Thomas Sowell hasn't quit the mortal coil, but he has put down his pen at age 86. A loss to us, but a release and a relief for him. Jason Riley and other sensible blacks will carry on.
Month: December 2016
If The New York Times were a serious newspaper . . .
. . .it would start by recognizing that Trump is a remarkable leader and that this is a new phenomenon. Then it would try to explore and understand the differences between the old order and the world Trump is trying to create. Then it could describe the context of the President-elect and educate its readers accurately in an informed, coherent manner.
Unfortunately, The New York Times is trapped within the obsolete establishment mindset which was wrong about Trump throughout the primaries, then was wrong about Trump throughout the general election, then was wrong about who would win. This elite mindset has learned nothing. It is now enthusiastically being wrong about the transition. All of this is great practice for the paper to be wrong about the new administration. (Newt Gingrich)
Hara Hachi Bu
Japanese. Eat until you are 80% full. Then stop. Excellent advice, Confucian in origin according to Wikipedia.
Word of the Day: Dehiscence
1. Biology: the release of materials by the splitting open of an organ or tissue.2. Botany: the natural bursting open of capsules, fruits, anthers, etc., for the discharge of their contents.3. Surgery: the bursting open of a surgically closed wound.
Most people have pitifully limited vocabularies. It is due to laziness in most cases. Don't pass over words you don't know. Write them down. Look them up. Compile lists. Review the lists.
Word of the Day: Conscient
If you are tired of 'conscious' and desire a stylistic variant, you may use 'conscient,' though it is a term that has fallen into desuetude. "They will make way for the unrepentant barbaric hordes of those who were conditioned throughout their conscient lives to believe that their time would never come." (Conrad Black)
An enjoyable way to resist change-for-the-sake-of-change 'progressive' knuckleheads is to resurrect and use obsolete words.
Heidegger and Anti-Semitism, Noch Einmal
I will begin by repeating part of something I wrote back in 2010. It bears repeating. Refer back to the 2010 entry for context.
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I should begin by saying that I haven't yet read Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. But if the earlier NYT article is to be trusted — a big 'if' — Faye's book
. . . calls on philosophy professors to treat Heidegger’s writings like hate speech. Libraries, too, should stop classifying Heidegger’s collected works (which have been sanitized and abridged by his family) as philosophy and instead include them under the history of Nazism. These measures would function as a warning label, like a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison, to prevent the careless spread of his most odious ideas, which Mr. Faye lists as the exaltation of the state over the individual, the impossibility of morality, anti-humanism and racial purity.
If this is what Faye is saying, then his book is rubbish and ought to be ignored. Hate speech? That's a term leftists use for speech they don't like. No one in his right mind could see Heidegger's magnum opus, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), published in 1927, as anything close to hate speech. The claim that it is is beneath refutation. Nor can his lectures and publications after 1933, when Hitler came to power, be dismissed in this way.
Heidegger undoubtedly inspires violent passions: he was a National Socialist, and what's worse, he never admitted he was wrong about his political alignment. But according to Michael Dummett, the great logician Gottlob Frege was an anti-Semite. (Dummett says this in either the preface or the introduction to Frege: The Philosophy of Language. ) Now will you ignore Frege's seminal teachings because of his alleged anti-Semitism? That would be senseless. And let's not forget that the later Jean-Paul Sartre was not just a Commie, but a Stalinist. Should Critique of Dialectical Reason be dismissed as hate speech? Should we deny Sartre the title 'philosopher' and re-classify him as a Commie ideologue? Of course not. And please no double standard. Why is being a Nazi worse than being a Stalinist? Why is murdering people because of their ethnic affiliation worse than murdering people because of their class affiliation?
You have two highly influential philosophers. One aligns himself politically with the mass murderer Hitler, the other with the mass murderer Stalin. That is extremely interesting, and no doubt troubling, but in the end it is truth that we philosophers are after, and in pursuit of it we should leave no stone unturned: we should examine all ideas in order to arrive as closely as we can to the truth. All ideas, no matter what they are, whether they come from a Black Forest ski hut or a Parisian coffee house, or the syphilitic brain of a lonely German philologist. Haul them one and all before the tribunal of Reason and question them in the full light of day. To understand the content of the ideas it may be necessary to examine the men and women behind them. But once a philosopher's propositions have been clearly set forth, the question of their truth or falsity is logically independent of their psychological, or sociological, or other, origin. To think otherwise is to commit the Genetic Fallacy.
Sartre claimed that man has no nature, that "existence precedes essence." He got the idea from Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, p. 42: Das 'Wesen' des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz. It is an interesting and influential idea. What exactly does it mean? What does it entail? What does it exclude? What considerations can be adduced in support of it? Questions like these are what a real philosopher pursues. He doesn't waste all his time poking into the all-too-human philosopher's dirty laundry in the manner of Faye and Romano. Are people in this Age of Celebrity incapable of focusing on ideas?
And then there is Nietzsche. If the Gesamtausgabe of Heidegger ought to be marked with a skull-and-crossbones, then a fortiori for the Gesammelte Schriften of Nietzsche. There are dangerous ideas in Nietzsche. See my post Nietzsche and National Socialism. Indeed, Nietzsche's ideas are far more dangerous than Heidegger's. Should we burn Nietzsche's books and brand The Antichrist as hate speech? Stupid!
The Nazis burned books and the Roman Catholic Church had an index librorum prohibitorum. Now I don't deny that certain impressionable people need to be protected from certain odious influences. But Heidegger writings are no more 'hate speech' (whatever that is) than Nietzsche's writings are, and they don't belong on any latter-day leftist's index librorum prohibitorum. Are they both philosophers? Of course. Are they on a par with Plato and Kant? Not by a long shot! Are their ideas worth discussing? I should think so: they go wrong in interesting ways. Just like Wittgenstein and many others.
According to Carlin Romano in "Heil Heidegger!"
Faye's leitmotif throughout is that Heidegger, from his earliest writings, drew on reactionary ideas in early-20th-century Germany to absolutely exalt the state and the Volk over the individual, making Nazism and its Blut und Boden ("Blood and Soil") rhetoric a perfect fit. Heidegger's Nazism, he writes, "is much worse than has so far been known." (Exactly how bad remains unclear because the Heidegger family still restricts access to his private papers.)
From his earliest writings? Absurdly false. Heidegger's dissertation was on psychologism in logic, and his Habilitationschrift was on Duns Scotus. No exaltation of the State or Blut und Boden rhetoric in those works. Trust me, I've read them. Have Faye and Romano?
One more quotation from Romano: "The "reality of Nazism," asserts Faye, inspired Heidegger's works "in their entirety and nourished them at the root level." That is an absurd claim. The ideas in Being and Time were worked out in the 1920s, long before Hitler came to power in '33, and are a highly original blend of themes from Kierkegaard's existentialism, Dilthey's Lebensphilosophie, Husserl's Phenomenology, Kantian and ne0-Kantian transcendental philosophy, and Aristotelian-scholastic ontological concerns about the manifold senses of 'being.' There is no Nazism there. The rumblings of Nazi ideology came later in such works as Introduction to Metaphysics (1935). But even in these works from the '30s on, what is really going on is a working out of Heidegger's philosophical problematic concerning Being. The notion that Heidegger's work is primarily an expression of Nazism is delusional and not worth discussing.
So why did I discuss it?
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For the latest developments in the controversy, see the following (HT: Sed Contra):
Intimations of Elsewhere Dismissed
A colleague once reported an out-of-body experience. He had been resting on his back on a couch when he came suddenly to view himself from the perspective of the ceiling. He dismissed the experience. He had too much class to use the phrase 'brain fart,' but that is what I suspect he thought it was: a weird occurrence of no significance. Vouchsafed a hint of what might have been a reality beyond the ordinary, he chose to ignore it as if it were not worth the trouble of investigating. That sort of dismissive attitude is one I have trouble understanding. Especially in a philosopher!
It would be as if the prisoner in Plato's Cave who was freed of his shackles and was able to turn his head and see an opening and a light suggestive of a route out of the enclosure wherein he found himself were simply to have dismissed the sight as an insignificant illusion and then went back to 'reality,' the shadows on the wall.
I have no trouble understanding someone who, never having had any religious or mystical experiences, cannot bring himself to take religion seriously. And I have no trouble understanding someone who, having had such experiences, and having seriously examined their epistemic credentials, comes to the conclusion that they are none of them veridical. But to have the experiences, and not think them worth investigating — that puzzles me.
Ross Douthat assembles some examples similar to the case of my quondam colleague in his Christmas Eve column, Varieties of Religious Experience, a title he borrows from the eponymous masterpiece of William James. Here is one:
As a young man in the 1960s, the filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, of “RoboCop” and “Showgirls” fame, wandered into a Pentecostal church and suddenly felt “the Holy Ghost descending … as if a laser beam was cutting through my head and my heart was on fire.” He was in the midst of dealing with his then-girlfriend’s unexpected pregnancy; after they procured an abortion, he had a terrifying, avenging-angel vision during a screening of “King Kong.” The combined experience actively propelled him away from anything metaphysical; the raw carnality of his most famous films, he suggested later, was an attempt to keep the numinous and destabilizing at bay.
That makes about as much sense to me as blinding oneself lest one see too radiant a light.
Two Different Christmas Day Meditations on the Incarnation
Last Year's:
"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.
And here is one first posted in 2010 and re-posted on Christmas Day, 2014:
Incarnation Approached Subjectively: The Mystical Birth of God in the Soul
[. . .]
1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.
2. The doctrine of the Trinity spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are numerically distinct from one another. According to the doctrine of the Incarnation, the second person of the Trinity, the Son or Logos, became man in Jesus of Nazareth. There is a strong temptation to think of the doctrinal statements as recording (putative) objective facts and then to wonder how they are possible. I have touched upon some of the logical problems the objective approach encounters in previous posts. The logical problems are thorny indeed and seem to require for their solution questionable logical innovations such as the notion (championed by Peter Geach) that identity is sortal-relative, or an equally dubious mysterianism which leaves us incapable of saying just what we would be accepting were we to accept the theological propositions in question. The reader should review those problems in order to understand the motivation of what follows.
3. But it may be that the objective approach is radically mistaken. Is it an objective fact that God (or rather the second person of the Trinity) is identical to a particular man in the way it is an objective fact that the morning star is identical to the planet Venus?
Perhaps we need to explore a subjective approach. One such is the mystical approach illustrated in a surprising and presumably 'heretical' passage from St. John of the Cross' The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Collected Works, p. 149, tr. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, emphasis added):
. . . when a person has finished purifying and voiding himself of all forms and apprehensible images, he will abide in this pure and simple light, and be perfectly transformed into it. This light is never lacking to the soul, but because of creature forms and veils weighing upon and covering it, the light is never infused. If a person will eliminate these impediments and veils, and live in pure nakedness and poverty of spirit . . . his soul in its simplicity and purity will then be immediately transformed into simple and pure Wisdom, the Son of God.
The Son of God, the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, is 'born,' 'enters the world,' is 'incarnated,' in the soul of any man who attains the mystic vision of the divine light. This is the plain meaning of the passage. The problem, of course, is to reconcile this mystical subjectivism with the doctrinal objectivism according to which the Logos literally became man, uniquely, in Jesus of Nazareth when a certain baby was born in a manger in Bethlehem some 2000 years ago.
Poor Barry Manilow
Here:
In an experiment published in 2000, the psychologist Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues asked undergraduates to wear a piece of clothing that they found embarrassing—a t-shirt with a picture of singer-songwriter Barry Manilow on it. After putting on the shirt, the undergraduates had to spend some time in a room with other students and were later asked to guess how many of the other students noticed what they were wearing. The undergraduates tended to overestimate the proportion by a large margin, and did the same when asked to wear a t-shirt with a positive image on it, like Bob Marley or Martin Luther King Jr. In study after study, experimental subjects thought that other people would notice them much more than they actually did.
Another study that confirms what we already knew. Were any tax dollars used to fund it? In a scientistic culture ignorant of its own rich traditions it is thought that only what is 'scientifically' validated can be taken seriously. I am not denying that a study such as this one might have some slight value.
More interesting, I should think, would be a study of why Marley and King have a positive image and Manilow a negative one, not that I would be caught dead listening to Manilow's schmaltz, except for analytic and culture-critical purposes. Or a study why there is a preponderance among the young of Che Guevara T-shirts over, say, Maggie Thatcher T-shirts.
Christmas Eve at the Oldies: Tunes of the Season
Merry Christmas everybody. Pour yourself a drink, and enjoy. Me, I'm nursing a Boulevardier. It's a Negroni with cojones: swap out the gin for bourbon. One ounce bourbon, one ounce sweet vermouth, one ounce Campari, straight up or on the rocks, with a twist of orange. A serious libation. It'll melt a snowflake for sure. The vermouth rosso contests the harshness of the bourbon, but then the Campari joins the fight on the side of the bourbon. Or you can think of it as a Manhattan wherein the Campari substitutes for the angostura bitters. That there are people who don't like Campari shows that there is no hope for humanity. An irrational prejudice against artichokes?
Cheech and Chong, Santa Claus and His Old Lady
Canned Heat, Christmas Boogie
Leon Redbone and Dr. John, Frosty the Snowman
Beach Boys, Little St. Nick. A rarely heard alternate version.
Ronettes, Sleigh Ride
Elvis Presley, Blue Christmas. This one goes out to Barack and Michelle.
Jeff Dunham, Jingle Bombs by Achmed the Terrorist. TRIGGER WARNING! Not for the p.c.-whipped.
Porky Pig, Blue Christmas
Dylan Magon, White Christmas. Don't know this dude. Appears to be a black Italian. Good performance, except that he says'sly bells' instead of 'slay bells.'
Charles Brown, Please Come Home for Christmas
Wanda Jackson and the Continentals, Merry Christmas Baby
Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run
Eric Clapton, Cryin' Christmas Tears
Judy Collins, Silver Bells
Ry Cooder, Christmas in Southgate. Don't miss this one if you are a Los Angeleno.
Bob Dylan, Must Be Santa
Is this the same guy who sang Desolation Row back in '65? This is the 'stoned' version. It'll grow on you! Give it chance.
Bob Dylan, Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache. Not Christmasy, but a good tune.
Who could possibly follow Dylan's growl except
Tom Waits, Silent Night. Give it a chance.
A surprising number of Christmas songs were written by Jews.
Trump’s ‘Street Corner’ Conservatism
Good article by Matthew Continetti.
Of Birth and Barcan
The Opponent writes,
"Death is not an end to existence, but the process of becoming non-concrete. Birth is the making concrete of something that has existed since the beginning of time and will exist until the end of time." (Reina Hayaki)
This is one way of interpreting the Barcan formula (possibly for some x Fx implies for some x possibly Fx). If the formula is true, there are no ‘contingent objects’, i.e. no objects that exist in some worlds but not others.
My position is that there are contingent entities (as well as contingent identities). I imagine you will be less sympathetic to this, however. Interested in your thoughts.
The Opponent is misrepresenting Professor Hayaki's view. On a careful reading of her article, the quotation above is not her view but expresses a temporal analog of the modal view of Linsky and Zalta that she is opposing.
Be that as it may. Let's consider the Barcan formula by itself.
The formula is that Possibly, something is F implies Something is possibly F. The modality in question is 'broadly logical' in Plantinga's sense. Some call it 'metaphysical.'
By my modal intuitions, the formula is false. A trio of 'possible' counterexamples.
A. Sally wants a baby. But there is no actual baby such that Sally wants it. Sally wants to have a baby, i.e, give birth to a baby, her own baby, one that does not yet exist. What Sally wants is possible. So, possibly, some baby is such that Sally wants it. But it doesn't follow that some actual baby is possibly such that Sally wants it. For every actual baby is such that Sally does not want it.
B. It is possible that there be a sinless man. But it does not follow that one of the men who exist is possibly sinless.
C. Possibly, some sloop satisfies Ortcutt's exacting specifications. (It is possible that there be such a sloop.) But it doesn't follow that some existing sloop (without modifications) is possibly such as to satisfy Ortcutt's exacting specifications. For it could be that every sloop that exists fails to satisfy our man.
I am assuming actualism: there are no merely possible objects. The truth of Possibly, something is F does not commit us to the existence of a merely possible individual that is F. 'Possibly, something is a matter transmitter,' for example, does not commit us to the existence of a merely possible matter transmitter. I should think it commits us only to the existence of a conjunctive property that is possibly instantiated.
The Barcan formula may hold for necessary beings such as the number 7. But it fails for contingent beings.
Of course I hold that there are contingent beings. Whether there are contingent identities is another topic entirely. One topic at a time.
I Receive Holiday Greetings from Thales
David French
David French continues to write good columns for NRO. His latest is about one of Hillary's darlings, Black Lives Matter. But when it came time to act and actually do something in opposition to this movement he calls "poisonous," he refused to support Trump, thereby aiding and abetting Hillary and her destructive leftist race-baiting agenda.
Edith Stein on Cognitio Fidei: Is Faith a Kind of Knowledge?
One finds the phrase cognitio fidei in Thomas Aquinas and in such Thomist writers as Josef Pieper. It translates as 'knowledge of faith.' The genitive is to be interpreted subjectively, not objectively: faith is not the object of knowledge; faith is a form or type of knowledge. But how can faith be a type of knowledge? One ought to find this puzzling.
On a standard analysis of 'knows,' where propositional knowledge is at issue, subject S knows that p just in case (i) S believes that p; (ii) S is justified in believing that p; and (iii) p is true. This piece of epistemological boilerplate is the starting point for much of the arcana (Gettier counterexamples, etc.) of contemporary epistemology. But its pedigree is ancient, to be found in Plato's Theaetetus.
It is obvious that on the standard analysis mere belief is inferior to knowledge since if I believe what is false I don't have knowledge, and if I believe what is true without justification I don't have knowledge either. How then can mere belief be a form or type of knowledge? It is rather a necessary but not sufficient condition of knowledge. Or so it seems to the modern mind.
Another puzzle has to do with certainty. Whether or not knowledge entails certainty, it seems to the modern mind that belief definitely does not entail certainty: what I believe but do not know I cannot be certain about since if I believe but do not know, then either truth is lacking or justification is lacking or both. How then can mere belief be said to be certain? And yet we read in Aquinas that "It is part of the concept of belief itself that man is certain of that in which he believes." (Quoted from Pieper, Belief and Faith, p. 15).
It is easy to understand how one who believes but does not know that p can be subjectively certain that p; but it is difficult to understand how such a person can be objectively certain that p. Objective certainty, however, alone has epistemic value.
We now turn to the remarkable Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic church. In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.
One issue is whether faith gives us access to truth. Stein has Thomas say:
. . . faith is a way to truth. Indeed, in the first place it is a way to truths — plural — which would otherwise be closed to us, and in the second place it is the surest way to truth. For there is no greater certainty than that of faith . . . . (Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, tr. Redmond, ICS Publications 2000, pp. 16-17)
Now comes an important question. What is it that we as philosophers want? We want the ultimate truths about the ultimate matters. If so, it is arguable that we should take these truths from whatever source offers them to us even if the source is not narrowly philosophical. We should not say: I will accept only those truths that can be certified by (natural) reason, but rather all truths whether certified by reason or 'certified' by faith. Thus Stein has Aquinas say:
If faith makes accessible truths unattainable by any other means, philosophy, for one thing, cannot forego them without renouncing its universal claim to truth. [. . .] One consequence, then, is a material dependence of philosophy on faith.
Then too, if faith affords the highest certainty attainable by the human mind, and if philosophy claims to bestow the highest certainty, then philosophy must make the certainty of faith its own. It does so first by absorbing the truths of faith, and further by using them as the final criterion by which to gauge all other truths. Hence, a second consequence is a formal dependence of philosophy on faith. (17-18)
But of course this cannot go unchallenged by Husserl. So Stein has him say:
. . . if faith is the final criterion of all other truth, what is the criterion of faith itself? What guarantees that the certainty of my faith is genuine? (20)
Or in terms of of the distinction made above between subjective and objective certainty: what guarantees that the certainty of faith is objective and not merely subjective? The faiths of Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all different. How can the Christian be sure that the revelation he takes on faith has not been superseded by the revelation the Muslim takes on faith? And what about contradictory faith-contents? God cannot be both triune (as the normative Christian believes) and not triune (as the normative Muslim believes). So Christian and Muslim cannot both be objectively certain about their characteristic beliefs; at most they can be subjectively certain. Subjective certainty, however, has no epistemic value.
Stein's Thomas replies to Husserl as follows:
Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith. [. . .]
All we can do is point out that for the believer such is the certainty of faith that it relativizes all other certainty, and that he can but give up any supposed knowledge which contradicts his faith. The unique certitude of faith is a gift of grace. It is up to the understanding and will to draw the practical consequences therefrom. Constructing a philosophy on faith belongs to the theoretical consequences. (20-22)
For Thomas and Stein, the certainty of faith is a gift of God. As such, it cannot be merely subjective. It is at once both subjective and objective, subjective as an inner certitude, objective as an effect of divine grace. Husserl, however, will ask how the claim that the certainty of faith is a divine gift can be validated. It is after all, a contestable and contested claim. How does one know that it is true? For Husserl, the claims that God exists and that the Christian revelation is his revelation are but dogmatic presuppositions. They need validation because of the existence of competing claims such as those made by Jews and Muslims and atheists.
If, as Stein says, "faith is its own guarantee," then, since the faith of the Christian and the faith of the Muslim are contradictory with respect to certain key propositions, it follows that one of these faiths offers a false guarantee. You can see from this that the Thomas-Stein stance leaves something to be desired. But Husserl's approach has problems of its own. Closed up within the sphere of his subjectivity, man cannot reach the truly Transcendent, which must irrupt into this sphere and cannot be constituted (Husserl's term) within it. The truly Transcendent is not a transcendence-in-immanence. It cannot be a constituted transcendence.
If man is indeed a creature, there is something absurd about measly man hauling the Creator before the bench of finite reason there to be rudely interrogated about his credentials. On the other hand, the claim that man is a creature is a claim like any other, and man must satisfy his intellectual conscience with respect to this claim. It is precisely his freedom, responsibility and love of truth that drive him to ask: But is it true? And how do we know? And isn't it morally shabby to fool oneself and seek consolation in a fairy tale?
Paradoxically, God creates man in his image and likeness, and thus as free, responsible, and truth-loving; characteristics that then motivate man to put God in the dock.
So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason but which are provided by faith in revelation, a revelation that must simply be accepted in humility and obedience. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.
My task, in this and in related posts, is first and foremost to set forth the problems as clearly as I can. Anyone who thinks this problem has an easy solution does not understand it. It is part of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem.