Category: God

The Divine Job Description

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Mormon Concept of God

I should thank (or perhaps blame) Spencer Case for sidetracking me into the thickets of Mormon metaphysics.  But I have no cause to complain seeing as how my motto is "Study everything, join  nothing."  Earlier I made a preliminary response to some of Spencer's concerns about the "facelessness" of the full Anselmian conception of deity.  Here I am not concerned to defend that conception in all its aspects.  Indeed, I will concede arguendo all of the following for the space of this post:  divine simplicity is incoherent; divine simplicity is inconsistent with the doctrine of the Trinity; the latter doctrine is incoherent; and so is the doctrine of the Incarnation. I make these concessions to focus the issue and to make clear that my interest as a philosopher is neither apologetic nor polemical.  I want to put Blake Ostler and other Mormons at ease: I am not here interested in attacking their faith or defending the sort of God conception found in Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas.  Philosophy is first and foremost inquiry; its purpose is not to attack or defend any worldview.  It does not exist to shore up or legitimate antecedently accepted worldviews or ideologies. (So it is not ancilla theologiae, not the handmaiden of theology or of natural science or of anything else.)  Religions are worldviews; philosophy as inquiry is no more a worldview than is mathematics or physics.  It is also important to note that if the Augustine-Anselm-Aquinas conception is incoherent it doesn't follow that the Mormon conception is coherent: they could both be incoherent.

The issue I will discuss is precisely whether the following assertion by A. A. Howsepian is true:  ". . . nothing countenanced by Mormon metaphysicians could possibly count as God." ("Are Mormons Theists?" Religious Studies, vol. 32, no. 3, Sept. 1996, p. 367)  Since I am not familiar with the particulars of Mormon doctrine, I will simply assume that they are what Blake T. Ostler says they are in his response to Howsepian in  "Worshipworthiness and the Mormon Concept of God," Religious Studies, vol. 33, no. 3 (Sept. 1997), pp. 315-326.  So what I will be doing is examining Ostler's view of the the Mormon conception of God with an eye to deciding whether it is an adequate God conception.

1. The Anselmian Criterion  of Deity

Obviously, not just anything could count as God.  So we need a criterion of deity.  According to the Anselmian criterion, which both Howsepian and Ostler accept, at least in the main, it is a matter of broadly logical necessity that nothing could count as God that is not the greatest conceivable being (GCB).   The Anselmian provenience of this notion is clear: God is "that than which no greater can be conceived."  The greatness of the GCB consists in its unsurpassibility in respect of all perfections or great-making properties.  The GCB possesses all great-making properties and the highest degree of those that admit of degrees.  Among these properties are the traditional omni-attributes, e.g. omniscience.  Only the GCB is an adequate object of worship.

Let's note that if a being is unsurpassable by any being distinct from itself it does not follow that it is unsurpassable, period.  For it might be "self-surpassable in some respects." (Ostler 315) Obviously, a being that was unsurpassable by any other but self-surpassable could not be actus purus inasmuch as it would have to  harbor unrealized potentialities.  We ought therefore to distinguish an unmodified and a modified GCB criterion:

Unmodified:  If a being counts as God, then that being is unsurpassable in point of perfection by any being, including itself.

Modified:  If a being counts as God, then that being  is unsurpassable in point of perfection by any being distinct from itself.

2.  Does the Mormon God Satisfy the Modified Anselmian Criterion?

It is obvious that the Mormon God cannot satisfy the unmodified  criterion since that criterion leads to the ontologically simple God in whom there is no composition of any kind, whether of form and matter, act and potency, essence and existence, supposit and attributes.  Since Mormons can reasonably reject ontological simplicity, they needn't be fazed by the unmodified criterion.  Ostler maintains, however, that the Mormon concept of God can satisfy the modified criterion.  It may have a chance of doing so if 'God' is construed as 'Godhead.'  (319).  This Godhead, Ostler tells us, is the one supreme being. (319)  If henotheism is the view that there is at least one God, then the Mormon view as Ostler presents it is henotheistic.  If monotheism is the view that there is exactly one God, then the Mormon view is not monotheistic.  Ostler tells us that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are three distinct Gods. (319) So there are at least three distinct Gods in the Mormon pantheon, which prevents the view from being strictly monotheistic.  They are nonetheless one Godhead in that the three "divine personages" are united "in love and unity." (320)

Each of the divine persons is "corporeal" and "located in a particular space-time." (320)  The Godhead, however, is not corporeal, at least if Godhead is the same as Godhood.  Ostler employs both of these terms without explaining whether or how they differ.  (320) My impression is that he is using them interchangeably.  If that is right, then Godhead/Godhood is not corporeal.  This is because ". . . Godhood refers to the immutable set of properties necessary to be divine. There is only one Godhood or divine essence in this sense." (320-321, emphasis in original)  Presumably, an immutable set of properties is not corporeal.  The same goes for a set of immutable properties, and a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are immutable properties.

How are God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost related?  They are related in a "relationship of divine love" which is "contingent and not necessary." (321) It is contingent because "Love is a voluntary attitude freely chosen." (321)  "The divine persons can kenotically empty themselves of the divine glory by separating themselves from the divine unity of the Godhead." (321)  Despite this ability of the persons to separate themselves from the unity of the Godhead,

. . . there always has been and always will be a God in the sense of divine persons united as one. The divine persons obviously can so plan that there will always be at least two joined as one to govern the universe. (321)

The individual divine persons are subject to "eternal progression," progression in knowledge, power and dominion.  (321) Does it follow that "Godhead as a whole" or "God-as-divine-persons-in-relationship" is subject to eternal progression?  No it doesn't, says Ostler, and to think otherwise would be to commit the fallacy of composition.  This is the fallacy with which Ostler taxes Howsepian. 

3. Preliminary Evaluation

My question is precisely this: Does the Mormon conception of God/Godhead, as explained by Ostler, satisfy the modifed Anselmian criterion?  The modified criterion requires that a candidate for GCB status  be necessarily unsurpassable by another, but allows the candidate to be self-surpassable in some respects.  Ostler tells us that

. . .there cannot be a greater being than God qua the divine persons united as one Godhead in Mormon thought.  God is necessarily unsurpassable by any other being. (323)

Here is one difficulty I am having.  Ostler claims that the divine persons are contingently related to each other.  It follows that the Godhead as the unity of the persons contingently exists. Please note that if x always existed and always will exist,it doesn't follow that x necessarily exists.  (If x exists at all times in the actual world, it does not follow that x exists in every possible world.)  If the divine persons "c an so plan that there will always be at least two joined as one" (321, emphasis added), it doesn't follow that they must so plan.  Now if the Godhead contingently exists, then there can be a greater being than "God qua the divine persons united as one Godhead," namely, a being having the same properties bu existing necessarily.

I conclude that the Mormon conception as explained by Ostler cannot satisfy the modified Anselmian criterion.  For whether God/Godhead is or is not self-surpassable, he must be a necessary being.  But he can't be a necessary being if the divine persons are merely contingently related. If they are contingently related, then they are possibly such as to be unrelated.  But if they are possibly such as to be unrelated, then their unity is possibly nonexistent, i.e. not necessary.  So it looks as if Howsepian is right in his claim that ". . . nothing countenanced by Mormon metaphysicians could possibly count as God."

Does Ostler have an escape via his talk of Godhood as opposed to Godhead?  (320-321) Godhood or "the divine essence" is "the immutable set of properties necessary to be divine."  This set counts as a necessary being unlike Godhead which we have seen is a contingent being.  But although metaphysically necessary, Godhood cannot be the one God who is "the governing power of the enture universe."  For no such abstract object as a set can play that role.  But, to be charitable, I won't hold Ostler to his talk of a 'set.'  Let us take him to mean a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are the divine attributes.  It too is a necessary being, but it too is causally impotent and cannot be the governing power of the entire universe. 

In sum, Godhead is powerful but contingent while Godhood is necessary but powerless.  To satisfy the modified Anselmian criterion, Ostler needs a being that is both necessary and powerful. 

Dennett, Anthropomorphism, and the ‘Deformation’ of the God Concept

One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006) is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of the concept of God: "I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation." (206) He speaks of "the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts." (205)

Why speak of deformation rather than of reformation, transformation, or refinement? Dennett's view is that the "original monotheists" thought of God as a being one could literally listen to, and literally sit beside. (206) If so, the "original monotheists" thought of God as a physical being: "The Old Testament Jehovah, or Yahweh, was quite definitely a super-man (a He, not a She) who could take sides in battles, and be both jealous and wrathful." (206, emphasis in original). The suggestion here is that monotheism in its original form, prior to deformation, posited a Big Guy in the Sky, a human being Writ Large, something most definitely made in the image of man, and to that extent an anthropomorphic projection.

What Dennett is implying is that the original monotheistic conception of God had a definite content, but that this conception was deformed and rendered abstract to the point of being emptied of all content. Dennett is of course assuming that the only way the concept of God could have content is for it to have a materialistic, anthropomorphic content. Thus it is not possible on Dennett's scheme to interpret the anthropomorphic language of the Old Testament in a figurative way as pointing to a purely spiritual reality which, as purely spiritual, is neither physical nor human. Dennett thereby simply begs the question against every sophisticated version of theism.

Dennett seems in effect to be confronting the theist with a dilemma. Either your God is nothing but an anthropomorphic projection or it is is so devoid of recognizable attributes as to be meaningless. Either way, your God does not exist. Surely there is no Big Guy in the Sky, and if your God is just some Higher Power, some unknowable X, about which nothing can be said, then what exactly are you affirming when you affirm that this X exists? Theism is either the crude positing of something as unbelievable as Santa Claus or Wonder Woman, or else it says nothing at all.

Either crude anthropomorphism or utter vacuity.  Compare the extremes of the spectrum of positions I set forth in Anthropomorphism in Religion.

Dennett's Dilemma — to give it a name — is quite reasonable if you grant him his underlying naturalistic and scientistic (not scientific) assumptions, namely, that there is exactly one world, the physical world, and that (future if not contemporary) natural science provides the only knowledge of it. On these assumptions, there simply is nothing that is not physical in nature. Therefore, if God exists, then God is physical in nature. But since no enlightened person can believe that a physical God exists, the only option a sophisticated theist can have is to so sophisticate and refine his conception of God as to drain it of all meaning. And thus, to fill out Dennett's line of thought in my own way, one ends up with pablum  such as Tillich's talk of God as one "ultimate concern." If God is identified as the object of one's ultimate concern, then of course God, strictly speaking, does not exist. Dennett and I will surely agree on this point.

But why should we accept naturalism and scientism? It is unfortunately necessary to repeat that naturalism and scientism are not scientific but philosophical doctrines with all the rights, privileges, and liabilities pertaining thereunto. Among these liabilities, of course, is a lack of empirical verifiability. Naturalism and scientism cannot be supported scientifically. For example, we know vastly more than Descartes (1596-1650) did about the brain, but we are no closer than he was to a solution of the mind-body problem. Neuroscience will undoubtedly teach us more and more about the brain, but it takes a breathtaking lack of philosophical sophistication — or else ideologically induced blindness — to think that knowing more and more about the physical properties of a lump of matter will teach us anything about consciousness, the unity of consciousness, self-conciousness, intentionality, and the rest.

This is not the place to repeat the many arguments against naturalism.  Suffice it to say that a very strong case can be brought against it, a case that renders its rejection reasonable. (See J. P. Moreland's The Recalcitrant Imago Dei for one case against it.) Dennett's reliance on naturalism is thus dogmatic and uncompelling. Indeed, when he pins his hopes on future science and confesses his faith that there is nothing real apart from the system of space-time-matter, he makes moves analogous to the moves the theist makes who goes beyond what he can claim to know to affirm the existence of a spiritual reality within himself and beyond himself.

Dennett needs to give up the question-begging and the straw-man argumentation. His talk of the "deformation" of the God concept shows that he is unwilling to allow what he would surely allow with other subject-matters, namely, the elaboration of a more adequate concept of the subject-matter in question. Instead, he thinks that theists must be stuck with the crudest conceptions imaginable. Thinking this, he merely projects his own crude materialism into them.

Genuine religion is ongoing, open-ended and (potentially) self-correcting.  It is more quest  than conclusions.  We don't hold it against science that its practioners contradict each other over time and at times. That is because we understand that science is an ongoing project, open-ended and self-correcting.  That is the way we should treat religion as well.  If you protest that there are huge differences between religion and science and that the latter has been highly successful in securing consensus while the former has not, I will simply agree with you and chalk that up to the great difference in their respective subject-matters.

It is no surprise that natural science secures consensus: it has available to it the touchstone of sense experience.  We all have sense organs, while the same cannot be said of moral and spiritual 'organs.'

Can God Break a Law of Nature?

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Plantinga's new book.  They are  collected under the rubric Science and Religion.  In the third chapter of Where the Conflict Really Lies, Plantinga addresses questions about divine action and divine intervention in the workings of nature.  A miracle is such an intervention.  But aren't miracles logically impossible?  Plantinga doesn't cite Earman, but I will: 

John Earman, Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (Oxford 2000), p. 8, writes:

 . . . if a miracle is a violation of a law of nature, then whether or not the violation is due to the intervention of the Deity, a miracle is logically impossible since, whatever else a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity.

According to one way of thinking, miracles are violations of laws of nature. And so one may argue:

1. A miracle is an exception to a law of nature.
2. Every law of nature is an exceptionless regularity (though not conversely).
Therefore
3. A miracle is an exception to an exceptionless regularity.
Therefore
4. Miracles are logically impossible.

 Please note that (2) merely states that whatever a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity. Thus (2) does not commit one to a regularity theory of laws according to which laws are identified with exceptionless regularities. The idea is that any theory of (deterministic) laws would include the idea that a law is an exceptionless regularity.

The above argument seems to show that if miracles are to be logically possible they cannot be understood as violations of laws of nature. To avoid the conclusion one must deny (1). How then are miracles to be understood?  Plantinga supplies an answer:

Miracles are often thought to be problematic, in that God, if he were to perform a miracle, would be involved in 'breaking,' going contrary to, abrogating, suspending, a natural law.  But given this conception of law, if God were to perform a miracle, it wouldn't at all involve contravening a natural law.  That is because, obviously, any occasion on which God performs a miracle is an occasion when the universe is not causally closed; and the laws say nothing about what happens when the universe is not causally closed.  Indeed, on this conception it isn't even possible that God break a law of nature. (pp. 82-83)

As I understand him, Plantinga is saying that a miracle is not a divine suspension of a law of nature, but a  divine suspension of causal closure.   Conservation and other natural laws apply to isolated or closed systems (78).  God cannot intervene without 'violating' closure; but that does not amount to a violation of a law since the laws hold only for closed systems.  "It is entirely possible for God to create a full-grown horse in the middle of Times Square without violating the principle of conservation of energy.  That is because the systems including the horse would not be closed or isolated." (79)

Plantinga is maintaining that it is logically impossible, impossible in the very strongest sense of the term, for anyone, including God, to contravene a law of nature.  But it is logically possible that God contravene causal closure.  This implies that causal closure is not a law of nature.

But isn't it a proposition of physics that the physical universe is causally closed, that every cause of a physical event is a physical event and that every effect of a physical event is a physical event?  No, says Plantinga.  Causal closure is a "metaphysical add-on," (79) not part of physics.  That's right, as far as I can see.  I would add that it is the mistake of scientism to think otherwise.

Whether or or not God ever intervenes in the physical world, I do it all the time.  It's called mental causation.  That it occurs is a plain fact; that mental causes are not identical to physical causes is not a plain fact, but very persuasively arguable, pace Jaegwon Kim.   So if a frail reed such as the Maverick Philosopher can bring about the suspension of causal closure, then God should be able to pull it off as well.  (This comparison with mental causation is mine, not Plantinga's.)

Creatio ex Deo and Pantheism

The following post draws mainly upon Robert Oakes, "Does Traditional Theism Entail Pantheism?" American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 1 (January 1983), pp. 105-112. Reprinted in Tom Morris, ed. The Concept of God (Oxford U. Press, 1987). 

The question arises:   Does my construal of creatio ex nihilo in terms of creatio ex Deo commit me to pantheism? If so, how does that comport with my avowed onto-theological personalism? I will try toshow that my construal does not commit me to pantheism, or at least not to the pantheism that Oakes seems to embrace.

The logically first question concerns just what pantheism is and is not. I’ll begin with what it is not.

A. Pantheism worth discussing is not the view that God (G) is identical to the physical universe (U). For that would amount to saying that God does not exist. Whether or not God exists, the divine nature excludes the possibility of God’s being a system of physical objects. The reduction of G to U thus amounts to the elimination of G. Therefore, the use of ‘God’ to refer to U is simply an egregious misuse of the term ‘God,’ a misuse on a par with Tillich’s misuse of ‘God’ to refer to one’s ultimate concern.

B. What of the opposite reduction of U to G? This is also a type of pantheism not worth discussing: it implies that God exists but the physical universe does not. For it is self-evident that the physical universe cannot exist unless it is in some sense distinct from G. After all, G is immutable whereas U is mutable; hence, by what McTaggart calls the Discernibility of the Diverse (the logical contrapositive of the Indiscernibility of Identicals), U cannot be identical to G if both exist.

C. If pantheism is to be worth discussing, it must somehow allow for a difference of some kind between God and the cosmos. It must steer a middle course between a strict identity of G and U and a type of difference that would render them ‘indifferent’ to each other, i.e., a type of radical difference that would allow the possibility of U existing without G existing. A viable pantheism must therefore avoid three positions: (1) God is world-identical; (2) The world is God-identical; (3) God and the world are externally related in the sense that either could exist without the other.

One way to satisfy these requirements is by saying, Spinozistically, that created entities are modes of God, or as Oakes says, "aspects or modifications" of God. (p. 106 et passim) For if x is a mode (aspect, modification) of y, then x is not identical to y, y is not identical to x, and x and y are not merely externally related.

It is important to realize that classical theism must also satisfy the requirements, (1)-(3). In particular, classical theism must deny that U can exist without G. For it is a central tenet of classical theism that God is not merely a cause of the inception of the universe, but a cause of its continuance as well. God is not merely a deistic 'starter-upper,' but a moment by moment conserver. How exactly creatio originans and creatio continuans fit together involves problems that cannot be discussed in this post.  (Cf. William F. Vallicella (2002), The Creation–Conservation Dilemma and Presentist Four-Dimensionalism, Religious Studies 38 (2):187-200.)  But there can be no doubt that for classical theism as it is found in Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley and others, creation in the full sense involves both notions, both originating creation and continuing creation. 

Now given the fact just mentioned, how are we to distinguish classical theism (CT) from pantheism in the (C)-sense, the only sense in play here? Does (CT) perhaps entail pantheism? (To say that p entails q is to say that, necessarily, if p is true, then q is true. Equivalently, it is to say that it is impossible that p be true, and q false.)

You will notice that the doctrine of conservation ‘shortens’ the ‘ontological distance’ between creator and creatures. It implies that at each moment divine activity is required to keep the creature from lapsing into nonbeing. The point is not merely that God as a contingent matter of fact conserves creatures moment by moment, but that creatures are necessarily such that they are conserved moment by moment by divine activity. This suggests that the very being of creatures is their being-conserved moment by moment, which in turn gives rise to the following worry: How then can creatures retain any ontological independence?

Drawing on Oakes, the following Argument from Conservation can be mounted for the thesis that classical theism entails pantheism (but of course not pantheism in the absurd (A) or (B) senses). (The argument is in Oakes, but the reconstruction is mine.)

1. Every contingent being is necessarily such that it is existentially dependent on God at each moment of its existence.

2. If anything X is necessarily such that it is dependent on something Y at each moment of its existence, then X is a mode (aspect, modification) of Y.

Therefore

3. Every contingent being is a mode (aspect, modification) of God, which amounts to pantheism.

The validity (formal correctness) of this argument is not in question, and premise (1) merely states the conservation doctrine, an essential subdoctrine of classical theism. So the soundness of the argument rides on premise (2).

Premise (2) fits some cases very well. A wrinkle in a carpet satisfies both the antecedent and the consequent of (2). Same holds for the dance and the dancer. Suppose Little Eva is doing the Locomotion ("C’mon baby, do the Lo-co-mo-shun . . ..) There is the dance-type and its various actual and possible tokens. Little Eva’s gyrations at time t constitute one of these tokens such that the token in question could not possibly exist except as an aspect or modification of Little Eva at t. Similarly for felt pleasures and felt pains. The esse of a pain just is its percipi: a pain cannot exist except as perceived. Pains and the like are therefore plausibly construed as aspects or modifications of perceivers. Finally, it is plausibly maintained that a particular thinking, believing, imagining, is an aspect or modification of a thinker or a believer or an imaginer.

But now consider an object imagined as opposed to the act of imagining it. I mean an object that does not exist apart from its being imagined, a purely intentional object. (A rich vein of gold at the base of Weaver’s Needle; a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater.) Said object does not exist on i
ts own, but only as the accusative of an act (or acts) of imagining. Now while it makes sense to say that the act (the occurrent episode) of imagining is an aspect or modification of an imaginer, it does not make much sense to say this of the intentional object (the accusative) of the act. Indeed, we cannot even say that the intentional object is an aspect or modification of the act trained upon it. Why not?

Note that if x is an aspect or modification of y, then x cannot exist without y, but y can exist without x. (A carpet wrinkle cannot exist without the carpet of which it is the wrinkle, but the carpet can surely exist without that, or any, wrinkle.) By contrast, if x is the intentional object of act y, then x cannot exist without y, AND y cannot exist without x. An imagining cannot exist except as the imagining of a definite object, and that object, qua intentional object, cannot exist without the act. I conclude from this difference that the intentional object cannot be an aspect or modification of the act. It is not a property of the act, but its object or intentum. A fortiori, it cannot be an aspect or modification of the subject of the act, the imaginer in the case of an act of imagining.

We therefore have a class of counterexamples to premise (2) above. The Argument from Conservation therefore fails, and classical theism does not collapse into pantheism – or at least not for the reason that Oakes provided in the article under discussion.

So far, then, I cannot see that I am committed to pantheism in any of the three senses lately distinguished by my construal of creatio ex nihilo  as creatio ex Deo.

Dolezal on Divine Simplicity: Does He Make a Mysterian Move?

Dr. James Dolezal kindly sent me a copy of his very recent book, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness (Pickwick, 2011).  Herewith, some quick notes and commentary based on a partial reading. 

1.  God is an absolute, or rather the absolute.  That is a non-negotiable starting point for both of us.  To uphold the divine absoluteness, however, it is necessary to think of God as ontologically simple, as devoid of metaphysical complexity and composition.  For if God is absolute, then he cannot depend on anything else for his existence or nature.  It follows that God cannot be an instance of his attributes but must be them; nor can he be an existent among existents: he must be his existence and existence itself.  Indeed, God as absolute must be ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsisting Existence.  These are hard sayings and sharp heads, Plantinga being one of them, find them incoherent.  For details and a bit of a response to Plantinga, I refer you to my Stanford Encyclopedia article.  Note also that an absolute cannot be lacking anything or in need of developing itself: it is, eternally, all that it can be.  This implies that there is no act/potency distinction in God, no unrealized powers or potentialities.  In the classical phrase, God is actus purus, pure act, wholly actual.  Dolezal puts it very well when he writes, "The consideration of God as ipsum esse subsistens and actus purus is crucial for any confession of God's absolute existence." (214)

2. But to uphold the divine absoluteness, it is also necessary that God be libertarianly free in his production of creatures.  For suppose there is something in the divine nature that necessitates God's creation.  Then God would depend on the world to be himself and to be fully actual.  He would need what is other than himself to actualize himself.  This entanglement with the relative would compromise the divine absoluteness.  God would need the world as much as the world needs God.  Each would require the other to be what it is.  (210)

3.  So God must be both simple and free to be absolute.  But it is very difficult to understand how a simple being could be free in the unconditional 'could have done otherwise' sense.    If God is simple, then he is pure act in which case he is devoid of unrealized powers, potentialities or possibilities.  To act freely, however is to act in such a way that one (unconditionally) could have done otherwise, which implies unrealized possibilities.  Now Dolezal's view if I have understood him — and he can correct me in the ComBox if I am wrong — is that it is not only difficult to reconcile simplicity and freedom, but impossible for us, at least in our present state.  "Though we discover strong reasons for confessing both simplicity and freedom in God, we cannot form an isomorphically adequate notion of how this is the case." (210)  In footnote 55 on the same page, Dolezal brings up wave-particle duality: light behaves both like a particle and like a wave.  We have good reason to believe that it is both despite the difficulty or impossibility of understanding  how it could be both.  On the basis of the quotation and the footnote I hope that Dolezal will forgive me for pinning the label 'mysterian' on him, at least with respect to the simplicity-freedom problem which is only one subproblem within the the divine simplicity constellation.

 4. I grant that if we have good reason to believe that p is true, and good reason to believe that q  is true, then we have good reason to believe that p and q are logically  consistent (with each other) despite an absence of understanding as to how they could be mutually consistent. What is actual is possible whether or not one can render intelligible how it is possible.  To give an example of my own, motion is actual, hence possible, despite my inability in the teeth of Zenonian considerations to understand how it is possible. Many similar examples could be given.

And so a mysterian move suggests itself:  We are justified in maintaining both that God is simple and that God is free despite the fact that after protracted effort we cannot make logical sense of this conjunction.  The fact that the conjunction  — God is simple & God is free — appears to us, and perhaps even necessarily appears to us, given irremediable cognitive limitations on our part, to be or rather entail  an explicit  logical contradiction is not a good reason to reject the conjunction.  The mysterian is not a dialetheist: he does not claim that there are true contradictions. Like the rest of us, the mysterian eschews them like the plague.  His point is rather that a proposition's non-episodic and chronic seeming to be a contradiction does not suffice for its rejection.  For it may well be that certain truths are inaccesible to us due to our mental limitations and defects, and that among these truths are some that appear to us only in the guise of contradictions, and must so appear.

Of course, Dolezal's  mysterian move cannot be reasonably made unless the extant attempts (by Barry Miller, Eleonore Stump, Brian Davies, et al.)  to reconcile simplicity and freedom are failures.  Since I agree with Dolezal that they are, I grant him this.

5.  So what are some possible questions/reservations?

First, if  a (conjunctive) proposition's seeming, after careful and repeated scrutiny, to be or entail an explicit logical contradiction is not sufficient evidence of its being a contradiction, what would be?  To put it another way, my inability to explain how it could be true both that p and that q does seem to be pretty good evidence that p and q are not both true.  Now  I said above that the actual is possible whether or not I can explain how it's possible.  Granted, but if I cannot explain the how, doubt is cast on the actuality.

How adjudicate between these opposing lines of argument:  A:  Because X is actual, X  is possible, whether or not anyone can explain how it is possible! B:  Because no one can explain how it is possible, it is not possible, and therefore not actual!

Second,  if all extant attempts to reconcile simplicity and freedom fail, it does not follow that there isn't a solution right over the horizon.  How can a mysterian rule out the possibiity of a future solution?  The mysterian seems committed to saying that it is impossible (at least in this life) that there be a solution.  How can he be sure of this?

Third,  if a proposition appears under careful scrutiny to be or entail a contradiction, then is there even a proposition before the mind?  If you require for my salvation that I believe that God is one and God is three, what exactly are you demanding that I believe?  Before I can affirm a proposition as true I must understand it, but how can I affirm as true a proposition that appears necessarily false?  Such a 'proposition' is arguably not a proposition at all.  (This requires development, of course . . . Richard Cartwright's Trinity paper will help you see what I am getting at.))

Creation: Ex Nihilo or Ex Deo? Am I a Panentheist?

In an e-mail Michael Sudduth asked me what I thought of panentheism.  I suspect my position, as developed in A Paradigm Theory of Existence and various articles, points in a panentheistic direction.  For when I think about the relation of the One and the Many, I think of the Many as 'in' the One in a manner analogous to the way an intentional object is 'in' the mind.  The manifold of contingent beings is 'in' the divine One.   The present post will sketch a way panentheism might  be teased out of classical theism.

Classical theists hold that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. This phrase of course carries a privative, not a positive, sense: it means not out of something as opposed to out of something called ‘nothing.’ This much is crystal clear. Less clear is how creation ex nihilo (CEN), comports, if it does comport, with the following principle:

ENN: Ex nihilo nihit fit. Nothing comes from nothing.

The latter principle seems intuitively obvious. It is not a truth of formal logic — since its negation is not self-contradictory — but it does appear to be a truth of metaphysics, indeed, a necessary truth of metaphysics. But if (ENN) is true, how can (CEN) be true? How can God create out of nothing if nothing can come from nothing?

It would be unavailing to say that God, being omnipotent, can do anything, including making something come out of nothing. For omnipotence, rightly understood, does not imply that God can do anything, but that God can do anything that any possible agent could possibly do. But there are limits on what is possible. For one thing, logic limits possibility, and so limits divine power: not even God can make a contradiction true. There are also extra-logical limits on divine power: God cannot restore a virgin. There are past events which possess a necessitas per accidens that puts them beyond the reach of the divine will. Nor can God violate (ENN), given that it is necessarily true. God is subject to necessary truths. Some may see a problem with that, but I don’t. Necessary truths, like all truths, are accusatives of the divine intellect and so cannot exist unless the divine intellect exists. The divine intellect limits the divine will.

So the problem remains: How can God create the world out of nothing if nothing can come from nothing? How can we reconcile (CEN) with (ENN)?

One response to the problem is to say that (CEN), properly understood, states that God creates out of nothing distinct from himself. Thus he does not operate upon any pre-given matter, nor does he bestow existence on pre-given essences, nor create out of pre-given possibles.  But if God creates out of nothing distinct from himself, this formulation allows that, in some sense, God creates ex Deo, out of himself. Creating the world out of himself, God creates the world out of nothing distinct from himself. In this way, (CEN) and (ENN) are rendered compatible.

In sum, ‘Creatio ex nihilo’ is ambiguous. It could mean that God creates out of nothing, period, in which case (CEN) collides with (ENN), or that God creates out of nothing ultimately distinct from himself. My proposal is that the Latin phrase be construed in the second of these ways. So construed, it has the sense of ‘creatio ex Deo.’

But what exactly does it mean to say that God creates out of God? A critic once rather uncharitably took me  to mean precisely what I do not mean, namely, that God creates out of God in a way that implies that the product of the creative operation (creation in the sense of created entities) is identical to its operator (God) and its operand (God). That would amount to an absurd pantheism in which all distinctions are obliterated, a veritable "night in which all cows are black," to borrow a phrase from Hegel.

When I say that God creates ex Deo what I mean is that God operates on entities that are not external to God in the sense of having existence whether or not God exists. I build a rock cairn to mark the trail by piling up otherwise scattered rocks. These rocks exist whether or not I do. My creation of the cairn is therefore neither out of nothing nor out of me but out of materials external to me. If God created in that way he would not be God as classically conceived, but a Platonic demiurge. So I say that God creates out of ‘materials’ internal to him in the sense that their existence depends on God’s existence and are therefore in this precise sense internal to him. (I hope it is self-evident that materials need not be made out of matter.) In this sense, God creates ex Deo rather than out of materials that are provided from without. It should be obvious that God, a candidate for the status of an absolute, cannot have anything ‘outside him.’

To flesh this out a bit, suppose properties are concepts in the divine mind. Then properties are necessary beings in that they exist in all metaphysically possible worlds just as God does. The difference, however, is that properties have their necessity from another, namely God, while God has his necessity from himself. (This distinction is in Aquinas.) Inother words, properties, though they are necessary beings, depend for their existence on God.  Suppose that properties are the ‘materials’ or ontological constituents out of which concrete contingent individuals – thick particulars in Armstrong’s parlance – are constructed. (This diverges somewhat from what I say in PTE, but no matter: it is a simplification for didactic purposes.) We can then say that the existence of contingent individual C is just the unity or contingent togetherness of C’s ontological constituents. C exists iff C’s constituents are unified. Creating is then unifying. (We have a model for this unifying in our own unification of a sensory manifold in the unity of one consciousness.)  Since the constituents are necessary beings, they are uncreated. But since their necessity derives from God, they are not independent of God.

In this sense, God creates out of himself: he creates out of materials that are internal to his own mental life. It is ANALOGOUS to the way we create objects of imagination. (I am not saying that God creates the world by imagining it.) When I construct an object in imagination, I operate upon materials that I myself provide. Thus I create a purple right triangle by combining the concept of being purple with the concept of being a right triangle. I can go on to create a purple cone by rotating the triangle though 360 degrees on the y-axis. The object imagined is wholly dependent on me the imaginer: if I leave off imagining it, it ceases to exist. I am the cause of its beginning to exist as well as the cause of its continuing to exist moment by moment. But the object imagined, as my intentional object, is other than me just as the creature is other than God. The creature is other than God while being wholly dependent on God just as the object imagined is other than me while being wholly dependent on me. 

A  critic thinks  that "The notion of total dependence, dependence in every respect, entails identity, and therefore no dependence at all. If a is dependent on b in all respects, then a ‘collapses’ into b, taking dependency, and difference, with it." So if the creature is dependent on God both for its existence and for its nature, the creature collapses into God. And of course we can’t have that. It is obvious that the manifest plurality of the world, the difference of things from one another and from God, must be maintained. We cannot allow a pantheism according to which God just is the wo
rld, nor one on which God swallows up the plural world and its plurality with it. 

The  principle lately quoted is refuted by every intentional object qua intentional object. The object imagined is totally dependent in its existence on my acts of imagining. After all, I excogitated it: in plain Anglo-Saxon, I thought it up, or out. This excogitatum, to give it a name, is wholly dependent on my cogitationes and on the ego ‘behind’ these cogitationes if there is an ego ‘behind’ them. (Compare Sartre’s critique of Husserl on this score in the former’s Transcendence of the Ego.) But this dependence is entirely consistent with the excogitatum’s being distinct both from me qua ego, and from the intentional acts or cogitationes emanating from the ego and directed upon the excogitatum. To press some Husserlian jargon into service, the object imagined ist kein reeller Inhalt, it is not "really contained" in the act. The object imagined is neither immanent in the act, nor utterly transcendent of the act: it is a transcendence in immanence. It is ‘constituted’ as a transcendence in immanence. 

The quoted  principle may also be refuted by more mundane examples, examples that I would not use to explain the relation between creator and creature. Consider a wrinkle W in a carpet C. W is distinct from C. This is proven by the fact that they differ property-wise: the wrinkle is located in the Northeast corner of the carpet, but the carpet is not located in the Northeast corner of the carpet. (The principle here is the Indiscernibility of Identicals.) But W is wholly (totally) dependent on C. A wrinkle in a carpet cannot exist without a carpet; indeed, it cannot exist apart from the very carpet of which it is the wrinkle. Thus W cannot ‘migrate’ from carpet C to carpet D. Not only is W dependent for its existence on C, but W is dependent on C for its nature (whatness, quiddity). For W just is a certain modification of the carpet, and the whole truth about W can be told in C-terms. So W is totally dependent on C. 

So dependence in both essence and existence does not entail identity.

Somehow the reality of the Many must be upheld.  The plural world is no illusion.  If Advaita Vedanta maintains that it is an illusion, then it is false.  On the other hand, the plural world is continuously dependent for its existence on the One.  Making sense of this relation is not easy, and I don't doubt that my analogy to the relation of finite mind and its intentional objects limps in various ways.

In any case, one thing seems clear: there is a problem with reconcling CEN with EEN.  I discuss and reject a different solution to the problem in On Reconciling Creatio Ex Nihilo with Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit.

An Ontological Disproof of God

Nothing could count as God that did not have the property of aseity, or in plain Anglo-Saxon, from-itself-ness. The concept of God is the concept of something that by its very nature cannot be dependent on anything else for its nature or existence, and this holds whether or not anything in reality instantiates the concept. This is equivalent to the assertion that God exists necessarily if he exists at all. But if everything that exists exists contingently, as philosophers of an empiricist bent are likely to maintain, then we have the makings of an ontological disproof of God. In a 1948 Mind article, J. N. Findlay gave essentially the following argument:

a. God cannot be thought of as existing contingently.
b. Everything that exists can only be thought of as existing contingently.
Therefore
c. God does not exist.

This ontological disproof of God turns Anselm on his head while retaining the Anselmian insight that God is “that than which no greater can be conceived.” Precisely because God is maximally great, supremely perfect, id quo maius cogitari non nequit, he cannot exist. For if everything that exists exists contingently, then nothing exists necessarily. Necessary existence, however, is a divine perfection. Ergo, God does not exist.

The trouble with Findlay’s 1948 argument, an argument which the older and wiser Findlay renounced, is that premise (b) is by no means obviously true, even if we replace ‘everything’ with ‘every concrete thing.’ Indeed, I believe that (b) is demonstrably false. But the argument for this belongs elsewhere.

Necessary Being: A Note on a Post by James Barham

In the context of a reply to a "nasty attack on [Alvin] Plantinga by Jerry Coyne that cannot go unanswered," James Barham explains why he is an atheist:

The other reason I balk [at accepting a theism like that of Plantinga's] is that I can’t help suspecting there is a category mistake involved in talking about the “necessity” of the existence of any real thing, even a ground of being. When we speak of the ground of being’s existing “necessarily,” perhaps we are conflating the nomological sense of “necessity”—in the earth’s gravitational field an unsupported object necessarily accelerates at 32 feet per second squared—with the logical sense of the word—if all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then necessarily Socrates is mortal.

Many experience intellectual discomfort at the thought of a being that is, as Barham says, real (as opposed, presumably, to ideal or abstract) but yet exists of broadly logical (metaphysical) necessity.  To discuss this with clarity I suggest we drop 'real' and use 'concrete' instead.  So our question is whether it is coherent to suppose that there exists a concrete being that necessarily exists, where the necessity in question is broadly logical.  The question is not whether it is true, but whether it is thinkable without broadly logical contradiction, and without 'category mistake.'   But what does 'concrete' mean?  It does not mean 'material' or 'physical.' Obviously, no material being could be a necessary being. (Exercise for the reader: prove it!)  Here are a couple of definitions:

D1. X is concrete =df X is causally active or passive.
D2. X is abstract =df X is causally inert, i.e., not concrete.

The terms of the concrete-abstract distinction are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive:  everything is one or the other, and nothing  is both.  And the same goes for the physical-nonphysical distinction.  The distinctions are not equivalent, however: they 'cut perpendicular' to each other.  There are (or at least it is coherent to suppose that there could be) nonphysical concreta.  Whether there are physical abstracta is a nice question I will set aside for now.

Plantinga's God, if he exists, is concrete, wholly immaterial, and necessarily existent.  Obviously, one cannot imagine such a being.  (A point of difference with Russell's celestial teapot, by the way.) But I find Plantinga's God to be conceivable without contradiction or confusion or conflation or category mistake.   Barham thinks otherwise, suggesting that the notion of a necessarily existent concretum trades on a confusion of nomological necessity with logical necessity.  I find no such confusion, but I do find a confusion in Barham's thinking.

First of all, there is a genuine distinction between nomological necessity and logical necessity. Barham's sentence about an unsupported object in Earth's gravitational field is nomologically necessary, but logically contingent.  It is the latter because there is no logical contradiction in the supposition that a body in Earth's gravitational field accelerate at a rate other than 32 ft/sec2.   The laws of nature could have been other  than what they are.  But what does this have to do with the possibility of the coherence of the notion of a concrete individual that exists in all broadly logically possible worlds if it exists in one such world?  Nothing that I can see.  Barham points, in effect, to a legitimate difference between:

1. Necessarily, an unsupported object in Earth's gravitation  falls at the rate of 32ft/sec2
and
2. Necessarily, if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal.

The difference is in type of modality.  In (1) the modality is nomological while in (2) it is logical.  Both cases are cases of de dicto modality: the modal operator operates upon a dictum or proposition.  But when we speak of God as a necessary being, we are not speaking of the necessary truth of a proposition, whether the necessity be nomological or logical.  We are speaking of the necessary existence of a 'thing,' a res. Accordingly, the modality is de re. So I am wondering whether Barham is succumbing to de dicto-de re confusion.  Of course, there is the proposition

3. Necessarily, God exists

where the necessity in question is broadly logical.  The truth-maker of this proposition, however, is God himself, a necessarily existent concrete individual.

My point, then , is that there is no logical mistake involved in the concept of God as necessary being, no confusion, no category mistake.  Even if the concept fails of instantiation, the concept itself is epistemically in the clear.

Barham will no doubt continue to be an atheist.  But he ought to drop the above accusation of category mistake.  He can do better. He could argue that all modality is de dicto.  Or that all necessity is linguistic/conventional in origin.  Or he could give J. N. Findlay's 1948 ontological disproof, which I will feature in my next post.  

I should add that Barham's post, What Happened to Jerry Coyne's Sensus Divinitatis, only a small part of which I examined above, is extremely good and should be carefully read.

Plantinga Versus Dawkins: Organized Complexity

This is the third in a series on Plantinga's new book.  Here is the first, and here is the second.  These posts are collected under the rubric Science and Religion besides being classified under other heads.  This third post will examine just one argument of Dawkins' and Plantinga's response to it, pp. 26-28. Here is Plantinga in Chapter One of Where the Conflict Really Lies quoting from Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, p. 141.  (The ellipses are Plantinga's; the emphasis is Dawkins'; I have added a sentence from Dawkins that Plantinga did not quote; and I should note that Plantinga gives the wrong page reference.  The passage is on 141, not 140.)

Organized complexity is the thing we are having difficulty in explaining. Once we are allowed simply to postulate organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity. . . .  But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself. …. To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like "God was always there", and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say "DNA was always there", or "Life was always there", and be done with it. (1986, p. 141)

Dawkins seems to me to be arguing as follows.

1. What is needed is an explanation of organized complexity as such.
2. God is an instance of organized complexity.
3. If God is invoked as that whose existence and operation explains organized complexity as such, then the explanation is manifestly circular: the explanandum has been imported into the explanans.
4. Circular explanations are worthless: they explain nothing.
Therefore
5. To posit God as cosmic designer fails as an explanation of organized complexity as such.

The argument on my reconstruction is unexceptionable, but how is it relevant? if the task is to explain organized complexity as such, this cannot be done via an instance of it.  No doubt.  But the argument misses the point.  The point is not to explain organized complexity as such, or even the organized complexity of all actual or possible life, but to explain the organized complexity of terrestrial life.  More precisely, the point is to show that this cannot be done by invoking God in one's explanation.  Obviously the argument as reconstructed does not succeed in showing that.

Note that there is no mention of any facts of biology in the above argument.  Now Plantinga doesn't say the following, but I will: the argument is purely a priori.  It is a proof, from concepts alone and without recourse to empirical facts, that an explanation of organized complexity as such cannot be had if the explanans mentions an instance of organized complexity.  How then, Plantinga asks, does the (empirical) evidence of evolution reveal a world without design? (p. 27)

Now suppose we substitute the following proposition for (1):

1* What is needed is an explanation of the organized complexity of terrestrial life.

But if we plug (1*) into the original argument, and modify (3) accordingly, then (3) is false and the argument is unsound.  If we are not trying to explain organized complexity in general, but only the organized complexity of terrestrial life, then there is nothing fallacious about invoking an explainer that is an instance of organized complexity.

The Dawkins passage suggests another sort of argument, oft-heard:  If there is a supernatural designer, what explains his existence?  If you say that God always existed, then you may as well say that life always existed.

This puerile argument is based on a failure to understand that explanations, of necessity, must come to an end.

Why did that tree in my backyard die?  Because subterranean beetles attacked its roots.  If the explanation is correct, it is correct whether or not I can explain how the subterranean beetles got into the soil, or which other beetles were their parents, and grandparents, etc.  Explanations come to an end, and an explanation of a given phenomenon in terms of its proximate cause can be perfectly adequate even in the absence of explanations of other events in the explanandum's causal ancestry.

It is the puerile atheist who demands to know what caused God.  As Plantinga remarks, "Explanations come to an end; for theism they come to an end in God." (p. 28)  I would add that this is obvious if God is an necessary being: such a being is in no need of explanation.  But it holds also if God is a contingent being.  For again, not everything can be explained.

But if God was "always there" as Dawkins puts it, why not say that life was "always there"?  Because life wasn't always there! 

Ultimately, the theist explains everything in terms of the divine mind.  Since explanations must come to an end, the theist has no explanation of the existence or complexity of the divine mind.  But, as Plantinga remarks, p. 28, the materalist or physicalist is in the same position. He cannot explain everything. He "doesn't have an explanation of the existence of elementary particles or, more generally, contingent physical or material beings . . . ." (28)  I would also ask whether the materialist can explain why there are natural laws at all, why the universe is intelligible in terms of them, and why there are these laws and constants rather than some other possible set. 

There is one point that ought to be conceded to Dawkins, however.  It certainly would be a "lazy way out" to invoke divine intervention in cases where  a naturalistic explanation is at hand. 

So far, then, Plantinga 1, Dawkins 0.

On Infinitely Regressive Explanations of the Universe’s Existence

We’ve never chatted. I’m Tom Belt, a friend of Alan Rhoda. I believe you know Alan.

Yes, in fact I was thinking about him just the other day in connection with his espousal of presentism.

I’ve always appreciated being challenged when I drop by your blog. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to help me understand something.

I'll do my best.

I’ve been exploring Hartshorne’s Modal/Ontological Argument with a friend, Jeff. Basically Jeff wants to agree that some manner of ‘necessity’ needs to be posited in order to explain the existence of the universe. So he agrees that CH's "Something exists" entails "Something exists necessarily." But he then argues that both ‘an infinite regress of created beings’ and ‘a single, necessary being’ equally fit the bill. Both are equally possible and both have the same explanatory value. So his point is, “Look, parsimony is the only thing that gets us a single, necessary being; there's no obvious metaphysical advantage that a necessary being has over an infinite regress of created beings. Either might be the case, and parsimony is all we have to adjudicate the choice between them.”  But something seems wrong here.

There is indeed something wrong here. 

But first let's lay out Jeff's suggestion — or a plausible candidate for that office — a bit more clearly.  To make things hard on the theist we begin by assuming that the universe has an actually infinite past.  Hence it always existed.  Let us also assume that the each total state of the  universe at a time  is (deterministically) caused to exist by an earlier such state of the universe.  A third assumption is that the universe is nothing over and above the sum of its states.  The third assumption implies that if each state has a causal explanation in terms of earlier states (in accordance with the laws of nature), then all of the states have an explanation, in which case the universe itself has a causal explanation.  This in turn implies that there is no need to posit anything external to the universe, such as God, to explain why the universe exists.  The idea, then, is that the universe exists because it causes itself to exist in that later states are caused to exist by earlier states, there being no earliest, uncaused, state.  We thereby explain why the universe exists via an infinite regress of universe-immanent causes thereby obviating the need for a transcendent cause.

If this could be made to work, then we would have a nice neat self-contained universe whose existence was not a brute fact but also not dependent on anything external to the universe.

The five or so assumptions behind this reasoning can all be questioned.  But even if they are all true, the argument is still no good for a fairly obvious reason.  The whole collection of states, despite its being beginningless and endless, is contingent: it might not have existed at all.  The fact that U always existed, if it is a fact, does not entail that U must exist.  If I want to know why this universe of ours exists as opposed to there being some other universe or no universe at all, it does no good to tell me that it always existed.  For what I want to know it why it exists AT ALL.  I am not asking about its temporal duration but about  its very existence.  Why it exists at all is a legitimate question since there is no necessity that there be a universe in the first place.

So Jeff is wrong when he says that both a single necessary being and and infinitely regressive series of contingent causes "have the same explanatory value."  The latter has no explanatory value at all.  And this for the reason that it is contingent.

I mentioned to him Hartshorne’s point that the only conceivable way to posit the non-existence of a necessary being is to hold such a being’s existence to be impossible. A necessary being can only exist or not exist necessarily. So I told him he’s free to say “I can’t figure out which is in fact the case, an infinite regress of contingent beings or a single necessary being,” but that once he settles upon the latter for reasons of parsimony, what this moves amounts to is settling for the necessity of one option over the impossibility of the other, since the (modal) possibility of an infinite regress of contingent beings entails the impossibility of a single necessary being. But he’s not buying.

First of all, considerations of parsimony come into play only when we are comparing two theories which are both explanatorily adequate.  In that case Occam's Razor enjoins us to give the nod to the more parsimonious of the two.  After all, the stricture is not against 'multiplying entities' tout court, but against mutiplyng entities beyond necessity, i.e., in excess of what is needed for purposes of adequate explanation.   But in the situation before us, Jeff's theory is not explanatorily adequate.  It completely fails as an explantion of why there is a universe rather no universe or some other universe.

If the universe has an explanation then it must be in terms of a noncontingent explainer.  As you appreciate, if such an entity exists, then it is necessary, and if it does not, then it is impossible.  But the rest of your reasoning is dubious which is why your friend is not buying it. The point you need to insist on is that Jeff is not offering an adequate alternative explanation.  He falsely assumes that the collection of contingent beings is a necessary being.  It is not.  It is as contingent as its members.

That aside, it doesn’t seem to me that an infinite regress of instances seeking [needing?] explanation really is conceivable EVEN IF actual infinities per se are conceivable. A necessary being may be temporally eternal. That’s one thing. But an infinite regress of contingent beings, each created by the previous? I don’t see how such a regress is conceivable, or how it embodies the necessity Jeff agrees has to be posited in order to explain the existence of the world. Surely if every member in an infinite regress is contingent, then the regress is contingent and the whole thing in need of the same explanation any particular member needs, no? We can’t reify the regress per se and attribute necessity to IT while positing the contingency of every member.

Right.  That's exactly the point I made above.  But surely such a regress is conceivable in the manner I explained above.  Just don't use the world 'create' because that muddies the waters.

Lastly, wouldn’t it be the case in such a regress that every member god would HAVE to create something, so that no one of them could be free to not create at all? That seems to follow. If any member in the regress is free to not create at all, and every member is created, then any member might not have been created at all (which is just to say each is contingent). But that is to posit the contingency of the regress and thus abandon its explanatory value. No? Yes?

I agree.  Jeff's suggestion is much stronger if he thinks of the regress as one of ordinary empirical causes in tandem with the assumption that causation is not probabilistic but deterministic.  But if he is talking about a regress of free gods, then an added dimension of contingency comes in via the libertarian free will of these gods.

Am I nuts? Personally I think an infinite regress of created/contingent beings is impossible.

You are not 'nuts.'  You are basically right.  But it is not clear that an infinite regress of contingent beings is impossible.  Why should it be impossible?  There are benign infinite regresses.  What you want to say is that an infinite regress of contingent beings cannot do any explanatory work re: the question, Why does the universe exist?

So far, then, Tom 1, Jeff 0.

Two Kinds of Critical Caution

One person fears loss of contact with reality and is willing to take doxastic risks and believe beyond what he can claim strictly to know. The other, standing firm on the autonomy of human reason, refuses to accept anything that cannot be justified from within his own subjectivity. He fears error, and finds the first person uncritical, gullible, credulous, tender-minded in James' sense.  The first is cautious lest he miss out on the real.  The second is cautious lest he make a mistake.
 
The second, brandishing W. K. Clifford,  criticizes the first  for believing on insufficient evidence, for self-indulgently believing what he wants to believe, for believing what he has no right to believe. The second wants reality-contact only on his own terms: only if he can assure himself of it, perhaps by ‘constituting’ the object via ‘apodictic’ processes within his own consciousness. (Husserl) The first person, however, is willing to accept uncertainty for the sake of a reality-contact otherwise inaccessible.
 
What should we fear more, loss of contact with objective reality, or being wrong?
 
Analogy.  Some are gastronomically timorous: they refuse to eat in restaurants for fear of food poisoning.  Their critical abstention does indeed achieve its prophylactic end — but only at the expense of the  foregoing of a world of prandial delights.
 
Now suppose a man believes in God and afterlife but is mistaken.  He lives his life in the grip of what are in reality, but unbeknownst to him,  life-enhancing illusions.  And of course, since he is ex hypothesi wrong, death cannot set him straight: he is after dying  nothing and so cannot learn that he lived his life in illusion.  But then why is his being wrong such a big deal?  Wouldn't it be a much bigger deal if his fear of being wrong prevented his participation in an unsurpassably great good?
 
"But he lived his life in the grip of illusions!"
 
To this I would respond, first: how do you know that he lived his life in untruth?  You are always demanding evidence, so what is your evidence for this?  Second, in a godless universe could there even be truth? (No truth without mind; no objective truth without objective mind.)  Third, even if there is truth in a godless universe, why would it be a value?  Why care about truth if it has no bearing on human flourishing?  Doesn't your concern for evidence only make sense in the context of a quest for truth? 

Does Classical Theism Require Haecceitism?

Haecceitism is the doctrine that there are haecceities. But what is an haecceity? 

Suppose we take on board for the space of this post the assumptions that (i) properties are abstract objects, that (ii) they can exist unexemplified, and that (iii) they are necessary beings. We may then define the subclass of haecceity properties as follows.

A haecceity is a property H of x such that: (i) H is essential to x; (ii) nothing distinct from x exemplifies H in the actual world; (iii) nothing distinct from x exemplifies H in any metaphysically possible world.

So if there is a property of Socrates that is his haecceity, then there is a property that individuates him, and indeed individuates him across all times and worlds at which he exists: it is a property that he must have, that nothing distinct from him has, and that nothing distinct from him could have. Call this property Socrateity. Being abstract and necessary, Socrateity is obviously distinct from Socrates, who is concrete and contingent. Socrateity exists in every world, but is exemplified (instantiated) in only some worlds. What's more, Socrateity exists at every time in every world that is temporally qualified, whereas Socrates exist in only some worlds and only at some times in the worlds in which he exists.

Now suppose you are a classical theist.  Must you accept haecceitism (as defined above) in virtue of being a classical thesist?  I answer in the negative.  Franklin Mason answers in the affirmative.  In a comment on an earlier post, Mason gives this intriguing argument into which I have interpolated numerals for ease of reference.

[1] When God created the world, he knew precisely which individuals he would get.  Thus [2] he didn't need to have those very individuals in front of him to know which ones they were.  Thus [3] there must be a way to individuate all possible individuals that in no way depends upon their actual existence. [4] Such a thing is by definition a haecceity. Thus [5] there are haecceities.

I don't anticipate any disagreement with Mason as to what an haecceity is.  We are both operating with the Plantingian notion.  We disagree, however, on (i) whether there are any haecceities and (ii) whether classical theism is committed to them. In this post I focus on (ii).  In particular, I will explain why I do not find Mason's argument compelling.

My reservations concern premise [1].  There is a sense in which it is true that when God created Socrates, he knew which individual he would get.  But there is also a sense in which it is not true.  So we need to make a distinction.  We may suppose, given the divine omniscience, that before God created Socrates he had before his mind a completely determinate description, down to the very last detail, of the individual he was about to bring into existence.  In this sense, God knew precisely which individual he would get before bringing said individual into existence.  Now either this description is pure or it is impure.

A pure description is one that includes no proper names, demonstratives or other indexicals, or references to singular properties.  Otherwise the description is impure.  Thus 'snubnosed, rationalist philosopher married to Xanthippe' is an impure description because it includes the proper name 'Xanthippe.'  'Snubnosed, rationalist, married  philosopher,' by contrast, is pure.  (And this despite the fact that 'married' is a relational predicate.)  Pure descriptions are qualitative in that they include no references to specific individuals.  Impure descriptions are nonqualitative in that they do include references to specific individuals.

Now if God has before his mind a complete pure description of the individual he wills to create then it could apply to precisely one individual after creation without being restricted to any precise one.  (Cf. Barry Miller, "Future Individuals and Haecceitism," Review of Metaphysics 45, September 1991, p. 14)  This is a subtle distinction but an important one.  It is possible that Socrates have an indiscernible twin.  So the complete description 'snubnosed, rationalist philosopher, etc.' could apply to precisely one individual without applying to Socrates.  This is because his indiscernible twin would satisfy it just as well as he does.  The description would then apply to precisely one individual without being restricted to any precise one.  So there is a clear sense, pace Mason, in which  God, prior to creation, would not know which individual he would get.  Prior to creation, God knows that there will be an individual satisfying a complete description.  But until the individual comes into existence, he won't know which individual this will be.

Creation is not the bestowal of existence upon a a pre-existent, fully-formed, wholly determinate essence.  It is not the actualization of a wholly determinate mere possible.  There is no individual essence or haecceity prior to creation.  Creation is the creation ex nihilo of a a new individual.  God creates out of nothing, not out of pre-existent individual essences or pre-existent mere possibles.  Thus the very individuality of the individual first comes into being in the creative act.  Socrates' individuality and haecceity do not antedate (whether temporally or logically) his actual existence.

Mason would have to be able rationally to exclude this view of creation, and this view of the relation of existence and individuality, for his argument to be compelling.  As it is, he seems merely to assume that they are false.

Could God, before creation, have before his mind a complete impure description, one that made reference to the specific individual that was to result from the creative act?  No, and this for the simple reason that before the creative act that individual would not exist.  And therein lies the absurdity of Plantingian haecceities.  The property of identity-with-Socrates  is a nonqualitative haecceity that make essential reference to Socrates.  Surely it is absurd to suppose that that this 'property' exists at times and in possible worlds at which Socrates does not exist.  To put it another way, it is absurd to suppose that this 'property' could antedate (whether temporally or logically) the existence of Socrates.

We are now in a position to see why Mason's argument is not compelling.  If [1] is true, then [2] doesn't follow from it.  And if [2] follows from [1], then [1] is false.  Thus [1] conflates two distinct propositions:

1a.  When God created the world, he knew precisely which pure complete descriptions would be satisfied.

1b.  When God created the world, he knew precisely which individuals would exist.

(1a) is true, but it does not entail

2.  God didn't need to have those very individuals in front of him to know which ones they were.

(1b) entails (2), but (1b) is false.

I conclude that classical theism does not entail haecceitism.  One can be such a theist without accepting haecceities.

Idolatry and Iconoclasm: A Weilian Meditation

In one of its senses, superstition involves attributing to an object powers it cannot possess. But the same thing is involved in idolatry. Someone who makes an idol of money, for example, attributes to it a power it cannot possess such as the power to confer happiness on those who have it. So we need to work out the relation between superstition and idolatry.

What is idolatry? I suggest that its essence consists in absolutizing the relative and finite. To make an idol is to take something of limited value and relative being and treat it as if it were of unlimited value and absolute being. Practically anything can be idolized including pleasure, money, property, name and fame, another human being, family, friends, country, the Party, the Revolution.  There are theologians who idolize their idea of God.  

Money, for example, is instrumentally good, and undeniably so. I think it is a plain mistake to consider money evil or the root of evil, as I  argue in Radix Omnium Malorum. But its value cannot be absolute since money is relational in its very nature as a means to an end.

To idolize money, to pursue it as if it were a thing of absolute value, is to commit a philosophical mistake — even if there is no  God. For only something absolute is worthy of worship, and money is   not absolute. If there is no absolute reality, then nothing is worthy of worship and everything should be treated as relative and finite  including one's own life. If there is an absolute reality, God for example, then everything other than this absolute reality should be treated as relative and finite.

If there is no God, then idolatry is a philosophical mistake. If there is a God, then idolatry is both a philosophical and a religious mistake, and as the latter, a sin.  Man is both an idol-erector and an idol-smasher. Our setting up of idols is rooted in a deep spiritual need to worship, honor, respect, and glorify. We need to look up to something.  But we are limited sense-bound creatures who tend to  latch onto foreground objects in the mistaken hope that they can satisfy us. We think a job, a house, a man, a woman, will satisfy us.   What we want they can't provide, but failing to realize this we succumb to the illusion of attributing to them powers to satisfy us that they cannot have. What is romantic love if not the illusion that possession of man or a woman could make one completely happy?

Idolatry gives rise to iconoclasm. Idol-positing leads to idol-smashing. What is revealed as hollow and unsatisfactory is destroyed in the name of the truly valuable. Both our tendency to erect idols and to smash them derives from our being oriented to the Absolute, our being unsatisfiable by the merely finite. Idolatry is the mistake of absolutizing the relative, infinitizing the finite. Iconoclasm tries to undo the mistake by destroying the would-be absolutes in the name of the true Absolute. It runs the risk, however, of falling into nihilism.  In the twilight of the idols there arises the specter of nihilism, a specter which, despite all his heroic efforts, Nietzsche could not lay.

In Gravity and Grace (Routledge 1995, p. 53), Simone Weil writes:

     Idolatry comes from the fact that, while thirsting for absolute
     good, we do not possess the power of supernatural attention and we
     have not the patience to allow it to develop.

What Weil is saying is that the absolute good is accessible only to inner listenting, inner passivity, an attentive stillness of the mind and heart. But cultivating such attention demands a patience we do not possess. So we create idols to do duty for the transcendent and inaccessible Absolute.

True religion is actually the enemy of idolatry and superstition. One who worships the true God sees the finite as finite and is secure against the illusion that the finite is ultimate. The true religionist is a bit of an iconoclast and indeed an atheist since he denies the God made in man's image. As Weil puts it, "Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the
other." (p. 103)

How Could an Impassible God be Offended or Know Any Contingent Fact?

Earlier (here and here) I asked how an all-good God could sentence a human agent to sempiternal punishment, punishment that has a beginning but no end.  If the punishment must fit the crime, and the crimes of finite agents are themselves finite, then it would seem that no one, no matter what his crimes, would deserve sempiternal punishment.  To make this a bit more precise we ought to substitute 'sin' for 'crime.'  They are different concepts.  Sin, but not crime, implies an offense to God.  If there is no God then there cannot, strictly speaking, be any sin.  But there could still be crime relative to an accepted body of positive law.  And if there is no positive law, but there is a God, then there could be sin but no crime.  (Positive law is the law posited by human legislators.) 

So let us say that the punishment must fit the sin.  My claim, then, is that no sin or sins committed by a human agent is such as to merit sempiternal punishment.  To put the point more sharply, a God who would condemn a finite human agent to unending misery is a moral monster, and not God.  (I am assuming that the agent in question has come to admit the error of his ways and is truly sorry for them. I have no problem with the unending misery of a recalcitrant rebel.) 

In response, Leo Mollica said that the offense to God, as an offense to a being of infinite dignity, is itself infinite and so deserves sempiternal punishment.  This prompted me to ask how an impassible God could be offended, which is the topic of this post.

Impassibility.  To say that God is impassible is to say that nothing external to God can affect God.  As Brian Leftow points out in his SEP article, impassibility is not the same as immutability.  He gives two reasons, but all we need is one: a God who induces a change in himself is not immutable but still could be impassible.  Now if God is impassible, then he cannot be offended by the antics of the Israelites as when they fell to worshipping a golden calf, etc.  He cannot be offended by sin.  And if he cannot be offended by sin, then he cannot be 'infinitely' offended by it.  Or so I maintained.

In response Mollica made a clever move.  He pointed out, rightly, that a person could be offended (wronged, slandered, calumniated, etc.) without knowing that he is.  Such a person would be offended without being affected.  I took the suggestion to be that God too could be offended without being affected.  Thus impassibility does not rule out God's being offended.

To this my reply was that God is omniscient.  He knows everything there is to know. So although it is true that a finite person could be offended without knowing it, and so not affected by the injury that was done to him, God could not be offended without knowing it. Good Thomist that he is, Mollica came back at me with the notion that God is not affected by what he knows.  So when the creature sins, God is offended; but his being offended in no way affects him:  he is not affected 'cognitively' by his knowledge that he is being offended, nor is he affected or injured  'morally' by his being offended.

Very interesting, but very problematic, as problematic as the Thomist line on divine knowledge.  If God is God, then he must be a metaphysical absolute and the pressure is on to say that he is both impassible and immutable.  (An immutable being is one that cannot undergo 'real' as opposed to 'mere Cambridge' change.)  After all, a decent absolute is not the sort of thing that could change or be affected by other things. If it underwent change or affection it would be relativized. But how could such an unchanging  God know anything contingent?  If God is unchanging, then his knowledge is unchanging: it cannot vary over time, or from possible world to possible world.  Here is an argument adapted from  Hartshorne.

1.  If p entails q, and q is contingent, then p is contingent.
2. *Tom sins at time t* is contingent.
3. *God knows that Tom sins at t* entails *Tom sins at t*.
Therefore
4. *God knows that Tom sins at t* is contingent.
Therefore
5. The property of knowing that Tom sins at t is an accidental (not essential) property of God.
6. God has no accidental properties: it is no part of his unchangeable essence that he know any contingent fact, any fact that could have been otherwise.
7. (5) and (6) are contradictories.  So one of the premises must be rejected.  (6) is the premise most plausibly rejected; but then impassibility and immutability go by the boards.

The challenge for our resident Thomist is to explain how an impassible and immutable God can know any contingent fact.