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.
iiDoes 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.
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.
. . . 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To theists, I say: go on being theists. You are better off being a theist than not being one. Your position is rationally defensible and the alternatives are rationally rejectable. But don't fancy that you can prove the existence of God or the opposite. In the end you must decide how you will live and what you will believe.
About "Don't fancy that you can prove the existence of God or the opposite," Owen Anderson asks:
How would we know if that claim is itself true? Isn't it is possible that one or the other can indeed be proven?
To formulate my point in the declarative rather than the exhortative mood:
P. Neither the existence nor the nonexistence of God is provable.
How do I know (P) to be true? By reflection on the nature of proof. An argument is a proof if and only if it satisfies all of the following six requirements: it is deductive; valid in point of logical form; free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii; possesses a conclusion that is relevant to the premises; has premises each of which is true; has premises each of which is known to be true.
I say that an argument is a proof if and only it is rationally compelling, or rationally coercive. But an argument needn't be rationally compelling to be a more or less 'good argument,' one that renders its conclusion more or less rationally acceptable.
Now if my definition above gives what we ought to mean by 'proof,' then it is clear that neither the existence nor the nonexistence of God can be proven. Suppose you present a theistic or anti-theistic argument that satisfies the first five requirements. I will then ask how you know that the premises are true. Suppose one of your premises is that change is the conversion of potency into act. That is a plausible thing to maintain, but how do you know that it is true? How do you know that the general-ontological framework within which the proposition acquires its very sense, namely, Aristotelian metaphysics, is tenable? After all, there are alternative ways of understanding change. That there is change is a datum, a Moorean fact, but it would be an obvious mistake to confuse this datum with some theory about it, even if the theory is true. Suppose the theory is true. This still leaves us with the question of how we know it is. Besides, the notions of potency and act, substance and accident, form and matter, and all the rest of the Aristotelian conceptuality are murky and open to question. (For example, the notion of prime matter is a necessary ingredient in an Aristotelian understanding of substantial change, but the notion of materia prima is either incoherent or else not provably coherent.)
To take a second example, suppose I give a cosmological argument the starting point of which is the seemingly innocuous proposition that there are are contingent beings, and go on to argument that this starting point together with some auxiliary premises, entails the existence of God. How do I know that existnece can be predicated of concrete individuals? Great philosophers have denied it. Frege and Russell fanmously held that existence vannot be meaningfully predicated of individuals but only of cncepts and propositional functions. I have rather less famoulsy argued that the 'GFressellina' view' is mstaken, but this is a point of controversy. Furtrhertmore, if existence cannot be meaningfully predicated of individuals, how can individuals be said to exist contingently?
The Appeal to Further Arguments
If you tell me that the premises of your favorite argument can be known to be true on the basis of further arguments that take those premises as their conclusions, then I simply iterate my critical procedure: I run the first five tests above and if your arguments pass those, then I ask how you know that their premises are true. If you appeal to still further arguments, then you embark upon a vicious infinite regress.
The Appeal to Self-Evidence
If you tell me that the premises of your argument are self-evident, then I will point out that your and my subjective self-evidence is unavailing. It is self-evident to me that capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain cases. I'll die in the ditch for that one, and pronounce you morally obtuse to boot for not seeing it. But there are some who are intelligent, well-meaning, and sophisticated to whom this is not self-evident. They will charge with with moral obtuseness. Examples are easily multiplied. What is needed is objective, discussion-stopping, self-evidence. But then, how, in a given case, do you know that your evidence is indeed objective? All you can go on is how things seem to you. If it seems to you that it is is objectively the case that p, that boils down to: it seems to you that, etc., in which case your self-evidence is again merely subjective.
The Appeal to Authority
You may attempt to support the premises of your argument by an appeal to authority. Now many such appeals are justified. We rightly appeal to the authority of gunsmiths, orthopaedic surgeons, actuaries and other experts all the time, and quite sensibly. But such appeals are useless when it comes to PROOF. How do you know that your putative authority really is one, and even if he is, how do you know that he is eight in the present case? How do you know he is not lying to you well he tells you you need a new sere in your semi-auto pistol?
The Appeal to Revelation
This is the ultimate appeal to authority. Necessarily, if God reveals that p, then p! Again, useless for purposes of proof. See Josiah Royce and the Paradox of Revelation.
Move in a Circle?
If your argument falls afoul of petitio principii, that condemns it, and the diameter of the circle doesn't matter. A circle is a circle no matter its diameter.
Am I Setting the Bar Too High?
It seems to me I am setting it exactly where it belongs. After all we are talking about PROOF here and surely only arguments that generate knowledge count as proofs. But if an argument is to generate a known proposition, then its premises must be known, and not merely believed, or believed on good evidence, or assumed, etc.
"But aren't you assuming that knowledge entails certainty, or (if this is different) impossibility of mistake?" Yes I am assuming that. Argument here.
Can I Consistently Claim to Know that (P) is true?
Owen Anderson asked me how I know that (P) is true. I said I know it by reflection on the concept of proof. But that was too quick. Obviously I cannot consistently claim to know that (P) if knowledge entails certainty. For how do I know that my definition captures the essence of proof? How do I know that there is an essence of proof, or any essence of anything? What I want to say, of course, is that it is very reasonable to define 'proof' as I define it -- absent some better definition -- and that if one does so define it then it is clear that there are very few proofs, and, in particular, that there are no proofs of God or of the opposite.
"But then isn't it is possible that one or the other can indeed be proven?"
Yes, if one operates with a different, less rigorous, definition of 'proof.' But in philosophy we have and maintain high standards. So I say proof is PROOF (a tautological form of words that expresses a non-tautological proposition) and that we shouldn't use the word to refer to arguments that merely render their conclusions rationally acceptable.
Note also that if we retreat from the rationally compelling to the rationally acceptable, then both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable. I suspect that what Owen wants is a knock-down argument for the existence of God. But if that is what he wants, then he wants a proof in my sense of the world. If I am right, that is something very unreasonable to expect.
There is no getting around the need for a decision. In the end, after all the considerations pro et contra, you must decide what you will believe and how you will live.
Life is a venture and an adventure. You cannot live without risk. This is true not only in the material sphere, but also in the realm of ideas.
God does what Husserl's transcendental ego wanted to do but couldn't pull off, namely, constitute beings not as mere unities of sense, but as beings, as "independent reals" to borrow a phrase from Josiah Royce. Husserl's transcendental idealism never gets the length of Sein; it reaches only as far as Seinsinn.
This leads us to perhaps 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, an other mind, like unto his own, made in his image, who is yet radically other in its inwardness and freedom. How is this conceivable?
We are not 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?
This is the 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.
Explanatory rationalism is the view that there is a satisfactory answer to every explanation-seeking why question. Equivalently, it is the view that there are no propositions that are just true, i.e., true, contingently true, but without explanation of their being true. Are there some contingent truths that lack explanation? Consider the conjunction of all contingent truths. The conjunction of all contingent truths is itself a contingent truth. Could this contingent conjunctive truth have an explanation? Jonathan Bennett thinks not:
Let P be the great proposition stating the whole contingent truth about the actual world, down to its finest detail, in respect of all times. Then the question 'Why is it the case that P?' cannot be answered in a satisfying way. Any purported answer must have the form 'P is the case because Q is the case'; but if Q is only contingently the case then it is a conjunct in P, and the offered explanation doesn't explain; and if Q is necessarily the case then the explanation, if it is cogent, implies that P is necessary also. But if P is necessary then the universe had to be exactly as it is, down to the tiniest detail -- i.e., this is the only possible world. (Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza's Ethics, Hackett 1984, p. 115)
Bennett's point is that explanatory rationalism entails the collapse of modal distinctions. To put it another way, the principle of sufficient reason, call it PSR, according to which every truth has a sufficient reason for its being true, entails the extensional equivalence of the possible, the actual, and the necessary. These modal words would then differ at most in their sense but not in their reference. If we assume, as most of us will, the non-equivalence of the possible, the actual, and the necessary, then, by modus tollens, we will infer the falsity of explanatory rationalism/PSR.
This is relevant to the God question. If PSR is false, then cosmological arguments for the existence of God which rest on PSR will be all of them unsound.
Now let's look at Bennett's argument in detail.
The world-proposition P is a conjunction of truths all of which are contingent. So P is contingent. Now if explanatory rationalism is true, then P has an explanation of its being true. Bennett assumes that this explanation must be in terms of a proposition Q distinct from P such that Q entails P, and is thus a sufficient reason for P. Now Q is either necessary or contingent. If Q is necessary, and a proposition is explained by citing a distinct proposition that entails it, and Q explains P, then P is necessary, contrary to what we have assumed. On the other hand, if Q is contingent, then Q is a conjunct of P, and again no successful explanation has been arrived at. Therefore, either explanatory rationalism is false, or it is true only on pain of a collapse of modal distinctions. We take it for granted that said collapse would be a Bad Thing.
Preliminary Skirmishing
Bennett's is a cute little argument, a variant of which impresses the illustrious Peter van Inwagen as well, but I must report that I do not find the argument in either version compelling. Why is P true? We can say that P is true because each conjunct of P is true. We are not forced to say that P is true because of a distinct proposition Q which entails P.
I am not saying that P is true because P is true; I am saying that P is true because each conjunct of P is true, and that this adequately and non-circularly explains why P is true. Some wholes are adequately and noncircularly explained when their parts are explained. In a broad sense of 'whole' and 'part,' a conjunction of propositions is a whole the parts of which are its conjuncts. Suppose I want to explain why the conjunction Tom is broke & Tom is fat is true. It suffices to say that Tom is broke is true and that Tom is fat is true. Their being conjoined does not require a separate explanation since for any propositions their conjunction automatically exists.
Suppose three bums are hanging around the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Why is this threesome there? The explanations of why each is there add up (automatically) to an explanation of why the three of them are there. Someone who understands why A is there, why B is there, and why C is there, does not need to understand some further fact in order to understand why the three of them are there. Similarly, it suffices to explain the truth of a conjunction to adduce the truth of its conjuncts. The conjunction is true because each conjunct is true. There is no need for an explanation of why a conjunctive proposition is true which is above and beyond the explanations of why its conjuncts are true.
Bennett falsely assumes that "Any purported answer must have the form 'P is the case because Q is the case'. . ." This ignores my suggestion that P is the case because each of its conjuncts is the case. So P does have an explanation; it is just that the explanation is not in terms of a proposition Q distinct from P which entails P.
Going Deeper
But we can and should go deeper. P is true because each of its conjuncts is true. But why are they true? Each is true because its truth-maker makes it true. A strong case can be made that there are truth-makers and that truth-makers are concrete facts or states of affairs. (See D. M. Armstrong, et al.) A fact is not a proposition, but that which makes a contingently true proposition true. My being seated, for example, makes-true 'BV is seated.' The sentence (as well as the proposition it is used to express) cannot just be true: there must be something external to the sentence that makes it true, and this something cannot be another sentence or anyone's say-so. As for Bennett's "great proposition P," we can say that its truth-maker is the concrete universe. Why is P true? Because the concrete universe makes it true. 'Makes true' as used in truth-maker theory does not mean entails even though there is a loose sense of 'makes true' according to which a true proposition makes true any proposition it entails. Entailment is a relation defined over propositions: it connects propositions to propositions. It thus remains within the sphere of propositions. Truth-making, however, connects non-propositions to propositions. Therefore, truth-making is not entailment.
We are now outside the sphere of propositions and can easily evade Bennett's clever argument. It is simply not the case that any purported answer to the question why P is the case must invoke a proposition that entails it. A genuine explanation of why a contingent proposition is true cannot ultimately remain within the sphere of propositions. In the case of P it is the existence and character of the concrete universe that explains why P is true.
Going Deeper Still
But we can and should go deeper still. Proposition P is true because the actual concrete universe U -- which is not a proposition -- makes it true. But what makes U exist and have the truth-making power? If propositional truth is grounded in ontic truth, the truth of things, what grounds ontic truth? Onto-theological truth?
Theists have a ready answer: the contingent concrete universe U exists because God freely created it ex nihilo. It exists because God created it; it exists contingently because God might not have created it or any concrete universe. The ultimate explanation of why P is true is that God created its truth-maker, U.
Now consider the proposition, God creates U. Call it G. Does a re-run of Bennett's argument cause trouble? G entails P. G is either necessary or contingent. If G is necessary, then so is P, and modal distinctions collapse. If G is contingent, however, it is included as a conjunct within P. Does the explanation in terms of divine free creation therefore fail?
Not at all. For it is not a proposition that explains P's being true but God's extra-propositional activity, which is not a proposition. God's extra-propositional activity makes true P including G and including the proposition, God's extra-propositional activity makes true P.
Conclusions
I conclude that Professor Bennett has given us an insufficient reason to reject the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
I apply a similar critique to Peter van Inwagen's version of the argument in my "On An Insufficient Argument Against Sufficient Reason," Ratio, vol. 10, no. 1 (April 1997), pp. 76-81.
Arguments to God a contingentia mundi that rely on PSR are not refuted by the Bennett argument.
William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality (Oxford University Press, 2015), ix + 369 pp.
This is a book philosophers of religion will want on their shelves. It collects sixteen of William E. Mann's previously published papers and includes “Omnipresence, Hiddenness, and Mysticism” written for this volume. These influential papers combine analytic precision with historical erudition: in many places Mann works directly from the classical texts and supplies his own translations. Mann ranges masterfully over a wealth of topics from the highly abstract (divine simplicity, aseity, sovereignty, immutability, omnipresence) to the deeply existential (mysticism, divine love, human love and lust, guilt, lying, piety, hope). As the title suggests, the essays are grouped under three heads, God, Modality, and Morality.
A somewhat off-putting feature of some of these essays is their rambling and diffuse character. In this hyperkinetic age it is a good writerly maxim to state one's thesis succinctly at the outset and sketch one's overall argument before plunging into the dialectic. Mann typically just plunges in. “The Guilty Mind,” for example, begins by juxtaposing the Matthew 5:28 commandment against adultery in the heart with the principle of mens rea from the criminal law. From there we move to a certain view of intentional action ascribed to a character Mann has invented. This is then followed with a rich and penetrating discussions of lying, strict criminal liability, the doctrine of Double Effect (307-9) and other topics illustrated with a half-dozen or so further made-up characters. One realizes one is in the presence of a fertile mind grappling seriously with difficult material, but after a couple of dense pages, one asks oneself: where is this going? What is the thesis? Why is the author making me work so hard? Some of us need to evaluate what we study to see if we should take it on board; this is made difficult if the thesis or theses are not clear.
I had a similar difficulty with the discussion of love in “Theism and the Foundations of Ethics.”
Central to Christian moral teaching are the two greatest commandments. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Matthew 22:35-40) Mann raises the question whether love can be reasonably commanded. Love is an emotion or feeling. As such it is not under the control of the will. And yet we are commanded to love God and neighbor. How is this possible? An action can be commanded, but love is not an action. If love can be commanded, then love is an action, something I can will myself to do; love is not an action, not something I can will myself to do, but an emotional response; ergo, love cannot be commanded.
One way around the difficulty is by reinterpreting what is meant by 'love.' While I cannot will to love you, I can will to act benevolently toward you. And while it makes no sense to command love, it does make sense to command benevolent behavior. "You ought to love her" makes no sense; but "You ought to act as if you love her" does make sense. There cannot be a duty to love, but there might be a duty to do the sorts of things to and for a person that one would do without a sense of duty if one were to love her. One idea, then, is to construe "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" as "Thou shalt act towards everyone as one acts toward those few whom one loves" or perhaps "Thou shalt act toward one's neighbor as if one loved him." The above is essentially Kant's view as Mann reports it (236 ff.) .
As for love of God, to love God with one's whole heart, mind, and soul is to act as if one loves God with one's whole heart, mind, and soul. But how does one do that? One way is by acting as if one loves one's neighbor as oneself. So far, so good. Mann, however, rejects this minimalist account as he calls it. And then the discussion becomes murky for this reviewer despite his having read it four or five times carefully. The murkiness is not alleviated by a segue into a rich and detailed discussion of eros, philia, and agape.
“Modality, Morality, and God” is written in the same meandering style but is much easier to follow. It also has the virtue of epitomizing the entire collection of essays. Its topic is the familiar Euthyphro dilemma: Does God love right actions because they are right, or are they right because God loves them? On the first horn, God is reduced to a mere spokesman for the moral order rather than its source, with negative consequences for the divine sovereignty. On the second horn, the autonomy of the moral order is compromised and made hostage to divine arbitrarity. If the morally obligatory is such because God commands it, then, were God to command injustice, it would be morally obligatory. And if God were to love injustice that would surely not give us a moral reason for loving it. Having set up the problem, Mann should have stated his solution and then explained it. Instead, he makes us slog through his dialectic. Mann's solution is built on the notion that with respect to necessary truths and absolute values God is not free to will otherwise than he wills. In this way the second horn is avoided. But how can God be sovereign over the conceptual and moral orders if he cannot will otherwise than he wills? If I understand the solution, it is that sovereignty is maintained and the first horn is avoided if the constraint on divine freedom is internal to God as it would be if “absolute values are the expression of that [God's] rational autonomy.” (168) Thus God is not free as possessing the liberty of indifference with respect to necessary truths and absolute values, but he is free as the rationally autonomous creative source of necessary truths and absolute values. Thus God is the source of necessary truths and absolute values, not their admirer. Does Mann's solution require the doctrine of divine simplicity? I dont think so. But it is consistent with it. If knowing and willing are identical in God, then the truth value and modal status of necessary truths cannot be otherise in which case God cannot will them to be otherwise.
Divine Simplicity
At the center of Mann's approach to God is the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). But as Mann wryly observes, “The DDS is not the sort of doctrine that commands everyone's immediate assent.” (260) It is no surprise then that the articulation, defense, and application of the doctrine is a recurrent theme of most of the first thirteen essays. Since DDS is the organizing theme of the collection, a critical look at Mann's defense of it is in order.
One of the entailments of the classical doctrine of divine simplicity is that God is what he has. (Augustine, The City of God, XI, 10.) Thus God has omniscience by being (identical to) omniscience. And similarly for the other divine attributes. The Platonic flavor of this is unmistakable. God is not an all-knowing being, but all-knowing-ness itself; not a good being, or even a maximally good being, but Goodness itself; not a wise being or the wisest of beings, but Wisdom itself. Neither is God a being among beings, an ens among entia, but ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsistent Being. To our ordinary way of thinking this sounds like so much nonsense: how could anything be identical to its attributes? It seems obvious that something that has properties is eo ipso distinct from them. But on another way of thinking, DDS makes a good deal of sense. How could God, the absolute, self-sufficient reality, be just one more wise individual even if the wisest? God is better thought of as the source of all wisdom, as Wisdom itself in its prime instance. Otherwise, God would be dependent on something other than himself for his wisdom, namely, the property of being wise. As Mann points out, the Platonic approach as we find it is the Augustinian and Anselmian accounts of DDS leads to difficulties a couple of which are as follows:
D1. If God = wisdom, and God = life, then wisdom = life. But wisdom and life are not even extensionally equivalent, let alone identical. If Tom is alive, it doesn't follow that Tom is wise. (23)
D2. If God is wisdom, and Socrates is wise by participating in wisdom, then Socrates is wise by participating in God. But this smacks of heresy. No creature participates in God. (23)
Property Instances
Enter property instances. It is one thing to say that God is wisdom, quite another to say that God is God's wisdom. God's wisdom is an example of a property instance. And similarly for the other divine attributes. God is not identical to life; God is identical to his life. Suppose we say that God = God's wisdom, and God = God's life. It would then follow that God's wisdom = God's life, but not that God = wisdom or that wisdom = life.
So if we construe identity with properties as identity with property instances, then we can evade both of (D1) and (D2). Mann's idea, then, is that the identity claims made within DDS should be taken as Deity-instance identities (e.g., God is his omniscience) and as instance-instance identities (e.g., God's omniscience is God's omnipotence), but not as Deity-property identities (e.g., God is omniscience) or as property-property identities (e.g., omniscience is omnipotence). Support for Mann's approach is readily available in the texts of the doctor angelicus. (24) Aquinas says things like, Deus est sua bonitas, "God is his goodness."
But what exactly is a property instance? If the concrete individual Socrates instantiates the abstract property wisdom, then two further putative items come into consideration. One is the (Chisholmian-Plantingian as opposed to Bergmannian-Armstrongian) state of affairs, Socrates' being wise. Such items are abstract, i.e., not in space or time. The other is the property instance, the wisdom of Socrates. Mann rightly holds that they are distinct. All abstract states of affairs exist, but only some of them obtain or are actual. By contrast, all property instances are actual: they cannot exist without being actual. The wisdom of Socrates is a particular, an unrepeatable item, just as Socrates is, and the wisdom of Socrates is concrete (in space and/or time) just as Socrates is. If we admit property instances into our ontology, then the above two difficulties can be circumvented. Or so Mann maintains.
Could a Person be a Property Instance?
But then other problems loom. One is this. If the F-ness of God = God, if, for example, the wisdom of God = God, then God is a property instance. But God is a person. From the frying pan into the fire? How could a person be a property instance? The problem displayed as an inconsistent triad:
a. God is a property instance.
b. God is a person.
c. No person is a property instance.
Mann solves the triad by denying (c). (37) Some persons are property instances. Indeed, Mann argues that every person is a property instance because everything is a property instance. (38) God is a person and therefore a property instance. If you object that persons are concrete while property instances are abstract, Mann's response is that both are concrete. (37) To be concrete is to be in space and/or time. Socrates is concrete in this sense, but so is his being sunburned.
If you object that persons are substances and thus independent items while property instances are not substances but dependent on substances, Mann's response will be that the point holds for accidental property instances but not for essential property instances. Socrates may lose his wisdom but he cannot lose his humanity. Now all of God's properties are essential: God is essentially omniscient, omnipotent, etc. So it seems to Mann that "the omniscience of God is not any more dependent on God than God is on the omniscience of God: should either cease to be, the other would also." (37) This is scarcely compelling: x can depend on y even if both are necessary beings. Both the set whose sole member is the number 7 and the number 7 itself are necessary beings, but the set depends on its member both for its existence and its necessity, and not vice versa. Closer to home, Aquinas held that some necessary beings have their necessity from another while one has its necessity in itself. I should think that the omniscience of God is dependent on God, and not vice versa. Mann's view, however, is not unreasonable. Intuitions vary.
Mann's argument for the thesis that everything is a property instance involves the notion of a rich property. The rich property of an individual x is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are all and only the essential and accidental properties, some of them temporally indexed, instantiated by x throughout x's career. (38) Mann tells us that for anything whatsoever there is a corresponding rich property. From this he concludes that "everything is a property instance of some rich property or other." (38) It follows that every person is a property instance. The argument seems to be this:
A. For every concrete individual x, there is a corresponding rich property R. Therefore,
B. For every concrete individual x, x is a property instance of some rich property or other. Therefore,
C. For every concrete individual x, if x is a person, then x is a property instance.
I am having difficulty understanding this argument. The move from (A) to (B) smacks of a non sequitur absent some auxiliary premise. I grant arguendo that for each concrete individual x there is a corresponding rich property R. And I grant that there are property instances. Thus I grant that, in addition to Socrates and wisdom, there is the wisdom of Socrates. Recall that this property instance is not to be confused with the abstract state of affairs, Socrates' being wise. From what I have granted it follows that for each x there is the rich property instance, the R-ness of x. But how is it supposed to follow that everything is a property instance? Everything instantiates properties, and in this sense everything is an instance of properties; but this is not to say that everything is a property instance. Socrates instantiates a rich property, and so is an instance of a property, but it doesn't follow that Socrates is a property instance. Something is missing in Mann's argument. Either that, or I am missing something.
There is of course no chance that Professor Mann is confusing being an instance of a property with being a property instance. If a instantiates F-ness, then a is an instance of the property F-ness; but a is not a property instance as philosophers use this phrase: the F-ness of a is a property instance. So what do we have to add to Mann's argument for it to generate the conclusion that every concrete individual is a property instance? How do we validate the inferential move from (A) to (B)? Let 'Rs' stand for Socrates' rich property. We have to add the claim that there is nothing one could point to that could distinguish Socrates from the property instance generated when Socrates instantiates Rs. Rich property instances are a special case of property instances. Socrates cannot be identical to his wisdom because he can exist even if his wisdom does not exist. And he cannot be identical to his humanity because there is more to Socrates that his humanity, even though he cannot exist wthout it. But since Socrates' rich property instance includes all his property instances, why can't Socrates be identical to this rich property instance? And so Mann's thought seems to be that there is nothing that could distinguish Socrates from his rich property instance. So they are identical. And likewise for every other individual. But I think this is mistaken. Consequently, I think it is a mistake to hold that every person is a property instance. I give three arguments.
Rich Properties and Haecceity Properties
Socrates can exist without his rich property; ergo, he can exist without his rich property instance; ergo, Socrates cannot be a rich property instance or any property instance. The truth of the initial premise is fallout from the definition of 'rich property.' The R of x is a conjunctive property each conjunct of which is a property of x. Thus Socrates' rich property includes (has as a conjunct) the property of being married to Xanthippe. But Socrates might not have had that property, whence it follows that he might not have had R. (If R has C as a conjunct, then necessarily R has C as a conjunct, which implies that R cannot be what it is without having exactly the conjuncts it in fact has. An analog of mereological essentialism holds for conjunctive properties.) And because Socrates might not have had R, he might not have had the property instance of R. So Socrates cannot be identical to this property instance.
What Mann needs is not a rich property, but an haecceity property: one that individuates Socrates across every possible world in which he exists. His rich property, by contrast, individuates him in only the actual world. In different worlds, Socrates has different rich properties. And in different worlds, Socrates has different rich property instances. It follows that Socrates cannot be identical to, or even necessarily equivalent to, any rich property instance. An haecceity property, however, is a property Socrates has in every world in which he exists, and which he alone has in every world in which he exists. Now if there are such haecceity properties as identity-with-Socrates, then perhaps we can say that Socrates is identical to a property instance, namely, the identity-with-Socrates of Socrates. Unfortunately, there are no haecceity properties as I and others have argued.1 So I conclude that concrete individuals cannot be identified with property instances, whence follows the perhaps obvious proposition that no person is a property instance, not God, not me, not Socrates.
The Revenge of Max Black
Suppose we revisit Max Black's indiscernible iron spheres. There are exactly two of them, and nothing else, and they share all monadic and relational properties. (Thus both are made of iron and each is ten meters from an iron sphere.) There are no properties to distinguish them, and of course there are no haecceity properties. So the rich property of the one is the same as the rich property of the other. It follows that the rich property instance of the one is identical to the rich property instance of the other. But there are two spheres, not one. It follows that neither sphere is identical to its rich property instance. So again I conclude that individuals are not rich property instances.
If you tell me that the property instances are numerically distinct because the spheres are numerically distinct, then you presuppose that individuals are not rich property instances. You presuppose a distinction between an individual and its rich property instance. This second argument assumes that Black's world is metaphysically possible and thus that the Identity of Indiscernibles is not metaphysically necessary. A reasonable assumption!
The Revenge of Josiah Royce
Suppose Phil is my indiscernible twin. Now it is a fact that I love myself. But if I love myself in virtue of my instantiation of a set of properties, then I should love Phil equally. For he instantiates exactly the same properties as I do. But if one of us has to be annihilated, then I prefer that it be Phil. Suppose God decides that one of us is more than enough, and that one of us has to go. I say, 'Let it be Phil!' and Phil says, 'Let it be Bill!' So I don't love Phil equally even though he has all the same properties that I have. I prefer myself and love myself just because I am myself. My Being exceeds my being a rich property instance.
This little thought-experiment suggests that there is more to self-love than love of the being-instantiated of an ensemble of properties. For Phil and I have the same properties, and yet each is willing to sacrifice the other. This would make no sense if the Being of each of us were exhausted by our being instances of sets of properties. In other words, I do not love myself solely as an instance of properties but also as a unique existent individual who cannot be reduced to a mere instance of properties. I love myself as a unique individual. And the same goes for Phil: he loves himself as a unique individual. Each of us loves himself as a unique individual numerically distinct from his indiscernible twin.
Classical theism is a personalism: God is a person and we, as made in the image and likeness of God, are also persons. God keeps us in existence by knowing us and loving us. God is absolutely unique and each of us is unique as, and only as, the object of divine love. The divine love penetrates to the very ipseity and haecceity of me and my indiscernible twin, Phil. God loves us as individuals, as essentially unique (Josiah Royce). But this is not possible if we are reducible to rich property instances. I detect a tension between the personalism of classical theism and the view that persons are property instances.
The Dialectic in Review
One of the entailments of DDS is that God is identical to his attributes, such defining properties as omniscience, omnipotence, etc. This view has its difficulties, so Mann takes a different tack: God is identical to his property instances. This implies that God is a property instance. But God is a person and it is not clear how a person could be a property instance. Mann takes the bull by the horns by boldly arguing that every concrete individual is a property instance -- a rich property instance -- and that therefore every person is a property instance, including God. The argument was found to be uncompelling for the three reasons given. Mann's problems stem from an attempt to adhere to a non-constituent ontology in explication of a doctrine that was developed within, and presumably only makes sense within, a constituent ontology. Too much indebted to A. Plantinga's important but wrong-headed critique of DDS in Does God Have a Nature?, Mann thinks that a shift to property instances will save the day while remaining within Plantinga's nonconstituent ontological framework.2 But God can no more be identical to a concrete property instance than he can to an abstract property.
1 William F. Vallicella, A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer Philosophical Studies Series #89, 2002, pp. 99-104. See also Hugh J. McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God, Indiana UP, 2012, pp. 86-87. See my review article, "Hugh McCann on the Implications of Divine Sovereignty," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 1 (Winter 2014), pp. 149-161.
2 See my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, “Divine Simplicity,” section 3.
Fr. Aidan Kimel asked me to comment on a couple of divine simplicity entries of his. When I began reading the first, however, I soon got bogged down in a preliminary matter concerning wonder at the existence of the world, its contingency, and whether its contingency leads us straightaway to a causa prima. So I will offer some comments on these topics and perhaps get around to divine simplicity later.
Fr. Kimel writes,
Why is it obvious to [David Bentley] Hart, when it is not obvious to so many modern theologians and philosophers, that a proper understanding of divinity entails divine simplicity? Earlier in his book Hart invites us to consider with wonder the very fact of existence. “How odd it is, and how unfathomable,” he muses, “that anything at all exists; how disconcerting that the world and one’s consciousness of it are simply there, joined in a single ineffable event. … Every encounter with the world has always been an encounter with an enigma that no merely physical explanation can resolve” (pp. 88-89). The universe poses the question “why?” and in so posing this question, it reveals to us its absolute contingency. The universe need not have been. [Emphasis added.]“Nothing within the cosmos contains the ground of its existence” (p. 92):
All things that do not possess the cause of their existence in themselves must be brought into existence by something outside themselves. Or, more tersely, the contingent is always contingent on something else. This is not a difficult or rationally problematic proposition. The complications lie in its application. Before all else, however, one must define what real contingency is. It is, first, simply the condition of being conditional: that is, the condition of depending upon anything external or prior or circumambient in order to exist and to persist in being. It is also mutability, the capacity to change over time, to move constantly from potential to actual states, and to abandon one actual state in favor of another. It is also the condition of being extended in both space and time, and thus of being incapable of perfect “self-possession” in some absolute here and now. It is the capacity and the tendency both to come into and pass out of being. It is the condition of being composite, made up of and dependent upon logically prior parts, and therefore capable of division and dissolution. It is also, in consequence, the state of possessing limits and boundaries, external and internal, and so of achieving identity through excluding—and thus inevitably, depending upon—other realities; it is, in short, finitude. (pp. 99-100)
And now some comments of mine.
Strictly speaking, the universe does not pose any questions; we pose, formulate, and try to answer questions. I share with Hart, Wittgenstein, et al. the sense of wonder that anything at all exists. But this sense of wonder is ours, not the universe's. We sometimes express this sense of wonder in a grammatically interrogative sentence, 'Why does/should anything at all exist?'
But please note that this expression of wonder, although grammatically interrogative, is not the same as the explanation-seeking why-question, Why does anything at all exist? And again, this is a question we ask; it is not one that the universe asks.
Nor does the universe reveal to us its absolute contingency by asking this question: it does not ask the question. We ask the explanation-seeking why-question, and in asking it we presuppose that the universe is contingent, that it "need not have been," that it is not necessary. For if the universe were necessary, it would make little or no sense to ask why it exists.
But is the universe contingent? Its contingency does not follow from the fact that we presuppose it to be contingent. But for the sake of this discussion I will just assume that the universe is contingent. It is, after all, a reasonable assumption.
But what is it to be contingent? There seems to be two nonequivalent definitions of 'contingency' at work above. I will call them the modal definition and the dependency definition.
X is modally contingent =df x exists in some but not all metaphysically (broadly logically) possible worlds. But since possible worlds jargon is very confusing to many, I will also put the definition like this: X is modally contingent =df x is possibly nonexistent if existent and possibly existent if nonexistent. For example, I am modally contingent because I might not have existed: my nonexistence is metaphysically possible. Unicorns, on the other hand, are also modally contingent items because they are possibly existent despite their actual nonexistence. This is what Aquinas meant when he said that the contingent is what is possible to be and possible not to be. Note that the contingent and the actual are not coextensive. Unicorns are contingent but not actual, and God and the number 9 are actual but not contingent. If you balk at the idea that unicorns are contingent, then I will ask you: Are they then necessary beings? Or impossible beings? Since they can't be either, then they must be contingent.
Now for the dependency definition. 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. We need something like the third clause in the definiens for the following reason. Any two distinct necessary beings will satisfy the first two clauses. Let x be the property of being prime and y the number 9. The two items are distinct and it is necessarily the case that if being prime exists, then 9 exists. But we don't want to say that the the property is contingently dependent upon the number.
The two definitions of 'contingency' are not equivalent. What is modally contingent may or may not be dependently contingent. Bertrand Russell and others have held that the universe exists as a matter of brute fact. (Cf. his famous BBC debate with Fr. Copleston.) Thus it exists and is modally contingent, but does not depend on anything for its existence, and so is not dependently contingent, contingent on something. It is not a contradiction, or at least not an obvious contradiction, to maintain that the universe is modally contingent but not depend on anything distinct from itself. 'Contingent' and 'contingent upon' must not be confused. On the other hand, Aquinas held that there are two sorts of necessary beings, those that have their necessity from another and those that have their necessity in themselves. God, and God alone, has his necessity in himself, whereas Platonica have their necessity from God. That is to say that they derive their esse from God; they depend for their existence of God despite their metaphysical necessity. If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then the denizens of the Platonic menagerie would not exist either. It follows that Platonica are dependently contingent.
So I would urge that it is not the case that, as Hart says, "the contingent is always contingent on something else." Or at least that is not obviously the case: it needs arguing. Hart appears to be confusing the two senses of 'contingency' and making things far too easy on himself. The following is a bad argument: The universe is contingent; the contingent, by definition, is contingent on something else; ergo the universe is contingent on something else, and this all men call God. It is a bad argument because it either equivocates on 'contingency,' or else the second premise is false. I am not sure that Hart endorses this argument. I am sure, however, that it is a bad argument.
When Thomas Aquinas and Baruch Spinoza write about the God of the Old Testament, they write about numerically the same Biblical character using the same Latin word, Deus. They write about this character, refer to it, and indeed succeed in referring to it. But Aquinas and Spinoza do not believe in the same divine reality. Of course they both believe in a divine reality; but their conceptions of a divine reality are so different that it cannot be maintained -- or so I argue here contra F. Beckwith -- that it is one and the same reality that they believe in. Nor do they succeed in referring to the same reality. Since it cannot be the case that both divine realities exist, one of the two philosophers fails to refer to anything at all. It follows that they cannot be said to worship the same God: one of them worships an idol.
God, Adam, Moses, "and all them prophets good and gone" (Bob Dylan, Gospel Plow) actually exist qua characters in the Biblical narrative. But of course it does not follow that they exist 'outside' the narrative in reality.
A few months ago in the wake of the Wheaton contretemps we were much exercised over the question whether the God of the Christians is the same as the God of the Muslims. I wonder if the distinction between God as Biblical character and God as divine reality can help in that dispute. Perhaps some variants of the dispute arise from a failure to draw this distinction. Perhaps the following irenic proposal will be acceptable:
Christians and Muslims write about, talk about, and refer to one and the same Biblical character when they use 'God' and 'Allah.' In this sense, the God of the Christians and that of the Muslims is the same God. It is one and the same Biblical character, God. But Christians and Muslims do not refer to one and the same divine reality by their uses of 'God' and 'Allah.' This is because extralinguistic reference is conceptually mediated, not direct, and no one item can instantiate both the Christian and the Muslim conceptions of God. Nothing can be both triune and non-triune, to mention just one important different in the two conceptions.
So either the Christian is failing to refer to anything such that his worship is of an idol, or the Muslim is failing to refer to anything such that his worship is of an idol. The situation is strictly parallel to the Aquinas-Spinoza case. The two philosophers are clearly referring to the same Biblical character when they write Deus. But their conceptions of God are so different that they cannot be said to be referring to the same being in external reality.
My suggestion, then, is that some may have got their knickers in a knot for no good reason by failing to make the above-captioned distinction.
According to Ed Buckner over at Dale Tuggy's place,
. . . there is at least one sort of case where it is clear they [Aquinas and Spinoza] are using the name ‘God’ in exactly the same way, namely when they discuss the interpretation of the scriptures. Aquinas does this many times in Summa Theologiae, using the words of the Bible and the Church Fathers to support complex theological and philosophical arguments. Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise is an extensive commentary on the text of the Bible and its meaning, also supported throughout by biblical quotation. So when Thomas writes
According to Chrysostom (Hom. iii in Genes.), Moses prefaces his record by speaking of the works of God (Deus) collectively. (Summa TheologiaeIª q. 68 a. 1 ad 1)
and Spinoza writes
As for the fact that God [Deus] was angry with him [Balak] while he was on his journey, that happened also to Moses when he was setting out for Egypt at the command of God [Dei]. (Tractatus ch. 3, alluding to Exodus 4:24-26)
it is clear that they are talking about the same persons, i.e. they are both talking about God, and they are both talking about Moses. It is somewhat more complicated than that, because Spinoza has a special theory about what the word ‘God’ means in the scriptures, but more of that later. In the present case, it seems clear that whenever we indirectly quote the scriptures, e.g. ‘Exodus 3:1 says that Moses was setting out for Egypt at the command of God’, we are specifying what the Bible says by using the names ‘Moses’ and ‘God’ exactly as the Bible uses them. Bill might disagree here, but we shall see.
I agree that they are both talking about the same persons qua characters in the Old Testament. The fact that Ed puts 'God' and 'Moses' in italics suggests, however, that he thinks that there is more here than reference to Biblical characters: there is also reference to really existent persons, and that our two philosophers are referring to the same really existent persons. But here I suspect that Ed is attempting a reduction of bona fide extralinguistic reference to what I will call text- and discourse-immanent reference, whether intertextual (as in the present case) or intratextual (as in the case of back references within one and the same narrative). If Ed is proposing a reduction -- or God forbid an elimination -- of real extralinguistic reference in favor of some form of discourse-immanent reference, then I have a bone to pick with him.
The issues here are much trickier than one might suspect. They involve questions Ed and I have been wrangling over for years, questions about fiction and intentionality and existence and quantification and logical form and what all else.
Having somewhat churlishly accused Daniel M. of failing to understand my post Does Classical Theism Logically Require Haecceitism, he wrote back in detail demonstrating that he did understand me quite well. I will now post his e-mail with some responses in blue.
I'm sorry. I've re-read your post, and it strikes me as quite clear, and I think I understand it. So perhaps the problem lies in my rather compressed e-mail, and not in my understanding of your post. Any rate, if this is wrong then this message should reinforce that. I elaborate a bit below on my earlier email, but this isn't meant to stop you from writing another post about the matter if that was your intent.
1. I agreed with your claim that classical theism does not entail haecceitism. I did not mean to imply, in saying this, that I agree either with the specific view of pre-creation divine knowledge you articulated, or with Mason's view. I agree that classical theism doesn't entail haecceitism because I don't think that the nature of classical theism forces a particular choice on this issue, either between your view or Mason's view or another.
BV: Good. I agree that a particular choice is not forced by the nature of classical theism.
2. I agreed (or rather said I'm inclined to agree) that there are no *non*-qualitative individual essences / haecceities prior to creation.
BV: I missed this; thanks for the clarification. It now seems we are on the same page. To spell it out: prior to God's creation of Socrates, and thus prior to the latter's coming into existence (actuality), there was no such non-qualitative property as identity-with-Socrates, or any other property involving Socrates himself as part of its very content. The modal analog holds as well: in those metaphysically possible worlds in which Socrates does not exist, there is no such property as identity-with-Socrates.
Of course, I am not saying that when Socrates does exist, then there is the haecceity property identity-with-Socrates instantiated by Socrates; I am saying that there are no haecceity properties at all, where an haecceity property is an abstract object that exists in every metaphysically possible world but is instantiated in only some such worlds, and furthermore satisfies this definition:
A haecceity property is a property H of x such that: (i) H is essential to x; (ii) nothing distinct from x instantiates H in the actual world; (iii) nothing distinct from x instantiates H in any metaphysically possible world.
An item is abstract iff it does not exist in space or time. An item is concrete iff it is not abstract.
Please note that when I say that there are no haecceity properties in the sense defined, that does not exclude there being haecceity properties in some other (non-Plantingian) sense. Note also that there might be haecceities that are in no sense properties. The materia signata of Socrates is not a property of him; so if someone holds that the haecceity (thisness) of Socrates either is or is grounded in his materia signata, then he would be holding that there are haecceities which are not properties. Similarly if spatiotemporal location is the principium individuationis, and if a thing's thisness = its principium individuationis.
Thus, if I am right, there is no sense in which the identity and individuality of Socrates somehow pre-exist his actual existence as they would pre-exist him if there were such a property as his nonqualitative haecceity property identity-with-Socrates. If so, then divine creation cannot be understood as God's bringing it about that the haecceity property identity-with-Socrates is instantiated. We would then need a different model of creation.
3. I then said that, notwithstanding (1) and (2), I defend a view that is close to haecceitism. I'll just elaborate a bit more here on where I'm coming from.
It seems to me you articulate a view like Robert Adams in his 1981 "Actualism and Thisness", and Christopher Menzel in his 1991 "Temporal Actualism and Singular Foreknowledge", with two key components.
First component: (A) Prior to creation, God's knowledge of what he might create is exclusively qualitative or pure in content (no reference to particular individuals). In light of my (2) above, I'm inclined to agree with this. Now let's say (this is admittedly imprecise, but I'm trying to be concise) that an item Q of qualitative knowledge *individuates* a particular possible creature C just in case Q's instantiation would be sufficient for C's existence and exemplification of Q.
Second component: (B) None of the aforementioned qualitative knowledge individuates a particular possible creature (such as Socrates). The reason for this is that for any relevant item of knowledge Q, there are multiple possible creatures that might exemplify Q (e.g., Socrates and Schmocrates), and so Q's instantiation is not *sufficient* for a *particular* possible creature to exist and exemplify Q.
The view I'm attracted to accepts (A) but denies (B). I think that purely qualitative knowledge could individuate possible creatures. (Thus far this view looks like Leibniz's, as I understand it.) So, were I arguing against you, your paragraph on Socrates/Schmocrates and the next paragraph on the Biblical / Platonic contrast would be areas of focus.
BV: Now I think I understand what your project is. You are right to mention Leibniz. I was all along assuming that the Identity of Indiscernibles is false: it is broadly logically possible that there be two individuals that share all qualitative or pure properties, whether essential or accidental, monadic or relational. I believe my view is committed to the rejection of the Identity of Indiscernibles. Could there not have been exactly two iron spheres alike in every respect and nothing else? This is at least thinkable if not really possible. You on the other had seem committed to the Identity of Indiscernibles: it is not broadly logically possible that there be two individuals sharing all the same qualitative or pure properties.
Suppose the Identity of Indiscernibles is true. And suppose God has before his mind a wholly determinate, but merely possible, concrete individual. Let it be an iron sphere. Equivalently, he has before his mind a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are the properties of the sphere he is contemplating creating. Call this conjunctive property a qualitative individual essence (QIE). It is qualitative in that it makes no reference to any actual individual in the way identity-with-Socrates does. It is an individual essence in that only one thing in the actual world has it, and this thing that has it must have it. If creation is actualization, all God has to do to create the wholly determinate mere possible iron sphere is add existence to it, or else bring it about that the qualitative individual essence is instantiated.
But then how could God create Max Black's world in which there are exactly two indiscernible iron spheres? He couldn't. There would be nothing to make the spheres numerically distinct. If x and y are instances of a QIE, then x = y. For there is nothing that could distinguish them. Contrapositively, if x is not identical to y, then it is not the case that x and y are instances of the same QIE. That is what you are committed to if you uphold the Identity of Indiscernibles.
On my view of creation, divine creation is not the bestowal of actuality upon pre-existent individuals; God creates the very individuality of individuals in creating them. In doing so he creates their numerical difference from one another. This is equivalent to the view that existence is a principle of numerical diversification, a thesis Aquinas held, as it would not be if existence were merely the being instantiated of a property. Thus individuals differ in their very existence: existence and individuality are bound up with each other. This view of creation involves God more intimately in what he creates: he creates both the existence and the identity of the things he creates. Thus he does not create out of mere possibles, or out of haecceity properties, whether qualitative or nonqualitative: he creates out of nothing!
On Plantinga's scheme, as it seems to me, creation is not ex nihilo but out of a certain 'matter,' the 'matter' of haecceity properties. Since they are necessary beings, there are all the haecceity properties there might have been, and what God does is cause some of them to be instantiated.
The view I've described might seem to commit me to this: (C) prior to creation, there exist *qualitative* haecceities (again, using your definition of 'haecceity') or individual essences for *every* possible creature. And the (compressed) part of my email about a "new kind of essence" is meant to challenge the implication of (C). (Here is where my view departs from Leibniz's.) I think that God can know precisely which individuals he will get (not just which pure descriptions would be satisfied), even if *some* possible creatures lack qualitative haecceities. However, I was imprecise at best in telling you that my view is "close to" haecceitism. Given that you define haecceitism as the view that there are haecceities, I think the view I've described is committed to haecceitism - it just isn't committed to the view that *every* possible creature has a haecceity. I don't claim to have adequately explained or motivated, either in this email or the last, this particular view of pre-creation knowledge. I was only trying to quickly sketch the view I defend in the paper I mentioned.
BV. Very interesting. Perhaps you could explain this more fully in the ComBox. I don't understand how any possible creature could lack a qualitative haecceity. Only wholly determinate (complete) mere possibles are fit to become actual. This is because it is a law of (my) metaphysics that existence entails completeness, though not conversely. Completeness is thus a necessary condition of (real) existence. But if x is complete, then has a qualitative thisness which can be understood to be a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are all of x's qualitative properties.
So why do you think that some possible creatures lack qualitative haecceities?
Haecceitism is the doctrine that there are haecceities. But what is an haecceity?
Suppose we take on board for the space of this post the assumptions that (i) properties are abstract objects, that (ii) they can exist unexemplified, and that (iii) they are necessary beings. We may then define the subclass of haecceity properties as follows.
A haecceity is a property H of x such that: (i) H is essential to x; (ii) nothing distinct from x exemplifies H in the actual world; (iii) nothing distinct from x exemplifies H in any metaphysically possible world.
So if there is a property of Socrates that is his haecceity, then there is a property that individuates him, and indeed individuates him across all times and worlds at which he exists: it is a property that he must have, that nothing distinct from him has, and that nothing distinct from him could have. Call this property Socrateity. Being abstract and necessary, Socrateity is obviously distinct from Socrates, who is concrete and contingent. Socrateity exists in every world, but is exemplified (instantiated) in only some worlds. What's more, Socrateity exists at every time in every world that is temporally qualified, whereas Socrates exist in only some worlds and only at some times in the worlds in which he exists.
Now suppose you are a classical theist. Must you accept haecceitism (as defined above) in virtue of being a classical theist? I answer in the negative. Franklin Mason answers in the affirmative. In a comment on an earlier post, Mason gives this intriguing argument into which I have interpolated numerals for ease of reference.
[1] When God created the world, he knew precisely which individuals he would get. Thus [2] he didn't need to have those very individuals in front of him to know which ones they were. Thus [3] there must be a way to individuate all possible individuals that in no way depends upon their actual existence. [4] Such a thing is by definition a haecceity. Thus [5] there are haecceities.
I don't anticipate any disagreement with Mason as to what an haecceity is. We are both operating with the Plantingian notion. We disagree, however, on (i) whether there are any haecceities and (ii) whether classical theism is committed to them. I deny both (i) and (ii). In this post I focus on (ii). In particular, I will explain why I do not find Mason's argument compelling.
My reservations concern premise [1]. There is a sense in which it is true that when God created Socrates, he knew which individual he would get. But there is also a sense in which it is not true. So we need to make a distinction. We may suppose, given the divine omniscience, that before God created Socrates he had before his mind a completely determinate description, down to the very last detail, of the individual he was about to bring into existence. In this sense, God knew precisely which individual he would get before bringing said individual into existence. Now either this description is pure or it is impure.
A pure description is one that includes no proper names, demonstratives or other indexicals, or references to singular properties. Otherwise the description is impure. Thus 'snub-nosed, rationalist philosopher married to Xanthippe' is an impure description because it includes the proper name 'Xanthippe.' 'Snubnosed, rationalist, married philosopher,' by contrast, is pure. (And this despite the fact that 'married' is a relational predicate: necessarily, to be married is to be married to someone or other.) Pure descriptions are qualitative in that they include no references to specific individuals. Impure descriptions are nonqualitative in that they do include references to specific individuals. Thus 'person identical to Socrates' is a nonqualitative description.
Now if God has before his mind a complete pure description of the individual he wills to create then that description could apply to precisely one individual after creation without being restricted to any precise one. (Cf. Barry Miller, "Future Individuals and Haecceitism," Review of Metaphysics 45, September 1991, p. 14) This is a subtle distinction but an important one. It is possible that Socrates have an indiscernible twin. Call his 'Schmocrates.' So the complete description 'snub-nosed, rationalist philosopher, etc.' could apply to precisely one individual without applying to Socrates, the man in the actual world that we know and love as Socrates. This is because his indiscernible twin Schmocrates would satisfy it just as well as he does. The description would then apply to precisely one individual without being restricted to any precise one. So there is a clear sense, pace Mason, in which God, prior to creation, would not know which individual he would get. Prior to creation, God knows that there will be an individual satisfying a complete description. But until the individual comes into existence, he won't know which individual this will be.
As I see it, creation understood Biblically as opposed to Platonically is not the bestowal of existence upon a pre-existent, fully-formed, wholly determinate essence. It is not the actualization of a wholly determinate mere possible. There is no individual essence or haecceity prior to creation. Creation is the creation ex nihilo of a new individual. God creates out of nothing, not out of pre-existent individual essences or pre-existent mere possibles. Thus the very individuality of the individual first comes into being in the creative act. Socrates' individuality and haecceity and ipsiety do not antedate (whether temporally or logically) his actual existence.
Mason would have to be able rationally to exclude this view of creation, and this view of the relation of existence and individuality, for his argument to be compelling. As it is, he seems merely to assume that they are false.
Could God, before creation, have before his mind a complete impure description, one that made reference to the specific individual that was to result from the creative act? No, and this for the simple reason that before the creative act that individual would not exist. And therein lies the absurdity of Plantingian haecceities. The property of identity-with-Socrates is a nonqualitative haecceity that makes essential reference to Socrates. Surely it is absurd to suppose that that this 'property' exists at times and in possible worlds at which Socrates does not exist. To put it another way, it is absurd to suppose that this 'property' could antedate (whether temporally or logically) the existence of Socrates.
We are now in a position to see why Mason's argument is not compelling. If [1] is true, then [2] doesn't follow from it. And if [2] follows from [1], then [1] is false. Thus [1] conflates two distinct propositions:
1a. When God created the world, he knew precisely which pure complete descriptions would be satisfied.
1b. When God created the world, he knew precisely which individuals would exist.
(1a) is true, but it does not entail
2. God didn't need to have those very individuals in front of him to know which ones they were.
(1b) entails (2), but (1b) is false.
I conclude that classical theism does not entail haecceitism. One can be such a theist without accepting haecceities. This is a good thing since there are no haecceity properties!
A tip of the hat to Karl White for pointing us to this article which includes a critique of Francis Beckwith's contribution to the debate. Craig concludes:
So whether Muslims and Christians can be said to worship the same God is not the truly germane question. The question is which conception of God is true.
I would allow that the latter question is the more important of the two questions, but it is not the question most of us were discussing. In my various posts, I endeavored to remain neutral on the question of the truth of Christianity while pursuing the former question. See the first two related articles infra.
Suppose the true God is the triune God. Then two possibilities. One is that Muslims worship the true God, but not as triune, indeed as non-triune; they worship the true God all right, the same one the Christians worship; it is just that the Muslims have one or more false beliefs about the true God. The other possibility is that Muslims do not worship the true God; they worship a nonexistent God, an idol. We are assuming the truth of monotheism: there is a God, but only one.
Now worship entails reference in the following sense: Necessarily, if I worship the true God, then I successfully refer to the true God. (The converse does not hold). So either (A) the (normative) Muslim successfully refers to the true God under one or more false descriptions, or else (B) he does not successfully refer to the true God at all.
Now which is it, (A) or (B)?
The answer depends on your theory of reference.
Consider this 'Kripkean' scenario. God presents himself to Abraham in person. All of Abraham's experiences on this marvellous occasion are veridical. Abraham 'baptizes God' with the name Yahweh or YHWH. The same name (though in different transliterations and translations) is passed on to people who use it with the intention of preserving the direct reference the name got when Abraham first baptized God with it. The name passes down eventually to Christians and Muslims. Of course the conceptions of God are different for Abraham, St. Paul, and Muhammad. To mention one striking difference: for Paul God became man in Jesus of Nazareth; not so for Muhammad, for whom such a thing is impossible.
If you accept a broadly Millian-Kripkean theory of reference, then it is reasonable to hold that (A) is true. For if the reference of 'God' is determined by an initial baptism or tagging and a causal chain of name transmission, then the reference of 'God' will remain the same even under rather wild variation in the concept of God. The Christian concept includes triunity; the Muslim conception excludes it. That is a radical difference in the conceptions. And yet this radical difference is consistent with sameness of referent. This is because the reference is not routed though the conception: it is not determined by the conception. The reference is determined by the initial tagging and the subsequent name transmission.
Now consider a 'Fressellian' scenario. The meaning of a proper name is not exhausted by its reference. Names are more than Millian tags. It is not just that proper names have senses: they have reference-determining senses. On a descriptivist or 'Fressellian' semantics, a thoughtful tokening by a person P of a proper name N successfully refers to an individual x just in case there exists an x such that x uniquely satisfies the definite descriptions associated with N by P and the members of his linguistic community.
So when a Christian assertively utters a token of 'God is almighty,' his use of 'God' successfully refers to God only if there is something that satisfies the sense the Christian qua Christian associates with 'God.' Now that sense must include being triune. The same goes for the Muslim except that the sense that must be satisfied for the Muslim reference to be successful must include being non-triune.
It should now be clear that, despite the considerable overlap in the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God, they cannot be referring to the same being on the 'Fressellian' theory of reference. For on this theory, sense determines reference, and no one thing can satisfy two senses one of which includes while the other excludes being triune. So we have to conclude, given the assumption of monotheism, that the Christian and Muslim do not refer to one and the same God. Given that the true God is triune, the Christian succeeds in referring to the true God while the Muslim fails. The Muslim does not succeed in referring to anything.
So I continue to maintain that whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God depends on one's theory of reference. This is why the question has no easy answer.
Those who simple-mindedly insist that Christians and Muslims worship numerically the same God are uncritically presupposing a dubious Millian-Kripkean theory of reference.
Exercise for the reader: explain what is wrong with Juan Cole's article below.
She says that it is too important to be left to philosophers. She is right that the debate is important and has practical consequences, although I don't think any of the philosophers who have 'piped up' recently (Beckwith, Tuggy, Feser, Rea, Vallicella, et al.) want to take the debate merely as a point of entry into technical questions about reference and identity.
One of the points McGrew makes is one I have repeatedly made as well, namely, that the sorts of examples proffered by Francis Beckwith, Dale Tuggy, and Edward Feser beg the question. If the question is whether Christians and Muslims worship and refer to the same God, one cannot just assume that they do and then take one's task to be one of explaining how it is possible. Of course it is possible to refer to one and the same thing under different descriptions. But how does that show that in the case before us there is one and the same thing?
Another point that McGrew makes that I have also made is that one cannot show that the Christian and Muslim God are the same because their respective conceptions significantly overlap. No doubt they do: for both religions there is exactly one God, transcendent of his creation, who is himself uncreated, etc. But the overlap is insufficient to show numerical identity because of the highly important differences. Could one reasonably claim that classical theists and Spinozists worship the same God? I don't think so. The difference in attributes is too great. The reasonable thing to say is that if classical theism is true, then Spinozists worship a nonexistent God. Similarly, the difference between a triune God who entered the material realm to share our life and misery for our salvation and a non-triune God whose radical transcendence renders Incarnation impossible is such a huge difference that it is reasonable to take it as showing that the Christian and Muslim Gods cannot be the same.
McGrew and I also agree in rejecting what I will call the 'symmetry argument': since Jews and Christian worship the same God, the Christians and Muslims also worship the same God. It doesn't follow. Roughly, the Christian revelation does not contradict the Jewish revelation on the matter of the Trinity, since the Jews took no stand on this question before the time of Jesus. The Christian revelation supplements the Jewish revelation. The Islamic 'revelation,' however, contradicts the Christian one by explicitly specifying that God cannot be triune and must be disincarnate.
McGrew is certainly right that the 'same God' question ". . . can’t be decided by a flick of the philosophical wrist." And this needed to be said. Where I may be differing from her, though, is that on my view a really satisfactory resolution of the questions cannot be achieved unless and until we achieve real clarity about the underlying questions about reference, identity, existence, property-possession, and so on. It is highly unlikely, however, that these questions will ever be answered to the satisfaction of all competent practioners.
Where does this leave the ordinary Christian believer? Should he accept the same God thesis? It is not clear to me that he needs to take any position on it at all. But if he feels the need to take a stand, I say to him that he can rest assured that his non-acceptance of it is rationally justifiable.
Suppose I point out a certain tree in the distance to Dale and remark upon its strange shape. I say, "That tree has a strange shape." Dale responds, "That's not a tree; that's a scarecrow!" Suppose we are looking at the same thing, a physical thing that exists in the external world independently of us. But what I take to be a tree, Dale takes to be a scarecrow. Suppose further that the thing in the external world, whatever it is, is the salient cause of our having our respective visual experiences. Are we referring to the same thing? The cause of the visual experiences is the same, but are the referents of our demonstrative phrases the same? Could we say that the referents are the same because the cause is the same?
If this makes sense, then perhaps we can apply it to the 'same God?' problem.
'Same cause, same referent' implies that the cause of my tokening of 'That tree' is its referent. It implies that we can account for successful reference in terms of physical causation. The idea is that what makes my use of 'that tree' successfully refer to an existing tree, this particular tree, and not to anything else is the tree's causing of my use of the phrase, and if not the tree itself, then some physical events involving the tree.
But the notion of salience causes trouble for this causal account of reference. What make a causal factor salient? What makes it jump out from all the other causal factors to assume the status of 'the cause'? (Salire, Latin, to jump.) After all, there are many causal factors involved in any instance of causation. Can we account for reference causally without surreptitiously presupposing irreducibly intentional and referential notions? Successful reference picks out its object from others. It gets to an existing object, and to the right object. Causation might not be up to this task. I shall argue that it is not.
We often in ordinary English speak of 'the cause' of some event, a myocardial infarction say, even though there are many contributing factors: bad diet, lack of exercise, hypertension, cigarette smoking, high stress job, an episode of snow-shoveling. Which of these will be adjudged 'the cause' is context- and interest-relative. A physician who gets a kick-back from a pharmaceutical concern will point to hypertension, perhaps, so that he can prescribe anangiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, while the man's wife might say that it was the snow shoveling that did him in. A liberal might say that the heart attack was caused by smoking.
Or suppose a short-circuit is cited as 'the cause' of a fire. In terms of fundamental physics, the whole state of the world at time determines its state at subsequent times. At this level, a short-circuit and the power's being on are equally causal in respect of a fire. Our saying that the short-circuit caused the fire, not the power's being on, simply advertises the fact that for us the latter is the normal and desired state of things, the state we have an interest in maintaining, and that the former is the opposite. Desire and interest are of course intentional notions: to desire is to desire something; to be interested is to be interested in something.
What these examples show is that there is an ordinary-language use of 'cause' which is context-sensitive and interest-relative. The ordinary notion of cause, then, resting as it does on our interests and desires, presupposes intentional notions. I cannot be interested in or desire something unless I am conscious of it. And I cannot adjudge one state of affairs as normal and the other as abnormal unless I have interests and desires.
In the case of my tokening of 'that tree,' what justifies us in saying that it is the tree that causes the tokening as opposed the total set of causal conditions including sunlight, my corrective lenses, my not having ingested LSD, the absence of smoke and fog, the proper functioning of my visual cortex, etc.? How is it that we select the tree as 'the cause'? And what about this selecting? It cannot be accounted for in terms of physical causation. The tree does not select itself as salient cause. We select it. But then selecting is an intentional performance. So intentionality, which underpins both mental and linguistic reference, comes back in through the back door.
The upshot is that an account of successful reference in terms of causation is viciously circular. What makes 'that tree' as tokened by me here and now refer to the tree in front of me? It cannot be the total cause of the tokening which includes all sorts of causal factors other than tree such as light and the absence of fog. It must be the salient cause. To select this salient cause from the among the various casual factors is to engage in an intentional performance. So reference presupposes intentionality and cannot be accounted for in non-intentional, purely causal, terms. Otherwise you move in an explanatory cricle of embarrassingly short diameter.
The point could be put as follows: I must already (logically speaking) have achieved reference to the tree in a noncausal way if I am then to single out the tree as the physical cause of my successful mental and linguistic reference.
Of course, I am not denying that various material and causal factors underpin mental and linguistic reference. What I am maintaining is that these factors are useless when it comes to providing a noncircular account of reference.
Now if causation cannot account for reference, then it cannot account for sameness of reference.
Dale and I are both in perceptual states. These two perceptual states have a common cause. But this common cause cannot be what makes one of our references successful and the other unsuccessful.
Christ and Allah
The above questions are analogs of the 'Same God?' question. Suppose a Christian and a Muslim each has a mystical or religious experience of the same type, that of the Inner Locution. Each cries out in prayer and each 'hears' the inner locution, "I am with you," and a deep peace descends upon him. Each is thankful and expresses his thanks. Suppose God exists and is the source of both of these locutions. But while the Christian may interpret the source of his experience in Trinitarian terms, the Muslim will not. Suppose the Christian takes the One who is answering to be a Person of the Trinity, Christ, while the Muslim takes it to be Allah who is answering. In expressing his thankfulness, the Christian prayerfully addresses Christ while the Muslim prayerfully addresses Allah.
Are Christian and Muslim referring to one and the same divine being? Yes, if the referent is the source/cause of the inner locutions. But this common cause does not select as between Christ and Allah, and so the common cause does not suffice to establish that Christian and Muslim are referring to one and the same divine being.
Are the Christian and Muslim Gods the same? Why not settle this in short order with a nice, crisp, Indiscernibility argument? To wit,
a. If x = y, then x, y share all intrinsic properties. (A version of the Indiscernibility of Identicals) b. The God of the Christians and that of the Muslims do not share all intrinsic properties: the former is triune while the latter is not. Therefore c. The God of the Christians is not identical to that of the Muslims.
Not so fast!
With no breach of formal-logical propriety one could just as easily run the argument in reverse, arguing from the negation of (c) to the negation of (b). They are the same God, so they do share all intrinsic properties!
But then what about triunity? One could claim that triunity is not an intrinsic property. A Muslim might claim that triunity is a relational property, a property that involves a relation to the false beliefs of Christians. In other words, triunity is the relational property of being believed falsely by Christians to be a Trinity.
Clearly, a relational property of this sort cannot be used to show numerical diversity. Otherwise, one could 'show' that the morning and evening 'stars' are not the same because Shlomo of Brooklyn believes of one that it is a planet but of the other than it is a star.
Now consider a 'mind' argument.
a. If x = y, then x, y share all intrinsic properties. (A version of the Indiscernibility of Identicals) b*. This occurrent thinking of Venus and its associated brain state do not share all intrinsic properties: my mental state is intentional (object-directed) whereas my brain state is not. Therefore c*. This occurrent thinking of Venus is not identical to its associated brain state.
Not so fast! A resolute token-token mind-brain identity theorist will run the argument in reverse, arguing from the negation of (c*) to the negation of (b*).
But then what about intentionality? The materialist could claim that intentionality is not an intrinsic property, but a relational one. Taking a page from Daniel Dennett, he might argue that intentionality is a matter of ascription: nothing is intrinsically intentional. We ascribe intentionality to what, in itself, is non-intentional. So in reality all there is is the brain state. The intentionality is our addition.
Now Dennett's ascriptivist theory of intentionality strikes me as absurd: it is either viciously infinitely regressive, or else viciously circular. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the infinite regress is benign. Can I show that it is not without begging the question?
Question for the distinguished MavPhil commentariat: Are there good grounds here for solubility-skepticism when it comes to philosophical problems?
Francis Beckwith mentions the Kalam Cosmological Argument in his latest The Catholic Thing article (7 January 2106):
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe began to exist. 3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.
Suppose that a Muslim and Christian come to believe that God exists on the basis of this Kalam argument and such ancillary philosophical arguments and considerations as are necessary to establish that the cause of the universe is uncreated, transcendent of the universe, unchanging, etc. The result is a conception of God achieved by reason without the aid of divine revelation. It is a conception common to the normative Muslim and the normative Christian. Crucial differences emerge when the core conception is fleshed out in competing ways by the competing (putative) revelations. But if we stick with the core philosophical conception, then all should agree that there is important overlap as between the Christian and Muslim God conceptions. The overlap is achieved by abstraction from the differences.
So far so good.
Beckwith then asks whether the Muslim and the Christian "believe in the same God" and he concludes that they do.
Permit me a quibble. 'Believe in' connotes 'trust in, have faith in, rely upon the utterances of,' and so on. I believe in my wife: I trust her, I am convinced of her fidelity. That goes well beyond believing that she exists. If I believe in a person, it follows that I believe that the person exists. But if I believe that a person exists, it does not follow that I believe in the person. Professor Beckwith is of course aware of this distinction.
At best, then, what the Christian and the Muslim are brought to by the Kalam argument and supplementary considerations is not belief in God, but belief that God exists. To be even more precise, the Kalam argument, at best, brings us to the belief that there exists a unique, transcendent, uncreated (etc.) cause of the beginning of the universe. In other words, both Christian and Muslim are brought to the belief and perhaps even the knowledge that a certain definite description is satisfied. The properties mentioned in this description are what constitute the shared philosophical understanding of 'God' by the Muslim and the Christian. At best, philosophy brings us to knowledge of God by description, not a knowledge by acquaintance. The common description is usefully thought of as a 'job description' inasmuch as God in brought in to do a certain explanatory job, that of explaining the beginning of the universe. As my teacher J. N. Findlay once said, "God has his uses."
But note that this common Christian-Muslim description leaves undetermined many properties an existent God must possess. (And it must be so given the finitude of our discursive, ectypal, intellects.) But in reality, outside the mind and outside language, God, like everything else, is completely determinate, or complete, for short. I am assuming the following existence entails completeness principle of general metaphysics (metaphysica generalis).
EX -->COMP: Necessarily, for any existent x, and for any non-intentional property P, either x instantiates P or x instantiates the complement of P.
What the principle states is that every real item, everything that exists, satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle. It rules out of reality incomplete objects. For example, God in reality is either triune or non-triune. He cannot be neither, any more than I can be neither a blogger nor not a blogger. The definite description(s) by means of which we have knowledge by description of God, however, are NECESSARILY (due to the finitude of our intellects) such that there are properties of God in reality that these descriptions do not mention. This is of course true of knowledge by description of everything. Everything is such that no description manageable by a finite mind makes mention of all of the thing's properties, intrinsic and relational.
Now suppose that Christianity is true and that God in reality is triune. Then the above common definite description is satisfied. The common Muslim-Christian conception is instantiated -- but it is instantiated by the Christian God which of course must exist to instantiate it.
The Christian and the Muslim both believe that God (understood as the unique uncreated creator of the universe) exists. That is: they believe that the common conception of God is instantiated, that the common definite description is satisfied. They furthermore believe that the common conception is uniquely instantiated and that the common description is uniquely satisfied. But they differ as to whether the instantiator/satisfier is the triune God or the non-triune God.
So we can answer our question as follows. The question, recall, is: Do Christians and Muslims believe in the same God?
Muslims and Christians believe in the same God, as Beckwith claims, in the following precise sense: they believe that the same God exists, which is to say: they believe that the common philosophical God concept is uniquely instantiated, instantiated by exactly one being. Call this the anemic sense of believing in the same God.
But this is consistent with saying that Muslim and Christian do not believe in the same God in the following precise sense: they don't believe that the wholly determinate being in reality that instantiates the common philosophical God concept is the triune God who sent his only begotten Son, etc. Call this the robust sense of believing in the same God.
Now we robustos will naturally go with the robust sense. So, to give a plain answer: Christians and Muslims do not believe in the same God. If Christianity is true, the Muslim God simply does not exist, and Muslims believe in an idol.
The mistake that some are making here is to suppose that the shared Muslim-Christian philosophical understanding enscapsulated in the common concept suffices to show that in reality one and the same God is believed in, and successfully referred to, and non-idolatrously worshipped by both Muslims and Christians. Not so!
The real (extramental, extralinguistic) existence of God cannot be identified with or reduced to the being instantiated of a concept that includes only some of the divine determinations (properties). 'Is instantiated' is a second-level predicate, but God exists in the first-level way. Equivalently, God is not identical to an instance of one of our concepts. God is transcendent of all our concepts. So if we know by revelation that God is a Trinity, then we know that the Muslim God, the non-triune God, does not exist.
Francis Beckwith and Dale Tuggy, two philosophers I respect, answer in the affirmative in recent articles. While neither are obviously wrong, neither are obviously right either, and neither seem to appreciate the depth and difficulty of the question. In all fairness, though, the two articles in question were written for popular consumption.
Beckwith begins with an obvious point: from a difference in names one cannot validly infer a difference in nominata. 'Muhammad Ali' and 'Cassius Clay,' though different names, refer to the same person. The same goes for 'George Orwell' and 'Eric Blair.' They refer to the same writer. So from the difference of 'Yahweh' and 'Allah' one cannot infer that Yahweh and Allah are numerically different Gods. Similarly, with 'God' and 'Allah.' Difference in names is consistent with sameness of referent. But difference in names is also consistent with difference of referents, a point that Beckwith does not make. 'Trump' and 'Obama' are different names and they refer to different people. 'Trump' and 'Zeus' are different names but only one of them refers, which implies that they do not have the same referent. It may be that 'God' and 'Allah' are like 'Trump' and 'Zeus' or like 'Trump' and 'Pegasus.'
Another obvious point Beckwith makes is that if some people have true beliefs about x, and other people have false beliefs about x, it does not follow that there is no one x that these people have true and false beliefs about. Suppose Sam believes (falsely) that Karl Marx is a Russian while Dave believes (truly) that he is a German. That is consistent with there being one and same philosopher that they have beliefs about and are referring to. Now suppose God is triune. Then (normative) Christians have the true belief that God is triune while (normative) Muslims have the false belief that God is not triune. This seems consistent with there being one God about whom they have different beliefs but to whom they both refer and worship. But it is also consistent with a difference in referent. It could be that when a Christian uses 'God' he refers to something while a Muslim refers to nothing when he uses 'Allah.'
Of course, both Christian and Muslim intend to refer to something real with their uses of 'God' and 'Allah.' But the question is whether they both succeed in referring to something real and whether that thing is the same thing. It could be that one succeeds while the other fails. And it could be that both succeed but succeed in referring to different items.
Consider God and Zeus. Will you say that the Christian and the ancient Greek polytheist worship the same God except that the Greek has false beliefs about their common object of worship, believing as he does that Zeus is a superman who lives on a mountain top, literally hurls thunderbolts, etc.? Or will you say that there is no one God that they worship, that the Christian worships a being that exists while the Greek worships a nonexistent object? And if you say the latter, why not also say the same about God and Allah, namely, that there is no one being that they both worship, that the Christian worships the true God, the God that really exists, whereas Muslims worship a God that does not exist?
And then there is the God of the orthodox Christian and the Deus sive Natura of Spinoza. Would it make sense to say that the orthodox Christian and the Spinozist worship the same God? Would it make sense for the orthodox Christian to give this little speech:
We and the Spinozists worship the same God, the one and only God, but we have different beliefs about this same God. We Christians believe (truly) that God is a transcendent being who could exist without having created anything, whereas Spinozists believe (falsely) that God is immanent and could not have existed without having created anything. Still and all, we and the Spinozists are referring to and worshiping exactly the same God.
Are the Christians and the Spinozists referring to one and the same being and differing merely about its attributes? I say No! The conceptions of deity are so radically different that there cannot be one and the same item to which they both refer when they say 'God' or Deus. (Deus is Latin for 'God.')
This is blindingly obvious in the case of the orthodox Christian versus the Feuerbachian. They both talk and write about God. Do they refer to one and same being with 'God' or 'Gott' and differ merely on his attributes? This is impossible. For the Feuerbachian, God is an unconsciously projected anthropomorphic projection. For the orthodox Christian, God is no such thing: he exists in reality beyond all human thoughts, desires, projections. It's the other way around: Man is a theomorphic projection. The characteristic Feuerbachian thesis, although it appears by its surface structure to be a predication ascribing a property to God, namely, the property of being an unconsciously projected anthropomorphic projection, is really a negative existential proposition equivalent to 'God does not exist.' Compare: 'Sherlock Holmes is a purely fictional item.' Is this at logical bottom a predication? Pace Meinong, it is not: in its depth structure it is a negative existential equivalent to 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist.' To be precise, it entails the latter. For it also conveys that the character Holmes figures in an extant piece of fiction which of course does exist.
To sum up the main point: there are concepts so radically different that they cannot be concepts of one and the same thing. Some people say that thoughts, i.e., acts or episodes of thinking, are brain states. Others object: "Thoughts are intentional or object-directed, whereas no physical state is object-directed; hence, no thought is a brain state." This is equivalent to maintaining that the concept intentional state and the concept physical state cannot be instantiated by one and the same item. So it cannot be the case that the mind-brain identity theorist and I are referring to the same item when I refer to my occurrent desiring of a double espresso.
Christians and Muslims disagree about whether God has a Son, right? Then, they’re talking about the same (alleged) being. They may disagree about “who God is” in the sense of what he’s done, what attributes he has, how many “Persons” are in him, and whether Muhammad was really his Messenger, etc. But disagreement assumes one subject-matter – here, one god.
I think Tuggy is making a mistake here. Surely disagreement about the properties of a putatively self-same x does not entail that there is in reality one and the same x under discussion, although it is logically consistent with it.
A dispute between me and Ed Feser, say, about whether our mutual acquaintance Tuggy has a son no doubt presupposes, and thus entails, that there is one and the same man whom we are talking about. It would be absurd to maintain that there are two Tuggys, my Tuggy and Ed's where mine has a son and Ed's does not. It would be absurd for me to say, "I'm talking about the true Tuggy while you, Ed, are talking about a different Tuggy, one that doesn't exist. You are referencing, if not worshipping, a false Tuggy." Why is this absurd? Because we are both acquainted with the man ('in the flesh,' by sense-perception) and we are arguing merely over the properties of the one and the same man with whom we are both acquainted. There is simply no question but that he exists and that we are both referring to him. The dispute concerns his attributes.
But of course the situation is different with God. We are not acquainted with God: God, unlike Tuggy, is not given to the senses. Mystical intuition and revelation aside, we are thrown back upon our concepts of God. And so it may be that the dispute over whether God is triune or not is not a dispute that presupposes that there is one subject-matter, but rather a dispute over whether the Christian concept of God (which includes the sub-concept triune) is instantiated or whether the Muslim concept (which does not include the subconcept triune) is instantiated. Note that they cannot both be instantiated by the same item similarly as the concept object-directed state and the concept physical state cannot be instantiated by one and the same item such as my desiring an espresso.
The point I am making against both Beckwith and Tuggy is that it is not at all obvious which of the following views is correct:
V1: Christian and Muslim can worship the same God, even though one of them must have a false belief about God, whether it be the belief that God is unitarian or the belief that God is trinitarian.
V2: Christian and Muslim must worship different Gods precisely because they have mutually exclusive conceptions of God. So it is not that one of them has a false belief about the one God they both worship; it is rather that one of them does not worship the true God at all.
There is no easy way to decide rationally between these two views. We have to delve into the philosophy of language and ask how reference is achieved. How do linguistic expressions attach or apply to extralinguistic entities? How do words grab onto the (extralinguistic) world? In particular, how do nominal expressions work? What makes my utterance of 'Socrates' denote Socrates rather than someone or something else? What makes my use of 'God' (i) have a referent at all and (ii) have the precise referent it has?
It is reasonable to hold, with Frege, Russell, Searle, and many others, that reference is routed through, and determined by, sense: an expression picks out its object in virtue of the latter's unique satisfaction of a description associated with the referring expression, a description that unpacks the expression's sense. If we think of reference in this way, then 'God' refers to whatever entity, if any, that satisfies the definite description encapsulated in 'God' as this term is used in a given linguistic community.
Given that God is not an actual or possible object of (sense) experience, this seems like a reasonable approach to take. The idea is that 'God' is a definite description in disguise so that 'God' refers to whichever entity satisfies the description associated with 'God.' The reference relation is then one of satisfaction. A grammatically singular term t refers to x if and only if x exists and x satisfies the description associated with t. Now consider two candidate definite descriptions, the first corresponding to the Muslim conception, the second corresponding to the Christian.
D1: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo and is unitarian'
D2: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo, and is triune.'
Suppose that reference is not direct, but routed through sense, or mediated by a description, in the manner explained above. It is easy to see that no one entity can satisfy both (D1) and (D2). For while the descriptions overlap, nothing can be both unitarian and triune. So if reference is routed through sense, then Christian and Muslim cannot be referring to the same being. Indeed, one of them is not succeeding in referring at all. For if God is triune, nothing in reality answers to the Muslim's conception of God. And if God is unitarian, then nothing in reality answers to the Christian conception.
And so, contrary to what Miroslav Volf maintains, the four points of commonality in the Christian and Muslim conceptions do NOT "establish the claim that in their worship of God, Muslims and Christians refer to the same object." (Allah: A Christian Response, HarperCollins 2011, p. 110.) The four points are:
a. There is exactly one God. b. God is the creator of everything distinct from himself. c. God is transcendent: he is radically different from everything distinct from himself. d. God is good.
For if reference to God is mediated by a conception which includes the subconcept triune or else the subconcept unitarian, then the reference cannot be to the same entity. And this despite the conceptual overlap represented by (a)-(d).
A mundane example (adapted from Saul Kripke) will make this more clear. Sally sees a handsome man at a party standing in the corner drinking a clear bubbly liquid from a cocktail glass. She turns to her companion Nancy and says, "The man standing in the corner drinking champagne is handsome!" Suppose the man is not drinking champagne, but mineral water instead. Has Sally succeeded in referring to the man or not?
Argumentative Nancy, who knows that no alcohol is being served at the party, and who also finds the man handsome, says, "You are not referring to anything: there is no man in the corner drinking champagne. The man is drinking mineral water or some other bubbly clear beverage. Nothing satisfies your definite description. There is no one man we both admire. Your handsome man does not exist, but mine does."
Now in this example what we would intuitively say is that Sally did succeed in referring to someone using a definite description even though the object she succeeded in referring to does not satisfy the description. Intuitively, we would say that Sally simply has a false belief about the object to which she is successfully referring, and that Sally and Nancy are referring to and admiring the very same man.
But note how this case differs from the God case. Both women see the man in the corner. But God is not an object of possible (sense) experience. We don't see God in this life. Hence the reference of 'God' cannot be nailed down perceptually. A burning bush is an object of possible sense experience, and God may manifest himself in a burning bush; but God is not a burning bush, and the referent of 'God' cannot be a burning bush. The man in the corner that the women sees and admire is not a manifestation of a man, but a man himself.
Given that God is not literally seen or otherwise sense-perceived in this life, then, apart from mystical experience and revelation, the only way to get at God is via concepts and descriptions. And so it seems that in the God case what we succeed in referring to is whatever satisfies the definite description that unpacks our conception of God.
My tentative conclusion, then, is that (i) if we accept a description theory of names, the Christian and Muslim do not refer to the same being when they use 'God' or 'Allah' and (ii) that a description theory of names is what we must invoke given the non-perceivability of God. Christian and Muslim do not refer to the same being because no one being can satisfy both (D1) and (D2) above: nothing can be both triune and not triune any more than one man can both be drinking champagne and not drinking champagne at the same time.
If, on the other hand, 'God' is a logically proper name whose reference is direct and not routed through sense or mediated by a definite description, then what would make 'God' or a particular use of 'God' refer to God? If names are Millian tags, we surely cannot 'tag' God in the way I could tag a stray cat with the name 'Mungo.'
One might propose a causal theory of names.
The causal theory of names of Saul Kripke et al. requires that there be an initial baptism of the target of reference, a baptism at which the name is first introduced. This can come about by ostension: Pointing to a newly acquired kitten, I bestow upon it the moniker, 'Mungojerrie.' Or it can come about by the use of a reference-fixing definite description: Let 'Neptune' denote the celestial object responsible for the perturbation of the orbit of Uranus. In the second case, it may be that the object whose name is being introduced is not itself present at the baptismal ceremony. What is present, or observable, are certain effects of the object hypothesized. (See Saul Kripke Naming and Necessity, Harvard 1980 p. 79, n. 33 and p. 96, n. 42.)
As I understand it, a necessary condition for successful reference on the causal theory is that a speaker's use of a name be causally connected (either directly or indirectly via a causal chain) with the object referred to. We can refer to objects only if we stand in some causal relation to them (direct or indirect). So my use of 'God' refers to God not because there is something that satisfies the definite description or Searlean disjunction of definite descriptions that unpack the sense of 'God' as I use the term, but because my use of 'God' can be traced back though a long causal chain to an initial baptism, as it were, of God by, say, Moses on Mt. Sinai.
A particular use of a name is presumably caused by an earlier use. But eventually there must be an initial use. Imagine Moses on Mt. Sinai. He has a profound mystical experience of a being who conveys to his mind such exogenic locutions as "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me." Moses applies 'God' or 'YHWH' to the being he believes is addressing him in the experience. But what makes the name the name of the being? One may say: the being or an effect of the being is simply labelled or tagged with the name in an initial 'baptism.'
But a certain indeterminacy seems to creep in if we think of the semantic relation of referring as explicable in terms of tagging and causation (as opposed to in terms of the non-causal relation of satisfaction of a definite description encapsulated in a grammatically proper name). For is it the (mystical) experience of God that causes the use of 'God'? Or is it God himself who causes the use of 'God'? If the former, then 'God' refers to an experience had by Moses and not to God. Surely God is not an experience. But if God is the cause of Moses' use of 'God,' then the mystical experience must be veridical. (Cf. Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God, Cambridge UP, 1991, p. 11.)
So if we set aside mystical experience and the question of its veridicality, it seems we ought to adopt a description theory of the divine names with the consequences mentioned in (i) above. If, on the other hand, a causal theory of divine names names is tenable, and if the causal chain extends from Moses down to Christians and (later) to Muslims, then a case could be made that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all referring to the same God when they use 'God' and such equivalents as 'Yahweh' and 'Allah.'
So it looks like there is no easy answer to the title question. It depends on the resolution of intricate questions in the philosophy of language.
Thomas Nagel writes that “whether atheists or theists are right depends on facts about reality that neither of them can prove” [“A Philosopher Defends Religion,” Letters, NYR, November 8]. This is not quite right: it depends on what kind of theists we have to do with. We can, for example, know with certainty that the Christian God does not exist as standardly defined: a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly benevolent. The proof lies in the world, which is full of extraordinary suffering. If someone claims to have a sensus divinitatis that picks up a Christian God, they are deluded. It may be added that genuine belief in such a God, however rare, is profoundly immoral: it shows contempt for the reality of human suffering, or indeed any intense suffering.
Galen Strawson
Strawson is telling us that it is certain that the God of Christianity does not exist because of the suffering in the world.
How's that for pure bluster?
What we know is true, and what we know with certainty we know without the possibility of mistake. When Strawson claims that it is certain that the Christian God does not exist, he is not offering an autobiographical comment: he is not telling us that it is subjectively certain, certain for him, that the Christian God does not exist. He is maintaining that it is objectively certain, certain in itself, and thus certain for anyone. From here on out 'certain' by itself is elliptical for 'objectively certain.'
And why is it certain that the Christian God does not exist? Because of the "extraordinary suffering" in the world. Strawson appears to be endorsing a version of the argument from evil that dates back to Epicurus and in modern times was endorsed by David Hume. The argument is often called 'logical' to distinguish it from 'evidential' arguments from evil. Since evidential or inductive or probabilistic arguments cannot render their conclusions objectively certain even if all of their premises are certain, Strawson must have the 'logical' argument in mind. Here is a version:
If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
Evil exists.
If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
Therefore, God doesn’t exist.
It is a clever little argument, endlessly repeated, and valid in point of logical form. But are its premises objectively certain? This is not the question whether the argument is sound. It is sound if and only if all its premises are true. But a proposition can be true without being known, and a fortiori, without being known with certainty, i.e., certain. The question, then, is whether each premise in the above argument is objectively certain. If even one of the premises is not, then neither is the conclusion.
Consider (5). It it certain that evil exists? Is it even true? Are there any evils? No doubt there is suffering. But is suffering evil? I would say that it is, and I won't protest if you say that it is obvious that it is. But the obvious needn't be certain. It is certainly not the case that it is certain that suffering is evil, objectively evil. It could be like this. There are states of humans and other animals that these animals do not like and seek to avoid. They suffer in these states in a two-fold sense: they are passive with respect to them, and they find the qualitative nature of these states not to their liking, to put it in the form of an understatement. But it could be that these qualitatively awful states are axiologically neutral in that there are no objective values relative to which one could sensibly say something like, "It would have been objectively better has these animals not suffered a slow death."
The point I am making is that only if suffering is objectively evil could it tell against the objective existence of God. But suffering is objectively evil only if suffering is objectively a disvalue. So suffering is objectively evil and tells against the existence of God only if there are objective values and disvalues.
Perhaps all values and preferences are merely subjective along with all judgments about right and wrong. Perhaps all your axiological and moral judgments reduce to mere facts about what you like and dislike, what satisfies your desires and what does not. Perhaps there are no objective values and disvalues among the furniture of the world. I don't believe this myself. But do you have a compelling argument that it isn't so? No you don't. So you are not certain that it isn't so.
And so you are not certain that evil exists. Evil ought not be and ought not be done, by definition. But it could be that there are no objective oughts and ought-nots, whether axiologically or agentially. There is just the physical world. This world includes animals with their different needs, desires, and preferences. There is suffering, but there is no evil. Since (5) is not certain, the conclusion is not certain either.
Now consider (2): If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil. Is that certain? Is it even true? Does God have the power to eliminate the evil that comes into the world through finite agents such as you and me? Arguably he does not. For if he did he would be violating our free will. By creating free agents, God limits his own power and allows evils that he cannot eliminate. Therefore, it is certainly not certain that (2) is true even if it is true. Reject the Free Will Defense if you like, but I will no trouble showing that the premises you invoke in your rejection are not certain.
Pure ideologically-driven bluster, then, from an otherwise brilliant and creative philosopher.
It is important to distinguish between the problem of evil and the argument from evil. The first is the problem of reconciling the existence of God, as traditionally understood, with the existence of natural and moral evils. As J. L. Mackie points out, this "is essentially a logical problem: it sets the theist the task of clarifying and if possible reconciling the several beliefs which he holds." (The Miracle of Theism, Oxford 1982, p. 150) Mackie goes on to point out that "the problem in this sense signally does not arise for those whose views of the world are markedly different from traditional theism." Thus the theist's problem of evil does not arise for an atheist. It might, however, be the case that some other problem of evil arises for the atheist, say, the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with life's being worth living. But that is a separate matter. I discuss it in A Problem of Evil for Atheists.
The argument from evil, on the other hand, is an attempt to show the nonexistence of God from the fact of evil, where 'fact of evil' is elliptical for 'the existence of natural and moral evils.'
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND THE ARGUMENT FROM EVIL
The main difference between the problem of evil and the argument from evil is that the former is an ad hominem argument whereas the second is not. I am using ad hominem in the way Peter Geach uses it on pp. 26-27 of his Reason and Argument (Basil Blackwell 1976):
This Latin term indicates that these are arguments addressed to a particular man -- in fact, the other fellow you are disputing with. You start from something he believes as a premise, and infer a conclusion he won't admit to be true. If you have not been cheating in your reasoning, you will have shown that your opponent's present body of beliefs is inconsistent and it's up to him to modify it somewhere.
As Geach points out, there is nothing fallacious about such an argumentative procedure. If A succeeds in showing B that his doxastic system harbors a contradiction, then not everything that B believes can be true. Now can an atheist prove the nonexistence of God in this way? No he cannot: at the very most he can prove (with the aid of various auxiliary premises that he and his interlocutor both accept) that God exists and Evil exists cannot both be true. But it does not follow therefrom that God exists is not true. For the atheist to transform the ad hominem problem of evil into a non-ad hominemargument from evil, he would have to establish, or at least assert, that evil exists, and not merely that the theist believes that evil exists. To see my point consider the following conditional, where P is the conjunction of auxiliary premises:
C. If evil exists & P, then God does not exist.
The atheist who raises the problem of evil for the theist asserts (C), or rather a proposition of that form. But to assert a conditional is not to assert its antecedent, or its consequent for that matter; it is to assert an entailment connection between the two. Now although it is the case that for each argument there is a corresponding conditional, and vice versa, arguments must not be confused with conditionals.
Transforming (C) into an argument from evil yields:
Evil Exists
P
Therefore
God does not exist.
Clearly, an atheist who gives this argument, or rather an argument of this form, must assert both premises. Doing so, he ceases his ad hominem examination of the consistency of another person's beliefs, beliefs he either rejects or takes no stand on, and 'comes clean' with his own beliefs.
THE ARGUER FROM EVIL NEEDS TO AFFIRM OBJECTIVE EVIL
If the atheist's aim is merely to poke holes in the logical consistency of the theist's belief set, then it doesn't matter whether he thinks of evil as objective or subjective. Indeed, he needn't believe in evil in any sense. He could hold that it is an illusion. But if the atheist's goal is to support his own belief that God does not exist with an argument from evil, then he needs to maintain that evil is objective or objectively real.
Consider all the enslavement of humans by humans that has taken place in the history of the world. Suppose it is agreed that slavery is morally wrong. What makes this true? Define a moral subjectivist as one who agrees that the claim in question is true, but holds that the truth-maker of this moral truth, and of others like it, is an individual's being in a psychological state, say, the state of being repulsed by slavery. For the moral subjectivist, then, sentences like 'Slavery is wrong' are elliptical for sentences like 'Slavery is wrong-for-X,' where X is a person or any being capable of being in psychological states. Furthermore, the moral subjectivist grants that moral claims have truth-makers, indeed objective truth-makers; it is just that these truth-makers involve psychological states that vary from person to person.
Now if our atheist subscribes to a theory of evil along those lines, then, although there will be objective facts of the matter regarding what various individuals feel about the practice or the institution of slavery, there will be no objective fact of the matter regarding the wrongness or moral evil of slavery.
If so, the fact of evil subjectively construed will have no bearing on the existence of God, a fact, if it a fact, that is objective.
Suppose a torturer tortures his victim to death solely for the satisfaction it gives him. And suppose that moral subjectivism is true. Then the torturing, though evil for the tortured, is good for the torturer, with the upshot that the torturing is neither good nor evil objectively. Now if I were on the scene and had the power to stop the torturing, but did not, would my noninterference detract from my moral goodness? Not at all. (The same goes a fortiori for God.) For nothing objectively evil is transpiring: all that is going on is that one person is securing his pleasure at the expense of another's pain. If you insist that something evil is going on, then that shows that you reject moral subjectivism. But if you accept moral subjectivism, then nothing evil is going on; the torturing is evil only in the mind of the victim and in the minds of any others who sympathize with him. If you accept moral subjectivism and continue to insist that the torturing is evil, then you would also have to insist that it is good, since it is good from the perspective of the torturer. But if it is both good and evil, then it is (objectively) neither.
What I am claiming, then, is that the atheist arguer from evil must construe evil objectively. This will result in trouble for the atheist if it can be shown that objective evil cannot exist unless God exists. For then the atheist arguer from evil will end up presupposing the very being whose existence he is out to deny. No doubt this is a big 'if.' But it is worth exploring. The problem for the atheist is to explain how there can be objective good and evil in a Godless universe. I wish him the best of luck with that.
And another line worth exploring is a theistic argument to God from the fact of objective good and evil. No such argument could PROVE the existence of God, but it could very well have the power of cancelling out the argument from evil.
A mercifully short (9:17) but very good YouTube video featuring commentary by name figures in the philosophy of religion including Marilyn Adams, William Alston, William Wainwright, and William Lane Craig. Craig recounts the experience that made a theist of him. (HT: Keith Burgess-Jackson)
As Marilyn Adams correctly points out at the start of the presentation, the belief of many theists is not a result of religious experience. It comes from upbringing, tradition, and participation in what Wittgenstein called a "form of life" with its associated "language game." I myself, however, could not take religion seriously if it were not for the variety of religious, mystical, and paranormal experiences I have had, bolstered by philosophical reasoning both negative and positive. Negative, as critique of the usual suspects: materialism, naturalism, scientism, secular humanism, and so on. Positive, the impressive array of theistic arguments and considerations which, while they cannot establish theism as true, make a powerful case for it.
But my need for direct experience reflects my personality and, perhaps, limitations. I am an introvert who looks askance at communal practices such as corporate prayer and church-going and much, if not all, of the externalities that go with it. I am not a social animal. I see socializing as too often levelling and inimical to our ultimate purpose here below: to become individuals. Socializing superficializes. Man in the mass is man degraded. We need to be socialized out of the animal level, of course, but then we need solitude to achieve the truly human goal of individuation. Individuation is not a given, but a task. The social animal is still too much of an animal for my taste.
It is only recently that I have forced myself myself to engage in communal religious activities, but more as a form of self-denial than of anything else. My recent five weeks at a remote monastery were more eremitic than cenobitic, but I did take part in the services. And upon return I began attending mass with my wife. Last Sunday a man sat down next to me, a friendly guy who extended to me his hand, but his breath stank to high heaven. Behind me some guy was coughing his head off. And then there are those who show up for mass in shorts, and I am not talking about kids. The priest is a disaster at public speaking and his sermon is devoid of content. Does he even understand the doctrine he is supposed to teach? And then there are all the lousy liberals who want to reduce religion to a crapload of namby-pamby humanist nonsense. And let's not forget the current clown of a pope who, ignorant of economics and climatology, speaks to us of the evils of capitalism and 'global warming' when he should be speaking of the Last Things. (Could he name them off the top of his head?)
But then I reason with myself as follows. "Look, man, you are always going on about how man is a fallen being in a fallen world. Well, the church and its hierarchy and its members are part of the world and therefore fallen too. So what did you expect? And you know that the greatest sin of the intellectual is pride and that pride blinds the spiritual sight like nothing else. So suck it up, be a man among men, humble yourself. It may do you some good."
I read about your recent experiences with communal
religion. Your self-reflection reminded me of something Rabbi Harold Kushner
writes about in his book WHO NEEDS GOD. He talks about visiting with a young man
who told him, "I hate churches and synagogues, they're full of nothing but
hypocrites and jerks"...Kushner says he had to fight the urge to say, 'yep, and
there is always room for one more'.
I reviewed A Most Unlikely God in Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review (vol. XXXVIII, no. 3, Summer 1999, pp. 614-617). Prof. N.M.L Nathan expressed an interest in reading it, so here it is.
A Most Unlikely God: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Nature of God. By Barry Miller. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996, viii + 175 pp. $27.00.
This is the sequel to Professor Miller's From Existence to God: A Contemporary Philosophical Argument (Routledge, 1992). (See my review in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. LXVII, no. 3, Summer 1993, pp. 390-394.) In that book he presents a version of the cosmological argument for the existence of God that does not rely on the principle of sufficient reason in any of its forms. A central upshot of that argument is that God as uncaused cause of the universe must be Subsistent Existence, i.e., a being not distinct from its existence. The notion that anything whatever could be non-distinct from its existence is of course an exasperatingly difficult one, and is rejected as incoherent by many, along with the doctrine of divine simplicity of which it is an integral part. An ontologically simple God is a most unlikely God since he is one in whom there is no real distinction between form and matter, act and potency, essence and existence, or individual and attribute. Since Miller's theistic argument terminates in the affirmation of a simple God, it is essential to his overall project to show the coherence of the very idea of a simple God and to rebut the numerous objections that have been brought against it. That is the task of the book under review.
Chapter 1 contrasts Miller's approach with the 'perfect-being theology' of the Anselmians. For the latter, God's perfection is construed as his possession of a maximally consistent set of great-making properties or perfections. Omnipotence is an example of a great-making property, and is taken by Anselmians as the logical maximum of a property that can be had by creatures. Thus Socrates is powerful, but God is maximally powerful. Miller rejects this approach to divine perfection in that it implies that such terms as 'powerful,' 'knowing,' 'loving,' etc., can be used univocally of God and creatures. (p. 2) On the Anselmian approach, the gulf between God and creatures is not an absolute divide, and thus God on this approach fails to be absolutely transcendent. The God of the Anselmians is thus "discomfitingly anthropomorphic." (p. 3)
Miller's alternative is to think of the greatest F not as a maximum or limit simpliciter in an ordered series of Fs, but as the limit case of such a series. (p. 4) Whereas the limit simpliciter of an F is an F, the limit case of an F is not an F. Consider, for example, the series: 3-place predicable, 2-place predicable, 1-place predicable. Since a predicable (e.g.,'___is wise') must have at least one place if it is to be a predicable, a 1-place predicable is a limit simpliciter of the ordered series of predicables. Although talk of zero-place predicables comes naturally, as when we speak of a proposition as a zero-place predicable, a zero-place predicable is no more a predicable than negative growth is growth. 'Zero-place' is thus an alienans adjective like 'negative' in 'negative growth' and 'decoy' in 'decoy duck.' Zero-place predicable is thus not a limit simpliciter of the series in question, but a limit case of this series: it is not a member of the series of which it is the limit case. It nevertheless stands in some relation to the members of the series inasmuch as they and the way they are ordered point to this limit case. (p. 8)
The idea, then, is that God's power is not the maximum or limit simpliciter of an ordered series of instances of power, but the limit case instance of power. This implies that God's power is not an instance of power any more than a zero-place predicable is a predicable. No doubt this will shock the Anselmians, but in mitigation it can be said that God's power, though not an instance of power, is that to which the ordered series of power-instances points, and is therefore something to which the members of that series stand in a definite relation.
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 engage the problem of how it could be that God is his existence. If sense can be made of this identity, the problem of how God can be identical with his non- existential properties should present no special difficulty. The story begins with Socrates who is spectacularly distinct from his existence. Of course, Socrates can be distinct from his existence only if there is some sense in which existence is a property of him. Since Frege, Russell and their epigones deny this, holding instead that existence is always a property of concepts or propositional functions, Miller devotes Chapter 2 to showing that there are first-level uses of '___exists' and thus that existence is a first-level property of contingent individuals. Miller makes a strong, and to this reviewer's mind convincing, case for this view.
But given that existence is a first-level property, it does not follow straightaway that it is a real (non-Cambridge) property. One is tempted to wonder what existence could 'add' to Socrates, and tempted to conclude that it could 'add' nothing and thus that existence is a Cambridge property. But so to conclude would be to labor under a false assumption as to how an individual is related to its existence. Chapter 3 argues that Socrates is not related to his existence in the way he is related to his wisdom. His wisdom inheres in him as subject; but it makes no sense to think of his existence as inhering in him as subject: "Socrates' existence could not inhere in him unless there was a sense in which he himself was real logically prior to his existence." (p. 30) And there is no such sense, as Miller goes on to argue. Plantinga's haecceities come in for a drubbing (pp. 31-32), and in general it is plausibly argued that individuals are inconceivable before they exist. That is, before Socrates came to exist, there were no de re possibilities involving him.
So although Socrates individuates his existence, i.e., makes his instance of existence distinct from every other such instance, Socrates cannot actualize his existence in the way he actualizes his wisdom: Socrates is logically posterior to his existence in respect of actuality. (p. 33) This seems right: Socrates' existence is what 'makes' him exist. But how can Socrates be logically posterior to his existence in respect of actuality and also logically prior to his existence in respect of individuation?
This question has an answer if Socrates is related to his existence, not as subject to what inheres in it, but as bound to what it bounds. A bound is logically posterior to what it bounds in respect of actuality, but logically prior in respect of individuation. Consider two blocks of ice cut from the same larger block. The two blocks are individuated by their bounding surfaces, which are logically posterior in respect of actuality to the blocks they bound. Bounds are parasitic on what they bound. But the bounding surfaces are logically prior in respect of individuation to the blocks they bound. This is a creative, if not wholly unproblematic, solution to what I am convinced is a genuine problem, namely, the problem of how existence can belong to an individual without being related to it as to a subject.
We are now in a position to understand the notion of Subsistent Existence as an identity of limit cases (Ch 4). Having seen that Socrates is the bound rather than the subject of his instance of existence, we form the notions of the limit case instance of existence and of the limit case bound of existence. "The notion of Subsistent Existence, then, is the notion of the entity which is jointly and identically the limit case instance of existence and the limit case bound of existence." (67) But doesn't this amount to the self-contradictory claim that some bound of existence is identical with the instance of existence which it bounds? No, because 'limit case' is an alienans adjective; a limit case bound of existence is not a bound at all, nor is a limit case instance of existence an instance of existence.
The rest of the book is an elaboration of this basic idea. Chapter 5 shows how God can be identical with his non-existential properties. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss the bearing of the simplicity doctrine on divine cognition, willing, and causation. Chapter 8 addresses the possibility of literal talk about a simple God. Miller attempts to show that on the limit case account of God's simplicity, "...absolute transcendence does not entail total ineffability..." (p. 154) Chapter 9 concludes the work.
There are some minor errors in the book, one of which should be mentioned. On p. 1, n. 1, Miller ascribes to Alvin Plantinga the view that God has no nature. This is a mistake, as Miller readily conceded when I pointed it out to him in correspondence. Plantinga of course holds that God has a nature; what he denies is that God is identical with his nature.
Minor errors aside, this work is the best defense of the divine simplicity to date. Anyone who thinks that this doctrine is obviously incoherent or easily dismissed should read this book -- and think again.
. . . I’m confused by some of your epistemic terms. You reject [in the first article referenced below] the view that we can “rigorously prove” the existence of God, and several times say that theistic arguments are not rationally compelling, by which you mean that there are no arguments “that will force every competent philosophical practitioner to accept their conclusions on pain of being irrational if he does not.“
Okay, so far I’m tracking with you. But then you go on to say that “[t]here are all kinds of evidence” for theism (not just non-naturalism), while the atheist “fails to account for obvious facts (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, intentionality, purposiveness, etc.) if he assumes that all that exists is in the space-time world. I will expose and question all his assumptions. I will vigorously and rigorously drive him to dogmatism. Having had all his arguments neutralized, if not refuted, he will be left with nothing better than the dogmatic assertion of his position."
So how is the atheist not irrational on your view, assuming he is apprised of your arguments? Perhaps the positive case for theism and the negative case against naturalism don’t count as demonstrations in a mathematical sense, but I’m not sure why they’re not supposed to be compelling according to your gloss on the term.
The term 'mathematical' muddies the waters since it could lead to a side-wrangle over what mathematicians are doing when they construct proofs. Let's not muddy the waters. 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.
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.
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 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. To illustrate, consider the following argument from Peter Kreeft (based on C. S. Lewis), an argument I consider good, but not rationally compelling. I will argue (though I will not prove!) that one who rejects this argument is not irrational.
The Argument From Desire
Premise 1: Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.
Premise 2: But there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature can satisfy.
Conclusion: Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth and creatures, which can satisfy this desire.
This something is what people call "God" and "life with God forever."
This is surely not a compelling argument. In fact, as it stands, it is not even valid. But it is easily repaired. There is need of an additional premise, one to the effect that the desire that nothing in time can satisfy is a natural desire. This supplementary premise is needed for validity, but it is not obviously true. For it might be -- it is epistemically possible that -- this desire that nothing in time can satisfy is artificially induced by one's religious upbringing or some other factor or factors.
Furthermore, is premise (1) true? Not as it stands. Suppose I am dying of thirst in the desert. Does that desire in me correspond to some real object that can satisfy it? Does the existence of my token desire entail the existence of a token satisfier? No! For it may be that there is no potable water in the vicinity, when only potable water in the immediate vicinity can satisfy my particular thirst. At most, what the natural desire for water shows is that water had to have existed at some time. It doesn't even show that water exists now. Suppose all the water on earth is suddenly rendered undrinkable. That is consistent with the continuing existence of the natural desire/need for water.
But this is not a decisive objection since repairs can be made. One could reformulate:
1* Every type of natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy some tokens of that type of desire.
But is (1*) obviously true? It could be that our spiritual desires are not artificial, like the desire to play chess, but lacking in real objects nonetheless. It could be that their objects are merely intentional. Suppose our mental life (sentience, intentionality, self-awareness, the spiritual desires for meaning, for love, for lasting happiness, for an end to ignorance and delusion and enslavement to base desires) is just an evolutionary fluke. Our spiritual desires would then be natural as opposed to artificial, but lacking in real objects.
Why do we naturally desire, water, air, sunlight? Because without them we wouldn't have come into material existence in the first place. Speaking loosely, Nature implanted these desires in us. This is what allows us to infer the reality of the object of the desire from the desire. Now if God created us and implanted in us a desire for fellowship with him, then we could reliably infer the reality of God from the desire. But we don't know whether God exists; so it may be that the natural desire for God lacks a real object.
Obviously, one cannot define 'natural desire' as a desire that has a real and not merely intentional object, and then take the non-artificiality of a desire as proof that it is natural. That would be question-begging.
My point is that (1) or (1*) is not known to be true and is therefore rationally rejectable. The argument from desire, then, is not rationally compelling.
As for premise (2), how do we know that it is true? Granting that it is true hitherto, how do we know that it will be true in the future? The utopian dream of the progressives is precisely that we can achieve here on earth final satisfaction of our deepest desires. Now I don't believe this for a second. But I don't think one can reasonably claim to know that (2) is false. What supports it is a very reasonable induction. But inductive arguments don't prove anything.
In sum, the argument from desire, suitably deployed and rigorously articulated, helps render theistic belief rationally acceptable. But it is not a rationally compelling argument.
A reader from Portugal raised a question I hadn't thought of before: "Can God satisfy our infinite desire if God is a being among beings?" This question presupposes that our desire is in some sense infinite. I will explain and defend this presupposition in a moment. Now if our desire is infinite, then it is arguable that only a truly infinite object could satisfy it, and that such an object cannot be a being among beings, not even a being supreme among beings, but must be an absolute reality, that is, God as Being itself. To put it another way, the ultimate good for man cannot be a good thing among good things, not even the best of all good things, but must be Goodness itself. Anything less would be a sort of high-class idol. So let's start with an analysis of idolatry.
I
What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite?
That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never fully satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions -- say a different black-eyed virgin every night as in popular Islam's depiction of paradise — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.
For thinkers of this stripe, all desire is ultimately desire for the Absolute. A desire that understood itself would understand this. But our deluded desire does not understand this. Our deluded desire is played for a fool by the trinkets and bagatelles of this fleeting world. It thinks it can find satisfaction in the finite. Therein lies the root of idolatry.
Buddha understood this very well: he saw that desire is infinite in that it desires its own ultimate quenching or extinguishing, its own nibbana, but that finite quenchings are unsatisfactory in that they only exacerbate desire by giving birth to new desires endlessly. No desire is finally sated; each is reborn in a later desire. Thus the enjoyment of virgin A does not put an end to lust; the next night or the next morning you are hot for virgin B, and so on, back to A or on to C, D, . . . and around and around on the wheel of Samsara. The more you dive into the flesh looking for the ultimate satisfaction, the more frustrated you become. You are looking for Love in all the wrong places.
So Buddha understood the nature of desire as infinite. But since he had convinced himself that there is no Absolute, no Atman, nothing possessing self-nature, he made a drastic move: he preached salvation through the extirpation of desire itself. Desire itself is at the root of suffering, dukkha, not desire for the wrong objects; so the way to salvation is not via redirection of desire upon the right Object, but via an uprooting of desire itself.
In Buddhist terms, we could say that idolatry is the treating of something that is anatta, devoid of self-nature, as if it were atta, possessive of self-nature. Idolatry arises when some finite foreground object, a man or a woman say, is falsely ascribed the power to provide ultimate satisfaction. This sort of delusion is betrayed in practically every love song ever written. Here are some typical lyrics (trivia question: name the song, the singer, the date):
You are my world, you're every move I make You are my world, you're every breath I take.
There are thousands more lyrics like them, and anyone who has been in love knows that they capture the peculiar madness of the lover, the delectable madness of taking the finite for infinite.
Or will you deny that this is madness, a very deep philosophical and perhaps also religious mistake? I say it is madness whether or not an absolute good exists. Whether or not an absolute good exists, reason suggests that we should love the finite as finite, that our love should be ordered to, and commensurate with, its object. Finite love for finite objects, and for all objects if there is no infinite Object.
II
Suppose you accept what I just wrote about desire being infinite and ultimately unsatisfiable by any finite object. Would this show that God cannot be a being among beings? Not obviously! The supreme being theists could agree that infinite desire is ultimately satisfiable only by an infinite object, but that the omni-qualified supreme being fills the bill. Furthermore, they could argue, plausibly, that talk of Goodness itself and Being itself, which imply the divine simplicity, is just incoherent to the discursive intellect. To which one response is: so much the worse for the discursive intellect. The ultimate goal is attainable only by transcending it.
You seem to hold that, if God is identical to his existence, then God is Existence itself. Why think that? Why not think instead that, if God is identical to his existence, then he is identical to his 'parcel' of existence, as it were?
This is an entirely reasonable question. I will try to answer it.
First of all, when we say that God is identical to his existence, we mean that there is no real distinction in God between essence (nature) and existence in the way in which there is a real distinction in Socrates (our representative creature) between essence (nature) and existence. It is the real distinction in Socrates that grounds his metaphysical contingency, while it is the lack of such a distinction in God that grounds his metaphysical necessity.
This is to say that God, unlike creatures, is ontologically simple. In a slogan of St Augustine, God is what he has. Thus he has his existence by being his existence. Why must God be simple? Because he is the absolute reality. If your god is not the absolute reality, then your god is not God but an idol. The absolute cannot depend on anything else for its nature or existence on pain of ceasing to be the absolute. It must possess aseity, from-itself-ness.
Now Existence is in some way common to everything that exists, though it is not common in the manner of a property or a concept. Thus God and Socrates have Existence in common. If God is not identical to Existence, then he is like Socrates and must depend on Existence as something other than himself to exist. But this violates the divine aseity.
Therefore, God is not only identical to his existence, he is identical to Existence itself.
Objection: "If God is identical to Existence, then God alone exists, which flies in the face of the evident fact that there is a plurality of non-divine existents."
Reply: The objection succeeds only if there are no different ways of existing. But if God exists-underivatively and creatures exist-derivatively, then God's identity with Existence does not entail that God alone exists; it entails that God alone exists-underivatively.
The picture is this. Existence is that which makes derivative existents exist. If Existence did not itself exist, then nothing would exist. So Existence itself exists. It is identical to God. God is the unsourced Source of everything distinct from God. God, as Existence itself, is the Paradigm Existent. God is at once both Existence and the prime case of Existence.
In this respect, God is like a Platonic Form in which all else participates. (It is worth recalling in this connection that Aquinas speaks of God as forma formarum, the form of all forms.) God is self-existent Existence; creatures are not self-existent, but derive their existence from self-existent Existence.
Objection: "This scheme issues in something like the dreaded Third Man Regress. If Socrates and Plato both exist by participating in Existence, which exists, then there are three things that exist, Socrates, Plato, and Existence, each of which exists by participation. If so, there must be a second Existence, Existence-2 that Socrates, Plato and Existence-1 participate in. But then an infinite regress is up and running, one that is, moreover, vicious."
Response: The Third Man Regress is easily blocked by distinguishing the way Existence exists and the way derivative existents exist. Socrates exists by participating in Existence; Existence exists, not by participation, but by being (identical to) Existence.
There is exactly one case in which existence = self-identity. This is the case of the Paradigm Existent, which is Existence itself, which is God. In every other case, existence is not self-identity. No doubt Socrates is self-identical; but his self-identity is not the ground of his existence.
The following entry, first posted on February 20, 2011, is relevant to the question whether God is a being among beings. My rejection of this claim requires that there be modes of Being. If talk of modes of Being is unintelligible, or based on an obvious mistake, then the claim that God is not a being among beings, but Being itself, is unintelligible, or based on an obvious mistake. Herewith, something in defense of the MOB doctrine.
To ward off misunderstanding, I am not saying that the 'relation' of God to the world of creatures is the 'relation' of a substance to its accidents or modes. Creatures do not inhere in God. They are not accidents. They are derivative substances in their own right, difficult as it may be to make sense of this. Christian metaphysics must somehow navigate between the Scylla of Spinozism and Charybdis of the sort of radical ontological pluralism to which my friend Dale Tuggy 'succumbs' (to put it tendentiously).
On second thought, since Spinozism sucks everything into itself, I should have written 'Charybdis of Spinozism.' Charybdis was a sea nymph transmogrified by Zeus into a whirlpool.
In his History of Philosophy Hegel jokes that due to the all-consumptiveness of the Spinozistic Absolute, it is in some sense fitting that Spinoza should die of consumption. As the story goes, Spinoza the lens-grinder died of what used to be called consumption (tuberculosis) from breathing in the glass dust.
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The 'thin' conception of Being or existence, lately explained, entails that there are no modes of Being. Most analytic philosophers accept the thin conception and reject modes of Being. Flying in the face of analytic orthodoxy, I maintain that the modes-of-Being doctrine is defensible. Indeed, I should like to say something stronger, namely, that it is indispensable for metaphysics.
My task in this series of posts is not to specify what the modes of Being are, but the preliminary one of defending the very idea of there being different modes of Being. So I plan to look at a range of examples without necessarily endorsing the modes of Being they involve. Against van Inwagen (see post linked above), I maintain that no mistake is made by partisans of the thick conception. They do not, pace van Inwagen, illicitly transfer what properly belongs to the nature of a thing to its existence.
This post focuses on substances and accidents and argues that an accident and a substance of which it is the accident differ in their very mode of Being, and not merely in their respective natures.
1. Intuitively, some items exist on their own while others are dependent in their existence on items that exist on their own. Smiles, grimaces, frowns, white caps, and carpet bulges are items that exist, but not on their own. They need -- as a matter of metaphysical necessity -- faces, waves, and carpets to exist in. This suggests some definitions:
D1. S is a (primary) substance =df S is metaphysically capable of independent existence.
D2. A is an accident =df A is not metaphysically capable of independent existence, but exists, if it exists, in a substance.
By 'metaphysically' I mean broadly logically in Plantinga's sense. So if a particular statue is a substance, then it is broadly logically possible that it exist even if nothing else exists. And if the smoothness or color of the statue are accidents, then it is broadly logically impossible that they exist (i) apart from some substance or other and indeed (ii) apart from the very substance of which they are the accidents.
The second point implies that accidents are particulars, not universals. Accidents cannot be shared. They are not 'repeatable' in the manner of universals. Nor can they 'migrate' from one substance to another. You can't catch my cold if my cold is an accident of me as substance. Your cold is your numerically distinct cold. Socrates' whiteness is his whiteness and is as such numerically distinct from Plato's whiteness. The connection between a substance and its accidents is a peculiarly intimate one.
2. Now suppose there is a substance S and an accident A of S. I do not deny that there is a sense of 'exist' according to which both S and A exist. There is a sense -- the quantificational sense -- in which both items exist and exist univocally: each is something and not nothing. Both are there to be talked about and referred to. We can write '(∃x)(x = S)' and '(∃x)(x = A)': 'Something is (identically) S' and 'Something is (identically) A.' The symbol for the particular quantifier -- '(∃x)(. . . x . . .)' -- has exactly the same sense in both occurrences.
3. The issue, however, is this: Does what I said in #2 exhaust what there is to be said about the Being or existence of S and A? On the thin conception, that is all there is to it. To be is to be something or other. If there are substances and accidents then both are in the same sense and in the same mode. ('Sense' is a semantic term; 'mode' is an ontological term.) Since S and A both exist in the same way on the thin conception, they are not distinguished by their mode of Being. They are distinguished by their respective natures alone.
4. In order to see what is wrong with the thin conception, let us ask how the two entities S and A are related. Indeed, can one speak of a relation at all? Traditionally, one speaks of inherence: A inheres in S. Inherence cannot be an external relation since if a and b are externally related, then a and b can each exist apart from the relation. But A cannot exist apart from the inherence 'relation' to S. The whiteness of Socrates cannot exist apart from Socrates. On the other hand, if S and A were internally related, then neither could exist without the other. But S can exist without A. Socrates' needn't be white. Since S can exist without A, but A cannot exist without S, A is existentially dependent on S, dependent on S for its very existence, while S is capable of independent existence. But this is just to say that A exists in a different way than S exists. Thus S and A differ in their modes of Being. One cannot make sense of inherence without distinguishing substantial and accidental modes of Being.
5. In sum: Talk of substances and their accidents is intelligible. But it is intelligible only if there are two modes of Being, substantial and accidental. Therefore, talk of modes of being is intelligible. Since the thin conception of Being entails that there cannot be modes of Being, because the very idea is unintelligible, the thin conception ought to be rejected.
The thesis under examination as expressed by Diogenes Allen: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone." Is this a defensible position? Let's consider both sides of the question.
A. First, a crisp little argument against the view.
Consider two possible scenarios. In the first, God alone exists. In the second, God exists and creates a world. On a classical view of God, according to which he is libertarianly free, both scenarios are indeed possible. There is no necessity that God create; his creating is free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense. Clearly, the scenarios are different. But if God + World = God, then there is no difference between the two scenarios. For on that supposition, God alone exists in both scenarios. Therefore,it is not the case that God + World = God.
To extend the argument:
If God is Being itself, ipsum esse subsistens, Being in its plenitude and infinity, then how could there be anything else? If God is Being itself, and thus not a being among beings, how could there be any 'ontological room' for anything else? How is creation so much as possible if God is Being itself? Isn't the Thomist line, as articulated by Diogenes Allen and Etienne Gilson (quoted previously) just obviously mistaken?
After all, it is evident to the senses (though not self-evident, cf. Descartes' Dream Argument) that this material world of time and change exists: it is not nothing. Nor it is a dream or an illusion. Clearly, it is 'better known' that this material world of multiplicity exists than that God exists. But suppose God does exist. Then both the world (creatures) and God exist. Is it not perfectly obvious that the totality of reality is greater with both God and creation than with God alone?
B. Now let's consider what could be said in favor of the view.
Given the force of the arguments for the thesis that God is not a being among beings, arguments we cannot rehearse again here, it is reasonable to hold that God is Being itself. This leaves us with the task of attaching some tolerably clear meaning to 'God + world = God' in the teeth of the argument contra. This cannot be done if there are no modes of Being. For if everything that exists exists in the same way (mode), and if G exists and W exists, and they are numerically distinct, then it is self-evident that there is a totality of existents and that this totality is greater if G and W both exist than if G alone exists.
So we need to bring in modes of Being or existence. To motivate the modes-of-Being doctrine, consider an analogy. I am standing before a mirror looking at my image. How many men? One, not two. I'm a man; my mirror image is not a man. An image, reflection, picture, drawing, sculpture of a man is not a man. And yet my mirror image is not nothing: it exists. I exist and my image exists. Both exist, but in different ways. I exist whether or not any mirror image of me exists; but no mirror image of me exists unless I exist. Note too that the mirror image is dependent on me for its existence at each moment of its existence, unlike a photograph or a sculpture. (Herein an analogy with creatio continuans.)
It is also worth noting that there is a correspondence between the visual properties of the man and the visual properties displayed in the image. (This fact is what allows a dentist to do precision work on a tooth without looking at it directly.) Now we cannot say that the seen man and his image instantiate the same quidditative properties since, e.g., the man is bearded but his image is not. But we can say that the same visual properties instantiated by the man are displayed in the image. While the image is not bearded, it is an image of a bearded man. There are two different properties, but they are related: being bearded, being of something bearded, where the 'of' is an an objective genitive.
Man and image both exist. Yet there is an important difference. I say it is a difference in mode of existence. The image, unlike the man, exists dependently or derivatively, and it depends existentially on the very original of which it is the image. Existential dependence is not a quidditative property. This mode of existence is no more a quidditative property than existence is.
So I say we need a tripartite distinction: quiddity (nature, essence in the broad sense); general or quantificational existence, the existence expressed by the particular quantifier; mode of existence.
Now it makes a certain amount of sense to say that Man + Mirror Image = Man. This could be explained by saying that there is no totality of independent existents that has both me and my mirror image in it. If we are adding and subtracting over a domain of independent existents, then it is true that Man + Image = Man.
Accordingly, 'God + World = God' could be explained by saying that there is no totality of a se existents that has both God and creatures in it.
C. Aporetic Conclusion
The argument I gave in section A will strike many as compelling. But what I said in section B shows that it is not compelling. If one holds that God exists in a different way than creatures, then there is no totality in reality to which God and creatures all belong. One can of course say that something is (identically) God and that something is (identically) Socrates and that *Something is (identically) ____* has exactly the same sense, no matter what you throw into the gap: no matter what its mode of Being. But that implies only that there is a merely conceptual totality to which God and creatures all belong. In this merely excogitated conceptual totality, however, abstraction is made from the real existence of the things in question, and their different modes of Being.
I grant that God and Socrates both exist in the quantificational sense of 'exists,' a sense univocal across all existential sentences regardless of subject matter; but that is consistent with there being no commonality in reality between God and creatures to warrant talk of a totality in reality containing both.
My interim conclusion is aporetic: both positions on our question are reasonably maintained. They cannot both be true, but they can both be reasonably upheld.
I would be satisfied if Dale Tuggy and the 'supreme (miniscule) being theists' would agree with me and other '(majuscule) Being theists' that it is a stand-off.
The Big Henry offers the following comment on my post, World + God = God?
"World + God = God" is (mathematically) analogous to "number + infinity = infinity", where "number" is finite. If God embodies all existence, then God is "existential infinity", and, therefore, no amount of existence can be added to or subtracted from God's totality.
The numerical concept of infinity does not comply with the rules of arithmetic addition or subtraction. Similarly, if God is presumed to be the embodiment of all existence, He does not comply with the rules of arithmetic addition or subtraction.
To supply an example that supports Big Henry's point, 8 + = . (aleph-nought, aleph-zero, aleph-null) is the first transfinite cardinal. A cardinal number answers the How many? question. Thus the cardinal number of the set {Manny, Moe, Jack} is 3, and the cardinal number of {1, 3, 5, 7} is 4. Cardinality is a measure of a set's size. What about the infinite set of natural numbers {0, 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . n, n + 1, . . .}? How many? . And as was known long before Georg Cantor, it is possible to have two infinite sets, call them E and N such that E is a proper subset of N, but both E and N have the same size or cardinality. Thus the evens are a proper subset of the naturals, but there are just as many of the former as there are of the latter, namely, . How can this be? Well, EACH element of the evens can be put into 1-1 correspondence with an element of the naturals.
So far the analogy holds. But I think Big Henry has overlooked the transfinite ordinals. The first transfinite ordinal, denoted , is the order type of the set of nonnegative integers. (See here.) You could think of as the successor of the natural numbers. It is the first number following the entire infinite sequence of natural numbers. (Dauben, 97) The successor of is + 1. These two numbers are therefore different. Here the analogy breaks down. God + Socrates = God. + 1 is not equal to .
Moreover, it is not true to say that "The numerical concept of infinity does not comply with the rules of arithmetic addition or subtraction." This ignores the rules of transfinite cardinal arithmetic and those of transfinite ordinal arithmetic. Big Henry seems to be operating with a pre-Cantorian notion of infinity. Since Cantor we have an exact mathematics of infinity.
In any case, I rather doubt that mathematical infinity provides a good analogy for the divine infinity. God is not a set!
I just started reading Philosophy for Understanding Theology by Diogenes Allen. The first chapter is devoted to the doctrine of creation. These two sentences jumped out at me: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone." Do you agree? How would you unpack them?
These are hard sayings indeed. Herewith, some rough notes on the aporetics of the situation.
By 'world' here is meant the totality of creatures, the totality of beings brought into existence by God from nothing. Now if God is a being among beings, it would make no sense at all to say that "The world plus God is not more than God alone." For if we add the uncreated being (God) to the created beings, then we have more beings. We have a totality T that is larger than T minus God. If God is a being among beings, then there is a totality of beings that all exist in the same way and in the same sense, and this totality includes both God and creatures such that subtracting God or subtracting creatures would affect the 'cardinality' of this totality.
But if God is not a being among beings, but Being itself in its absolute fullness, as per the metaphysics of Exodus 3:14 (Ego sum qui sum, "I am who am") then there is no totality of beings all existing in the same way having both God and creatures as members. When we speak of God and creatures,
. . . we are dealing with two orders of being not to be added together or subtracted; they are, in all rigour, incommensurable, and that is also why they are compossible. God added nothing to Himself by the creation of the world, nor would anything be taken away from Him by its annihilation -- events which would be of capital importance for the created things concerned, but null for Being Who would be in no wise concerned qua being. (Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Scribners 1936, p. 96. Gilson's Gifford lectures, 1931-1932.)
Here, I am afraid, I will end up supplying some 'ammo' to Tuggy, Rhoda, and Anderson. For the Gilson passage teeters on the brink of incoherence. We are told that there are two orders of being but that they are incommensurable. This can't be right, at least not without qualification. If there are two orders of being, then they are commensurable in respect of being. There has to be some sense in which God and Socrates both are. Otherwise, God and creatures are totally disconnected, with the consequence that creatures fall away into nothingness. For if God is Being itself, and there is no common measure, no commensurability whatsoever, between God and creatures, then creatures are nothing. God is all in all. God alone is. Gilson is well aware of the dialectical pressure in this monistic direction: "As soon as we identify God with Being it becomes clear that there is a sense in which God alone is." (65) If we emphasize the plenitude and transcendence of God, then this sensible world of matter and change is "banished at one stroke into the penumbra of mere appearance, relegated to the inferior status of a quasi-unreality." (64) But of course Christian metaphysics is not a strict monism; so a way must be found to assign the proper degree of reality to the plural world.
Here is the problem in a nutshell. God cannot be a being among beings. "But if God is Being, how can there be anything other than Himself?" (84) We need to find a way to avoid both radical ontological pluralism and radical ontological monism.
It's a variation on the old problem of the One and the Many.
A. If Being itself alone is, then beings are not. But then the One lacks the many. Not good: the manifold is evident to the senses and the intellect.
B. If beings alone are, then Being is not. But then the many lacks the One. Not good: the many is the many of the One. A sheer manifold with no real unity would not a cosmos make. The world is one, really one.
C. If Being and beings both are in the same way and and the same sense, then either Being is itself just another being among beings and we are back with radical pluralism, or Being alone is and we are back with radical monism.
Gilson's Thomist solution invokes the notions of participation and analogy. God is Being itself in its purity and plenitude and infinity. Creatures exist by participation in the divine Being: they are limited participators in unlimited Being. So both God and creatures exist, but in different ways. God exists simply and 'unparticipatedly.' Creatures exist by participation. God and creatures do not form a totality in which each member exists in the same way. We can thus avoid each of (A), (B), and (C).
But the notion of participation is a difficult one as Gilson realizes. It appears "repugnant to logical thought" (96): ". . . every participation supposes that the participator both is, and is not, that in which it participates." (96) How so?
I exist, but contingently. My Being is not my own, but received from another, from God, who is Being itself. So my Being is God's Being. But I am not God or anything else. So I have my own Being that distinguishes me numerically from everything else. So I am and am not that in which I participate.
Gilson does not show a convincing way around this contradiction.
The One of the many is not one of the many: as the source of the many, the One cannot be just one more member of the many. Nor can the One of the many be the same as the many: it cannot divide without remainder into the many. The One is transcendent of the many. But while transcendent, it cannot be wholly other than the many. For, as Plotinus says, "It is by the One that all beings are beings." The One, as the principle by which each member of the many exists, cannot be something indifferent to the many or external to the many, or other than the many, or merely related to the many. The One is immanent to the many. The One is immanent to the many without being the same as the many. The One is neither the same as the many nor other than the many. The One is both transcendent of the many and immanent in the many. Theologically, God is said to be both transcendent and omnipresent.
What should we conclude from these affronts to the discursive intellect? That there is just nothing to talk about here, or that there is but it is beyond the grasp of our paltry intellects? If what I have written above is logical nonsense, yet it seems to be important, well-motivated, rigorously articulated nonsense.
I have just finished reading your most instructive and thought-provoking book, A Paradigm Theory of Existence.
On p. 257, you write: "(We will have to consider whether our view also undercuts realism.)" However, I did not see any discussion of this issue in the rest of the book.
On its face, the Paradigm Theory of Existence (PTE) seems to be close to Berkeley's position---the being of existents is grounded in the voluntary action/perception of a transcendent Mind (God/Paradigm Existent)---and yet if I understand you correctly, you wish to maintain that your theory is a version of "realism."
I realize, of course, that these are crude characterizations, and that the problem of what constitutes "realism" is a difficult one. Still, there is an apparent tension in your book---indicated by the passage I quoted above, which constitutes an unredeemed promissory note.
So, I was wondering:
1. What I am missing?;
2. Have you published anything else directly addressing how the PTE manages to avoid the charge of "idealism"?
Any help you could give me in understanding your thoughts about the PTE and "realism" would be most appreciated.
These questions are reasonable ones and one of them is easy to answer: No, I haven't published anything about PTE and idealism. I probably should. What follows are some rough thoughts.
1. Is the position of PTE realistic or idealistic? The short answer is that it is realistic with respect to most of the objects of finite minds, but idealistic with respect to all of the objects of Infinite Mind.
First something in defense of the second conjunct of my short answer.
If God creates ex nihilo, and everything concrete other than God is created by God, and God is a pure spirit, then one type of metaphysical realism can be excluded at the outset, namely, a realism that asserts that there are radically transcendent uncreated concrete things in themselves. 'Radically transcendent' means 'transcendent of any mind, finite or infinite.' Radically transcendent items exist and have most of their properties independently of any mind. Call this realism-1. No classical theist could be a realist-1. Corresponding to realism-1, as its opposite, is idealism-1. This is the view that everything other than God is created ex nihilo by God, who is a pure spirit, and who therefore creates in a purely spiritual way. (To simplify the discussion, let us leave to one side the problem of so-called 'abstract objects.') It seems to me, therefore, that there is a very clear sense in which classical theism is a type of idealism. For on classical theism God brings into existence and keeps in existence every concretum other than himself and he does so by his purely mental/spiritual activity. We could call this type of idealism onto-theological absolute idealism. This is not to say that the entire physical cosmos is a content of the divine mind; it is rather an accusative or intentional object of the divine mind. Though not radically transcendent, it is a transcendence-in-immanence, to borrow some Husserlian phraseology. So if the universe is expanding, that is not to say that the divine mind or any part thereof is expanding. If an intentional object has a property P it does not follow that a mind trained upon this object, or an act of this mind or a content in this mind has P. Perceiving a blue coffee cup, I have as intentional object something blue; but my mind is not blue, nor is the perceiving blue, nor any mental content. If I perceive or imagine or in any way think of an extended sticky surface, neither my mind nor any part of it becomes extended or sticky. Same with God. He retains his difference from the physical cosmos even while said cosmos is nothing more than his merely intentional object incapable of existing on its own.
Actually, what I just wrote is only an approximation to what I really want to say. For just as God is sui generis, I think the relation between God and the world is sui generis, and as such not an instance of the intentional relation with which we are familiar in our own mental lives. The former is only analogous to the latter. If one takes the divine transcendence seriously, then God cannot be a being among beings; equally, God's relation to the world cannot be a relation among relations. If we achieve any understanding in these lofty precincts, it is not the sort of understanding one achieves by subsuming a new case under an old pattern; God does not fit any pre-existing pattern, nor does his 'relation' to the world fit any pre-existing pattern. If we achieve any understanding here it will be via various groping analogies. These analogies can only take us so far. In the end we must confess the infirmity of finite reason in respect of the Absolute that is the Paradigm Existent.
There is also the well known problem that the intentional 'relation' is not, strictly speaking, a relation. It is at best analogous to a relation. So it looks as if we have a double analogy going here. The God-world relation is analogous to something analogous to a relation in the strict sense. Let me explain.
If x stands in relation R to y, then both x, y exist. But x can stand in the intentional 'relation' to y even if y does not exist in reality. It is a plain fact that we sometimes have very definite thoughts about objects that do not exist, the planet Vulcan, for example. What about the creating/sustaining 'relation'? The holding of this 'relation' as between God and Socrates cannot presuppose the existence in reality of both relata. It presupposes the existence of God no doubt, but if it presupposed the existence of Socrates then there would be no need for the creating/sustaining ex nihilo of Socrates. Creating is a producing, a causing to exist, and indeed moment by moment.
For this reason, creation/sustaining cannot be a relation, strictly speaking. It follows that the createdness of a creature cannot be a relational property, strictly speaking. Now the createdness of a creature is its existence or Being. So the existence of a creature cannot be a relational property thereof; but it is like a relational property thereof.
What I have done so far is argue that classical theism is a form of idealism, a form of idealism that is the opposite of an extreme from of metaphysical realism, the form I referred to as 'realism-1.' If you say that no one has ever held such a form of realism, I will point to Ayn Rand.
2. According to the first conjunct of my short answer, realism holds with respect to some of the objects of finite minds. Not for purely intentional objects, of course, but for things like trees and mountains and cats and chairs. They exist and have most of their properties independently of the mental activity of finite minds such as ours.
3. Kant held that empirical realism and transcendental idealism are logically compatible and he subscribed to both. Now the idealism I urge is not a mere transcendental idealism, but a full-throated onto-theological absolute idealism; but it too is compatible, as far as I can see, with the empirical reality of most of the objects of ectypal intellects such as ours. The divine spontaneity makes them exist and renders them available to the receptivity of ectypal intellects.
I appreciated your recent post with the above title. However, I note that you didn't connect your comments there with your ongoing discussion with Dale Tuggy. From point 3 of your post:
Ryan seems to think that to believe in God is to believe that there is a special object in addition to the objects we normally take to exist. But this is not what a sophisticated theist maintains.
And:
People like Ryan, Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the theist's assertions. To sum up. [...] (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings.
Yet Tuggy apparently affirms [the negation of] (iii) and thus agrees with Ryan et al. on that point at least. So should we conclude that Tuggy isn't really a theist? Or that he isn't a sophisticated theist? Neither seems fair! But then if Tuggy (and his fellow non-classical theists) can be appropriately categorized as theists, it seems your analysis of "theist-atheist debates" needs some qualification.
Just some more grist for the mill!
REPLY
Thanks, James. The entry in question is an old post from six or seven years ago. That explains the lack of reference to my present conversation with Dale Tuggy. So let me now bring Tuggy into the picture.
Let us first note that 'God is a being among beings' does not imply the existence of God. It is a claim about how God exists should he exist. It is like the claim 'Chairs are not (subjective) concepts.' That is true whether or not there are any chairs. It says something about how chairs exist should any exist, namely, extramentally. The same goes for 'God is not a concept,' which is true whether or not God exists.
A second point to note is that 'God is a being among beings' is not equivalent to 'God is a physical thing among physical things.' Maybe Yuri Gagarin believed in that equivalence, and maybe Dawkins does, but surely it would be uncharitable in the extreme to impute such a belief to Russell despite his comparison of God to a teapot. That wasn't the point of the comparison. And of course Tuggy does not hold to the equivalence.
Is Dale a sophisticated theist? Well, he is sophisticated, holding a Ph.D. in philosophy from Brown University, and he is a theist. So he is a sophisticated theist. But it doesn't follow that his theism is sophisticated. I say it isn't. A sophisticated X-ist can hold to an unsophisticated X-ism.
God, if he exists, is not just one more thing that exists having properties that distinguish him from everything else that exists. God is the ultimate source, the absolute ground, of the existence, properties, intelligibility, and value of everything distinct from himself. As such, he cannot be just one more thing that exists, one more item in the ontological inventory. Why not? Here is one argument.
God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing, everything (or at least every contingent thing) distinct from himself. So everything distinct from God depends on God for its existence, while God does not depend on anything for his existence. The Being of creatures is their Being-created-by-God while the Being of God is not his Being-created-by-God. Therefore, there are two very different modes of Being in play here, one pertaining to God, the other to creatures. Since God and creatures exist in different ways (modes), God is not a being among beings. For when we say that God is a being among beings part of what we mean is that God exists or is in the very same way that everything else is or exists.
Is this not a good argument? It is not a compelling argument, but then no argument for any substantive claim in philosophy is compelling.
Rather than say more in defense of the above sketch of an argument, I will enable Comments and let my esteemed and astute readers poke holes in the argument if they can.
I admire Dale Tuggy's resolve to continue this difficult discussion despite the manifold demands on his time and energy. (This Gen-X dude is no slacker! If one of us is a slacker, it's this Boomer. Or, if you prefer, I am a man of leisure, otium liberale, in the classical sense.) The core question, you will recall, is whether God is best thought of as a being among beings, or as Being itself. The best way to push forward, I think, is via very short exchanges. In Part 2, near the top, we read:
“Being itself,” I take it, is something like a universal property, an abstract and not a concrete object. (Or at least, it’s not supposed to be concrete; maybe he thinks that it is neither abstract nor concrete.) I’m not sure if Bill would accept those characterizations, but if not, I invite him to say a little more about what he means by “Being itself.” The “itself,” I assume, entails not being a self. But God – that is, the God of Christianity, or of biblical monotheism – is a god, and a god is, analytically, a self. I’m pretty sure that no self can be “Being itself” in the way that Bill means it, but again, I invite him to say more about what it is to be “Being itself.”
1. First a comment on 'itself' in 'Being itself.' I don't understand why Dale thinks that 'itself' entails not being a self or person. In expressions of the form 'X itself,' the 'itself' in typical instances functions as a device to focus attention on X in its difference from items with which it could be conflated or confused. In a Platonic dialogue Socrates might say to an interlocutor: "You gave me an instance of a just act, but I want to know what justice itself is." Justice itself is justice as distinct from just acts whether the latter are taken distributively or collectively. The same goes for knowledge itself, virtue itself, piety itself. Piety itself is not any given pious act or the collection of pious acts, but that in virtue of which pious acts are pious. It is that which 'makes' pious acts pious. 'Itself' in these constructions is a device of emphasis. It is a form of pleonasm that serves a sort of underlining function. Compare the sentence, 'Obama himself called for transparency in government.' 'Himself' adds a nuance absent without it. It serves to insure that the reader appreciates that it is Obama and not some other person who made the call for transparency; Obama, that very man, who is not known for his contributions to transparency.
Similarly with Being itself and Existence itself. When I speak of Being/Existence itself, I speak of Being/Existence in its difference from beings/existents. I am making it clear that I intend Being as other than each being and from the whole lot of beings. I am emphasizing the difference between Being and beings. I am warning against their conflation or confusion or (thoughtless) identification. I am implying, among other things, that Being does not divide without remainder into beings. Or rather, I am raising this as a question. For after investigation we may decide that Being does, in the end, divide without remainder into beings. But note that to make this assertion one has to have distinguished Being from beings. Otherwise, the assertion would be a miserable tautology along the lines of: beings are beings.
2. Now does 'Being itself' imply that Being is not a self? 'Self' has a narrow use and a wide use. In the narrow use, a self is a person. Now suppose it were said that God himself is a person. Would that imply that God is not a person? Of course not. In the wide use, a self is anything that has what Buddhists call self-nature or own-being. The Buddhist anatta doctrine amounts to the claim that nothing has self-nature, that nothing is a self in the broad sense. This could be interpreted to mean that nothing is a substance in the Aristotelian sense. (Cf. T. R. V. Murti) A mark of substance in this sense is independence: X is a substance iff x is logically capable of independent existence. Now God is either a substance or analogous to a substance. If God is a self in the broad sense, than this is consistent with God's being a person either univocally or analogically.
3. Can an abstract object be a person? No! On this point I am confident that Dale and I will rejoice in agreement. Here is a quick argument. Persons are agents. Agents do things. No abstract object does anything: abstracta are causally inert. They cannot act or be acted upon. Therefore, no person is an abstract object.
Dale operates within a certain general-metaphysical scheme common to most analytic philosophers, a scheme that he does not question and that perhaps seems obvious to him. On this scheme, every object or being is either abstract or concrete, no object is both, and no object is neither. For Dale, then, persons are concrete objects; God is a person; hence God is a concrete object.
On this understanding of 'concrete,' a concretum is anything that is either capable of being causally active or capable of being causally passive. And this, whether or not the item is a denizen of space and time. For Dale, God is not in space or time without prejudice to his being concrete. I don't know whether Dale thinks of God as impassible, and I rather doubt that he does; but one could hold that God is impassible while also holding that God is concrete given the definition above. On some conceptions, God acts but cannot be acted upon.
4. But is Being an abstract object? No! First of all, I question Dale's general-metaphysical scheme according to which everything is either abstract or concrete, nothing is neither, and nothing is both. So I don't feel any dialectical pressure to cram Being or Existence into this scheme. Being is not a being among beings; therefore, it is not an abstract being or a concrete being.
Being is that which makes beings be: outside their causes, outside the mind, outside language and its logic, outside of nothing. Being is that without which beings are nothing at all.
5. Is Being a property of beings? No. But this denial does not give aid and comfort to the Fregean view that Being or existence is a property of properties. There is a clear sense in which Being belongs to beings: one cannot kick it upstairs in the Fressellian manner. But while Being belongs to beings, it is not a property of them in any standard sense of 'property.' Suppose we agree with this definition that I got from Roderick Chisholm:
P is a property =df P is possibly such that it is instantiated.
Accordingly, every property is an instantiable item, and every instantiable item is a property. The question whether Being is a property of beings then becomes the question whether Being is instantiated by beings. In simpler terms, are beings instances of Being in the way Max and Manny are instances of felinity? I argue against this in my existence book. Being (existence) does not and cannot have instances or examples. Max is an instance of felinity, an example of cat; he is not an instance or example of Being.
Here is one consideration among several. If x, y are instances of F-ness, then x, y are not numerically distinct just in virtue of being instances of F-ness. Qua instances of F-ness, x, y are identical and interchangeable. Whatever it is that makes x, y two and not one has nothing to do with their being instances of F-ness. Max and Manny, for example, are numerically distinct, but not numerically distinct as cats, i.e., as instances of felinity. But they are numerically distinct as existents. Therefore, existents are not instances of existence. If you think otherwise, you are thinking of existence as a quidditative determination, a highest what-property. But existence pertains not to what a thing is, but to its very Being. Two cats are not numerically different as cats, but they are numerically different as existents: existence enters into their numerical diversity. For this reason, existence is not common to existents in the manner of a property or essence or quiddity or what-determination or concept.
Here is a second argument. First-level instantiation is a dyadic relation that connects an individual to a property. Now it is a necessary truth about relations that if a relation holds between or among two or more items, then all of these items exist. For example, Socrates cannot be an instance of the property of being a philosopher, as he is, unless he exists and unless the property exists. But then it should be clear that nothing exists in virtue of being an instance of a property, including the putative property of existence.
6. Is Being universal? Yes. It is common to every being, and in that sense universal. But it is not universal in the manner of a property or concept. If existence itself is God, then existence is common to existents in the manner of a common metaphysical cause, or as I prefer to say, common metaphysical ground. (I reserve 'cause' for so-called 'secondary causes.')
7. I suspect the above won't make much sense to Dale. It is very difficult to get analytically-trained philosophers to 'think outside the box.' They (the vast majority of them anyway) are boxed in by dogmas that they never question such as that "existence is what existential quantification expresses" (Quine); that there are no modes of existence; that properties are 'abstract objects,' and others.
Joseph B. Soloveitchik's The Lonely Man of Faith (Doubleday 2006) is rich and stimulating and packed with insights. I thank Peter Lupu for having a copy sent to me. But there is a long footnote on p. 49 with which I heartily disagree. Here is part of it:
The trouble with all rational demonstrations of the existence of God, with which the history of philosophy abounds, consists in their being exactly what they were meant to be by those who formulated them: abstract logical demonstrations divorced from the living primal experiences in which these demonstrations are rooted. For instance, the cosmic experience was transformed into a cosmological proof, the ontic experience into an ontological proof, et cetera. Instead of stating that the the most elementary existential awareness as a subjective 'I exist' and an objective 'the world around me exists' awareness is unsustainable as long as the the ultimate reality of God is not part of this experience, the theologians engaged in formal postulating and deducing in an experiential vacuum. Because of this they exposed themselves to Hume's and Kant's biting criticism that logical categories are applicable only within the limits of the human scientific experience.
Does the loving bride in the embrace of her beloved ask for proof that he is alive and real? Must the prayerful soul clinging in passionate love ecstasy to her Beloved demonstrate that He exists? So asked Soren Kierkegaard sarcastically when told that Anselm of Canterbury, the father of the very abstract and complex ontological proof, spent many days in prayer and supplication that he be presented with rational evidence of the existence of God.
A man like me has one foot in Jerusalem and the other in Athens. Soloveitchik and Kierkegaard, however, have both feet in Jerusalem. They just can't understand what drives the philosopher to seek a rational demonstration of the existence of God. Soloveitchik's analogy betrays him as a two-footed Hierosolymian. Obviously, the bride in the embrace of the beloved needs no proof of his reality. The bride's experience of the beloved is ongoing and coherent and repeatable ad libitum. If she leaves him for a while, she can come back and be assured that he is the same as the person she left. She can taste his kisses and enjoy his scent while seeing him and touching him and hearing him. He remains self-same as a unity in and through the manifold of sensory modes whereby he is presented to her. And in any given mode, he is a unity across a manifold. Shifting her position, she can see him from different angles with the visual noemata cohering in such a way as to present a self-same individual. What's more, her intercourse with his body fits coherently with her intercourse with his mind as mediated by his voice and gestures.
I could go on, but point is plain. There is simply no room for any practical doubt as to the beloved's reality given the forceful, coherent, vivacious, and obtrusive character of the bride's experience of him. She is compelled to accept his reality. There is no room here for any doxastic vountarism. The will does not play a role in her believing that he is real. There is no need for decision or faith or a leap of faith in her acceptance of his reality.
Our experience of God is very different. It comes by fleeting glimpses and gleanings and intimations. The sensus divinitatis is weak and experienced only by some. The bite of conscience is not unambiguously of higher origin than Freudian superego and social suggestion. Mystical experiences are few and far-between. Though unquestionable as to their occurrence, they are questionable as to their veridicality because of their fitful and fragmentary character. They are not validated in the ongoing way of ordinary sense perception. They don't integrate well with ordinary perceptual experiences. And so the truth of these mystical and religious experiences can and perhaps should be doubted. It is this fact that motivates philosophers to seek independent confirmation of the reality of the object of these experiences by the arguments that Soloveitchik and Co. dismiss.
The claim above that the awareness expressed by 'I exist' is unsustainable unless the awareness of God is part of the experience is simply false. That I exist is certain to me. But it is far from certain what the I is in its inner nature and what existence is and whether the I requires God as its ultimate support. The cogito is not an experience of God even if God exists and no cogito is possible without him. The same goes for the existence of the world. The existence of God is not co-given with the existence of the world. It is plain to the bride's senses that the beloved is real. It is not plain to our senses that nature is God's nature, that the cosmos is a divine artifact. That is why one cannot rely solely on the cosmic experience of nature as of a divine artifact, but must proceed cosmologically by inference from what is evident to what is non-evident.
Soloveitchik is making the same kind of move that St. Paul makes in Romans 1: 18-20. My critique of that move here.
In the preface to his magnum opus, F. H. Bradley observes that "Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct." (Appearance and Reality, Oxford 1893, p. x) The qualifier 'bad' is out of place and curiously off-putting at the outset of a 570 page metaphysical tome, so if, per impossibile, I had had the philosopher's ear I would have suggested 'good but not rationally compelling.' Be that as it may, the point is that our basic sense of things comes first, and only later, if at all, do we take up the task of the orderly discursive articulation of that basic sense.
Thus atheism is bred in the bone before it is born in the brain. The atheist feels it in his bones and guts that the universe is godless and that theistic conceptions are so many fairy tales dreamt up for false consolation. This world is just too horrifying to be a divine creation: meaningless unredeemed suffering; ignorance and delusion; the way nature, its claws dripping with blood, feasts on itself; moral evil and injustice -- all bespeak godlessness. There can't be a God of love behind all this horror! For most atheists, theism is not a Jamesian live option. What point, then, in debating them?
This deep intuition of the godlessness of the world is prior to and the force behind arguments from evil. The arguments merely articulate and rationalize the intuition. The counterarguments of theists don't stand a chance in the face of the fundamental, gut-grounded, atheist attitude. No one who strongly FEELS that things are a certain way is likely to be moved by what he will dismiss as so much verbiage, hairsplitting, and intellectualizing.
But for the theist it is precisely the horror of this world that motivates the quest for a solution, or rather, the horror of this world together with the conviction that we cannot provide the solution for ourselves whether individually or collectively. Evil is taken by the theist, not as a 'proof' of the nonexistence of God, but as a reason, a motive, to seek God. 'Without God, life is horror.'
I should add that it would be pointless to seek God if any of the atheist arguments were rationally compelling. But none are.
In fact, no argument for any substantive conclusion in such fields of controversy as philosophy and theology is rationally compelling. Reason is a god-like element in us, but she is weak, very weak. As I see it, the infirmity of reason is itself part of the problem of evil.
Herewith, a second response to Aidan Kimel. He writes,
The claim that God is a being among beings is immediately ruled out, so it seems to me, by the classical understanding of divine transcendence: if all beings have been created from nothing by the self-existent One, then this One cannot be classified as one of them, as sharing a world with them. To think of God as a being would thus represent nothing less than a return to paganism. We would be back at Mt Carmel with Elijah and the priests of Ba’al.
I myself incline to the view that the divine transcendence entails that God cannot be a being among beings. But I do not see in the passage above a good argument for the view to which I incline. Fr. Kimel's argument appears to be this:
1. All beings have been created from nothing by the self-existent One.
Therefore
2. The self-existent One cannot be a being among beings.
This argument is valid in point of logical form — the conclusion follows from the premise — but the premise is false. If all beings have been created ex nihilo by the self-existent One, then, given that the One cannot create itself, it follows that the One does not exist and thus cannot be self-existent. The premise is self-refuting.
But let us be charitable. Perhaps what Fr. Kimel intends is the following argument:
1*. All beings other than the self-existent One have been created from nothing by the self-existent One.
Therefore
2. The self-existent One cannot be a being among beings.
The premise is now true, but the conclusion does not follow — or at least it is not clear how the conclusion is supposed to follow. Why cannot it be like this? God, the self-existent One, creates beings distinct from himself. These beings 'now' (either temporally or logically) form with God a collection of beings. So although God has all sorts of properties that make him the supreme being such as omniscience, and the rest of the omni-attributes, he remains a being among beings.
It is a simple point of logic that one can give a bad argument for a true conclusion. This is what Fr. Kimel does above. I agree with his conclusion, but I reject his reasoning as confused. He in effect confuses the two arguments displayed. The first is valid with a false premise; the second is invalid with a true premise.
At his weblog Eclectic Orthodoxy, Fr. Aidan Kimel references the discussion Dale Tuggy and I are having about whether God is a being among beings, or Being itself. Fr. Kimel writes,
That God, as conceived by Christians (and I’m not really interested in any other God), is not a being among beings is so utterly obvious to me that I honestly do not know how to argue against it. One of the very first theology books I read back in the 70s was He Who Isby Eric Lionel Mascall. When I look back now on my theological development since then, I have come to realize how profoundly he influenced my understanding of God, even though it was decades later before I read even a little Aquinas. My paperback copy of the book is filled with underlining (ditto for my copy of Existence and Analogy). Here’s one passage that I underlined:
We cannot lump together in one genus God and everything else, as if the word “being” applied to them all in precisely the same sense, and then pick out God as the supreme one. For if God is the Supreme Being, in the sense in which Christian theology uses the term, “being” as applied to him is not just one more instance of what “being” means when applied to anything else. So far from being just one item, albeit the supreme one, in a class of beings, he is the source from which their being is derived; he is not in their class but above it. … In the technical term, when we apply to God a term which is normally used of other beings, we are using it not univocally but analogically; for he is not just one member of a class with them, but their ground and archetype. (p. 9)
Although I incline to the view that God is not a being among beings, I don't think it is at all obvious that this is so. We all agree that God is the source of the Being or existence of everything other than God. What exists other than God exists because God has created it, and would not exist if God had not created it. So far, so good. But how is it supposed to follow that God is not a being among beings? How is it supposed to follow that God is not a being in the very same sense in which Socrates is a being? I think my friends Dale Tuggy and Alan Rhoda -- theistic personalists to slap a label on them -- are on solid ground here. They could reply to Fr. Kimel that the following is a non sequitur:
1. Everything other than God has been created by God ex nihilo and so depends on God for its very existence.
Therefore
2. 'Exists' in 'God exists' and 'Socrates exists' cannot be taken in the precisely the same (univocal) sense.
Dale and Alan might plausibly maintain that while (1) is true, (2) does not follow because the negation of (2) is consistent with (1). The theistic personalist might reasonably insist that 'exists' in both of the above occurrences has exactly the same sense -- this is a semantic point -- and that the corresponding ontological point holds as well, namely, that God and Socrates exist in the very same way.
So we are in need of some supplemental premise to mediate a valid transition from (1) to (2). Note that Mascall above uses the phrase "ground and archetype." I think Dale and Alan could be brought to accept the term 'ground' as in 'ultimate metaphysical real-ground or first cause.' Surely God is that. But archetype? Here Dale and Alan might reasonably balk at this Plato talk. 'Archetype' suggests that God is more than an efficient cause, but a formal cause as well, something like a Platonic Form. (I recall a passage wherein Aquinas speaks of God as forma formarum, form of all forms.) Now if God is something like a Platonic Form, then the relation of creatures and creator is something like Platonic participation (methexis): Socrates, a being, an ens, is by participating in the divine Being or To Be (esse). The Latin ens is the present participle of the Latin infinitive esse (to be), and this linguistic relation suggests the metaphysical relation of participation.
Now if God is something like a Platonic Form, then he is the Being of creatures. But God also is. Now if God is Being (esse) and God is, then God is self-subsistent Being, ipsum esse subsistens. That is, God is Being (esse) and being (ens). Both! But then it follows that God is not a being among beings, a being on a par with other beings. Why not? Well, the other beings, creatures, are not identical to their Being (esse) whereas God is the being that is also Being. In God and God alone, esse and ens 'coalesce' if you will: they are one in reality; they are not really distinct ever though we perhaps cannot think of them except as distinct. In Socrates, however, esse and ens are really distinct, distinct in reality, outside the mind.
As St. Augustine says, "God is what he has." So God has Being by being (identical to) Being.
God cannot be a being because that implies that he is just one of an actual or possible plurality of beings. God is rather the being who is also Being. God is Being or Existence (Deus est esse), and Existence itself exists. This is why in my book I speak of Existence as the Paradigm Existent.
Thus we have at least two ways of Being, the creaturely way and the divine way. But they are connected: creatures participate in divine Being. Thus we have an analogia entis, not an aequivocatio entis.
Now what could Dale and Alan say in rebuttal of this? They could say that there is no justification, scriptural or philosophical, for thinking of God as an archetype, to use Mascall's word. Thomists typically invoke Exodus 3:14, "I am who am" which suggests to some of us that God is referring to himself as Being itself. In conversation, Dale told me he rejects this reading and said (if I understood him) that the Hebrew just means that God is telling Moses that he is and will remain constant. Dale and Alan could say that the God of the Bible is nothing like a Platonic Form.
Conclusions
1. It is not obvious that God is not a being among beings. (Contra Fr. Kimel)
2. It is not obvious that God is a being among beings. (Contra Drs. Tuggy and Rhoda)
3. In general, "It ain't obvious what's obvious." (Hilary Putnam) Leastways, not in philosophy.
4. For Dale and Alan, God is a being among beings in the precise sense I attached to that phrase in my first post in this series. They are mistaken if they think that can show that God is not a being among beings by making such obvious points as that God creates everything distinct from himself or that God is unique or that God has properties that nothing else has, or that God is a metaphysically necessary being, etc. Those sorts of points are logically consistent with God's being a being among beings.
5. 'Being among beings' is a technical phrase; it doesn't mean whatever one wants it to mean. Nor is it a 'dirty' or pejorative phrase. It is not a 'kosher' move in a philosophical discussion, once a term or phrase has been defined, to ignore the definition and use it in some other sense.
6. The question whether God is a being among beings or rather ipsum esse subsistens is a very difficult one with no easy answer.
7. The question cannot be answered apart from a deep-going inquiry into general metaphysics. One has to tackle head-on such questions as What is existence? What are properties? What is property-possession? What is creation? What is the difference between primary and secondary causation and how are they related? and plenty of others besides.
8. It may well be that the problem whether or not God is being among beings is insoluble, a genuine aporia, and that the arguments on both sides cancel out.
This is another round in an ongoing discussion (via face-to-face conversations, podcasts, and weblog posts) with Dale Tuggy on whether or not God is best thought of as a being among beings, albeit the highest being (summum ens), or rather as self-subsistent Being itself (ipsum esse subsistens). In this entry I will respond to just a bit of Dale's first weblog response to my post. Dale writes,
God and I (and you) all exist. Does it follow that we all three of us exist in the same way? Well, we all satisfy the concept existing, but God also satisfies the concept necessarily existing, which is just to say that he exists, and it is absolutely impossible for him to not exist. (In the jargon which is so common: he exists “in all possible worlds.”) We all exist, yes, but God necessarily exists (which entails his existing). So I think it can be misleading to say that “God is in the same way that creatures are.” This suggests that God and creatures aren’t importantly different as respects their existence. But creatures can not exist, whereas God can’t not exist. That’s a big difference.
Let me first point out that what we have here is an intramural dispute among theists who agree about quite a bit. Thus we agree that God exists (in the sense in which naturalistic atheists* deny that God exists), has the standard omni-attributes, is unique, is in some sense a necessary being, is transcendent of creation, possesses aseity, and so on. But we differ on questions like these: how exactly are the divine necessity, the divine uniqueness, and the divine transcendence to be understood? To put it roughly, we who side with Thomas subscribe to a radical necessity, uniqueness, and transcendence, whereas those on Dale's side hold to less radical readings of these terms. For example, Dale thinks of God as transcendent, but not so transcendent as to prevent the univocal (not equivocal, not analogical) application of the predicate '___ is a person' to both God and Socrates. For Dale, God is transcendent all right, but not Maimonides-transcendent or Thomas-transcendent. (I trust my meaning is clear, or clear enough for now; I plan to blog further on these options later.)
A second preliminary observation is that in a discussion like this we cannot avoid the deepest questions of metaphysics. In the deepest depths of the deep lurks the question: What is existence? A question about which your humble correspondent wrote a book. One cannot adequately tackle the God question while just presupposing some theory of existence such as the Frege-Russell-Quine theory. To put it gnomically, no thin theory of existence for a thick God. What's more, one cannot just presuppose some general-metaphysical framework such as 'relation' versus 'constituent' ontology. (This terminology, from Wolterstorff, though current, leaves something to be desired.)
Let's now get down to the nuts and bolts.
Is Existence a Concept?
Dale says in effect that God and Socrates both "satisfy the concept existing." Right here I must object. I maintain that existence (existing) cannot be a concept, whether subjective or objective. Subjective concepts are mental items: no minds, no concepts. Of course, we can also speak of objective concepts, but I think Dale understands by 'concept' subjective concepts. Dispositionally viewed, subjective concepts are classificatory powers grounded in minds like ours: I have the concept triangle in that I have the power to classify items given in experience as either triangular or not triangular. Occurrently viewed, the concept triangle is the mind-dependent content of such a classificatory power. The main thing, though, is this: no minds, no (subjective) concepts.
Now existence is that which makes an existing item exist. It is that which determines it as existent. It is that without which a thing would be nothing at all. We assume pluralism: there are many existents. But they all have something in common: they exist. It follows that existence cannot be identified with existents either distributively or collectively. Existence is not identical to any one existent, nor to the whole lot of them. Existence is different from existents. Given the commonality of existence, and its difference from existents, one may be tempted to think of existence as a concept abstractly common to existing items or existents. Dale apparently succumbs to this temptation. He thinks of existence as common in the manner of an abstract concept. But this can't be right. Existence is not a concept. The existing of things is not their falling under any concept, not even the putative concept, existence.
Argument 1. Things existed long before there were concepts. Therefore, the existence of these things cannot be identified with their falling under any concept, let alone the putative concept, existence.
Note: if Dale wants a concept, existence, I'll give it to him. But then I will go on to show that this concept is not existence, that it is not the gen-u-ine article (stamp the foot, pound the lectern).
Argument 2. The modal analog of the foregoing temporal argument is this. Much of what exists now would have existed now had no concepts existed now. For example, the Moon would have existed now had no concept-users and concepts existed now. Therefore, the existence of these things cannot be identified with their falling under any concept, let alone the putative concept, existence.
Argument 3. Necessarily, if an individual x falls under a concept C, then both x and C exist. So it cannot be the case that x exists in virtue of falling under any concept, including the putative concept, existence. You move in an explanatory circular if you try to account for the existence of x by saying that x exists in virtue of falling under a concept when nothing falls under a concept unless it exists. Note that this third argument works for both subjective and objective concepts.
So I say about existence what I say about God: neither can be a concept. It is clear, I hope, that God is not a concept. There is of course the concept, God, but this concept is not God. The concept God is no more God than the concept chair is a chair. One can sit on a chair; one cannot sit on a concept. Suppose there were no chairs. It would still be the case that the concept chair is not a chair. (And if all chairs were suddenly to cease to exist, they would not at that moment become concepts.) Likewise, even if there is no God, it is still the case that the concept God is not God. You haven't grasped the concept God if you think that God is a mind-dependent item or that God is abstract or that God can have items instantiating it or falling under it. To understand the concept God is to understand that whatever satisfies it, if anything, cannot be a concept.
Now if existence is not a concept, then necessary existence is not a concept either.
There is a way Dale might agree with part of the foregoing. He might say, "OK, existence in its difference from existents cannot be a concept. But I deny that there is in reality, outside the mind, anything called 'existence.' There are existents, but no existence. There is nothing different from existents that makes them exist. There is just the manifold of existents. In your jargon, I subscribe to radical ontological pluralism: (ROP) In reality, existence divides without remainder into existents."
This is not the place for a full-scale response, but I need to say something. There cannot, in reality, be a manifold of existents unless there is something in reality common to them all that makes them a manifold of existents, as opposed to a sheer manyness. When this is properly appreciated then it will be appreciated that existence cannot divide without remainder into existents. Outside the mind, the Existential Difference, the difference between existence and existents, remains.
Are Necessity and Contingency Ways of Existing?
For Dale, God is a being among beings in the sense I defined earlier. I infer from this that for Dale God is in the same way that creatures are. Dale seeks to block this inference by pointing out that God is a necessary being while creatures are contingent beings. This is of course a big difference as Dale says. But it needn't be taken to imply a difference in ways of existing, and it cannot be so taken unless Dale wants to abandon his scheme. For the difference between metaphysical necessity and metaphysical contingency is logically consistent with God and creatures existing in the very same way, as would not be the case if God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. So I hold to my claim that for Dale, God is in the same way that creatures are.
To appreciate this, note that 'exists' across the following two sentences is univocal in sense:
a. Necessarily, God exists.
b. It is not the case that necessarily, Socrates exists.
This univocity gives us no reason to think that God and Socrates differ in their way of existing. This becomes even clearer if we explicate (a) and (b) in 'possible worlds' terms:
a*. God exists in all possible worlds.
b*. Socrates exists in some but not all possible worlds.
This suggests that the difference between necessity and contingency is not a difference in ways of existing, but a difference in the number of worlds quantified over, whether all or some. So Dale by his own lights cannot maintain that the necessity-contingency difference is a difference in ways of existing. He fails to block my inference above.
Now suppose we ask: why does God exist in all worlds? Answer: because he is necessary; he cannot not exist. But why cannot he not exist? What is it about God that distinguishes him from Socrates in this respect? Why can't Socrates not exist? Is it just a brute fact that God exists in all worlds, but Socrates only in some? What is the ground of the divine metaphysical necessity? I say: the divine necessity is grounded in the divine simplicity. The latter accounts for the former. It is because God is (identical to) his existence, that he cannot not exist. And it is because Socrates is not (identical to) his existence that he can not exist. Now this answer does imply that there are different ways of existing. Thus:
a**. God exists-necessarily.
b**. Socrates exists-contingently.
Note that in this last pair there is no univocity on the side of the predicate as there is in the first two pairs.
Summary
I aim at clarity, not agreement. I aim to clarify our differences, not secure agreement with my views. Clarity is an attainable goal in a philosophical discussion; I rather doubt that agreement is.
I deny the analytic dogma according to which there are no modes of Being or ways of existing. (See my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak, eds. Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75) Dale apparently subscribes to the dogma. Thus for me the divine modal status, broadly logical or metaphysical necessity, is grounded in and accounted for by the divine simplicity, while for Dale the same modal status is left ungrounded and unaccounted for. Dale does not answer the question: Why is God such that he cannot not exist? Nor does he answer the question: Why is Socrates such that he can not exist?
This is equivalent to saying that for Dale, God and Socrates do not differ as to mode of Being or way of existing. For me, however, an ontologically simple being, one that is (identical to) its existence cannot be said to exist in the same way as one that is not (identical to) to its existence.
______________________
*I take a naturalistic atheist to be one whose atheism is a logical consequence of his naturalism. If one holds, as D. M. Armstrong does, that reality is exhausted by the space-time system, then it follows straightaway that there is no God as Dale and I are using 'God.'
Last Wednesday morning, just as Old Sol was peeping his ancient head over the magnificent and mysterious Superstition range, I embarked on a drive down old Arizona 79, past Florence, to a hash house near Oracle Junction where I had the pleasure of another nice long three and one half hour caffeine-fueled discussion with Dale Tuggy. For me, he is a perfect interlocutor: Dale is a serious truth-seeker, no mere academic gamesman, analytically sharp, historically well-informed, and personable. He also satisfies a necessary though not sufficient condition of fruitful dialog: he and I differ on some key points, but our differences play out over a wide field of agreement.
I incline toward the view that God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. Dale rejects this view as incoherent. In this entry I will take some steps toward clarifying the issues that divide us.
A Being Among Beings
First of all, what could 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:
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.
Dale is uncomfortable with talk of properties and seems 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 rejects divine simplicity whereas I am inclined to accept it. See my SEP entry for more on this.
If I understand Dale's position, he maintains that God is a being among beings in the above sense. If he is right, then God cannot be Being itself. But he presumably has a more direct reason to think that God cannot be Being itself.
Being Itself
Suppose God is not a being among beings in the sense I have just explained. And suppose, as we have been all along, that God exists. Does it follow that God is Being itself? It depends on what 'Being itself' refers to. For Dale, if I understand him, it doesn't refer to anything, or at least not to anything mind-independently real. If so, then God, who we both believe exists, cannot be identical to Being itself. For God is mind-independently real. In conversation, Dale owned up to being a subscriber to what I call radical ontological pluralism:
ROP: In reality, Being (existence) divides without remainder into beings (existents).
What (ROP) says is that in reality outside the mind there is no such 'thing' as Being. There are only beings. Since in reality there are only beings, Being itself, Existence itself, does not exist. A partisan of (ROP) may admit a distinction between Being and beings, Sein und das Seiende, esse et ens, existence and existent, but he will go on to say that Being in its difference from beings is nothing real, but only something verbal or conceptual. Thus Dale granted in conversation that we can use 'existence' and 'Being' to refer collectively to existents or things that are, but he denied that 'existence itself' and 'Being itself' refer to anything that really exists other than these existents. There is no one item, distinct from each of them and from all of them, in virtue of which the many beings ARE. Thus there is no Platonic Form, Existence itself, or any other sort of universal or property or entity or stuff for 'Being itself' or "Existence itself' to refer to. These high-falutin' words, if they refer to anything, refer to concepts we excogitate. If this is right, then there just is no Being itself for God to be identical to. On Dale's scheme all we've got are beings; it is just that one of these beings is the omni-qualified God of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Dale did not give the above argument, but it is available to him, given that he accepts (ROP). The argument is formidable and cannot be dismissed out of hand. In sum:
Existence itself does not exist; God exists; Ergo, God is not (identical to) existence itself.
This argument, if sound, puts paid to any conception like that of Aquinas according to which Deus est ipsum esse subsistens, "God is self-subsistent Being." Framing the matter as I have shows that the fundamental issue is as much about the 'nature' of existence as it is about God.
An Antilogism
Here is an antilogism or aporetic triad corresponding to the above syllogism:
Existence itself exists. God exists. God is not (identical to) existence itself.
The limbs of this aporetic triad cannot all be true given the following assumptions that I believe Dale accepts. (A1) God is the source/ground of everything distinct from himself. (A2) Existence itself, if there is such a 'thing,' is the source/ground of the existing of what exists. The difference between Dale and me can now be put concisely as follows.
I accept the first two limbs and reject the third while Dale accepts the second two limbs and rejects the first. We agree on the second limb.
Five Possible Views
By my count there are five combinatorially possible views:
V1. God exists, Existence exists, and they are identical. (BV) V2. God exists, but Existence does not exist. (DT) V3. Existence exists, but God does not exist. (A version of non-naturalistic atheism) V4. Both God and Existence exist, but they are different. V5. Neither God nor Existence exists. (Naturalistic atheism)
You might think that no one holds (V4). You would be wrong. Theist J. P. Moreland insists that existence itself exists while holding that it is a special property, the property of having properties, and thus not identifiable with God. (Universals, McGill-Queen's UP, 2001, pp. 134-139.)
Why Should We Think that God is identical to Existence itself?
I hope Dale will agree that I have made sufficiently clear the issue that divides us. We now need to look at some arguments. Here is one argument for the view that God is Existence itself.
Classically, God is causa prima, the 'first cause,' where 'first' needn't be taken temporally. Now God cannot play the role of first cause unless he exists. There are five 'possibilities' regarding the divine existence. Either (P1) God causes himself to exist, or (P2) God is caused by another to exist, or (P3) God exists contingently as a matter of brute fact without cause or reason, or (P4) God is a necessary being, but nonetheless a being among beings really distinct from his existence and from Existence itself, or (P5) God is (identically) Existence itself.
Each of the first four possibilities can be excluded.
Nothing can cause itself to exist. For that would require a thing to exist 'before' it exists whether temporally or logically-ontologically. Since that is impossible, God cannot cause himself to exist. On the other hand, nothing other than God can cause God to exist -- else God would not be God, would not be the ultimate metaphysical ground of all else. God is the Absolute, and it is self-evident that the Absolute cannot depend for its existence or nature on anything 'higher up' or 'farther back.' Please note that one can accept this, and Dale will, even while holding that God is a being among beings as I explained this notion.
On (P3), the existence of God is a brute fact. But then God is a contingent being in which case, again, God is not God. God is the Absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is a contingent being. No absolute just happens to exist. It is built into the divine job description that God be a necessary being, and indeed one whose metaphysical necessity is from itself and not from another as the necessity of certain propositions is necessary from another if they are divine thoughts.
I think Dale will agree with my rejection of the first three possibilities. I expect him to opt for (P4) according to which God is a necessary being but nonetheless a being among beings, and not Being itself. But if God is a necessary being, what is the ground of his necessity if it is not the divine simplicity? We agree that God cannot not exist. But I ask: why not? If in both God and Socrates there is a real distinction between essence and existence, and if in Socrates his contingency is rooted in the real distinction, then God too will be contingent. Dale needs to supply a ground for the divine necessity, and the only plausible ground is the identity in God of essence and existence.
I hope it is obvious that existing in all possible worlds cannot be the ground of the divine necessity. For that puts the cart before the horse. God exists in all possible worlds because he is a necessary being; it is not the case that he is necessary because he exists in all possible worlds.
Now there are only the five 'possibilities' mentioned above. (Or can you think of a sixth?) Since the first four are eminently rejectable and herewith rejected, the fifth alone remains standing: God is (identically) his existence and Existence itself. If so, God is not a being among beings. He transcends the general-metaphysical framework to which all else must conform. God is self-existent Existence.
Is the Argument Rationally Compelling?
Unfortunately, it is not. I think Dale would be within his epistemic rights were he to object: "You have reasoned logically toward a conclusion that makes no logical sense. The discursive intellect simply cannot 'process' any such claim as that God is identical to self-existent Existence. And the same goes for all of the characteristic claims of the divine simplicity to which you are committed by your denial that God is a being among beings."
So we end this round with a stand-off at an impasse. I continue to insist that the divine necessity, transcendence and aseity require divine simplicity as underpinning while granting that simplicity cannot be formulated in a way that satisfies the exigencies of the discursive intellect.
I am disposed to say either that the problem is insoluble at the level of the discursive intellect, a genuine aporia, or that there may be a way forward via the analogia entis. But, like Dale, I find the latter exceedingly murky. Erich Pryzwara's recently translated (into English) and published Analogia Entis certainly hasn't helped. Nor have the reviews I have read of it. Rigor of thought and clarity of expression are not phrases I would use to describe most of the writers on this topic. But then there is more to philosophy than rigor of thought and clarity of expression.
For Dave Bagwill, who posed some questions in the near vicinity of the ones I will be addressing. This is a heavily revised version of a 2011 post. The MavPhil doctrine of abrogation is in effect. This is a hairy topic; expect a hard slog. If you prefer a 'leiter' read, a certain gossip site suggests itself.
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One morning an irate C-Span viewer called in to say that he prayed to the living God, not to the mythical being, Allah, to whom Muslims pray. The C-Span guest made a standard response, which is correct as far as it goes, namely, that Allah is Arabic for God, just as Gott is German for God. He suggested that adherents of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) worship the same God under different names. No doubt this is a politically correct thing to say, but is it true?
Our question, then, is precisely this: Does the normative Christian and the normative Muslim worship numerically the same God, or numerically different Gods? (By 'normative Christian/Muslim' I mean an orthodox adherent of his faith who understands its content, without subtraction of essential tenets, and without addition of private opinions.) Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic. So if Christian and Muslim worship different Gods, and a monotheistic God exists, then one is worshipping a nonexistent God, or, if you prefer, is failing to worship the true God.
1. Let's start with the obvious: 'Allah' is Arabic for God. So if an Arabic-speaking Coptic Christian refers to God, he uses 'Allah.' And if an Arabic-speaking Muslim refers to God, he too uses 'Allah.' From the fact that both Copt and Muslim use 'Allah' it does not follow that they are referring to the same God, but it also does not follow that they are referring to numerically different Gods. So we will not make any progress with our question if we remain at the level of words. We must advance to concepts.
2. We need to distinguish between our word for God, the concept (conception) of God, and God. God is not a concept, but there are concepts of God and, apart from mystical intuition and religious feelings such as the Kreatur-Gefuehl that Rudolf Otto speaks of, we have no access to God except via our concepts of God. Now it is undeniable that the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God partially overlap. The following is a partial list of what is common to both conceptions:
a. There is exactly one God. b. God is the creator of everything distinct from himself. c. God is transcendent: he is radically different from everything distinct from himself. d. God is good.
Now if the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God were identical, then we would have no reason to think that Christian and Muslim worship different Gods. But of course the conceptions, despite partial overlap, are not identical. Christians believe in a triune God who became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Or to put it precisely, they believe in a triune God the second person of which became man in Jesus of Nazareth. This is the central and indeed crucial (from the Latin, crux, crucis, meaning cross) difference between the two faiths. The crux of the matter is the cross.
So while the God-concepts overlap, they are different concepts. (The overlap is partial, not complete.) And let's not forget that God is not, and cannot be, a concept (as I am using 'concept'). No concept is worship-worthy or anyone's highest good. No concept created the world. Whether or not God exists, it is a conceptual truth that God cannot be a concept. For the concept of God contains the subconcept, being that exists apart from any finite mind. It is built into the very concept of God that God cannot be a concept.
It is clear then, that what the Christian and the Muslim worship or purport to worship cannot be that which is common to their respective God-conceptions, for what is common its itself a concept.
We could say that if God exists, then God is the object of our God-concept or the referent of our God-concept, but also the referent of the word 'God.'
3. Now comes the hard part, which is to choose between two competing views:
V1: Christian and Muslim can worship the same God, even though one of them must have a false belief about God, whether it be the belief that God is unitarian or the belief that God is trinitarian.
V2: Christian and Muslim must worship different Gods precisely because they have different conceptions of God. So it is not that one of them has a false belief about the one God they both worship; it is rather that one of them does not worship the true God at all.
There is no easy way to decide rationally between these two views. We have to delve into the philosophy of language and ask how reference is achieved. How do linguistic expressions attach or apply to extralinguistic entities? How do words grab onto the (extralinguistic) world? In particular, how do nominal expressions work? What makes my utterance of 'Socrates' denote Socrates rather than someone or something else? What makes my use of 'God' (i) have a referent at all and (ii) have the precise referent it has?
4. It is reasonable to hold, with Frege, Russell, and many others, that reference is routed through, and determined by, sense: an expression picks out its object in virtue of the latter's unique satisfaction of a description associated with the referring expression, a description that unpacks the expression's sense. If we think of reference in this way, then 'God' refers to whatever entity, if any, that satisfies the definite description encapsulated in 'God' as this term is used in a given linguistic community.
Given that God is not an actual or possible object of (sense) experience, this seems like a reasonable approach to take. The idea is that 'God' is a definite description in disguise so that 'God' refers to whichever entity satisfies the description associated with 'God.' The reference relation is one of satisfaction. A grammatically singular term t refers to x if and only if x exists and x satisfies the description associated with t. Now consider two candidate definite descriptions, the first corresponding to the Muslim conception, the second corresponding to the Christian.
D1: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo and is unitarian' D2: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo, and is triune.'
Suppose that reference is not direct, but routed through sense, or mediated by a description, in the manner explained above. It is easy to see that no one entity can satisfy both (D1) and (D2). For while the descriptions overlap, nothing can be both unitarian and triune. So if reference is routed through sense, then Christian and Muslim cannot be referring to the same being. Indeed, one of them is not succeeding in referring at all. For if God is triune, nothing in reality answers to the Muslim's conception of God. And if God is unitarian, then nothing in reality answers to the Christian conception.
And so, contrary to what Miroslav Volf maintains, the four points of commonality in the Christian and Muslim conceptions listed above do NOT "establish the claim that in their worship of God, Muslims and Christians refer to the same object." (Allah: A Christian Response, HarperCollins 2011, p. 110.) For if reference to God is mediated by a conception which includes the subconcept triune or else the subconcept unitarian, then the reference cannot be to the same entity.
A mundane example (adapted from Kripke) will make this more clear. Sally sees a handsome man at a party standing in the corner drinking a clear bubbly liquid from a cocktail glass. She turns to her companion Nancy and says, "The man standing in the corner drinking champagne is handsome!" Suppose the man is not drinking champagne, but mineral water instead. Has Sally succeeded in referring to the man or not?
Argumentative Nancy, who knows that no alcohol is being served at the party, and who also finds the man handsome, says, "You are not referring to anything: there is no man in the corner drinking champagne. The man is drinking mineral water or some other bubbly clear beverage. Nothing satisfies your definite description. There is no one man we both admire. Your handsome man does not exist, but mine does."
Now in this example what we would intuitively say is that Sally did succeed in referring to someone using a definite description even though the object she succeeded in referring to does not satisfy the description. Intuitively, we would say that Sally simply has a false belief about the object to which she is successfully referring, and that Sally and Nancy are referring to and admiring the very same man.
But note how this case differs from the God case. Both women see the man in the corner. But God is not an object of possible (sense) experience. We don't see God in this life. Hence the reference of 'God' cannot be nailed down perceptually. A burning bush is an object of possible sense experience, and God may manifest himself in a burning bush; but God is not a burning bush, and the referent of 'God' cannot be a burning bush. The man in the corner that the women see and admire is not a manifestation of a man, but a man himself.
Given that God is not literally seen or otherwise sense-perceived in this life, then, apart from mystical experience, the only way to get at God is via concepts and descriptions. And so it seems that in the God case what we succeed in referring to is whatever satisfies the definite description that unpacks our conception of God.
5. My tentative conclusion, then, is that (i) if we accept a description theory of names, the Christian and Muslim do not refer to the same being when they use 'God' or 'Allah' and (ii) that a description theory of names is what we must invoke given the nonperceivability of God. Christian and Muslim do not refer to the same being because no one being can satisfy both (D1) and (D2) above: nothing can be both triune and not triune any more than one man can both be drinking champage and not drinking champagne at the same time.
If, on the other hand, 'God' is a logically proper name whose reference is direct and not routed through sense or mediated by a definite description, then what would make 'God' or a particular use of 'God' refer to God?
One might propose a causal theory of names.
The causal theory of names of Saul Kripke et al. requires that there be an initial baptism of the target of reference, a baptism at which the name is first introduced. This can come about by ostension: Pointing to a newly acquired kitten, I bestow upon it the moniker, 'Mungojerrie.' Or it can come about by the use of a reference-fixing definite description: Let 'Neptune' denote the celestial object responsible for the perturbation of the orbit of Uranus. In the second case, it may be that the object whose name is being introduced is not itself present at the baptismal ceremony. What is present, or observable, are certain effects of the object hypothesized. (See Saul Kripke Naming and Necessity, Harvard 1980 p. 79, n. 33 and p. 96, n. 42.)
As I understand it, a necessary condition for successful reference on the causal theory is that a speaker's use of a name be causally connected (either directly or indirectly via a causal chain)) with the object referred to. We can refer to objects only if we stand in some causal relation to them (direct or indirect). So my use of 'God' refers to God not because there is something that satisfies the definite description or disjunction of definite descriptions that unpack the sense of 'God' as I use the term, but because my use of 'God' can be traced back though a long causal chain to an initial baptism, as it were, of God by, say, Moses on Mt. Sinai.
A particular use of a name is presumably caused by an earlier use. But eventually there must be an initial use. Imagine Moses on Mt. Sinai. He has a profound mystical experience of a being who conveys to his mind such locutions as "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me." Moses applies 'God' or 'YHWH' to the being he believes is addressing him in the experience. But what makes the name the name of the being? One may say: the being or an effect of the being is simply labelled or tagged with the name in an initial 'baptism.'
But a certain indeterminacy seems to creep in if we think of the semantic relation of referring as explicable in terms of tagging and causation (as opposed to in terms of the non-causal relation of satisfaction of a definite description encapsulated in a grammatically proper name). For is it the (mystical) experience of God that causes the use of 'God'? Or is it God himself who causes the use of 'God'? If the former, then 'God' refers to an experience had by Moses and not to God. Surely God is not an experience. But if God is the cause of Moses' use of 'God,' then the mystical experience must be veridical. (Cf. Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God, Cambridge UP, 1991, p. 11.)
So if we set aside mystical experience and the question of its veridicality, it seems we ought to adopt a description theory of the divinenames with the consequences mentioned in (i) above. If, on the other hand, a causal theory of divine names names is tenable, and if the causal chain extends from Moses down to Christians and (later) to Muslims, then a case could be made that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all referring to the same God when they use 'God' and such equivalents as 'Yahweh' and 'Allah.'
So it looks like there is no easy answer to the opening question. It depends on the resolution of intricate questions in the philosophy of language.
A reader sent me an argument expressed in an idiosyncratic and unnecessarily technical terminology. But his idea is a very interesting one. I'll present and then evaluate my version of the reader's argument.
1. There are several actual and many possible positions on the nature and existence of God. Call them God-positions. One who occupies a God-position takes a stand on the existence of God, yes or no.
2. All but one of these God-positions are theistic: they affirm the existence of God, though they differ as to the divine attributes.
3. Only one of these God-positions is atheistic: only one affirms the nonexistence of God.
4. Exactly one of these God-positions is true.
Therefore
5. The probability that one of the many theistic God-positions is true is much greater than the probability that the one atheistic God-position is true.
Therefore
6. The claim that God exists is much more likely to be true than the claim that God does not exist.
I should think that the first three premises need no support: they are well-nigh self-evident. If support is wanted for (4), it can be found in logic. By Bivalence, there are exactly two truth-values. By Excluded Middle, every proposition is either true or not true.
But how is (5) supposed to follow from (1)-(4)? Here is where I think the problem lies. Intuitively, (5) does not follow from the premises.
Consider a parody argument. There are several actual and many possible positions on the nature and existence of the Lost Dutchman Goldmine. All but one of these LDM-positions are affirmative of the mine's existence; the remaining one is negative. But only one LDM-position is true. Therefore, it is more likely than not that the LDM exists.
This is obviously a fallacious argument. If it is, then so is the original argument. But this leaves us with the task of explaining why both are fallacious. This is not so easy.
Either the LDM exists or it does not. At most, these contradictory propositions are equiprobable. (Given my knowledge of the geology of the Superstition Wilderness, I would deny that these propositions are equiprobable; but let's assume that they are.) The number of different conceptions of the LDM has no bearing on the probability of its existence. One cannot raise (lower) the probability of the mine's existence by adding to (subtracting from) the conceptions of the LDM. Why not? Well, if the mine exists, then exactly one of the conceptions is instantiated, and all the other conceptions are uninstantiated. And it seems obviously true that the probability of some concept's being instantiated does not vary with the number of similar concepts that might have been instantiated instead.
The same goes for God even if the existence and nonexistence of God are equiprobable. There are many different conceptions of God even within a broadly Abrahamic ambit. On one conception, God is triune and simple; on another, triune but not simple; on a third, simple but not triune. And so it goes. Some hold God to be absolutely unlimited in power; others hold that logic limits God's power. And so on. Each of these conceptions is such that, if it is instantiated, then God exists. But surely the number of God-conceptions has no bearing on the probability of one of them being instantiated.
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