January 2016 – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

Descartes Meets Meinong: Might I be a Nonexistent Individual?

Lukas Novak thinks I am being politically, or rather philosophically, 'correct' in rejecting Meinongianism. And a relier on 'intuitions' to boot. I plead innocent to the first charge. As for the second, I rather doubt one can do philosophy at all without appealing to some intuition somewhere. That would make for an interesting metaphilosophical discussion. For now, however, an argument against Meinongianism. I will join the Frenchman to beat back the Austrian. But first we have to understand at least some of what the great Austrian philosopher Alexius von Meinong was about. What follows is a rough sketch that leaves a lot out. It is based on Meinong's writings, but also on those of distinguished commentators including J. N. Findlay, Roderick Chisholm, Karel Lambert, Terence Parsons, Richard Routley/Sylvan, Reinhardt Grossmann, and others.

A Meinongian Primer

The characteristic Meinongian thesis is the doctrine that some items have no Being whatsoever: they neither exist nor subsist nor have any other mode of Being. A Meinongian item (M-item) is something, not nothing; it is just that it has no Being. A famous example is the golden mountain. It has no Being at all according to Meinong. It is a pure Sosein, a pure whatness, a Sosein without Dasein, "beyond Being and non-Being." (jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein.) What's more, the golden mountain actually has properties: it is actually made of gold and actually a mountain. It is not merely possibly these things, nor is it merely imagined or merely thought to be these things. The golden mountain is actually made of gold even though it does not exist or subsist or enjoy esse intentionale or any other mode of Being!

Furthermore, the golden mountain, though in one sense merely possible, is in itself actual, not merely possible. It is merely possible in relation to existence, but in itself it is actual, though nonexistent. The realm of Aussersein is a realm of actualia. This holds also for the round square which is both actually round and actually square. It is in one sense impossible: it cannot exist, or subsist either. But it is not nothing: it is some actual item even though it has no Being whatsoever. Actually round, actually square, actually an item!

We should also note that the golden mountain is an incomplete object: it has exactly two properties, the ones mentioned, but none of their entailments. The set of an M-object's properties is not closed under entailment. Consider the blue triangle. It is not colored. Nor is it either isoceles nor not isoceles.

A number of philosophers, Kant being one of them, held to the Indifference of Sosein and Sein, but what is characteristic of Meinong is the radical Independence of Sosein from Sein:

Indifference: The being or nonbeing of an item is no part of its nature or Sosein. Whether an item is or is not makes no difference to what it is.

Independence: An item has a nature or Sosein whether or not it has Being and so even if it has no Being at all. In no instance does property-possession entail existence. There are no existence-entailing properties.

The two principles are clearly distinct. The first principle implies that nothing is such that its nature entails its existence. But it is neutral on the question that the second principle takes a stand on. For the second principle implies that an item can actually have a nature without existing, and indeed without having any Being at all. (Nature = conjunction of monadic properties.)

Independence entails Indifference. For if an item has a nature whether or not it has Being, then a fortiori it is what it is whether or not it is. But the converse entailment does not hold. For consistently with holding Indifference one could hold that Being is a necessary condition of property-possession: nothing can have properties unless it either exists or subsists or has some other mode of Being. Independence, however, implies that the actual possession of properties does not require that the property-possessor have any Being at all.

The Question

Do I know, and how do I know, that I am not a nonexistent object, say, a purely fictional individual like Hamlet? Can I employ the Cartesian cogito to assure myself that I am not a nonexistent person?

An Argument

The following is excerpted from my "Does Existence Itself Exist? Transcendental Nihilism Meets the Paradigm Theory" in The Philosophy of Panayot Butchvarov: A Collegial Evaluation, ed. Larry Lee Blackman, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005, pp. 57-73, excerpt pp. 67-68.

If anything can count as an established result in philosophy, it is the soundness of Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum 'argument.' Thus to the query, 'How do I know that I exist?', the Cartesian answer is that the very act of doubting that one exists proves that one indubitably exists. Now this may not amount to a proof that a substantial self, a res cogitans, exists; and this for the reason that one may doubt whether acts of thinking emanate from a metaphysical ego. But the cogito certainly does prove that something exists, even if this is only an act of thinking or a momentary bundle of acts of thinking. Thus I know with certainty that my present doubting is not a nonexistent object. But if Meinong were right, my present doubting could easily be a nonexistent object, indeed, a nonexistent object that actually has the property of being indubitably apparent to itself.

For on Meinongian principles, I could, for all I could claim to know, be a fictional character, one who cannot doubt his own existence. In that case, the inability to doubt one's own existence would not prove that one actually exists. This intolerable result certainly looks like a reductio ad absurdum of the Meinongian theory. If anything is clear, it is that I know, in the strictest sense of the word, that I am not a fictional character. My present doubting that I exist is an object that has the property of being indubitable, but cannot have this property without existing. It follows that there are objects whose actual possession of properties entails their existence. This implies the falsity of Meinong's principle of the independence of Sosein from Sein, and with it the view that existence is extrinsic to every object. Forced to choose between Descartes and Meinong, we ought to side with Descartes.

Is the Above Argument Rationally Compelling?

What is the difference between me enacting the cogito and a purely fictional Hamlet-like character — Hamlet* — enacting the cogito? What I want to say is that Hamlet* is not an actual individual and does not actually have any properties, including the property of being unable to doubt his own existence. Unlike me. I really exist and can assure myself of my existence as a thinking thing via the cogito, but Hamlet* is purely fictional, hence does not exist and so cannot assure himself of his existence via the cogito.

That is what I want to say, of course, but then I beg the question against Meinong. For if an item can actually have properties without existing, then it is epistemically possible that I am in the same 'boat' with Hamlet*: we are both purely fictional nonexistent items.

So I don't believe I can show compellingly that Meinong is wrong in his characteristic claims using the Cartesian cogito. But I have given an argument, and it is a reasonable argument. So I am rationally justified in rejecting Meinongianism, and justified in just insisting that I am of course not a nonexistent person but a fully existent person with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto.

This fits nicely with my metaphilosophy which teaches that there are no rationally compelling arguments for ANY substantive thesis in philosophy and cognate areas of controversy.

So this is enough to answer Novak's first charge. And perhaps also his second. In the end I recur to the intuition that I really exist, and that I am not merely possible, or purely fictional, or nonexistent. The appeal to intuition is justified. And must not Novak also appeal to an intuition if he disagrees with me, the intution, say, that some items have no Being at all? Or does he have a knock-down argument for that thesis?

Harry Binswanger’s Conversion

It's an old story. An adolescent adrift reads or hears Ayn Rand and suddenly has something to live for. (Via Objectiblog)

Why Some Think that Terrorism is No Big Deal

Bryan Caplan quotes "the brilliant Nathan Smith" who advances "A familiar truism well-expressed:"

If we're still driving cars despite thousands of automobile accident deaths per year, we don't really set the value of human life so high that attacks in Paris (130 victims) and San Bernardino (22 victims) objectively warrant the massive media attention, revolutions in foreign policy, and proposals to shut the borders completely to Muslims that they evoke. Such events get such attention because of statistical illiteracy.

A truism is a truth that is obviously true. The above, however, is not true at all, let alone obviously true. It is obviously idiotic.

The Caplan/Smith argument is that because the number of auto-related deaths is much greater than terror-related deaths so far, a high level of concern about terrorism is not objectively warranted.

But this sort of reasoning involves vicious abstraction. It is highly unreasonable to consider merely the numbers on both sides while abstracting from the motives of the terrorists and the societal impact of terrorism. With very few exceptions, drivers do not intend to kill anyone, and when their actions bring about deaths, those deaths involve only themselves and a few others.

Suppose a drunk driver unintentionally causes the death of himself and a family of five. Total deaths = 6. Other people will be affected, of course, but not many. (The wife and children of the drunk driver will now have less income to get by on, etc.) The effects are confined to a small circle of acquaintances and the effects are not additive in the way that the effects of terror events are additive.

One cannot reasonably abstract from the political agenda of terrorists and the effects even a few terrorist events have on an entire society. Ask yourself: has your life changed at all since 9/11? It most certainly has if you travel by air whether domestically or internationally. And even if you don't. Terrorists don't have to kill large numbers to attain their political goal and wreak large-scale disruption. The Tsarnaev attack on the Boston Marathon shut down the city for a few days. Same with Paris, San Bernardino, Madrid, London, etc. That had all sorts of repercussions economic and psychological.

And if you care about civil liberties, then you should take the terror threat seriously and do your bit to combat it. For the more terror, the more government surveillance and the more infringement of civil liberties.

There is also the obvious point that jihadis would kill millions if they could. Would they use nukes against the West if they could? Of course they would. And that would change the raw numbers!

For more on this topic as it relates to gun deaths, see my Thinking Clearly About Terrorist and Gun-Related Deaths.

UPDATE 1/15. Today's Wall Street Journal, B1, reports that travel to Paris plunged in the wake of the November terror attacks. International flight bookings to Paris were down by 78% from Italy, 64% from Spain, 62% from other, 54% from the U.S., 51% from China, 48% from the U. K., 48% from Germany, and 41% from Canada. This for the period from 14 November to 15 December, 2105, as compared to a year earlier.

And yet only 130 were killed in the recent Parisian terror attacks. What this shows is that terrorists do not have to kill large numbers of people to have a huge effect on the world economy and on the quality of life everywhere. The fact that the people who stayed away vastly overestimated the danger to themselves is irrelevant.

Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method

My latest publication. Here is a pre-print version.

Political Correctness Can Get You Raped

Here. Which is more important, to protect women from rape or to be a p.c.-whipped multi-culti?

Reflections on Wise and Suicidal Immigration

An outstanding essay by Victor Davis Hanson, except that he fails to address the question of Muslim immigration and the question of a moratorium on it. A failure of nerve? A desire to remain comfortably respectable in his ivory tower? You will recall the 'conservative' Lindsay Graham's denunciation of Donald Trump as a 'xenophobe' when he made his moratorium proposal. That's exactly how liberals talk! The implication is that one has an irrational fear of foreigners because one has an entirely reasonable desire to keep jihadis out of the country.

How insidious is political correctness! It infects even conservatives.

More Scientistic Bullshit

Yet another exercise in silly scientism. Shut up already with this stuff. I've refuted this genre of crap too many times before. Here is a sample: Bull Meets Shovel: Could Consciousness be a Conjuring Trick?

What Kind of Religion is Islam?

Our old friend Jeff Hodges recommends this outstanding Commentary article by Alain Besançon. Extracts:

Within this scheme, where to locate Islam? For Christians and Jews alike, the difficulty—and the embarrassment—lie in the indisputable fact that Islam believes in one God, eternal, almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, merciful. Is not this formula, which I have adapted from the Christian credo, continuous with the words spoken by the Lord when He passed before Moses on Mount Sinai at the second giving of the Ten Commandments? Yes. But those same Ten Commandments open by identifying God as the liberator of His people in a particular historical situation: “I am the Lord your God Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” In the God of the Qur’an, there is no such history.

Nor is that the only problem that presents itself if one tries to approach Islam as a revealed religion, at least as Christians and Jews understand the term. The Christian Church believes that it is the desire of the revealed God to manifest Himself and communicate His message of redemption, letting man know of the truths that elude the grasp of the human mind unaided by grace. To the revelation contained in the Hebrew Bible, the Christians added a “new testament,” while continuing to recognize the full authority of the document given before the arrival of their messiah.

Muslims also hold that they received a revelation. It is conceived, however, not as part of a historical narrative but as the transmission of an eternally preexisting text. In this transmission, the prophet, Muhammad, does not play a role akin to that of Moses and Jesus. He does nothing but receive texts, which he repeats as if under dictation. As opposed to the Bible, which Christians declare to have been “inspired,” the Qur’an is uncreated. It is the uncreated Word of God.

[. . .]

Thus, for a Christian as for a Jew, there can be no continuity between the Bible and the Qur’an. The point holds even for those passages reflecting an evident concurrence on the idea of the one God. Although Muslims like to enumerate the 99 names of God, missing from the list, but central to the Jewish and even more so to the Christian conception of God, is “Father”—i.e., a personal God capable of a reciprocal and loving relation with men. The one God of the Qur’an, the God Who demands submission, is a distant God; to call him “Father” would be an anthropomorphic sacrilege. The Muslim God is utterly impassive; to ascribe loving feelings to Him would be suspect.

Are Muslims, then, like Jews and Christians, “children of Abraham”? The Abraham whom Islam claims for itself is yet another messenger—and a Muslim. He is not the common father first of Israel and then of Christians who share his faith. Indeed, since the truth, according to the Qur’an, was given totally on the first day and to the first man, it is inconceivable that Abraham could have played the founding role assigned to him by Jews and Christians. Rather, the Ibrahim of the Qur’an takes part in Muslim worship by building the Ka’ba temple and instituting the pilgrimage to Mecca. Far from Muhammad sharing the faith of Abraham, it is Abraham who holds the faith of Muhammad.

[. . .]

Much fun has been made, wrongly, of the Muslim notion of paradise. Admittedly, it is not like the Jewish or Christian notion, which envisions an eternity participating in the life of the divine. In the other-world of Islam, God remains separate and inaccessible, but man finds there forgiveness, peace, “satisfaction.” If biblical religion suggests a road map that originates in a garden, Eden, and finishes in a city, the heavenly Jerusalem, the Qur’an charts a return to the garden. Ancient mythologies are replete with similar images: idealized banquets with flowing cups, beautiful virgins and young men, a climate of heavenly satiety in which all desire is fulfilled.

In concordance with natural religion (and with the Hellenistic substratum on which Islam was built), Muslim religious life offers more than one model of piety. For the truly devout, two ways are open, just as in the Greco-Roman world: philosophy (Arab falsafa, itself heavily impregnated with neo-Platonism) and mysticism. Less rigorous souls, with the help of the law and moderate observance of the “five pillars” of Islam, can adhere to a mild but perfectly sufficient religious regimen. This is surely a great advantage over the two biblical religions, which expect of believers a greater scrupulousness and a deeper introspection; it is also, once more, reminiscent of ancient paganism, whose rites were designed to ornament and to enhance the individual’s natural, spontaneous sense of the divine.

From this perspective, two facts about Islam that always astonished medieval Christians seem not so astonishing after all: the difficulty of converting Muslims, and the stubborn attachment to their faith of even the most superficially observant. From the Muslim point of view, it was absurd to become a Christian, because Christianity was a religion of the past whose best parts had been included in and superseded by Islam. Even more basically, Christianity was anti-natural: just as Manuel’s Muslim debater insisted, its moral requirements exceeded human capacities, and its central mysteries defied reason.

[. . .]

Of all the contemporary expressions hinting at a consanguinity between the Qur’an and the Bible, the falsest may be “religions of the Book.” This phrase is itself of Islamic origin, but it has nothing to do with what it is widely and misleadingly supposed to suggest. It refers, rather, to a special legal category, “people of the Book,” that provided an exception for Christians and Jews to the general rule decreeing death or slavery for those who refused to convert to Islam. Instead, these groups (as well as two other peoples in possession of a scripture, namely Sabians and Zoroastrians) were allowed to retain their property and to continue to reside in Muslim lands with the second-class status of dhimmi.

That such expressions can be so lightly employed is a sign that elements of the Christian world are no longer capable of distinguishing clearly between their own religion and Islam. Are we returning to the times of John of Damascus, when it was possible to entertain the deluded thought that Islam might itself be a form of Christianity? It is not inconceivable. History records more than one instance of a Christian church unconsciously drifting toward Islam when it does not know any longer what it believes in, or why. This was precisely the fate of the Monophysites in Egypt, the Nestorians in Syria, the Donatists in North Africa, the Arians in Spain.

Islam is not some primitive, simplistic, unworked-out religion. It is neither a “religion of camel drivers” nor a religion of soft and malleable borders. To the contrary, it is an extremely strong religion, with a specific and highly crystallized conception of the relation between man and God. That conception is no less coherent than the Jewish and Christian conceptions; but it is quite opposed to them. Although some Christians may imagine that, because Muslims worship the common God of Israel, Islam and Christianity are closer than either is to paganism, this is not the case. In fact, Christianity and Islam are paradoxically but radically separated by the same God.

It follows that the effort to engage in “dialogue” with Muslims has been set on a mistaken course. The early Church fathers deemed the works of Virgil and Plato a preparatio evangelica—preparation for the Gospel, for the truth of Christianity. The Qur’an is neither a preparation for biblical religion nor a retroactive endorsement of it. In approaching Muslims, self-respecting Christians and others would do better to rely on what remains within Islam of natural religion—and of religious virtue—and to take into account the common humanity that Muslims share with all people everywhere.

Trinities Podcast 121: Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God? Part II

Master podcaster Dr. Dale Tuggy and I continue our discussion. He's got a great voice for this medium, doesn't he? Me, I'm too sotto voce.

What Problem Does Literary Fiction Pose?

More than one. Here is one. And as old Chisholm used to say, you are not philosophizing unless you have a puzzle. So try on this aporetic triad for size:

1. Purely fictional objects do not exist.

2. There are true sentences about purely fictional objects, e.g., 'Sherlock Holmes is a detective' and 'Sherlock Holmes is purely fictional.'

3. If a sentence of the form Fa is true, then there exists an x such that 'a' refers to x.

The triad is logically inconsistent: any two limbs entail the negation of the remaining one. So the limbs cannot all be true despite the considerable plausibility of each. So one of the propositions must be rejected. But the first is nonnegotiable since it is true by definition. The leaves two options: reject (2) or reject (3).

I want to avoid truck with Meinong if at all possible. So I should like to adhere to (3). There are no true singular sentences about what does not exist.

Suppose we reject (2). One way to do this is by supplying a paraphrase in which the apparent reference to the nonexistent is replaced by real reference to the existent. For example, the apparent reference to Sherlock, who does not exist, is replaced by real reference to a story in which he figures, a story that, of course, exists. The elliptical approach is one way of implementing this paraphrastic strategy. Accordingly,

4. Sherlock Holmes is a detective

and

5. Sherlock Holmes is fictional

are elliptical for, respectively,

6. In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes is a detective

and

7. In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes is fictional.

But note that while (5) is plainly true, (7) is plainly false. The stroies represent the detective as a real individual, not a fictional individual! So (7) cannot be taken as elliptical for (5) This is a serious problem for the 'story operator' approach. Or consider the true

8. Sherlock Holmes does not exist.

(8) is surely not short for the false

9. In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes does not exist.

The point can be made with other 'extranuclear' predicates such as 'merely possible' and 'mythological.' If I say that Pegasus is mythological, I don't mean that, according to legend, Pegasus is mythological.

I'll end with a different challenge to the story operator approach. Consider

10. Pinocchio was less of a liar than Barack Obama.

Whether you consider (1) true or false, it is certainly not elliptical for

11. In Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), Pinocchio was less of a liar than Barack Obama.

To put it vaguely, one problem with the story operator approach is that it traps fictional characters within particular stories, songs, legends, tales, etc. so that (i) it becomes difficult to understand how they can show up in different different stories, songs, etc. as they obviously do in the cases of Faust and Pinocchio, and (ii) it becomes difficult to understand how they can show up in comparisons with nonfictional individuals.

Is there a tenable solution to my triad or is it a genuine aporia?

God and Mind: Indiscernibility Arguments

Are the Christian and Muslim Gods the same? Why not settle this in short order with a nice, crisp, Indiscernibility argument? To wit,

a. If x = y, then x, y share all intrinsic properties. (A version of the Indiscernibility of Identicals)
b. The God of the Christians and that of the Muslims do not share all intrinsic properties: the former is triune while the latter is not.
Therefore
c. The God of the Christians is not identical to that of the Muslims.

Not so fast!

With no breach of formal-logical propriety one could just as easily run the argument in reverse, arguing from the negation of (c) to the negation of (b). They are the same God, so they do share all intrinsic properties!

But then what about triunity? One could claim that triunity is not an intrinsic property. A Muslim might claim that triunity is a relational property, a property that involves a relation to the false beliefs of Christians. In other words, triunity is the relational property of being believed falsely by Christians to be a Trinity.

Clearly, a relational property of this sort cannot be used to show numerical diversity. Otherwise, one could 'show' that the morning and evening 'stars' are not the same because Shlomo of Brooklyn believes of one that it is a planet but of the other than it is a star.

Now consider a 'mind' argument.

a. If x = y, then x, y share all intrinsic properties. (A version of the Indiscernibility of Identicals)
b*. This occurrent thinking of Venus and its associated brain state do not share all intrinsic properties: my mental state is intentional (object-directed) whereas my brain state is not.
Therefore
c*. This occurrent thinking of Venus is not identical to its associated brain state.

Not so fast! A resolute token-token mind-brain identity theorist will run the argument in reverse, arguing from the negation of (c*) to the negation of (b*).

But then what about intentionality? The materialist could claim that intentionality is not an intrinsic property, but a relational one. Taking a page from Daniel Dennett, he might argue that intentionality is a matter of ascription: nothing is intrinsically intentional. We ascribe intentionality to what, in itself, is non-intentional. So in reality all there is is the brain state. The intentionality is our addition.

Now Dennett's ascriptivist theory of intentionality strikes me as absurd: it is either viciously infinitely regressive, or else viciously circular. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the infinite regress is benign. Can I show that it is not without begging the question?

Question for the distinguished MavPhil commentariat: Are there good grounds here for solubility-skepticism when it comes to philosophical problems?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ildefonso Fraga Ozuna and Baldemar Garza Huerta

Ildefonso Fraga Ozuna is better known as Sunny Ozuna of Sunny and the Sunglows fame. Their big hit was Talk to Me that made the #11 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in October, 1963. It is a cover of Little Willie John's effort of the same name from 1958.

The Sunglows became the Sunliners and came out with Just a Dream.

Baldemar Garza Huerta, also a Tejano, is better known as Freddy Fender.

Do Aquinas and Spinoza Refer to the Same God?

I put the following question to Francis Beckwith via e-mail:

Thomas Aquinas and Spinoza both hold that there is exactly one God. Would you say that when they use Deus they succeed in referring to one and the same God, but just have contradictory beliefs about this one and the same God? When I put this question to Dale Tuggy in his podcast discussion with me, he bit the bullet and said Yes to my great surprise.

Professor Beckwith responded:

. . . I am accepting what each faith tradition (at least in its orthodox formulations) believes about God: he is the self-existent subsistent source of all that receives its being from another. Does that include Spinoza’s God? Yes, with a caveat. He has the right God but the wrong universe. He gets the self-existent subsistent source right, but he gets that which receive its being from another wrong. It’s the univocal predication of the theistic personalists–God and nature are of the same order of being–except in reverse. This is why St. Thomas is the bomb. :-)

Before I reply to Beckwith, let us make sure we understand how the Spinozistic conception of God differs from, while partially overlapping with, the traditional conception we find in Augustine, Aquinas, et al. Steven Nadler in SEP writes,

According to the traditional Judeo-Christian conception of divinity, God is a transcendent creator, a being who causes a world distinct from himself to come into being by creating it out of nothing. God produces that world by a spontaneous act of free will, and could just as easily have not created anything outside himself. By contrast, Spinoza's God is the cause of all things because all things follow causally and necessarily from the divine nature. Or, as he puts it, from God's infinite power or nature “all things have necessarily flowed, or always followed, by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles” (Ip17s1). The existence of the world is, thus, mathematically necessary. It is impossible that God should exist but not the world. This does not mean that God does not cause the world to come into being freely, since nothing outside of God constrains him to bring it into existence. But Spinoza does deny that God creates the world by some arbitrary and undetermined act of free will. God could not have done otherwise. There are no possible alternatives to the actual world, and absolutely no contingency or spontaneity within that world. Everything is absolutely and necessarily determined.

The two conceptions overlap in that for both the traditionalist and the Spinozist, there is exactly one God who is the necessarily existent, uncreated, and the ground of the existence of everything distinct from itself. But there are important differences. For Spinoza, God is immanent, not transcendent; not libertarianly free; not capable of existing on his own apart from nature. There are other differences as well.

Beckwith's response implies that the orthodox Thomist and the orthodox Spinozist refer to the same God, but that the Spinozist harbors some false beliefs about God, among them, that God is not a libertarianly free agent who could have created some other world or no world at all. On the traditional conception, God does things for reasons or purposes while for Spinoza, "All talk of God's purposes, intentions, goals, preferences or aims is just an anthropomorphizing fiction." (Nadler)

As I see it, there is no one God that both the Thomist and the Spinozist succeed in referring to. If the God of Aquinas exists, then the God of Spinoza does not exist. And contrapositively: if the God of Spinoza does exist, then the God of Aquinas does not. This strikes me as evident even if we don't bring in the point that for Aquinas God is ipsum esse subsistens. If we do bring it in it is even more evident.

From my point of view, Beckwith makes the following mistake. He apparently thinks that the overlap of the Thomistic and the Spinozistic God concepts suffices to show that in reality there is exactly one God to which both Thomists and Spinozists refer. It does not.

Suppose the common concept is instantiated. Then it is instantiated by something that exists. But existence entails completeness:

EX –> COMP: Necessarily, for any existent x, and for any non-intentional property P, either x instantiates P or x instantiates the complement of P.

What the principle states is that every real item, everything that exists, satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle. Nothing in reality is incomplete. So if the common God concept is instantiated, then it is instantiated by something that is either libertarianly free or not libertarianly free. A concept of God can abstract from this alternative. But God in reality must be one or the other. Since successful reference is reference to what exists, Thomist and Spinozist cannot be referring to one and the same God.

Objection. "Why not? if Thomism is true, they are both referring to the Thomist God, and if Spinozism is true, they are both referring to the Spinozist God."

Reply. There are two conditions on successful reference. First, the referent must exist. Second, the referent must satisfy the understanding of the one who is referring. As I said in an earlier post, successful reference requires the cooperation of mind and world. The second condition is not satisfied for the Spinozist if Thomism is true. The Spinozist intends to refer to a being that is not libertarianly free. His reference cannot be called successful if, willy-nilly, he happens to get hold of the Thomist God.

Shooting analogy. A sniper has a Muslim man in his sights, a man whom the sniper believes is a jihadi he must kill. Next to the man is a Muslim woman whom the sniper believes is not a jihadi and whom he endeavors not to harm. Unbeknownst to the sniper, it is the woman who is the jihadi and not the man. The sniper, aiming at the man, gets off his shot, but misses him while hitting the woman and killing her. Question: has the sniper made a successful shot? No doubt he hit and destroyed a jihadi. That's the good news. The bad news is that he missed the target he was aiming at. He failed to hit the target he intended to hit.

So I say the sniper failed to get off a successful shot. He just happened to hit a jihadi. He satisfied only one of the conditions of a successful shot. You must not only hit a target; you must hit the right target. Suppose I score a bull's eye at the shooting range, but the bull's eye belongs to the target of the shooter to my right. Did I get off a successful shot? Of course not: I failed to hit what I was aiming at.

Same with successful reference: You must not only hit something; you must hit the right thing. Now what makes a thing the right thing is the intention of the one who refers. When a jihadi screams, Allahu akbar! he intends to refer to the voluntaristic, radically unitarian, God of Islam, not the triune God. If he happens to latch on to the triune God, then he has failed in his reference. He has failed just as surely as if there is no God to refer to.

Traditional Theism and Reductive Pantheism: Same God?

Suppose we define a reductive pantheist as one who identifies God with the natural world — the space-time system and its contents — where this identification is taken as a reduction of God to nature, and thus as a naturalization of God, as opposed to a divinization of nature. In short, for the reductive pantheist, God reduces to the physical universe. God just is the physical universe. (I take no position on whether Spinoza is a reductive pantheist; I suspect he is not, but this is a question for the Spinoza scholars.)

Now do the traditional theist and the reductive pantheist believe in, worship, and refer to the same God, except that one or the other has false beliefs about this same God? The traditional theist holds that God is not identical to the physical universe, while the reductive pantheist holds that God is identical to the physical universe. Does it make sense to say that one of them has a false belief about the same God that the other has a true belief about?

This makes no sense. To maintain that God just is the physical universe is tantamount to a denial of the existence of God. Either that, or 'God' is being used in some idiosyncratic way.

What we should say in this case is that the respective senses of of 'God' are so different that they rule out sameness of referent.

Someone who worships the physical universe is not worshiping God under a false description; he is not worshiping God at all. He is worshiping an idol.

Now Spinoza, as I read him, is not a reductive pantheist. But if you can see why the reductive pantheist does not worship the same God as the traditional theist, then perhaps you will be able to appreciate why it is reasonable to hold the same of the Spinozist.

And if I can get you to appreciate that, then perhaps I can get you to appreciate that it is scarcely obvious that Christian and Muslim worship the same God.

Do Christians and Muslims Believe in the Same God? Francis Beckwith and the Kalam Cosmological Argument

Francis Beckwith mentions the Kalam Cosmological Argument in his latest The Catholic Thing article (7 January 2106):

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

Suppose that a Muslim and Christian come to believe that God exists on the basis of this Kalam argument and such ancillary philosophical arguments and considerations as are necessary to establish that the cause of the universe is uncreated, transcendent of the universe, unchanging, etc. The result is a conception of God achieved by reason without the aid of divine revelation. It is a conception common to the normative Muslim and the normative Christian. Crucial differences emerge when the core conception is fleshed out in competing ways by the competing (putative) revelations. But if we stick with the core philosophical conception, then all should agree that there is important overlap as between the Christian and Muslim God conceptions. The overlap is achieved by abstraction from the differences.

So far so good.

Beckwith then asks whether the Muslim and the Christian "believe in the same God" and he concludes that they do.

Permit me a quibble. 'Believe in' connotes 'trust in, have faith in, rely upon the utterances of,' and so on. I believe in my wife: I trust her, I am convinced of her fidelity. That goes well beyond believing that she exists. If I believe in a person, it follows that I believe that the person exists. But if I believe that a person exists, it does not follow that I believe in the person. Professor Beckwith is of course aware of this distinction.

At best, then, what the Christian and the Muslim are brought to by the Kalam argument and supplementary considerations is not belief in God, but belief that God exists. To be even more precise, the Kalam argument, at best, brings us to the belief that there exists a unique, transcendent, uncreated (etc.) cause of the beginning of the universe. In other words, both Christian and Muslim are brought to the belief and perhaps even the knowledge that a certain definite description is satisfied. The properties mentioned in this description are what constitute the shared philosophical understanding of 'God' by the Muslim and the Christian. At best, philosophy brings us to knowledge of God by description, not a knowledge by acquaintance. The common description is usefully thought of as a 'job description' inasmuch as God in brought in to do a certain explanatory job, that of explaining the beginning of the universe. As my teacher J. N. Findlay once said, "God has his uses."

But note that this common Christian-Muslim description leaves undetermined many properties an existent God must possess. (And it must be so given the finitude of our discursive, ectypal, intellects.) But in reality, outside the mind and outside language, God, like everything else, is completely determinate, or complete, for short. I am assuming the following existence entails completeness principle of general metaphysics (metaphysica generalis).

EX –>COMP: Necessarily, for any existent x, and for any non-intentional property P, either x instantiates P or x instantiates the complement of P.

What the principle states is that every real item, everything that exists, satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle. It rules out of reality incomplete objects. For example, God in reality is either triune or non-triune. He cannot be neither, any more than I can be neither a blogger nor not a blogger. The definite description(s) by means of which we have knowledge by description of God, however, are NECESSARILY (due to the finitude of our intellects) such that there are properties of God in reality that these descriptions do not mention. This is of course true of knowledge by description of everything. Everything is such that no description manageable by a finite mind makes mention of all of the thing's properties, intrinsic and relational.

Now suppose that Christianity is true and that God in reality is triune. Then the above common definite description is satisfied. The common Muslim-Christian conception is instantiated — but it is instantiated by the Christian God which of course must exist to instantiate it.

The Christian and the Muslim both believe that God (understood as the unique uncreated creator of the universe) exists. That is: they believe that the common conception of God is instantiated, that the common definite description is satisfied. They furthermore believe that the common conception is uniquely instantiated and that the common description is uniquely satisfied. But they differ as to whether the instantiator/satisfier is the triune God or the non-triune God.

So we can answer our question as follows. The question, recall, is: Do Christians and Muslims believe in the same God?

Muslims and Christians believe in the same God, as Beckwith claims, in the following precise sense: they believe that the same God exists, which is to say: they believe that the common philosophical God concept is uniquely instantiated, instantiated by exactly one being. Call this the anemic sense of believing in the same God.

But this is consistent with saying that Muslim and Christian do not believe in the same God in the following precise sense: they don't believe that the wholly determinate being in reality that instantiates the common philosophical God concept is the triune God who sent his only begotten Son, etc. Call this the robust sense of believing in the same God.

Now we robustos will naturally go with the robust sense. So, to give a plain answer: Christians and Muslims do not believe in the same God. If Christianity is true, the Muslim God simply does not exist, and Muslims believe in an idol.

The mistake that some are making here is to suppose that the shared Muslim-Christian philosophical understanding enscapsulated in the common concept suffices to show that in reality one and the same God is believed in, and successfully referred to, and non-idolatrously worshipped by both Muslims and Christians. Not so!

The real (extramental, extralinguistic) existence of God cannot be identified with or reduced to the being instantiated of a concept that includes only some of the divine determinations (properties). 'Is instantiated' is a second-level predicate, but God exists in the first-level way. Equivalently, God is not identical to an instance of one of our concepts. God is transcendent of all our concepts. So if we know by revelation that God is a Trinity, then we know that the Muslim God, the non-triune God, does not exist.

Alles klar?

Why Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God