Maverick Philosopher

John Henry Newman and the Problem of Private Judgment

Onsi A. Kamel (First Things, October 2019):

The issue of ecclesiastical authority was trickier for me. I recognized the absurdity of a twenty-year-old presuming to adjudicate claims about the Scriptures and two thousand years of history. Newman’s arguments against private judgment therefore had a prima facie plausibility for me. In his Apologia, Newman argues that man’s rebellion against God introduced an “anarchical condition of things,” leading human thought toward “suicidal excesses.” Hence, the fittingness of a divinely established living voice infallibly proclaiming supernatural truths. In his discourse on “Faith and Private Judgment,” Newman castigates Protestants for refusing to “surrender” reason in matters religious. The implication is that reason is unreliable in matters of revelation. Faith is assent to the incontestable, self-evident truth of God’s revelation, and reasoning becomes an excuse to refuse to bend the knee.

The more I internalized ­Newman’s claims about private judgment, however, the more I descended into skepticism. I could not reliably interpret the Scriptures, history, or God’s Word preached and given in the sacraments. But if I could not do these things, if my reason was unfit in matters religious, how was I to assess Newman’s arguments for Roman Catholicism? Newman himself had once recognized this dilemma, writing in a pre-conversion letter, “We have too great a horror of the principle of private judgment to trust it in so immense a matter as that of changing from one communion to another.” Did he expect me to forfeit the faculty by which I adjudicate truth claims, because that faculty is fallible? My ­conversion would have to be rooted in my private ­judgment—but, because of Rome’s claim of infallibility, conversion would forbid me from exercising that faculty ever again on doctrinal questions.

MavPhil comment: Here is one problem. I must exercise my private judgment in order to decide whether to accept Rome's authority and thereby surrender my private judgment. But if my private judgment is trustworthy up to that point, then it will be trustworthy beyond that point in the evaluation of the pronouncements of say, Pope Francis.  It is also important to note that my private judgment is not merely private inasmuch as it is informed and tempered and corrected by a lifetime of  wide and diligent study and by the opinions of many others who have exercised their private judgments carefully and responsibly.

A second problem is that it is the private judgments  of powerful and influential intellects driven by resolute commitment  that have shaped Rome's teaching. St. Augustine is a prime example. Imagine being at a theological conference or council and squaring off with the formidable Augustinus. Whom do you think would carry the day? The magisterial teaching does not come directly from the Holy Spirit but is mediated by these intellectually powerful and willful drivers of doctrine. They were not mere conduits even if they were divinely inspired.

Finally, the infighting among traditionalist, conservative, and liberal Catholics made plain that Catholics did not gain by their magisterium a clear, living voice of divine authority. They received from the past a set of magisterial documents that had to be weighed and interpreted, often over against living prelates. The ­magisterium of prior ages only multiplied the texts one had to interpret for oneself, for living bishops, it turns out, are as bad at reading as the rest of us.

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

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

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It looks to be a stand-off.

One can imagine a Thomist giving the following speech. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karl Barth, Divine Revelation, and Mystical Experience

"It [divine revelation] is the opening of a door that can only be unlocked from the inside." Quoted by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Books, 1965, p. 10) from a Christmas sermon preached by Karl Barth in 1931. I am going to take this ball and run with it.

Imagine someone who would  pass through only those doors that he could open himself whether by hand, by key, by picking the lock, or by brute force.  Imagine him declaring, "The only  permissible passages are those initiated by me  and controlled by me at every step." Such a one would never knock or ring a bell. To knock or ring would be to rely on another for entry and thus to sacrifice one's ingressive self-reliance, to give it a name. It would be the heteronomy of help in violation of the autonomy of self-entry. "The only fully responsible entry is self-entry!"  "It is wrong always and everywhere to rely on another for entry."  "The only doors worth opening are those one can open by oneself!"

The person I am imagining would be like the modern (post-Cartesian) man who accepts as true only that for which he has sufficient evidence, only that which he can verify for himself by internal criteria and methods. Such a one, if he were standing before the portals of saving truth that can only be unlocked from the inside, would deny himself access to such truth out of a  refusal to accept help. His fear of error would prevent his contact with truth.

Would that be a prideful, and thus a morally censurable, refusal? Would it be the rebellious refusal of a miserable creature who, though dependent on God for everything, absurdly privileges his own petty ego and sets it up as epistemic arbiter?

Or would the refusal to accept divine revelation be a laudable refusal that bespeaks a cautious and critical love of truth? "I so love the truth that I will accept no substitutes!"

The question is not easy to answer. It is not even easy to formulate. The question concerns the very possibility of divine revelation, and the possibility of its acceptance, not the content of any particular putative revelation.

Trust or verify?  The child is trusting, but gullible; he learns to be critical. Having come of age, and having been repeatedly fooled, he trusts as little as possible. The adult is wary, as he must be to negotiate a world of snares and delusions and evil doers.

I had an unforgettable mystical experience at the age of 28. I was tormented by a torrent of deep doubts as to the ultimate sense of things.  Around and around I went like a Zen man in the grip of his koan. Striding along, alone, in the early pre-dawn of a Spring day in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, I came to a point where I caught a glimpse of the rising sun just as it appeared over the horizon. Suddenly all my doubts vanished and I was flooded with a deep intuition of the ultimate sense and rightness of things. The solar glimpse triggered a mystical Glimpse into the intrinsic intelligibility of the universe.  All my doubts vanished. The Last Word was sense, not absurdity! I bowed my head and was suffused with peace, and Metaphysical Trust, as I later described it in my journal.  Not a trust in this thing or that, or in any human person, or in oneself and one's powers of understanding, but trust in the Unseen Order in which this transient bubble of space-time is suspended and rendered meaningful.

But of course that remarkable experience was only an experience, and no experience proves the veridicality, the reality, of its intentional object.  That's Modern Philosophy 101 and only an unthinking dogmatist could think it easily dismissed.

The dialectic proceeds beyond this point, of course, but weblog entries are best kept succinct.  So I leave you with the alternative: Trust or Verify? Finite reason is not equipped to solve this conundrum. You will have to de-cide. That involves a leap of faith. You can put your faith in the Unseen or in your own powers.

God Doesn't Philosophize

He doesn't need to.  We need to. But our neediness goes together with our inability to make any progress at it.  A double defect: need and inability.  The truth we need we cannot acquire by our own efforts.  It is this fact that motivates some philosophers to consider the possibility of divine revelation. Can they raise the question of revelation without leaving Athens?  Can they show the need for, and the possibility of, divine revelation without ceasing to be philosophers?  If I understand Maurice Blondel, that was his project.

A Rule for Reading the Bible

What we know to be the case constrains Biblical interpretation. For example, we know that an individual human life does not begin with its first breath. If any passage in the Bible states or implies otherwise, that passage may and indeed must be dismissed and cannot count as divine revelation. So much for Biblical inerrancy, at least on one reading of that phrase.

The Question of Private Judgment

I have commented critically on the Roman Catholic teaching on indulgences. One who refuses to accept, or questions, a teaching of the Church on faith or morals may be accused of reliance upon private judgment and failure to submit to the Magisterium or teaching authority of the Church.  Two quick observations on this accusation.

First, for many of us private judgment is not merely private, based as it is on consultation with many, many public sources.  It is as public as private. Everything I've read over the years from Parmenides on down in the West, the Bible on down in the Near East, and the Upanishads on down in the Far East feeds into my 'private' judgment.  So my 'private' judgment is not merely mine as to content inasmuch as it is a collective cultural upshot, albeit processed through my admittedly fallible and limited pate. Though collective as to content, its acceptance by me is of course my sole responsibility.

Second, the party line or official doctrine of any institution is profoundly influenced by the private judgments of individuals. Think of the profound role that St. Augustine played in the development of Roman Catholic doctrine.  He was a man of powerful will, penetrating intellect, and great personal presence.  Imagine going up against him at a theological conference or council.  

So the private is not merely private, and the official is not merely official.

Of course, part of the official doctrine of the Roman church is that its pronunciamenti anent faith and morals are guided and directed by the Holy Ghost. (Use of the old phrase, besides chiming nicely with der Heilige Geist, is a way for this conservative to thumb his nose at Vatican II-type innovations which, though some of them may have had some sense, tended to be deleterious in the long run.  A meatier question which I ought to take up at some time is the one concerning the upsurge of priestly paederasty after Vatican II: post hoc ergo propter hoc?)

What I have just written may sound as if I am hostile to the Church. I am not. Nor have I ever had any negative experiences with priests, except, perhaps to have been bored by their sermons. All of the ones I have known have been upright, and some exemplars of the virtues they profess.  In the main they were manly and admirable men.  But then I'm an old man, and I am thinking mainly of the priests of my youth. 

I have no time now to discuss the Church's guidance by the third person of the Trinity, except to express some skepticism: if that is so, how could the estimable Ratzinger be followed by the benighted Bergoglio? (Yes, I am aware that there were far, far worse popes than the current one.)

Of course, I have just, once again, delivered my private judgment. But, once again, it is not merely private inasmuch as it is based on evidence and argument: I am not merely emoting in the manner of a liberal such as Bergoglio when he emoted, in response to the proposed Great Wall of Trump, that nations need bridges, not walls. Well, then, Vatican City needs bridges not walls the better to allow jihadis easy access for their destructive purposes. Mercy and appeasement even unto those who would wipe Christianity from the face of the earth, and are in process of doing so.

Addendum

But how can my judgment, even if not merely private, carry any weight, even for me, when it contradicts the Magisterium, the Church's teaching authority, when we understand the source and nature of this authority? ('Magisterium' from L. magister, teacher, master.)

By the Magisterium we mean the teaching office of the Church. It consists of the Pope and Bishops. Christ promised to protect the teaching of the Church : "He who hears you, hears me; he who rejects you rejects me, he who rejects me, rejects Him who sent me" (Luke 10. 16). Now of course the promise of Christ cannot fail: hence when the Church presents some doctrine as definitive or final, it comes under this protection, it cannot be in error; in other words, it is infallible. 

In a nutshell: God in Christ founded the Roman church upon St. Peter, the first pope, as upon a rock. The legitimate succession culminates in Pope Francis. The Roman church as the one true holy and apostolic church therefore teaches with divine authority and thus infallibly. Hence its teaching on indulgences not only cannot be incorrect, it cannot even be reasonably questioned. So who am I to -- in effect -- question God himself?

Well, it is obvious that if I disagree with God, then I am wrong.  But if a human being, or a group of human beings, no matter how learned, no matter how saintly, claims to be speaking with divine authority, and thus infallibly, then I have excellent reason to be skeptical. How do I know that they are not, in a minor or major way, schismatics diverging from the true teaching, the one Christ promised to protect?  Maybe it was some version of Eastern Orthodoxy that Christ had in mind as warranting his protection.

These and other questions legitimately arise in the vicinity of what Josiah Royce calls the Religious Paradox. 

Is Everything in the Bible Literally True?

Of course not. 

If everything in the Bible is literally true, then every sentence in oratio obliqua in the Bible is literally true.  Now the sentence 'There is no God'  occurs in the oblique context, "The fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'"  (Psalm 14:1)  So if everything  in the Bible is literally true, then 'There is no God' is literally true and the Bible proves that it is not the word of God!  Again, at Genesis 3:4 the Bible reports the Serpent saying to the woman (Eve), "You surely shall not die!"  So if everything in the Bible is true, then this falsehood is true.  Ergo, not everything in the Bible is literally true.

Someone who concedes the foregoing may go on to say, "OK, wise guy, everything in the Bible in oratio recta is literally true."  But this can't be right either.  For the Bible tells us in oratio recta that light was created before sources of light (sun, moon, stars) were created. The creation of light is reported at Genesis 1:3, but the creation of sources of light occurs later as reported at Genesis 1: 14-17.  Obviously, light cannot exist before sources of light exist.  So what the Bible reports on this head is false, if taken literally.  Furthermore, if the sun does not come into existence until the fourth day, how can there be days before the fourth day?  In one sense of 'day,' it is the period of time from the rising of the sun to its setting.  In a second sense of 'day,' one that embraces the first, a day is the period of time from the rising of the sun to its next rising.  In either of these senses there cannot be a day without a sun.  So again, these passages cannot be taken literally.

But there is a deeper problem.  The Genesis account implies that the creation of the heavens and the earth took time, six days to be exact. But the creation of the entire system of space-time-matter cannot be something that occurs in time.  And so again Genesis cannot be taken literally, but figuratively as expressing the truth that, as St. Augustine puts it, "the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time." (City of God, XI, 6)

And then there is the business about God resting on the seventh day.  What? He got fagged out after all the heavy lifting and had to take a rest?  As Augustine remarks, that would be a childish way of reading  Genesis 2:3.  The passage must be taken figuratively: ". . . the sacred narrative states that God rested, meaning thereby that those rest who are in Him, and whom He makes to rest." (City of God, XI, 8)

What is to be taken literally and what figuratively?  ". . . a method of determining whether a locution is literal or figurative must be established.  And generally this method consists in this:  that whatever appears in the divine Word that literally does not pertain to virtuous behavior or to the truth of faith you must take to be figurative." (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book Three, Chapter 10)

This method consigns a lot to the figurative.  So it is not literally true that God caused the Red Sea to part, letting the Isrelites through, and then caused the waters to come together to drown the Pharaoh's men?

I'm just asking.

Ancora Una Volta: "Reasoned Mysterianism"

Dr. Vito Caiati writes (minor edits, formatting, and bolding added),

I thank you for your online response (Reasoned Mysterianism: A Defense of an Aphoristic Provocation) to my recent email.  In it you offer an impressive, rigorous defense of “reasoned mysterianism” that has impelled me to think more deeply on this subject, so much so, in fact, that I spent part of the night awake in bed ruminating over your argument.  Both it and your aphorism of July 21 (The Believing Philosopher) lead me to repeat what I wrote in my first email to you last February: “You have helped me sharpen and deepen by thinking on many questions, and you have made me more assured in turning away from easy or comforting answers.”

In this spirit, I will take up the invitation made in your email of yesterday and respond.  In doing so, I would like to draw a clearer distinction between a “reasoned belief” and a “reasoned mysterianism” by referring to your statement,

Vito mentions the leap of faith. As I see it, there is no avoiding such a leap when it comes to ultimate questions. There is no possibility of proof or demonstration hereabouts.  One can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, for example. So if, on the basis of arguments for or against the existence of God, one comes to believe in God or not, there will be a leap of faith either way.

I fully agree with what you say here because while the affirmations of God’s existence or the existence and immortality of the soul cannot be proven, they can be reasonably held. In holding the former, for example, one gives assent to one or more philosophical arguments or calls on other forms of evidence, while acknowledging the powerful arguments and evidence against this belief. But here, most would agree that we are not dealing with what “to the discursive intellect must appear contradictory”; rather, while the intellectual challenges are so enormous that certainty is beyond our grasp and, as you correctly point out, that a leap of faith is required, we respect the intellectual limitations imposed on us by our “cognitive architecture.”

For me, this is the important point: that we not go beyond these limitations however much we would like to do so.  Therefore, I agree that “reasoning about God and the soul, etc. is precisely reasoning in justification of a leap of faith or else in justification of a leap of disbelief.” In such matters, the absence of “certainty” is no hurdle for me in affirming the existence of God, which I do. 

However, while I grant that “it may well be that there are certain objects and states of affairs and phenomena whose internal possibility we cannot discern due to our irremediable cognitive limitations. [And that] Apparent contradictoriness would then not argue unreality,” I hold that such objects and states of affairs are best left alone.  If the objects and states of affairs of “reasoned belief,” such as God’s existence, remain as open and debated today as they were in the distant past and as cloudy to the human mind, what can we possibly know of those shrouded in absolute mystery and apparent contradiction? Here, it seems mere hubris to make a leap of faith; rather, is it not better to acknowledge the mystery and grasp what aspects of the Unknown, albeit small, that reasoned belief permits?  Why not be content with the latter and leave the rest to God, who, after all, either intended or permits our having a constrained “cognitive architecture”?  

The misery of our ignorance, perhaps the greatest evil, is not to be undone by mere conjecture and hope, however well intended. Thus, while I agree that we must choose, I think that the possible choices are quite circumscribed. 

REPLY

I will begin on a note of deep agreement: the misery of our ignorance is indeed a great, and perhaps the greatest, evil. It surprises me that this is not usually mentioned when people recount the evils of the human predicament. Surely it is awful that we are almost totally in the dark about the ultimate whence, whither, and wherefore, and that bitter controversy rages on every side.  To my mind the human condition is indeed a predicament, a 'situation' deeply unsatisfactory, the solution to which is either impossible or, if possible, then such as to require a radical revision of the way we live.

Now on to the meat of our disagreement. 

For most of my philosophical life I have held the position sketched by Vito Caiati according to which only what we can see to be rationally acceptable may be accepted.   So if, by my best efforts, I cannot bring myself to see how a religious dogma satisfies the exigencies of reason, then I ought not accept it.

But lately I have been re-examining this position. Such re-examination is in the spirit of philosophy as critical reflection that spares nothing, not even itself. There is nothing unphilosophical in questioning the reach of reason.*  Note that this questioning remains within philosophy: from within philosophy one can question philosophy and raise the possibility that philosophy can be and perhaps must be supplemented ab extra. 

One type of supplementation is via divine revelation.  Now philosophy cannot prove the fact of divine revelation, nor can it validate the specific contents of a putative revelation, but it can reasonably allow for the possibility of divine revelation. Without quitting the sphere of immanence it can allow for the possibility of an irruption into this sphere of salvific truths that we need but cannot access by our own powers.

Vito will grant me that it is reasonable to believe that God exists.  If so, it is reasonable to believe that there is a transcendent Person capable of revealing himself to man.  I would argue that the possibility of revelation is built into the concept of God.  Our concept of God is a concept of a personal being who could, if he so desired, reveal himself to his creatures in specific ways, via prophets who leave written records, or even by revealing himself in person in a special man who somehow is an, or rather the, incarnation of God.  Our possession of such a concept of God is of course no guarantee that there is such a God.   But without straying from the precincts of philosophy one can articulate such a concept.

This implies that it is reasonable to be open to the possibility of receiving 'information' of the highest importance to us and our ultimate well-being from a transcendent Source lying beyond the human horizon. This possibility is one that we can validate from within our own resources and thus without appeal to divine revelation.

One who grants the existence of a personal God cannot foreclose on the possibility of the receipt of such 'information.' To foreclose on it one would have to adopt some form of naturalism or else a non-personal conception of God.  Spinoza's deus sive natura, for example, is clearly not up to the task of transmitting any saving truths to us.

Now suppose some of these bits of 'information' or revealed truths are beyond our ken not only in the sense that we cannot validate them as true from within our immanence, but also in the sense  that we cannot validate them as possibly true. That is, we can generate no insight into their logical possibility. Suppose they appear, and indeed must appear, logically impossible to us within our present (fallen) state.  The idea is not that they are logically impossible in themselves, but that they must appear logically impossible to us due to our current 'cognitive architecture.'

Supposing all this, would it be reasonable to take Vito's advice and leave these putative truths of revelation alone, on the ground that it would be hubris to make a leap of faith in their direction when, by our own best lights, and after protracted examination, they appear logically impossible?

It is not clear to me that it would.  For then the measly creature would be valuing his intellectual integrity over the possibility of an eternity of bliss.

There might well be more hubris is setting up ourselves as arbiters as to what is possible and what is not. Weak-minded as we are, who are we to judge what is possible and what is not? If God exists, then we are his creatures. We are in the inferior position and ought to listen to God's teachings and commands whether or not they pass muster by our criteria, and especially since our ultimate happiness is at stake. 

If we really understand what is meant by 'God,' and we believe that God exists -- which I admit itself requires a leap beyond what we can legitimately claim strictly to know -- then how can we insist that God, his actions, his commands, and his revelations satisfy the exigencies of our puny intellects in order to be admissible?

There is much more to be said, but I have gone on long enough for one post. 

________________

* Think of the academic and the Pyrrhonian skeptics, the empiricists, the critical philosophy of Kant, phenomenology with its anti-dialectical orientation and invocation of the given, logical positivism, and the ordinary language philosophy of the later Wittgenstein.

Plato's Cave and the Garden of Eden

This is a revised entry from over five years ago. I re-post it to solicit the comments of the Opponent and anyone else who can provide some enlightenment.  I am not a theologian, but theology is far too important to be left to professional theologians.

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

An archeologist who claimed to have uncovered the site of Plato's Cave would be dismissed as either a prankster or a lunatic.  There never was any such cave as is described in the magnificent Book VII of Plato's Republic.  And there never were any such cave-dwellers or  goings-on as the ones described in Plato's story.  And yet this, the most famous allegory in the history of philosophy, gives us the truth about the human condition.  It lays bare the human predicament in which shadow is taken for substance, and substance for shadow, the truth-teller for a deceiver, and the deceiver for a truth-teller.

The reader may have guessed where I am going with this.  If the allegory of the Cave delivers the truth about the human predicament despite its falsity when taken literally as an historical narrative, the same could be true for the stories in the Bible. No reasonable person nowadays could take Genesis as reporting historical facts.  To take but one example, at Genesis 3, 8 we read that Adam and Eve, after having tasted of the forbidden fruit, "heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the Garden . . . ."  Taken literally, this implies that God has feet.  But if he has feet was he shod on that day or not?  If shod, what was his shoe size?  10 1/2?    Obviously, nothing can have feet without having feet of a determinate size!  And given that the original parents heard God stomping around, then he had to be fairly large: if God were the size of a flea, he wouldn't have made any noise.  If God were a  physical being, why couldn't he be the size of a flea or a microbe?  The answer to these absurdities is the double-barreled denial that God is a physical being and that Genesis is an historical account.  I could give further examples. (And you hope I won't.)

This is why the deliverances of evolutionary biology do not refute the Fall.  (I grant that said deliverances refute some doctrines of the Fall, those doctrines that posit an original pair of humans, without animal progenitors, from whom the whole human race is descended.)  Indeed, it is quite unintelligent to think that the Fall can be refuted from biology.  It would as stupid as to think that the truths about the human condition that are expressed in Plato's famous allegory can be negated or disconfirmed by the failure of archeologists to locate the site of Plato's Cave, or by any physical proof that a structure like that of Plato's Cave is nomologically impossible.

And yet wasn't that what Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago biologist, was quoted as maintaining? 

Earlier I quoted John Farrell quoting biologist Jerry Coyne:

I’ve always maintained that this piece of the Old Testament, which is easily falsified by modern genetics (modern humans descended from a group of no fewer than 10,000 individuals), shows more than anything else the incompatibility between science and faith. For if you reject the Adam and Eve tale as literal truth, you reject two central tenets of Christianity: the Fall of Man and human specialness.

 I suppose this shows that the wages of scientism are (topical) stupidity.  

Addenda 

1.  I said that the Allegory of the Cave "gives us the truth about the human condition."  Suppose you disagree.  Suppose you think the story provides no insight into the human condition.    My point goes through nonetheless.  The point is that the truth or falsity of the story is unaffected by empirical discoveries and nondiscoveries.  Anthropological and archeological investigations are simply irrelevant to the assessment of the claims being made in the allegory.  That, I hope, is perfectly obvious.

2.  There is another point that I thought of making but did not because it struck me as too obvious, namely, that the Allegory of the Cave is clearly an allegory, and is indeed explicitly presented as such in Chapter VII of the Republic (cf. 514a et passim), whereas the Genesis account is neither clearly  an allegory, nor explicitly presented in the text as one.  But that too is irrelevant to my main point.  The point is that biological, anthropological, and geological investigations are simply irrelevant for the evaluation of what Genesis discloses or purports to disclose about the human condition.  For example, at Gen 1, 26 we are told that God made man in his image and likeness.  That means:  Man is a spiritual being.  (See my post Imago Dei) Obviously, that proposition can neither be established nor refuted by any empirical investigation.  The sciences of matter cannot be expected to  disclose any truths about spirit.  And if, standing firm on the natural sciences, you deny that there is anything other than matter, then you fall into the easily-refuted mistake of scientism.  Furthermore, Genesis is simply incoherent if taken as presenting facts about history or facts about cosmology and physical  cosmogenesis.  Not only is it incoherent; it is contradicted by what we know from the physical sciences.  Clearly, in any conflict between the Bible and natural science, the Bible will lose.

The upshot is that the point I am making about Genesis cannot be refuted by adducing the obvious difference between a piece of writing that presents itself as an allegory and a piece of writing that does not.  Plato's intention was to write an allegory.  The authors of Genesis presumably did not have the intention of writing an allegory.  But that is irrelevant to the question whether the stories can be taken as reporting historical and physical facts.  It is obvious that Plato's story cannot be so taken.  It is less obvious, but nonetheless true, that the Genesis story cannot be so taken.  For if you take it as historical reportage, then it is mostly false or incoherent, and you miss what is important: the spiritual, not the physical, meaning.

The Opponent writes:

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.

My response is as follows.

The Opponent, following Sommer, 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.

3.  The mistake of those who think that biology refutes the Fall is the mirror-image of those benighted fundamentalists and literalists who think that the Fall 'stands or falls' with the historical accuracy of tales about original parents, trees, serpents, etc.  The opposing groups are made for each other.  The scientistic atheist biologist attacks a fundamentalist straw man while the benighted fundamentalist knocks himself out propping up his straw man.  Go at it, boys!  The spectacle is entertaining but not edifying.

Related articles

Pope Francis' Attempt to Put a Christian Face on Islam

Maverick Philosopher: The Old Testament is a Cipher

General Terms, Singular Terms, and Direct Reference

Comments on "Divine Fluidity"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ergo

Their language is to be taken literally.

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

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

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

Buckner continues: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related articles

Review of Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God

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

Can a Return to Federalism Save Us?

A Partial Philosophical Defense of the Monastic Life

The suggestion was made that I give a little talk to the monks of Christ in the Desert, a Benedictine monastery outside of Abiqui, New Mexico.  I thought I would offer a few words in defense of the monastic life, not that such an ancient and venerable tradition needs any defense from me, but just to clarify my own thoughts and perhaps help others clarify theirs either by way of agreement or disagreement with mine. I will attempt three things.  I will first list some convictions I hold to be of the essence of religion.  Then I will suggest that the monastic path is an excellent way to implement these convictions.  Finally I will ask myself why I am not a monk.

The Essence of Religion

There is much more to a religion than its beliefs and doctrines; there are also its practices.  The practices, however, are informed and guided by certain central convictions whose importance cannot be denied. Religion is not practice alone. Now it is not easy to define religion, and it may be impossible. (Religion may be a family-resemblance concept in Wittgenstein's sense.)  In any case I will not attempt to define religion by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions of the concept's application.  But as I see it,  most of the following are essential (necessary) to anything that deserves to be called a religion, and all of them are essential to Christianity.  What I offer is a characterization, not a definition.

1. In first place, and not just in the order of exposition, is the belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53)  This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions.  It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection.  It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.  So it lies beyond the discursive intellect, as it does beyond the senses. One can reason about it, and reason to it, but one cannot access it directly via the discursive intellect.  It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience.  An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.

Compare the first item in Simone Weil's Profession of Faith: "There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties."

2. The  belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)  The Unseen Order is thus not merely a realm of absolute reality, but also one of absolute value and an object of our highest and purest desire. 

Compare the second item in Weil's profession: "Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world."

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the Unseen Order.  Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the Order which alone is the source of his ultimate happiness and final good.  His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences. That is, our ability to know the saving truth has been impaired by our moral deficiency.

4. The conviction that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready, or perhaps any, access to the Unseen Order. Proximately, we need the help of others; ultimately, we need help from the Unseen Order.

5.  The conviction that adjustment to the Unseen Order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the Unseen Order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order, while not unreal, is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative, and as derivative defective.  It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the Unseen Order.

Each of these seven convictions is an element in my personal credo.  Can I prove them?  Of course not.  But then nothing of a substantive nature in philosophy, theology, or any controversial field, can be proven.  But each of the above convictions is rationally defensible.  So while not provable, they are not matters of mere faith either.  They can be argued for, their negations are rationally rejectable, and there are experiences that vouch for them. (See Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It.)

The Monastic Path

I will now suggest that the monastic life is perhaps the best way to realize existentially the above convictions, but also to have the sorts of experiences that tend to provide evidence for the convictions.  One lives the convictions, and by living them is granted experiences and intimations that validate the convictions.

Let us suppose that you accept all or most of the above seven propositions, in their spirit if not in their letter, and that you also share with me the meta-conviction that these first-order convictions  are to be lived (existentially realized, realized in one's Existenz) and not merely thought about or talked about or argued over. 

Then it makes sense to go into the desert.  The negative reason is to escape the manifold distractions of the world which keep one scattered and enslaved to the ephemeral, while the positive reason is to live a life focused on the the absolute and unchanging Source of all reality and value.  The entrance into the monastery signals that one is truly convinced of the reality of the unseen (#1), it supreme value for us and our happiness (#2) and the relative unreality and insignificance of this world of time and change and vain ambition (#7).

To live such a focused existence, however, requires discipline. We have a fallen nature in at least two senses.  First, we are as if fallen from a higher state.  Second, we are ever falling against the objects of our world and losing ourselves in them, becoming absorbed in them.  (Compare Heidegger's Verfallenheit, fallingness.)  Here we find the ontological root of such sins of the flesh as avarice, gluttony, and lust.  Given our fallen and falling nature, a monastic institution can provide the moral discipline and guidance that might be difficult if not impossible to secure on the outside, especially in a secularized and sex-saturated society such as ours has become.  The weight of concupiscence is heavy and it drags us down.  We are sexual beings naturally, and oversexualized beings socially, and so we are largely unable to control our drives to the extent necessary to develop spiritual sight.  The thrust of desire confers final reality upon the sensuous while occluding one's spiritual sight.  Sensuous desire, especially inordinate sensuous desire, realizes the things of the senses while de-realizing the things of the spirit.

Here, as I see it, is the main reason for sexual continence.  We are not continent because we are undersexed, or prudes, or anti-natalists, or despisers of matter.  (Certainly no Christian could despise the material world, and a Christian such as Kierkegaard who at the end of his life waxed anti-natalist veered off into a personal idiosyncrasy.)  The continence of the loins subserves the continence of the mind and heart which in turn are probably necessary, though certainly not sufficient, for a Glimpse of spiritual realities.  (I say 'probably necessary' because divine grace may grant sight to the committed worldling nolens volens.)

And then there is the great problem of suggestibility. We are highly sensitive and responsive to social suggestions as to what is real and important and what is not.  In a society awash with secular suggestions, people find it hard to take religion seriously.  Here is another reason why a community of the like-minded may be necessary for most spiritual seekers.  They provide reinforcement and the requisite counter-suggestions.  (It is worth noting that if cults can 'brainwash' their members, whole societies can go off the rails and brainwash their members.)

Why Am I not a Monk?

"If you think so highly of the monastic life, what are you doing on the outside?" 

A fair question deserving a straight answer. I didn't come to religion; I was brought up Roman Catholic by a pious Italian mother and pre-Vatican II nuns and priests.  But I had a religious nature, so the training 'took.'  But I also had a strong intellectual bent and was inclined philosophically from an early age.  So I couldn't avoid asking, and not just intellectually, but existentially as well: how much of this is true and how do I know?  The ferment of the 1960s only intensified my cognitive dissonance as the religious upbringing clashed on the one side with my philosophical questioning, and on the other with the secular and counter-cultural suggestions of the 'sixties.  I remember in 1965 listening intently to the words of Bob Dylan's Gates of Eden and trying to discern its compatibility, if any, with Catholic teaching.  (By the way, attending a Dylan concert in those days was like going to church: the audience remained dead quiet, hanging on every word.)

So philosophy took over the role in the pious youth's life that religion had played. That kept me away from any conventional religious vocation.  And so it kept me out of the monastery.  For one cannot join a monastery in general; it must be either Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Buddhist or whatever, and to do that in good faith and with a clear intellectual conscience one must accept the central doctrinal content of those religions.  But that content was exactly what to my mind needed examination. Athens at that point got the upper hand over Jerusalem.  So why am I not a monk?  Because of Athens.

But now, as I approach the end of the trail, I see ever more clearly the vanity of any philosophy that does not complete itself in something beyond it.  But what? The empty discursivity of reason needs to be filled and completed by a direct spiritual seeing.  Concepts without intuitions are empty. (Kant)  So philosophy needs completion by mystical intuition, but this is rare and sporadic and fragmentary here below, mere Glimpses;  to sustain us in the between times we need faith grounded in revelation. 

Related articles

Kierkegaard: "To Hell With the Pope!" and Monkishness. The Highest Life

Christ in the Desert Monastery

Josiah Royce and the Paradox of Revelation

There are tough questions about the possibility and the actuality of divine revelation. An examination of some ideas of the neglected philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916) from the Golden Age of American philosophy will help us clarify some of the issues and problems. One such problem is this: How can one know in a given case that a putative piece of divine revelation is genuine? Before advancing to this question we need a few sections of stage-setting.  (That's Royce on the right, by the way, and William James on the left.  Surely it was degeneration when American philosophy came to be dominated by the likes of Quine and Rorty.) 

1. Concern for Salvation as Essential to Religion. It is very difficult to define religion, in the sense of setting forth necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct application of the term, but I agree with Royce's view that an essential characteristic of anything worth calling religion is a concern for the salvation of man. (The Sources of Religious Insight, Charles Scribner and Sons, 1912, p. 8) Religious objects are those that help show the way to salvation. The central postulate of religion is that "man needs to be saved." (8-9) Saved from what? ". . . from some vast and universal burden, of imperfection, of unreasonableness, of evil, of misery, of fate, of unworthiness, or of sin." (8) In an earlier post on Simone Weil I spoke of generic wretchedness. It is that which  we need salvation from.

2. The Need for Salvation. "Man is an infinitely needy creature." (11)  But the need for salvation, for those who feel it, is paramount among human needs. The need for salvation  depends on two simpler ideas:

a) There is a paramount end or aim of human life relative to which other aims are vain. (12)

b) Man as he now is, or naturally is, is in danger of missing his highest aim, his highest good. (12)

To hold that man needs salvation is to hold both of (a) and (b). I would put it like this. The religious person perceives our present  life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory; he feels it to be, not a mere condition, but a predicament; it strikes him as vain or empty if taken as an end in itself; he sees himself as homo viator, as a wayfarer or pilgrim treading a via dolorosa through a vale that cannot possibly be a final and fitting  resting place; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness. If this doesn't strike a chord in you, then I suggest you do not have a religious disposition.  Some people don't, and it cannot be helped.  One cannot discuss religion with them, for it cannot be real to them.  It is not, for them, what William James in "The Will to Believe" calls a "living option," let alone a "forced" or "momentous" one. 

3. Religious Insight. Royce defines religious insight as ". . . insight into the need and into the way of salvation." (17) No one can take religion seriously who has not felt the need for salvation. But we need religious insight to show that we really need it, and to show the way to it.

4. Royce's Question. He asks: What are the sources of religious insight? What are the sources of insight into the need and into the way of salvation? Many will point to divine revelation through a scripture or through a church as the principal source of religious insight. But at this juncture Royce discerns a paradox that he calls the religious paradox, or the paradox of revelation.

5. The Paradox of Revelation. Suppose someone claims to have received a divine communication regarding the divine will, the divine plan, the need for salvation, the way to salvation, or any related matter. This person can be asked, "By what marks do you personally distinguish a divine revelation from any other sort of report?" (22-23) How is a putative revelation authenticated? By what marks or criteria do we recognize it as genuine? The identifying marks must be in the believer's mind prior to his acceptance of the revelation as valid. For it is by testing the putative revelation against these marks that the believer determines that it is genuine. One needs "a prior acquaintance with the nature and marks and, so to speak, signature of the divine will." (p. 25) But how can a creature who needs saving lay claim to this prior acquaintance with the marks of genuine revelation?

The paradox in a nutshell is that it seems that only revelation could provide one with what one needs to be able to authenticate a report as revelation:

Faith, and the passive and mysterious intuitions of the devout, seem to depend on first admitting that we are naturally blind and helpless and ignorant, and worthless to know, of ourselves, any saving truth; and upon nevertheless insisting that we are quite capable of one very lofty type of knowledge -- that we are capable, namely, of knowing God's voice when we hear it, of distinguishing a divine revelation from all other reports, of being sure, despite all our worthless ignorance, that the divine higher life which  seems to speak to us in our moments of intuition is what it  declares itself to be. If, then, there is a pride of intellect, does there not seem to be an equal pride of faith, an equal pretentiousness involved in undertaking to judge that certain of our least articulate intuitions are infallible?

Surely here is a genuine problem, and it is a problem for the reason. (103)

Is it a genuine problem or not? Can a church's teaching authority be invoked to solve the problem? Suppose a point of doctrine regarding salvation and the means thereto is being articulated at a church council. The fathers in attendance debate among themselves, arrive at a result, and claim that it is inspired and certified by the Holy Spirit. By what marks do they authenticate a putative deliverance of the Holy Spirit as a genuine deliverance? How do they know that the Holy Spirit is inspiring them and not something else such as their own subconscious desire for a certain result? But this is exactly Royce's problem.

UPDATE: Joshua Orsak responds:

It has been a long time since I've emailed anything to you. I recently read your post on the paradox of revelation. It is a subject I've thought a lot about, and one I've been particularly thinking about the last few days, serendipitously. It seems to me an intractable problem. One cannot claim to KNOW one has received a genuine revelation. One can, I think, only reasonably believe it.

 

It seems to me that when confronted with what appears to be a revelation from God, one is put in a position where one has to choose whether or not one believes. If the revelation is of what it appears to be, then one can believe that the God who has reached out to one has also put one in a position to be able to receive a revelation. But this kind of trust is invariably, to some degree, volitional. One of my favorite short stories, is Dostoevsky's THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN. The main character seems to know it is 'ridiculous' to change one's entire life and worldview because of a dream, but I gather the point is, in essence, 'but let it happen to you and see what you believe.'

 

If one has the experience of being transformed in mind and spirit by the Holy Spirit, and also of being contacted in some way by the same Spirit, one can reasonably choose to believe that this experience, both partial regeneration and revelation, are genuine. But one cannot, I think, claim to ever know with certainty that this is genuine. For the very reasons you mention.

I think Rev. Orsak has given us the right answer to Royce's paradox.

Geen Ketter Sonder Letter: No Heretic Without a Text

The following quotation from Spinoza may serve as a sort of addendum to what I just posted anent Sam Harris and the idea of  divine revelation.

 

Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, Ch. XIV, Dover, 1951, tr. Elwes, p. 182:

. . . a person who accepted promiscuously everything in Scripture as being the universal and absolute teaching of God, without accurately defining what was adapted to the popular intelligence, would find it impossible to escape confounding the opinions of the masses with the Divine doctrines, praising the judgments and comments of man as the teaching of God, and making a wrong use of Scriptural authority. Who, I say, does not perceive that this is the chief reason why so many sectaries teach contradictory opinions as Divine documents, and support their contentions with numerous Scriptural texts, till it has passed in Belgium into a proverb, geen ketter sonder letter -- no heretic without a text?

Eminently incorporable in a post contra fundamentalism. 

Sam Harris on the Very Idea of Divine Revelation as 'Poison'

Sam Harris is a liberal I respect and admire.  He has not succumbed to the PeeCee delusion and he actively combats it.  Although Harris is a contemporary, he is not a 'contemporary liberal' as I  use that phrase: he is a classical or old-time or paleo or respectable liberal.  But on religion and some philosophical topics he is out beyond his depth.

Here is Harris in his mainly excellent  Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon (emphasis added):

And just like moderates in every other religion, most moderate Muslims become obscurantists when defending their faith from criticism. They rely on modern, secular values—for instance, tolerance of diversity and respect for human rights—as a basis for reinterpreting and ignoring the most despicable parts of their holy books. But they nevertheless demand that we respect the idea of revelation, and this leaves us perpetually vulnerable to more literal readings of scripture. The idea that any book was inspired by the creator of the universe is poison—intellectually, ethically, and politically. And nowhere is this poison currently doing more harm than in Muslim communities, East and West. Despite all the obvious barbarism in the Old Testament, and the dangerous eschatology of the New, it is relatively easy for Jews and Christians to divorce religion from politics and secular ethics. A single line in Matthew—“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”—largely accounts for why the West isn’t still hostage to theocracy. The Koran contains a few lines that could be equally potent—for instance, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256)—but these sparks of tolerance are easily snuffed out.

Why does Harris think that  the idea of divine (scriptural) revelation is intellectual, ethical, and political poison? Perhaps his reasoning is along the following lines.

1. In every extant scripture there are morally offensive prescriptions and proscriptions which, if followed, would be detrimental to human flourishing, and in that sense 'poisonous.'
2. If one believes that a given scripture is the Word of God, then one believes that everything in that scripture carries divine sanction (approbation): it proceeds from the ultimate moral authority in the universe.
3. If one believes that everything in a given scripture carries divine sanction, then one believes that one has an obligation to commit some morally offensive actions, namely, those enjoined in the scripture in question, actions detrimental to human flourishing. (from 1+ 2)
4. Actions detrimental to human flourishing are 'poison.'
Therefore
5. The idea of divine revelation, if accepted, is 'poison.'  (from 3 + 4)

I have just imputed to Harris an argument the reasoning of which is correct.  Please recall the Logic 101 distinction between correctness/incorrectness of reasoning and truth/falsity of premises and conclusions. (If this argument, or something very similar, is not the argument at the back of Harris's assertion, then I have no idea what that argument would be). 

But no defender of divine revelation need be troubled by the above argument.  For such a defender may simply deny premise # 2.  If a given scripture is the inspired Word of God, that doesn't change the fact that it is written down by men -- and we know what they are like: fallible, sometimes foolish, liable to embellish and distort, biased, limited in ever so many ways. 

To put it very simply, I can accept  a scripture  as divinely inspired while rejecting parts of it as merely human accretions.  Why not?  There are things that St. Paul says, for example, that are pretty obviously nothing but reflections of his own personal preferences and biases, or else those of his time and place. 

Notice that Harris is attacking the very idea of divine revelation: the acceptance of that idea is 'poison.'  But he has given us no good reason to accept this wild claim.  Of course, if there is no God, then there cannot be divine revelation.  But the existence of God is not at issue here. The above argument is logically independent of the existence/nonexistence of God.  Indeed, a theist could deploy the above argument. 

And the issue is not whether particular portions of some scripture are credible or not.  The issue concerns divine revelation as such and in general.

Harris may be assuming that anyone who accepts scriptural revelation must be a fundamentalist in the sense of someone who believes that everything in the Christian Bible, say, wears its meaning on its 'sleeve' and is literally true.  But obviously, not everyone who accepts scriptural revelation need be a fundamentalist!

So much for the second of the two bolded sentences above.

The first sentence reads:  But they nevertheless demand that we respect the idea of revelation, and this leaves us perpetually vulnerable to more literal readings of scripture.  This sentence encapsulates an inference which, unfortunately for Harris, is a non sequitur.  If one respects the idea of divine scriptural revelation, how is it supposed to follow that one is vulnerable to literalism?  It obvously doesn't follow.  And what exactly is literalism?

Harris ought to read Augustine on the interpretation of Genesis.  Here is a sampler of some of the issues that arise.

As I said, Harris is way out of his depth when he enters these theological waters.

The Need for Outside Help

A human life is too short for the acquisition by oneself of the wisdom needed to live it well -- or to end it well.  And the same goes for the appropriation of the hard-won wisdom of one's predecessors: the brevity of life militates against the needed appropriation as much as against the needed acquisition.  So wisdom must come from outside the human-all-too-human if it is to come at all.

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

Addendum .  Dave Bagwill submits the following pertinent quotation from George MacDonald's Diary of an Old Soul for July 15th:

Who sets himself not sternly to be good,
Is but a fool, who judgment of true things
Has none, however oft the claim renewed.
And he who thinks, in his great plenitude,
To right himself, and set his spirit free,
Without the might of higher communings,
Is foolish also--save he willed himself to be.

 

Related articles

Two Pipe Quotations

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

The same thing goes on in the sciences.  There are climate scientists who are committed to the thesis that anthropogenic global warming is taking place.  They then look for evidence to buttress this conviction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suppose someone denies the law of noncontradiction . . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

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

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

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

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

It looks to be a stand-off.

One can imagine a Thomist giving the following speech. 

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

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

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

Related articles

Philosophers Who Compartmentalize and Those Who Don't

A Question for Benson Mates

Philosophy is a Useless Major; All Praise to Philosophy

Susan Haack on the Current State of Professional Philosophy

God Doesn't Philosophize

He doesn't need to.  We need to. But our neediness goes together with our inability to make any progress at it.  A double defect: need and inability.  The truth we need we cannot acquire by our own efforts.  It is this fact that motivates some philosophers to consider the possibility of divine revelation.  They can raise the question of revelation without quitting Athens.  See Blondel.

Related articles

A Meditation on Certainty on Husserl's Birthday

The Original Christian Revelation: The Bible or the Teaching of Jesus?

Richard Swinburne, Revelation, Oxford, 1992, pp. 102-103:

. . . there has been a strain in Protestantism, with its immense reverence for Scripture, to write of Holy Scripture itself as the original [propositional] revelation; what was given by God was the Bible.  But that surely fits very badly with other things that those same Protestants wish to say: for example that there were Christians in the first four centuries AD.  For the books of the New Testament were not written down until from twenty to seventy years after Christ taught on Earth, and were only put together and recognized as a New Testament in final form in the fourth century AD.  If the books themselves were the revelation, how could there be Chrsitians when there were no books?  [Footnote 6 not reproduced: it quotes Iraneus and Papias as quoted by Eusebius.]  Holy Scripture must be regarded by Protestants as it is by Catholics, as no more than a true record of a revelation which existed before it.

Related articles

The Bible as the Christian Faith's 'Constitution'

Protestants, Catholics, Purgatory, Inerrancy and Related Topics

Are the Dogmas of Catholicism Divine Revelations?

Protestants, Catholics, Purgatory, Inerrancy and Related Topics

My last post drew a number of e-mail responses.  Here is one, by Joshua Orsak.  Subheadings added.  The ComBox is open in case Professor Anderson, or anyone, cares to respond.

 

Purgatory

 

First I'd like to make a quick note on purgatory. Purgatory is found in the Apocrypha, the 10 or so books of the Bible found in the Septuagint, the Hellenized Jews' Scriptures and not in the Hebrew Scriptures. You find it in Tobit 12:9, 2 Maccabees 12:43-45 and Ecclesiasticus 3:30. Protestants don't accept these scriptures as divinely inspired, but the Catholic faiths (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglo-Catholic, etc) do. I don't want to expound TOO much on arguments for including the Apocrypha, but I want to say this. The Jews did not canonize their scriptures until around 90 AD. They did this, in part, because the Septuagint, in particular the books we call the Apocrypha, were being used against them by the Christians in debates over Jesus' place as messiah. Ironically, Protestants later excluded the books because they are not included in the Jewish' canon. Anderson's point about purgatory is confused. The issue is not whether purgatory is found in the Bible but which scriptures should be included in the Bible at all.

 

BV:  Perhaps the point could be put like this:  The question whether purgatory is to be found in the Bible is not a well-defined question, and is therefore unanswerable, until we decide which books are canonical. "You tell me which books make up the Bible, and I will tell whether there is Biblical support for a doctrine of purgatory." 

 

Inerrancy

 

As to whether the Bible supports plenary inerrancy, in my opinion it does not do this consistently. The Bible is a collection of books that take a variety of positions on various theological issues. They are more like conversations around the Revelation of God to the Israelite people (and later the church) than the Revelation itself. The Bible is not the Revelation, but the record of The Revelation. Just to give an example, Jeremiah 28:7-9 modifies the conditions by which we test whether a prophet is genuine from an earlier set of conditions laid down in Deuteronomy 18:21-22. In the latter case we are told that a prophet is only a true prophet if his prophecy comes true. Jeremiah says that this is true only in the case of a prophet that prophecies peace. If a prophet gives you an oracle that you like, that is in line with what you want to hear, then his prophecy must come true or he was a false prophet. But Jeremiah insists that any prophet that challenges you or gives you a word of judgment, i.e., tells you what you do not want to hear, is a true prophet regardless of whether his prophecy comes true.

 

In the New Testament, the writers often quote passages out of context, and take them to mean something different than the original writers thought they meant. They take prophecies about the return from Babylon to Israel under Persian rule and talk about them as if they are messianic. This is not lying, from the writers' perspective. At the time the New Testament was written, it was believed that the truths behind scripture were hidden even to the original writers, and one needed the Spirit to guide one to dig into the hidden meaning behind the text. It is the Holy Spirit, and not scripture, that is primary in the New Testament, and it is guidance by the Spirit (rather than, say, the Pope) that gives credence to one's understanding of scripture. Jesus does this all the time in Matthew. He quotes scripture "you have heard it said" and then replaces or modifies it "but I say unto you...". Jesus has the authority to 'bind and loose' the law (to bind the law is to make it more strict, to loose it is to make it less strict, this was the pharisees' understanding of what a teacher was supposed to do). This authority derives from the Spirit. Just to give one example, think about Matthew 9:1-12. Jesus says that the allowance of divorce, found in Deuteronomy 24:1-4 did not derive from God but from Moses, clearly implying that not all of scripture comes from God alone. Jesus then goes to a rather ambiguous passage from Genesis to clarify what our attitude towards divorce should be.

 

The Danger of Bibliolatry

 

This is just the beginning of a sketch of a Biblical argument, but I'd say you are on firm BIBLICAL ground when you reject plenary inerrancy. There are certain passages that do seem to support that doctrine, but there are many, many more passages that indicate a vastly different way of approaching scripture. God should be the center of our theology, not a book. Experience and reason have to play a role. The Bible is not a constitution that restricts our limits our relationship with the Divine, it is rather a long and storied history of one people's (or two peoples') relationship with God and how God revealed Himself to them over an extended period of time. It includes their reflections on that revelation. It has a lot to say to us, and gives form and function to our own experience. Without it, we'd be starting pretty much from scratch. I love the Bible and it plays a central role in my relationship with God. But if it becomes the end-all be-all it becomes idolatrous in its own right. Bibliolatry is a subtle but I think very dangerous form of that terrible sin.

 

I find myself in broad agreement with Pastor Orsak.  Here is the slant on scripture I took in Four Slants on Scripture:

 

C. Scripture is a product of divine-human interaction. It exists contingently and does convey divine revelation. But it is not inerrant. It contains errors and defects that reflect the fact that it is a product of
divine-human interaction. God may be an impeccable transmitter, but we are surely not impeccable receivers.  There will be plenty of human 'noise' mixed in with the divine 'signal.'  God is not the author of the Bible, various human beings are the authors, but some of these at some times are writing under inspiration and thus are drawing truths from a transcendent source. Although the Book contains divine revelation, it is not the Last Word. Nor is it impossible that divine revelation is to be found in such writings as the Bhagavad-Gita and the Dhammapada, not to mention 'inspired' philosophers such as Plato and Plotinus.

More on Scriptural Revelation

Joshua Orsak e-mails,

I really enjoyed your recent post on various ways to approach revelation. I, too, opt for something like option C. It is similar to Karl Barth's position: that the Bible is NOT the revelation of God, but a record of God's revelation to mankind. I find that shift to be vital. Many Christians engage in a kind of biblolatry, they seek to have a relationship with a book. I don't want to have a relationship with a book, I want to have a relationship with God. I am a minister, I love the Bible, I study it every day and I find it to be an important part OF my relationship with God, but it is NOT the sum total of that relationship.

Let me see if I understand the shift.  You seem to be distinguishing between the (human) record of God's revelation of certain truths to man and God's revelation of these truths.  That is a good distinction and I accept it.  You may also be distinguishing between God's revelation of certain truths to mankind and God's revelation of himself.  It could be that God reveals little or nothing about himself while revealing certain truths to mankind. (In the same way that an anonymous caller to the police could reveal the whereabouts of a bank robber without revealing anything about himself.) The phrase 'revelation of God' can be interpreted as either an objective or a subjective genitive.  Thus one could deny that the Bible is the revelation of God (objective genitive) while maintaining that the Bible is the revelation of God (subjective genitive).  Putting the two distinctions together, I interpret you to be saying that the Bible is the human record of the revelation by God to mankind of certain truths.  If that is what you mean, then I agree.  This allows us to rule out two notions that ought to be ruled out, namely, scriptural inerrancy and the notion that the Biblical revelation is final. Once we admit that the Bible is a human product, though not merely a human product, we will give up preposterous claims to inerrancy.  And if we grant that God does not primarily reveal himself in the Bible, then we will have much less reason to think that there cannot be any further divine-to-human communications.

I think that 'finding God' within scripture takes place because we have access to revelation that is outside scripture. We find some passage, some moment that 'links up' to an experience we have in our own lives, and we say 'yes, this matches, this fits'. It is because the Bible deepens and enlightens my own encounter with God's revelation that it has the weight it does with me. Peter Berger talks about a 'nexus' forming between our own experiences and scripture.

So thank you for your thoughts on this matter. I think they are spot on.  Peace and Blessings.

Four Slants on Scripture

Suppose you are a theist (classically defined) and are also open to  the possibility of divine revelation. Suppose further that you are  open to the possibility of a written revelation. Call the scripture of  a religion its 'Book.' The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism,  Christianity, and Islam, sometimes called 'religions of the Book,'  each have their Book. Let's not worry about overlap, or translation, or influence, or sectarian squabbles over the canonicity or otherwise of certain writings. Let's think like philosophers in terms of big broad possibilities of interpretation. A philosopher worth his salt goes for the big picture. He is out to reconnoitre the conceptual  landscape, not get lost in details. Off the top of my head, there are four main possible slants on scripture. These interpretations can be arranged on a spectrum from the radically transcendent to the utterly immanent.*

Revelation and Miracles

The question I want to pose and to which I do not have a firm answer — Nescio ergo blogo! — is whether every case of divine revelation is a miraculous event, or whether there are or can be cases of divine revelation that are not miraculous. To treat this question properly we need some preliminary definitions of key terms. After proposing some definitions I will suggest that they point in the direction of the possibility of non-miraculous revelations.