December 2015 – Maverick Philosopher

On ‘Making It’

One reason to try to 'make it' is to come to appreciate, by succeeding, that worldly success cannot be a final goal of legitimate human striving. 'Making it' frees one psychologically and allows one to turn one's attention to worthier matters. He who fails is dogged by a sense of failure whereas he who succeeds is in a position to appreciate the ultimate insignificance of both success and failure, not that most of the successful ever do. Their success traps them. Hence the sad spectacle of the old coot, a good flight of stairs away from a major coronary event, scheming and angling for more loot and land when in the end a man needs only — six feet.

Brand Blanshard on Santayana’s Prose Style

Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 49-50. Originally appeared in 1954. Emphases added.

The most distinguished recent example of imaginative prose in philosophy is certainly George Santayana. Santayana was no man's copy, either in thought or in style. He consistently refused to adopt the prosaic medium in which most of his colleagues were writing. To read him is to be conducted in urbane and almost courtly fashion about the spacious house he occupies, moving noiselessly always on a richly figured carpet of prose. Is it a satisfying experience as one looks back on it? Yes, undoubtedly, if one has been able to surrender to it uncritically. But that, as it happens, is something the philosophical reader is not very likely to do. Philosophy is, in the main, an attempt to establish something by argument, and the reader who reads for philosophy will be impatient to know just what thesis is being urged, and what precisely is the evidence for it. To such a reader Santayana seems to have a divided mind, and his doubleness of intent clogs the intellectual movement. He is, of course, genuinely intent on reaching a philosophic conclusion, but it is as if, on his journey there, he were so much interested also in the flowers that line the wayside that he is perpetually pausing to add one to his buttonhole. The style is not, as philosophic style should be, so transparent a medium that one looks straight through it at the object, forgetting that it is there; it is too much like a window of stained glass which, because of its very richness, diverts attention to itself.

There is no reason why a person should not be a devotee of both truth and beauty; but unless in his writing he is prepared to make one the completely unobtrusive servant of the other, they are sure to get in each other's way. Hence ornament for its own beautiful irrelevant sake must be placed under interdict. Someone has put the matter more compactly: "Style is the feather in the arrow, not the feather in the hat."

It seems to me that far too much Continental philosophy is plagued by the same "divided mind" and "doubleness of intent."

Peter Geach on Worshipping the Right God

Having just read Peter Geach's "On Worshipping the Right God" (in God and the Soul, Thoemmes Press, 1994, pp. 100-116, orig. publ. 1969) I was pleased to discover that I had arrived by my own reasoning at some of his conclusions. On Christmas Eve I quoted Michael Rea:

Christians and Muslims have very different beliefs about God; but they agree on this much: there is exactly one God. This common point of agreement is logically equivalent to [the] thesis that all Gods are the same God. In other words, everyone who worships a God worships the same God, no matter how different their views about God might be.

Rea's argument is this:

A. There is exactly one God if and only if all Gods are the same God

Ergo

B. Everyone who worships a God worships the same God.

But as I pointed out, the state of worship/worshipping is an intentional or object-directed state, and like all such states, not such as to entail the existence of the object of the state. One cannot worship without worshipping something, but it does not follow that the object worshipped exists. So (B) is false. Geach makes the same point in 'formal mode':

It may be thought that since there is only one God to worship, a man who worships a God cannot but worship the true God. But this misconceives the logical character of the the verb 'to worship.' In philosophers' jargon, 'to worship' is an intentional verb. (108)

Exactly right. And so, just as I can shoot at an animal that is not there to be shot at, I can worship a God that is not there to be worshipped.

I put the point in my own 'formal mode' way when I said that 'worships' is not a verb of success.

The possibility of worshipping what does not exist is connected with the question whether 'God' is a logically proper name. Geach rightly argues that "'God' is not a proper name but a descriptive term: it is like 'the Prime Minister' rather than 'Mr. Harold Wilson.'" (108) One of his arguments is similar to one I had given, namely, that God is not known by acquaintance in this life. As Geach puts it, ". . . in this life we know God not as an acquaintance we can name, but by description." (109)

God is therefore relevantly disanalogous to the examples Beckwith and Tuggy gave. Those examples were of things known or knowable by sensory acquaintance here below. Suppose Dale and I are seated at one and the same table. I pound on it and assert "This table is solid oak!" Dale replies, "No, it is not: there is particle board where you can't see." Dale thinks that a disagreement about the properties of a putatively self-same x presupposes, and thus entails, that there really is a self-same x whose properties are in dispute. But that is not the case. Disagreement about the properties of a putatively self-same x is merely logically consistent with there really being a self-same x whose properties are in dispute. In the case of the table, of course, we KNOW that the dispute is about one and the same item. This is because the table is an object of sensory acquaintance: its existence and identity are evident. But it can be different in the case of God with whom we are not sensorily acquainted.

Clearly, a Spinozist and a Thomist are not worshipping one and the same God despite the fact that for both Thomists and Spinozists there is exactly one God. One of them is worshipping what does not exist.

And so it is not at all obvious that Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all worshipping the same God. That, I submit, is crystal-clear. And so those who think that the question has an obvious answer are plainly wrong.

But this is not to say that Jew, Christian, and Muslim are NOT worshipping one and the same God. That is much more difficult question.

Do we all agree now?

Do Christians and Jews Worship the Same God?

Yale's Miroslav Volf has a 17 December 2015 piece entitled Wheaton professor’s suspension is about anti-Muslim bigotry, not theology. It is a sloppy piece of mere journalism but it does raise an important question:

What is theologically wrong with asserting that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, according to Hawkins’s opponents — and mine? Muslims deny the Trinity and incarnation, and, therefore, the Christian God and Muslim God cannot be the same. But the conclusion doesn’t square. And Christians, though historically not friendly to either Judaism or the Jews, have rightly resisted that line of thinking when it comes to the God of Israel.

The important question is this: Is someone who denies that the Christian and Muslim Gods are the same logically committed to denying that the Christian and Jewish Gods are the same? Volf seems to think so. To the extent that an argument can be attributed to Volf it seems to be this:

A. There are good reasons to deny that the Christian and Muslim Gods are the same if and only if there are good reasons to deny that the Jewish and Christian Gods are the same.

B. There are no good reasons to deny that the Jewish and Christian Gods are the same.

Ergo

C. There are no good reasons to deny that the Christian and Muslims Gods are the same.

I think one can reasonably reject (A). Volf writes,

For centuries, a great many Orthodox Jews have strenuously objected to those same Christian convictions: Christians are idolaters because they worship a human being, Jesus Christ, and Christians are polytheists because they worship “Father, Son and the Spirit” rather than the one true God of Israel.

It is arguable however that these great many Orthodox Jews have misrepresented the Christian convictions. Christians do not worship a mere human being; they worship a being that is both human and divine. So the charge of idolatry is easily turned aside. And Christians are not polytheists since they explicitly maintain that there is exactly one God, albeit in three divine persons. Trinitarianism is not tri-theism.

A Christian could say this: The God of the ancient Jews and the God of the Christians is the same God; it is just that his attributes were more fully revealed in the Christian revelation. The Christian revelation augments and supersedes the Jewish revelation without contradicting it. Or did Jews before Christianity arose explicitly maintain that God could not be triune? Did they address this question explicitly? And did they explicitly maintain that Incarnation as Christians understand it is impossible? (These are not rhetorical questions; I am really asking!) Suppose the answers are No and No. Then one could argue that the Christian revelation fills in the Jewish revelation without contradicting it and that the two putatively distinct Gods are the same. My knowledge of an object can be enriched over time without prejudice to its remaining numerically one and the same object.

Analogy: the more Dale Tuggy 'reveals' about himself, the fuller my knowledge of him becomes. Time was when I didn't know which state he hails from. At that time he was to my mind indeterminate with respect to the property of being from Texas: he was to my mind neither from Texas nor not from Texas. I simply had no belief about his native state. But now I know he is from Texas. There was no real change in him in this respect; there was a doxastic change in me. My knowledge of the man was enriched due to his 'self-revelation.'

Now why couldn't it be like that with respect to the O.T. God and the N.T. God? We know him better now because we know him through Jesus Christ, but he is numerically the same One as we knew before.

It is different with Islam. It is arguably a Christian heresy that explicitly denies Trinity and Incarnation which (from the Christian point of view) are attributes God has revealed to us. Islam takes a backward step. Arguably, Islam's God does not exist since it is determined explicitly to be non-triune and non-incarnated. The God of the O. T. was not explicitly determined to be non-triune and non-incarnated; so there is no difficulty with the O.T. God being identical to the N. T. God. But what if Jews now claim, or even before the Christ event claimed, that their God is non-triune and non-incarnated? Then their God does not exist. This seems like a reasonable line for a Christian to take. It involves no bigotry whatsoever.

Of course, these issues are exceedingly difficult and one cannot reasonably expect to reach any agreement on them among learned and sincere truth-seekers. I am not being dogmatic above. As before, I am urging caution and rejecting simple-minded solutions. Volf's simple-mindedness and sloppy journalism gets us nowhere. And his accusations of bigotry are deeply offensive and themselves an expression of politically correct bigotry.

A Note on Analytic Style

The precise, explicitly argued, analytic style of exposition with numbered premises and conclusions promotes the meticulous scrutiny of the ideas under discussion. That is why I sometimes write this way. I know it offends some. There are creatures of darkness and murk who seem allergic to any intellectual hygiene. These types are often found on the other side of the Continental Divide.

"How dare you be clear? How dare you ruthlessly exclude all ambiguity thereby making it impossible for me to yammer on and on with no result?"

Ortega y Gasset somewhere wrote that "Clarity is courtesy." But clarity is not only courtesy; it is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of resolving an issue. If it be thought unjustifiably sanguine to speak of resolving philosophical issues, I have a fall-back position: Clarity is necessary for the very formulation of an issue, provided we want to be clear about what we are discussing.

On Writing Well: The Example of William James

This from a graduate student in philosophy:

I have always been an admirer of your philosophical writing style–both in your published works and on your blog. Have you ever blogged about which writers and books have most influenced your philosophical writing style?

Yes, I have some posts on or near this topic. What follows is one from 21 September 2009, slightly revised.

……………………….

From the mail bag:

I've recently discovered your weblog and have enjoyed combing through its archives these past several days. Your writing is remarkably lucid and straightforward — quite a rarity both in philosophy and on the web these days. I was wondering if perhaps you had any advice to share for a young person, such as myself, on the subject of writing well.

To write well, read well. Read good books, which are often, but not always, old books. If you carefully read, say, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, you will learn something of the expository potential of the English language from a master of thought and expression. If time is short, study one of his popular essays such as "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life." Here is a characteristic paragraph:

But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, or keep his nerves in condition? — he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for Amelia, or for Henrietta? — both cannot be the choice of his heart. Shall he have the dear old Republican party, or a spirit of unsophistication in public affairs? — he cannot have both, etc. So that the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has to deal. (The Will to Believe, Dover 1956, pp. 202-203, emphases in original)

“And the Word Was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us” (John 1:14)

Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born between feces and urine, entering between the legs of a poor girl in a stable. Just like one of us, a slob like one of us. The notion is so mind-boggling that one is tempted to credit it for this very reason, for its affront to Reason, and to the natural man, accepting it because it is absurd, or else dismissing it as the height of absurdity. A third possibility is to accept it despite its being absurd, and a fourth is to argue that rational sense can be made of it. The conflict of these approaches, and of the positions within each, only serves to underscore the mind-boggling quality of the notion, a notion that to the eye and mind of faith is FACT.

The Most High freely lowers himself, accepting the indigence and misery of material existence, including a short temporal career that ends with the ultimate worldly failure: execution by the political authorities. And not a civilized Athenian execution by hemlock as was the fate of that other great teacher of humanity, but execution by the worst method the brutal Romans could devise, crucifixion.

In the Incarnation the Word nailed itself to the flesh in anticipation of later being nailed to the wood of the cross to suffer the ultimate fate of everything material and composite: dissolution. Christ dies like each of us will die, utterly, alone, abandoned. But then the mystery: He rises again. Is this the central conundrum of Christianity? He rises, but not as a pure spirit. He rises body and soul.

God is the Word ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God"); the Word becomes flesh; the flesh nailed to wood becomes dead matter and nothing Wordly or Verbal or Logical or Spiritual or Sense Bearing, and so next-to-nothing; but then the next-to-nothing rises and ascends body and soul to the Father by the power of the Father. Christ rises bodily and ascends bodily. A strange idea: bodily ascension out of the entire spatio-temporal-bodily matrix! He ascends to the Father who is pure spirit. So, in ascending, Christ brings matter, albeit a transformed or transfigured matter, into the spiritual realm which must therefore be amenable to such materialization. It must permit it, be patient of it. The divine spiritual milieu cannot be essentially impervious to material penetration.

Before the creation and before the Incarnation of the Creator into the created order divine spirit had the power to manifest itself materially, and in the Incarnation the power not only to manifest itself materially but to become material. The divine Word becomes flesh; the Word does not merely manifest itself in a fleshly vehicle. It becomes that vehicle and comes to suffer the fate of all such vehicles, dissolution. The divine spirit was always already apt for materialization: it bore this possibility within it from the beginning. It was always already in some way disposed toward materialization. On the other hand, matter was always already apt for spiritualization.

We humans know from experience that we can in some measure spiritualize ourselves and indeed freely and by our own power. We know ourselves to be spiritual beings while also knowing ourselves to be animals, animated matter, necessarily dependent on inanimate matter including air, water, dead plants and dead meat. (When an animal eats another animal alive, the first is after the matter of the second, not after its being animated.)

Whether or not we exercise our severely limited power of self-spiritualization, we are spiritual animals whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not: we think. Each one of us is a hunk of thinking meat. We are meaning meat. How is this possible? The matter of physics cannot think. But we are thinking matter. This is the mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in us. We live it and we experience it.

We could call it the 'The Little Incarnation.' Mind is incarnated, enfleshed, in us. The Little Word, the Little Logos, has always already been incarnated is us, separating us as by an abyss from the rest of the animals. Here, in us, we have an ANALOGY to the Incarnation proper. In the latter, the Second Person of the Trinity does not take on a human body merely, but an individual human nature body and soul. So I speak of an analogy. Incarnation in the case of Christ is not a mere enfleshment or embodiment. The Little Incarnation in us is the apparently necessary enfleshment of our spiritual acts in animal flesh.

The mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in us reflects the mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in God. Divine spirit is pregnant with matter, and accepting of the risen matter of Christ, but matter is also pregnant with divine spirit. Mary is the mother of God. A material being gives birth to God. This is how the Word, who is God, is made flesh to dwell among us for our salvation from meaninglessness and abandonment to a material world that is merely material.

Matter in Mary is mater Dei. Matter in Mary is mother and matrix of the birth of God.

For a different take on the meaning of Christmas, see my Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?

White Christmas

Do you dream of a white Christmas? Then you must be a raaacist!

Merry Xmas!

When I was eight years old or so and first took note of the phrase 'Merry Xmas,' my piety was offended by what I took to be the removal of 'Christ' from 'Christmas' only to be replaced by the universally recognized symbol for an unknown quantity, 'X.' But it wasn't long before I realized that the 'X' was merely a font-challenged typesetter's attempt at rendering the Greek Chi, an ancient abbreviation for 'Christ.' There is therefore nothing at all offensive in the expression 'Xmas.' Year after year, however, certain ignorant Christians who are old enough to know better make the mistake that I made when I was eight and corrected when I was ten.

It just now occurs to me that 'Xmas' may be susceptible of a quasi-Tillichian reading. Paul Tillich is famous for his benighted definition of 'God' as 'whatever is one's ultimate concern.' Well, take the 'X' in 'Xmas' as a variable the values of which are whatever one wants to celebrate at this time of year. So for some, 'Xmas' will amount to Solsticemas, for burglars Swagmas, for materialists Lootmas, for gluttons Foodmas, for inebriates Hoochmas, and for ACLU extremists Antichristianitymas.

A reader suggests some further constructions:

For those who love the capitol of the Czech Republic: Pragmas. For Dutch Reformed theologians of Frisian extraction who think Christmas is silly: Hoekemas. For Dutch Reformed philosophy professors of Frisian extraction who like preserves on their toast: Jellemas. For fans of older British sci-fi flicks: Quatermas. For those who buy every special seasonal periodical they can get their hands on: Magmas. One could probably multiply such examples ad nauseum, so I won't.

How could an ACLU bonehead object to 'Xmas' so construed? No doubt he would find a way.

A while back I quipped that "Aporeticians qua aporeticians do not celebrate Christmas. They celebrate Enigmas." My man Hodges shot back: "But they do celebrate 'X-mas'! (Or maybe they 'cerebrate' it?)"

Merry Chimas to all, and to all a good night.

Christians and Muslims: Exactly One God, so the Same God?

Michael Rea, no slouch of a philosopher, makes the following surprising claim in the Huffington Post:

Christians and Muslims have very different beliefs about God; but they agree on this much: there is exactly one God. This common point of agreement is logically equivalent to [the] thesis that all Gods are the same God. In other words, everyone who worships a God worships the same God, no matter how different their views about God might be.

I am having trouble understanding this; perhaps the esteemed members of the MavPhil commentariat can help me. Doesn't Rea's claim succumb to an elementary counterexample?

Suppose there is exactly one God, but that Tom worships a nonexistent God. (Tom is perhaps a Mormon, or a Manichean, or a 'pastafarian.') It would then not be the case that "everyone who worships a God worships the same God." This is because the one existent God cannot be identical to a nonexistent God. Therefore, if there is exactly one God it does not follow that all Gods are the same God. What follows is merely that all existent Gods are the same God. But that is surely trivial. It is as trivial as saying that if I own exactly one house, then all the houses I own are the same house. (It is relevant to point out that if one owns x, then x exists whereas if one desires x, it does not follow that x exists. The relevance will emerge in a moment.)

How is the above trivial truth — There is exactly one God if and only if all existent Gods are the same God — supposed to help us with the question whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God? It does not help at all: it may be that the God Muslims worship does not exist while the God Christians worship does exist. Or the other way around.

Surely this is a logically consistent trio of propositions:

The Christian (triune) God exists.
The Muslim (non-triune) God does not exist.
There is exactly one God.

And this one as well:

The Christian (triune) God does not exist.
The Muslim (non-triune) God does exist.
There is exactly one God.

So it could be that while there is, i.e., exists, exactly one God, Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God. It could be that Muslims worship a nonexistent God. Or it could be that Christians worship a nonexistent God. Bear in mind that the one existent God cannot be both triune and not triune. Cannot be: if God is triune, then essentially triune, and if essentially triune, then necessarily triune given that God is a necessary being. The same modal upshot if God is not triune but unitarian.

So What Was Rea Thinking?

That 'worships' is a verb of success? If 'worships' is a verb of success, then Rea's claim is true. To say that 'worships' is a verb of success is to say that it follows from x's worshiping y that both x and y exist. But if Rea assumes that 'worships' is a verb of success, then he simply begs the question. The question is whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God on the assumption that they both hold, namely, that there is exactly one God. To assume that whatever one worships exists is equivalent under the just-named assumption to assuming that the Christian and Muslim must be worshiping the same God. But then the question is begged.

A Dilemma

Either 'worships' is a verb of success or it is not. If it is a verb of success, then Rea begs the question. But if he holds that 'worships' is not a verb of success, then he allows the possibility that either the Muslim or the Christian worships a God that does not exist. Ergo, etc.

'Worships' is not Reasonably Viewed as a Verb of Success

'Sees' has both a phenomenological use according to which it is not a verb of success and a use as a verb of success. It is reasonably taken to have both uses. But all I need for present purposes is the point that 'sees' is reasonably used as a verb of success: if I see x, then x exists. On this use of 'see,' one cannot see what does not exist. What's more, it is reasonable to say that there is a causal explanation of my being in a state as of seeing a tree. The explanation is that the state is caused (in part) by the tree which would not be the case if the tree did not exist. Why do I know have a visual experience as of a tree? Becuase there really is a tree that is causing me to have this very experience. This makes some sense.

Does 'worships' have a reasonable use as a verb of success? I say No. God, being a pure spirit, is not given to the senses; nor is he 'giveable' to the senses: he is not a possible object of sinnliche Anschauung in Kantian jargon. We have no direct sensory evidence of the existence of God. So it doesn't make much sense to try to explain my being in a worshipful state by saying that my being in this state is caused by God. Nor does it make much sense to say that my use of 'God' succeeds in referring to God because God caused my use of the name.

Worship as an Intentional (Object-Directed) State

In any case, to worship is to worship something, with no guarantee that the item worshiped exists. In this respect worship is like belief: to believe is to believe something with no guarantee that what one believes is the case. If S knows that p, it follows that p is true; if S believes that p, it does not follow that p is true. The proposition believed may or my not be true without prejudice to one's being in a state of belief.

I say the same is true of worship/worshiping. The object of worship may or may not exist without prejudice to one's being in a worshipful state with respect to it. So it could be that Muslims worship a God that does not exist. How might this come about? It would come about if nothing in reality satisfies the definite description that they associate wth their use of 'Allah' and equivalents. And how could that be? That would be so if the true God is triune.

Interim Conclusion

There are very deep issues here and I am but scratching the surface in bloggity-blog style. But one thing is clear to me: one cannot resolve the question whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God with "a flick of the philosophical wrist" to borrow a cute phrase from Lydia McGrew (my only distaff reader?) who dropped it in an earlier comment thread.

There is no 'quickie' solution here, with all due respect to Michael Rea and Francis Beckwith and Dale Tuggy et al.

It is Christmas Eve. Time to punch the clock. I leave you with a fine rendition of Silver Bells.

Self-Control and Self-Esteem

"Self-control is infinitely more important that self-esteem." (Dennis Prager)

Delete 'infinitely' and you have an important truth pithily and accurately expressed. With self-control one can develop attributes that justify one's self-esteem. Without it one may come to an untimely end as did Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, who brought about his own death through a lack of self-control.

Liberals, of course, preach an empty self-esteem.

Dale Tuggy’s Round-Up of the Wheaton Dust-Up

This thing has really 'gone viral' as they say. A tip of the holiday hat to Dale for his excellent compilation of hyperlinks and commentary. Everybody and his uncle seems eager to jump into the fray, one that is at once bitterly political and deeply philosophical.

A moment ago I headed over to The Catholic Thing to drop a link there to my piece, but the combox to Dr. Beckwith's article has been closed at 170 comments. Just as well. That comment zone resembles the Augean stables and you are well-advised to don your hip-length boots before wading in. "Don we now our gay apparel." Better yet, just read the material Dale has selected.

Chris Hedges

I saw Chris Hedges on C-SPAN the other night. Four years ago I heard him in the same venue and was much impressed by what he had to say about pornography. Oxymoronic as it may sound, I'd say Hedges is a decent leftist. Decent but delusional, as witness this opening paragraph of The Creeping Villainy of American Politics:

The threefold rise in hate crimes against Muslims since the Paris and San Bernardino attacks and the acceptance of hate speech as a legitimate form of political discourse signal the morbidity of our civil society. The body politic is coughing up blood. The daily amplification of this hate speech by a commercial media whose sole concern is ratings and advertising dollars rather than serving as a bulwark to protect society presages a descent into the protofascist nightmare of racism, indiscriminate violence against the marginalized, and a blind celebration of American chauvinism, militarism and bigotry.

Who accepts hate speech as a legitimate form of political discourse? And, more importantly, what do leftists mean by 'hate speech'? Suppose I call for a moratorium on immigration from Muslim lands, or, more precisely, a moratorium on the immigration of Muslims from any land. Is my call 'hate speech'? Not to any rational person. You may disagree with this proposal but it is reasonable and prudent given the state of the world, and numerous reasons can be given in support of it. It reflects no hatred of Muslims, but a sober recognition of the threat they pose to our culture and values, a culture that we of course have a right to defend.

This suggests that leftists use 'hate speech' in such a broad way that it includes any speech with which they disagree. Should we conclude that leftists are opposed to free speech and open debate and free inquiry? I am afraid so. In this respect they are just like the orthodox Muslims they quite strangely defend. They think they own dissent. And surely it is passing strange for so many of them to defend Islam given the pronounced 'libertine wobble' of so many leftists. Don't these people defend homosexual practices and alternative sexual lifestyles generally? They would be the first to lose their heads under Sharia. Do our lefty pals perhaps have a death wish?

Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?

Francis Beckwith and Dale Tuggy, two philosophers I respect, answer in the affirmative in recent articles. While neither are obviously wrong, neither are obviously right either, and neither seem to appreciate the depth and difficulty of the question. In all fairness, though, the two articles in question were written for popular consumption.

Beckwith begins with an obvious point: from a difference in names one cannot validly infer a difference in nominata. 'Muhammad Ali' and 'Cassius Clay,' though different names, refer to the same person. The same goes for 'George Orwell' and 'Eric Blair.' They refer to the same writer. So from the difference of 'Yahweh' and 'Allah' one cannot infer that Yahweh and Allah are numerically different Gods. Similarly, with 'God' and 'Allah.' Difference in names is consistent with sameness of referent. But difference in names is also consistent with difference of referents, a point that Beckwith does not make. 'Trump' and 'Obama' are different names and they refer to different people. 'Trump' and 'Zeus' are different names but only one of them refers, which implies that they do not have the same referent. It may be that 'God' and 'Allah' are like 'Trump' and 'Zeus' or like 'Trump' and 'Pegasus.'

Another obvious point Beckwith makes is that if some people have true beliefs about x, and other people have false beliefs about x, it does not follow that there is no one x that these people have true and false beliefs about. Suppose Sam believes (falsely) that Karl Marx is a Russian while Dave believes (truly) that he is a German. That is consistent with there being one and same philosopher that they have beliefs about and are referring to. Now suppose God is triune. Then (normative) Christians have the true belief that God is triune while (normative) Muslims have the false belief that God is not triune. This seems consistent with there being one God about whom they have different beliefs but to whom they both refer and worship. But it is also consistent with a difference in referent. It could be that when a Christian uses 'God' he refers to something while a Muslim refers to nothing when he uses 'Allah.'

Of course, both Christian and Muslim intend to refer to something real with their uses of 'God' and 'Allah.' But the question is whether they both succeed in referring to something real and whether that thing is the same thing. It could be that one succeeds while the other fails. And it could be that both succeed but succeed in referring to different items.

Consider God and Zeus. Will you say that the Christian and the ancient Greek polytheist worship the same God except that the Greek has false beliefs about their common object of worship, believing as he does that Zeus is a superman who lives on a mountain top, literally hurls thunderbolts, etc.? Or will you say that there is no one God that they worship, that the Christian worships a being that exists while the Greek worships a nonexistent object? And if you say the latter, why not also say the same about God and Allah, namely, that there is no one being that they both worship, that the Christian worships the true God, the God that really exists, whereas Muslims worship a God that does not exist?

And then there is the God of the orthodox Christian and the Deus sive Natura of Spinoza. Would it make sense to say that the orthodox Christian and the Spinozist worship the same God? Would it make sense for the orthodox Christian to give this little speech:

We and the Spinozists worship the same God, the one and only God, but we have different beliefs about this same God. We Christians believe (truly) that God is a transcendent being who could exist without having created anything, whereas Spinozists believe (falsely) that God is immanent and could not have existed without having created anything. Still and all, we and the Spinozists are referring to and worshiping exactly the same God.

Are the Christians and the Spinozists referring to one and the same being and differing merely about its attributes? I say No! The conceptions of deity are so radically different that there cannot be one and the same item to which they both refer when they say 'God' or Deus. (Deus is Latin for 'God.')

This is blindingly obvious in the case of the orthodox Christian versus the Feuerbachian. They both talk and write about God. Do they refer to one and same being with 'God' or 'Gott' and differ merely on his attributes? This is impossible. For the Feuerbachian, God is an unconsciously projected anthropomorphic projection. For the orthodox Christian, God is no such thing: he exists in reality beyond all human thoughts, desires, projections. It's the other way around: Man is a theomorphic projection. The characteristic Feuerbachian thesis, although it appears by its surface structure to be a predication ascribing a property to God, namely, the property of being an unconsciously projected anthropomorphic projection, is really a negative existential proposition equivalent to 'God does not exist.' Compare: 'Sherlock Holmes is a purely fictional item.' Is this at logical bottom a predication? Pace Meinong, it is not: in its depth structure it is a negative existential equivalent to 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist.' To be precise, it entails the latter. For it also conveys that the character Holmes figures in an extant piece of fiction which of course does exist.

To sum up the main point: there are concepts so radically different that they cannot be concepts of one and the same thing. Some people say that thoughts, i.e., acts or episodes of thinking, are brain states. Others object: "Thoughts are intentional or object-directed, whereas no physical state is object-directed; hence, no thought is a brain state." This is equivalent to maintaining that the concept intentional state and the concept physical state cannot be instantiated by one and the same item. So it cannot be the case that the mind-brain identity theorist and I are referring to the same item when I refer to my occurrent desiring of a double espresso.

Dale Tuggy writes,

Christians and Muslims disagree about whether God has a Son, right? Then, they’re talking about the same (alleged) being. They may disagree about “who God is” in the sense of what he’s done, what attributes he has, how many “Persons” are in him, and whether Muhammad was really his Messenger, etc. But disagreement assumes one subject-matter – here, one god.

I think Tuggy is making a mistake here. Surely disagreement about the properties of a putatively self-same x does not entail that there is in reality one and the same x under discussion, although it is logically consistent with it.

A dispute between me and Ed Feser, say, about whether our mutual acquaintance Tuggy has a son no doubt presupposes, and thus entails, that there is one and the same man whom we are talking about. It would be absurd to maintain that there are two Tuggys, my Tuggy and Ed's where mine has a son and Ed's does not. It would be absurd for me to say, "I'm talking about the true Tuggy while you, Ed, are talking about a different Tuggy, one that doesn't exist. You are referencing, if not worshipping, a false Tuggy." Why is this absurd? Because we are both acquainted with the man ('in the flesh,' by sense-perception) and we are arguing merely over the properties of the one and the same man with whom we are both acquainted. There is simply no question but that he exists and that we are both referring to him. The dispute concerns his attributes.

But of course the situation is different with God. We are not acquainted with God: God, unlike Tuggy, is not given to the senses. Mystical intuition and revelation aside, we are thrown back upon our concepts of God. And so it may be that the dispute over whether God is triune or not is not a dispute that presupposes that there is one subject-matter, but rather a dispute over whether the Christian concept of God (which includes the sub-concept triune) is instantiated or whether the Muslim concept (which does not include the subconcept triune) is instantiated. Note that they cannot both be instantiated by the same item similarly as the concept object-directed state and the concept physical state cannot be instantiated by one and the same item such as my desiring an espresso.

The point I am making against both Beckwith and Tuggy is that it is not at all obvious which of the following views is correct:

V1: Christian and Muslim can worship the same God, even though one of them must have a false belief about God, whether it be the belief that God is unitarian or the belief that God is trinitarian.

V2: Christian and Muslim must worship different Gods precisely because they have mutually exclusive conceptions of God. So it is not that one of them has a false belief about the one God they both worship; it is rather that one of them does not worship the true God at all.

There is no easy way to decide rationally between these two views. We have to delve into the philosophy of language and ask how reference is achieved. How do linguistic expressions attach or apply to extralinguistic entities? How do words grab onto the (extralinguistic) world? In particular, how do nominal expressions work? What makes my utterance of 'Socrates' denote Socrates rather than someone or something else? What makes my use of 'God' (i) have a referent at all and (ii) have the precise referent it has?

It is reasonable to hold, with Frege, Russell, Searle, and many others, that reference is routed through, and determined by, sense: an expression picks out its object in virtue of the latter's unique satisfaction of a description associated with the referring expression, a description that unpacks the expression's sense. If we think of reference in this way, then 'God' refers to whatever entity, if any, that satisfies the definite description encapsulated in 'God' as this term is used in a given linguistic community.

Given that God is not an actual or possible object of (sense) experience, this seems like a reasonable approach to take. The idea is that 'God' is a definite description in disguise so that 'God' refers to whichever entity satisfies the description associated with 'God.' The reference relation is then one of satisfaction. A grammatically singular term t refers to x if and only if x exists and x satisfies the description associated with t. Now consider two candidate definite descriptions, the first corresponding to the Muslim conception, the second corresponding to the Christian.

D1: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo and is unitarian'

D2: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo, and is triune.'

Suppose that reference is not direct, but routed through sense, or mediated by a description, in the manner explained above. It is easy to see that no one entity can satisfy both (D1) and (D2). For while the descriptions overlap, nothing can be both unitarian and triune. So if reference is routed through sense, then Christian and Muslim cannot be referring to the same being. Indeed, one of them is not succeeding in referring at all. For if God is triune, nothing in reality answers to the Muslim's conception of God. And if God is unitarian, then nothing in reality answers to the Christian conception.

And so, contrary to what Miroslav Volf maintains, the four points of commonality in the Christian and Muslim conceptions do NOT "establish the claim that in their worship of God, Muslims and Christians refer to the same object." (Allah: A Christian Response, HarperCollins 2011, p. 110.) The four points are:

a. There is exactly one God.
b. God is the creator of everything distinct from himself.
c. God is transcendent: he is radically different from everything distinct from himself.
d. God is good.

For if reference to God is mediated by a conception which includes the subconcept triune or else the subconcept unitarian, then the reference cannot be to the same entity. And this despite the conceptual overlap represented by (a)-(d).

A mundane example (adapted from Saul Kripke) will make this more clear. Sally sees a handsome man at a party standing in the corner drinking a clear bubbly liquid from a cocktail glass. She turns to her companion Nancy and says, "The man standing in the corner drinking champagne is handsome!" Suppose the man is not drinking champagne, but mineral water instead. Has Sally succeeded in referring to the man or not?

Argumentative Nancy, who knows that no alcohol is being served at the party, and who also finds the man handsome, says, "You are not referring to anything: there is no man in the corner drinking champagne. The man is drinking mineral water or some other bubbly clear beverage. Nothing satisfies your definite description. There is no one man we both admire. Your handsome man does not exist, but mine does."

Now in this example what we would intuitively say is that Sally did succeed in referring to someone using a definite description even though the object she succeeded in referring to does not satisfy the description. Intuitively, we would say that Sally simply has a false belief about the object to which she is successfully referring, and that Sally and Nancy are referring to and admiring the very same man.

But note how this case differs from the God case. Both women see the man in the corner. But God is not an object of possible (sense) experience. We don't see God in this life. Hence the reference of 'God' cannot be nailed down perceptually. A burning bush is an object of possible sense experience, and God may manifest himself in a burning bush; but God is not a burning bush, and the referent of 'God' cannot be a burning bush. The man in the corner that the women sees and admire is not a manifestation of a man, but a man himself.

Given that God is not literally seen or otherwise sense-perceived in this life, then, apart from mystical experience and revelation, the only way to get at God is via concepts and descriptions. And so it seems that in the God case what we succeed in referring to is whatever satisfies the definite description that unpacks our conception of God.

My tentative conclusion, then, is that (i) if we accept a description theory of names, the Christian and Muslim do not refer to the same being when they use 'God' or 'Allah' and (ii) that a description theory of names is what we must invoke given the non-perceivability of God. Christian and Muslim do not refer to the same being because no one being can satisfy both (D1) and (D2) above: nothing can be both triune and not triune any more than one man can both be drinking champagne and not drinking champagne at the same time.

If, on the other hand, 'God' is a logically proper name whose reference is direct and not routed through sense or mediated by a definite description, then what would make 'God' or a particular use of 'God' refer to God? If names are Millian tags, we surely cannot 'tag' God in the way I could tag a stray cat with the name 'Mungo.'

One might propose a causal theory of names.

The causal theory of names of Saul Kripke et al. requires that there be an initial baptism of the target of reference, a baptism at which the name is first introduced. This can come about by ostension: Pointing to a newly acquired kitten, I bestow upon it the moniker, 'Mungojerrie.' Or it can come about by the use of a reference-fixing definite description: Let 'Neptune' denote the celestial object responsible for the perturbation of the orbit of Uranus. In the second case, it may be that the object whose name is being introduced is not itself present at the baptismal ceremony. What is present, or observable, are certain effects of the object hypothesized. (See Saul Kripke Naming and Necessity, Harvard 1980 p. 79, n. 33 and p. 96, n. 42.)

As I understand it, a necessary condition for successful reference on the causal theory is that a speaker's use of a name be causally connected (either directly or indirectly via a causal chain) with the object referred to. We can refer to objects only if we stand in some causal relation to them (direct or indirect). So my use of 'God' refers to God not because there is something that satisfies the definite description or Searlean disjunction of definite descriptions that unpack the sense of 'God' as I use the term, but because my use of 'God' can be traced back though a long causal chain to an initial baptism, as it were, of God by, say, Moses on Mt. Sinai.

A particular use of a name is presumably caused by an earlier use. But eventually there must be an initial use. Imagine Moses on Mt. Sinai. He has a profound mystical experience of a being who conveys to his mind such exogenic locutions as "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me." Moses applies 'God' or 'YHWH' to the being he believes is addressing him in the experience. But what makes the name the name of the being? One may say: the being or an effect of the being is simply labelled or tagged with the name in an initial 'baptism.'

But a certain indeterminacy seems to creep in if we think of the semantic relation of referring as explicable in terms of tagging and causation (as opposed to in terms of the non-causal relation of satisfaction of a definite description encapsulated in a grammatically proper name). For is it the (mystical) experience of God that causes the use of 'God'? Or is it God himself who causes the use of 'God'? If the former, then 'God' refers to an experience had by Moses and not to God. Surely God is not an experience. But if God is the cause of Moses' use of 'God,' then the mystical experience must be veridical. (Cf. Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God, Cambridge UP, 1991, p. 11.)

So if we set aside mystical experience and the question of its veridicality, it seems we ought to adopt a description theory of the divine names with the consequences mentioned in (i) above. If, on the other hand, a causal theory of divine names names is tenable, and if the causal chain extends from Moses down to Christians and (later) to Muslims, then a case could be made that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all referring to the same God when they use 'God' and such equivalents as 'Yahweh' and 'Allah.'

So it looks like there is no easy answer to the title question. It depends on the resolution of intricate questions in the philosophy of language.

Hate Crimes Against Jews and Muslims

Supposing we acquiesce in the 'hate crimes' terminology, here are some interesting statistics from the FBI for 2013:

Religious bias

Of the 1,223 victims of anti-religious hate crimes:

60.3 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Jewish bias.
13.7 percent were victims of anti-Islamic (Muslim) bias.
6.1 percent were victims of anti-Catholic bias.
4.3 percent were victims of bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).
3.8 percent were victims of anti-Protestant bias.
0.6 percent were victims of anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
11.2 percent were victims of bias against other religions (anti-other religion). (Based on Table 1.)