Maverick Philosopher

Étienne Gilson on the Jewish Philosophers He Knew

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?

We can ask a parallel question about Muslims. 

Athens and Jerusalem, Disagreement and Dogmatism: The Case of Gilson

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.  

Etienne Gilson comes down on the Hierosolymitan side:

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.

        Faust 1, Vers 1112 - 1117; Vor dem Tor. 

https://www.gutzitiert.de/zitat_autor_johann_wolfgang_von_goethe_thema_seele_zitat_18635.html

 

Christianity and Intelligibility: A Response to Flood

Anthony Flood writes,

Beneath a post on his blog, Bill Vallicella commented on a matter of common interest. I stress that Bill wrote a comment, not a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, and that’s all I’m doing here. I offer the following only as a further, not a last word.

Last Sunday, in responding to one Joe Odegaard, Bill wrote:

While I agree that Christianity makes sense of the world and in particular of the scientific enterprise, and while I myself have argued against materialism/physicalism/naturalism and in favor of Divine Mind as source of the world’s intelligibility, it must be borne in mind that Xianity [Christianity] is a very specific religion with very specific tenets such as Incarnation and Trinity. Why should anyone think that such apparently unintelligible doctrines are necessary for the intelligibility of the natural world? (Emphasis added.—A. G. F.)

The short answer is that appearances can be untrustworthy. Unless it can be shown that those tenets are really, not just apparently, unintelligible, the implicit objection (in the form of a rhetorical question) has no force.

BV: Not so, and for two reasons.  Trinity and Incarnation may or may not be intelligible doctrines.  Either way, the question remains why an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of nature in terms of Divine Mind requires them.  That is the question I am posing to Joe, and indirectly to C. S. Lewis, and it is not rhetorical. I am genuinely asking it. But I have found that some people do not understand what a rhetorical question is. In fact, one night I caught the astute Mark Levin of Life, Liberty, and Levin (Fox News) misusing the phrase. So permit me a brief digression. 

A rhetorical question is a grammatically interrogative form of words that is not logically interrogative but either logically indicative or logically imperative.  Such a form of words is used to issue a command or to make a statement, not to ask a question.   For example, Daddy says to teenage girl, "Do you have to talk on the phone while driving?"  Clearly, the old man is not asking a question despite the grammatically interrogative formulation.  He is issuing a command, or perhaps a recommendation, in a polite way. A second example is from Hillary Clinton. "Do you really think Donald Trump has the temperament to be commander-in-chief?" When she said that in a speech, she was not asking whether Trump has the requisite temperament, but stating or asserting that he does not. And this despite her use of the grammatical interrogative.

Here is an interesting case. Someone sincerely asks, "Does God exist?" and receives the reply, "Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon?" (Ed Abbey).  The first question is genuine; the second is rhetorical.  Another curious case: an uniformed person sincerely asks a genuine question, "Is Mayorkas lying about border security?" and receives in response a rhetorical question that expresses either a tautology, "Is a cat a cat?" or an analytic truth, "Is the Pope Catholic?" End of digression.

And so my question is not rhetorical. I am not asserting anything, I am genuinely asking why Joe or C. S. Lewis, to whom Joe links, or anyone thinks that an account of the intelligibility of nature (including its uniformity, regularity, and predictability) in terms of Divine Mind must also include such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation.  By the intelligibility of nature I mean its intrinsic understandability by minds such as ours.  The natural world is intrinsically such as to be understandable by us. As opposed to what? As opposed to deriving its intelligibility from us via our conceptual schemes. If the latter derivation were the case, then the intelligibility would not be intrinsic but relational: relative to us and our conceptual frameworks.  (I note en passant that there are other ways of accounting for intelligibility without God. The late Daniel Dennett would probably say that it 'evolves.' I'll come back to Dennett later.)

After all, a Jew who rejects Trinity and Incarnation could  hold that nature is intrinsically intelligible only if it is a divine creation. And a Muslim could as well.  And our friend Dale Tuggy too! He is a  unitarian Christian.

So again: Why does an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of the natural world in terms of Divine Creative Mind require the specific doctrines of normative Christianity?  That and that alone is the question I am raising in my response to Joe and C. S. Lewis. 

Tony may have a defensible answer to my question. Or he may not. We can discuss it if he likes. But all of this is irrelevant to the initial post and the comment thread it generated.  The question I raised in the initial post was whether the knowledge involved when a person knows that the Sun has risen is exactly the same sort of knowledge involved  when a person knows -- if he does know --- that Christianity is true.

The Sun Also Rises: On Solar and Christian Belief

A reader sends us to an article that begins like this:

The need for a return to God is clearly evident in today’s deranged and dysfunctional world. It is a need, exceeding all others, that must be fulfilled in order to keep enemies of God from interfering with human life. 

And then a little later we get an unsourced quotation from C. S. Lewis replete with a non-functioning hyperlink:

C.S. Lewis: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” This points directly to the essence of the faith in Christianity and to its need in life. A short explanation, found here, includes the observation: “At first glance, this quote may appear simple, but upon closer examination, its deep meaning and profound importance become evident. Essentially, Lewis suggests that his faith in Christianity is not solely based on tangible evidence but also on the transformative impact it has on his perception of the world.” [My emphasis.]

Since the quotation is unsourced, I cannot check whether Lewis said what he is quoted as saying. If he did, it is a silly thing to say. Let me explain.

This morning I observed a beautiful sunrise. And so I believe that the Sun rose this morning. I also believe that the Sun is the source of the natural light we enjoy on Earth.  But it is false, and indeed silly, to say that one who believes in Christianity believes in the very same way.  The difference is obvious. I cannot help but believe that the Sun rose this morning: I saw it with my own two eyes!  Seeing is believing in a case like this.* That the Sun rose is given, if not indubitably, then for all practical purposes.** There is no need for a leap of faith beyond the given.  The will does not come into it. In no way do I decide to believe that the Sun has risen. Examples like this one refute a universal doxastic voluntarism.

But if you believe that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth, if you believe that the God-Man is fully divine and fully human, that he is one person in two natures, then you believe beyond the sensorily given.  (You also arguably believe beyond what is intelligible to the discursive intellect.) You cannot see God the way you see the Sun. To 'see' God in Jesus you need the 'eye' of faith which is quite obviously not a physical eye but a spiritual 'eye.'  The last sentence in the quotation reads:

Essentially, Lewis suggests that his faith in Christianity is not solely based on tangible evidence but also on the transformative impact it has on his perception of the world.

Better, but still bad. Someone who comes to embrace Christianity comes to view the world in a way very different from the way he viewed it prior to his becoming a Christian. True! So, yes, his worldview has been transformed. But that transformation is no part of the evidence of the truth of Christianity; if it were, then the transformation that occurs in someone who goes from being a Christian to an atheist or a Christian to a Communist  or a Christian to a Buddhist, etc. is a transformation that is evidence of the truth of atheism, Communism, Buddhism respectively, etc.

Article here.

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*There may be other cases in which seeing does not suffice for belief. I am thinking of G. E. Moore's putative counterexample: "I see it, but I don't believe it!"

** The hyperbolic skepticism of Descartes is not to the point here.

Faith: Life-Enhancing Only if True?

In July of 2022 I published a post entitled Faith's Immanent Value.  Here are the opening paragraphs slightly redacted:

Suppose you sincerely believe in God and the soul but that your faith is in vain. You die and become nothing. Your faith was that the curtain would lift, but it falls, irrevocably.  My question is whether that possible upshot would matter. If it should turn out there is nothing on the other side of the Great Divide, would that retroactively remove your faith's immanent value?

My answer is that it won't matter because you won't know it. You will not learn that your faith was in vain. There will be no disappointment. You will not discover that your faith was a life-enhancing illusion. You will have had the benefit of a faith which will have sustained you until the moment of your annihilation as an individual person. You will not die alone for you will die with the Lord-believed-in, a Lord never to be known, but also never to be known not to be.   If the Lord-believed-in is enough for this life, and this life turns out to be the only life, then the Lord-believed-in is enough, period.

Your faith will have had immanent value. If this life is the only life, then this immanent value is the only value your faith could have had. 

The post received a strong response positive and negative. I return to the topic now, as I re-read for the third time Dietrich von Hildebrand's Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven (Sophia Institute Press, 1991, tr. Alice von Hildebrand. The German original appeared in 1980 under the title Über den Tod (On Death)).

On pp. 109-110, von Hildebrand says things that seem to contradict what I am saying. My purpose in this entry is to re-think the question so as to test my view against his. Here is the paragraph that gives me pause and prompts me to re-examine my position:

Nothing would be more absurd than for us to regard the subjective happiness that results from the supernatural view of death as an end, and to see faith as a means for obtaining this end. To do so would mean detaching from truth both faith and the supernatural view of death. Such a pragmatic interpretation of faith comes close to a total misunderstanding of it. We must, therefore, condemn as blind nonsense the idea that, because it cheers and comforts us, supernatural view of death is worth nourishing even if it is an illusion. Faith gives comfort only if it is true. (110, emphasis added)

The pragmatic interpretation of faith as described by von Hildebrand is not mine.  My first  task, then, is to explain why. I turn then to an evaluation of von Hildebrand's positive view.

I

My claim is that religious faith has an immanent value, a value for this life in the here and now, whether or not the objects of this faith, God and the soul,* really exist. This is equivalent to saying that faith has immanent value whether or not the faith is objectively true. I am not saying that that faith has immanent value whether or not the believer really believes in God and the soul. I assume that he really does believe, and shows that he really does believe by living his faith, by 'walking the walk' and and not merely by 'taking the talk.'   My claim is that a believer who really believes derives an important life-enhancing benefit from his sincere belief whether or not the objects of his belief  really exist.

It is important to understand that one who really believes in God and the soul believes that they really exist whether or not he or anyone else believes that they do. His believing purports to target transcendent entities that exist independently of his believing. But note that this purport to target the transcendent is what is whether or not the targets exist.  In other words, from the fact that one really believes that a transcendent God exists, it does not follow that a transcendent God really exists.

Am I saying that faith is a means to the end of subjective happiness? No. The sincere believer does not make himself believe in order to make himself feel good or to comfort himself.  He is not fooling himself so as to comfort himself.  To fool himself, he would have to know or strongly believe that God does not exist and then hide that fact from himself.

The believer believes because of various experiences he has had: he feels (what he describes as) the presence of the Lord on certain occasions; he senses the absoluteness of moral demands and the gap between what he is and what he ought to be; he feels the bite of conscience and cannot bring himself to believe any naturalistic explanation of conscience and its deliverances; he has religious and mystical experiences that seem to tell of an Unseen Order; he takes the beauty, order, and intelligibility of the world to point beyond it to a transcendent Source of this beauty, order, and intelligibility; he feels that life would be meaningless if there were no God, that there would be no ultimate justice; he senses the presence of purely spiritual demonic agents interfering with his attempts to pray and meditate and conform to the demands of morality. 

Or it may be that a sincere religious believer never has any experiences that purport to reveal the reality of God and the soul, and has never considered any of the arguments for God and the soul; he believes because he was brought up to believe by people he admires and respects and trusts.  Even in this case the believer is not making himself believe as a means to the end of feeling good or comfortable or subjectively happy; he believes simply because he has taken on board the beliefs of others he trusts and respects.  I seem to recall Kierkegaard somewhere saying that he believes because his father told him so.  Some imbibe belief with their mother's milk. 

II

Despite these clarifications of my position, it still seems that if von Hildebrand is right, then I am wrong, and vice versa.  He holds that "Faith gives comfort only if it is true." I will take that to mean that faith confers an important life-enhancing benefit only it is objectively true and not merely believed to be truth by a sincere believer.  What I am saying, however, is that faith confers an important life-enhancing benefit to the sincere believer  whether or not  it is objectively true.

Who is right? In all intellectual honesty, it seems to me that I am right. Why should it be necessary that the faith be true for it be life-enhancing, for it to be good for me to believe it? An analogy may help me get my point across.

At age 60 I attempted a marathon. At the starting line I did not know whether I could cover the 26.2 miles within the allotted time (under seven hours). I did not know whether I could pull it off, but I strongly believed that I could, and surely this strong belief, whether true or false, was good for me to believe: it had race-immanent value in that with this belief I performed better than I would have performed without it.  As things turned out, I completed the marathon in six hours.  But suppose I hadn't.  Suppose that my belief in my ability to complete the marathon in the allotted time was false. It would still have been the case that my belief  in completion had race-immanent value.  I would still have been better off with that belief than without it.

Now in the Great Race of Life we compete against our own hebetude, decrepitude, and sinfulness  for the crown of Eternal Life, the Beatific Vision. But here below we cannot know whether we will attain the crown, or even whether it exists, so here below we need faith.  Living by faith we live better than we would have lived without it. We run the Race better, with more enthusiasm, commitment, and resoluteness.  Clearly, or so it seems to me, we reap the benefits of this faith in the here and now whether or not there is anything on the other side of the Great Divide.

So I say that von Hildebrand does not understand the pragmatics of faith. One problem is that he caricatures the pragmatic approach as I showed in the first section.  The other problem is that he is a dogmatist: his doxastic security needs are so strong that he cannot psychologically tolerate the idea that he might be wrong.  He wants objective certainty about ultimates, as all serious philosophers do, but he confuses his subjective certainty, which falls far short of knowledge,  with objective certainty, which knowledge logically requires.

He claims to know things that he cannot possibly know. He writes,

We ought to have faith because by our belief in God we give the response to which He is entitled. We ought to believe in divine Revelation because it is absolute truth. (110)

What von Hildebrand is doing here is simply presupposing the existence of God and the absolute truth of  divine revelation.  If God exists, then of course we ought to have faith in him. And if divine revelation is absolute truth, then we ought to believe in it. But how does von Hildebrand  know that God exists and that revelation is true? He doesn't t know these things, he merely believes them.  He is claiming to know what he cannot know, but can only believe.  

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*'Soul' in the Platonic sense, not the Aristotelian one according to which the soul is the mere life-principle of the body.

Reading Now: Karl Barth, Henri Bouillard, Erich Przywara

'Now' above refers to March 2003. Tempus fugit! This unfinished post has been languishing in storage and now wants to see the light of day. Fiat lux!

...........................................

I'm on a bit of theological jag at present. The updating of my SEP divine simplicity entry has occasioned my review of recent literature on modal collapse arguments against DDS, some of it by theologians. See the final section for the modal collapse arguments.

Henri Bouillard's The Knowledge of God (Herder and Herder, 1968) introduced me to Karl Barth.  Bouillard is a philosopher, Barth a theologian.  Both are in quest of the Absolute but in different ways. But completeness demands a tripartite distinction between philosopher, theologian, and mystic.

Thomas Aquinas, the Great Synthesizer, is all three at different times and in different texts. The natural theology of the praeambula fidei is philosophy, not theology strictly speaking. To argue from the mundus sensibilis to an extra-mundane causa prima is to do natural theology, which is a branch of philosophy.  No use is made by the philosopher qua philosopher of divine revelation. There is no appeal to the supernatural. Recourse is only to (discursive/dianoetic) reason and the deliverances of the senses.  Properly theological topics, on the other hand, among them  Trinity and Incarnation, are knowable only via revelation, which presupposes faith. They are not knowable by philosophical methods. Whether cognitio fidei (knowledge by faith) should be called knowledge is an important but vexing question, especially for those of us who toil in the shadow of the great Descartes. I have something to say about it here in connection with Edith Stein and her first and second 'masters,' the neo-Cartesian Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas, respectively.

A third source of insight into the Absolute is via mysticism which promises direct access to God as opposed to access via discursive operations from the side of the finite subject and/or access via divine communication from God to man via Scripture. As I understand Barth so far in my study of him, he denies that God reveals himself in the created world or via the teaching authority of any church, let alone the church of Rome. On his account we know God only from God. Revelation is confined to Scripture and to God Incarnate, Jesus Christ. So there is no access to God via natural theology nor through direct mystical insight. 

Erich Przywara (1889-1972) somewhere in his stupendous Analogia  Entis (orig. publ. in German in 1962, English tr. by Betz and Hart, Eerdmans 2014) adds a fourth category, that of the theological philosopher. But I have forgotten what exactly he means by 'theological philosopher.'

He who quests for the Absolute may therefore wear one or more of four hats: philosopher, theologian (narrow or proper sense), mystic, or theological philosopher. Might there be other 'hats'? That of the moral reformer? That of the the beauty-seeker?

Is Belief in God Rationally Required? Response to a Critic

S. L. writes, 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The Problem of Pain

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lev Shestov on the Fall of Man

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God, Doubt, Denial, and Truth: A Note on Van Til

Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., P&R Publishing, 2008, p. 294: "To doubt God is to deny him."

I take that to mean that to doubt that God exists is to deny that God exists. The obvious objection to this is that doubt and denial are very different propositional attitudes. In most cases, one can doubt that p without denying that p.  I can doubt that Biden will get a second term without denying that he will. 

In almost all cases. But in every case?  Suppose we replace 'p' with 'truth exists.'  Can we doubt that truth exists without denying that truth exists.  No! In the case of truth, the distinction between doubt and denial collapses. 

To doubt that truth exists is to presuppose that truth exists. For if you doubt that truth exists, you are doubting whether it is true that truth exists.  The same goes for denial. If you deny that truth exists, you affirm that it is true that truth does not exist. 

Whether you doubt or deny that truth exists, you presuppose that truth exists. Truth is such that doubt and denial are the same. Truth cannot be doubted and it cannot be denied. The existence of truth is the ultimate transcendental condition of all our intellectual operations, doubt, denial, affirmation, predication, reasoning, and so on. So we may say:

To doubt truth is to deny her.

Of course, it remains that case that doubt and denial are different propositional attitudes. But in the case of truth, doubt becomes denial.

Therefore,  if God is identical to truth, then Van Til is right: "To doubt God is to deny him." If God is identical to truth, then God is the ultimate transcendental condition of all our intellectual operations, including giving arguments for God's nonexistence! If so, then Van Til and his followers are not begging the question against atheists and agnostics by simply assuming what they need to prove; they are giving a noncircular transcendental argument for the existence of God.

But is God identical to truth? Is it true that God is identical to truth? These remain open questions. I grant that if God is identical to truth, then God exists as the necessary condition of all affirmation, denial, and argument, including atheistic argument.  But how do we know that the antecedent of this conditional is true?

It may be that in reality apart from us, God and truth are the same. But from our point of view, the only POV available to us, God and truth are not the same. To see this, note that it is conceivable (thinkable without contradiction) that God not exist, but not conceivable that truth not exist. So it might be true that God exists and it might be true that God does not exist.  The 'might' in the preceding sentence in both of its occurrences is epistemically modal. It is epistemically possible that God exist and epistemically possible that God not exist.  For all we know, either could be the case. But it is epistemically necessary that truth exist: we cannot help presupposing it.  Given that we know anything at all, truth must exist. So the argument could be put like this:

a) That truth exists is epistemically necessary: we cannot help presupposing that it exists.

b) That God exists is not epistemically necessary: we can conceive the nonexistence of God.

Therefore

c) God cannot be proven to exist by proving that truth exists.

Therefore

d) The Transcendental Argument for God fails as a proof.

Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Religion

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One source of the appeal of ordinary language philosophy (OLP) is that it reinstates much of what was ruled out as cognitively meaningless by logical positivism (LP) but without rehabilitating the commitments of old-time metaphysics. In particular, OLP allows the reinstating of religious language. This post explains, with blogic brevity, how this works and what is wrong and what right with the resulting philosophy of religion. Since OLP can be understood only against the backdrop of LP, I begin with a brief review of LP.

Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method

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August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher in her own right, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

 

Does Doubt Have a Role to Play in Religion?

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I list six such salutary roles.

Genuine Inquiry and Two Forms of Pseudo-Inquiry: Sham Reasoning and Fake Reasoning

Steven Nemes sent me to his Substack site where he has an article entitled Theology and Philosophy in Roman Catholicism. His way of thinking reminds me of my younger self. What follows is a revised re-posting of an article of mine from September 2014 which explores similar themes. At the end of the re-posting I offer some comments on Nemes' article.

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In Philosophers Who Compartmentalize and Those Who Don't,  I drew a distinction between

1. Philosophical inquiry pursued in order to support (defend and rationally justify) an antecedently held thesis or worldview whose source is extra-philosophical

and

2. Philosophical inquiry pursued in order to support (by generating) a thesis or worldview that is not antecedently held but arrived at by philosophical inquiry.  

But we need to nuance this a bit inasmuch as (1) conflates the distinction between

1a. Philosophical inquiry pursued in order to support (defend and rationally justify) an antecedently held thesis or worldview whose source is extra-philosophical, a thesis or worldview that will continue to be maintained whether or not the defensive and justificatory operations are successful

and

1b. Philosophical inquiry pursued in order to support (defend and rationally justify) an antecedently held thesis or worldview whose source is extra-philosophical, a thesis or worldview that will continue to be maintained only if the defensive and justificatory operations are successful.

Alvin Plantinga may serve as a contemporary example of (1a). I think it is fair  to say that his commitment to his  Dutch Reformed Christian worldview is such that  he would continue to adhere to it whether or not his technical philosophical work is judged successful in defending and rationally justifying it.  For a classical example of (1a), we may turn to Thomas Aquinas.  His commitment to the doctrine of the Incarnation does not depend on the success of his attempt at showing the doctrine to be rationally acceptable. (Don't confuse rational acceptability with rational provability.  The Incarnation cannot of course be rationally demonstrated. At best it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)  Had his amanuensis Reginald convinced him that his defensive strategy in terms of reduplicatives was a non-starter, Thomas would not have suspended his acceptance of the doctrine in question; he would have looked for a  defense immune to objections.

There are of course atheists and materialists who also exemplify (1a).  Suppose a typical materialist about the mind proffers a theory that attempts to account for qualia and intentionality in purely naturalistic terms, and I succeed in showing him that his theory is untenable. Will he then reject his materialism about the mind or suspend judgment with respect to it?  Of course not.  He will 'go back to the drawing board' and try to develop a naturalistic theory immune to my objections. 

The same thing goes on in the sciences.  There are climate scientists who are ideologically committed to the thesis that anthropogenic global warming is taking place to such a degree that it poses an imminent threat to life on Earth.  They then look for evidence to buttress this conviction. If they find it, well and good; if they don't, they keep looking or adjust their thesis by shifting from the species to the genus, from global warming to climate change.  Clearly, the ideological commitment drives the well-funded research, and raises doubts about whether the science itself is more ideology than science.

According to Susan Haack, following C. S. Peirce, the four examples above (which are mine, not hers) are examples of pseudo-inquiry:

The distinguishing feature of genuine inquiry is that what the inquirer wants is to find the truth of some question. [. . .] The distinguishing feature of pseudo-inquiry is that what the 'inquirer' wants is not to discover the truth of some question but to make a case for some proposition determined in advance. (Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 8)

Haack, again following Peirce, distinguishes within pseudo-inquiry sham inquiry and sham reasoning from fake inquiry and fake reasoning.  You engage in sham reasoning when you make  "a case for the truth of some proposition your commitment to which is already evidence- and argument-proof."  (8) Characteristic of the sham 'inquirer' is a "prior and unbudgeable commitment to the proposition for which he tries to make a case." (9)

There are also those who are indifferent to the truth-value of the thesis they urge, but argue for it anyway to make a name for themselves and advance their careers.  Their reasoning is not sham but fake.  The sham reasoner is committed to the truth of the thesis he urges; the fake reasoner isn't: he is a bullshitter in Harry Frankfurt's sense.  I will not be concerned with fake inquiry in this post.

The question I need to decide is, first of all,  whether every case of (1a) is sham inquiry.  And the answer to that is No.  That consciousness exists, for example, is something I know to be true, and indeed from an extra-philosophical source, namely, introspection or inner sense.  Those who claim that consciousness is an illusion are frightfully mistaken.  I would be within my epistemic rights in simply dismissing their absurd claim as a bit of sophistry.   But suppose I give an argument why consciousness cannot be an illusion.  Such an argument would not count as sham reasoning despite my mind's being made up before I start my arguing, despite my "prior and unbudgeable commitment to the proposition" for which I argue.

Nothing is more evident that that consciousness, in my own case at least, exists.  Consider a somewhat different case, that of other minds, other consciousnesses.  Other minds are not given to me in the way my own mind is given to me.  Yet when I converse with a fellow human being, and succeed in communicating with him more or less satisfactorily, I am unshakably convinced that I am in the presence of an other mind: I KNOW that my interlocutor is an other mind.  And in the case of my cats, despite the fact that our communication does not rise to a very high level, I am unbudgingly convinced that they too  are subjects of consciousness, other minds. As a philosopher I want to know how it is that I have knowledge of other minds; I seek a justification of my belief in them.  Whether I come up with a decent justification or not, I hold fast to my belief.  I want to know how knowledge of other minds is possible, but I would never take my inability to demonstrate possibility as entailing that the knowledge in question is not actual.  The reasoning I engage in is genuine, not sham, despite the fact that there is no way I am going to abandon my conviction.

Suppose an eliminative materialist claims that there are no beliefs or desires.  I might simply dismiss his foolish assertion or I might argue against it.  If I do the latter, my reasoning is surely not sham despite my prior and unbudgeable commitment to my thesis.

Suppose David Lewis comes along and asserts that unrealized possibilities are physical objects.  I know that that is false.  Suppose a student doesn't see right off the bat that the claim is false and demands an argument.  I supply one.  Is my reasoning sham because there is no chance that I will change my view?  I don't think so.

Suppose someone denies the law of non-contradiction . . . .

There is no need to multiply examples: not every case of (1a) is sham inquiry.  Those who claim that consciousness is an illusion or that there are no beliefs and desires can, and perhaps ought to be, simply dismissed as sophists or bullshitters.  "Never argue with a sophist!" is a good maxim.  But deniers of God, the soul, the divinity of Christ, and the like cannot be simply dismissed as sophists or bullshitters.

So now we come to the hard cases, the interesting cases.

Consider the unshakable belief held by some that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53)  Some of those who have this belief claim to have glimpsed the unseen order via mystical experience.  They claim that it lies beyond the senses, outer and inner, and that is also lies beyond what discursive reason can grasp.  And yet they reason about it, not to prove its existence, but to show how it, though supra-rational, is yet rationally acceptable.  Is their reasoning sham because they will hold to their conviction whether or not they succeed in showing that the conviction is rationally acceptable? 

I don't think so.  Seeing is believing, and mystical experience is a kind of seeing. Why trust abstract reasoning over direct experience? If you found a way out of Plato's Cave, then you know there is a way out, and all the abstract reasoning of all the benighted troglodytes counts for nothing at all in the teeth of that experience of liberation.  But rather than pursue a discussion of mystical experience, let's think about (propositional) revelation.

Consider Aquinas again.  There are things he thinks he can rationally demonstrate such as the existence of God.  The existence of God is a philosophically demonstrable preamble of faith, but not an article of faith. And there are things such as the Incarnation he thinks cannot be rationally demonstrated, but can be known to be true on the basis of revelation as mediated by the church's teaching authority. But while not provable (rationally demonstrable), the Incarnation is rationally acceptable.  Or so Thomas argues.  Is either sort of reasoning sham given that Aquinas would not abandon belief in God or in the Incarnation even if his reasoning in either case was shown to be faulty?  Bertrand Russell would say yes:

There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.  (Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Schuster, p. 463)

It is easy to see that Haack is a sort of philosophical granddaughter of Russell at least on this point.

In correspondence Dennis Monokroussos points out that "Anthony Kenny had a nice quip in reply to the Russell quotation. On page 2 of his edited work, Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (London, 1969) (cited in Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 19), he says that the remark “comes oddly from a philosopher who took three hundred and sixty dense pages to offer a proof that 1 + 1 = 2.”

Exactly right.  This is yet another proof that not every instance of (1a) above is an instance of sham reasoning or sham inquiry. 

It is certainly false to say that, in general, it is unphilosophical or special pleading or an abuse of reason to seek arguments for a proposition antecedently accepted, a proposition the continuing acceptance of which does not depend on whether or not good arguments for it can be produced.  But if we are to be charitable to Lord Russell we should read his assertion as restricted to propositions, theological and otherwise, that are manifestly controversial.  So restricted, Russell's asseveration cannot be easily refuted by counterexample, which is not to say that it is obviously true.

Thus I cannot simply cite the Incarnation doctrine and announce that we know this from revelation and are justified in accepting it whether or not we are able to show that it is rationally acceptable.  For if it really is logically impossible then it cannot be true.  If you say that it is actually true, hence possibly true whether or not we can explain how it is possible for it to be true, then you beg the question by assuming that it is actually true despite the opponent's arguments that it is logically contradictory.

It looks to be a stand-off.

One can imagine a Thomist giving the following speech. 

My reasoning in defense of the Incarnation and other such doctrines as the Trinity is not sham despite the fact that I am irrevocably committed to these doctrines.  It is a question of faith seeking understanding.  I am trying to understand what I accept as true, analogously as Russell tried to understand in terms of logic and set theory what he accepted as true in mathematics.   I am not trying to decide whether what I accept is true since I know it it to be true via an extra-philosophical source of knowledge.  I am trying to understand how it could be true.  I am trying to integrate faith with reason in a manner analogous to the way Russell sought to integrate arithmetic and logic.  One can reason to find out new truths, but one can also reason, and reason legitimately, to penetrate intellectually truths one already possesses, truths the ongoing acceptance of which does not depend on one's penetrating them intellectually.

What then does the Russell-Haack objection  amount to?  It appears to amount to a rejection of certain extra-philosophical sources of knowledge/truth such as mystical experience, authority, and revelation.  I have shown that Russell and his epigones cannot reject every extra-philosophical source of knowledge, else they would have to reject inner and outer sense.  Can they prove that there cannot be any such thing as divine revelation?  And if they cannot prove that, then their rejection of the possibility is arbitrary.  If they say that any putative divine revelation has to validate itself by our lights, in our terms, to our logic, then that is just to reject divine revelation.

It looks to be a stand-off, then.  Russell and his epigones are within their  rights to remain within the sphere of immanence and not admit as true or real anything that cannot be certified or validated within that sphere by the satisfaction of the criteria human reason imposes.  And their opponents are free to make the opposite decision: to open themselves to a source of insight ab extra.

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Nemes mentions a "fundamental asymmetry." "Theology takes itself for granted and makes use of philosophy only to the extent that it is useful for furthering theology’s own purposes. Theology is never really critiqued or corrected by philosophy per se." That's right: philosophia ancilla theologiae. But secular ideologies do the same thing.  Metaphysical naturalism and its epistemology, scientism, do not allow themselves to be "critiqued or corrected by philosophy per se." Philosophia ancilla scientiae.

Where is the asymmetry? The situation is symmetrical: both magisteria put philosophy to work to shore up their respective worldviews.  Atheists and mortalists, as a group, never admit defeat.  Corner a naturalist and he'll go eliminativist or mysterian on you.  Show Dennett that consciousness has no naturalist explanation, and he'll just deny its existence and pronounce it an illusion.  We don't explain illusions; we explain them away. Drive McGinn to the wall and he will tell you that it's a mystery.  How is that different from the orthodox Chalcedonian incarnationalist's claim that Christ is fully human and fully divine, one suppositum supporting two natures? Each side is committed to its 'truths' come hell or high water.

The Philosopher and the Christian

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