Think of all those who were brought up to believe that slavery is a natural social arrangement, that some races are fit to be slaves and others to be masters. Others were brought up to believe that a woman's place is in the home and that any education beyond the elementary was wasted on them. Punishment by crucifixion, the eating of human flesh, and so on were all traditionally accepted practices and their supporting beliefs were accepted uncritically from supposed authorities. "That's the way it has always been done." "That's the way we do things around here." "Beef: It's what's for dinner." It is not that the longevity of the practices was taken to justify them; it is rather that the question of justification did not arise. Enclosed within their cultures, and shielded from outside influences, there was no cause for people to doubt their beliefs and practices. Beliefs and practices functioned well enough as social cement and so the questions about truth and justification did not arise.
The opposite view is that of Socrates as reported by Plato: "The unexamined life is not worth living." For humans to flourish, they must examine their beliefs and try to separate the true from the false, the justified from the unjustified, the better from the worse. Supposed authorities must be tested to see if they are genuinely authoritative. The cosmogonic myths and the holy books contradict each other; hence they cannot all be true. Which is true? Might it be that none are true? Then what is the ultimate truth about how we should live?
Man come of age is man become aware of the great dualities: true and false, real and unreal, good and evil. Man come of age is man having emerged into the light of spirit, man enlightened, man emergent from the animal and tribal. Mythos suppressed and Logos ascendent, inquiry is born, inquiry whose engine is doubt. While remaining a miserable animal, man as spirit seeks to know the truth. To advance in knowledge, however, he must question the handed-down.
The problem is the tension between the heteronomous life of tradition, authority, prejudice, and obedience, and the autonomous Socratic, truth-seeking life, a life willing to haul everything and anything before the bench of Reason, including itself, there to be rudely interrogated. In different dress this is the old problem of Athens and Jersualem in its stark Straussian contours.
The problem is real and it is no solution to appeal to tradition, authority, and prejudice. On the other hand, there is no denying that the spirit of inquiry, the skeptical spirit, can and in some does lead to a weakening of belief and a consequent loss of the will to act and assert oneself and the interests of one's group. Decadence and nihilism can result from the spirit of inquiry, the skeptical spirit. The West is in danger of perishing due to lack of will and a lack of belief in our values as we let ourselves be replaced by foreign elements. Europe faces extinction or dhimmitude if it does not affirm its will to live and take measures against the invasion of representatives of an inferior unenlightened culture.
Burke saw with penetrating insight that freedom was not the antonym of authority or the repudiation of obedience. “Real freedom,” Sir Roger observed, “concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.”
Really? So I am truly free when I bend my knee to the sovereign? True freedom is bondage to the lord and master? Sounds Orwellian. Could real freedom, concrete freedom, be a form of obedience? Perhaps, if the one obeyed is God himself. But God is absent. In his place are dubious representatives.
My interim judgment: Scruton's conservatism as presented by Kimball is facile, superficial, and unsatisfying. It is a mere reaction to Enlightenment and classically liberal excesses.
Another typically aporetic (and therefore inconclusive) conclusion by the Aporetic Philosopher. It seems right, fitting, and helpful unto enlightenment that a maverick should be an aporetician.
I have commented critically on the Roman Catholic teaching on indulgences. One who refuses to accept, or questions, a teaching of the Church on faith or morals may be accused of reliance upon private judgment and failure to submit to the Magisterium or teaching authority of the Church. Two quick observations on this accusation.
First, for many of us private judgment is not merely private, based as it is on consultation with many, many public sources. It is as public as private. Everything I've read over the years from Parmenides on down in the West, the Bible on down in the Near East, and the Upanishads on down in the Far East feeds into my 'private' judgment. So my 'private' judgment is not merely mine as to content inasmuch as it is a collective cultural upshot, albeit processed through my admittedly fallible and limited pate. Though collective as to content, its acceptance by me is of course my sole responsibility.
Second, the party line or official doctrine of any institution is profoundly influenced by the private judgments of individuals. Think of the profound role that St. Augustine played in the development of Roman Catholic doctrine. He was a man of powerful will, penetrating intellect, and great personal presence. Imagine going up against him at a theological conference or council.
So the private is not merely private, and the official is not merely official.
Of course, part of the official doctrine of the Roman church is that its pronunciamenti anent faith and morals are guided and directed by the Holy Ghost. (Use of the old phrase, besides chiming nicely with der Heilige Geist, is a way for this conservative to thumb his nose at Vatican II-type innovations which, though some of them may have had some sense, tended to be deleterious in the long run. A meatier question which I ought to take up at some time is the one concerning the upsurge of priestly paederasty after Vatican II: post hoc ergo propter hoc?)
What I have just written may sound as if I am hostile to the Church. I am not. Nor have I ever had any negative experiences with priests, except, perhaps to have been bored by their sermons. All of the ones I have known have been upright, and some exemplars of the virtues they profess. In the main they were manly and admirable men. But then I'm an old man, and I am thinking mainly of the priests of my youth.
I have no time now to discuss the Church's guidance by the third person of the Trinity, except to express some skepticism: if that is so, how could the estimable Ratzinger be followed by the benighted Bergoglio? (Yes, I am aware that there were far, far worse popes than the current one.)
Of course, I have just, once again, delivered my private judgment. But, once again, it is not merely private inasmuch as it is based on evidence and argument: I am not merely emoting in the manner of a liberal such as Bergoglio when he emoted, in response to the proposed Great Wall of Trump, that nations need bridges, not walls. Well, then, Vatican City needs bridges not walls the better to allow jihadis easy access for their destructive purposes. Mercy and appeasement even unto those who would wipe Christianity from the face of the earth, and are in process of doing so.
Addendum
But how can my judgment, even if not merely private, carry any weight, even for me, when it contradicts the Magisterium, the Church's teaching authority, when we understand the source and nature of this authority? ('Magisterium' from L. magister, teacher, master.)
By the Magisterium we mean the teaching office of the Church. It consists of the Pope and Bishops. Christ promised to protect the teaching of the Church : "He who hears you, hears me; he who rejects you rejects me, he who rejects me, rejects Him who sent me" (Luke 10. 16). Now of course the promise of Christ cannot fail: hence when the Church presents some doctrine as definitive or final, it comes under this protection, it cannot be in error; in other words, it is infallible.
In a nutshell: God in Christ founded the Roman church upon St. Peter, the first pope, as upon a rock. The legitimate succession culminates in Pope Francis. The Roman church as the one true holy and apostolic church therefore teaches with divine authority and thus infallibly. Hence its teaching on indulgences not only cannot be incorrect, it cannot even be reasonably questioned. So who am I to -- in effect -- question God himself?
Well, it is obvious that if I disagree with God, then I am wrong. But if a human being, or a group of human beings, no matter how learned, no matter how saintly, claims to be speaking with divine authority, and thus infallibly, then I have excellent reason to be skeptical. How do I know that they are not, in a minor or major way, schismatics diverging from the true teaching, the one Christ promised to protect? Maybe it was some version of Eastern Orthodoxy that Christ had in mind as warranting his protection.
These and other questions legitimately arise in the vicinity of what Josiah Royce calls the Religious Paradox.
So understood, private judgment can yield at least a measure of certitude, but not in any fashion certainty.
I agree that private judgment cannot deliver certainty, if objective certainty is in question. But I should think that the same is true of any collective judgment as well, including the collective judgments of the Roman Catholic magisterium. I am a cradle Catholic, but my 'inner Protestant' demands his due. In what follows, I will quote Liccione, agree with much of what he says, but try to explain why I cannot accept his ultimate conclusion.
If no human collectivity can be counted on implicitly to preserve and transmit the deposit of faith in its fullness, still less can any fallible, human individual. One can, for a lesser or greater time, feel certain that one is in possession of the faith once delivered; it can and does happen that the cognitive content of one’s faith thus contains much truth; one can even and thereby develop a genuine relationship of love and trust with Jesus Christ. But by one’s own profession one is no closer to infallibility, and probably less so, than any external human authority.
I agree with the above.
Faith must accordingly co-exist with a principle if not always a feeling of doubt, and be hedged about by that principle. For if councils and popes can err even in their most solemn exercises of doctrinal authority, then so a fortiori can anybody who eschews for themselves or their own faith community the kind of authority those sources have claimed. Ultimately, then, one’s faith is a matter of opinion. No matter how great the certitude which which one holds one’s religious opinions, they are just that—human opinions, always and in principle open to revision, just as any and all churches are human organizations semper reformanda.
If there is no ecclesial any more than individual indefectibility, then there is no ecclesial any more than individual infallibility. In principle if not always and everywhere in practice, everything remains up for grabs. If by nothing else, that is proven by the apparently limitless capacity of Protestantism to devolve into denominations and sects who can agree only on the proposition that, whatever the Bible means, it doesn’t have God giving the Catholic or even the Orthodox Church the kind of interpretive authority they claim.
The above too strikes me as correct as long as it is understood that matters of opinion needn't be matters of mere opinion and that some opinions are better than others, whether these be the opinions of individuals or the opinions officially endorsed by groups.
Faith so constituted and developed is radically different from what the Catholic and Orthodox churches both think of as faith. On the latter showing, part of the content of faith is that the Church teaches about faith and morals with an authority divinely bestowed and maintained; the differences between Catholicism and Orthodoxy about how “the Church” manifests such authority are secondary; in either case, the assent of faith entails accepting, as divinely revealed, what the Church definitively proposes as such. Such assent is not a matter of opinion, as it would be if it were a merely human product rather than a divine gift. It does not merely entail certitude; the certitude is itself based on the objective relation of certainty. By that latter relation, what is believed is understood to be unchangeably true because its ultimate object, a God who neither deceives nor can be deceived, is the same who proposes, through his Church, what is to be believed. When faith so understood is accepted as a gift of the Holy Spirit, and thus of grace, it is a virtue infused into the soul and its faculties, chiefly the mind. While its cognitive content can and should deepen and develop along with the coordinate virtues of life, nevertheless one either has such a virtue or one does not. It is not a human product and does not depend on human opinion. And if one has it, then one has eo ipso abandoned private judgment in matters pertaining to it.
The crucial proposition is the following. For the Catholic and Orthodox churches, "part of the content of faith is that the Church teaches about faith and morals with an authority divinely bestowed and maintained . . . ." Part of what one believes, then, is that the Church teaches with divine authority: God himself teaches us through the Church. If so, then its specific teachings with respect to faith and morals are objectively certain. Being taught by God himself is as good as it gets, epistemically speaking. We also note that if the Church teaches with divine authority, then this teaching itself, namely, that the Church teaches with divine authority, is objectively certain.
But what justifies one's belief that this particular church teaches with divine authority? If it teaches with divine authority, then not only are the particulars of the depositum fidei objectively and absolutely secured beyond all private judgment, but also the meta-claim to teach with divine authority is objectively and absolutely secured beyond all private judgment. But how do I know -- where knowledge entails objective certainty -- that the antecedent of the foregoing conditional is true?
That is, how can I be objectively certain that the Catholic and Orthodox churches teach with divine authority?
Of course, I can believe it, and perhaps I can believe it reasonably. Reasonable belief does not, however, amount to objective certainty. So I can't be objectively certain of it, whence it follows that I can't be objectively certain that the collective judgment of the Roman Catholic magisterium with respect to faith and morals is infallible. But I hear an objection coming.
"You believe it because the Church teaches it. And since the Church teaches with divine authority, you can be objectively certain that what you believe is true. And since part of what the Church teaches is that it teaches with divine authority, you can be objectively certain that the Church teaches with divine authority."
This objection, however, is plainly circular. I want to know how I can know with objective certainty that a particular church, the Roman Catholic Church, is the unique divine mouthpiece, and I am told that I can know this with objective certainty because it is the unique divine mouthpiece. But this doesn't help due to its circularity.
Liccione speaks above of the assent of faith as a divine gift and not as something I create from my own resources. Thus my acceptance of the Church's absolute authority and reliability with respect to faith and morals is a gift from God. But even if this is so, how can I be objectively certain that it is so and that my acceptance is a divine gift? Again the circle rears its head: it is objectively certain that the acceptance is a divine gift because it is God who gives the gift through the Church.
What Liccione is claiming on behalf of the Church is that it is an objectivelyself-certifying source of objectively certain truth with respect to faith and morals. As objectively self-certifying, it needs no certification by us. The Church is like God himself. God needs no external certification of his beliefs; he is the self-certifying source of his own certainty which is at once both subjective and objective.
Unfortunately, this doesn't help me. After all, I am the one who has to decide what to believe and how to live. I am the one who needs salvation and needs to find the right path to it. I am the one who needs to decide whether I will accept the Church's authority. The Church doesn't need my certification, but I need to certify to my own satisfaction that the Church's CLAIM to be the unique objectively self-certifying source of objectively certain moral and soteriological knowledge is a CREDIBLE claim that I ought to accept.
The aporetic philosopher regularly finds himself in a bind. What bind am I in now? It looks to be the old business about Athens and Jerusalem whose recent heroes are Husserl and Shestov. Autonomous reason demands validation of all claims by its own lights. Faith says, "Obey, submit, stop asking questions, accept the heteronomy of the creature who owes everything to his Creator, including his paltry reason and its flickering lights. Accept the divine gift of faith in humility."
To end on a romantic note, it seems somehow noble to stand astride the two great cities, with a leg in each, seeking, but not finding the coincidentia oppositorum, maintaining oneself in this tension until death reveals the answer or puts an end to all questions.
The following quotation is from John M. Oesterreicher, The Walls are Crumbling: Seven Jewish Philosophers Discover Christ, London: Hollis and Carter, 1953, p. 195. Oesterreicher is glossing Landsberg's doctoral thesis Wesen und Bedeutung der Platonischen Akademie, 1923:
. . . there are two types of philosophy: the autonomous, patterned after Plato's, which undertakes to bring about man's redemption; and the heteronomous, which, following St. Augustine's lead, does not feign to be man's guide to his last end, but takes him to the very portals of faith, and there wthdraws before the one thing necessary.
Ah, but what is the one thing necessary?
There is a tension between the two types of philosophy and this tension is the transposition onto the philosophical plane of the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality. As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:
To put it very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is is the life of autonomous understanding. The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love. The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)
So is the Christian the true philosopher? Only in the sense that philosophy points beyond itself to something that is no longer philosophy but that completes philosophy while cancelling it. I am tempted to reach for an Hegelian trope while turning it on its head: if Christianity is true, then philosophy is aufgehoben, sublated, in it. If Christianity is true, then the Christian arrives at the truth that the philosopher at best aims at but cannot arrive at by his method and way of life, the life of autonomous understanding. To achieve what he aims at, the philosopher would have to become "as a little child" and accept in obedient love the gift of Revelation. But it is precisely that which he cannot do if he is to remain a philosopher in the strict sense, one who lives the life of autonomous understanding.
This is tension some of us live. The life of autonomous understanding and critical examination? Or the life of child-like trust and obedient love?
The problem in what is perhaps its sharpest form is presented in the story of Abraham and Isaac.
The Christian life is not the philosophical life. It lies beyond the philosophical life and, if true, is superior to it.
But is it true?
In the end, you have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.
Some extensive quotation from the neglected Landsberg in Kant on Suicide.
George W. Bush once referred to Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher, thereby betraying both a failure to grasp what a philosopher is and who Jesus claimed to be.
Jesus Christ is not a philosopher. The philosopher is a mere lover of wisdom. His love is desirous and needy; it is eros, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks. But Jesus Christ lacks nothing; he is is the fullness of wisdom, the Word and Wisdom of God embodied. So Christ is no lover of wisdom in the strict sense in which Socrates is a lover of wisdom. Divine love is not erotic but agapic.
If a sage is a possessor of wisdom, no philosopher qua philosopher is a sage. If a philosopher were to become a sage, he would thereby cease to be a philosopher: one does not seek what one possesses. Socrates is the embodiment of philosophy but not of wisdom. Socrates, then, is not a sage.
The wisdom of Socrates was largely the wisdom of nescience: he knew that he did not know what he did not know. In stark contrast, Christ claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth as recounted in the via, veritas, vita passage at John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me." Ego sum via et veritas et vita; nemo venit ad Patrem nisi per me.
Suppose a philosopher comes to accept Christian doctrine. Does he remain a philosopher in his acceptance of Christian doctrine or does he move beyond philosophy? I say that a philosopher who accepts the revealed truths characteristic of Christianity has moved beyond philosophy in this acceptance. Why?
A philosopher is not only one who, lacking wisdom and desiring it, seeks it, but also one who seeks the truth in a certain way, by a certain method. It is characteristic of philosophy that it is the pursuit of truth by unaided reason. 'Unaided' means: not aided by divine revelation. (It does not mean that the philosopher does not consult the senses.) The philosopher operates by reason and seeks reasons for what he believes. The philosopher relies on discursive reason as he encounters it in himself and accepts only what he can validate by his autonomous use of reason. Qua philosopher, he accepts no testimony but must verify matters for himself. The philosopher is like Doubting Thomas Didymus at John 20:25: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe."
That is the attitude of the philosopher. The philosopher is an inquirer into ultimate matters, and doubt is the engine of inquiry. The philosopher qua philosopher asks: Where's the evidence? What's the argument? What you say may be true, my brothers, but how do you know? What's your justification?
You say our rabbi rose from the dead? That sort of thing doesn't happen! I want knowledge, which is not just true belief but justified true belief. You expect me to believe that Jesus rose on no evidence but your testimony from probably hallucinatory experiences fueled by your fear and hunger and weakness? Prove it! W. K. Clifford takes it to the limit and gives it a moral twist: "It is wrong always and everywhere to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Presumably the testimony of a bunch of scared, unlettered, credulous fisherman would not count as sufficient evidence for Thomas Didymus or Clifford.
The Christian, however, operates by faith. If Reason is the faculty of philosophy, Faith is the faculty of religion. The philosopher may reason his way to the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, but he cannot qua philosopher arrive at the saving truth that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) by the use of reason. The saving truths are 'known' by faith and not by reason. It is also clear that faith for the Christian ranks higher than reason. As Jesus says to Thomas at John 20:29: "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed."
The attitude of the believer who is also a philosopher is fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. But what if no understanding is found? Does the believer reject or suspend his belief? No. If he is a genuine believer, he continues to believe whether or not he achieves understanding. This shows that for the believer, reason has no veto power. The apparent logical impossibility of the Incarnation does not cause him to reject or suspend his belief in Jesus as his Lord and Savior. If he finds a way to show the rational acceptability of the Incarnation, well and good; if he fails, no matter. The Incarnation is a fact 'known' by Revelation; as an actual fact it is possible, and what is possible is possible whether or not we frail reeds can understand how it is possible. The believer in the end will announce that the saving truths are mysteries impenetrable to us here below even if he does not go to the extreme of a Tertullian, a Kierkegaard, or a Shestov and condemn reason wholesale.
The attitude of the philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation is different. He feels duty-bound by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept. This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl. On his death bed, attended by nuns, open to the Catholic faith, he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation.
There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality. As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:
To put it very very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is is the life of autonomous understanding. The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love. The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)
So is the Christian the true philosopher? Only in the sense that philosophy points beyond itself to something that is no longer philosophy but that completes philosophy while cancelling it. I am tempted to reach for an Hegelian trope while turning it on its head: if Christianity is true, then philosophy is aufgehoben, sublated, in it. If Christianity is true, then the Christian arrives at the truth that the philosopher at best aims at but cannot arrive at by his method and way of life, the life of autonomous understanding. To achieve what he aims at, the philosopher would have to be "as a little child" and accept in obedient love the gift of Revelation. But it is precisely that which he cannot do if he is to remain a philosopher in the strict sense, one who lives the life of autonomous understanding.
That is tension some of us live. The life of autonomous understanding and critical examination? Or the life of child-like trust and obedient love?
The problem in what is perhaps its sharpest form is presented in the story of Abraham and Isaac.
The Christian life is not the philosophical life. It lies beyond the philosophical life and, if true, is superior to it.
But is it true?
In the end, you have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.
Steven Nemes makes two main points in his Christian Life as Philosophy. The first I agree with entirely: Jesus Christ is not a philosopher. The philosopher is a mere lover of wisdom. His love is desirous and needy; it is eros, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks. But Jesus Christ lacks nothing; he is is the fullness of wisdom, "The Wisdom of God embodied," as Nemes accurately puts it. So Christ is no lover of wisdom in the strict sense in which Socrates is a lover of wisdom. Divine love is not erotic but agapic.
The wisdom of Socrates was largely the wisdom of nescience: he knew what he did not know. In stark contrast, Christ claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth in the via, veritas, vita passage at John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me." Ego sum via et veritas et vita; nemo venit ad Patrem nisi per me.
Here is Nemes' second point:
So Christ falls into the category of god or sage (or both), rather than that of philosopher. On the other hand, the Christian -- the person who desires to learn of Christ, and who finds in him the fount of all wisdom -- is the true philosopher. The Christian admits that she lacks wisdom, yet she desires it. So she goes to the source of all wisdom, which is Christ, in order to learn from him.
Christian life can therefore be understood as philosophy: a desirous effort to learn wisdom from Wisdom Itself, embodied in the person of the Godman Jesus Christ.
I disagree with this second point. A philosopher is not only one who, lacking wisdom and desiring it, seeks it, but also one who seeks the truth in a certain way, by a certain method. It is characteristic of philosophy that it is the pursuit of truth by unaided reason. 'Unaided' means: not aided by divine revelation. (It does not mean that the philosopher does not consult the senses.) The philosopher operates by reason and seeks reasons for what he believes. The philosopher relies on discursive reason as he encounters it in himself and accepts only what he can validate by his autonomous use of reason. Qua philosopher, he accepts no testimony but must verify matters for himself . The philosopher is like Doubting Thomas Didymus at John 20:25: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe."
That is the attitude of the philosopher. The philosopher is an inquirer into ultimate matters, and doubt is the engine of inquiry. Where's the evidence? What's the argument? What you say may be true, my brothers, but how do you know? What's your justification? You say our rabbi rose from the dead? That sort of thing doesn't happen! I want knowledge, which is not just true belief but justified true belief. You expect me to believe that Jesus rose on no evidence but your testimony from probably hallucinatory experiences fueled by your fear and hunger and weakness ? Prove it! W. K. Clifford takes it to the limit and gives it a moral twist: "It is wrong always and everywhere to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Presumably the testimony of a bunch of scared, unlettered, credulous fisherman would not count as sufficient evidence for Thomas Didymus or Clifford.
The Christian, however, operates by faith. If Reason is the faculty of philosophy, Faith is the faculty of religion. The philosopher may reason his way to the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, but he cannot qua philosopher arrive at the saving truth that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) by the use of reason. The saving truths are 'known' by faith and not by reason. It is also clear that faith for the Christian ranks higher than reason. As Jesus says to Thomas at John 20:29: "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed."
The attitude of the believer who is also a philosopher is fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. But what if no understanding is found? Does the believer reject or suspend his belief? No. If he is a genuine believer, he continues to believe whether or not he achieves understanding. This shows that for the believer, reason has no veto power. The apparent logical impossibility of the Incarnation does not cause him to reject or suspend his belief in Jesus as his Lord and Savior. If he finds a way to show the rational acceptability of the Incarnation, well and good; if he fails, no matter. The Incarnation is a fact known by Revelation; as an actual fact it is possible, and what is possible is possible whether or not we frail reeds can understand how it is possible. The believer in the end will announce that the saving truths are mysteries impenetrable to us here below even if he does not go to the extreme of a Tertullian, a Kierkegaard, or a Shestov and condemn reason wholesale.
The attitude of the philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation is different. He feels duty-bound by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept. This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl. On his death bed, open to the Catholic faith, he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation.
There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality. As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:
To put it very very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is is the life of autonomous understanding. The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love. The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)
So is the Christian the true philosopher? Only in the sense that philosophy points beyond itself to something that is no longer philosophy but that completes philosophy while cancelling it. I am tempted to reach for an Hegelian trope while turning it on its head: if Christianity is true, then philosophy is aufgehoben, sublated, in it. If Christianity is true, then the Christian arrives at the truth that the philosopher at best aims at but cannot arrive at by his method and way of life, the life of autonomous understanding. To achieve what he aims at, the philosopher would have to be "as a little child" and accept in obedient love the gift of Revelation. But it is precisely that which he cannot do if he is to remain a philosopher in the strict sense, one who lives the life of autonomous understanding.
The Christian life is not the philosophical life. It lies beyond the philosophical life and, if true, is superior to it.
I heard David Brooks on C-Span 2 last night. He uncorked a very funny line. "I am the conservative at The New York Times, which is like being the chief rabbi in Mecca."
By the way, it was a mention by Brooks in his latest book that got my friend Lupu onto Soloveitchik. Now I am reading the good rabbi. I have finished The Lonely Man of Faith and I've started on Halakhic Man. Impressive and important for those of us exercised by the Athenian-Hierosolymanic dialectic.
In other humor news, Heather Wilhelm reports, via Chelsea Clinton, that the Clinton family motto is, wait for it:
“We have a saying in my family—it’s always better to get caught trying (rather than not try at all).”
Wilhelm comments:
Full disclosure: When I first read that sentence, I laughed out loud. Next, I read it two more times, just to make sure it was not some glorious figment of my imagination. “Get caught trying?” Who makes this their family motto? Concerned that I was missing the popular resurgence of this wise old adage—a saying that ranks right up there with “There’s more than one way to obliterate an old email server” and “If the silverware is missing, Sandy Berger’s pants are a-jangling”—I decided to Google “get caught trying.” If you’re looking for lots of advice on how to do things like hide an affair from your spouse, illegally sneak over the border, or fight off a wild crow that is trying to eat your lunch, I suggest you do the same.
Here’s the thing: If you “get caught” doing something, it implies that you are doing something secretive, underhanded, or out-and-out bad. What kind of family, outside of the Corleone crime syndicate, instinctively associates “trying” with doing something surreptitious, or an action where one can get “caught”? Moreover, is there any one-liner in the history of the world—with the exception, of course, of “It depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is”—that better sums up the Clinton ethos?
What Miss Wilhelm fails to realize, however, is the signal impetus Bill Cinton gave to a renewed assault upon the question of the meaning of Being, die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein, a question occluded and forgotten (Seinsvergessenheit!) in political precincts until Bubba re-ignited it with his penetrating inquiry into the manifold meanings of 'is.'
"God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob -- not of the philosophers and scholars." Thus exclaimed Blaise Pascal in the famous memorial in which he recorded the overwhelming religious/mystical experience of the night of 23 November 1654. Martin Buber comments (Eclipse of God, Humanity Books, 1952, p. 49):
These words represent Pascal's change of heart. He turned, not from a state of being where there is no God to one where there is a God, but from the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham. Overwhelmed by faith, he no longer knew what to do with the God of the philosophers; that is, with the God who occupies a definite position in a definite system of thought. The God of Abraham . . . is not susceptible of introduction into a system of thought precisely because He is God. He is beyond each and every one of those systems, absolutely and by virtue of his nature. What the philosophers describe by the name of God cannot be more than an idea. (emphasis added)
Buber here expresses a sentiment often heard. We encountered it before when we found Timothy Ware accusing late Scholastic theology of turning God into an abstract idea. But the sentiment is no less wrongheaded for being widespread. As I see it, it simply makes no sense to oppose the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob -- the God of religion -- to the God of philosophy. In fact, I am always astonished when otherwise distinguished thinkers retail this bogus distinction. Let's try to sort this out.
It is first of all obvious that God, if he exists, transcends every system of human thought, and cannot be reduced to any element internal to such a system whether it be a concept, a proposition, an argument, a set of arguments, etc. But by the same token, the chair I am sitting on cannot be reduced to my concept of it or to the judgments I make about it. I am sitting on a chair, not a concept of a chair. The chair, like God, is transcendent of my conceptualizations and judgments. The transcendence of God, however, is a more radical form of transcendence, that of a person as opposed to that of a material object. And among persons, God is at the outer limit of transcendence, so much so that it is plausibly argued that 'person' in application to God can only be used analogically.
Now if Buber were merely saying something along these lines then I would have no quarrel with him. But he is saying something more, namely, that when a philosopher in his capacity as philosopher conceptualizes God, he reduces him to a concept or idea, to something abstract, to something merely immanent to his thought, and therefore to something that is not God. In saying this, Buber commits a grotesque non sequitur. He moves from the unproblematically true
1. God by his very nature is transcendent of every system of thought or scheme of representation
to the breathtakingly false
2. Any thought about God or representation of God (such as we find, say in Aquinas's Summa Theologica) is not a thought or representation of God, but of a thought or representation, which, of course, by its very nature is not God.
As I said, I am astonished that anyone could fall into this error. When I think about something I don't in thinking about it turn it into a mere thought. When I think about my wife's body, for example, I don't turn it into a mere thought: it remains transcendent of my thought as a material thing. A fortiori, I am unable by thinking about my wife as a person, an other mind, to transmogrify her personhood into a mere concept in my mind. She remains in her interiority as a person delightfully transcendent of my acts of thinking.
It is interesting to observe that it is built into the very concept God that God cannot be a concept. This concept is the concept of something that cannot by its very nature be a concept. This is the case whether or not God exists. The concept God is the concept of something that cannot be a concept even if nothing falls under the concept.
It is therefore bogus to oppose the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, et al. Or at least it is bogus to make this oppositin for the reason Buber supplies. There is and can be only one God. But there are different approaches to this one God. By my count, there are four ways of approaching God: by reason, by faith, by mystical experience, and by our moral sense. To employ a hackneyed metaphor, if there are four routes to the summit of a mountain, it does not follow that there are four summits, with only one of them being genuine, the others being merely immanent to their respective routes. Suppose Tom, Dick, Harry, and Mary each summit by a different route. Mary cannot denigrate the accomplishments of the males by asserting that they didn't really summit on the ground that their respective termini were merely immanent to their routes. She cannot say, "You guys didn't really reach the summit; you merely reached a point on your map."
I should think that direct acquaintance with God via mystical/religious experience is superior to contact via faith or reason or morality. It is better to taste food than to read about it on a menu. But that's not to say that the menu is about itself: it is about the very same stuff that one encounters by eating. The fact that it is better to eat food than read about it does not imply that when one is reading one is not reading about it. Imagine how silly it would be be for me to exclaim, while seated before a delicacy: "Food of Wolfgang Puck, Food of Julia Child, Food of Emeril Lagasse, not of the nutritionists and menu-writers!"
I believe I have established my point against Buber conclusively. But to appreciate this, you must not confuse the question I am discussing with another question in the vicinity.
Suppose one philosopher argues to an unmoved mover, another to an ultimate ground of moral obligation, and a third to an absolute source of truth. How do we know that thesee three notionally distinct philosophical Gods are the same as each other in reality and the same as the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob, in reality? This is an important question, but not the one I am addressing in this entry. The present question is whether a philosophical treatment of God transforms God into a mere concept or mere idea. The answer is resoundingly in the negative. Such a treatment purports to treat of the very same real God that is addressed in prayer, seen in mystical vision, and sensed in the deliverances of conscience.
Joseph B. Soloveitchik's The Lonely Man of Faith (Doubleday 2006) is rich and stimulating and packed with insights. I thank Peter Lupu for having a copy sent to me. But there is a long footnote on p. 49 with which I heartily disagree. Here is part of it:
The trouble with all rational demonstrations of the existence of God, with which the history of philosophy abounds, consists in their being exactly what they were meant to be by those who formulated them: abstract logical demonstrations divorced from the living primal experiences in which these demonstrations are rooted. For instance, the cosmic experience was transformed into a cosmological proof, the ontic experience into an ontological proof, et cetera. Instead of stating that the the most elementary existential awareness as a subjective 'I exist' and an objective 'the world around me exists' awareness is unsustainable as long as the the ultimate reality of God is not part of this experience, the theologians engaged in formal postulating and deducing in an experiential vacuum. Because of this they exposed themselves to Hume's and Kant's biting criticism that logical categories are applicable only within the limits of the human scientific experience.
Does the loving bride in the embrace of her beloved ask for proof that he is alive and real? Must the prayerful soul clinging in passionate love ecstasy to her Beloved demonstrate that He exists? So asked Soren Kierkegaard sarcastically when told that Anselm of Canterbury, the father of the very abstract and complex ontological proof, spent many days in prayer and supplication that he be presented with rational evidence of the existence of God.
A man like me has one foot in Jerusalem and the other in Athens. Soloveitchik and Kierkegaard, however, have both feet in Jerusalem. They just can't understand what drives the philosopher to seek a rational demonstration of the existence of God. Soloveitchik's analogy betrays him as a two-footed Hierosolymian. Obviously, the bride in the embrace of the beloved needs no proof of his reality. The bride's experience of the beloved is ongoing and coherent and repeatable ad libitum. If she leaves him for a while, she can come back and be assured that he is the same as the person she left. She can taste his kisses and enjoy his scent while seeing him and touching him and hearing him. He remains self-same as a unity in and through the manifold of sensory modes whereby he is presented to her. And in any given mode, he is a unity across a manifold. Shifting her position, she can see him from different angles with the visual noemata cohering in such a way as to present a self-same individual. What's more, her intercourse with his body fits coherently with her intercourse with his mind as mediated by his voice and gestures.
I could go on, but point is plain. There is simply no room for any practical doubt as to the beloved's reality given the forceful, coherent, vivacious, and obtrusive character of the bride's experience of him. She is compelled to accept his reality. There is no room here for any doxastic vountarism. The will does not play a role in her believing that he is real. There is no need for decision or faith or a leap of faith in her acceptance of his reality.
Our experience of God is very different. It comes by fleeting glimpses and gleanings and intimations. The sensus divinitatis is weak and experienced only by some. The bite of conscience is not unambiguously of higher origin than Freudian superego and social suggestion. Mystical experiences are few and far-between. Though unquestionable as to their occurrence, they are questionable as to their veridicality because of their fitful and fragmentary character. They are not validated in the ongoing way of ordinary sense perception. They don't integrate well with ordinary perceptual experiences. And so the truth of these mystical and religious experiences can and perhaps should be doubted. It is this fact that motivates philosophers to seek independent confirmation of the reality of the object of these experiences by the arguments that Soloveitchik and Co. dismiss.
The claim above that the awareness expressed by 'I exist' is unsustainable unless the awareness of God is part of the experience is simply false. That I exist is certain to me. But it is far from certain what the I is in its inner nature and what existence is and whether the I requires God as its ultimate support. The cogito is not an experience of God even if God exists and no cogito is possible without him. The same goes for the existence of the world. The existence of God is not co-given with the existence of the world. It is plain to the bride's senses that the beloved is real. It is not plain to our senses that nature is God's nature, that the cosmos is a divine artifact. That is why one cannot rely solely on the cosmic experience of nature as of a divine artifact, but must proceed cosmologically by inference from what is evident to what is non-evident.
Soloveitchik is making the same kind of move that St. Paul makes in Romans 1: 18-20. My critique of that move here.
Yesterday I quoted Christopher Hitchens as saying that nothing is sacred. I now ask what it means to say that nothing is sacred. I think it means something like the following. Nothing, nothing at all, is holy, venerable, worthy of worship; nothing is an appropriate object of reverence. (One cannot appropriately revere one's spouse, 'worship the ground she walks on,' etc.) If nothing is sacred, then nothing is so far above us in reality and value as to require our submission and obedience as the only adequate responses to it.
If nothing is sacred, then man is the measure of all things; he is not measured by a standard external to him. Man is autonomous: he gives the law to himself. Human autonomy is absolute, the absolute. There is nothing beyond the human horizon except matter brute and blind. There is nothing that transcends the human scale. If so, then it makes sense for Hitchens to maintain that the right to free expression is absolute, subject to no restrictions or limitations: "the only thing that should be upheld at all costs and without qualification is the right of free expression."
The right to mock and deride religious figures such as Muhammad follows. For if nothing is sacred, then there is no God, no Allah, and hence no prophets of God. And of course no Son of God. If nothing is sacred and there is no God, then there is no revelation of God in any form, not in nature, not in a human person such as Jesus of Nazareth, and not in any scripture. If there is no God, then the Koran and the Bible are not the word of God; they are books like any other books, wholly human artifacts, and subject to criticism like any other books. And the same goes for physical objects and places. There are no holy relics and holy sites. Mecca and Jerusalem are not holy because, again, nothing is sacred. If there is nothing that is originally sacred, then there is nothing that is derivatively sacred either.
One obvious problem with Hitchens' position is that it is by no means obvious that there is nothing sacred. I should think that something is originally sacred if and only if God or a suitably similar transcendent Absolute exists. No God, then nothing originally sacred. Atheism rules out the sacred. And if nothing is originally sacred, then nothing is derivatively sacred either. If there is no God, then there are no prophets or saints or holy relics or holy places or holy books. And of course no church of God either: no institution can claim to have a divine charter.
I reject the position of Hitchens. I reject it because I reject his naturalism and atheism. They are reasonably rejected . But I also reject the position of those -- call them fundamentalists -- who think that there are people and books and institutions to which we must unconditionally submit. Here is where things get interesting.
I do not deny the possibility of divine revelation or that the book we call the Bible contains divine revelation; but I insist that it is in large part a human artifact. As such, it is open to rational criticism. While man cannot and must not place himself above God, he can and must evaluate what passes for the revelation of God -- for the latter is in part a human product.
God reveals himself, but he reveals himself to man. If the transmitter is perfect, but the receiver imperfect, then one can expect noise with the signal. Rational critique aims to separate the signal from the noise. To criticize is to separate: the true from the false, the reasonable from the unreasonable, the genuine from the specious.
I insist that religion must submit to rational critique. Religion is our affair, not God's. God has no religion. He doesn't need one. He needs religion as little as he needs philosophy: he is the truth in its paradigm instance; he has no need to seek it. Since religion is our affair, our response to the Transcendent, it is a human product in part and as such limited and defective and a legitimate object of philosophical examination and critique.
It is reasonable to maintain, though it cannot be proven, that there is a transcendent Absolute and that therefore there is something sacred. But this is not to say that what people take to be embodiments of the sacred are sacred. Is Muhammad a divine messenger? That is a legitimate question and the right to pose it and answer it negatively must be upheld. To answer it negatively, however, is consistent with holding that something is sacred. Is Jesus God? That is a legitimate question and the right to pose it and answer it negatively must be upheld. To answer it negatively, however, is consistent with holding that something is sacred.
My position is a balanced one. I reject the New Atheist extremism of Hitchens & Co. These people are contemptible in a way in which many old atheists were not: their lack of respect for religion, their militant hostility to any and every form of religion, shows a lack of respect for the unquenchable human desire for Transcendence. Religion is one form of our quest for the Absolute. This quest is part of what makes a human. This quest, which will surely outlast the New Atheists and their cyberpunk acolytes, must not be denigrated just because many of the concrete manifestations of the religious impulse are fanatical, absurd, and harmful.
One ought not mock religion, and not just for the prudential reason that one doesnot want to become the target of murderous Muslim fanatics. One ought not mock religion because religion testifies to man's dignity as a metaphysical animal, as Schopenhauer so well understood. Even Islam, the sorriest and poorest of the great religions, so testifies.
But while I reject the extremism of Hitchens and Co., an extremism that makes an idol of free expression, I agree that what passes for religion, the concrete embodiments of same, must submit to being hauled before the bench of Reason, there to be interrogated, often rudely. Reason, in its turn, must be open to what lies beyond it. It must be open to revelation.
You blogged that doing philosophy has great value in itself; even if philosophy is aporetic. But how often, or how long per day or month, should one devote to it? Doing philosophy seems (to me at least) to have diminishing returns, if philosophy is aporetic. Or has your experience been different?
My approach to philosophy could be called radically aporetic. Thus I hold not only that philosophy is best approached aporetically, via its problems, but also that its central problems are insoluble. Thus I tend, tentatively and on the basis of inductive evidence, to the view that the central problems of philosophy, while genuine and thus not amenable to Wittgensteinian or other dissolution, are true aporiai, impasses. It is clear that one could take a broadly aporetic approach without subscribing to the insolubility thesis. But I go 'whole hog.' Hence radically aporetic.
I won't explain this any further, having done so elsewhere, but proceed to V.'s question.
I take our friend to be asking the following. How much time ought one devote to philosophy if philosophy is its problems and they are insoluble? But there is a deeper and logically prior question lurking in the background: Why do philosophy at all if its problems are insoluble? What good is philosophy aporetically pursued?
1. It is good in that it conduces to intellectual humility, to an appreciation of our actual predicament in this life, which is one of profound ignorance concerning what would be most worth knowing if we could know it. The aporetic philosopher is a Socratic philosopher, one who knows what he knows and knows what he does not know. The aporetic philosopher is a debunker of epistemic pretense. One sort of epistemic pretense is that of the positive scientists who, succumbing to the temptation to wax philosophical, overstep the bounds of their competence, proposing bogus solutions to philosophical problems, and making incoherent assertions. They often philosophize without knowing it, and they do it incompetently, without self-awareness and self-criticism. I have given many examples of this in these pages. Thus philosophy as I conceive it is an important antidote to scientism. Scientism is an enemy of the humanities and I am a defender of the humanities.
There is also the threat emanating from political ideologies such as communism and leftism and Islamism and their various offshoots. The critique of these and other pernicious worldviews is a task for philosophy. And who is better suited for debunking operations than the aporetician?
2. Beyond its important debunking use, philosophy aporetically pursued has a spiritual point and purpose. If there are indeed absolutely insoluble problems, they mark the boundary of the discursive intellect and point beyond it. Immersion in philosophical problems brings the discursive mind to an appreciation of its limits and raises the question of what, if anything, lies beyond the limits and how one may gain access to it.
I take the old-fashioned view that the ultimate purpose of human life, a purpose to which all others must be subordinated, is to search for, and if possible, participate in the Absolute. There are several approaches to the Absolute, the main ones being philosophy, religion, and mysticism.
The radical aporetician in philosophy goes as far as he can with philosophy, but hits a dead-end, and is intellectually hnest enough to admit that he is at his wit's end. This motivates him to explore other paths to the Absolute, paths via faith/revelation and mystical intuition. The denigration of the latter by most contemporary philosophers merely shows how spiritually benighted and shallow they are, how historically uniformed, and in some cases, how willfully stupid.
But once a philosopher always a philosopher. So the radical aporetician does not cease philosophizing while exploring the other paths; he uses philosophy to chasten the excess of those other paths. And so he denigrates reason as little as he denigrates faith/revelation and mystical intuition. He merely assigns to reason its proper place.
Now to V.'s actual question. How much time for philosophy? A good chunk of every day. Just how much depending on the particular circumstances of one's particular life. But time must also be set aside for prayer and meditation, the reading of the great scriptures, and other religious/ mystical practices.
For one ought to be a truth-seeker above else. But if one is serious about seeking truth, then one cannot thoughtlessly assume that the only access to ultimate truth is via philosophy. A person who refuses to explore other paths is like the churchmen who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. They 'knew' that Aristotle had 'proven' the 'quintessential' perfection of celestial bodies, a perfection that would disallow any such 'blemishes' as craters. So they refused to look and see.
One of my correspondents is a retired philosophy of professor and a Buddhist. He maintains that one ought to spend as much time meditating as one spends on philosophy. So if one philosophizes for five hours per day, then one ought to meditate for five hours per day! A hard saying indeed!
According to Bryan Magee ("What I Believe," Philosophy 77 (2002), 407- 419), nobody knows the answers to such questions as whether we survive our bodily deaths or whether God exists. Citing Xenophanes and Kant, Magee further suggests that the answers to these questions are not only unknown but impossible for us to know. Assuming that Magee is right on both counts, what follows?
One inference one might draw from our state of irremediable ignorance about ultimates is that it provides us with 'doxastic wiggle-room' (my expression): if one cannot know one way or the other, then one is permitted either to believe or not believe that we survive and that God exists. After all, if it cannot be proven that ~p, then it is epistemically possible that p, and this epistemic possibility might be taken to allow as reasonable our believing that p. Invoking the Kantian distinction between thinking and knowing (Critique of Pure Reason, B 146 et passim) one could maintain that although we have and can have no knowledge of God and the soul, we can think them without contradiction, and without contradicting anything we know. Does not the denial of knowledge make room for faith, as Kant himself famously remarks? CPR B xxx: Ich musste also das Wissen aufheben, um zum Glauben Platz zu bekommen... "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith...." (And given that contact with reality is a great good, would it not be better to venture contact with the unknowable portion of it via faith rather than have no contact with it at all by insisting that only knowable truth is admissible truth?)
This inference, however, the inference from our irremediable ignorance to the rational allowability of belief in the epistemically possible, is one that Magee resolutely refuses to draw, seeing it as a shabby evasion and an "illegitimate slide."(408) Thus he holds it to be illegitimate to move from the epistemic possibility of post-mortem survival to belief in it. As he puts it, "What I find myself wantingto drive home is not merely that we do not know but that the only honest way to live and think is in the fullest possible acknowledgment of that fact and its consequences, without ducking out into a faith of some kind, and without evasion or self-indulgence of any other sort." (417) Near the beginning of his essay, Magee cites Freud to the effect that no right to believe anything can be derived from ignorance. (408)
The relevance of the Freudian point, however, is unclear. First of all, no one would maintain that ignorance about a matter such as post-mortem survival justifies, in the sense of provides evidence for, the belief that one survives. And a person who thinks it rationally allowable to believe where we cannot know will presumably not take a deontological approach to belief in terms of epistemic rights and duties. In any case, the issue is this: Is it ever rationally permissible to believe where knowledge is unavailable? Magee answers this question in the negative. But I cannot see that he makes anythingclose to a convincing case for this answer. I will simply run through some questions/objections the cumulative force of which will be to neutralize, though perhaps not refute, Magee's view. Thus I play for a draw, not a win. I doubt that one can expect more from philosophy. This post presents just one of my questions/objections.
Probative Overkill?
One problem with Magee's argument is that it seems to prove too much. If we have no knowledge about such metaphysical/religious matters as God and the soul, and so must suspend belief in them lest we violate the putative epistemic duty to believe only on sufficient evidence, then we must also suspend belief on a host of other issues in respect of which we certainly cannot claim knowledge. Surely, the very same reasons that lead Magee to say that no one knows anything about God and the soul must also lead us to say that no one knows whether or not there are cases in which justice demands capital punishment, or whether or not a just society is one which provides for redistribution of wealth, or whether or not animals have rights, etc. Indeed, we must say that no one knows what justice is or what rights are. And of course it is not merely about normative issues that we are ignorant.
Do we know what motion, or causation, or time are? Do we know what properties are, or what is is for a thing to have a property, or to exist, or to change, or to be the same thing over time? Note that these questions, unlike the God and soul questions, do not pertain to what is transcendent of experience. I see the tomato; I see that it is red; I see or think I see that it is the same tomato that I bought from the grocer an hour ago; applying a knife to it, I see or think I see that slicing it causes it to split apart.
For that matter, Does Magee know that his preferred ethics of belief is correct? How does he know that? How could he know it? Does he have sufficient evidence? If he knows it, why do philosophers better than him take a different view? Does he merely believe it? Does he believe it because his fear of being wrong trumps his desire for the truth? Does he want truth, but only on his terms? Does he want only that truth that can satisfy the criteria that he imposes? Would it not be more self-consistent for Magee to suspend belief as to his preferred ethics of belief? Why is it better to have no contact with reality than such contact via faith? Isn't it better to have a true belief that I cannot justify about a life and death matter than no belief about that matter? Does the man of faith self-indulgently evade reality, or does the philosopher of Magee's stripe self-indulgently and pridefully refuse such reality as he cannot certify by his methods?
No one knows how economies really work; if we had knowledge in this area we would not have wildly divergent paradigms of economic explanation. But this pervasive ignorance does not prevent people from holding very firm beliefs about these non-religious issues, beliefsthat translate into action in a variety of ways, both peaceful and violent. It is furthermore clear that people feel quite justified in holding, and acting upon, these beliefs that go beyond what they can claim to know. What is more, I suspect Magee would agree that people are often justified in holding such beliefs.
So if Magee is right that we ought to suspend belief about religious matters, then he must also maintain that we ought to suspend belief about the social and political matters that scarcely anyone ever suspends belief about. That is, unless he can point to a relevant difference between the religious questions and the social-political ones. But it is difficult to discern any relevant difference. In both cases we are dealing with knowledge-transcendent beliefs for which elaborate rational defenses can be constructed, and elaborate rational refutations of competing positions.
In both cases we are dealing with very abstruse and 'metaphysical' issues such as the belief in equal rights, a belief which manifestly has no empirical justification. And in both cases we are dealing with issues of great importance to our welfare and happiness. On the other hand, if Magee thinks that we are justified in holding beliefs about social and political matters, something he does of course hold, then he should also maintain that we are justified in holding beliefs about religious matters. There is no justification for a double standard. In this connection, one should read Peter van Inwagen's Quam Dilecta, in God and the Philosophers, ed. T. V. Morris (Oxford University Press, 1994), 31-60. See especially 41-46 for a penetrating discussion of the double standard.
On Ockham and supposita: A little perplexity at the end, when you write that “[w]hat is curious here is how very specific theological doctrines are allowed to drive the general ontology.” One man’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens, I suppose, but if Ockham is trying to maintain theological orthodoxy it doesn’t seem too strange to me. Presumably his Christian faith came first, and wasn’t based on any complicated metaphysical arguments. Isn’t it reasonable for him to hold the faith unless it just can’t be done, no way and no how, rather than revise it for the sake of a more straightforward ontology – especially if he is concerned with the risk to his salvation? Maybe I’m misunderstanding something simple here.
I agree that Ockham's Christian faith came first. But I don't agree that the content of his faith wasn't based on any complicated metaphysical arguments. The theological dogmas had to be hammered out in the councils in the teeth of various competing teachings, later to be branded 'heretical,' and that hammering-out involved metaphysical reasoning using principles and distinctions and logical operations not to be found in the Scripture. To state the obvious, the church fathers made use of Greek philosophical conceptuality.
For example, if the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, what exactly does that mean? That God took on a human body? That is, roughly, the Appolinarian heresy. Does it mean that there are two persons in Christ, the Word and the person of the man Jesus? That, roughly, is the Nestorian heresy. If Jesus died on the cross, did a real man die on the cross, or merely a phantom body as the Docetists maintained? Did God the Father suffer on the cross as the Patripassians held? And so on.
Therefore, if Ockham's faith was, or was in part, faith that certain dogmatic propositions are true, then his faith was based on "complicated metaphysical arguments." Of course, there is much more to a living religious faith than giving one's intellectual assent to theological propositions. And one can and should question just how important doctrine is to a vital religious faith.
The problem I am trying to command a clear view of can be approached via the following aporetic tetrad:
a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition)
b. There is only one person in Christ, the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity. (Rejection of the heresy of Nestorius, according to which in Christ there are two persons in two natures rather than one person in two natures.)
c. The individual(ized) human nature of Christ is a primary substance of a rational nature.
d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.
Now let's say you have been schooled in Aristotle's metaphysics and are also an orthodox Christian. So you are inclined to accept all four propositions. But they cannot all be true. So one of them must be rejected. Suppose you reject (d). You are then allowing your theological convictions to influence your ontology, your metaphysica generalis.
Is this kosher? Well, if there are non-theological cases in which a distinction between substance and suppositum is warranted, then clearly yes. But if there aren't, then the rejection of (d) and the attendant distinction between substances and supposita smacks of being ad hoc. You are in a logical bind and you extricate yourself by making a distinction that caters to this very bind.
The distinction is made to accommodate a piece of theology, namely, the orthodox Incarnation doctrine. And so the distinction between primary substance and supposit is open to the charge of being ad hoc. The Latin phrase means 'to this' and suggests that the distinction has no independent support and is a mere invention pulled out of thin air to render coherent an otherwise incoherent, or not obviously coherent, theological doctrine.
Again, I ask: Is this (philosophically) kosher?
If our question as philosophers of religion is whether the Incarnation doctrine is rationally acceptable, then it is hard to see how it can shown to be such by the use of a distinction which has no independent support, a distinction which is crafted for the precise purpose of making the doctrine in question rationally acceptable. To rebut this objection from ad hocness, someone will have to explain to me that and how the primary substance-supposit distinction has independent warrant. Is there some clear non-theological case in which the distinction surfaces?
If I ask whether the Incarnation doctrine is rationally acceptable, and you make an ad hoc distinction that removes a putative contradiction, this simply pushes the question back a step: is your distinction rationally acceptable? Arguably, it is not if it is purely ad hoc.
But I admit that the objection from ad-hocness or ad-hocceity is not decisive. Dennis might say to me, "Look, the theological dogma has the force of divine revelation because it was elaborated by fathers of the church under the guidance of the Holy Ghost. So what more support could you ask for?"
At this point we have a stand-off. If the Incarnation doctrine in its specific Chalcedonian formulation is divinely revealed, then of course it is true, whether or not we mere mortals can understand how it is true. But note also that if the doctrine is divinely revealed, then there is no need to defend it by making fancy distinctions. The main point, however, is that anyone who worries about the rational acceptability of the orthodox Incarnation doctrine will also worry about how any group of men can legitimately claim to be guided by the Holy Ghost. How could anyone know such a thing? Any person or group can claim to be under divine inspiration. But how validate the claim?
This looks to be another version of the Athens versus Jerusalem stand-off. The religionist can say to the philosopher: "We have our truth and it is from God, and we are under no obligation to prove its 'acceptability' to your puny 'reason.' To which the philosopher might respond, "You are asking us to abandon our very way of life, the life of inquiry and rational autonomy, and for what? For acquiescence in sheer dogmatism, dogmatism contradicted by other dogmatisms that you conveniently ignore."
Dennis also brings up the soteriological angle. Is one's salvation at risk if one questions or rejects a particular doctrinal formulation of the Incarnation? Is it reasonable to think that salvation hinges on the acceptance of the Chalcedonian definition? Is it reasonable to think that Nestorius is in hell for having espoused a doctrine that was rejected as heretical? Not by my lights. By my lights to believe such a thing is border-line crazy. How could a good God condemn to hell a man who, sincerely, prayerfully, and by his best intellectual lights, in good faith and in good conscience, arrived at a view that the group that got power labelled heretical or heterodox?
I wrote an entry on the main sorts of motive that might lead one who takes religion seriously to take up the study of philosophy. I distinguished five main motives: the apologetic, the critical, the debunking, the transcensive, and the substitutional. But there is also the move away from philosophy to religion and its motives. One motive is the suspicion that philosophy is a snare and a delusion, a blind alley; there is the sense that it cannot be what its noble name suggests, namely, the love of wisdom, and that he who seeks wisdom must forsake Athens for Jerusalem. There is the sense that philosophy is, in truth, misosophy, the hatred of wisdom. An ancient theme, that of the irreconcilable antagonism between religion and philosophy, one traceable back to Tertullian at least. (See Étienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, Charles Scribners, 1938, Chapter One.)
Anthony Flood has been an off-and-on correspondent of mine since the early days of the blogosphere: I believe we first made contact in 2004. I admire him because he "studies everything" as per my masthead motto. As far as I can judge from my eremitic outpost, Tony is a genuine truth-seeker, a restless quester who has canvassed many, many positions with an open mind and a willingness to admit errors. (The man was at one time a research assistant for Herbert Aptheker!) Better a perpetual seeker than a premature finder. Here below we are ever on the way: in statu viae. Tony's views have changed over the years I have known him and it is his present attitude toward philosophy that I wish to examine here. In particular, I will evaluate his claim that philosophy is misosophy. Is this right? Or is it rather the case that religion when opposed to philosophy is misology, the hatred of reason? Is philosophy misosophy or is religion misology? That is a stark, if somewhat inaccurate, was of defining the problematic. I will quote liberally from Tony's position statement and then comment.
The position I've come to has been percolating in my mind for years. It intruded upon my thinking intermittently, but until recently I was unable to remove certain obstacles to my assent. [. . .] The critique of philosophy worked out by Gregory L. Bahnsen . . . however, has at last won my allegiance . . .
[. . .]
The gist of Bahnsen’s critique is that philosophy as it has been practiced is virtually at enmity with Christ, who is the Wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24). To the degree that it is op-posed to Christ, to that degree it is misosophy, the hatred rather than the love of wisdom. For the Christian, wisdom is not an abstract virtue, but a divine person. To pretend indifference to Christ is pretend indifference to the only Wisdom worth having; to hate Christ is to hate wisdom, that is, to hate him in whom all the treasures of wisdom are hid (Col 2:3); and to hate wisdom is to love death (Prov 8:36). Christians may continue to use “philosophy” and its cognates, but they reserve the right to qualify that usage. Between the philosopher and the misosopher, covenant keeper and covenant breaker, there is antithesis.
Tony hasn't given us the "gist" of Bahnsen's critique but the conclusion at which he arrives; the gist of the critique would have to contain a summary of the reasons for the conclusion. Setting that quibble aside, I move to a substantive point. While it is true that for a Christian Christ is the source of all wisdom and therefore, in a sense, wisdom itself, saying this is consistent with maintaining that philosophy is the love of wisdom. The philosopher qua philosopher seeks wisdom using his unaided reason, unaided, that is, by the data of revelation. It is not that the philosopher qua philosopher rejects the data of revelation or the very idea that there could be such a thing as divine revelation; it is rather that he makes no use of it qua philosopher. (To save keystrokes I won't keep repeating the qualification 'qua philosopher' but it remains in force.) To borrow a term from Husserl, the philosopher 'brackets' revelation. I see nothing in the nature of philosophy to prevent a philosopher from arriving at the conclusion that wisdom is ultimately a person. So my first question to Tony would be: Why must philosophy be opposed to wisdom when wisdom is taken to be a divine person?
Admittedly, philosophy cannot bring us to Wisdom in its fullness, especially if wisdom is a divine person, but it hardly follows that it cannot serve as a propadeutic to a participation in this Wisdom. Here is a crude analogy. The menu is not the meal. But the menu is not opposed to the meal. The menu provides access to the meal via verbal description, the very same meal that one goes on to eat. It is not as if there are two meals, the meal of the menu writer and the meal of the eater. There is exactly one meal accessed in two ways, the first obviously inferior to the second. If you don't get the analogy, forget it.
There is an important point of terminology that we need to discuss. Tony claims that Christians have the right to use 'philosophy' in their way as meaning the love of Christ. (After all, if wisdom is Christ, then the love of wisdom is the love of Christ.) I deny this right. 'Philosophy' means what it means and that is to be discerned from the practice of the great philosophers beginning with the ancient Greeks. To know what philosophy is one reads Plato, for starters, and not just for starters. Philosophy is what is done in those dialogues and what has arisen by way of commentary on and critique of what was done in those famous discussions. "Philosophy is Plato and Plato philosophy." (Emerson) I characterize philosophy here. The characterization begins with this sentence: "Philosophy is not fundamentally a set of views but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to know the truth, applies discursive reason to the data of life in an attempt to arrive at the ultimate truth about them."
The Christian, therefore, is not free to use 'philosophy' and cognates in an idiosyncratic way. Or rather he is free to do so but if he does he causes confusion and makes communication difficult if not impossible. 'Philosophy' does not and cannot mean 'love of Christ.' This is not to say that one cannot move beyond philosophy to Christian faith. One can, and perhaps one should. But nothing is to be gained by tampering with the established sense of 'philosophy.'
Tony writes, "Between the philosopher and the misosopher, covenant keeper and covenant breaker, there is antithesis." I object to this sentence because of the misuse of the word 'philosopher.' Tony has decided that the philosopher, in his sense, is a lover of Christ, and that a philosopher (in the proper sense) is a misosopher and thus a hater of Christ. But he has no right to hijack the terminology, nor, as regards the substantive question, has he shown that philosophy is opposed to Christian wisdom.
Autonomy versus Heteronomy/Theonomy
We now come to the crux of the matter: the tension between the autonomy of finite reason and the heteronomy of obedient faith. This is, in essence, the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. Whether this tension is an opposition or contradiction, as Tertullian thought, and as Tony seems to think, remains to be seen, and cannot be assumed at the outset. (I set aside the tension between Athens and Benares, the discussion of which does not belong here, even though that too is a tension between philosophy and a kind of religion.) Finite reason, reason as we find it within ourselves, presumes to judge heaven and earth and everything in between; it would play "the spectator of all time and existence," to borrow a beautiful line from Plato's Republic. But it must be admitted that the results have been meager. Has even one substantive philosophical question been resolved to the satisfaction of all competent practioners in two and one half mllennia? No. What we have instead are endless controversies and the strife of systems. Magnificent in aspiration, philosophy is miserable in execution. Philosophy has proven impotent to provide us with the knowledge we seek, the knowledge of ultimates, and in particular salvific knowledge, knowledge that caters not merely to our theoretical needs but to our deepest existential ones as well, knowledge that does not merely inform us, but transforms us.
To make up for the infirmity of finite reason we must look elsewhere to a source of succor lying beyond the human horizon. And so reason, while remaining within the sphere of immanence and autonomy, raises the question of the possibility of revelation, the possibility of an irruption into the sphere of immanence from beyond the human-all-too-human. The possibility is entertained that the true nomos is theonomos, and that what at first appears as heteronomy is in reality theonomy. The possibility is entertained that the prideful intellect must fall silent and humbly submit to God's Word.
But at this juncture we encounter what Josiah Royce calls the religious paradox or
The Paradox of Revelation. Suppose someone claims to have received a divine communication regarding the divine will, the divine plan, the need for salvation, the way to salvation, or any related matter. This person can be asked, "By what marks do you personally distinguish a divine revelation from any other sort of report?" (Josiah Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight, 22-23) How is a putative revelation authenticated? By what marks or criteria do we recognize it as genuine? The identifying marks must be in the believer's mind prior to his acceptance of the revelation as valid. For it is by testing the putative revelation against these marks that the believer determines that it is genuine. One needs "a prior acquaintance with the nature and marks and, so to speak, signature of the divine will." (p. 25) But how can a creature who needs saving lay claim to this prior acquaintance with the marks of genuine revelation?The paradox in a nutshell is that it seems that only revelation could provide one with what one needs to be able to authenticate a report as revelation. Royce:Faith, and the passive and mysterious intuitions of the devout, seem to depend on first admitting that we are naturally blind and helpless and ignorant, and worthless to know, of ourselves, any saving truth; and upon nevertheless insisting that we are quite capable of one very lofty type of knowledge -- that we are capable, namely, of knowing God's voice when we hear it, of distinguishing a divine revelation from all other reports, of being sure, despite all our worthless ignorance, that the divine higher life which seems to speak to us in our moments of intuition is what it declares itself to be. If, then, there is a pride of intellect, does there not seem to be an equal pride of faith, an equal pretentiousness involved in undertaking to judge that certain of our least articulate intuitions are infallible?Surely here is a genuine problem, and it is a problem for the reason. (103)
Is it a genuine problem or not? Can the church's teaching authority be invoked to solve the problem? Suppose a point of doctrine regarding salvation and the means thereto is being articulated at a church council. The fathers in attendance debate among themselves, arrive at a result, and claim that it is inspired and certified by the Holy Spirit. But by what marks do they authenticate a putative deliverance of the Holy Spirit as a genuine deliverance? How do they know that the Holy Spirit is inspiring them and not something else such as their own subconscious desire for a certain result? This is exactly Royce's problem.
The problem, then, is this. Reason is weak and philosophy, whose engine is unaided reason, cannot deliver the goods. The salvific wisdom we seek it cannot supply. It remains an interminable and inconclusive seeking, but never a finding; it remains forever the (erothetic) love of wisdom, not its possession. So we look beyond philosophy to the data of revelation. But how do we authenticate such data? How do we distinguish pseudo-revelation from the genuine article? By what marks is it known? We are thrown back upon our infirm reasoning powers to sort this out.
So, while confessing in all humility the infirmity of reason, we have no option but to rely on it as we do when, by its means, we come to admit the infirmity of reason. Though weak, reason is strong enough to acquire a genuine insight into its own weakness and limitations and the need for supplementation ab extra. But this supplementation by revelation cannot go untested. Tony may be right that we need to "repent" and submit our wills to God's, but what that will is has to be discerned, and there is no way around the fact that it is up to us to do the discerning using the God-given equipment we possess, as infirm as it may be.
But let's hear what Flood has to say:
From 1969, when I first began to read philosophy (as it is commonly called), I had very rarely questioned the presumption of autonomy exhibited by my models in that field, whereby the human mind posits itself as the final judge of what is real, true, and good. I did not question that presumptive stance even when the provisional conclusions I arrived at were professedly Christian-theistic and therefore incompatible with it. The way I approached “God” did not ethically comport with wanting God. I played it safe, hedged my bets, looking for nothing more than a piece of metaphysical furniture to complete the interior design of my latest philosophical mansion. The irony of this discrepancy was lost on me, at least until recently.
What Tony seems to be saying here is that when we approach God via philosophy, i.e., via finite discursive reason, relying only on those evidences that can be validated from within the sphere of immanence, eschewing any such exogenic input as the data of revelation, what we arrive at is not the true God, but 'God,' a mere furnishing in the mansion of immanence, a mansion that is perhaps better compared to a doghouse. Tony thus seems to be sounding a very old theme, that of the opposition of the God of the philosophers to the the God of Sbraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I myself do not accept this opposition for reasons I supply in Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers.
To revert to the crude analogy presented above, there are not two meals, the meal of the menu-writer and the meal of the eater. One and the same meal is 'accessed' in two different ways, via description and via 'ingestion.' What the menu-writer describes, assuming the accuracy of the description, is not something that exists only in his mind, a bit of mental furniture, but something that exists in reality. Similarly, when the philosopher speaks of God , he is not speaking of something that exists only in his mind, but of something that exists in reality. But let's hear some more from Tony:
As I now see it, that loss was not innocent and my present insight is wholly of grace. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov 9:10), however, not something tacked on at the end of one’s system. (Part V of Whitehead’s Process and Reality comes to mind. So does Chapter XIX of Lonergan’s Insight.)
Human beings, Christian and non-Christian alike, do know things. They do reason. They do calculate, induct, deduce, plan, accuse, exonerate, interpret. They do write histories, novels, and plays. They do compose symphonies and conduct experiments. They do creatively improvise on canvas, in the sculpture studio, and on the band stand. But their attempts to account for these facts apart from their dependence upon God have been marvelous failures, for they cannot secure the experience-transcending universal claims on which they rely when they engage in any of those activities. They ought to acknowledge the laws of logic, the uniformity of nature, moral absolutes as gifts of God. Unless God grants them the spirit of repentance, however, this they will not do, for it is offensive to their posture of autonomy. But they pay a price for this posture in the coin of rank foolishness.
Ironically, such a critique of philosophy is what one would predict professing Christian philosophers to produce, informed as they are by their awareness of the covenantal relationship they bear to God. Historically, however, what comes under the label “Christian philosophy” is compromised. Christian philosophers have generally given their blessing to pretenses of neutrality and autonomy, content to conjecture how far the human mind can go under its own steam before grabbing the supernatural rope to take them the rest of the way.
They can give that blessing, however, only by suppressing awareness (that they otherwise happily acknowledge) that the human being is a created, covenant-bound bearer of the image of God. That is, Christian philosophers join their enemies in “testing” the hypothesis that Christian theism is at least as “reasonable” as anything else on offer in the marketplace of ideas. As though any inference at all could be reasonable if Christian theism were not antecedently true. As though an impersonal matrix of possibility were Lord of all. I understand why Christianity’s opponents “load” the argument against Christian theism. But why do Christians follow them?
In this last paragraph, Tony raises a couple of fascinating questions. One is whether (to put it in my own way) the necessary truth of the laws of logic presupposes the existence of God. There are those who have argued such a thing, but, if Tony is right, why bother? If Jerusalem supplies all the needs of man, who needs Athens? If reason cannot be relied upon to bring us to any truth at all, then it cannot be relied upon to show that logic presupposes God. The other question concerns the relation between the modal framework, standardly artculated in terms of 'possible worlds,' and God. Analytic theists standardly maintain that God exists in all possible worlds. Does such talk subject God to the modal framework, thereby compromising the divine sovereignty? Is God lord of all, including the modal framework, or is God subject to the modal framework? Or neither?
These questions cannot be pursued here, but one comment is in order, and an obvious one it is: Tony seems merely to beg the question against his opponents. For example, he just assumes that Athens and Jerusalem are irreconcilably anatagonistic and that the whole truth resides in Jerusalem. He is free to make these assumptions of course. No one is compelled to remain within philosphy's smoky rooms. The door is unlocked and one is free to pass throught it. But then one should not attempt to explain or justify one's exit. For any such attempt will entangle on in the very thing one is trying to get away from.
There is of course more to be said -- in subsequent posts.
The following is from an interview with A. C. Grayling who is speaking of the open mind and open inquiry:
It’s a mindset, he reveals, that “loves the open-endedness and the continuing character of the conversation that humankind has with itself about all these things that really matter.”
It’s also a way of thinking that marks a line in the sand between religion and science. The temptation to fall for the former—hook, line, and sinker—is plain to see: “People like narratives, they like to have an explanation, they like to know where they are going.” Weaving another string of thought into his tapestry of human psychology, Grayling laments that his fellow human beings “don’t want to have to think these things out for themselves. They like the nice, pre-packaged answer that’s just handed to them by somebody authoritative with a big beard.”
A. C. Grayling, like many if not most militant atheists, sees the difference between religion and science in the difference between pre-packaged dogmas thoughtlessly and uncritically accepted from some authority and open-ended free inquiry.
That is not the way I see it. For me, mature religion is more quest than conclusions. It too is open-ended and ongoing, subject to revision and correction. It benefits from abrasion with such competing sectors of culture as philosophy and science. By abrasion the pearl is formed.
All genuine religion involves a quest since God must remain largely unknown, and this by his very nature. He must remain latens Deitas in Aquinas' phrase:
Adoro te devote, latens Deitas, Quæ sub his figuris vere latitas; Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit, Quia te contemplans totum deficit.
Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore, Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more, See, Lord, at Thy service low lies here a heart Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.
But as religion becomes established in the world in the form of churches, sects, and denominations with worldly interests, it becomes less of a quest and more of a worldly hustle. Dogmatics displaces inquiry, and fund-raising faith. The once alive becomes ossified. All human institutions are corruptible, and are eventually corrupted.
Mature religion must be more quest than conclusions. It is vastly more a seeking than a finding. More a cleansing of windows and a polishing of mirrors than a glimpsing. And certainly more a glimpsing than a comfortable resting upon dogmas. When philosophy and religion and mysticism and science are viewed as quests they complement one another. And this despite the tensions among Athens, Jerusalem, Benares, and Alexandria.
The critic of religion wants to pin it down, reducing it to dogmatic contents, so as to attack it where it is weakest. Paradoxically, the atheist 'knows' more about God than the sophisticated theist -- he knows so much that he knows no such thing could exist. He 'knows' the divine nature and knows that it is incompatible with the existence of evil -- to mention one line of attack. What he 'knows,' of course, is only the concept he himself has fabricated and projected. Aquinas, by contrast, held that the existence of God is far better known than God's nature -- which remains shrouded in a cloud of unknowing.
The (immature) religionist also wants religion pinned down and dogmatically spelled out for purposes of self-definition, doxastic security, other-exclusion, worldly promotion, and political leverage. This is a reason why reformers like Jesus are met with a cold shoulder -- or worse.
How is it that someone as intelligent as Grayling could have such a cartoonish understanding of religion? The answer is that he and his brethren utterly lack the religious sensibility. They lack it in the same way many scientists lack the philosophical sensibility, many prosaic folk the poetic sensibility, and so on.
This is why debates with militant atheists are a waste of time. To get a taste of the febrile militancy of Grayling's atheism, see here.
Formerly atheist blogger Leah Libresco reports that she has converted to Catholicism.
That's quite a shift. Typically, the terminus a quo of Tiber swimmers is either generic theism or mere Christianity (in C. S. Lewis' sense) or some Protestant sect. Seismic is the shift from out-and-out God denial to acceptance of an extremely specific conception of God.
How specific?
The God of Catholicism is of course a Trinity: one God in three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. (It was 'Holy Ghost' still in the 'fifties; the arguably ruinous Vatican II reforms of the 'sixties replaced 'Ghost' with 'Spirit.') The Second Person of the Trinity, the Son, or Logos (Word), entered human history at a particular time in a particular place in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the doctrine of the Incarnation. God, or rather God the Son, became man. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us." To do so, Jesus had to be born of a woman in that humble manner common to all of us, inter faeces et urinam, and yet without an earthly father. Thus arises the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. But since the God-Man is perfectly sinless, he canot be born of a woman bearing the taint of Original Sin. Hence the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception: Mary, the mother of God, was born without Original Sin. So far, five dogmas that go beyond generic Western monotheism: Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Original Sin, Immaculate Conception. See Trinity and Incarnation and Original Sin categories for some details.
I have gone only a about a third of the way into the specificity of the Catholic God-conception, but far enough for one to see how dogmatically rich it is.
Now the more dogmatically rich a religion, the more specific its claims, the harder it will be to accept. To be an intellectually honest Roman Catholic, for example, one must accept not only the above dogmas but a number of others besides. These extremely specific dogmas are stumbling blocks to many thinking people. (Of course, the same problem arises with other doctrinally rich belief systems such as Communism.)
For some of us who were raised in the Roman church, the dogmas and their presuppositions beg give rise to questions that we simply must get clear about. (We cannot merely go along to get along, or participate in rites and rituals the theological foundations of which are murky. Example: to take communion when Transubstantiation beggars understanding.) And so some of us become philosophers. But any movement towards Athens is a movement away from Jerusalem . . . .
But it's Saturday night, time to punch the clock, time for my once-a-week ration of tequila, and time for Saturday Night at the Oldies. Tomorrow's another day.
Which is better: to inquire whether there is immortality, or to live in such a way as to deserve it? Both are good, but the second is better.
A childhood friend and committed Christian offers this well-crafted comment:
You are meant for immortality but cannot live in such a way as to deserve it. The only thing you can “do” in this regard is step aside and let the only person so qualified for this task (of deserving a living survival from death) substitute for you. Your willingness to step aside to let this uniquely qualified individual do the thing that only he can do will change you. Until that change you are incompletely made as it were and are qualified for going from death to death. God sees our unfitness to be fully in his presence. When the substitution takes place, God sees the substitute’s fitness as an attribute of our soul and we are accepted into God’s presence. This is immortal life. This is possible for any man.
The substitute is qualified and ready. The transition event pivots on our willingness to either use our free will as though its purpose is to allow us to be established as independent from the presence of God or to accept God’s purpose in equipping us with this free will which is to accept freely this offer of substitution, admit our inability to make ourselves fit to be fully in God’s presence, and submit to the process of substitution and be born again.
Note first that the comment is consistent with the truth of my aphorism. I asked which is better: to examine the question of personal immortality or to live in such a way as to deserve it. It should be obvious that while both are good -- the first as an instance of the Socratic principle that the examined life is better than the unexamined life -- the second is better. The second is better even if nothing we do or could do suffices to secure for us personal immortality. In other words, the second disjunct does not presuppose the possibility of attaining immortality 'on our own power' and as our just desert. One can live so as to deserve immortality even if one does not, in the end, deserve it.
Nevertheless, it is a very important question whether, if there is personal immortality, we can secure it by our own efforts. The Christian answer is in the negative. As a result of the Fall, we are so out of right relation to God that nothing we could do could restore us to right relation. Adam's sin condemned him and his descendants to death. The Platonic notion that man is naturally immortal, in virtue of the immortality of his soul, is foreign to Christianity. Immortality was a supernatural gift in our prelapsarian state, and, after the Fall, it became a gift again only because of the substitutionary sacrifice of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, agnus dei qui tollit peccatum mundi.
My old friend is suggesting that all we can do is confess our impotence in bringing about our own salvation and accept exogenic assistance, substituting for our own vain efforts the Savior's efficacious efforts. One comment is that, while my friend was brought up Catholic, he now seems perilously close to the Protestant sola fide, a a doctrine I have never understood. How could faith alone suffice? Works don't count at all? Nothing we do makes any difference? As I understand the Catholic doctrine -- which strikes me as balanced where the Protestant one is unbalanced -- there is no soteriological bootstrapping: one cannot save oneself by one's own efforts alone; still, works play some role, however exiguous that role may be.
As a philosopher, however, my problems lie far deeper than this intramural theological dispute, having to do with the exact meaning of the Fall, and the sense and possibility of Trinity and Incarnation. My friend is presupposing the truth of Christianity. But for a philosopher, the truth of Christianity is a problem, not a presupposition.
And so once again we are brought back to the fruitful tension between Athens and Jerusalem, the tension between the need for autonomous understanding and the need to accept, faithfully and obediently, Biblical revelation. The Bible-based believer has his truth and so sees no need to inquire; the philosopher, however, well disposed as he may be to the claims of revelation, cannot help, on pain of violating his own nature and integrity, inquiring whether what the believer calls truth really is truth.
When I began to read your “Who doesn't need philosophy?” post, I immediately started to think of reasons why adherents of religious and nonreligious worldviews need philosophy as inquiry. Indeed, one can think of many good reasons why such adherents (especially the dogmatic ones) need philosophy.
However, as I continued to read, I noticed the irony of your post (particularly the final paragraph). It seems at least possible that your entry is a dialectic antiphrasis to make the point that we all need philosophy as inquiry, including sincere believers and religious and nonreligious dogmatists. Humanity needs to inquire because humanity needs truth. As Aristotle put it in the first sentence of the Metaphysics, all humans by nature seek to know.
Over the weekend, I found myself wondering whether your post is antiphrastic or literal. Do you really think philosophy as inquiry is unnecessary for the religious person? Or do you think the religious person should philosophize? I think the latter; I am curious to know what you think; either way I appreciate the thought provoking post.
To answer the reader's question I will write a commentary on my post.
Philosophy: Who Doesn't Need It?
The title is a take-off on Ayn Rand's Philosophy: Who Needs It? Rand's rhetorical question is not intended to express the proposition that people do not need philosophy, but that they do. So perhaps we could call the question in her title an antiphrastic rhetorical question.
Who doesn't need philosophy?
I don't approve of one-sentence paragraphs in formal writing, but blogging is not formal writing: it is looser, more personal, chattier, pithier, more direct. And in my formal writing I indent my paragraphs. That too is a nicety that is best dropped in this fast medium.
People who have the world figured out don't need it. If you know what's up when it comes to God and the soul, the meaning of life, the content and basis of morality, the role of state, and so on, then you certainly don't need philosophy. If you are a Scientologist or a Mormon or a Roman Catholic or an adherent of any other religious or quasi-religious worldview then you have your answers and philosophy as inquiry (as opposed to philosophy as worldview) is strictly unnecessary. And same goes for the adherents of such nonreligious worldviews as leftism and scientism and evangelical atheism.
The first two sentences are intended literally and they are literally true. 'Figured out' is a verb of success: if one has really got the world figured out, then he possesses the truth about it. But in the rest of the paragraph a bit of irony begins to creep in inasmuch as the reader is expected to know that it is not the case, and cannot be the case, that all the extant worldviews are true. So by the end of the paragraph the properly caffeinated reader should suspect that my point is that people need philosophy. They need it because they don't know the ultimate low-down, the proof of which is the welter of conflicting worldviews.
(The inferential links that tie There is a welter of conflicting worldviews to People don't know the ultimate low-down to People need philosophy as inquiry all need defense. I could write a book about that. At the moment I am merely nailing my colors to the mast.)
He who has the truth needn't seek it. And those who are in firm possession of the truth are well-advised to stay clear of philosophy with its tendency to sow the seeds of doubt and confusion.
Now the irony is in full bloom. Surely it cannot be the case that both a Communist and a Catholic are in "firm possession of the truth" about ultimate matters. At most one can be in firm possession. But it is also possible that neither are. There is also the suggestion that truth is not the sort of thing about which one side or the other can claim proprietary rights.
Those who are secure in their beliefs are also well-advised to turn a blind eye to the fact of the multiplicity of conflicting worldviews. Taking that fact into cognizance may cause them to doubt whether their 'firm possession of the truth' really is such.
The final paragraph is ironic. I am not advising people to ignore the conflict of worldviews. For that conflict is a fact, and we ought to face reality and not blink the facts. I am making the conditional assertion that if one values doxastic security over truth, then one is well-advised to ignore the fact that one's worldview is rejected by many others. For careful contemplation of that fact may undermine one's doxastic security and peace of mind. (It is not for nothing that the Roman church once had an index librorum prohibitorum.) Note that to assert a conditional is not to assert either its antecedent or its consequent. So it is logically consistent of me to assert the above conditional while rejecting both its antecedent and its consequent.
The reader understood my entry correctly as "a dialectic antiphrasis to make the point that we all need philosophy as inquiry, including sincere believers and religious and nonreligious dogmatists."
In saying that I of course give the palm to Athens over Jerusalem. But, if I may invoke that failed monk and anti-Athenian irrationalist, Luther: Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders.
For Spencer who, though he no longer believes that the Mormon God concept is instantiated, yet believes that as a concept it remains a worthy contender in the arena of God concepts.
What jobs would a being have to perform to qualify as God?
I count four sorts of job, ontological, epistemological, axiological, and soteriological, the first two more 'Athenian,' the second two more 'Hierosolymic.' The fruitful tension between Athens and Jersualem is a background presupposition. (The tension is fruitful in that it helps explain the vitality of the West; its lack in the Islamic world being part of the explanation of the latter's inanition.) This macro-tension between philosophy and Biblical revelation is mirrored microcosmically in human beings in the tension, fruitful or not, between reason and faith, autonomy and authority. (Man is a microcosm as Nicholas Cusanus maintained.)
1. Ontological Jobs. Why does anything exist at all? To be precise: why does anything contingent exist at all? A God worth his salt must play a role, indeed the main role, in any explanation. In brief: the reason why contingent beings exist is because God, a necessary being, (i) created them out of nothing and (ii) maintains them in existence. God is thus the unsourced source of all finite and contingent existents. Maybe nothing does this job. It might be that the existence of contingent beings is a factum brutum. But nothing could count as God that did not do this explanatory job. Or at least so I claim.
But I hear an objection. "Why couldn't there be a god who was a contingent being among contingent beings or even a contingent god among a plurality of contingent gods?" I needn't deny that there are such minor deities, not that I believe in any. I needn't even deny that they could play an explanatory role or a soteriological role. (I discuss soteriology in #4 below.) My argument would be that they cannot play an ultimate explanatory role or an ultimate soteriological role. Suppose a trio of contingent gods, working together, created the universe. I would press the question: where did they come from? If each of these gods is possibly such as not to exist, then it is legitimate to ask why each does exist. And if each is contingent and in need of explanation, then the same goes for the trio. (Keep your shirts on, muchachos, that is not the fallacy of composition.)
If you say that they always existed as a matter of brute fact, then no ultimate explanation has been given. Suppose time is infinite in both directions and x exists at every time. It doesn't follow that x necessarily exists. To think otherwise would be to confuse the temporal with the modal. An ultimate explanation must terminate in a being whose existence is self-explanatory, where a self-explanatory being is one that exists as a matter of metaphysical necessity and thus has no need of explanation in terms of anything distinct from it.
"Perhaps an ultimate explanation in your sense is not to be had." Well then, the ontological job -- the job of explaining why anything contingent exists at all -- won't get done, and there is no God. Here I may be approaching a stand-off with my interlocutor. I say: nothing counts as God unless it does all four types of job, including the ontological job. My opponent, however, balks at my criterion. He does not see why the God-role can be played only by an absolutely unique being who exists a se and thus by metaphysical necessity.
If you believe in a contingent god or a plurality of contingent gods, and stop there, then I can conceive of something greater, a God who exists of metaphysical necessity and who not only is one without a second, but one without the possibility of a second. But this just brings us back to the Anselmian conception of God as 'that than which no greater can be conceived,' God as the greatest conceivable being, or the maximally perfect being, or the ens reallisimum/perfectissimum, etc. This conception of deity is very Greek and very unanthropomorphic residing as it does in the conceptual vicinity of the Platonic Good and the Plotinian One. But that is what I like about it and my interlocutor doesn't. It's inhuman, 'faceless,' impersonal, he complains. I prefer to say that God is transpersonal and transhuman -- not below but beyond the personal and the human. As I have said before, religion is about transcendence and transformation, not about a duplicate world behind the scenes, a hinterworld if you will. Whatever God is, he can't be a Big Guy in the Sky. And whatever survival of bodily death might be, it is not the perpetuation of these petty selves of ours. An immortality worth wanting is one in which we are transformed and transfigured. The proper desire for immortality is not an egotistical desire but a desire to be purged of one's egotism.
2. Epistemological Jobs. What accounts for the intelligibility of the world and what is its source? A God worth his salt (salary) must play a role, indeed the main role, in any explanation of why the world can be understood by us. The explanation, in outline, is that the world is intelligible because it it is the creation of an intelligent being. As an embodiment and expression of the divine intelligence of the intellectus archetypus it is intelligible to an intellectus ectypus. Maybe the world has no need of a ground or source of its intelligibility. Or maybe we are the source of all intelligibility and project it outward onto what is in itself devoid of intelligibility. But if the world is intelligible, and if this intelligibility is not a projection by us, and if the world has a ground of its intelligibility, then God must play a role, the main role, in the explanation of this intelligibility. Nothing could be called God that did not play this role.
Now if God is the ultimate source of intelligibility and the ultimate ground of ontic truth and, as such, the ultimate condition of the possibility of propositional truth as adequatio intellectus ad rem, then he cannot be just one more intelligible among intelligibles any more than he can be just one more being among beings. A God worthy of the name must be Being itself (self-existent Existence) and Intelligibility itself (self-intelligent Intelligibility), and ontological truth. And so God could not be a contingent being, or a material being, or a collection of contingent material beings. He couldn't be what Mormons apparently believe God to be.
3. Axiological Jobs. By a similar pattern of reasoning, I would argue that nothing could count as God that did not function as the unsourced source of all goodness and the ultimate repository of all value. God is not just another thing that has value, but the paradigm case of value.
4. Soteriological Jobs. Every religion, to count as a religion, must include a doctrine of salvation, a soteriology. Religions exist to cater to the felt need for salvation. It is not essential to a religion that it be theistic, as witness the austere forms of Buddhism, but it is essential to every religion as I define the term that it have a soteriology. A religion must show a way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, and one that is unsatisfactory. Sarvam dukkham! as the First Noble Truth has it. I would go a step further and add that out unsatisfactory predicament is one that we cannot escape from by our own power. Self-power alone won't cut it; other-power is also needed. 'Works' are not sufficient, though I suspect they are necessary.
When it comes to salvation we can ask four questions: of what? from what? to what? by what? Here is one possible answer. Salvation is of the soul, not the body; from our unsatisfactory present predicament of sin, ignorance, and meaninglessness; to a state of moral perfection, intellectual insight, peace, happiness, and meaning; by an agent possessing the power to bring about the transformation of the individual soul. God is the agent of salvation. To be worth his salt he must possess the power to save us. Since the only salvation worth wanting involves a complete overhaul and cleansing of our present wretched selves, this God will have to have impressive powers. He cannot be a supplier of material or quasi-material goodies in some hinterworld in which we carry on in much the same way as we do here, though with the negatives removed. The crudest imaginable paradise is the carnal paradise of the Muslims with its 72 black-eyed virgins who never tire out the lucky effer; but if I am not badly mistaken, Mormon conceptions are also crudely materialistic and superstitiously anthropomorphic to boot.
What I'm driving towards is the thesis that a God who can play the ultimate soteriological role cannot be some minor deity among minor deities who just happens to exist. He must be a morally perfect being with the power to confer moral perfection. This moral and soteriological perfection would seem to require as their ground ontological and epistemological perfection. Not that I have quite shown this . . . .
Back in April, 60 Minutes had a segment on the monks of Mt. Athos. It was surprisingly sympathetic for such a left-leaning program. What one expects and usually gets from libs and lefties and the lamestream media is religion-bashing -- unless of course the religion is Islam, the religion of peace -- but the segment in question was refreshingly objective. It was actually too sympathetic for my taste and not critical enough. It didn't raise the underlying questions. Which is why you need my blog.
We know that this world is no dream and is to that extent real. For all we know it may be as real as it gets, though philosophers and sages over the centuries, East and West, have assembled plenty of considerations that speak against its plenary reality. We don't know that there is any world other than this one. We also don't know that there isn't. Now here is an existential question for you: Will you sacrifice life in this world, with its manifold pleasures and satisfactions, for the chance of transcendent happiness in a merely believed-in hinterworld? The Here is clear; the Hereafter is not. It is not clear that is is, or that it isn't, or what it is if it is. When I say that the world beyond is merely believed-in, I mean that it is merely believed-in from the point of view of the here and now where knowledge is impossible; I am not saying that there is no world beyond.
Let us be clear what the existential option is. It is not between being a dissolute hedonist or an ascetic, a Bukowski or a Simon of Sylites. It is between being one who lives in an upright and productive way but in such a way as to assign plenary reality and importance to this world, this life, VERSUS one who sees this world as a vanishing quantity that cannot be taken with full seriousness but who takes it as preparatory for what comes after death. (Of course, most adherents of a religion live like ordinary worldlings for the most part but hedge their bets by tacking on some religious observances on the weekend. I am not concerned with these wishy-washy types here.)
The monks of Mount Athos spend their lives preparing for death, writing their ticket to the Beyond, engaging in unseen warfare against Satan and his legions. They pray the Jesus Prayer ceaselessly; they do not surf the Web or engage in competitive eating contests or consort with females -- there are no distaff elements on the Holy Mountain.
Is theirs the highest life possible for a human being? Or is the quest to determine what is the highest life the highest life? The monks think they have the truth, the final truth, the essential and saving truth. Thinking they possess it, their task is not to seek it but to implement it in their lives, to 'existentially appropriate it' as Kierkegaard might say, to knit it into the fabric of their Existenz. There is a definite logic to their position. If you have the truth, then there is no point in wasting time seeking it, or talking about it, or debating scoffers and doubters. The point is to do what is necessary to achieve the transcendent Good the existence of which one does not question.
This logic is of course common to other 'true believers.' Karl Marx in the 11th of his Theses on Feuerbach wrote that "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." Marx and the Commies he spawned thought they had the truth, and so the only thing left was to implement it at whatever cost, the glorious end justifying the bloody means. Buddha was famously opposed to speculation. If you have been shot with a poisoned arrow, there is no point in speculating as to the trajectory of the arrow, the social class of the archer, or the chemical composition of the poison; the one thing necessary is to extract the arrow. The logic is the same, though the point is different. The point for Buddha was not theosis (deification) as in Eastern Orthodoxy, or the classless society as in Marxism, but Nirvana, extinguishment of the ego-illusion and final release from the wheel of Samsara.
If you have the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then by all means live in accordance with it. Put it into practice. But do you in fact have the truth? For the philosopher this is the question that comes first and cannot be evaded. If the monks of Mt Athos are right about God and the soul and that the ultimate human goal is theosis, then they are absolutely right to renounce this world of shadows and seemings and ignorance and evil for the sake of true reality and true happiness.
But do they have the truth or does one throw one's life away when one flees to a monastery? Does one toss aside the only reality there is for a bunch of illusions? There is of course a secular analog. I would say that all the earnest and idealistic and highly talented individuals who served the cause of Communism in the 20th century sacrificed their lives on the altar of illusions. They threw their lives away pursuing the impossible. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for example. Such true believers wasted their lives and ended up enablers of great evil. In the end they were played for fools by an evil ideology.
So isn't the philosopher's life the highest possible life for a human being? For only the philosopher pursues the ultimate questions without dogmatism, without blind belief, in freedom, critically, autonomously. I am not saying that the ultimate good for a human being is endless inquiry. The highest goal cannot be endless inquiry into truth, but a resting in it. But that can't come this side of the Great Divide. Here and now is not the place or time to dogmatize. We can rest in dogma on the far side.
My Athenian thesis -- that the life of thephilosopher is the highest life possible for a human being -- won't play very well in Jerusalem. And I myself have doubts about it. But all such doubts are themselves part and parcel of the philosophical enterprise. For if nothing is immune from being hauled before the bench of Reason, there to be rudely interrogated, then fair Philosophia herself must also answer to that tribunal.
I stand astride both cities, with a foot in each. But I favor one leg . . . .
Or to change the metaphor: I do not look down upon the cities from above as from an Olympian standpoint but sight from the perspective of one of the cities, Athens, towards the other, Jerusalem.
So while I attempt a syn-optic view, my syn-optics cannot quite shake off the perspectivism of all finite optics. My intellectual honesty demands recognition of this fact.
In the last paragraph of the preface to the book that bears the slightly inaccurate English title Philosophical Faith and Revelation, Karl Jaspers explains why he entitled his book Der Philosophische Glaube Angesichts der Offenbarung and not Der Philosophische Glaube und Offenbarung. Jaspers remarks that und (and) would be inappropriate because it would suggest that he was laying claim to a superior standpoint outside both philosophy and revelation, a standpoint that Jaspers does not claim to occupy. He speaks from the side of philosophy while being touched, struck, affected (betroffen) by the claims of revelation. Thus his philosophical faith is in the face of (angesichts) revelation, elaborated in confrontation with it. And so his philosophical optics are situated and perspectival, not synoptic or panoptic.
It seems we have only four options assuming that an Hegelian panoptical God's eye view is unavailable to us, a view which would somehow synthesize philosophy and religion:
1. Deny the tension by eliminating Athens in favor of Jersualem in the manner of an irrationalist like Lev Shestov. 2. Deny the tension by eliminating Jerusalem in favor Athens. 3. Live the tension as a philosopher who takes seriously the claims and demands of revelation. 4. Live the tension as a religionist who take seriously the claims and demands of philosophy.
(1) and (2) are nonstarters. So we are left with the difficult choice between (3) and (4).
Our old friend Jeff Hodges of Gypsy Scholar e-mails:
I liked the interesting argument that the consequences of belief and nonbelief in original sin are both bad and thus evidence of our fallen natures. But I do wonder what either original sin or fallenness mean in a Darwinian world . . .
Jeff has posed an excellent question which I must try to answer.
1. I begin with what it can't mean. It cannot mean that our present fallen condition is one we inherited from Adam and Eve if these names refer to the original parents of the human race. And this for two reasons.
A. The first is that nothing imputable to a person, nothing for which he is morally responsible, can be inherited. For what I inherit I receive ab extra by causal mechanisms not in my control. (It doesn't matter whether these mechanisms are deterministic or merely probabilistic.) That which is imputable to me, however, is only that which I freely bring about. It is a clear deliverance of our ordinary moral sense that a person is morally responsible only for what he does and leaves undone, not for what others do or leave undone. This deliverance is surely more credible than any theory that entails its negation. So one cannot inherit sinfulness, guilt, or desert of punishment. Therefore the actual sins of past persons cannot induce in me a state of sinfulness or guilt or desert of punishment. And that includes the actual sins of our first parents if there were any.
This amounts to a denial of originated original sin. It does not amount to a denial of originating original sin. The distinction is explained in greater detail here. So there can still be original sin even if sinfulness, guilt, and desert of punishment cannot be inherited.
As I said elsewhere, we must distinguish between the putative fact of original sin and the various theories one can have of it. Refuting a particular theory does not amount to refuting the fact.
B. The second reason is that there were in actual historical fact no original parents of the human race who came into existence wthout animal progenitors. We know this from evolutionary biology which is more credible -- more worthy of belief -- than the stories of Genesis interpreted literally. In any conflict between the Bible so interpreted and natural science, the latter will win -- every time. So if one takes both Bible and science seriously, the Bible must be read in such a way that it does not conflict with our best science.
2. To take this whole original sin problematic seriously one must of course assume that in some sense or other 'Man is a fallen being.' I warmly recommend the study of history to those who adhere to such delusions of the Left as that of human perfectibility or the inherent goodness of humanity. Once you disembarrass yourself of those illusions you will be open to something like human fallenness or Kant's radical evil. I am not saying that the horrors of history by themselves entail man's fallenness. Our fallenness is certainly not a plain empirical fact as G. K. Chesterton and others have foolishly and tendentiously suggested. Chesterton's "plain as potatoes" remark was silly bluster. It is rather that a doctrine of the fall is reasonably introuduced, by a sort of inference to the best explanation, to account for man's universal wretchedness and inability to substantially improve his lot. The details of the inferential move from what could count as plain facts to a doctrine of a fall is not my present topic.
3. Now to Jeff's question. If the Genesis stories cannot be read as literally true accounts of actual historical facts, if we accept the findings and theories of evolutionary biology as regards the genesis of human animals, then what can human fallenness mean? There are various possibilities. I will mention just one, which derives from Kant.
What we need is a theory that allows us to embrace all of the following propositions without contradicting any deliverance of natural science or any deliverance of our ordinary sound moral sense:
a. There is a universal propensity to moral evil in human beings which is radical in that it is at the root of every specific act of wrong-doing. b. This propensity to evil is the best explanation of the fathomless horrors of the human condition. c. The radical propensity to moral evil is innate in that it not acquired at any time in a moral agent's life, but is present at every time precisely as the predisposition to specific evil acts. d. The propensity is imputable. e. The propensity is not inherited. f. Imputable actions and states are free and unconditioned.
Here is a quick and dirty sketch of Kant's theory, a theory which allows one to affirm each of the six propositions above.
Man enjoys dual citzenship. As a physical being, and thus as an animal, he he is a member of the phenomenal world, the world of space-time-matter. In this realm determinism reigns: everything that happens is necessitated by the laws of nature plus the initial conditions. But man knows himself to be morally responsible, and so knows himself to be libertarianly free. Since everything phenomenal is determined, and nothing free, man as moral agent is a noumenal being who 'stands apart from the causal nexus.'
Kant sees with blinding clarity that nothing imputable to an agent can be caused by factors external to the agent: only that which the agent does or leaves undone freely and by his own agency is imputable to the agent. It follows that sinfulness, guilt, and desert of punishment cannot be inherited: there is no originated original sin. For what is inherited is caused to be by factors external to the agent. So (e) is true. But the predisposition to moral evil is nonetheless innate in the sense that it is not conditioned by events in time. It is logically prior to every action of the agent in the time-order.
How is the predisposition imputable? It is imputable because it is the result of a free noumenal choice. And so there is originating original sin. Each of us by an atemporal noumenal choice is the origin of the radical evil which is at the root of each specific evil act. So (d) is true.
Kant's theory has its problems which I have no desire to paper over. But it does provide an answer to Jeff's question. His question, in effect, was what original sin or human fallenness could mean if Darwinism is true. Kant's theory counts as an answer to that question. For on Kant's theory there is no need to contradict evolutionary biology by positing two original parents of the human race, nor any need to accept the notion that moral qualities such as guilt are biologically transmissible, or the morally unacceptable notion that such qualities are in any way (biologically, socio-culturally) inheritable.
It is important to distinguish between the putative fact of human fallenness and the various theories and doctrines about what this fall consists in and how it came about. The necessity of this distinction is obvious: different philosophers and theologians and denominations who accept the Fall have different views about the exact nature of this event or state. I use 'fact' advisedly. It is unlikely that we will be able to peel back to a level of bare factuality uncontaminated by any theory or interpretation. Surely G. K. Chesterton is involved in an egregious exaggeration when he writes in effect that our fallen condition is a fact as "plain as potatoes." (See here for quotation and critique.) But while it is not a plain empirical fact that we are fallen beings, it is not a groundless speculation or bit of theological mystification either.
It is widely recognized that there is something deeply unsatisfactory about the human condition, and that this deep unsatisfactoriness is both universal across time and space and apparently unameliorable by anything we do, either individually or collectively. Indeed, the prodigious efforts made in amelioration have in notable cases made things vastly worse. (The Communists, to take but one example, murdered 100 million in their ill-starred attempt at fundamentally improving the human condition.) This sort of 'ameliorative backfire' is a feature of our fallenness as is the refusal of many to admit that we are fallen, not to mention the cacophany of conficting theories as to what our fallenness consists in. We are up to our necks in every manner of contention, crime and depravity. One would have to be quite the polyanna to deny that there is something deeply wrong with the world and the people in it, or to think that we are going to set things right by our own efforts. We know from experience that there is no good reason to believe that. The problem is not 'society' or anything external to us. The problem is us. In particular, the problem is not them as opposed to us, but us, all of us.
So that's an important first distinction. There is the fact or quasi-fact of fallenness and there are the various theories about it. If you fail to make this distinction and identify the Fall with some particular theory of it, then you may end up like the foolish biologist who thought that the Fall is refuted by evolutionary biology according to which there were no such original human animals as Adam and Eve. To refute one of the theories of the Fall is not to refute the 'fact' of the Fall.
Lev Shestov, the Russian existentialist and irrationalist, has an interesting theory which it is the purpose of this post briefly to characterize and criticize. I take as my text an address he delivered at the Academy of Religion and Philosophy in Paris, May 5, 1935.
Start with the 'fact' of deep, universal, unameliorable-by-us unsatisfactoriness. Is this unsatisfactoriness inscribed into the very structure of Being? Is it therefore necessary and unavoidable except by entry into nonbeing? Shestov thinks that for the philosophers of West and East it is so: "In being itself human thought has discovered something wrong, a defect, a sickness, a sin, and accordingly wisdom has demanded the vanquishing of that sin at its roots; in other words, a renunciation of being which, since it has a beginning, is fated inevitably to end." (p. 2) Buddha and Schopenhauer serve as good illustrations, though Shestov doesn't mention them. Shestov, of course, is one of those for whom Athens and Jerusalem are mortal enemies ever at loggerheads. And so it comes as no surprise that he opposes the revealed truth of the Book of books, the Bible, to the wisdom of the philosophers. For the philosophers, the deep wrongness of the world is rooted in its very Being and is therefore essential to it; but for the Bible the world is good, as having been created by a good God, and its deep deficiency is contingent, not necessary:
What is said in it [the Bible] directly contradicts what men have found out through their intellectual vision. Everything, as we read in the very beginning of the Book of Genesis, was made by the Creator, everything had a beginning. But this not only is not seen as a precondition of the decay, imperfection, corruption, and sinfulness of being; on the contrary, it is an assurance of all possible good in the universe. (2)
Since the source of all being, God, is all-good, to be, as such, is good. But whence then evil? The Bible-based theist cannot say that being itself harbors imperfection and evil; so where did evil come from?
Scripture gives a definite answer to this question. God planted among the other trees in the Garden of Eden the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And He said to the first man: "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." But the tempter . . . said: "No, ye shall not die; your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing." Man succumbed to temptation, ate of the forbidden fruit; his eyes were opened and he became knowing. What was revealed to him? What did he find out? He learned the same thing that the Greek philosophers and Hindu sages had learned: the "it is good" uttered by God was not justified—all is not good in the created world. There must be evil and, what is more, much evil, intolerable evil, in the created world, precisely because it is created. Everything around us—the immediate data of consciousness—testifies to this with unquestionable evidence; he who looks at the world with open eyes," he who "knows," can draw no other conclusion. At the very moment when man became "knowing," sin entered the world; in other words, it entered together with "knowledge"—and after sin came evil. This is what the Bible tells us. (p. 3, emphasis added)
Whence the horrors of life, the deep-going unsatisfactoriness that the Buddha announces in the first of his Noble Truths, Sarvam dukkham? The answer from Athens and Benares is that being is defective in itself, essentially and irremediably. And it doesn't matter whether finite being is created by God or uncreated. Finite being as being is intrinsically defective. The answer from the Bible according to Shestov is that "sin and evil arise from 'knowledge,' from 'open eyes,' from 'intellectual vision,' that is, from the fruit of the forbidden tree."
This is an amazing interpretation. Shestov is claiming that the Fall of Man consists in his embracing of philosophy and its child science, his discovery and use of reason, his attempt to figure things out for himself by laying hold of law-like and thus necessary structures of the world. The Fall is the fall into knowledge. Like his mentor Kierkegaard, Shestov rails against the hyper-rationalism of Hegel who "accepts from the Bible only what can be 'justified' before rational consciousness" (p. 5). "And it never for a moment entered into Hegel's mind that in this lies the terrible, fatal Fall, that 'knowledge' does not make a man equal to God, but tears him away from God, putting him in the clutches of a dead and deadening 'truth.' (p. 6)
My first problem with this is the substitution of 'tree of knowledge' for 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil.' I don't find any justification for that substitution in the text under examination. Surely moral knowledge, if knowledge at all, is but a proper part of knowledge in general.
But it is worse than this. Shestov thinks of God as a being for whom all things are possible. This is connected with his beef with necessity and with reason as revelatory of necessity. "What handed man over to the power of Necessity?" (p. 12) He quotes Kierkegaard: "God signifies that everything is possible, and that everything is possible signifies God." But this leads straightaway to absurdities -- a fact that will of course not disturb the equanimity of an absurdist and irrationalist like Shestov.
If God is defined as the being for whom all is possible, then nothing is necessary and everything that exists is contingent, including God, all truths about God, and the moral laws. And if all things are possible, then it is possible that some things are impossible. Therefore, possibly (All things are possible & Some things are not possible), whence it follows that it is possible that some contradictions are true.
So the position Shestov is absurd, which fact will not budge him, he being an embracer of absurdities. But it does give us a reason to ignore him and his interpretation of the Fall. So I consider his theory of the Fall refuted.
A serious faith, a vital faith, is one that battles with doubt. Otherwise the believer sinks into complacency and his faith becomes a convenience. Doubt is a good thing. For doubt is the engine of inquiry, the motor of Athens. Jerusalem needs Athens to keep her honest, to chasten her excesses, to round her out, to humanize her. There is not much Athens in the Muslim world, which helps explains why Islam breeds fanaticism, murder, and anti-Enlightenment.
A guest post by Peter Lupu. Minor edits and a comment (in blue) by BV.
In an intriguing paper “God and Moral Autonomy”, James Rachels offers what he calls “The Moral Autonomy Argument” against the existence of God. The argument is based on a certain analysis of the concept of worship and its alleged incompatibility with moral autonomy (pp. 9-10; all references are to the Web version). I will first present Rachels’ argument verbatim. Next I will point out that in order for the argument to be valid, additional premises are required. I will then supply the additional premises and recast the argument accordingly in a manner consistent with what I take to be Rachels’ original intent. While the resulting argument is valid, I will argue that it is not sound. Despite its deficiency, however, Rachels’ argument points towards something important. In the final section I will try to flesh out this important element.
Rachels’ Argument Verbatim (p. 10):
“1. If any being is God, he must be a fitting object of worship.
2. No being could possibly be a fitting object of worship, since worship requires the abandonment of one’s role as an autonomous moral agent.
3. Therefore, there cannot be any being who is God.”
Obviously, this argument is not valid. While the two premises have the form of if-then conditionals, the conclusion is not a conditional statement. There is no way of deriving an unconditional statement from conditional premises alone. Clearly, some additional premises are required. Let me now recast the argument in a valid form. I shall take the liberty to reword some of the premises so that their logical form is more apparent.
(A) FirstModified Argument from Moral Autonomy:
1*) Necessarily, if God exists, then God is a fitting object of worship;
2*) If worship requires abandoning autonomous moral agency, then it is not the case that God is a fitting object of worship;
3*) Worship requires abandoning autonomous moral agency.
Therefore,
4*) God does not exist.
Argument (A) is valid. The question is whether it is sound. Rachels maintains that premise (1*) is something like a logical truth. He says: “That God is not to be judged, challenged, defied, or disobeyed is at bottom a truth of logic. To do any of these things is incompatible with taking him as one to be worshiped.” (p. 8). So we are asked to assume that the very concept of God includes the concept of being worthy or fitting of worship, in the sense that being worthy or fitting of worship logically excludes one from being able to judge, challenge, defy, or disobey God. Let us grant this claim for now.
Rachels further claims that premise (3*) is supported by “a long tradition in moral philosophy, from Plato to Kant,…” (p. 9). Such support would go something like this. Worshiping any being worthy of worship requires the worshiper to recognize such a being as having absolute authority. Absolute authority in turn entails an “unqualified claim of obedience.” (p.9). But, no human being, qua autonomous moral agent, can recognize an “unqualified claim of obedience”. Hence, no human being qua autonomous moral agent can recognize any such absolute authority. Therefore, human beings cannot worship God without abandoning their autonomous moral agency.
What about premise (2*)? I think premise (2*) is false. And this fact reveals the underlying problem with Rachels’ argument. For suppose that the antecedent of premise (2*) is true. Does it follow from this fact alone that God is not a fitting object for worship? No such thing follows, for it may still be true that God is a fitting object of worship by creatures that are not autonomous moral agents. Or to put the matter somewhat more precisely: even if we suppose that worship requires abandoning autonomous moral agency, what follows from this assumption is that God is not a fitting object of worship by a being, qua autonomous moral agent. Of course, God may still be a fitting object of worship by a being as long as that being abandons their autonomy while worshiping.
If this is correct, then premise (2*) is false and, therefore, argument (A) is not sound. Clearly, we need to modify Rachels’ argument once again:
(B) Second Modified Argument from Moral Autonomy:
(1**) Necessarily, if God exists, then God is a fitting object of worship by autonomous moral agents;
(2**) If worship requires abandoning autonomous moral agency, then it is not the case that God is a fitting object of worship by autonomous moral agents;
(3**) Worship requires abandoning autonomous moral agency;
Therefore,
(4**) God does not exist.
Argument (B) is also valid. Is it sound? I believe that a theist may legitimately reject premise (1**). Remember that the necessity in the first premise of each of the above versions of the argument is intended by Rachels to express the claim that the very concept of God logically entails the concept of being worthy of worship, where being worthy (or fitting) of worship logically excludes judging, challenging, defying, or disobeying God. But, clearly, an activity that logically rules out judging, challenging, defying or disobeying another being is an activity that logically requires abandoning the exercise of autonomous moral agency. And a theist may quite legitimately object to such a conception of God. In particular, a theist may consistently maintain that the exercise of worshiping God is not logicallyinconsistent with judging, challenging, defying, or even disobeying God. And if worshiping is not logically inconsistent with any of these activities, then worshiping is not logically inconsistent with maintaining one’s autonomous moral agency. Therefore, a theist can legitimately reject premise (1**). Therefore, the argument cannot be sound.
Comment by BV: It is not clear why the theist could not reject (3**). Why does worship require the abandonment of autonomous moral agency? Granted, if x is God, then God has absolute authority, which includes the right to command and the right to be obeyed. But equally, if if x is indeed God, then God will not command anything immoral; he will not command anything that would not coincide with what we would impose on ourselves if we are acting autonomously. Contrapositively, if x commands anything which is by our moral lights immoral, such as the slaughtering of one's innocent son, then x is not God.
Rachels attempts to meet this objection as follows: "Thus our own judgment that some actions are right and others wrong is logically prior to our recognition of any being as God. The upshot is that we cannot justify the suspension of our own judgment on the grounds that we are deferring to God's command; for if, by our own best judgment, the command is wrong, this gives us good reason to withhold the title "God" from the commander." True, but why should we think that obeying God ever involves suspending our own judgment? Rachels is assuming that there are circumstances in which there is a discrepancy between what God commands and what the creature knows is right. But it is open to the theist to deny that there are ever any such circumstances. In the case of Abraham and Isaac, the theist can say that what Abraham thought was a divine command did not come from God at all. Of course, the Bible portrays the command as coming from God, but the theist is under no obligation to take at face value everything that is in the Bible.
Kant, who was a theist, famously remarked that two things filled him with wonder: "the starry skies above me, and the moral law within me." Now the moral law stands above me as a sensible (phenomenal) being subject to inclinations. It is in one sense outside me as commanding my respect and my submission to its dictates. In respecting the universal moral law do I abandon my autonomy? Not at all. I am truly autonomous only in fulfilling the moral law. So the theist could say that God and the moral law are one, and that worshipping God is like respecting the moral law. Just as it is no injury to my autonomy that the moral law imposes restrictions on my behavior, it is no injury to my autonomy that God issues commands. We needn't follow Rachels in assuming that there is a discrepancy between what God commands and what by our lights (when they are 'shining properly') it is right to do.
If God is a tyrant for whom might makes right, then I grant that worship and autonomy are incompatible. But if the object of worship is a concrete embodiment of the moral law that is in me, the following of which constitutes my autonomy, then worship and autonomy are not incompatible.
I wish now to propose an argument, similar to Rachels, but without the objectionable assumptions accompanying the first premise of Rachels’ argument. Let us stipulate that the term ‘God!’ expresses the concept of a being that is just like the theistic concept of God, except that the following is true of this being:
(!) God! is worthy or fitting of submission; where fitting of submission logicallyexcludes judging, challenging, defying, or disobeying God!.
With the help of (!) I shall now restate Rachels’ argument and prove that God! does not exist, provided autonomous moral agents exist. The argument assumes that at least some autonomous moral agents exist.
(C) Third Modified Argument from Moral Autonomy.
(1!) Necessarily, if God! exists, then God! is a fitting object of submission by autonomous moral agents;
(2!) If submission requires abandoning autonomous moral agency, then it is not the case that God! is a fitting object of submission by autonomous moral agents;
(3!) Submission requires abandoning autonomous moral agency;
Therefore,
(4!) God! does not exist.
Argument (C) is valid. Is it sound? I think it is. I think that every one of the premises is true and I am willing to defend this claim. Premise (1!) is true by stipulation. Premise (3!) is also true. For submission requires recognizing the absolute authority of another and doing so is not possible while retaining ones autonomy. What about premise (2!)? Premise (2!) might initially appear somewhat strange. But premise (2!) simply states the consequences of our stipulation regarding the concept of God!, when this concept is applied to the requirement that autonomous agents must submit to a being such as God!. I think that given the stipulation expressed by (!), premise (2!) is true. Hence, it is true that God! does not exist.
A theist of course would be correct to vehemently deny that the concept of God! as stipulated is identical to the concept of God in his sense: i.e.,that his concept of God includes (!). And it follows, then, that such a theist must also deny that worship is the same as submission. In particular, such a theist must deny that his God requires submission from autonomous agents. But, then, such a theist must cease to include in the concept of worship elements that belong more properly to the concept of submission.
It also follows that any religion, religious institution, or religious figure that promotes the idea that worshiping a deity requires submission to this deity presupposes that such a deity is God!. But since a being such as God! cannot exist alongside with autonomous moral agents that are required to submit to such a deity, it follows that anyone who promotes such things is promoting the existence of false gods.
It is not just some Christians who feel the moral dubiousness of joy and celebration at the death of evildoers. Here is Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld. "So our tradition is clear: Public rejoicing about the death of an enemy is entirely inappropriate." Here is a delightfully equivocal statement by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman.
Interestingly, Dennis Prager is still pounding on this theme. About twenty minutes ago I heard him repeat his argument against me and others. The argument could be put like this:
1. The Israelites rejoiced when the Red Sea closed around the Egyptians, drowning them. (Exodus 15) 2. This rejoicing was pleasing to God. Therefore 3. To rejoice over the death of evildoers is morally permissible.
This argument is only as good as its second premise. Two questions. First, does the Bible depict God as being pleased at the rejoicing? Not unequivocally. Prager could argue from Ex 15: 22-25 that God was indeed pleased because he showed Moses a tree with which he rendered the bitter waters of Marah sweet and potable. The Israelites were mighty thirsty after three days of traipsing around in the wilderness of Shur after emerging from the Red Sea. Unfortunately, Prager provided no support for (2).
But more important is the second question. Why should we take the fact that God is depicted as being pleased at the rejoicing -- if it is a fact -- as evidence that God is pleased? I grant that if God is pleased at some behavior then that behavior is morally acceptable. But the fact that God is depicted as being pleased does not entail that God is pleased.
And so, as a philosopher, I cannot credit the (1)-(3) argument. It assumes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. But this is not to be assumed; this is to be tested. The Bible has to satisfy reason's criteria before it can be accepted as true. If the Bible violates the deliverances of practical reason (as it quite clearly does in the Abraham and Isaac story, see my Kant on Abraham and Isaac) then it cannot be accepted in those passages in which the violation occurs as the word of God.
We who have one foot in Athens and the other in Jerusalem face the problem of how we can avoid being torn asunder. On the one hand, philosophy can bring us to the realization that we need revelation; on the other hand, nothing can count as genuine revelation unless it passes muster by reason's own theoretical and practical lights. This is not to demand that the content of revelation be derivable from reason; it is to demand that nothing that purports to be revelation can be credited as genuine revelation if it violates the clearest principles of theoretical and practical reason, for example, the Law of Non-Contradiction and the principles that one may not kill the innocent or rejoice over another man's evil fate.
The problem is to reconcile divine authority with human reason and autonomy. Two nonsolutions may be immediately dismissed: fideism which denigrates reason, and rationalism which denigrates faith.
To keep Osama's purported martyrdom from inspiring others, the point needs to be made, loudly and repeatedly, that killing innocent people is not the path to heaven. This will put the US government, and Barack Obama in particular, in an an awkward spot. It is undoubtedly a theological statement and an uncomfortable one at that.
It is uncomfortable because to assert that Osama did not go to heaven is to suggest that he went to hell. That could be a problem, given the current state of America's religious ferment. As the controversy over Rev. Rob Bell's new book has shown us, a great number of religious Americans do not want to believe in eternal damnation.
1. The notion that there is heaven but no hell smacks of the sort of namby-pamby feel-good liberalism that I feel it my duty to combat. Of course there may be none of the following: God, afterlife, post-mortem reward, post-mortem punishment. But if you accept the first three, then you ought to accept them all.
2. One reason to believe in some form of punishment after death is that without it, there is no final justice. There is some justice here below, but not much. One who "thirsts after justice and righteousness" cannot be satisfied with this world. Whatever utopia the future may bring, this world's past suffices to condemn it as a vale of injustice. (This is why leftist activism is no solution at all to the ultimate problems.) Nothing that happens in the future can redeem the billions who have been raped and crucified and wronged in a thousand ways. Of course, it may be that this world is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Life may just be absurd. But if you do not accept that, if you hold that life has meaning and that moral distinctions have reality, then you may look to God and beyond this life. Suppose you do. Then how can you fail to see that justice demands that the evil be punished? Consider this line of thought:
a. If there is no making-good of the injustices of this life, it is absurd. b. There is no making-good of the injustices of this life in this life. c. Only if there is God and afterlife is there a making-good of the injustices of this life d. This life is not absurd. Therefore e. There is a making-good of the injustices of this life in the afterlife, and this requires the punishment/purification of those who committed evil in this life and did not pay for their crimes in this life.
This is not a compelling argument by any means. But if you are a theist and accept (a)-(d), then you ought to accept the conclusion.
3. A second reason to believe in some sort of hellish state after death for some is because of free will. God created man in his image and likeness, and part of what that means is that he created him an autonomous being possessing free will and sensitive to moral distinctions. In so doing, God limits his own power: he cannot violate the autonomy of man. So if Sartre or some other rebellious nature freely decides that he would rather exist in separation from God, then God must allow it. But this separation is what hell is. So God must allow hell.
4. Is hell eternal separation from God? Well, if Sartre, say, or any other idolater of his own ego wants to be eternally separated from God, then God must allow it, right? Like I said, man is free and autonomous, and God can't do anything about that. But if Stalin, say, repents, how could a good God punish him eternally? The punishment must fit the crime, and no crime that any human is capable of, even the murdering of millions, deserves eternal punishment. How do I know that? By consulting my moral sense, the same moral sense that tells me a god that commands me to murder my innocent son cannot be God. See Kant on Abraham and Isaac.
There is a response to this of course, and what I just asserted is by no means obvious; but this is a topic for a separate post.
I suppose I am a bit of a theological liberal. Theology must be rationally constrained and constrained by our God-given moral sense. Irrationalism is out. Fideism is out. No fundamentalism. No Bibliolatry. No inerrantism. None of the excesses of Protestantism, if excesses they are. No sola scriptura or sola fide or, for that matter, extra ecclesiam salus non est. The latter is also a Roman Catholic principle.
5. As I see it, then, justice does not demand an eternal or everlasting hell. (In this popular post I blur the distinction between eternity and everlastingness.) But free will may. Again, if Russell or Sartre or Hitchens refuse to submit any authority superior to their own egos, then their own free decision condemns them everlastingly. Justice does demand, however, some sort of post-mortem purification/punishment.
6. Will I go directly to heaven when I die? Of course not (and the same goes for almost all of us.) Almost all of us need more or less purgation, to even be in a state where we would unequivocally want to be with God. If your life has been mainly devoted to piling up pleasure and loot, how can you expect that death will reverse your priorities? In fact, if you have solely devoted yourself to the pursuit and acquisition of the trinkets and baubles of this world, then punishment for you may well consist in getting them in spades, to your disgust. If the female ass and the whiskey glass is your summum bonum here below, you may get your heart's desire on the far side. I develop this idea in A Vision of Hell.
7. Is Osama bin Laden in hell? Anyone who claims to know the answer to this is a 'damned' fool. But not even he (Osama or the fool) deserves eternal separation from God -- unless he wants it. But it is good that the al-Qaeda head is dead.
In posts of months past you claimed there was no distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; they're the same thing, if God can be called a thing at all; you asked for an argument that they were [not the same], if I am not mistaken. Here is my attempt to satisfy that request.
The God of the philosophers is immutable, as a result of his simplicity; this implies that he cannot be affected and respond to the goings on of the natural order, including us. Whatever happens in the natural order, God is [not] changed or affected in response to it. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, however, does seem to be so affected, on any reasonable reading of the relevant religious texts: in Christianity, he enters into the world to provide a means of salvation from sin, which presupposes his consciousness of sin freely committed by created agents; in Judaism, I would guess, he talks to and responds to the prayers of prophets and great leaders, destroys civilizations because of their sins (which again is an instance of responding to occurrences in the natural order), etc. I won't talk about Islam because I don't know enough.
In short: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob seems to be affected in various ways and acts in response to goings-on in the natural order, whereas the God of the philosophers, by his very nature as immutable, cannot be so affected. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob offers a way of salvation because of human sin, and promises judgment in the future for those who don't repent; the God of the philosophers, on the other hand, cannot be said to do anything in response to what goes on in the natural order.
[. . .]
Your argument is this:
1. The God of the philosophers is ontologically simple, and therefore immutable: he cannot change, and so cannot be affected by anything that occurs in the created realm.
2. The God of the monotheistic religions is not immutable: he affects and is affected by goings-on in the created realm.
3. If there is a property P such that x has P but y does not, then x is not identical to y. (Contrapositive of the Indiscernibility of Identicals)
Therefore
4. The God of the philosophers is not identical to the God of the monotheistic religions.
The argument is valid (correct in point of logical form) if 'God of the philosophers' means 'God as conceived by the philosophers' and 'God of the montheistic religions' means 'God as conceived within the monotheistic religions.' And I do think that is what you mean by the phrases in question. (Correct me if I am wrong.)
But whether or not the argument is valid, it is not probative because the first premise is false and the second is dubious.
Ad (1). Only some philosophers hold that God is ontologically simple; Alvin Plantinga is a prominent contemporary theist who does not. One cannot therefore build ontological simplicity into the definition of 'God of the philosophers.' As for immutability, some philosophers think of God as mutable, Charles Hartshorne, for example. So one cannot pack immutability into the definition either. And similarly for other attributes. For some, there are broadly logical limits on divine power, for others there are no limits on divine power. There are different views about the omni-attributes. There are different views about the divine modal status. There are different views about how the causa prima is related to the realm of secondary causes, etc.
The point is that 'God of the philosophers' does not pick out some one definite conception of God. There are many philosophical conceptions of God even within monotheism. There is no God of the philosophers if the phrase means 'God as conceived by the philosophers.' Premise (1) therefore rests on a false presupposition.
I read 'God of the philosophers' differently. What the phrase refers to is an approach to the divine reality, the approach by way of discursive reason applied to the data of experience, the approach exemplified by Aquinas in the Five Ways, for instance. Or the approach exemplified by Descartes in the theistic arguments of his Meditations on First Philosophy. The God of the philosophers, then, is God approached by way of discursive reason. It is essential to realize that what Aquinas, Descartes, and others were groping towards using their unaided discursive intellects was not a concept, an idea, an ens rationis, or anything merely immanent to their own thinking. It was nothing merely excogitated, or projected, or abtract, or merely immanent to their minds. It was, instead, the real concrete God, transcendent of the mind and independent of all modes of approach thereto.
My claim is that what the philosopher seeks to know by discursive reason is the same as what the mystic seeks to know by direct, albeit nonsensible, experience, and is the same as what the religionist seeks to contact by way of belief on the basis of revelation. They approach one and the same God, but in three different ways. To employ a crude analogy: if there are three routes up K2, it does not follow that there are three summits. There is and can be only one summit. Similarly, there is an can be only one God. Reason, mystical intuition, and faith are three routes to the same 'summit.'
Ad (2). It is certainly true that God is portrayed in many passages of the Bible as changing and thus as changeable. But it doesn't follow straightaway that the God of religion is changeable. For perhaps those passages can be taken in a merely figurative way and interpreted so as to be consistent with God's immutability. Just as one must distinguish between philosophical conceptions of God and God, one must distinguish between Biblical portrayals of God and God. The God of religion is God as approached via faith in revelation; but what exactly the content of revelation is is something to be worked out by hard theological work. The Bible does not supply its own theology. One cannot simply read it and know what it means. One has toreason about what one reads. But that is not to say that theology is philosophy. Theology accepts revelation as data; philosophy does not.
Consider Genesis 3, 8: "And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden." Obviously, this passage cannot be taken literally, for if so taken, one would have to say that God, a purely spiritual being, has feet. But if he was walking around on his feet, was he shod or not? And what was his shoe size? Were his toenails properly trimmed? How many corns and calluses did he have, if any? There must be answers to these questions and a thousand more if God was literally walking through the garden and making noise as he did so. And furthermore, he had to have physical eyes if Adam and Eve though they could hide from him behind trees.
Since we know that a purely spiritual being cannot have feet, and since we know that only a purely spiritual being could be the cause of the existence of the physical universe, we know that the passage in question cannot be taken literally. So what exactly the content of revelation is in Genesis and elsewhere is not easy to discern. But we can be sure that any portrayals of God that imply that he has physical attributes must be taken figuratively so as not to conflict with God's spiritual nature. It may well be, though I am not prepared to argue it in detail, that portrayals of God as mutable must also be taken figuratively. So I find your second premise doubtful.
So I persist in my view that the 'distinction' between the God of the philosophers and the God of the religionists is entirely bogus. In fact my view strikes me as self-evident if one construes the relevant phrases in my way. The God of the philosophers is the divine reality, if there is one, which is approached by discursive reason applied to the data of experience, with no use being made of the putative date of revelation. The God of the religionists is the divine reality, if there is one, that is approached via faith on the basis of revelation. Clearly, there can be only one divine reality. For if there were two, neither would be divine given that only an absolute reality can be divine and given that the divine is that than which no greater can be conceived. Since there can be only one divine reality, the God of the philosophers and the God of the religionists is the same.
This is a slightly redacted version of a piece first posted on 18 September 2006 at the old PowerBlogs site. I repost it not only to save it for my files, but also because it it important to remember not only the successful and unsuccessful acts of Islamist terrorism worldwide, but also the many incidents which betray the illiberal and anti-Enlightenment values of our Islamist opponents (e.g., the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the Danish cartoon 'caper,' etc. etc. The analog to the fatwa would be the Pope putting a price on the head of Andres Serrano, the 'artist' famous notorious for his 'Piss Christ.')
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People need to face the fact that Western civilization is under serious threat from militant Islamic fanaticism. (And it may be coming to a theater near you.) Yet another recent indication of the threat is the unreasoning umbrage taken by many in the Islamic world over a mere QUOTATION Pope Benedict XVI employs in his address at the University of Regensburg entitled, "The Best of Greek Thought is an Integral Part of Christian Faith."
Benedict's talk is only tangentially about Islam; it is primarily about the role of reason in the posing and answering of the God question, and about whether Christianity should be dehellenized. The Pope begins by mentioning a dialogue "by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both." Then comes the 'offending' passage (bolding added):
I got a phone call from philosopher of religion Robert Oakes yesterday. In the course of a lengthy chat, I mentioned my recent post on Pascal and Buber and asked him what he thought of it. Today I received the following from him by e-mail:
Very good to talk with you. Short comment on that El Stupido notion of Buber-Pascal. The idea, presumably, is that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is a proper object of worship, while the God of the Philosophers is a bloodless abstraction. But, of course, God (for the philosophical theist) is that than which a greater is metaphysically impossible. So: is a being Who is worthy of worship greater (ceteris paribus) than one who is not? Of course. End of issue, No?
An admirable instance of pithiness. Bob's argument could be extended as follows. A quintessentially philosophical definition of 'God' is the one that derives from Anselm of Canterbury: God is that than which no greater can be conceived. Borrowing the phrase 'great-making property' from Plantinga, we can say that God instantiates all great-making properties. Now being worthy of worship is a great-making property. Because no concept, idea, or abstraction is worthy of worship, it follows from the philosophical definition alone, without appeal to any (putative) revelation or anything from religion, that the God of the philosophers cannot be a concept, idea, or abstraction.
But not only that. It also follows from the Anselmian definition that nothing short of a worship-worthy being could be God. So a First Cause could not count as God for a philosophical theist who operates with the concept of God in Judeo-Christian monotheism. Within this tradition the God of philosophy is not different from the God of religion. It is the same God, but approached via discursive reason rather than via faith in revelation.
I turn on my computer and check out the Maverick Philosopher and suddenly half of my day is shot. First I have to look up the word 'pellucidity' and then I am stuck trying to figure out why your claim about the phrases 'God-P' and 'God-R' does not seem right to me.
It sounds like I'm doing something right! You can look up a word without getting out of your chair. Here's a tip that you may already be aware of: type 'define: pellucidity' (without the inverted commas) into the Google search box and you will get a pageof definitions, some of them from reputable sources. (I don't consider Wikipedia a particularly reputable source.) Needless to say, this works for almost any word inserted after the colon and not just for 'pellucidity'!
I agree that the sentence [from Martin Buber], "What the philosophers describe by the name of God cannot be more than an idea," is false but to state that that 'God-P' and 'God-R' have the same referent, if they have a referent, seems false to me as it carries an assumption of the monotheism of the 'God-R' that may not be present in 'God-P.' The idea that there is and can only be one God is one that does not have to be accepted in 'God-P' and I do not believe that it would be possible, except by defining 'God-P' ='God-R', for 'God-P' and 'God-R' to always have the same referent. Maybe you can point out where I am wrong and what I missed.
Well, every discussion occurs within a context, a context which cannot be ignored or set aside, since the very meaning of the terms of the debate is influenced by the context. The present immediate context is Pascal's exclamation, "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob -- not of the philosophers and scholars" and Buber's comment thereon. The Pascalian exclamation and the Buberian comment themselves fit into a wider context, Judeo-Christian monotheism. The question before us is whether, within this Judeo-Christian monotheistic context, there is any merit to the notion that what philosophers qua philosophers talk about and argue for and against is numerically different from what religionists qua religionists talk about and try to relate themselves to. My answer is plain from my earlier posts: this notion has no merit whatsoever.
Your suggestion seems to be that the God(s) of the philosophers needn't be one, but could be many, even if the God of the religionists must be one. My answer to you is very simple: in the precise context I have specified, namely, the context of Judeo-Christian monotheism, both the God of the philosophers and the God of the religionists is one. Polytheism is simply not a Jamesian live option within this tradition and certainly was not for Pascal and Buber whose utterances provide the immediate context of my remarks.
Of course, there is nothing to stop you or anyone from shifting the context. Philosophers are free to make a case for polytheism if they care to. Within the community of polytheists, the question could arise whether the gods of the philosophers (the gods the polytheistic philosophers argue for) are the same as the gods of the religionists (the gods the polytheistic religionists invoke in prayer, etc.) But that question is not my question.
Note that I am not merely stipulating that 'God-R' and 'God-P' have the same reference. That would be arbitrary and unmotivated. What I am doing is unpacking the concept of God what we already have and work with in the Judeo-Christian tradition. My point is that within this tradition, pace Pascal and Buber and many others, it makes no sense to imagine that what the philosophers are talking about when they talk about God is numerically different from what the religionists talk about when they talk about God.
Finally, none of my discussion presupposes the existence of God. As I said, I am unpacking the concept of God, and this concept is what it is whether or not it is instantiated.
Joe Carter over at First Thingsargues that "We have to abandon the politically correct notion that atheism is intellectually respectable." My own view is that theism and atheism are both intellectually respectable. Carter makes his case by invoking St. Paul:
In Romans, St. Paul is clear that atheism is a case of vincible ignorance: “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Acknowledging the existence of God is just the beginning—we must also recognize several of his divine attributes. Atheists that deny this reality are, as St. Paul said, without excuse. They are vincibly ignorant.
Rather than quote the whole of the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20, I'll summarize it. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . ."
Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the truth. There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork. Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is planted firmly in Athens (philosophy, the autonomy of reason). And so I must point out that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism. It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.
But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident. It is not evident to the senses that the natural world is a divine artifact.
I may be moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me" (Kant). But seeing is not seeing as. If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework. But the datum seen can just as easily be given a nontheistic interpretation.
At the end of the day you must decide which of these interpretations to accept. You will not find some plain fact that will decide it for you. There is no fact you can point to, or argument you can give, that definitively rules out theism or rules it in.
If the atheism of some has its origin in pride, stubborness and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as is plainly the case with many of the cyberpunks over at Internet Infidels and similar sites, not to mention such luminaries as Russell and Sartre, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.
It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.
Paul appears to be doing what ideologues regularly do when pushed to the wall in debate: they resort to ad hominem attacks and psychologizing: you are willful and stubborn and blinded by pride and lust; or you are a shill for corporate interests; or you are 'homophobic' or 'Islamophobic' or xenophobic; or you are a fear-monger and a hater; or you are a liar or insincere or stupid; or you are a racist, etc.
Joe Carter does the same thing.
Objection: "You are ignoring the deleterious noetic consequences of original sin. Because our faculties have been corrupted by it, we fail to find evident what is in itself evident, namely, that the world is a divine artifact. And it is because of this original sin that unbelief is inexcusable."
This response raises its own difficulties. First, how can one be morally responsible for a sin that one has not oneself committed but has somehow inherited? Second, if our faculties have been so corrupted by original sin that we can no longer reliably distinguish between the evident and the non-evident, then this corruption will extend to all our cognitive operations including Paul's theological reasoning, which we therefore should not trust either.
One finds the phrase cognitio fidei in Thomas Aquinas and in such Thomist writers as Josef Pieper. It translates as 'knowledge of faith.' The genitive is to be interpreted subjectively, not objectively: faith is not the object of knowledge; faith is a form or type of knowledge. But how can faith be a type of knowledge? One ought to find this puzzling.
On a standard analysis of 'knows,' where propositional knowledge is at issue, subject S knows that p just in case (i) S believes that p; (ii) S is justified in believing that p; and (iii) p is true. This piece of epistemological boilerplate is the starting-point for much of the arcana (Gettier counterexamples, etc.) of contemporary epistemology. But its pedigree is ancient, to be found in Plato's Theaetetus.
It is obvious that on the standard analysis mere belief is inferior to knowledge since if I believe what is false I don't have knowledge, and if I believe what is true without justification I don't have knowledge either. How then can mere belief be a form or type of knowledge? It is rather a necessary but not sufficient condition of knowledge. Or so it seems to the modern mind.
Another puzzle has to do with certainty. Whether or not knowledge entails certainty, it seems to the modern mind that belief definitely does not entail certainty: what I believe but do not know I cannot be certain about since if I believe but do not know, then either truth is lacking or justification is lacking or both. How then can mere belief be said to be certain? And yet we read in Aquinas that "It is part of the concept of belief itself that man is certain of that in which he believes." (Quoted from Pieper, Belief and Faith, p. 15).
Is easy to understand how one who believes but does not know that p can be subjectively certain that p; but it is difficult to understand how such a person can be objectively certain that p. Objective certainty, however, alone has epistemic value.
We now turn to the remarkable Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic church. In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.
One issue is whether faith gives us access to truth. Stein has Thomas say:
. . . faith is a way to truth. Indeed, in the first place it is a way to truths — plural — which would otherwise be closed to us, and in the second place it is the surest way to truth. For there is no greater certainty than that of faith . . . . (Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, tr. Redmond, ICS Publications 2000, pp. 16-17)
Now comes an important question. What is it that we as philosophers want? We want the ultimate truths about the ultimate matters. If so, it is arguable that we should take these truths from whatever source offers them to us even if the source is not narrowly philosophical. We should not say: I will accept only those truths that can be certified by (natural) reason, but rather all truths whether certified by reason or 'certified' by faith. Thus Stein has Aquinas say:
If faith makes accessible truths unattainable by any other means, philosophy, for one thing, cannot forego them without renouncing its universal claim to truth. [. . .] One consequence, then, is a material dependence of philosophy on faith.
Then too, if faith affords the highest certainty attainable by the human mind, and if philosophy claims to bestow the highest certainty, then philosophy must make the certainty of faith its own. It does so first by absorbing the truths of faith, and further by using them as the final criterion by which to gauge all other truths. Hence, a second consequence is a formal dependence of philosophy on faith. (17-18)
But of course this cannot go unchallenged by Husserl. So Stein has him say:
. . . if faith is the final criterion of all other truth, what is the criterion of faith itself? What guarantees that the certainty of my faith is genuine? (20)
Or in terms of of the distinction made above between subjective and objective certainty: what guarantees that the certainty of faith is objective and not merely subjective? The faiths of Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all different. How can the Christian be sure that the revelation he takes on faith has not been superseded by the revelation the Muslim takes on faith?
Stein's Thomas replies to Husserl as follows:
Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith. [. . .]
All we can do is point out that for the believer such is the certainty of faith that it relativizes all other certainty, and that he can but give up any supposed knowledge which contradicts his faith. The unique certitude of faith is a gift of grace. It is up to the understanding and will to draw the practical consequences therefrom. Constructing a philosophy on faith belongs to the theoretical consequences. (20-22)
So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason but which are provided by faith in revelation. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.
My task, in this and in related posts, is first and foremost to set forth the problems as clearly as I can. Anyone who thinks this problem has an easy solution does not understand it. It is part of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem.
Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, "that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt." (Pyrrho entry, Bayle's Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude of faith is no solution either! Recoiling from the labyrinth into which unaided human reason loses itself, Bayle writes:
It seems therefore that this unfortunate state [the one brought about by the infirmity of reason] is the most proper one of all for convincing us that our reason is a path that leads us astray since, when it displays itself with the greatest subtlety, it plunges us into such an abyss. The natural conclusion of this ought to be to renounce this guide and to implore the cause of all things to give us a better one. This is a great step toward the Christian religion; for it requires that we look to God for knowledge of what we ought to believe and what we ought to do, and that we enslave our understanding to the obeisance of faith. If a man is convinced that nothing good is to be expected from his philosophical inquiries, he will be more disposed to pray to God to persuade him of the truths that ought to be believed than if he flatters himself that he might succeed by reasoning and disputing. A man is therefore happily disposed toward faith when he knows how defective reason is. (206, emphasis added)
Now how is this a solution to the alleged infirmity of reason? A Christian fideist, acquiescing in pure blind (purblind?) faith, accepts the Trinity while a Muslim fideist, equally subjectively certain of his faith, rejects the Trinity while intoning that God is one. Blind conviction butts up against blind conviction of the opposite kind and all too often strife and bloodshed is the upshot.
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