I'm So Glad to join you, My Best Friend, as we follow Mr. Tambourine Man on an Embryonic Journey to hear the Chimes of Freedom as we Break on Through to the Other Side.
Author: Bill Vallicella
God, Gratitude, and Gladness
Jim Ryan of Philosoblog posts infrequently, but always interestingly. Ryan is both a conservative and an atheist. Being a conservative, he appreciates the importance of gratitude. Being an atheist, he sees no reason to take gratitude and its importance as supportive of theistic belief. Herewith, some commentary on his post A New Error Theory for Theism.
1. Gratitude and human flourishing. Ryan rightly suspects a connection between gratitude and human flourishing: "The ordering of attitudes and dispositions in the soul is dysfunctional if at or near the center of these there is no deep gratitude, by which I mean gratitude that this world exists and that one lives in it." I believe this is a genuine insight.
2. The nature of gratitude. Let us first note that gratitude exhibits a triadic structure. To feel grateful is for someone X to feel grateful to someone Y for something or someone Z. If I receive a gift, I am grateful to the donor for the gift. 'To whom?' and 'For what?' are both questions it is appropriate to ask in ordinary cases of gratitude. And as the grammar of 'To whom?' suggests, the donor must be a person. I cannot be grateful to a vending machine for disgorging a can of Pepsi upon the insertion of a few coins. Here too we have a triadic relation: the machine gave me a can of soda. But I cannot be grateful to a machine, though I could perhaps be grateful to its installer or manufacturer or inventor. It would be a case of incorrect or inappropriate emotion were one to feel grateful to a vending machine. I hold, with Brentano, that one can distinguish between correct and incorrect emotion.
Note also that what one is grateful for, the gift, must be gratuitously given. I can be appropriately grateful only for that which is freely given, which implies that the donor is both a free agent and an uncoerced free agent. If Robin Hood forces you to give me your money, I cannot be appropriately grateful to you, though I may be to Robin Hood. For there to be gratitude, there must be a donor, and it is necessary that the donor be a person; but it is not sufficient that the donor be a person: the donor's donation must be a free act.
3. Can one be grateful to a not presently existing donor? If I am grateful to a person P at time t does it follow that P exists at t? Or can one appropriately feel gratitude only to persons who presently exist? Suppose someone likes what I write and mails me a check as a gift for my blogging endeavours. Unbeknownst to me, the donor dies before I receive the check. I am grateful to him for the check even though at the time of receiving the check and feeling the gratitude he no longer exists. This suggests that gratitude to a person P does not entail the present existence of P. And certainly it does seem that gratitude to past persons is appropriately felt. A child, student, philosopher might appropriately feel gratitude in respect of his deceased parents, teachers, predecessors. If one feels grateful to a person surely the gratitude does not end when the person does. My gratitude to you can survive your death though it cannot survive mine. (I am assuming for the moment that we are not immortal souls.)
4. Gratitude to a never existing donor? Can one appropriately feel grateful to a nonexistent person? A child, for example, feels grateful to Santa Claus for her Christmas presents. This looks to be a genuine case of gratitude despite the nonexistence of the person to whom the child feels grateful. But note that for the child the existence of Santa Claus is an epistemic possibility. If the child were convinced of the nonexistence of the fat guy, then she couldn't feel grateful to him. Note also that the triadic structure is preserved. The girl is grateful to Santa Claus for her presents despite his nonexistence. If a theist is grateful to God for his existence, his gratitude is what it is whether or not God exists. But a person who disbelieves in God cannot be grateful to God.
5. Must the relata of a relation all of them exist? #4 points up a fiendishly difficult philosophical question that turns up in many different contexts: Can a relation obtain if one or more of its relata do not exist? #3 points up the same problem on the assumption of presentism, the doctrine that (the contents of) the present alone exist, that past and furture items to do not exist.
6. Metaphysical gratitude. What Jim Ryan is talking about, however, is not ordinary gratitude — gratitude to some intramundane person for some intramundane object — but what we might call metaphysical gratitude or what he calls "deep gratitude": gratitude for the existence of the world and our lives within it. Now if this is a genuine case of gratitude, it seems appropriate to ask to whom we feel grateful. This person can only be God, as Ryan realizes, since only God could bestow the gift of the world's existence. So it would seem that a metaphysically grateful person is grateful to God. A theist might try to argue from gratitude to God as follows:
a. We are appropriately grateful for the existence of the world
b. To be grateful is to be grateful to someone
c. The only person to whom one can be appropriately grateful for the
existence of the world is God
—–
d. God exists.
7. Ryan's rejection of this argument. Ryan will of course reject this argument by rejecting premise (b). He maintains:
P: There is no entailment from the proposition that one feels gratitude to the proposition that there is someone to whom one feels gratitude.
That could be read, not as a denial of the triadic structure of gratitude, but as saying that, from the mere fact that one feels grateful, it does not follow that the person to whom one feels grateful exists. (Compare the Santa Claus example above. The child is grateful to someone, namely, Santa Claus; but it does not follow that Santa Claus exists. Or consider the situation in which presentism is true and one is grateful to a dead parent. One would then be grateful to a nonexistent donor.) So from the mere fact that one feels grateful for the existence of the world, it does not follow that God exists, even in the presence of the auxiliary premises that gratitude is by its very nature gratitude to a person, and the only possible donor of the world is God.
This seems right and refutes the (a)-(d) argument. But it raises an interesting question. Suppose the following: subject S is grateful for some object O; O can only be the gift of some person P and S knows
this to be the case; S either knows or else is subjectively certain that P does not exist. Are these suppositions consistent? Can I be grateful to a person I am subjectively certain does not exist? Ryan is subjectively certain that God does not exist. How then can he feel grateful for the existence of the world given that he knows that gratitude is by its very nature gratitude to a person and that in the
present case the person can only be God?
8. Gratitude and Gladness. I say that Ryan cannot be grateful that the world exists given his atheism. For if he is grateful, he is grateful to someone, and this someone can only be God given that the object of the gratitude is the existence of the world. I grant that gratitude for the existence of the world does not prove the existence of God. But the gratitude to be gratitude must allow the existence of God: the existence of God must be epistemically possible for the subject of gratitude. But Ryan's 'gratitude' is blended with subjective certainty of God's nonexistence: the existence of God is not an epistemic possibility for Ryan. So I say that what Ryan feels is not gratitude. Ryan concludes,
Atheists can feel deep gratitude, as well, however. When we construe the emotion as deep gladness and modesty, the personal object (God) drops out. One is simply glad that this universe exists and that one lives in it. There need be no one to whom one is grateful. So, the error theory doesn't cast any aspersions on deep gratitude. It is perfectly consistent with holding, as I do, that deep gratitude is indeed part of proper functioning for human beings.
I deny that atheists can feel deep (metaphysical) gratitude, gratitude for the very existence of the world and our lives in it. An atheist is one who explicitly denies the existence of God. For such a person it is not epistemically possible that there be a person to whom to be grateful for the existence of the world. Since the existence of God is a priori ruled out, what the atheist feels cannot be gratitude. Gratitude by its very nature is gratitude to a person. Granted, the existence of the person is not guaranteed by the presence of the emotion; but it can't be excluded by it either. It is incoherent to feel gratitude to a person one believes did not ever exist. Ryan can no more feel gratitude for the existence of the world than I can feel gratitude for Christmas presents whose existence could only be explained by Santa's having dropped them down my chimney.
An atheist can be glad that the world exists, but gladness is not gratitude.
Save the Planet with George Carlin
I have never thought much of that overgrown adolescent, George Carlin. But this is a brilliant and hilarious performance which serves as a useful corrective to environmental extremism and nature idolatry. (Hat tip: The blogging biker.)
The Question of the Reality of God: Wittgensteinian Fideism No Answer
Taking a Wittgensteinian line, D. Z. Phillips construes the question of the reality of God as like the question of the reality of physical objects in general, and unlike the question of the reality of any particular physical object such as a unicorn. Phillips would therefore have a bone to pick with Edward 'Cactus Ed' Abbey who writes,
Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?
Abbey's meaning is clear: It is as idle to suppose that there is a God as to suppose that there is an irate unicorn on the far side of the moon. Of course, there could be such a unicorn. It is logically possible in that there is no contradiction in the idea. It is also epistemically possible in that the supposition is consistent with what we know. (Perhaps a clever extraterrestrial scientist synthesized a unicorn, put him in a space suit, and deposited the unfortunate critter on the moon.) But there is no positive reason to believe in something so outlandish. The same goes for God according to Abbey, Russell, and plenty of others. Such theists think of God as just one more being among beings, as something in addition to all the other things that exist.
How might a theist respond to this puerile conception? (And to such cognate 'objections' as Russell's Teapot? ) One way to respond is that of the Wittgensteinian fideist. A fideist like Phillips would take Abbey to have misconstrued the very sense of the theist's affirmation. Abbey takes the theist to be adding a weird object to the ontological inventory: hence the comparison of God to an irate lunar unicorn. Phillips, however, clearly sees that this is a mistake. His positive theory, however, is just as bad. Phillips thinks that the claim that God exists is more like the claim that there are physical objects in general. That there are physical objects in general is presupposed by any inquiry into whether a particular physical object exists. It is a presupposition without which such an inquiry would make no sense. As Phillips puts it:
Similarly, the question of the reality of God is a question of the possibility of sense and nonsense, truth and falsity, in religion. When God's existence is construed as a matter of fact, it is taken for granted that the concept of God is at home within the conceptual framework of the reality of the physical world. . . . to ask a question about the reality of God is to ask a question about a kind of reality, not about the reality of this or that, in much the same way as asking a question about the reality of physical objects is not to ask about the reality of this or that physical object. ("Philosophy, Theology, and the Reality of God," Phil. Quart., 1963, reprinted in Rowe and Wainwright, p. 281)
Phillips blunders badly in this passage when he says that construing the divine existence as a matter of fact takes it for granted that the concept of God belongs within the conceptual framework of the reality of the physical world. For if anything is clear, it is that God for the theist is not a physical object. Surely, in claiming that God exists as a matter of fact, the theist who understands his doctrine is not claiming that God exists as a physical object. What Phillips should have said is that construing God's existence as a matter of fact presupposes, not that God is a physical object, but that God is a being or an existent.
Phillips would want to deny that too. His view is that the reality of God is not the reality of a special being, but the reality of a presupposition that is not and cannot be questioned from within a religious language-game (or at least from within a theistic religious language-game). The reality of God has to do with what a religious believer is prepared to say: ". . . the religious believer is not prepared to say that God might not exist. It is not that as a matter of fact God will always exist, but that it makes no sense to say that God might not exist." (280)
Perhaps the following analogy will clarify what Phillips is driving at. Consider the reality of checkmate in chess. The existence of checkmate is not a matter of fact in the way that it is a matter of fact that Karpov opened a certain game with 1. d4. For within the game of chess it makes no sense to say that checkmate might not exist. Checkmate and the rules governing it are defining features of the game. They cannot be questioned from within the game, and to question them from without the game is simply to reject the game. For that reason, it makes no sense to demand proof of these rules, nor can one raise the question whether they are reasonable. Is it reasonable that one cannot castle out of check, into check, or though check? It is neither reasonable nor unreasonable. The question of reasonableness cannot arise. Similarly, for Phillips, it is neither reasonable nor unreasonable that God exists. To play a theistic language-game is to presupposes the meaningfulness of God-talk just as to play chess is to presuppose the meaningfulness of talk of checkmate. And just as God exists in theistic language-games, checkmate exists in chess. But also: just as checkmate does not exist outside chess, God does not exist outself theistic language-games. For if God does exist apart from theistic language-games, then there would be a fact of that matter as to the existence of God.
At this point one can see what is wrong with Phillips' view. Every sane person is an anti-realist about checkmate, but to be an anti-realist about God, as Phillips' view seems to require, is to make a joke of theistic belief. Phillips' claim that "theology is the grammar of discourse" (282) is therefore as preposterous as the claim that botany is the grammar of discourse about plants. There is of course a sense in which for the theist the existence of God is necessary, but this is not the sense in which a rule is necessary for a language-game. Chess is not chess without checkmate, so checkmate is necessary within chess. God, however, is not a rule, nor a linguistic presupposition, nor concept, nor anything dependent on human talking and acting. So the necessity of God is not the necessity of a rule. God is a necessary being, which implies that he is a being, which implies that he exsts independently of human talk and speech if he exists at all. God cannot be reduced to God-talk and God-ritual. Chess just is chess-talk and chess-ritual: chess has no reality outside chess conventions and the chessic form of life. Not so with God.
These points are frightfully obvious, but one can understand why Phillips was driven to contravene them. Surely God is not a physical object, and it is arguable that he is not a being among beings. What then is God, and how understand his reality? His is not the reality of any sort of abstract object, nor that of any sort of collection; thus he is not the world-whole. So Phillips is driven to say something equally untenable, namely, that God is immanent to certain language-games, as a sort of framework truth of those language-games.
The question of the reality of God is a hard nut to crack, but surely it won't do to say that the reality of God is a matter of talk and practice, as if God were merely a feature of certain language games and forms of life. If God exists, then he is a reality transcendent of any Sprachspiel or Lebensform.
The Recluse Aphorizes, Laconically
By oneself one can be oneself.
Limits
The young should test their limits. The old, having tested them, should respect them. Two misfortunes: never to learn what one is capable of; to come to grief from attempting what one is incapable of.
From the Mail: John Bishop, Believing by Faith
Dr. Vallicella,
Another excellent post with which I whole-heartedly agree!
A. Rationalism: Put your trust in reason to deliver truths about ultimates and ignore the considerations of Sextus Empiricus, Nagarjuna, Bayle, Kant, and a host of others that point to the infirmity of reason.
B. Fideism: Put your trust in blind faith. Submit, obey, enslave your reason to what purports to be revealed truth while ignoring the fact that what counts as revealed truth varies from religion to religion, and within a religion from sect to sect.
C. Skepticism: Suspend belief on all issues that transcend the mundane if not on all beliefs, period. Don't trouble your head over whether God is or is not tripersonal. Stick to what appears. And don't say, 'The tea is sweet'; say, 'The tea appears sweet.' (If you say that the tea is sweet, you invite contradiction by an irascible table-mate.)
D. Reasoned Faith: Avoiding each of the foregoing options, one formulates one's beliefs carefully and holds them tentatively. One does not abandon them lightly, but neither does one fail to revisit and revise them. Doxastic examination is ongoing at least for the length of one's tenure here below. One exploits the fruitful tension of Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and religion, reason and faith, playing them off against each other and using each to chasten the other.
I recommend (D). Or are there other options?
John Bishop (University of Auckland) has a book , Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Faith (OUP, 2007) which is perhaps the best book that I have read on the subject. He argues for what he calls a ‘supra-evidential fideism’ in which one is ‘morally entitled’ to “take as true in one’s practical and theoretical deliberations” a claim that lacks evidence sufficient for epistemically-justified acceptance or rejection.
It is a developed Jamesian’ approach to the right to believe. He does not allow for beliefs that go contrary to the weight of evidence, thus he rejects Wittgensteinian fideism. One may believe beyond the evidence, but not against the evidence. He holds that one must always respect the canons of rational inquiry and not dismiss them, even in matters of faith. Yet, by the very nature of the faith-issue, they can be transcended with moral entitlement.
Nor does he allow for ‘induced willings-to believe.’ He holds that one who already has an inclination / disposition to believe is morally entitled to do so if the issue is important, forced, and by the nature of the issue cannot be decided upon the basis of ‘rationalist empiricist’ evidential practice.I came across the book on a list of important books in philosophy of religion on Prosblogion.
I think that it is a type of fideism that combines your categories B and D – fideism and reasoned faith.
Mark Weldon Whitten
They Refused to Look Through the Telescope
There were churchmen and other contemporaries of Galileo who, standing fast on convictions swotted up from the lore of Aristotle and his commentators, refused to look through the Italian's telescope. Similarly, there are atheists and mortalists today who, standing fast on convictions derived from less reputable sources, refuse to engage in the spiritual practices which could serve as their 'telescope.'
Just as the scientific attitude demands of us an openness to one range of experience, the religious attitude demands of us an openness to another.
Talk is Cheap?
Talk is cheap, they say, but the right word, at the right time, spoken from the heart with purity of intent to the right person can be priceless.
What Socializing and Whisky Have in Common
A little socializing, like a little whisky, is good. But more is not better. The sobriety of solitary silence is superior to the sloughing off of self into the social, and the value of the latter is to enhance, by way of contrast, the delights of the former. Thus spoke the introvert.
Edith Stein on Cognitio Fidei: Is Faith a Kind of Knowledge?
One finds the phrase cognitio fidei in Thomas Aquinas and in such Thomist writers as Josef Pieper. It translates as 'knowledge of faith.' The genitive is to be interpreted subjectively, not objectively: faith is not the object of knowledge; faith is a form or type of knowledge. But how can faith be a type of knowledge? One ought to find this puzzling.
On a standard analysis of 'knows,' where propositional knowledge is at issue, subject S knows that p just in case (i) S believes that p; (ii) S is justified in believing that p; and (iii) p is true. This piece of epistemological boilerplate is the starting-point for much of the arcana (Gettier counterexamples, etc.) of contemporary epistemology. But its pedigree is ancient, to be found in Plato's Theaetetus.
It is obvious that on the standard analysis mere belief is inferior to knowledge since if I believe what is false I don't have knowledge, and if I believe what is true without justification I don't have knowledge either. How then can mere belief be a form or type of knowledge? It is rather a necessary but not sufficient condition of knowledge. Or so it seems to the modern mind.
Another puzzle has to do with certainty. Whether or not knowledge entails certainty, it seems to the modern mind that belief definitely does not entail certainty: what I believe but do not know I cannot be certain about since if I believe but do not know, then either truth is lacking or justification is lacking or both. How then can mere belief be said to be certain? And yet we read in Aquinas that "It is part of the concept of belief itself that man is certain of that in which he believes." (Quoted from Pieper, Belief and Faith, p. 15).
Is easy to understand how one who believes but does not know that p can be subjectively certain that p; but it is difficult to understand how such a person can be objectively certain that p. Objective certainty, however, alone has epistemic value.
We now turn to the remarkable Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic church. In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.
One issue is whether faith gives us access to truth. Stein has Thomas say:
. . . faith is a way to truth. Indeed, in the first place it is a way to truths — plural — which would otherwise be closed to us, and in the second place it is the surest way to truth. For there is no greater certainty than that of faith . . . . (Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, tr. Redmond, ICS Publications 2000, pp. 16-17)
Now comes an important question. What is it that we as philosophers want? We want the ultimate truths about the ultimate matters. If so, it is arguable that we should take these truths from whatever source offers them to us even if the source is not narrowly philosophical. We should not say: I will accept only those truths that can be certified by (natural) reason, but rather all truths whether certified by reason or 'certified' by faith. Thus Stein has Aquinas say:
If faith makes accessible truths unattainable by any other means, philosophy, for one thing, cannot forego them without renouncing its universal claim to truth. [. . .] One consequence, then, is a material dependence of philosophy on faith.
Then too, if faith affords the highest certainty attainable by the human mind, and if philosophy claims to bestow the highest certainty, then philosophy must make the certainty of faith its own. It does so first by absorbing the truths of faith, and further by using them as the final criterion by which to gauge all other truths. Hence, a second consequence is a formal dependence of philosophy on faith. (17-18)
But of course this cannot go unchallenged by Husserl. So Stein has him say:
. . . if faith is the final criterion of all other truth, what is the criterion of faith itself? What guarantees that the certainty of my faith is genuine? (20)
Or in terms of of the distinction made above between subjective and objective certainty: what guarantees that the certainty of faith is objective and not merely subjective? The faiths of Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all different. How can the Christian be sure that the revelation he takes on faith has not been superseded by the revelation the Muslim takes on faith?
Stein's Thomas replies to Husserl as follows:
Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith. [. . .]
All we can do is point out that for the believer such is the certainty of faith that it relativizes all other certainty, and that he can but give up any supposed knowledge which contradicts his faith. The unique certitude of faith is a gift of grace. It is up to the understanding and will to draw the practical consequences therefrom. Constructing a philosophy on faith belongs to the theoretical consequences. (20-22)
So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason but which are provided by faith in revelation. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.
My task, in this and in related posts, is first and foremost to set forth the problems as clearly as I can. Anyone who thinks this problem has an easy solution does not understand it. It is part of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem.
Primum Non Nocere
"First of all, do no harm." Not just for medicos. Also for the benighted politicos who would 'fix' health care. Their approach is a bit like fixing a roof leak by tearing down the house and building a new one.
And don't you just love the way these idiots use 'fix' and broken'? Talk like a first-grader and you'll think like one too. And these fools are our rulers?
Not Uxorious, but Appreciative
Having paid tribute to WD-40, the least I can do is pay tribute, once again, to my wife. She may not be a solvent, but she contributes mightily to my being solvent.
As for marriage, it is a good thing if one enters into it for the right reasons, at the right time, and after due consideration. Bear in mind that every man has two heads. The big one is for thinking, the little one for linking. Understand their offices and respective spheres of operation. To cerebrate with the organ of copulation is Clintonian and not conducive unto happiness. Even in the question of marriage, the big head must be the ruling element.
Another Look at Anderson’s Trinitarian Mysterianism (Peter Lupu)
(Hauled up from the vasty deeps of the ComBox into the light of day by BV who supplies minor edits and comments in blue.)
I strongly recommend to everyone interested in the subject to read Anderson’s “In defense of mystery: a reply to Dale Tuggy” (2005), Religious Studies, 41, 145-163 in which he replies to Dale Tuggy’s paper “The unfinished business of Trinitarian theorizing”, Religious Studies, 39(2003), 165-183. I was unable to obtain Dale Tuggy’s original paper.
Continue reading “Another Look at Anderson’s Trinitarian Mysterianism (Peter Lupu)”
The Infirmity of Reason Versus the Certitude of Faith
Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, "that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt." (Pyrrho entry, Bayle's Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude of faith is no solution either! Recoiling from the labyrinth into which unaided human reason loses itself, Bayle writes:
It seems therefore that this unfortunate state [the one brought about by the infirmity of reason] is the most proper one of all for convincing us that our reason is a path that leads us astray since, when it displays itself with the greatest subtlety, it plunges us into such an abyss. The natural conclusion of this ought to be to renounce this guide and to implore the cause of all things to give us a better one. This is a great step toward the Christian religion; for it requires that we look to God for knowledge of what we ought to believe and what we ought to do, and that we enslave our understanding to the obeisance of faith. If a man is convinced that nothing good is to be expected from his philosophical inquiries, he will be more disposed to pray to God to persuade him of the truths that ought to be believed than if he flatters himself that he might succeed by reasoning and disputing. A man is therefore happily disposed toward faith when he knows how defective reason is. (206, emphasis added)
Now how is this a solution to the alleged infirmity of reason? A Christian fideist, acquiescing in pure blind (purblind?) faith, accepts the Trinity while a Muslim fideist, equally subjectively certain of his faith, rejects the Trinity while intoning that God is one. Blind conviction butts up against blind conviction of the opposite kind and all too often strife and bloodshed is the upshot.
Continue reading “The Infirmity of Reason Versus the Certitude of Faith”