Athens and Jerusalem – Page 4 – Maverick Philosopher

Robert Oakes Weighs in on the God of the Philosophers

I got a phone call from philosopher of religion Robert Oakes yesterday. In the course of a lengthy chat, I mentioned my recent post on Pascal and Buber and asked him what he thought of it. Today I received the following from him by e-mail:

Very good to talk with you. Short comment on that El Stupido notion of Buber-Pascal. The idea, presumably, is that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is a proper object of worship, while the God of the Philosophers is a bloodless abstraction. But, of course, God (for the philosophical theist) is that than which a greater is metaphysically impossible. So: is a being Who is worthy of worship greater (ceteris paribus) than one who is not? Of course. End of issue, No?

An admirable instance of pithiness. Bob's argument could be extended as follows. A quintessentially philosophical definition of 'God' is the one that derives from Anselm of Canterbury: God is that than which no greater can be conceived. Borrowing the phrase 'great-making property' from Plantinga, we can say that God instantiates all great-making properties. Now being worthy of worship is a great-making property. Because no concept, idea, or abstraction is worthy of worship, it follows from the philosophical definition alone, without appeal to any (putative) revelation or anything from religion, that the God of the philosophers cannot be a concept, idea, or abstraction.

But not only that. It also follows from the Anselmian definition that nothing short of a worship-worthy being could be God. So a First Cause could not count as God for a philosophical theist who operates with the concept of God in Judeo-Christian monotheism. Within this tradition the God of philosophy is not different from the God of religion. It is the same God, but approached via discursive reason rather than via faith in revelation.

Still More on the God of the Philosophers Versus the God of Abraham, et al.

Ken e-mails and I respond in blue:

I turn on my computer and check out the Maverick Philosopher and suddenly half of my day is shot. First I have to look up the word 'pellucidity' and then I am stuck trying to figure out why your claim about the phrases 'God-P' and 'God-R' does not seem right to me.

It sounds like I'm doing something right! You can look up a word without getting out of your chair. Here's a tip that you may already be aware of: type 'define: pellucidity' (without the inverted commas) into the Google search box and you will get a page of definitions, some of them from reputable sources. (I don't consider Wikipedia a particularly reputable source.) Needless to say, this works for almost any word inserted after the colon and not just for 'pellucidity'!

I agree that the sentence [from Martin Buber], "What the philosophers describe by the name of God cannot be more than an idea," is false but to state that that 'God-P' and 'God-R' have the same referent, if they have a referent, seems false to me as it carries an assumption of the monotheism of the 'God-R' that may not be present in 'God-P.' The idea that there is and can only be one God is one that does not have to be accepted in 'God-P' and I do not believe that it would be possible, except by defining 'God-P' ='God-R', for 'God-P' and 'God-R' to always have the same referent. Maybe you can point out where I am wrong and what I missed.

Well, every discussion occurs within a context, a context which cannot be ignored or set aside, since the very meaning of the terms of the debate is influenced by the context. The present immediate context is Pascal's exclamation, "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars" and Buber's comment thereon. The Pascalian exclamation and the Buberian comment themselves fit into a wider context, Judeo-Christian monotheism. The question before us is whether, within this Judeo-Christian monotheistic context, there is any merit to the notion that what philosophers qua philosophers talk about and argue for and against is numerically different from what religionists qua religionists talk about and try to relate themselves to. My answer is plain from my earlier posts: this notion has no merit whatsoever.

Your suggestion seems to be that the God(s) of the philosophers needn't be one, but could be many, even if the God of the religionists must be one. My answer to you is very simple: in the precise context I have specified, namely, the context of Judeo-Christian monotheism, both the God of the philosophers and the God of the religionists is one. Polytheism is simply not a Jamesian live option within this tradition and certainly was not for Pascal and Buber whose utterances provide the immediate context of my remarks.

Of course, there is nothing to stop you or anyone from shifting the context. Philosophers are free to make a case for polytheism if they care to. Within the community of polytheists, the question could arise whether the gods of the philosophers (the gods the polytheistic philosophers argue for) are the same as the gods of the religionists (the gods the polytheistic religionists invoke in prayer, etc.) But that question is not my question.

Note that I am not merely stipulating that 'God-R' and 'God-P' have the same reference. That would be arbitrary and unmotivated. What I am doing is unpacking the concept of God what we already have and work with in the Judeo-Christian tradition. My point is that within this tradition, pace Pascal and Buber and many others, it makes no sense to imagine that what the philosophers are talking about when they talk about God is numerically different from what the religionists talk about when they talk about God.

Finally, none of my discussion presupposes the existence of God. As I said, I am unpacking the concept of God, and this concept is what it is whether or not it is instantiated.

Is Atheism Intellectually Respectable? On Romans 1:18-20

Joe Carter over at First Things argues that "We have to abandon the politically correct notion that atheism is intellectually respectable." My own view is that theism and atheism are both intellectually respectable. Carter makes his case by invoking St. Paul:

In Romans, St. Paul is clear that atheism is a case of vincible ignorance: “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Acknowledging the existence of God is just the beginning—we must also recognize several of his divine attributes. Atheists that deny this reality are, as St. Paul said, without excuse. They are vincibly ignorant.

Rather than quote the whole of the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20, I'll summarize it. 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 . . . ."

Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the truth. There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork. Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is planted firmly in Athens (philosophy, the autonomy of reason). And so I must point out that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism. It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.

But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident. It is not evident to the senses that the natural world is a divine artifact.

I may be moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me" (Kant). But seeing is not seeing as. If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework. But the datum seen can just as easily be given a nontheistic interpretation.

At the end of the day you must decide which of these interpretations to accept. You will not find some plain fact that will decide it for you. There is no fact you can point to, or argument you can give, that definitively rules out theism or rules it in.

If the atheism of some has its origin in pride, stubborness and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as is plainly the case with many of the cyberpunks over at Internet Infidels and similar sites, not to mention such luminaries as Russell and Sartre, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.

It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.

Paul appears to be doing what ideologues regularly do when pushed to the wall in debate: they resort to ad hominem attacks and psychologizing: you are willful and stubborn and blinded by pride and lust; or you are a shill for corporate interests; or you are 'homophobic' or 'Islamophobic' or xenophobic; or you are a fear-monger and a hater; or you are a liar or insincere or stupid; or you are a racist, etc.

Joe Carter does the same thing.

Objection: "You are ignoring the deleterious noetic consequences of original sin. Because our faculties have been corrupted by it, we fail to find evident what is in itself evident, namely, that the world is a divine artifact. And it is because of this original sin that unbelief is inexcusable."

This response raises its own difficulties. First, how can one be morally responsible for a sin that one has not oneself committed but has somehow inherited? Second, if our faculties have been so corrupted by original sin that we can no longer reliably distinguish between the evident and the non-evident, then this corruption will extend to all our cognitive operations including Paul's theological reasoning, which we therefore should not trust either.

For a different take on Carter's piece, see Michael Liccione's Why Atheism Can Be Respectable.

Edith Stein on Cognitio Fidei: Is Faith a Kind of Knowledge?

One finds the phrase cognitio fidei in Thomas Aquinas and in such Thomist writers as Josef Pieper. It translates as 'knowledge of faith.' The genitive is to be interpreted subjectively, not objectively: faith is not the object of knowledge; faith is a form or type of knowledge. But how can faith be a type of knowledge? One ought to find this puzzling.

On a standard analysis of 'knows,' where propositional knowledge is at issue, subject S knows that p just in case (i) S believes that p; (ii) S is justified in believing that p; and (iii) p is true. This piece of epistemological boilerplate is the starting-point for much of the arcana (Gettier counterexamples, etc.) of contemporary epistemology. But its pedigree is ancient, to be found in Plato's Theaetetus.

The Infirmity of Reason Versus the Certitude of Faith

Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, "that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt." (Pyrrho entry, Bayle's Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude of faith is no solution either! Recoiling from the labyrinth into which unaided human reason loses itself, Bayle writes:

Continue reading “The Infirmity of Reason Versus the Certitude of Faith”

Athens and Jerusalem at Loggerheads Over the One Thing Needful

The following is highly relevant to our Trinitarian/Christological discussions:

For Leo Strauss, ". . . Western civilization consists of two elements, or has two roots, which are in radical disagreement with each other." ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. 245) These two elements are the Bible and Greek philosophy, Jerusalem and Athens. The "whole history of the West" is an attempt at harmonizing this radical disagreement. But the various attempts at harmonization were doomed to fail for the following reason:

. . . each of these two roots of the Western world sets forth one thing as the one thing needful, and the one thing needful as proclaimed by the Bible is incompatible, as it is understood by the Bible, with the one thing needful proclaimed by Greek philosophy, as it is understood by Greek philosophy. To put it very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is the life of autonomous understanding. The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love. The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. (Ibid., p. 246, emphasis added.)

I should point out that Strauss goes on to speak of an underlying agreement between the Bible and Greek philosophy, but I'll leave that for a subsequent post. What he says above, though, strikes me as exactly right. First, Western civilization does have the two roots mentioned, a fact apparently missed by the Reverend Jesse Jackson when he sang at Stanford University, "Hey hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go." Did Brother Jesse realize that he was advocating the throwing out of his own bread and butter?

Second, the two roots or elements are in radical, albeit fruitful, tension. Indeed, the vitality of the West, as Strauss remarks elsewhere, derives in good measure from this tension, a tension which, absent in the Islamic world, may help explain the inanition in that world.

ADDENDUM

A reader suggests that Pope Benedict's Regensburg address can be read, in part, as an implicit response to the Straussian thesis of radical disagreement between the Bible and Greek philosophy. Compare this passage:

Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the λόγος". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word – a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) – this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.

Augustine and the Child at the Seashore: Trinitarian Metatheory

I was told this story as a child by a nun. One day St. Augustine was walking along the seashore, thinking about the Trinity. He came upon a child who had dug a hole in the sand and was busy filling it with buckets of seawater.

Augustine: "What are you doing?"

Child: "I am trying to empty the ocean into this hole."

Augustine: "But that’s impossible!"

Child: "No more impossible than your comprehending the Trinity."

The point of the story is that the Trinity is a mystery beyond our comprehension. It is true, even though we cannot understand how could it be true, where 'could' expresses epistemic possibility. It is a non-contradictory truth that lies beyond our mental horizon. Could there be such truths?

Note that there are at least three other ways of thinking about the Trinity doctrine. One could take the view that the doctrine is both true and contradictory, along the lines of dialetheism according to which there are some true contradictions. (b) Or one could take the view that the doctrine is all of the following: true, non-contradictory, and intelligible to us, even though we cannot know it to be true by reason unaided by revelation. Under this head would fall putative solutions to the consistency problem that aim to provide an adequate model or analogy, a model or analogy sufficient to render the orthodox doctrine intelligible to us. (c) Finally, one could take the line that the doctrine is contradictory and therefore false.

Thus there appear to be at least four meta-theories of the orthodox Trinity doctrine. These are theories about the logico-epistemic status of the doctrine. We could call them Mysterianism, Dialetheism, Intelligibilism, and Incoherentism. The last two terms are my own coinages.

Note that I have been talking about orthodox (Athanasian) Trinity doctrine. But religion and theology are, I would urge, open-ended, analogously as science is, and so there is no bar to theological innovation and development. Perhaps one of the doctrines that got itself branded 'heretical' can be rehabilitated and made to work. It is worth pondering that the orthodox are heretics to the heretics: had a given heretical sect acquired sufficient power and influence, had it drawn to its side the best minds and most persuasive exponents, then it would not be heretical but orthodox.

Everyone likes to think of his own doxa as orthotes but not every doxa can be such on pain of contradiction. So we ought to be humble. Apply the honorific 'orthodox' to your doctrine if you like, but smile as you do so.

A Philosopher’s Notes on Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3

This post continues my commentary on the Book of Ecclesiastes, the first installment of which is here. But a brief review is in order. The central theme of the book, you will recall, is the vanity and futility of all human endeavor including such pursuit of wisdom and understanding as the Preacher himself undertakes in the book in question. Surprisingly, this seems to extend even to God's rewarding of the righteous and punishing of the sinner. "This too is vanity and striving after wind." (2:26) Here are some questions that the book suggests:

Continue reading “A Philosopher’s Notes on Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3″

A Philosopher’s Notes on Ecclesiastes, Chapters 1-2

Herewith, a first installment of some chapter-by-chapter observations on the magnificent Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes, with an attempt to lay bare some of the philosophical issues lurking below the surface of the text.

1. Chapter 1 sounds the central theme of the Book: Omnia vanitas, "All is vanity." What is the scope of 'all'? Presumably it does not include God, but it does include every human pursuit whether for pleasure, power, possessions, progeny, or any other finite good that mortals strive after. All is vanity and "striving after wind." (1:14) Even the striving for wisdom is a vain pursuit. (1:17-18)

Continue reading “A Philosopher’s Notes on Ecclesiastes, Chapters 1-2″

Is There Any Excuse for Unbelief? Romans 1: 18-20

If the atheism of some has its origin in pride, stubborness and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as is plainly the case with many of the cyberpunks over at Internet Infidels and similar sites, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.

Kant on Abraham and Isaac

What I said about Abraham and Isaac yesterday is so close to Kant's view of the matter that I could be accused of repackaging Kant's ideas without attribution. When I wrote the post, though, I had forgotten the Kant passage. So let me reproduce it now. It is from The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), the last book Kant published before his death in 1804 except for his lectures on anthropology: