Ken Hochstetter of the College of Southern Nevada kindly sent me some comments on my SEP Divine Simplicity entry. They are thoughtful and challenging and deserve a careful reply. My remarks are in blue. I have added some subheadings.
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This just over the transom:
I hope you don’t mind my seeking your help on an issue related to the history of philosophy. I and a few friends are have a disagreement re: the origin of belief in divine apatheia.
In Manana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective, Justo Gonzalez discusses the political motivations behind the origin and development of the concept. His claim is that belief in divine impassibility merely reflects the desire for permanence (of power) on the part of the ruling class so that Athenian politics is responsible for the philosophical development of the belief, a projection onto God of the political aspirations of the elite.
The question of how apatheia got adopted/revised by Christians isn’t so much my concern at this point (as legitimate a question as it is). I’m interested in Gonzalez’s history and whether and to what extent he’s right in supposing apatheia was a projection onto the divine being of the political aspirations for the permanence of the city and its ruling class.Does that ring true with your understanding? Thoughts?
A reader asks:
Are all infinite regresses (regressions?) vicious? Why the pejorative
label? Of the many things I don't understand, this must be near the
top of my list, and it's an ignorance that dates back to my undergrad
Intro to Philosophy days. When I first read the Thomistic cosmological
proofs, I found myself wondering why Aquinas had such trouble
countenancing the possibility that, as the lady says, "it's turtles
all the way down."
Without a first, there can't be a second… so what? It doesn't follow
that there must be a first element to a series. What makes a
temporally infinite series (of moments, causes/effects, etc.)
impossible?
No, not all infinite regresses are vicious. Some are, if not 'virtuous,' at least innocuous or benign. The term 'benign' is standardly used. The truth regress is an example of a benign infinite regress. Let p be any true proposition. And let 'T' stand for the operator 'It is true that ( ).' Clearly, p entails T(p). For example, *Snow is white* entails *It is true that snow is white.* The operation is iterable. So T(p) entails T(T(p)). And so on, ad infinitum or ad indefinitum if you prefer. The resulting infinite series is unproblematic. Whether you call this a progression or a regression, it doesn't cause any conceptual trouble. Nor does it matter whether you think that infinity is potential only, or hold to actual infinities. Either way, the truth regress is a nice clear example of an infinite regress that is benign.
So some infinite regresses are benign.
Setting aside the lady and her turtles, suppose, contrary to current cosmology, that the universe has an infinite past, and that each phase of the universe is caused by an earlier phase. Suppose further that there is nothing problematic in the notion of an actual (as opposed to potential) infinity, and that there is a good answer to the question of how, given the actual infinity of the past, we ever arrived at the present moment. Granting all that, the infinite regress of causes is benign.
But note that one cannot explain why the universe exists by saying that it always existed. For even if there is no time at which it did not exist, there remains the question why it exists at all. The universe is contingent: it might not have existed. So even if it exists at every time with earlier phases causing later phases, that does not explain why it exists at all.
To say that the universe always existed is to say that it has no temporal beginning, no temporally first cause. But this gives no answer to the question why this temporally beginningless universe exists in the first place.
Here is where the theist invokes God. God is the ontologically, not temporally, first cause. Now if Mill asks, "But what causes God?" the answer is that God is a necessary being. If God were a contingent being, then a vicious infinite regress would arise. For one cannot get an ultimate explanation of U if one invokes a contingent G. And if there were an infinite regress of Gs, the whole series would be without ultimate explanation. Thts is true whether the regress is potentially infinite or actually infinite.
If we compare the truth regress with the regress just mentioned, we can perhaps see what makes the latter vicious. The viciousness consists in the failure to satisfy the need for an explanation. P if and only it is true that p. No one will take either side of this biconditional as explaining the other. But explanation comes in when you ask why the universe U exists. If you say that U exists because G caused it to exist, then you can reasonably ask: what caused G? The classical answer is that G is causa sui, i.e., a necessary being. The buck stops here. If, on the other hand, you say that G is contingent, then it cannot be causa sui, in which case the regress is up and running. Because the explanatory demand cannot be satisfied by embarking upon the regress, the regress is said to be vicious.
To answer the reader's question, there is perhaps nothing vicious about a temporally infinite regress of empirical causes. But that gives us no explanation of why a temporally infinite universe exists in the first place.
Schopenhauer, Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde (1813), sec. 20:
. . . causa prima ist, eben so gut wie causa sui, eine contradictio in adjecto, obschon der erstere Ausdruck viel häufiger gebraucht wird, als der letztere, und auch mit ganz ernsthafter, sogar feierlicher Miene ausgesprochen zu werden pflegt, ja Manche, insonderheit Englische Reverends, recht erbaulich die Augen verdrehn, wenn sie, mit Emphase und Rührung, the first cause, — diese contradictio in adjecto, — aussprechen. Sie wissen es: eine erste Ursache ist gerade und genau so undenkbar, wie die Stelle, wo der Raum ein Ende hat, oder der Augenblick, da die Zeit einen Anfang nahm. Denn jede Ursache ist eine Veränderung, bei der man nach der ihr vorhergegangenen Veränderung, durch die sie herbeigeführt worden, notwendig fragen muß, und so in infinitum, in infinitum!
I quote this passage in German because I do not have the English at hand, but also because the pessimist's German is very beautiful and very clear, and closer to English than any other philosophical German I have ever read.
Schopenhauer's claim is that a first cause (causa prima) is unthinkable (undenkbar) because every cause is an alteration (Veränderung) which follows upon a preceding alteration. For if every cause is an alteration that follows upon a preceding alteration, then the series of causes is infinite in the past direction, and there is no temporally first cause.
And so 'first cause' is a contradictio in adiecto: the adjective 'first' contradicts the noun 'cause.' Charitably interpreted, however, Schopenhauer is not making a semantic point about word meanings. What he really wants to say is that the essence of causation is such as to disallow both a temporally first cause and a logically/metaphysically first cause. There cannot be a temporally first cause because every cause is an alteration that follows upon a preceding alteration. And there cannot be a logically/metaphysically first cause for the same reason: if every cause and effect is an alteration in a substance then no substance can be a cause or an effect. Causation is always and everywhere the causation of alterations in existing things by alterations in other existing things; it is never the causation of the existing of things. For Schopenhauer, as I read him, the ultimate substrates of alterational change lie one and all outside the causal nexus. If so, there cannot be a causal explanation of the sheer existence of the world.
Here I impute to Schopenhauer the following argument:
1. The relata of the causal relation are changes.
2. Every change is an alteration.
3. Every alteration presupposes a substrate of alteration that does not change in respect of its existence and identity.
4. Some, but not all, substrates of alteration are non-ultimate, where a non-ultimate substrate is one whose coming into existence or passing out of existence is reducible to the alteration of an already existing substrate or substrates; hence there must be ultimate substrates of alteration.
5. If there are ultimate substrates of alteration, then they do not come into existence or pass away.
6. Because changes occur, there are ultimate substrates of alteration.
7. There are ultimate substrates of change that do not come into existence or pass away, and are thus sempiternal. (5, 6)
8. The existence of these sempiternal substrata are at the basis of all causation.
Therefore
9. The existence of the ultimate substrata of change cannot have a cause, divine or otherwise.
Therefore
10. Cosmological arguments, presupposing as they do that causation of existence makes sense, are one and all unsound.
What can we say in critique of this argument? (2) may be questioned. If every change is an alteration, then nothing can come into existence except by the alteration of some thing or things already in existence. That implies that there cannot be creation ex nihilo. But then Schopenhauer's argument may be said to beg the question against the theist at line (2) — unless there is some independent way of supporting (2).
But is creation ex nihilo a change? In what? It cannot be a change in some stuff out of which God creates. For then the creation would not be ex nihilo. God is not a demiurge. Nor can it be a real change in God if God is unchanging. One might just say that the creation out of nothing of contingent beings is a change in the way things are. But this is tricky because this change would appear to have to be an atemporal change. There could be time without change, but how could there be change without time?
Consider the possible worlds in which no contingent beings exist and compare them with C, a world in which contingent beings exist. Suppose God causes C to be actual. Suppose further that C — like all worlds — is a maximal Fregean proposition or a maximal Chisholmian state of affairs. Now we have a substrate of exnihilation, namely, the the maximal proposition or state of affairs C. It is not that C is created, but that C is made actual. But it is not as if C 'goes' from being unactual to being actual. 'Going' is a transition, and transition takes time, and indeed time as involving temporal becoming. Given that time is contingent, there is no time at which there are no contingent beings and a later time at which there are. Divine creation is presumably not in time, but of time and of everything else that is contingent.
Well, perhaps we could introduce a notion of modal change which would be analogous to temporal change as the latter is construed by B-theorists:
Reality changes just in case it has different properties in different possible worlds.
Reality changes from not containing contingent beings to containing them iff there are possible worlds in which there are, and possible worlds in which there are not, contingent beings.
If every change requires a cause, then presumably the change just mentioned requires a divine cause.
To review the dialectic: if creatures are effects of a cause, and effects are changes, and every change requires a substrate, then what is the subject or substrate of exhihilation? What is creatio ex nihilo a change in? My very tentative suggestion is that it is a change in reality in accordance with the definitions just given.
Since the cause of this change cannot itself be a change, (1) must be rejected as well.
I have in my hands the Winter 2014 issue of American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. It contains (pp. 149-161) my review essay on McCann's 2012 Creation and the Sovereignty of God. Many thanks to Peter Lupu and Hugh McCann for comments and discussion, and to the editors for allowing me to expand my review into a review article.
I see that the same issue contains a reply by Peter Dillard to Ed Feser anent James F. Ross' case for the immateriality of abstract thinking. I'll have to study that for sure.
Another in the NYT Opiniator series. This one is particularly bad and illustrates what is wrong with later Continental philosophy. Earlier Continental philosophy is good: Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, early Heidegger, early Sartre, and a whole host of lesser lights including Stumpf, Twardowski, Ingarden, Scheler, von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, et al. The later movement, however, peters out into bullshit with people like Derrida who, in the pungent words of John Searle, "gives 'bullshit' a bad name."
This is the third in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is John D. Caputo, a professor of religion and humanities at Syracuse University and the author of “The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion.”
Gary Gutting: You approach religion through Jacques Derrida’s notion of deconstruction, which involves questioning and undermining the sorts of sharp distinctions traditionally so important for philosophy. What, then, do you think of the distinction between theism, atheism and agnosticism?
John Caputo: I would begin with a plea not to force deconstruction into one of these boxes. I consider these competing views as beliefs, creedal positions, that are inside our head by virtue of an accident of birth. There are the people who “believe” things from the religious traditions they’ve inherited; there are the people who deny them (the atheism you get is pegged to the god under denial); and there are the people who say, “Who could possibly know anything about all of that?” To that I oppose an underlying form of life, not the beliefs inside our head but the desires inside our heart, an underlying faith, a desire beyond desire, a hope against hope, something which these inherited beliefs contain without being able to contain.
One could be forgiven for stopping right here, though I read the whole thing. First of all, it is simply false to maintain that one is a theist or an atheist or an agnostic "by virtue of an accident of birth." Some are brought up theists and become atheists or agnostics. Some are brought atheists and become theists or agnostics. And so one. It is also wrong for Caputo to imply that those brought up theist or atheist can have no reasons for their theism or atheism. Then there is the silly opposing of beliefs and desires, head and heart. And the talk of a form of life as if it does not involve beliefs. Then the empty rhetoric of desire beyond desire. Finally, the gushing ends with the contradictory "contain without being able to contain."
The interview doesn't get any better after this. But there is an insight that one can pick out of the crap pile of mush and gush: there is more to religion than doctrinal formulations: the reality to which they point cannot be captured in theological propositions.
Retractio 3/11. Joshua H. writes,
As one of your loyal "continental"-trained readers, I must say I agree that Caputo's performance in the NYT elicits a rather terrible odor of self-congratulatory BS. But surely "later" continental philosophy as a whole doesn't suffer from this unfortunate illness?! Gadamer, Frankfurt School, Ricoeur, among others? Surely Gadamer-Habermas and Habermas-Ratzinger are some of the most interesting debates the discipline has produced in the last 50+ years?
As someone who, back in the day, spent his philosophical time mainly on Gadamer and Habermas and Adorno and Horkheimer and Levinas and Ricoeur, et al., I must agree that Joshua issues a well-taken corrective to what I hastily wrote above at the end of a long day of scribbling. The later movement cannot be dismissed the way I did above. I would, however, maintain that the quality declined as the movement wore on and wears on.
I will also hazard the observation, sure to anger many, that just as one becomes more conservative and less liberal with age, and rightly so, one becomes more analytic and less Continental, and rightly so. It is the same with enthusiasm for Ayn Rand and Nietzsche. Adolescents are thrilled, but as maturity sets in the thrill subsides, or ought to.
I present some reasons for my aversion to much of the later Continental stuff — an apt word — in The Trouble with Continental Philosophy: Badiou.
I recall a remark by Hans-Georg Gadamer in his Philosophische Lehrjahre to the effect that the harvest years of a scholar come late. That was certainly true in the case of the Australian philosopher Barry Miller (1923-2006). His philosophical career culminated in a burst of productivity. In roughly the last decade of his long life he published a trilogy in philosophical theology: From Existence to God (1992), A Most Unlikely God (1996), and The Fullness of Being (2002). I reviewed the first two in the journals and made substantial comments on a manuscript version of the third. Miller kindly acknowledged my help at the end of the preface of the 2002 book. So I was pleased to be of some small service on Miller's behalf by refereeing Kremer's manuscript for Oxford UP and supplying the blurb below when it was accepted by Bloomsbury.
“Barry Miller’s philosophical theology clearly shows how a philosopher can think rigorously about God without caving into fashionable and facile refutations of theism. In this study of his writings, Elmar Kremer provides an exemplary account of his sophisticated arguments while discussing their value and cogently defending them against a number of objections. Kremer’s welcome book is both a fine introduction to Miller and a significant contribution to philosophy of religion.” – Brian Davies, Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University, USA,
“Barry Miller was a brilliant philosophical theologian with an original argument for, and development of, the Thomist idea of God as the entity whose essence is existence. Unfortunately Miller's ideas have not been given the attention they deserve. In part this is because he made few concessions to the reader. In this book Elmar J. Kremer provides the 'clear, well-developed exposition' that Miller's ideas deserve. I recommended it highly to all interested in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, or theology.” – Peter Forrest, Retired Professor of Philosophy, University of New England, Australia,
“Barry Miller's penetrating work in philosophical theology has not received the attention it deserves. It is therefore with pleasure that I recommend the first book-length treatment of Miller's work, Elmar J. Kremer's Analysis of Existing: Barry Miller's Approach to God.” – William F. Vallicella, Retired Professor of Philosophy, USA,
“Kremer's book consists of philosophically acute, painstaking scholarship. It is a very fine introduction to Miller’s highly original work on the metaphysics of theism.” – Bruce Langtry, Senior Fellow in Philosophy, The University of Melbourne, Australia,
Gary Gutting recently interviewed Alvin Plantinga in the pages of The New York Times and brought up the business about Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot. The following response of Gutting to Plantinga comes early on in the interview:
G.G.: You say atheism requires evidence to support it. Many atheists deny this, saying that all they need to do is point out the lack of any good evidence for theism. You compare atheism to the denial that there are an even number of stars, which obviously would need evidence. But atheists say (using an example from Bertrand Russell) that you should rather compare atheism to the denial that there’s a teapot in orbit around the sun. Why prefer your comparison to Russell’s?
Russell's comparison has long struck me as lame, and so I want to revisit and rethink this topic. What follows is an old post from August 2010 amended and substantially expanded:
In his recent NYT Opinionator piece, On Dawkins's Atheism, Notre Dame's Gary Gutting writes, describing the "no arguments argument" of some atheists:
To say that the universe was created by a good and powerful being who cares about us is an extraordinary claim, so improbable to begin with that we surely should deny it unless there are decisive arguments for it (arguments showing that it is highly probable). Even if Dawkins’ arguments against theism are faulty, can’t he cite the inconclusiveness of even the most well-worked-out theistic arguments as grounds for denying God’s existence?
He can if he has good reason to think that, apart from specific theistic arguments, God’s existence is highly unlikely. Besides what we can prove from arguments, how probable is it that God exists? Here Dawkins refers to Bertrand Russell’s example of the orbiting teapot. We would require very strong evidence before agreeing that there was a teapot in orbit around the sun, and lacking such evidence would deny and not remain merely agnostic about such a claim. This is because there is nothing in our experience suggesting that the claim might be true; it has no significant intrinsic probability.
But suppose that several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot and, later, a number of reputable space scientists interpreted certain satellite data as showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object, even though other space scientists questioned this interpretation. Then it would be gratuitous to reject the hypothesis out of hand, even without decisive proof that it was true. We should just remain agnostic about it.
The claim that God exists is much closer to this second case. There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being, and there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence. Therefore, an agnostic stance seems preferable to atheism.
I have a serious problem with Gutting's response to the Russell-Dawkins tag team. Gutting concedes far too much in his reply, namely, that it even makes sense to compare the claim that there is an orbiting teapot with the claim that God exists. Instead of attacking this comparison as wrongheaded from the outset, Gutting in effect concedes its aptness when he points out that, just as there could be (inconclusive) scientific evidence of a celestial teaspot, there could be (inconclusive) experiential and argumentative evidence for the existence of God. So let me try to explain why I think that the two existence claims ('God exists' and 'A celestial teapot exists') are radically different.
If someone asserts that there there is a celestial teapot orbiting the Sun, or an angry unicorn on the far side of the Moon, or that 9/11 was an 'inside job,' one will justifiably demand evidence. "It's possible, but what's your evidence for so outlandish a claim?" It is the same with God, say many atheists. The antecedent probability of God's existence, they think, is on a par with the extremely low antecedent probability of there being a celestial teapot or an irate lunar unicorn, a 'lunicorn,' if you will.
But this is to assume something that a sophisticated theist such as Thomas Aquinas would never grant, namely, that God, if he exists, is just another being among the totality of beings. For Aquinas, God is not an ens (a being) but esse ipsum subsistens (self-subsistent Being). God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. Admittedly, this is not an easy notion; but if the atheist is not willing to grapple with it, then his animadversions are just so many grapplings with a straw man.
Why can't God be just another being among beings in the way an orbiting teapot would be just another being among beings were it to exist? I hope it is clear that my point is not that while a teapot is a material object, God is not. That's true, of course, but my point cuts much deeper: if God exists, he exists in a way dfferent from the way contingent beings exist.
First of all, if God exists, then God is the metaphysical ground of the existence of every contingent being. Every such being on classical theism is continuously maintained in existence by the exercise of divine power. Thus every contingent being is radically dependent for its existence on divine activity. The same cannot be said about an orbiting teapot. If 'ontic' means pertaining to beings, and 'ontological' means pertaining to the Being of beings (the esse of entia), then 'God exists' is both ontic and ontolological. It says that there is a being possessing such-and-such divine attributes, but it also says something about the Being of what is other than God, namely, that its Being is createdness, a form of continuous ontological dependency. 'An orbiting teapot exists,' however is merely an ontic claim. It says or implies nothing about the Being of anything distinct from it. Now this difference between an ontic-ontological claim and a merely ontic one strikes me as very important. It is a difference that throws a spanner into the works of such facile comparisons as Russell's.
Second, on some accounts necessarily existent abstracta are also dependent on God. If (Fregean) propositions are divine thoughts then they are dependent on God despite their metaphysical necessity. The exist necessarily, but they have their necessity not from themselves but from another. Not so for the teapots and the unicorns.
Third, God is not only the ultimate ground of all beings, both contingent and necessary (except himself); he is also the ultimate ground of the intelligibility of all beings, of their aptness to be understood by us or anyone, their aptness to be subjects of true predications. Propositional or sentential truth is made possible by ontic truth, the intelligibility of that which is veridically represented by true propositions. But I don't think one would want to say that an angry unicon on the far side of the moon is the ultimate ground of intelligibility.
Fourth, God is the ultimate source of all value.
Fifth, God is the all-pervasive One, immanent in each thing yet transcendent of all things. This is not true of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility and its value snd its unity in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic purely spiritual being, a being who does not have existence like a teapot but is its existence
So, on a sophisticated conception, God cannot be just one more being among beings. The Source of being is not just another thing sourced. The ground of intelligibility is not just another intelligible item. The Thinker behind every thought is not just another thought. The locus and source of all value is not just another valuable thing. The One is not just another member of the Many.
These differences between God classically conceived and outlandish specimens of space junk is connected with the fact that one can argue from general facts about the universe to the existence of God, but not from such facts to the existence of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. Thus there are various sorts of cosmological argument that proceed a contingentia mundi to a ground of contingent beings. But there is no similar a posteriori argument to a celestial teapot. There are also arguments to God from truth, from consciousness, from apparent design, from desire, from morality, and others besides. But as far as I know there are no similar arguments to teapots or unicorns or flying spaghetti monsters.
The very existence of these arguments shows two things.
People like Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the classical theist's assertions. To sum up. (i) God is not a gratuitous posit in that there are many detailed arguments for the existence of God; (ii) God is not a physical being; (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings. In all three respects, God is quite unlike a celestial teapot, a lunar uncorn, an invisible hippopotamus, and suchlike concoctions.
God is a not a being among beings, but the very Being of beings. To deny God, then, is not like denying an orbiting teapot; it is more like denying Being itself, and with it, beings. Or it is more like denying truth itself as opposed to denying that a particular proposition is true.
One who appreciates this ought to find discussions about the antecedent probability of theism as compared to teapotism faintly absurd. The question of the antecedent probability of something like Russell's teapot makes sense and has an easy answer: very low! The question of the antecedent probability of there being truths has no clear sense. The probability of a proposition is the probability of its being true. Hence, that there is truth, or that there are truths, is a presupposition of any meaningful talk of probability. It is therefore senseless to ask about the antecedent probability of there being truths, and the following answer is clearly absurd: the antecedent probabilty of there being any true propositions is extremely low.
Now my point is that the God question is like the truth question, not like the teapot question.
Unfortunately, the line I have sketched here will be rejected both by all atheists, but also by many theists, those theists who think of God as a being among beings, uniquely qualified no doubt, but no different in his Being or in the way he has properties than any other being qua being. Or, in the quasi-Heideggerian jargon employed above, these theists will say that 'God exists' is an ontic, not an ontic-ontological claim, and as such no different than 'Socrates exists' or 'Russell's celestial teapot exists.'
And the widely-bruited 'death of God?' It is an 'event' of rather more significance than the discovery that there is no celestial teapot (or Santa Claus, or . . . ) after all. As Nietzsche observed, the death of God is the death of truth.
The Humean reasoning in defense of (3) rests on the assumption that conceivability entails possibility. To turn aside this reasoning one must reject this assumption. One could then maintain that the conceivability by us of the nonexistence of God is consistent with the necessity of God's existence.
I’m not convinced this is right. Conceivability has a close analogue with perception. If it seems to S that p, then S is prima facie justified in believing that (actually) p. So consider cases of perceptual seemings. Care must be taken to distinguish two forms of negative seemings:
Clearly, (1) is not properly a seeming at all; it is denying an episode of seeming altogether. If I assert (1), me and a rock are on epistemic par with respect to it seeming to us that p. (2) also faces an obvious problem: how could ~p, a lack or the absence or negation of something, appear to me at all? Photons do not bounce off of lacks. There are ways around this, but for now I just want to register the distinction between (1) and (2) and the prima facie difficulties with them that do not attend to positive seemings.
So now consider conceivability. The analogue: If it is conceivable to S that p, then S is prima facie justified in believing that possibly p. Now for our two negative conceivablility claims:
Again, (1’) is trivial; it is (2’) we’re interested in. Does (2’) provide prima facie evidence for possibly ~p? It depends. What we do when we try to conceive of something is imagine "in our mind’s eye" a scenario—i.e., a possible world—in which p is the case. So really (2’) translates:
(3) seems totally innocent. I can conceive of worlds in which chipmunks exist and others in which they don’t.
With its conceivability counterpart being
which looks a lot like the above illicit negative seemings: negations or absences of an object of conceivability. But my not conceiving of something doesn't entail anything! But suppose we waive that problem, and instead interpret (4’) as a positive conceiving:
The problem now is that (4’’) is no longer a modest claim that warrants prima facie justification. In fact, (4*) has a degree of boldness that invites further inquiry: presumably there is some obvious reason—a contradiction, category mistake, indelible opacity—etc. apparent to me that has led me to think numbers are impossible. But if that’s so, then surely my critic will want to know what exactly I’m privy to that he isn’t.
Mutatis mutandis in the case of God qua necessary being.
Philosophy is its problems, and they are best represented as aporetic polyads. One sort of aporetic polyad is the antilogism. An antilogism is an inconsistent triad: a set of three propositions that cannot all be true. The most interesting antilogisms are those in which the constitutent propositions are each of them plausible. If they are more than plausible, if they are self-evident or undeniable, then we are in the presence of an aporia in the strict sense. (From the Greek a-poros, no way.) Aporiai are intellectual impasses, or, to change the metaphor, intellectual knots that we cannot untie. Here is a candidate:
1. God is a perfect being.
2. A perfect being is one that exists necessarily if it exists at all.
3. Whatever exists exists contingently.
It is easy to see that the members of this trio are collectively inconsistent. So the trio is an antilogism. Now corresponding to every antilogism there are three valid syllogisms. (A syllogism is deductive argument having exactly two premises.) Thus one can argue validly from any two of the propositions to the negation of the remaining one. Thus there are three ways of solving the antilogism:
A. Reject (1). The price of rejection is high since (1) merely unpacks the meaning of 'God' if we think of God along Anselmian lines as "that than which no greater can be conceived," or as the greatest conceivable being. It seems intuitively clearly that an imperfect being could not have divine status. In particular, nothing imperfect could be an appropriate object of worship. To worship an imperfect being would be idolatry.
B. Reject (2). The price of rejection is steep here too since (2) seems merely to unpack the meaning of 'perfect being.' Intuitively, contingent existence is an imperfection.
C. Reject (3). This is a more palatable option, and many will solve the antilogism in this way. If ~(3), then there are noncontingent beings. A noncontingent being is either necessary or impossible. So if God is noncontingent, it does not follow that God is necessary. He could be impossible.
Unfortunately, the rejection of (3) is not without its problems.
According to David Hume, "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) I would put it this way, trading Latin for plain Anglo-Saxon: no matter what we think of as existing, we can just as easily think of as not existing. This includes God.
Try it for yourself. Think of God together with all his omni-attributes and then think of God as not existing. Our atheist pals have no trouble on this score. The nonexistence of God is thinkable without logical contradiction.
The Humean reasoning in defense of (3) rests on the assumption that conceivability entails possibility. To turn aside this reasoning one must reject this assumption. One could then maintain that the conceivability by us of the nonexistence of God is consistent with the necessity of God's existence.
The price of rejecting (3) is that one must deny that conceivability entails possibility.
Is our antilogism an aporia in the strict sense? I don't know.
This from a reader:
I still read your blog conscientiously, but sometimes stare at your words in ignorant awe.
I have a question for you this morning which may be of interest. In a recent conversation with someone who described himself as a "gay" Christian (or is it a Christian "gay" ?), I gave reasons for observing that "gay Christian" is an oxymoron. My interlocutor said I must not be judgmental and justified his position by the saying, “You have your way, I have my way. As for the right way, it does not exist.” I made no headway with my argument that a belief in moral relativism is incompatible with a belief in God. If God is the incontestable ground of moral absolutes, it seems to me you can't have one without the other. Am I on the right track ?
Thank you for reading. Several points in response.
1. Can one be a Christian and a homosexual? I don't see why not, as long as one does not practice one's homosexuality. So I don't see that 'gay Christian' is an oxymoron. (AsI am using 'practice,' a homosexual man who succumbs to temptation and has sexual intercourse with a man on an occasion or two, while believing it to be immoral, is not practicing his homosexuality. The occasional exercise of a disposition does not constitute a practice.)
2. To be judgmental is to be hypercritical, captious, cavilling, fault-finding, etc. One ought to avoid being judgmental. But it is a mistake to confuse making moral judgments with being judgmental. I condemn the behavior of Ponzi-schemers like Bernie Madoff. That is a moral judgment. (And if you refuse to condemn it, I condemn your refusal to condemn.) But it would be an egregious misuse of language to say that I am being judgmental in issuing either condemnation.
3. If your friend thinks it is wrong to make moral judgments, ask him whether he thinks it is morally wrong. If he says yes, then point out that he has just made a moral judgment; he has made the moral judgment that making moral judgments is morally wrong.
4. Then ask him whether (a) he is OK with contradicting himself, or (b) makes an exception for the meta assertion that making moral judgments is morally wrong, or (c) thinks that both the meta judgment and first-order moral judgments (e.g., sodomy is morally wrong) are all morally wrong. (C) is a logically consistent position, although rejectable for other reasons.
5. He might of course say that 'must not' in 'must not be judgmental' is not to be construed morally, but in some other way. Press him on how it is to be construed.
6. Is moral relativism compatible with theism? No. If the God of the Christian faith exists, then there are absolute (objective) moral truths. This is quite clear if you reflect on the nature of the Christian God. It is not clear, however, that the arrow of entailment runs in the opposite direction. A Christian could affirm that it does, but he needn't. Either way, moral relativism and theism are logically inconsistent.
7. A further point. When your friend 'went relativistic' on you, there was nothing unusual about that. Alethic and moral relativism in most people are not thought-through positions, but simply ways of avoiding further discussion and the hard thinking necessary to get clear on these matters. It is a form of 'psychic insulation': "You can't teach me anything, because it's all relative."
8. A final point. That there are moral absolutes leaves open what they are. While moral relativism is easily dismissed, especially if one is a theist, it is considerably less easy to say what the moral absolutes are, even if one is a theist. So there is no call to be dogmatic. One can, and I think ought to, combine anti-relativism with fallibilism.
London Karl refers me to this piece by Stephen H. Webb in which we read (emphases added):
I recently reviewed Hart’s new book, The Experience of God, at First Things. Hart defends three basic points: First, there was a consensus among ancient philosophers and theologians regarding the simplicity of God. Divine simplicity can be stated in many ways, but it basically means that God has no parts. Or you could just say that God is immaterial (since anything material can be divided). Second, this consensus was shared by nearly all the world’s oldest religions. Third, this consensus is crucial for the Christian faith. It is, in fact, the only way to make sense of God, and thus it is fundamental for everything that Christians believe and say about the divine.
The first bolded passage is inaccurate. On traditional theism God is of course immaterial, and is maintained to be such by all traditional theists. But the doctrine of divine simplicity is not identical to the claim that God is immaterial, a claim rejected by many traditional theists. The simplicity doctrine entails the immateriality doctrine, but not vice versa. Thus the simplicity doctrine says more than the immateriality doctrine. If God is simple, then God has and can have no (proper) parts, hence has and can have no material parts; a simple God is therefore an immaterial God given that every material thing is partite, actually or potentially. But an immaterial God needn't be simple. The simplicity doctrine implies that there are no real distinctions among:
Consider God and the attribute of omniscience. According to the simplicity doctrine, God does not exemplify omniscience; he is (identical to) omniscience. And the same holds for all the divine attributes. For each such attribute A, God does not have (exemplify) A; he is (identical to) A.
Someone who holds that God is immaterial, however, holds that God has no material parts (and also no spatial parts, and no temporal parts if there are temporal parts). One can hold this consistently with holding that God is disinct from his attributes as he must be if he exemplifies them, exemplification either being or being very much like a dyadic asymmetrical relation.
But what if one were a constituent ontologist who thought that the attributes of a thing are parts thereof (in some suitably extended, non-mereological sense of 'part')? Then too the simplicity doctrine would not be identical to the immateriality doctrine. For immateriality has to do with a lack of material parts while simplicity has to do with a lack of material and 'ontological' parts such as attributes.
As for the second bolded passage, it is certainly false. Webb needs to read Plantinga and Swinburne.
To believe in Man is to believe in what is necessarily nothing; to believe in God is to believe in what is at least possibly something.
………….
See this post for explanation and exfoliation.
When I reported to Peter Lupu over Sunday breakfast that Hugh McCann denies that natural causation is existence-conferring, he demanded to know McCann's reasons. He has three. I'll discuss one of them in this post, the third one McCann mentions. (Creation and the Sovereignty of God, p. 18)
The reason is essentially Humean. Rather than quote McCann, I'll put the matter in my own rather more detailed way.
But first I should limn the broader context. McCann's God is not a mere cosmic starter-upper. He keeps the universe in existence moment to moment after its beginning to exist — assuming it has a beginning — such that, were God to cease his creative sustenance, the universe would vanish. On such a scheme, God is needed to explain the universe and its continuance in existence even if it always existed. But now suppose natural causation is existence-conferring and the universe always existed. Then the naturalist might argue as follows: (i) the universe is just the sum-total of its states; (ii) each state is caused to exist by earlier states; (iii) there is no first state; ergo (iv) every state has an immanent causal explanation in terms of earlier states; (v) if every state has an explanation of its existence in terms of earlier states, then the universe has an immanent, naturalistic explanation of its existence; ergo, (vi) there is no need for a God to explain why the universe exists, and (vii) if there were a God of McCann's stripe, then the existence of the universe would be causally overdetermined.
The above reasoning rests on the assumption that natural causation is existence-conferring. This is why McCann needs to show that natural causation is not existence-conferring. Here is one reason, a Humean reason.
One monsoon season I observed a lightning bolt hit a palm tree which then exploded into flame. A paradigm case of event causation. Call the one event token Strike and the other Ignition. One would naturally say that Strike caused Ignition. To say such a thing is to refer to the salient cause without denyng the contribution of such necessary causal conditions as the presence of atmospheric oxygen.
But what exactly did I observe? Did I observe, literally observe, an instance of causation? Not clear! What is clear is that that I observed two spatiotemporally contiguous events. I also observed that Strike occurred slightly earlier than Ignition. Thus I observed the temporal precedence of the cause over the effect. But I did not observe the production (the bringing-into-existence) of the effect by the cause. Thus I did not observe the cause conferring existence on the effect. Strike and Ignition were nearby in space and time and Ignition followed Strike. That I literally saw. But I did not literally see any producing or causing-to-exist. What I actually saw was consistent with there being no causal production of the effect by the cause. Admittedly, it was also consistent with there being unobservable causal production.
The point is that conferral of existence by natural causation is not empirically detectable. One cannot see it, or hear it, etc. Nor is there any such instrument as a causation-detector that one could use to detect what one's gross outer senses cannot detect.
Nothing changes if we add the third Humean condition, constant conjunction. Some event sequences are causal and some are not. How do we distinguish the causal from the noncausal? Since we cannot empirically detect existence-conferral, we cannot say that causal event sequences are those that involve existence-conferral. So the Humean invokes constant conjunction: in terms of our example, whenever an event of the Strike-type occurs it is spatiotemporally contiguously followed by an event of the Ignition type. Accordingly, there is nothing more to causation on this empiricist approach than regular succession. A causal event sequence is one that instantiates a regularity. What makes a causal sequence causal is just its instantiation of a regularity. But then, causation is not the bringing into existence of one event by another. The two events are what Hume calls "distinct existences." The events are out there in the world. But the causal link is not out there in the world, or rather, it is not empirically detectable.
I hope my friend Peter will agree to at least the following: if we adopt a regularity theory of causation, then natural causation is not existence-conferring. The regularity theory can be stated as follows:
RT. x (directly) causes y =df (i) x and y are spatiotemporally contiguous; (ii) x
occurs earlier than y; (iii) x and y are subsumed under event types X and Y that
are related by the de facto empirical generalization that all events of type X are followed by events of type Y.
If this is what causation is, it is is not existentially productive: the cause does not produce, bring about, bring into existence the effect. On the contrary, the holding of the causal relation presupposes the existence of the cause-event and the effect-event. It follows that causation as understood on (RT) merely orders already existent events and cannot account for the very existence of these events. Since Peter is a B-theorist about time, he should be comfortable with the notion that the universe is a four-dimensional space-time manifold the states or events of which are all tenselessly existent logically in advance of any ordering by whatever the exact relation is that is the causal relation.
Peter should tell me whether he accepts this much.
Of course, the naturalist needn't be a Humean about causation. But then the naturalist ought to tell us what theory of causation he accepts and how it can be pressed into service to explain the very existence of events. My challenge to Peter: describe a theory of natural causation on which the cause event confers existence on the effect event, as opposed to merely ordering already existent events. Nomological and counterfactual theories won't fill the bill (or satisfy the Bill.)
Here is another little puzzle for Peter to ruminate over. Causation is presumably a relation. But a relation cannot obtain unless all its relata exist. So if x directly causes y, and causation is a relation, then both x and y exist. But then x in causing y does not confer existence on y. To the contrary, the obtaining of the causal relation presupposes the logically antecedent existence of y.
This little conundrum works with any theory of causation (regularity, nomological, counterfactual, etc.) so long as it is assumed that causation is a relation and that no relation can hold or obtain unless all its relata exist. For example, suppose you say that x causes y iff had x not occurred, then y would not have occurred. That presupposes the existence of both relata, ergo, etc.
For details and a much more rigorous development, see my article "The Hume-Edwards Objection to the Cosmological Argument," Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. XXII, 1997, pp. 425-443, and the second article below.
James Anderson responds here to my critique of his and Greg Welty's The Lord of Non-Contradiction: An Argument for God from Logic.
Professor Anderson's combox is open.
