Month: March 2025

Notes on R. C. Sproul, Does God Exist? Part II

Part I is here. Sproul thinks he can prove that the God of the Christian Bible exists from reason alone.  By 'prove' he means establish with objective certainty. 

He begins by listing four possible explanations of reality as we encounter it.  I take him to mean by 'reality' the world as given to the senses.

1) Reality is an illusion.
2) Reality creates itself.
3) Reality is self-existent.
4) Reality is created by something distinct from it that is self-existent, God.

Sproul considers these the only four possibilities. His strategy is to refute the first three, thereby establishing (4). Pressed for time, I will be brief.  I will simply dismiss (1) as beneath refutation.

As for (2), nothing can create itself, if 'x creates x' means x causes x to exist. Why not? Well, for anything to do any causing it must already exist.  'Already' can be taken either logically or temporally or both. But nothing is or can be either temporally or logically prior to itself.  It is therefore impossible that anything create itself.  It is a necessarily true law of metaphysica generalis that nothing can create itself.  

But isn't God classically characterized as causa sui? He is indeed. But what that means is not that he causes himself to exist, but that he is not caused by another to exist. As I like to put it, the sense of causa sui is privative, not positive. It is built into the very concept God that God would not be God if he were caused by another to exist; that is not to say, however, that he causes himself to exist. To say that God is causa sui is equivalent to saying that he exists of metaphysical necessity.

By the way, don't confuse the concept God with God. That would be like confusing the concept chair with what you are presumably now sitting on.  Are you sitting on a concept?

As for (3), this pantheistic possibility is worth consideration, but I must move on. The idea is that Reality does not cause itself to exist, nor does it just happen to exist; it necessarily exists.

Sproul affirms (4) and he thinks he can prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt. By 'reality,' he means "reality as we encounter it." (p. 9)  That includes mainly, if not wholly, the people and things disclosed by inner and outer sense experience.  

But are those four the only (epistemic) possibilities? Why couldn't the reality we encounter just exist as a factum brutum, a brute fact?  By 'brute fact' I mean an obtaining or existing state of affairs that exists without cause or reason.  

Sproul needs to explain why the cosmos, physical world, nature cannot just exist. Why must it have an efficient cause or a reason/purpose (final cause)?  Why can't its existence  be a brute fact?  That is a (fifth) epistemic possibility he does not, as far as I can see, consider.

It’s Later than You Think

A Substack protreptic. Pithy and pointed. No TLDR excuses accepted.

In rhetoric, protrepsis (Ancient Greek: πρότρεψις) and paraenesis (παραίνεσις) are two closely related styles of exhortation that are employed by moral philosophers. While there is a widely accepted distinction between the two that is employed by modern writers, classical philosophers did not make a clear distinction between the two, and even used them interchangeably. (Wikipedia)

Joseph Sobran

Tony Flood asked me if I had read Joseph Sobran. I have. In fact, I have a couple of posts on him. Here's one from 6 October 2010. I've added an update. Comments enabled.

Joseph Sobran

Joseph Sobran is dead at the age of 64.  Beginning as a paleocon, he ended up an anarchist, and apparently something of an anti-Semite.    His 1985 Pensees: Notes for the Reactionary of Tomorrow, however, contains a wealth of important ideas worth ruminating on.  A couple of excerpts, emphasis added:

"The poor" are to liberalism roughly what "the proletariat" is to Communism–a formalistic device for legitimating the assumption of power. What matters, for practical liberals, is not that (for example) the black illegitimacy rate has nearly tripled since the dawn of the Great Society; it is that a huge new class of beneficiaries has been engendered–beneficiaries who vote, and who feel entitled to money that must be taken from others. It is too seldom pointed out that a voter is a public official, and that the use of proffered entitlements to win votes amounts to bribery. For this reason John Stuart Mill pronounced it axiomatic that those who get relief from the state should be disfranchised. But such a proposal would now be called inhuman, which helps account for the gargantuan increase in the size and scope of federal spending. Corrupt politicians make headlines; but no honest politician dares to refer to the problem of corrupt voters, who use the state as an instrument of gain.

[. . .]

The enemy, for socialism, is any permanent authority, whether it is a long-standing church or a holy scripture, whose tendency is to put a brake on political power. In fact power and authority are often confused nowadays: the thoroughly politicized man who seeks power can only experience and interpret authority as a rival form of power, because it impedes his ambition for a thoroughly politicized society. But authority is more nearly the opposite of power. It offers a standard of truth or morality that is indifferent and therefore often opposed to current desires and forces, standing in judgment over them. If God has revealed Himself to man, the progressive agenda may find itself seriously inconvenienced.

For this reason, religion is a source of deep anxiety to the liberal. He harps on its historical sins: Crusades, Inquisitions, witch burnings, wars. He never notices that the crimes of atheist regimes, in less than a century, have dwarfed those of all organized religions in recorded history. He sees Christianity's sporadic persecutions as being of its essence; he regards Communism's unbroken persecution as incidental to its potential for good. He warns of the "danger" posed by American fundamentalists (one of the most gentle and law-abiding segments of the population) and is unchastened by the results of "peace" in Vietnam and Cambodia.

2025 comments:

1) Excellent point about power and authority and their difference, one well illustrated by the "thoroughly politicized" men and women who waged lawfare against Donald Trump (who got the last laugh at his astonishingly good and hugely entertaining 100 minute quasi-SOTU speech). It was delightful to watch the merely performative performance of the tribal fem-Dems in their cute red Barbie coats waving their paddles around. 

2) Might does not make right. My ability to put a .223 round through your head does not morally justify my doing so.  I hope we all agree on that. But there remains the question, the central question of political philosophy: whence the authority of the State? What gives the State apparatus, composed as it is of defective specimens just like the rest of us, with many rogues among them, the right to rule over us? I hope we agree that said apparatus must be coercive to do its job.  In other words, the State is coercive by its very nature. If so, how can its coercion be morally justified? Not theocratically, although Sobran appears to be headed in that direction, though I am not sure, not having read enough of his work.  Throne-and-altar conservatism is a thing of the past and ought to remain so. Ask yourself: whose throne? Which altar?

3) I agree with the italicized sentence. "It is too seldom pointed out that a voter is a public official, and that the use of proffered entitlements to win votes amounts to bribery. For this reason John Stuart Mill pronounced it axiomatic that those who get relief from the state should be disfranchised."

4) Sobran should use 'leftist,' not 'liberal.' After all, isn't J. S. Mill whom he cites a classical liberal?

5) Sobran is right to point out that religion is a  "source of deep anxiety" to leftists, not to mention a source of their animosity and determination to use the awesome power of the State against religion. He is also right to excoriate them for remaining silent about the crimes of atheist regimes. (Cf. The Black Book of Communism) While the horrific deeds of institutionalized religion must be honestly acknowledged — Wasn't John Calvin party to the judicial/ecclesiastical murder of Michael Servetus? — the good that religion has done to enhance human flourishing outweighs the bad.

You should rejoice that Trump has taken a resolute stand for religious liberty. 

Thomas Aquinas: Unity is Our Strength!

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, Chapter 1, C. J. O'Neill, tr., University of Notre Dame Press, 1975, p. 35, para. 2, emphasis added:

. . . since causes are more noble than their effects, the very first caused  things are lower than the First Cause, which is God, and still stand out above their effects. And so it goes until one arrives at the lowest of things. And because in the highest summit of things, God, one finds the most perfect unity — and because everything, the more it is one, is the more powerful and the more worthy – – it follows that the farther one gets from the first principle,  the greater is the diversity and variation one one finds in things. The process of emanation from God, must, then be unified in the principle itself, but multiplied in the lower things which are its terms. 

Key  ideas in and suggested by the above passage:

1) Unity admits of degrees.  Some unities are 'tighter' than others. 

2) The supreme unity is the divine unity. It is the 'tightest' of all, so tight in fact, that God is devoid of all complexity or internal diversity and is therefore ontologically simple, as I explain in my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on divine simplicity. God is pure unity, Unity itself in its highest instance.

3) At the other extreme is pure diversity, a mere collection of items that cannot even be called a collection in that that there is nothing real that collects them, nothing real that they share and that makes them that collection as opposed to some other actual or possible collection. Such a collection is so 'loose' that it does not deserve to be called a collection. We could aptly refer to it as a mere manifold, a mere many-ness.  Think of the membership or extension of  a mereological sum of utterly disparate items.  That would be a pure diversity or mere many-ness.

4) Perfection comes in degrees, and so the divine unity is maximally perfect.  A mere many-ness is maximally imperfect.

5) The notion of perfection in Aquinas and thinkers of his stripe blends the ontic with the axiological/normative.  To be is to be good.  A being is good in the measure that it is, and in the measure that it is, it is good. That, I take it, is the meaning of ens et bonum convertuntur. The terms 'a being' and 'a good thing' are convertible terms, which is to say, in Carnapian material mode: necessarily, for any x, x is or exists if and only if x is good,  valuable, pursuit-worthy. (That I reference Carnap in this context should have the old positivist rolling in his grave.)

'In the measure that' conveys the idea that there are degrees of being, an idea anathema to most contemporary analytic philosophers.  Divine unity is maximally perfect unity, and thus the unsurpassably best unity and the unsurpassably most real unity. God is really real, ontos on; at the other extreme, non-being, me on, or an approach thereto  as in the limit concept (Grenzbegriff), material prima.

6) God's unity is the unity of the transcendent One which does not and cannot form with the Many a super-manifold in which God is just one member among the others. The One and the Many do not, taken together, form a many of which the One is just one more item among the others.  Why not? Well, the One is other than or different from the Many both in its nature and in its way of existing. God, for Aquinas, is One to the Many of creatures, but is neither a creature, nor  a member of a super-manifold of beings each of which is or exists in the same sense and the same way.  

7) Aquinas says above that the more unified a thing, the more powerful it is. So God, the maximally unified being — so unified that this being (ens) is (identically) Being or To Be (esse) itself — is the maximally powerful being.  

And so, in conclusion, I say to Canadian pretty boy Justin Trudeau, that diversity is precisely not "our strength," and that you and like-minded State-side fools are to be condemned for your willful self-enstupidation.

My point stands whether or not one accepts Thomism. 

Back to Inerrancy: A Note on Vanhoozer

I have been doing my level best as time permits to get up to speed on inerrancy as understood by evangelical Protestants. I have a long way to go. Today I preach on a text from Kevin J. Vanhoozer.  I will examine just one sentence of his in his contribution to Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013, p. 202, "God does not contradict himself, despite surface textual appearances to the contrary (Isa. 45:19)."

This compound sentence conveys two thoughts:

a) God does not contradict himself.

and 

b) Some Biblical texts appear to show that God does contradict himself, but in every case this is a mere appearance.

Ad (a). This is true, and presumably true by definition. Nevertheless, there is a question one could raise, but pursuing it here would lead us off track. The  question concerns God's relation to the law of noncontradiction (LNC).  Is he subject to it as to a norm external to himself? Must he abide by it? If yes, that would appear to limit God's sovereignty and his power. If he is all-powerful, does he have the power to make LNC false? See here. I raise this issue only to set it aside (for now); so please no comments on this issue. For present purposes, (a) stands fast.

Ad (b). What I write here is not verbatim the same as what Vanhoozer wrote in his second clause.  What justifies my "in every case"?  It is justified by Vanhoozer's definition of inerrancy on p. 202:

. . . inerrancy means that God's authoritative word is wholly true and trustworthy in everything  it claims about what was, what is, and what will be. (emphasis in original)

Vanhoozer appears to be reasoning along the following lines. Since God does not contradict himself, and since God is wholly truthful and trustworthy in everything he communicates to us in the Scripture, the Scripture cannot contain any contradictory passages or any false claims.  From this follows that any appearance of contradiction is a mere or false appearance, and any appearance of falsehood is a mere or false appearance.  And so what some of us see as errors, are not really errors, but mere "difficulties." (202)

Thus the Bible is wholly inerrant, inerrant in everything it claims, and not merely in its soteriological claims, that is, its claims regarding what is needed for salvation!

Now why don't I accept this? 

Well, Vanhoozer appears to be confusing the Word of God = the Logos = the Second Person of the Trinity with the Word of God in a second sense of the term, namely, the Scripture. I argued in an earlier post that they cannot be one and the same, and this for a very simple reason: the Word in the first sense is co-eternal with the Father and thus eternal. The Word in the second sense is not eternal inasmuch as it had an origin in time.  So at best it is sempiternal. 

What's more, the Word in the first sense is metaphysically necessary; it is as metaphysically necessary as the First Person of the Trinity. But the Scripture is metaphysically contingent, which is to say: there is no necessity that it exists. It would not have existed had God not created anything.  The divine aseity ensures that God has no need to create. Had he not created us humans, we would not have fallen, and would be in no need of 'salvific info.'  God revealed himself to us in Scripture. No 'us,' no revelation to us. It takes two to tango, as Trump recently reminded us, echoing Ronnie Raygun (as lefties call him).

If you disagree with what I have just argued, then you would be saying that the Scripture pre-exists its being written down.  That may be so in Islam (I am not quite sure), but it is surely not so in Christianity.

But there is more to my argument, namely, that communication from God to man is via ancient human authors, who are finite and fallible and riven with tribal and cultural biases, even if they are our superiors in wisdom and discernment.  This is why one cannot validly infer the inerrancy of Scripture from the inerrancy of God. No doubt God is wholly veracious, infallible, omniscient, and inerrant. But how do you get from that proposition to the proposition that the Scripture contains no errors about anything soteriological or non-soteriological? You need an auxiliary premise to the effect that the authors of the scriptural texts,  who received the divine messages, were somehow able to put them into the words of ancient languages and in such a way that the divine meaning was perfectly captured and expressed. I see no reason to believe that. In fact, given  what we know about human beings, I see every reason not to believe it.

Vito Caiati correctly pointed out that in Christianity God reveals himself in the man Jesus of Nazareth. True. But that is irrelevant to the inerrancy question. Here's why.  The doctrine of inerrancy states that the Bible, the whole Bible, OT and NT, is inerrant, either in all its claims or in all its soteriological claims. So the fact, if it is a fact, that "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us," — the Second Person of the Trinity, mind you, not the Bible! — and that the Incarnate Word was encountered by the apostles and disciples of Jesus and written about by them, is irrelevant to the question whether the Bible as a whole is inerrant.

Random Political-Polemical Observations

Hanoi Jane.  Jane Fonda recently opined that being 'woke' means that you care about people. Now how stupid is that? But I'll give her this much: she looks damned good after all these years (to an old man, leastways.) All style and no substance, just like pretty-boy Gavin Newsom of California, an unctuous opportunist if ever there was one. Dems demonstrate their stupidity by their inability to see through poseurs like him.  

The Democrats. Knee-jerk oppositionalism and blind obstructionism  are all they have these days, as witness the In-Lieu-of-SOTU spectacle. 

John Fetterman.  When a guy such as this piece of atavism is the wise man of the Dems, and, horribile dictu,  a Senator to boot, you know that the Dems have become a pack of fools, and that any ship of state with them in control is headed for troubled waters. That being said, my estimation of Fetterman has gone up a notch since he 'beat' Dr. Oz.  The well-fed Futter/Fetterman actually possesses a soupçon of sense, and a grain of gravitas, with which he surpasses Kamala the Clown and the overgrown adolescent, AOC.

Sartorial slack-off and the demise of decorum. That charismatic and stylish trend-setter, JFK, rid men of their Fedoras.  Now we have baseball caps and Senator Fetterman in cargo shorts. Decorum on the decline.  "Weird Al" Green, who is black, and sports a pony (horse?) tail, was rightly censured for his recent outburst by the Speaker of the House. He complained about being made to "sit in the back of the bus."  It will always be the 'fifties for these people.  And they say we want to 'turn back the clock'?

Let's not leave out Adam Schiff, a leaky vessel if ever there was one, issuing his "Screw you and the horse you rode in on" to Trump & Co.   Not to mention the 'shit' mantra dutifully repeated by the Dem lemmings. My friendly advice to them: You'd better get your shit together or you'll never lift your sorry asses out of the dreck.  As for the 'Ragin Cajun,' he seems to have reversed himself on his 'Play possum" advice.  Back to the bayou with you, pal.

Why We Are Winning

Roland Fryer, WSJ, The Economics of DEI and MEI. (Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence)

Victor Davis Hanson, Five Ukrainian Fables

James Piereson, New Criterion, Too Many Democrats

Kimberly Strassel, WSJ, Trump's School Choice

Paul Craig Roberts, Every Vote for a Democrat is an Attack on America.  HT: Tony Flood who writes, "Salient line (for me): 'And still, American citizens vote for Democrats. How can a population this stupid be made great again?' "

We are winning, but it will remain a nasty slugfest for the foreseeable future, as my man Hanson fully appreciates. We need to get tough with our political enemies, as they reveal, day by day, the full depth of their depravity.

Victor Davis Hanson, New Criterion, MAGA agonistes. Excerpt:

Trump has now inherited an almost bankrupt country. The ratio of debt to annual gdp has reached a record high of nearly 125 percent—exceeding the worst years of World War II. The nation remains sharply divided over the southern border, which for most of Biden’s term was nonexistent. Trump’s own base demands that he address an estimated twelve million additional unvetted illegal aliens, diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and racial quotas, and an array of enemies abroad who are no longer deterred by or content with the global status quo. The eight-year Obama revolution in retrospect did not change American institutions and policies nearly as much as the more radical four-year Biden tenure. And so often, when drastic remedies are proposed, their implementation may appear to the inured public—at least initially—as a cure worse than the disease.

Take the example of illegal immigration. Since Trump left office in January 2021, two major and unexpected developments have followed during the Biden years. First, the border did not just become porous but virtually disappeared. Indeed, Biden in his first hours of governance stopped further construction of the Trump wall, restored catch-and-release policies, and allowed illegal immigrants to cross the border without first applying for refugee status.

Given the magnitude of what followed—as many as twelve million illegal aliens crossed the border during the Biden tenure—the remedy of deportation would now necessitate a massive, indeed unprecedented, effort. The public has been increasingly hectored by the Left to fear the supposedly authoritarian measures Trump had in mind when he called for “massive deportations.” Left unsaid was that such deportations would only be a response to the prior four years of lawless and equally “massive” importations of foreign nationals. And yet, while the twelve million illegal entrances over four years were an insidious process, the expulsion of most of those entrants will be seen as abrupt, dramatic, and harsh. In addition, it was much easier for felons and criminals to blend into the daily influx of thousands than it will be to find them now amid a population of 335 million.

On Swimming the Tiber: Reasons for Leaving Protestantism

I had put the question to Russell B, "What were your reasons for becoming a Protestant in the first place and then leaving Protestantism, apart from acceptance of DDS? [The doctrine of Divine Simplicity?] And what sect did you leave? Here is his response; I have intercalated some comments of my own.
 
1) The reason I became a Protestant was due to poor catechesis, unfortunately. I went to Biola as an undergrad where I attended an Anglo-Catholic church in Newport Beach (Still a great and lively one). Unsurprisingly, my metaphysics class (which was actually labeled as an ontology class) just presupposed the thin theory of existence. 
Then you probably did not take that class from J. P. Moreland, who very favorably reviewed my A Paradigm Theory of Existence. 
My primary reasons for leaving Protestantism: 
 
A) One has to admit the Church was fundamentally wrong for 1500 years until Luther came around (an impossible pill to swallow) 
 
B) Unification of the church: you need a ‘head’ to settle disputes (much like a Supreme Court). I think orthodoxy struggles with this as well: they are seemingly split too. 
 
C) I am a big-time social conservative (I would say I am slightly ‘left’ leaning economically) and couldn’t square most Protestant churches caving to the cultural winds of secularism. The Catholic Church has problems, of course, but not compromising on things like abortion and homosexuality, for example, struck me as very attractive. I also read portions of Alex Pruss’ One Body which sealed the deal. 
 
D) The lives of the Saints especially Aquinas, Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, Anselm, Francis and St John of the Cross. 
 
Now, I don’t want to knock Protestantism too hard. Of course one can be a Protestant and subscribe to DDS and endorse a thick conception of Existence.  
2) The two upward paths, that of religion and that of philosophy, come together as one at the apex of the ascent in the divine simplicity.  The ascent to the Absolute is thus onto-theological.
 
Beautifully written. I also want to thank you for your clear prose. I love Barry Miller and his work but at points he was a little sloppy and difficult to understand. I didn’t encounter that with your work. 
 
PS:
 
1) I was recently listening to your episode on Dale Tuggy’s podcast. I hate recommending podcasts but I think my friend Pat Flynn—podcast called Philosophy for the People—reached out to you. If you have time, you should definitely consider going on it. His podcast is the only one that I am aware of that consistently talks about DDS, thin/thick existence, analytic philosophy’s dismissal of existence, etc.—basically everything that would appear on your blog. (Feser, Koons, Dolezal have all had appearances)
Russell's (B) above raises questions about the pros and cons of a teaching authority to unify doctrine and settle disputes.
 
One who refuses to accept, or questions, a teaching of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) may be accused of reliance upon private judgment and failure to submit to the Magisterium or teaching authority of the Church.  Two observations on this accusation.

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

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

Summing up the two points, the private is not merely private, and the official is not merely official.

Of course, part of the official doctrine of the Roman church is that its pronunciamenti anent faith and morals are guided and directed by the Holy Ghost. (Use of the old phrase, besides chiming nicely with der Heilige Geist, is a way for this conservative to thumb his nose at Vatican II-type innovations which, though some of them may have had some sense, tended to be deleterious in the long run.  A meatier question which I ought to take up at some time is the one concerning the upsurge of priestly paederasty after Vatican II: post hoc ergo propter hoc? That should give pause to any one thinking of swimming the Tiber. Rod Dreher, who took the plunge, kept swimming, eastward. We could say he swam the Tiber first, and then the Bosporus, when, disgusted by priestly paedophilia, and the RCC's mafia-like protection of their own, he embraced Eastern Orthodoxy.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In-Lieu-of-SOTU: Trump’s Congressional Address

Fabulous address by Trump to both houses of Congress last night. It kept me up beyond my monkish bedtime. So I got up 'late' this morning at two a.m.

How good was it? The boneheads of The Bulwark are going bonkers. 

Can I say anything bad about it? Well, our boy spoke of two genders instead of two sexes. And he needs to learn  that the correct phrase is 'rare earth minerals,' not 'rare earths.'

Roger Kimball:

Many commentators have said that Trump 2.0 has accomplished more in six weeks than other administrations accomplished in four, six or even eight years. It is true.

Tonight, the president provided a detailed inventory of his initiatives. Within hours of taking office, he designated illegal immigration a national emergency. Trump noted that Democrats kept saying that new legislation was needed to fix the border. But in fact, he said, “all we really needed was a new president.” Trump declared war on inflation and took steps to undermine the deep state and its racist DEI initiatives, thus restoring merit and race- and colorblind justice to their proper place in the economy of American values. He also took a page from the Book of Genesis, and articulated the non-woke, matter-of-fact truth that there are only two sexes: male and female. The crowd (but not the Democrats) cheered at that bit of common sense. 

The president presented a bracing tour d’horizon in his opening sally. He ordered federal workers back to work: “They will either show up for work, in person, or be removed from their job.” As I write, the Trump administration is ending “weaponized government,” restoring free speech, underwriting English as the official language of the United States and pursuing a policy of “drill, baby, drill” to exploit America’s energy resources.