Category: Athens and Jerusalem

Atheist Blogger Swims the Tiber

Formerly atheist blogger Leah Libresco reports that she has converted to Catholicism.

That's quite a shift.  Typically,  the terminus a quo of Tiber swimmers is either generic theism or mere Christianity (in C. S. Lewis' sense) or some Protestant sect.  Seismic is the shift from out-and-out God denial to acceptance of an extremely specific conception of God.

How specific? 

The God of Catholicism is of course a Trinity: one God in three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. (It was 'Holy Ghost' still in the 'fifties; the arguably ruinous Vatican II reforms of the 'sixties replaced 'Ghost' with 'Spirit.')  The Second Person of the Trinity, the Son, or Logos (Word), entered human history at a particular time in a particular place in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  This is the doctrine of the Incarnation.  God, or rather God the Son, became man.  "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  To do so, Jesus had to be born of a woman in that humble manner common to all of us, inter faeces et urinam, and yet without an earthly father.  Thus arises the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. But since the God-Man  is perfectly sinless, he canot be born of a woman bearing the taint of Original Sin.  Hence the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception:  Mary, the mother of God, was born without Original Sin.  So far, five dogmas that go beyond generic Western monotheism: Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Original Sin, Immaculate Conception.  See Trinity and Incarnation  and Original Sin categories for some details.

I have gone only a about a third of the way into the specificity of the Catholic God-conception, but far enough for one to see how dogmatically rich it is.

Now the more dogmatically rich a religion, the more specific its claims, the harder it will be to accept.  To be an intellectually honest Roman Catholic, for example, one must accept not only the above dogmas but a number of others besides.  These extremely specific dogmas are stumbling blocks to many thinking people.  (Of course, the same problem arises with other doctrinally rich belief systems such as Communism.)

For some of us who were raised in the Roman church, the dogmas and their presuppositions beg give rise to questions that we simply must get clear about.  (We cannot merely go along to get along, or participate in rites and rituals the theological foundations of which are murky.  Example: to take communion when Transubstantiation beggars understanding.)  And so some of us become philosophers.  But any movement towards Athens is a movement away from Jerusalem . . . .

But it's Saturday night, time to punch the clock, time for my once-a-week ration of tequila, and time for Saturday Night at the Oldies.  Tomorrow's another day.

Deserving Immortality

I lately aphorized:

Which is better: to inquire whether there is immortality, or to live in such a way as to deserve it? Both are good, but the second is better.

A childhood friend and committed Christian offers this well-crafted comment:

You are meant for immortality but cannot live in such a way as to deserve it. The only thing you can “do” in this regard is step aside and let the only person so qualified for this task (of deserving a living survival from death) substitute for you. Your willingness to step aside to let this uniquely qualified individual do the thing that only he can do will change you. Until that change you are incompletely made as it were and are qualified for going from death to death. God sees our unfitness to be fully in his presence. When the substitution takes place, God sees the substitute’s fitness as an attribute of our soul and we are accepted into God’s presence. This is immortal life. This is possible for any man.

The substitute is qualified and ready. The transition event pivots on our willingness to either use our free will as though its purpose is to allow us to be established as independent from the presence of God or to accept God’s purpose in equipping us with this free will which is to accept freely this offer of substitution, admit our inability to make ourselves fit to be fully in God’s presence, and submit to the process of substitution and be born again.

Note first that the comment is consistent with the truth of my aphorism.  I asked which is better: to examine the question of personal immortality or to live in such a way as to deserve it.  It should be obvious that while both are good — the first as an instance of the Socratic principle that the examined life is better than the unexamined life –  the second is better.  The second is better even if nothing we do or could do suffices to secure for us personal immortality.  In other words, the second disjunct does not presuppose the possibility of attaining immortality 'on our own power' and as our just desert.  One can live so as to deserve immortality even if one does not, in the end, deserve it.

Nevertheless, it is a very important question whether, if there is personal immortality, we can secure it by our own efforts.  The Christian answer is in the negative.  As a result of the Fall, we are so out of right relation to God that nothing we could do could restore us to right relation.  Adam's sin condemned him and his descendants to death.  The Platonic notion that man is naturally immortal, in virtue of the immortality of his soul, is foreign to Christianity.  Immortality was a supernatural gift in our prelapsarian state, and, after the Fall, it became a gift again only because of the substitutionary sacrifice of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, agnus dei qui tollit peccatum mundi. 

My old friend is suggesting that all we can do is confess our impotence in bringing about our own salvation and accept exogenic assistance, substituting for our own vain efforts the Savior's efficacious efforts.  One comment is that, while my friend was brought up Catholic, he now seems perilously close to the Protestant sola fide, a a doctrine I have never understood.  How could faith alone suffice?  Works don't count at all? Nothing we do makes any difference?  As I understand the Catholic doctrine — which strikes me as balanced where the Protestant one is unbalanced — there is no soteriological bootstrapping: one cannot save oneself by one's own efforts alone; still, works play some role, however exiguous that role may be.

As a philosopher, however, my problems lie far deeper than this intramural theological dispute, having to do with the exact meaning of the Fall, and the sense and possibility of Trinity and Incarnation. My friend is presupposing the truth of Christianity.  But for a philosopher, the truth of Christianity is a problem, not a presupposition.

And so once again we are brought back to the fruitful tension between Athens and Jerusalem, the tension between the need for autonomous understanding and the need to accept, faithfully and obediently, Biblical revelation.  The Bible-based believer has his truth and so sees no need to inquire; the philosopher, however, well disposed as he may be to the claims of revelation, cannot help, on pain of violating his own nature and integrity, inquiring whether what the believer calls truth really is truth.

Literal or Antiphrastic?

Elliot writes,

When I began to read your “Who doesn't need philosophy?” post, I immediately started to think of reasons why adherents of religious and nonreligious worldviews need philosophy as inquiry. Indeed, one can think of many good reasons why such adherents (especially the dogmatic ones) need philosophy.

However, as I continued to read, I noticed the irony of your post (particularly the final paragraph). It seems at least possible that your entry is a dialectic antiphrasis to make the point that we all need philosophy as inquiry, including sincere believers and religious and nonreligious dogmatists. Humanity needs to inquire because humanity needs truth. As Aristotle put it in the first sentence of the Metaphysics, all humans by nature seek to know.   

Over the weekend, I found myself wondering whether your post is antiphrastic or literal. Do you really think philosophy as inquiry is unnecessary for the religious person? Or do you think the religious person should philosophize? I think the latter; I am curious to know what you think; either way I appreciate the thought provoking post.

To answer the reader's question I will write a commentary on my post.

Philosophy: Who Doesn't Need It?

The title is a take-off on Ayn Rand's Philosophy: Who Needs It?  Rand's rhetorical question is not intended to express the proposition that people do not need philosophy, but that they do.  So perhaps we could call the question in her title an antiphrastic  rhetorical question.

 Who doesn't need philosophy?

I don't approve of one-sentence paragraphs in formal writing, but blogging is not formal writing: it is looser, more personal, chattier, pithier, more direct.  And in my formal writing I indent my paragraphs.  That too is a nicety that is best dropped in this fast medium.

People who have the world figured out don't need it. If you know what's up when it comes to God and the soul, the meaning of life, the content and basis of morality, the role of state, and so on, then you certainly don't need philosophy. If you are a Scientologist or a Mormon or a Roman Catholic or an adherent of any other religious or quasi-religious worldview then you have your answers and philosophy as inquiry (as opposed to philosophy as worldview) is strictly unnecessary. And same goes for the adherents of such nonreligious worldviews as leftism and scientism and evangelical atheism.

The first two sentences are intended literally and they are literally true.  'Figured out' is a verb of success: if one has really got the world figured out, then he possesses the truth about it.  But in the rest of the paragraph a bit of irony begins to creep in inasmuch as the reader is expected to know that it is not the case, and cannot be the case,  that all the extant worldviews are true.  So by the end of the paragraph the properly caffeinated reader should suspect  that my point is that people need philosophy.  They need it because they don't know the ultimate low-down, the proof of which is the welter of conflicting worldviews. 

(The inferential links that tie There is a welter of conflicting worldviews to People don't know the ultimate low-down to People need philosophy as inquiry all need defense. I could write a book about that.  At the moment I am merely nailing my colors to the mast.)

He who has the truth needn't seek it. And those who are in firm possession of the truth are well-advised to stay clear of philosophy with its tendency to sow the seeds of doubt and confusion.

Now the irony is in full bloom.  Surely it cannot be the case that both a Communist and a Catholic are in "firm possession of  the truth" about ultimate matters.  At most one can be in firm possession.  But it is also possible that neither are.  There is also the suggestion that truth is not the sort of thing about which one side or the other can claim proprietary rights. 

Those who are secure in their beliefs are also well-advised to turn a blind eye to the fact of the multiplicity of conflicting worldviews. Taking that fact into cognizance may cause them to doubt whether their 'firm possession of the truth' really is such.

 The final paragraph is ironic.  I am not advising people to ignore the conflict of worldviews.  For that conflict is a fact, and we ought to face reality and not blink the facts.  I am making the conditional assertion that if one values doxastic security over truth, then one is well-advised to ignore the fact that one's worldview is rejected by many others.  For careful contemplation of  that fact may undermine one's doxastic security and peace of mind.  (It is not for nothing that the Roman church once had an index librorum prohibitorum.)  Note that to assert a conditional is not to assert either its antecedent or its consequent.  So it is logically consistent of me to assert the above conditional while rejecting both its antecedent and its consequent.

The reader understood my entry correctly as "a dialectic antiphrasis to make the point that we all need philosophy as inquiry, including sincere believers and religious and nonreligious dogmatists."

In saying that I of course give the palm to Athens over Jerusalem.  But, if I may invoke that failed monk and anti-Athenian irrationalist, Luther:  Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders.

The Divine Job Description

For Spencer who, though he no longer believes that the Mormon God concept is instantiated, yet believes that as a concept it remains a worthy contender in the arena of God concepts.

What jobs would a being have to perform to qualify as God?

I count four sorts of job, ontological, epistemological, axiological, and soteriological, the first two more 'Athenian,' the second two more 'Hierosolymic.' The fruitful tension between Athens and Jersualem is a background presupposition. (The tension is fruitful in that it helps explain the vitality of the West; its lack in the Islamic world being part of the explanation of the latter's inanition.) This macro-tension between philosophy and Biblical revelation is mirrored microcosmically in human beings in the tension, fruitful or not, between reason and faith, autonomy and authority. (Man is a microcosm as Nicholas Cusanus maintained.)

1. Ontological Jobs. Why does anything exist at all? To be precise: why does anything contingent exist at all? A God worth his salt must play a role, indeed the main role, in any explanation. In brief: the reason why contingent beings exist is because God, a necessary being, (i) created them out of nothing and (ii) maintains them in existence. God is thus the unsourced source of all finite and contingent existents. Maybe nothing does this job. It might be that the existence of contingent beings is a factum brutum. But nothing could count as God that did not do this explanatory job. Or at least so I claim.

But I hear an objection. "Why couldn't there be a god who was a contingent being among contingent beings or even a contingent god among a plurality of contingent gods?" I needn't deny that there are such minor deities, not that I believe in any. I needn't even deny that they could play an explanatory role or a soteriological role. (I discuss soteriology in #4 below.) My argument would be that they cannot play an ultimate explanatory role or an ultimate soteriological role. Suppose a trio of contingent gods, working together, created the universe. I would press the question: where did they come from? If each of these gods is possibly such as not to exist, then it is legitimate to ask why each does exist. And if each is contingent and in need of explanation, then the same goes for the trio. (Keep your shirts on, muchachos, that is not the fallacy of composition.)

If you say that they always existed as a matter of brute fact, then no ultimate explanation has been given. Suppose time is infinite in both directions and x exists at every time. It doesn't follow that x necessarily exists. To think otherwise would be to confuse the temporal with the modal. An ultimate explanation must terminate in a being whose existence is self-explanatory, where a self-explanatory being is one that exists as a matter of metaphysical necessity and thus has no need of explanation in terms of anything distinct from it.

"Perhaps an ultimate explanation in your sense is not to be had." Well then, the ontological job — the job of explaining why anything contingent exists at all — won't get done, and there is no God. Here I may be approaching a stand-off with my interlocutor. I say: nothing counts as God unless it does all four types of job, including the ontological job. My opponent, however, balks at my criterion. He does not see why the God-role can be played only by an absolutely unique being who exists a se and thus by metaphysical necessity.

If you believe in a contingent god or a plurality of contingent gods, and stop there, then I can conceive of something greater, a God who exists of metaphysical necessity and who not only is one without a second, but one without the possibility of a second. But this just brings us back to the Anselmian conception of God as 'that than which no greater can be conceived,' God as the greatest conceivable being, or the maximally perfect being, or the ens reallisimum/perfectissimum, etc. This conception of deity is very Greek and very unanthropomorphic residing as it does in the conceptual vicinity of the Platonic Good and the Plotinian One. But that is what I like about it and my interlocutor doesn't. It's inhuman, 'faceless,' impersonal, he complains. I prefer to say that God is transpersonal and transhuman — not below but beyond the personal and the human. As I have said before, religion is about transcendence and transformation, not about a duplicate world behind the scenes, a hinterworld if you will. Whatever God is, he can't be a Big Guy in the Sky. And whatever survival of bodily death might be, it is not the perpetuation of these petty selves of ours. An immortality worth wanting is one in which we are transformed and transfigured. The proper desire for immortality is not an egotistical desire but a desire to be purged of one's egotism.

2. Epistemological Jobs. What accounts for the intelligibility of the world and what is its source? A God worth his salt (salary) must play a role, indeed the main role, in any explanation of why the world can be understood by us. The explanation, in outline, is that the world is intelligible because it it is the creation of an intelligent being. As an embodiment and expression of the divine intelligence of the intellectus archetypus it is intelligible to an intellectus ectypus. Maybe the world has no need of a ground or source of its intelligibility. Or maybe we are the source of all intelligibility and project it outward onto what is in itself devoid of intelligibility. But if the world is intelligible, and if this intelligibility is not a projection by us, and if the world has a ground of its intelligibility, then God must play a role, the main role, in the explanation of this intelligibility. Nothing could be called God that did not play this role.

Now if God is the ultimate source of intelligibility and the ultimate ground of ontic truth and, as such, the ultimate condition of the possibility of propositional truth as adequatio intellectus ad rem, then he cannot be just one more intelligible among intelligibles any more than he can be just one more being among beings. A God worthy of the name must be Being itself (self-existent Existence) and Intelligibility itself (self-intelligent Intelligibility), and ontological truth. And so God could not be a contingent being, or a material being, or a collection of contingent material beings. He couldn't be what Mormons apparently believe God to be.

3. Axiological Jobs. By a similar pattern of reasoning, I would argue that nothing could count as God that did not function as the unsourced source of all goodness and the ultimate repository of all value. God is not just another thing that has value, but the paradigm case of value.

4. Soteriological Jobs. Every religion, to count as a religion, must include a doctrine of salvation, a soteriology. Religions exist to cater to the felt need for salvation. It is not essential to a religion that it be theistic, as witness the austere forms of Buddhism, but it is essential to every religion as I define the term that it have a soteriology. A religion must show a way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, and one that is unsatisfactory. Sarvam dukkham! as the First Noble Truth has it. I would go a step further and add that out unsatisfactory predicament is one that we cannot escape from by our own power. Self-power alone won't cut it; other-power is also needed. 'Works' are not sufficient, though I suspect they are necessary.

When it comes to salvation we can ask four questions: of what? from what? to what? by what? Here is one possible answer. Salvation is of the soul, not the body; from our unsatisfactory present predicament of sin, ignorance, and meaninglessness; to a state of moral perfection, intellectual insight, peace, happiness, and meaning; by an agent possessing the power to bring about the transformation of the individual soul. God is the agent of salvation. To be worth his salt he must possess the power to save us. Since the only salvation worth wanting involves a complete overhaul and cleansing of our present wretched selves, this God will have to have impressive powers. He cannot be a supplier of material or quasi-material goodies in some hinterworld in which we carry on in much the same way as we do here, though with the negatives removed. The crudest imaginable paradise is the carnal paradise of the Muslims with its 72 black-eyed virgins who never tire out the lucky effer; but if I am not badly mistaken, Mormon conceptions are also crudely materialistic and superstitiously anthropomorphic to boot.

What I'm driving towards is the thesis that a God who can play the ultimate soteriological role cannot be some minor deity among minor deities who just happens to exist. He must be a morally perfect being with the power to confer moral perfection. This moral and soteriological perfection would seem to require as their ground ontological and epistemological perfection. Not that I have quite shown this . . . .

Monasticism and the Monks of Mount Athos

Mt Athos Back in April, 60 Minutes had a segment on the monks of Mt. Athos.  It was surprisingly sympathetic for such a left-leaning program. What one expects and usually gets from libs and lefties and the lamestream media is religion-bashing — unless of course the religion is Islam, the religion of peace – but the segment in question was refreshingly objective.  It was actually too sympathetic for my taste and not critical enough.  It didn't raise the underlying questions.  Which is why you need my blog.

 

We know that this world is no dream and is to that extent real.  For all we know it may be as real as it gets, though  philosophers and sages over the centuries, East and West, have assembled plenty of considerations that speak against its plenary reality.  We don't know that there is any world other than this one.  We also don't know that there isn't.  Now here is an existential question for you:  Will you sacrifice life in this world, with its manifold pleasures and satisfactions, for the chance of transcendent happiness in a merely believed-in hinterworld?  The Here is clear; the Hereafter is not.  It is not clear that is is, or that it isn't, or what it is if it is.  When I say that the world beyond is merely believed-in, I mean that it is merely believed-in from the point of view of the here and now where knowledge is impossible; I am not saying that there is no world beyond. 

Let us be clear what the existential option is.  It is not between being a dissolute hedonist or an ascetic, a Bukowski or a Simon of Sylites.  It is between being one who lives in an upright and productive way but in such a way as to assign plenary reality and importance to this world, this life, VERSUS one who sees this world as a vanishing quantity that cannot be taken with full seriousness but who takes it as preparatory for what comes after death.  (Of course, most adherents of a religion live like ordinary worldlings for the most part but hedge their bets by tacking on some religious observances on the weekend.  I am not concerned with these wishy-washy types here.)

The monks of Mount Athos spend their lives preparing for death, writing their ticket to the Beyond, engaging in unseen warfare against Satan and his legions.  They pray the Jesus Prayer ceaselessly; they do not surf the Web or engage in competitive eating contests or consort with females – there are no distaff elements on the Holy Mountain.

Is theirs the highest life possible for a human being?  Or is the quest to determine what is the highest life the highest life?  The monks think they have the truth, the final truth, the essential and saving truth.  Thinking they possess it, their task is not to seek it but to implement it in their lives, to 'existentially appropriate it' as Kierkegaard might say, to knit it into the fabric of their Existenz.  There is a definite logic to their position.  If you have the truth, then there is no point in wasting time seeking it, or talking about it, or debating scoffers and doubters.  The point is to do what is necessary to achieve the transcendent Good the existence of which one does not question. 

This logic is of course common to other 'true believers.'  Karl Marx in the 11th of his Theses on Feuerbach wrote that "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it."  Marx and the Commies he spawned thought they had the truth, and so the only thing left was to implement it at whatever cost, the glorious end justifying the bloody means.   Buddha was famously opposed to speculation.  If you have been shot with a poisoned arrow, there is no point in speculating as to the trajectory of the arrow, the social class of the archer, or the chemical composition of the poison; the one thing necessary is to extract the arrow.  The logic is the same, though the point is different.  The point for Buddha was not theosis (deification) as in Eastern Orthodoxy, or the classless society as in Marxism, but Nirvana, extinguishment of the ego-illusion and final release from the wheel of Samsara. 

If you have the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then  by all means live in accordance with it.  Put it into practice.  But do you in fact have the truth?  For the philosopher this is the question that comes first and cannot be evaded.  If the monks of Mt Athos are right about God and the soul and that the ultimate human goal is theosis, then they are absolutely right to renounce this world of shadows and seemings and ignorance and evil for the sake of true reality and true happiness.

But do they have the truth or does one throw one's life away when one flees to a monastery? Does one toss aside the only reality there is for a bunch of illusions?  There is of course a secular analog.  I would say that all the earnest and idealistic and highly talented individuals who served the cause of Communism in the 20th century sacrificed their lives on the altar of illusions.  They threw their lives away pursuing the impossible.  Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for example.  Such true believers wasted their lives and ended up  enablers of  great evil.  In the end they were played for fools by an evil ideology.

So isn't the philosopher's life the highest possible life for a human being?  For only the philosopher pursues the ultimate questions without dogmatism, without blind belief, in freedom, critically, autonomously.  I am not saying that the ultimate good for a human being is endless inquiry.  The highest goal cannot be endless inquiry into truth, but a resting in it.   But that can't come this side of the Great Divide.  Here and now is not the place or time to dogmatize.  We can rest in dogma on the far side.

My Athenian thesis — that the life of thephilosopher is the highest life possible for a human being — won't play very well in Jerusalem. And I myself have doubts about it.  But all such doubts are themselves part and parcel of the philosophical enterprise.  For if nothing is immune from being hauled before the bench of Reason, there to be rudely interrogated, then fair Philosophia herself must also answer to that tribunal.

 

Athens, Jerusalem, and Karl Jaspers

I stand astride both cities, with a foot in each.  But I favor one leg . . . .

Or to change the metaphor:  I do not look down upon the cities from above as from an Olympian standpoint but sight from the perspective of one of the cities, Athens, towards the other, Jerusalem.

So while I attempt a syn-optic view, my syn-optics cannot quite shake off the perspectivism of all finite optics.  My intellectual honesty demands recognition of this fact. 

JaspersIn the last paragraph of the preface to the book that bears the slightly inaccurate English title Philosophical Faith and Revelation, Karl Jaspers explains why he entitled his book Der Philosophische Glaube Angesichts der Offenbarung and not Der Philosophische Glaube und Offenbarung.  Jaspers remarks that und (and) would be inappropriate because it would suggest that he was laying claim to a superior standpoint outside both philosophy and revelation, a standpoint that Jaspers does not claim to occupy.  He speaks from the side of philosophy while being touched, struck, affected (betroffen) by  the claims of revelation.  Thus his philosophical faith is in the face of (angesichts) revelation, elaborated in confrontation with it.  And so his philosophical optics are situated and perspectival, not synoptic or panoptic.

 

It seems we have only four options assuming that an Hegelian panoptical God's eye view is unavailable to us, a view which would somehow synthesize philosophy and religion:

1. Deny the tension by eliminating Athens in favor of Jersualem in the manner of an irrationalist like Lev Shestov.
2. Deny the tension by eliminating Jerusalem in favor Athens.
3. Live the tension as a philosopher who takes seriously the claims and demands of revelation.
4. Live the tension as a religionist who take seriously the claims and demands of philosophy.

(1) and (2) are nonstarters.  So we are left with the difficult choice between (3) and (4).

Original Sin in a Darwinian World

Our old friend Jeff Hodges of Gypsy Scholar e-mails: 

I liked the interesting argument that the consequences of belief and nonbelief in original sin are both bad and thus evidence of our fallen natures. But I do wonder what either original sin or fallenness mean in a Darwinian world . . .

Jeff has posed an excellent question which I must try to answer.

1. I begin with what it can't mean.  It cannot mean that our present fallen condition is one we inherited from Adam and Eve if these names refer to the original parents of the human race.  And this for two reasons.

A. The first is that nothing imputable to a person, nothing for which he is morally responsible, can be inherited.  For what I inherit I receive ab extra by causal mechanisms not in my control.  (It doesn't matter whether these mechanisms are deterministic or merely probabilistic.)  That which is imputable to me, however, is only that which I freely bring about.  It is a clear deliverance of our ordinary moral sense that a person is morally responsible only for what he does and leaves undone, not for what others do or leave undone.  This deliverance is surely more credible than any theory that entails its negation.  So one cannot inherit sinfulness, guilt, or desert of punishment.  Therefore the actual sins of past persons cannot induce in me a state of sinfulness or guilt or desert of punishment.  And that includes the actual sins of our first parents if there were any.

This amounts to a denial of originated original sin.  It does not amount to a denial of originating original sin.  The distinction is explained in greater detail here.  So there can still be original sin even if sinfulness, guilt, and desert of punishment cannot be inherited.

As I said elsewhere, we must distinguish between the putative fact of original sin and the various theories one can have of it.  Refuting a particular theory does not amount to refuting the fact.

B. The second reason is that there were in actual historical fact no original parents of the human race who came into existence wthout animal progenitors.  We know this from evolutionary biology which is more credible — more worthy of belief — than the stories of Genesis interpreted literally.  In any conflict between the Bible so interpreted and natural science, the latter will win — every time.  So if one takes both Bible and science seriously, the Bible must be read in such a way that it does not conflict with our best science.

2. To take this whole original sin problematic seriously one must of course assume that in some sense or other 'Man is a fallen being.'   I warmly recommend the study of history to those who  adhere to such delusions of the Left as that of human perfectibility or the inherent goodness of humanity.  Once you disembarrass yourself of those illusions you will be open to something like human fallenness or Kant's radical evil.  I am not saying that the horrors of history by themselves entail man's fallenness.  Our fallenness is certainly not a plain empirical fact as G. K. Chesterton and others have foolishly and tendentiously suggested.  Chesterton's "plain as potatoes" remark was silly bluster.  It is rather that a doctrine of the fall is reasonably introuduced, by a sort of inference to the best explanation, to account for man's universal wretchedness and inability to substantially improve his lot. The details of the inferential move from what could count as plain facts to a doctrine of a fall is not my present topic. 

3. Now to Jeff's question.  If the Genesis stories cannot be read as literally true accounts of actual historical facts, if we accept the findings and theories of evolutionary biology as regards the genesis of human animals, then what can human fallenness mean? There are various possibilities.  I will mention just one, which derives from Kant. 

What we need is a theory that allows us to embrace all of the following propositions without contradicting any deliverance of natural science or any deliverance of our ordinary sound moral sense:

a. There is a universal propensity to moral evil in human beings which is radical in that it is at the root of every specific act of wrong-doing.
b. This propensity to evil is the best explanation of the fathomless horrors of the human condition.
c. The radical propensity to moral evil is innate in that it not acquired at any time in a moral agent's life, but is present at every time precisely as the predisposition to specific evil acts.
d. The propensity is imputable. 
e. The propensity is not inherited. 
f.  Imputable actions and states are free and unconditioned.

Here is a quick and dirty sketch of Kant's theory, a theory which allows one to affirm each of the six propositions above.

Man enjoys dual citzenship.  As a physical being, and thus as an animal, he he is a member of the  phenomenal world, the world of space-time-matter.  In this realm determinism reigns: everything that happens is necessitated by the laws of nature plus the initial conditions.  But man knows himself to be morally responsible, and so knows himself to be libertarianly free.  Since everything phenomenal is determined, and nothing free, man as moral agent is a noumenal being who 'stands apart from the causal nexus.'

Kant sees with blinding clarity that nothing imputable to an agent can be caused by factors external to the agent: only that which the agent does or leaves undone freely and by his own agency is imputable to the agent.  It follows that sinfulness, guilt, and desert of punishment cannot be inherited:  there is no originated original sin. For what is inherited is caused to be by factors external to the agent.  So (e) is true.  But the predisposition to moral evil is nonetheless innate in the sense that it is not conditioned by events in time.  It is logically prior to every action of the agent in the time-order.

How is the predisposition imputable?  It is imputable because it is the result of a free noumenal choice.  And so there is originating original sin.  Each of us by an atemporal noumenal choice is the origin of the radical evil which is at the root of each specific evil act. So (d) is true.

Kant's theory has its problems which I have no desire to paper over.  But it does provide an answer to Jeff's question.  His question, in effect, was what original sin or human fallenness could mean if Darwinism is true. Kant's theory counts as an answer to that question.  For on Kant's theory there is no need to contradict evolutionary biology by positing two original parents of the human race, nor any need to accept the notion that moral qualities such as guilt are biologically transmissible, or the morally unacceptable notion that such qualities are in any way (biologically, socio-culturally) inheritable. 

Lev Shestov’s Irrationalist-Existentialist Reading of the Fall of Man

It is important to distinguish between the putative fact of human fallenness and the various theories and doctrines about what this fall consists in and how it came about.  The necessity of this distinction is obvious:  different philosophers and theologians and denominations who accept the Fall have different views about the exact nature of this event or state. I use 'fact' advisedly.  It is unlikely that we will be able to peel back to a level of bare factuality uncontaminated by any theory or interpretation.  Surely G. K. Chesterton is involved in an egregious exaggeration when he writes in effect that our fallen condition is a fact as "plain as potatoes."  (See here for quotation and critique.)  But while it is not a plain empirical fact that we are fallen beings, it is not a groundless speculation or bit of theological mystification either. 

It is widely recognized that there is something deeply unsatisfactory about the human condition, and that this deep unsatisfactoriness is both universal across time and space and apparently unameliorable by anything we do, either individually or collectively.  Indeed, the prodigious efforts made in amelioration have in notable cases made things vastly worse.  (The Communists, to take but one example, murdered 100 million in their ill-starred attempt at fundamentally improving the human condition.)   This sort of 'ameliorative backfire'  is a feature of our fallenness as is the refusal of many to admit that we are fallen, not to mention the cacophany of conficting theories as to what our fallenness consists in.  We are up to our necks in every manner of contention, crime and depravity.  One would have to be quite the polyanna to deny that there is something deeply wrong with the world and the people in it, or to think that we are going to set things right by our own efforts. We know from experience that there is no good reason to believe that.  The problem is not 'society' or anything external to us.  The problem is us.  In particular, the problem is not them as opposed to us, but us, all of us. 

So that's an important  first distinction.  There is the fact or quasi-fact of fallenness and there are the various theories about it.  If you fail to make this distinction and identify the Fall with some particular theory of it, then you may end up like the foolish biologist who thought that the Fall is refuted by evolutionary biology according to which there were no such original human animals as Adam and Eve.  To refute one of the theories of the Fall is not to refute the 'fact' of the Fall. 

Lev_shestov Lev Shestov, the Russian existentialist and irrationalist,  has an interesting theory which it is the purpose of this post briefly to characterize and criticize. I take as my text an address he delivered at the Academy of Religion and Philosophy  in Paris, May 5, 1935.

 

 

 Start with the 'fact' of  deep, universal, unameliorable-by-us unsatisfactoriness.  Is this unsatisfactoriness inscribed into the very structure of Being?  Is it therefore necessary and unavoidable except by entry into nonbeing?  Shestov thinks that for the philosophers of West and East it is so:  "In being itself human thought has discovered something wrong, a defect, a sickness, a sin, and accordingly wisdom has demanded the vanquishing of that sin at its roots; in other words, a renunciation of being which, since it has a beginning, is fated inevitably to end."  (p. 2) Buddha and Schopenhauer serve as good illustrations, though Shestov doesn't mention them.  Shestov, of course, is one of those for whom Athens and Jerusalem are mortal enemies ever at loggerheads.  And so it comes as no surprise that he opposes the revealed truth of the Book of books, the Bible, to the wisdom of the philosophers.  For the philosophers, the deep wrongness of the world is rooted in its very Being and is therefore essential to it;  but for the Bible the world is good, as having been created by a good God, and its deep deficiency is contingent, not necessary:

What is said in it [the Bible] directly contradicts what men have found out through their intellectual vision. Everything, as we read in the very beginning of the Book of Genesis, was made by the Creator, everything had a beginning. But this not only is not seen as a precondition of the decay, imperfection, corruption, and sinfulness of being; on the contrary, it is an assurance of all possible good in the universe. (2)

Since the source of all being, God, is all-good, to be, as such, is good. But whence then evil? The Bible-based theist cannot say that being itself harbors imperfection and evil; so where did evil come from?

Scripture gives a definite answer to this question. God planted among the other trees in the Garden of Eden the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And He said to the first man: "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." But the tempter . . . said: "No, ye shall not die; your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing." Man succumbed to temptation, ate of the forbidden fruit; his eyes were opened and he became knowing. What was revealed to him? What did he find out? He learned the same thing that the Greek philosophers and Hindu sages had learned: the "it is good" uttered by God was not justified—all is not good in the created world. There must be evil and, what is more, much evil, intolerable evil, in the created world, precisely because it is created. Everything around us—the immediate data of consciousness—testifies to this with unquestionable evidence; he who looks at the world with open eyes," he who "knows," can draw no other conclusion. At the very moment when man became "knowing," sin entered the world; in other words, it entered together with "knowledge"—and after sin came evil. This is what the Bible tells us. (p. 3, emphasis added)

Whence the horrors of life, the deep-going unsatisfactoriness that the Buddha announces in the first of his Noble Truths, Sarvam dukkham?  The answer from Athens and Benares is that being is defective in itself, essentially and irremediably.  And it doesn't matter whether finite being is created by God or uncreated.  Finite being as being is intrinsically defective.  The answer from the Bible according to Shestov  is that "sin and evil arise from 'knowledge,' from 'open eyes,' from 'intellectual vision,' that is, from the fruit of the forbidden tree."

This is an amazing interpretation.  Shestov is claiming that the Fall of Man consists in his embracing of philosophy and its child science, his discovery and use of reason, his attempt to figure things out for himself by laying hold of law-like and thus necessary structures of the world.  The Fall is the fall into knowledge.  Like his mentor Kierkegaard, Shestov rails against the hyper-rationalism of Hegel who "accepts from the Bible only what can be 'justified' before rational consciousness" (p. 5).  "And it never for a moment entered into Hegel's mind that in this lies the terrible, fatal Fall, that 'knowledge' does not make a man equal to God, but tears him away from God, putting him in the clutches of a dead and deadening 'truth.' (p. 6)

My first problem with this is the substitution of 'tree of knowledge' for 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil.'  I don't find any justification for that substitution in the text under examination.  Surely moral knowledge, if knowledge at all, is but a proper part of knowledge in general.

But it is worse than this.  Shestov thinks of God as a being for whom all things are possible.  This is connected with his beef with necessity and with reason as revelatory of necessity. "What handed man over to the power of Necessity?" (p. 12)  He quotes Kierkegaard:  "God signifies that everything is possible, and that everything is possible signifies God."  But this leads straightaway to absurdities — a fact that will of course not disturb the equanimity of an absurdist and irrationalist like Shestov.

If God is defined as the being for whom all is possible, then nothing is necessary and everything that exists is contingent, including God, all truths about God, and the moral laws. And if all things are possible, then it is possible that some things are impossible.  Therefore, possibly (All things are possible & Some things are not possible), whence it follows that it is possible that some contradictions are true. 

So the position Shestov is absurd, which fact will not budge him, he being an embracer of absurdities.  But it does give us a reason to ignore him and his interpretation of the Fall.  So I consider his theory of the Fall refuted.

Serious Faith

A serious faith, a vital faith, is one that battles with doubt.  Otherwise the believer sinks into complacency and his faith becomes a convenience.  Doubt is a good thing.  For doubt is the engine of inquiry, the motor of Athens.  Jerusalem needs Athens to keep her honest, to chasten her excesses, to round her out, to humanize her.  There is not much Athens in the Muslim world, which helps explains why Islam breeds fanaticism, murder, and anti-Enlightenment.

James Rachels’ Argument from Moral Autonomy Against the Existence of God*

A guest post by Peter Lupu.  Minor edits and a comment (in blue) by BV.

In an intriguing paper “God and Moral Autonomy”, James Rachels offers what he calls “The Moral Autonomy Argument” against the existence of God. The argument is based on a certain analysis of the concept of worship and its alleged incompatibility with moral autonomy (pp. 9-10; all references are to the Web version). I will first present Rachels’ argument verbatim. Next I will point out that in order for the argument to be valid, additional premises are required. I will then supply the additional premises and recast the argument accordingly in a manner consistent with what I take to be Rachels’ original intent. While the resulting argument is valid, I will argue that it is not sound. Despite its deficiency, however, Rachels’ argument points towards something important. In the final section I will try to flesh out this important element.

Rachels’ Argument Verbatim (p. 10):

“1. If any being is God, he must be a fitting object of worship.

2. No being could possibly be a fitting object of worship, since worship requires the abandonment of one’s role as an autonomous moral agent.

3. Therefore, there cannot be any being who is God.”

Obviously, this argument is not valid. While the two premises have the form of if-then conditionals, the conclusion is not a conditional statement. There is no way of deriving an unconditional statement from conditional premises alone. Clearly, some additional premises are required. Let me now recast the argument in a valid form. I shall take the liberty to reword some of the premises so that their logical form is more apparent.

(A) First Modified Argument from Moral Autonomy:

1*) Necessarily, if God exists, then God is a fitting object of worship;

2*) If worship requires abandoning autonomous moral agency, then it is not the case that God is a fitting object of worship;  

3*) Worship requires abandoning autonomous moral agency.

Therefore,

4*) God does not exist.

Argument (A) is valid. The question is whether it is sound. Rachels maintains that premise (1*) is something like a logical truth. He says: “That God is not to be judged, challenged, defied, or disobeyed is at bottom a truth of logic. To do any of these things is incompatible with taking him as one to be worshiped.” (p. 8). So we are asked to assume that the very concept of God includes the concept of being worthy or fitting of worship, in the sense that being worthy or fitting of worship logically excludes one from being able to judge, challenge, defy, or disobey God. Let us grant this claim for now.

Rachels further claims that premise (3*) is supported by “a long tradition in moral philosophy, from Plato to Kant,…” (p. 9). Such support would go something like this. Worshiping any being worthy of worship requires the worshiper to recognize such a being as having absolute authority. Absolute authority in turn entails an “unqualified claim of obedience.” (p.9). But, no human being, qua autonomous moral agent, can recognize an “unqualified claim of obedience”. Hence, no human being qua autonomous moral agent can recognize any such absolute authority. Therefore, human beings cannot worship God without abandoning their autonomous moral agency.

What about premise (2*)? I think premise (2*) is false. And this fact reveals the underlying problem with Rachels’ argument. For suppose that the antecedent of premise (2*) is true. Does it follow from this fact alone that God is not a fitting object for worship? No such thing follows, for it may still be true that God is a fitting object of worship by creatures that are not autonomous moral agents. Or to put the matter somewhat more precisely: even if we suppose that worship requires abandoning autonomous moral agency, what follows from this assumption is that God is not a fitting object of worship by a being, qua autonomous moral agent. Of course, God may still be a fitting object of worship by a being as long as that being abandons their autonomy while worshiping.

If this is correct, then premise (2*) is false and, therefore, argument (A) is not sound. Clearly, we need to modify Rachels’ argument once again:

(B) Second Modified Argument from Moral Autonomy:

(1**) Necessarily, if God exists, then God is a fitting object of worship by autonomous moral agents;

(2**) If worship requires abandoning autonomous moral agency, then it is not the case that God is a fitting object of worship by autonomous moral agents;           

(3**) Worship requires abandoning autonomous moral agency;

Therefore,

(4**) God does not exist.

Argument (B) is also valid. Is it sound? I believe that a theist may legitimately reject premise (1**). Remember that the necessity in the first premise of each of the above versions of the argument is intended by Rachels to express the claim that the very concept of God logically entails the concept of being worthy of worship, where being worthy (or fitting) of worship logically excludes judging, challenging, defying, or disobeying God. But, clearly, an activity that logically rules out judging, challenging, defying or disobeying another being is an activity that logically requires abandoning the exercise of autonomous moral agency. And a theist may quite legitimately object to such a conception of God. In particular, a theist may consistently maintain that the exercise of worshiping God is not logically inconsistent with judging, challenging, defying, or even disobeying God. And if worshiping is not logically inconsistent with any of these activities, then worshiping is not logically inconsistent with maintaining one’s autonomous moral agency. Therefore, a theist can legitimately reject premise (1**). Therefore, the argument cannot be sound.

Comment by BV:  It is not clear why the theist could not reject (3**).  Why does worship require the abandonment of autonomous moral agency? Granted, if x is God, then God has absolute authority, which includes the right to command and the right to be obeyed.  But equally, if if x is indeed God, then God will not command anything immoral; he will not command anything  that would not coincide with what we would impose on ourselves if we are acting autonomously.  Contrapositively, if x commands anything which is by our moral lights immoral, such as the slaughtering of one's innocent son, then x is not God.

Rachels attempts to meet this objection as follows: "Thus our own judgment that some actions are right and others wrong is logically prior to our recognition of any being as God. The upshot is that we cannot justify the suspension of our own judgment on the grounds that we are deferring to God's command; for if, by our own best judgment, the command is wrong, this gives us good reason to withhold the title "God" from the commander."  True, but why should we think that obeying God ever involves suspending our own judgment?  Rachels is assuming that there are circumstances in which there is a discrepancy between what God commands and what the creature knows is right.  But it is open to the theist to deny that there are ever any such circumstances.  In the case of Abraham and Isaac, the theist can say that what Abraham thought was a divine command did not come from God at all.  Of course, the Bible portrays the command as coming from God, but the theist is under no obligation to take at face value everything that is in the Bible. 

Kant, who was a theist, famously remarked that two things filled him with wonder: "the starry skies above me, and the moral law within me."  Now the moral law stands above me as a sensible (phenomenal) being subject to inclinations.  It is in one sense outside me as commanding my respect and my submission to its dictates.  In respecting the universal moral law do I abandon my autonomy?  Not at all.  I am truly autonomous only in fulfilling the moral law.  So the theist could say that God and the moral law are one, and that worshipping God is like respecting the moral law.  Just as it is no injury to my autonomy that the moral law imposes restrictions on my behavior, it is no injury to my autonomy that God issues commands.  We needn't follow Rachels in assuming that there is a discrepancy between what God commands and what by our lights (when they are 'shining properly') it is right to do.

If God is a tyrant for whom might makes right, then I grant that worship and autonomy are incompatible.  But if the object of worship is a concrete embodiment of the moral law that is in me, the following of which constitutes my autonomy, then worship and autonomy are not incompatible.

            I wish now to propose an argument, similar to Rachels, but without the objectionable assumptions accompanying the first premise of Rachels’ argument. Let us stipulate that the term ‘God!’ expresses the concept of a being that is just like the theistic concept of God, except that the following is true of this being:

(!) God! is worthy or fitting of submission; where fitting of submission logically excludes judging, challenging, defying, or disobeying God!.

With the help of (!) I shall now restate Rachels’ argument and prove that God! does not exist, provided autonomous moral agents exist. The argument assumes that at least some autonomous moral agents exist.

(C) Third Modified Argument from Moral Autonomy.

(1!) Necessarily, if God! exists, then God! is a fitting object of submission by autonomous moral agents;

(2!) If submission requires abandoning autonomous moral agency, then it is not the case that God! is a fitting object of submission by autonomous moral agents; 

(3!) Submission requires abandoning autonomous moral agency;

Therefore,

(4!) God! does not exist.

Argument (C) is valid. Is it sound? I think it is. I think that every one of the premises is true and I am willing to defend this claim. Premise (1!) is true by stipulation. Premise (3!) is also true. For submission requires recognizing the absolute authority of another and doing so is not possible while retaining ones autonomy. What about premise (2!)? Premise (2!) might initially appear somewhat strange. But premise (2!) simply states the consequences of our stipulation regarding the concept of God!, when this concept is applied to the requirement that autonomous agents must submit to a being such as God!. I think that given the stipulation expressed by (!), premise (2!) is true. Hence, it is true that God! does not exist.

A theist of course would be correct to vehemently deny that the concept of God! as stipulated is identical to the concept of God in his sense: i.e., that his concept of God includes (!). And it follows, then, that such a theist must also deny that worship is the same as submission. In particular, such a theist must deny that his God requires submission from autonomous agents. But, then, such a theist must cease to include in the concept of worship elements that belong more properly to the concept of submission.

It also follows that any religion, religious institution, or religious figure that promotes the idea that worshiping a deity requires submission to this deity presupposes that such a deity is God!. But since a being such as God! cannot exist alongside with autonomous moral agents that are required to submit to such a deity, it follows that anyone who promotes such things is promoting the existence of false gods.  

  

* I thank Mark Vuletic for bringing to my attention the paper by James Rachels “God and Moral Autonomy”. The paper is available on the Secular Web at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/james_rachels/autonomy.html. Rachel’s paper anticipates some of the things I say about submission in my essay “Why I am a Quasi-Atheist” by about thirteen years.

Still More on the Morality of Celebrating the Death of Evildoers

It is not just some Christians who feel the moral  dubiousness of joy and celebration at the death of evildoers.  Here is Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld.  "So our tradition is clear: Public rejoicing about the death of an enemy is entirely inappropriate."  Here is a delightfully equivocal statement by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman.

Interestingly, Dennis Prager is still pounding on this theme.  About twenty minutes ago I heard him repeat his argument against me and others.  The argument could be put like this:

1. The Israelites rejoiced when the Red Sea closed around the Egyptians, drowning them.  (Exodus 15)
2.  This rejoicing was  pleasing to God. 
Therefore
3.   To rejoice over the death of evildoers is morally permissible.

This argument is only as good as its second premise.  Two questions.  First, does the Bible depict God as being pleased at the rejoicing?  Not unequivocally.  Prager could argue from Ex 15: 22-25 that God was indeed pleased because he showed Moses a tree with which he rendered the bitter waters of Marah sweet and potable.  The Israelites were mighty thirsty  after three days of traipsing around in the wilderness of Shur after emerging from the Red Sea.  Unfortunately, Prager provided no support for (2).

But more important is the second question. Why should we take the fact that God is depicted as being pleased at the rejoicing — if it is a fact — as evidence that God is pleased?  I grant that if God is pleased at some behavior then that behavior is morally acceptable.  But the fact that God is depicted as being pleased does not entail that God is pleased.

And so, as a philosopher, I cannot credit the (1)-(3) argument.  It assumes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God.  But this is not to be assumed; this is to be tested.  The Bible has to satisfy reason's criteria before it can be accepted as true. If the Bible violates the deliverances of practical reason (as it quite clearly does in the Abraham and Isaac story, see my Kant on Abraham and Isaac)  then it cannot be accepted in those passages in which the violation occurs as the word of God.

We who have one foot in Athens and the other in Jerusalem face the problem of how we can avoid being torn asunder.  On the one hand, philosophy can bring us to the realization  that we need revelation; on the other hand, nothing can count as genuine revelation unless it passes muster by reason's own theoretical and practical lights.  This is not to demand that the content of revelation be derivable from reason; it is to demand that nothing that purports to be revelation can be credited as genuine revelation if it violates the clearest principles of theoretical and practical reason, for example, the Law of Non-Contradiction and the principles that one may not kill the innocent or rejoice over another man's evil fate.

The problem is to reconcile divine authority  with human reason and autonomy.  Two nonsolutions may be immediately dismissed:  fideism which denigrates reason, and rationalism which denigrates faith.

Is Osama bin Laden in Hell?

Jeremy Lott, Osama bin Laden in Hell:

To keep Osama's purported martyrdom from inspiring others, the point needs to be made, loudly and repeatedly, that killing innocent people is not the path to heaven. This will put the US government, and Barack Obama in particular, in an an awkward spot. It is undoubtedly a theological statement and an uncomfortable one at that.

It is uncomfortable because to assert that Osama did not go to heaven is to suggest that he went to hell. That could be a problem, given the current state of America's religious ferment. As the controversy over Rev. Rob Bell's new book has shown us, a great number of religious Americans do not want to believe in eternal damnation.

1.  The notion that there is heaven but no hell smacks of the sort of namby-pamby feel-good liberalism that I feel it my duty to combat.  Of course there may  be none of the following: God, afterlife, post-mortem reward, post-mortem punishment.  But if you accept the first three, then you ought to accept them all. 

2. One reason to believe in some form of punishment after death is that without it, there is no final justice.  There is some justice here below, but not much.  One who "thirsts after justice and righteousness" cannot be satisfied with this world.  Whatever utopia the future may bring, this world's past suffices to condemn it as a vale of injustice.  (This is why leftist activism is no solution at all to the ultimate problems.)  Nothing that happens in the future can redeem the billions who have been raped and crucified and wronged in a thousand ways.  Of course, it may be that this world is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  Life may just be absurd.  But if you do not accept that, if you hold that life has meaning and that moral distinctions have reality, then you may look to God and beyond this life.  Suppose you do.  Then how can you fail to see that justice demands that the evil be punished?  Consider this line of thought:

a. If there is no making-good of the injustices of this life, it is absurd.
b. There is no making-good of the injustices of this life in this life.
c.  Only if there is God and afterlife is there a making-good of the injustices of this life
d.  This life is not absurd.
Therefore
e.  There is a making-good of the injustices of this life in the afterlife, and this requires the punishment/purification of those who committed evil in this life and did not pay for their crimes in this life.

This is not a compelling argument by any means.  But if you are a theist and accept (a)-(d), then you ought to accept the conclusion.

3.  A second reason to believe in some sort of hellish state after death for some is because of free will.  God created man in his image and likeness, and part of what that means is that he created him an autonomous being possessing free will and sensitive to moral distinctions.  In so doing, God limits his own power: he cannot violate the autonomy of man.  So if Sartre or some other rebellious nature freely decides that he would rather exist in separation from God, then God must allow it.  But this separation is what hell is.  So God must allow hell.

4. Is hell eternal separation from God?  Well, if Sartre, say, or any other idolater of his own ego wants to be eternally separated from God, then God must allow it, right?  Like I said, man is free and autonomous, and God can't do anything about that.  But if Stalin, say, repents, how could a good God punish him eternally?   The punishment must fit the crime, and no crime that any human is capable of, even the murdering of millions, deserves eternal punishment.  How do I know that?  By consulting my moral sense, the same moral sense that tells me a god that commands me to murder my innocent son cannot be God.  See Kant on Abraham and Isaac.

There is a response to this of course, and what I just asserted is by no means obvious; but this is a topic for a separate post.

I suppose I am a bit of a theological liberal. Theology must be rationally constrained and constrained by our God-given moral sense. Irrationalism is out.  Fideism is out. No fundamentalism.  No Bibliolatry.  No  inerrantism.  None of the excesses of Protestantism, if excesses they are.  No sola scriptura  or sola fide or, for that matter, extra ecclesiam salus non est.  The latter  is also a Roman Catholic principle.

5.  As I see it, then, justice does not demand an eternal or everlasting hell. (In this popular post I blur the distinction between eternity and everlastingness.)  But free will may.  Again, if Russell or Sartre or Hitchens refuse to submit any authority superior to their own egos, then their own free decision condemns them everlastingly.  Justice does demand, however, some sort of post-mortem purification/punishment.

6.  Will I go directly to heaven when I die?  Of course not (and the same goes for almost all of us.)  Almost all of us need more or less purgation, to even be in a state where we would unequivocally  want to be with God.  If your life has been mainly devoted to piling up pleasure and loot, how can you expect that death will reverse your priorities?   In fact, if you have solely devoted yourself to the pursuit and acquisition of the trinkets and baubles of this world, then punishment for you may well consist in getting them in spades, to your disgust.  If the female ass and the whiskey glass is your summum bonum here below, you may get your heart's desire on the far side.  I develop this idea in A Vision of Hell.

7.  Is Osama bin Laden in hell?  Anyone who claims to know the answer to this is a 'damned' fool.  But not even he (Osama or the fool) deserves eternal separation from God — unless he wants it.  But it is good that the al-Qaeda head  is dead.

The God of Philosophy and the God of Religion

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

Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity

This is a slightly redacted version of a piece first posted on 18 September 2006 at the old PowerBlogs site.  I repost it not only to save it for my files, but also because it it important to remember not only the successful and unsuccessful acts of Islamist terrorism worldwide, but also the many incidents which betray the illiberal and anti-Enlightenment values of our Islamist opponents (e.g., the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the Danish cartoon 'caper,' etc. etc. The analog to the fatwa would be the Pope putting a price on the head of Andres Serrano, the 'artist' famous notorious for his 'Piss Christ.') 

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People need to face the fact that Western civilization is under serious threat from militant Islamic fanaticism. (And it may be coming to a theater near you.) Yet another recent indication of the threat is the unreasoning umbrage taken by many in the Islamic world over a mere  QUOTATION Pope Benedict XVI employs in his address at the University of Regensburg entitled, "The Best of Greek Thought is an Integral Part of Christian Faith."

Benedict's talk is only tangentially about Islam; it is primarily about the role of reason in the posing and answering of the God question, and about whether Christianity should be dehellenized. The Pope begins by mentioning a dialogue "by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both." Then comes the 'offending' passage (bolding added):

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