Category: Christian Doctrine

Edward Feser on Christians, Muslims, and the Reference of ‘God’

So far, Ed Feser's is perhaps the best of the  Internet discussions of this hot-button question, a question recently re-ignited by the Wheaton dust-up, to mix some metaphors.  Herewith, some notes  on Feser's long entry.  I am not nearly as philosophically self-confident as Ed or Lydia McGrew, so I will mainly just be trying to understand the issue for my own edification. But I am sure of one thing:  the question is difficult and has no easy solution.  If you think it does, then I humbly suggest you are not thinking very hard, indeed, you are hardly thinking.

1.  Feser rightly points out that a difference in (Fregean) sense does not entail a difference in (Fregean) reference.  So the difference in sense as between 'God of the Christians' and 'God of the Muslims' does not entail that these expressions differ in reference.  Quite so.  But I would add that on a descriptivist semantics  reference is routed through, and determined by, sense: an expression picks out its object in virtue of the latter's unique satisfaction of an identifying description associated with the referring expression, a description that unpacks the expression's sense.  If we think of reference in this way, then 'God' refers to whichever entity, if any, that satisfies the definite description encapsulated in 'God' as this term is used in a given linguistic community.  So while difference in sense does not by itself entail difference in reference, difference in sense is consistent with difference in reference, so that in a particular case it may be that the difference in sense is sufficiently great to entail a difference in reference.    Suppose that in one linguistic community a person understands by 'God' the unique contingent being who created the universe but was himself created, while  in another a person understands by 'God' the unique necessary uncreated being who created the universe.  In this case I think it is clear that the difference in sense entails a difference in reference.  Both uses of 'God' may fail of reference, or one might succeed.  But they cannot both succeed.  For nothing can be both necessary and contingent.

From what has been said so far, 'God' (used by a Christian) and 'Allah' (used by a Muslim) may have the same reference or may have a different reference.  The issue cannot be decided by merely pointing out that a difference in sense does not entail a difference in reference.

2.  Feser makes a point about beliefs that is surely correct.  You and I can have conflicting beliefs about a common object of successful reference without prejudice to its being precisely a common object of successful reference.  For example, we both see a sharp-dressed man across the room drinking from a Martini glass.  Suppose I erroneously believe that he is drinking a Martini while you correctly believe that he is drinking water.  That difference in belief is obviously consistent with one and the same man's being our common object of perceptual and linguistic reference.  "Similarly, the fact that Muslims have what Christians regard as a number of erroneous beliefs about God does not by itself entail that Muslims and Christians are not referring to the same thing when they use the expression 'God.'" (Emphasis added.)

True, but it could also be that conflicting beliefs make it impossible that there be a common object of successful reference.  It will depend on what those beliefs are and whether they are incorporated into the respective senses of 'God' as used by Muslims and Christians.  I will also depend on one's theory of reference, whether descriptivist, causal, hybrid, or something else.

It should also be observed that in perceptual cases such as the Martini case there is no question but that we are referentially glomming onto one and the same object.  The existence and identity of the sharp-dressed drinker are given to the senses.  Since we know by direct sensory acquaintance that it is the same man both of us see, the conflicting beliefs have no tendency to show otherwise.  But God is not an object of perception via the outer senses.  So one can question how much weight we should assign to the perceptual analogies, and indeed to any analogy that makes mention of a physical thing.  At best, these analogies show that, in general, contradictory beliefs about a putatively self-same x are consistent with there being in reality one and the same subject of these beliefs.  But they are also consistent with there not being in reality one and the same subject of the contradictory beliefs.

But not only is God not an object of sensory acquaintance, he is also arguably not an object among objects or a being among beings.  Suppose God is ipsum esse subsistens as Aquinas held.  It will then be  serious question whether a theory of reference that caters to ordinary references to intramundane people and things, beings, can be extended to accommodate reference to self-subsistent Being.  Not clear!  But I raise this hairy issue only to set it aside for the space of this entry.  I will assume for now that God is a being among beings.   I bring this issue up only to get people to appreciate how difficult and involved this 'same God?' issue is.  Do not comment on this paragraph; it is off-topic for present purposes. See here for one of the posts in which I disagree with Dale Tuggy on this issue.

3. Now consider these conflicting beliefs:  God is triune; God is not triune. Please note that it would be question-begging to announce that the fact of this dispute entails that the object of the dispute is one and the same.  For that is exactly what is at issue.  The following would be a question-begging little speech:

Look man, we are disputing whether God is triune or not triune; we are therefore presupposing that there is one and the same thing, God, about whose properties we are disputing!  The disagreement entails sameness of object!  Same God!

This is question-begging because it may be that the tokens of 'God' in "God is triune; God is not triune"  differ in sense so radically that they  also differ in reference.  In other words, the mere fact that one and the same word-type 'God' is tokened twice does not show that there is one and the same object about whose properties we are disputing.

4. Feser writes,

Even errors concerning God’s Trinitarian nature are not per se sufficient to prevent successful reference.  Abraham and Moses were not Trinitarians, but no Christian can deny that they referred to, and worshiped, the same God Christians do.

[. . .]

But shouldn’t a Christian hold that some reference to the Trinity or to the divinity of Jesus is also at least necessary, even if not sufficient, for successful reference to the true God?  Doesn’t that follow from the fact that being Trinitarian is, from a Christian point of view, also essential to God?   No, that doesn’t follow at all, and any Christian who says otherwise will, if he stops and thinks carefully about it, see that he doesn’t really believe that it follows.  Again, Christians don’t deny that Abraham and Moses, or modern Jews, or Arians and other heretics, refer to and worship the same God as orthodox Christians, despite the fact that these people do not affirm the Trinity or the divinity of Jesus. 

There is a modal fudge across these two passages that I don't think it is mere pedantry on my part to point out.  In the first passage Feser claims in effect that

A. No Christian CAN deny that Abraham and Moses worshiped the same God that Christians do

while in the second Feser claims in effect that

B. No Christian DOES deny that Abraham and Moses worshiped the same God that Christians do.

If we charitably substitute 'hardly any' for 'no' in (B) then we get a statement that I am willing to concede is true.  (A), however, strikes me as false.  I myself am strongly tempted to deny that Jews and Christians worship the same God — assuming that the Jewish God is non-triune and explicitly determined to be such by Jews –  and what I am strongly tempted to do strikes me as entirely possible and rationally justifiable.  Why can't someone reasonably deny that Jews and Christians worship the same God?

Feser thinks he has cited some incontrovertible fact that decides the issue, the fact being that everyone or almost everyone claims that Jews and Christians worship the same God.  I concede the fact.  What I don't concede is that it decides the issue. My claim against Feser on the present occasion is not that he is wrong to maintain that (normative) Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God, but that he is not obviously right, his confident asseverations in the passages lately quoted notwithstanding. I am saying to Feser what I said to Beckwith and Tuggy: you gentlemen think this issue easily resolved.  But it isn't, in large part because its resolution depends on the solution of hitherto unsolved problems in the philosophy of language.

Here are two questions we ought to distinguish:

Q1. Do Christians use 'God'  and equivalents with the intention of referring to the same being that Jews refer to or think they are referring to with 'God' and equivalents?

Q2. Do Christians and Jews succeed in refer to the same being?

An affirmative answer to the first question is consistent with a negative answer to the second question.  I agree with an affirmative answer to (Q1).  But this affirmative answer does not entail an affirmative answer to (Q2).  Moreover, it is reasonable to return a negative answer to (Q2).  I will now try to explain how it is reasonable to answer (Q2) in the negative.

5. The crux of the matter is the nature of reference.  How exactly is successful reference achieved?  And what exactly is reference?  And how is worship related to reference?

First off,the causal theory of Kripke, Donnellan, et al. is reasonably rejected and I reject it .  It is rife with difficulties.  (See e.g., John Searle, Intentionality, Cambridge UP, 1983, ch. 9) Connected with this is my subscription to  the broadly logical primacy of the intentional over the linguistic.  Part of what this means is that words don't refer, people refer using words, and they don't need to use words to refer.  All reference, at bottom, is thinking reference or mental reference.  Reference at bottom is intentionality.  To refer to something, then, whether with words or without words, is to intend it or think of it.  This is to be understood as implying that words, phrases, and the like, considered in their physical being as marks on paper or sounds in the air or carvings in stone (etc.) are entirely lacking in any intrinsic referential, representative, semantic,  or intentional character.  They are not intrinsically object-directed.  There is no object-directedness in nature apart from mind.  (Though it may be that dispositionality is an analog of it.  See here.)  This is equivalent to saying that there is no objective reference without mind.   A word acquires reference only when it is thoughtfully used.  

Reference to particulars  in the sense of 'refer' just explained is always and indeed necessarily reference to propertied particulars.  This is because reference to a particular 'picks it out' from all else, singles it out, designates it to the exclusion of everything else. Particulars taken in abstraction from their properties cannot be singled out to the exclusion of all else.  To think of a thing or person is to think of it as an instance of certain properties and indeed in such a way as to distinguish it from all else.  So, to think of, and thus refer to,  a particular is to think of it as an instance of a set of properties that jointly individuate it. 

To refer to God, then, is to think of God as an instance of certain properties.  I cannot think of God directly as just a particular, and then as instantiating certain properties.  This ought to be quite clear from the fact  that in this life our (natural) knowledge of God is not by acquaintance but by description.  I don't literally see God when I look upwards at "the starry skies above me" or gaze  inward at "the moral law within me" to borrow a couple of signature phrases from Immanuel Kant.  Our only access to God here below is indirect via his properties, as an instance of those properties.  Here below we approach God from the side of his properties as we understand them.  The existence and identity of my table is known directly by acquaintance. Not so in the case of God. The existence of God is not given to sense perception but has to be understood as the being-instantiated of certain properties.  The God I know by description is God qua uniquely satisfying my understanding of 'God.'

Someone could object:  What about mystical experience?  Is it not possible in this life to enjoy mystical knowledge by acquaintance of God?  This  is a very large, and I think separate topic.  To the extent that mystical experience leads to mystical union it tends to collapse the I-Thou and man-God duality that is part of the framework of worship as we are discussing it in this context.  See my Buber on Buddhism and Other Forms of Mysticism.   It also tends to explode the framework in which questions about reference are posed .  I mean the framework in which:  here is a minded organism with linguistic capacity who thoughtfully utters certain words and phrases while out there are various things to which the organism is trying to refer and often succeeding.  

There is also the question of the veridicality of mystical experience.  How do I know that an experience of mine is revelatory of something real?  How do I know that successive experiences of mine are revelatory of the same thing?  How do I know that  the mystical experiences of different people are veridically of the same thing?  So I suggest we bracket the question of mystical experience.

Any  natural knowledge of God in this life, then, is by description.  Reference to God is indirect and via the understanding of 'God' within a given religion.  Now the orthodox Christian understanding of 'God' is that God sent his only begotten Son, begotten not made, into our predicament to teach us and show us the Way (via, veritas, vita) and to suffer and die for our sins.  Together with this contingent Sending goes the triunity of God as the necessary condition of its possibility.  This is part of what an orthodox Christian means by 'God,' although I reckon few Christians would put it the way I just did.   It is part of the sense of 'God' for an orthodox Christian.  But this is not part of the sense of 'God' for the orthodox Muslim who denies the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the soteriology connected with both.

So do Christians and  Muslims succeed in referring to the same being?  No.  Successful reference on a descriptivist semantics requires the cooperation of Mind and World.  Successful reference, whether with words or without words, requires that there exist outside the mind something that satisfies the conditions set within the mind.  (Remember: it is not primarily words that refer, but minds via words and mental states.)  Now suppose there exists exactly one God and that that God is a Trinity.  Then the Christian's understanding of 'God' will be satisfied, and his reference to God will be successful.  But the Muslim's reference will fail.  The reason for this is that there is nothing outside the mind that satisfies his characteristic understanding of 'God.' 

Of course, the Muslim could put it  the other way around.  Either way, my point goes through:  Muslim and Christian cannot be referring to the one and the same God.

You say the Christian and Muslim understandings of 'God' overlap?  You are right!  But this overlap is but an abstraction insufficient to determine an identifying reference to a concrete, wholly determinate, particular.  In reality, God is completely determinate.  As such, he cannot be neither triune nor not triune, neither incarnated nor not incarnated, etc.  in the way the overlapping conception is.  So if the triune God exists, then the non-triune God does not exist.  Of course, we can say that the Christian and the Muslim are 'driving in the same direction.'  Heading  West on Interstate 10, I am driving toward the greater Los Angeles area, and thus I am driving toward both Watts and Laguna Niguel.  But there is a big difference, and perhaps one pertaining unto my 'salvation,' whether I arrive in Watts or in Laguna Niguel.  What's more, I cannot terminate my drive in some indeterminate location.  The successful termination of my peregrination must occur at some wholly definite place.  So too with successful reference to a concrete particular: it must terminate with a completely determinate referent.

Here is another related objection.  "If the Christian God exists, then both Christian and Muslim succeed in referring to the same God — it is just that this same God is  the Christian God, i.e., God as understood in the characteristically Christian way. The existence of the Christian God suffices to satisfy the common Christian-Muslim underdstanding of 'God.'"

In reply I repeat that both mind and world must cooperate for successful reference on a descriptivist semantics.  So it is not enough that God exists and that there be exactly one God.  Nor is it enough that the one God satisfy the common Christian-Muslim conception; for the Muslim God to be an object of successful reference it must both exist and satisfy the characteristic Muslim understanding of 'God.'

Conclusion

My thesis is a rather modest one.  To repeat what I said above:

My claim against Feser on the present occasion is not that he is wrong to maintain that (normative) Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God, but that he is not obviously right, his confident asseverations in the passages lately quoted notwithstanding. I am saying to Feser what I said to Beckwith and Tuggy: you gentlemen think this issue easily resolved.  But it isn't, in large part because its resolution depends on the solution of hitherto unsolved problems in the philosophy of language.

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Do Christians and Jews Worship the Same God?

Yale's Miroslav Volf has a 17 December 2015 piece entitled Wheaton professor’s suspension is about anti-Muslim bigotry, not theology.  It is a sloppy piece of mere journalism but it does raise an important question:

What is theologically wrong with asserting that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, according to Hawkins’s opponents — and mine? Muslims deny the Trinity and incarnation, and, therefore, the Christian God and Muslim God cannot be the same. But the conclusion doesn’t square. And Christians, though historically not friendly to either Judaism or the Jews, have rightly resisted that line of thinking when it comes to the God of Israel.

The important question is this:  Is someone who denies that the Christian and Muslim Gods are the same logically committed to denying that the Christian and Jewish Gods are the same?  Volf seems to think so.  To the  extent that an argument can be attributed to Volf it seems to be this:

A. There are good reasons to deny that the Christian and Muslim Gods are the same if and only if there are good reasons to deny that the Jewish and Christian Gods are the same.

B.  There are no good reasons to deny that the Jewish and Christian Gods are the same.

Ergo

C.  There are no good reasons to deny that the Christian and Muslims Gods are the same.

I think one can reasonably reject (A).  Volf writes,

For centuries, a great many Orthodox Jews have strenuously objected to those same Christian convictions: Christians are idolaters because they worship a human being, Jesus Christ, and Christians are polytheists because they worship “Father, Son and the Spirit” rather than the one true God of Israel.

It is arguable however that these great many Orthodox Jews have misrepresented the Christian convictions.  Christians do not worship a mere human being; they worship a being that is both human and divine.  So the charge of idolatry is easily turned aside.  And Christians are not polytheists since they explicitly maintain that there is exactly one God, albeit in three divine persons.   Trinitarianism is not tri-theism.

A Christian could say this:  The God of the ancient Jews and the God of the Christians is the same God; it is just that his attributes were more fully revealed in the Christian revelation.  The Christian revelation augments and supersedes the Jewish revelation without contradicting it.  Or did Jews before Christianity arose explicitly maintain that God could not be triune?  Did they address this question explicitly?  And did they explicitly maintain that Incarnation as Christians understand it is impossible? (These are not rhetorical questions; I am really asking!)  Suppose the answers are No and No.  Then one could argue that the Christian revelation fills in the Jewish revelation without contradicting it and that the two putatively distinct Gods are the same.  My knowledge of an object can be enriched over time without prejudice to its remaining numerically one and the same object.

Analogy:  the more Dale Tuggy 'reveals' about himself, the fuller my knowledge of him becomes.  Time was when I didn't know which state he hails from.  At that time he was to my mind indeterminate with respect to the property of being from Texas: he was to my mind neither from Texas nor not from Texas.  I simply had no belief about his native state.  But now I know he is from Texas.  There was no real change in him in this respect; there was a doxastic change in me. My knowledge of the man was enriched due to his 'self-revelation.'

Now why couldn't it be like that with respect to the O.T. God and the N.T. God?  We know him better now because we know him through Jesus Christ, but he is numerically the same One as we knew before. 

It is different with Islam.  It is arguably a Christian heresy that explicitly denies Trinity and Incarnation which (from the Christian point of view) are attributes God has revealed to us.  Islam takes a backward step.  Arguably, Islam's God does not exist since it is determined explicitly  to be non-triune and non-incarnated.  The God of the O. T. was not explicitly determined to be non-triune and non-incarnated; so there is no difficulty with the O.T. God being identical to the N. T. God.  But what if Jews now claim, or even before the Christ event claimed,  that their God is non-triune and non-incarnated?  Then their God does not exist.  This seems like a reasonable line for a Christian to take.  It involves no bigotry whatsoever.

Of course, these issues are exceedingly  difficult  and one cannot reasonably expect to reach any agreement on them among learned and sincere truth-seekers.  I am not being dogmatic above.  As before, I am urging caution and rejecting simple-minded solutions.  Volf's simple-mindedness and sloppy journalism gets us nowhere.  And his accusations of bigotry are deeply offensive and themselves an expression of politically correct bigotry.

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“And the Word Was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us” (John 1:14)

Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born between feces and urine, entering between the legs of a poor girl in a stable.  Just like one of us, a slob like one of us. The notion is so mind-boggling that one is tempted to credit it for this very reason, for its affront to Reason, and to the natural man, accepting it because it is absurd,  or else dismissing  it as the height of absurdity. A third possibility is to accept it despite its being absurd, and a fourth is to argue that rational sense can be made of it. The conflict of these approaches, and of the positions within each, only serves to underscore the mind-boggling quality of the notion, a notion that to the eye and mind of faith is FACT.

The Most High freely lowers himself, accepting the indigence and misery of material existence, including a short temporal career that ends with the ultimate worldly failure: execution by the political authorities.  And not a civilized Athenian execution by hemlock as was the fate of that other great teacher of humanity, but execution by the worst method the brutal Romans could devise, crucifixion.

In the Incarnation the Word nailed itself to the flesh in anticipation of later being nailed to the wood of the cross to suffer the ultimate fate of everything material and composite: dissolution. Christ dies like each of us will die, utterly, alone, abandoned.  But then the mystery: He rises again.  Is this the central conundrum of Christianity?  He rises, but not as a pure spirit.  He rises body and soul.

God is the Word ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God"); the Word becomes flesh; the flesh nailed to wood becomes dead matter and nothing Wordly or Verbal or Logical or Spiritual or Sense Bearing, and so next-to-nothing; but then the next-to-nothing rises and ascends body and soul to the Father by the power of the Father.  Christ rises bodily and ascends bodily.  A strange idea: bodily ascension out of the entire spatio-temporal-bodily matrix!  He ascends to the Father who is pure spirit.  So, in ascending, Christ brings matter, albeit a transformed or transfigured matter, into the spiritual realm which must therefore be amenable to such materialization. It must permit it, be patient of it.  The divine spiritual milieu cannot be essentially impervious to material penetration.

Before the creation and before the Incarnation of the Creator into the created order divine spirit had the power to manifest itself materially, and in the Incarnation the power not only to manifest itself materially but to become material.  The divine Word becomes flesh; the Word does not merely manifest itself in a fleshly vehicle.  It becomes that vehicle and comes to suffer the fate of all such vehicles, dissolution.  The divine spirit was always already apt for materialization: it bore this possibility within it from the beginning.  It was always already in some way disposed toward materialization.  On the other hand, matter was always already apt for spiritualization. 

We humans know from experience that we can in some measure spiritualize ourselves and indeed freely and by our own power.  We know ourselves to be spiritual beings while also knowing ourselves to be animals, animated matter, necessarily dependent on inanimate matter including air, water, dead plants and dead meat. (When an animal eats another animal alive, the first is after the matter of the second, not after its being animated.) 

Whether or not we exercise our severely limited power of self-spiritualization, we are spiritual animals whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not:  we think.  Each one of us is a hunk of thinking meat.  We are meaning meat.  How is this possible? The matter of physics cannot think.  But we are thinking matter.  This is the mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in us.  We live it and we experience it.

We could call it the 'The Little Incarnation.'  Mind is incarnated, enfleshed, in us.  The Little Word, the Little Logos, has always already been incarnated is us, separating us as by an abyss from the rest of the animals. Here, in us, we have an ANALOGY to the Incarnation proper.  In the latter, the Second Person of the Trinity does not take on a human body merely, but an individual human nature body and soul.  So I speak of an analogy.  Incarnation in the case of Christ is not a mere enfleshment or embodiment.  The Little Incarnation in us is the apparently necessary  enfleshment of our spiritual acts in animal flesh.

The mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in us reflects the mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in God.  Divine spirit is pregnant with matter, and accepting of the risen matter of Christ, but matter is also pregnant with divine spirit.  Mary is the mother of God.  A material being gives birth to God.  This is how the Word, who is God, is made flesh to dwell among us for our salvation from meaninglessness and abandonment to a material world that is merely material.

Matter in Mary is mater Dei.  Matter in Mary is mother and matrix of the birth of God.

For a different take on the meaning of Christmas, see my Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?

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Merry Xmas!

When I was eight years old or so and first took note of the phrase 'Merry Xmas,' my piety was offended by what I took to be the removal of 'Christ' from 'Christmas' only to be replaced by the universally recognized symbol for an unknown quantity, 'X.' But it wasn't long before I realized that the 'X' was merely a font-challenged typesetter's attempt at rendering the Greek Chi, an ancient abbreviation for 'Christ.' There is therefore nothing at all offensive in the expression 'Xmas.' Year after year, however, certain ignorant Christians who are old enough to know better make the mistake that I made when I was eight and corrected when I was ten.

It just now occurs to me that 'Xmas' may be susceptible of a quasi-Tillichian reading. Paul Tillich is famous for his benighted definition of 'God' as 'whatever is one's ultimate concern.' Well, take the 'X' in 'Xmas' as a variable the values of which are whatever one wants to celebrate at this time of year. So for some, 'Xmas' will amount to Solsticemas, for burglars Swagmas, for materialists Lootmas, for gluttons Foodmas, for inebriates Hoochmas, and for ACLU extremists Antichristianitymas.

A reader suggests some further constructions:

For those who love the capitol of the Czech Republic: Pragmas. For Dutch Reformed theologians of Frisian extraction who think Christmas is silly: Hoekemas. For Dutch Reformed philosophy professors of Frisian extraction who like preserves on their toast: Jellemas. For fans of older British sci-fi flicks: Quatermas. For those who buy every special seasonal periodical they can get their hands on: Magmas. One could probably multiply such examples ad nauseum, so I won't.

How could an ACLU bonehead object to 'Xmas' so construed? No doubt he would find a way.

A while back I quipped that "Aporeticians qua aporeticians do not celebrate Christmas. They celebrate Enigmas."  My man Hodges shot back:  "But they do celebrate 'X-mas'! (Or maybe they 'cerebrate' it?)"

Merry Chimas to all, and to all a good night.

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San Bernardino, ISIS, Islam, and Refugees

A measured statement from the Christian evangelical camp by Mark Tooley.  Excerpt:

At the very least, Christian immigration advocates should urge U.S. immigration policies that strongly prohibit persons who reject American democratic principles.  Over one hundred years ago immigration policies screened against anarchist sympathies, which murderously raged in Europe.  Later U.S. policies screened against Bolshevism.  Of course, the U.S. screened against Nazi and Fascist sympathizers.  So too it should protect against adherents of Islamist theocratic political supremacy.

This should strike one as supremely self-evident unless one is  a hate-America leftist as are too many people in high places.  I don't need to name names.

(That's a curious expression, isn't it?  If I write or say a name, I haven't named it.  I have named the bearer of the name.  For example, if I write 'Obama,' I haven't named that name; to name that name I would have to write something like, " 'Obama'. ")

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Galen Strawson Versus Nicholas Humphrey on Consciousness

(This is a repost from February 2013 slightly emended, except for an addendum added today.  Reposts are the reruns of the blogosphere.  You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode just once do you?) 

…………………

A couple of days ago I had Nicholas Humphrey in my sights.  Or, to revert to the metaphor of that post, I took a shovel to his bull.  I am happy to see that Galen Strawson agrees that it is just nonsense to speak of consciousness as an illusion.  Strawson's trenchant review of Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness is here.  Unfortunately, I cannot see that Strawson has shed much light either, at least judging from the sketch of his position presented in the just-mentioned review:

There is no mystery of consciousness as standardly presented, although book after book tells us that there is, including, now, Nick Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. We know exactly what consciousness is; we know it in seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, in hunger, fever, nausea, joy, boredom, the shower, childbirth, walking down the road. If someone denies this or demands a definition of consciousness, there are two very good responses. The first is Louis Armstrong's, when he was asked what jazz is: "If you got to ask, you ain't never goin' to know." The second is gentler: "You know what it is from your own case." You know what consciousness is in general, you know the intrinsic nature of consciousness, just in being conscious at all.

"Yes, yes," say the proponents of magic, "but there's still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?" (I'm assuming, with them, that we're wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the "magical mystery show", Humphrey and many others make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it's surprising that it involves consciousness. We don't. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell and Whitehead in the 1920s.

One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they're put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It's happening to you right now.) And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.

The main point of Strawson's first paragraph is surely correct: we know what consciousness is in the most direct and  unmistakable way possible: we experience it, we live through it, we are it.  We know it from our own case, immediately, and we know it better than we know anything else.  If Dennett doesn't know what a sensory quale is, then perhaps the cure is to administer a sharp kick to his groin.  Feel that, Dan?  That's a quale.  (I am assuming, of course, that Dennett is not a 'zombie' in the technical sense in which that term is used in philosophy of mind discussions.  But I can't prove he isn't.  Perhaps that is the problem. If he were a zombie, then maybe all his verbal behavior would be understandable.)

In the second paragraph Strawson rejects an assumption and he makes one himself.  He rejects the assumption that we know enough about the intrinsic nature of matter to know that a material being cannot think.    The assumption he makes is that we are wholly physical beings.  So far I understand him.  It could be that (it is epistemically possible that) this stuff inside my skull is the thinker of my thoughts.  This is epistemically possible because matter could have hidden powers that we have yet to fathom. On our current understanding of matter it makes no bloody sense to maintain that matter thinks; but that may merely reflect our ignorance of the intrinsic nature of matter.  So I cannot quickly dismiss the notion that matter thinks in the way I can quickly dismiss the preternaturally boneheaded notion that consciousness is an illusion.

I agree with Strawson's first paragraph; I understand the second; but I am flabbergasted by the third.  For now our man waxes dogmatic and postures as if he KNOWS that consciousness is a wholly physical phenomenon.  How does he know it?  Obviously, he doesn't know it.  It is a mere conjecture, an intelligible conjecture, and perhaps even a reasonable one.  After all it might be (it is epistemically possible that) the matter of our brains has occult powers that physics has yet to lay bare, powers that enable it to think and feel.  I cannot exclude this epistemic possibility, any more than Strawson can exclude the possibility that thinkers are spiritual substances.  But to conjecture that things might be thus and so is not to KNOW that they are thus and so.  All we can claim to KNOW is what Strawson asseverates in his first paragraph.

Here is Strawson's  argument in a nutshell:

1. We know the intrinsic nature of consciousness from our own case.

2. We know that consciousness is a form of matter.

Ergo

3.  There is nothing mysterious about consciousness or about how matter gives rise to consciousness; nor is there any question whether consciousness is wholly physical; the only mystery concerns the intrinsic nature of matter.

The problem with this argument is premise (2).  It is pure bluster: a wholly gratuitous assumption, a mere dogma of naturalism.  I can neutralize the argument with this counterargument:

4. If (1) & (2), then brain matter has occult powers.

5. We have no good reason to assume — it is wholly gratuitous to assume — that brain matter has occult powers.

Therefore

6. We have no good reason to assume that both (1) and (2) are true.

7. We know that (1) is true.

Therefore

8. We have good reason to believe that (2) is false. 

Further Thoughts: Strawsonian Theology? (20 September 2015)

Strawson tells us that he is assuming that we are "wholly physical beings."  Now a proposition cannot be true or false unless it is meaningful.  But what does it even mean to say that we are wholly physical beings given that this entails that some wholly physical beings are conscious and self-conscious?  What does 'physical' mean if beings as richly endowed with mentality as we are count as "wholly physical"?  There is a semantic problem here, and it looks to be a failure of contrast.  'Physical' contrasts with 'mental' and has a specific meaning in virtue of this contrast.  And vice versa. So if nothing is mental, then nothing is physical in the specific contrastive sense that lends 'bite' and interest to the thesis that we are wholly physical.  To put it another way, if nothing is mental and everything is physical including us with our richly endowed inner lives, then the claim that we are wholly physical is not particularly interesting.    It is nearly vacuous if not wholly vacuous.  It has been evacuated of its meaning by a failure of contrast.  If we are wholly physical in an umbrella sense that subsumes the contrastive senses of 'physical' and 'mental,' then Strawson has merely papered over the problem of how the mental and the physical are related when these terms are taken in their specific senses.

Suppose Einstein and his blackboard are both wholly physical.  We still have to account for the fact that one of them is conscious and entertains thoughts while the other isn't and doesn't.  That is a huge difference.  What Strawson has to say is that  in us thinking and feeling beings powers of matter are exercised that are not exercised in other, less distinguished clumps of matter.  Hidden in the bosom of matter are powers that a future physics may lay bare and render intelligible.

But if Strawson widens his concept of matter to cover both thinking and nonthinking matter,  does he have a principled way to prevent an even further widening?

If minds like ours are wholly physical, why can't God be wholly physical?  God is a mind too.  Presumably God cannot be wholly physical because God is not in space and is not subject to physical decomposition.  But if we can be wholly physical despite the fact that we think and are conscious — if there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out thought and consciousness — then perhaps there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out material beings that have no spatial location and are not subject to physical decomposition.

If an advanced physics will reveal how meat heads like us can think, then perhaps there are other properties and possibilities of matter hitherto undreamt of.  Consider Christ's Ascension, body and soul, into heaven. Christ's Ascension is not a dematerialization: he ascends bodily into a purely spiritual, nonphysical, 'dimension.' Without losing his (resurrected) body, Christ ascends to the Father so that, after the Ascension, the Second Person of the Trinity acquires Christ's resurrected body. On our ordinary way of thinking, this is utterly unintelligible.  God is pure spirit, pure mind.  How can Christ  ascend bodily into heaven, and without divesting himself of his body,  enter into the unity of the purely spiritual Trinity?  It is unintelligible to us because it issues in a formal-logical contradiction: God is wholly nonphysical and also in part physical.  A mysterian would say it is a mystery.  It happened, so it's possible, and this regardless of its unintelligibility to us. 

On Strawson's approach there needn't be any mystery here:  some parcels of matter have amazing powers.  For example, we are wholly material and yet we think and feel.  It is truly amazing that we should be thinking meat!  If so, God might be a parcel of matter that thinks, feels, and — without prejudice to his physicality — has no spatial location and is not subject to physical decomposition. If so, the Ascension is comprehensible: Christ ascends bodily to join the physical Trinity.  It is just that he sheds his particular location and his physical mutability.  He remains what he was on earth, an embodied soul. 

The same could be said of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven.  She too entered bodily into heaven.  On a Strawsonian theology, this might be rendered intelligible without mysterianism.

To sum up.  If matter actually thinks and feels  in us, as Strawson holds, then he has widened the concept of matter to embrace both 'ordinary' matter and sentient, thinking, 'spiritual' matter.  But then what principled way would Strawson have to prevent a further widening of the concept of matter so that it embraces God, disembodied souls, angels, and what not?

Is the Christian the True Philosopher?

Steven Nemes makes two main points in his Christian Life as Philosophy.  The first I agree with entirely: Jesus Christ is not a philosopher.  The philosopher is a mere lover of wisdom.  His love is desirous and needy; it is eros, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks.  But Jesus Christ lacks nothing; he is is the fullness of wisdom, "The Wisdom of God embodied," as Nemes accurately puts it.  So Christ is no lover of wisdom in the strict sense in which Socrates is a lover of wisdom.  Divine love is not erotic but agapic.

The wisdom of Socrates was largely the wisdom of nescience: he knew what he did not know.  In stark contrast, Christ claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth in the via, veritas, vita passage at John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me."  Ego sum via et veritas et vita; nemo venit ad Patrem nisi per me.

Here is Nemes' second point:

So Christ falls into the category of god or sage (or both), rather than that of philosopher. On the other hand, the Christian — the person who desires to learn of Christ, and who finds in him the fount of all wisdom — is the true philosopher. The Christian admits that she lacks wisdom, yet she desires it. So she goes to the source of all wisdom, which is Christ, in order to learn from him.

Christian life can therefore be understood as philosophy: a desirous effort to learn wisdom from Wisdom Itself, embodied in the person of the Godman Jesus Christ.

I disagree with this second point. A philosopher is not only one who, lacking wisdom and desiring it, seeks it, but also one who seeks the truth in a certain way, by a certain method.  It is characteristic of philosophy that it is the pursuit of truth by unaided reason.  'Unaided' means: not aided by divine revelation.  (It does not mean that the philosopher does not consult the senses.)  The philosopher operates by reason and seeks reasons for what he believes.  The philosopher relies on discursive reason as he encounters it in himself and accepts only what he can validate by his autonomous use of reason.  Qua philosopher, he accepts no testimony but must verify matters for himself .  The philosopher is like Doubting Thomas Didymus at John 20:25: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe." 

That is the attitude of the philosopher.  The philosopher is an inquirer into ultimate matters, and doubt is the engine of inquiry.  Where's the evidence?  What's the argument?  What you say may be true, my brothers, but how do you know?  What's your justification?  You say  our rabbi rose from the dead?  That sort of thing doesn't happen!  I want knowledge, which is not just true belief but justified true belief.  You expect me to believe that Jesus rose on no evidence but your testimony from probably hallucinatory experiences fueled by your fear and hunger and weakness ?  Prove it!  W. K. Clifford takes it to the limit and gives it a moral twist:  "It is wrong always and everywhere to believe anything on insufficient evidence."  Presumably the testimony of a bunch of scared, unlettered, credulous fisherman would not count as sufficient evidence for Thomas Didymus or Clifford.

The Christian, however, operates by faith.  If Reason is the faculty of philosophy, Faith is the faculty of religion.  The philosopher may reason his way to the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, but he cannot qua philosopher arrive at the saving truth that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) by the use of reason.  The saving truths are 'known' by faith and not by reason.  It is also clear that faith for the Christian ranks higher than reason.  As Jesus says to Thomas at John 20:29:  "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed."

The attitude of the believer who is also a philosopher is fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.  But what if no understanding is found?  Does the believer reject or suspend his belief?  No.  If he is a genuine believer, he continues to believe whether or not he achieves understanding.  This shows that for the believer, reason has no veto power.  The apparent logical impossibility of the Incarnation does not cause him to reject or suspend his belief in Jesus as his Lord and Savior.  If he finds a way to show the rational acceptability of the Incarnation, well and good; if he fails, no matter.  The Incarnation is a fact known by Revelation; as an actual fact it is possible, and what is possible is possible whether or not we frail reeds can understand how it is possible.  The believer in the end will announce that the saving truths are mysteries impenetrable to us here below even if he does not go to the extreme of a Tertullian, a Kierkegaard, or a Shestov and condemn reason wholesale.

The attitude of the philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation is different.  He feels duty-bound by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept.  This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl.  On his death bed, open to the Catholic faith, he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation.

There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality.    As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:

To put it very very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is 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. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)

So is the Christian the true philosopher?  Only in the sense that philosophy points beyond itself to something that is no longer philosophy but that completes philosophy while cancelling it. I am tempted to reach for an Hegelian trope while turning it on its head:  if Christianity is true, then philosophy is aufgehoben, sublated, in it.  If Christianity is true, then the Christian arrives at the truth that the philosopher at best aims at but cannot arrive at by his method and way of life, the life of autonomous understanding.  To achieve what he aims at, the philosopher would have to be "as a little child" and accept in obedient love the gift of Revelation.  But it is precisely that which he cannot do if he is to remain a philosopher in the strict sense, one who lives the life of autonomous understanding.

The Christian life is not the philosophical life.  It lies beyond the philosophical life and, if  true, is superior to it.

Peter Kreeft on the Trinity

This from reader D. B.:
 
The doctrine of the Trinity does not say there is one God and three Gods, or that God is one Person and three Persons, or that God has one nature and three natures. Those would indeed be self-contradictory ideas. But the doctrine of the Trinity says that there is only one God and only one divine nature but that this one God exists in three Persons. That is a great mystery, but it is not a logical self-contradiction.

Peter Kreeft, Fundamentals of the Faith, (Ignatius, 1988), p.42.

I don't think that the doctrine as so stated (above) rises to a level of clarity that allows for Kreeft's last sentence. Do you?

I agree with you, Dave.

First sentence:  Exactly right.

Second sentence:  Right again.

Third sentence:  Also correct.

Fourth sentence:  this is a bare assertion sired by confusion.  The confusion is between the explicitly or manifestly  contradictory and the implicitly or latently contradictory.  The following are all explicitly self-contradictory:

a. There is only one God and there are three Gods.
b. God is one person and God is three persons.
c.  God has one nature and God has three natures.

To be precise, the above are self-contradictory in the logical presence of the proposition that nothing can be both numerically one and numerically three.  To be totally precise, then, I should say that the above three are near-explicitly self-contradictory to distinguish then from, say, 'God is one person and it is not the case that God is one person,' which is an explicitly formal-logical contradiction, i.e., a contradiction whose contradictoriness is rooted in logical form alone: *p & ~p.*  Such contradictions I call narrowly-logical to distinguish them from (wait for it) broadly-logical contradictions such as *Some colors are sounds.* But

d. There is exactly one God in three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit

though not explicitly or near-explicitly contradictory as are the above three examples, is nonetheless contradictory in that it entails (in the logical presence of other orthodox doctrinal claims and self-evident truths) contradictions.  How?   Well, consider this aporetic septad:

1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4. The Holy Spirit is God.
5. The Father is not the Son.
6. The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
7. The Father is not the Holy Spirit.

If we assume that in (2)-(7), the 'is' expresses absolute numerical identity, then it is clear that the septad is inconsistent.  (Identity has the following properties: it is reflexive, symmetric, transitive, and governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals).  For example, from (2) and (3) taken together it follows that the Father is the Son by Transitivity of Identity.  (That identity is a transitive relation is an example of a necessary and self-evident truth.) But this contradicts (5): The Father is not the Son.

So we have an inconsistent septad each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy.

What this shows is that (d) above, while not explicitly and manifestly contradictory as are (a)-(c), is nonetheless contradictory in that it entails three explicit formal-logical contradictions, one of them being *The Father is the Son and the Father is not the Son.*

Of course, there are various ways one might try to evade the inconsistency of the above septad.  But this is not the present topic.  The present topic is whether Kreeft's fourth sentence is justified.  Clearly it is not.  The mere fact that (d) is not obviously contradictory as are (a)-(c) does not show that it is not contradictory.  I have just argued that it is.

Kreeft says in effect that (d) is a "great mystery."  Why does he say that it is a mystery if not because it expresses a proposition that we find contradictory?  If we didn't find (d) contradictory we would have no reason to call it mysterious.  So Kreeft is in effect admitting that we cannot make coherent logical sense  of (d).  This suggests that Kreeft may be waffling between two views:

V1:  The doctrine of the Trinity, though of course not rationally provable by us (because known by revelation alone) is yet rationally acceptable by us, i.e., free of logical contradiction, and can be see by our unaided reason to be free of logical contradiction

and

V2:   The doctrine of the Trinity cannot be seen by us to be rationally acceptable in the present life, and so must remain a mystery to us here below, but is nonetheless both true and free of contradiction in itself.

(V1) and (V2) are clearly distinct, the latter being a form of mysterianism.  I raised some doubts about Trinitarian mysterianism yesterday.

The Aporetics of Baptism

Peter Lupu wrote me yesterday about baptism, I responded online, and today he is back at me again:

In your response you say:
 
" As for the change in metaphysical status wrought by baptism, the main change is the forgiveness of all sins, whether original or individual (personal).  The baptism of infants removes or rather forgives original sin only . . . ." 
 
and
 
" The change in metaphysical status wrought by baptism would be better described as a change in soteriological status."
 
I am puzzled. Why isn't conception (or even natural birth) sufficient for a salvational (soteriological) status? After all, according to all Monotheistic views, conception marks man's metaphysical status as having a spiritual soul that would animate his natural existence post birth and determine man's metaphysical status as a vital, organic, yet spiritual, being. Granting the soul at conception and rendering it a vital, active, animating force upon natural birth should suffice to grant man salvational status. Moreover, according to the creation, the soul represents God's spirit that was transferred from God to man ('spirit' in Hebrew also means 'ruah ' or 'wind' and God's spirit is translated as 'ruah Hashem' or "God's wind or breath"). Hence, bestowing a soul upon man at conception, and rendering it a vital force that animates his life at birth and thereafter, should suffice to bestow upon man salvational metaphysical status; for the soul represents God's determination, not man's. Baptism as a determinant of soteriological metaphysical status trumps the prior decision of God to grant salvational status and, since, Baptism is an act of man, it represents man's overreaching into the divine sphere where only God may act. 
 
Hence, I am puzzled.
 
Peter asked me yesterday about baptism in Christianity, and so I took my task as one of explaining concisely what the sacrament of Baptism does for the one baptized according to Christians.  What I said was correct, though I left a lot out.  Now I will say some more in trying to relieve Peter's puzzlement.  I will not give my own view of baptism, but merely explain  what I take to be the Christian view.
 
Peter's puzzlement concerns the necessity of baptism.  Why do we need it?  After all, man is made in the image and likeness of God.  This likeness, of course, is spiritual, not physical.  Like God, man is a spiritual being.  Unlike God, he is an animal.  Man, then, has a dual nature: he is a spiritual animal.  This sets him above every other type of animal, metaphysically speaking.  He has a special metaphysical status: he is the god-like animal.  As god-like, he equipped to share in the divine life.  Every creature has a divine origin, but only man has a divine destiny.
 
If so, if man was created to be a spiritual being, and to share in the divine life, then his special metaphysical status should suffice for his salvation.  Or so Peter reasons.  Why then is there any need for baptism? The Christian answer, I think, is because of Original Sin.
 
Man is a fallen being.  Somehow he fell from the metaphysical height he originally possessed.  This is not to say that he ceased to be a spiritual animal and became a mere animal.  It is not as if he was metaphysically demoted.  Both pre- and post-lapsarian man has the special metaphysical status.  But after the fall, Man's relation to God was disturbed in such a way that he was no longer fit to participate in the divine life.   I would put it like this: Man the spirit became man the ego.  Overcome by the power to say 'I' and mean it, a power that derives from his being a spirit, man separated from God to go it alone.  The power went to his head and he fell into the illusion of self-sufficiency.  He used the God-given power to defy God.  He became a law unto himself.
 
In short, man fell out of right relation to God.  Thus the necessity of a restoration of that right relation.  This is where the Incarnation comes into the picture.  Only God can bring man back into right relation with God.  God becomes one of us, suffers and dies and rises from the dead.  Having entered fully into death and rising again, God the Son secures the redemption of man for those who believe in him.  The immersion in water and the re-emergence from it signify the entry into death and the resurrection in which death is conquered.
 
So why do we need baptism if we already enjoy the special metaphysical status of being spiritual beings? We need it because of the fall of man, his original sin.  In baptism, each individual human being appropriates the inner transformation that Christ won for humanity in general by his death and resurrection.
 
Peter says that baptism is an act of man.  That is not the way a Christian would understand it.  Baptism is a sacrament: an outward sign of an inward (spiritual) transformation.  The physical rite is of course an act of man, but the inner transformation is due to divine agency.
 
The Peter Puzzle Potentiated
 
Suppose Peter accepts the foregoing.  He can still raise a difficulty.  "OK, I see how Original Sin comes into the picture, along with Incarnation, Resurrection, Redemption and Atonement.  But if Christ died for our sins and restored humanity to right relation with God, why do we need baptism?  What additional job does this do?  Didn't Christ do the work for us?"
 
Here I suppose an answer might be: "Yes, Christ did the heavy lifting, but each of us must accept Christ as savior by faith. Baptism is the faithful acceptance whereby the individual joins the Mystical Body of Christ wherein he reaps the salvific benefits of Christ's passion."
 
At this point Peter might reasonably object:  "But how is such a thing possible for an infant?  How can an infant accept Jesus Christ as lord and savior?"  Here we arrive at the vexing question of infant baptism.
 
There are obviously many difficult questions here, and equally difficult answers.
 
The ComBox is open.
Related articles
Baptism
Gluttony: Another Sign of Decline
The Resurrection and Baptism

Baptism

A reader asks:

What ontic or metaphysical status does baptism bestow upon one who is baptized in Christianity? Clarification: What ontic or metaphysical status does a newborn have pre-baptism vs. post-baptism?

I am not a theologian, nor do I play one in the blogosphere.  But that never stopped me from pursuing my education in public on all sorts of topics including narrowly theological ones.  So here are some thoughts.

Right off the bat we need two distinctions.  One is between infant baptism and baptism that comes later in life.  The latter, for an obvious reason, should not be called adult baptism.  Some Christians are opposed to infant baptism.  A famous example is Kierkegaard.  (See Attack Upon 'Christendom', p. 205 f.) The other distinction  is among different understandings of baptism within Christianity.   Some sects such as Baptists are opposed to infant baptism.  It is also worth noting that baptism antedates Christianity.  According to the New Testament, John the Baptist baptized Jesus, which indicates that baptism was a Jewish practice before it was a Christian one.

As for the change in metaphysical status wrought by baptism, the main change is the forgiveness of all sins, whether original or individual (personal).  The baptism of infants removes or rather forgives original sins only since infants cannot commit personal sins, while in the case of the baptism of adults, or rather non-infants, both original and individual sins are forgiven.  The effects of original sin, such as mortality, of course remain.  The above is true for both the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox.

One interesting difference, however, is that in the Roman church the three sacraments of Christian initiation, baptism, communion, and confirmation, are not all conferred on infants at the same time, while in the Eastern church they are.  A second difference is that the Orthodox continue the primitive practice of baptism by total immersion, whereas the Romans merely sprinkle some holy water on the candidate's forehead.  The Eastern objection to this 'watering down' of the primitive rite (pun intended) is that it destroys or at least weakens the symbolism.  If all sins, whether original or not, are forgiven by baptism, then this is better symbolized by total immersion than by a little water on the forehead. (See Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin 1963, pp. 283-285)

The change in metaphysical status wrought by baptism would be better described as a change in soteriological status. 

Puzzles and problems and questions galore lurk beneath the surface.  Perhaps I shall address some of them later.  One question that occurred to me:  assuming that there are good arguments for infant baptism, why not pre-natal baptism, in the third trimester, say?  How would the rite be implemented? Water could be sprinkled on the pregnant woman's abdomen. 

Addendum

A budding theologian friend of mine offers his thoughts here.

Does the Divine Transcendence Require that God not be a Being among Beings?

Herewith, a second response to Aidan Kimel.  He writes,

The claim that God is a being among beings is immediately ruled out, so it seems to me, by the classical understanding of divine transcendence: if all beings have been created from nothing by the self-existent One, then this One cannot be classified as one of them, as sharing a world with them. To think of God as a being would thus represent nothing less than a return to paganism. We would be back at Mt Carmel with Elijah and the priests of Ba’al.

I myself incline to the view that the divine transcendence entails that God cannot be a being among beings. But I do not see in the passage above a good argument for the view to which I incline.  Fr. Kimel's argument appears to be this:

1. All beings have been created from nothing by the self-existent One.

Therefore

2. The self-existent One cannot be a being among beings.

This argument is valid in point of logical form — the conclusion follows from the premise — but the premise is false.  If all beings have been created ex nihilo by the self-existent One, then, given that the One cannot create itself, it follows that the One does not exist and thus cannot be self-existent.  The premise is self-refuting.

But let us be charitable.  Perhaps what Fr. Kimel intends is the following argument:

1*. All beings other than the self-existent One have been created from nothing by the self-existent One.

Therefore

2. The self-existent One cannot be a being among beings.

The premise is now true, but the conclusion does not follow — or at least it is not clear how the conclusion is supposed to follow.  Why cannot it be like this?  God, the self-existent One, creates beings distinct from himself.  These beings 'now' (either temporally or logically) form with God a collection of beings.  So although God has all sorts of properties that make him the supreme being such as omniscience, and the rest of the omni-attributes, he remains a being among beings.

It is a simple point of logic that one can give a bad argument for a true conclusion.  This is what Fr. Kimel does above.  I agree with his conclusion, but I reject his reasoning as confused.  He in effect confuses the two arguments displayed.  The first is valid with a false premise; the second is invalid with a true premise. 

Related articles
God: A Being among Beings or Being Itself?
God and Socrates: Two Different Ways of Existing?
Is it Obvious that God is not a Being Among Beings?

Nietzsche and the New Atheists

The following quotation from a very interesting Guardian piece by John Gray entitled What Scares the New Atheists (HT: Karl White):

[1] The new atheists rarely mention Friedrich Nietzsche, and when they do it is usually to dismiss him. [2] This can’t be because Nietzsche’s ideas are said to have inspired the Nazi cult of racial inequality – an unlikely tale, given that the Nazis claimed their racism was based in science. [3]The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. [4] It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. [5] The question is which morality an atheist should serve.

Five sentences, five comments.

1. Yes.

2. Granted, the Nazis claimed their racism was based in science. But this is consistent with their racism having other sources as well.  So it doesn't follow that it is an "unlikely tale" that the Nazis drew inspiration from Nietzsche.  I say it is very likely.  See Nietzsche and Nationalism Socialism.

3.  Spot on!

4.  Agreed, atheists can be moral.  Indeed, some atheists are more moral that some theists — even when the moral code is the Decalogue minus the commandments that mention God.  The question whether an atheist can be moral, however, is ambiguous.  While it is clear that an atheist can be moral in the sense of satisfying moral demands, it is not clear that an atheist can be moral in the sense of recognizing moral demands in the first place.  It is an open question whether an atheist, consistent with his atheism, could have justification for admitting objective moral demands.

5.  Before one can ask which morality an atheist should serve, there is a logically prior question that needs asking and answering, one that Gray glides right past, namely,

Q. Is there any morality, any moral code, that an atheist would be justified in adhering to and justified in demanding that others adhere to?

Hitler-next-to-a-bust-of-nietzscheIf  a negative answer is given to (Q), then Gray's logically posterior question lapses.

Most of us in the West, atheists and theists alike, do agree on a minimal moral code.  Don't we all object to child molestation, female sexual mutilation, wanton killing of human beings, rape, theft,  lying, financial swindling, extortion,  and arson?   And in objecting to these actions, we mean our objections to be more than merely subjectively valid. When our property is stolen or a neighbor murdered, we consider that an objective wrong has been done. And when the murderer is apprehended, tried, and convicted we judge that something objectively right has been done.  But if an innocent person is falsely accused and convicted, we judge that something objectively wrong has been done.  Let's not worry about the details or the special cases: killing in self-defense, abortion, etc.  There are plenty of gray areas.  The existence of gray, however, does not rule out that of black and white.  Surely, in the West at least, there is some moral common ground that most atheists and theists, liberals and conservatives, stand upon.  For example, most of us agree that snuffing out the life of an adult, non-comatose, healthy human being for entertainment purposes is objectively wrong.

What (Q) asks about is the foundation or basis of the agreed-upon objectively binding moral code. This is not a sociological or any kind of empirical question. Nor is it a question in normative ethics. The question is not what we ought to do and leave undone, for we are assuming that we already have a rough answer to that. The question is meta-ethical: what does morality rest on, if on anything?

There are different theories. Some will say that morality requires a supernatural foundation, others that a natural foundation suffices.  I myself do not see how naturalism is up to the task of providing an objective foundation for even a minimal code of morality.

But of course one could be an atheist without being a naturalist. One could hold that there are objective values, but no God, and that ethical prescriptions and proscriptions are axiologically grounded.  (N. Hartmann, for example.) But let's assume, with Nietzsche, that if you get rid of God, you get rid of the Platonic menagerie (to cop a phrase from Plantinga)  as well.  It needs arguing, but it is reasonable to hold that God and Platonica stand and fall together.  That is what Nietzsche would say and I think he would be right were he to say it.   (The death of God is not an insignificant 'event' like the falling to earth of a piece of space junk such as Russell's celestial teapot.) 

No God, no objective morality binding for all.  Suppose that is the case.  Then how will the new atheist, who is also a liberal, uphold and ground his 'enlightened' liberal morality?  John Gray appreciates the difficulty:

Awkwardly for these atheists, Nietzsche understood that modern liberalism was a secular incarnation of these religious traditions. [. . .]  Nietzsche was clear that the chief sources of liberalism were in Jewish and Christian theism: that is why he was so bitterly hostile to these religions. He was an atheist in large part because he rejected liberal values. To be sure, evangelical unbelievers adamantly deny that liberalism needs any support from theism. If they are philosophers, they will wheel out their rusty intellectual equipment and assert that those who think liberalism relies on ideas and beliefs inherited from religion are guilty of a genetic fallacy. Canonical liberal thinkers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant may have been steeped in theism; but ideas are not falsified because they originate in errors. The far-reaching claims these thinkers have made for liberal values can be detached from their theistic beginnings; a liberal morality that applies to all human beings can be formulated without any mention of religion. Or so we are continually being told. The trouble is that it’s hard to make any sense of the idea of a universal morality without invoking an understanding of what it is to be human that has been borrowed from theism.

Gray is right.  Let me spell it out a bit.  

Consider equality.  As a matter of empirical fact, we are not equal, not physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, socially, politically, economically.  By no empirical measure are people equal.  We are naturally unequal.  And yet we are supposedly equal as persons.  This equality as persons we take as requiring equality of treatment.  Kant, for example, insists that every human being, and indeed very rational being human or not, exists as an end in himself and therefore must never be treated as a means to an end.  A person is not a thing in nature to be used as we see fit.  For this reason, slavery is a grave moral evil.  A person is a rational being and must be accorded respect just in virtue of being a person.  And this regardless of inevitable empirical differences among persons.   Thus in his third formulation of the Categorical Imperative in his 1785 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes:

Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.  (Grundlegung 429)

In connection with this supreme practical injunction, Kant distinguishes between price and dignity. (435)  "Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has dignity."  Dignity is intrinsic moral worth.  Each rational being, each person, is thus irreplaceably and intrinsically valuable with a value that is both infinite — in that no price can be placed upon it — and the same for all. The irreplaceability of persons is a very rich theme, one we must return to in subsequent posts. 

These are beautiful and lofty thoughts, no doubt, and most of us in the West (and not just in the West) accept them in some more or less confused form.  But what do these pieties have to do with reality?  Especially if reality is exhausted by space-time-matter?

Again, we are not equal by any empirical measure.  We are not equal as animals or even as rational animals. (Rationality might just be an evolutionary adaptation.)  We are supposedly equal as persons, as subjects of experience, as free agents.  But what could a person be if not just a living human animal (or a living 'Martian' animal).  And given how bloody many of these human animals there are, why should they be regarded as infinitely precious?  Are they not just highly complex physical systems?  Surely you won't say that complexity confers value, let alone infinite value.  Why should the more complex be more valuable than the less complex?  And surely you are not a species-chauvinist who believes that h. sapiens is the crown of 'creation' because we happen to be these critters.

If we are unequal as animals and equal as persons, then a person is not an animal.  What then is a person?  And what makes them equal in dignity and equal in rights and infinite in worth?

Now theism can answer these questions.   We are persons and not mere animals because we are created in the image and likeness of the Supreme Person.  We are equal as persons because we are, to put it metaphorically, sons and daughters of one and the same Father.  Since the Source we depend on for our being, intelligibility, and value is one and the same, we are equal as derivatives of that Source.  We are infinite in worth because we have a higher destiny, a higher vocation, which extends beyond our animal existence: we are created to participate eternally in the Divine Life.

But if you reject theism, how will you uphold the Kantian values adumbrated above?  If there is no God and no soul and no eternal destiny, what reasons, other than merely prudential ones, could I have for not enslaving you should I desire to do so and have the power to do so?

Aristotle thought it natural that some men should be slaves.  We find this notion morally abhorrent.  But why should we if we reject the Judeo-Christian God?  "We just do."  But that's only because we are running on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  What happens when the fumes run out?

It is easy to see that it makes no sense, using terms strictly, to speak of anything or anybody as a creature if there is no creator. It is less easy to see, but equally true, that it makes no sense to try to hold on to notions such as that of the equality and dignity of persons after their metaphysical foundations in Christian theism have been undermined.

So there you have the Nietzschean challenge to the New Atheists.  No God, then no justification for your liberal values! Pay attention, Sam.  Make a clean sweep! Just as religion is for the weak who won't face reality, so is liberalism.  The world belongs to the strong, to those who have the power to impose their will upon it.  The world belongs to those hard as diamonds, not to those soft as coal and weak and womanish. Nietzsche:

Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation – but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?

Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter 9, What is Noble?, Friedrich Nietzsche    Go to Quote

More quotations on strength and weakness here.

Kierkegaard: “To Hell With the Pope!” and Monkishness. The Highest Life

KierkegaardI plan to spend a few days next month at a Benedictine monastery in the desert outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.  The suggestion was made that I give some of the monks a little talk.  I think "A Philosopher Defends Monasticism" would be an appropriate title.  So I have been reading up on the subject.

This morning I looked to see what Kierkegaard has to say on the topic of monks and monasteries in his late works For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! They are bound together in an attractive English translation by Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton University Press, 1990).

Of course I did not expect old Kierkegaard to have anything good to say about the monastic ideal, but I was slightly surprised by the harshness of his tone.

I myself am highly sympathetic to the ideal.  Had I been born in the Middle Ages I would have been a monk for sure.  I fantasize my having been Thomas Aquinas' amanuensis and intellectual sparring partner.  And although I love to read Kierkegaard and about him and have been doing so all of my philosophical life, there are two things about him that put me off.  One is his anti-mysticism, which is of course connected with his anti-monasticism.  The other is his anti-rationalism.  But these two add up to a third, his fideism, which I also find off-putting. Well, more on all of this later.  Now let's look at some quotations.

One of S.K.'s objections, perhaps his main objection, to monks and monasteries and 'popery' is straight from Luther:  it is to the idea of earning merit before God by good works:

To want to build upon good works — the more you practice them, the stricter you are with yourself, the more you merely develop the anxiety in you, and new anxiety. On this road, if a person is not completely devoid of spirit, on this road he comes to the very opposite of peace and rest for his soul, to discord and unrest.  No, a person is justified solely by faith.  Therefore, in God's name, to hell with the pope and all his helpers' helpers, and away with the monastery, together with all your fasting, scourging, and all the monkey antics that came into use under the name of imitation. (Judge for Yourself! 193, emphasis added)

You cannot justify yourself before God by your own efforts: "a person is justified solely and only by faith."  (193) In these later works of direct communication, S. K. speaks in his own voice and is here clearly endorsing the thought of Luther on justification.

A few pages earlier S. K. speaks of the highest life:

No, it is certainly not the highest to seek a solitary hiding place in order if possible to seek God alone there.  It is not the highest — this we indeed see in the prototype [Christ].  But although it is not the highest it is nevertheless possible . . . that not a single one of us is this coddled and secularized generation would be able to do it.  But it is not the highest.  The highest is: unconditionally heterogeneous with the world by serving God alone, to remain in the world and in the middle of actuality before the eyes of all, to direct all attention to oneself — for then persecution is unavoidable.  This is Christian piety: renouncing everything to serve God alone, to deny oneself in order to serve God alone — and then to have to suffer for it — to do good and then to have to suffer for it.  It is this that the prototype expresses; it is also this, to mention a mere man, that Luther, the superb teacher of our Church, continually points our as belonging to true Christianity: to suffer for the doctrine, to do good and suffer for it, and that suffering in this world is inseparable from being a Christian in this world. (169)

S. K. here sounds his recurrent theme of Christianity as heterogeneity to the world.  The heterogeneity to the world of the monastic life, however, does not go far enough.  A more radical heterogeneity is lived by one who remains in the world, not only living the doctrine, but suffering for it. No doubt that is how the Prototype lived, but he was and is God.  How is such a thing possible for any mere  mortal?

If true Christianity requires suffering for the doctrine, if it requires persecution and martyrdom, then true Christianity is out of reach except for those who, like present-day Christians in the Middle East, are even as we speak having their throats cut for the doctrine by radical Muslim savages as the rest of the world looks on and does nothing.  In the Denmark of Kierkegaard's day (1813-1855), when Christianity was the state religion and the object of universal lip-service, true Christianity was out of reach for S. K. himself by his own teaching.  The true Christian must be prepared for persecution and martyrdom, but it is difficult to see how they can be "inseparable from being a Christian in this world."

So add this persecution extremism to the off-putting factors already listed: the anti-mysticism, the anti-rationalism, and the extreme fideism.

But what a prodigiously prolific writer he was!  What a genius, and what a fascinating specimen of humanity.

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More on “Daily Bread”

From a reader:

Thank you for continuing to examine the important topic of "daily bread." I don't know of any other philosophy blog writer who combines depth, significance, and clarity like you do!

I agree that spiritual needs are primary, that our world is a vale of soul-making, and that there need not be a disjunction between the spiritual and physical aspects of human nature. Passages such as Mt. 4:4,  Jn. 4:10-14, Jn. 6:35, Prov. 4:7 and 16:16, and 2 Peter 1:4-15 seem to emphasize spiritual needs over material needs. Jn. 4:10-14 is particularly interesting.

Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." "Sir," the woman said, "you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?" Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life." (Jn. 4:10-14)

Notice that Jesus states a counterfactual. The woman interprets the statement in material terms. Jesus responds by contrasting the transience of material water with the permanence of spiritual water.

Jesus goes on to say:

"A time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth." (verses 23 and 24) Meanwhile his disciples urged him, "Rabbi, eat something." But he said to them, "I have food to eat that you know nothing about." (verses 31 and 32)

These passages seem to prioritize spiritual development, and to support your spiritual interpretation of "daily bread."