Swedish police seem to think so.
Author: Bill Vallicella
Lydia McGrew on the ‘Same God’ Debate
She says that it is too important to be left to philosophers. She is right that the debate is important and has practical consequences, although I don't think any of the philosophers who have 'piped up' recently (Beckwith, Tuggy, Feser, Rea, Vallicella, et al.) want to take the debate merely as a point of entry into technical questions about reference and identity.
One of the points McGrew makes is one I have repeatedly made as well, namely, that the sorts of examples proffered by Francis Beckwith, Dale Tuggy, and Edward Feser beg the question. If the question is whether Christians and Muslims worship and refer to the same God, one cannot just assume that they do and then take one's task to be one of explaining how it is possible. Of course it is possible to refer to one and the same thing under different descriptions. But how does that show that in the case before us there is one and the same thing?
Another point that McGrew makes that I have also made is that one cannot show that the Christian and Muslim God are the same because their respective conceptions significantly overlap. No doubt they do: for both religions there is exactly one God, transcendent of his creation, who is himself uncreated, etc. But the overlap is insufficient to show numerical identity because of the highly important differences. Could one reasonably claim that classical theists and Spinozists worship the same God? I don't think so. The difference in attributes is too great. The reasonable thing to say is that if classical theism is true, then Spinozists worship a nonexistent God. Similarly, the difference between a triune God who entered the material realm to share our life and misery for our salvation and a non-triune God whose radical transcendence renders Incarnation impossible is such a huge difference that it is reasonable to take it as showing that the Christian and Muslim Gods cannot be the same.
McGrew and I also agree in rejecting what I will call the 'symmetry argument': since Jews and Christian worship the same God, the Christians and Muslims also worship the same God. It doesn't follow. Roughly, the Christian revelation does not contradict the Jewish revelation on the matter of the Trinity, since the Jews took no stand on this question before the time of Jesus. The Christian revelation supplements the Jewish revelation. The Islamic 'revelation,' however, contradicts the Christian one by explicitly specifying that God cannot be triune and must be disincarnate.
McGrew is certainly right that the 'same God' question ". . . can’t be decided by a flick of the philosophical wrist." And this needed to be said. Where I may be differing from her, though, is that on my view a really satisfactory resolution of the questions cannot be achieved unless and until we achieve real clarity about the underlying questions about reference, identity, existence, property-possession, and so on. It is highly unlikely, however, that these questions will ever be answered to the satisfaction of all competent practioners.
Where does this leave the ordinary Christian believer? Should he accept the same God thesis? It is not clear to me that he needs to take any position on it at all. But if he feels the need to take a stand, I say to him that he can rest assured that his non-acceptance of it is rationally justifiable.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Jimmy Elledge and Some Other One-Hit Wonders
Jimmy Elledge, Funny How Time Slips Away. Born January 8, 1943 in Nashville, Elledge died June 10, 2012 after complications following a stroke. The song, written by Willie Nelson, made the #22 slot on Billboard Hot 100 in 1961, and sold over one million copies. Elledge never had another hit. As a YouTube commenter pointed out, that does sound like Floyd Cramer tickling the ivories. A great song. I always thought it was a female singing.
Rosie and the Originals, Angel Baby, 1960. Perfect for cruising Whittier Boulevard in your '57 Chevy on a Saturday Night.
Claudine Clark, Party Lights, 1962
Contours, Do You Love Me? 1962
Norma Tanega, Walkin' My Cat Named 'Dog,' 1966. A forgotten oldie if ever there was one. If you remember this bit of vintage vinyl, one of the strangest songs of the '60s, I'll buy you a beer or a cat named 'dog.' One.
Bruce Channel, Hey! Baby, 1962
Barbara George, I Know, 1962
And now a couple more forgotten one-hit wonders who get almost no play on the oldies stations which is exactly why you need Uncle Wild Bill's Saturday Night at the Oldies:
Bob Luman, Let's Think About Livin' Trivia question: The song contains references to three contemporary songs. Name them. And how quaint the reference to the fellow with the switch-blade knife.
Larry Finnegan, Dear One, 1962
David Bowie? Who's he?
UPDATE 1/17: Dave B. tells me that I owe his wife Ronda a beer:
Yeah she remembered that song from the opening riff.What a waste of a nice Gibson SG…
You are quite right, Dave: the girl is flailing at a Gibson SG standard. Clapton, a.k.a 'God,' played them before switching over to Fender Strats. I wanted an SG back around '67 or '68 but they were too much in demand. So I 'settled' for a Gibson ES 335TD. But then I did the dumbest thing I ever did a few years later.
In What Sense Does an Indefinite Noun Phrase Refer?
London Ed propounds a difficulty for our delectation and possible solution:
Clearly the difficulty with the intralinguistic theory is its apparent absurdity, but I am trying to turn this around. What can we say about extralinguistic reference? What actually is the extralinguistic theory? You argue that the pronoun ‘he’ inherits a reference from its antecedent, so that the pronoun does refer extralinguistically, but only per alium, not per se.
Mark 14:51 And there followed him [Jesus] a certain young man (νεανίσκος τις) , having a linen cloth (σινδόνα) cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him. 14:52 And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.
So the pronoun ‘he’ inherits its reference through its antecedent. But the antecedent is the noun phrase ‘a certain young man’. On your theory, does this refer extralinguistically? That’s a problem, because indefinite noun phrases traditionally do not refer, indeed that’s the whole point of them. ‘a certain young man’ translates the Latin ‘adulescens quidam’ which in turn translates the Greek ‘νεανίσκος τις’. Here ‘certain’ (Latin quidam, Greek τις) signifies that the speaker knows who he is talking about, but declines to tell the audience who this is. Many commentators have speculated that the man was Mark himself, the author of the gospel, which if true means that ‘a certain young man’ and the pronouns, could be replaced with ‘I’, salva veritate. But Mark deliberately does not tell us.
So, question 1, in what sense does the indefinite noun phrase refer, given that, on the extralinguistic theory, it has to be the primary referring phrase, from which all subsequent back-reference inherits its reference?
A. First of all, it is not clear why Ed says, ". . . indefinite noun phrases traditionally do not refer, indeed that’s the whole point of them." Following Fred Sommers, in traditional formal logic (TFL) as opposed to modern predicate logic (MPL), indefinite noun phrases do refer. (See Chapter 3, "Indefinite Reference" of The Logic of Natural Language.) Thus the subject terms in 'Some senator is a physician' and 'A physician is running for president' refer, traditionally, to some senator and to a physician. This may be logically objectionable by Fregean lights but it is surely traditional. That's one quibble. A second is that it is not clear why Ed says "that's the whole point of them."
So the whole point of a tokening of 'a certain young man' is to avoid making an extralinguistic reference? I don't understand.
B. Ed says there is a problem on my view. A lover of aporetic polyads, I shall try to massage it into one. I submit for your solution the following inconsistent pentad:
a. There are only two kinds of extralinguistic reference: via logically proper names, including demonstratives and indexicals, and via definite descriptions.
b. The extralinguistic reference of a grammatical pronoun used pronominally (as opposed to quantificationally or indexically) piggy-backs on the extralinguistic reference of its antecedent. It is per alium not per se.
c. 'His,' 'him,' and 'he' in the verse from Mark are pronouns used pronominally the antecedent of which is 'a certain young man.'
d. 'A certain young man' in the verse from Mark is neither a logically proper name nor a definite description.
e. 'A certain young man' in the verse from Mark refers extralinguistically on pain of the sentence of which it is a part being not true.
The pentad is inconsistent.
The middle three limbs strike me as datanic. So there are two possible solutions.
One is (a)-rejection. Maintain as Sommers does that indefinite descriptions can refer. This 'solution' bangs up against the critique of Peter Geach and other Fregeans.
The other is (e)-rejection. Deny that there is any extralinguistic reference at all. This, I think, is Ed's line. Makes no sense to me, though.
I wonder: could Ed be toying with the idea of using the first four limbs as premises in an argument to the conclusion that all reference is intralinguistic? I hope not.
Same Cause, Same Referent? More on the ‘Same God’ Problem
Tree and Scarecrow
Suppose I point out a certain tree in the distance to Dale and remark upon its strange shape. I say, "That tree has a strange shape." Dale responds, "That's not a tree; that's a scarecrow!" Suppose we are looking at the same thing, a physical thing that exists in the external world independently of us. But what I take to be a tree, Dale takes to be a scarecrow. Suppose further that the thing in the external world, whatever it is, is the salient cause of our having our respective visual experiences. Are we referring to the same thing? The cause of the visual experiences is the same, but are the referents of our demonstrative phrases the same? Could we say that the referents are the same because the cause is the same?
If this makes sense, then perhaps we can apply it to the 'same God?' problem.
'Same cause, same referent' implies that the cause of my tokening of 'That tree' is its referent. It implies that we can account for successful reference in terms of physical causation. The idea is that what makes my use of 'that tree' successfully refer to an existing tree, this particular tree, and not to anything else is the tree's causing of my use of the phrase, and if not the tree itself, then some physical events involving the tree.
But the notion of salience causes trouble for this causal account of reference. What make a causal factor salient? What makes it jump out from all the other causal factors to assume the status of 'the cause'? (Salire, Latin, to jump.) After all, there are many causal factors involved in any instance of causation. Can we account for reference causally without surreptitiously presupposing irreducibly intentional and referential notions? Successful reference picks out its object from others. It gets to an existing object, and to the right object. Causation might not be up to this task. I shall argue that it is not.
We often in ordinary English speak of 'the cause' of some event, a myocardial infarction say, even though there are many contributing factors: bad diet, lack of exercise, hypertension, cigarette smoking, high stress job, an episode of snow-shoveling. Which of these will be adjudged 'the cause' is context- and interest-relative. A physician who gets a kick-back from a pharmaceutical concern will point to hypertension, perhaps, so that he can prescribe anangiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, while the man's wife might say that it was the snow shoveling that did him in. A liberal might say that the heart attack was caused by smoking.
Or suppose a short-circuit is cited as 'the cause' of a fire. In terms of fundamental physics, the whole state of the world at time determines its state at subsequent times. At this level, a short-circuit and the power's being on are equally causal in respect of a fire. Our saying that the short-circuit caused the fire, not the power's being on, simply advertises the fact that for us the latter is the normal and desired state of things, the state we have an interest in maintaining, and that the former is the opposite. Desire and interest are of course intentional notions: to desire is to desire something; to be interested is to be interested in something.
What these examples show is that there is an ordinary-language use of 'cause' which is context-sensitive and interest-relative. The ordinary notion of cause, then, resting as it does on our interests and desires, presupposes intentional notions. I cannot be interested in or desire something unless I am conscious of it. And I cannot adjudge one state of affairs as normal and the other as abnormal unless I have interests and desires.
In the case of my tokening of 'that tree,' what justifies us in saying that it is the tree that causes the tokening as opposed the total set of causal conditions including sunlight, my corrective lenses, my not having ingested LSD, the absence of smoke and fog, the proper functioning of my visual cortex, etc.? How is it that we select the tree as 'the cause'? And what about this selecting? It cannot be accounted for in terms of physical causation. The tree does not select itself as salient cause. We select it. But then selecting is an intentional performance. So intentionality, which underpins both mental and linguistic reference, comes back in through the back door.
The upshot is that an account of successful reference in terms of causation is viciously circular. What makes 'that tree' as tokened by me here and now refer to the tree in front of me? It cannot be the total cause of the tokening which includes all sorts of causal factors other than tree such as light and the absence of fog. It must be the salient cause. To select this salient cause from the among the various casual factors is to engage in an intentional performance. So reference presupposes intentionality and cannot be accounted for in non-intentional, purely causal, terms. Otherwise you move in an explanatory cricle of embarrassingly short diameter.
The point could be put as follows: I must already (logically speaking) have achieved reference to the tree in a noncausal way if I am then to single out the tree as the physical cause of my successful mental and linguistic reference.
Of course, I am not denying that various material and causal factors underpin mental and linguistic reference. What I am maintaining is that these factors are useless when it comes to providing a noncircular account of reference.
Now if causation cannot account for reference, then it cannot account for sameness of reference.
Dale and I are both in perceptual states. These two perceptual states have a common cause. But this common cause cannot be what makes one of our references successful and the other unsuccessful.
Christ and Allah
The above questions are analogs of the 'Same God?' question. Suppose a Christian and a Muslim each has a mystical or religious experience of the same type, that of the Inner Locution. Each cries out in prayer and each 'hears' the inner locution, "I am with you," and a deep peace descends upon him. Each is thankful and expresses his thanks. Suppose God exists and is the source of both of these locutions. But while the Christian may interpret the source of his experience in Trinitarian terms, the Muslim will not. Suppose the Christian takes the One who is answering to be a Person of the Trinity, Christ, while the Muslim takes it to be Allah who is answering. In expressing his thankfulness, the Christian prayerfully addresses Christ while the Muslim prayerfully addresses Allah.
Are Christian and Muslim referring to one and the same divine being? Yes, if the referent is the source/cause of the inner locutions. But this common cause does not select as between Christ and Allah, and so the common cause does not suffice to establish that Christian and Muslim are referring to one and the same divine being.
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?