Maverick Philosopher

Given Anselm's Insight, How is Empirical Evidence Relevant to the Existence/Nonexistence of God?

ANSELM'S INSIGHT

I take what I call Anselm's Insight to be non-negotiable.  St. Anselm appreciated, presumably for the first time in the history of thought, that a divine being, one worthy of worship, must be non-contingent.  If your god is contingent, then your god is not God. For if your god is contingent, and he exists, then his nonexistence is possible, and nothing like that could count as God. God, by definition, is that than which no greater can be conceived, to use use Anselm's signature phrase, and necessity is a greater or higher modal status than contingency. Contingency in an existing thing is an ontological defect. God is an absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is contingent.  If, on the other hand, your god is contingent and he doesn't exist, then it is worse still: your god is impossible. 

Anselm's point, expressed with the help of Leibniz, is that the concept of God is the concept of a being that either exists in every metaphysically possible world, or in no metaphysically possible world.  This formulation has the advantage of not presupposing the existence of God by the use of 'God.' For it may be that the concept is not instantiated, as it would not be if God is impossible.

Anselm's Insight rests on the assumption that the necessarily existent is 'better' than the contingently existent, which in turn rests on the Platonic sense that the immutable is higher in value than the mutable. This assumption can be reasonably questioned but also reasonably defended. But I won't go into that now. For present purposes I endorse both the Insight and the Assumption upon which it rests.

ANSELM'S ARGUMENT

But it does not follow from Anselm's Insight that Anselm's Argument is probative. I am referring to the modal ontological argument found in Proslogion III. One cannot validly infer from God's non-contingent status alone that he exists.  For it is epistemically possible -- possible for all we know -- that God is modally impossible. 'Non-contingent' does not mean 'necessary.' It means 'either necessary or impossible.'  To arrive at God's existence, one needs a possibility premise to the effect that God  is possible.  But how would you know that the premise is true? Conceivability is no sure guide to real possibility. 

For more on the Argument see here. Today's topic is different.

IS EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE RELEVANT TO THE EXISTENCE/NON-EXISTENCE OF A NON-CONTINGENT GOD?

A question posed to me by a reader requires only Anselm's Insight although he thinks it requires the probativity of Anselm's Argument. I take him to be asking how empirical evidence could be relevant to the existence of a non-contingent God.  

Suppose God does not exist.  Then, by the Insight, he is impossible.  But no amount of empirical evidence could show that what is impossible is actual.  So no miraculous event could show that God exists. If God is impossible, any putative empirical evidence to the contrary could be legitimately dismissed a priori.  Compare round squares and colored sounds. They are impossible. The claims of anyone who said he had empirical evidence to the contrary would be legitimately dismissed a priori.  We know that there  cannot be any round squares or colored sounds. We do not know that God is impossible. But we do know (given Anselm's Insight) that either God necessarily exists or God is impossible.  

If, on the other hand, God does exist, then he cannot fail to exist and no empirical evidence is needed or could be relevant.  Suppose that someone demanded empirical evidence of the truth of 7 is prime or the existence of 7 or the existence of the proposition, 7 is prime.   You would show that person the door.

Now either God exists or he does not. Either way, empirical evidence is irrelevant to the existence of God.

What then of natural and moral evil? Are they evidence of the nonexistence of Anselm's God?  No, and to think otherwise is to assume that God is a contingent being.

The above is my interpretation of my reader's reasoning.  I am inclined to accept it as I interpret it.

The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason

With Halloween upon us, it is appropriate that I should present to my esteemed readers for their delectation if not horror the scariest passage in Kant's magnum opus:

Unconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable abyss . . . . We cannot put aside, and  yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme among all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: 'I am from eternity to eternity, and outside of me there is nothing save what is through my will, but whence then am I? All support here fails us; and the greatest perfection, no less than the least perfection, floats insubstantially before the merely speculative reason, which incurs no cost in allowing either the one or the other to vanish entirely.  (A613 B641, Norman Kemp Smith tr. corrected by BV)

God thinks to himself: I am a necessary being: I cannot not exist. What's more, I am unconditionally necessary: I do not derive my necessity from another like numbers and other abstracta; they derive their necessity from me, but I have my necessity from myself.  And yet, while my nonexistence is impossible, I can conceive of my nonexistence: the question Whence then am I? makes sense.  My nonexistence is thinkable without logical contradiction even if it is impossible. This is troubling.  I do not exist of merely logical necessity, but of metaphysical necessity, which is a species of real necessity, and the latter suggests some hidden contingency, some hidden dependence.

God thinks further to himself:  Am I truly unconditioned? I am who am: my nature is to be, to exist.  (Exodus, 3:14) I do not have existence like my creatures; I am existence itself in its primary instance.  As such, I cannot not exist, and I cannot cease to exist. I cannot commit suicide. I have no power over my own existence. I am bound to exist.  It is my nature to exist, and I have no power over my nature. How then am I absolutely sovereign?  I am bound by a condition over which I have no control. 

How then am I absolutely unconditioned?  I am not that than which no greater can be conceived.  For I can conceive a greater, a being that is not bound by existence but is free to enter nonexistence.  If I were absolutely unconditioned, then I would be beyond existence and nonexistence. I would be master of that distinction, and not subject to it. I would be beyond all duality.

As subject to the distinction between existence and nonexistence, I am not the Absolute, the Ultimate, the Unconditioned. I am merely the highest being. I am at the apex of the samsaric pyramid -- but still samsaric. The truly Unconditioned is beyond Being and Nonbeing.

With this, his final thought, God entered nibbana.

Natural Evil and Fallen Angels

This is an old post from my first blog,  dated 3 January 2005, slightly redacted.

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

Keith Burgess-Jackson writes:

I have a question for my theistic readers. How do you reconcile the devastation wrought by the tsunami with your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being? If God could have prevented the tsunami but didn’t, then God’s omnibenevolence is called into question. If God wanted to prevent the tsunami but couldn’t, then God’s omniscience or omnipotence is called into question. You can’t explain away the evil by citing free will, for no human being brought about the tsunami. (Surely you don’t believe in fallen angels.) Do events like this shake your faith? If not, why not? If death and destruction on this scale don’t make you doubt the existence of your god, what would?

1. The parenthetical material is puzzling. If someone can see his way clear to accepting the existence of a purely spiritual being such as God, then the belief in angels, fallen or otherwise, will present no special problem. Given the existence of fallen angels, the Free Will Defense may be invoked to account for natural evils such as tsunamis: natural evils turn out to be a species of moral evils.

2. Of course, the argument can be turned around. If someone argues from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God, that person assumes that there is indeed an objective fact of evil, and thus, an objective distinction between good and evil. A sophisticated theist can counterargue that there cannot be an objective distinction between good and evil unless God exists. I could make that argument as rigorous as you like. That is not to say that the argument would be compelling to every rational consumer of it, but only that it would logically impeccable, plausibly premised, and sufficiently strong to neutralize the atheist's argument from evil. I distinguish between refuting and neutralizing. It may be difficult to refute a sophisticated interlocutor since he will not be likely to blunder. But he can be neutralized by presenting counterarguments of equal but opposite probative force. The result is a stand-off: you battle the opponent to a draw.

3. In a separate argument, a theist could make the case that the very quantity and malevolence of the moral evil in the world -- think of the 20th century and the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, the 100 million murdered by Communists, etc.) -- cannot be explained naturalistically. This would be another way to argue from the fact of objective evil to supernatural agents of evil.  See my The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence.

4. There is no denying that evil presents a serious challenge to theism. Should it shake the theist's faith? Only if the objections to atheism/naturalism shake the atheist's/naturalist's faith. We seem to have doxastic parity. There are reasons both for and against theism. But there are also reasons both for and against atheism/naturalism. It would be special pleading to suppose that the reasons against theism are much more weighty that the reasons against atheism/naturalism. See my companion post on the naturalist's version of fides quaerens intellectum.

5. At the end of the day, after all the dialectical smoke has cleared, you simply have to decide what you are going to believe and how you are going to live. The decision is not a mere decision, but rationally informed, and subject to revision after the consideration of further arguments; but at some point ratiocination must cease and a position must be taken.

Note: Most atheists are naturalists, hence my conflation of them in this post. But one could be an anti-naturalist and an atheist (McTaggart) and I suppose one could be a theist and a naturalist.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Seder Scene in "Crimes and Misdemeanors"

"Crimes and Misdemeanors" is Woody Allen's masterpiece. Here is the Seder scene.

Addendum 8/26

The scene ends with Saul saying "If necessary, I will always choose God over the truth."  It works cinematically, but it is a philosophically lame response to the atheist Aunt May. It is lame because Saul portrays the theist as one who self-deceivingly embraces consolatory fictions despite his knowledge that they are fictions. Saul might have plausibly replied along one or both of the following lines.

1) It cannot be true that there is no God, since without God there is no truth.  The existence of truth presupposes the existence of God. Truth is the state of a mind in contact with reality. No minds, no truth. But there are infinitely many truths, including infinitely many necessary truths. The infinity of truths and the necessity of some them require for their ultimate support and repository an  infinite and necessary mind. "And this all men call God." So if there is no God, then there is no truth, in which case one cannot prefer truth over God in the manner of Aunt May.

Nietzsche understood this very well. He saw that the death of God is the death of truth. He concluded that there is no truth, but only  the competing perspectives of mutually antagonistic power-centers.

Now the above is a mere bloggity-blog sketch. Here is a more rigorous treatment.

2) Saul might also have challenged Aunt May as follows:

You say that it is true that there is no God, that there is no moral world-order, that might makes right, and so on. You obviously think that it is important that we face up to these truths and stop fooling ourselves.  You obviously think that there is something morally disreputable about cultivating illusions and stuffing the heads of the young with them, that morally one ought not do these things.  But what grounds this moral ought that you plainly think binds all of us and not just you?  Does it just hang in the air, so to speak? And if it does, whence its objective bindingness or 'deontic tug'?  Can you ultimately make sense of objective moral oughts and ought-nots on the naturalistic scheme you seem to be presupposing?  Won't you have to make at least a Platonic ascent in the direction of the Good?  If so, how will you stop the further ascent to the Good as self-existent and thus as  God?

Or look at this way, May. You think it is a value that we face reality, a reality that for you is Godless, even if  facing what you call reality does not contribute to our flourishing but in fact contributes to the opposite.  But how could something be a value for us if it impedes our flourishing? Is it not ingredient in the concept of value that a value to be what it is must be a value for the valuer? So even if it is true that there is no God, no higher destiny for humans, that life is in the end absurd, how could it be a value for us to admit these truths if truths they be?  So what are you getting so worked up over, sister? I have just pulled the rug out from under your moral enthusiasm!

How are God and Truth Related?

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 truth ultimately depends on the existence of God. There is truth only because there is God.

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

5) There is God, but no truth.

Ad (1). This I would guess 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.

Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers.  Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths, but would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either. 

Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept.  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 God and 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.

Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view.  Tod Gottes = Tod der Wahrheit.

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

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

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

I will mention quickly a problem for the admittedly plausible first 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. 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. 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.  But a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exist except in, or for, a mind.  If there is no God, or rather, if there is no necessarily existent mind, every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind.

Here are some ways an atheist might 'solve' the problem:

a) Deny that there are necessary truths.

b) Deny that truth is any sense a property of propositions.

c) Deny Anti-Meinong.

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

But each of these denials involves problems of its own which I would have no trouble unpacking.

A Mormon De-Conversion

I have a category called Conversions. De-conversions are equally interesting. Here Spencer Case tells his story.

If memory and the engines of search serve, I have written only two extended entries on Mormonism, both of which mention our old friend Spencer.

Religion and Anthropomorphism with an Oblique Reference to Mormonism

On the Mormon Conception of God

Indexicality and Omniscience

Patrick Grim gives something like the following argument for the impossibility of divine omniscience. What I know when I know that

1. I am making a mess

is an indexical fact that no one else can know. At most, what someone else can know is that

2. BV is making a mess

or perhaps, pointing to BV, that

3. He is making a mess.

Just as no one except BV can refer to BV by tokening the first-person singular pronoun, no one except BV has access to the indexical fact that, as BV would put it to himself, I am BV. Only BV is privy to this fact; only BV knows himself in the first-person way. Now an omniscient being knows everything that can be known. Although I am not omniscient, there is at least one proposition that I know -- namely (1) -- that is not known by any other knower, including an omniscient knower. So an omnisicent being is impossible: by its very definition it must know every fact that can be known, but there are indexical facts that it cannot know. God can know that BV is making a mess but he cannot know what I know when I know that I am making a mess. For any subject S distinct from God, the first-person facts appertinent to S are inaccessible to every mind distinct from S, including God's mind. That is what I take to be Grim's argument.

I suppose one could counter the argument by denying that there are indexical facts.  But since I hold that there are both indexical propositions and indexical facts, that response route is not available to me.  Let me see if I can respond by making a distinction between two senses of 'omniscience.'

A. X is omniscient₁=_df X knows every fact knowable by some subject or other.

B. X is omniscient₂ =df X knows every fact knowable by some one subject.

What indexical facts show is that no being is or can be omniscient in the first sense. No being knows every indexical and non-indexical fact. But a failure to know what cannot be known does not count against a being's being omniscient in a defensible sense of this term any more than a failure to do what cannot be done counts against a being's being omnipotent. A defensible sense of 'omniscience' is supplied by (B). In this second sense, God is omniscient: he knows every fact that one subject can know, namely, every non-indexical fact, plus all facts pertaining to the divine subjectivity. What more could one want?

Since no being could possibly satisfy (A), (A) is not the appropriate sense of 'omniscience.' Compare omnipotence. An omnipotent being cannot be one who can do just anything, since there are both logical and non-logical limits on what any agent can do.  Logical: God cannot actualize (create) an internally contradictory state of affairs. Non-logical: God cannot restore a virgin.  So from the fact that it is impossible for God to know what is impossible for any one being to know, it does not follow that God is not omniscient.

To sum up. There are irreducible first-personal facts that show that no being can be omniscient in the (A)-sense: Patrick Grim's argument is sound. But the existence of irreducible first-personal facts is consistent  with the truth of standard theism since the latter is committed only to a being omniscient in the (B)-sense of 'omniscience.'

Does Omniscience Require Incarnation? Pursuing Some Consequences

Dr. Vito Caiati  occasioned in  me a new thought the other day: that divine omniscience might require divine incarnation.  The gist of the thought is as follows. If God is all-knowing, then he possesses not only all knowledge by description, but also all knowledge by acquaintance. But it is not easy to see how God in his disincarnate state  could have all or any  knowledge by acquaintance of beings whose subjectivity is realized in matter.  And this for the simple reason that if God is a pure spirit then his subjectivity is real without being realized in matter.

One could know everything there is to know objectively  about bats but still not know subjectively, 'from the inside,' what it is like to be a bat in Thomas Nagel's sense.  Objective omniscience is compatible with subjective nescience.  To know what it is like to be a bat I would have to be one: I would have to have the physiological constitution of a bat.  And so for God to know what it is like to be a man dying on a cross God would have to be a man dying on a cross.  To have objective knowledge of every aspect of dying on a cross is not to experience dying on a cross. That's the rough idea.  It has interesting and troubling consequences which I didn't pursue on Saturday night. So I am pleased to hear from Jacques.

Jacques writes,

I agree that God has to become a human being in order to know everything. But, as you say, this seems to lead to further problems. Here are two things that come to mind. 

First, there would be the same problem with respect to every sentient being. God has to be one of us in order to know certain perspectival or subjective facts about us. But God also has to be a bat or a beetle, for the same reason, if God is to be truly omniscient.

It seems so.

But in addition, it's not enough for omniscience that God has been incarnated once as a certain type of being. After all, that would mean only that God knows what it's like to have been that human being--a male one, living in the Roman empire, etc. Surely God also needs to know what it's like to be a woman, or a Mayan, or whatever. And also needs to know what it's like to be me as opposed to you, and you as opposed to me. Does this mean that believing in an omniscient God rationally supports some kind of Hindu-ish or pantheistic theory over Christianity? (Or does it mean that Christianity properly understood implies that God is every single one of us, and every bat and beetle?)

This is much less clear.  You and I are two numerically different human beings, but I don't need to be you  in order to know what it is like to be you.  Despite the privacy of experience, most if not all of our sensory qualia are similar if not qualitatively identical.  Lacking the special powers of Bill Clinton, I can't feel your pain: I cannot live through numerically the same pain experiences you live though when you are in some definite kind of pain, such as non-migraine headache. Your experiencings are in your psyche; mine are in mine. But I know what it is like when you have a headache since the subjective qualitative features of the experiencings are the same or very similar.  What makes this possible is that we are animals of very similar physiological constitution.  I suspect that sensory qualia are universals of a sort.

I am not a woman and I so I don't quite know what it is like to experience menstrual cramps. But I know what muscle cramps are like, and so I have some basis for empathy with the distaff contingent of child-bearing years.

And so I would not go so far as to say that for God to know what it is like to be a human, he must be or become every human.  It suffices for him to become a human. Nor is it necessary that he become a woman for him to know what it is like to be a woman.

But then there is this consideration:

Is there something it is like to be me, this particular person, numerically different from every other person?  Sometimes I have the strong sense that there is.  Call it one's irreducible haecceity (thisness) or ipseity (selfness).  It is irreducible in that it cannot be reduced to anything repeatable or multiply exemplifiable or anything constructed out of repeatable  or multiply exemplifiable elements. This is a sort of quale that I alone have and experience and that no one distinct from me could have or experience. We are all unique, but each of us has his own uniqueness 'incommunicable to any other' as a scholastic might say. I sometimes have the sense that each of us is uniquely unique as a person, as a subject in the innermost core of his subjectivity. And sometimes it seems that I know what it is like to be this uniquely unique person, absolutely irreplaceable and (therefore?) infinitely precious  and of absolute worth.

If God exists, he is super-eminently uniquely unique and we, who are made in his image and likeness, are derivatively uniquely unique.

Trouble is, this notion of a uniquely unique haecceity tapers off into the mystical. For my thisness or your's or anything's is ineffable. It cannot be conceptually articulated or put into language. Individuum ineffabile est as a medieval Aristotelian might say.  Is the ineffable nonexistent because ineffable?   That was Hegel's view. Or is the ineffable existent despite being ineffable? That was the Tractarian Wittgenstein's view: Es gibt allerdings das Unaussprechliche.   One cannot eff the ineffable. Does this mean that it is not there to be effed? Or does it mean that effing is not the proper mode of access to the existent ineffable? I incline in the latter direction. 

Now suppose that each person at the base of his subjectivity is uniquely unique and is acquainted with his own irreducible haecceity and ipseity. How could God know anyone's haecceity?  He can't know it objectively, and to know my haecceity subjectively, as I know it, God would have to be me.  This leads on to the heretical thought that for God to be all-knowing, he would have to be every sentient being, as Jacques appreciates.

Second, it seems that having all objective knowledge precludes subjectivity and vice versa. While incarnated as a particular man, with a perspective and personality, God was not simultaneously aware of all objective facts. That kind of awareness would seem to make it impossible to have a perspective and a personality. So is true omniscience impossible? Either you know everything objective, or you know only something objective and only something subjective. I don't mind this result too much. I have no strong intuition that omniscience is possible. But then what should a Christian or other theist believe about God's knowledge? 

A God's eye view is a View from Nowhere (to allude to a title of one of T. Nagel's books.) An incarnate God would have to have a definite perspective and personality.  But then he could not be objectively omniscient. If, on the other hand, he were objectively omniscient, then he could not be incarnate.  That seems to be what Jacques is saying.

It might be replied that that Jesus qua God is objectively omnisicent but subjectively nescient, but qua man is objectively limited in knowledge but has knowledge of qualia. If that makes sense, then we could say that an incarnate God knows more than the same God aloof from matter. For then the incarnate God knows everything the disincarnate God knows plus what it is like to be a man, and by analogy what it is like to be a cat or a dog or any sentient being sufficiently similar in physiological make-up to a man.

Is true omniscience possible? If true omniscience requires knowing everything there is to know, both objectively  (by description) and subjectively (by acquaintance), then true or full omniscience is impossible, i.e., no one person could be fully omniscient.  What then should a Christian theologian say?

He could perhaps say this: God is omniscient in that he knows everything that it is possible for any one person to know.  Now it is not possible that any one person know everything both objectively and subjectively. Therefore, it is no restriction of God's omniscience that he does not know everything.

Could an eternal God know what time it is? Presumably not. Could God be both omniscient and ignorant with respect to future contingents?  Why not?  God knows whatever it it possible to know; future contingents, however, are impossible for anyone to know.

It is like the situation with respect to omnipotence. It is no restriction of God's omnipotence that he can do only what it is logically possible to do.  God is powerless to restore a virgin. But that's nothing against the divine omnipotence.

Robert Spaemann Dies at 91

Professor Robert Spaemann, Philosopher and Advocate of the Traditional Mass, Dies at 91. (HT: Kai Frederik Lorentzen)

See also, Philosophie und Glaube: Vom Tod von Robert Spaemann. Excerpt:

Gott als Grundlage aller Wahrheitsansprüche

Gottesglaube ist weder Bedingung für wahre Urteile noch für Gewissensüberzeugungen. Aber da die Existenz Gottes der ontologische Grund beider und in ihnen impliziert ist, beseitigt die Leugnung Gottes die Grundlage aller Wahrheitsansprüche und aller sittlicher Überzeugungen und damit tendenziell diese Ansprüche selbst.

God as Foundation of all Truth Claims

Belief in God is a condition neither of true judgments nor of convictions of conscience. But because the existence of God is implied by both and is the ontological ground of both, the denial of God does away with the foundation of all truth claims and all moral convictions, and thereby tends to do away with these claims and convictions themselves. (tr. BV)

You don't need to believe in God to make  true statements. Atheists make many true statements. And you don't need to believe in God to have correct moral convictions. Atheists have many correct moral convictions. But if there is no God, then there is no truth including moral truth. If there is no God, there are no truths to state.  Atheists don't need to know that God exists to make true statements, but if there is no God, then they cannot make true statements.

But is it obvious that: no God, no truth?  It is not obvious but it can be persuasively argued. Here is a rough sketch of one such argument.  The laws of logic are not only true, they are necessarily true. As we say in the trade, they are true in all possible worlds. Now finite minds are not to be found in every possible world: there are possible worlds in which there are no finite minds, Furthermore, truth cannot exist outside of a mind: truth resides in minds to the extent that said minds are in contact with extramental reality.   Since the laws of logic are necessarily true, there must be a necessary mind. And this all men call God.

Now that was quick and dirty. I present the argument with considerably more rigor and intellectual cleanliness here.

The Divine Job Description

What jobs would a being have to perform to qualify as God?  I proffer an answer at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical.

How Can Anyone Live for This Life Alone?

This just over the transom:

There's a question I've been pondering for some time that I'd like your opinion on if you're willing. I've always been fascinated by people who have been occupied and consumed by the things of the world- power, money, fame, sex, etc. For example, I just finished watching a documentary about Ronnie Coleman, one of, if not the most, famous body builders of all time. For him, body building was his life, he won 8 Mr. Olympia titles. Now, in his old age, he has horrible back issues from all his training and gets around on crutches. Yet he says he regrets nothing. There are countless examples of people who spend their entire lives devoted to the material and transient world, seemingly in complete ignorance of the Divine and the eternal.

As a Christian, I find it hard to understand how this is possible. If God does exist, and there is an eternal realm as Plato thought, then how can someone be 'satisfied' with a life that was devoted to the temporal and earthly realm? Is it that such persons are simply ignorant? Or perhaps such persons are willfully ignorant? As a person who has always had a religious disposition, like yourself, I find it hard to understand and sympathize with people who do not. 

Any thoughts you might have would be much appreciated. Thanks so much for your time. 

How can so many live for the goods of this life alone?

The short answer is that they don't take seriously the idea that there is any other life and any other goods.  It is not just that they don't believe that there is an eternal realm, Unseen Order, divine milieu, or whatever you want to call it.  It is not even an issue for them.  The question is idle and otiose: it simply does not arise for them in any existentially arresting form.  Questions about God and the soul are simply dismissed in the way almost all adults dismiss questions about Santa Claus.

But WHY don't they take Unseen Things seriously? 

It comes down to what could be called one's sense of reality.  For the worldling, the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility.  The worldling doesn't take then as indices of unreality as a Platonist would. If you point out the brevity of life to a worldling he might give a speech like the following:

Precisely because life is short, one must not waste it.  Brevity does not show lack of reality or value, pace Plato and his latter-day acolytes such as Simone Weil, but how real and valuable life is. This life is as real as it gets.  It is precious precisely because it is short. Make the most of it because there is not much of it, but what there is of it is enough for those who are fortunate, who live well, and who do not die too soon. Don't waste your life on religious illusions!

The attitude here is that life is short but long enough and valuable enough, at least for some of us.  One should make friends with finitude enjoying what one has and not looking beyond to what is merely imagined.  Near the beginning of the The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus quotes Pindar, "O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." (Pythian, iii)

A frat boy might put it like this:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

Or in the words of a 1970 beer commercial:

You only go around once in life
So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.

This attitude of the worldling is possible because it is actual and indeed widespread more so now than ever before in history, in good measure because of our technology that extends life and makes it vastly  more endurable than in previous centuries. Our 24-7, 365(6) connectivity also practically insures that we will remain trapped within the sphere of immanence and be unable to 'pick up any signals' from beyond the human horizon. 

The worldling's attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult to argue with anyone's sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that.  In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane  of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills.

Is the worldling ignorant?

My reader and I would say he is. But how prove it either to him or to us? Can one PROVE that God and the soul are real? No. At best one can give a number of plausible arguments for these 'objects' and a number of plausible arguments against metaphysical naturalism. But at the end of the day one is going to have to invoke certain mystical vouchsafings, intimations, glimpses, revelations, teachings of some magisterium deemed finally authoritative, all of which are easily hauled before the bench of reason to have their veridicality questioned. In the end, a leap of faith. You will have to decide what to believe and how to live.

Suppose I take the 'bite of conscience' as pointing to the existence of a Supreme Moral Authority of a personal nature.  I could make a very strong case. But would it be rationally compelling? No.  Could I ever be objectively certain that no naturalistic explanation could account adequately for the deliverances of conscience?  I don't think so.

Is the worldling morally culpable for his ignorance?

Some might be, but in general, he is not.  Pace St. Paul at Romans 1: 18-20, I don't find unbelief to be morally culpable.  It is neither evident that God exists nor evident that he does not exist.

If God Cannot Cause Himself, How Can He Know Himself?

This from a reader:

If we say God cannot create himself since this implies a contradiction (God existing prior to himself to act on himself), how can we say God does anything with regard to himself?

For instance, we say God knows himself. But how is this possible, seeing as God would need to first exist, in order to know himself? Knowledge is a relation in the mind to what is outside it. If I "know" a thing, I have the thing, the thing that is not me, in my mind. But if there is only simply God, how does he "have" himself in his mind?

An interesting question worth thinking about.

I grant that God cannot create himself. For if he creates himself then he causes himself to exist, and nothing can cause itself to exist. For a thing cannot enter into a causal relation unless it exists. So if God causes himself to exist, then his existence is logically, if not temporally, prior to his existence. And that, we agree, is impossible.

The main point is that the existence of a thing cannot be logically prior to its existence. (And if it cannot be logically prior, then it cannot be temporally prior either.) But the existence of a knower not only can but must be logically prior to its self-knowledge.  I cannot know myself unless I exist, but I can exist without knowing myself. In the finite case, then, it is clear that existence is logically prior to self-knowledge, and indeed other-knowledge as well.

Now God is omniscient and exists in all possible worlds.  So there is no possible situation in which he does not know himself or fails to know everything there is to know about himself. If we think of God as omnitemporal as opposed to eternal, then at every moment he enjoys full self-knowledge. At every moment, his existence and self-knowledge are simultaneous. But this is not a problem since there is no problem with God's existence being logically prior to his self-knowledge even if the former is not temporally prior to the latter.  We get the same result if God is eternal.

In sum, God's existence cannot be logically prior to God's existence as it would have to be if God creates himself. But God's existence can be logically prior to God's self-knowledge.

There is a second problem that the reader conflates with one I just discussed.   If God alone exists, how can God know himself if "Knowledge is a relation in the mind to what is outside it"?  This problem is solved by denying the assumption. Self-knowledge is NOT a relation to what is outside the mind.  I feel good right now, and I know it. The object of my knowledge is an internal state. God's self-knowledge can be said to be analogous to finite self-knowledge. 

Nietzsche, Truth, Power, and the Left

According to Victor Davis Hanson, the following is one of the tenets of contemporary leftism as represented by the Democrat Party:

Truth is not universal, but individualized. [Christine Blasey] Ford’s “truth” is as valid as the “Truth,” given that competing narratives are adjudicated only by access to power. Ford is a victim, therefore her truth trumps “their” truth based on evidence and testimony.

To understand this adequately you need to understand Nietzsche. Old Fritz has posthumously insinuated himself into our politics, and Democrat politicians, though they are too dumb to know it, are Nietzscheans.  So take a gander at Nietzsche, Truth, and Power.  It concludes thusly:

What Nietzsche wants to say is that there is no truth 'in itself'; there are only various interpretations from the varying perspectives of power-hungry individuals and groups, interpretations that serve to enhance the power of these individuals and groups. At bottom, the world is a vast constellation of ever-changing power-centers vying with each other for dominance, and what a particular power-center calls 'true' are merely those interpretations that enhance and preserve its power.  For the essence of the world is not reason or order, but blind will, will to power.

But if that is the way it is, then there is an absolute truth after all. Nietzsche never extricates himself from this contradiction. And where he fails, his followers do not succeed.  We are now, as a culture, living and dying in the shadow of this contradiction, reaping the consequences of the death of God and the death of truth.

I now add that I count it as one of Nietzsche's great insights to have perceived the link between God and truth, and that between the death of God and the death of truth. For Nietzsche, no God, no truth; no God; ergo, no truth.  For me, no God, no truth;  truth; ergo, God. Nietzsche's  modus ponens is my modus tollens.

I believe it is in De Veritate where the doctor angelicus says something along these lines: If, per impossibile, God did not exist, then truth would not exist either.

Now God cannot die, nor truth. But the disappearance among the educated elites of the God-belief brings with it the disappearance among the elites of the belief in truth which, by its very nature is universal and absolute. 

It is important to appreciate that the statement that truth is perspectival only masquerades as a statement of the nature of truth; in reality it is a denial that there is truth.  Truth simply cannot be perspectival; to call it such is therefore to deny its existence.  The attempt at identification collapses into elimination. Perspectivism is an eliminativist theory of truth.

So all is lost if we allow talk of 'Ford's truth' and 'Kavanaugh's truth' where each has his own truth in the measure that he is 'empowered' by it.

That way the abyss.

Their Cocks Make Them Sure

There are those who are cocksure that there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem judgment, no ultimate meaning to human existence, and that we are all just material bits of a material world. Now it may be so for all we  know. This is not an area in which proofs or disproofs are possible. 

But for those who are cocksure about it, I suspect that it is their cocks that make them sure.

Crudity aside, their natural concupiscence blinds them to the spiritual reality of God and the soul, dulls their consciences, and ties them to a passing world that their lust convinces them is ultimately real.

This is why I do not trust the atheisms of Russell and Sartre. They were sensualists and worldlings who failed to satisfy the prerequisites of spiritual insight. Pride and lust dimmed their eyes.

God, Simplicity, Freedom, and Two Senses of 'Contingency'

Fr. Aidan Kimel wants me to comment on his recent series of posts about divine simplicity, freedom, and the contingency of creation. In the third of his entries, he provides the following quotation:

As Matthew Levering puts it: “God could be God without creatures, and so his willing of creatures cannot have the absolute necessity that his willing of himself has” (Engaging the Doctrine of Creation, p. 103). That is the fact of the case, as it were. Granted the making of the world by a simple, immutable, and eternal Deity, we have no choice but to accept the apparent aporia:

Indeed, there is no ‘moment’ in God’s eternity in which he does not will all that he wills; there is no God ‘prior’ to God’s will to create. In this sense, God can be said to will necessarily everything that he wills. The potency or possibility stems not from God’s will, but from the contingent nature of the finite things willed; they do not and cannot determine the divine will. (Levering, p. 103)

The problem is to understand how the following  propositions can all be true:

1) There is no absolute necessity that God create: "God could be God without creatures."

2) God created (better: ongoingly creates and sustains) the universe we inhabit.

3) God, being simple or metaphysically incomposite, is devoid of potency-act composition and unexercised powers: God is pure act.

4) The universe we inhabit, and indeed any universe God creates, is modally contingent: it does not exist of metaphysical necessity.

The problem, in brief, is to understand how a universe that is the product of a divine act of willing that is necessary (given God's simplicity) can yet be contingent. Levering's answer does not help at all. In fact, he seems to be confusing two senses of contingency when he says that "the contingent nature of the finite things willed" does not determine the divine will.  That's right, it doesn't and for the simple reason that the finite things willed depend entirely on the divine will and are in this sense contingent upon the divine will; but this is not the relevant sense of 'contingency.' Let me explain.

In the modal sense, a contingent item is one that is possible to be and possible not to be, as Aquinas says somewhere. In 'possible worlds' jargon, x is modally contingent =_df x exists in some but not all metaphysically (broadly logically) possible worlds.  

In the dependency sense, x is dependently contingent =_df there is  some y such that (i) x is not identical to y; (ii) necessarily, if x exists, then y exists; (iii) y is in some sense the ground or source of x's existence. 

It is important to see that an item can be (a) modally contingent without being dependently contingent, and (b) dependently contingent without being modally contingent.

Ad (a). If the universe is a brute fact, as Russell (in effect) stated in his famous BBC debate with Copleston, then the universe exists, exists modally contingently, but has no cause or explanation of its existence.  If the universe is a brute fact, then of course it does not depend on God for its existence.  Its existence is a factum brutum without cause or explanation. It is contingent, but not contingent upon anything. It is modally but not dependently contingent.

Ad (b). Not all necessary beings are "created equal."  That is because one of them, God, is not created at all. The others are creatures, at least for Aquinas. (A creature is anything that is created by God.) The number 7 serves as an example, as does the proposition that 7 is prime.  That proposition is a necessary being. (If it weren't it could not be necessarily true.)  But it has its necessity "from another," namely, from God, whereas God has his necessity "from himself."  The doctor angelicus himself makes this distinction.

These so-called 'abstract objects' -- not the best terminology but the going terminology -- are creatures, and, insofar forth, dependent on God, and therefore contingent upon God, and therefore (by my above definition), dependently contingent. They are dependently contingent but modally necessary. 

Now let's apply the distinction to our problem. The problem, again, is this: How can the product of a necessary creating be contingent? One might think to solve the problem as follows.  God necessarily creates, but what he creates is nonetheless contingent because  what he creates is wholly dependent on God for its existence at every moment. But this is no solution because it involves an equivocation on 'contingent.'

The problem is: How can the product of a modally necessary creating be modally contingent? 

Think of it this way. (I assume that the reader is en rapport with 'possible worlds' talk.) If God is simple, and he creates U in one world, then he creates U in all worlds. But then U exists in every world, in which case U is necessary. But U is contingent, hence not necessary. Therefore, either God does not exist or God is not simple, or U is not a divine creation.  

Fr. Kimel wanted me to comment on his posts. One comment is that they are top-heavy with quotations.  Quote less, argue and analyze more.

Now I would like the good padre to tell me whether he agrees with me.  I think he just might inasmuch as he speaks of an aporia.  We have good reasons to believe that God is simple, and we have good reasons to believe that the created universe is modally contingent. Suppose both propositions are true. Then they must be logically consistent.  But we cannot understand how they could both be true. So what do we do?

One way out is to jettison the divine simplicity. (But then we end having to say that God is a being among beings and neither I nor Kimel will countenance that, and for good reasons.) A second way is by denying that the created universe is contingent, either by maintaining that it is necessary or by denying that there is any real modality, that all (non-deontic) modality is epistemic.  The second way leads to a load of difficulties.

A third way is by arguing that there is no inconsistency. But I have argued that there is both above and in other recent posts dealing with the dreaded 'modal collapse.'  And it seems to me that my argumentation is cogent.

Well suppose it is. And suppose that the relevant propositions are all true. There is yet another way out. We can go mysterian.  The problem is a genuine aporia. It is insoluble by us. God is simple; he freely created our universe; it is modally contingent.  How is this possible? The answer is beyond our ken. It is a mystery.

Now if Fr. Kimel is maintaining something like this, then we agree.

Corrigendum (9/25). A reader points out, correctly, that in the above graphic the gentleman on the left is not Fr. Copleston, but A. J. Ayer.

Divine Simplicity, Modal Collapse, and a Powers Theory of Modality

This is the third in a series on whether the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) entails modal collapse (MC). #1 is here and #2 here. Most of us hold that not everything possible is actual, and that not everything actual is necessary. I will assume that most of us are right. A doctrine entails modal collapse if it entails that, for every x, x is possible iff x is actual iff x is necessary.  

In God's Powers and Modality: A Response to Mullins on Modal Collapse (no bibliographical information provided, date, or author's name, but presumably by someone named 'Lenow') we read:

Our problem is not with the notion that God has created the world; it is with the fear that we will be forced by divine simplicity to say that God has created the world necessarily. 

[. . .]

I believe that the recent work of Barbara Vetter offers an account of potentiality and modal grounding capable not only of resisting modal collapse, but of doing so along the traditional Thomist lines Mullins rejects as incoherent. Vetter presents us with the theoretical resources needed to affirm divine simplicity without forcing a breakdown in our modal language, and thus allows us to avoid being cornered into asserting that God creates necessarily or that all creaturely events occur necessarily.

We shall see.

What Vetter calls the “standard conception” of a dispositionalist account of modality runs roughly as follows. Objects possess dispositional properties: a vase, for example, possesses the property of fragility; an electron possesses the property of repelling other particles with a negative charge; I have the ability to learn how to play the violin. (3)

I am well-disposed (pun intended) toward this sort of view. 

I am seated now, but I might not have been. I might have been standing now or in some other bodily posture. What makes this true? What is the ontological ground of the (real, non-epistemic) possibility of my not being seated now?  As useful as possible worlds talk is for rendering modal concepts and relations graphic, it is of no use for the answering of this question if we take an abstractist line on possible worlds as sanity requires that we do. On the other hand, David Lewis' concretist approach is, if I may be blunt, just crazy. 

The best answer invokes my presently unexercised ability to adopt a physical posture other than that of the seated posture, to stand up for example.  Ultimately, the ground of real modality is in the powers, abilities, capacities, dispositions, potencies, tendencies, and the like of the things the modal statements are about.

The typical wine glass is fragile: it is disposed to shatter if struck with moderate force. Fragility is a stock example of a dispositional property.  But fragility comes in degrees.  Think of a spectrum of breakability from the most easily breakable items all the way up to items that are breakable only with great difficulty such as rocks and metal bolts and steel beams. We do not apply 'fragile' to things like steel beams, but they too are breakable. 

Yet Vetter is most interested in the property that characterizes all the objects on
this spectrum: the possibility of being broken, the manifestation that she takes to
individuate this property. This modal property that extends from one end of this spectrum
to the other she calls a potentiality—in this case, the potentiality of a thing’s being
breakable.(4)

Now let's see if Vetter's power theory of modality solves our problem.  The problem can be put as follows without possible worlds jargon. There is a tension between divine simplicity and divine freedom.  

1) If God is simple, then he is pure act (actus purus) and thus devoid of unexercised powers and unrealized potentials. He is, from all eternity, all that he can be.  Given that God is simple, there can be no real distinction in him between potency and act. This is necessarily true  because God exists of metaphysical necessity and is essentially pure act.

2) As it is, God freely created our universe from nothing; but he might have created a  different universe, or no universe at all. Had he created no universe, then his power to create would have gone unexercised.  In that case he would not be pure act: he would harbor an unactualized potential.

The dyad is logically inconsistent. What I called a tension looks to be a contradiction. If (1) is true, then it is impossible that God have unexercised powers such as the never-exercised power to create.  But if (2) is true, it is possible that God have unexercised powers. So if God is both simple and (libertarianly) free, then we get a logical contradiction.

If we hold to (1), then we must reject (2). The upshot is modal collapse. For given that God willed our universe with a will that is automatically efficacious, both the willing and the willed are necessary. And so the existence of Socrates is necessary and the same goes for his being  married to Xanthippe and his being the teacher of Plato, etc.

To what work can we put Vetter’s theory in forestalling the threat of modal collapse? Consider God’s will, using Vetter’s language, as an intrinsic maximal first-order potentiality to will God’s own infinite goodness as the ultimate and perfect end of the divine nature. Let me take each descriptor in turn. First, this potentiality is intrinsic, because it does not depend upon any external circumstances for its manifestation and is not possessed jointly. Second, it is maximal, because God cannot fail to manifest this potentiality. As Vetter argued, something is maximally breakable if it is not possible for it not to break—it will break under any circumstances. Similarly, the willing of God’s goodness as end is a potentiality that can be possessed in degrees: rocks do not seem to possess it at all, demons possess it only to the extent that their wills remain a corrupted version of their original unvitiated creation, humans possess it to a greater extent in that the possibility of redemption remains open to them, angels possess it in the highest created degree as a gift from God; yet God “possesses” this potentiality in qualitatively different fashion, possessing it maximally because it is identical with God’s nature—God cannot fail to will God’s goodness. Third, this is a potentiality simpliciter—that is, a first order iterated potentiality, rather than as a potentiality to acquire some other potentiality; the doctrine of divine simplicity removes the possibility of any such composition. Finally, to avoid the threat of modal collapse, this must be a multi-track potentiality, multiply realizable (as are most potentialities); in effect, this means that God is capable of willing God’s goodness in multiple ways, but that no one instance of such willing is any more or any fuller a manifestation of this potentiality than any other such willing. Defenders of divine simplicity typically hold that God’s life is itself full and infinite goodness, lacking nothing.[ . . .] Consequently, had God willed to exist without creation, God would not have willed a lesser goodness than God has willed in creating the world; similarly, had God willed the creation of a different world, God would not have willed a lesser (or greater) goodness than God has willed in creating this one. Each of these acts of willing would have produced different effects, to be sure—but in each case, the potentiality manifested is the same, the potentiality to will God’s infinite goodness as ultimate end.

What is the argument here? It is none too clear.  But one key notion is that of a maximal potentiality. A maximal potentiality is one that cannot fail to be manifested.  An example of a non-maximal potentiality is that of a wine glass to break into discrete pieces when dropped onto a hard surface or struck. That disposition need never be manifested. (Imagine that the glass ceases to exist by being melted down, or maybe God simply annihilates it.) Or think of all the abilities that people have but never develop.

Breakability looks to be a candidate for the office of maximal potentiality. It cannot fail to be manifested. "As Vetter argued, something is maximally breakable if it is not possible for it not to break—it will break under any circumstances." This is a strange formulation. It is true that some things are such that they must eventually break down. But this is not to say that they will break under any circumstances. But let that pass.

Consider now God's power to will his own goodness. We may grant that this is a power that cannot fail to be exercised or manifested. Since it is not possible for God not to exercise this power, it is no threat at all to the divine simplicity. There is no real distinction between God and his willing his own goodness. God's willing his own goodness just is his power to will his own goodness.  This power is plainly compatible with God's being pure act.

But how does this avoid modal collapse?  

Finally, to avoid the threat of modal collapse, this must be a multi-track potentiality, multiply realizable (as are most potentialities); in effect, this means that God is capable of willing God’s goodness in multiple ways, but that no one instance of such willing is any more or any fuller a manifestation of this potentiality than any other such willing.

The second key idea, then, is that of the multiple realizability of liabilities and potentialities and such. I am not now actually sick, but I am liable to get sick, or I have the potential to get sick, in many different ways.  I can get sick from bad food, or polluted water, or a virus can attack me, etc.  My liability to get sick is multiply realizable. The same goes for active powers and abilities.  My power to express myself is realizable in different ways, in writing, in speech, in different languages, using sign language etc. 

God's power to will his own goodness is realizable by creating our universe, some other universe, or no universe at all. So it too is multiply realizable. Fine, but how does this solve the problem? 

Suppose I will to buy whisky. I go to the liquor story and say, "I want whisky!"  The proprietor says, "Very well, sir, would you like bourbon or scotch or rye or Irish?"  If I insist that I just want whisky, I will learn that whisky is not to be had. One cannot buy or drink whisky without buying or drinking either bourbon or scotch or rye or Irish or . . . .

It is the same with God. He cannot will his own goodness 'in general'; he must will it in some specific way, by willing to create this universe or that universe or no universe.

But then we are back to our problem. For whatever he does, whether he creates or not, is necessary and we have modal collapse.  The modal collapse that we all agree is in the simple God spreads to everything else.

As far as I can see, Lenow's response to Mullins fails.

UPDATE (9/4). Joe Lenow writes,

Hi Bill—I am Spartacus. Thanks for engaging the paper. 

 

This is a version of the argument from a conference presentation a couple of years ago; hadn't realized that the conference papers were public view. I've got a much more carefully worked-out version of the argument presently under review; please find it attached. I'd appreciate any thoughts you have on it!

 

Best wishes,

 

Joe Lenow

Resident Assistant Professor of Theology

Creighton University

I will have to study Professor Lenow's latest version. It cannot be reproduced or discussed here, of course, since it is under review.

From the Mailbag: Modality and Perfection

Daniel C. writes,

A quick remark on your recent possible worlds post. 

You only mention it in  passing but one thing possible worlds talk surely does throw into sharp relief is the issue of the modality of modal statements i.e. if a certain proposition is possibly true is it necessarily possibly true or merely possibly possibly true? To the best of my knowledge most pre-modern metaphysicians simply presumed the truth of the Brouwer axiom (Leibniz and Scotus) or of S5. Far be it from me to challenge these venerable principles but as far as I know very few thought of disputing them before the question could be phrased in terms of accessibility relations between worlds.

Your general point is important and correct: possible worlds talk allows for the rigorous formulation of questions about the modal status of modal statements, which in turn hinges on accessibility relations between worlds.  But I hope you are not suggesting that the Brouwer axiom is the same as the characteristic S5 axiom. I am not a logician, but my understanding is that they are not.

 

Brouwer Axiom: p --> Nec Poss p. That is to say, if a proposition is true, then it is necessarily possibly true.

 

Characteristic S5 axiom: Poss p --> Nec Poss p. That is, if a proposition is possibly true, then it is necessarily possibly true.

Also: On the contrary, I say that God's status as a necessary being follows from His perfection rather than simplicity (although the former may entail the latter as Anselm certainly thought).

I take it that a perfect being is one that possesses all perfections. The Plantingian gloss on 'perfection' seems good enough: a perfection is a great-making property. So a perfect being is one that possesses all great-making properties and the maximal degree of those great-making properties that admit of degrees. 

Now A. Plantinga famously denies the divine simplicity while upholding the divine perfection. I take it we all agree that God is a necessary being.  That than which no greater can be conceived cannot be a mere contingent being. But what makes a necessary being greater than a contingent being? On a possible worlds approach, it will presumably be the fact that a being that exists in all worlds is greater than one that exists in some but not all worlds. It is a matter of quantity of worlds.

But then I will press the question: what makes it the case that God exists in all possible worlds?  What grounds this fact? My answer: the divine simplicity, which implies the identity in God of essence and existence.  Divine perfection is not enough. For God could be perfect in Plantinga's sense while harboring a real internal difference between essence and existence. But this leaves open the question as to why God is necessary.

If you say that God is necessary because he exists in all worlds, then you give a bad answer. It is true that God exists necessarily iff all world-propositions say he exists. But it doesn't follow that God is necessary because all world-propositions say he exists. It is the other way around: he exists according to every world-proposition because he is necessary!

Mundane example. Am I seated because the proposition BV is seated is true? No. The proposition is true because I am seated. The truth-maker is what makes the truth true; it is 'bass ackwards' to say that truths make states of affairs exist.  

Same with God. It is the divine necessity that makes it true that God exists in (i.e., according to) every possible world, and not the other way around. But to be necessary in the unique way that God is necessary, a way he does not share with garden-variety necessary beings such as the number 9 and the set of prime numbers, God must be metaphysically simple.

Is God Beyond All Being?

This is a redacted re-posting of an entry that first appeared in these pages on 8 May 2015. It answers a question Fr. Kimel poses in the comments to Divine Simplicity and Modal Collapse.

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

Fr. Aidan Kimel writes,

Reading through Vallicella’s article, I kept asking myself, Would Mascall agree with the proposition “existence exists”? I find the proposition odd. [. . .] What about the assertion of Pseudo-Dionysius that God is beyond all Being? Aquinas would certainly agree that the Creator transcends created being; but I suspect that Dionysius is trying to say something more.  I wonder what the Maverick Philosopher thinks about “beyond Being” language  (I can pretty much guess what Tuggy thinks about it).

I plan to discuss the strange question whether existence exists in a separate post.  Here I will say something about whether God is beyond all Being.

Well, what would it be for God to be beyond Being?  What could that mean?

First we must distinguish between Being and beings, esse and ens, das Sein und das Seiende.  It is absolutely essential to observe this distinction and to mark it linguistically by a proper choice of terms. If we do so, then we see right away that Kimel's question is ambiguous.  Is he asking whether God is beyond all beings or beyond all Being?  Big difference! (Heidegger calls it the Ontological Difference.)

I think what Kimel means to ask is whether God is beyond all beings.  A being is anything at all that is or exists, of whatever category, and of whatever nature.  Being, on the other hand, majuscule Being, is that which makes beings be. Now one of the vexing questions here is whether Being itself is, whether that which makes beings be is itself a being or else the paradigmatic being.  Heidegger and Pseudo-Dionysius say No!  Aquinas says Yes!  (That is, Aquinas says that Being is the paradigmatic being from which every other being has its being.)  Dale Tuggy would presumably dismiss the question by maintaining that there just is no Being, there are only beings; hence the question lapses, resting as it does (according to Tuggy) on a false presupposition.  

Now distinguish three positions.  (A) God is a being among beings. (B) God is not a being among beings, but self-subsistent Being itself.  (C) God is neither a being among beings, nor self-subsistent Being itself, but beyond every being.  Tuggy, Aquinas, Pseudo-Dionysius.  (You're in good company, Dale!)

I have already explained what it means to say that God is a being among beings.  But to repeat myself, it it to say that the very same general-metaphysical scheme, the very same scheme of metaphysica generalis,  that applies to creatures applies also to God.  This implies, among other things, that God and Socrates (Socrates standing in for any creature whatsoever) exist in the same way.  It implies that there are not two modes of Being, one pertaining to God alone, the other pertaining to Socrates. If, on the other hand, one maintains that God is not a being among beings, then one is maintaining, among other things, that God and Socrates exist in different ways.  The difference can be put by saying that God is (identically) his existence and existence itself while this is surely not the case for Socrates: he has existence but he doesn't have it by being it.  In God there is no real distinction, no distinctio realis, between essence and existence while in Socrates there is a real distinction between essence and existence.

Equivalently, if God is a being among beings, then God is one member of a totality of beings each of which exists in the very same sense of 'exists' and has properties in the very same sense of 'has properties.'  But if God is not a being among beings, then there is no such totality of beings each of which exists in the very same sense of 'exists' and has properties in the very same sense of 'has properties' such that both God and Socrates are members of it.

How does (B) differ from (C)?  On (B) God is (identical to) Being but also is.  God is not a being, but the being that is identical to Being itself.  (C) is a more radical view.  It is the view that God is so radically transcendent of creatures that he is not!  This is exactly what pseudo-Dionysius says in The Divine Names (Complete Works, p. 98) It is the view that God is other than every being.  But if God is other than every being, then God in no way is.  

This can also be explained in terms of univocity, analogicity, and equivocity.  For Tuggy & Co. 'exists' in 'God exists' and 'Socrates exists' has exactly the same sense.  The predicate is univocal across these two occurrences.  For Aquinas, the predicate is being used analogously, which implies that while God and Socrates both are, they are in different ways or modes. But for Pseudo-Dionysius the predicate is equivocal.

Fr. Kimel suspects that Pseudo-Dionysius is saying more than that God transcends every creature.  The suspicion is correct.  Whereas Aquinas is saying that God is, but transcends every creature in respect of his very mode of Being, Pseudo-Dionysius is saying more , namely that God is so transcendent that he is not.  

My question for Fr. Kimel: Do you side with the doctor angelicus, or do you go all the way into the night of negative theology with Pseudo-Dionysus? 

The Multiverse Idea: Does it Help with the Question 'Why Something Rather than Nothing?'

If 'universe' refers to the totality of what exists in space-time, then there can be only one universe. Call that the ontological use of 'universe.' On that use, which accords with etymology and common sense, there cannot be multiple universes or parallel universes. But if 'universe' refers to the totality of what we can 'see' (empirically detect) with our best telescopes in all directions out to around 14 billion light-years -- call that the epistemological use of the term -- then it is a reasonable speculation that there are many such universes. 

After all, it is epistemically possible -- possible for all we know -- that there are other self-contained spatio-temporal regions beyond our current ken.  Let's run with the speculation.

These many universes would then make up the one actual universe (in the ontological sense) which we can now call the multiverse: one universe with many spatio-temporally disconnected regions each with its origin in its own big bang.

Some journalists succumb to the conflation of the MODAL notion of possible worlds with the COSMOLOGICAL notion of a multiplicity of universes. These need to be kept distinct.

If there are many physical universes, as some cosmologists speculate, they are parts of total physical reality, albeit spatio-temporally disconnected parts thereof, and therefore parts of the total way things are, using 'are' tenselessly.  But the total way things are is just what we mean by the actual world.  To invoke the Tractarian Wittgenstein, "The [actual] world is all that is the case." "The [actual] world is the totality of facts not of things."  The actual world is the total (maximal) way things are, and merely possible worlds are total ways things could have been.  Therefore, if there are many physical universes, they are all  'located within' the actual world in the sense that they are all parts of what is actually the case. 

In other words, each universe in the multiverse is a huge chunk of actuality; universes other than ours are not merely possible.  They are actually out there beyond our ken. So it is a mistake to refer to the universes in the multiverse as possible worlds.  This should be obvious from the fact that there is a possible world in which there are no universes beyond the one we 'see.'  Obviously, this possible world is not identical to a physical universe beyond the reach of our telescopes.

Now suppose we want an answer to the question, Why is there anything physical at all, and not rather nothing physical at all? Does the multiverse idea help with this question?

Not in the least. 

First of all, we can ask the same question about the multiverse that we asked about the plain old universe prior to the popularity of the multiverse theory.  We can ask: why does the multiverse exist? After all, it is just as modally contingent as 'our' universe, the one we 'see.' Even if there are infinitely many universes in the multiverse, there might not have been any. What then explains  the existence of the multiverse?

If I want to know why 'our' universe exists, it does no good to say that it is one of the universes in the multiverse, for that simply invites the question: why does the multiverse exist?

You might say, "The multiverse contains every possible universe, and therefore, necessarily, it contains ours." This is not a good answer because the ensemble of universes -- the multiverse -- might not have existence at all.  Surely there is a possible world in which nothing physical exists.

Let us also not forget that the multiplicity of universes comes into existence. So there is need of a multiverse-generating  mechanism which will have to operate on some pre-given stuff according to laws of nature. Even if different universes have different laws, there is need for meta-laws to explain how the base-level laws come to be. According to Paul Davies, as paraphrased and quoted here, 

. . .to get a multiverse, you need a universe-generating mechanism, "something that's going to make all those Big Bangs go bang. You're going to need some laws of physics. All theories of the multiverse assume quantum physics to provide the element of spontaneity, to make the bangs happen. They assume pre-existing space and time. They assume the normal notion of causality, a whole host of pre-existing conditions." Davies said there are about "10 different basic assumptions" of physical laws that are required "to get the multiverse theory to work."

Davies then made his deep point. "OK, where did those laws all come from? What about those meta-laws that generate all the universes in the first place? Where did they come from? Then what about the laws or meta-laws that impose diverse local laws upon each individual universe? How do they work? What is the distribution mechanism?" Davies argues that the only thing the multiverse theory does is shift the problem of existence up from the level of one universe to the level of multiple universes. "But you haven't explained it," Davies asserted.

Davies dismissed the idea that "any universe you like is out there somewhere. I think such an idea is just ridiculous and it explains nothing. Having all possible universes is not an explanation, because by invoking everything, you explain nothing."

Here Davies may be going too far. If you want to explain why the physical constants are so finely tuned as to allow the emergence of life and consciousness and the minds of physicists, then it does seem to be a good explanation to say that there are all the possible universes there might have been; it would then be no surprise that in our universe physics exists. It had to exist in at least one! One would not then need God to do the fine-tuning or to actualize a life-supporting universe. But this still leaves unexplained why there is the ensemble of universes in the first place.  

Davies' critique of the multiverse goes deeper. To explain the universe, he rejects "outside explanations," he said.

"I suppose, for me, the main problem [with a multiverse] is that what we're trying to do is explain why the universe is as it is by appealing to something outside of it," Davies told me. "In this case, an infinite number of multiple universes outside of our universe is used as the explanation for our universe." 

Then Davies makes his damning comparison. "To me, multiverse explanations are no better than traditional religion, which appeals to an unseen, unexplained God — a God that is outside of the universe — to explain the universe. In fact, I think both explanations — multiverse and God — are pretty much equivalent." To Davies, this equivalence is not a compliment. 

I don't see the damnation nor the equivalency. The appeal to God is the appeal to a necessary being about which it make no sense to ask: But why does it exist?  The crucial difference between appealing to God and appealing to the multiverse is that the former is a necessary being while the second is not.

I grant, though, that the idea of a necessary being is a very difficult one! 

Woody Allen, Meet Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange: Meaning and Desire

To repeat some of what I wrote earlier,

According to Woody Allen, we all know that human existence is meaningless and that it ends, utterly and meaninglessly, with death. We all know this, he thinks, but we hide the horrible reality from ourselves with all sorts of evasions and distractions.  Worldly people, for example, imagine that they will live forever and lose themselves in the pursuit of pleasure, money, name and fame. Religious people console themselves with fairy tales about God and the soul and post-mortem bliss.  Leftists, in the grip of utopian fantasies, having smoked the opium of the intellectuals, sacrifice their lives on the altar of activism. And not only their lives: Communists in the 20th century broke 100 millon 'eggs' in pursuit of an elusive 'omelet.' Ordinary folk live for their children and grandchildren as if procreation has redemptive power.

Pushing the line of thought further, I note that Allen is deeply bothered, indeed obsessed in his neurotic  Manhattanite Jewish intellectual sort of way, by the apparent meaninglessness of human existence.  Why does the apparent lack of an ultimate meaning bother him?  It bothers him because a deep desire for ultimate sense, for point and purpose, is going unsatisfied.  He wants  redemptive Meaning, but Meaning is absent.  (Note that what is phenomenologically absent may or may not be nonexistent.)

But a deep and natural desire for a meaning that is absent may be   evidence of a sort for the possibility of the desire's satisfaction.  Why do sensitive souls feel the lack of point and purpose?  The felt lack and unsatisfied desire is at least a fact and wants an explanation.  What explains the felt lack, the phenomenological absence of a redemptive Meaning that could make all this misery and ignorance and evil bearable?  What explains the fact that Allen is bothered by the apparent meaninglessness of human existence?

You could say that nothing explains it; it is just a brute fact that some of us crave meaning. Less drastically, and more plausibly, one could say that the craving for meaning has an explanation in terms of efficient causes, but not one that requires the reality of its intentional object.  Let me explain.

Craving is an intentional state: it is an object-directed state of mind.  One cannot just crave, desire, want, long for, etc.  One craves, desires, wants, longs for something.  This something is the intentional object.  Every intentional state takes an object; but it doesn't follow that every such state takes an object that exists.  If a woman wants a man, it does not follow that there exists a man such that she wants him.  She wants Mr. Right, but no one among us satisfies the requisite criteria.   So while she wants a man, there is no man she wants.  Therefore, the deep desire for Meaning does not guarantee the existence of Meaning. We cannot validily argue, via the intentionality of desiderative consciousness, to the extramental reality of the the object desired.

Nevertheless, if is it a natural (as opposed to an artificially induced) desire we are talking about, then  perhaps there is a way to infer the existence of the object desired from the fact of the desiring, that is, from the existence of the desiderative state, not from the content or realitas objectiva of the desiderative state.  The inferential move from realitas objectiva to realitas formalis is invalid; but the move from the existence of the state to the reality of its object may be valid.

Suppose I want (to drink) water.  The natural desire for water is rooted in a natural need.  I don't just desire it, the way I might desire (to smoke) a cigar; I need it.  Now it doesn't follow from the existence of my need that there is water hereabouts or water in sufficient quantity to keep me alive, but the need for water is very good evidence for the existence of water somewhere. (Suppose all the water in the universe ceases to exist, but I exist for a little longer.  My need for water would still be good evidence for the existence of water at some time.) If there never had been any water, then no critter could desire or need it; indeed no critter could exist at all.

The need for water 'proves' the existence of water.  Perhaps the desire/need for Meaning 'proves' the existence of Meaning.  The felt lack of meaning -- its phenomenological absence -- is grounded in the natural (not artificial) need for Meaning, and this need would not exist if it were not for the extramental reality of a source of Meaning with which we  were once in contact, or the traces of which are buried deep within us.  And this all men call God. 

Mr. Allen, meet Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange:

Since natural desire can never be in vain, and since all men naturally desire beatitude, there must exist an objective being that is infinitely perfect, a being that man can possess, love, and enjoy. (Beatitude, tr. Cummins, Ex Fontibus 2012, p. 79)

This argument, studied in the context of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, is more impressive than it may seem.  If  nothing else it ought to undermine the belief of Allen and his like that it is known by all of us today that human existence is ultimately meaningless.

Here is a video with relevant excerpts from G-L's Life Everlasting and the Immensity of the Soul.

God, Pronouns, and Anthropomorphism

I was delighted to hear from an old student of mine from 35 years ago. He writes,

In your writings, you often refer to God in pronouns bearing gender.  Does such language result in God’s anthropomorphism?

I would reformulate the question as follows:

In your writings, whenever you refer to God using a third-person pronoun, you use the masculine pronoun 'he.' Does this use of 'he' promote an anthropomorphic conception of God?

I would say No. It is true that the pronoun I use in reference to God is 'he.' And because I write almost always as a philosopher, I do not write upper-case 'He' in reference to God except at the beginning of a sentence. This is not a sign of disrespect; it arises from a desire not to mix the strictly philosophical with the pious.

Does a use of 'he' in reference to God imply that God is of the male sex? Not at all. Otherwise one would have to say that a use of 'she' in reference to a ships and airplanes implies that these things  are of the female sex.  But ships and airplances, being inanimate material objects, are of no sex.*

God too is of no sex, but for a different reason: he is wholly immaterial.  (I will suggest a qualification below.) Still, we need to be able to refer to God. Assuming we don't want to keep repeating 'God,' we need pronouns. 'It' is out. 'He or she' makes no sense. Why not then use 'he'? Note that any argument against 'he' would also work against 'she.' 

As a conservative, I of course oppose silly and unnecessary innovations; so I use 'he' to refer to God.  For a conservative, there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional practices: the burden of proof is on the innovator.

One must distinguish between grammatical gender, which is a property of words, and sex which is a property of some referents of words.  As already noted, if one uses 'she' to refer to something it doesn't follow that the thing referred to is female. That shows that grammatical gender and sex come apart.  One ought to bear in mind that gender is first and foremost a grammatical category. Sex is a biological category.  I have no objection to talk of gender roles as (in part) socio-cultural constructs, which involves an extended use of 'gender.' 

That grammatical gender and sex come apart  is also the case with nouns. In English, the nouns 'table' and 'boat' have no gender, but in Italian (and other languages such as German) their counterparts do: tavolo is masculine while barca is feminine. This is reflected in the difference between the appropriate definite articles, il and la, where in English we have the gender-neutral 'the.'   But while tavolo and barca are masculine and feminine respectively, their referents are sexless.  So again grammatical gender and sex come apart.

So when I use 'he' in reference to God there is no implication that God is of the male sex.

It is also worth pointing out that an anthropomorphic conception of God is not a concept of God as a male, but as a human being. So if I use 'he' in reference to God am I implying that God is  a human being?  No. But he is more like a human being than he is like any other type of animal or any inanimate object. So 'he' is an appropriate pronoun to use.

But why 'he' rather than 'she'? 

Recall that when his disciples asked Jesus how they should pray, he taught them the "Our Father." Was Jesus suggesting that we are all the biological offspring of God? Of course not. Still, he used 'Father' or the equivalent in Aramaic.

Is there a hint of sexism here? If there is, it would seem to be mitigated By God's having a mother, the Virgin Mary: Sancte Maria, mater dei . . . . Mary is not merely the mother of Jesus, but the mother of God:

According to St. John (1:15) Jesus is the Word made flesh, the Word Who assumed human nature in the womb of Mary. As Mary was truly the mother of Jesus, and as Jesus was truly God from the first moment of His conception, Mary is truly the mother of God. (here)

This divine motherhood does not elevate Mary above God, for she remains a creature, even after her Assumption into heaven. She is not worshipped or adored (latria) but she is due a special sort of veneration called hyperdulia, dulia being the name for the veneration appropriate to saints.  Or at least that is the Catholic doctrine.

Is God Immaterial?

There is another curious theological wrinkle. Christ is supposed to have ascended into heaven body and soul. The Ascension was therefore not a process of de-materialization or disembodiment. Christ returned to the Godhead body and soul. The Ascension did not undo the Incarnation: returning to the Godhead, Christ did not become disincarnate. After the Word (Logos, Second Person of the Trinity) became flesh and dwelt among us it remained flesh even after it ceased to dwell among us.

This seems to imply that after the Ascension  matter was imported into the Godhead, perhaps not the gross matter of the sublunary plane, but matter nonetheless.  But not only that: the matter imported into the Godhead, even if appropriately transfigured or spiritualized, was the matter of a male animal. For Jesus was male.  

So while we tend to think of God and the Persons of the Trinity as wholly immaterial and sexless when we prescind from the Incarnation and Ascension, God after these events includes a material and indeed sexually male element. This is a further reason to think that 'he' is an appropriate pronoun to apply to God.

But what if God is Being Itself?

According to Aquinas, Deus est ipsum esse subsistens. God is self-subsistent Being. He is not an ens among entia but esse itself. He is Being itself in its primary instance.

Is it appropriate to refer to such a metaphysical absolute as 'he'? Not entirely, but 'he' is better than any other pronoun I can think of.  Of course, one could coin a pronoun for use only in reference to God, say 'de.' But as I said, conservatives are chary of innovations, especially when they are unnecessary. Just use 'he' but realize what you are doing. 

___________________

* Is 'he' ever used to refer to what is not a male animal? I should think so.  Suppose a man gives his primary male characteristic the name 'Max.' He may go on to say: 'Old Max ain't what he used to be.'  This use of 'he' refers to the penis of a human being which is a proper part of a male human being. But I should think that no proper part of a human being is a human being. 

If God Created the World, Who Created the Creator? A Good Koan?

Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. 5, p. 183, entry of 25 December 1964:

St Maximus [the Confessor] says that he who "has sanctified his senses by looking with purity at all things" becomes like God. This is, I think, what the Zen masters tried to do. A letter from John Wu spoke of running into [D. T.] Suzuki at Honolulu last summer. They talked of my meeting with him in New York. Suzuki was going to ask me a question but didn't. "If God created the world, who created the Creator?' A good koan.

Nice try, Tom, but surely that old chestnut, sophomoric as it is, is not a good koan. Or at least it is not a good koan for one who is intellectually sophisticated. And this for the reason that it is easily 'solved.'  A koan is an intellectual knot that cannot be untied by discursive means, by remaining on the plane of ordinary mind; a koan is a sort of mental bind or cramp the resolute wrangling with which is supposed, on an auspicious occasion, to precipitate a break-through to non-dual awareness.

God is the Absolute. The Absolute, by its very nature, is not possibly such as to be relativized by anything external to it. In particular, qua absolute, God does not depend on anything else for his existence or nature or modal status.  It follows straightaway that he cannot have a cause. If to create is to cause to exist, then God quite obviously cannot have a creator.  Since God cannot have a creator, one cannot sensibly ask: Who or what created God? Or at least one cannot ask this question in expectation of an answer that cites some entity other than God.

Classically, God is said to be causa sui.  This is is to be read privatively, not positively.  Or so I maintain. It means that God is not caused by another. It does not mean that God causes himself to exist. Nothing can cause itself to exist. If something could cause itself to exist, then it would have already (logically speaking) to exist in order to bring itself into existence. Which is absurd.

Equivalently, God is ens necessarium. In my book, that means that he is THE, not A, necessary being.  He enjoys a unique mode of necessity unlike 'ordinary' necessary beings such as the set of natural numbers. Arguably, there is a nondenumerable infinity of necessary beings; but there is only one necessary being that has its necessity from itself (i.e., not from another) and this all men call God.

Accordingly, to ask who created God is to presuppose that God is a contingent being.  Given that the presupposition is false, the question can be dismissed as predicated on misunderstanding.  This is why the question is not a good koan. It is easily solved or dissolved on the discursive plane. Nothing counts as a koan unless it is insoluble on the discursive plane.

"But if God doesn't need a cause, why does the world need a cause?" The short answer is: because the world is contingent. We must regress from the world to God, but then that at God we must stop.  No vicious infinite regress.

A Much Better Christian Koan: The Riddle of Divine Simplicity

I have just demonstrated to my own satisfaction that the old chestnut from John Stuart Mill is no good as a koan. But suppose we dig deeper. It is not wrong to unpack the divine necessity by saying that God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds. But it is superficial.  For this is true of all necessary beings. What is the ground of the divine necessity?

I would argue that the divine necessity rests on the divine simplicity according to which there are no real distinctions in God. See my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for details. This implies, among other things, that God does not instantiate his attributes; rather he is (identical to) them. God has omniscience by being omniscience, for example. As St Augustine says, "God is what he has."  The same goes for the other attributes as well. If you think about it you will soon realize that the logical upshot is that every attribute is identical to every other one.

God's being the Absolute implies that he is unique, but uniquely so. God is uniquely unique: he is not one of a kind, but so radically One that he transcends the distinction between kind and instance. God is not the unique instance of the divine kind: he is (identically!) his kind.  That is why I say that God is uniquely unique: he is unique in his mode of uniqueness. 

But surely, or rather arguably, this makes no discursive sense which is why very astute philosophical theologians such as A. Plantinga reject the simplicity doctrine. although he doesn't put it quite like that. (See his animadversions in Does God Have a Nature?) Almost all evangelical Christians follow him (or at least agree with him) on this. (Dolezal is an exception.) How could anything be identical to its attributes? To put it negatively, how could anything be such that there is no distinction between it and its attributes? 

We are beginning to bite into a real koan: a problem that arises and its formulable on the discursive place, but is insoluble on the discursive plane.

On the one hand, God as absolute must be ontologically simple. No God worth his salt could be a being among beings, pace my evangelical friends such as Dale Tuggy. On the other hand, we cannot understand how anything could be ontologically simple.  There are no good solutions to this within the discursive framework. There are solutions, of course, and dogmatic heads will plump for this one or that one all the while contradicting each other. But I claim that there is no ultimately satisfactory solution to the problem.  Note that this is also a problem for the divine necessity since it rest on the divine simplicity.

My suggestion, then, is that here we have a candidate for a good koan within Christian metaphysics.

The Ultimate Christian Koan

This, I have long held, is the crucified God-Man. It is arguably absurd (logically contradictory) as Kiekegaard held that God become a man while remaining God.  It is the height of absurdity that this God-Man, the most perfect of all men, should die the worst death the brutal Romans could devise, crucifixion.

If to accept this is to accept the crucifixion of the intellect, then here we have the ultimate Christian koan. 

The Leftist-Islamist Axis of Evil and Divine Sovereignty

James S. writes,

Your point about the twin threats coming from the Left and from Islam reminded me of an email I received from Fr. Schall some months ago when I shared a draft of the Syllabus with him.  He made the same point, as both the Left and Islam are voluntarist systems where will is exalted over reason.  He called the parallel between them the main issue of our time.  Many of the points in the Syllabus were paraphrases of an earlier Schall essay on voluntarism. 

Fr. Schall is right. But the issue may be a bit more complicated than the good father appreciates. As I say in Pope Benedict's Regensburg Speech and Muslim Insensitivity:

Benedict is not denigrating Islam or its prophet but setting forth a theological problem, one that arises within Christianity itself, namely the problem of the tension between the intellectualism of Augustine and Aquinas and the voluntarism of Duns Scotus. "Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?" Roughly, does the transcendence of God -- which both Christianity and Islam affirm though in different ways -- imply that God is beyond our categories, including that of rationality?

Perhaps a better way to put the question would be in terms of divine sovereignty. Is God absolutely sovereign and thus unlimited in knowledge and power? Or are there logical and non-logical limits on his knowledge and power?  For example, is a law of logic such as Non-Contradiction within God's power? In his 2012 Creation and the Sovereignty of God, Hugh McCann argues that God is not only sovereign over the natural order, but also over the moral order, the conceptual/abstract order, and the divine nature itself. That seems to give the palm to voluntarism, does it not?

I consider McCann's view to be highly problematic as I argue in my long discussion article, "Hugh McCann on the Implications of Divine Sovereignty," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 1 (Winter 2014), pp. 149-161. 

Related: Muslim Atrocities Against Christians and their Churches 

Can Belief in Man Substitute for Belief in God?

A slightly redacted re-post from 26 September 2009. 

.................................... 

The fact and extent of natural and moral evil make belief in a providential power difficult. But they also make belief in man and human progress difficult. There is the opium of religion, but also the opium of the intellectuals, the opium of future-oriented utopian naturalisms such as Marxism. Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?

And isn’t it more difficult to believe in man than in God? We know man and his wretchedness and that nothing much can be expected of him, but we don’t know God and his powers.  Man is  impotent to ameliorate his condition in any fundamental way.

We have had centuries to experience this truth, have we not? Advances in science and technology have brought undeniable benefits but also unprecedented dangers. The proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, their possession by rogue states and their terrorist surrogates, bodes ill for the future of humanity. As I write these lines, the prime minister of a Middle Eastern state calls brazenly and repeatedly for the destruction of another Middle Eastern state while the state of which he is the prime minister prepares the nuclear weapons to carry out the unspeakably evil deed.  Meanwhile the rest of the world is complacent and appeasing.  We know our ilk and what he is capable of, and the bases of rational optimism seem slim indeed.

There is also the scarcely insignificant point that there is no such thing as Man, there are only individual men, men  at war with one another and with themselves.  We are divided, divisive, and duplicitous creatures.  But God is one. You say God does not exist? That may be so.

But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard,  is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.

There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.

Cosmic Meaninglessness and the Theistic Gambit

This is the third in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). This entry covers pp. 35-45 of Chapter 3.

The good news from Chapter 2 was that there is meaning at the terrestrial level. The bad news from Chapter 3 is that there is none at the cosmic level, or from the cosmic perspective. Cosmic meaning is meaning from the perspective of the universe.  Of course, the universe does not literally have a perspective or point of view: it is not an experiencing subject. But one can usefully speak as if it did. (35)

I object, though, to Benatar's calling the cosmic view the view sub specie aeternitatis.  From the point of view of eternity, the cosmos, as unimaginably vast as it is, is not ultimate or absolute. For one thing, it is modally contingent: it exists but might not have. It is also finite in the past direction as per current cosmology.  It is certainly not eternal or necessary. Given that the cosmos is not eternal, its point of view cannot be the point of view of eternity. The cosmos is not causa sui or the ground of its own being. Its point of view is not the widest of all wide-angle points of view. From the point of view of eternity, there might not have been any cosmos, any physical universe, at all. Thus there is a wider point of view than the cosmic point of view, namely God's point of view. It alone is the view sub specie aeternitatis.   The point of view of eternity is the eternal God's point of view and he alone views things under the aspect of eternity.  

It is obvious that one can speak of God's point of view without assuming the existence of God: it is the point of view that God would have if God existed.  We can avoid all reference to God by saying that the view sub specie aeternitatis is the ultimate point of view, the view of Being or of truth. The truth is the ultimate way things are. I tap into the ultimate point of view when I think the thought: there might have been no physical universe at all. I am able to do this despite my being a measly bit of the world's fauna.

In any case, Benatar's claim is that human life has no meaning when viewed cosmically, from what he thinks is the ultimate point of view, that of the universe, but which I claim is not the ultimate point of view.

Why does human life (both at the individual and species levels) have no cosmic meaning? His main point is that we humans "have no significant impact on the broader universe." (36) He means the universe beyond the Earth. "Nothing we do on earth has any effect beyond it." (36) This is true, apart from some minor counterexamples, but trivial. Or so it seems to me. Why should the lack of causal impact of the earthlings on the wider universe argue the ultimate meaninglessness of their existence?  It strikes me as very strange to tie existential meaning to causal impact. 

Suppose earthlings were everywhere in the universe and could have an impact everywhere. That would not show that their lives have meaning. The earthlings might ask: "We are everywhere but why are we anywhere? Why do we exist?" Our lack of cosmic impact cannot show that our lives lack meaning if maximal causal impact is consistent with meaninglessness.   It is worth noting that size does not matter either. If we human animals were many times larger than we are and had the causal impact of elephants or dinosaurs, how would that augment our meaning?  Suppose I am the biggest, baddest hombre in the entire universe. Suppose I am omni-located within it, able to affect every part of it.  I could still ask: But why do I exist?  For what purpose?

Benatar points out that we won't exist for long and that this is true for the species and for individuals. (36) True, but again how is this relevant to the question of existential meaning?  Suppose humans always existed. This would not add one cubit of meaning to the meaning of the individual or the species. So the fact that we do not last long either as individuals or as a species does not argue lack of meaning. Duration matters as little as size.

One of the puzzles here is why Benatar should tie existential meaning to causal impact. But he also speaks of our lack of purpose.

The Theistic Gambit

For Benatar, "The evolution of life, including human life, is a product of blind forces and serves no apparent purpose." (36) To which a theist might respond with a Baltimore catechism type of answer, "God made us to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next."  Our ultimate purpose, on this scheme, is to share in the divine life and achieve final felicity. 

Benatar gives a strange argument against the coherence of the theistic scheme:

Even in the best-case scenario, it is hard to understand why God would create a being in order to prepare it for an afterlife given that no afterlife would be needed or desired if the being had not been created in the first place. [. . .] The sort of meaning that the afterlife provides cannot explain why God would have created us at all. (39)

While it is true that only beings who already exist could want or need an afterlife, it is a non sequitur to conclude that it is no explanation of why we exist in the first place to say that we exist in order to share in the divine life.  God wants to share his super-effulgent being, consciousness, and bliss and so he creates free beings with the capacity to participate in the divine life.  If that is true, then it explains why we exist in the first place.

Of course, we don't know that it is true, and we cannot prove that God exists or that we have a destiny beyond this brief animal life. But the naturalist is in the same boat: he cannot prove that God does not exist and that human life is a product of blind forces. Benatar movingly describes animal pain and the horror of nature red in tooth and claw (42-44). Considerations such as these should put paid to any pollyanish conceit that life is beautiful.  And yet they are not compelling or conclusive. While it is reasonable to be a naturalist, it is also reasonable to be a theist.  Neither side can refute the other, and one's subjective certainty counts for nothing.

One of the things I like about Benatar is that he draws the pessimistic consequences of naturalism.  Most naturalists compartmentalize: in their studies and offices they are naturalists who reject God and the soul and ultimate meaning; at home, however, with their families and bourgeois diversions they are happy and optimistic.  But given their theoretical views, what entitles them to their happiness and optimism? Nothing that I can see. They are living in a state of self-deception.

Benatar lives his atheism: he has existentially appropriated his theoretical convictions and drawn the consequences. (Not that atheism by itself entails anti-natalism.) But is it practically possible to live as an atheist?  W. L. Craig thinks not. See his The Absurdity of Life Without God. Benatar, needless to say, is not impressed by Craig's reasoning. (44).

Speaking for myself, if I KNEW that I was nothing but a complex physical system slated for anihilation in a few years, I would be sorely tempted to walk out into the deseert and blow my brains out, my devotion to my wife being the only thing holding me back.  Why hang around for sickness, old age and a death out of one's control? And it is not because my life isn't good; it is very good. I have achieved the happiness that eluded me in younger years. But if one appreciates what naturalism entails, then all the mundane goodness and middle-sized happiness in the world is ultimately meaningless.

It is my reasonable belief that I am not a mere complex physical system slated for annihilation that adds zest and ultimate purpose to my life.  I keep on because there is reason to hope, not only within this life, but beyond it as well.  

Related articles

Maverick Philosopher: Is Life a Predicament?

David Benatar, <i>The Human Predicament</i>, Chapter 2, Meaning

Maverick Philosopher: David Benatar, The Human Predicament, Introduction

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Distinctions and Assumptions (2017)

Creation, Existence, and Extreme Metaphysical Realism

 This entry is a continuation of the ruminations in The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation.

Recapitulation

Divine creation ex nihilo is a spiritual/mental 'process' whereby an object of the divine consciousness is posited as non-object, as more than a merely intentional object, and thus as a transcendent reality. By 'transcendent reality' I mean an item that is not immanent to consciousness, whether human or divine,  but exists on its own. And by 'consciousness' in this discussion I mean intentional (object-directed) consciousness. 

(I deny that every instance of consciousness is a consciousness of something: there are, I claim in agreement with Searle, non-intentional conscious states, states not directed upon an object.   See Searle on Non-Intentional Mental States and the  good ComBox discussion to which Harry Binswanger and David Gordon contribute. Objectivist Binswanger disagrees with Searle and me. And even if every consciousness is a consciousness of something, it does not follow that every consciousness is a conscious of something that exists.)

So God creates independent reals. What he creates exists on its own, independently, an sich. At the same time, however, what he creates he sustains moment-by-moment. At every moment of its existence the creature depends on the Creator for the whole of its Being, for its existence, its nature, as well as for such  transcendental determinations as its intelligibility and goodness.  Ens et verum convertuntur is grounded in God's being the ultimate source of all truth,and ens et bonum convertuntur is grounded in God's being The Good itself and thus the ultimate source of all goodness in creatures.

Creatures, then, depend for their whole Being on the Creator according to the classical conception of divine creation that involves both an original bringing-into-existence (creatio originans) and an ongoing conservation of what has been brought into existence (creatio continuans). And yet creatures exist on their own, independently. As I emphasized in the earlier post, finite persons are the prime examples of this independence. And yet how is such independence possible given divine conservation? It appears to issue in a contradiction: the creature exists both independently and dependently.

Does it follow that a creator God does not exist? (It would take a separate post to show that a God worth his salt cannot be conceived along deistic lines.)

Rand to the Rescue?

Thinking about this I recalled Ayn Rand and her notorious axiom, "Existence exists." On a charitable reading it is not the tautology that whatever exists, exists, but expresses an extreme metaphysical realism: whatever exists exists independently of all consciousness, including divine consciousness.  But then it follows that God cannot exist, and our problem dissolves. 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)

Therefore

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

Is there any good reason not to accept the above argument?  

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Maverick Philosopher: The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation

Unbegriff

This passage from Schopenhauer illustrates one of my favorite German words, Unbegriff, for which we have no simple equivalent in standard English. 

"An impersonal God is no God at all, but only a word misused, an unconcept, a contradictio in adjecto, a philosophy professor's shibboleth, a word with which he tries to weasel his way after having had to give up the thing." (my trans.)

I read Schopenhauer as attacking those who want to have it both ways at once: they want to continue talking about God after having abandoned the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So they speak of an impersonal God, a construction in which the adjective 'contradicts' the noun. (The Ostrich of London may perhaps fruitfully reflect on the deliberate use-mention fudge in my last sentence.)

The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation

God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind.  The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality.  God creates potential rebels.  He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus.  He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway.  Lucifer as the father of all perversity.

God creates and sustains, moment by moment, other minds, like unto his own, made in his image, who are yet radically other in their inwardness and freedom.  He creates subjects who exist in their own right and not merely as objects of divine thought. How is this conceivable?  

We are not mere objects for the divine subject, but subjects in our own right.  How can we understand creation ex nihilo, together with moment by moment conservation, of a genuine subject, a genuine mind with intellect and free will and autonomy and the power of self-determination even unto rebellion?

This is a mystery of divine creation.  It is is above my pay grade.  And yours too.

God can do it but we can't.  We can't even understand how God could do it.  A double infirmity. An infirmity that sires a doubt: Perhaps it can't be done, even by God. Perhaps the whole notion is incoherent and God does not exist. Perhaps it is not a mystery but an impossibility.  Perhaps Christian creation is an Unbegriff.

Joseph Ratzinger accurately explains the Christian metaphysical position, and in so doing approaches what I am calling the ultimate paradox of divine creation, but he fails to confront, let alone solve, the problem:

The Christian belief in God is not completely identical with either of these two solutions [materialism and idealism]. To be sure, it, too, will say, being is being-thought. Matter itself points beyond itself to thinking as the earlier and more original factor. But in opposition to idealism, which makes all being into moments of an all-embracing consciousness, the Christian belief in God will say: Being is being-thought -- yet not in such a way that it remains only thought and that the appearance of independence proves to be mere appearance to anyone who looks more closely.

On the contrary, Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence. In this it goes beyond any mere idealism. While the latter , as we have just established, explains everything real as the content of a single consciousness, in the Christian view what supports it all is a creative freedom that sets what has been thought in the freedom of its own being, so that, on the one hand, it is the being-thought of a consciousness and yet, on the other hand, is true being itself. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, German original 1968, latest English version Ignatius Press, 2004, p. 157)

And that is where the good Cardinal (later Pope Benedict the XVI) leaves it. He then glides off onto another topic. Not satisfactory!  What's the solution to the paradox?

If you tell me that God creates other minds, and then somehow releases them into ontological independence, my reply will be that makes hash of the doctrine of creatio continuans, moment-by-moment conservation.  The Christian God is no mere cosmic starter-upper of what exists; his creating is ongoing. In fact, if the universe always existed, then all creation would be creatio continuans, and there would be no starting-up at all.

On Christian metaphysics, "The world is objective mind . . . ." (155) This is what makes it intelligible. This intelligibility has its source in subjective mind: "Credo in Deum expresses the conviction that objective mind is the oproduct of subjective mind . . . ." (Ibid.)  So what I call onto-theological idealism gets the nod. You don't understand classical theism unless you understand it to be a form of idealism. But creatures, and in particular other minds, exist on their own, in themselves, and their Being cannot be reduced to their Being-for-God.  Therein lies the difficulty.

Is divine creation a mystery or an impossibility?

Related: Realism, Idealism, and Classical Theism 

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How Can a Simple God Know Contingent Truths?

Chris M writes, 

If God simply is his act of existence, and if his existence is necessary, how can God have knowledge of contingent truths? What I mean is that it is possible for God to do other than he does (say not create, or create different things.) If he did differently - say, if the world didn't exist - his knowledge would be different in content. Yet God is supposed to be a single act of being, purely simple and identical across all possible worlds. God's essence just is his act of necessary existence, knowing and willing. It seems God's knowledge of contingents thus is an accident in him. But God can have no accidents. How then can he, as actus purus and necessary existence, have properties (such as knowing x or willing x) which he may not have had ?

That  is a clear statement of the difficulty.  As I see it, the problem is essentially one of solving the following aporetic tetrad:

1) God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2) God knows some contingent truths.

3) Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4) God exists necessarily.

The classical theist, Aquinas for example, is surely committed to (1), (2), and (4). The third limb of the tetrad, however, is extremely plausible. And yet the four propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.

 

For example, it is contingently true that Socrates published nothing and contingently true that God knows this truth.  He presumably knows it in virtue of being in some internal mental state such as a belief state or some state analogous to it. But this state, while contingent, is intrinsic to God.  The divine simplicity, however, requires that there be nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.  Since God exists necessarily, as per (4), the belief state exists necessarily, which contradicts the fact that it must exist contingently.

 

I discuss this problem here, and in nearby posts in the Divine Simplicity category. 

God, Necessity, and Truth

Jacques e-mails:

You think that if God exists, He exists necessarily, and if He does not exist, He does not exist necessarily.  But suppose that God does not exist.  We agree, I think, that we can't rationally rule out the possibility?  For instance, you've often argued that our evidence doesn't settle the question of theism versus atheism.  But then, supposing that God doesn't exist, and supposing that He might not exist in the actual world (for all we know), isn't it evident that regardless there are lots of truths?  For instance, even if God does not exist, it would still be true that He does not exist, or that He does not exist necessarily.  I'm not sure that you'd agree with this, but if you would, shouldn't you also agree that if God does not exist, there are some truths?

That is not quite what I said. I accept what I call Anselm's Insight: if God exists, then he exists necessarily; if he does not exist, then necessarily he does not exist.  What does not exist necessarily might be contingent; what necessarily does not exist is impossible. I know you understand the idea; it is just that your formulation suffers from scope ambiguity. Anselm's Insight, then, is that God is either necessary or impossible. He is necessarily non-contingent. (The non-contingent embraces both the necessary and the impossible.) In the patois of possible worlds, either he exists in every, or in no, world. If you wonder why I don't capitalize 'he,' it is because I hold that while piety belongs in religion, it does not belong in philosophy of religion.

Agreed, we cannot rationally rule out the possibility of God's nonexistence. I would say we cannot rationally rule it out or rule it in. "But then, supposing that God doesn't exist, and supposing that He might not exist in the actual world (for all we know), isn't it evident that regardless there are lots of truths? "

I would rewrite your sentence as follows:

It is epistemically possible that God not exist. Nevertheless, it is evident that there are truths.

I agree with the rewrite.  It is evident that there are truths, but for all we can claim to know, God does not exist. But this leaves open how God and truth are related.  Here are five different views:

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 truth ultimately depends on the existence of God. There is truth because there is God.

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

5) There is God, but no truth.

Ad (1). This I would guess is the view of  many. There are truths, and among these truths is the truth that God does not exist.  This, I take it, would be the standard atheist view.

Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers.  Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths, but would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either. 

Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept.  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 God and truths are necessary, but the Augustinian -- to give him a name -- holds that God is the ultimate  'source' of all truth and thus all intelligibility, or, if you prefer, the ultimate 'ground' of all truth and intelligibility.

Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view.  

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

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

Each of the three has difficulties and none of the three can be proven.

I will mention quickly a problem for the admittedly plausible first 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. 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. 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.  But a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exists except for a mind.  If there is no God, every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind.

Here are some ways an atheist might 'solve' the problem:

a) Deny that there are necessary truths.

b) Deny that truth is any sense a property of propositions.

c) Deny Anti-Meinong.

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

But each of these denials involves problems of its own which I would have no trouble unpacking.

 What say you, Jacques?

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God, Truth, Reality Denial: A Response to Some Questions

It is always a pleasure to get a challenge from a professional philosopher who appreciates the intricacies of the issues and knows the moves.  The comments below address things I say here. My responses are in blue.

A few questions about this idea:

"As Nietzsche saw, if there is no God, then there is no truth.  And if no truth, then no intrinsic intelligibility. Next stop: perspectivism, Nietzsche's central epistemological doctrine."

1) Suppose that if p, nothing is true.  Does that make sense?  Surely whatever p is, if p then at least p itself is true.

BV: What you are saying is something I agree with, namely, that it is incoherent, indeed self-refuting, to maintain that nothing is true.  For either it is true that nothing is true or it is is false. (Assume Bivalence to keep it simple.)  If true, then false. If false, then false. Therefore, necessarily false. 

Now could it be true that if there is no God, then there is no truth? Easily. A true conditional can have a false antecedent and a false consequent. We have just seen that the consequent is false, indeed, necessarily false. That the antecedent is true is not excluded by anything we know. So assume it true. Where's the problem?

2) A related problem:  How do we understand or reason about anything in some scenario where, supposedly, nothing is true?  How do we understand things like 'if ... then ...' except in terms of what is or would be true given the truth of the antecedent?

BV: Well, can't we reason about incoherent ideas, among them necessarily false propositions?  Consider the following subjunctive conditional

A.  If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then there would be no truth.

Both antecedent and consequent are necessarily false; yet the conditional is (arguably) true! The antecedent is necessarily false because God is a necessary being.  I accept Anselm's Insight (but not his Ontological Argument). The Insight is that nothing divine can have contingent modal status: God is either necessary or impossible. 

Surely we can argue, correctly, to and from necessarily false propositions such as Nothing is true.  Of course, when we engage in such reasoning we are presupposing truth. If that is your point, then I agree with it. 

3) If there's a 'total way things are', and that's 'the truth' or the truth about the actual world, then surely there has to be a truth about a world where God does not exist--there's a total way things are, including various states of affairs but not including the existence of God.  How are we to understand the idea that, if the actual world is Godless, there's some total way things actually are, and yet no truth?  What more is needed for there to be truth, or the whole truth, in a Godless world?  Or do you mean to say that in a Godless world there is no 'total way things are'?  But then how would that even count as a world, or a scenario?  (Is there even a less-than-total-way-things-are, at least?  And in that wouldn't there have to be some particular truths, if not total truth or Truth?)

BV: I accept Anselm's Insight: If God exists, then he exists in every metaphysically possible world; if God does not exist, then he exists in no metaphysically possible world.  I also accept Nietzsche's Insight that if there is no God, then there is no truth. no total, non-relative, non-perspectival  way things are independent of the vagaries of human belief and desire. So I disagree when you say "surely there has to be a truth about a world where God does not exist." 

4) In some of your other entries on this topic you are suggesting that truth might be a property of God's thoughts, or maybe just the totality of His thoughts.  (Is that right?)  But intuitively there is a distinction between the truth of a thought and the thought itself, so that even though God's thoughts are necessarily true, those same thoughts could have been false thoughts (though not while being His thoughts, of course).  Suppose this is right.  Then, in a Godless world, there is some totality of thoughts--merely possible thoughts, maybe, for lack of a suitable Thinker--that fully characterizes that world.  Why can't we say that there's truth in that world simply in virtue of the totality of thoughts that would have been true if God had existed there?  

BV: Let's distinguish some questions:

a) Is there truth? Is there a total way things are that is not dependent upon the vagaries of human (or rather ectypal-intellect) belief and desire? Answer: Yes, truth is absolute, hence not a matter of perspective.

b) What is the truth? This is the question about which propositions are true. Obviously, not all are. It presupposes an affirmative answer to the first question. Only if there are some true propositions or other can one proceed to ask which particular propositions are true.

c) What is truth? This question concerns the property -- in a broad sense of 'property' -- the possession of which by a truth-bearer makes it true.  If a truth is a true proposition, then all true propositions have something in common, their being true; what is this property?

Frege uses Gedanke, thought, to refer to what we refer to by 'proposition.'  Let's adopt this usage. A proposition, then, is a thought, not an act of thinking, but the accusative or direct object of an act of thinking. Frege held that thoughts have a self-subsistent Platonic status. That's dubious and can be argued against. Arguably, there is no thought without a thinker. Thoughts/propositions, then, have a merely intentional status. But some thoughts are necessarily true. It follows that there is need for a necessary mind to accommodate these thoughts. I lay this out rigorously in a separate post to which I have already linked. 

I don't say that the truth is the totality of God's thoughts since some of these thoughts are not true. Socrates dies by stangulation, for example, is false, but possibly true. And yet it is a perfectly good thought. God has that proposition/thought before his mind but he doesn't affirm it. This is equivalent to saying that God did not create a world in which Socrates dies by strangulation.

Of course, I distinguish between the thought and its truth value, and I don't think every thought is necessarily true. Why do you say that God's thoughts are necessarily true?   Of course, God, being omniscient,  knows everything that it is possible to know.  But only some of what he knows is necessarily true. He can't know false propositions, but he can think them by merely entertaining them (with or without hospitality).

Think of a possible world as a maximal proposition, a proposition that entails every proposition with which it is logically consistent. God has an infinity of these maximal propositions/thoughts before his mind. He entertains them all, but affirms only one. After all, there can be only one actual world.  I of course reject David Lewis' theory of actuality.

If God does not exist, then God is impossible. (Anselm's Insight again.) He then exists in no world including the actual world.  But then there are no truth-bearers in the actual world, and hence no truths.  But if no truths, then no total way things are.

You speak of "merely possible thoughts." But that's ambiguous.  Do you mean a thought/proposition that actually exists but is merely possibly true?  Or do you mean that the proposition itself is merely possibly existent?  I am assuming that there are all the propositions there might have been; that some are true and some false; and that among the false propositions some are necessarily false (impossibly true) and that some are possibly true.  

5) If there is no truth, how could that rationally support perspectivism?  Maybe I just don't understand perspectivism, but suppose this is the idea that any old thought can be true (perspectivally, at least) just in case it seems true to someone, or enhances their feeling of power, or whatever...  In a truth-less world, THAT is also not true:  it's just not true that any old thought can be true or be rationally considered true under circumstances x, y or z.  Perspectivism isn't true, or isn't any truer than anti-perspectivism.  In other words I don't understand why granting that God is necessary for truth justifies Nietzsche in affirming some other, merely perspectival concept of truth; he should just be a nihilist about truth, I guess.

BV: I insist that truth, by its very nature, is absolute and thus cannot be perspectival. I reject perspectivism. So there is no question of rationally supporting perspectivism. It is an irrational and self-defeating doctrine. 

You say, "I don't understand why granting that God is necessary for truth justifies Nietzsche in affirming some other, merely perspectival concept of truth; he should just be a nihilist about truth, I guess."

I am not claiming that Nietzsche rationally justifies his perspectivism. But one can understand how he came to the doctrine.  He has a genuine insight: no God, no truth. (By the way, for me 'insight' is a noun of success in the way that 'know' is a verb of success: there are no false insights any more than there is false knowledge.) There are no truths, but there are interpretations and perspectives from different power-centers; these interpretations and perspectives are either life-enhancing and 'empowering' or not.  This can be (misleadingly) put by saying that truth is perspectival. 

Is perspectivism identitarian or eliminativist? Is Nietzsche saying that there is truth but it is perspectival in nature, or is he saying that there is no truth?  I would say that the identity collapses into an elimination. Truth cannot be perspectival; so to claim that it is amounts to claiming that there is no truth. So I agree that one could say that he is a nihilist about truth.

What makes this all so relevant is that cultural Marxism is heir to Nietzsche.  To understand the Left you have to understand Nietzsche and his two main claims, one ontological the other epistemological. "The world is the will to power and nothing besides." Truth is perspectival. This sires the leftist view that everything is power relations and social construction. Reality and its intrinsic order are denied. 

Are Any Substantive Philosophical Propositions Epistemically Certain?

I asked our Czech colleague Lukáš Novák for examples of philosophical propositions that he considers to be not only true, but knowable with certainty. He provided this list:

a) God exists.
b) There are substances.
c) There are some necessary truths, even some de re necessary truths.
d) Human cognition is capable of truth and certainty.
e) There are no contradictions in reality.

In this entry I will discuss only the first example.

Is it certain that God exists?

My position is that it is true that God exists, but not certain that God exists. How can a proposition be true but not certain? Logically prior question: What is certainty?

We first distinguish  epistemic from psychological certainty. If S is epistemically certain that p, then S knows that p. But if S is psychologically certain that p, i.e., thoroughly convinced that p, it does not follow that S knows that p.  For people are convinced of falsehoods, and one cannot know a falsehood, let alone be epistemically certain of it. There was the case not long ago of the benighted soul who was convinced that Hillary Clinton was running a child-abuse ring out of a pizzeria. He was certain of it! This shows that we must distinguish subjective or psychological certainty from objective or epistemic certainty.  Epistemic certainty alone concerns us.

But what is epistemic certainty?

On one approach, a proposition is epistemically certain just in case it is indubitable.   By indubitability I don't mean a psychological inability to doubt, but a property of some propositions. For example, the proposition I exist has the property of being such that no subject S who entertains and understands this proposition can doubt its truth.  There are any number of propositions about one's state of mind at a given time that are epistemically certain to the subject of these states.  Examples: I seem to see a tree (but not: I see a tree); I seem to recall first meeting her on a April 2014 (but not: I recall meeting her on 1 April 2014).

The facts about one's mental life are a rich source or epistemic certainties. But there is also a class of truths of reason that are epistemically certain, for example propositions true ex vi terminorum, e.g., every effect has a cause, and formal-logical truths such as a proposition and its negation cannot both be true, etc.

God exists, by contrast with the members of the two classes just mentioned, is not indubitable.  One can easily doubt it. Atheists go so far as to deny it. So if epistemic certainty is defined in terms of indubitability, then God exists is not epistemically certain.

We also note that God exists  does not record a fact about anyone's mental life, nor is it true ex vi terminorum. So it belongs to neither class of the epistemically certain.

At this point one might respond that God exists, while not indubitable by itself, is indubitable as the conclusion of an argument. Well, suppose you give a valid deductive argument for the proposition that God exists. The conclusion will be epistemically certain only if each premise of the argument is epistemically certain.  But is there such an argument?

I don't believe there is. I am, however, quite willing to change my view if someone could present one. Indeed I would positively love to be refuted on this point. After all, I have already announced that I believe it is true that God exists; if it is absolutely epistemically certain, then all the better!  To get a feel for the problem, consider the Kalam argument

1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause;

2) The universe began to exist; Therefore:

3) The universe has a cause. (And this all men call God.)

This is a valid deductive argument and the premises are highly plausible. What's more, they may well be true. But they are not both certain.  Is (1) epistemically certain? No. Its negation, Something begins to exist without a cause, is not a formal-logical contradiction. Nor is (1) an analytic or conceptual truth.

If an argument is presented for (1), then I will show that the premises of that argument are not, all of them, certain.

Patrick Toner tells me that the "modal ontological argument [is] compelling," and that we can "know God and the soul with certainty through the use of natural human reason." (emphasis added) In Is the Modal Ontological Argument Compelling?, however, I return a negative answer by showing that the crucial possibility premise is not certain.

An impressive argument, no doubt, but not rationally compelling or such as to deliver epistemically certain insight into the truth of its conclusion.  The same goes for another powerful argument, From the Laws of Logic to the Existence of God.

What say you, Professor Novak?  Can you show me that I am wrong? I would be much obliged if you could.

Related articles

Disagreement in Philosophy: Notes on Jiří Fuchs

Physicalist Christology? Notes on Merricks

 "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us . . . . (John 1:14)

Physicalism is popular among philosophers these days. So it is no surprise that Christian philosophers are drawn to it as well, including those who subscribe to the central teaching that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the Logos or Word, became man in Jesus of Nazareth. 

Incarnation, whatever else it involves, involves embodiment. How is God the Son during his earthly tenure related to his body? Trenton Merricks assumes that "God the Son . . . is related to his body just as you and I are related to our respective bodies." ("The Word Made Flesh," 261.) One might have thought that the embodiment relation that connects the Son to his body would have to be very special  or even sui generis; after all, the Logos is sui generis and so it might naturally be thought that any relation into which it enters would inherit that sui-generic quality. Merricks, however, assumes that divine and human cases of embodiment are cases of one and the same embodiment relation. The divine case is just a special case. Call this the Same Relation assumption. (My tag, not Merrick's).

And what relation is that?  On physicalism, "You have a body if and only if you are identical with that body." (294)  So the Same Relation assumption in conjunction with physicalism yields the conclusion that the Incarnate Son is "identical with the body of Jesus." (294) So in becoming human, the Incarnate Son "became [numerically identical to] a body."

This does not make much sense to me and I find it more worthy of rejection than of acceptance.  My problems begin with physicalism itself.

Physicalism

The physicalism in question is not physicalism about everything, but about beings like us, minded organisms, if you will, which include all human animals. (If there are so-called 'abstract objects,' then they are not physical, and presumably before the Incarnation, no member of the Trinity was a physical object.)  Physicalism is "the claim that each of us is a physical object." (294). Now there is a sense in which it is obviously true that each of us is a physical object, and that is the sense in which it is obviously true that each of us has a body; but one quits the precincts of the obvious and the datanic  and enters the space of philosophical theories when one claims that one has a body by being numerically identical to a body, or that the the 'is' in 'Each of us is a body' is the 'is' of identity.

For this is not obvious. How do you know that the 'is' in 'Each of us is a body' is not the 'is' of composition? (Compare: 'Each of these statues is bronze.' That can't mean that each of the statues is identical to bronze or to a particular hunk of bronze. A statue and its proximate matter have different persistence conditions both temporally and modally.)  

But we are discussing  physicalism. I am not asserting that we are composite beings. And I am not espousing substance dualism either. I am merely considering whether physicalism about minded organisms is an intellectually satisfying position. Does it command our assent? Merricks thinks it is "pretty obvious" that physicalism is true. (294) I don't find it obvious at all. And as Hilary Putnam once quipped, "It ain't obvious what's obvious."

On physicalism, I am identical to the living, breathing, sweating animal wearing my clothes. Of course, I am not always sweating and not always wearing clothes; but if I cease breathing, I cease living and, on physicalism, I cease existing. (The physicalist claim is obviously not that I am identical to a corpse or an inanimate hunk of  human-looking flesh and bones wearing my clothes.)  To underscore the obvious, when I speak of identity I mean numerical identity. 

One might find physicalism hard to swallow.  If x and y are identical, then whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa.  That is necessarily so, and part of what we mean by 'identity.'  But it is true of me that I am a "spectator of all time and existence," (Plato, Republic VI) whereas that is not true of my body.  So I can't be identical to my living body. To take a less grand example, I am now thinking of a girl I used to know. So is my body thinking of her?  The whole body? Some proper part or parts  thereof?  Presumably not the plantar fascia in my left foot.  My brain? The whole brain? Some proper part thereof?  How could any portion of the brain be the subject of acts of thinking?  That doesn't make much sense. In fact, it does not make any sense. A bit of highly organized meat is the subject of acts of thinking in the broad Cartesian sense of 'thinking' which includes memorial acts? Are you serious?

Could it nonetheless be true that what thinks in me when I think is the brain or some portion thereof? I suppose, but then it would be a mystery how it is true.  The Incarnation may be a mystery, but if we are trying to understand the Incarnation physicalistically, then physicalism had better not be a mystery too. I'll come back to this point below.

The obviousness of physicalism seems to have vanished.  Merrick does not give the following invalid argument, but what he says on 294 ff. suggests it:

Whatever has physical properties is a physical object.
Socrates has physical properties. 
Therefore
Socrates is a physical object.
Therefore
Physicalism is true.

The argument is rendered invalid by an equivocation on 'is' as between the 'is' of class inclusion and the 'is' of identity.

What I have said does not refute physicalism, but it does show that physicalism is far from obvious and does not follow from such Moorean facts as that you and I have shape and mass.  So I balk at Merricks' "it seems pretty obvious that physicalism . . . is true." (294) It is not obvious at all.

Property Dualism

Can these objections be met by adopting property dualism?  Merricks' view is that while we are physical objects having physical properties, we are not merely physical objects: we also have mental properties. "Persons also have mental properties." (295) Furthermore, these mental properties are irreducible to physical properties. Merricks tells us that his physicalism is consistent with property dualism. (295) I think it is fair to say that with respect to beings like us, he is a substance monist and a property dualist.

The idea is that the human individual having properties is a physical object, but that it has two different mutually irreducible sorts of properties, physical properties and mental properties.  But how does this help? I am thinking about a girl I used to know, a particular girl, Darci. Is there a mental property corresponding to the predicate '___ is thinking about Darci'? I doubt it, for reasons I don't have ther space to go into, but suppose there is this strange property.  Call it 'D.' Presumably it is an abstract object unfit to do any thinking.  So it is not the subject of the thinking, that in me which thinks when I think.

Should we say that I am thinking about Darci in virtue of my instantiating of D? But who am I? On physicalism, I am identically this living body. So this animal body instantiates the mental property. But this brings us right back to our earlier question as to which part of the animal body does the thinking.  Introducing a dualism of properties does not answer this question.

How Could a Non-Physical Object Become a Physical Object?

But even if physicalism is true, how could it, in tandem with the Same Relation assumption mentioned above,  be used to make sense of the Incarnation, or rather the embodiment the Incarnation implies?  How could the second person of the Trinity, a purely spiritual, nonphysical person, at a certain point in history become numerically identical to the body of Jesus?  How could an immaterial being become a material being? I should think that an item's categorial status is essential to it. So if an abstract object such as the number 7 or the set of primes  is nonphysical, then this object is nonphysical in all  possible worlds in which it exists, and indeed in all possible worlds, full stop, given that 7 and the number of primes are necessary beings.  If so, then in no possible world could the number 7 or the set of primes become a concrete item sporting causal properties and spatiotemporal locations.

Something similar holds for that necessary being which is the second person of the Trinity. Its purely spiritual, wholly nonphysical nature is essential to it.  So, on the face of it, its embodiment in a particular human being cannot be understood as its becoming numerically identical to that human being.  For then, per impossibile,  it would have to quit its kind and become another kind of thing.

Rejecting Kind-Essentialism

Now the above is an obvious and obviously powerful objection to which Merricks makes a daring response.  He recommends rejecting the kind-essentialism that is at the back of it:

Believers in the Incarnation must reject kind-essentialism. Once kind-essentialism is rejected, it is hard to see why the non-physical God the Son could not become [numerically identical to] a human organism. Perhaps this is the sort of thing that might not seem possible merely upon reflection, given no relevant revelation.  But the same thing goes for God the Son's becoming human. This is the mystery. (296)

I don't follow the reasoning here. Let us assume that we accept as revealed truth that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. And let us assume that the Incarnation is, as Merricks says, a mystery. Now faith seeks understanding. Fides quarens intellectum.  In this case we want to understand how God became man. How is understanding helped by the rejection of what appears to the unaided intellect as obviously true, namely, kind-essentialism? Is its falsity supposed to be a mystery too?

If I want to understand the  Incarnation, I have to use principles that to the unaided discursive intellect appear secure. If I use the Incarnation to reject kind-essentialism, which is one of the principles that appear secure to the finite intellect, then I haven't made sense of the Incarnation; I have wreaked havoc on the discursive intellect.  Would it not be better simply to rest with the Incarnation as mystery and forgo desperate attempts to make sense of it that violate very secure principles that are arguably definitive of finite understanding?

Why Not Reject the 'Same Relation' Assumption?

Suppose one wants to retain one's physicalism about humans at all costs and to accept the Incarnation as well. Would it not be better to jettison the 'same relation' assumption? Would it not be better to say that embodiment in the divine case is a different relation from embodiment in (merely) human cases?  Suppose that in the merely human cases, to have a body, i. e., to be embodied, is just to be a body, i.e., to be identical to a (living) body, while in the divine case to have a body is something else, something perhaps incomprehensible to us in our present state. One could then be a physicalist without rejecting kind-essentialism.

Note that Merricks is not a physicalist about God or any of the persons of the Trinity prior to the Incarnation.   He does not hold that every mind is physical. He makes an exception for the divine mind. Well, then he can make an exception in the way a divine mind becomes embodied should such a mind become embodied.

There seems to be two ways to go for one who aims to accept the Incarnation while also accepting physicalism about minded organisms. Accept either package A or package B:

Package A

Incarnation; physicalism; 'same relation' assumption; rejection of kind-essentialism.

Package B

Incarnation; physicalism; 'different embodiment relation' assumption; acceptance of kind-essentialism.

I should think that Package B is the more attractive of the two.

Merricks' paper is here. Many thanks to Professor Andrew M. Bailey for uploading it!   Ditto to Kevin Wong for drawing my attention to it and for supplying me with a bibliography of recent work on physicalist Christology. Mr. Wong is a gentleman and a scholar!

"Some of Us Just Go One God Further"

A revised version of an entry from 26 July 2010.

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

I've seen the above-captioned quotation attributed to Richard Dawkins. From what I have read of him, it seems like something he would say. The idea, I take it, is that all gods are on a par, and so, given that everyone is an atheist with respect to some gods, one may as well make a clean sweep and be an atheist with respect to all gods. You don't believe in Zeus or in a celestial teapot. Then why do you believe in the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob?

What Dawkins and his New Atheist colleagues  seem to be assuming is that the following questions are either senseless or not to be taken seriously:   'Is the Judeo-Christian god the true God?'  'Is any particular god the true God'  'Is any particular conception of deity adequate to the divine reality?' 

The New Atheist presupposition, then, is that all candidates for deity are in the same logical boat, and that this boat is one leaky vessel. Nothing could be divine. Since all theistic religions are false, there is no live question as to which such religion is true. It is not as if there is a divine reality and that some religions are more adequate to it than others. One could not say, for example, that Judaism is somewhat adequate to the divine reality, Christianity more adequate, and Buddhism not at all adequate. There just is no divine reality. There is nothing of a spiritual nature beyond the human horizon.  There is no Mind beyond finite mind.  Man is the measure. This is it!

That is the atheist's deepest conviction.  It seems so obvious to him that he cannot begin genuinely to doubt it, nor can he understand how anyone could genuinely believe the opposite. Belief in God is like belief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or Ed Abbey's Angry Unicorn on the Dark Side of the Moon. You don't believe in any of those nonentities, do you? Well, Dawkins & Co. just go one nonentity further!

This morning I received a message from a Canadian reader, C. L., who asks whether Dawkins and friends are begging the question against the theist. That depends on whether they are giving  an argument or just making an assertion. It also depends on what exactly 'begging the question' is. If they are just making an assertion then I say: Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. But suppose they intend the following argument:

1) All gods are on an epistemic/doxastic par: they are all equal in point of rational acceptability. Therefore:

2) If one god is such that its existence is not rationally acceptable, then this is true of all gods.

3) There are gods such as Zeus whose existence is not rationally acceptable. Therefore:

4) No god is such that its existence is rationally acceptable.

This is a valid argument: it cannot be the case that the premises are true and the conclusion false. Does it beg the question? The problem here is that it is not very clear what the informal fallacy in question (pun intended) is supposed to be.   If I argue that The Los Angeles Times displays liberal bias because its reportage and editorializing show a left-of-center slant, then I reason in a circle, or beg the question.  That is a clear example.  But suppose I argue that The L. A. Times displays liberal bias because all mainstream media outlets display liberal bias and The L. A. Times is a mainstream media outlet. Have I begged the question? Not so clear. Surely we don't want to say that every valid argument begs the question! (John Stuart Mill floated this suggestion.) On the other hand, it is impossible for a valid argument to have true premises and a false conclusion which suggests that he who accepts the premises of the second argument above has in so doing begged the question: he has at least implicitly committed himself to an affirmative answer to the question, 'Does The L. A. Times display liberal bias?'

'Beg the question,' I suggest, is not a very useful phrase. Besides, people nowadays regularly conflate it with 'raising a question.' See On Begging the Question. It is becoming a useless phrase.

Regarding the above argument, I would say that, while valid, it is nowhere near rationally compelling and is therefore rationally rejectable. What reason do we have to think that all candidates for divine status are on a doxatic/epistemic par?  

In sum, either Dawkins is asserting or he is arguing. If he is asserting, then his gratuitous assertion can be met with a gratuitous counter-assertion. If he is arguing, and his argument is as above, then his argument is easily turned aside.

The fundamental issue here is whether there is anything beyond the human horizon. The issue dividing theists and atheists can perhaps be put in terms of Jamesian 'live options':

EITHER: Some form of theism (hitherto undeveloped perhaps or only partially developed) is not only logically and epistemically possible, but also an 'existential' possibility, a live option;

OR: No form of theism is an existential possibility, a live option.

Theist-atheist dialog is made difficult by a certain asymmetry: whereas a sophisticated living faith involves a measure of purifying doubt, together with a groping beyond images and pat conceptualizations toward a transcendent reality, one misses any corresponding doubt or tentativeness on the part of sophisticated atheists. Dawkins and Co. seem so cocksure of their position. For them, theism is not a live option or existential possibility.  This is obvious from their mocking comparisons of God to a celestial teapot, flying spaghetti monster, and the like. 

For sophisticated theists, however, atheism is a live option. The existence of this asymmetry makes one wonder whether any productive dialog with atheists is possible.  It is probably no more possible than productive dialog with leftists. We live on different planets.

Companion post:  Russell's Teapot: Does It Hold Water?

Related articles

Where Are the Honest Atheists?

Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms? Reply to a Comment

Nietzsche, Truth, and Power

Nature, Signs, and Religious Experience

Reader P. J. offers us for delectation and analysis the following quotation from Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God:

[Brother Lawrence] was eighteen at the time, and still in the world. He told me that it had all happened one winter day, as he was looking at a barren tree. Although the tree's leaves were indeed gone, he knew that they would soon reappear, followed by blossoms and then fruit. This gave him a profound impression of God's providence and power which never left him. Brother Lawrence still maintains that his impression detached him entirely from the world and gave him such a great love for God that it hasn't changed in all of the forty years he has been walking with Him.

P. J. comments that

. . . nature is sometimes said to serve as a 'signpost' to God's existence, without the need for auxiliary premises such as the complexity of things, the orderly patterns of substances as described by the laws of nature, the intelligibility of the world, and so on and on. It is almost as if -- at least for Br. Lawrence -- nature, just by being there, served to point toward God in a primitive or non-inferential way. Nature, for him, pointed not simply to God's existence, but to a more positive account of God as the providential orderer of nature.

I admit that I don't know where to take this idea, or how far it can be taken, but it strikes me as an interesting topic to research in natural theology: the way(s) in which nature, without the aid of auxiliary premises, can point to God's existence, and to a more content-rich account of the divine attributes.

 

I agree that the question is interesting and important. Perhaps we can formulate it as the question whether nature can be taken as a natural sign of the existence of God, and certain features of nature as natural signs of certain of the divine attributes. I will consider here only the first question.  Whether nature as a whole can be taken as a natural sign of the existence of God will depend on what we understand by 'natural sign.' Suppose we adopt Laird Addis' definition: 

 

An entity is a natural sign if by its very nature, it represents some other entity or would-be entity, that is , if it is an intrinsically intentional entity. (Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality, Temple UP, 1989, p. 29)

 

I don't doubt that there are intrinsically intentional entities, thoughts (acts of thinking) being an example. Intrinsic intentionality is to be understood by contrast with derived intentionality. The intentionality or aboutness of a map, for example, is derivative, not intrinsic. A map is not about a chunk of terrain just in virtue of the map's intrinsic properties such as physical and geometrical properties.  Suppose a neutron bomb wipes out all minded organisms. Maps and chunks of terrain remain. Do the maps in this scenario map anything, mean anything? No. This is because there are no minds to give the maps meaning.

 

Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. But that closer together should mean steeper is a meaning assigned and agreed upon by the community of map-makers and map-users. This meaning is not intrinsic to the map qua physical object. Closer together might have meant anything, e.g., that the likelihood of falling into an abandoned mine shaft is greater. The intentionality of the map and its features (contour lines, colors, etc.) is derivative from the intrinsic intentionality of minds.

 

So our question becomes this: Could nature be a natural sign in virtue of being intrinsically intentional?  I don't think so. Nature can be taken or interpreted or read as pointing to God, but that would be a case of derivative intentionality: we would then be assigning to nature the property of pointing to God.  But there is nothing intrinsic to nature that makes it point to God.

 

But of course one might mean something else by 'natural sign.' Fresh bear scat on a trail is a natural sign that a bear has been by recently.  A natural sign in this sense is a bit of the natural world, or a modification of the natural world, that typically has a natural cause and that by its presence 'refers' us to this cause.  The scat is the scat of a bear, but this 'of' is not the 'of' of intentionality.  Similarly with the tracks of a mountain lion.  They are typically caused by a mountain lion but they are not about a mountain lion.  

 

Note the difference between the subjective and the objective genitive. The tracks of a mountain lion are a mountain lion's tracks (genitivus subjectivus) whereas the hiker's fear of a mountain lion is not a mountain lion's fear but the hiker's fear (genitivus objectivus). Both genitives can occur in one and the same sentence. My favorite example: Timor domini initium sapientiae. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A second example: Obsidis metus mortis magnus est. The fear of death of the hostage is great. The hostage is the subject of fear; death the object. Analysis of this example in German here.    

 

But I digress.  

 

Could the natural world point to God in the way mountain lion tracks point to a mountain lion?  Yes, if the natural world is the effect of a divine cause. But how do we know this?  One cannot tell that the natural world is a created world just by observing it. Even if it is created, its createdness cannot be 'read off' from it. It can only be 'read into' it.

 

Now let me try to answer my reader's question.  I take him to be asking the following question:

 

Q. Does the the natural world, by its sheer existence, directly show (i.e., show without the aid of auxiliary premises), that there exists a transcendent creator of the natural world?

 

If (Q) is the question, my answer is in the negative.  This is invalid: the universe exists; ergo, God exists. This is valid: the universe exists; the universe is contingent; whatever contingently exists cannot exist as a matter of brute fact but must have a cause of its existence; nothing can cause its own existence; ergo, God as transcendent causa prima exists. Whether the second is a sound argument and how one would know it to be sound are of course further questions; it is, however, a valid argument.  

 

But we had to bring in auxiliary premises.  And similarly for this question:

 

Q*. Does the apparent designedness of the natural order directly show the existence of a transcendent designer?

 

And this one:

 

Q**. Does the beauty of "The starry skies above me" (Kant) directly show that this beauty has a transcendent Source which "all men call God" (Aquinas)?

 

Closely Related: Overbelief and Romans 1: 18-20 

 

Again on Divine Simplicity and God's Knowledge of Contingent Truths

This entry continues yesterday's discussion.  The question was: How can an ontologically simple God know contingent truths?  Here again is yesterday's aporetic tetrad:

1. God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2. God knows some contingent truths.

3. Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4. God exists necessarily.

I briefly discussed, without endorsing, an externalist way of rejecting (3). Reader Dan M. has a different idea for rejecting (3):

. . . a kind of nominalism about mental acts or states.

To illustrate, consider this truth: (A) Bill is sitting. Because 'Bill' is a singular term denoting a man, (A)'s truth implies the existence of at least one item. But there's disagreement about whether (A) implies the existence of other items. A property realist might say: (A) implies the existence of a property, sitting-ness. An event or state realist might say: (A) implies the existence of an event or state, Bill's sitting. But a nominalist may say: no, an item (e.g. Bill) can be a certain way (e.g. sitting), without that consisting in (or otherwise committing us to) the existence of any further items (such as a property of sitting, or a state or event of Bill's sitting).

Bringing in God's knowledge, we can say: (B) God knows that Bill has two cats. Someone who accepts proposition 3 might say: (B) implies the existence of an item intrinsic to God, namely a particular state of knowledge. If I understand you on knowledge externalism, that sort of response takes issue with 'intrinsic'. On the alternative view I'm entertaining, we take issue with 'item' instead. We say: there is no item of God's knowing that Bill has two cats. Just as Bill can sit without there being a state of Bill's sitting (construed as a bona fide item), God can know that something is the case without there being a state of God's knowing it (construed as a bona fide item).

Very interesting!

The suggestion, to put it generally, is that if a subject S believes/knows/wants/desires (etc.) that p, a correct ontological assay of the situation will not turn up anything in addition to S and p.  Thus there is no need to posit any such item as the state (or state of affairs or fact or event) of S's believing/knowing/wanting/desiring that p.  So on Dan's proposal, if 'God knows that Bill has two cats' is true, this truth does not commit us ontologically to the state (state of affairs, fact, event) of God's knowing that Bill has two cats.

In Cartesian terms, there is an ego and a cogitatum, but no cogitatio. This amounts to a denial of mental acts and thereby a denial of the act-content distinction.

Well, why not?  One reason off the top of my head is that such a parsimonious scheme cannot account for the differences among believing, doubting, suspending judgment, wanting, desiring, willing, imagining, remembering, etc.

One and the same proposition, that Bill has two cats, is known by me, believed but not known by my loyal and trusting readers, doubted by a doubting Thomas or two, suspended by Seldom Seen Slim the Skeptic who takes no position on the weighty question of the extent of my feline involvement, remembered by last year's house guests, etc.  Indeed, one and the same subject can take up different attitudes toward one and the same proposition.

Suppose a neighbor tells me there's a mountain lion in my backyard. I begin by doubting the proposition, suspecting my neighbor of confusing a mountain lion with a bobcat, but then, seeing the critter with my own eyes, I advance to believing and perhaps even to knowing.  So one and the same subject can take up two or more different attitudes toward one and the same proposition.

These examples are phenomenological evidence that we cannot eke by with just the subject and the object/content but also need to posit mental acts, particular mental occurrences or episodes such as Bill's seeing here and now that there is a mountain lion in his backyard. The differences among believing, knowing, doubting, desiring, remembering, etc. will then be act-differences, differences in the types of mental acts. 

How would a resolute denier of mental acts account for these differences?  Will he shunt all the differences onto propositional contents?  Will he theorize that there are memorial, imaginal, dubitable, desiderative, etc. propositional contents?  Good luck with that.

Suppose that S goes from doubting that p to believing that p. The denier of mental acts would have to redescribe the situation as one in which there are two propositions, call them a dub-prop and a cred-prop, with awareness of the first followed by awareness of the second.  How could one display these two propositions? Dubitably, there is a mountain lion on the backyard and Credibly, there is a mountain lion in the back yard? 

Perhaps such a theory can be worked out plausibly. But it makes little sense to me.

And so we are brought back to our problem: How can a simple God know contingent truths? 

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John D. Caputo's Truth Problem

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The Decline of the Culture of Free Discussion and Debate

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Divine Simplicity: Is God Identical to His Thoughts?

Theophilus inquires,

I've been researching the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) recently and I've had a hard time figuring something out. On DDS, is it the case that God is identical with his thoughts? Surely on the view (as you say in your SEP article) God is identical with his omniscience. But does that also mean he is identical with the content of that attribute? 

I would appreciate your input on this question, and your SEP article has given me a lot to think about.

The good news for Theophilus is that he has stumbled onto a serious problem. The bad news is that there is no really satisfactory solution known to me.

 

On DDS, God is identical to his attributes. Omniscience is one of the divine attributes; ergo God is identical to omniscience. This seems to imply that God is identical to the mental states in which his omniscience is articulated.  But a good lot of what God knows is contingent, for example, that I am the author of the SEP entry in question. Someone else might have been the author of that encyclopedia entry, not to mention the fact that there might not have been any such entry, or any such encyclopedia.

 

If we think of knowledge as a propositional attitude, and if this holds for God as well as for us, then there are many contingently true propositions with respect to which God is in corresponding contingent mental states. For if it is contingent that p, then it is contingent that God is in the state of knowing that p. Thus God is contingently in the state -- call it S -- of knowing that there is such an on-line publication as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

 

But how can God be identical to S?  This, I take it, is the question that vexes Theophilus.  He is right to be vexed.  How can an ontologically simple God know contingent truths? 

The problem may be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad:

1. God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2. God knows some contingent truths.

3. Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4. God exists necessarily.

The plausibility of (3) may be appreciated as follows.  Whatever else knowledge is, it is plausibly regarded as a species of true belief.  A belief is an intrinsic state of a subject.  Moreover, beliefs are individuated by their contents: beliefs or believings with different contents are different beliefs or believings.  It cannot be that one and the same act of believing has different contents at different times or in different possible worlds. 

That the tetrad is inconsistent can be seen as follows.  Suppose God, who knows everything there is to be known,  knows some contingent truth t.  He knows, for example, that I have two cats.  It follows from (3) that there is some item intrinsic to God such as a belief state whereby God knows t.  Given (1), this state, as intrinsic to God, is not distinct from God.  Given (4), the state whereby God knows t exists necessarily.  For, necessarily, if x = y, and x is a necessary being, then y is a necessary being. But then t is necessarily true.  This contradicts (2) according to which t is contingent.

Opponents of the divine simplicity will turn the tetrad into an argument against (1).  They will argue from the conjunction of (2) & (3) & (4) to the negation of (1). The classical theist, however, accepts (1), (2), and (4).  If he is to solve the tetrad, he needs to find a way to reject (3). He needs to find a way to reject the idea that when a knower knows something, there is, intrinsic to the knower, some mediating item that is individuated by the object known.

So consider an externalist conception of knowledge.  I see a cat and seeing it I know it -- that it is and what it is.  Now the cat is not in my head; but it could be in my mind on an externalist theory of mind.  My awareness of the cat somehow 'bodily' includes the cat, the whole cat, all 25 lbs of him, fur, dander, and all.  Knowledge is immediate, not mediated by sense data, representations, mental acts, occurrent believings, or any other sort of epistemic intermediary or deputy.  Seeing a cat, I see the cat itself directly, not indirectly via some other items that I see directly such as an Husserlian noema, a Castanedan ontological guise, a Meinongian incomplete object, or any other sort of merely intentional object. On this sort of scheme, the mind is not a container, hence has no contents in the strict sense of this term.  The mind is directly at the things themselves.

If this externalism is coherent, then then we can say of God's knowledge that it does not involve any intrinsic states of God that would be different were God to know different things than he does know.  For example, God knows that I have two cats.  That I have two cats is an actual, but contingent fact.  If God's knowledge of this fact were mediated by an item intrinsic to God, a mental act say, an item individuated by its accusative, then given the divine simplicity, this item could not be distinct from God with the consequence that the act and its accusative would be necessary.  This consequence is blocked if there is nothing intrinsic to God whereby he knows that I have two cats.

I don't find externalism plausible, so I am left with an impasse.  I cannot see how God can exist without being ontologically simple. So I cannot reject (1). And of course I cannot solve or rather dissolve the problem by disposing of the presupposition that God exists. As for (2), I am not about to deny that there are contingent truths or that God knows contingent truths. As for (4), if God is simple, then surely he is a necessary being.  A being that is its existence cannot not exist.

 

Few philosophers will follow me to the conclusion that our tetrad is a genuine aporia.  Most theists will cheerfully deny (1). A few will deny (4) which implies the denial of (1). Atheists will dismiss the whole discussion as an empty academic exercise  since it is plain to them that there is no God. A few brave souls will deny (2) either by denying that there are contingent truths or that God knows them. And then there are those who will deny (3).  This I should think is the best way to go if there is a way forward.

 

Could we go mysterian on this? The limbs of the tetrad are each of them true, and so collectively consistent; it is just that we cannot understand how they could all be true.

 

REFERENCE: W. Matthews Grant, "Divine Simplicity, Contingent Truths, and Extrinsic Models of Divine Knowing," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 29, no. 3, July 2012, pp. 254-274.

  

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Which is More Certain, God or My Hands?

A reader inquires, "I'm curious, if someone asked you what you were more certain of, your hands or belief in the existence of God, how would you respond?"

The first thing a philosopher does when asked a question is examine the question.  (Would that ordinary folk, including TV pundits, would do likewise before launching into gaseous answers to ill-formed questions.)  Now what exactly am I being asked?  The question is ambiguous as between:

Q1. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of the existence of God?

Q2. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of your belief in the existence of God? 

My reader probably intends (Q1). If (Q1) is the question, then the answer is that I am more certain of the existence of my hands than of the existence of God.  My hands are given in sense perception throughout the day, every day.  Here is one, and here is the other (he said with a sidelong glance in the direction of G. E. Moore).  It is not perfectly certain that I have hands, or even that I have a body -- can I prove that I am not a brain in a vat? -- but it is practically certain, certain for all practical purposes.  

By the way, it borders on a bad joke to think that one can prove the external world by waving one's hands around as Moore famously did.  Still, if I don't know basic facts such as these 'handy' facts, then I know very little, things of the order of 'I now seem to see a hand' but not 'I now see a hand.'  (I am using 'see' as a verb of success: If S sees an F, there there exists an x such that x is F and S sees x.)

So, for practical purposes, I am certain that my hands exist.  But I am not certain in the same sense and to the same degree that God exists.  The evidence is a lot slimmer.  This is not to say that there is no evidence.  There is plenty of evidence, it is just that it is not compelling.  There is the evidence of conscience, of mystical and religious experience, the consensus gentium; there is the 'evidence' of the dozens and dozens of arguments for the existence of God, there is the testimony of prophets.  But none of this evidence, even taking the whole lot of it together, gets the length of the evidence of my hands that I get from seeing them, touching them, clapping them, manipulating things with them.

When I fall down and feel my hands slam into the hard hot rock of a desert canyon, then I know beyond any practical doubt that hands exist and rock exists.  Then I say with 'Cactus Ed' Abbey, "I believe in rock and sun."  In that vulnerable moment, alone in a desolate desert canyon, it is very easy to doubt that there is any providential order, that there is any ultimate intelligibility, that there is any Sense beyond the flimsy and fragmented sense we make of things.  But it is practically impossible to doubt hands and rock and sun.

The difference could be put like this.  The existence and the nonexistence of God are both of them epistemic possibilities: for all I can claim to know, there is no God; but also: there is a God.  Both states of affairs are consistent with what I can claim to know.  But it is not an epistemic possibility that these hands of mine do not exist unless one takes knowledge to require an objective certainty impervious to hyperbolic doubt.

In the case of my hands there is really no counter evidence to their existence apart from Cartesian hyperbolic doubt.  But in the case of God, not only is the evidence spotty and inconclusive, but there is also counter evidence, the main piece of which is the existence of evil.  It is worth noting, however, that if one would be skeptical, one ought to doubt also the existence of evil, and with it, arguments to the nonexistence of God from the putative fact of evil.  How do you know there is evil?  No doubt there is pain, excruciating pain.  But is pain evil?  Maybe pain is just a sensation that an organism feeling it doesn't like, and the organism's not liking it is just an attitude of that organism, so that in reality there is no good or evil.  Pain is given.  But is evil given?  Pain is undeniable.  But one can easily deny the existence of evil.  Perhaps the all is just a totality of value-indifferent facts.

As for (Q2), it makes reference to my belief in God.  Whether you take the belief as a disposition or as an occurrent state, the belief as a feature of my mental life must be distinguished from its truth-value.  I am not certain of the truth of my belief that God exists, but I am certain of the existence of my belief (my believing) that God exists.  As certain as I am that I have hands?  More certain.  I can doubt that I have hands in the usual Cartesian way.  But how can I doubt that fact that I have a belief if in fact I have it?

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God, Proof, and Desire

A reader inquires, "I'm curious, if someone asked you what you were more certain of, your hands or belief in the existence of God, how would you respond?"

The first thing a philosopher does when asked a question is examine the question.  (Would that ordinary folk, including TV pundits, would do likewise before launching into gaseous answers to ill-formed questions.)  Now what exactly am I being asked?  The question is ambiguous as between:

Q1. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of the existence of God?

Q2. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of your belief in the existence of God? 

My reader probably intends (Q1). If (Q1) is the question, then the answer is that I am more certain of the existence of my hands than of the existence of God.  My hands are given in sense perception throughout the day, every day.  Here is one, and here is the other (he said with a sidelong glance in the direction of G. E. Moore).  It is not perfectly certain that I have hands, or even that I have a body -- can I prove that I am not a brain in a vat? -- but it is practically certain, certain for all practical purposes.  

By the way, it borders on a bad joke to think that one can prove the external world by waving one's hands around as Moore famously did.  Still, if I don't know basic facts such as these 'handy' facts, then I know very little, things of the order of 'I now seem to see a hand' but not 'I now see a hand.'  (I am using 'see' as a verb of success: If S sees an F, there there exists an x such that x is F and S sees x.)

So, for practical purposes, I am certain that my hands exist.  But I am not certain in the same sense and to the same degree that God exists.  The evidence is a lot slimmer.  This is not to say that there is no evidence.  There is plenty of evidence, it is just that it is not compelling.  There is the evidence of conscience, of mystical and religious experience, the consensus gentium; there is the 'evidence' of the dozens and dozens of arguments for the existence of God, there is the testimony of prophets.  But none of this evidence, even taking the whole lot of it together, gets the length of the evidence of my hands that I get from seeing them, touching them, clapping them, manipulating things with them.

When I fall down and feel my hands slam into the hard hot rock of a desert canyon, then I know beyond any practical doubt that hands exist and rock exists.  Then I say with 'Cactus Ed' Abbey, "I believe in rock and sun."  In that vulnerable moment, alone in a desolate desert canyon, it is very easy to doubt that there is any providential order, that there is any ultimate intelligibility, that there is any Sense beyond the flimsy and fragmented sense we make of things.  But it is practically impossible to doubt hands and rock and sun.

The difference could be put like this.  The existence and the nonexistence of God are both of them epistemic possibilities: for all I can claim to know, there is no God; but also: there is a God.  Both states of affairs are consistent with what I can claim to know.  But it is not an epistemic possibility that these hands of mine do not exist unless one takes knowledge to require an objective certainty impervious to hyperbolic doubt.

In the case of my hands there is really no counter evidence to their existence apart from Cartesian hyperbolic doubt.  But in the case of God, not only is the evidence spotty and inconclusive, but there is also counter evidence, the main piece of which is the existence of evil.  It is worth noting, however, that if one would be skeptical, one ought to doubt also the existence of evil, and with it, arguments to the nonexistence of God from the putative fact of evil.  How do you know there is evil?  No doubt there is pain, excruciating pain.  But is pain evil?  Maybe pain is just a sensation that an organism feeling it doesn't like, and the organism's not liking it is just an attitude of that organism, so that in reality there is no good or evil.  Pain is given.  But is evil given?  Pain is undeniable.  But one can easily deny the existence of evil.  Perhaps the all is just a totality of value-indifferent facts.

As for (Q2), it makes reference to my belief in God.  Whether you take the belief as a disposition or as an occurrent state, the belief as a feature of my mental life must be distinguished from its truth-value.  I am not certain of the truth of my belief that God exists, but I am certain of the existence of my belief (my believing) that God exists.  As certain as I am that I have hands?  More certain.  I can doubt that I have hands in the usual Cartesian way.  But how can I doubt that fact that I have a belief if in fact I have it?

How Could a Simple God be a Person?

The Worthy Opponent writes,

And how is the view of divine simplicity and consequent unintelligibility consistent with the view of God as a person? A person has a mind whose thoughts and feelings are distinct and successive. As Hume (1711–76) argued, a being who is simple has ‘no thought, no reason, no will, no sentiment, no love, no hatred; or in a word, is no mind at all’.ⁱ Yet God is obviously a person, according to Plantinga and othersⁱⁱ. Then he is obviously not simple. 

i^ Hume, David. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Edited by Richard Popkin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980, part 4.

ii^ Does God Have a Nature? Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1980. See Eleanor Stump on the same. ‘We can say ‘you’ to God’. God is a particular, with a mind and a will. ‘We can say ‘you’ to one another, and say ‘you’ to God’.

This is a very hard nut to crack. The problem cannot be solved, in my opinion, by simply denying the divine simplicity. For there is a very powerful argument for it.  As I say elsewhere:

I believe a case can be made, pace Alvin Plantinga and other theistic deniers of divine simplicity, that to deny the absolute ontological simplicity of God is to deny theism itself.  For what we mean by 'God' is an absolute reality, something metaphysically ultimate, "that than which no greater can be conceived." (Anselm)   Now an absolute reality cannot depend for its existence or nature or value upon anything distinct from itself.  It must be from itself alone, or a se.  Nothing could count as divine, or worthy of worship, or be an object of our ultimate concern, or be maximally great, if it lacked the property of aseity.  But the divine aseity, once it is granted, seems straightaway to entail the divine simplicity, as Aquinas argues in ST.  For if God is not dependent on anything else for his existence, nature, and value, then God is not a whole of parts, for a whole of parts depends on its parts to be and to be what it is.  So if God is a se, then he is not a composite being, but a simple being.  This implies that in God there is no real distinction between: existence and essence, form and matter, act and potency, individual and attribute, attribute and attribute.   In sum, if God is God, then God is simple.  To deny the simplicity of God is to deny the existence of God.  It is therefore possible for an atheist to argue:  Nothing can be ontologically simple, therefore, God cannot exist.

A theist who denies divine simplicity might conceivably be taxed with idolatry inasmuch as he sets up something as God that falls short of the exacting requirements of deity.  The divine transcendence would seem to require that God cannot be a being among beings, but must in some sense be Being itself . (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens:  God is not an existent but self-subsisting Existence itself.)  On the other hand, a theist who affirms divine simplicity can be taxed, and has been taxed, with incoherence.  As an aporetician first and foremost, I seek to lay bare the problem in all its complexity under suspension of the natural urge for a quick solution.

In sum, God must be simple to be God.  On the other hand, there can no denying of the force of the Opponent's objection. It has two prongs: the notion of a simple being is unintelligible; no person is simple.  But God is a person. This cannot be denied either.  We appear to be nailed to the cross of the following aporetic triad:

A.God is a person.
B. No person is simple.
C. God is simple.

The classical theist accepts all three propositions. But they are inconsistent.  Some theists will argue that the inconsistency is merely apparent.  I don't believe that this can be compellingly established, and neither does the Opponent.  He thinks the inconsistency real and so concludes that God is not simple.   This makes sense, of course, but it is not quite satisfactory, ignoring as it does the powerful arguments for divine simplicity.  God can be neither an impersonal absolute nor a personal non-absolute.  The Opponent ends up with the view that God is a personal non-absolute.

I myself am inclined to adopt a mysterian 'solution' according to which we accept all three propositions while confessing that we cannot understand how they could all be true.

If we have good reason to believe that p is true, and good reason to believe that q  is true, then we have good reason to believe that p and q are logically consistent (with each other) despite an absence of understanding as to how they could be mutually consistent. What is actual is possible whether or not one can render intelligible how it is possible.  For example, motion is actual, hence possible, despite my inability in the teeth of Zenonian considerations to understand how it is possible. Many similar examples could be given.

And so a mysterian move suggests itself:  We are justified in maintaining both that God is simple and that God is a person despite the fact that after protracted effort we cannot make logical sense of this conjunction.  The fact that the conjunction  -- God is simple & God is a person -- appears to us, and perhaps even necessarily appears to us, given irremediable cognitive limitations on our part, to be or rather entail  an explicit  logical contradiction is not a good reason to reject the conjunction.  The mysterian is not a dialetheist: he does not claim that there are true contradictions. Like the rest of us, the mysterian eschews them like the plague.  His point is rather that a proposition's non-episodic and chronic seeming to be a contradiction does not suffice for its rejection.  For it may well be that certain truths are inaccessible to us due to our mental limitations and defects, and that among these truths are some that appear to us only in the guise of contradictions, and must so appear.

Compare the mind-body problem. Many are inclined to say that that in us which thinks is the brain. But the brain is wholly material, and matter can't think. No physical state as physical states are understood by physics has semantic content and is directed to an object.  Colin McGinn suggests that our cognitive architecture is such as to prevent us from understanding how the limbs of this apparent contradiction can all be true.  How the brain thinks is thus a mystery.  I am not endorsing McGinn's materialist mysterianism but suggesting that a mysterian approach to theological topics may be the best we can do. Besides divine simplicity, Trinity, Incarnation, and Real Presence are all arguably impervious to understanding by the discursive intellect.  We just cannot see how they could be logically possible.

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The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence

Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing, Nelson, 2016, p. 231:

There are people who say that an evil as great as the Holocaust is proof there is no God. But I would say the opposite. The fact that it is so great an evil, so great that it defies any material explanation, implies a spiritual and moral framework that requires God's existence.

I've had a similar thought for years.

One can of course argue, plausibly, from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God. From Epicurus to David Hume to J. L. Mackie, this has been a staple in the history of philosophy. There is no need to rehearse the logical and evidential arguments from evil to the nonexistence of God (See my Good and Evil category.)  But one can argue, just as plausibly, from the fact of evil to the existence of God.  I envisage two sorts of argument. One type argues that there could be no objective difference between good and evil without God.  The other type, an instance of which will be sketched here, argues from a special feature of the evil in the world to the existence of God. This special feature is the horrific depth and intensity of moral evil, a phenomenon which beggars naturalistic understanding.  This second type of argument is what Klavan is hinting at.

How might such an argument go? Here is a sketch. This is merely an outline, not a rigorous development.  

I should also say that my aim is not to sketch a rationally compelling argument for the existence of God. There are no compelling arguments for substantive theses in philosophy and theology. My aim is to neutralize the atheist arguments from evil by showing that the tables can be turned: evil can just as easily be marshaled in support of God.  Further, I have no illusions about neutralizing atheist arguments in the eyes of atheists.  The purpose of the following is simply to show theists that their position is rationally defensible. 

A. Consider not just the occurrence, but also the magnitude, of moral evil. I don't mean just the ubiquity of moral evil but also its horrific depth. Fidel Castro, for example, that hero of the Left, did not merely imprison his political opponents for their dissent, he had them tortured in unspeakable ways:

Mr. Valladares and other prisoners who refused ''political rehabilitation'' were forced to live in the greatest heat and the dampest cold without clothes. They were regularly beaten, shot at and sometimes killed; they were thrown into punishment cells, including the dreaded ''drawer cells,'' specially constructed units that make South Vietnam's infamous tiger cages seem like homey quarters. Eventually, together with several others, Mr. Valladares plotted an escape from their prison on the Isle of Pines. But the boat that was to pick them up never arrived. He and his accomplices were brought back to their cells and given no medical attention, though Mr. Valladares had fractured three bones in his foot during the escape attempt.

The retribution was swift. Mr. Valladares writes: ''Guards returned us to the cells and stripped us again. They didn't close the cell door, and that detail caught my attention. I was sitting on the floor; outside I heard the voices of several approaching soldiers. . . . They were going to settle accounts with us, collect what we owed them for having tried to escape. . . . They were armed with thick twisted electric cables and truncheons. . . . Suddenly, everything was a whirl - my head spun around in terrible vertigo. They beat me as I lay on the floor. One of them pulled at my arm to turn me over and expose my back so he could beat me more easily. And the cables fell more directly on me. The beating felt as if they were branding me with a red-hot branding iron, but then suddenly I experienced the most intense, unbearable, and brutal pain of my life. One of the guards had jumped with all his weight on my broken, throbbing leg.''

That treatment was typical. In the punishment cells, prisoners were kept in total darkness. Guards dumped buckets of urine and feces over the prisoners who warded off rats and roaches as they tried to sleep. Fungus grew on Mr. Valladares because he was not allowed to wash off the filth. Sleep was impossible. Guards constantly awoke the men with long poles to insure they got no rest. Illness and disease were a constant. Even at the end, when the authorities were approving his release, Mr. Valladares was held in solitary confinement in a barren room with fluorescent lights turned on 24 hours a day. By then he was partially paralyzed through malnutrition intensified by the lack of medical attention.

B. What explains the depth and ferocity of this evil-doing for which Communists, but not just them, are notorious?   If you wrong me, I may wrong you back in proportional fashion to 'even the score' and 'give you a taste of your own medicine.' That's entirely understandable in naturalistic terms.  You punch me, I punch you back, and now it's over.  We're even.  That may not be Christian behavior, but it's human behavior.  But let's say you steal my guitar and I respond by microwaving your cat, raping your daughter, murdering your wife, and burning your house down.  What explains the lack of proportionality? What explains the insane, murderous, inner rage in people, even in people who don't act on it?  What turns ordinary Cubans into devils when they are given absolute power over fellow Cubans?  There is something demonic at work here, not something merely animalic.

Can I prove that? Of course not. But neither can you prove the opposite. 

Homo homini lupus does not capture the phenomenon. And it is an insult to the wolves to boot who are by (fallen) nature condemned to predation.   Man is not a wolf to man, but a demon to man.  No bestial man is merely bestial; he is beneath bestial in that he has freely chosen to degrade himself. His bestiality is spiritual. Only a spiritual being, a being possessing free will, can so degrade himself. Degrading themselves, the torturers then degrade their victims.

Now, dear reader, look deep into your own heart and see if there is any rage and hate there.  And try to be honest about it.  Is there a good naturalistic explanation for that cesspool of corruption in your own heart, when you have had, on balance, a good life? What explains the intensity and depth of the evil you find there and in Castro's henchmen, not to mention Stalin's, et al. What explains this bottomless, raging hate?

As a sort of inference to the best explanation we can say that moral evil in its extreme manifestations has a supernatural source. It cannot be explained adequately in naturalistic terms.  There is an Evil Principle (and Principal) the positing of which is reasonable. The undeniable reality of evil has  a metaphysical ground.  Call it Satan or whatever you like.

C. It is plausible, then, to posit an Evil Principle to explain the full range and depth and depravity of moral evil.  But Manicheanism is a non-starter.  Good and Evil are not co-equal principles.  Good is primary, Evil secondary and derivative.  It cannot exist without Good. The doctrine that evil is privatio boni, a lack of good, does not explain the positive character of evil. But if there is an Evil One as the source of evil, then the positivity of evil can be charged to the Evil One's account.  The positivity consists in the existence of the Evil One and his will; the privation in the Evil One's malevolent misuse of his free will. Satan is good insofar as he is: ens et bonum convertuntur. He is the ultimate source of evil in that his exercise of free will is malevolent.

D. If the existence of evil presupposes the existence of good, and evil exists in its prime instance as as an Evil Person, then good exists in its prime instance as God.

This sketch of an argument can be presented in a rigorous form with all the argumentative gaps plugged. But even then it won't be rationally compelling.  No naturalist will accept the premise that there are some evils which require a supernatural explanation. He will hold to his naturalism come hell or high water and never give it up no matter how lame his particular explanations are.  His attitude will be: there just has to be a naturalist/materialist explanation.

And so I say what I have said many times before. In the end, you must decide what you will believe about these ultimate matters, and how you will live. There are no knock-down arguments to guide you. And yet you ought to be able to give a rational account of what you believe and why. Hence the utility of the above sort of argument.  It is not for convincing atheists but for articulating the views of theists.

Addendum (1/24). Paulo Juarez comments,

I just read your article regarding the Holocaust argument for the existence of God. It was gut-wrenching, as it was convincing in my eyes.

One line of argument worth considering (one that I sketch here) is that, on the supposition that the problem of evil is sound, and God does not exist, then presumably justice falls to us and no one else. But there is a disproportion between the justice we are able to administer, and the kind of justice everyone in their heart of hearts desires: justice for every person to ever live and to ever have lived [every person who will ever live and who has ever lived]. This desire for justice, unconditioned and absolute, can only be met if God exists, and so the very argument that is supposed to show an incompatibility between God and the existence of evil (particularly horrendous evils) fails to take into account that only if God exists, can there possibly be justice for the sufferer of evils (especially horrendous evils).

From there one could argue, either a) that our desire for justice unconditioned and absolute (call it 'cosmic justice') must have a corresponding object (God), or b) you could take a Pascalian route similar to the one we discussed last week.

Of course, an atheist could bite the bullet and say that there just are unredeemed and unredeemable evils.  But then a different argument of mine kicks is, one that questions how an atheist could reasonablly affirm life as worth living given the fact of evil.  See A Problem of Evil for Atheists.

 Related articles

Dolezal, Knowledge, and Belief

Soloveitchik on Proving the Existence of God

John Passmore on Entity-Monism and Existence-Monism

Is the Modal Ontological Argument Compelling?

In a comment, Patrick Toner writes,

. . . there is no substantive philosophical position for which there is *better* philosophical support than theism. I'm open to the possibility that at least one other philosophical position--namely, dualism--is at least as well supported by philosophical argument as theism. But nothing's got better support.

[. . .]

That said, I find St. Thomas's second way indubitable. I also find the modal ontological argument compelling. The kalam cosmological argument seems pretty much irrefutable.

In another comment in the same thread, Toner writes,

But we still do (or can) know God and the soul with certainty through the use of natural human reason. (emphasis added)

What interests me in this entry is Toner's explicit claim that the modal ontological argument is (rationally) compelling, and his implicit claim that this argument delivers (objectively) certain knowledge of the existence of God.  While I consider the argument in question to be a good argument, I don't find it to be compelling.  Nor do I think that it renders its conclusion certain. My view is that no argument for or against theism is rationally compelling.  No such argument resolves the issue.  I think it would be wonderful if there were a compelling argument for the existence of God.  The metaphysical knowledge generated by such an argument would be the most precious knowledge that one could possess.  So I would be much beholden to Toner if he could show me the error of my ways.  

Perhaps there is a theistic argument that is rationally compelling. If there is I should like to know what it is.  I am quite sure, however, that the following argument does not fill the bill.

A Modal Ontological Argument

'GCB' will abbreviate 'greatest conceivable being,' which is a rendering of Anselm of Canterbury's "that than which no greater can be conceived."  'World' abbreviates 'broadly logically possible world.' 'OA' abbreviate 'ontological argument.'

1. Either the concept of the GCB is instantiated in every  world or it is instantiated in no world.

2. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in some world.  Therefore:

3. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in every world.  (1, 2 by Disjunctive Syllogism) 

4. The actual world is one of the worlds. Therefore:

5. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in the actual world. (3, 4 ) Therefore:

6. The GCB exists. (5)

This is a valid argument: it is correct in point of logical form.  Nor does it commit any informal fallacy such as petitio principii, as I argue in Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 97-110.  Note also that this version of the OA does not require the controversial assumption that existence is a first-level property, an assumption that Frege famously rejects and that many read back (with some justification) into Kant.  (Frege held that the OA falls with that assumption, cf. Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, sec. 53; he was wrong: the above version is immune to the Kant-Frege objection.)

(1) expresses what I call Anselm's Insight.  He appreciated, presumably for the first time in the history of thought, that a divine being, one worthy of worship, must be noncontingent, i.e., either necessary or impossible.  I consider (1) nonnegotiable.  If your god is contingent, then your god is not God. There is no god but God.  God is an absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is contingent.  End of discussion.  (If, however, (1) is reasonably disputable, then this only strengthens my case against compellingness.)

It is premise (2) -- the key premise -- that ought to raise eyebrows.  What it says -- translating out of the patois of possible worlds -- is that it it possible that the GCB exists.

Whereas conceptual analysis of 'greatest conceivable being' suffices in support of (1), how do we support (2)?  Why should we accept it?  How do we know that (2) is true?  Some will say that the conceivability of the GCB entails its possibility.  But I deny that conceivability entails possibility.  

Conceivability Does not Entail Possibility

The question is whether conceivability by finite minds like ours entails real possibility.  A real possibility is one that has a mind-independent status.  Real possibilities are not parasitic upon ignorance or on our (measly) powers of conception.  Thus they contrast with epistemic/doxastic possibilities.  Since what is epistemically possible for a person might be really impossible (whether broadly-logically or nomologically), we should note that 'epistemic' in 'epistemically possible' is an alienans adjective: it functions like 'decoy' in 'decoy duck.'  Ducks don't come in two kinds, real and decoy.  Similarly, there are not two kinds of possibility, epistemic and real.  To say that a state of affairs is epistemically/doxastically possible for a subject S is to say that the obtaining of the state of affairs is logically compatible with what S knows/believes.  For example, is it possible that my State Farm insurance agent Tim be working his office during normal business hours today ?  Yes, epistemically: it is not ruled out by anything I know.  But if Tim unbeknownst to me 'bought the farm' last night, then it is not really possible that Tim be working in his office today.

By 'conceivability' I mean thinkability by us without apparent logical contradiction.  

First Argument

Why should the fact that a human being can conceive something without apparent logical contradiction show that the thing in question can exist in reality? Consider the FBI: the floating bar of iron. If my thought about the FBI is sufficiently abstract and indeterminate, then it will seem that there is no 'bar' to its possibility in reality. (Pun intended.) If I think the FBI as an object that has the phenomenal properties of iron but also floats, then those properties are combinable in my thought without contradiction. But if I know more about iron, including its specific gravity, and I import this information into my concept of iron, then the concept of the FBI will harbor a contradiction. The specific gravity of iron is 7850 kg/cu.m, which implies that it is 7.85 times more dense than water, which in turn means that it will sink in water.

The upshot is that conceivability without contradiction is no sure guide to (real) possibility. Conceivability does not entail possibility.

Second Argument

Both the existence and the nonexistence of God are conceivable, i.e., thinkable by us without apparent logical contradiction.  So if conceivability entails possibility, then both the existence and the nonexistence of God are possible.  If so, God is a contingent being.  But this contradicts the Anselmian Insight according to which God is noncontingent.  So if the Anselmian Insight is true, then conceivability-entails-possibility is false and cannot be used to support premise (2) of the modal OA.  The argument can be put in the form of a reductio:

a. Conceivability entails possibility.  (assumption for reductio)

b. It is conceivable that God not exist. (factual premise)

c. It is conceivable that God exist.  (factual premise)

d. God is a noncontingent being. (true by Anselmian definition)

Ergo

e. It is possible that God not exist and it is possible that God exist.  (a, b, c)

Ergo

f. God is a contingent being. (e, by definition of 'contingent being')

Ergo

g. God is a noncontingent being and God is a contingent being. (d, f, contradiction)

Ergo

~a. It is not the case that conceivability entails possibility. (a-g, by reductio ad absurdum) 

Or, if you insist that conceivability entails possibility, then you must give up the Anselmian Insight.  But the modal OA stands and falls with Anselmian insight.  

 

Is Conceivability Nondemonstrative Evidence of Possibility?

 

We don't need to discuss this in any depth.  Suppose it is.  This won't help Toner's case.  For if it is not certain, but only probable that (2) is true, then this lack of certainty will be transmitted to the conclusion, which will be, at most, probable but not certain. In that case, the argument will not be compelling.  I take it that an argument is compelling if and only if it renders its conclusion objectively certain.

Are There Other Ways to Support the Possibility Premise?

I can think of one other way.  It has been suggested that the possibility premise can be supported deontically:

A. A maximally perfect being ought to exist.
B. Whatever ought to exist, is possible.
Therefore
C. A maximally perfect being is possible.

I discuss this intriguing suggestion in a separate post  wherein I come to the conclusion that the deontically supercharged modal OA is also not compelling.

What is it for an Argument to be Compelling? 

My claim on the present occasion is that the modal OA provides no demonstrative knowledge of the truth of theism. Demonstrative knowledge is knowledge produced by a demonstration.  A demonstration in this context is an argument that satisfies all of the following conditions:

1. It is deductive
2. It is valid in point of logical form
3. It is free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii
4. It is such that all its premises are true
5. It is such that all its premises are known to be true
6. It is such that its conclusion is relevant to its premises.

To illustrate (6).  The following argument satisfies all of the conditions except the last and is therefore probatively worthless:

Snow is white
ergo
Either Obama is president or he is not.

On my use of terms, a demonstrative argument = a probative argument = a proof = a rationally compelling argument.  Now clearly there are good arguments (of different sorts) that are not demonstrative, probative, rationally compelling.  One type is the strong inductive argument. By definition, no such argument satisfies (1) or (2).  A second type is the argument that satisfies all the conditions except (5). 

And that is the problem with the modal OA. Condition (5) remains unsatisfied.  While the possibility premise may be true for all we know, we do not know it to be true.  So while the modal OA is a good argument in that it helps render theism rational, it is not a compelling argument. 

Related articles

Soloveitchik on Proving the Existence of God

Modality, Possible Worlds, and the Accidental-Essential Distinction

Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms?

Creation: Ex Nihilo or Ex Deo?

Classical theists hold that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. This phrase carries a privative, not a positive, sense: it means not out of something as opposed to out of something called ‘nothing.’ This much is crystal clear. Less clear is how creation ex nihilo (CEN), comports, if it does comport, with the following hallowed principle:

ENN: Ex nihilo nihit fit. Nothing comes from nothing.

 The latter principle seems intuitively obvious. It is not the case that something comes from nothing.  Had there been nothing at all, there would not now be anything.  (ENN) is not, however, a logical truth.  A logical truth is one whose negation is a formal-logical contradiction.  Negating (ENN) yields:  something comes from nothing.  This is logically possible in that no contradiction is involved in the notion that something come to be out of nothing.  Logical possibility notwithstanding, that is hard to swallow.  Rather than explain why -- a fit topic for yet another post -- I will assume for present purposes that (ENN) is a necessary truth of metaphysics.  It is surely plausible.  (And if true, then necessarily true.) Had there been nothing at all, there would have been nothing to 'precipitate' the arisal of anything.  (But also nothing to prevent the arisal of something.)

You are not philosophizing until you have a problem.  My present problem is this:  If (ENN) is true, how can (CEN) be true? How can God create out of nothing if nothing can come from nothing? It would seem that our two principles form an inconsistent dyad.  How solve it?

It would be unavailing to say that God, being omnipotent, can do anything, including making something come out of nothing. For omnipotence, rightly understood, does not imply that God can do anything, but that God can do anything that it is possible to do.  But there are limits on what is possible. For one thing, logic limits possibility, and so limits divine power: not even God can make a contradiction true. There are also non-logical limits on divine power: God cannot restore a virgin. There are past events which possess a necessitas per accidens that puts them beyond the reach of the divine will. Nor can God violate (ENN), given that it is necessarily true. God's will  is subject to necessary truths. Necessary truths, like all truths, are accusatives of the divine intellect and so cannot exist unless the divine intellect exists. The divine intellect limits the divine will.

Admittedly, what I just stated, though very plausible, is not obvious.  Distinguished philosophers have held that the divine will is not limited in the way I have described.  But to enter this can of worms would take us too far afield, to mix a couple of metaphors.  So we add to our problem the plausible background assumption that there are logical and non-logical limits on divine power.

So the problem remains: How can God create the world out of nothing if nothing can come from nothing? How can we reconcile (CEN) with (ENN)?

One response to the problem is to say that (CEN), properly understood, states that God creates out of nothing distinct from himself. Thus he does not operate upon any pre-given matter, nor does he bestow existence on pre-given essences, nor create out of pre-given possibles.  God does not create out of pre-given matter, essences, or mere possibilia.  But if God creates out of nothing distinct from himself, this formulation allows that, in some sense, God creates ex Deo, out of himself. Creating the world out of himself, God creates the world out of nothing distinct from himself. In this way, (CEN) and (ENN) are rendered compatible.

In sum, ‘Creatio ex nihilo’ is ambiguous. It could mean that God creates out of nothing, period, in which case (CEN) collides with (ENN), or that God creates out of nothing ultimately distinct from himself. My proposal is that the Latin phrase be construed in the second of these ways. So construed, it has the sense of ‘creatio ex Deo.’

But what exactly does it mean to say that God creates out of God? A critic once rather uncharitably took me  to mean precisely what I do not mean, namely, that God creates out of God in a way that implies that the product of the creative operation (creation in the sense of created entities) is identical to its operator (God) and its operand (God). That would amount to an absurd pantheism in which all distinctions are obliterated, a veritable "night in which all cows are black," to borrow a phrase from Hegel.

When I say that God creates ex Deo what I mean is that God operates on entities that are not external to God in the sense of having existence whether or not God exists. I build a rock cairn to mark the trail by piling up otherwise scattered rocks. These rocks exist whether or not I do. My creation of the cairn is therefore neither out of nothing nor out of me but out of materials external to me. If God created in that way he would not be God as classically conceived, but a Platonic demiurge.

So I say that God creates out of ‘materials’ internal to him in the sense that their existence depends on God’s existence and are therefore in this precise sense internal to him. (I hope it is self-evident that materials need not be made out of matter.) In this sense, God creates ex Deo rather than out of materials that are provided from without. It should be obvious that God, a candidate for the status of an absolute, cannot have anything ‘outside him.’

To flesh this out a bit, suppose properties are concepts in the divine mind. Then properties are necessary beings in that they exist in all metaphysically possible worlds just as God does. The difference, however, is that properties have their necessity from another, namely God, while God has his necessity from himself. (This distinction is in Aquinas.) In other words, properties, though they are necessary beings, depend for their existence on God. If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then properties, and indeed the entire Platonic menagerie (as Plantinga calls it) would not exist.

Suppose that properties are the ‘materials’ or ontological constituents out of which concrete contingent individuals – thick particulars in Armstrong’s parlance – are constructed. (This diverges somewhat from what I say in A Paradigm Theory of Existence, but no matter: it is a simplification for didactic purposes.) We can then say that the existence of contingent individual C is just the unity or contingent togetherness of C’s ontological constituents. C exists iff C’s constituents are unified. Creating is then unifying. (We have a model for this unifying in our own unification of a sensory manifold in the unity of one consciousness.)  Since the constituents are necessary beings, they are uncreated. But since their necessity derives from God, they are not independent of God.

In this sense, God creates out of himself: he creates out of materials that are internal to his own mental life. It is ANALOGOUS to the way we create objects of imagination. (I am not saying that God creates the world by imagining it.) When I construct an object in imagination, I operate upon materials that I myself provide. Thus I create a purple right triangle by combining the concept of being purple with the concept of being a right triangle. I can go on to create a purple cone by rotating the triangle though 360 degrees on the y-axis. The object imagined is wholly dependent on me the imaginer: if I leave off imagining it, it ceases to exist. I am the cause of its beginning to exist as well as the cause of its continuing to exist moment by moment. But the object imagined, as my intentional object, is other than me just as the creature is other than God. The creature is other than God while being wholly dependent on God just as the object imagined is other than me while being wholly dependent on me. 

A  critic thinks  that "The notion of total dependence, dependence in every respect, entails identity, and therefore no dependence at all. If a is dependent on b in all respects, then a ‘collapses’ into b, taking dependency, and difference, with it." So if the creature is dependent on God both for its existence and for its nature, the creature collapses into God. And of course we can’t have that. It is obvious that the manifest plurality of the world, the difference of things from one another and from God, must be maintained. We cannot allow a pantheism according to which God just is the world, nor one on which God swallows up the plural world and its plurality with it. 

The  principle lately quoted is refuted by every intentional object qua intentional object. The object imagined is totally dependent in its existence on my acts of imagining. After all, I excogitated it: in plain Anglo-Saxon, I thought it up, or out. This excogitatum, to give it a name, is wholly dependent on my cogitationes and on the ego ‘behind’ these cogitationes if there is an ego ‘behind’ them. (Compare Sartre’s critique of Husserl on this score in the former’s Transcendence of the Ego.) But this dependence is entirely consistent with the excogitatum’s being distinct both from me qua ego, and from the intentional acts or cogitationes emanating from the ego and directed upon the excogitatum. To press some Husserlian jargon into service, the object imagined ist kein reeller Inhalt, it is not "really contained" in the act. The object imagined is neither immanent in the act, nor utterly transcendent of the act: it is a transcendence in immanence. It is ‘constituted’ as a transcendence in immanence. 

The quoted  principle may also be refuted by more mundane examples, examples that I would not use to explain the relation between creator and creature. Consider a wrinkle W in a carpet C. W is distinct from C. This is proven by the fact that they differ property-wise: the wrinkle is located in the Northeast corner of the carpet, but the carpet is not located in the Northeast corner of the carpet. (The principle here is the Indiscernibility of Identicals.) But W is wholly (totally) dependent on C. A wrinkle in a carpet cannot exist without a carpet; indeed, it cannot exist apart from the very carpet of which it is the wrinkle. Thus W cannot ‘migrate’ from carpet C to carpet D. Not only is W dependent for its existence on C, but W is dependent on C for its nature (whatness, quiddity). For W just is a certain modification of the carpet, and the whole truth about W can be told in C-terms. So W is totally dependent on C. 

So dependence in both essence and existence does not entail identity.

Somehow the reality of the Many must be upheld.  The plural world is no illusion.  If Advaita Vedanta maintains that it is an illusion, then it is false.  On the other hand, the plural world is continuously dependent for its existence on the One.  Making sense of this relation is not easy, and I don't doubt that my analogy to the relation of finite mind and its intentional objects limps in various ways.

In any case, one thing seems clear: there is a problem with reconciling CEN with EEN.  The reconciliation sketched here involves reading creatio ex nihilo as creatio ex Deo.  The solution is not pantheistic, but panentheistic.  It is not that all is God, but that all is in God.

I discuss and reject a different solution to the problem in On Reconciling Creatio Ex Nihilo with Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit.

Related articles

Truth and God: How are they Related?

Bertrand Russell: Empiricism is Self-Refuting. Is He Right?

The Discursive Framework, Logic, and Whether the Via Negativa is the Path to Nowhere

Tropes as Truth-Makers? Or Do We Need Facts?

The Decline of the Culture of Free Discussion and Debate

God as Uniquely Unique

 I hit upon 'uniquely unique' the other day 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 possible world in which he exists, and he exists in every 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 propositions 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 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 it 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.

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 to 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.

Related articles

Are There Possible Worlds in which the Human Nature of Christ Exists Unassumed?

Is it Coherently Conceivable that One Person Have Two Natures?

Thinking and Speaking about the Absolute: Three Views

Love your God (Moreland)

God: A Being among Beings or Being Itself?

God and Socrates: Two Different Ways of Existing?

Divine Simplicity and God's Contingent Knowledge: An Aporetic Tetrad

Comments on "Divine Fluidity"

By Edward Buckner, here, at Dale Tuggy's place.  Ed's text is indented; my comments are not.  I thank Ed for the stimulating discussion. He begins:

I have been telling the Maverick Philosopher here about Benjamin Sommer’s theory of divine fluidity, which is one solution to the problem of anthropomorphic language in the Hebrew Bible. The problem is not just Genesis 1:26 (‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’) but also Genesis 3:8 ‘They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze’. Can God be a man with feet who walks around the garden leaving footprints? As opposed to being a pure spirit? The anthropomorphic conception is, in Maverick’s opinion ‘a hopeless reading of Genesis’, and makes it out to be garbage. ‘You can’t possibly believe that God has feet’.

Yet Benjamin Sommer, Professor of Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages at the Jewish Theological Seminary, proposes such a literal and anthropomorphic interpretation. As he argues (The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel), if the authors of the Hebrew Bible had intended their anthropomorphic language to be understood figuratively, why did they not say so? The Bible contains a wide variety of texts in different genres, but there is no hint of this, the closest being the statement ofDeuteronomy 4.15 that the people did not see any form when the Ten Commandments were revealed at Sinai.

I should first of all say that I haven't read Sommer's book; so none of this is directed against Sommer except in modo obliquo.  My target is Buckner's take on the matters discussed by Sommer.  I should also point out that Ed quotes from my Combox where I am known to make remarks even less guarded than in my main entries.  I was a little irritated that he had hijacked my thread by using 'anthropomorphic' in a way other than the way I had defined it.  My post has nothing to do with the Bible or divine revelation.  You could say that my concern there is the absolute and therefore ontologically simple  'God of the philosophers' not 'the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,' to acquiesce for a moment in that dubious but provocative distinction.  

My aim there was to show that (i) univocity of predicate sense across such predications as 'God is wise' and 'Socrates is wise' is incompatible with the divine simplicity, and that the friends of univocity support a conception of God that is anthropomorphic in the narrow sense of being a conception according to which the great-making properties of God are really just great-making properties of creatures even if they are the maxima of those of the great-making properties that admit of degrees.  This narrow and refined sense of 'anthropomorphic' has to be distinguished from the more ordinary, crude sense according to which 'anthropomorphic' means having the form of a human animal, including its physical form and composition. So if you imagine God stomping around in a physical garden leaving footprints, then your conception is crudely anthropomorphic.  But if you think of God as a pure spirit having many of the same properties as Socrates possesses, but none of his physical properties, and having all of his properties in the same way that Socrates has his  -- two different but connected issues here, nota bene --  then you have an anthropomorphic conception of God, albeit a refined one.

But now onto the topic dear to Ed's heart.  He asks:  " if the authors of the Hebrew Bible had intended their anthropomorphic language to be understood figuratively, why did they not say so?"  This rhetorical question is grammatically interrogative but logically declarative: it amounts to the declaration that the authors did intend their crudely anthropomorphic language to be taken literally because they didn't say otherwise.  This declaration, in turn, is a telescoped argument:

The authors did not say that their language was to be taken figuratively;

ergo

Their language is to be taken literally.

The argument, however, is plainly a non sequitur.  It therefore gives me no reason to change my view.

Besides, it is preposterous to suppose that the creator of the the physical universe, "the heavens and the earth," is a proper part of the physical universe.  Since that is impossible, no intelligent reading of Genesis can take the creator of the universe to be a bit of its fauna. Presumably, God gave us the intelligence to read what is obviously figurative as figurative.

And if one takes the Bible to be divine revelation, then it is natural to assume that God is using the authors to get his message across. For that to occur, the authors needn't be terribly bright or apprised of the variety of literary tropes.  What does it matter what the authors intended?  Suppose they intended talk of man being made in the divine image and likeness to be construed in some crassly materialistic way.  Then they failed to grasp the profound spiritual truth that they, willy nilly (nolens volens), were conveying.

Buckner continues: 

‘Until Saadiah [the 10th century father of Jewish philosophy], all Jewish thinkers, biblical and post-biblical, agreed that God, like anything real in the universe, has a body’. A proper understanding of the Hebrew Bible requires not only that God has a body, but that God has many bodies ‘located in sundry places in the world that God created’. These bodies are not angels or messengers. He says in this this interview that an angel in one sense is not sent by God but actually is God, just not all of God.

>>[It] is a smaller, more approachable, more user-friendly aspect of the cosmic deity who is Hashem. That idea is very similar to what the term avatara conveys in Sanskrit. So in this respect, we can see a significant overlap between Hindu theology and one biblical theology.<<

Do hard-assed logicians such as ourselves balk at such partial identity? Not necessarily. I point to a shadow at the bottom of the door, saying ‘that is the Fuller Brush man’. Am I saying that the Fuller Brush man is a shadow? Certainly not! Nor, when I point to a beach on the island, saying ‘that island is uninhabited’, am I implying that the whole island is a beach. By the same token, when I point to the avatar, and truly say ‘that is God’, am I implying that God is identical with the avatar? Not at all. Nor am I saying that God has feet, even though the avatar has feet. The point is that the reference of ‘that’ is not the physical manifestation before me, but God himself. Scholastic objections that we cannot think of God as ‘this essence’ (ut haec essentia) notwithstanding.

I grant that if an avatar of God has feet, it doesn't follow that God has feet.  My wife's avatar on Second Life has a tail, but you will be relieved to hear that my wife does not, literally, have a tail.  And yet there is a sense of 'is' according to which the avatar is my wife.  But how does this deal with my objection?  My point was not that God cannot have feet, but that God cannot be a physical being. The creator of the physical universe cannot be a proper part thereof.

Now suppose God himself is a pure spirit who has the power to manifest himself at will in and through various physical avatars.  This is an interesting and quite different notion, but apparently not the one that Sommer is floating. 

The Jewish philosopher/theologian who turns my crank is the great Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) as he is known in the West.  He goes to the opposite extreme rejecting both crude and refined anthropomorphism.  His path is that of the via negativa, a path  beset by its own perils.  I hope to say something about it in a later entry.

Related articles

Review of Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God

Is it Obvious that God is not a Being Among Beings?

Can a Return to Federalism Save Us?

The Anthropomorphism of Perfect-Being (Anselmian)Theology

One approach to God and his attributes is Anselmian: God is "that that which no greater can be conceived."  God is the greatest conceivable being, the most perfect of all beings, the being possessing all perfections.  But what is a perfection?  A perfection is not just any old (positive, non-Cambridge) property, but a great-making property.  Some of these properties admit of degrees while some do not. To say of God that he is the ens perfectissimum, the most perfect of all beings, is to say that he possesses all great- making properties, and of those that admit of degrees, he possesses them to the highest degree.

For example, power admits of degrees; so while Socrates and God are both powerful, only God is maximally powerful.  Wisdom too admits of degrees; so while both Socrates and God are both wise, only God is maximally wise.  And the same holds for love and mercy and moral goodness.  Many of the divine attributes, then, are maxima of attributes possessed by humans.

Are Socrates and God wise in the same sense of 'wise'?  This follows if wisdom in God is just the highest degree of the same attribute that is found in some humans.  Accordingly, the predicate 'wise' is being used univocally in 'Socrates is wise' and 'God is wise' despite the fact that God but not Socrates is all-wise.

Thus a commitment to univocity appears to be entailed by the Anselmian or perfect-being approach.

The polar opposite of univocity is equivocity.  The phenomenon of equivocity is illustrated by this pair of sentences: 'Socrates is wise,' 'Hillary is in no wise fit to be president.'  The meaning of 'wise' is totally different across the two sentences.  Midway between univocity and equivocity there is analogicity.  Perhaps an example of an analogical use of 'wise' would be in application to Guido the mafioso.  He's a wise guy; he knows the score; but he is not a wise man like Socrates, though he is like the latter in being knowledgeable about some things.   But I mention analogy only to set it aside.

My thesis: an Anselmian approach to God and his attributes such as we find in Alvin Plantinga and T. V. Morris is anthropomorphic. One takes God to have the very same great-making properties that (some) humans have, but to the maximal degree.  Socrates is benevolent and merciful; God is omnibenevolent and all-merciful.  And so on.  In so doing, one approaches God from the side of man, assimilating God to man.  God is 'made' in the image and likeness of man, as a sort of superman, but with defects removed and attributes maximized.

Well, what is wrong with anthropomorphism?  The problem with it is that it fails to do justice to God's absolute transcendence and ineffability.  If the difference between creatures and God is only a matter of degree, then God would not be worthy of worship. He would be "the greatest thing around" and no doubt an object of wonder and admiration, but not an appropriate object of worship. (See Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God, U. of  Notre Dame Press, 1996, p. 3)

God is the Absolute.  As such, he is radically other than creatures.  His attributes cannot be 'in series' with human degreed attributes even if at the limits of these series.  God in not just another thing that exists  and possesses properties in the way creatures possess properties.  

A subsequent entry will examine the view opposite to that of perfect-being theology, that of negative theology. 

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Review of Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God

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Is the Real a Tricycle? Plantinga versus Hick, Round One

Thinking and Speaking about the Absolute: Three Views

Thinking and Speaking about the Absolute: Three Views

Univocity.  There is an absolute reality.  We can speak of it literally and sometimes truly using predicates of ordinary language that retain in their metaphysical use the very same sense they have in their mundane use.  For example, we can say of Socrates that he exists, and using 'exists' in the very same sense we can say of God that he exists.  Accordingly, 'exists' is univocal in application to creature and creator.  Corresponding to this sameness of sense there is a sameness in mode of Being: God and Socrates exist in the very same way.  No doubt God exists necessarily whereas Socrates exist contingently; but this is a mere different in modal status, not a difference in mode of Being.  It is the difference between existing in all possible worlds and existing in some, but not all, possible worlds.

And the same holds for non-existential predicates such as 'wise.' We can say of Socrates that he is wise, and using 'wise' in the very same sense we can say of God that he is wise.  Accordingly, 'wise' is univocal in application to creature and creator.  Corresponding to this sameness of sense there is sameness in mode of property-possession: God and Socrates both have wisdom by instantiating it.

Analogicity.  Theological language is literal, but analogical.  I won't discuss this view now.

Negative Theology.  The absolute reality is beyond all our concepts. God is utterly transcendent, radically other. Nothing can be truly predicated of God as he is in himself, not even that he exists, or does not.  The problem with this approach is that it threatens to render theological language unintelligible.

So why not adopt the Univocity View?  Is there any good reason not to adopt it?

I think there is a good reason, namely, that the UV implies that God is a being among beings; that God as absolute reality cannot be a being among beings;  ergo, etc.  

But what does it mean to say that God is a being among beings?  As I see it, to say that God is a being among beings is to say that God is no exception to the logical and ontological principles (pertaining to properties, property-possession, existence, modality, etc.) that govern anything that can be said to exist.  It is to say that God fits the ontological or general-metaphysical schema that everything else fits. It is to say that God is ontologically on a par with other beings despite the attributes (omniscience, etc.) that set him apart from other beings and indeed render him unique among beings. To spell it out.  If God is a being among beings, then:

a.  Properties. Some properties are such that God and creatures share them.  Consider the property of being a self.  For present purposes we may accept Dale's definition: "a being capable of consciousness, with intelligence, will, and the ability to intentionally act."  God is a self, but so is Socrates.  Both are selves in the very same sense of 'self.'  'Self' is being used univocally (not equivocally and not analogically) in 'God is a self' and 'Socrates is a self' just as 'wise' is being used univocally in 'God is wise' and 'Socrates is wise,' and so on.

Some are  uncomfortable with talk of properties and seem to prefer talk of concepts.  Well then, I can put my present point by saying that some concepts are such as to be common to both God and creatures, the concept self being one example.

b. Property-possession. God has properties in the same way that creatures do.  My first point was that there are some properties that both God and creatures share; my present point is a different one about property-possession: the having of these shared properties is the same in the divine and creaturely cases.  Both God and Socrates instantiate the property of being a self, where first-level instantiation is an asymmetrical relation or non-relational tie that connects individuals and properties construed as mind-independent universals.

The point could be put conceptualistically as follows.  Both God and Socrates fall under the concept self, where falling under is an asymmetrical relation that connects individuals and concepts construed as mind-dependent universals. 

c. Existence. God is in the same way that creatures are.  Given that God exists and that Socrates exists, it does not follow that they exist in the same way.  Or so I maintain.  But part of what it means to say that God is a being among beings is to say that God and Socrates do exist in the very same way.  Whatever it is for an item to exist, there is only one way for an item to exist, and God and Socrates exist in that very same way. For example, if what it is for x to exist is for x to be identical to some y, then this holds both for God and Socrates.

d. It follows from (a) and (b) taken together that God is really distinct from his properties, and that his properties are really distinct from one another.  God is in this respect no different from Socrates. Really distinct: distinct in reality, apart from our mental operations.  (What is really distinct need not be capable of separate existence.)  And both items have their properties by instantiating them.

e. It follows from (c) that God is really distinct from his existence (just as Socrates is really distinct from his existence) and that God is really distinct from existence (just as Socrates is distinct from existence). 

f. It follows from (d) and (e) taken together that God is not ontologically simple.  Contrapositively, if God is ontologically simple, then God is not a being among beings as I am using this phrase.  It is therefore no surprise that Dale Tuggy ansd other evangelical Christians reject divine simplicity whereas I am inclined to accept it.  See my SEP entry for more on this.

To conclude, my argument against the Univocity View is as follows: 

A. If the UV is true, then God is a being among beings in the sense explained.
B. If God is a being among beings, then God is not ontologically simple.
C. An absolute being must be ontologically simple.
D. God is the absolute being.
Ergo
E. God is ontologically simple.
Ergo
F. God is not a being among beings.
Ergo
G. The Univocity View is not true.

So I reject the UV.  If the other two views are also rationally rejectable, then we have an aporia, which, I suggest, is what we have. We are at an impasse, as usual in philosophy.  

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God and Socrates: Two Different Ways of Existing?

Review of Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God

Can Kant Refer to God?

 Ed Buckner raises this 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 begins 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 is also an unstable  tissue of 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 exfoliation 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.  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.

The soul 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 they are actual in mathematics and physics, and would have to be actual in metaphysics if the latter were a science.  To put it quick and dirty:  synthetic a priori judgments are possible in math and physics because the phenomenal world is our construction.  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.  Things in themselves (noumena in the negative sense) are beyond our ken.  And yet we must posit them since the appearances are appearances of something (obj. gen.).  This restriction of human knowledge to the physical rules out any knowledge of the metaphysical.

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 arguments against the traditional soul substance of the rationalists are in the Paralogisms section of KdrV, and they are extremely interesting.

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.  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 are social constructs, etc.

How's that for bloggity-blog quick and dirty?

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. 

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Nietzsche and the New Atheists

Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

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

If man is made in God's image and likeness, does it follow that God is essentially embodied?

Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram . . . (Gen 1, 26) Let us make man in our image and likeness. . .

Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam. . . (Gen 1, 27) And God created man in his image. . .

I used to play chess with an old man by the name of Joe B., one of the last of the WWII Flying Tigers. Although he had been a working man all his life, he had an intellectual bent and liked to read. But like many an old man, he thought he knew all sorts of things that he didn’t know, and was not bashful about sharing his ‘knowledge.’ One day the talk got on to religion and the notion that man was created in the image and likeness of God. Old Joe had a long-standing animus against the Christianity of his youth, an animus probably connected with his equally long-standing hatred for his long-dead father.

Recalling some preacher’s invocation of the’ image and likeness’ theme, old Joe snorted derisively, "So God has a digestive tract!?" In Joe’s mind this triumphal query was supposed to bear the force of a refutation. Joe’s ‘reasoning’ was along these lines:

1. Man is made in God’s image.
2. Man is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.
Therefore
3. God is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.

But that’s like arguing:

1. This statue is made in Lincoln’s image.
2. This statue is composed of marble.
Therefore
3. Lincoln is composed of marble.

Joe’s mistake, one often repeated, is to take a spiritual saying in a materialistic way. The point is not that God must be physical because man is, but that man is a spiritual being just like God, potentially if not actually. The idea is not that God is a big man, the proverbial ‘man upstairs,’ but that man is a little god, a proto-god, a temporally and temporarily debased god who has open to him the possibility of a Higher Life with God, a possibility whose actualization requires both creaturely effort and divine grace.

In Feuerbachian terms, the point of imago dei is not that God is an anthropomorphic projection whereby man alienates his best attributes from himself and assigns them to an imaginary being external to himself, but that man is a theomorphic projection whereby God shares some of his attributes, such as free will,  with real beings external to him though dependent on him.

Which is true? Does man project God, or does God project man? Is man the measure, or the measured? Does man 'create' God, or God man?

Note first the following asymmetry. If God is literally an anthropomorphic projection, then God does not exist. It would be absurd to say that God exists as an anthropomorphic projection when it is built into the very concept of God that he be a se, from himself, i.e., incapable of any kind of ontological dependency. But if man is a theomorphic projection, then man exists to a degree greater than he would exist if there were no God. For if man is a creature of God, and indeed one created in the image and likeness of God, then man has the possibility of a Higher Life, an eternal life.

The paradox is that when atheistic man tries to stand on his own two feet, declaring himself independent of God, at that moment he is next to nothing, a transient flash in the cosmic pan. But when man accepts his creaturely status as imago Dei, thereby accepting his radical dependence, at that moment he becomes more than a speck of cosmic dust slated for destruction. Thus Jean-Paul Sartre had it precisely backwards in thinking that if God exists then man is nothing; it is rather that man is something only if God exists. For if man exists in a godless universe he is but a cosmic fluke and all the existentialist posturing in the world won't change the fact.

Is "image and likeness" a redundant phrase, or does it mark a distinction? Arguably the latter. To be created in God’s image is to be granted the potentiality for sharing in the divine life, a potentiality that may or may not be actualized and is shared in equally by all human beings without their consent. Likeness, however, results from man’s free actualization of that potentiality. Whereas the image of God is imposed on man, likeness to God is not, but requires the free cooperation of the creature. (Cf. Harry Boosalis, Orthodox Spiritual Life, St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1999), pp. 28-29.)

I am not free with respect to the image of God within me since I am not free to renounce my potential for divine sonship; but I am free with respect to the likeness since it is up to me whether I actualize the potential.  

Well, does God exist or not? Before one can answer this question, one must understand it. In particular, one must understand that it cannot be dismissed as one the answer to which is obvious. To wax Continental for a moment, one must restore the question (die Frage) to its questionableness (Fragwuerdigkeit), where ‘questionable’ means not only able to be questioned, but, as the corresponding German term suggests, worthy of being questioned, of being raised as a question. And for that it is necessary not to take phrases like imago Dei in a crude materialistic way in the manner of old Joe and so many others.

One reason so many are atheists is because they are crude materialists: they cannot conceive how anything could be real that is not material.  This, in turn, is aided and abetted by, and perhaps grounded in, their concupiscence:  The lusts of the flesh have persuaded them that the sensible alone is real.

One must see that there is nothing obvious in the Feuerbachian suggestion, even though the weight of our culture favors this obviousness; one must see that the opposite and much much older suggestion, according to which man is a theomorphic projection, is just as reasonable. 

But reasonable is not the same as true; so in the end one must decide what one will believe and how one will live.

In these regions of inquiry one cannot prove  anything.  To think otherwise is to fail to grasp the concept of proof.

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If man is made in God's image and likeness, does it follow that God is essentially embodied?

Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram . . . (Gen 1, 26) Let us make man in our image and likeness. . .

Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam. . . (Gen 1, 27) And God created man in his image. . .

I used to play chess with an old man by the name of Joe B., one of the last of the WWII Flying Tigers. Although he had been a working man all his life, he had an intellectual bent and liked to read. But like many an old man, he thought he knew all sorts of things that he didn’t know, and was not bashful about sharing his ‘knowledge.’ One day the talk got on to religion and the notion that man was created in the image and likeness of God. Old Joe had a long-standing animus against the Christianity of his youth, an animus probably connected with his equally long-standing hatred for his long-dead father.

Recalling some preacher’s invocation of the’ image and likeness’ theme, old Joe snorted derisively, "So God has a digestive tract!?" In Joe’s mind this triumphal query was supposed to bear the force of a refutation. Joe’s ‘reasoning’ was along these lines:

1. Man is made in God’s image.
2. Man is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.
Therefore
3. God is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.

But that’s like arguing:

1. This statue is made in Lincoln’s image.
2. This statue is composed of marble.
Therefore
3. Lincoln is composed of marble.

Joe’s mistake, one often repeated, is to take a spiritual saying in a materialistic way. The point is not that God must be physical because man is, but that man is a spiritual being just like God, potentially if not actually. The idea is not that God is a big man, the proverbial ‘man upstairs,’ but that man is a little god, a proto-god, a temporally and temporarily debased god who has open to him the possibility of a Higher Life with God, a possibility whose actualization requires both creaturely effort and divine grace.

In Feuerbachian terms, the point of imago dei is not that God is an anthropomorphic projection whereby man alienates his best attributes from himself and assigns them to an imaginary being external to himself, but that man is a theomorphic projection whereby God shares some of his attributes, such as free will,  with real beings external to him though dependent on him.

Which is true? Does man project God, or does God project man? Is man the measure, or the measured? Does man 'create' God, or God man?

Note first the following asymmetry. If God is literally an anthropomorphic projection, then God does not exist. It would be absurd to say that God exists as an anthropomorphic projection when it is built into the very concept of God that he be a se, from himself, i.e., incapable of any kind of ontological dependency. But if man is a theomorphic projection, then man exists to a degree greater than he would exist if there were no God. For if man is a creature of God, and indeed one created in the image and likeness of God, then man has the possibility of a Higher Life, an eternal life.

The paradox is that when atheistic man tries to stand on his own two feet, declaring himself independent of God, at that moment he is next to nothing, a transient flash in the cosmic pan. But when man accepts his creaturely status as imago Dei, thereby accepting his radical dependence, at that moment he becomes more than a speck of cosmic dust slated for destruction. Thus Jean-Paul Sartre had it precisely backwards in thinking that if God exists then man is nothing; it is rather that man is something only if God exists. For if man exists in a godless universe he is but a cosmic fluke and all the existentialist posturing in the world won't change the fact.

Is "image and likeness" a redundant phrase, or does it mark a distinction? Arguably the latter. To be created in God’s image is to be granted the potentiality for sharing in the divine life, a potentiality that may or may not be actualized and is shared in equally by all human beings without their consent. Likeness, however, results from man’s free actualization of that potentiality. Whereas the image of God is imposed on man, likeness to God is not, but requires the free cooperation of the creature. (Cf. Harry Boosalis, Orthodox Spiritual Life, St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1999), pp. 28-29.)

I am not free with respect to the image of God within me since I am not free to renounce my potential for divine sonship; but I am free with respect to the likeness since it is up to me whether I actualize the potential.  

Well, does God exist or not? Before one can answer this question, one must understand it. In particular, one must understand that it cannot be dismissed as one the answer to which is obvious. To wax Continental for a moment, one must restore the question (die Frage) to its questionableness (Fragwuerdigkeit), where ‘questionable’ means not only able to be questioned, but, as the corresponding German term suggests, worthy of being questioned, of being raised as a question. And for that it is necessary not to take phrases like imago Dei in a crude materialistic way in the manner of old Joe and so many others.

One reason so many are atheists is because they are crude materialists: they cannot conceive how anything could be real that is not material.  This, in turn, is aided and abetted by, and perhaps grounded in, their concupiscence:  The lusts of the flesh have persuaded them that the sensible alone is real.

One must see that there is nothing obvious in the Feuerbachian suggestion, even though the weight of our culture favors this obviousness; one must see that the opposite and much much older suggestion, according to which man is a theomorphic projection, is just as reasonable. 

But reasonable is not the same as true; so in the end one must decide what one will believe and how one will live.

In these regions of inquiry one cannot prove  anything.  To think otherwise is to fail to grasp the concept of proof.

Could God Prove His Own Existence?

In response to two recent posts, here and here, Jacques comments:

I'm mostly persuaded by your recent posts about theism and knowledge, but I disagree about your claim that

"Presumably God can prove the existence of God, if he exists, not that he needs to."

Think of your condition 5 ["It is such that all its premises are known to be true."]  if you can prove that p then you can derive p from an argument with premises all of which are known to be true.  Suppose that God has some argument A for the conclusion that God exists.  As you point out, A will either depend on premises taken to be self-evident, or an appeal to the seeming self-evidence of further premises in sub-arguments for the premises in A that are not taken to be self-evident.  But now suppose that there's some premise P such that A is a proof of theism for God only if God takes P to be self-evident and P really is self-evident -- in other words, only if P is 'objectively' self-evident and not just 'subjectively'.  Of course, P might well appear to God to be self-evident; it might even appear to him that the objective self-evidence of P is itself objectively self-evident, and so on ad infinitum.  But how could He really know, or be rationally entitled to believe, that P really is self-evident in the relevant sense rather than just seeming that way to Him?  Sure, if He already knows that God exists, and that He Himself = God, then He can infer that the fact that P seems to him self-evident entails its real objective self-evidence.  But how can He know that unless He can prove that He = God?

BV:  The question seems to come down to whether or not the distinction between subjective and objective self-evidence  applies to God as well as to us.  It does apply to us.  But I don't see that it applies to God.  God's is an archetypal intellect, which implies that divine knowledge is creative of its object, whereas our knowledge is clearly not.  If God knows that p by making it the case that p, then there is no logical gap between subjective and objective self-evidence for God.

On the other hand, it could be that God isn't even capable of proving anything.  Maybe proofs are only possible for ignorant thinkers (who don't know directly, by acquaintance all the facts).  But if He could prove or try to prove things I suspect His situation would be no better than ours with respect to His existence.  Of course that conflicts with the (definitional?) fact of His omniscience, but maybe the conclusion should just be that the traditional concept of the Omni- God is incoherent.

BV:  The divine intellect is intuitive, not discursive.  God knows directly, not mediately via inferential processes.  To know something in the latter way is an inferior way of knowing, and as such inappropriate to the divine intellect.  Does it follow that God can't prove anything?  I would hesitate to say  that given the divine omnipotence: if he wanted to construct a proof he could.  The point is that he doesn't need to.  But we do need to employ inferential process to articulate and amplify our knowledge both deductively and inductively.

The main question, however, was whether WE can prove the existence of God.  My answer to that is in the negative.  The reason is due to the nature of proof as set forth in my definition.  But perhaps you have a better definition.

God and Proof

This is an addendum to clarify what I said two days ago.

My claim is that we have no demonstrative knowledge of the truth of theism or of the falsity of naturalism.  Demonstrative knowledge is knowledge produced by a demonstration.  A demonstration in this context is an argument that satisfies all of the following conditions:

1. It is deductive
2. It is valid in point of logical form
3. It is free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii
4. It is such that all its premises are true
5. It is such that all its premises are known to be true
6. It is such that its conclusion is relevant to its premises.

To illustrate (6).  The following argument satisfies all of the conditions except the last and is therefore probatively worthless:

Snow is white
ergo
Either Obama is president or he is not.

On my use of terms, a demonstrative argument = a probative argument = a proof = a rationally compelling argument.  Now clearly there are good arguments (of different sorts) that are not demonstrative, probative, rationally compelling.  One type is the strong inductive argument. By definition, no such argument satisfies (1) or (2).  A second type is the argument that satisfies all the conditions except (5). 

Can one prove the existence of God?  That is, can one produce a proof (as above defined) of the existence of God?   I don't think so.  For how will you satisfy condition (5)?  Suppose you give argument A for the existence of God.  How do you know that the premises of A are true?  By argument?  Suppose A has premises P1, P2, P3.  Will you give arguments for these premises?  Then you need three more arguments, one for each of P1, P2, P3, each of which has its own premises.  A vicious infinite regress is in the offing.  Needless to say, moving in an argumentative circle is no better.

At some point you will have to invoke self-evidence.   You will have to say that, e.g., it is just self-evident that every event has a cause.  And you will have to mean objectively self-evident, not just subjectively self-evident.  But how can you prove, to yourself or anyone else, that what is subjectively self-evident is objectively self-evident?  You can't, at least not with respect to states of affairs transcending your consciousness. 

Paging Baron von Muenchhausen.

I conclude that no one can prove the existence of God.  But one can reasonably believe that God exists.  The same holds for the nonexistence of God.  No one can prove the nonexistence of God.  But one can reasonably believe that there is no God.

Of course, when I say that no one can prove the existence of God I mean no one of us.  Presumably God can prove the existence of God, if he exists, not that he needs to.  And when I said above that a probative argument  is such that all its premises are known to be true, I meant, as any charitable reader would have assumed, "known by us."

The same goes for naturalism.  I cannot prove that there is more to reality than the space-time system and its contents.  But I can reasonably believe it.  For I have a battery of powerful arguments each of which satisfies conditions (1), (2), (3) and (6) and may even, as far as far as I know, satisfy  (4).

"So how is the atheist not irrational on your view, assuming he is apprised of your arguments?"

He is not irrational because none of my arguments are rationally compelling in the sense I supplied, namely, they are not such as to force every competent philosophical practitioner to accept their conclusions on pain of being irrational if he does not.   Surely it would be foolish to say that atheists, the lot of them, are irrational people.

Either God exists or he does not.  But both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable.  

To end with a psychological speculation:  those who hanker after proofs of God and the soul or the opposite are insufficiently mature to live with doxastic insecurity.

Our life here below is insecure physically, psychologically, socially, economically, and in every way, including doxastically.  We need, and sometimes crave, security.  Our pursuit of it can be ordinate.  For example, the wise make provision for the future by saving and investing, taking care of their health, buying insurance, planning how they will react to certain emergencies, etc.  Fools, by contrast, live as if there is no tomorrow.  When tomorrow comes, they either perish of their folly or suffer unnecessarily.

But there is also an inordinate pursuit of security.  It is impossible in this life totally to secure oneself in any of the ways mentioned, including with respect to belief.  One  must accept that life is a venture and an adventure across the board.