Maverick Philosopher

The Euthyphro Problem, Islam, and Thomism.

Top o' the Stack. The problem is genuine but insoluble. Or so I conclude. What say you?

The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God: A First Response to Flood

I thank Anthony G. Flood for his The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God Revisited: Toward a Response to Bill Vallicella.  Herewith, a first installment by way of rejoinder. Convergence upon agreement is not to be expected, but clarification of differences is an attainable goal. In any case, philosophy is a joy to its true acolytes, and in dark times a great consolation as well. Now let's get to work.

Tony introduces the theme skillfully:

Preamble: if the God of the Bible, who created human beings in his image to know and love him and to know, value, and rule the rest of creation under him (hereafter, “God”), exists, then we know one way that the conditions of intelligible predication (IP) can be met. The preceding sentence includes key aspects of the Christian worldview (CW)—the Theos-anthropos-kosmos relationship—expressed on the pages of the Bible.

If no alternative explanation for IP is possible, then Biblical theism is necessarily true (which is what the CW predicts).

[. . .]

If no worldview other than the Christian (CW) can account for IP, if (as I now hold) an alternative to the CW when it comes to accounting for IP cannot even be conceived, then to hold out for an alternative, as though doing so were an expression of rational exigency (“demandingness”)—that to reserve judgment somehow accords with epistemic duty—models only dogmatic stubbornness, not tolerant liberality.

Given the actual fact of intelligible predication, which is not in dispute, and assuming, as we must, the modal axiom ab esse ad posse valet illatio, it follows that intelligible predication (IP) is possible. Necessarily, whatever is actual is possible. So we ask the transcendental question: under what conditions is IP possible? What condition or conditions would have to obtain for it to be possible that there be actual cases of intelligible predication?  An example of an intelligible predication is any true or false statement, such as 'The Moon is presently uninhabited' which happens to be true, or its negation which happens to be false. 

Now I agree with Flood that if the God of the Christian Bible (hereafter 'God') exists, then the condition or conditions of the possibility of IP are satisfied. The existence of God suffices for the possibility of intelligible predication. But here we need to remind ourselves of a couple or three simple points of logic.

The first is  that if X is sufficient for Y, it does not follow that X is necessary for Y. So if the existence of God is not only a sufficient but also a necessary condition of IP, this will require further argumentation. The second point is that to assert a conditional is not to assert either its antecedent/protasis or its consequent/apodosis.  To assert or affirm a conditional is to assert or affirm a connection between antecedent and consequent, the nature of the connection depending on the type of conditional it is, whether logical or nomological or whatever. The third point is that some conditionals are true despite having a false antecedent and a false consequent.

And although it is not self-evident, I also agree with Flood that there is and must be some condition or set of conditions that make IP possible. Let 'TC' stand for this transcendental condition or set of conditions. We agree then that the TC necessarily exists.

We seem to have found some common -- dare I say 'neutral'? -- ground: (a) there are actual cases of IP; (b) given that they are actual, they are possible; (c) it is legitimate to launch a regressive (transcendental) inquiry into the condition or conditions of the possibility of these actual cases; (d) there must be such a transcendental condition; (e) the existence of God suffices for the possibility of IP. 

This leaves us with the question whether the God of the Christian Bible  = TC. Is God's existence not only sufficient but also both necessary for the possibility of IP? Flood will answer with alacrity in the affirmative: yes, God and God alone is (numerically) identical to the ultimate transcendental condition of all intelligible predication. This of course implies that it is not possible that anything distinct from God be the TC. God necessarily exists, and is necessarily identical to the ultimate transcendental condition of intelligible predication.  

But wait, there's more! Flood tells us that  "an alternative to the CW [the Christian worldview] when it comes to accounting for IP cannot even be conceived." So it is not just impossible that anything other than God be identical to the TC; this is inconceivable as well. 

Here is one of the places where Flood blunders: he confuses the epistemic modality inconceivability with the ontic modality impossibility. Conceivability and inconceivability are tied to the thinking powers of such  finite and limited intellects as ours. By contrast, what is possible and impossible in reality are independent of what we frail reeds are able to think and unable to think.  I will have more to say about this in subsequent posts since it appears to be a trademark mistake of presuppositionalists to conflate epistemic and ontic modality.

In any case, it is very easy to conceive of alternatives  to Flood's candidate for TC status. Here is a partial catalog of candidates in which (B), (C), and (D) are alternatives to Flood's candidate, (A).

A. Intelligible predication  presupposes the truth of the Christian worldview  (Van Til & Co.) as the transcendental condition of IP's very possibility.

B. Intelligible predication presupposes the existence of God, but not the Christian worldview as the Calvinist Van Til and his followers calvinistically understand it, the essential commitments of which include such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity, Incarnation, etc. as well as the specifically Calvinist TULIP doctrines. Some who call themselves Christians are unitarians and deniers of the divinity of Christ. Our friend Dale Tuggy is such a one.  And those the presuppositionalists refer to as 'Romanists' who do accept Trinity and Incarnation don't accept the specifically Calvinist add-ons.

C. Intelligible predication presupposes the truth of Kant's transcendental idealism according to which "The understanding is the law-giver of nature," and space and time are a priori forms of our sensibility.  For Kant the ultimate transcendental condition of the objective validity of every judgment, and thus of every intelligible predication, is located in the transcendental unity of apperception which is assuredly not God, whatever exactly it is. 

D. Intelligible predication presupposes, not the God of the Christian Bible, but  an immanent order and teleology in nature along the lines of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos (Oxford 2012). On Nagel's view, the rational order of nature is self-explanatory, a necessary feature of anything that could count as a cosmos. Nagel views the intelligibility of the world as "itself part of the deepest explanation why things are as they are." (17).  Now part of the way things are is that they are understandable by us.  Given that the way things are is intelligible, it follows that the intelligibility of the world is self-explanatory or self-grounding. "The intelligibility of the world is no accident." (17) But neither is it due to theistic intervention or imposition. "Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings." (17) See my overview of Nagel's book for details.

I am not endorsing any of the above-listed alternatives to (A). They all have their problems as does (A). My point is that they are conceivable alternatives to (A). This being the case, Flood's asseveration, "an alternative to the CW [the Christian worldview] when it comes to accounting for IP cannot even be conceived" is false.

It is quite clear that what Van Til & Co. want is a rationally compelling, 'knock-down,' argument for the existence of the God of the Christian Bible calvininstically interpreted.  But they know (deep down even as they suppress the knowledge) that no circular argument is probative.  So they essay the above transcendental argument.

What I have shown, however, is that the transcendental argument is not probative.  It fails to establish that the God of the Christian Bible is both sufficient and necessary for the possibility of intelligible predication. At most, it renders rationally acceptable the conclusion that the God of the Christian Bible exists.

I am not denying that the God of the Christian Bible exists. Nor am I denying that if said God exists, then he flawlessly executes all the transcendental functions that need executing.  How could he fail to? In particular, how could he fail to be the ultimate ungrounded transcendental-ontological ground of intelligible predication?  My point is that the presuppositionalists have not proven, i.e., established with objective certainty, that God alone could play the transcendental role.

 

Belief in God

Wish-fulfillment or inducement to strenuous living? Freud versus James. Top o' the Stack.

Argumentative Circles and their Diameters: More on Presuppositionalism

The day before yesterday, re: presuppositionalism, I wrote:

We need to bear in mind  that arguments have premises and that no argument can prove its own premises. An argument of the form p therefore p is an argument valid in point of logical form in which premise and conclusion are identical, but no one will take an argument of this form as proving that p. Every circular argument of the above form is valid, and some are sound; but none are probative. By that I mean that no such argument constitutes a proof.  That ought to be perfectly obvious.

'Circularity' in respect of arguments is of course a metaphor: no argument is literally a geometrical circle. But it is a useful metaphor and I propose we extend it by speaking of the 'diameter' of a circular argument.  The logical form italicized above -- p therefore p -- has a 'diameter' than which no shorter can be conceived.  Its 'diameter' is zero. If a geometrical circle has a diameter of zero, then it is not a circle but a point.  The diameter of a circular argument of the above form is also a 'point,' figuratively speaking, the point being the one proposition that serves as both premise and conclusion.

A circular argument of zero diameter is said to be 'vicious.' Are there then 'virtuous' or if not positively virtuous then  'non-vicious' circular arguments?  Can one argue in a way that is circular but logically acceptable? Brian Bosse brought up this issue over lunch Sunday as we were discussing my longish entry on presuppositionalism. He may have had John M. Frame in mind.

Presuppositionalists such as Frame take the Word of God as set forth in the Protestant Christian Bible as their "ultimate presupposition." (Five Views on Apologetics, Zondervan 2000, 209) It is their "ultimate criterion of truth." (209)  This commitment of theirs is faith-based:

. . . for Christians, faith governs reasoning just as it governs all other human activities. Reasoning is not in some realm that is neutral between faith and unbelief. There is no such realm, since God's standards apply to all of life. (209)

What causes faith? ". . . God causes faith by his own free grace." (209) What is the rational basis of faith? ". . . the answer is that faith is based on reality, on truth. It is in accord with all the facts of God's universe and all the laws of thought that God has ordained. . . . The faith he gives us agrees with God's own perfect rationality." (209-210)

We want to know what rationally justifies faith in God and in his Word as found in the Bible. We are told that this faith is justified because it is true, agreeing as it does with all of the laws of thought that God has ordained. God himself, as the ultimate source of all things, including rationality, is the ultimate rational justification of our faith in him and his Word.  The reasoning here is plainly circular as Frame admits:

There is a kind of circularity here, but the circularity is not vicious. It sounds circular to say that faith governs reasoning and also that it is based on rationality. It is therefore important to remember that the rationality that serves as the rational basis for faith is God's own rationality. The sequence is: God's rationality -->human faith -->human reasoning. The arrows may be read "is the rational basis for." That sequence is linear, not circular. (210)

Frame's fancy footwork here is unavailing, an exercise in sophistry. He is obviously reasoning in a circle by presupposing the very thing whose existence he wants to prove. But he is loathe to admit that this is what he is doing. So he introduces a bogus distinction between vicious circles and linear circles.  But just as 'linear circle' in geometry is a contradictio in adjecto , so too is 'linear circle' in logic. 

You are either arguing in a circle or you are not. You are either presupposing what you are trying to prove or you are not. You are either begging the question or you are not. You are either committing the formal fallacy of petitio principii (hysteron proteron) or you are not. That is the long and the short of it. One or the other and no weaseling out via some bogus distinction between vicious and non-vicious circular arguments.

What Frame wants is a 'knock-down' (rationally compelling or rationally coercive) argument for the existence of the God of the Protestant Christian Bible interpreted along Calvinist lines.  He thinks he can get what wants by way of a transcendental argument,  one that issues in God "not merely as the conclusion of an argument, but as the one who makes argument possible." (220)  He wants God to play a transcendental role as the ultimate and unconditioned condition of the possibility of all our intellectual operations including reasoning, whether valid or invalid, sound or unsound. (If his God does play the transcendental role, then Frame can say that the arguments of atheists, just insofar as they are arguments, prove the existence of God!) 

Now it must be granted, as I granted to Brian over lunch, that if Frame's God exists, then he does play the transcendental role. The question, however, is whether it can be proven that nothing other than Frame's God could play the transcendental role. It can be proven that there is a transcendental condition of all our intellectual operations. (See my earlier entry.) Where Frame goes wrong is in thinking that from the fact that there is a rationally compelling argument for the existence of a transcendental condition of the possibility of all our intellectual operations (forming concepts, defining terms, making judgments, giving arguments, replying to objections offering hypotheses, etc.) it follows immediately that his God exists beyond the shadow of a rational doubt.  How does he know that his God alone could play the transcendental role? Frame may be taxed with  giving the following invalid argument:

a) If the God of the Protestant Christian Bible exists, then he plays the transcendental role;

b) It is objectively certain that something plays the transcendental role;

ergo

c) It is objectively certain that the God of the Protestant Christian Bible  plays the transcendental role. 

The premises are true, but the conclusion does not follow from them. For it is not objectively certain that nothing other than the God of the Christian Bible could play the transcendental role. This is because no non-transcendental argument -- Frame mentions the "causal argument" -- for the existence of God is rationally compelling. Hence no non-transcendental God argument can assure us that the existence of God is objectively certain. 

Here is another way to see the matter. It is rationally demonstrable that there is a total and unique way things are. (For if you assert that there is no way things are, then you are asserting that the way things are is that there is no way things are.) Now if Frame's God exists, then he is the concrete and personal metaphysical ground of the way things are. But how do we know that Frame's God exists? We cannot simply assume that the transcendental proof of the existence of the way things are is also a proof of Frame's God.  So non-transcendental arguments must be brought into to take us to Frame's God, Frame's "causal argument" for example. But these arguments are none of them rationally compelling. They do not generate objective certainty. So how do we know that something else is not the metaphysical ground of the way things are?

The Presuppositionalist Challenge to My Position

The presuppositionalism of Cornelius van Til, Greg L. Bahnsen, John M. Frame and others sets me a challenge given some long-held views of mine. I will here explain one of these views and then explain why it is incompatible with presuppositionalism. After that, I will begin to explain my reasons for rejecting presuppositionalism. This third task will require additional posts.

I have maintained that both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable by beings like us in  our present state. Theism is the view that there is a supreme transcendent being of a personal nature who created ex nihilo everything other than himself.  Atheism, then, is the view that there is no such being. Because the competing views thus defined are logical contradictories, they cannot both be true and they cannot both be false. Not everyone will accept the above definitions of 'theism' and 'atheism,' but if I am not mistaken presuppositionalists do accept them.

So on my accounting theism and atheism are both rationally acceptable. To appreciate my thesis you must understand that truth and rational acceptability are not the same. Some propositions are true but not rationally acceptable.  It is also easily shown that some propositions are rationally acceptable but not true.  This is because truth is absolute whereas rational acceptability is relative to various indices. Rational acceptability can vary with time and place and other factors; truth cannot. That there are four elements, air, earth, fire, and water was rationally acceptable to the ancient Greeks. It is not rationally acceptable to us. If one were to identify the true with the rationally acceptable, one would have to say that the number and nature of the elements has changed over time.

To claim that both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable is to claim that good arguments  can be given for both.  A good argument, as I use 'good argument,' is one that has plausible premises and commits no formal or informal fallacy. A good argument, then, is not the same as a rationally compelling or rationally coercive argument.  Every rationally compelling argument is of course good, but not every good argument is rationally compelling. A well-reasoned case for a proposition needn't be a rationally compelling case.  If it is well-reasoned, then I call it 'good.'  Here are the details. (The reader may want to skip the next section (in Georgia 12-pt) the better to catch the drift of this entry, and then come back to it.)

Excursus

Philosophers make reasoned cases for all manner of propositions, but their colleagues typically do not find these arguments to be compelling.  But what do I mean by 'compelling'?   I say that a (rationally) compelling case or argument is one that forces the 'consumer' of the argument to accept the argument's conclusion on pain of being irrational should he not accept it.  I will assume that the 'consumer' is intelligent, sincere, open to having his mind changed, and well-versed in the subject matter of the argument. Now it may be that there are a few arguments that are rationally compelling in this sense. But there are no rationally compelling arguments available to us here below (in our present state) for or against the existence of God. Or so I claim.  I do not claim to have a rationally compelling argument for this meta-philosophical claim. I claim merely that There are no rationally compelling arguments for or against the existence of God is rationally acceptable.  It follows that I will not tax you with irrationality if you reject my meta-philosophical claim. I tolerate your dissent: I allow that you may reasonably disagree with me about my meta-claim.

 

We need to bear in mind  that arguments have premises and that no argument can prove its own premises. An argument of the form p therefore p is an argument valid in point of logical form in which premise and conclusion are identical, but no one will take an argument of this form as proving that p. Every circular argument of the above form is valid, and some are sound; but none are probative. By that I mean that no such argument constitutes a proof.  That ought to be perfectly obvious. Equally obvious is that one cannot prove a proposition by presupposing it. I trust that the reader understands the standard definitions of 'valid' and 'sound.'  Proofs are demonstrative; they establish their conclusions with  objective certainty. There is of course non-demonstrative reasoning, inductive and abductive.  But no inductive argument, no matter how strong, amounts to a proof. This is a point I share with Greg L. Bahnsen: "Inductive arguments are always inconclusive . . . ." (Presuppositional Apologetics, American Vision, 2021, p. 302) Since every argument has a conclusion, what does it mean to say that an argument is inconclusive? It means that the argument does not amount to a proof of its conclusion.

 

Now given that no argument can prove its own premises, what reason could one give for accepting the premises of a given argument?  Suppose  argument A has P1 and P2 as premises and that its conclusion C follows logically from the premises.  Why accept P1 and P2?  One could adduce further arguments B and C for P1 and P2 respectively.  But then the problem arises all over again.  For arguments B and C themselves have premises.  If P3 is a premise of B, what reason could one give for the acceptance of P3? One could adduce argument D.  But D too has premises, and if you think this through you soon realize that you have brought down upon your head an infinite regress which is vicious.  The regress is vicious because the task of justifying by argument all the premises involved cannot be completed.

 

To avoid argumentative regress we need premises that are self-justifying in the sense that they are justified, but not justified by any proposition external to themselves.  Such propositions could be said to be, not just evident, but self-evident.  But what is self-evident to one person is often not self-evident to another.  This plain fact forces a distinction between subjective and objective self-evidence.  Clearly, subjective self-evidence is not good enough if our concern is with things external to consciousness such as God as opposed to what Roderick Chisholm calls self-presenting states such as the state I am in when I feel pain.   In the case of felt pain, subjective and objective self-evidence coalesce. Felt pain is an internal state: to feel pain is to be in pain. Felt or phenomenal pains are such that their esse (their to be) is identical to  their percipi (their to be perceived) But with respect to propositions that are about external things, things that exist independently of finite consciousness, if it merely seems to subject S that p is self-evident, that does not suffice to establish that p is objectively self-evident.  Trouble is, when someone announces that such-and-such is objectively self-evident that too is a claim about how it seems to that person, so that it is not clear that what is being claimed as objectively self-evident is not in the end itself merely subjectively self-evident. 

 

Example.  Suppose an argument for the existence of God employs the premise, 'Every event has a cause.'  Is this premise objectively self-evident?  No.  Why can't there be an uncaused event?  "Uncaused event,' unlike 'uncaused effect,' is not a contradictio in adiecto. So how does one know that that premise is true?  It is a plausible premise, no doubt, but plausibility is not the same as truth.  (There are implausible truths, and false plausibilities. Exercise for the reader: give examples.) And if you do not know (with objective certainty) that the premises of your argument are true, then your argument, even if logically impeccable in every other way, does not amount to a proof, strictly speaking.  A proof of a proposition is a rationally compelling argument for it.

 

My point is that there are hardly any rationally compelling arguments for substantive theses about matters external to consciousness.  But one can make reasoned cases for such theses.  Therefore, a reasoned case is not the same as a compelling argument. Again, I do not claim to have a rationally compelling argument for the bolded thesis.  I claim merely that the thesis is rationally acceptable. The thesis is both substantive and self-applicable; it implies with respect to itself that is not provable, strictly speaking, or compellingly arguable. I accept that consequence as I must.

 

Because people are naturally dogmatic and crave doxastic security, security in their beliefs, they are unwilling to accept my meta-philosophical thesis that there are hardly any compelling arguments for substantive theses about such matters external to our consciousness as the existence of God.  They want to believe that their pet beliefs are compellingly provable and that people who do not accept their 'proofs' are either irrational or morally defective.  Their tendency is to accept as probative any old argument for the conclusions they antecedently accept, no matter how shoddy the argument,  and to reject as non-probative arguments that issue in conclusions they do not accept.  I am not saying that all give in to this tendency in its crude form, but the tendency is there and is operative.

 

One way to refute what I am saying would be by providing a rationally compelling argument for the existence of God, or a rationally compelling argument for the nonexistence of God.  You won't be able to do it. Or so I claim. But I am open to challenge. If you think you have a rationally compelling/coercive argument for or against the existence of God, send it to me. 

 

The reader might suspect that it is the fact of disagreement among highly competent practitioners that leads me to hold, or at least plays an important role in leading me to hold, that on the theism-atheism issue (and on many others) both sides are rationally acceptable, but neither is provable, demonstrable, compellingly arguable. If that is what the reader suspects, then he is on the right track. My position is close to the one articulated in Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics (Hackett, 1981, 7th edition; originally published in 1907):

. . . it will be easily seen that the absence of such disagreement must remain an indispensable negative condition of the [objective] certainty of our beliefs. For if I find any of my judgments, intuitive or inferential, in direct conflict with the judgment of some other mind, there must some error somewhere: and if I have no more reason to suspect error in the other mind than in my own, reflective comparison between the two judgments necessarily reduces me temporarily to a state of neutrality. (342, emphasis added)

 

End of Excursus: Back to the Main Line

 

Neutrality is the key word here. A stock claim of presuppositionalists is  that there is no neutrality with respect to the existence or nonexistence of God, which for them is the God of the (Christian) Bible.  That is to say: there is no neutral point of view from which to evaluate impartially the arguments for and against the existence of God and thereby objectively adjudicate the dispute between theists and atheists. There is and can be no neutrality or impartiality with respect to God because the existence of God is taken by them to be the ultimate presupposition of  all reasoning such that, were God not to exist, neither would the possibility of correct or incorrect reasoning.  No God? Then no correct or incorrect reasoning. According to John M. Frame,

 

. . . our [apologetic] argument should be transcendental. That is, it should present the biblical God, not merely as the conclusion to an argument, but as one who makes argument possible. We should present him as the source of all meaningful communication, since he is the author of all order, truth, beauty, goodness, logical validity, and empirical fact. (Five Views of Apologetics, Zondervan 2000, p. 220)

So if God were not to exist, there would be no meaning, truth, or logical validity. And if that were the case, then atheism could not count as rationally acceptable as defined above. Atheism is rationally acceptable, i.e., reasonable, only if arguments can be adduced in support of it. But if "God makes argument possible," then any argument the atheist gives would presuppose the existence of the very entity against which he is arguing. If "God makes argument possible," then atheism cannot be rationally acceptable, but is instead ruled out ab initio by the ultimate presupposition of all reason and argument, namely, the existence of God.  By "God makes argument possible" I take Frame to mean that the existence of God is a necessary condition of the possibility of both correct and incorrect reasoning about any topic including God.  Following Kant, such a necessary condition of possibility is called a transcendental condition.

 

The reader should pause for a moment to appreciate just how powerful this presuppositional strategy is assuming it stands up to scrutiny.  If it so stands, then to deny the existence of God would be like denying the existence of truths. Anyone who denies that there are truths presupposes that there is at least one truth, namely, the truth that there are no truths. There is thus a clear sense in which the existence of truths is rationally undeniable.  Surely, there is no neutral point of view from which to evaluate impartially the arguments for and against the existence of truths and thereby objectively adjudicate the dispute between those who assert that there are truths and those who assert that there are no truths. That there are no truths is not rationally acceptable.

 

Similarly, presuppositionalists think that there is a clear sense in which God is rationally undeniable: anyone who denies the existence of God, presupposes the existence of God.  This is a powerful argument strategy if it works, and vastly superior to the fallacy -- the 'logical howler' -- of thinking that one can prove a proposition by simply presupposing it, which is what some presuppositionalists sometimes do or at least seem to do. It is perfectly plain that a circular argument for God is probatively worthless. But a transcendental argument for God is not a circular argument.  Might it do the trick?

 

Here then is the precise place where my long-held view that there are rationally acceptable arguments on both sides of the God question collides with presuppositionalism. If I am right, then the presuppositionalists are wrong, and if they are right, then I am wrong. This is why my intellectual honesty requires me to confront the presuppositionalist challenge. 

 

The issue is this: Is the God of the (Christian) Bible the ultimate transcendental condition of meaning, truth, and logical validity? That there is such a transcendental condition  I do not deny. What I question is whether the God of the (Christian) Bible is this transcendental condition. Thus I do not deny that we must presuppose the existence of truth in all of our intellectual activities. To seek the truth is to presuppose that there are truths to be discovered.  If someone were to assert that there are no truths, that person would be asserting it to be true that there are no truths, thereby presupposing what he is denying, namely, that there are truths. We, therefore, cannot fail to presuppose the existence of truths when we prosecute our intellectual activities which include forming concepts, making judgments, and drawing inferences.

 

But this is a far cry from presupposing the existence of the biblical God. There is clearly a logical gap between

 

1) We finite cognizers in pursuit of our cognitional goals must presuppose the existence of truths

and

2) We finite cognizers in pursuit of our cognitional goals must presuppose the existence of the biblical God.

It is easy to understand how (1) could be true without (2) being true. I will mention two ways. It might be that the truths that we must presuppose, such as the necessary truths of logic,  have a 'platonic' status: they just exist as abstract or ideal objects whether or not the biblical (Christian) God exists. These necessarily true propositions necessarily exist: they don't just happen to exist.  Since they are non-contingent, one cannot sensibly ask why they exist, any more than one can sensibly exist why a necessarily existent God exists. 

 

The second way is the one suggested by Martin Heidegger in the notorious section 44 of Sein und Zeit (1927), Dasein, Disclosedness, and Truth. Roughly, the truth we must presuppose arrives on the scene with us and leaves the scene with us. I do not endorse this second way and will say no more about it here.  

 

On the face of it, then, (1) can be true without (2) being true. But Frame seems to think that they stand and fall together. He seems to think that a  transcendental presupposition in a broadly Kantian sense of the term could be identical to a transcendent metaphysical entity such as the biblical God.

 

Thinking this, however, Frame conflates two different senses of 'transcendental.' In one sense, 'transcendental' means transcendent. The God of the Bible is transcendent in the sense that he is other than the created realm and in no way dependent on it for his own existence. The biblical God exists in himself and from himself, a se.  In a second sense, 'transcendental' has the roughly Kantian sense invoked by Frame when he describes God as "the one who makes argument possible." By conflating the two senses of 'transcendental,' Frame conflates (1) and (2).  

 

Frame's conflation of the two senses occurs in the paragraph immediately following the one I quoted above:

 

We can reach this transcendental conclusion by many kinds of specific arguments, including many of the traditional ones. The traditional cosmological argument, for example, argues that God must exist as the First Cause of all the causes in the world. That conclusion is biblical and true, and if it can be drawn from true premises and valid logic, it may contribute to the goal of a transcendental conclusion. Certainly if God is the author of all meaning, he is the author of causality. And if God is the author of causality, the cause of all causes, he is the cause of all meaning. Therefore, the causal argument yields a transcendental conclusion. (pp. 220-221)

 

This is by no means obvious. What the causal argument purports to yield is a transcendent conclusion. If successful, what it proves is the existence of a transcendent metaphysical entity, a concrete entity, that exists whether or not finite cognizers exist. The truth of (1), however, does not require that the ultimate transcendental presupposition be concrete. For on the broadly 'platonic' approach, the transcendental conditions are of an abstract or ideal nature.   (And if the early Heidegger is right, the truth of (1) does not require that the ultimate transcendental presupposition exist whether or not finite cognizers exist. But we leave Heidegger aside for now.)

 

By 'concrete,' I mean causally active or passive or both. Thus Socrates is concrete because he both acts and he can be acted upon. Leaving aside the question whether God can be acted upon, the biblical God surely acts by causing creatures to exist. So God too counts as a concrete entity by the definition. And this despite his being outside both space and time. What makes God concrete is his capacity for the exercise of causal power. Whatever is neither casually active nor causally passive is abstract.  Abstract entities lack the capacity for the exercise of causal power.

 

Now the biblical God is obviously no abstract object. He is after all causa prima, the first or primary cause. So if the causal argument manages to establish his existence, what it manages to establish is the existence of a metaphysical concretum. Could this transcendent concretum be identical to the transcendental presupposition mentioned in (1) above?  Frame and Co. will presumably say, Why not? 

 

Here is an important difference. The transcendental presupposition of truth (and whatever else truth can be shown to presuppose such as truth-bearers, meaning, etc.) is objectively certain.  The presupposition of truth is rationally undeniable such that to deny the existence of truth is rationally unacceptable.  But that is not the case with respect to the causal argument and the rest of the standard theistic arguments including the quinque viae of Aquinas. These arguments are  reasonably rejected and have been rejected by distinguished Christian theologians. Therefore, Frame is not justified in his conflation of (1) and (2). Equivalently, he is not justified in thinking that the standard theistic arguments constitute specifically transcendental arguments for the existence of God.

 

There is a lot more to be said, but this entry is already too long. To sum up the argument in the preceding paragraph:  (a) The transcendental argument to truth is conclusive; it is rationally compelling; (b) none of the standard theistic arguments are conclusive, which implies none of them are rationally compelling; therefore, (c) pace Frame & Co. one cannot enlist the causal argument or any of the standard arguments to do the transcendental job; therefore, Frame's presuppositionalism, at least, does not prove the existence of God.

The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence

Top o' the Stack.

Is there an adequate naturalistic explanation for the unspeakable depth and depravity of moral evil? If not, what might we reasonably conclude? Can one plausibly argue from the depth and depravity of moral evil to the existence of God?  

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Yesterday I ordered a book on Amazon and it arrived today. That's what I call service. The book is described here by its author:

.  .  . bold demonic action is on the rise, mainly due to the fact that sin is not only tolerated in society but even publicly celebrated. This is not what the film is about, but it is the basis of Fr. Gabriele Amorth’s ministry. It should be noted that Fr. Amorth was not, in fact, the exorcist for the pope but, rather, for the city of Rome.

Exorcisms are sacramentals, on which I have recently published a book. In it, I dedicate an extensive chapter to the subject of exorcisms and place it in the context of what theologians describe as “preternatural reality.” It means that demons operate in an order that surpasses the natural but is less than supernatural. The Latin word praeter indicates a realm that goes beyond the natural possibilities of any human being. In other words, demons cannot work miracles, but they can produce phenomena that appear miraculous to us because they exceed the power of the natural order. There are many references to this in Sacred Scripture.

After the Old Atheism (J. L. Mackie and Co.) came the New Atheism the  'four horsemen' of which were Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. The New Atheism is now utterly passé. These latter-day naturalists have been replaced by the preternaturalists, Satanists among them. 

Time to bone up on this stuff, folks, especially you folks with kiddies in the public schools.  I'll dive into Ralph Weimann's book tomorrow. If you've read any of it, report below.

UPDATE 10/11. Tony Flood comments on the Holocaust Argument:

Bill, woven through your well-wrought argument (to the effect, as I like to formulate the point, that naturalists can't even frame a problem of evil) is your insistence (but I'm sure it's more than that) that there are no knock-down (rationally compelling, not merely rationally acceptable) arguments for any substantive philosophical position. ("Show me one you think is knock-down, and I'll knock it down," I remember you writing years ago.) Do you have an argument for that? Is your claim more than a gambit or posture, a bluff that someone can call? Might the auditor of a rationally compelling argument simply be psychologically impervious to its objective rational power? Is there a rationally compelling argument for your "non-substantive" philosophical position? Or is it merely rationally acceptable? Can you "rationally coerce" me to accept your universal negative claim?  Sorry to hit you with a stream of questions which may not have been expressed with sufficient rigor.  

 

Your essay reminded me of a possible issue with my putative transcendental argument in PaC: an exclusive disjunction (P V ~P); the elimination of ~P, namely, the class of non-Christian worldviews; ergo, P. Arguably one weakness is that it's impossible to show that no non-Christian worldview can account for rational predication (etc.). 

 

I also appreciated your homo homini daemonium insight, which I hadn't considered before.

Thank you for the well-written comment, Tony. But it seems that you ignored my footnote which was intended to blunt the force of the objection/question that you pose in the first paragraph.  The footnote reads:

*It follows, of course, that there are no rationally coercive arguments for my characteristic meta-philosophical thesis. I accept this consequence with equanimity. I claim merely that my characteristic thesis is rationally acceptable.

If we assume, as I believe we must, that meta-philosophy is a branch of philosophy, then, given that my characteristic thesis is a thesis in meta-philosophy, it follows that my characteristic thesis cannot be rationally coercive, i.e., rationally compelling. Now I am not a dialetheist; I hold to LNC and deny that there are any true contradictions. So I maintain, as I must given the two assumptions already stated, that my characteristic thesis  is rationally acceptable but not rationally compelling. And so, being the nice guy and classical liberal that I am, I tolerate your dissent. I will not tax you with logical inconsistency should you reject my characteristic thesis.  

You ask whether I can "rationally coerce" you to accept my "universal negative claim." No, I cannot, nor do I want to. I want to live in peace with your.  I will now insert a psychological observation that I hope is not inaccurate. You started out a Catholic, became a commie -- a card-carrying member of the CPUSA if I am not mistaken -- and then later rejected that adolescent (in both the calendrical and developmental senses of the word) commitment to become some sort of Protestant Christian presuppositionalist along the lines of Cornelius Van Til and Greg L. Bahnsen.   What you have retained from your commie indoctrination is your polemical attitude which, I speculate, was already present in nuce in your innate psychological makeup and perhaps environmentally enhanced and molded by your life-long residency in NYC.

You see philosophy polemically, as a matter of  worldview.  (You are psychologically like Ed Feser in this regard, but I'll leave my friend Ed out of it for now.) I do not see philosophy polemically, or as matter of worldview. I see philosophy as inquiry, not worldview, Wissenschaft, not Weltanschauung. And so I distinguish philosophy from politics, which is not to be confused with political philosophy. Philosophically, I have friends, but no enemies. Politically, I have both enemies and friends.   And so I want the scum who support Traitor Joe beaten into the dirt figuratively speaking, that is, removed from power.  The tone of the preceding sentence indicates how I view the politics of the present day: it is not matter of gentlemanly debate, but a form of warfare. Whether it must by its very nature be a form of warfare (as per Carl Schmitt) is a further and very difficult philosophical, not political, question. 

All of this needs elaboration and nuancing. And I am aware that I haven't responded to all of your questions. More later. Time for this honorary kike to mount his bike. Combox open.

 

William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality

Vallicella, William F. (2016) "William E. Mann, GOD, MODALITY, AND MORALITY," Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: Vol. 33 : Iss. 3 , Article 8. DOI: 10.5840/faithphil201633368

Available here. A long and meaty review article including a discussion of divine simplicity and Mann's approach thereto.

Can a Necessary Being Depend for its Existence on a Necessary Being?

Brian Bosse raised this question over the phone the other day. This re-post from February 2010 answers it.

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According to the Athanasian Creed, the Persons of the Trinity, though each of them uncreated and eternal and necessary, are related as follows. The Father is unbegotten.  The Son is begotten by the Father, but not made by the Father.  The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.  Let us focus on the relation of the Father to the Son.  When I tried to explain this to Peter the atheist, he balked at the idea of one necessary being begetting another, claiming that the idea makes no sense.  One of his arguments was as follows.  If x begets y, then x causes y to begin to exist.  But no necessary being begins to exist.  So, no necessary being is begotten.  A second argument went like this.  Begetting is a causal notion.  But causes are temporally precedent to their effects.  No two necessary beings are related as before to after.  Therefore, no necessary being begets another.

I first pointed out in response to Peter that the begetting in question is not the begetting of one animal by another, but a begetting in a different sense, and that whatever else this idea involves, it involves the idea of one necessary being depending for its existence on another.  Peter balked at this idea as well.  "How can a necessary being depend for its existence on a necessary being?"  To soften him up, I looked for a non-Trinitarian case in which a necessary being stands in the asymmetrical relation of existential dependency to a necessary being. Note that I did not dismiss his problem the way a dogmatist might; I admitted that it is a genuine difficulty, one that needs to be solved.

So I said to Peter:  Look, you accept the existence of Fregean propositions, items which Frege viewed as the senses of sentences in the indicative mood from which indexical elements (including the tenses of verbs) have been removed and have been replaced with non-indexical elements.  You also accept that at least some of these Fregean propositions, if not all,  are necessary beings.  For example, you accept that the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12' is necessarily true, and you see that this requires that the proposition be necessarily existent.  Peter agreed to that.

You also, I said to him, have no objection to the idea of the God of classical theism who exists necessarily if he is so much as possible.  He admitted that despite his being an atheist, he has no problem with the idea of a necessarily existent God.

So I said to Peter:  Think of the necessarily existent Fregean propositions as divine thoughts.  (I note en passant that Frege referred to his propositions as Gedanken, thoughts.)  More precisely, think of them as the accusatives or objects of divine acts of thinking, as the noemata of divine noeses.  That is, think of the propositions as existing precisely as the  accusatives of divine thinking.  Thus, their esse is their concipi by God.  They don't exist a se the way God does; they exist in a mind-dependent manner without prejudice to their existing in all possible worlds.  To cop a phrase from the doctor angelicus, they have their necessity from another, unlike God, who has his necessity from himself.

So I said to Peter:  Well, is it not now clear that we  have a non-Trinitarian example in which a necessary being, the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12,' depends for its existence on a necessary being, namely God, and not vice versa?  Is this not an example of a relation that is neither merely logical (like entailment) nor empirically-causal?  Does this not get you at least part of the way towards an understand of how the Father can be said to beget the Son?

To these three questions, Peter gave a resounding 'No!' looked at his watch and announced that he had to leave right away in order to be able to teach his 5:40 class at the other end of the Valle del Sol.

A Response to My Is Sin a Fact?

Brian Bosse is not convinced by my Substack article, Is Sin a Fact? A Passage from Chesterton Examined.   Brian writes,

Your Argument Against Chesterton

(1) If the existence of sin is a fact one can see in the street, then the existence of God is a fact one can see in the street. 

(2) It is not the case that the existence of God is a fact one can see in the street.

From (1) and (2), it follows that

(3) It is not the case that the existence of sin is a fact one can see in the street.  

Bill’s Prior Commitments

(4) The existence of moral evil is a fact one can see in the street.

(5) There are objective moral values/laws.

It seems to me that from (4) and (5) one must conclude that…

(6) The existence of objective moral values/laws is a fact one can see in the street.

Bill, do you accept (6)?  If so, do you think it is possible for there to be objective moral laws in a non-theistic worldview? 

I endorse the first argument. It is obviously valid in point of logical form, instantiating as it does modus tollens.  And I claim that both premises are true. You will agree with me that the first is true if you agree that sin is an offense against God, which implies that if there is no God, then there is no sin.  The first premise is uncontroversially true because true ex vi terminorum, which is a fancy way of saying that it is true by definition. You will agree with me that the second premise is true if you agree that the existence of sinful acts and sinful omissions is not perceivable via the senses. (More on this in a moment.)

As for the second argument, I did not give it and I do not endorse it. I do not consider (4) to be true. And I reject (6). Brian is omitting some important distinctions I make. I affirm the existence of moral evil (evil that comes about through the actions and omissions of free agents), but I say nothing in that Substack article about how the fact of moral evil is known. Is there moral evil? is one question. How do we know that there is moral evil? is a different question. 

Do we literally see moral evil? Is there any empirical access to it? Can we build a 'ponerometer,' an evil detector?  Do we humans possess a non-empirical sensus moralitatis whereby we discern the existence of moral evil? These are just some of the questions that naturally arise.  I deny that we literally see instances of moral evil.  I will give a graphic example in a moment. 

It is also important not to leave out the distinction I make between two senses or uses of fact.' On one use of 'fact,' a fact is a true proposition. On a second use, a fact is a true proposition known to be true.  If  the existence of moral evil is a fact in the second sense, that leaves open the question as to how we know that moral evil is a fact in this second sense. I deny that we can see it (with our eyes) "in the street." The fact of moral evil is not "as plain as potatoes," to use Chesterton's expression. I know that the vegetable on my counter is a potato by seeing it (with my eyes). I do not see moral evil with my eyes. I maintain that there are actions that are morally evil, but I deny that their being morally evil is a fact that one can literally see. Now for the example. 

There is a video online that depicts a black thug nonchalantly loading his semi-automatic pistol and shooting  in the back of the head a homeless man sitting on a curb.  What do you see? You see a man shooting another man in the head. You do not see the evil of the act. (You do not see the illegality of the act either. You see a killing; you do not see a murder.) That is not to say that the act is not evil; it is to say that the evilness of the act is not visible or in any other way empirically detectable by our outer senses even when instrumentally extended.  Suppose you saw the shooting from different angles in great detail, with the blood surging out of the wound, etc. You would still not thereby know by empirical means that the the act of shooting is an evil act.  Suppose you had a videotape of the entire execution and then analyzed it frame-by-frame. Would you then see (with your eyes) the evilness of the act? Of course not.

In sum, I affirm the existence of moral evil.  But I deny both that the existence of moral evil is a fact one can see in the street, and that the existence of sin is a fact that one can see in the street. The crucial point however, as Brian appreciates, is that moral evil is not the same as sin.  It is perfectly plain that sin presupposes the existence of God. It is not perfectly plain that objective moral evil presupposes the existence of God.  

Brian asks, "Do you think it is possible for there to be objective moral laws in a non-theistic worldview? [i.e., in a world in which God does not exist?]"  Well, there cannot be objectively binding moral commandments without a very special commander, or objectively binding moral imperatives without an Imperator.  But why couldn't there be objectively true moral declaratives -- e.g., it is wrong always and everywhere to torture innocent human beings for one's sexual gratification -- in the atheist's world?

But these questions go well beyond the topic of my article which was merely to show that Chesterton was blustering when he claimed that it is empirically obvious -- "plain as potatoes," a fact in the second sense -- that there are sinful deeds and omissions. That could be true only if it is empirically obvious that God exists. But the latter is not empirically obvious.  

God as Human Projection?

Substack latest

Del Noce deciphered; Feuerbach refused.

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Update (3/3): Substack informs me: "After 24 hours, your public post has had

2,234 views." (Note that if a reader accesses my post n times (n > 1), that counts as one view.)

Curious, in that I have at present only 1,200 subscribers. And why should this calmly argued post on a non-political topic be so bloody interesting when others of a more polemical nature are not? 

An Online Catalog of Theistic Arguments

Chad McIntosh writes,

I'd like to let you know about a project I've been working on for the past two years that I have just completed (for now): a fairly comprehensive, organized list and summary of theistic arguments. I hope it will be a useful resource.

https://www.camcintosh.com/theistic/index.html

I've also included at the very end (under META > Cumulative Case) a calculator that allows visitors to come up with their own estimate of the evidential power of the arguments.

The website is a little clunky, but serviceable (it is best as expanded window on desktop). Of course, I've included several of your arguments:

ONTOLOGICAL > Possibility Defenses > Kordig & Vallicella 
METAPHYSICAL > Facts
AXIOLOGICAL > Deontic Value > Modal Axiarchism 

I thought I should take a look at your book A Paradigm Theory of Existence with the intent to summarize it's main argument, but that's a hard book to get a hold of! There's also a similar argument just published by Christoph de Ray called "Existence Exists and it is God," in which he interacts with your book. I may integrate both yours and de Ray's arguments in a future update to the page. 

Great to hear from you, Chad. You've created an interesting and useful resource. The site is a bit clunky but it displays clearly and easily on my desktop and is easy to navigate. Thank you for your references to my work. As for my existence book, I'd send you a copy if I had one to spare. If someone reading this has a copy he would be willing to part with, please contact Chad. I don't recommend that you buy it; it is way overpriced, although on occasion the Amazon pricing algorithm goes haywire and the tome becomes relatively affordable.

Thanks also for referring me to Christophe de Ray, whose article I found here.  I will have to read it.

Let me make two minor comments on the material in the Prolegomena section. You define 'theistic argument' as follows:

Theistic arguments are arguments for (or the rationality of belief in or commitment to) the existence of a being with at least one God-like attribute, such as necessity, God-like power or knowledge, ground of morality, creator or designer of the natural world, and so on.

The first is that you need a second 'for' after 'or' in the parenthesis. The second is substantive. Suppose an entity has exactly one God-like attribute. I wouldn't call an argument for the existence of such an entity an argument for God given your definition of theism:

 Theism is the view that there is a personal God like that worshipped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

The Good of Plato, the One of Plotinus, the deus sive natura of Spinoza,  the objevktiver Geist of Hegel, and F. H. Bradley's Absolute, to mention just these five, are each such as to have one or more God-like attributes, but none of them are persons.  I have no objection to your definition of theism; my point is that it does not comport well with your definition of 'theistic arguments.' The latter is easily repaired, but I'll leave that to you.

Comments are enabled and invited.

Notes on Avicenna: Essence, Existence, and Creation

Time was when the Islamic world could boast world-class philosophers. The Persian Ibn Sina (980-1037 anno domini) was one of them. He is known in the West as Avicenna.  Translated into Latin, his works had a major influence on the philosophy of the 12th and 13th centuries and beyond. De Ente et Essentia of Thomas Aquinas is a well-known text that shows the Persian's influence.  In this entry I will discuss some of Avicenna's  positions in metaphysics as I understand them. My understanding is based on close study of Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, The Paradoxical Structure of Existence. Comments and corrections solicited. That Avicenna anticipates Alexius von Meinong is an idea I arrived at independently. (The exposition of this anticipation belongs in a separate post.)

1) Wilhelmsen credits Avicenna with raising a new question in philosophy: "How is existence related to the order of nature or essence?" (PSE, 40; cf. BSP, 40 ff.) What motivates the new question is the conviction that the world of beings is a world of creatures that owe their existence to a creator. If the Being or existence (esse) of a being (ens) is its being-created-and-sustained-by-God, then there must be a real distinction (distinctio realis) between existence and essence in the creature.  To exist is then not to be the same (Plato) or to be a substance (Aristotle). An existing thing is thus in some way 'composed' of essence and existence. Avicenna thus upholds a real distinction between essence and existence. (Is he the first to do so in the history of philosophy? I'm really asking!)  I myself understand the distinctio realis along the following lines. (Someone who knows Avicenna's texts can comment on how closely my understanding, which is fairly close to that of Aquinas, matches Avicenna's.) 

About anything whatsoever, including God,  we can ask two different questions: What is it? (Quid sit?) and Is it? (An sit?)  In a contingent being (ens), the distinction between what the thing is (wide essence, quiddity) and its existence (esse) is real, meaning that the distinction pertains to the thing (res) itself apart from our modes of considering it. 'Real' in this context does NOT mean that in a contingent existent such as my cat Max Black there are two things, one res being the essence, the other res being the existence. That is supposedly what Giles of Rome held, not what Aquinas or I hold. I am going to assume that Avicenna did not anticipate Giles of Rome.

Analogy: my head and my eyeglasses are really distinct in the Giles-of-Rome way: head and glasses can each exist on its own apart from the other. But the convexity and concavity of a particular lens cannot exist on their own apart from each other. And yet the convexity-concavity distinction is real, not projected by us.  The real distinction that I espouse is like the distinction between the particular convexity and the particular concavity in a particular lens. 'Like,' not 'the same as.' The real distinction between essence and existence in a contingent being such as an optical lens is sui generis: there is no adequate model for it. We acquire some understanding of the sui generis distinction only by analogy from mundane examples. 

2) A second Avicennian innovation is a distinction between modes of Being (esse) or modes of existence, different ways for an item to be or exist.   (That there are different ways of existing or different modes of Being  is a notion fiercely resisted by most contemporary analytic philosophers, but I am of the opinion that the MOB doctrine -- to give it a cute name -- can be plausibly defended quite apart from Avicenna's particular views. See Holes and Their Mode of Being and the entries in my modes of being category. See also "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak, eds., in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, pp. 45-75. One of the dogmas of analysis is that there are no modes of being.) The second innovation presupposes the first, the real distinction. The latter allows us to focus on the existence of the thing without conflating it with its essence or quiddity. We find this conflation in Aristotle for whom there is no difference between an F and an existing F, a man and an existing man, say. For Aristotle, then, there is no difference between Milo and existing Milo. Once one grasps the difference between the existence/existing of Milo and Milo, one can go on to ask how something like Milo exists, in what specific way he exists.  In the case of God and Socrates we surely want to say that God exists necessarily whereas Socrates exists contingently. Now it is not obvious, but it can be plausibly argued that this modal-logical  difference -- typically spelled out nowadays in analytic precincts by saying that God exists in all possible worlds whereas Socrates exists in some but not all possible worlds -- is rooted in an ontological difference between two ways (modes) of existing.  If that is right, then it is not the case that God and Socrates exist in the same way, pace such luminaries as Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen and their numerous acolytes. (See my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer Philosophical Studies Series #89, 2002, Chapter One, Section 4, "Contingency and Necessity as Modes of Existence," p. 22 f.) Back to the Persian.

3) For Avicenna, there are two modes of existence; there are two ways for one and the same essence/nature to exist/be. The one way is universally in mente; the other is singularly in re. Thus one and the same essence (humanity) exists singularly in the man, Milo, and in the man Socrates, and so on, and universally in the mind of anyone who knows Milo or Socrates or any man to be a man. The first mode could be called esse reale, the second esse intentionale. So if essence is really distinct from existence, then essence is really distinct both from intramental (esse intentionale) existence and extramental existence (esse reale).

4) Given (3), it follows that an essence in  itself is neither mental nor extramental, neither universal (repeatable) nor singular (unrepeatable), neither one nor many, neither abstract nor concrete, neither predicable nor impredicable, and -- mirabile dictu -- neither existent nor nonexistent. The essence in itself is thus a third item, a tertium quid. (It looks very much like a Meinongian Sosein jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein! But Meinong goes on the 'back burner' for now.)  

In sum, there are two ways for an Avicennian essence or nature to exist: either in things outside the mind, or else in the mind, and one way for an essence to be (not exist), and that is to be absolutely or indifferently, or if you prefer, amphibiously (either on the dry land of the real, or in the water of mind).  It is here that the dialectic becomes tricky and 'aporetic.' For what I take Avicenna to be saying is that the essence or nature absolutely considered, i.e., considered in its neutrality or indifference to both intramental and extramental existence,  is in itself a non-existing mind-independent item.  That is to say: the essence an sich, the essence as a modally indifferent tertium quid, is not an artifact or product of our considering.  Its absoluteness and indifference does not derive from our absolute considering;  our considering is an absolute considering because that which is being considered IS (not exists) absolutely. Get it? 

Now to exist is to be actual, whether in minds or in things. So the essence or nature in itself which exists neither in minds nor in things, is metaphysically prior to actuality and is therefore a pure possibility. "It follows that pure nature is pure possibility for being in some order. Therefore the possible is prior to the actual in an absolute sense." (Wilhelmsen, 41) Gilson puts it like this: in Avicenna's world, "essences always remain, in themselves, pure possibles, and no wonder, since the very essence of essence is possibility." (BSP, 82)

5) It follows from (4) that essentia as pure possibility is no longer internally tied to esse as etymology would suggest inasmuch as essences in themselves are what they are whether or not they exist in either of the two modes in which they exist. Avicenna thus drives a wedge between essence and existence in such a way that existence can only accede to essences and is insofar forth only accidental to them. Existence 'happens' to them while they on their part remain indifferent to existence.  

6) You will recall that for Aristotle, accidents receive their being from (primary) substances (prote ousiai) and are nothing without them.  Thus if A is an Aristotelian accident, then A cannot exist apart from some substance or other, and indeed cannot exist apart from the very substance S of which it happens to be the accident. The Islamic thinker takes the Greek's substance-accident distinction and puts it to use in a highly creative way. Whereas accidents for Aristotle derive their being from the substances of which they are the accidents, the Being (esse) of creatures is reduced by Avicenna to an accident of essences which, in themselves, as pure possibles, are beyond existence and nonexistence.

7) (6) entails interesting consequences for the notion of divine creation.  On an Avicennian scheme, creation is actualization of the merely possible.  If so, God does not create ex nihilo, but ex possibilitate. He doesn't create out of nothing; he creates out of possibles. This does not comport well with divine sovereignty. If God is sovereign, he is sovereign over all orders, including the order of the merely possible.  On the Avicennian scheme God is constrained by the ontologically prior order of mere possibles. He is therefore not free. Or at least he is no free in the libertarian sense of 'free.'

8) We have landed in a curious dialectical predicament.  On the one hand, we need the real distinction to make sense of divine creation ex nihilo.   The pagan philosophers didn't have it or need it, because their systems were not informed by divine revelation.  Aristotle's God is not a creator but merely a prime mover. His primary substances exist just in virtue of being the substances they are. For Aristotle, for a primary substance S of kind K to exist is just for S to be a member of K.  For Socrates to exist is just for Socrates to be a man. Hence there is no need for a real distinction between Socrates and his existence.  On the other hand, the Avicennian scheme, which needs the real distinction, fails to safeguard the absolute sovereignty and freedom of God and fails to capture the radicality of creatio ex nihilo. The reason, again, is that Avicenna's God creates, not out of nothing, but out of possibilities.  He is thus not a creator in the strict sense, but a mere actualizer of mere possibles that ARE independently of his will. (Cf. BSP, 83)

Galen Strawson on God

Substack latest. Does the fact of evil render the nonexistence of God certain?

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Tony Flood comments:

A good one, Bill. Bahnsen held that atheists, having no reason for affirming an absolute moral standard (which evil offends) can't even frame a problem of evil. He also held that the classic argument you summarized is missing a premise: God could not have a morally sufficient reason for permitting evil. (That He hasn't shared it with us is neither here nor there.) If He does, however, the argument doesn't go through. What atheist has even attempted to argue for it? 

The God Question and the Christian Proposition

A conversation between Alain Fikielkraut and Pierre Manent.  Very French and very flabby, but here is an excerpt that I approve of (emphasis added):

P.M. What is the nature of Islam’s challenge for us? And who is this “we” being challenged? The challenge lies in the fact that what is happening is that Islam is exerting considerable pressure on Europe, which should not have happened according to the grand progressive narrative elaborated since the eighteenth century—this philosophy of history, according to which humanity, under the leadership of the European avant-garde, was supposed to emancipate itself irresistibly from religious claims, dogma, and doctrine. The vitality that Islam as a whole has maintained, or rather reinforced, goes against a historical perspective that the weakening or “secularization” of Christianity seemed, to many, to validate. Islam is, in any case, the religion that refuses to come to an end and that affirms itself in ways that are manifestly public and triumphalist, casting doubt at least on the grand narrative of secularization. This challenges the consciousness upon which the self-confidence of modern Europe once rested.

Progressivism will not reconsider its approach to the religious question. What, then, does it do? On the one hand, it radically modifies its definition of progress in order to make Islam a part of the grand narrative. Europe no longer represents progress as the framework for the coming forth of a new association of humanity, of an industrial or socialist society, as August Comte or Karl Marx thought; on the contrary, it now represents progress because it has totally renounced self-affirmation and has reinvented itself as unlimited openness to the other—even when this other goes as directly as possible against our principles, particularly those concerning the equality of men and women. Since we now measure the quality of our progressivism by our disposition to welcome Islam unconditionally, Islam obliges us by confirming our grand narrative rather than refuting it. But since it is necessary all the same to take account of the fact that Muslim customs conflict with some of our essential principles, we decree with confidence (in a complementary strategic move) that secularism will take care of the problem by requiring Muslims to remove at least the visible signs of the subordination of women. While the first move boasts of its acceptance of Muslims as they are, the second promises that secularism will make them what they ought to be. Thus is removed all limitation on the welcoming of Islam, whether in the name of its present difference or in the name of its future similarity. Of course, this similarity will be slow in coming; progressivism lives by waiting.

MavPhil 'intervention': European progressivism is so progressive that it transmogrifies into ethno-masochism and cultural suicide. The progressivity of this progressivism is that of  a progressive disease. With the exception of Hungary, Europe is decadent-unto-death, and there is no decadent like a French decadent. (Am I being fair, Vito?) Of course, we over here are decadent as hell as well, but not as decadent, since about half of our population is willing to punch back against ethno-masochistic wokery, 'critical' race-delusionality, reality-denying social constructivism, the celebration of grotesquerie, the canonization of worthless individuals, the destruction of monuments to the great and noble, the destruction of the family, the moral corruption of children, the excusing of brazen mendacity at the highest levels of government, and all the rest of the depredations of cultural Marxism.

As for the "complementary strategic move," good luck with that! Do you Frenchies have the WILL to defend your superior culture against that of the Muslim invaders? Will European secularism "take care of" Muslim barbarism? Maybe. But addiction to la dolce vita is vitiating, weakening in plain English, and you Europeans may end up in dhimmitude. (My use of the Italian phrase may be inappropriate given the current 'stiffening' in my ancestral country, powered by a fiery Italian female.)

The rest of the discussion is pretty good too.

Le Figaro: The Catholic and Republican frameworks that hold together French society have become dislocated, as Jerome Fourquet explains at the beginning of his work L’Archipel francais. And so, we seek alternative religions. The philosopher Jean-Francois Braunstein recently published La religion woke. Alain Finkielkraut, what do you make of the idea of looking at wokeism as a religion?

A.F. I am not comfortable with this metaphorical use of the term religion. I am not convinced by the concept of secular religions. The promise of a radiant future is not religious. In his book, Pierre Manent sets up a very illuminating debate between Pascal and Rousseau. Original sin occupies a central place in Pascal’s thought. Manent writes: “The claim to overcome human injustice by ourselves, the injustice in which we are born and in which we will live as long as God has not delivered us, is the beginning and indeed the height of our injustice.” Rousseau says the opposite; he excludes the hypothesis of original sin: “I have shown that all the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it; I have stated the manner in which they are born. I have followed their genealogy, so to speak, and I have shown how through the continuous deterioration of their original goodness, men finally become what they are.”

Rousseau replaces original sin by the original crime: property, inequality. Those we call the oppressors are the successors of this crime. For Rousseau, politics must take responsibility for the whole of reality, and its final purpose becomes the elimination of evil. This project can take no other form than the elimination of the wicked; this is what the totalitarian experience teaches us. This is why we see the unexpected return of a meditation on original sin in late nineteenth-century thought. We human beings do not have the strength to deliver ourselves from sin.

Now, with wokeism, we return to the original crime, as if totalitarianism had never happened. With wokeism, evil has an address: evil is the male, white heterosexual over 50. Evil must be eliminated at all costs. Thus, cancel culture arises and spreads.

P.M. The new ideology no longer sees in human bonds the expression and fulfillment of human nature, but what threatens freedom and injures the rights of the individual. The new progressive finds his way in society as in a suspect country. The sole common cause is the protection of nature—but protection against whom? Against human beings, who stain or destroy nature, in one way or another. Political ecology introduces a principle of distrust or of limitless enmity between human beings and with respect to humanity as such. The desire for an earth without people turns humanity against itself and thus feeds the project of effacing what is special about humanity, of making human beings animals like the others, and so, in the end, inoffensive. Thus, at the moment when we claim to base all collective order on the sole principle of human rights, we wish to remove from humanity all that is distinctive by promulgating the rights of animals, plants, and rocks against humanity. Those who speak on behalf of species incapable of speaking need fear no refutation. All of nature provides them with an inexhaustible supply of motives in their accusations against other human beings.

As I have said, contemporary progressivism would have us admit that our species has no real or legitimate privilege over other species, which ultimately have as many rights as we do. And yet there is one point concerning which progressivism absolutely refuses to consider us as animals like the others: it rejects the idea that our lives should be organized according to the difference between the sexes, the natural polarity between males and females. How can we be animals like the others if the human order must construct itself on the basis of the negation of this natural difference that we have in common with animals? In this way, contemporary ideology succeeds in combining a radical contestation of the human difference with a radical contestation of the animal part of our natures. We have only to open the Bible to the book of Genesis to recover a bit of common sense.

 

Countering the Absurd with an Argument from Desire: Preliminaries

Vito Caiati comments:

I have been thinking about your intriguing post in which you write: “For the absurd is not simply that which makes no sense; it is that which makes no sense, but ought to, or is supposed to.  To say that life is absurd is not merely to say that it has no point or purpose; it is to say that it fails to meet a deep and universal demand or expectation on our part that it have a point or purpose.”

Does this intuitive, subtle yearning for purpose have some probative value with relation to large questions such as belief in God and, if so, how much?  Does its existence reveal some innate need for an Ultimate Ground of meaning and purpose or can it be dismissed as a vain hope, a refusal by conscious beings to accept the chancy, hollow state of the world? Might it be one more ambiguous indicator that allows for either conclusion, leaving its evidential value as an open question?

Vito is asking the right follow-up questions. Here are five questions that his comments suggest to me.

Q1) Can one mount an argument from desire for the existence of God in which God serves as ultimate ground of meaning and purpose? Answer: Yes, of course. It's been done.

Q2) Is any such argument probative in the sense that it proves (demonstrates, definitively establishes) the existence of such a God? Answer: Not according to my metaphilosophy. For I maintain that there are no rationally compelling arguments for any substantive theses in metaphysics. 

Q3) Despite the nonexistence of any probative arguments from desire, are there any such arguments that render reasonable the belief that there is a God who (among other services) serves as ultimate ground of meaning and purpose, and in particular, the meaning and purpose of human life? Answer: Yes.

Q4) Given an affirmative answer to (Q3), are there also arguments that render reasonable the belief there is no entity, whether classically divine or not, that can that serve as ultimate ground of meaning and purpose of human life and indeed the world as a whole?  Answer: Yes. 

Q5) Given affirmative answers to both (Q3) and (Q4), how should one proceed? Answer: it is up to the individual to decide, after careful consideration of the pros and cons of the issue, what he will believe.  It is a matter of personal, free, decision. There is no algorithm, no objective decision procedure, that can decide the issue for you.  The life of the mind and spirit, like life in general, is a venture and an adventure. You could say that a leap of faith is involved as long as it is understood that the leap is a calculated one made after the exercise of due doxastic vigilance. The decision is free but not arbitrary, in that it is guided by, but not determined by,  reasons.

Of course I am not saying that the truth is a matter of free decision; I am saying that what one accepts as the truth, what one believes to be the truth, is a matter of free decision in a matter like the one before us.

But it all depends on whether I can make good on my claim that that are no rationally compelling arguments either for or against the existence of God. 

I will conclude today's installment by nuancing something I said earlier.  I now distinguish two sub-senses of the existential sense of 'absurd':  (a) the absurd as that which exists, exists contingently, but has no cause, ground, reason, or purpose for its existence; (b) the absurd as that which is absurd in the (a)-sense, but also necessarily refers back to a demand, desire, or expectation on our part that it fails to satisfy. In the (b)-sense, the world, human life, whatever is judged to be absurd, ought,  or is supposed to, or is expected to meet our demands for meaning and intelligibility but doesn't. 

This is the sense of 'absurd' operative in Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus. For Camus, absurdity is rooted in the perceived discrepancy between demand and satisfaction, a demand that we ineluctably make and that the world appears unable to satisfy.  There is a disconnect between the deep desire of the heart that 'it all make sense in the end' and the despairing belief that it does not make sense, that it is absurd in the (a)-sense. What constitutes the absurd sensibility so skillfully depicted in Camus' essay is not merely that the universe exists as a matter of brute fact, and is therefore existentially absurd in the (a)-subsense, but that the universe so exists  and in so existing fails to satisfy an ineluctable exigency or demand that the best of us make, namely, the demand that it have a purpose, a final cause in Aristotelean jargon, and our lives in it.

I am distinguishing between the absurd sensibility, which is a feeling, mood, attitude that Camus had and some of us have, or rather a disposition occurrently to possess such a feeling, mood, attitude, on the one hand, and the property of being absurd in the (a)-subsense, on the other, a non-relational property such that, if the universe has it, it has it whether or not there are any beings like us who make demands or harbor expectations of intelligibility.

God and Morality

A short piece by Richard Swinburne.

If God is Simple, How can the World be Contingent?

This entry is an offshoot of the earlier discussion of classical theism and its difference from theistic personalism. These labels have the meaning here than they had in that earlier discussion. Classical theism is committed to all three of the following:

1) God is simple.

2) God freely created the world in the libertarian 'could have done otherwise' sense.

3) There is no absolute necessity that God create our world or any world.

Theistic personalists hold that these three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  If they are logically inconsistent, then at least one of them must be either rejected or modified. The theistic personalist will reject (1) on the ground that God is a person and that no person is simple.  This the classical theist will refuse to do on the basis of reasons he finds compelling. So refusing, he must find a way to turn aside the accusation of inconsistency.

Well, why should the triad be thought inconsistent? Here's why. If God is simple, then he is purely actual. If purely actual, then he harbors no potencies or unrealized powers. His power, which is manifested in his creating of the world (the totality of creatures), could then not have gone unrealized. He could not have refrained from creating. If so, his power to create had to be realized, in which case God's creating of the world (the totality of created items)  is necessary, not contingent. It is the necessary action of a necessarily existent agent, and is thus absolutely, as opposed to conditionally necessary. But then it follows that the world exists necessarily and not contingently. This is a consequence that cannot be countenanced by the classical theist. For it  conflicts with the divine aseity which is an entailment  of the divine simplicity, which is a plank in the classical platform. If God is a se, then he is under no necessity to create.  If God is a se, then he is wholly self-sufficient and fully actual whether or not he creates anything.

Can this reasoning be evaded?  I will conclude this entry by considering and rejecting one evasive stratagem.  Nathan Greeley writes,

. . . to say that God's activity of knowing and willing exist necessarily is not to say that created objects of his knowing and willing must also exist necessarily. As long as these created objects are considered really distinct from the acts by which they are known and willed, then the objects in themselves, need not have the same modal status as these acts. [. . .] God, one can then say, necessarily knows and necessarily wills  in an absolute manner, but at least some of the particular objects of his knowledge are contingent. ("Divine Simplicity: A Reply to Philosophical Objections" in The Lord is One: Reclaiming Divine Simplicity, eds. Minich and Kamel, Davenant Press, 2019, p. 237, emphasis added.)

The idea here is that what God necessarily creates, and thus could not have failed to create, can nevertheless be contingent, i.e., possibly nonexistent. As far as I can see, there is only way this could be true. Suppose that God's creating of a thing simultaneously releases it into ontological independence.  The divine creative act makes the thing exist, but once it exists, it exists on its own, 'by its own power' without divine assistance.  In other words, when God creates a thing, he creates it in such a way that its existence, moment by moment, does not depend on God's ongoing creative sustenance after the initial creative action. If this is the nature of creation, then the created entity could very well be contingent despite the creative act's being necessary. For the created entity to exist in the first place it is necessary that God create it, but after he does so the entity exists contingently. On this scheme, there is creatio originans (originating creation), but no creatio continuans (continuing creation). This allows what is originally caused to exist to be contingent.

Unfortunately, this understanding of creation is foreign to classical theism. On classical theism, creation is both originating and continuing. What's more, classical theism need not insist on the reality of this distinction. For even if the world (the created realm) has an infinite past and always existed, it could nonetheless have creaturely status. If that were the case, then there would be no real distinction between originating and continuing creation. If, on the other hand, the world had a beginning in time, then, on classical theism, it still needs to be kept in being moment by moment. 

I conclude that the stratagem proposed by Greeley above does not allow the proponent of divine simplicity to evade the conclusion that, if the simple God creates, then the product of his creative act necessarily exists. 

Next stop: modal collapse.

Theistic Personalism versus Classical Theism: Response to Roger Pouivet

Professor Roger Pouivet (Université de Lorraine, France) recently subscribed to my Substack series. I wrote to thank him and to request a copy of his Against Theistic Personalism: What Modern Epistemology Does to Classical Theism. He replied promptly and I dove into his article. It proved to be stimulating and I thank him for writing it. Herewith, some comments and questions.

1) Theistic personalism is the view that God is a person and that therefore the relations between God and human creatures are interpersonal. Pouivet argues against this view, taking the classical line of Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Maimonides, and Thomas  according to which God is ontologically simple and thus identical to his attributes. (See my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, Divine Simplicity, for details, motivation, criticisms, and references to current literature.*) The simple God of classical theism is wholly devoid of complexity and composition. The distinctions that apply to creatures do not apply to God. Among them: form-matter, act-potency, essence-existence, and individual-attribute. I would add to the list contingency-necessity as standardly understood.  Aquinas held that some necessary beings have their necessity ab alio, i.e., from God, whereas God has his necessity in se. The former are creatures because they depend on God for their existence.  (A creature is simply anything created by God.) The contingency-necessity ab alio distinction does not apply to God. God is therefore uniquely necessary as he is uniquely unique: he is not a necessary being among necessary beings. This is why, on classical theism, the divine necessity is not properly represented, or fully captured, if you say merely that God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds as theistic personalists such as Alvin Plantinga will say. They think of God as a necessary being among necessary beings.

2) The main question, however, is whether the classical God, the simple God, could be a person. That depends on what a person is taken to be. For Pouivet, no person can be simple: no person is identical to its attributes. It follows straightaway that the simple God cannot be a person.  That's one argument.  Second, no person is immutable: people change mentally and physically. Whatever changes is in time. To put the point precisely, it is metaphysically impossible that anything undergo intrinsic (non-relational) change unless it is in time. (The eternal God, outside of time, could presumably 'undergo' relational change as when I start and stop thinking about him and his attributes.) So persons are mutable and in time and are thus non-eternal). But the simple God is both intrinsically immutable and eternal. It follows that the simple God cannot be a person.

c) For Pouivet, "A person is a being with an essentially mental life made up of mental states such as thoughts (mental representations) or desires." (p. 3) It seems to follow from this definition that if God is not and cannot be a person, then he cannot have a mental life with thoughts, desires and intentions. But then I will ask Professor Pouivet how, on his view, we can makes sense of the divine omniscience. Classical theism does not exclude omniscience as a divine attribute. But to know is to be in a mental state. So it would seem that God must either possess mental states or something analogous to mental states. Granted, the archetypal intellect's knowing is very different from our ectypal knowing: God knows the object by creating it; we do not. There cannot, however, be an equivocation on 'knows' in 'God knows' and 'Socrates knows' even if there is no univocity of sense. But I found no mention of analogy in Pouivet's article.

The problem also arises with respect to the divine will. Pouivet rightly points out that for Aquinas the simplicity doctrine entails that there is nothing potential in God, that God is actus purus.  (7) He then takes aim at Swinburne's view that God is a "superlative person" who is perfectly free, all-powerful, and omniscient. Pouivet objects to Swinburne:

But this has nothing to do with God as pure act . . . . In this [Thomist] tradition, God is not described as a being with intentional power . . . . For theistic personalists, the notion of intentional power is however directly linked to the idea of conscious experience which is also characteristic of human beings. The result is a deeply anthropomorphic account of God. (7-8)

A question for Professor Pouivet: can classical theism do justice to the notion that God freely created the world? It seems to me that there is a tension between divine simplicity (upheld by classical theists) and divine freedom (upheld by theistic personalists) and that Judeo-Christian theism is committed to both. 

1) If God is simple, then he is purely actual (actus purus) and thus devoid of unexercised powers and unrealized potentialities. He is, from all eternity, all that he can be. This is true in every possible world because God exists in every possible world, and is pure act in every possible world.  As a necessary being, God exists in every possible world, and as a simple being, he is devoid of act-potency composition in every world in which he exists. 

2) As it is, God freely created our universe from nothing; but he might have created a different universe, or no universe at all. This implies that any universe God creates contingently exists.

The dyad seems logically inconsistent.   If (1) is true, then there is no possible world in which God has unexercised powers. But if (2) is true, there is at least one possible world in which God has unexercised powers. Had God created no universe, then his power to create would have gone unexercised.  Had God created a different universe than the one he did create, then his power to create our universe would also have gone unexercised. So if God is both simple and (libertarianly) free, then we get a logical contradiction.

In nuce, the problem is to explain how it can be true both that God is simple and that the universe which God created ex nihilo is contingent.  Clearly, the classical theist wants to uphold both. What is unclear, however, is whether he can uphold both.

There are two main ways to solve an aporetic polyad. One is to show that the inconsistency alleged is at best apparent, but not real.  The other way is by rejection of one of the limbs. 

Many if not most theists, and almost all Protestants, will simply (pun intended) deny the divine simplicity.  I myself think there are good reasons for embracing the latter.  But how then avoid modal collapse?

Modal Collapse

We have modal collapse just when the following proposition is true: For any x, x is possible iff x is actual iff x is necessary.  This implies that nothing is merely possible; nothing is contingent; nothing is impossible.  If nothing is merely possible, then there are no merely possible worlds, which implies that there is exactly one possible world, the actual world, which cannot fail to be actual, and is therefore necessary.  Modal collapse ushers in what I call call modal Spinozism. 

(The collapse is on the extensional, not the intensional or notional plane: the modal words retain their distinctive senses.)

Suppose divine simplicity entails modal collapse (modal Spinozism). So what? What is so bad about the latter?  Well, it comports none too well with God's sovereignty. If God is absolutely sovereign, then he cannot be under a metaphysical necessity to create. Connected with this is the fact that if God must create, then his aseity would be compromised. He cannot be wholly from himself, a se, if his existence necessarily requires a realm of creatures.  Finally, creaturely (libertarian) freedom would go by the boards if reality is one big block of Spinozistic necessity.

______________________

*Curiously, just yesterday the SEP editors informed me that an updated version is due from me by the end of February, 2023. Readers apprised of the latest literature are encouraged to contact me with their references.) 

God as Human Projection?

What could be logically weaker than the theory that God is a projection of human needs? Supposedly God does not exist because his existence reflects human exigencies. This argument presupposes that God could exist only if man did not need Him. What could be more absurd? But then, why is this idea so widespread?

Augusto Del Noce, in The Crisis of Modernity edited and translated by Carlo Lancellotti, (MQUP, Kindle Edition), p. 299. HT: Michael Liccione, Facebook, 12/16/21.

The Continental philosopher will often say in an obscure and confusing way what the analytic philosopher can say clearly.  Allow me to demonstrate.

 

God cannot be a human projection. This follows directly from what we mean by 'God' and what we mean by 'projection.' By 'God' we mean a being whose existence does not depend on the existence of anything else.  Of course, that is not all we mean by 'God,' but it is an essential part of what we mean. So if God exists, he exists in splendid independence of humans and their wants and needs. By 'projection' we mean either a projecting or that which is projected in a projecting. Either way a projection cannot exist without a projector. It follows that God cannot be a human projection.  We know this by sheer analysis of the terms 'God' and 'projection.' For nothing that is a projection could satisfy the concept God.

 

Does it follow that God exists? No.  But that is not the point. The point is that God cannot be a human projection, pace Ludwig Feuerbach and his followers.  God obviously cannot be a human projection if he exists. Suppose God does not exist. Then there is nothing in reality to which the term 'God' applies. The nonexistence of God leaves both the meaning of 'God' and the concept God intact.  So it is not the case that if God does not exist then the concept God becomes the concept of a human projection. The concept God remains the concept of something such that, if it existed, it would not be dependent on anything else for its existence, and therefore, the concept of something such that, if it existed, it could not be a human projection.

 

So what is Ludwig Feuerbach's signature sentence, "God is an unconscious anthropomorphic projection," about? Despite its surface grammar, the sentence cannot, given the cogency of the above reasoning, be  about God, but about our concept God. What it says about this concept is that nothing satisfies it. But then Feuerbach begs the question against the theist.

Pascal, Buber, and the God of the Philosophers

Substack latest.

It is a mistake to oppose the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?

I return an affirmative answer.

 

If God creates ex nihilo, and everything concrete other than God is created by God, and God is a pure spirit, then one type of metaphysical realism can be excluded at the outset. This  realism asserts that there are radically transcendent uncreated concrete things other than God.  'Radically transcendent' means 'transcendent of any mind, finite or infinite.' On this view, radically transcendent items exist and have most of their properties independently of any mind, including the divine mind.  Call this realism-1. We could also call it extreme metaphysical realism.  

 

No classical theist could be a realist-1. For on classical theism, everything other than God is created by God, created out of nothing, mind you, and not out of Avicennian mere possibles or any cognate sort of item. God creates out of nothing, not out of possibilities. ('Out of nothing' is  a privative expression that means 'not out of something.') We also note that on classical theism, God is not merely an originating cause of things other than himself, but a continuing cause that keeps these things in existence moment-by-moment. He is not a mere cosmic starter-upper. That would be deism, not classical theism. Whom do I have in mind? Thomas Aquinas for one. But I am not interested in playing the exegete with respect to his texts. I am thinking things through for myself. 

 

Corresponding to realism-1, as its opposite, is idealism-1.  This is the view that everything other than God is created ex nihilo by God, who is a pure spirit, and who therefore creates in a purely spiritual way.  (To simplify the discussion, let us leave to one side the problem of so-called 'abstract objects.')  It seems to me, therefore, that there is a very clear sense in which classical theism is a type of idealism.   For on classical theism God brings into existence and keeps in existence every concretum other than himself and he does so by his  purely mental/spiritual activity.  We could call this type of idealism onto-theological absolute idealism. It is the position that my A Paradigm Theory of Existence (Kluwer 2002) defends. The book bears the embarrassingly 'high horse' subtitle: Onto-Theology Vindicated, which was intended as a swipe against Heidegger. But I digress.

 

I am not saying that the entire physical cosmos is a content of the divine mind; it is rather an accusative or intentional object of the divine mind.  Though not radically transcendent, the cosmos is a transcendence-in-immanence, to borrow some Husserlian phraseology. 

 

So if the universe is expanding, that is not to say that the divine mind or any part thereof is expanding.  If an intentional object has a property P it does not follow that a mind trained upon this object, or an act of this mind or a content in this mind has P.  Perceiving a blue coffee cup, I have as intentional object something blue; but my mind is not blue, nor is the perceiving blue, nor any mental content that mediates the perceiving.  If I perceive or imagine or recall or in any way think of an extended sticky surface, neither my mind nor any part of it becomes extended or sticky.  Same with God.  He retains his difference from the physical cosmos even while said cosmos is nothing more than his merely intentional object incapable of existing on its own.

 

Actually, what I just wrote is only an approximation to what I really want to say.  For just as God is sui generis, the relation between God and the world is also sui generis, and as such not an instance of the intentional relation with which we are familiar in our own mental lives.  The former is only analogous to the latter.  If one takes the divine transcendence seriously, as classical theism does, then God cannot be a being among beings; equally, God's relation to the world cannot be a relation among relations.  If we achieve any understanding in these lofty precincts, it is not the sort of understanding one achieves by subsuming a new case under an old pattern; God does not fit any pre-existing pattern, nor does his 'relation' to the world fit any pre-existing pattern.  God is the Absolute and the Absolute cannot be a token of a type. If we achieve any understanding here it will be via various groping analogies.  These analogies can only take us so far.  In the end we must confess the infirmity of finite reason in respect of the Absolute that is the ontologically simple Paradigm Existent.

 

God's relation to the world (the realm of creatures), then, cannot be just another relation.  There is also the well-known problem that the intentional 'relation' is not, strictly speaking, a relation.  It is at best analogous to a relation.  So it looks as if we have a double analogy going here.  The God-world 'relation' is analogous to something analogous to a relation in the strict sense.  Let me explain.  

 

Necessarily, if x stands in relation R to y, then both x, y exist.  But x can stand in the intentional 'relation' to y even if y does not exist in reality.  'Exist in reality' is harmless pleonasm; it underscores the fact that, strictly speaking, to exist is to exist in reality. It is a plain fact that we sometimes have very definite thoughts about objects that do not exist, the planet Vulcan, for example.  What about the creating/sustaining 'relation'? The holding of this 'relation' as between God and Socrates cannot presuppose the existence in reality of both relata.  It presupposes the existence of God no doubt, but if it presupposed the existence of Socrates then there would be no need for the creating/sustaining ex nihilo of Socrates. Creating is a producing, a causing to exist, and indeed moment by moment.

 

For this reason, creation/sustaining cannot be a relation, strictly speaking.  It follows that the createdness of a creature cannot be a relational property, strictly speaking. (Mundane example: if a cat licks my arm, then my arm has the relational property of being licked by a cat.)  Now the createdness of a creature is its existence or Being.  So the existence of a creature cannot be a relational property thereof; it is at most  like a relational property thereof.

 

What I have done so far is argue that classical theism is a form of idealism, a form of idealism that is the opposite of an extreme from of metaphysical realism, the form I referred to as 'realism-1.'  If you say that no one has ever held such a form of realism, I will point to Ayn Rand. (See Rand and Peikoff on God and Existence.)

 

Moderate  Realism (Realism-2)

 

Realism holds with respect to some of the objects of finite minds.  Not for merely intentional objects, of course, but for things like trees and mountains and cats and chairs and their parts.  They exist and have most of their properties independently of the mental activity of finite minds such as ours. We can call this realism-2.

 

Kant held that empirical realism and transcendental idealism are logically compatible and he subscribed to both.  Now the idealism I urge is not a mere transcendental idealism, but a full-throated onto-theological absolute idealism; but it too is compatible, as far as I can see, with the empirical reality of most of the objects of ectypal intellects such as ours.  (God's intellect is archetypal; mine is ectypal.) The divine spontaneity makes the objects of ectypal intellects  exist thereby rendering them  them available to the receptivity of such intellects.  Realism-2 is consistent with idealism-1. 

 

My thesis, then, is that classical theism is a type of idealism; it is onto-theological absolute idealism.  If everything concrete is created originally and sustained ongoingly ex nihilo by a purely spiritual being, an Absolute Mind, and by purely spiritual activity, then this is better denominated 'idealism' than 'realism.'  Is that not obvious?

 

But trouble looms as I will argue in the next entry in this series.  And so we will have to consider whether the sui generis, absolutely unique status of God and his relation to the world is good reason to withhold both appellations, 'realism' and 'idealism.'

The Question of the Reality of God: Wittgensteinian Fideism No Answer

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Three Theisms: Ontic, Alterity, and Onto-Theological and their Liabilities

There is a problem that has occupied me on and off for years. One way into the problem is via the following aporetic triad:

1. There are things other than God that exist, and they all depend on God for their existence.

2.  For any x, y,  if x depends for its existence on y, and x exists, then y exists. (This implies that nothing can depend on God for its existence unless God exists.)

3. God is not one of the many things that exist, and so God does not exist.

It is easy to see that the limbs of the triad cannot all be true. And yet each has some plausibility, at least 'in-house,' i.e., among theists.

(1) or something like it will be accepted by both ontic theists and alterity theists, assuming that they are not pantheists. Roughly, an ontic theist is a theist who maintains that God is a being among beings, an ens among entia, while an alterity theist is one who maintains that God is radically transcendent, radically other, to such an extent that he cannot be identified with any being.

(2) won't be accepted by the alterity theists, but it is to my mind exceedingly plausible! If everything other than God depends on God for its existence, then God must in some mode or manner exist; otherwise he would be nothing at all. And on nothing nothing can depend.

(3) won't be accepted by the ontic theist, but alterity theists find it plausible. If God is other than every being, then he is no being. If to be is to exist, then God does not exist.

Since the limbs cannot all be true, one of them must be rejected.  I am assuming, of course, that there cannot be true contradictions.  There are therefore three main ways of solving the problem.

A. The quickest solution, call it Blanket Atheism, is by rejecting (1).  There is no God in any sense of the term.  No being is God, and there is no God 'beyond being.'   There is just the natural world (and perhaps abstracta) but nature is not God, and so God does not exist. Reality is exhausted by space-time, its occupants, and (perhaps) the Platonic menagerie.  To put it another way, concrete reality is exhausted by space-time and its occupants.

B.  The alterity theist rejects (2) while accepting (3).

C.  The ontic theist accepts (2) while rejecting (3).

But there are two other C-options, two other options involving the acceptance of (2) and the rejection of (3).

One could take a monistic tack, roughly along the lines of Spinoza.  Accordingly, (i) there is a sense in which God exists -- God is not natura naturata, but natura naturans -- ; (ii) God exists in the primary sense of 'exists'; (iii) God alone exists, hence is not one of many existents, and so does not exist in the sense in which Spinozistic modes exist.

This is what I used to think, back in the '80s.  See my "Two Faces of Theism," Idealistic Studies, vol. xx, no. 3 (September 1990), pp. 238-257.  But I moved away from this position in the '90s and took an onto-theological turn that found expression in my existence book.

That is the other C-option.  Accordingly, God is not an existent among existents as the ontic theist maintains.  Nor is God somehow real but nonexistent as the alterity theist maintains.  Nor is God the one and only existent as the monist maintains.  Rather, God is self-existent Existence, yet transcendent of the created realm, pace monism.  This is roughly akin to the position of Aquinas.  Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.  God is not a being (ens), but self-subsisting  Being (esse). So God is Being (esse) but God also is.  God is both esse and ens.  Gott ist beides: Sein und Seiendes. Thus there is no 'ontological difference' (Heidegger) in God. God is Being but also the prime 'case' -- not instance! -- of Being.  (Being has no instances.) But God is in a mode of Being unlike the mode of Being of anything else. So God is not a being among beings, nor does he have properties in the way Socrates has properties. I have gone over this in painful detail in many other entries.

If we take the Thomistic tack, we can navigate between the Scylla of ontic theism and the Charybdis of alterity theism. We can avoid the untenable extremes. God is not a being among beings, but God is also not nothing as he would have to be if he were wholly other than every being.

But this too has its difficulties.  I will mention one. How could anything both be and be identical to Being? How could anything be both ens and esse? How could Existence itself exist? This is unintelligible to intellects of our constitution, discursive  intellects. So now I am contemplating the final step: Into the Mystic.

The above triad strikse me as an aporia, an insolubilium.  The 'solutions' to it are mere stopgaps that generate problems of their own as bad as or worse than the original problem. For example, if you 'solve' the triad by embracing Blanket Atheism, then you face all the problems attending naturalism, problems we have rehearsed many times. The original problem looks to be absolutely insoluble. One has to blast through it, as through a koan, into the Transdiscursive.  The philosopher, however, hovers at the boundary of the Sayable, marking it without overstepping it, incapable qua philosopher of effing the Ineffable, but able -- and this is his office --  to point to it while refuting both denials of it and bad theories about it.

Omnia Sana Sanis

"All is reasonable to the reasonable." Herein lies a reason to limit one's reasonableness.

For it is not reasonable to be reasonable in all things or in relation to all persons. We live among enemies. The enemy needs sometimes to experience the hard fist of unreason, the brute rejection, the blind refusal, the lethal blow. Or at least he must be made to fear this response, and you must be capable of making it.  The good are not the weak, but those capable of  violence while remaining the masters of its exercise.

Otherwise, are you fit for this world? On the other hand, it might be better not to be fit for this world. What sort of world is it in which the good must be brutal to preserve the reign of the Good?

Of Russell's Teapot and Abbey's Angry Lunicorn

Does the angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon manage his anger by sipping herbal tea from Russell's teapot?

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The Concept GOD as a Limit Concept

The concept GOD is the concept of a being that cannot be constituted in consciousness in Husserl's sense of 'constitution,' a being that cannot be a transcendence-in-immanence, but must be absolutely transcendent, transcendent in itself, not merely for us.  It follows that there cannot be a phenomenology of God. At best, there can be a phenomenology of such of our experiences as purport to be of or about God.

We know that the concept GOD is the concept of something absolutely transcendent, and we know this by purely conceptual means. We have the concept GOD and we analyze it: we simply unpack its meaning. Whatever the origin of this concept, it is there in us and available for analysis. Of course, we cannot learn by conceptual analysis that God exists, but we can know something about what God cannot be like, if he does exist.  We can know, for example, that God, if he exists, is not a concept.  No surprise here, and nothing that distinguishes God from my chair, since my chair is not a concept either.  (One cannot sit on a concept.)  The difference between the concept CHAIR and the concept GOD is the difference between an ordinary concept and a limit concept (Grenzbegriff).* 

This is the distinction between those concepts that can capture (mirror, represent) the essences or natures of the things of which they are the concepts, and those concepts that cannot. Call the first type ordinary concepts and the second limit concepts. Thus the concept CUBE captures the essence of every cube, which is to be a three-dimensional solid bounded by six square faces or sides with three meeting at each vertex, and it captures this essence fully.   The concept HELIOTROPIC PLANT captures, partially,  the essence of those plants that exhibit diurnal or seasonal motion of plant parts in response to the direction of the sun.  Concepts are mental representations.  Essences are extra-mental.

Now the concept GOD cannot be ordinary since this concept cannot capture the essence of God. For (i) in God essence and existence are one, and (ii) there is no ordinary concept of existence.

Ad (i). That in God essence and existence are one follows from the fact that nothing could count as the Absolute if it were a composite of essence and existence.  And we know by conceptual analysis that God is the Absolute: the concept GOD is the concept of 'something' absolute.  This is the case whether or not God exists.

Ad (ii).  When I say that there is no ordinary concept of existence, I mean that there is no ordinary (non-limit) concept that is adequate to existence. (There are bogus concepts of existence such as Quine's.) There is no ordinary (non-limit) concept of existence because the existence of a thing, as other than its essence, cannot be conceptualized.  Why not? 

This is because each existing thing has its own existence.  Thus the existence of Al is Al's existence, the existence of Bob is Bob's, and the existence of Carla is Carla's.  For the existence of a thing is that which makes that very thing exist.  Existence cannot be a property like being human, being sentient, being sunburned.  These properties are multiply instantiable; existence, however, is not multiply instantiable. There are no instances of existence.  

Now if each thing has its own existence, then existence is implicated in the irreducible singularity of each existing thing. Irreducible singularity, in turn, cannot be conceptualized by minds like ours which trade only in the general and multiply instantiable. It's an Aristotelian point. If Aristotle wrote in Latin it would go: individuum qua individuum ineffabile est. The individual as such, the singular as such,  is ineffable and cannot be conceptualized.  The Peripatetic tells us that science is never of the particular as particular but only of the particular as exhibiting general or repeatable features. The particular as such is unrepeatable.   But of course there are no individuals (particulars) bare of properties. Every finite individual is a this-such. This is a law of metaphyica generalis. So, while the individual as individual cannot be conceptualized, the individual as bearer of properties can be conceptualized as an instance of those properties.  If  I think of Mary as an instance of lovable properties, then I abstract from the haecceity (thisness) that makes her different numerically from her indiscernible twin Sherry.  So if I love Mary precisely and only as an instance of lovable properties, then it will make no difference to my so loving her whether Mary or Sherry is its object. It will, however, make a difference to Mary. "I want that you should love me for what makes me me, and not for what I have in common with her!"  I explain this all in great detail in Do We Love the Person or Only Her Qualities?

The crucial point here is that when we think of an individual as an instance of properties, we abstract from (leave out of consideration) the individual's thisness and its existence.  I am not saying that the existence and the thisness of a concrete individual are one and the same; I am saying that that they go together as a matter of metaphysical necessity.  

Ad (i + ii).  In God there is no real distinction between existence and nature. That was the first point. The second was that no ordinary (non-limit) concept captures the individuality of the thing of which it is the concept. Therefore, since God is (identically) his nature, there can be no ordinary concept of God, whence it follows frat GOD is a limit concept.

There is, then, a  clear sense in which God is unconceptualizable or unbegreiflich: he cannot be grasped by the use of any ordinary concept. But it doesn't follow that we have no concept of God.  We do. The concept GOD is a limit concept: it is the concept of something that cannot be grasped using ordinary concepts.  Our cognitive architecture is such that we can grasp only the general, the repeatable, but never the irreducibly singular.  The concept GOD, however, is the concept of 'something' absolutely and irreducibly singular.  God is one without a second, one without even the possibility of a second. Any god that doesn't satisfy this metaphysical exigency just isn't worth his salt.

The concept GOD is the concept of something that lies at the outer limit of discursive intelligibility, and indeed just beyond that limit. We can argue up to this Infinite Object/Subject, but then discursive operations must cease. We cannot penetrate the divine essence since this essence is one with existence, and existence cannot be conceptually penetrated. We can however point to God, in a manner of speaking, using limit concepts. The concept GOD is the concept of an infinite, absolute and wholly transcendent reality whose realitas formalis so exceeds our powers of understanding that it cannot be taken up into the realitas objectiva of any of our ordinary concepts.

Now if you have followed that, then you are in a position to see that the following objection is a 'cheap shot' easily dismissed.  "You contradict yourself. You say that God cannot be conceptualized but at the same time you operate with a concept of God as unconceptualizable."  But no contradiction arises once we distinguish ordinary from limit concepts. 

If the critic accuses me of inventing a distinction ad hoc to save the ineffability and transcendence of God, then my reply will be that there are numerous other examples of limit concepts.  See the aptly appellated category, Limit Concepts. 

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*The term Grenzbegriff first enters philosophy in 1781 in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Curiously, he uses the term only once in the works he himself published. The term surfaces a few more times in his Nachlass.  The sole passage in the published works is at A255/B311 where Kant remarks that the concept noumenon is a Grenzbegriff.

Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain, Part One (2021 Version)

For Vito Caiati.  This 2021 version of a November 2010 post corrects unclarities, infelicities of expression, and outright errors in the initial entry . And the font is more legible for ancient eyes.

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When theists are confronted by atheists with the various arguments from evil, the former should not reject the premise that objective evil exists.  That would eliminate the problem, but eliminativism here as elsewhere in philosophy is a shabby evasion. (Example: How does brain activity give rise to consciousness? No problem! Consciousness is an illusion!) Evil exists and it is not merely subjective. But the same is true of holes. See Holes and Their Mode of Being.  Holes are not nothing, and that is objectively the case despite their being absences.  You could say that holes have no positive entitative status and are only as privations.  (Curiously, as argued in the linked entry, they are empirically detectable absences which is another reason to hold that they are not nothing.)

So, to accommodate the objective reality of evil we should consider whether perhaps evil has no positive entitative status and is only as a privation. In classical jargon, this is the view of evil as privatio boni. Thus Augustine, Enchiridion XI:

For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present --namely, the diseases and wounds -- go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance, -- the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils -- that is, privations of the good which we call health -- are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.

If evil is a privation or absence then the ancient problem -- dating back beyond David Hume to Epicurus -- of reconciling the existence of God (as traditionally defined) with the existence of evil seems either to dissolve or else become rather more tractable. Indeed, if the evil-as-privation thesis is coupled with the Platonic notion alive in both Augustine and Aquinas that Goodness is itself good as the Primary Good, the unique exemplar of goodness whence all good things receive their goodness, then one can argue from the existence of evils-as-privations to the existence of that of which they are privations. But that is a separate and very difficult topic.

Without going that far, let us first  note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent. Thus in one clear sense good and evil are opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good.  In fact, I will lay it down as a condition of adequacy for any theory of evil that evil not be hypostatized.  If a (primary) substance is anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then evil is not a substance.  That way lies Manicheanism.  There are no two co-equal 'principles' eternally at war, Good and Evil.  

The Problem of Pain

But then 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 pain is something all-too-positive. The  what-it-is-like is something quite distinctive. (This hyphenated locution from Thomas Nagel.) 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.

Two Possible Responses

Felt pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:

A. One might argue that felt pains are evil but that the painfulness of a felt pain is a matter of projection.  One might flesh this out as follows. There is a certain sensory quale that I experience when my knee slams into the leg of the table. Call this the experiential substratum of the pain. I am not talking about the physical damage to the knee, if any, or about anything physical. By the experiential substratum I mean the felt datum precisely and only as felt, as lived though, as experienced.  I am talking about the physical pain as a phenomenal datum. The painfulness of this felt pain is something else again. On the objection now being considered, the painfulness of the felt pain is a matter of projection or interpretation or 'attitude': it is something supplied by the subject. The experiential substratum, the sensory quale, exists in objective reality despite the fact that its esse est percipi. But the painfulness, and thus the evil or badness of the sensory quale is an interpretation from the side of the sufferer.

What's more, this interpretation or projection can be altered or withdrawn entirely. Thus, with practice, one can learn to focus one's attention on a painful sensory quale and in so doing lessen its painfulness. If you try this, it works to some extent. After a long day of hiking over rocky trails, my feet hurt. But I say to myself, "It's only a sensation, and your aversion to it is your doing." "Master desire and aversion!" Focusing on the sensation in this way, and noting that one's attitude towards it plays a role in the painfulness, one can reduce the painfulness.  One reduces the painfulness but without eliminating the felt pain. You still feel the sensation, but you have withheld the aversive overlay. If you try it, you will see that it works to some extent.   This suggests that the painfulness is merely subjective.

Unfortunately, this response is not convincing as a general response to the problem of pain.   Imagine the physical and mental suffering of one who is being tortured to death. And then try to convince yourself that the pain in a situation like this is just a matter of 'attitude' or aversion. "Conquer desire and aversion" is a good Buddhist maxim. And a good Stoic one as well.  But I find it hard to swallow the notion that the painfulness of every painful sensation derives from the second-order stance of aversion.

I conclude that plenty of felt pains are not only objectively real but also objectively evil: their evilness is not a subjective addition.

B. One might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil since they are outweighed by greater goods. But I'll leave the elaboration of this response for Part II. Brevity is the soul of blog.

Is Theism Empirically Refutable?

Consider the following passage from J. J. C. Smart:

It looks as though the theistic hypothesis is an empirically refutable one, so that theism becomes a refuted scientific theory. The argument goes: (1) If God exists then there is no evil, (2) There is evil, therefore (3) It is not the case that God exists. Premiss (1) seems to follow from our characterization of God as an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent being. (2) is empirical. We can hardly reject (2). It seems therefore that the theist has to find something wrong with (1) and this is not easy. (J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism, Blackwell 2003, 2nd ed, p. 60)

Smart's argument from evil is plainly valid, being of the form modus tollens. But for an argument to be probative, other conditions must be met. One of these conditions is that the premises be true. Another is that the argument involve no 'informal fallacy' such as equivocation.

So let us ask: how would 'evil' in (1) have to be construed so that (1) comes out true? I say that 'evil' must be short for 'gratuitous evil.' But then, to avoid equivocation, we would have to replace 'evil' in (2) with 'gratuitous evil.' The result would be:

1*. If God exists, then there is no gratuitous evil.
2*. There is gratuitous evil.
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3. It is not the case that God exists.

The resulting argument is valid, and (1*) is plainly true, unlike (1) which is not plainly true, but false. That (1) is false can be seen from the fact that an omni-qualified God could easily permit the existence of an evil that was necessary for the attainment of a greater good. Such an evil would not be gratuitous. So it is just false to say, "If God exists, then there is no evil."

But (1*) is plainly true. Now it may be — it is epistemically possible that -- (2*) is also true. The reformulated argument would then be sound. A sound argument, by definition, is a deductive argument that is both valid in point of logical form and whose premises are all of them true. As for epistemic possibility, a proposition p is epistemically (doxastically) possible for a subject S if and only if p is logically consistent with what S knows (believes).

But note that a sound argument will be probatively worthless if it begs the question, if it is such that one cannot know a premise to be true without already knowing the conclusion to be true. So let us ask a very simple question: How does one know that (2*) is true? How does one know that there is gratuitous evil? Smart tells us that (2) is empirical. 'Empirical' is a term of epistemology. It is applied to those propositions that are known from experience, by observation via the senses and their instrumental extensions (microscopes, telescopes, etc.) Now I am willing to grant arguendo that (2) — There is evil — is an empirical truth. (2), however, is not what Smart needs to make his argument work. He needs (2*). But is (2*) an empirical truth? Can one know from sensory experience (whether inner or outer) that there is gratuitous evil? Is gratuitousness an empirical attribute of the evils one experiences?

Consider the evil of intense pain. I am acquainted with pain by 'inner sense.' And I am willing to grant arguendo, though it is not quite obvious, that I am acquainted empirically with the evil of intense pain. But I am surely not acquainted empirically with the gratuitousness of experienced evils. Gratuitousness is no more an empirical attribute than the createdness of the natural world. It is not evident to the senses that nature is a divine creation. Similarly, it is not evident to the senses that instances of evil are gratuitous. Is it not epistemically possible that they are all non-gratuitous?

To say that an evil is gratuitous is equivalent to saying that it is an evil inconsistent with the existence of the omni-qualified God. It is to say that it is an evil that no such God could have a morally sufficient reason for permitting. Clearly, one cannot 'read off' such a complex relational attribute from any instance of evil.  Even if it is empirically obvious that there are evils such as the intense pain both physical and psychological of a fawn being incinerated in a forest fire, it is not empirically obvious that this evil is gratuitous.

The conclusion I am driving towards is that Smart's argument supra is question-begging. For in order to know that premise (2*) is true, I must know that the conclusion is true. That is, to know that there are gratuitous evils, I must know that God does not exist. For if God exists, then then there are no gratuitous evils.  At most, there would only seem to be such.

Smart tells us above that the theistic hypothesis is empirically refutable. But I say Smart is mistaken: he needs (2*) for his argument to work, but this proposition -- There is gratuitous evil -- is not empirical. It may be true for all that, but it is not knowable by experience. You may be convinced that it is true, and I won't blame you if you find it much more plausible than the truth of 'God exists'; but it is not an empirical truth, if it is a truth. It is an interpretation imposed upon the data. It is as metaphysical as 'God exists.'

One last observation. There is something strange about referring as Smart does to theism as an empirical hypothesis.  This is not the place to pursue this.   I will merely suggest that the existence of God is more like the existence of truth than it is like the existence of something empirically confirmable or disconfirmable. It would be easy to show the absurdity of the question, Is the existence of truth empirically refutable? So too, perhaps, with the existence of God. The existence of truth is an ultimate presupposition of all inquiry and all assertion. The existence of God may be in the same logical boat.

If you are thinking of God along the lines of Russell's celestial teapot, you have missed the boat.

C. S. Lewis on the (Non) Additivity of Pain in Relation to the Problem of Evil

In The Problem of Pain (Fontana 1957, pp. 203-204, first publ. in 1940), C. S. Lewis writes,

We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the 'unimaginable sum of human misery'. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and all space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.

I think that Lewis is right that felt pain is not additive across different subjects. Your pain and my pain cannot be summed.  This holds for both physical and psychological pain. Pain is additive only in a given subject and not across subjects.  "There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it."

So far, so good. It is equally true, however,  that two people being tortured to death  is worse than one person  being tortured to death.  Both states of affair are evil, but the first is more evil than the second. The quantity of felt pain is the same, but in the first there are twice as many evils than in the second.

I conclude that the question of the quantity of pain in the world is distinct from the question of the quantity of evil in the world. This is relevant to the problem of evil faced by theists.  Lewis has shown that "the maximum that a single person can suffer" is "all the suffering that there ever can be in the universe."  And that includes all the suffering of the non-human animals who suffer. But the problem of evil faced by the theist is precisely a problem of evil and not a problem of felt pain. And this despite the fact that many pains are evil (all those, I should think, the suffering of which does not lead to a greater good.) 

My tentative conclusion is that the considerations adduced in the passage quoted above do little to alleviate the severity of the problem of evil faced by traditional theists.

Generic and Specific Problems of Evil

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The nature and tractability of the problem depends on the type of theism espoused.

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Vito Caiati comments:

I very much profited from the short essay “Generic and Specific Problems of Evil” that you posted on Substack yesterday. I have read it several times, and, if viewed from the perspective of the ultimate destiny of the members of our species alone, I see the merit of your claim that “It is arguable that there is no insoluble problem of evil for theists-A, . . . [those who regard] this world [as] a ‘vale of soul-making’ (the phrase is from John Keats) in which human beings, exercising free will, make themselves worthy, or fail to make themselves worthy, of communion with God. Combine this soul-making idea with post-mortem existence, and the existence of purgatory but not hell, and we have perhaps the elements of a solution to the problem of evil.”

However, what about non-human animals, who “Despite being wholly corporeal, . . . enjoy and suffer sentience: they are the subjects of conscious states, contra Descartes. Among these conscious states are non-intentional states such as pleasure and pain, but also . . . intentional (object-directed) states such as affection and anger” (Maverick Philosopher, “Soteriology for Brutes,”3/21/2019)?  

It seems to me, who, as you know, is a philosophic neophyte in these matters, that the theist-A operates with too narrow a perspective on sentience, for ultimate value is placed only on those sentient beings that are rational and hence capable to abstract thought and moral judgments.  The suffering of all the others, including the highest mammals, counts very little or not at all; it certainly does not figure in the soteriology of, say, Christianity, which is obsessively centered on human sin and the need for salvation from it, rather than on the agony and death that permeates the natural world.  Perhaps “death is the wages of sin” for mankind, but what explains the agonizing deaths of our fellow sentient creatures that have not sinned?  Only by remaining in his sin/redemption theory of salvation, which is necessarily restricted to human beings, can theist-A be more reconciled to the existence of evil.  

None of these may be worth your time, but I wanted to share it with you, since it is one of the central concerns of my intellectual and emotional life.

You have pointed out a serious lacuna in my discussion, Vito.  I focused on moral and natural evil as it pertains to human animals but left out of account the natural evil, including both physical and mental suffering, that besets non-human animals.  I will now try to formulate your objection to me as trenchantly as I can.  'You' in what follows refers to me!

1) You maintain that the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of God is considerably more tractable if we humans survive our bodily deaths  and come to enjoy (after a period of purgation) eternal bliss. 

2) You also argue that "It is dialectically unfair for atheists to argue against all (classical) theists from the fact of the evil in this world when . . . some theists believe that the transient evils of this short life are far outweighed by the unending bliss of the world to come."

3) You are presenting a sort of "All's well that ends well" response to moral and natural evil.  You are arguing that the evils of this life are far outweighed and almost completely made up for by the unending bliss of the world to come, so much so that the the 'problem' of evil vanishes for those who subscribe to the specific theism that you call Theism-A.

4) You ignore, however, the problem of animal pain which is certainly real. (We both reject as preposterous the Cartesian view that non-human animals are insensate or non-sentient.) Given that non-human animals are not spiritual beings as we are, and do not survive their bodily deaths, there is no redemption for them: their horrific suffering -- imagine the physical pain and mental terror of being eaten alive! -- is in no way recompensed or outweighed.  And given how many species of non-human critter there are, and how many specimens per species, and how long these animals existed before man made the scene, there is a VAST amount of evil that goes unredeemed.

5) Your argument therefore fails to get God off the hook. 

I take this objection seriously and I thank Dr. Caiati for raising it. At the moment, three possible lines of response occur to me, assuming that there is no Cartesian way out.

A. We can take something like the  line that David Bentley Hart champions against Edward Feser, which I briefly discussed in "Soteriology for Brutes?" (linked above) namely, that animals do survive their bodily deaths and 'go to heaven.' (Lacking as they do free will, I see no reason to posit purgatory or hell for them.  The savagery of a tiger devouring its prey alive is amoral unlike the savagery of humans. No homo is literally homini lupus.)

B. Without embracing Cartesianism, one might argue that we are engaging in illicit anthropomorphic projection when we project into animals our terrors and physical pains.  One might to try to argue that their sufferings, while real,  are next to nothing as compared to ours and don't really count very much or at all when it comes to the problem of evil.

C.  One might take a mysterian tack. God exists and evil exists. Therefore, they co-exist, whence it follows that it is possible that they co-exist. The fact that we cannot understand how it possible reflects poorly on our cognitive architecture but has no tendency to show that God and evil do not co-exist.  Of course, if one took a line like this, one could evade the particulars of my Substack proposal.

While (B) strikes me as lame, (A) and (C) show promise, (A) more than (C).

ComBox now open.

ADDENDUM (9/17)

This morning I found a passage in Berdyaev that supports Dr. Caiati's intuitions about animal suffering from a broadly Christian perspective.

The death of the least and most miserable creature is unendurable, and if it is irremediable, the world cannot be accepted and justified. All and everything must be raised to eternal life. This means that the principle of eternal being must be affirmed in relation to human beings, animals, plants and even inanimate things. [. . .] Christ's love of the world and for man is victory over the powers of death and the gift of abundant life. (Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, tr. Natalie Duddington, Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p. 253.)

The (febrile) Russian existentialist is making a surprisingly radical claim here. He is maintaining that the existence of the world is justified and our lives in it are affirmable as worth living only if absolutely everything is redeemed and preserved in the end, not only everything living, but the inanimate as well.  Somehow everything temporal must be somehow cancelled and preserved -- aufgehoben in Hegel's sense  -- in eternity.  How the inanimate could be brought to eternal life is of course a thought transgressive of the discursive and hard by the boundary of the mystical.  

In Berdyaev as in Simone Weil, we are at the outer limits of the religious sensibility.

Presentism and Evil: If Presentism is False, then God does not Exist

Bradley Schneider sent me the following argument and would like my opinion. I am happy to accommodate him. (I have edited his argument for the sake of brevity, the soul of blog. I have also given it a title.)

PRESENTISM FALSE? THEN GOD DOES NOT EXIST!

1)   An all-good, omniscient, omnipotent God should not allow any horrendous evil.

2)  If there is a solution to the problem of evil, it must entail that God eventually defeats evil and, to defeat evil, God must not only compensate the victims of evil but destroy evil's existence.  

3)  If presentism is not true, however, it means that past events still exist, even if they do not exist now.  

 

4)  But this implies that a horrendous evil that occurred in, say, 1994 (the Rwandan genocide, for example) still exists.  Not only that, it will always exist.  As will every other horrendous evil throughout human history.

5)  God may be able to vanquish evil at the eschaton, but all of the horrendous evils will persist throughout all eternity.  Even while the blessed are enjoying heaven, the horrendous evils will continue to exist.  All of the past evils will remain real and hence undefeated, even if God can assure that no further evil will occur post-eschaton.

 

6)  So God ultimately cannot vanquish evil if presentism is false.

 

7)  Therefore, God doesn't exist if presentism is false.

 

The problem is with (3).   If presentism is not true, then presumably eternalism is true. Presentism is the view that only  temporally present items (times, events, . . .) exist. That is, everything that exists exists at present.  On eternalism, this is not the case: past and future items also exist.  Now for these two views to be contradictory, 'exist(s)' must be used in the same sense. But what sense is that? It cannot be the present-tensed sense because that would reduce presentism to a tautology and eternalism to a contradiction. How so?

 

Well, 'Everything that exists (present tense) exists at present' is a trivial logical truth devoid of metaphysical import. On the other hand, 'Past, present, and future items all exist (present tense)' is logically contradictory since wholly past and wholly future items  are not temporally present.  Presentism and eternalism are substantive metaphysical theses that contradict each other only if 'exist(s)' is taken tenselessly.

 

Now glance back at (3).  It reads, in part, "If presentism is not true, however, it means that past events still exist . . . "  This is arguably a presentist misunderstanding of what the eternalist is saying.  'Still exists' means 'existed and exists (present tense).' That is not what the eternalist is saying. He is not saying, for example, that the gladiatorial combat in the Coliseum is still going on. He is saying that past events, i.e., events earlier than his speaking, exist simpliciter, i. e., tenselessly, whatever that comes to.

 

Note also that if past events still exist, then they do exist now, which contradicts the rest of (3): " . . . even if they do not exist now." 

 

So Schneider's argument needs some work.

 

My view is that both eternalism and presentism are fraught with insuperable difficulties. Using either for theological purposes is not likely to get us anywhere.

Shestov on the Fool

Lev Shestov (1866-1938), Job's Balances:

"The fool said in his heart: There is no God." Sometimes this is a sign of the end and of death. Sometimes of the beginning and of life. As soon as man feels that God is not, he suddenly comprehends the frightful horror and the wild folly of human temporal existence, and when he has comprehended this he awakes, perhaps not to the ultimate knowledge but to the penultimate. Was it not so with Nietzsche, Spinoza, Pascal, Luther, Augustine, even with St. Paul?

Quoted from D. M. White, Eternal Quest (Paragon, 1991), p. 111.

The penutimate knowledge, I take it, would be the knowledge that without God, life is meaningless, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." This was Nietzsche's knowledge, and Nietzsche's dead end. The ultimate knowledge would then be the knowledge that God exists, a knowledge that begins in earnest once one has come through the Great Doubt expressed by the fool.

God and Existence: How Related?

A reader asks:

You seem to hold that, if God is identical to his existence, then God is Existence itself. Why think that? Why not think instead that, if God is identical to his existence, then he is identical to his 'parcel' of existence, as it were?

This is an entirely reasonable question. I will try to answer it.

 

First of all, when we say that God is identical to his existence, we mean that there is no real distinction in God between essence (nature) and existence in the way in which there is a real distinction in Socrates (our representative creature) between essence (nature) and existence.  It is the real distinction in Socrates that grounds his metaphysical contingency, while it is the lack of such a distinction in God that grounds his metaphysical necessity.

 

This is to say that God, unlike creatures, is ontologically simple.  In a slogan of St Augustine, God is what he has.  Thus he has his existence by being his existence.  In this one case, the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication coalesce. Why must God be simple?  Because he is the absolute reality.  If your god is not the absolute reality, then your god is not God but an idol.  The absolute cannot depend on anything else for its nature or existence on pain of ceasing to be the absolute.  It must possess aseity, from-itself-ness. 

 

Now Existence is in some way common to everything that exists, though it is not common in the manner of a property or a concept.  Thus God and Socrates have Existence in common.  If God is not identical to Existence, then he is like Socrates and must depend on Existence as something other than himself to exist.  But this violates the divine aseity.

 

Therefore, God is not only identical to his existence, he is identical to Existence itself.

 

Objection:  "If God is identical to Existence, then God alone exists, which flies in the face of the evident fact that there is a plurality of non-divine existents."

 

Reply:   The objection succeeds only if there are no different ways of existing.  But if God exists-underivatively and creatures exist-derivatively, then God's identity with Existence does not entail that God alone exists; it entails that God alone exists-underivatively.

 

The picture is this.  Existence is that which makes derivative existents exist.  If Existence did not itself exist, then nothing would exist.  So Existence itself exists.  It is identical to God.  God is the unsourced Source of everything distinct from God.  God, as Existence itself, is the Paradigm Existent.  God is at once both Existence and the prime case of Existence.

 

In this respect, God is like a Platonic Form in which all else participates.  (It is worth recalling in this connection that Aquinas speaks of God as forma formarum, the form of all forms.)  God is self-existent Existence; creatures are not self-existent, but derive their existence from self-existent Existence.

 

Objection:  "This scheme issues in something like the dreaded Third Man Regress.  If Socrates and Plato both exist by participating in Existence, which exists, then there are three things that exist, Socrates, Plato, and Existence, each of which exists by participation.  If so, there must be a second Existence, Existence-2 that Socrates, Plato and Existence-1 participate in.  But then an infinite regress is up and running, one that is, moreover, vicious."

 

Response:  The Third Man Regress is easily blocked by distinguishing the way Existence exists and the way derivative existents exist.  Socrates exists by participating in Existence; Existence exists, not by participation, but by being (identical to) Existence.

 

There is exactly one case in which existence = self-identity.  This is the case of the Paradigm Existent, which is Existence itself, which is God.  If God is God, then God exists. (Bonaventura) In every other case, existence is not self-identity.  No doubt Socrates is self-identical; but his self-identity is not the ground of his existence.

Platonism and Christianity

Brother Dave writes,

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 to refer 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.

Whether 'Image and Likeness' Supports God's Having a Body

Latest Substack entry.

How are God and Truth Related? (2021 Expanded Version)

By my count, there are five different ways to think about the relation of God and truth:

1) There is truth, but there is no God.

2) There is truth, and there is God, but God is not the ontological ground of truth.

3) There is truth, there is God, and God is the ontological ground of truth: truth ultimately depends for its existence on the existence of God. There is truth only because there is God. (This 'because' signifies a relation that is neither empirically-causal nor merely logical. Call it the relation of ontological grounding.)

4) There is no truth, because there is no God.

5) There is God, but no truth.

Ad (1). This is the view of  many if not most today. There are truths, and among these truths is the truth that God does not exist.  This, I take it, is the standard atheist view.  The standard atheist does not deny that there are truths; he presupposes that there are and that they are absolute. It is just that one of these truths is that there is no God.

Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers.  There are truths, and one of the truths is that God exists. Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and who also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths. Such a philosopher would have to hold that the existence of God is logically equivalent to the existence of some truths. That is, he would have to hold that, necessarily God exists if and only if truths exist. But this philosopher would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either. That is, he would deny that God is the ontological ground of truth.

Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept, were I to accept a view.  Thus I would affirm the subjunctive conditional lately mentioned. The difference between (2) and (3) is subtle. On both sides it is held that both the existence of God and the existence of some truths are necessary, but the Augustinian -- to give him a name -- holds that God is the ultimate 'source' of all truth and thus of all intelligibility, or, if you prefer, the ultimate 'ground' of all truth and intelligibility. Therefore, if, per impossibile, God were not to exist, truth would not exist either.

Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view.  Tod Gottes = Tod der Wahrheit.  The death of God is the death of truth.  By 'truth' I of course mean absolute truth which cannot be perspectival or in any way relative.  Truth cannot be relative, as I have argued many times. 

Ad (5). I have the impression that certain post-modernists hold this. It is a view not worth discussing.

I should think only the first three views have any merit.  

But each of the three has difficulties and none of the three can be strictly proven.

A. I will argue against the admittedly plausible first view by arguing for the third view.

Among the truths, there are necessary truths such as the laws of logic. Now a truth is a true truth-bearer, a true proposition, say. (There are different candidates for the office of truth-bearer; we needn't list them here.) Now nothing can have a property unless it exists. (Call this principle Anti-Meinong). So no proposition can have the property of being true unless the proposition exists. By definition, a necessary truth is true in every metaphysically possible world. It follows that a necessarily true proposition exists in every possible world including worlds in which there are no finite minds.  (I assume, plausibly, that there are such worlds.)

But -- and this is the crucial move in this reasoning -- a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exist except in, or rather for, a mind.  Thus there are no truths in themselves that float free of minds. Now if there is no God, or rather, if there is no necessarily existent mind, then every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a possible world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind.  For example, the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12' is true and exists in every possible world including those worlds in which there are no minds.  This contradiction ensues on the assumption that there is no necessarily existent mind.

Therefore, there is a necessarily existent mind. "And this all men call God."

If the argument just given is sound, then (3) is true, and (1) is false.

Here are the ways an atheist might respond to the argument for (3):

a) Deny that there are necessary truths.

b) Deny that truth is a property of propositions.

c) Deny Anti-Meinong, the principle that whatever has a property exists.

d) Deny that propositions are thought-accusatives; accept some sort of Platonism about propositions.

But each of these denials involves problems of its own. 

 

Deism, Classical Theism, and Existential Inertia

On deism, God starts the universe existing, but then he takes it easy, allowing it to exist on its own in virtue of its 'existential inertia.' The latter is an analog of inertia in physics. Newton's First Law states that a body at rest or in uniform rectilinear motion continues in its state of rest or motion unless acted upon by an external force. Analogously, what could be called the First Law of Deistic Metaphysics states that an existing thing continues to exist on its own without external assistance unless acted upon by an external annihilatory force.  This is but a rough and preliminary formulation of the thesis of existential inertia.  Continuing to exist is the 'default.'  Suppose I bring a primitive table into existence by placing a board on a stump.  The thought behind 'existential inertia' is that the compound object that just came to be does not need something to keep it from blinking out of existence a nanosecond, microsecond, millisecond . . . later.

On classical theism, by contrast with deism, God is no mere cosmic starter-upper: creatures need God not only to begin to exist but to continue existing moment by moment.  A defense of classical theism against deism must therefore include a rejection of existential inertia.

Steven Nemes offers a rejection of existential inertia in his article Deism, Classical Theism, and Existential Inertia. He solicits my comments. I am happy to oblige.

He defines the phrase as follows:

Let’s say that the existence of a thing is “inertial” if and only if it continues to exist over time, in the absence of annihilating factors, without the assistance of anything outside of it.

He gives the example of a cat which, "once in existence, continues to exist over time, so long as nothing intervenes to destroy it, without anything outside of the cat helping it or sustaining it in existence." But surely the cat cannot continue to exist without air, water, food, a tolerable range of temperatures, and so on, factors clearly external to the cat.   Note also that Nemes' definition presupposes that only temporal items are existentially inertial which is not obvious: on a classically theistic scheme even so-called 'abstract objects' are going to have to be existentially inertial.  But I won't worry this second point in this entry.

Here is a better way to convey the notion of existential inertia. Suppose a deistic god creates exactly one iron sphere and nothing else.  In this world there is nothing to cause the sphere to rust or otherwise corrode away into nonexistence.  Nor does it, like a living organism, require anything external to it to continue to exist.  It doesn't need oxygen or water like Nemes' cat. And it has no internal mechanism to self-destruct.  The sphere exists inertially iff its 'default setting' is continued existence which is to say: it has no intrinsic tendency to cease to exist. 

The sphere is of course a contingent being. Hence there is no necessity that it continue to exist.  But while there is no necessity that it continue to exist, it will continue to exist absent some external annihilatory force. The deistic god could zap it out of existence, but if he doesn't, it will continue to exist on its own 'steam.'  He needn't do anything to keep it in existence, and of course he can't if he is truly deistic.

And the same goes for the cat, despite the cat's need for materials in its environment such as oxygen and food.  It too will continue to exist if those things are supplied without the need for a special metaphysical factor to keep it from sliding into nonbeing.  The critter's natural default is to existence.

Nemes's Argument against Existential Inertia

1) The real existence of the cat does not show itself as one of its properties.

2) "The real existence of the cat is thus not a part of that total complex of individuated properties which make up the particular cat which we experience. "

3) "The unexperienceable real existence of the experienceable cat must therefore be something that is somehow “outside” of the cat, and yet “pointed at it” in such a way that the cat exists."

4) "This is easy to understand if we say that the existence of the cat consists in its standing on the receiving end of an existence-endowing relation to “something else.” ". . . a “something else” that is not itself an individual thing with properties but rather pure existence itself. And this “pure existence itself,” according to classical theists, is God."

(1) is true. (2) appears merely to unpack (explicate) (1); if so, it too is true.  The transition to (3), however, is a non sequitur. The real existence of the cat might be hidden within it or an empirically inaccessible feature of it.  Absent further premises, one cannot conclude that the real existence is 'outside' the cat.

Of course, I am not endorsing existential inertia; I am merely pointing out that the above argument, as it stands, is invalid. Perhaps with further work it can be made valid. 

Can Kant Refer to God?

This is a re-working of an entry from 19 September 2016.  It relates to present concerns about limit concepts and whether and to what extent God can be subsumed under our concepts.

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

Ed Buckner raises the title question, and he wants my help with it.  How can I refuse?  I'll say a little now, and perhaps more later.

Kant was brought up a rationalist within the Wolffian school, but then along came David Hume who awoke him from his dogmatic slumber.  This awakening began his Critical period in which he struggles mightily to find a via media between rationalism and empiricism.  The result of his struggle, the Critical philosophy, is of great historical significance but it is also an unstable  tissue of apparently irresolvable tensions. As a result there are competing interpretations of his doctrines.

I will propose  two readings relevant to Ed's question.  But first a reformulation and clarification of the question.  

Can one think about God and meaningfully predicate properties of him?  For example, can one meaningfully say of God that he exists, is omnipotent, and is the cause of the existence of the natural world?  Or is it rather the case that such assertions are meaningless and that the category of causality, for example, has a meaningful application only within  the realm of phenomena but not between the phenomenal realm as a whole and  a putative transcendent causa prima?  Are the bounds of sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) also the bounds of sense (Sinn), or are there senseful, meaningful assertions that transgress the bounds of sensibility?

Weak or Moderate Reading.  On this reading, we can think about God and meaningfully make predications of him, but we cannot have any knowledge of God and his attributes. We cannot have knowledge of God because knowledge necessarily involves the interplay of two very different factors, conceptual interpretation via the categories of the understanding, and sensory givenness.  God, however, is not given to the senses, outer or inner.  In Kantian jargon, there is no intuition, keine Anschauung, of God.  For intellects of our type, all intuition is sensible intuition.  The Sage of Koenigsberg will not countenance any mystical intuition, any Platonic or Plotinian visio intellectualis, at least not in this life.  That sort of thing he dismisses in the Enlightenment manner as Schwaermerei, 'enthusiasm' in an obsolete  18th century sense of the English term.

But while Kant denies that there is knowledge of God here below whether  by pure reason or by mystical intuition, he aims to secure a 'safe space' for faith:  "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." (Preface to 2nd ed. of Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1787, B xxx.)  Now if God and the soul are objects of faith, this would imply that we can think of them and thus refer to them even if we cannot have knowledge of them.

As for the soul, it is the object of the branch of metaphysica specialis called rational psychology. Since all our intuition is sensible, there is no sensible intuition of the soul.  As is well-known, Kant denies that special metaphysics in all three branches (psychology, cosmology, and theology) is possible as science, als Wissenschaft.  To be science it would have to include synthetic a priori judgments, but these are possible only with respect to phenomena.

Kant's key question is: How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?  He believes that they are actual in mathematics and physics, and would have to be actual in metaphysics if the latter were a science.  Kant concludes that  synthetic a priori judgments are possible in mathematics and physics only because the world of experience (Erfahrung) is not a world of things in themselves whose existence, nature, and law-like regularity are independent of our mental contribution, but a merely phenomenal world to whose construction (transcendental) mind makes an indispensable contribution. 

The dignity and necessity of the synthetic causal principle -- every event has a cause -- is rescued from the jaws of Humean skepticism, but the price is high: the only world we can know is the world of phenomena.  This is not a world of illusions, but a world of intersubjectively valid objects of experience. But while objective in the sense of intersubjectively valid, these objects do not exist in themselves. Things in themselves (noumena in the negative sense) are beyond our ken.  Yet we must posit them since the appearances are appearances of something (obj. gen.).  And it is presumably the affection of our sense organs by these things in themselves that gives rise to the sensory manifold that is then organized by a priori forms (categories and forms of sensibility) on the side of the subject.  The restriction of human knowledge to phenomena secures the objectivity (intersubjective validity) of our knowledge, but by the same stroke rules out any knowledge of the objects of special metaphysics (God, the soul, the world as a whole). 

On the moderate reading, then, Kant restricts the cognitive employment of the categories of the understanding to phenomena but not their thinking employment. We can think about and refer to the positive noumena, God, the soul, and the world as a whole, but we cannot have any knowledge of them. (And the same goes for the negative noumena that correspond to sensible appearances.)  We can talk sense about God and the soul, and predicate properties of these entities, but we cannot come to have knowledge of them.  Thus we can meaningfully speak of the soul as a simple substance which remains numerically self-same over time and through its changing states, but we cannot know that it has these properties.  

The weak reading is represented by the following argument:

1) A necessary condition of knowledge is intuition (Anschauung).

2) In us, the only mode of intuition is sensible. We have no faculty of intellectual intuition.

3) The concept of God is the concept of an entity that cannot be an object of the senses.

Therefore

4) God is unknowable by us. (1, 2, 3)

Nevertheless

5) God is thinkable by us. (3)

Strong or Extreme Reading.  On this reading,  we cannot talk sense about positive or negative noumena: such categories as substance and causality cannot be meaningfully applied beyond the bounds of sensibility to God, the soul, angels, libertarianly free noumena agents, the world as a whole, or even things in themselves. Riffing on P. F. Strawson one could say that on the strong reading the bounds of sensibility are the bounds of sense.  This reading wins the day in post-Kantian philosophy.  Fichte liquidates the Ding an sich, the neo-Kantians reduce the transcendental ego to a mere concept (Rickert, e.g.), the categories which for Kant were ahistorical and fixed become historicized and relativized, and we end up with a conceptual relativism which fuels a lot of the nonsense of the present day, e.g., race and sex as social constructs, etc.

The strong reading is represented by the following argument:

1*) A necessary condition of meaningful objective reference is intuition.

2) In us, the only mode of intuition is sensible. We have no faculty of intellectual intuition.

3) The concept of God is the concept of an entity that cannot be an object of the senses.

Therefore

4*) God cannot be meaningfully referred to by us.

So my answer to Ed Buckner's title question is:  It depends.  It depends on whether we read Kant in the weak way or in the strong way.  Read in the weak way, Kant is saying that the categories of the understanding  have no cognitive employment in the absence of sensory input, but they do have an empty logical employment and objective reference/meaning.  Read in the strong way, the categories are devoid of objective reference/meaning in the absence of sensory givenness.  If so, the concept of God is a limit concept in the negative sense: it merely marks a limit to our understanding, but does not point beyond that limit. At best, the concept of God is a regulative Idea whose employment is purely immanent.

What is a Limit Concept? The Example of Prime Matter

In an earlier entry I suggested that the concept God is a limit concept or Grenzbegriff.  I now need to back up a few steps and clarify the concept limit concept and give some non-divine examples.  If I cannot supply any non-divine examples, then I might justifiably be accused of ad-hoc-ery.

Terminological note: The term Grenzbegriff first enters philosophy in 1781 in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Curiously, he uses the term only once in the works he himself published. The term surfaces a few more times in his Nachlass.  The sole passage in the published works is at A255/B311 where Kant remarks that the concept noumenon is a Grenzbegriff.

In the earlier post I distinguished between ordinary concepts and limit concepts. I said in effect that ordinary concepts 'track' essences and are more or less adequate 'captures' of the essences of things encountered in experience.  Limit concepts, I said, 'point beyond' ordinary experience. Thus the concept of God does not and cannot represent the essence of God but it can serve to conceptualize God as that which lies beyond ordinary conceptualization.  The concept of God is a limit concept that points beyond itself to something real that cannot be subsumed under ordinary concepts.

But there is an ambiguity here that I glossed over in the earlier entry. Can't there be limit concepts that simply limit without 'pointing beyond'? How do I know that the concept of God is not like this? (This is connected with the question whether the concept of God might just be a regulative ideal in Kant's sense.)

The trailhead is where the road ends. But further locomotion is possible  on foot or in some other non-motorized manner (horse, mountain bike, pogo stick . . .) The limit in this example has a this-side and an accessible far side. The limit points beyond the paved road to the unpaved trail. But let us say that I have reached the end of the road figuratively speaking: I have just died.  Assuming mortalism, my death is a limit to my life beyond which there is nothing. Some limits are such that the this-side has a far-side; others have only a far-side.

So we should distinguish between limit concepts that simply limit and limit concepts that both limit and point beyond.

Example: Prime Matter

The concept of prime matter is clearly a limit concept. For prime matter is matter at the lowest level of hylomorphic analysis.  Now does this concept point beyond itself to something real, prime matter in itself?  Or does this concept simply mark a limit to the hylomorphic analysis of the real? 

To pursue this question, a  little primer on hylomorphism is needed.

Given that thought sometimes makes contact with reality, one can ask: what must real things be like if thought is to be able to make contact with them? What must these things be like if they are to be intelligible to us? A realist answer is that these mind-independent things must be conformable to our thought, and our thought to them. There must be some sort of isomorphism between thought and thing. Since we cannot grasp anything unstructured, reality must have structure. So there have to be principles of form and organization in things. But reality is not exhausted by forms and structures; there is also that which supports form and structure. In this way matter comes into the picture.  Forms are determinations.  Matter, in a sense that embraces both primary and secondary matter, is the determinable as such.

Proximate matter can be encountered in experience, at least in typical cases. The proximate matter of a chair consists of its legs, seat, back. But this proximate matter itself has form. A leg, for example, has a shape and thus a form. (Form is not identical to shape, since there are forms that are not shapes; but shapes are forms.) Suppose the leg has the geometrical form of a cylinder. (Of course it will have other forms as well, the forms of smoothness and brownness, say.) The cylindrical form is the form of some matter. The matter of this cylindrical form is wood, say. But a piece of wood is a partite entity the parts of which have form and matter. For example, the complex carbohydrate cellulose is found in wood. It has a form and a proximate matter. But cellulose is made of beta-glucose molecules. Molecules are made of atoms, atoms of subatomic particles like electrons, and these of quarks, and so it goes.

Hylomorphic analysis is thus iterable. The iteration cannot be infinite: the material world cannot be hylomorphic compounds 'all the way down,' or 'all the way up' for that matter. The iteration has a lower limit in prime or primordial or ultimate matter (materia prima), just as it has an upper limit in pure form, and ultimately in the forma formarum, God, the purely actual being. Must hylomorphic analysis proceed all the way to prime matter, or can it coherently stop one step shy of it at the lowest level of materia secunda? I think that if one starts down the hylomorphic road one must drive to its bitter end in prime matter. (Cf. Feser's manual, p. 173 for what I read as an argument to this conclusion.) Ultimate matter, precisely because it is ultimate, has no form of its own. As John Haldane describes it, it is "stuff of no kind." (“A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind” in Form and Matter, ed. Oderberg, p. 50) We could say that prime matter is the wholly indeterminate determinable. As wholly indeterminate, it is wholly determinable.

The Antinomy of the Existence of Prime Matter

While it is easy to appreciate the logic that leads to the positing of prime matter, it is difficult to see that what is posited is coherently thinkable. Here is one consideration among several. Call it the Antinomy of the Existence of Prime Matter. It may be compressed into the following aporetic dyad:

1. Prime matter exists.

2. Prime matter does not exist.

Argument for limb (1). There is real substantial change and it cannot be reduced to accidental change. All change is reduction of potency to act, and all change requires an underlying substrate of change that remains self-same and secures the diachronic identity of that which changes. The substrate of a change is the matter of the change. What changes in a change are forms, whether accidental or substantial. Without the potency-act and matter-form distinctions we cannot accommodate the fact of change and avoid both the Heraclitean doctrine of radical flux and the Eleatic denial of change. Or so say the scholastics. In the case of accidental change, the subject or substrate is secondary matter (materia secunda). But substantial change is change too, and so it also requires a substrate which cannot be secondary matter and so must be prime matter. Given what we must assume to make sense of the plain fact of both accidental and substantial change, “prime matter must exist.” (Feser's manual, p. 172) It must exist in reality as the common basis of every substantial change.

So if substantial change occurs, prime matter exists!

Argument for limb (2). Prime matter is pure potency. It has to be, given the exigencies of accounting for substantial as opposed to accidental change. As pure potency, prime matter is wholly indeterminate and wholly formless. In itself, then, prime matter does not exist. It does not exist actually, as is obvious. But it also does not exist potentially: prime matter does not have potential Being. This is because the principle of the metaphysical priority of act over potency requires that every existing potency (e.g., the never actualized potency of a sugar cube to dissolve in water) be grounded in something actual (e.g., the sugar cube). The pure potency which is prime matter is not, however, grounded in anything actual. (Note that one cannot say that prime matter is a pure potency grounded in each primary substance. Prime matter is the ultimate stuff of each primary substance; it is not potency possessed by these substances.) Therefore, prime matter does not exist. It does not exist actually and it does not exist potentially. This is also evident from the first of the twenty-four Thomistic theses:

Potency and act are a complete division of being. Hence whatever is must be either pure act or a unit composed of potency and act as its primary and intrinsic principles. (Quoted by Feser, Schol. Metaph., p. 31)

If so, prime matter does not exist. For prime matter is neither pure act nor composed of potency and act. It is interesting to observe that while purely actual Being can itself be by being something actual, purely potential Being cannot itself be by being something potential (or actual). God is actual Being (Sein, esse) and an actual being (Seiendes, ens). But prime matter is neither potential nor actual. So prime matter neither is actually nor is potentially.

It thus appears that we have cogent arguments for both limbs of a contradiction. If the contradiction is real and not merely apparent, and the arguments for the dyad's limbs are cogent, then there is no prime matter, the very concept thereof being self-contradictory.  But the concept does seem to make sense.  To solve the above dyad, then, we may simply deny that prime matter exists. (And let the scholastics worry about how to account for substantial change.)  If we deny that prime matter exists, we are left with the concept, but nothing to which it 'points.'   The concept of prime matter would then be a limit concept that merely marks a limit to our hylomorphic analysis of the real, but does not refer beyond itself to anything real.

Of course, I am not maintaining that the concept of God is like this.  I am merely giving an example of a non-divine limit concept and explaining the difference between limit concepts that are 'immanent' and merely regulate our thinking activity, and those that are 'transcendent' and point beyond.

Summing Up the Dialectic

Some claim that God is inconceivable.  According to a stock objection, this is either false or meaningless. It is false if the claimant is operating with some concept of God, and meaningless if with no concept of God.  I replied to the objection by distinguishing between ordinary and limit concepts.  If the concept of God is a limit concept, then it can be true both that we have a concept of God and that God is nonetheless inconceivable in that he falls under no ordinary  concept.

What I have yet to show is the concept of God is a limit concept in the positive or transcendent sense or 'pointing' sense and a not a limit concept that merely limits us to the this-side.  The concept of prime matter is most plausibly viewed as a limit concept in the negative or immanent sense.  Why isn't the God concept like this?

 

 

On God's Not Falling Under Concepts

Fr. Deinhammer tells us,  ". . . Gott fällt nicht unter Begriffe, er ist absolut unbegreiflich. . . ." "God does not fall under concepts; he is absolutely inconceivable or unconceptualizable. . . ."

Edward the Logician sent me an e-mail in which he forwards a stock objection:

Who is it who is absolutely inconceivable or unconceptualizable? Either ‘he’ tells us, or not. If so, the proposition is false. If not, the proposition is incoherent.

I appreciate that you are quoting the person who wrote to you, but my aporia stands.

Ed's aporetic point can be summed up as follows. Talk of God as inconceivable is either false or meaningless. If the person who claims that God is inconceivable is operating with some concept of God, then the claim is meaningful but false. If, on the other hand, the person is operating with no concept of God, then saying that God is inconceivable is no better than saying that X is inconceivable, which says nothing and is therefore meaningless. (X is inconceivable is at best a propositional function, not a proposition, hence neither true nor false. To make a proposition out of it you must either bind the free variable 'x' with a quantifier or else substitute a proper name for 'x.')

A Response to the Objection

Suppose we make a distinction between those concepts that can capture the essences or natures of the things of which they are the concepts, and those concepts that cannot. Call the first type ordinary concepts and the second limit concepts (Grenzbegriffe). Thus the concept cube captures the essence of every cube, which is to be a three-dimensional solid bounded by six square faces or sides with three meeting at each vertex, and it captures this essence fully.   The concept heliotropic plant captures, partially,  the essence of those plants which exhibit diurnal or seasonal motion of plant parts in response to the direction of the sun.

Now the concept God cannot be ordinary since this concept cannot capture the essence of God. For in God essence and existence are one, and there is no ordinary concept of existence.  (The existence of a thing, as other than its essence, cannot be conceptualized.) Again, in God there is no real distinction between God and his nature, whereas no ordinary concept captures the individuality of the thing of which it is the concept. Since God is (identically) his nature, there can be no ordinary concept of God.

There is, then, a tolerably clear sense in which God is unconceptualizable or unbegreiflich: he cannot be grasped by the use of any ordinary concept. But it doesn't follow that we have no concept of God.  The concept God is a limit concept: it is the concept of something that cannot be grasped using ordinary concepts. It is the concept of something that lies at the outer limits of discursive intelligibility, and indeed just beyond that limit. We can argue up to this Infinite Object/Subject, but then discursive operations must cease. We can however point to God, in a manner of speaking, using limit concepts. The concept God is the concept of an infinite, absolute and wholly transcendent reality whose realitas formalis so exceeds our powers of understanding that it cannot be taken up into the realitas objectiva of any of our ordinary concepts.

If this is right, then there is a way between the horns of the above dilemma. But of course it needs further elaboration and explanation.

God as Uniquely Unique

I hit upon 'uniquely unique' a while back as an apt predicate of God.  But it is only the formulation that is original; the thought is ancient.

To be unique is to be one of a kind.  It will be allowed that nothing counts as God unless it is unique.  So at a bare minimum, God must be the one and only instance of the divine kind.  (This kind could be thought of as the conjunction of the divine attributes.) Beyond that, it will be allowed that whatever counts as God must be essentially unique: nothing that just happens to be uniquely of the divine kind could count as God.  What's more, it will be allowed that nothing counts as God that is not a necessary being. Putting these three allowances together, I say that God is not just essentially, but necessarily unique.  (In the patois of 'possible worlds,' God is unique in every metaphysically possible world in which he exists, and he exists in every such possible world. By contrast, Socrates is essentially human, but not necessarily human inasmuch as he does not exist in every metaphysically possible world.)

But some of us want to go further still.  We want to say that God is uniquely unique.  His uniqueness extends to his mode of being unique.  He is unique in a way that no other thing is unique.  Suppose there is more than one necessarily unique being.  The necessarily unique God would then be just one of many necessarily unique beings.  In that case he would not be uniquely unique. He would share the property of being necessarily unique with other items.  (Fregean Gedanken and Bolzanian Saetze an sich and other platonica are epistemically possible candidates.)

But then something greater could be conceived, namely, a being that transcends the distinction between kind and instance in terms of which uniqueness is ordinarily defined.  If I asked someone such as Alvin Plantinga wherein resides the divine uniqueness, he would presumably say that it resides in the fact that the there is one and only one possible instance of the divine nature: this nature exists in every world and God instantiates it in every world.  But then God is just another necessarily unique necessary being.  

A truly transcendent God, however, must transcend the ontological framework  applicable to everything other than God.  So he must transcend the distinction between kind and instance.  In a truly transcendent God there cannot be real distinctions of any kind and thus no real distinction between kind and instance, nature and individual having the nature.

Now if God transcends the distinction between instance and kind/nature, and is uniquely unique, unique in a way that no other being is or could be unique, then that is equivalent to maintaining that God is ontologically simple.  (See my SEP entry.)

But why think that God is ontologically simple and uniquely unique?  Here is where the paths diverge.

Some of us feel impelled to say that a God worth his salt cannot be anything other than the absolute reality, the Absolute.  So God cannot be relative to anything or dependent on anything or immanent in anything as he would be if he were just one more being among beings.  For then he would be immanent to what I earlier called the Discursive Framework.  It is rather the case that God transcends this framework.  If God is the Absolute, then he must be simple; otherwise he would depend on properties distinct from himself to be what he is.  

Again, if God is the Absolute, then he cannot be one of many; he must be the ONE that makes possible the one and the many.  As such he transcends the Discursive Framework in which the one opposes the many.  The ONE, however, is the ONE of both the one and many.  It cannot be brought  into opposition to anything.  

"But such a God as you are describing is ineffable!  I want a God that that can be addressed in petitionary prayer, a God  that is a Thou to my I."

What you want is to stop short at a highest finite object, when the religious-metaphysical quest is animated by dissatisfaction with every finite thing.  The truly religious quester is a nihilist with respect to every finite object.  A God worthy of our highest quest must be absolute, simple, transcendent, and ineffable.

Can the Existence of God be Proven?

A reader inquires,

I was wondering whether you had any direction you could offer for rational arguments for God's existence?

If you are looking for arguments that are not merely rational, but rationally compelling, I don't believe that there are any.  I also believe that there aren't any such arguments for the nonexistence of God.  A rationally compelling argument for a proposition is a proof; a rationally compelling argument for its logical contradictory is a disproof.  When it comes to God, and not just God, there are no proofs or disproofs. There are arguments, some better than others. That's as good as it gets.

Note that my claim that this is so is not a proposition that I claim to be able to prove.  I claim merely that it is reasonable to believe.  I do believe it and will continue to believe until someone gives me a compelling reason not to believe it. If I am right, however,  that cannot happen. For my meta-philosophical thesis is substantive, and if I am right, said thesis can neither be proven nor disproven. So the the best you could do would be counter me with the contradictory of my meta-thesis. But then we would be in a stand-off.

What is it for an argument to be rationally compelling?

Philosophers make reasoned cases for all manner of propositions, but their colleagues typically do not find these arguments to be compelling.  So a reasoned case need not be a compelling case.  But it depends on what exactly is meant by 'compelling.'  I suggest that a (rationally) compelling argument is one which forces the 'consumer' of the argument to accept the argument's conclusion on pain of being irrational.  (What is it to be irrational? That's a long story I cannot now go into, but the worst form of irrationality would be the acceptance of a logical contradiction.) I will assume that the 'consumer' is intelligent, sincere, open to having his mind changed, and well-versed in the subject matter of the argument.  Now it may be that there are a few arguments that are rationally compelling in this sense, but there are precious few, and surely no arguments for or against the existence of God.

 

To appreciate this, note first that arguments have premises and that no argument can prove its own premises. (An argument of the form p therefore p is an argument valid in point of logical form in which premise and conclusion are identical, but no one will take an argument of this form as proving that p.)  Now given that no argument can prove its own premises, what reason could one give for accepting the premises of a given argument?  Suppose  deductive argument A has P1 and P2 as premises and that conclusion C follows logically from the premises.  Why accept P1 and P2?  One could adduce further arguments B and C for P1 and P2 respectively.  But then the problem arises all over again.  For arguments B and C themselves have premises.  If P3 is a premise of B, what reason could one give for the acceptance of P3? One could adduce argument D.  But D too has premises, and if you think this through you soon realize that you have brought down upon your head an infinite regress which is vicious.  The regress is vicious because the task of justifying by argument all the premises involved cannot be completed.

 

To avoid argumentative regress we need premises that are self-justifying in the sense that they are justified, but not justified by anything external to themselves.  Such propositions could be said to be self-evident.  But what is self-evident to one person is often not self-evident to another.  This plain fact forces a distinction between subjective and objective self-evidence.  Clearly, subjective self-evidence is not good enough.  If it merely seems to subject S that p is self-evident, that does not suffice to establish that p is objectively self-evident.  Trouble is, when someone announces that such-and-such is objectively self-evident that too is a claim about how it seems to that person, so that it is not clear that what is being claimed as objectively self-evident is not in the end itself merely subjectively self-evident.

 

Example.  Suppose an argument for the existence of God employs the premise, 'Every event has a cause.'  Is this premise self-evident?  No.  Why can't there be an uncaused event?  So how does one know that that premise is true?  It is a plausible premise, no doubt, but plausibility is not the same as truth.  And if you do not know that the premises of your argument are true, then your argument, even if logically impeccable in every other way, does not amount to a proof, strictly speaking.  Knowledge entails certainty, objective certainty.

 

My point is that there are hardly any rationally compelling arguments for substantive theses.  But one can make reasoned cases for theses.  Therefore, a reasoned case is not the same as a compelling argument.

 

Because people are naturally dogmatic and crave doxastic security, they are unwilling to accept my meta-philosophical thesis that there are hardly any compelling arguments for substantive theses.  They want to believe that their pet beliefs are compellingly provable and that people who do not accept their 'proofs' are either irrational or morally defective.  Their tendency is to accept as sound any old argument for the conclusions they antecedently accept, no matter how shoddy the argument,  and to reject as unsound arguments that issue in conclusions they do not accept.  Their craving for doxastic security swamps and suborns their critical faculties.

 

One way to refute what I am saying would be by providing a compelling argument for the existence of God, or a compelling argument for the nonexistence of God.  You won't be able to do it. 

In the absence of compelling arguments, what should one do?

I don't believe that there can be talk of proof when it comes to God, the soul, and other big topics, assuming you use 'proof' strictly.  After considering all the evidence for and against, you will have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.  The will comes into it. One freedom comes into it. I thus espouse a limited doxastic voluntarism. In the shadowlands of this life there is light enough and darkness enough to lend support to either answer, that of the theist and that of his opposite number.  So it is up to you to decide what you will believe and how you will live.

For me the following consideration clinches the matter.  Bring the theoretical question back down to your lived life, your Existenz in the existentialist sense.  How will you live, starting right now and for the rest of your days?  Will you live as if you will be utterly extinguished in a few years or will you live as if what you do and leave undone right now matters, really matters? Will you live as if life is serious, or will you live as if it is some sort of cosmic joke?  Will you live as if something is at stake in this life, however dimly descried, or will you live as if nothing is ultimately at stake?  Will you live life as if it has an Absolute Meaning that transcends the petty particular relative meanings of the quotidian round?  Will you take the norms that conscience reveals as so many pointers to an Unseen Order to which this paltry and transient sublunary order is but prelude?

It is your life.  You decide.  You can drift and not decide, but your drifting in the currents of social suggestion and according to the idols of the age is a deficient  mode of decision. Not to decide is to decide.

Now suppose that when Drs. Mary Neal and Eben Alexander die the body's death, they become nothing.  Suppose that their phenomenologically vivid paranormal after-death experiences were revelatory of nothing real, that their experiences were just the imaginings of malfunctioning brains at the outer limits of biological life.  What will they have lost by believing as they did?

Nothing! Nothing at all.  You could of course say that they were wrong and were living in illusion and giving themselves and others false hope.  But no one will ever know one way or the other.  And if the body's death is the last word, then nothing ultimately matters, and so it can't matter that they were wrong if turns out that they were.

If they were right, however, then the moral transformation that their taking seriously of their experiences has wrought in them can be expected to redound to their benefit when they pass from this sphere. 

More on "God + World = God"

The thesis under examination as expressed by Diogenes Allen: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone." Is this a defensible position?  Let's consider both sides of the question.

A. First, a crisp little argument against the view.

Consider two possible scenarios.  In the first, God alone exists.  In the second, God exists and creates a world.  On a view of God according to which he is libertarianly free, both scenarios are indeed possible.  It is possible that God create and it is possible that he not create. There is no necessity that God create; his creating is free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense.  Clearly, the scenarios are different.  But if God + World = God, then there is no difference between the two scenarios.  For on that supposition, God alone exists in both scenarios.  Therefore, it is not the case that God + World = God.

To extend the argument:

If God is Being itself, ipsum esse subsistens, Being in its plenitude and infinity, then how could there be anything else?   If God is Being itself, and thus not a being among beings, how could there be any 'ontological room' for anything else?  How is creation so much as possible if God is Being itself?  Isn't the Thomist line, as articulated by Diogenes Allen and Etienne Gilson (quoted previously) just obviously mistaken?

After all, it is evident to the senses, even if not self-evident, that this material world of time and change exists: it is not nothing.  Nor it is a dream or an illusion.  Nor is it a world of Spinozistic modes, but a world of finite substances. I would also say that it is 'better known' that this material world of multiple substances exists than that God exists.  But suppose God does exist.  Then both the world (creatures) and God exist.  Is it not perfectly obvious that the totality of reality is greater with both God and creation than with God alone? Someone who maintains that God + world = God is maintaining in effect that there are no creatures at all.

B. Now let's consider what could be said in favor of the view.

Given the force of the arguments for the thesis that God is not a being among beings, arguments we cannot rehearse again here, it is reasonable to hold that God is Being itself. This leaves us with the task of attaching some tolerably clear meaning to 'God + world = God' in the teeth of the argument contra. This cannot be done if there are no modes of Being.  For if everything that exists exists in the same way (mode), and if G exists and W exists, and they are numerically distinct,  then it is self-evident that there is a totality of existents and that this  totality is greater if G and W both exist than if G alone exists.

So we need to bring in modes of Being or existence.  To motivate the modes-of-Being doctrine, consider an analogy.  I am standing before a mirror looking at my image.  How many men?  One, not two.  I'm a man; my mirror image is not a man.  An image, reflection, picture, drawing, sculpture of a man is not a man.  To be of a man is not to be a man.  My image is of a man (genitivus objectivus); it is not a man. And yet my mirror image is not nothing: it exists.  I exist and my image exists.  Both exist, but in different ways.  I exist whether or not any mirror image of me exists; but no mirror image of me exists unless I exist.  Note too that the mirror image is dependent on me for its existence at each moment of its existence, unlike a photograph or a sculpture.  (Herein an analogy with creatio continuans.) 

It is also worth noting that there is a correspondence between the visual properties of the man and the visual properties displayed in the image.  (This fact is what allows a dentist to do precision work on a tooth without looking at it directly.)  Now we cannot say that the man and his image instantiate the same quidditative properties since, e.g., the man is bearded but his image is not.  But we can say that the same visual properties instantiated by the man are displayed in the image. While the image is not bearded, it is an image of a bearded man.   There are two different properties, but they are related: being bearded, being of something bearded, where the 'of' is an objective genitive.

Man and image both exist.  Yet there is an important difference.  I say it is a difference in mode of existence.  The image, unlike the man, exists dependently or derivatively, and it depends existentially on the very original of which it is the image. Existential dependence is not a quidditative property.  This mode of existence is no more a quidditative property than existence is.

So I say we need a tripartite distinction: quiddity (nature, essence in the broad sense); general or quantificational existence, the existence expressed by the particular quantifier; mode of existence. 

Now it makes a certain amount of sense to say that Man + Mirror Image = Man.  This could be explained by saying that there is no totality of independent existents that has both me and my mirror image in it.  If we are adding and subtracting over a domain of independent existents, then it is true that Man + Image  = Man.

Accordingly, 'God + World = God' could be explained by saying that there is no totality of a se existents that has both God and creatures in it. 

C. Aporetic Conclusion

The argument I gave in section A will strike many as compelling.  But what I said in section B shows that it is not compelling.  If one holds that God exists in a different way than creatures, then there is no totality in reality to which God and creatures all belong.  One can of course say that something is (identically) God and that something is (identically) Socrates and that *Something is (identically) ____* has exactly the same sense, no matter what you throw into the gap: no matter what its mode of Being.  But that implies only that there is a merely conceptual totality to which God and creatures all belong.  In this merely excogitated conceptual totality, however, abstraction is made from the real existence of the things in question, and their different modes of Being.

I grant that God and Socrates both exist in the quantificational sense of 'exists,' a sense univocal across all existential sentences regardless of subject matter; but that is consistent with there being no commonality in reality between God and creatures to warrant talk of a totality in reality containing both.

My interim conclusion is aporetic:  both positions on our question are reasonably maintained.  They cannot both be true, but they can both be reasonably upheld.

I would be satisfied if Dale Tuggy and the 'supreme (miniscule) being theists' would agree with me and other '(majuscule) Being theists' that it is a stand-off.

God and Our Rights

Conservatives regularly say that our rights come from God, not from the state. It is true that they do not come from the state. But if they come from God, then their existence is as questionable as the existence of God. Now discussions with leftists are not likely to lead anywhere; but they certainly won't lead anywhere if we invoke premises leftists are sure to reject.  The  Left has always been reliably anti-religion and atheist, and so there is no chance of reaching them if we insist that rights come from God. So from a practical point of view, we should not bring up God in attempts to find common ground with leftists.  It suffices to say that our rights are natural, not conventional.  We could say that the right to life, say, is just there, inscribed in the nature of things, and leave it at that.  Why wave a red flag before a leftist bull who suspects theists of being closet theocrats? 

Now I am not sanguine about the prospects of fruitful discussion with leftists, but we ought to make the effort since talking with is better than shooting at. Apart from our practical interests, the topic is theoretically fascinating.

The following aporetic tetrad is a partial map of the conceptual terrain:

1) Unalienable rights, and the duties they generate, have an absolute character incompatible with their being conferred or withheld arbitrarily by  those who happen to control the state apparatus.

2) Rights and duties cannot have this absolute character unless their source is God.

3) There are unalienable rights.

4) There is no God.

Although individually plausible, the members of this foursome are collectively inconsistent.  So something has to give. (1) is a conceptual truth and so is not up for rejection.

Suppose you endorse (1), (2), and (3).  You would then have a valid argument for the rejection of (4) and thus for the existence of God. 

But (2) is not self-evident. And so the argument to God is not rationally compelling. It is epistemically possible that moral absolutes 'hang in the air' with no need of support by an Infinite Mind. An atheist could validly argue from (1), (3), and (4) to the negation of (2).

More drastically, one could validly argue that there are no unalienable rights via the acceptance of (1), (2), and (4).  Imagine a naturalist who argues that if there were unalienable rights, they would have to have the absolute character that only God could ground, but that, since there is no God, there are no unalienable rights.

From a logical point of view, that argument is as good as the other two.

I have reasons to not be a metaphysical naturalist, and I have a strong intuition that some rights are absolute and unalienable; I am therefore within my epistemic rights in accepting the argument to God, despite its not being rationally compelling. But then no argument for any substantive thesis in a subject like this is rationally compelling.

An Atheological Argument from the Evil of Radical Skepticism

Bradley Schneider sends this argument of his devising:

Premise 1: If God exists, God has the power to eliminate/overcome/defeat any evil in reality without creating more evil (i.e., God and evil can coexist but God should prevail over evil in the end).

Premise 2: Radical skepticism about the world is an evil (NOT that radical skeptics are evil; rather, our inability to counter radical skepticism and to be sure about our knowledge of reality is an evil).

Premise 3: God cannot eliminate radical skepticism without overriding free will (creating another evil) -- e.g., a skeptic who dies and goes to heaven may still not be convinced that he or she is not under an illusion created by a Cartesian demon; heaven could be part of the illusion.

Conclusion: God does not exist.

I accept the first two premises. With respect to the second, I have long believed that our deep and irremediable ignorance on matters of great importance to us is a major evil and germane both to the case for God's nonexistence, but also to the anti-natalist case.  (Atheists who argue to the nonexistence of God from evil ought to consider whether the manifold evils of this world don't also put paid to the notion that human life is worth living and propagating.)

I balk, however, at the third premise. Schneider seems to be assuming that the origin of radical skepticism is in a free decision not to accept some putative givenness.  There is, I admit, the willful refusal on the part of certain perverse individuals to accept the evident, and even the self-evident; as I see it, however, the origin of radical skepticism is not in a free refusal to accept what is evident or self-evident, but in a set of considerations that the skeptic finds compelling.  A skeptic is not a willful denier, but a doubter, and indeed one whose doubt is in the service of cognition. He doesn't doubt for the sake of doubting, but for the sake of knowing. The skeptic wants to know, but he has high standards: he wants objective certainty, not mere subjective conviction. He doubts whatever can be doubted in order to arrive at epistemic bedrock.  This is what motivates the hyperbolic doubt of the Dream Argument and the considerations anent the evil genius.

I therefore reject the claim that "God cannot eliminate radical skepticism without overriding free will . . . ."  Free will doesn't come into it. Heaven is the Beatific Vision, and in that vision there will be such a perfect coalescence of finite knower and Infinite Object that no doubt can arise. In the visio beata, radical skepticism will not be possible.  A mundane analog is supplied by the experience of a sensory quale such as a felt pain, or rather pleasure.  In the moment that one feels it, one cannot doubt it, so long as one attends to its phenomenal features alone and brackets (in Husserl's sense) all external considerations as to causes, effects, etc.  The phenomenology is indubitable whatever may be the case with the etiology.

So if heaven is the Beatific Vision, heaven cannot be illusory.  But this highly refined, highly Platonic, Thomist take on heaven is not for everyone. It is not for Protestants whose conception is cruder.  I call that conception Life 2.0 and I contrast in with the Thomist conception in Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision ?  On a crude conception, according to which Jethro will be united after death with his faithful hound 'Blue,' drink home brew, and hunt rabbits, there is room for illusion.  It could be that there is a whole series of quasi-material 'spiritual' heavens above the sublunary but shy of the ultimate heaven of the Beatific Vision, but I won't pursue that speculation here.

It just so happens that I am now reading Pierre Rousselot, Intelligence (Marquette UP, 1999), which is a translation of L'Intellectualisme de Saint Thomas. On p. 35, we read:

By a profoundly logical coincidence the beatific vision, which is the final cause of the world and ultimate perfection of the created spirit, is also, according to Thomas, the only example of a created knowledge other than the intuitions of personal consciousness which seizes and possesses being such as it is, directly, not only without abstraction but with no mediation whatever. The beatific vision is perfect intellection with regard both to its object and to its mode of operation; on this account we must study it here; otherwise it would be impossible to have an exact idea of what intellection is in itself.

This text supports my analogy above. "The intuitions of personal consciousness" are the felt qualia I referred to.  These are "created knowledges" Writ Very Small, paltry sublunary analogs (e.g., the smell of burnt toast) of the ultimate coalescence of subject and object in the visio beata. But in both the sublunary and beatific cases, Being (esse) is seized and possessed directly, not via abstract concepts and without the mediation of epistemic deputies and mediators.  Being is grasped itself and not via representations. The little mysticisms of sensation prefigure the Big Mysticism of Ultimate Beatitude.

My prose is starting to 'flow French,' but I trust you catch my drift.

 

How Could God be Justice itself?

David Gudeman writes; I reply:

 

George Berkeley was the first author who really shook my confidence in my existing world view. Before I read Berkeley, I had a Mr. Johnson-style contempt of physical idealism; after reading Berkeley, I realized that I had been naive--not because Berkeley was necessarily right, but because once I suppressed my presuppositions, I found him hard to refute, and came to realize how logically futile Mr. Johnson's refutation was.

Well, no one calls it 'physical idealism.' Stick with 'Berkeleyan idealism.' And of course it cannot be refuted ad lapidem, by kicking a stone.  Berkeley was not an eliminativist about material objects.  He did not maintain that rocks and trees do not exist; he did not question WHETHER they are; he offered an unusual ontological account of WHAT they are, namely ideas in the divine mind. 

 

I offer this story as evidence of my good faith in the following, because I know I have irritated you before by bringing up topics like this, and very much do not want to do so again. In particular, I do have hopes that there is something to be found here if only I can come to grasp it.

 

With that, I'd like to ask you if you can explain what you mean by phrases like "God is the measure of Justice. God is Justice itself." (From this entry.)

 

To me this looks like a couple of category errors. God is a person, a measure of justice is a measure, and justice is a quality. How can these three be equated in any literal sense? [. . .]

Fair questions. 

 

A. I take it that you will grant me that God is a wholly just person.  Now assume the following: God is unique; there are non-divine persons; none of the latter are wholly just.  You and I are non-divine persons, and neither of us is wholly just, although one of us may be more just than the other.  There are degrees of justice in non-divine (created) persons. Now it makes sense to say that God sets the standard with respect to justice or being just.  God is the measure of justice in that he is just to the highest degree, and we fail to measure up, to different degrees.

 

It therefore makes sense to say that God, a person, is the standard, exemplar, measure of justice.  There is no category mistake.  The second alleged category mistake is harder to deal with, and a wholly satisfactory answer is not possible because when we discuss God, the ultimate source of all being, value, and intrinsic intelligibility, we are at the outer limit of intelligibility. (The Intelligent Source of all intrinsic intelligibility, because it is an Other Mind, cannot be understood with the clarity and completeness with which we understand ordinary objects among objects.) All I can hope to show is that the accusation of category mistake can be turned aside or rationally repelled. So here we go.

 

B. God is a just person, and he is just to the highest possible degree. Now is God just in virtue of instantiating a property of justice that exists independently of him?  You say justice is a quality. I'll play along. Is God just in virtue of instantiating this quality?  (Perhaps you are thinking of this quality as a necessarily existent 'abstract object.') If you say yes, then you compromise God's aseity, his from-himself-ness.  God is the Absolute. Not an absolute, but the Absolute.  As such, he cannot be dependent on anything external to himself for his existence or nature.   You will grant that God cannot have a cause of his existence external to himself. You must also grant that for God to be God he cannot be dependent on anything external to himself for his nature (essence).  So he can't be just in virtue of instantiating your quality, justice.  God sets the standard by being the standard: there is no standard of justice outside of God that he needs to conform to.

 

If so, if God is not an instance of justice, a just entity, then he must be (identically)  justice.  The Platonist Augustine drew this conclusion, one that entails the divine simplicity, and the Jansenists followed Augustine in this. God is like a self-exemplifying Platonic Form or paradigm.  Supreme Wisdom is itself wise; supreme Justice is itself just.  God is at once each of his attributes and also their unique instance.  God is, but he is not a being among beings.  God is (identically) Being itself, but not in a way the detracts from his being a being, or to be precise, the being.  For God to be God he must be unique in the highest possible sense: not one of a kind, not necessarily one of a kind, but necessarily such  that in him kind and instance are one.

 

The theist faces a dilemma.  Either God is or is not distinct from his attributes. if the former, then God is not God. If the latter, then God is beyond the comprehension of the discursive intellect.

 

(But is the second horn so bad? A God worth his salt must be transcendent, Transcendence itself. (Otherwise, your god is an idol. Whatever you say about Islam, it at least has a lively sense of the transcendence of God.)

In conclusion, Gudeman's second accusation of category error can be rationally resisted as I have just done.  One can cogently argue  up to the divine simplicity. The problem, however -- and I freely admit it -- is that the discursive intellect cannot wrap itself around  (cannot understand) how something can be ontologically simple. One is reduced to pointing beyond the discursive sphere.

 

Here we reach an impasse beyond which we cannot move by philosophical means. But what justifies the conceit that the only way to the ultimate truth is the philosophical way?

Pascal the Jansenist

Herewith, a note on Pascal inspired by Leszek Kolakowski's fascinating book, God Owes Us Nothing (University of Chicago, 1995).

Faith is a divine gift, bestowed arbitrarily, not a reward for merit. We postlapsarians groaning under Adam's sin are wholly without merit. There is no way we can get right with God by our own efforts.  Grace is both necessary and sufficient for salvation. God cannot be called unjust in arbitrarily bestowing the grace that leads to faith and salvation on some but not others -- for God is not measured by Justice, a standard external to him; God is the measure of Justice.  God is Justice itself. In this respect he is like a self-exemplifying Platonic Form. Justice is just; God is Justice; God is just. Whatever Supreme Justice does is just by definition. This is a consequence of God's absolute sovereignty. Kolakowski hasn't (so far in my reading) mentioned divine simplicity, but this doctrine is arguably entailed by absolute sovereignty.

And so the very question whether God acts justly in damning some and saving others presupposes what cannot be the case given absolute sovereignty, namely, that God can be judged by a standard external to him. This view leads by inexorable logic to some horrific consequences.  One is the justice of the consignment of unbaptized infants to eternal torment.  Pascal bites the Augustinian bullet.  See p. 85 ff.

Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?

I return an affirmative answer.

 

If God creates ex nihilo, and everything concrete other than God is created by God, and God is a pure spirit, then one type of metaphysical realism can be excluded at the outset. This  realism asserts that there are radically transcendent uncreated concrete things other than God.  'Radically transcendent' means 'transcendent of any mind, finite or infinite.' On this view, radically transcendent items exist and have most of their properties independently of any mind, including the divine mind.  Call this realism-1. We could also call it extreme metaphysical realism. 

 

No classical theist could be a realist-1. For on classical theism, everything other than God is created by God, created out of nothing, mind you, and not out of Avicennian mere possibles or any cognate sort of item. ('Out of nothing' is  a privative expression that means 'not out of something.') We also note that on classical theism, God is not merely an originating cause of things other than himself, but a continuing cause that keeps these things in existence moment-by-moment. He is not a mere cosmic starter-upper. 

 

Corresponding to realism-1, as its opposite, is idealism-1.  This is the view that everything other than God is created ex nihilo by God, who is a pure spirit, and who therefore creates in a purely spiritual way.  (To simplify the discussion, let us leave to one side the problem of so-called 'abstract objects.')  It seems to me, therefore, that there is a very clear sense in which classical theism is a type of idealism.   For on classical theism God brings into existence and keeps in existence every concretum other than himself and he does so by his  purely mental/spiritual activity.  We could call this type of idealism onto-theological absolute idealism. This is not to say that the entire physical cosmos is a content of the divine mind; it is rather an accusative or intentional object of the divine mind.  Though not radically transcendent, it is a transcendence-in-immanence, to borrow some Husserlian phraseology. 

 

So if the universe is expanding, that is not to say that the divine mind or any part thereof is expanding.  If an intentional object has a property P it does not follow that a mind trained upon this object, or an act of this mind or a content in this mind has P.  Perceiving a blue coffee cup, I have as intentional object something blue; but my mind is not blue, nor is the perceiving blue, nor any mental content that mediates the perceiving.  If I perceive or imagine or in any way think of an extended sticky surface, neither my mind nor any part of it becomes extended or sticky.  Same with God.  He retains his difference from the physical cosmos even while said cosmos is nothing more than his merely intentional object incapable of existing on its own.

 

Actually, what I just wrote is only an approximation to what I really want to say.  For just as God is sui generis, I think the relation between God and the world is also sui generis, and as such not an instance of the intentional relation with which we are familiar in our own mental lives.  The former is only analogous to the latter.  If one takes the divine transcendence seriously, then God cannot be a being among beings; equally, God's relation to the world cannot be a relation among relations.  If we achieve any understanding in these lofty precincts, it is not the sort of understanding one achieves by subsuming a new case under an old pattern; God does not fit any pre-existing pattern, nor does his 'relation' to the world fit any pre-existing pattern.  The Absolute cannot be an instance of a type. If we achieve any understanding here it will be via various groping analogies.  These analogies can only take us so far.  In the end we must confess the infirmity of finite reason in respect of the Absolute that is the Paradigm Existent.

 

There is also the well-known problem that the intentional 'relation' is not, strictly speaking, a relation.  It is at best analogous to a relation.  So it looks as if we have a double analogy going here.  The God-world relation is analogous to something analogous to a relation in the strict sense.  Let me explain.

 

If x stands in relation R to y, then both x, y exist.  But x can stand in the intentional 'relation' to y even if y does not exist in reality.  It is a plain fact that we sometimes have very definite thoughts about objects that do not exist, the planet Vulcan, for example.  What about the creating/sustaining 'relation'? The holding of this 'relation' as between God and Socrates cannot presuppose the existence in reality of both relata.  It presupposes the existence of God no doubt, but if it presupposed the existence of Socrates then there would be no need for the creating/sustaining ex nihilo of Socrates.  Creating is a producing, a causing to exist, and indeed moment by moment.

 

For this reason, creation/sustaining cannot be a relation, strictly speaking.  It follows that the createdness of a creature cannot be a relational property, strictly speaking.   Now the createdness of a creature is its existence or Being.  So the existence of a creature cannot be a relational property thereof; but it is like a relational property thereof.

 

What I have done so far is argue that classical theism is a form of idealism, a form of idealism that is the opposite of an extreme from of metaphysical realism, the form I referred to as 'realism-1.'  If you say that no one has ever held such a form of realism, I will point to Ayn Rand. (See Rand and Peikoff on God and Existence.)

 

Moderate  Realism (Realism-2)

 

Realism holds with respect to some of the objects of finite minds.  Not for merely intentional objects, of course, but for things like trees and mountains and cats and chairs and their parts.  They exist and have most of their properties independently of the mental activity of finite minds such as ours. We can call this realism-2.

 

Kant held that empirical realism and transcendental idealism are logically compatible and he subscribed to both.  Now the idealism I urge is not a mere transcendental idealism, but a full-throated onto-theological absolute idealism; but it too is compatible, as far as I can see, with the empirical reality of most of the objects of ectypal intellects such as ours.  The divine spontaneity makes them exist and renders them available to the receptivity of ectypal intellects.  Realism-2 is consistent with idealism-1. 

 

My thesis, then, is that classical theism is a type of idealism; it is onto-theological absolute idealism.  If everything concrete is created originally and sustained ongoingly ex nihilo by a purely spiritual being, an Absolute Mind, and by purely spiritual activity, then this is better denominated 'idealism' than 'realism.'  Is that not obvious?

 

But trouble looms as I will argue in the next entry in this series.  And so we will have to consider whether the sui generis, absolutely unique status of God and his relation to the world is good reason to withhold both appellations, 'realism' and 'idealism.'

Rand and Peikoff on God and Existence

The following is by Leonard Peikoff, acolyte of Ayn Rand:

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics . . . .

Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence—some supernatural realm—you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, “To Hell with argument, I have faith.” That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason.

Objectivism advocates reason as man’s sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that’s all.

Most professional philosophers consider Rand and Co. not worth discussing.  Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus, however, is one of my mottoes (see here for explanation); so I will engage the Randian ideas to see if they generate any light. But I will try to avoid the polemical and tabloid style Rand and friends favor.  

In the quotation above we meet once again our old friend 'Existence exists.'  Ayn Rand & Co. use 'existence' to refer to what exists, not to something -- a property perhaps -- in virtue of which existents exist.  Now It cannot be denied that all existing things exist, and that only existing things exist.  This is entirely trivial, a logical truth.  Anyone who denies it embraces the following formal-logical contradiction:  There are existing things that do not exist. We should all agree, then, with the first sentence of the second paragraph. Existence exists!

So far, so good. 

But then Peikoff tells us that to postulate something supernatural such as God is "to postulate something beyond existence."  Now it may well be that there is no God or anything beyond nature.  But how would it follow that there is something beyond existence, i.e., beyond what exists, if God exists? It may well be that everything that exists is a thing of nature.   Distinguished philosophers have held that reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.  But the nonexistence of God or of so-called abstract objects does not follow from the triviality that everything that exists exists.  Does it take a genius to see that the following argument is invalid?

1. Existence exists.

ergo

2. God does not exist.

One cannot derive a substantive metaphysical conclusion from a mere tautology. No doubt, whatever exists exists.  But one cannot exclude God from the company of what exists by asserting the tautology that whatever exists exists.  The above argument is a non sequitur.  Here is an example of a valid argument:

3. Nothing supernatural exists.

4. God is supernatural.

ergo

5. God does not exist.

For Peikoff to get the result he wants, the nonexistence of God, from the premise 'Existence exists,' he must conflate 'existence' with 'natural existence.' Instead of saying "only existence exists," he should have said 'only natural existence exists.' But then he would lose the self-evidence of "Existence exists and only existence exists."  And he would also be begging the question.

Conflating a trivial self-evident thesis with a nontrivial controversial thesis has all the advantages of theft over honest toil as Russell said in a different connection.  It would take a certain amount of honest philosophical toil to construct a really good argument for the nonexistence of any and all supernatural entities.  But terminological mischief is easy.  What Peikoff seems to be doing above is smuggling the nonexistence of the supernatural into the term 'existence'  Clearly, this is an intellectually disreputable move.  

It is like a bad ontological argument in reverse.  On one bad version of the ontological argument, one defines God into existence by smuggling the notion of existence into the concept of God and then announcing that since we have the concept of God, God must exist.  Peikoff is doing the opposite: he defines God and the supernatural out of existence by importing their nonexistence into the term 'existence.'  But you can no more define God out of existence than you can define him into existence.  

An Objection and a Reply

"You are missing something important.  The claim that existence exists is the claim that whatever exists, exists independently of all consciousness, including divine consciousness.  It is a substantive claim, not a mere tautology.  It is a claim about the nature of existence.  It asserts the primacy of existence over consciousness.  It is a statement of extreme metaphysical realism: to exist is to be independent of all minds and their states. This axiom implies that no existents are created or caused to exist by a mind.   But then God, as the creator of everything distinct from himself, cannot exist."

Here, then, is a Rand-inspired argument for the nonexistence of God resting on Rand's axiom of existence.

1) To exist is to exist independently of all consciousness. (The notorious axiom)

2) Things other than God exist. (Obviously true)

Therefore

3) Things other than God exist independently of all consciousness. (Follows from 1 and 2)

4) If God exists, then it is not the case that everything that exists exists independently of all consciousness. (True given the classical conception of God as creator according to which whatever exists that is not God is maintained in existence moment-by-moment by God's creative power.)

Therefore

5) God does not exist. (Follows from 3 and 4 by standard logical rules including modus tollens)

This argument stands and falls with its first premise. Why should we accept it?  It is not self-evident.  Its negation -- some items that exist depend for their existence on consciousness -- is not a contradiction. Indeed, the negation is true: my current headache pain exists but it would not not exist were I not conscious of it.  My felt pain depends for its existence on consciousness.

Note also that the argument can be run in reverse with no breach of logical propriety. Simply deny the conclusion and then infer the negation of the initial premise. In brief: if God exists, then Rand's existence axiom is false.  This shows that the argument is not rationally compelling. Of course, the argument run in reverse is also not rationally compelling. So we have a stand-off.

We read above that existence, i.e. existents, are uncreated, indestructible, and eternal.  Well, if there is no God, then existents are uncreated.  But how could they be indestructible?  Is the Moon indestructible? Obviously not.  Is there anything in nature that is indestructible? No. So what might Rand or rather Peikoff mean by his strange assertion?  Does he mean that, while each natural item is destructible, it is 'indestructible' that there be some natural items or other? 

And how can natural items be eternal? What is eternal is outside of time. But everything in nature in in time. Perhaps he means that everything in nature is omnitemporal, i.e., existent at every time. But the Moon did not always exist and will not always exist.

I conclude that the Randian existence axiom does not bear up well under scrutiny. Classical theism has its own problems to which I will be returning.

(Rand below looks a little like Nancy "the Ripper" Pelosi. Both leave a lot to be desired character-wise, but Rand is sharp as a tack while Pelosi is dumb as a post.)

Does Divine Immutability Entail Modal Collapse?

That divine simplicity entails modal collapse is a controversial thesis, but one for which there are strong arguments. Does the same hold for divine immutability? I don't think so. That immutability should entail modal collapse strikes me as based on a simple confusion of the temporal with the modal.

Modal Collapse

In the state of modal collapse, there are no contingent propositions, where a contingent proposition is one that is possibly false if true, and possibly true if false, and where there are no contingent beings, where a contingent being  is one that is possibly nonexistent if existent and possibly existent if nonexistent.  So in the dreaded state of modal collapse, every proposition is either necessarily true or necessarily false, and every being is either necessary or impossible.  

Although one philosopher's datum is often another's (false) theory, I take it to be a datum, a Moorean fact, that, for example, I exist contingently and that many of the propositions about me are contingently either true or false. For example, it is contingently true that I am now blogging, and contingently false that I am now riding my bike, where 'now' picks out the same time. 

I take it, then, that we should want to uphold the modal distinctions and that it is an argument against a theory if it should fail to do so.

Divine Immutability 

In a strong form, the immutability doctrine states that God does not undergo any sort of intrinsic change.  We distinguish intrinsic from relational changes. If Hillary becomes furious at Bill's infidelity, that is an intrinsic change in her.  But there needn't be any corresponding intrinsic change in Bill.  He will change, but relationally by becoming the object of Hillary's wrath.  (And perhaps only relationally if Bill is unaware of Hillary's discovery of his infidelity and the onset of her wrath.) If, however, her rage should vent itself in her conking him on the head with a rolling pin, then intrinsic changes will occur in both parties to this famous marriage.

Similarly, if I start and stop thinking about God, I undergo an intrinsic change, but this intrinsic change in me is a merely relational ('merely Cambridge') change in God, and is insofar forth compatible with God's strong immutability.

Strong immutability, then, is the claim that God is not subject to intrinsic change.

Confusing the Temporal with the Modal

If God is strongly immutable, then any intrinsic property that he has at a given time he has at every time.  But if a thing has a property at every time at which it exists, it does not follow that it has that property necessarily. I'm a native Californian. I always was and I always will be. But that is a contingent fact about me: I might have been born in some other state. So the property of being born in California is one I have contingently despite my having it at every moment of my existence.  The same goes for intrinsic properties. Suppose the universe always existed and always will exist.  That is consistent with the universe's being contingent.  What is always the case needn't necessarily be the case.

Now suppose God always wills the existence of our universe. It does not follow that God necessarily wills the existence of our universe. Nor does it follow that what he wills-- our universe -- necessarily exists. This consideration puts paid to the threat of modal collapse.   Tim Pawl in his IEP article puts it like this:

Divine immutability rules out that God go from being one way to being another way. But it does not rule out God knowing, desiring, or acting differently than he does. It is possible that God not create anything. If God hadn’t created anything, he wouldn’t talk to Abraham at a certain time (since no Abraham would exist). But such a scenario doesn’t require that God change, since it doesn’t require that there be a time when God is one way, and a later time when he is different. Rather, it just requires the counterfactual difference that if God had not created, he would not talk to Abraham. Such a truth is neutral to whether or not God changes. In short, difference across possible worlds does not entail difference across times. Since all that strong immutability rules out is difference across times, divine immutability is not inconsistent with counterfactual difference, and hence does not entail a modal collapse. Things could have been otherwise than they are, and, had they been different, God would immutably know things other than he does, all without change . . . .

Three Theses

First, the divine simplicity doctrine entails modal collapse.  This was argued earlier.

Second, divine simplicity is not to be confused with divine immutability. The first entails the second, but the second does not entail the first.

Third,  divine immutability does not entail modal collapse.