Author: Bill Vallicella

‘Frege’ on the Trinity

Peter Lupu writes,

The following are some recent thoughts about the Trinity. Let me know what you think.

The three expressions of the Trinity: ‘The Father’, ‘The Son’, and ‘The Holy Spirit’ all refer to the same divine being namely God. Thus, with respect to reference, each pair of expressions forms a true identity. However, they have different senses in Frege’s sense. The three senses are as follows:

1) The sense of ‘The Father’ is the will of the divine being to love, atone, and forgive. Call this the divine-will.  

2) The sense of ‘The Holy Spirit’ is the will of a non-divine being when and only when it genuinely aspires to be like the divine with respect to its moral identity and worth. Call this the inspired-will.

3) The sense of ‘The Son’ (i.e., the person of Jesus) is when the divine-will and the inspired-will coincide in a human person such as Jesus. Thus, Jesus is a moral-exemplar (Steven’s term) of a case when the divine-will and the inspired-will seamlessly coincide.

The senses of the three expressions of the Trinity are different. Therefore, while identities among each pair with respect to their senses are false, identities with respect to their referents are true.

It warms my heart that  a Jew should speculate on the Trinity on Good Friday.   Rather than comment specifically on the senses that Peter  attaches to 'the Father,' 'the Son,' and 'the Holy Spirit,' I will  address the deeper question of whether the logical problem of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity can be solved by means of Gottlob Frege's distinction between the sense and the reference of expressions.

The Logical Problem of the Trinity

Our question concerns the logical consistency of the following septad, each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy.  See here for details.  How can the following propositions all be true?

1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4. The Holy Spirit is God.
5. The Father is not the Son.
6. The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
7. The Father is not the Holy Spirit.

If we assume that in (2)-(7), the 'is' expresses absolute numerical identity, then it is clear that the septad is inconsistent.  (Identity has the following properties: it is reflexive, symmetric, transitive, governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals and by the Necessity of Identity).  For example, from (2) and (3) taken together it follows that the Father is the Son by Transitivity of Identity.  But this contradicts (5).

So we have an inconsistent septad each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy.  The task is to remove the contradiction without abandoning orthodoxy.  There are different ways to proceed.  Here I consider only one, the Fregean way.  (Of course, Frege himself did not address the Trinity; but we may address it using his nomenclature and conceptuality.) 

The Fregean solution is to say that 'Father,' 'Son,' and 'Holy Spirit, are expressions that differ in sense (Sinn) but coincide in reference (Bedeutung).  Frege famously gave the example of 'The morning star is the evening star.'  This is an identity statement that is both true and informative.  But how, Frege asked, could it be both?  If it says of one thing that it is identical to itself, then it is true but not informative because tautological.  If it says of two things that they  are one thing, then it is false, and uninformative for this reason.  How can it be both true and nontautological? 

Frege solved his puzzle by distinguishing between sense and reference and by maintaining that reference is not direct but routed through sense.  'Morning star' and 'evening star' differ in sense, but coincide in reference.  The terms flanking the identity sign refer to the same entity, the planet Venus, but the reference is mediated by two numerically distinct senses.  The distinction allows us to account for both the truth and the informativeness of the identity statement.  The statement is true because the two terms have the same referent; the statement is informative because the two terms have different senses.  They are different modes of presentation of the same object.

Now let's apply this basic idea to the Trinity.  To keep the discussion simple we can restrict ourselves to the Father and the Son.  If we can figure out the Binity, then we can figure out the Trinity.  And if we restrict ourselves to the Binity, then we get a nice neat parallel to the Fregean example.  The Frege puzzle can be put like this:

a. The Morning Star is Venus
b. The Evening Star is Venus
c. The Morning Star is not the Evening Star. 

This parallels

2. The Father is God
3. The Son is God
5. The Father is not the Son.

Both triads are inconsistent.  The solution to the Fregean triad is to replace (c) with
c'.  The sense Morning Star is not the sense Evening Star.

The suggestion, then, is to solve the Binity triad by replacing (5) with
5'. The sense Father is not the sense Son.

The idea, then, is that the persons of the Trinity are Fregean senses.  To say that the three persons are one God is to say that the three senses, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, are three distinct modes of presentation (Darstellungsweisen) of the same entity, God.

Why the Fregean Solution Doesn't Work

Bear in mind that we are laboring under the constraint of preserving orthodoxy.  So, while the Fregan approach is not incoherent, it fails to preserve the orthodox doctrine.  One reason is this.  Senses are abstract (causally inert) objects while the persons of the Trinity are concrete (causally efficacious).  Thus the Holy Spirit inspires people, causing them to to be in this or that state of mind.  The Father begets the Son.  Begetting is a kind of causing, though unlike empirical causing.  The Son loves the Father, etc.  Therefore, the persons cannot be Fregean senses.

Furthermore, senses reside in Frege's World 3 which houses all the Platonica necessary for the semantic mediation of mental contents (ideas, Vorstellungen, etc.) in World 2 and primary referents in World 1.  Now God is in World 1.  But if the persons are senses, then they are in World 3.  But this entails the shattering of the divine unity.  God is one, three-in-one, yet still one.  But on the Fregean approach what we have is a disjointed quaternity: God in World 1, and the three persons in World 3.  That won't do, if the task is to preserve orthodoxy.

At this point, someone might suggest the following.  "Suppose we think of senses, not as semantic intermediaries, but as constituents of the entity in World 1.  Thus the morning star and the evening star are ontological parts of Venus somewhat along the lines of Hector Castaneda's Guise Theory.   To say that a sense S is of its referent R is to say  that S is an ontologcal part or constitutent of R.  And then we can interpret 'The Morning Star is the Evening Star' to mean that the MS-sense is 'consubstantiated' (to borrow a term from Castaneda) with the ES-sense.  Thus we would not have the chorismos, separation, of senses in Worldf3 from the primary referents in World 1: the senses would be where the primary referents are, as ontological parts of them. 

But this suggestion also violates orthodoxy.  The persons of the Trinity are not parts of God; each is (identically) God.  No proper part of a whole is identical to the whole.  But each person is identical to God.

I conclude that there is no Fregean way out of the logical difficulties of the orthodox Trinity doctrine.  If so, then Peter's specific suggestion above lapses.

 

Easter Morning Thoughts on 1 Corinthians 15:14

Biblia Vulgata: Si autem Christus non resurrexit, inanis est ergo praedicatio nostra, inanis est et fides vestra.

King James: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

Orthodox Christianity stands and falls with a contingent historical fact, the fact of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. If he rose from the dead, he is who is said he was and can deliver on his   promises. If not, then the faith of the Christian inanis est, is vain, void, empty, delusional.

Compare Buddhism. It too promises salvation of a sort. But the salvation it promises is not a promise by its founder that rests on the existence of the founder or on anything he did. For Christianity, history is essential, for Buddhism inessential. The historical Buddha is not a savior, but merely an example of a man who saved himself by realizing his inherent Buddha-nature. The idea of the Buddha is enough; his   historical existence unnecessary.  'Buddha,' like 'Christ,' is a title: it means 'the Enlightened One.'  Buddhism does not depend either on the existence of Siddartha, the man who is said to have become the Buddha, or on Siddartha's  becoming the Buddha.

Hence the Zen saying, "If you see the Buddha, kill him." I take that to mean that one does not need the historical Buddha, and that  cherishing any piety towards him may prove more hindrance than help.  Buddhism, as the ultimate religion of self-help, enjoins each to become a lamp unto himself. What is essential is the enlightenment that one either achieves or fails to achieve on one's own, an   enlightenment which is a natural possibility of all. If one works diligently enough, one can extricate oneself from the labyrinth of samsara.  Oner can achieve the ultimate goal on one's own, by one's own power.  There is no need for supernatural assistance.

Is this optimism justified? I remain open to Christianity's claims because I doubt the justification of self-help optimism. One works and works on oneself but makes little progress. That one needs help is   clear. That one can supply it from within one's own resources is unclear.  I know of no enlightened persons.  But I know of plenty of frauds, spiritual hustlers, and mountebanks.

Both Buddhism and Christianity are life-denying religions.  But while Christianity denies this life for the sake of a higher life elsewhere and elsewhen, Buddhism denies this life for the sake of extinction.  The solution to the problem of suffering is to so attenuate desire and aversion that one comes to the realization that one never existed in the first place.  Some solution.  And yet there is much to learn from Buddhism and its practices.  They are the two highest religions.  The two lowest are the religions of spiritual materialism, Judaism and Islam, with Islam at the very bottom of the hierarchy of great religions. 

Islam is shockingly crude, as crude as Buddhism is overrefined.  The Muslim is promised all the crass material pleasures on the far side that he is forbidden here, as if salvation consists of eating and drinking and endless bouts of  sexual intercourse.  Hence my term 'spiritual materialism.'  'Spiritual positivism' is also worth considering.  The Buddhist is no positivist but a nihilist: slavation though annihilation.

Admittedly, this is quick and dirty, but it is important to cut to the bone of the matter from time to time with no mincing of words.  For details see my Buddhism category.

Note: By 'orthodox' I do not have in mind Eastern Orthodoxy, but a Christianity that is not mystically interpreted, a Christianity in which, for example, the resurrection is not interpreted to mean the   attainment of Christ-consciousness or the realization of Christ-nature.

Is Everything in the Bible Literally True?

Of course not. 

If everything in the Bible is literally true, then every sentence in oratio obliqua in the Bible is literally true.  Now the sentence 'There is no God'  occurs in the oblique context, "The fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'"  (Psalm 14:1)  So if everything  in the Bible is literally true, then 'There is no God' is literally true and the Bible proves that it is not the word of God!  Again, at Genesis 3:4 the Bible reports the Serpent saying to the woman (Eve), "You surely shall not die!"  So if everything in the Bible is true, then this falsehood is true.  Ergo, not everything in the Bible is literally true.

Someone who concedes the foregoing may go on to say, "OK, wise guy, everything in the Bible in oratio recta is literally true."  But this can't be right either.  For the Bible tells us in oratio recta that light was created before sources of light (sun, moon, stars) were created. The creation of light is reported at Genesis 1:3, but the creation of sources of light occurs later as reported at Genesis 1: 14-17.  Obviously, light cannot exist before sources of light exist.  So what the Bible reports on this head is false, if taken literally.  Furthermore, if the sun does not come into existence until the fourth day, how can there be days before the fourth day?  In one sense of 'day,' it is the period of time from the rising of the sun to its setting.  In a second sense of 'day,' one that embraces the first, a day is the period of time from the rising of the sun to its next rising.  In either of these senses there cannot be a day without a sun.  So again, these passages cannot be taken literally.

But there is a deeper problem.  The Genesis account implies that the creation of the heavens and the earth took time, six days to be exact. But the creation of the entire system of space-time-matter cannot be something that occurs in time.  And so again Genesis cannot be taken literally, but figuratively as expressing the truth that, as St. Augusine puts it, "the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time." (City of God, XI, 6)

And then there is the business about God resting on the seventh day.  What? He got fagged out after all the heavy lifting and had to take a rest?  As Augustine remarks, that would be a childish way of reading  Geneis 2:3.  The passage must be taken figuratively: ". . . the sacred narrative states that God rested, meaning thereby that those rest who are in Him, and whom He makes to rest." (City of God, XI, 8)

What is to be taken literally and what figuratively?  ". . . a method of determining whether a locution is literal or figurative must be established.  And generally this method consists in this:  that whatever appears in the divine Word that literally does not pertain to virtuous behavior or to the truth of faith you must take to be figurative." (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book Three, Chapter 10)

This method consigns a lot to the figurative.  So it is not literally true that God caused the Red Sea to part, letting the Isrelites through, and then caused the waters to come together to drown the Pharaoh's men?

 

Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of  iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of  it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed  part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The  whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is not  more at least [at last?] than that of privation. This stage has to  be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron  is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real   proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

Christianity is the ultimate in "heterogeneity to the world," to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard.  God becomes man in a miserable outpost of the Roman empire, fully participates in the miseries of human embodiment, is rejected by the religious establishment and is sentenced to death by the political authorities, dying the worst sort of death the brutal Romans could devise.  Humanly absurd but divinely true?

Toleration Extremism: Notes on John Stuart Mill

Here are two passages from Chapter Two of John Stuart Mill's magnificent On Liberty (emphases added):

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. [. . .]  We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

[. . .]

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be  questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

Evaluation of the First Passage

As sympathetic as I am to Mill, I am puzzled (and you ought to be too) by the last sentence of the first quoted passage.  It consists of two claims. The first is that  " We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion . . . ."   This is plainly false!  The opinion of some Holocaust deniers that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz is an opinion we can be sure is false.  We are as sure of this as we are sure of any empirical fact about the past.  Or suppose some fool denies that JFK died by assasination or maintains that McCain won the last presidential election.  Those are  fools' opinions we  know to be wrong. There is no lack of examples.   What was Mill thinking?  "We can never be sure," he writes.  A modal auxiliary married to a negative universal quantifier!  To refute a 'can never' statement all you need is one merely possible counterexample.  Think about it.

Mill's second claim is that even if we are sure that an opinion we are trying to stifle is false, stifling it would nevertheless be an evil.  Mill is here maintaining something so embarrassingly extreme that it borders on the preposterous.  Consider again an actual or possible Holocaust denier who makes some outrageously false assertion that we know (if we know anything about the past) to be false.  Suppose this individual has the means to spread his lies far and wide and suppose that his doing so is likely to incite a horde of radical Islamists to engage in an Islamist equivalent of Kristallnacht.  Would it be evil to 'stifle' the individual in question?  By no means.  Indeed it could be reasonably argued that it is morally imperative that such an individual not be permitted to broadcast his lies.

How could anyone fail to see this?  Perhaps because he harbors the notion that free expression is unconditionally worthwhile, worthwhile regardless of the content of what is being expressed, whether true or false, meaningful or meaningless, harmful or innocuous.  Now I grant that  freedom of expression, discussion, inquiry and the like are very high values.  I'm an Enlightenment man after all, an American, and a philosopher.  Argument and dialectic are the lifeblood of philosophy.  But why do we value the freedom to speak, discuss, publish, and inquire? 

I say that we value them because we value truth and because the freedom to speak, publish, discuss, and inquire are means conducive to the acquisition of truth and the rooting out of falsehood.  It follows that we do not value them, or rather ought not value them, for their own sakes or unconditionally.  We ought to accord them a high value only on condition that they, on balance, lead us to truth and away from falsehood.

So the Holocaust denier, who abuses the right to free speech to spread what we all know (if we know anything about the past) to be falsehoods, has no claim on our toleration.  For again, there is no unconditional right to free expression.  That right is limited by competing values, the value of truth being one of them.  The value of social order is another. 

As I see it, then, Mill makes two mistakes in his first passage.  He fails to see that some opinions are known to be false.  Now there may not be many such opinions, but all I need is one to refute him since he makes a universal claim.  I will of course agree with Mill that many of the doctrines that people denounce as false, and will not examine, are not known to be false.  The second mistake is to think that even if we know an opinion to be false we have no right to suppress its propagation. 

Now of course I am not claiming that all, or even most, known falsehoods are such that their propagation ought to be suppressed.  Let the Flat Earth Society propagate its falsehoods to its heart's content.  For few take them seriously, and their falsehoods, though known to be falsehoods,  are not sufficiently pernicious to warrant suppression.  Obviously, government censorship or suppression of the expression of opinions must be employed only in very serious cases.  This is because government, thought it is practically necessary and does do some good, does much evil and has a tremendous capacity for unspeakable evils.  It was communist governments that murdered 100 million in the 20th century.  And when the Nazis stripped Jews of their property and sent them to the Vernichtungslager, it was legal.  (Think about that and about whether you want to persist in conflating  the legal and the moral.)

Mill's mistake, as it seems to me, is that he allows NO cases where such suppression would be justified.  And that is a position whose extremism condemns it.  Toleration extremism, to give it a name.

Evaluation of the Second Passage

Mill only digs his hole deeper in the second passage.  "Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."  Surely the bolded principle is a bizarre one.  Consider respect for human life.  Respecting human life, we uphold a general prohibition against homicide.  But it is not plausibly maintained there are no exceptions to this 'general'  prohibition where the term does not mean 'exceptionless' but 'holding in most cases.'  There are at least five putative classes of exceptions: killing in self-defence, killing in just war, capital punishment,  abortion, and suicide.   Now suppose someone were to apply Mill's principle (the one I bolded) and argues as follows: "Unless the reasons against killing humans are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."  Would you not put such a person down as a doctrinaire fool?   He holds that if it is wrong to kill human beings 'in general,' then it is wrong to kill any human being in any circumstance whatsoever.  It would then follow that it is wrong to kill a home invader who has just murdered your wife and is about to do the same to you and your children.    The mistake here is to take an otherwise excellent principle or precept (Do not kill human beings) and remove all restrictions on its application.

There are plenty of counterexamples to Mill's bizarre principle that "unless reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."

We conservatives are lovers of liberty  and we share common ground with our libertarian brethren, but here we must part company with them.

 

The God of Philosophy and the God of Religion

Steven Nemes by e-mail:
 
In posts of months past you claimed there was no distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; they're the same thing, if God can be called a thing at all; you asked for an argument that they were [not the same], if I am not mistaken. Here is my attempt to satisfy that request.
 
The God of the philosophers is immutable, as a result of his simplicity; this implies that he cannot be affected and respond to the goings on of the natural order, including us. Whatever happens in the natural order, God is [not] changed or affected in response to it. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, however, does seem to be so affected, on any reasonable reading of the relevant religious texts: in Christianity, he enters into the world to provide a means of salvation from sin, which presupposes his consciousness of sin freely committed by created agents; in Judaism, I would guess, he talks to and responds to the prayers of prophets and great leaders, destroys civilizations because of their sins (which again is an instance of responding to occurrences in the natural order), etc. I won't talk about Islam because I don't know enough. 
 
In short: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob seems to be affected in various ways and acts in response to goings-on in the natural order, whereas the God of the philosophers, by his very nature as immutable, cannot be so affected. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob offers a way of salvation because of human sin, and promises judgment in the future for those who don't repent; the God of the philosophers, on the other hand, cannot be said to do anything in response to what goes on in the natural order.
 
[. . .]
 
Your argument is this:
 
1. The God of the philosophers is ontologically simple, and therefore immutable: he cannot change, and so cannot be affected by anything that occurs in the created realm.
2. The God of the monotheistic religions is not immutable: he affects and is affected by goings-on in the created realm.
3. If there is a property P such that x has P but y does not, then x is not identical to y. (Contrapositive of the Indiscernibility of Identicals)
Therefore
4. The God of the philosophers is not identical to the God of the monotheistic religions.
 
The argument is valid (correct in point of logical form) if 'God of the philosophers' means 'God as conceived by the philosophers' and 'God of the montheistic religions' means 'God as conceived within the monotheistic religions.'  And I do think that is what you mean by the phrases in question. (Correct me if I am wrong.) 
 
But whether or not the argument is valid, it is not probative because the first  premise is false and the second is dubious.
 
Ad (1).  Only some philosophers hold that God is ontologically simple; Alvin Plantinga is a prominent contemporary theist who does not.  One cannot therefore build ontological simplicity into the definition of 'God of the philosophers.'  As for immutability, some philosophers think of God as mutable, Charles Hartshorne, for example.  So one cannot pack immutability into the definition either.  And similarly for other attributes.  For some, there are broadly logical limits on divine power, for others there are no limits on divine power. There are different views about the omni-attributes.  There are different views about the divine modal status.  There are different views about how the causa prima is related to the realm of secondary causes, etc.
 
The point is that 'God of the philosophers' does not pick out some one definite conception of God.  There are many philosophical conceptions of God even within monotheism.  There is no God of the philosophers if the phrase means 'God as conceived by the philosophers.'  Premise (1) therefore rests on a false presupposition.
 
I read 'God of the philosophers' differently.  What the phrase refers to is an approach to the divine reality, the approach by way of discursive reason applied to the data of experience, the approach exemplified by Aquinas in the Five Ways, for instance.  Or the approach exemplified by Descartes in the theistic arguments of his Meditations on First Philosophy.  The God of the philosophers, then, is God approached by way of discursive reason.  It is essential to realize that what Aquinas, Descartes, and others were groping towards using their unaided discursive intellects was not a concept, an idea, an ens rationis, or anything merely immanent to their own thinking. It was nothing merely excogitated, or projected, or abtract, or merely immanent to their minds.  It was, instead, the real concrete God, transcendent of the mind and independent of all modes of approach thereto.
 
To think otherwise is to commit the mistake I expose in Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers.
 
My claim is that what the philosopher seeks to know by discursive reason is the same as what the mystic seeks to know by direct, albeit nonsensible, experience, and is the same as what the religionist seeks to contact by way of belief on the basis of revelation.  They approach one and the same God, but in three different ways.  To employ a crude analogy: if there are three routes up K2, it does not follow  that there are three summits.  There is and can be only one summit.  Similarly, there is an can be only one God.  Reason, mystical intuition, and faith are three routes to the same 'summit.'
 
Ad (2).  It is certainly true that God is portrayed in many passages of the Bible as changing and thus as changeable.  But it doesn't follow straightaway that the God of religion is changeable.  For perhaps those passages can be taken in a merely figurative way and interpreted so as to be consistent with God's immutability.  Just as one must distinguish between philosophical conceptions of God and God, one must distinguish between Biblical portrayals of God and God.  The God of religion is God as approached via faith in revelation; but what exactly the content of revelation is is something to be worked out by hard theological work.  The Bible does not supply its own theology.  One cannot simply read it and know what it means.  One has toreason about what one reads.  But that is not to say that theology is philosophy.  Theology accepts revelation as data; philosophy does not.
 
Consider Genesis 3, 8:  "And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden."  Obviously, this passage cannot be taken literally, for if so taken, one would have to say that God, a purely spiritual being, has feet.  But if he was walking around on his feet, was he shod or not?  And what was his shoe size?  Were his toenails properly trimmed?  How many corns and calluses did he have, if any?  There must be answers to these questions and a thousand more  if God was literally walking through the garden and making noise as he did so.  And furthermore, he had to have physical eyes if Adam and Eve though they could hide from him behind trees.
 
Since we know that a purely spiritual being cannot have feet, and since we know that only a purely spiritual being could be the cause of the existence of the physical universe, we know that the passage in question cannot be taken literally.  So what exactly the content of revelation is in Genesis and elsewhere is not easy to discern.  But we can be sure that any portrayals of God that imply that he has physical attributes must be taken figuratively so as not to conflict with God's spiritual nature.  It may well be, though I am not prepared to argue it in detail, that portrayals of God as mutable must also be taken figuratively.  So I find your second premise doubtful.
 
So I persist in my view that the 'distinction' between the God of the philosophers and the God of the religionists is entirely bogus.  In fact my view strikes me as self-evident if one construes the relevant phrases in my way.  The God of the philosophers is the divine reality, if there is one, which is approached by discursive reason applied to the data of experience, with no use being made of the putative date of revelation.  The God of the religionists is the divine reality, if there is one, that is approached via faith on the basis of revelation.  Clearly, there can be only one divine reality.  For if there were two, neither would be divine given that only an absolute reality can be divine and given that the divine is that than which no greater can be conceived.  Since there can be only one divine reality, the God of the philosophers and the God of the religionists is the same.

The Wages of Appeasement

The_wages_of_appeasement

I am right now listening to Michael Medved interview Bruce S. Thornton, a colleague of Victor Davis Hanson, and author of The Wages of Appeasement.   Here is a Front Page interview with Thornton.  Excerpt:

MT: Could you talk a bit about one of the recurring themes among the three historical examples you write about in the book: a crippling failure of imagination “to see beyond the pretexts and professed aims of the adversary and recognize his true goals, no matter how bizarre or alien to our own way of thinking”?

BT: We in the West assume our ideals and goods are universal. They are, but only potentially: there are many alternatives to our way of living and governing ourselves, most obviously Islam and its totalizing social-political-economic order, sharia law. Suffering from this myopia, we fail to see those alternatives or take them seriously, usually dismissing them as compensations for material or political goods such as prosperity or democracy.

Worse yet, our enemies are aware of this weakness, and are adept at telling us what we want to hear, and using our own ideals as masks for their own agendas. Just look at the misinterpretations of the protestors in Egypt and the Muslim Brothers, not just from liberals but from many conservatives, who have been duped by the use of vague terms like “freedom” or “democracy.”

An important factor in this bad habit is our own inability to take religion seriously. Since religion is mainly a private affair, a lifestyle choice and source of private therapeutic solace, we can’t imagine that there are people so passionate about spiritual aims that they will murder and die in the pursuit of those aims.

I would add to these excellent points the observation that  the failure to take religion seriously is one of the worst mistakes of the New Atheists.  Being both atheists and leftists, they cannot take religion seriously.  (By contrast, most conservative atheists, though atheists, appreciate the value and importance of religion in human life.)  The New Atheists do not appreciate how deep reach the roots of religion into the human psyche.  And so, like the benighted John Lennon, they "imagine no religion" as if their imagining picks out a real possibility.  They fancy that a change in material conditions will cause religion to evaporate.  Pure Marxist folly, I say.  Man does not live by bread alone.  He wants more, whether or not there is anything more.  He wants meaning and purpose, whether there is meaning and purpose.  He is a metaphysical animal whether he likes it or not, a fact to which every mosque, temple, church and shrine testifies.

‘Material’ as *Alienans* in ‘Material Implication’

The topic of conditionals is ancient, not as ancient as Aristotle and logic itself, but damn near: hard thinking on this topic began with the Dialectical School which featured such worthies as Philo the   Logician and Diodorus Cronus, circa late 4th to mid-3rd centuries B.C. In nuce, those gentlemen had wrapped their minds around what much later came to be called material and strict implication, Philo around the former, Diodorus around the latter. The topic of conditionals is also deep and fascinating. But then no topic in philosophy lacks for fascination. The mansion of philosophy has countless rooms, each a labyrinth. Be sure to secure your thread of Ariadne before plunging on . . . .

The other day it occurred to me that 'material' in 'material implication' is best thought of as an alienans adjective. Normally, an FG is a G.  Thus a nagging wife is a wife, a female duck is a duck, cow's leather is leather, and a contingent truth is a truth. But if 'F' is alienans, then either an FG is not a G, or it does not follow from x's being an FG that x is a G. For example, your former wife is not your wife, your quondam lover is not your lover, a decoy duck is not a duck, artificial leather is not leather, negative growth is not growth, and a relative truth is not a truth. Is an apparent heart attack a heart attack? It may or may not be. One cannot infer from 'Jones had an apparent heart attack' to 'Jones had a heart attack.' So 'apparent' in 'apparent heart attack' is alienans.

Now if p materially implies q, does it follow that p implies q? Obviously not. I am breathing materially implies 7 + 5 = 12, but the first does not imply the second. Material implication is no more a kind or species of implication than former wives are a kind of wives, or artificial leather is a kind or species of leather. Just as 'artificial' shifts or alienates the sense of 'leather,' 'material' shifts or alienates the sense of 'implication.'

Material implication is rather a necessary condition any implication must satisfy if it is to be what it is, namely, a genuine implication. For all will agree that in no case does p imply q if p is true and q false. Thus material implication does capture something essential to every genuine implication. But if X is essential to Y, it does not follow that X is a kind of Y.

Once we appreciate that 'material' in 'material implication' is an alienans adjective, and that material implication is not a kind of implication, we are in a position to see that that the 'paradoxes' of   material implication are not paradoxes strictly speaking, but arise from foisting the ordinary sense of 'implication' upon 'material implication.'

Soul Food

People are generally aware of the importance of good nutrition, physical exercise and all things health-related. They understand that what they put into their bodies affects their physical health.  Underappreciated is a truth just as, if not more important: that what one puts into one's mind affects one's mental and spiritual health. The soul has its foods and its poisons just as the body does. This   simple truth, known for centuries, goes unheeded while liberals fall all over each other climbing aboard the various environmental and health bandwagons. 

Second-hand smoke the danger of which is negligible much exercises our leftist pals while the soul-destroying toxicity of the mass 'entertainment' media concerns them not at all.

Why are those so concerned with physical toxins so tolerant of cultural toxins? This is another example of what I call misplaced moral enthusiasm. You worry about global warming and sidestream smoke when you give no thought to the soul, its foods, and its poisons? You liberals are a strange breed of cat, crouching behind the First Amendment, quick to defend every form of cultural pollution under the rubric 'free speech.'

Levi Asher Writes Book on Ayn Rand

Levi Asher of Literary Kicks e-mails:
 
Your blog is just about my favorite philosophy blog on the web — not because I often agree with your political opinions (I don't) but because you write with clarity, humor and just the right amount of personal touch.  Salut!  I also write about philosophy on my blog Literary Kicks, and you may remember a cross-blog interchange between Litkicks and the Maverick Philosopher over the meaning of Buddhism late last year.
 
I'm writing you now to ask if I could send you a PDF or Kindle copy of my new book Why Ayn Rand Is Wrong (and Why It Matters), which is currently #21 on the Amazon Politics/Ideologies Kindle bestsellers list.  This book offers an unusual and original approach to Ayn Rand's ethical philosophy, and aims to present an alternative conception of practical ethics that cherishes individual freedom while allowing a greater regard for the important place of the collective soul in all our lives. Since you haven't paid much attention to Ayn Rand on your blog, I gather that she is not very present on your philosophical radar, but I hope you'll consider spending a few minutes checking out my short book regardless, because I think this book has wider value as an original approach to popular ethical philosophy.
 
Here is a brief explanation of why I wrote it.  Thanks for your time, and please let me know if I can send a PDF or Kindle version of "Why Ayn Rand is Wrong" for your consideration and/or review.  Have a great day!
Thanks for the kind words, Levi, and do send me the PDF file.  Actually, there has been a fair amount of discussion of Ayn Rand on this blog.  It is collected in the Ayn Rand category.  In early 2009 there was a heated debate here about Rand.  The posts with open comboxes drew over 200 comments.  There were numerous other comments that I deleted.  Rand attracts adolescents of all ages and they tend to be uncivilized.  I was doing a lot of deleting and blocking in early aught-nine.
 
But I agree with you: Rand's ideas ought to be discussed, not dismissed.

Eric Hoffer, Contentment, and the Paradox of Plenty

Eric Hoffer as quoted in James D. Koerner, Hoffer's America (Open Court, 1973), p. 25:

I need little to be contented. Two meals a day, tobacco, books that hold my interest, and a little writing each day. This to me is a full life.

And this after a full day at the San Francisco waterfront unloading ships.  And we're talking cheap tobacco smoked after a meal of Lipton soup and Vienna sausage in a humble apartment in a marginal part of town.  Hoffer, who had it tough indeed, had the wisdom to be satisfied with what he had. 

Call it the paradox of plenty: those who had to struggle in the face of adversity developed character and worth, while those with opportunities galore and an easy path became slackers and malcontents and 'revolutionaries.'   Adding to the paradox is that those who battled adversity learned gratitude while those who had it handed to them became ingrates.