Author: Bill Vallicella

Of Blood and Blog

I don't think my experience is unusual: our blood relatives tend not to give a hoot about our blogging activities. They say blood is thicker than water, but consanguinity  sure doesn't seem to translate into  spiritual affinity. No matter, the community that we can't find by blood, we'll find by blog.

The people who know us take us for granted. Is it not written that "no prophet is welcome in his hometown"? (Luke 4, 24: nemo propheta acceptus est in patria sua.)

One could call it the injustice of propinquity. We often underestimate those nearby, whether by blood or space, while overestimating those afar.

An Escape From Reality?

If someone tells you that philosophy is an escape from reality, reply: "You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether philosophy is an escape from it."

The point, of course, is that all assertions about reality and its evasions are philosophical assertions that embroil the objector in the very thing from which he seeks to distance himself.

From the Mail: Trinity and Incarnation

Dr. Vallicella,

Thank you for some exceptionally helpful posts lately! Regarding your point

(1) “Is there a clear scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Trinity?”

It would seem that a part of that question, or perhaps a prior question to it is:

 (1*) “Is there a clear scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Incarnation?”

It was because early Christians came to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was divine/God  that the question of how a divine Christ/God-Christ related to the ‘Father God’ to whom he prayed and in whom the Christians also first believed.  As a theologically-trained former minister, who still tries to keep up with contemporary work on the historical Jesus, I must confess that I fail to see that (1*) is the case, therefore I fail to see that (1) is the case.

 Mark Weldon Whitten, PhD   

Continue reading “From the Mail: Trinity and Incarnation”

The Reclusive J. D. Salinger Dies at 91

SalingerTime Here.

We who are obscure ought to be grateful for it.  It is wonderful to be able to walk down the street and be taken for an average schmuck.  A lttle recognition from a few high-quality individuals is all one needs.  Fame can be a curse.   The unhinged Mark David Chapman, animated by Holden Caulfield's animus against phoniness, decided that John Lennon was a phony, and so had to be shot.

The mad pursuit of empty celebrity by so many in our society shows their and its spiritual vacuity.

 

 

UPDATE (1/30/10):  Apparently, today's teens cannot relate to Holden Caulfield.

Some Questions About the Trinity Distinguished

It may help to distinguish the following questions.

1. Is there a clear scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Trinity?

2. Is the doctrine, as formulated in the Athanasian creed and related canonical documents, true?

3. Is it possible for human reason, unaided by divine revelation, to know the doctrine to be true?

4. Is the doctrine of the Trinity possibly true?

5. Is the doctrine thinkable (conceivable) without contradiction?

I have little to say about the exegetical (1) since it is beyond my competence as a philosopher. I cannot pronounce upon (2), either for or against, until I have decided (4) and (5). The same goes for the epistemological question, (3). My present interest is in (4) and (5), which are logically prior to the first three, with (5) being logically prior to (4). 

(4) and (5) are distinct questions. An affirmative answer to (5) does not entail an affirmative answer to (4). This is because conceivability is no sure guide to real (extramental) possibility. Of the two questions, (5) comes first in the order of inquiry: if we cannot think the Trinity without contradiction, how could we advance to the further question of whether it is really possible?

(5) is the question at the center of my interest.

It is difficult to get some people to appreciate the force and importance of (5) because they are dogmatists who accept the Trinity doctrine as true simply because they were brought up to believe it, or because it is something their church teaches.  Since they accept it as true, no question of its logical coherence arises for them.  And so they think that anyone who questions the doctrine must not understand it.  To 'set the objector straight' they then repeat the very verbal formulas the logical coherence of which is in question.  "What's the problem? There is one God in three divine Persons!"  They think that if they only repeat the formulas often enough, then the objector will 'get it.'  But it is they who do not get it, since they do not understand the logical problems to which the doctrinal formulations give rise.

Or the adherent may think that the objector is merely 'attacking' or polemicizing against his faith; it doesn't occur to the adherent that there are people whose love of truth is so strong that they will not accept claims without examination.  Now if one examines the creedal formulations, one will see that the gist of the Trinity doctrine is as follows:

1. Monotheism: There is exactly one God.

2. Divinity of Persons:  The Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Ghost is God.

3. Distinctness of Persons:  The Father is not the Son; and the Holy Ghost is not the Father or the Son.

The problem is to show how these propositions are logically consistent, that is, how they can all be true, but without falling into heresy.  If you cannot see the problem, you are not paying attention, or you lack intelligence, or your thought-processes are being distorted by ideological commitments.  Whatever you think of Brower and Rea's solution to the problem, their exposition of it is very clear and I recommend it to you.  My reason for not accepting their solution is here.

 

Bertrand Russell on Arabic Philosophy

The following passage is from Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1945), p. 427. I found it here, but without a link and without a reference. So, exploiting the resources of my well-stocked library, I located the passage, and verified that it had been properly transcribed. Whether Russell is being entirely fair to the Arabs is a further question.

Arabic philosophy is not important as original thought. Men like Avicenna and Averroes are essentially commentators. Speaking generally, the views of the more scientific philosophers come from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists in logic and metaphysics, from Galen in medicine, from Greek and Indian sources in mathematics and astronomy, and among mystics religious philosophy has also an admixture of old Persian beliefs. Writers in Arabic showed some originality in mathematics and in chemistry; in the latter case, as an incidental result of alchemical researches. Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. Its importance, which must not be underrated, is as a transmitter. Between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened. The Mohammedans and the Byzantines, while lacking the intellectual energy required for innovation, preserved the apparatus of civilization, books, and learned leisure. Both stimulated the West when it emerged from barbarism; the Mohammedans chiefly in the thirteenth century, the Byzantines chiefly in the fifteenth. In each case the stimulus produced new thought better than that produced by the transmitters — in the one case scholasticism, in the other the Renaissance (which however had other causes also).

What Explains the Hard Left’s Toleration of Militant Islam?

From 1789 on, a defining characteristic of the Left has been hostility to religion, especially in its institutionalized forms. This goes together with a commitment to such Enlightenment values as individual liberty, belief in reason, and equality, including equality among the races and between the sexes. Thus the last thing one would expect from the Left is an alignment with militant Islam given the latter’s philosophically unsophisticated religiosity bordering on rank superstition, its totalitarian moralism, and its opposition to gender equality.

So why is the radical Left soft on militant Islam?  The values of the progressive creed are antithetic to those of the Islamists, and it is quite clear that if the Islamists got everything they wanted, namely, the imposition of Islamic law on the entire world, our dear progressives would soon find themselves headless. I don’t imagine that theylong to live under Sharia, where ‘getting stoned’ would have more than metaphorical meaning. So what explains this bizarre alignment?

Continue reading “What Explains the Hard Left’s Toleration of Militant Islam?”

On the Trinity: A Medievalist Takes Me to Task

 Long-time reader Michael Sullivan e-mails:

In my experience a lot of the problems in modern philosophy of religion come about from not taking enough care to get right the religious position the philosopher is analyzing. Part of this difficulty stems from the way terminology shifts across the centuries, so that the modern philosopher takes for granted an anachronistic understanding of key terms.

I think something like this is happening in your most recent post "Some Water Analogies for the Trinity". You write: " The sense in which water is a substance is not the sense in which God is a substance. Water is a substance in the sense of a stuff; God is a substance in the sense of a hypostasis (that which stands under) orhypokeimenon (that which is placed under), or as I prefer to say, an individual."

From the standpoint of traditional, classical Trinitarian theology, this is incorrect. God is a substance neither in the sense of stuff (hyle) nor in the sense of individual (hypostasis). Here's a representative explanatory snippet from St John of Damascus, showing the universal traditional use of the terms, from "De Fide Orthodoxa" c.48: "Substantia quidem communem speciem et complectivam speciem homoiodon (id est earum quae unum sunt specie) hypostaseon (id est personarum) significat, utputa Deus, homo; hypostasis autem atomon (id est individuum) demonstrat, scilicet Patrem, Filium, Spiritum Sanctum, Petrum, Paulum."

So "substance" here means something like "essence" or "being" (in the sense of ousia) rather than hypostasis; the whole doctrine of the Trinity depends on this distinction between the one nature, substance, being, essence, etc. on the one hand and the three individual persons or hypostases on the other. In most cases where there is one existing human nature (man), there is one individual hypostasis (Peter or Paul); in the case of the Trinity there is one divine nature (God) instantiated in three hypostases (Father and Son and Holy Spirit); conversely, in the Incarnation there are two existing natures (God and man), but only one hypostasis (Christ the Incarnate Logos).

I hope you don't think this too presumptuous; but Christian doctrine really does turn to unintelligible mush in these crucial distinctions are not carefully preserved.

Continue reading “On the Trinity: A Medievalist Takes Me to Task”

Does Trinity Entail Quaternity?

Christianity, like the other two Abrahamic religions, is monotheistic. But unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity holds to a trinitarian conception of God. The idea, spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are distinct from one another. How is this possible? How can Christians convince Jews and Muslims that their position is logically tenable and does not collapse into tritheism, and thus into polytheism to the detriment of the divine unity and transcendence?

Here is one problem. God is said to be tripersonal: the one God somehow includes three numerically distinct Persons. But none of these Persons is tripersonal. The Father is not tripersonal. The Son is not tripersonal. The Holy Ghost is not tripersonal. Now if two things differ in a property, then they cannot be identical. (This is the irreproachable principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals expressed in its contrapositive form.) Now God and each of the Persons differs in point of tripersonality: God is tripersonal while no Person is tripersonal.  It follows that God is not identical to the Father, nor to the Son, nor to the Holy Ghost. Therefore, God is not identical to any of the Persons, whence it follows that God is distinct from each of the three Persons. And if God is distinct from each of the Persons, then he is a Fourth. 

Is God a divine person? If you say yes, then we are on our way to the Quaternity, the doctrine that there is one God in four divine Persons. For if God is not identical to the Father, or to the Son, or or to the Holy Ghost, each of which is a person, and God is a person, then there are four – count ‘em – four Persons.

Some doctrines in philosophy threaten to collapse into others. Thus mind-brain identity theory threatens to collapse into eliminativism about the mind. Other doctrines seem to want to expand. How do we keep the Trinity from expanding into the Quaternity? The attentive reader will have noticed that the argument can be iterated. If the Three-in-One becomes a Four-in-One, how avoid a Five-in-One, ad infinitum?

Some Water Analogies for the Trinity

The following is based partially on H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, Volume One: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation (Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 359-363.

Hippolytus: The Logos comes from the Father as water from a fountain.

Tertullian: The Father is to the Logos as fountain is to river. One substance assumes two forms.

Lactantius: The Father is an overflowing fountain, the Son a stream flowing from it.

Zeno of Verona: Father and Son are two seas filled with the same water which, though two, are yet one.

Vallicella of Arizona: Water occurs in three distinct states, the gaseous, the liquid, and the solid. One and and the same quantity of water can assume any of these three states. Distinctness of states is compatible with oneness of substance.

Of the water analogies, I like the last one best (!) despite its being as worthless as the others. All four involve an equivocation on ‘substance.’ The sense in which water is a substance is not the sense in which God is a substance. Water is a substance in the sense of a stuff; God is a substance in the sense of a hypostasis (that which stands under) or hypokeimenon (that which is placed under), or as I prefer to say, an individual. Note also that a quantity of H2O can be in the three states only successively not simultaneously whereas God is 'simultaneously' the three Persons.

Of course, there are better physical analogies, light for example, and also nonphysical analogies such as the soul (Augustine). Something on this later. My only point is that these water analogies do nothing to render the Trinity doctrine intelligible, hence no one should be convinced by them.

Neglected Philosophers

It is unfortunate that a philosopher like Heidegger receives a vast amount of attention, and indeed more than he deserves, while a philosopher such as Wolfgang Cramer is scarcely read at all. I have German correspondents who have first heard of Cramer from me, an American. I admit to being part of the problem: I have published half a dozen articles on Heidegger, but not one on Cramer, or on Maurice Blondel, or on Constantin Brunner, or on Brand Blanshard.

Jacques Derrida is another philosopher who has received an excess of attention. (Because he out-Heidegger's Heidegger?)  Why read him when you can read Blondel or Blanshard? Just because he has made a big splash and people are talking about him? Are you a philosopher or a fashionista?  Form your own opinion. Try this. Set a volume of Derrida side by side with a volume of Blanshard. Read a few pages back and forth. Then ask who you are more likely to learn something from. But being as perverse as we are, we often prefer the far-out, novel and radical, even when  incoherent, to the boringly solid and sensible.

Trinitarian Reading Material

Trinity Dale Tuggy's Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, Trinity, provides a good overview.  The specialist blog, Trinities, to which he contributes will also be of interest.  Here is Richard Cartwright's excellent "On the Logical Problem of the Trinity."  Caveat lector: it contains a few scanning errors. Essential reading nonetheless.  Cartwright rejects Peter Geach's relative identity solution.  For a defense of the relative identity approach, see A, P. Martinich, Identity and Trinity. (Requires access to JSTOR.  What? You say you don't have access to JSTOR?  How do you live without it?)

Jeffrey Brouwer and Michael Rea, Material Constitution and the Trinity.  For William Lane Craig's critique, see Does the Problem of Material Constitution Illuminate The Doctrine of The Trinity? 

That barely scratches the surface, but should keep you busy for a while.

By the way, don't confuse the diagram with the doctrine.  It is a graphic 'aid' which probably does more harm than good.  Philosophical thinking is not picture-thinking.  As Hegel might have said, Philosophisches Denken ist nicht vorstellendes, sondern begriffliches, Denken.

The Naturalist’s Version of Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Theism in its various forms faces numerous threats to its truth and coherence. Christianity, for example, is committed to doctrines such as the Trinity whose very coherence is in doubt. And all classical theists face the problem of evil, the problem of reconciling the fact of evil with the existence of a God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Faced with an objection like the one from evil, theists typically don’t give up their belief; keeping the faith, they seek an understanding both of it and its compatibility with the facts and considerations alleged to be inconsistent with it.

What I want to argue is that naturalists employ the principle of Faith Seeking Understanding no less than theists. Naturalism faces numerous threats to its truth and coherence. Let’s start with what philosophers call the phenomenon of intentionality, the peculiar directedness to an object that characterizes (some) mental states. It is very difficult to understand how a purely physical state, a state of the brain for example, could be of, or about, something distinct from it, something that need not exist to be the object of the state in question. How could a physical state have semantic properties, or be true or false? How could a piece of meat be in states that MEAN anything? How do you get meaning out of meat? By squeezing hard? By injecting it with steroids? Does a sufficiently complex hunk of meat suddenly become a semantic engine? How could a brain state, for example, be either true or false? This suggests an argument:

Continue reading “The Naturalist’s Version of Fides Quaerens Intellectum“

Chess: Game or Sport?

Paul Weiss, Sport: A Philosophic Inquiry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), pp. 142-143:

Hockey demands bodily exertion. Like every other sport, it tests what a rule-abiding man can bodily be and do. Though chess also has rules, and these have a history, and though a masterly game makes considerable demands on the stamina of the players, chess is not a sport because it does not test what a man is as a body. Mind and body more or less reverse their roles in these two cases. In hockey judgment and determination are subservient to bodily achievement, but in chess the body is used only to make possible a more effective judgment and determination.