Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Conservatives, Liberals, and Happiness

It turns out that conservatives are happier than liberals.  But why?

Conservative explanation.  Marriage and religious faith are conducive to happiness.  More conservatives are married than liberals, and more practice a religion. Ergo, conservatives as a group are happier than liberals as a group.

Liberal explanation.  Conservatives are happier because they turn a blind eye to the injustices of the world.  They are oblivious to inequality.  And when they do see it,they rationalize it. Ignorance is bliss.  Conservatives naively believe that people can better themselves by the practice of the old virtues of frugality, perseverance, hard work, self-control, deferral of gratification, and the like, when the truth is that people are products of their environment and need government help to do well.

As a conservative, I of course consider the liberal explanation to be bogus.

Do we conservatives, ostrich-like, ignore injustice?  The answer depends on what one takes justice to be.  The liberal tendency is to see justice as fairness, and to understand fairness in terms of material equality, equality of wealth and equality of power.  A just society for a liberal, then, is one in which material inequality is either eliminated or severely mitigated.  Along these lines the prominent political philosopher John Rawls puts forth his famous Difference Principle the gist of which is that social and economic inequalities in a society are justified only if they benefit the worst off, i.e., only if the worst off are better of than they would have been without the inequality.

But why should my having more than you be considered unjust unless it benefits you?  Of course, my having more than you will typically benefit you. "A rising tide lifts all boats."  

My roof was leaking  in two places. Now I could have done an amateur patch job myself: roofing ain't rocket science.  But I decided to have the entire house professionally re-roofed with all that that entails in terms of new flashing, etc.  My ability to afford such an expensive job gave support to a local company and all its jobbers, not to mention the crew of workers who had employment for a week.  And having extra dough, I laid $60 in tips on the workers.  I could give a hundred examples of how my having more than certain others benefited those others. 

When's the last time a poor man made a loan to a friend, or a contribution to a charity?  How many poor people give people jobs?  And of course people like me who are modestly well-off due to hard work and the practice of the old virtues have been benefited in innumerable ways by people who are wealthy.  Think of those who have endowed art museums and university chairs. 

But suppose, contrary to fact, that my having more did not benefit others. Why should that affect the justice of my having more?  If I work harder, longer, and smarter than you, and practice the old-fashioned virtues that liberals mock even when they themselves owe their success to them, then it is a good bet that I will end up with more than you.  Unless I engage in force or fraud I am entitled to what I earn or what I inherit or what falls out of the sky into my lap.  Take my intelligence and my good genes.  Do I deserve them?  No, but I have a right to them. I have a right to them and right to what I acquire by their use. 

I grant that a certain amount of luck is ingredient in every success.  But I have a right to my good luck even though I don't deserve it.  Of course, liberals often 'see' luck where there is no luck at all but  hard work and the exercise of conservative virtues.  Hence the conservative saying, "The harder I work the luckier I become."   The point is that what the liberal misconstrues as luck is really not luck at all but effort.  Should we help life's unlucky?  I should think so.  But not if the helping is really a harming, a making of the recipients of charity weaker and more dependent.  

Liberals consider it legitimate for the state to use its coercive powers to promote material equality by taking from the highly productive and giving to the unproductive and less productive.  This cannot work in the long run.  The well-off will resist being ripped off by government functionaries who line their own pockets and feather their nests with perquisites purchased at taxpayer expense.  Many will expatriate.  Government, it is clear, is too often a hustle like any hustle rigged by those who benefit from it for their own benefit.  Government needn't be a hustle, but too often it is, which is why vigilance on the part of the citizenry is necessary to keep it in check.

The value of liberty trumps that of material equality.  This is a key difference between conservative and libertarian on the one side and leftist on the other.  Naturally I believe in formal equality, equality of treatment, treating like cases in a like manner, not discriminating on the basis of irrelevant criteria such as race, sex, or creed.

Of course, it depends on the creed. If you are a radical Muslim out to impose sharia and subvert our way of life, and act upon your beliefs, then you ought to be deported, or jailed, or executed, depending on the nature of your actions.  You should never have been let in in the first place.  After all, toleration, though a good thing, has limits, and if you do not see that it has limits then you are hopelessly foolish.  In a word, you are a liberal.

For more on toleration and its limits see my aptly titled Toleration category.

The Divine Job Description

What jobs would a being have to perform to qualify as God?

I count four sorts of job, ontological, epistemological, axiological, and soteriological, the first two more 'Athenian,' the second two more 'Hierosolymic.' The fruitful tension between Athens and Jersualem is a background presupposition. (The tension is fruitful in that it helps explain the vitality of the West; its lack in the Islamic world being part of the explanation of the latter's inanition.) This macro-tension between philosophy and Biblical revelation is mirrored microcosmically in human beings in the tension, fruitful or not, between reason and faith, autonomy and authority. (Man is a microcosm as Nicholas Cusanus maintained.)

1. Ontological Jobs. Why does anything exist at all? To be precise: why does anything contingent exist at all? A God worth his salt must play a role, indeed the main role, in any explanation. In brief: the reason why contingent beings exist is because God, a necessary being, (i) created them out of nothing and (ii) maintains them in existence. God is thus the unsourced source of all finite and contingent existents. Maybe nothing does this job. It might be that the existence of contingent beings is a factum brutum. But nothing could count as God that did not do this explanatory job. Or at least so I claim.

But I hear an objection. "Why couldn't there be a god who was a contingent being among contingent beings or even a contingent god among a plurality of contingent gods?" I needn't deny that there are such minor deities, not that I believe in any. I needn't even deny that they could play an explanatory role or a soteriological role. (I discuss soteriology in #4 below.) My argument would be that they cannot play an ultimate explanatory role or an ultimate soteriological role. Suppose a trio of contingent gods, working together, created the universe. I would press the question: where did they come from? If each of these gods is possibly such as not to exist, then it is legitimate to ask why each does exist. And if each is contingent and in need of explanation, then the same goes for the trio. (Keep your shirts on, muchachos, that is not the fallacy of composition.)

If you say that they always existed as a matter of brute fact, then no ultimate explanation has been given. Suppose time is infinite in both directions and x exists at every time. It doesn't follow that x necessarily exists. To think otherwise would be to confuse the temporal with the modal. An ultimate explanation must terminate in a being whose existence is self-explanatory, where a self-explanatory being is one that exists as a matter of metaphysical necessity and thus has no need of explanation in terms of anything distinct from it.

"Perhaps an ultimate explanation in your sense is not to be had." Well then, the ontological job -- the job of explaining why anything contingent exists at all -- won't get done, and there is no God. Here I may be approaching a stand-off with my interlocutor. I say: nothing counts as God unless it does all four types of job, including the ontological job. My opponent, however, balks at my criterion. He does not see why the God-role can be played only by an absolutely unique being who exists a se and thus by metaphysical necessity.

If you believe in a contingent god or a plurality of contingent gods, and stop there, then I can conceive of something greater, a God who exists of metaphysical necessity and who not only is one without a second, but one without the possibility of a second. But this just brings us back to the Anselmian conception of God as 'that than which no greater can be conceived,' God as the greatest conceivable being, or the maximally perfect being, or the ens reallisimum/perfectissimum, etc. This conception of deity is very Greek and very unanthropomorphic residing as it does in the conceptual vicinity of the Platonic Good and the Plotinian One. But that is what I like about it and my interlocutor doesn't. It's inhuman, 'faceless,' impersonal, he complains. I prefer to say that God is transpersonal and transhuman -- not below but beyond the personal and the human.

As I have said before, religion is about transcendence and transformation, not about a duplicate world behind the scenes, a hinterworld if you will. Whatever God is, he can't be a Big Guy in the Sky. And whatever survival of bodily death might be, it is not the perpetuation of these petty selves of ours. An immortality worth wanting is one in which we are transformed and transfigured. The proper desire for immortality is not an egotistical desire but a desire to be purged of one's egotism. This is an extremely important point typically missed by atheists and mortalists.

2. Epistemological Jobs. What accounts for the intelligibility of the world and what is its source? A God worth his salt (salary) must play a role, indeed the main role, in any explanation of why the world can be understood by us. The explanation, in outline, is that the world is intelligible because it it is the creation of an intelligent being. As an embodiment and expression of the divine intelligence of the intellectus archetypus it is intelligible to an intellectus ectypus. Maybe the world has no need of a ground or source of its intelligibility. Some will say, incoherently, that we are the source of all intelligibility and project it outward onto what is in itself devoid of intelligibility. But if the world is intelligible, and if this intelligibility is not a projection by us, and if the world has a ground of its intelligibility, then God must play a role, the main role, in the explanation of this intelligibility. Nothing could be called God that did not play this role.

Now if God is the ultimate source of intelligibility and the ultimate ground of ontic truth and, as such, the ultimate condition of the possibility of propositional truth as adequatio intellectus ad rem, then he cannot be just one more intelligible among intelligibles any more than he can be just one more being among beings. A God worthy of the name must be Being itself (self-existent Existence) and Intelligibility itself (self-intelligent Intelligibility), and ontological truth. And so God could not be a contingent being, or a material being, or a collection of contingent material beings. He couldn't be what Mormons apparently believe God to be.

3. Axiological Jobs. By a similar pattern of reasoning, I would argue that nothing could count as God that did not function as the unsourced source of all goodness and the ultimate repository of all value. God is not just another thing that has value, but the paradigm case of value. God is not a good being, but Goodness itself in its prime instance.

4. Soteriological Jobs. Every religion, to count as a religion, must include a doctrine of salvation, a soteriology. Religions exist to cater to the felt need for salvation. It is not essential to a religion that it be theistic, as witness the austere forms of Buddhism, but it is essential to every religion as I define the term that it have a soteriology. A religion must show a way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, one that is profoundly unsatisfactory, but also one from which escape is possible.  Sarvam dukkham! as the First Noble Truth has it. I would go a step further and add that out unsatisfactory predicament is one that we cannot escape from by our own power. Self-power alone won't cut it; other-power is also needed. 'Works' are not sufficient, though I suspect they are necessary.

When it comes to salvation we can ask four questions: of what? from what? to what? by what? Here is one possible answer. Salvation is of the soul, not the body, or at least not the gross body; from our unsatisfactory present predicament of sin, ignorance, and meaninglessness; to a state of moral perfection, intellectual insight, peace, happiness, and meaning; by an agent possessing the power to bring about the transformation of the individual soul. God is the agent of salvation. To be worth his salt he must possess the power to save us. Since the only salvation worth wanting involves a complete overhaul and cleansing of our present wretched selves, this God will have to have impressive powers. He cannot be a supplier of material or quasi-material goodies in some hinterworld in which we carry on in much the same way as we do here, though with the negatives removed. The crudest imaginable paradise is the carnal paradise of the Muslims with its 72 black-eyed virgins who never tire out the lucky effer; but if I am not badly mistaken, Mormon conceptions are also crudely materialistic and superstitiously anthropomorphic to boot.

What I'm driving towards is the thesis that a God who can play the ultimate soteriological role cannot be some minor deity among minor deities who just happens to exist. He must be a morally perfect being with the power to confer moral perfection. This moral and soteriological perfection would seem to require as their ground ontological and epistemological perfection. Not that I have quite shown this . . . .

Is It Sometimes Rational to Believe on Insufficient Evidence?

I should think so.

The notion that we should always and everywhere apportion belief to evidence in such a way that we affirm only that for which we have sufficient evidence ignores the fact that belief for beings like us subserves action. If one acted only on those beliefs for which one had sufficient evidence one  would not act as one must to live well.

 

When a young person believes that he or she can do such-and-such, it is almost always on the basis of insufficient evidence.  And yet such belief beyond the evidence is a sine qua non of success.  There are two necessary conditions of success in life: one must believe that what one proposes to do is worth doing, and one must believe that one is capable of doing it.  In both cases one believes and acts on evidence that could hardly be called sufficient. 

As a young man observing my professors, I said to myself, "I can do this and I can do it better!"  (It can be advantageous to have mediocre teachers!) My belief in myself was not without evidence but surely was not grounded in sufficient evidence. (Suppose we agree that sufficient evidence for proposition p renders p more likely than not.)  My believing in myself was a believing well beyond the evidence. But my belief in self, even unto cockiness, was sine qua non for my success.  Effort follows belief.  In cases like these, belief is a matter of the will: one chooses to believe that a certain good is attainable despite the insufficiency of the evidence the intellect can gather at the time.

This strikes me as a good maxim:  Don't let insufficient evidence prevent you from believing what you are better off believing than not believing. 

Let's consider another example.

The New Neighbors

What evidence do I have that my new neighbors are morally decent people? Since they have just moved in, my evidence base is exiguous indeed and far from sufficient to establish that they are decent people. (Assume that some precisifying definition of 'decent' is on the table.) Should I suspend judgment and behave in a cold, skeptical, stand-offish way toward them? ("Prove that you are not a scumbag, and then I'll talk to you.") Should I demand of them 'credentials' and letters of recommendation before having anything to do with them? Either of these approaches would be irrational.

A rational being wants good relations with those with whom he must live in close proximity and whose help he may need. Wanting good relations, he must choose means that are conducive to that end. Knowing something about human nature, he knows that 'giving the benefit of the doubt' is the wise course when it comes to establishing relations with other people. If you begin by impugning the integrity of the other guy, he won't like you.  One must assume the best about others at the outset and adjust downwards only later and on the basis of evidence to the contrary. But note that my initial belief that my neighbors are decent people -- a belief that I must have if I am to act neighborly toward them -- is not warranted by anything that could be called sufficient evidence. Holding that belief, I believe way beyond the evidence. And yet that is the rational course.

So again we see that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational. A theory of rationality adequate for the kind of beings we are cannot require that belief be always and everywhere apportioned to evidence.

Anthony Flood on Philosophy as Misosophy

(Written 23 June 2013)

I wrote an entry on the main sorts of motive that might lead one who takes religion seriously to take up the  study of philosophy.  I distinguished five main motives: the apologetic, the critical, the debunking, the transcensive, and the substitutional.  But there is also the move away from philosophy to religion and its motives. One motive is the suspicion that philosophy is a snare and a delusion, a blind alley; there is the sense that it cannot be what its noble name suggests, namely, the love of wisdom, and that he who seeks wisdom must forsake Athens for Jerusalem.  There is the sense that philosophy is, in truth, misosophy, the hatred of wisdom.  This is an ancient theme, that of the irreconcilable antagonism between religion and philosophy, one traceable back to Tertullian at least. (See Étienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, Charles Scribners, 1938, Chapter One.)

Anthony Flood has been an off-and-on correspondent of mine since the early days of the blogosphere: I believe we first made contact in 2004.  I admire him because he "studies everything" as per my masthead motto, "Study everything, join nothing."  As far as I can judge from my eremitic outpost, Tony is a genuine truth-seeker, a restless quester who has canvassed many, many  positions with an open mind and a willingness to admit errors and change his positions. (The man was at one time a research assistant for Herbert Aptheker!)  Better a perpetual seeker than a premature finder.  Here below we are ever on the way: in statu viae. 

Tony's views have changed over the years I have known him and it is his present (2013) attitude toward philosophy that  I wish to examine here.  In particular, I will evaluate his claim that philosophy is misosophy.  Is this right?  Or is it rather the case that religion when opposed to philosophy is misology, the hatred of reason?  Is philosophy misosophy or is religion misology?  That is  a stark, if somewhat inaccurate, was of defining the problematic. I will quote liberally from Tony's position statement and then comment.

The position I've come to has been percolating in my mind for years.  It intruded upon my thinking intermittently, but until recently I was unable to remove certain obstacles to my assent. [. . .] The critique of philosophy worked out by   Gregory L. Bahnsen . . .  however, has at last won my allegiance . . . 

[. . .]

The gist of Bahnsen’s critique is that philosophy as it has been practiced is virtually at enmity with Christ, who is the Wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24).  To the degree that it is op-posed to Christ, to that degree it is misosophy, the hatred rather than the love of wisdom.  For the Christian, wisdom is not an abstract virtue, but a divine person.  To pretend indifference to Christ is pretend indifference to the only Wisdom worth having; to hate Christ is to hate wisdom, that is, to hate him in whom all the treasures of wisdom are hid (Col 2:3); and to hate wisdom is to love death (Prov 8:36). Christians may continue to use “philosophy” and its cognates, but they reserve the right to qualify that usage.  Between the philosopher and the misosopher, covenant keeper and covenant breaker, there is antithesis.

Tony hasn't given us the "gist" of Bahnsen's critique but the conclusion at which he arrives; the gist of the critique would have to contain a summary of the reasons for the conclusion.  Setting that quibble aside, I move to a substantive point.  While it is true that for a Christian Christ is the source of all wisdom and therefore, in a sense, wisdom itself, saying this is consistent with maintaining that philosophy is the love of wisdom.  The philosopher qua philosopher seeks wisdom using his unaided reason, unaided, that is, by the data of revelation.  It is not that the philosopher qua philosopher rejects the data of revelation or the very idea that there could be such a thing as divine revelation; it is rather that he makes no use of it qua philosopher.  (To save keystrokes I won't keep repeating the qualification 'qua philosopher' but it remains in force.)  To borrow a term from Edmund Husserl, the philosopher 'brackets' revelation.  I see nothing in the nature of philosophy to prevent a philosopher from arriving at the conclusion that wisdom is ultimately a person.  So my first question to Tony would be: Why must philosophy be opposed to wisdom when wisdom is taken to be a divine person?

Admittedly, philosophy cannot bring us to Wisdom in its fullness, especially if wisdom is a divine person, but it hardly follows that it cannot serve as a propaedeutic to a participation in this Wisdom.  Here is a crude analogy.  The menu is not the meal.  But the menu is not opposed to the meal.  The menu provides access to the meal via verbal description, the very same meal that one goes on to eat.  It is not as if there are two meals, the meal of the menu writer and the meal of the eater.  There is exactly one meal accessed in two ways, the first obviously inferior to the second. (If you don't get the analogy, forget it.)

There is an important point of terminology that we need to discuss.  Tony claims that Christians have the right to use 'philosophy' in their way as meaning the love of Christ.  (After all, if wisdom is Christ, then the love of wisdom is the love of Christ.)  I deny this right.  'Philosophy' means what it means and that is to be discerned from the practice of the great philosophers beginning with the ancient Greeks.  To know what philosophy is one reads Plato, for starters, and not just for starters.  Philosophy is what is done in those dialogues and what has arisen by way of commentary on and critique of what was done in those famous discussions.  "Philosophy is Plato and Plato philosophy." (Emerson)  I characterize philosophy here.  My characterization begins with this sentence: "Philosophy is not fundamentally a set of views but an activity whereby a questing individual, driven by a need to know the truth, applies discursive reason to the data of life in an attempt to arrive at the ultimate truth about them." 

The Christian, therefore, is not free to use 'philosophy' and cognates in an idiosyncratic way.  Or rather he is free to do so but if he does he causes confusion and makes communication difficult if not impossible.  'Philosophy' does not and cannot mean 'love of Christ.' This is not to say that one cannot move beyond philosophy to Christian faith.  One can, and perhaps one should.  But nothing is to be gained by tampering with the established sense of 'philosophy.' 

Tony writes, "Between the philosopher and the misosopher, covenant keeper and covenant breaker, there is antithesis."  I object to this sentence because of the misuse of the word 'philosopher.'  Tony has decided that the philosopher, in his sense, is a lover of Christ, and that a philosopher (in the proper sense) is a misosopher and thus a hater of Christ.  But he has no right to hijack the terminology, nor, as regards the substantive question, has he shown that philosophy is opposed to Christian wisdom.

Autonomy versus Heteronomy/Theonomy

We now come to the crux of the matter: the tension between the autonomy of finite reason and the heteronomy of obedient faith.  This is, in essence, the tension between Athens and Jerusalem.  Whether this tension is an opposition or contradiction, as Tertullian thought, and as Tony seems to think, remains to be seen, and cannot be assumed at the outset. (I set aside the tension between Athens and Benares, the discussion of which does not belong here, even though that too is a tension between philosophy and a kind of religion.)  Finite reason, reason as we find it within ourselves, presumes to judge heaven and earth and everything in between; it would play "the spectator of all time and existence," to borrow a beautiful line from Plato's Republic.  But it must be admitted that the results have been meager.  Has even one substantive philosophical question been resolved to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners in two and one half millennia?  No.  What we have instead are endless controversies and the strife of systems.  Magnificent in aspiration, philosophy is miserable in execution.   Philosophy has proven impotent to provide us with the knowledge we seek, the knowledge of ultimates, and in particular salvific knowledge, knowledge that caters not merely to our theoretical needs but to our deepest existential ones as well, knowledge that does not merely inform us, but transforms us.

To make up for the infirmity of finite reason we must look elsewhere to a source of succor lying beyond the human horizon.  And so reason, while remaining within the sphere of immanence and autonomy, raises the question of the possibility of revelation, the possibility of an irruption into the sphere of immanence from beyond the human-all-too-human.  The possibility is entertained that the true nomos is theonomos, and that what at first appears as heteronomy is in reality theonomy.  The possibility is entertained that the prideful intellect must fall silent and humbly submit to God's Word.

But at this juncture we encounter what Josiah Royce calls the religious paradox or

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?" (Josiah Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912, pp. 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.  Royce:

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 the 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. But 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?  This is exactly Royce's problem.

The problem, then, is this.  Reason is weak and philosophy, whose engine is unaided reason,  cannot deliver the goods.  The salvific wisdom we seek it cannot supply.  It remains an interminable and inconclusive seeking, but never a finding; it remains forever the (erothetic) love of wisdom, not its possession.  So we look beyond philosophy to the data of revelation.  But how do we authenticate such data?  How do we distinguish pseudo-revelation from the genuine article?  By what marks is it known?  We are thrown back upon our infirm reasoning powers to sort this out.

So, while confessing in all humility the infirmity of reason, we have no option but to rely on it as we do when, by its means, we come to admit the infirmity of reason.  Though weak, reason is strong enough to acquire a genuine insight into its own weakness and limitations  and the need for supplementation ab extra.  But this supplementation by revelation cannot go untested.  Tony may be right that we need to "repent" and submit our wills to God's, but what that will is has to be discerned, and there is no way around the fact that it is up to us to do the discerning using the God-given equipment we possess, as infirm as it may be. 

But let's hear what Flood has to say:

From 1969, when I first began to read philosophy (as it is commonly called), I had very rarely questioned the presumption of autonomy exhibited by my models in that field, whereby the human mind posits itself as the final judge of what is real, true, and good.  I did not question that presumptive stance even when the provisional conclusions I arrived at were professedly Christian-theistic and therefore incompatible with it.  The way I approached “God” did not ethically comport with wanting God.  I played it safe, hedged my bets, looking for nothing more than a piece of metaphysical furniture to complete the interior design of my latest philosophical mansion. The irony of this discrepancy was lost on me, at least until recently.

What Tony seems to be saying here is that when we approach God via philosophy, i.e., via finite discursive reason, relying only on those evidences that can be validated from within the sphere of immanence, eschewing any such exogenic input as the data of revelation, what we arrive at is not the true God, but 'God,' a mere furnishing in the mansion of immanence, a mansion that is perhaps better compared to a doghouse.  Tony thus seems to be sounding a very old theme, that of the opposition of the God of the philosophers to the the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  I myself do not accept this opposition for reasons I supply in Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers. 

To revert to the crude analogy presented above, there are not two meals, the meal of the menu-writer and the meal of the eater.  One and the same meal is 'accessed' in two different ways, via description and via 'ingestion.' What the menu-writer describes, assuming the accuracy of the description,  is not something that exists only in his mind, a bit of mental furniture, but something that exists in reality.  Similarly, when the philosopher speaks of God , he is not speaking of something that exists only in his mind, but of something that exists in reality.  But let's hear some more from Tony:

As I now see it, that loss was not innocent and my present insight is wholly of grace. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov 9:10), however, not something tacked on at the end of one’s system.  (Part V of Whitehead’s Process and Reality comes to mind.  So does Chapter XIX of Lonergan’s Insight.)

Human beings, Christian and non-Christian alike, do know things.  They do reason.  They do calculate, induct, deduce, plan, accuse, exonerate, interpret.  They do write histories, novels, and plays. They do compose symphonies and conduct experiments.  They do creatively improvise on canvas, in the sculpture studio, and on the band stand.  But their attempts to account for these facts apart from their dependence upon God have been marvelous failures, for they cannot secure the experience-transcending universal claims on which they rely when they engage in any of those activities.  They ought to acknowledge the laws of logic, the uniformity of nature, moral absolutes as gifts of God.  Unless God grants them the spirit of repentance, however, this they will not do, for it is offensive to their posture of autonomy.  But they pay a price for this posture in the coin of rank foolishness.

Ironically, such a critique of philosophy is what one would predict professing Christian philosophers to produce, informed as they are by their awareness of the covenantal relationship they bear to God. Historically, however, what comes under the label “Christian philosophy” is compromised.  Christian philosophers have generally given their blessing to pretenses of neutrality and autonomy, content to conjecture how far the human mind can go under its own steam before grabbing the supernatural rope to take them the rest of the way.  

They can give that blessing, however, only by suppressing awareness (that they otherwise happily acknowledge) that the human being is a created, covenant-bound bearer of the image of God.  That is, Christian philosophers join their enemies in “testing” the hypothesis that Christian theism is at least as “reasonable” as anything else on offer in the marketplace of ideas.  As though any inference at all could be reasonable if Christian theism were not antecedently true.  As though an impersonal matrix of possibility were Lord of all.  I understand why Christianity’s opponents “load” the argument against Christian theism.  But why do Christians follow them? 

In this last paragraph, Tony raises a couple of fascinating questions.  One is whether (to put it in my own way) the necessary truth of the laws of logic presupposes the existence of God.  There are those who have argued such a thing, but, if Tony is right, why bother?  If Jerusalem supplies all the needs of man, who needs Athens?  If reason cannot be relied upon to bring us to any truth at all, then it cannot be relied upon to show that logic presupposes God.  The other question concerns the relation between the modal framework, standardly articulated in terms of 'possible worlds,' and God.  Analytic theists standardly maintain that God exists in all possible worlds.  Does such talk subject God to the modal framework, thereby compromising the divine sovereignty?  Is God lord of all, including the modal framework, or is God subject to the modal framework?  Or neither?

These questions cannot be pursued here, but one comment is in order, and an obvious one it is:  Tony seems merely to beg the question against his opponents.  For example, he just assumes that Athens and Jerusalem are irreconcilably antagonistic  and that the whole truth resides in Jerusalem.  He is free to make these assumptions of course.  No one is compelled to remain within philosophy's smoky rooms.  The door is unlocked and one is free to pass through it.  But then one should not attempt to explain or justify one's exit.  For any such attempt will entangle on in the very thing one is trying to get away from.

Addendum (13 November 2018) 

Re-reading and re-evaluating five years later I find that I still object to Flood's linguistic recommendation that 'philosophy' be used to refer to the love of Christ. Granted, philosophy is the love of wisdom and the pursuit of wisdom. But it is the pursuit of wisdom by means of  reason unaided by divine revelation.  The italicized phrase is an essential ingredient in any adequate definition of 'philosophy.' It may well be the case that Wisdom is incarnate in the person of Christ; but that this is so cannot be known by the philosopher qua philosopher.  It is a revealed truth if it is a truth.

Furthermore, a philosopher does not hate wisdom if he finds that he cannot, qua philosopher, accept the Christian revelation.  Such a philosopher simply does not acknowledge Christ as the ultimate wisdom.  It is therefore wrong to call him a misosopher and philosophy, properly and traditionally understood, misosophy.

But what I have just written leaves untouched the fundamental problem of how to reconcile the autonomy of reason with the heteronomy of obedient faith. Some will say that they cannot be reconciled, that one must opt for one or the other, for the Athenian life of autonomous reason with its demands for evidence and justification, or for the Hierosolymic life of heteronomous faith and obedient love.

Flood above opts for the latter.  But what could motivate this free opting?  Don't the claims of revealed religion need to be examined and assessed?  Given a plurality of putative revelations, how decide which is the true revelation?  Must not reason play a role here?  On the other hand, reason is weak and unavailing. The conclusions of the philosophers are inconclusive. Great minds have tried to put philosophy on the path of strict science, but without success.  

I don't know what the solution is.  But a mere opting for one 'city' or the other strikes me as no solution at all.  So I still think I was right when I wrote:

Tony seems merely to beg the question against his opponents.  For example, he just assumes that Athens and Jerusalem are irreconcilably antagonistic  and that the whole truth resides in Jerusalem.  

Evidence and Actuality: A Modal Punch at W. K. Clifford

W. K. Clifford is often quoted for his asseveration that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."  Now one of my firmest beliefs is that I am an actual individual, not a merely possible individual. A second is my belief that while there is an infinity of possible worlds, there is exactly one actual world and that this world of me and my world mates is the world that happens to be actual.  (Think of the actual world as the total way things are, and of a merely possible world as a total way things could have been.  For a quick and dirty primer, see Some Theses on Possible Worlds.)

But not only do I have insufficient evidence for these two beliefs, it looks as if I have no evidence at all.  And yet I feel wholly entitled to my acceptance of them and in breach of no plausible ethics of belief, assuming there is such a subject as the ethics of belief.

Consider the following argument that I adapt from D. M. Armstrong, who borrowed it from Donald C. Williams:

1. Exactly one of the infinity of possible worlds is actual.

2. This world of me and my mates is a possible world.

Therefore, very probably,

3. This world of me and my mates is merely possible.

This is an inductive argument, but a very strong one.  While it does not necessitate its conclusion, it renders the conclusion exceedingly likely.  For if there is an infinity of worlds, how likely is it that mine is the lucky one?

And yet the conclusion is absurd, or to be precise: manifestly false.  Is it not perfectly obvious that this world of ours and everything in it is actual?  I am convinced that I am actual, and that all this stuff I am interacting with is actual.  I am sitting in an actual chair in an actual room which is lit by an actual sun, etc. 

But how do I know this?  What is my evidence?  There are no facts known to me that are better known than the fact that I am actual (that I actually exist).  So my evidence cannot consist of other facts.  Is it self-evident that I am actual?  You could say this, but how do I know, given the above argument, that my actuality is objectively self-evident as opposed to merely subjectively self-evident?  Subjective self-evidence is epistemically worthless, while objective self-evidence is not to be had in the teeth of the above argument.  No doubt I seem to myself to be actual.  But that subjective seeming does not get the length of objective self-evidence.  I now argue as follows:

4. If it is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence, then it is wrong to believe anything on no evidence.

5. I have no evidence that me and my world are actual.

6. It is not wrong to believe what is obviously true.

7. It is obviously true that I am actual.

Therefore, contra Clifford,

8.  There are some things it is not wrong to believe on insufficient evidence.

This is not a compelling argument, but it is a very powerful one.  Not compelling because the Cliffordian extremist could bite the bullet by denying (7).  He might say that the ethics of belief enjoins us to suspend belief on the question whether one is actual.  

Now this is psychologically impossible, for me anyway.  But apart from this impossibility, it is surely better known that I am actual than that Clifford's extreme thesis is true.

There are other obvious problems with the thesis.  Any tyro in philosophy should see right away that it is self-vitiating.  If it is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence, then it is wrong to believe Clifford's thesis on insufficient evidence.  But what conceivable evidence could one have for it?  None that I can see.  It is not only a normative claim, but one stuffed with universal quantifiers.  Good luck!  If you say that the thesis needn't be taken as applying to itself, then other problems will arise that you can work out for yourself.  Why do I have to do all the thinking?

Toleration Extremism: Notes on John Stuart Mill

In the wake of the murderous rampage by Muslim terrorists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January 2015, many have embraced a form of extremism according to which any and all (public) expression must be tolerated.  This entry questions this extremism as we find it in John Stuart Mill.

Here are two passages from Chapter Two of John Stuart Mill's magnificent On Liberty (emphases added):

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. [. . .]  We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

[. . .]

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be  questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

Evaluation of the First Passage

As sympathetic as I am to Mill, I am puzzled (and you ought to be too) by the last sentence of the first quoted passage.  It consists of two claims. The first is that  " We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion . . . ."   This is plainly false!  The opinion of some Holocaust deniers that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz is an opinion we can be sure is false.  We are as sure of this as we are sure of any empirical fact about the past.  Or suppose some fool denies that John F. Kennedy died by assassination or maintains that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 U. S. presidential election.  Those are  fools' opinions we  know to be wrong. There is no lack of examples.   What was Mill thinking?  "We can never be sure," he writes.  A modal auxiliary married to a negative universal quantifier!  To refute a 'can never' statement all you need is one merely possible counterexample.  I have given three actual counterexamples.  Pace Mill, we can be sure in some cases that certain opinions are wrong.

Mill's second claim is that even if we are sure that an opinion we are trying to stifle is false, stifling it would nevertheless be an evil.  Mill is here maintaining something so embarrassingly extreme that it borders on the preposterous.  Consider again an actual or possible Holocaust denier who makes some outrageously false assertion that we know (if we know anything about the past) to be false.  Suppose this individual has the means to spread his lies far and wide and suppose that his doing so is likely to incite a horde of radical Islamists to engage in an Islamist equivalent of Kristallnacht.  Would it be evil to 'stifle' the individual in question?  By no means.  Indeed it could be reasonably argued that it is morally imperative that such an individual not be permitted to broadcast his lies.

How could anyone fail to see this?  Perhaps because he harbors the notion that free expression is unconditionally worthwhile, worthwhile regardless of the content of what is being expressed, whether true or false, meaningful or meaningless, harmful or innocuous, and regardless of the context in which the opinions are expressed. Now I grant that freedom of expression, of discussion, of inquiry and the like are very high values.  That goes without saying.  I have utter contempt for Islamists and other totalitarians.  I'm an Enlightenment man after all, a student of Kant, an American, and a philosopher.  Argument and dialectic are the lifeblood of philosophy.  Philosophy is free and open inquiry.  But why do we value the freedom to speak, discuss, publish, and inquire? That is a question that must be  asked and answered.

I say that we value them and ought to value them mainly because we value truth and because the freedom to speak, publish, discuss, and inquire are means conducive to the acquisition of truth and the rooting out of falsehood.   We ought to accord them a high value,  a value that trumps other values, only on condition that they, on balance, lead us to truth and away from falsehood.  We value them, and ought to value them, mainly as means, not as ends in themselves.  This is consistent with holding that some public expression that is not truth-conducive has a value in itself.

So the Holocaust denier, who abuses the right to free speech to spread what we all know (if we know anything about the past) to be falsehoods, has no claim on our toleration.  For again, there is no unconditional or absolute right to free expression.  That right is limited by competing values, the value of truth being one of them.  The value of social order is another. 

Two arguments, then.

The first is that free expression while it may have some value in itself has a high value only as  a means to an end, where the end is the acquisition and dissemination of truth.  The second is that the value of social order far outweighs the extremely limited value of someone's spouting falsehoods about, say, the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis. Those who abuse the right to free speech by spreading pernicious falsehoods have no claim on our toleration.

As I see it,  then, Mill makes two mistakes in his first passage.  He fails to see that some opinions are known to be false.  Now there may not be many such opinions, but all I need is one to refute him since he makes a universal claim.  I will of course agree with Mill that many of the doctrines that people denounce as false, and will not examine, are not known to be false.  The second mistake is to think that even if we know an opinion to be false we have no right to suppress its propagation. 

Now of course I am not claiming that all, or even most, known falsehoods are such that their propagation ought to be suppressed.  Let the Flat Earth Society propagate its falsehoods to its heart's content.  For few take them seriously, and their falsehoods, though known to be falsehoods,  are not sufficiently pernicious to warrant suppression.  Obviously, government censorship or suppression of the expression of opinions must be employed only in very serious cases.  This is because government, though it is practically necessary and does do some good, does much evil and has a tremendous capacity for unspeakable evils.  It was communist governments that murdered 100 million in the 20th century.  And when the Nazis stripped Jews of their property and sent them to the Vernichtungslager, it was legal.  (Think about that and about whether you want to persist in conflating  the legal and the moral.)

Mill's mistake, as it seems to me, is that he allows NO cases where such suppression would be justified.  And that is a position whose extremism condemns it.  Toleration extremism, to give it a name.

Evaluation of the Second Passage

Mill only digs his hole deeper in the second passage.  "Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."  Surely the bolded principle is a bizarre one.  Consider respect for human life.  Respecting human life, we uphold a general prohibition against homicide.  But it is not plausibly maintained there are no exceptions to this 'general'  prohibition where the term does not mean 'exceptionless' but 'holding in most cases.'  There are at least five classes of putative exceptions: killing in self-defense, killing in just war, capital punishment,  abortion, and suicide.   Now suppose someone were to apply Mill's principle (the one I bolded) and argues as follows: "Unless the reasons against killing humans are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."  Would you not put such a person down as a doctrinaire fool?   He holds that if it is wrong to kill human beings 'in general,' then it is wrong to kill any human being in any circumstance whatsoever.  It would then follow that it is wrong to kill a home invader who has just murdered your wife and is about to do the same to you and your children.    The mistake here is to take an otherwise excellent principle or precept (Do not kill human beings) and remove all restrictions on its application.

There are plenty of counterexamples to Mill's bizarre principle that "unless reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."

We conservatives are lovers of liberty  and we share common ground with our libertarian brethren, but here we must part company with them.