Category: Atheism and Theism

Are Atheists Vincibly Ignorant? (2021 Version)

In Catholic thought there is what is called vincible ignorance. Here is a definition:

Lack of knowledge for which a person is morally responsible. It is culpable ignorance because it could be cleared up if the person used sufficient diligence. One is said to be simply (but culpably) ignorant if one fails to make enough effort to learn what should be known; guilt then depends on one's lack of effort to clear up the ignorance.

For present purposes, it suffices to say that 'God' refers to the supreme being of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that an atheist is one who denies the existence of God.

I hold that there is vincible ignorance on various matters. But I deny that atheists qua atheists are vincibly ignorant.  Whether or not God exists, one is not morally culpable for denying the existence of God.* Nor do I think one is morally culpable if one doubts the existence of God.

If God exists, and one is an atheist, then one is ignorant of God, but it does not follow that one is culpably ignorant. This commits me to saying that the atheist is invincibly ignorant of God. He is invincibly ignorant of God because God cannot be known to exist. If I cannot know that such-and-such, then I cannot be morally culpable for not knowing it.  If I ought to X, then I am capable of X-ing. And so, by contraposition, if I am not capable of X-ing, then I am not morally obliged to X, whence it follows that I am not morally culpable for not  X-ing.

If the atheist is invincibly ignorant of God, then so is the theist, whence it follows that I am not morally praiseworthy for being a theist.

This puts me at odds with St. Paul, at least on one interpretation of what he is saying at Romans 1: 18-20.

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*Why not?  Because it is not clear that God exists. There are powerful albeit uncompelling arguments against the existence of God, chiefly, arguments from natural and moral evil, and, while there is plenty of evidence of the existence of God, the evidence does not entail the existence of God.  Will you tell me that the evidence renders the existence of God more probable than not?  I will respond by asking what probability has to do with it. Either God exists or he does not. If he does, then he is a necessary being. If he does not, then he is impossible.   I will demand of you that you attach sense to the claim that such a being — one that is either necessary or impossible– can have its probability raised or lowered by evidence.  This is a huge and controversial topic. No more can be said about it now.

Berdyaev on the Moral Source of Atheism

There are respectable forms of atheism. The atheist needn't be a rebellious punk stuck in intellectual adolescence, swamped by sensuality, and given to self-idolatry.  

Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (Harper Torchbooks, 1960, tr. Natalie Duddington, p. 24):

It is precisely the traditional theology that leads good men, inspired by moral motives, to atheism. The ordinary theological conception of freedom in no way saves the Creator from the responsibility for pain and evil.  Freedom itself is created by God and penetrable by Him down to its very depths. In His omniscience, ascribed to Him by positive theology, God foresaw from all eternity the fatal consequences of freedom with which He endowed man. He foresaw the evil and suffering of the world which has been called into being by His will and is wholly in His power; He foresaw everything, down to the perdition and everlasting torments of many. And yet He consented to create man and the world under those terrible conditions. This is the profound moral source of atheism.

I read Berdyaev's The Beginning and the End in the summer of 1970.  The following autumn I committed myself to philosophy as my vocation. The Russian personalist moved me deeply at the time, but then other philosophical interests and concerns took over. It is wonderful to be reading him again some 50 years later.  If this existentialist is a bit on the febrile side, he at least avoids the empty intellectual gamesmanship of the analytic logic choppers  whose philosophical activity bespeaks their spiritual vacuity.  The task of the true philosopher is to combine rigor and Wissenschaftlichkeit with spiritual depth. Plato and Spinoza come to mind. We lesser lights are not quite up to the task, but we ought to take such luminaries as guides and tutelary spirits. 

Berdayev 1

Addendum 9/24

Some of us are old enough to remember seeing Bishop Fulton J. Sheen on television.  His message below is effectively answered by Berdyaev above. The cause of theism is not well-served by the caricaturing of atheists as all of the same stripe.  There are saints and scamps on both sides of the theological divide.

Fulton Sheen on atheism

Is Theism Empirically Refutable?

Consider the following passage from J. J. C. Smart:

It looks as though the theistic hypothesis is an empirically refutable one, so that theism becomes a refuted scientific theory. The argument goes: (1) If God exists then there is no evil, (2) There is evil, therefore (3) It is not the case that God exists. Premiss (1) seems to follow from our characterization of God as an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent being. (2) is empirical. We can hardly reject (2). It seems therefore that the theist has to find something wrong with (1) and this is not easy. (J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism, Blackwell 2003, 2nd ed, p. 60)

Generic and Specific Problems of Evil

Substack latest.

The nature and tractability of the problem depends on the type of theism espoused.

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Vito Caiati comments:

I very much profited from the short essay “Generic and Specific Problems of Evil” that you posted on Substack yesterday. I have read it several times, and, if viewed from the perspective of the ultimate destiny of the members of our species alone, I see the merit of your claim that “It is arguable that there is no insoluble problem of evil for theists-A, . . . [those who regard] this world [as] a ‘vale of soul-making’ (the phrase is from John Keats) in which human beings, exercising free will, make themselves worthy, or fail to make themselves worthy, of communion with God. Combine this soul-making idea with post-mortem existence, and the existence of purgatory but not hell, and we have perhaps the elements of a solution to the problem of evil.”

However, what about non-human animals, who “Despite being wholly corporeal, . . . enjoy and suffer sentience: they are the subjects of conscious states, contra Descartes. Among these conscious states are non-intentional states such as pleasure and pain, but also . . . intentional (object-directed) states such as affection and anger” (Maverick Philosopher, “Soteriology for Brutes,”3/21/2019)?  

It seems to me, who, as you know, is a philosophic neophyte in these matters, that the theist-A operates with too narrow a perspective on sentience, for ultimate value is placed only on those sentient beings that are rational and hence capable to abstract thought and moral judgments.  The suffering of all the others, including the highest mammals, counts very little or not at all; it certainly does not figure in the soteriology of, say, Christianity, which is obsessively centered on human sin and the need for salvation from it, rather than on the agony and death that permeates the natural world.  Perhaps “death is the wages of sin” for mankind, but what explains the agonizing deaths of our fellow sentient creatures that have not sinned?  Only by remaining in his sin/redemption theory of salvation, which is necessarily restricted to human beings, can theist-A be more reconciled to the existence of evil.  

None of these may be worth your time, but I wanted to share it with you, since it is one of the central concerns of my intellectual and emotional life.

You have pointed out a serious lacuna in my discussion, Vito.  I focused on moral and natural evil as it pertains to human animals but left out of account the natural evil, including both physical and mental suffering, that besets non-human animals.  I will now try to formulate your objection to me as trenchantly as I can.  'You' in what follows refers to me!

1) You maintain that the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of God is considerably more tractable if we humans survive our bodily deaths  and come to enjoy (after a period of purgation) eternal bliss. 

2) You also argue that "It is dialectically unfair for atheists to argue against all (classical) theists from the fact of the evil in this world when . . . some theists believe that the transient evils of this short life are far outweighed by the unending bliss of the world to come."

3) You are presenting a sort of "All's well that ends well" response to moral and natural evil.  You are arguing that the evils of this life are far outweighed and almost completely made up for by the unending bliss of the world to come, so much so that the the 'problem' of evil vanishes for those who subscribe to the specific theism that you call Theism-A.

4) You ignore, however, the problem of animal pain which is certainly real. (We both reject as preposterous the Cartesian view that non-human animals are insensate or non-sentient.) Given that non-human animals are not spiritual beings as we are, and do not survive their bodily deaths, there is no redemption for them: their horrific suffering — imagine the physical pain and mental terror of being eaten alive! — is in no way recompensed or outweighed.  And given how many species of non-human critter there are, and how many specimens per species, and how long these animals existed before man made the scene, there is a VAST amount of evil that goes unredeemed.

5) Your argument therefore fails to get God off the hook. 

I take this objection seriously and I thank Dr. Caiati for raising it. At the moment, three possible lines of response occur to me, assuming that there is no Cartesian way out.

A. We can take something like the  line that David Bentley Hart champions against Edward Feser, which I briefly discussed in "Soteriology for Brutes?" (linked above) namely, that animals do survive their bodily deaths and 'go to heaven.' (Lacking as they do free will, I see no reason to posit purgatory or hell for them.  The savagery of a tiger devouring its prey alive is amoral unlike the savagery of humans. No homo is literally homini lupus.)

B. Without embracing Cartesianism, one might argue that we are engaging in illicit anthropomorphic projection when we project into animals our terrors and physical pains.  One might to try to argue that their sufferings, while real,  are next to nothing as compared to ours and don't really count very much or at all when it comes to the problem of evil.

C.  One might take a mysterian tack. God exists and evil exists. Therefore, they co-exist, whence it follows that it is possible that they co-exist. The fact that we cannot understand how it possible reflects poorly on our cognitive architecture but has no tendency to show that God and evil do not co-exist.  Of course, if one took a line like this, one could evade the particulars of my Substack proposal.

While (B) strikes me as lame, (A) and (C) show promise, (A) more than (C).

ComBox now open.

ADDENDUM (9/17)

This morning I found a passage in Berdyaev that supports Dr. Caiati's intuitions about animal suffering from a broadly Christian perspective.

The death of the least and most miserable creature is unendurable, and if it is irremediable, the world cannot be accepted and justified. All and everything must be raised to eternal life. This means that the principle of eternal being must be affirmed in relation to human beings, animals, plants and even inanimate things. [. . .] Christ's love of the world and for man is victory over the powers of death and the gift of abundant life. (Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, tr. Natalie Duddington, Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p. 253.)

The (febrile) Russian existentialist is making a surprisingly radical claim here. He is maintaining that the existence of the world is justified and our lives in it are affirmable as worth living only if absolutely everything is redeemed and preserved in the end, not only everything living, but the inanimate as well.  Somehow everything temporal must be somehow cancelled and preserved — aufgehoben in Hegel's sense  — in eternity.  How the inanimate could be brought to eternal life is of course a thought transgressive of the discursive and hard by the boundary of the mystical.  

In Berdyaev as in Simone Weil, we are at the outer limits of the religious sensibility.

Deism, Classical Theism, and Existential Inertia

Nemes and VallicellaOn deism, God starts the universe existing, but then he takes it easy, allowing it to exist on its own in virtue of its 'existential inertia.' The latter is an analog of inertia in physics. Newton's First Law states that a body at rest or in uniform rectilinear motion continues in its state of rest or motion unless acted upon by an external force. Analogously, what could be called the First Law of Deistic Metaphysics states that an existing thing continues to exist on its own without external assistance unless acted upon by an external annihilatory force.  This is but a rough and preliminary formulation of the thesis of existential inertia.  Continuing to exist is the 'default.'  Suppose I bring a primitive table into existence by placing a board on a stump.  The thought behind 'existential inertia' is that the compound object that just came to be does not need something to keep it from blinking out of existence a nanosecond, microsecond, millisecond . . . later.

On classical theism, by contrast with deism, God is no mere cosmic starter-upper: creatures need God not only to begin to exist but to continue existing moment by moment.  A defense of classical theism against deism must therefore include a rejection of existential inertia.

Steven Nemes offers a rejection of existential inertia in his article Deism, Classical Theism, and Existential Inertia. He solicits my comments. I am happy to oblige.

He defines the phrase as follows:

Let’s say that the existence of a thing is “inertial” if and only if it continues to exist over time, in the absence of annihilating factors, without the assistance of anything outside of it.

He gives the example of a cat which, "once in existence, continues to exist over time, so long as nothing intervenes to destroy it, without anything outside of the cat helping it or sustaining it in existence." But surely the cat cannot continue to exist without air, water, food, a tolerable range of temperatures, and so on, factors clearly external to the cat.   Note also that Nemes' definition presupposes that only temporal items are existentially inertial which is not obvious: on a classically theistic scheme even so-called 'abstract objects' are going to have to be existentially inertial.  But I won't worry this second point in this entry.

Here is a better way to convey the notion of existential inertia. Suppose a deistic god creates exactly one iron sphere and nothing else.  In this world there is nothing to cause the sphere to rust or otherwise corrode away into nonexistence.  Nor does it, like a living organism, require anything external to it to continue to exist.  It doesn't need oxygen or water like Nemes' cat. And it has no internal mechanism to self-destruct.  The sphere exists inertially iff its 'default setting' is continued existence which is to say: it has no intrinsic tendency to cease to exist. 

The sphere is of course a contingent being. Hence there is no necessity that it continue to exist.  But while there is no necessity that it continue to exist, it will continue to exist absent some external annihilatory force. The deistic god could zap it out of existence, but if he doesn't, it will continue to exist on its own 'steam.'  He needn't do anything to keep it in existence, and of course he can't if he is truly deistic.

And the same goes for the cat, despite the cat's need for materials in its environment such as oxygen and food.  It too will continue to exist if those things are supplied without the need for a special metaphysical factor to keep it from sliding into nonbeing.  The critter's natural default is to existence.

Nemes's Argument against Existential Inertia

1) The real existence of the cat does not show itself as one of its properties.

2) "The real existence of the cat is thus not a part of that total complex of individuated properties which make up the particular cat which we experience. "

3) "The unexperienceable real existence of the experienceable cat must therefore be something that is somehow “outside” of the cat, and yet “pointed at it” in such a way that the cat exists."

4) "This is easy to understand if we say that the existence of the cat consists in its standing on the receiving end of an existence-endowing relation to “something else.” ". . . a “something else” that is not itself an individual thing with properties but rather pure existence itself. And this “pure existence itself,” according to classical theists, is God."

(1) is true. (2) appears merely to unpack (explicate) (1); if so, it too is true.  The transition to (3), however, is a non sequitur. The real existence of the cat might be hidden within it or an empirically inaccessible feature of it.  Absent further premises, one cannot conclude that the real existence is 'outside' the cat.

Of course, I am not endorsing existential inertia; I am merely pointing out that the above argument, as it stands, is invalid. Perhaps with further work it can be made valid. 

Soloveitchik on Proving the Existence of God

Joseph B. Soloveitchik's The Lonely Man of Faith (Doubleday 2006) is rich and stimulating and packed with insights.  But there is a long footnote on p. 49 with which I heartily disagree. Here is part of it:

The trouble with all rational demonstrations of the existence of God, with which the history of philosophy abounds, consists in their being exactly what they were meant to be by those who formulated them: abstract logical demonstrations divorced from the living primal experiences in which these demonstrations are rooted.  For instance, the cosmic experience was transformed into a cosmological proof, the ontic experience into an ontological proof, et cetera.  Instead of stating that  the the most elementary existential awareness as a subjective 'I exist' and an objective 'the world around me exists' awareness is unsustainable as long as the the ultimate reality of God is not part of this experience, the theologians engaged in formal postulating and deducing in an experiential vacuum.  Because of this they exposed themselves to Hume's and Kant's biting criticism that logical categories are applicable only within the limits of the human scientific experience. 

Does the loving bride in the embrace of her beloved ask for proof that he is alive and real? Must the prayerful soul clinging in passionate love ecstasy to her Beloved demonstrate that He exists?  So asked Soren Kierkegaard sarcastically when told that Anselm of Canterbury, the father of the very abstract and complex ontological proof, spent many days in prayer and supplication that he be presented with rational evidence of the existence of God.

SoloveitchikA man like me has one foot in Jerusalem and the other in Athens. Soloveitchik and Kierkegaard, however, have both feet in Jerusalem. They just can't understand what drives the philosopher to seek a rational demonstration of the existence of God.  Soloveitchik's analogy betrays him as a two-footed Hierosolymian.  Obviously, the bride in the embrace of the beloved needs no proof of his reality.  The bride's experience of the beloved is ongoing and coherent and repeatable ad libitum.  If she leaves him for a while, she can come back and be assured that he is the same as the person she left.  She can taste his kisses and enjoy his scent while seeing  him and touching him and hearing him. He remains self-same as a unity in and through the manifold of sensory modes whereby he is presented to her.  And in any given mode, he is a unity across a manifold.  Shifting her position, she can see him from different angles with the visual noemata cohering in such a way as to present a self-same individual. What's more, her intercourse with his body fits coherently with her intercourse with his mind as mediated by his voice and gestures.

I could go on, but point is plain.  There is simply no room for any practical doubt as to the beloved's reality given the forceful, coherent, vivacious, and obtrusive character of the bride's experience of him. She is compelled to accept his reality.  There is no room here for any doxastic voluntarism. The will does not play a role in her believing that he is real.  There is no need for decision or faith or a leap of faith in her acceptance of his reality.

Our experience of God is very different.  It comes by fleeting glimpses and gleanings and intimations. The sensus divinitatis is weak and experienced only by some.  The bite of conscience is not unambiguously of higher origin than the Freudian superego and social suggestion.  Mystical experiences are few and far-between. Though unquestionable as to their occurrence, they are questionable as to their veridicality because of their fitful and fragmentary character.  They are not validated in the ongoing way of ordinary sense perception. They don't integrate well with ordinary perceptual experiences.  And so the truth of these mystical and religious experiences can and perhaps should be doubted.  It is this fact that motivates philosophers to seek independent confirmation of the reality of the object of these experiences by the arguments that Soloveitchik and Co. dismiss.

The claim above that the awareness expressed by 'I exist' is unsustainable unless the awareness of God is part of the experience is simply false.  That I exist is certain to me.  But it is far from certain what the I is in its inner nature and what existence is and whether the I requires God as its ultimate support.  The cogito is not an experience of God even if God exists and no cogito is possible without him.  The same goes for the existence of the world.  The existence of God is not co-given with the existence of the world.  It is plain to the bride's senses that the beloved is real.  It is not plain to our senses that nature is God's nature, that the cosmos is a divine artifact.  That is why one cannot rely solely on the cosmic experience of nature as of a divine artifact, but must proceed cosmologically by inference from what is evident to what is non-evident.

Soloveitchik is making the same kind of move that St. Paul makes in Romans 1: 18-20.  My critique of that move here.

An Atheological Argument from the Evil of Radical Skepticism

Bradley Schneider sends this argument of his devising:

Premise 1: If God exists, God has the power to eliminate/overcome/defeat any evil in reality without creating more evil (i.e., God and evil can coexist but God should prevail over evil in the end).

Premise 2: Radical skepticism about the world is an evil (NOT that radical skeptics are evil; rather, our inability to counter radical skepticism and to be sure about our knowledge of reality is an evil).

Premise 3: God cannot eliminate radical skepticism without overriding free will (creating another evil) — e.g., a skeptic who dies and goes to heaven may still not be convinced that he or she is not under an illusion created by a Cartesian demon; heaven could be part of the illusion.

Conclusion: God does not exist.

I accept the first two premises. With respect to the second, I have long believed that our deep and irremediable ignorance on matters of great importance to us is a major evil and germane both to the case for God's nonexistence, but also to the anti-natalist case.  (Atheists who argue to the nonexistence of God from evil ought to consider whether the manifold evils of this world don't also put paid to the notion that human life is worth living and propagating.)

I balk, however, at the third premise. Schneider seems to be assuming that the origin of radical skepticism is in a free decision not to accept some putative givenness.  There is, I admit, the willful refusal on the part of certain perverse individuals to accept the evident, and even the self-evident; as I see it, however, the origin of radical skepticism is not in a free refusal to accept what is evident or self-evident, but in a set of considerations that the skeptic finds compelling.  A skeptic is not a willful denier, but a doubter, and indeed one whose doubt is in the service of cognition. He doesn't doubt for the sake of doubting, but for the sake of knowing. The skeptic wants to know, but he has high standards: he wants objective certainty, not mere subjective conviction. He doubts whatever can be doubted in order to arrive at epistemic bedrock.  This is what motivates the hyperbolic doubt of the Dream Argument and the considerations anent the evil genius.

I therefore reject the claim that "God cannot eliminate radical skepticism without overriding free will . . . ."  Free will doesn't come into it. Heaven is the Beatific Vision, and in that vision there will be such a perfect coalescence of finite knower and Infinite Object that no doubt can arise. In the visio beata, radical skepticism will not be possible.  A mundane analog is supplied by the experience of a sensory quale such as a felt pain, or rather pleasure.  In the moment that one feels it, one cannot doubt it, so long as one attends to its phenomenal features alone and brackets (in Husserl's sense) all external considerations as to causes, effects, etc.  The phenomenology is indubitable whatever may be the case with the etiology.

So if heaven is the Beatific Vision, heaven cannot be illusory.  But this highly refined, highly Platonic, Thomist take on heaven is not for everyone. It is not for Protestants whose conception is cruder.  I call that conception Life 2.0 and I contrast in with the Thomist conception in Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision ?  On a crude conception, according to which Jethro will be united after death with his faithful hound 'Blue,' drink home brew, and hunt rabbits, there is room for illusion.  It could be that there is a whole series of quasi-material 'spiritual' heavens above the sublunary but shy of the ultimate heaven of the Beatific Vision, but I won't pursue that speculation here.

It just so happens that I am now reading Pierre Rousselot, Intelligence (Marquette UP, 1999), which is a translation of L'Intellectualisme de Saint Thomas. On p. 35, we read:

By a profoundly logical coincidence the beatific vision, which is the final cause of the world and ultimate perfection of the created spirit, is also, according to Thomas, the only example of a created knowledge other than the intuitions of personal consciousness which seizes and possesses being such as it is, directly, not only without abstraction but with no mediation whatever. The beatific vision is perfect intellection with regard both to its object and to its mode of operation; on this account we must study it here; otherwise it would be impossible to have an exact idea of what intellection is in itself.

This text supports my analogy above. "The intuitions of personal consciousness" are the felt qualia I referred to.  These are "created knowledges" Writ Very Small, paltry sublunary analogs (e.g., the smell of burnt toast) of the ultimate coalescence of subject and object in the visio beata. But in both the sublunary and beatific cases, Being (esse) is seized and possessed directly, not via abstract concepts and without the mediation of epistemic deputies and mediators.  Being is grasped itself and not via representations. The little mysticisms of sensation prefigure the Big Mysticism of Ultimate Beatitude.

My prose is starting to 'flow French,' but I trust you catch my drift.

Beatific Vision

 

Is Classical Theism a Type of Idealism?

I return an affirmative answer.
 
If God creates ex nihilo, and everything concrete other than God is created by God, and God is a pure spirit, then one type of metaphysical realism can be excluded at the outset. This  realism asserts that there are radically transcendent uncreated concrete things other than God.  'Radically transcendent' means 'transcendent of any mind, finite or infinite.' On this view, radically transcendent items exist and have most of their properties independently of any mind, including the divine mind.  Call this realism-1. We could also call it extreme metaphysical realism. 
 
No classical theist could be a realist-1. For on classical theism, everything other than God is created by God, created out of nothing, mind you, and not out of Avicennian mere possibles or any cognate sort of item. ('Out of nothing' is  a privative expression that means 'not out of something.') We also note that on classical theism, God is not merely an originating cause of things other than himself, but a continuing cause that keeps these things in existence moment-by-moment. He is not a mere cosmic starter-upper. 
 
Corresponding to realism-1, as its opposite, is idealism-1.  This is the view that everything other than God is created ex nihilo by God, who is a pure spirit, and who therefore creates in a purely spiritual way.  (To simplify the discussion, let us leave to one side the problem of so-called 'abstract objects.')  It seems to me, therefore, that there is a very clear sense in which classical theism is a type of idealism.   For on classical theism God brings into existence and keeps in existence every concretum other than himself and he does so by his  purely mental/spiritual activity.  We could call this type of idealism onto-theological absolute idealism. This is not to say that the entire physical cosmos is a content of the divine mind; it is rather an accusative or intentional object of the divine mind.  Though not radically transcendent, it is a transcendence-in-immanence, to borrow some Husserlian phraseology. 
 
So if the universe is expanding, that is not to say that the divine mind or any part thereof is expanding.  If an intentional object has a property P it does not follow that a mind trained upon this object, or an act of this mind or a content in this mind has P.  Perceiving a blue coffee cup, I have as intentional object something blue; but my mind is not blue, nor is the perceiving blue, nor any mental content that mediates the perceiving.  If I perceive or imagine or in any way think of an extended sticky surface, neither my mind nor any part of it becomes extended or sticky.  Same with God.  He retains his difference from the physical cosmos even while said cosmos is nothing more than his merely intentional object incapable of existing on its own.
 
Actually, what I just wrote is only an approximation to what I really want to say.  For just as God is sui generis, I think the relation between God and the world is also sui generis, and as such not an instance of the intentional relation with which we are familiar in our own mental lives.  The former is only analogous to the latter.  If one takes the divine transcendence seriously, then God cannot be a being among beings; equally, God's relation to the world cannot be a relation among relations.  If we achieve any understanding in these lofty precincts, it is not the sort of understanding one achieves by subsuming a new case under an old pattern; God does not fit any pre-existing pattern, nor does his 'relation' to the world fit any pre-existing pattern.  The Absolute cannot be an instance of a type. If we achieve any understanding here it will be via various groping analogies.  These analogies can only take us so far.  In the end we must confess the infirmity of finite reason in respect of the Absolute that is the Paradigm Existent.
 
There is also the well-known problem that the intentional 'relation' is not, strictly speaking, a relation.  It is at best analogous to a relation.  So it looks as if we have a double analogy going here.  The God-world relation is analogous to something analogous to a relation in the strict sense.  Let me explain.
 
If x stands in relation R to y, then both x, y exist.  But x can stand in the intentional 'relation' to y even if y does not exist in reality.  It is a plain fact that we sometimes have very definite thoughts about objects that do not exist, the planet Vulcan, for example.  What about the creating/sustaining 'relation'? The holding of this 'relation' as between God and Socrates cannot presuppose the existence in reality of both relata.  It presupposes the existence of God no doubt, but if it presupposed the existence of Socrates then there would be no need for the creating/sustaining ex nihilo of Socrates.  Creating is a producing, a causing to exist, and indeed moment by moment.
 
For this reason, creation/sustaining cannot be a relation, strictly speaking.  It follows that the createdness of a creature cannot be a relational property, strictly speaking.   Now the createdness of a creature is its existence or Being.  So the existence of a creature cannot be a relational property thereof; but it is like a relational property thereof.
 
What I have done so far is argue that classical theism is a form of idealism, a form of idealism that is the opposite of an extreme from of metaphysical realism, the form I referred to as 'realism-1.'  If you say that no one has ever held such a form of realism, I will point to Ayn Rand. (See Rand and Peikoff on God and Existence.)
 
Moderate  Realism (Realism-2)
 
Realism holds with respect to some of the objects of finite minds.  Not for merely intentional objects, of course, but for things like trees and mountains and cats and chairs and their parts.  They exist and have most of their properties independently of the mental activity of finite minds such as ours. We can call this realism-2.
 
Kant held that empirical realism and transcendental idealism are logically compatible and he subscribed to both.  Now the idealism I urge is not a mere transcendental idealism, but a full-throated onto-theological absolute idealism; but it too is compatible, as far as I can see, with the empirical reality of most of the objects of ectypal intellects such as ours.  The divine spontaneity makes them exist and renders them available to the receptivity of ectypal intellects.  Realism-2 is consistent with idealism-1. 
 
My thesis, then, is that classical theism is a type of idealism; it is onto-theological absolute idealism.  If everything concrete is created originally and sustained ongoingly ex nihilo by a purely spiritual being, an Absolute Mind, and by purely spiritual activity, then this is better denominated 'idealism' than 'realism.'  Is that not obvious?
 
But trouble looms as I will argue in the next entry in this series.  And so we will have to consider whether the sui generis, absolutely unique status of God and his relation to the world is good reason to withhold both appellations, 'realism' and 'idealism.'

Five Grades of Agnosticism

In David Horowitz's Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America (Humanix, 2018), we read:

My own theological views are those of an agnostic — one who doesn't know. I do not know whether there is a Divine designer or not. (p. 24)

Well, I don't know either. I agree with Horowitz when he tells us, on the preceding page, that

. . . the question of whether God exists cannot be resolved. Both sides must rely on faith. (p. 23)

So what is the difference between me and Horowitz? We are both agnostics by his definition. But I am a theist whereas he is not. It appears that we need to distinguish different types or grades of agnosticism. It will develop that one can be both a theist and an agnostic.

AG-1: "I don't know, and I don't care. The existence of God is not a (live) issue for me."  This sort of agnostic is a practical atheist. He lives as if there is no God, but without denying or doubting his existence.  

AG-2:  "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the importance of the question.  But I see no good reason either to affirm or to deny, and so I suspend judgment. Rather than trouble my head over such a question, I content myself with the ordinary life of a mortal man. I do not dream of immortality or hanker after transcendence. While I grant that the question is of some importance, I do not consider the question of enough importance to trouble myself over it." This sort of agnosticism is close to Pyrrhonism.

AG-3:  "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the importance of the question.  And while I see no good reason to affirm or deny,  I don't suspend judgment; I continue to inquire. I sense that my ultimate happiness is at stake, and that it would be imprudent simply to dismiss the question as unanswerable and sink back into everydayness."

AG-4:  "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the great importance of the question. What's more, I find nothing epistemically disreputable about believing beyond the evidence, seeing as how we do this regularly in other areas of life; I cannot, however, bring myself to believe."

AG-5: "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the great importance of the question. I am inclined to believe, and I do believe, for reasons that are not rationally compelling, but also not epistemically disreputable. My faith is a living faith, not merely intellectual assent to a proposition; it is something I live, and my living as I do attests to the psychological reality of my believing."

The fifth grade of agnosticism is a type of theism. It is not the theism of the one who claims to know that God exists, or who claims to be able to prove that God exists.  But it is theism nonetheless, for it is an affirmation of the existence of God.  It follows that one can be both an agnostic and a theist.  In fact, I would argue further that an agnostic is the only sort of theist one ought to be.  

To conclude, what is the difference between me and Horowitz?  We are both agnostics by his definition.  But whereas I am an AG-5 agnostic, he, as far as I can tell, is an AG-3 agnostic.

Addendum (12/12). Vito Caiati responds:

I found your most recent post “Five Grades of Agnosticism” most valuable in that it succinctly sets out the quite diverse tenors of this philosophic position on the existence of God. Over the years, I have fallen into all of these “five grades,” with the exception of AG-1. As you know, I now, as for much of my life, affirm a much more specific version of AG-5, one that centers my life on Christian dogmas and practices, as taught by the Roman Catholic Church. My most recent return to Catholicism was, if you recall from our correspondence over the last few years, fraught with intellectual conflict, since my faith exists alongside of a powerful skeptical inclination, which is only further reinforced once the already daunting difficulties involved in an assertion of God’s existence are compounded by those involved in matters of dogma and doctrine. I have often thought that it would be best to remain with the embrace of philosophic theism, which is, I assume, what you are affirming in AG-5, that is, the affirmation of the existence of a theistic God and an adherence to those moral precepts that are evident to reason and conscience. Am I right about this?

Not quite.  I am thinking of AG-5 as a type of theism that could be filled out and made more specific in different ways. One could add some or all of the following beliefs: immortality of the soul, resurrection of the body, triune nature of the one God, divine simplicity, divine incarnation, and so on through a range of even more specific beliefs concerning, e.g., the nature of post-mortem rewards and punishments, the impossibility of gaining merit after death, etc.   None of these are precluded by the AG-5 schema. What the schema excludes is any claim to knowledge with regard to these matters.   I am assuming that knowledge entails objective certainty.  And so AG-5 runs counter to the traditional Roman Catholic claim that its magisterium teaches infallibly with absolute, divinely sanctioned and grounded authority, with respect to faith and morals.  AG-5 rules out that sort of dogmatism.

If so, where does religion fit in, since a commitment to theism, even one that guides one’s mode of life is not a religion but a private philosophic and moral stance? Is it your position that a life-shaping belief, in a theistic God renders the choice of, say, a particular religious tradition not of first importance? So, for example, one might simply be advised to follow the theistic tradition into which one was born, as long as it possesses doctrinal, ethical, and liturgical features that are not inimical to the existence of a deity as classically construed?

AG-5 is not a merely philosophical schema that excludes religion. I am thinking of it as allowing for religious deployment and development.  And if religion is communal, then the schema would permit a development that was not merely private.

I would say that a life-shaping belief in God (which goes beyond the mere belief that God exists) does not require adherence to any extant religious tradition. But that would be a hard row to hoe for most.  They would be well-advised to stick to the tradition in which they were raised — except perhaps for Islam which is more of a destructive political ideology than a religion, although for peaceful Muslims it is better than no religion. 

So you, Vito, would be well-advised to remain within the Roman Catholic ambit, provided you can find a parish with a Latin mass that is not manned by pedophiles or mere social workers or theological know-nothings and that adheres to and attempts to transmit traditional teachings.

Your post raises many other questions and concerns, such as those touching on revelation, but I will stop here.

Yes it does, and I am willing continue the conversation "until death do us part."  It is my firm belief that there is no better and more noble way to spend the lion's share of one's brief time here below than by addressing, reverentially but critically, the Great Questions.  And that includes the question of the possibility and actuality of divine revelation and all the rest of the theological and philosophical conundra, including Trinity, Incarnation, Transubstantiation, Ascension, Assumption, and so on, until death which, we hope, will lift the curtain and bring us light.

And if it doesn't? Well then, we have spent our lives in a most excellent way and have lost nothing of value.  

Natural Evil and Fallen Angels

This is an old post from my first blog,  dated 3 January 2005, slightly redacted.

………………………………..

Keith Burgess-Jackson writes:

I have a question for my theistic readers. How do you reconcile the devastation wrought by the tsunami with your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being? If God could have prevented the tsunami but didn’t, then God’s omnibenevolence is called into question. If God wanted to prevent the tsunami but couldn’t, then God’s omniscience or omnipotence is called into question. You can’t explain away the evil by citing free will, for no human being brought about the tsunami. (Surely you don’t believe in fallen angels.) Do events like this shake your faith? If not, why not? If death and destruction on this scale don’t make you doubt the existence of your god, what would?

1. The parenthetical material is puzzling. If someone can see his way clear to accepting the existence of a purely spiritual being such as God, then the belief in angels, fallen or otherwise, will present no special problem. Given the existence of fallen angels, the Free Will Defense may be invoked to account for natural evils such as tsunamis: natural evils turn out to be a species of moral evils.

2. Of course, the argument can be turned around. If someone argues from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God, that person assumes that there is indeed an objective fact of evil, and thus, an objective distinction between good and evil. A sophisticated theist can counterargue that there cannot be an objective distinction between good and evil unless God exists. I could make that argument as rigorous as you like. That is not to say that the argument would be compelling to every rational consumer of it, but only that it would logically impeccable, plausibly premised, and sufficiently strong to neutralize the atheist's argument from evil. I distinguish between refuting and neutralizing. It may be difficult to refute a sophisticated interlocutor since he will not be likely to blunder. But he can be neutralized by presenting counterarguments of equal but opposite probative force. The result is a stand-off: you battle the opponent to a draw.

3. In a separate argument, a theist could make the case that the very quantity and malevolence of the moral evil in the world — think of the 20th century and the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, the 100 million murdered by Communists, etc.) — cannot be explained naturalistically. This would be another way to argue from the fact of objective evil to supernatural agents of evil.  See my The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence.

4. There is no denying that evil presents a serious challenge to theism. Should it shake the theist's faith? Only if the objections to atheism/naturalism shake the atheist's/naturalist's faith. We seem to have doxastic parity. There are reasons both for and against theism. But there are also reasons both for and against atheism/naturalism. It would be special pleading to suppose that the reasons against theism are much more weighty that the reasons against atheism/naturalism. See my companion post on the naturalist's version of fides quaerens intellectum.

5. At the end of the day, after all the dialectical smoke has cleared, you simply have to decide what you are going to believe and how you are going to live. The decision is not a mere decision, but rationally informed, and subject to revision after the consideration of further arguments; but at some point ratiocination must cease and a position must be taken.

Note: Most atheists are naturalists, hence my conflation of them in this post. But one could be an anti-naturalist and an atheist (McTaggart) and I suppose one could be a theist and a naturalist.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Seder Scene in “Crimes and Misdemeanors”

"Crimes and Misdemeanors" is Woody Allen's masterpiece. Here is the Seder scene.

Crimes-and-misdemeanors- seder

Addendum 8/26

The scene ends with Saul saying "If necessary, I will always choose God over the truth."  It works cinematically, but it is a philosophically lame response to the atheist Aunt May. It is lame because Saul portrays the theist as one who self-deceivingly embraces consolatory fictions despite his knowledge that they are fictions. Saul might have plausibly replied along one or both of the following lines.

1) It cannot be true that there is no God, since without God there is no truth.  The existence of truth presupposes the existence of God. Truth is the state of a mind in contact with reality. No minds, no truth. But there are infinitely many truths, including infinitely many necessary truths. The infinity of truths and the necessity of some them require for their ultimate support and repository an  infinite and necessary mind. "And this all men call God." So if there is no God, then there is no truth, in which case one cannot prefer truth over God in the manner of Aunt May.

Nietzsche understood this very well. He saw that the death of God is the death of truth. He concluded that there is no truth, but only  the competing perspectives of mutually antagonistic power-centers.

Now the above is a mere bloggity-blog sketch. Here is a more rigorous treatment.

2) Saul might also have challenged Aunt May as follows:

You say that it is true that there is no God, that there is no moral world-order, that might makes right, and so on. You obviously think that it is important that we face up to these truths and stop fooling ourselves.  You obviously think that there is something morally disreputable about cultivating illusions and stuffing the heads of the young with them, that morally one ought not do these things.  But what grounds this moral ought that you plainly think binds all of us and not just you?  Does it just hang in the air, so to speak? And if it does, whence its objective bindingness or 'deontic tug'?  Can you ultimately make sense of objective moral oughts and ought-nots on the naturalistic scheme you seem to be presupposing?  Won't you have to make at least a Platonic ascent in the direction of the Good?  If so, how will you stop the further ascent to the Good as self-existent and thus as  God?

Or look at this way, May. You think it is a value that we face reality, a reality that for you is Godless, even if  facing what you call reality does not contribute to our flourishing but in fact contributes to the opposite.  But how could something be a value for us if it impedes our flourishing? Is it not ingredient in the concept of value that a value to be what it is must be a value for the valuer? So even if it is true that there is no God, no higher destiny for humans, that life is in the end absurd, how could it be a value for us to admit these truths if truths they be?  So what are you getting so worked up over, sister? I have just pulled the rug out from under your moral enthusiasm!

Crimes and misdemeanors seder 2


Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil

A Catholic reader of this blog is deeply troubled by the problem of animal suffering. He reports his painful recollection of a YouTube video that depicts

. . . the killing of a baby elephant by 13 lions. They first attacked the little elephant in the open, but he was saved when several water buffalo intervened and drove the lions off. The baby then ran to two large bull elephants nearby, but rather than protecting him from the lions, they were indifferent. The lions, seeing this, rushed the baby, which helplessly ran off into the bush, where the lions, 13 in all, caught him, and began to devour him. You probably know that because of an elephant’s trunk, a lion’s bite to the neck does not kill, so I assume that the baby was eaten alive.

I find the thought of this killing and the myriad other killings like it very hard to accept. How does a theist explain such acts in nature? I know something of the various theodicies and defenses of theistic philosophers, but when confronted with this scene of terror and horrendous death, I find them all unconvincing. Something in the depths of my being rejects them all as over-sophisticated attempts to mask what is truly terrible so as to defend at all costs the first of Hume’s four options, that of a perfectly good first cause. I am not saying that I am abandoning my theistic beliefs, but I think that for too long, theists have not taken the matter of animal pain and suffering seriously enough.

Leaving philosophic theism aside, there is glaring indifference to this matter in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, where the fixation on humanity’s fall, faults, and need for salvation. Without denying whatever truth may be found in this long theological reflection on human misery, what of the animals, those here millions of years before man walked on the earth, and all those who have shared and do share the earth with him? (Your posts on animal sentience, from which I have greatly profited, form part of the background to this question.)

[. . .]  You often speak of choosing, and I agree that we must choose what we believe, but there is something at the very heart of reality that undermines our choices, and we find ourselves, if we are honest, doubting what we have chosen and thrown back on uncertainty, or if perhaps less honest and more fearful, falling into elaborate intellectual defenses to fend off what is unpalatable. As I wrote to you last year, I still believe that our ignorance is perhaps the greatest evil that we must confront.

Again, I had to share this with you, since I have no one here who would understand what is troubling me . . .

The horrors of nature "red in tooth and claw" cannot be denied.  Sensitive souls have been driven by their contemplation to the depths of pessimism and anti-natalism. (See my Anti-natalism and Benatar categories).  The notion that this awful world could be the creation of an all-powerful and loving deity who providentially cares about his creatures can strike one as either a sick joke, a feel-good fairy tale, or something equally intellectually disreputable.  As my old atheist friend Quentin Smith once put it to me, "If you were God, would you have created this world?"  To express it in the form of an understatement,  a world in which sentient beings eat each other alive, and must do so to survive, and lack the ability to commit suicide, does not seem to be a world optimally arranged.  If you were the architect of the world, would you design it as a slaughter house?

If one suffers from the problem of (natural) evil, there is little a philosopher qua philosopher can do.  Pastoral care is not his forte. But if one can gain some intellectual light on the philosophical problem, that light might  help with the existential-psychological problem.  I will now suggest how a theist who is also inclined toward skepticism can find some peace of mind.

Here is an argument from evil:

Theological Premise: Necessarily, if there is a God, there are no pointless evils.

Empirical Premise: There are pointless evils.

Conclusion: There is no God.

A pointless evil is one that is unjustified or gratuitous. Suppose there is an evil that is necessary for a greater good. God could allow such an evil without prejudice to his omnibenevolence. So it it not the case that evils as such tell against the existence of God, but only pointless evils.  

Now the lions' eating alive of the baby elephant would seem to be a pointless evil: why couldn't an omnipotent God have created a world in which all animals are herbivores?

But — and here the skeptic inserts his blade — how do we know this? in general, how do we know that the empirical premise is true? Even if it is obvious that an event is evil, it is not obvious that it is pointlessly evil.   One can also ask, more radically, whether it is empirically obvious that an event is evil.  It is empirically obvious to me that the savagery of nature is not to my liking, nor to the liking of the animals being savaged, but it does not follow that said savagery is objectively evil.  But if an event or state of affairs is not objectively evil, then it cannot be objectively pointlessly evil.

So how do we know that the so-called empirical premise above is true or even empirical? Do we just see or intuit that an instance of animal savagery is both evil and pointless?  Suppose St. Paul tells us (Romans 1:18-20) that one can just see that the universe is a divine artifact, and that God exists from the the things that have been made, and that therefore atheism is morally culpable! I say: Sorry, sir, but you cannot read off the createdness-by-God of nature from its empirical attributes. Createdness is not an empirical attribute; it is an ontological status. But neither is being evil or being pointlessly evil.

So both the theist and the atheist make it too easy for themselves when they appeal to some supposed empirical fact. We ought to be skeptical both about Paul's argument for God and the atheist's argument against God.  Paul begs the question when he assumes that the natural world is a divine artifact.  The atheist too begs the question when he assumes that all or some evils are pointless evils.

Will you say that the pointlessness of some evils is not a direct deliverance but an inference? From which proposition or propositions?  From the proposition that these evils are inscrutable in the sense that we can discern no sufficient reasons for God's allowing them?  But that is too flimsy a premise to allow such a weighty inference.

The dialectical lay of the land seems to be as follows. If there are pointless evils, then God does not exist, and if God exists, then there are no pointless evils. But we don't know that there are pointless evils, and so we are within our epistemic rights in continuing to affirm the existence of God. After all, we have a couple dozen good, but not compelling, arguments for the existence of God.  One cannot prove the existence of God. By the same token, one cannot prove the nonexistence of God.  One can bluster, of course, and one can beg the question. And one can do this both as a theist and as an atheist. But if you are intellectually honest, you will agree with me that there are no proofs and no objective certainties in these sublunary precincts.

This is why I say that, in the end, one must decide what one will believe and how one will live. And of course belief and action go together: what one believes informs how one lives, and how one lives shows what one believes. If I believe in God and the soul, then those beliefs will be attested in my behavior, and if I live as if God and the soul are real, then that is what it is to believe these things.

If you seek objective certainty in these matters, you will not find it. That is why free decision comes into it.  But there is nothing willful about the decision since years of examination of arguments and counterarguments are behind it all. The investigation must continue if the faith is to be authentic.  Again, there is no objective certainty in this life. There is only subjective certainty which many people confuse with objective certainty.  We don't KNOW. This, our deep ignorance, is another aspect of the problem of evil.

Making these assertions, I do not make them dogmatically. I make them tentatively and I expose them to ongoing investigation. In this life we are in statu viae: we are ever on the road. If rest there is, it is at the end of the road.

My correspondent seems to think that I think that deciding what to believe and how to live generates objective certainty. That is not my view.  There is no objective certainty here below. It lies on the Other Side if it lies anywhere. And there is no objective certainty here below that there is anything beyond the grave.  One simply has to accept that one is in a Cave-like condition, to allude to Plato's great allegory, and that, while one is not entirely in the dark, one is not entirely in the light either, but is muddling around in a chiaroscuro of ignorance and insight.

Once More on Romans 1: 18-20 and Whether Atheism is Morally Culpable

Brian writes,

In Van Til and Romans 1: 18-20 you accused Paul of begging the question in Romans 1 when he characterizes the natural world as ‘created’. The question you have in mind – the one presumably being begged by Paul – is whether the world is a divine creation.

BV: That's right, but let's back up a step.

Paul is concerned to show the moral culpability of unbelief.  He assumes something I don't question, namely, that some beliefs are such that, if a person holds them, then he is morally culpable or morally blameworthy for holding them. We can call them morally culpable beliefs as long  we understand that it is the holding of the belief, not its content, that is morally culpable.  I would even go so far as to say that some beliefs are morally culpable whether or not one acts on them. 

So I don't question whether there are morally culpable beliefs. What I question is whether atheism is a  morally culpable belief, where atheism in this context is the thesis that there is no God as Paul and those in his tradition conceive him.

So why does Paul think atheism is morally culpable? The gist of it is as follows. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . ."

We can argue over whether there is an argument here or just some dogmatic statements dressed up as an argument. (The word 'for' can reasonably be taken as signaling argumentative intent.)  Suppose we take Paul to be giving an argument. What is the argument? It looks to be something like the following:

1) It is morally inexcusable to refuse to acknowledge what is known to be the truth.

2) That God exists is known to be the truth from the plain evidence of creation.

Therefore

3) It is morally inexcusable to refuse to acknowledge that God exists.

This argument is only as good as its minor premise, (2). But right here is where Paul begs the question.  If the natural world is a divine creation, it follows analytically that God exists and that God created the world.  Paul begs the question by assuming that the natural world is a divine creation.  Paul is of course free to do that. He is free to presuppose the existence of God, not that he, in full critical self-awareness, presupposes the existence of God; given his upbringing he probably never seriously questioned the existence of God and always took his existence for granted.

And having presupposed — or taken for granted — the existence of God, it makes sense for him to think of us as having been created by God with an innate  sense of the divine — Calvin's sensus divinitatis — that our sinful rebelliousness suppresses. And it makes sense for him to think  that the wrath of God is upon us for our sinful self-will and refusal to acknowledge God's reality and sovereignty.

For him to have begged the question here, wouldn’t Paul’s burden of  proof have to be that the world is a divine creation? This does not seem to be his burden in Romans 1. It seems to me that Paul is accounting for why people are under the wrath of God. His answer is that: (1) they know God; and (2) they fail to honor Him as God. If (1) and (2) are the case, then this accounts for why they are under God’s wrath.

Your talk of burden of proof is unclear. You seem to think that the burden of proof is the proposition one aims to prove.  But that's not right. So let's not muddy the waters with 'burden of proof.' 

We may be at cross purposes.  What interests me is the question whether atheist belief is morally blameworthy. I read the passage in question as containing an argument that it is. I presented the argument above, and I explained why it is a bad argument: it commits the informal fallacy of petitio principii.  To answer my own question: it is not in general morally blameworthy to hold characteristic atheist beliefs, although it may in some cases be morally blameworthy.  

What interests Brian about the passage in question is the explanation it contains as to why the wrath of God is upon us.  Well, if you assume that God exists and that venereal disease and the other bad things Paul mentions are the effects of divine wrath, then, within the presupposed framework, one can ask what accounts for God's wrath. It would then make sense to say that people know that God exists but willfully suppress this knowledge and fail to honor God.  Therefore, God, to punish man for his willful refusal to acknowledge God's reality and sovereignty, sends down such scourges as AIDS.

I have no problem with this interpretation.

So far so good. But, this is not all that Paul says. The key section for our purposes is how Paul argues for (1), the proposition that people know God. Paul claims that they all know God because He made Himself evident to them through creation. Is Paul now be begging the question because of his use of ‘creation’? Again, I do not think so. Here is the pertinent passage:

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made…(Rom. 1:20 NASB).

But now I do have a problem. Brian has not appreciated the point that, to me, is blindingly evident.  What is MADE by God is of course made by GOD.  But this analytic proposition give us no reason to think that nature is MADE, i.e., created by a divine being that is transcendent of nature. It ought to be obvious that one cannot straightaway infer from the intelligibility, order, beauty, and existence of nature that 'behind' nature there is a supernatural personal being that is supremely intelligent, the source of all beauty, and the first cause of all existing things apart from itself.  One cannot 'read off' the being instantiated of the divine attributes from contemplation of nature.

Suppose I see a woman. I am certain that if she is a wife, then there is a person who is her husband. Can I correctly infer from those two propositions that the woman I see is a wife?  Can I 'read off' from my perception of the woman that she is a wife?