Category: Christian Doctrine

The God of Christianity and the God of Islam: Same God?

One morning an irate C-Span viewer called in to say that he prayed to the living God, not to the mythical being, Allah, to whom Muslims pray. The C-Span guest made a standard response, which is correct as far as it goes, namely, that Allah is Arabic for God, just as Gott is German for God. He suggested that adherents of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) worship the same God under different names. No doubt this is a politically correct thing to say, but is it true?

Our question, then, is precisely this:  Does the normative Christian and the normative Muslim worship numerically the same God, or numerically different Gods?  (By 'normative Christian/Muslim' I mean an orthodox adherent of his faith who understands its content, without subtraction and without addition of private opinions.)  Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic.  So if Christian and Muslim worship different Gods, then one is worshipping  a nonexistent God, or, if you prefer, is failing to worship the true God.

1. Let's start with the obvious: 'Allah' is Arabic for God.  So if an Arabic-speaking Coptic Christian refers to God, he uses 'Allah.'   And if an Arabic-speaking Muslim refers to God, he too uses 'Allah.'  From the fact that both Copt and Muslim use 'Allah' it does not follow that they are referring to the same God, but it also does not follow that they are referring to numerically different Gods.  So we will not make any progress with our question if we remain at the level of words.  We must advance to concepts.

2. We need to distinguish between the word for God, the concept (conception) of God, and God.  God is not a concept, but there are concepts of God and, apart from mystical intuition, we have no access to God except via our concepts of God.  Now it is undeniable that the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God partially overlap.  The following is a partial list of what is common to both conceptions:

a. There is exactly one God.
b.  God is the creator of everything distinct from himself.
c.  God is transcendent: he is radically different from everthing distinct from himself.
d. God is good.

Now if the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God were identical, then we would have no reason to think that Christian and Muslim worship different Gods.  But of course the conceptions, despite partial overlap, are not identical. Christians believe in a triune God who became man in Jesus of Nazareth.  Or to put it precisely, they believe in a triune God the second person of which became man in Jesus of Nazareth.  This is the central and indeed crucial (from the Latin, crux, crucis, meaning cross) difference between the two faiths.  The crux of the matter is the cross. 

3. Now comes the hard part, which is to choose between two competing views:

V1: Christian and Muslim worship the same God, but one of them has a false belief about God, whether it be the belief that God is unitarian or the belief that God is trinitarian.

V2:  Christian and Muslim worship different Gods precisely because they have different conceptions of God.  So it is not that one of them has a false belief about the one God they both worship; it is rather that one of them does not worship the true God at all.

There is no easy way to decide rationally between these two views.  We have to delve into the philosophy of language and ask how reference is achieved.  How do linguistic expressions attach or apply to extralinguistic entities? How do words grab onto the (extralinguistic) world? In particular, how do nominal expressions work? What makes my utterance of 'Socrates' denote Socrates rather than someone or something else?  What makes my use of 'God' (i) have a referent at all and (ii) have the precise referent it has?

4.  It is reasonable to hold, with Frege, Russell, and many others, that reference is routed through, and determined by, sense: an expression picks out its object in virtue of the latter's satisfaction of a
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 whatever entity, if any, that satisfies the definite description encapsulated in 'God' as this term is used in a given linguistic community.

Given that God is not an actual or possible object of (sense) experience, this seems like a reasonable approach to take.  The idea is that 'God' is a definite description in disguise so that 'God' refers to whichever entity satisfies the description associated wth 'God.'    Now consider two candidate definite descriptions, the first corresponding to the Mulsim conception, the second corresponding to the Christian.

D1: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo and is unitarian'

D2: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo, and is triune.'

Suppose that reference is not direct, but routed through sense, or mediated by a description, in the manner explained above.   It is easy to see that no one entity can satisfy both (D1) and (D2).  So if reference is routed through sense, then Christian and Muslim cannot be referring to the same being.  Indeed, one of them is not succeeding in referring at all.  For if God is triune, nothing in reality answers tothe Muslim's conception of God.  And if God is unitarian, then nothing in reality answers to the Christian conception.

And so, contrary to what Miroslav Volf maintains, the four points of commonality in the Christian and Muslim conceptions listed above do NOT "establish the claim that in their worship of God, Muslims and Christians refer to the same object." (Allah: A Christian Response, HarperCollins 2011, p. 110.)  For if reference to God is mediated by a conception which includes the subconcept triune or unitarian, the reference cannot be to the same entity.

A mundane example (adapted from Kripke) will make this more clear.  Sally sees a handsome man at a party standing in the corner drinking a clear bubbly liquid from a cocktail glass.  She turns to her companion Nancy and says, "The man standing in the corner drinking champagne is handsome!"  Suppose the man is not drinking champagne, but sparkling water instead.  Has Sally succeeded in referring to the man or not?  Argumentative Nancy,  who knows that no alcohol is being served at the party, and who also finds the man handsome, says, "You are not referring to anything: there is no man in the corner drinking champagne.  The man is drinking sparkling water.  Nothing satisfies your definite description.  There is no one man we both admire.   Your handsome man does not exist, but mine does." 

Now in this example what we would intuitively say is that Sally did succeed in referring to someone using a definite description even though the object she succeeded in referring to does not satisfy the description.  Intuitively, we would say that Sally simply has a false belief about the object to which she is successfully referring, and that Sally and Nancy are referring to and admiring the very same man.

But note how this case differs from the God case.  Both women see the man in the corner.  But God is not an object of possible (sense) experience, of Kant's moegliche Erfarhung.  Hence the reference of 'God' cannot be nailed down perceptually.  And so it seems that what we succeed in referring to is whatever satisfies the definite description that unpacks our conception of God.

5.  My tentative conclusion, then, is that (i) if we accept a description theory of names, the Christian and Muslim do not refer to the same being when they use 'God' or 'Allah'  and (ii) that a description theory of names is what we must invoke given the nonperceivability of God.

If, on the other hand, 'God' is a logically proper name whose   meaning is exhausted by its reference, a Kripkean rigid designator,  rather than a Russellian definite description in disguise, then what would make 'God' or a particular use of 'God' refer to God?

A particular use is presumably caused by an earlier use. But eventually there must be an initial use. Imagine Moses on Mt. Sinai. He has a profound mystical experience of a being who conveys to his
mind such locutions as "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me." Moses applies 'God' or 'Yahweh' to the being. But what makes the name the name of the being? One may say: the fact that the being or an effect of the being causes the use of the name. 

But a certain indeterminacy seems to creep in if we think of the semantic relation of referring as explicable in terms of causation. For is it the (mystical) experience of God that causes the use of 'God'? Or is it God himself who causes the use of 'God'? If the former, then 'God' refers to an experience had by Moses and not to God. Surely God is not an experience. But how can God be the cause of Moses' use of 'God'? Causes are events, God is not an event, so God cannot be a cause.

If these difficulties could be ironed out and a causal theory of names is tenable, and if the causal chain extends from Moses down to Christians and (later)to Muslims, then a case could be made that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all referring to the same God when they use 'God' and such equivalents as 'Yahweh' and 'Allah.'

So it looks like there is no easy answer to the opening question.  It depends on the resolution of intricate questions in the philosophy of language. 

Easter Morning Thoughts on 1 Corinthians 15:14

Biblia Vulgata: Si autem Christus non resurrexit, inanis est ergo praedicatio nostra, inanis est et fides vestra.

King James: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

Orthodox Christianity stands and falls with a contingent historical fact, the fact of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. If he rose from the dead, he is who is said he was and can deliver on his   promises. If not, then the faith of the Christian inanis est, is vain, void, empty, delusional.

Compare Buddhism. It too promises salvation of a sort. But the salvation it promises is not a promise by its founder that rests on the existence of the founder or on anything he did. For Christianity, history is essential, for Buddhism inessential. The historical Buddha is not a savior, but merely an example of a man who saved himself by realizing his inherent Buddha-nature. The idea of the Buddha is enough; his   historical existence unnecessary.  'Buddha,' like 'Christ,' is a title: it means 'the Enlightened One.'  Buddhism does not depend either on the existence of Siddartha, the man who is said to have become the Buddha, or on Siddartha's  becoming the Buddha.

Hence the Zen saying, "If you see the Buddha, kill him." I take that to mean that one does not need the historical Buddha, and that  cherishing any piety towards him may prove more hindrance than help.  Buddhism, as the ultimate religion of self-help, enjoins each to become a lamp unto himself. What is essential is the enlightenment that one either achieves or fails to achieve on one's own, an   enlightenment which is a natural possibility of all. If one works diligently enough, one can extricate oneself from the labyrinth of samsara.  Oner can achieve the ultimate goal on one's own, by one's own power.  There is no need for supernatural assistance.

Is this optimism justified? I remain open to Christianity's claims because I doubt the justification of self-help optimism. One works and works on oneself but makes little progress. That one needs help is   clear. That one can supply it from within one's own resources is unclear.  I know of no enlightened persons.  But I know of plenty of frauds, spiritual hustlers, and mountebanks.

Both Buddhism and Christianity are life-denying religions.  But while Christianity denies this life for the sake of a higher life elsewhere and elsewhen, Buddhism denies this life for the sake of extinction.  The solution to the problem of suffering is to so attenuate desire and aversion that one comes to the realization that one never existed in the first place.  Some solution.  And yet there is much to learn from Buddhism and its practices.  They are the two highest religions.  The two lowest are the religions of spiritual materialism, Judaism and Islam, with Islam at the very bottom of the hierarchy of great religions. 

Islam is shockingly crude, as crude as Buddhism is overrefined.  The Muslim is promised all the crass material pleasures on the far side that he is forbidden here, as if salvation consists of eating and drinking and endless bouts of  sexual intercourse.  Hence my term 'spiritual materialism.'  'Spiritual positivism' is also worth considering.  The Buddhist is no positivist but a nihilist: slavation though annihilation.

Admittedly, this is quick and dirty, but it is important to cut to the bone of the matter from time to time with no mincing of words.  For details see my Buddhism category.

Note: By 'orthodox' I do not have in mind Eastern Orthodoxy, but a Christianity that is not mystically interpreted, a Christianity in which, for example, the resurrection is not interpreted to mean the   attainment of Christ-consciousness or the realization of Christ-nature.

Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of  iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of  it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed  part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The  whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is not  more at least [at last?] than that of privation. This stage has to  be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron  is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real   proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

Christianity is the ultimate in "heterogeneity to the world," to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard.  God becomes man in a miserable outpost of the Roman empire, fully participates in the miseries of human embodiment, is rejected by the religious establishment and is sentenced to death by the political authorities, dying the worst sort of death the brutal Romans could devise.  Humanly absurd but divinely true?

The Christian ‘Anatta Doctrine’ of Lorenzo Scupoli

Buddhism and Christianity both enjoin self-denial. But Buddhism is more radical in that it connects self-denial with denial of the very existence of the self, whereas Christianity in its orthodox versions   presupposes the existence of the self: Christian self-purification falls short of self-elimination. Nevertheless, there are points of comparison between the 'No Self' doctrine of Buddhism and the   Christian doctrine of the self.

In his Combattimento Spirituale (1589), Lorenzo Scupoli writes:

     You my mind, are not mine: you were given me by God. Neither are
     the powers active within me — will, with its energy – mine. Nor
     does my feeling, my ability to enjoy life and all my surroundings
     belong to me. My body with all its functions and requirements,
     which determine our physical well-being, is not mine either….And
     I myself belong not to me, but to God. (Unseen Warfare, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995, p.   172)

Apart from the references to God, this meditation of Scupoli, of which the above is merely an excerpt, bears a striking resemblance to the one contained in the Anattalakkhana Sutta. Buddha there examines each of the khandas, body, feeling, perception, etc., and concludes with respect to each of them that "This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am." In Scupoli we encounter virtually the   same litany: body, feeling, mind . . . of all of which it is true that "This is not mine, etc." Of course, nothing depends on the exact taxonomy of personality-constituents. The point is that however one classifies the constituents of personality, no one of them, nor any combination of them, is veridically identifiable as one's very self. I say 'veridically,' since we do as a matter of fact (falsely) identify   ourselves with all manner of item both within us (feelings, memories, etc.) and without us (property, progeny, etc.) But these false self-identifications are part of what our ignorance/sinfullness consists in.

Thus Scupoli (who I take to be a representative Christian, and who is of interest here only as such) and Buddha agree with respect to the (negative) thesis that nothing in one's experience is veridically identifiable as one's very self. Thus nothing that we ordinarily take to be ourselves (our bodies, our thoughts, feelings, memories, etc.)  can in truth be one's self. But there is also similarity in their reasoning. One way Buddha reasons is as follows. If x (body, feeling, perception, etc.) were my very self, or were something that belonged to me, then I would have complete control over x. But it is evident that no x is such that I have complete control over x. Therefore, no x is either my self or anything that belongs to me. This could be called the 'complete control' argument. Scupoli has something similar:
     Let us remember that we can boast only of something which is a
     direct result of our own will and is done by us independently of
     anything else. But look how our actions proceed. How do they begin?
     Certain circumstances come together and lead to one action or
     another; or a thought comes to our mind to do something, and we do
     it. But the concurrence of circumstances does not come from us;
     nor, obviously, is the thought to do something our own; somebody
     suggests it. Thus, in such cases, the origin or birth of the
     thought to do something cannot or should not be an object of
     self-praise. Yet how many actions are of this kind? If we examine
     them conscientiously, we shall find that they almost all start in
     this way. So we have nothing to boast of. (174)

This passage suggests the following argument: One cannot justifiably take pride in anything (an action, a physical or mental attribute, etc.) unless one originates it 'independently of anything else.' But   nothing is such that one originates it in sublime independence of all else. Therefore, one cannot justifiably take pride in anything.

But does this amount to an argument against the self? It does, given the Buddhist assumption, crucial to the reasoning in the Anattalakkhana Sutta, that a self is an entity that has complete control over itself. Such a self could justifiably take pride in its actions and attributes. For it would be their fons et origo. So if one cannot justifiably take pride in any of one's actions or attributes, then one is not a self. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins  precisely because the proud person arrogates to himself a status he lacks, namely, the status of being a self in the sense in which this term is employed in the Anattalakkhana Sutta.

In sum, both Buddha and Scupoli are claiming that no one of us is a self for the reason than no one of us is in complete control of any of his actions or attributes. No one of the things which one normally takes to be oneself or to belong to oneself (e.g., one's body, habits, brave decisions, brilliant insights, etc.) is such that one has originated it autonomously and independently.

The main difference between Buddha and Scupoli, of course, is that the latter maintains that God gives us what we do not have under our control. Thus for Scupoli, what we do not have from ourselves, we have from another, and so have. But for Buddha, what we do not have from ourselves, we do not have at all.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

     Our plesance here is all vain glory,
     This fals world is but transitory,
     The flesche is brukle, the Feynd is slee;
     Timor mortis conturbat me.

     No stait in Erd here standis sicker;
     As with the wynd wavis the wicker,
     Wavis this wardlis vanitie;
     Timor mortis conturbat me.

     (William Dunbar c. 1460 — c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")

     Here lie I by the chancel door;
     They put me here because I was poor.
     The further in, the more you pay,
     But here lie I as snug as they.

     (Devon tombstone.)

     Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety,
     Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.

     Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"

     Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be found
     A lad to love you, girl, under the ground.
     Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're dead
     It's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.

     (Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)

     The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage in
     philosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, it
     would surely be strange for a man all through his life to desire
     only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it,
     when it has been his study and his desire for so long.

     Plato, Phaedo, St. 64, tr. F. J. Church

Kerouac October Quotation #30: The Holes in Jesus’ and Buddha’s Bags

Vanity of Duluoz, Book Thirteen, X, pp. 274-276, ellipses and bold emphases added:

Kerouac again.  .  .  .Mad Dog creation has a side of compassionate mercy in it . . . we have seen the brutal creation send us the Son of Man who, to prove that we should follow His example of mercy, brotherly love, charity, patience, gave Himself up without murmur to be sacrificed.  Otherwise we would have taken his example lightly.  Seeing that He really meant it right down to the cross, we are impressed.  [. . .] But we cant be redeemed "unless we believe," it says, or follow His example.  And who can do that?  Not even Count Leo Tolstoy who still had to live in a "humble hut" but on his own lands even tho he had signed over his "own lands" of course to his own family, and had the gall then, from that earthly vantage point of vaunt, to write The Kingdom of God is Within You.  If I, myself, for instance, were to try to follow Jesus' example I'd first have to give up my kind of drinking, which prevents me from thinking too much(like I'm doing in awful pain this morning), and so I'd go insane and go on public debt and be a pain to everybody in the blessed "community" or "society."  And I'd be furthermore bored to death by the knowledge that there is a hole even in Jesus' bag: and that hole is, where He says to the rich young man "Sell everything you have and give it tothe poor, and follow me," okay, where do we go now, wander and beg our food off poor hardworking householders?  and not even rich at that like that rich young man's mother? but poor and harried like Martha?  Martha had not "chosen the better part" when she cooked and slaved and cleaned house all day while her younger sister Mary  sat in the doorway like a modern beatnik with "square" parents talking to Jesus about "religion" and "redemption" and "salvation" and all that guck.  Were Jesus and young Mary McGee waiting for supper to be ready? While talking about redemption?  How can you be redeemed when you have to pass food in and out of your body's bag day in and day out, how can you be "saved" in a situation so sottish and flesh-hagged as that? (This was also the hole in Buddha's bag: he more or less said "It's well for Bodhisattva sages and Buddhas to beg for their food so as to teach the ordinary people of the world the humility of charity," ugh I say. No, the springtime bud I talked about with rain dew on its new green, it's the laugh of a maniac.  Birth is the direct cause of all pain and death, and a Buddha dying of dysentery at the age of eighty-three had only to say, finally, "Be ye lamps unto thyselves" — last words –"work out thy salvation with diligence," heck of a thing to say as he lay there in an awful pool of dysentery.  Spring is the laugh of a maniac, I say.

Schall on Belloc: Islam as a Christian Heresy

This is a thought-provoking essay. Excerpts with a bit of commentary:

Belloc’s thesis is that Islam began as a Christian heresy which retained the Jewish side of the faith, the Oneness and Omnipotence of God, but denied all the Christian aspects – the Incarnation, the divinity of Christ, who, as a result, became just a prophet. The denial of the church, the priesthood, and the sacraments followed. Islam succeeded because, in its own terms, it was a simple religion. It was easy to understand and follow its few doctrinal and devotional points.

Question: Given that Islam is much closer to Judaism than is Christianity, what explains the murderous ferocity of the Muslim hatred for Jews? One part of the explanation must be in terms of envy. Muslims feel profoundly diminished in their sense of worth by Jewish success and well-being. The Jews have made outstanding contributions to culture out of all proportion to their sparse numbers, whereas the hordes of Muslims have languished for the last four hundred years in backwardness and negativity. What else but envy could motivate the wild cries for the extermination of Jews and the destruction of Israel? Ahmadinejad, you will have noticed, is not a Palestinian, but an Iranian. When non-Palestinian Muslims call for the elimination of Israel, and prepare for decades of suicidal jihad, their 'beef' cannot be a relatively minor land dispute between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs.

Unlike Stanley Jaki, Belloc did not think that there was something in Islamic theology that militated against Islam’s ever becoming a major industrial or military-technological power by itself. (133). The fact that it never accomplished this transformation was for Belloc merely an accident, whereas for Jaki it was rooted in the relation of an absolute notion of divine will to its consequent denial of stable secondary causes. Jaki sees much of the rage in modern Islam to be due to its failure or inability to modernize itself by its own powers.6 Most of the weapons and equipment found in Muslim states are still foreign made, usually inferior, and paid for with oil money.

Islam apparently takes an occasionalist view of divine omnipotence. God is all-powerful not just in the sense that he has the power to do all, but in the sense that he exercises all the power that gets exercised. Thus secondary causes — so-called to distinguish them from the causa prima — are not causes at all, strictly speaking, but mere occasions for the exercise of divine causality, the only causality there is. If so, then everything is up to God, and nothing is up to secondary 'causes' including ourselves. When I lived in Turkey, I was struck by the prevalence of the belief in kismet, or fate. It is reflected in driving habits. Turks are arguably the worst drivers in the world. It is as if they don't believe that what happens on the road is largely up to them: kismet rules. When your number's up, it's up, and it doesn't matter what you do.

The very existence of Christianity is a blasphemy in Muslim terms if we insist on the truth of the Incarnation, that God became man.

In the eyes of Islam, Christianity is a form of idolatry: a mere man is identified with God. Schall quotes Belloc:

Mohammedanism was a heresy: that is the essential point to grasp before going any further. It began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church: it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine. Its vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was — not a denial, but an adaptation and misuse, of the Christian thing (76-77). Though it is not often attended to, saying Mass itself is forbidden in Saudi Arabia, even in private, and, even when permitted in other lands, it is restricted and constantly hemmed in by various formal and informal practices. Freedom of religion is not a concept that rises naturally in Muslim theory but it is a Western idea, even largely a modern Western idea. In Islam, the very practice of freedom of religion is thought to be a species of not giving submission to Allah, even where some non-Muslim churches are permitted.  Belloc thought that the Mohammedan temper was not tolerant. It was, on the contrary, fanatical and bloodthirsty. It felt no respect for, nor even curiosity about, those from whom it differed. It was absurdly vain of itself, regarding with contempt the high Christian culture about it. It still so regards it even today (90). The practical compromise in this situation was to allow the Christians to remain but within very confined areas and occupations. They had to pay a tribute. Many were gradually absorbed into Islam (91).

On Reconciling Creatio Ex Nihilo with Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit

This post examines Richard C. Potter's solution to the problem of reconciling creatio ex nihilo with ex nihilo nihil fit in his valuable article, "How To Create a Physical Universe Ex Nihilo," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 1, (January 1986), pp. 16-26. (Potter appears to have dropped out of sight, philosophically speaking, so if anyone knows what became of him, please let me know. The Philosopher's Index shows only three articles by him, the last of which appeared in 1986.)

I. THE PROBLEM

We first need to get clear about the problem. On classical conceptions, God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing.  He is not a Platonic demiurge who operates upon some preexistent stuff: he creates without it being the case that there is something out of which he creates.  Nor does God create out of himself, a notion that presumbaly would give aid and comfort to pantheism.  God creates out of nothing.  Given that God creates out of nothing, how is this consistent with the apparent truth that something cannot come from nothing? The latter, the principle of ex nihilo nihil fit, seems to be an intuitively self-evident metaphysically necessary truth. Let us assume that it is.   As metaphysically necessary, it is not a truth over which God has any control. Its truth-value is not within the purview of the divine will.  Our problem is to understand, if possible, how it can be true both that God creates out of nothing, and that out of nothing nothing comes.  Potter offers an ingenious solution.

Ex nihilo nihil fit is interpreted by Potter in terms of the following Principle of Creation by Compounding:

PCC. For any object O and time t, if O comes into being at t, then there exist some objects out of which O is composed and those objects existed prior to t.

Potter sees the problem as one of reconciling (PCC) with the following principle:

ENP. God created contingent objects in such a way that there was a time t1 at which contingent objects came into being, although there was no time prior to t1.

On the face of it, (PCC) and (ENP) are logically inconsistent.

Continue reading “On Reconciling Creatio Ex Nihilo with Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit“

East Versus West on the Trinity: The Filioque Controversy

Filioque Controversy Our meeting with the affable and stimulating  Dale Tuggy on June 20th at St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox monastery a little south of Florence, Arizona, got me thinking about the Trinity again.  So I pulled Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church off the shelf wherein I found a discussion of the differences between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman approaches to the doctrine.  Let's take a look.  Earlier this year, in January and February, we had a stimulating and deep-going discussion of Trinitarian topics which the interested reader can find here.  But there was no discussion of the Orthodox line.  It is high time to fill that lacuna.  (Image credit.)

East and West agree that there is exactly one God in three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  They also agree that the Father is neither born of anything nor proceeds from anything, that the Son is born of the Father but does not proceed from the Father, and that the Holy Spirit proceeds but is not born.  Bear in mind that 'born' and 'proceeds' in this context refer to relations that are internal to the triune Godhead, and are therefore eternal relations.  I hope it is also clear that neither of these relations is one of creation.  Each of the persons is eternal and uncreated.

The main difference between East and West concerns that from which the Holy Spirit proceeds.  The West says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque), whereas the East says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone.  One can of course question whether this dispute has any clear sense, but let's assume that it does for the space of this post.  I don't reckon there are any Stovian or other positivists hanging around this site.  (If there are, I pronounce my anathema upon them.)

The question is whether there is any reason to prefer the one view over the other.  Ware naturally thinks the Orthodox view superior (pp. 219-222).  He thinks it is superior because it is able to account for the unity of the three persons without making of this unity something impersonal.  His reasoning is as follows.  The tripersonal God is one God, not three Gods.  So the question arises as to the unity of the Godhead.  What is the ground of God's unity?  There is one God because there is one Father, the Father being the 'cause' or 'source' of Godhead, the principle (arche) of unity among the three.  The Orthodox speak of the "monarchy of the Father."  The other two persons originate from the Father.  Because the principle of unity is the Father, and the Father is one of the divine persons, the principle of unity is personal in nature.  So although there are three persons in one God, the unity of these three persons is itself a person, namely, the Father.

The Western view, however, issues in the result that the principle of unity is impersonal.  The reasoning is along the following lines.  If the Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son, then "the Father ceases to be the unique source of Godhead, since the Son is also a source." (219)  Consequently, "…Rome finds its principle of unity in the substance or essence which all three persons share." (219)  This implies that, on the Roman Catholic view, the principle of unity is impersonal.  (I am merely reporting Ware's reasoning here, not endorsing it.)

And that, Ware maintains, is not good.  "Late Scholastic theology, emphasizing as it does the essence at the expense of the persons, comes near to turning God into an abstract idea."  (222)  The concrete and personal God with whom one can have a direct and living encounter gets transmogrified into a God of the philosophers (as opposed to the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), an impersonal being whose existence needs to be proved by metaphysical arguments.

And so the Orthodox "regard the filioque as dangerous and heretical. Filioquism confuses the persons, and destroys the proper balance between unity and diversity in the Godhead." (222) God is stripped of concrete personality and made into an abstract essence.  And that's not all. The Roman view gives the Holy Spirit short shrift with the result that his role in the church and in the lives of believers is downplayed.  What's more, this subordination of the Holy Spirit, together with an overemphasis on the divine unity, has deleterious consequences for ecclesiology.  As a result of filioquism, the church in the West has become too worldly an institution, and the excessive emphasis on divine unity has led to too much centralization and too great an emphasis on papal authority.  It is worth noting in this connection that the Orthodox reject papal infallibility while accepting the infallibility of the church.

You can see, then, that for the Orthodox  the filioque is quite a big deal: it is not a mere theological Spitzfindigkeit.

Ware's exposition — which I assume is a faithful representation of the Orthodox position — saddles filioquism with a nasty dilemma: either ditheism or semi-Sabellianism.  For if the Son as well as the Father is an arche, a principle of unity in the Godhead, then the upshot is ditheism, two-God-ism.  But if it is said that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son tamquam ex/ab uno principio, 'as from one principle,' then, as the Orthodox see it, the Father and the Son are confused and semi-Sabellianism is the upshot.  (221)

Sabellianism or modalism is the view that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are modes or aspects of the deity.  The East sees semi-Sabellianism in the West insofar as the Western view, in avoiding ditheism, merges Father and Son into one principle so that they become mere modes or aspect of that one principle.

That's the lay of the land as seen from the East.  I have been concerned in this post with exposition only.  Adjudication can wait for later. (He said magisterially.)

 

Milan Kundera’s Misunderstanding of the Basic Thesis of Christian Anthropology: Imago Dei

In Giles Fraser's excellent Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge 2002, p. 140) I came across the following quotation from Milan Kundera's Art of the Novel:

When I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children and illustrated in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God standing on a cloud. He was an old man with eyes, nose, and a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines. But that thought always gave me fright, because even though I had come from a family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious. Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, as a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image – and God has intestines! – or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.  The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus “ate, drank, but did not defecate.” (emphasis added)

It is surprising that Kundera continues to endorse as an adult his childish misunderstanding of the imago dei doctrine.  Kundera's alternative rests on the false assumption that the only likeness between man and God could be a physical likeness.  

Kundera's reasoning appears to be like this:

1. Man is made in God’s image.
2. Man is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.
Therefore
3. God is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.

The incompatibility of God and excrement that the young Kundera rightly perceived is logically comptabile with the imago dei doctrine.  Now if Jesus Christ was wholly man, as orthodoxy maintains, then he did defecate.  But this presents no problem in addition to the problems already raised by the Incarnation doctrine itself.

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.

Divine Simplicity and Truthmakers: Notes on Brower

1. One of the entailments of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) is that God is identical to: God's omniscience, God's omnipotence, and in general God's X-ness, where 'X' ranges over the divine attributes.  And it is easy to see that if God = God's F-ness, and God = God's G-ness, then (by transitivity of identity) God's F-ness = God's G-ness.  I suggest that we use 'divine attribute' to refer to those properties of God that are both essential and intrinsic.  The problem, of course, is to make sense of these identities given the fact that, prima facie, they do not make sense.  The pattern is the same as with Trinity and Incarnation.  These doctrines imply identities which, on the face of it, beggar understanding.  It thus falls to the philosopher of religion to try to render coherent that which, on the face of it, is incoherent.

2. One of the questions that arise when we try to make sense of DDS concerns which category of entity such phrases as 'God's omniscience' pick out.  One possibility is that such phrases pick out properties, whether universal (multiply exemplifiable) properties or particular (not multiply exemplifiable) properties, also known as tropes. But this leads to trouble as Brower points out.  For if God is identical either to omniscience or to his omniscience, then God is identical to a property — which sounds absurd: how can God, a person, be a property?  Properties are predicable entities, but God is an individual and so not predicable.  Properties are exemplifiable entities (whether multiply or non-multiply); but God is an individual and so not exemplifiable.  Properties are abstract (causally inert)  whereas God is concrete (causally active/passive).  No property is a person, but God is a person.  No property creates or knows or loves.  These are some hastily sketched reasons for thinking that God cannot be identical to his properties.

3. Jeffrey E. Brower forwards an interesting proposal.  He suggests that such phrases as 'God's nature,' 'God's goodness' and 'God's power' refer to "entities of a broadly functional type — namely, truthmakers." (Simplicity and Aseity, sec. 2)  The idea is that 'God's omniscience' refers to the trruthmaker of 'God is omniscient' or perhaps to the truthmaker of the proposition expressed by 'God is omniscient.'  If (Fregean) propositions are the primary truthbearers, then (tokenings of) declarative sentences that express such propositions can be said to be secondary truthbearers.  I trust that it is clear that truthbearers and truthmakers are not to be confused.  One key difference is that while some truthbearers are are false, no truthmaker is false.  Truth and falsity are properties of certain representations (propositions, declarative sentences, beliefs, judgments, etc.)  whereas truthmakers are the ontological grounds of some true truthbearers.  If I understand Brower's view, it is not only that truthmakers are neither true nor false — every TM theorist will hold this — but also that truthmakers are not at all proposition-like.  By contrast, I follow D. M. Arstrong in holding that truthmakers must have a proposition-like structure.  But more on this in a moment.

4. Roughly, a truthmaker is whatever plays a certain role or performs a certain function; it is whatever makes true a true truthbearer.  The 'truthmaker intuition' — which I share with Brower — is that a sentence such as 'Tom is blogging' cannot just be true; there is need of some worldly entity to 'make' it true, to serve as the ontological ground of its truth, to 'verify' it in an ontological, not epistemological, sense of this term.  To say that some or all truthbearers need truthmakers is not yet to specify which sort of entity plays the truthmaker role.  Among philosophers who accept the need for truthmakers there is disagreement about the ontological category to which they belong. 

 Brower says rather incautiously that the functional characterization of truthmakers "places no restriction on the specific nature or ontological category to which a truthmaker can belong." (sec 2.1)  That can't be right.  Surely there are some restrictions.  For one thing, a truthmaker cannot be a Fregean proposition for the simple reason that such items are among the items made true by truthmakers.  And the same goes for declarative sentences, beliefs, and judgments.  My belief that the cat is asleep is either true or false and as such is a truthbearer.  It is in need of a truthmaker but is not itself one.  Of course, the fact of my believing that the cat is asleep can serve as truthmaker for the sentence ' BV now believes that the cat is asleep'  if concrete facts are admitted as truthmakers – but that is something else again.  So not just anything can be a truthmaker.  Charitably interpreted, what Brower is telling us is that TM theorists are allowed some ontological latitude when it comes to specifying which category of entity is fit to play the truthmaker role. 

5. Let us note that if a true Fregean proposition p entails a Fregean proposition q, then one could say that the first 'makes true' the second.  And so one could speak of the first as a 'truthmaker' of the second.  But this is not what is meant  by 'truthmaking' in these discussions despite the fact that p broadly logically necessitates q.   What is intended is a relation of broadly logical necessitation that connects a nonpropositional entity (but on some theories a proposition-like entity) to a propositional entity, or more precisely, to an entity that can serves as the bearer or vehicle of a truth-value.  As I see it, the entailment relation and the truthmaking relation are species of broadly logical necessitation; but truthmaking is not entailment.  Entailment will never get you 'outside the circle of propositions'; but that is exactly what truthmaking is supposed to do.  A truthmaker is an ontological, not propositional or representational truth-ground.  Philosophers who are attracted to truthmakers typically have a realist sense that certain of our representations need to be anchored in reality.

Brower sees it a little differently.  He would agree with me that entailment and truthmaking cannot be identical, but he thinks of it as "a form of broadly logical necessitation or entailment" and says that entailment is necessary but not sufficient for truthmaking. (Sec. 2.1)  So Brower seems to be maintaining that while there is more to truthmaking than entailment, every truthmaker entails the truth it makes true.  But this makes little or no sense.  Entailment is a relation defined on propositions.  If x entails y, then you can be sure that x and y are propositions or at least proposition-like entities, whether these be sentences or judgments or beliefs or even concrete states of affairs such as the fact of (not the fact that) Peter's being tired, which concrete fact contains Peter himself as constituent, warts and all.  But for Brower, as we will see in a moment, concrete individuals such as Socrates, entities that are neither propositions nor proposition-like, can serve as truthmakers.  As far as I can see, it makes no sense to say that Socrates entails a proposition.  It makes no sense because entailment is defined in terms of truth, and no individual can be true or false.  To say that p entails q is to say that it is impossible that p be true and q false.  Since it makes no sense to say of an individual that it is true, it makes no sense to say of an individual that it entails a proposition.  So truthmaking cannot be a type or species of entailment if individuals are truthmakers.

6.  But setting aside for the moment the above worry, if it makes sense to say that God is the truthmaker of 'God is omniscient,' and if 'God's omniscience' refers to this truthmaker, then it will be clear how God can be identical to God's omniscience.  For then 'God is identical to his omniscience' is no more problematic than 'God is God.' It will also be clear how God's omniscience can be identical to God's omnipotence. 

7.  But can it really be this easy to show that DDS is coherent? Although I agree with Brower that some truthbearers need truthmakers, I don't see how truthmakers could be ontologically structureless individuals or 'blobs' as opposed to 'layer-cakes' in Armstrong's terminology.  By 'ontologically structureless' I mean lacking in propositional or proposition-like structure.  Consider the following true intrinsic essential predicative sentences: 'Socrates is human,' 'Socrates is an animal,' Socrates is a material object,' 'Socrates exists,' and 'Socrates is self-identical.'  (It is not obvious that 'Socrates exists' is an essential predication inasmuch as Socrates exists contingently, but let's not enter into this thorny thicket just now.)

Brower's claim is that in each of these cases (which parallel the true intrinsic essential predications of divine attributes) the truthmaker is the concrete individual Socrates himself.  Thus Socrates is the truthmaker of 'Socrates is human' just as God is the truthmaker of 'God is omniscient.'  Unfortunately, no individual lacking propositional or proposition-like structure can serve as a truthmaker as I argued in #5 above.  Just as it makes no sense to say that Socrates is true, it makes no sense to say that Socrates entails the proposition expressed by 'Socrates is human.' 

There is more to say, but tomorrow's another day.  Time to punch the clock.

Another Example of a Necessary Being Depending for its Existence on a Necessary Being

The Father and the Son are both necessary beings.  And yet the Father 'begets' the Son.  Part, though not the whole, of the notion of begetting here must be this: if x begets y, then y depends for its existence on x.  If that were not part of the meaning of 'begets'' in this context, I would have no idea what it means.  But how can a necessary being depend for its existence on a necessary being?  I gave a non-Trinitarian example yesterday, but it was still a theological example. Now I present a non-theological example.

I assume that there are mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sets.  And I assume that numbers are necessary beings.  (There are powerful arguments for both assumptions.) Now consider the set S = {1, 3, 5} or any set, finite or infinite, the members of which are all of them necessary beings, whether numbers, propositions, whatever.  Both S and its membership are necessary beings.  If you are worried about the difference between members and membership, we can avoid that wrinkle by considering the singleton set T = {1}.

T and its sole member are both necessary beings.  And yet it seems obvious to me that one depends on the other for its existence:  the set is existentially dependent on the member, and not vice versa.  The set exists because — though this is not an empirically-causal use of 'because' — the members exist, and not the other way around.   Existential dependence is an asymmetrical relation.  I suppose you either share this intuition or you don't.  In a more general form, the intuition is that collections depend for their existence on the things collected, and not vice versa.  This is particularly obvious if the items collected can also exist uncollected.  Think of Maynard's stamp collection.  The stamps in the collection will continue to exist if Maynard sells them, but then they will no longer form Maynard's collection. The point is less obvious if we consider the set of stamps in Maynard's collection.  That set cannot fail to exist as long as all the stamps exist.  Still, it seems to me that the set exists because the members exist and not vice versa.

And similarly in the case of T.  {1} depends existentially on 1 despite the fact that there is no possible world in which the one exists without the other.  If, per impossibile, 1 were not to exist, then {1} would not exist either. But it strikes me as false to say: If, per impossibile, {1} were not to exist, then 1 would not exist either.  These counterfactuals could be taken to unpack the sense in which the set depends on the member, but not vice versa.

It therefore is reasonable to hold that two necessary beings can be such that one depends for its existence on the other.  And so one cannot object to the notion of the Father 'begetting'  the Son by saying that no necessary being can be existentially dependent upon a necessary being.  Of course, this is not to say that other objections cannot be raised.