Category: God

Is Mariology a Part of the Presuppositionalist ‘Package Deal’? A Question for Flood

Full disclosure: I am not a theologian. I am a philosopher of religion who, as part of his task, thinks about theologoumena which, on a broad interpretation of the term, are simply things said about God, a term which therefore includes not only official, dogmatic pronunciamenti of, say, the RCC's magisterium, but also includes conjectures, speculations, and opinions about God that are not officially promulgated.

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Anthony Flood writes,

The Christian worldview, expressed on the pages of the Bible, is a revelatory “package deal,” if you will, not a buffet of optional metaphysical theses. The organic connectedness (within the divine decree) of creation, trinity, and incarnation—even the so-called “contingencies of history,” e.g., Joshua’s impaling the King of Ai on a pole after slaughtering all of his subjects (Joshua 8)—await clarification in God’s good time, if He sees fit to provide it, but are put before us for our assent today.

Flood is a presuppositionalist who believes that "intelligible predication" presupposes the truth of the Christian worldview.  Thus, "The Christian does not avail himself of his birthright (Christian theistic) worldview because it confers omniscience on him, but rather because (a) it saves intelligible predication and (b) no competing worldview does."

We are being told that the Christian worldview, as Flood understands it, offers the best and indeed the only explanation of the fact of intelligible predication.  That intelligible predication is indeed a fact I do not question. But I do have some questions about Flood's explanation of the fact. One of them concerns what he includes in his explanation.  It is clear that he includes more than the existence of God where 'God' refers to a purely spiritual being, of a personal nature, endowed with the standard omni-attributes, who exists of metaphysical necessity, and who created out of nothing everything distinct from himself, or at least everything concrete distinct from himself. One reason for this 'more' is because Flood's God is not just personal, but tri-personal: one God in three divine persons. This is not intended as tri-theism, of course, but as monotheism: one God in three divine persons. 

Furthermore, in the Christian worldview as Flood understands it, the second person of the Trinity, variously known as the Logos, the Word, God the Son, became man in a particular man, Jesus of Nazareth, at a particular time in a particular place. One and the same person, the Son, without ceasing to be fully divine, became fully human, with a human body and a human soul, by being born of a virgin named 'Mary' in a stable in Bethlehem.  So it seems that the 'package deal' must include, in addition to Trinity and Incarnation, some version of Mariology.  Why must it? Because Jesus Christ, the God-Man, had to have gotten his human nature from somewhere. He inherited his human nature from his human mother.

Let's think about this.  God the Son is not a creature. Is Jesus a creature? His earthly mother is a creature. Jesus had no heavenly mother, at least not until the Assumption of Mary, body and soul, into heaven.  But that was long after the Incarnation event; I won't say anything more about the Assumption here. And Jesus had no earthly father. Joseph was his step-father, and a step-father is not a father in the earthly or biological sense of the term. The father of Jesus is a purely spiritual being.  So Jesus Christ, the God-Man, at the moment of Incarnation, has a heavenly father but no earthly father, and an earthly mother but no heavenly mother.

Mary became pregnant.  What was the nature of the inseminating seed? It had to be purely spiritual. Why? Because it came from God who is purely spiritual. What about the inseminated egg? It had to be physical. Why? Because it was the ovum of an earthly woman. It was a miraculous pregnancy by supernatural agency.

Now the God-Man had to be free of original sin to be able to do his redemptive work and restore right relations between man and God. So he could not have 'contracted' original sin from his earthly mother. Hence the logic of the soteriological narrative required that Mary be conceived without original sin. Hence the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

It therefore seems that Mariology must be part of Flood's 'package deal,' and indeed a Mariology that includes Immaculate Conception.  So my first question to Flood is this:

Do you hold that the only possible explanation of  intelligible predication must be in terms of a Christian worldview that includes not only Trinity and Incarnation but also Immaculate Conception?

This is not a rhetorical question. It is a genuine question raised so that I might understand what exactly Flood's position is.  Tony is making a mistake if he thinks I am being polemical here. I am not. I honestly find presuppositionalism puzzling and I am trying to understand it.

My second question to Flood which I cannot develop and defend in this installment is this:

Given the well-known logical conundra that arise when we try to render intelligible to ourselves such doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation, conundra that seem to threaten the intelligibility of these doctrines, and therefore seem to threaten the intelligibility of any explanation of intelligible predication in terms of a worldview committed to them, how do you respond?  Do you maintain that the supposed logical puzzles are easily solved and that Trinity and Incarnation in their orthodox formulations are logically and epistemically unobjectionable? If that is not the tack you take, what tack do you take?

Faith: Life-Enhancing Only if True?

In July of 2022 I published a post entitled Faith's Immanent Value.  Here are the opening paragraphs slightly redacted:

Suppose you sincerely believe in God and the soul but that your faith is in vain. You die and become nothing. Your faith was that the curtain would lift, but it falls, irrevocably.  My question is whether that possible upshot would matter. If it should turn out there is nothing on the other side of the Great Divide, would that retroactively remove your faith's immanent value?

My answer is that it won't matter because you won't know it. You will not learn that your faith was in vain. There will be no disappointment. You will not discover that your faith was a life-enhancing illusion. You will have had the benefit of a faith which will have sustained you until the moment of your annihilation as an individual person. You will not die alone for you will die with the Lord-believed-in, a Lord never to be known, but also never to be known not to be.   If the Lord-believed-in is enough for this life, and this life turns out to be the only life, then the Lord-believed-in is enough, period.

Your faith will have had immanent value. If this life is the only life, then this immanent value is the only value your faith could have had. 

The post received a strong response positive and negative. I return to the topic now, as I re-read for the third time Dietrich von Hildebrand's Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven (Sophia Institute Press, 1991, tr. Alice von Hildebrand. The German original appeared in 1980 under the title Über den Tod (On Death)).

On pp. 109-110, von Hildebrand says things that seem to contradict what I am saying. My purpose in this entry is to re-think the question so as to test my view against his. Here is the paragraph that gives me pause and prompts me to re-examine my position:

Nothing would be more absurd than for us to regard the subjective happiness that results from the supernatural view of death as an end, and to see faith as a means for obtaining this end. To do so would mean detaching from truth both faith and the supernatural view of death. Such a pragmatic interpretation of faith comes close to a total misunderstanding of it. We must, therefore, condemn as blind nonsense the idea that, because it cheers and comforts us, supernatural view of death is worth nourishing even if it is an illusion. Faith gives comfort only if it is true. (110, emphasis added)

The pragmatic interpretation of faith as described by von Hildebrand is not mine.  My first  task, then, is to explain why. I turn then to an evaluation of von Hildebrand's positive view.

I

My claim is that religious faith has an immanent value, a value for this life in the here and now, whether or not the objects of this faith, God and the soul,* really exist. This is equivalent to saying that faith has immanent value whether or not the faith is objectively true. I am not saying that that faith has immanent value whether or not the believer really believes in God and the soul. I assume that he really does believe, and shows that he really does believe by living his faith, by 'walking the walk' and and not merely by 'taking the talk.'   My claim is that a believer who really believes derives an important life-enhancing benefit from his sincere belief whether or not the objects of his belief  really exist.

It is important to understand that one who really believes in God and the soul believes that they really exist whether or not he or anyone else believes that they do. His believing purports to target transcendent entities that exist independently of his believing. But note that this purport to target the transcendent is what is whether or not the targets exist.  In other words, from the fact that one really believes that a transcendent God exists, it does not follow that a transcendent God really exists.

Am I saying that faith is a means to the end of subjective happiness? No. The sincere believer does not make himself believe in order to make himself feel good or to comfort himself.  He is not fooling himself so as to comfort himself.  To fool himself, he would have to know or strongly believe that God does not exist and then hide that fact from himself.

The believer believes because of various experiences he has had: he feels (what he describes as) the presence of the Lord on certain occasions; he senses the absoluteness of moral demands and the gap between what he is and what he ought to be; he feels the bite of conscience and cannot bring himself to believe any naturalistic explanation of conscience and its deliverances; he has religious and mystical experiences that seem to tell of an Unseen Order; he takes the beauty, order, and intelligibility of the world to point beyond it to a transcendent Source of this beauty, order, and intelligibility; he feels that life would be meaningless if there were no God, that there would be no ultimate justice; he senses the presence of purely spiritual demonic agents interfering with his attempts to pray and meditate and conform to the demands of morality. 

Or it may be that a sincere religious believer never has any experiences that purport to reveal the reality of God and the soul, and has never considered any of the arguments for God and the soul; he believes because he was brought up to believe by people he admires and respects and trusts.  Even in this case the believer is not making himself believe as a means to the end of feeling good or comfortable or subjectively happy; he believes simply because he has taken on board the beliefs of others he trusts and respects.  I seem to recall Kierkegaard somewhere saying that he believes because his father told him so.  Some imbibe belief with their mother's milk. 

II

Despite these clarifications of my position, it still seems that if von Hildebrand is right, then I am wrong, and vice versa.  He holds that "Faith gives comfort only if it is true." I will take that to mean that faith confers an important life-enhancing benefit only it is objectively true and not merely believed to be truth by a sincere believer.  What I am saying, however, is that faith confers an important life-enhancing benefit to the sincere believer  whether or not  it is objectively true.

Who is right? In all intellectual honesty, it seems to me that I am right. Why should it be necessary that the faith be true for it be life-enhancing, for it to be good for me to believe it? An analogy may help me get my point across.

At age 60 I attempted a marathon. At the starting line I did not know whether I could cover the 26.2 miles within the allotted time (under seven hours). I did not know whether I could pull it off, but I strongly believed that I could, and surely this strong belief, whether true or false, was good for me to believe: it had race-immanent value in that with this belief I performed better than I would have performed without it.  As things turned out, I completed the marathon in six hours.  But suppose I hadn't.  Suppose that my belief in my ability to complete the marathon in the allotted time was false. It would still have been the case that my belief  in completion had race-immanent value.  I would still have been better off with that belief than without it.

Now in the Great Race of Life we compete against our own hebetude, decrepitude, and sinfulness  for the crown of Eternal Life, the Beatific Vision. But here below we cannot know whether we will attain the crown, or even whether it exists, so here below we need faith.  Living by faith we live better than we would have lived without it. We run the Race better, with more enthusiasm, commitment, and resoluteness.  Clearly, or so it seems to me, we reap the benefits of this faith in the here and now whether or not there is anything on the other side of the Great Divide.

So I say that von Hildebrand does not understand the pragmatics of faith. One problem is that he caricatures the pragmatic approach as I showed in the first section.  The other problem is that he is a dogmatist: his doxastic security needs are so strong that he cannot psychologically tolerate the idea that he might be wrong.  He wants objective certainty about ultimates, as all serious philosophers do, but he confuses his subjective certainty, which falls far short of knowledge,  with objective certainty, which knowledge logically requires.

He claims to know things that he cannot possibly know. He writes,

We ought to have faith because by our belief in God we give the response to which He is entitled. We ought to believe in divine Revelation because it is absolute truth. (110)

What von Hildebrand is doing here is simply presupposing the existence of God and the absolute truth of  divine revelation.  If God exists, then of course we ought to have faith in him. And if divine revelation is absolute truth, then we ought to believe in it. But how does von Hildebrand  know that God exists and that revelation is true? He doesn't t know these things, he merely believes them.  He is claiming to know what he cannot know, but can only believe.  

___________________________

*'Soul' in the Platonic sense, not the Aristotelian one according to which the soul is the mere life-principle of the body.

Is Belief in God Rationally Required? Response to a Critic

S. L. writes, 
I will just tell you three quick things about myself in an effort to get your kind response to my question.
 
1. I am a 70-year-old "evangelical", conservative (in every way), protestant, Christian believer. I put evangelical in quotes because I don't subscribe to all ideas that fit under the rubric of evangelicalism as it is known publicly today. I do believe that the true God has revealed Himself through creation/nature and human self-consciousness, and in the 66 "books" of the Old and New Testaments and supremely through Jesus Christ, sufficiently for man to understand and be accountable for that knowledge. 
 
2. I am not an intellectual by any stretch. I aspire to rigorous and valid thinking, but I am not terribly good at it. I do read, think, and investigate ideas in search for truth.
 
3. I found your website probably back in the nineties. I have been reading you ever since, because you help me think better.
 
Here is my question. I have gathered that your studied position is that belief in the existence of a personal, sovereign, and good God, and man's accountability to him, is not a necessary belief. Meaning the evidence for God is insufficient to rationally require anyone to believe in God. That is how I understand your thinking.
 
To me, the evidence of our senses together with common sense makes the existence of this God beyond question. In other words, the way reality is presented to and experienced self-consciously by every man makes the existence of God beyond dispute. By "common sense" I just mean the common human experience and understanding of reality as it presents itself to every man; which cannot be successfully denied because it is obviously true across all of reality.
 
These facts that "prove" this God's existence include common sense notions such as these:
  1. Nothing in nature comes into being without the intentional action of a personal agent. Natural infinities cannot exist. Nothing comes into existence out of nothing.
  2. In the natural world life cannot come from non-life. personality can only come from Personality.
  3. The existence of personal, self-conscious beings requires a supernatural, self-conscious, personal, powerful being to account for that existence. 
  4. Goodness, truth, beauty, order are fundamental facts of reality, seen in the observation that their opposites (evil, error, ugly, chaos) only exist as the negation of them, not as fundamental facts of their own. 
  5. Since our existence had a beginning and that beginning had to find its source in this God (nothing else explains that existence), that means all of this creation has meaning and purpose. Again, a God that is good, true, beautiful, powerful, sovereign, and orderly would to create something for no good and meaningful purpose. Additionally, the kind of God the Creator must be, He would communicate with this creation He made in a way that was available, understandable, and universally reliable. Because they cannot know about their Creator unless He reveals Himself.
These above undeniable realities along with others, require the existence of a good, true, beautiful, orderly, sovereign, and powerful God. Additionally, they render any denial of this God's existence by a rational person as invalid and carrying culpability with it. The existence of this God is just part and parcel the reality that presents itself to every self-conscious, rational being, simply by his existing in this world. He can use reason to understand it, to explain it, to analyze it, and even to defend the existence of this God. But believe it He must, or he denies all reality.
 
You understand my position, S. L.  Using your words, but adding to them, I would put it like this: The evidence for God available to us in this life is insufficient rationally to require that God exists. Presumably angels and demons have sufficient evidence rationally to require belief that God exists, if they and he exist, and presumably this holds for us as well if we survive bodily death as conscious persons, and God exists.  The way I usually put it, however, is that here below there are rationally acceptable arguments both for and against the existence of God, but no rationally compelling arguments either way.
 
A rationally compelling argument is one that is rationally coercive or philosophically dispositive. It is an argument such that the consumer of the argument must accept the conclusion on pain of being positively irrational should he not accept it.  It is an argument that settles the matter once and for all beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt. Thus my position entails that one cannot prove or demonstrate the existence of God. Equally, however, one cannot prove or demonstrate the nonexistence of God.  By my lights, then, theism and atheism are both reasonable.  The ubiquity and depth of both natural and moral evil is the central consideration in support of the reasonableness of atheism. 
 
For you,  however, the existence of God is "beyond question" and "beyond dispute," and not just for you. You mean by these phrases that the existence of God cannot be reasonably or rationally questioned or disputed by anyone. You think that it is positively unreasonable to either doubt or deny the existence of God. Our disagreement on this point thus runs deep: you believe the exact opposite of what I believe.  We don't disagree about the existence of God — we are both theists — and I take it that we both mean (roughly) the same thing by 'God' which is to say that our concepts of God, which must never be confused with God, are basically the same.  (To the extent that our concepts differ, this discussion would take on added complexity. For the sake of this discussion, and to keep things simple, I will assume that you and I share the very same concept of God.)
 
In support of your position you invoke "the evidence of the senses" and "common sense."  If by the senses you mean the five outer senses, they do not reveal the existence of God, and this for the simple reason that God is neither a material thing nor the totality of material things, the physical universe.  God is nothing like Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot, or Edward Abbey's angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon.  You are old enough to remember cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's 1961 space flight and his report to his handlers that he saw no God up there.  I was eleven at the time and laughed at the stupidity of the remark. (In all charity to the cosmonaut, however, he was probably just spouting what he thought the commies at ground control wanted to hear.) And we will also agree that God, who is not a material thing, is also is not identical to the totality of material things, the physical universe.  
 
As for inner sense, God is not evident to a person when he introspects his mental states.  God is neither an object of sensible extrospection nor of sensible introspection.
 
Of course, there is what Calvin calls the  sensus divinitatus, the sense of the divine, which is a type of inner spiritual awareness which purports to be of, or about, a being distinct from the awareness, namely, God.  But there is also the sensus absurditatis, the sense of the absurd, which seems to reveal that the totality of what exists, the physical universe, exists without reason, cause, or purpose. It seems to reveal that the universe is just there as a factum brutum and is, in this sense, ab-surd. Clearly, these two senses cannot both be revelatory of the real. They might  both be false, but they cannot both be true.  One and only one of them can be veridical. Which one?  Some people have both senses (at different times). How would such a person know which was veridical and which wasn't? The point here is that there is nothing internal to the SD or the SA experience that guarantees either the existence of God or the absurdity of what exists. (If existence is absurd, then of course God as we are using the term, does not exist.)   
 
Your invocation of "common sense" does not help. The common sense of a majority of Westerners at the present time is that there is no God, and that the supposed sense of the divine is delusional.   Galen Strawson is representative in this regard. In any case, and apart from any sociological considerations, "common sense" is no sure guide to truth as could be shown by many examples since it varies with time, place, social class, race, age, sex, level of social suggestibility, level of education, and so on. Additivity of velocities is a well-known example from physics.
 
For you and I it is just common sense that the toleration of criminal behavior leads to more criminal behavior, and we are surely right about this; but we are not right because this reasonable view is common: it is not common among our political enemies, and so it is not common to all of us.  Imagine if  a  majority of Americans came to believe that the sex of a neonate is not biologically determined but is socially assignable at birth, or that a majority came to believe that eliminating penalties for shoplifting would lead to less shoplifting.  "Common sense," despite its commonality, would then obviously not be a  guide to truth.  Invocation of "common sense," therefore, cuts no ice in an intellectually serious discussion.
 
Let's now look at your "common sense notions" that supposedly prove the existence of God.
 
Ad (1). You say that nothing comes into existence without the intentional action of a personal agent. But this is plainly not the case. Suppose a storm dislodges some rocks that roll down a hillside and form a neat pile by a trail. The rock pile comes into existence, but no personal agent is involved, in the sense in which a personal agent would have been involved had a hiker stacked the rocks into a cairn so as to mark the direction of the trail.   You also say, rather more plausibly, that nothing comes into existence out of nothing. Ex nihilo nihil fit. But that proposition is not consistent with the theism you embrace. For you presumably believe that creatures (created entities) came into existence out of nothing. For you believe in divine creatio ex nihilo: God created the world of creatures out of nothing. Not out of a pre-existent stuff, nor out of  mere possibles, nor ex Deo, out of God, but out of nothing.  Coming into existence ex nihilo is not easy to understand either with or without a divine efficient cause. The point I am making is that Ex nihilo nihil fit is a highly problematic principle which is reasonably doubted, and that bringing God into the picture does nothing to make it less problematic. 
 
What you want to say, of course, is that the universe did not come into existence out of nothing by itself:  it had to have had a cause of its coming to exist at some past time if it is finite in the past direction, and, if it it did not, if it always existed, it still needs a cause of its existing at all ('in the first place') given that it contingently  exists, and thus might not have existed.   And this Cause must be transcendent of the universe and be of a personal nature.  
 
Well, suppose that, contrary to contemporary cosmology, the universe always existed.  How could you prove that it is contingent in the existential sense  of being dependent for its existence on something external to it, and not merely contingent in the merely modal sense of being possibly nonexistent? How could you prove (not merely argue for, but demonstrate or establish as objectively certain) that the existence of the universe is not a brute fact, where a brute fact is a fact that is modally contingent but without cause, reason, or explanation?
 
Ad (2).  You say, ". . . life cannot come from non-life; personality can only come from Personality."  Note first that life and personality are not the same since not every living thing is a person.  Cancer cells are alive but they are not persons; otherwise a man suffering from cancer has multiple-personality disorder.  I grant you, though, that it is very difficult to understand, and perhaps impossible for us to understand given our present cognitive architecture, how the biotic could emerge from a abiotic.  But if life did arise from non-life, if that arisal is actual, then it is possible, and if possible then possible whether or not a finite intellect (an ectypal intellect in Kant's terms)  can understand how it is possible.  That is to say: my inability to understand how it is possible does not show that it non-actual. On the other hand, my inability to understand how the biotic could emerge from the abiotic prevents me from dogmatically asserting that the emergence is actual, and gives me a good reason, though not a compelling or 'knock-down' reason, to believe that it does not occur.
 
Do you see what I am doing here? I am questioning both a dogmatic assertion and a dogmatic counter-assertion. I am questioning the dogmatic assertion that the biotic just had to arise naturally (without any intervention ab extra) from the abiotic, the assertion that, in Daniel Dennett's phrase, a "gradualist bridge" can be built from the first to the second.  I am also questioning the dogmatic assertion that there just had to be divine intervention to bring life out of mere matter. What I am saying is that both the assertion and the counter-assertion are reasonably believed. The are both rationally acceptable, but neither is rationally mandatory.
 
Ad (3).  Your third "common sense notion" is that the existence of finite persons logically requires the existence of a supernatural person.  How do you know that? You believe it, and you have reason to believe it, and you are probably better off believing it than not believing it, but you do not know it.  The same considerations that I brought to bear on the preceding point I bring to bear here.
 
Ad (4).  I myself have always believed something like your (4). Good and evil, for example, are not on an ontological par as equally real but mutually opposing principles: Good (goodness) is primary whereas  evil exists only as a negation of the good, as you say, or as privatio boni, a privation of the good as Aquinas says. This is a very large topic, but unless one is an unreconstructed dogmatist one should appreciate the difficulty of reducing evil to privatio boni as Augustine and Aquinas do. 
 
The Problem of Pain

How are we to think of animal and human pain, whether physical or mental? Pains are standardly cited as examples of natural or physical evils as opposed to moral evils that come into the world via a misuse of free will.  Suppose you have just slammed your knee against the leg of a table. Phenomenologically, the felt pain is something all-too-positive.  It is not a mere absence of well-being, but the presence of ill-being. Compare an absence of sensation in the knee with intense pain in the knee. An absence of sensation, as in a numb knee, is a mere lack; but a pain is not a mere lack, but something positive in its own right. This seems to show that not all evils can be privations.

The argument in nuce is that not all evils can be privations of good because a  felt pain is a positively evil sensation that is not an absence, lack, or privation of something good.  And so we cannot dismiss evil as privatio boni.  

The same seems to hold for mental pains such as an intense sadness. It is not merely an absence of happiness, but something positive in its own right. Hence, the evil of sadness is not merely a privation of the good of happiness.  Examples are easily multiplied: Angst, terror, clinical depression, etc.

Ad (5):  Here you are merely telling us what you believe. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. But you have done nothing to show that your beliefs are rationally required.

Your beliefs are, however, rationally acceptable.  And that is really all you need! Why the hankering for an objective certainty unattainable here below?  So my advice to you is: go on believing what you believe. You are within your epistemic rights in so doing.  And live your beliefs.

I suspect you will agree with me that orthopraxy trumps orthodoxy.  All the best to you.

Occasionalism, Omnipotence, and Matthew 23:9

 "Secondary causes are mere occasional causes, occasions of the exercise of the causality of the only true productive cause, God."

And call no man your father upon earth, for One is your Father, who is in Heaven. (Matthew, 23:9)

Posted by: Simon Neale | Sunday, February 18, 2024 at 03:21 PM

Before we can evaluate Mr. Neale's suggestion we need to take a step back. Since occasionalism and divine omnipotence are related topics, consider four combinatorially possible views of the latter.  What is it for God to be all-powerful?

A) God can do anything at all, and anything at all that gets done is done by God. God is all-powerful (omnipotent) in that (i) God has power over everything, including the laws of logic, and (ii) God alone exercises all the power that is exercised.   God is then the only genuine efficient cause, and all so-called 'secondary causes' are not causes stricto sensu, but mere occasions for the exercise of the efficient causality of the one and only 'primary cause.' Accordingly, 'secondary' in 'secondary cause' is an alienans adjective: it 'alienates' or 'others' the sense of  'cause' to such an extent that a secondary cause is not a cause. (Cognate examples: a decoy duck is not a duck; artificial leather is not leather, etc. Leather does not come into kinds, real and artificial, etc. More on this topic in my Adjectives category.)) 

The above understanding of divine omnipotence is occasionalist and makes God out to be absolutely sovereign: he is lord of all orders, the physical, the spiritual, the logical, the moral, and even the modal.  A less extreme version of occasionalism results from the deletion of clause (i). Thus:

B) God cannot do everything, but everything that is doable and gets does is done by God. Thus God cannot do what is logically impossible or command or do what is morally wrong. Nor does his will determine what is merely possible and what is necessary. All the power that is exercisable, which is to say permitted by logic, morality, and modality, is exercised by God alone. This too is occasionalism since it denies that so-called 'secondary causes' are genuine causes.

C) God cannot do everything, and not every exercise of causal power is an exercise of divine power: there are genuine natural or secondary causes. On this non-occasionalist view both God and secondary causes are genuine causes.

D) God can do everything but not everything that gets done is done by God. I don't believe anyone has held this view; I include it only for combinatorial completeness. Having brought it up, I now set it aside.

As for the New Testament verse, I read it as logically consistent with (C) and thus as not logically requiring (entailing) the truth of either (A) or (B). Since the verse does not entail the truth of occasionalism, it is consistent with (A) and with (B).  

Why not say the following? My biological father is a real cause (or rather part-cause, along with my mother and various other causal factors) of my coming to exist.  If I have a Father in heaven, he too is a real cause, of anything's having come to exist and of anything's remaining in existence. The 'horizontal' causality of natural causes presupposes the 'vertical' causality of the divine cause in that without the causa prima, there would be no causae secundae. 

The difference between my two fathers is that the first is natural whereas the second is supernatural. The first is a spiritual animal, whereas the second is a pure spirit. But both are real. The word 'father' is not used univocally in application to both, nor equivocally.  It is used analogically, but literally.  Thus 'father' is being used literally of God and not metaphorically as when I say  that the subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.  That use of 'mother' is metaphorical or figurative.

Does this 'hold water'? I fear that my glib explanation hides aporiai.  I am not in the clear when it comes to the analogia entis, and the formidable Erich Pryzwara, brilliant and erudite as he is, is too obscure to be of much help.

Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis

The book has been recently translated.  

Unfortunately, I find myself in agreement with Josef Pieper as to the 'unreadibility' of the book: "The unfinished, and hardly readable book, Analogia Entis (1932), which he himself declares is the quintessence of his view, in fact gives no idea of the wealth of concrete material he spread out before us in those days."

Of course, the book is not strictly unreadable: I am reading it and getting something out of it.   But it has many of the faults of Continental writing and old-time scholastic writing. 

To make a really good philosopher you need to start with someone possessing a love of truth, spiritual depth, metaphysical aptitude, and historical erudition. Then some nuts-and-bolts analyst needs to beat on him with the logic stick until he can express himself clearly and precisely.  Such a thrashing would have done gentlemen such as E. Gilson and J. Maritain a world of good. Gallic writing in philosophy tends toward the flabby and the florid, and the same goes for many Europeans to the east of France.

A ‘Feuerbachian’ Objection to Descartes’ First Meditation III God Argument

Descartes gives three arguments for the existence of God  in his Meditations on First Philosophy.  This entry discusses the first argument and commenter Elliot's objection to it. We can call it the argument from the representational content of the God-idea.  In a subsequent entry I hope to set forth the argument in full dress and point out its weaknesses. For now I offer a quick sketch of it as I interpret it. After the sketch, Elliot's objection, and finally Descartes' anticipation of the objection.  It will lead us into some deep waters. So put on your thinking caps and diving gear.

Sketch

The argument attempts to move from the idea of God, an idea that we find in ourselves, to God as the only possible cause of the idea. It is not the mere occurrence of the idea in us, the mere fact of our having it, that is the starting point of the argument, but what I will call the representational content of this idea. Ideas are representations. They occur in consciousness as representings, acts of representation, but they purport to refer beyond themselves to realities external to consciousness.  Which ones? The ones indicated by their representational contents. A three-fold distinction is on the table: mental act, representational content  of  the act, extramental thing presented to consciousness under the aspect of the content.  Cogitatio, cogitatum qua cogitatum, res extramentem. (An anticipation of Husserl's noesis-noema schema?)

In the jargon that Descartes borrows from the scholastics, the representational content of an idea is its realitas objectiva. By 'objective reality,' Descartes does not mean something mind-independent; he means the representational content of the act of representing which, while distinguishable from the act, is inseparable from it.  Every act has its content, and every content is the content of an act. By 'formal reality,' he means items that exist in themselves and thus independently of us and our representations. The direction of the first argument is thus from the realitas objectiva of the idea of God to the realitas formalis of God.

Descartes takes it for granted that there are degrees of reality, and therefore degrees of objective reality. Thus an idea that represents a substance has a higher degree of objective reality than one that represents an accident. The idea of God, Descartes writes, "certainly contains in itself more objective reality than do those by which finite substances are represented." (Adam-Tannery Latin ed., p. 32) 

Now according to Descartes, the lumen naturale (natural light) teaches that "there must be at least as much reality in the total efficient cause as in its effect, for whence can the effect derive its reality if not from the cause?" (Ibid.) The more perfect cannot be caused by or be dependent upon the less perfect. The more perfect is that which contains more objective reality. This holds not only for external things existing in formal reality, but also for  ideas when one considers only their objective reality. And so the realitas objectiva of the God-idea can only have God himself as its cause. Ergo, God exists!

I will note en passant, and with a tip of the hat to Etienne Gilson, just how medieval this reasoning by the father of modern philosophy is! It is very similar to the reasoning found in the Fourth Way of Aquinas. Descartes takes on board the degrees-of-reality notion as well as the idea of efficient causality together with the related notion that the efficient cause must be at least as real as its effect. These are stumbling blocks for post-Cartesian thinkers, a fit topic for  subsequent posts. 

Elliot's Objection

I hold Descartes in high regard, but I have doubts about the claim that no human is sufficient to cause the idea ‘God.’ Suppose a human who is (a) aware of himself as a person, and thus has the idea ‘person,’ (b) aware of axiological relations such as ‘greater than,’ and (c) understands the concepts of infinity and supremeness. Why couldn’t such a human come up with the idea ‘God’ by reflecting on ‘human person,’ ‘greater than,’ 'supremeness,' and ‘infinity’? Why can't an Anselm come up with the idea of the greatest conceivable being? Why can't a Plato come up with the idea of a perfect being (Republic, Book II)?

Elliot's objection has a 'Feuerbachian' flavor. Ludwig Feuerbach held that God is an anthropomorphic projection.  What he meant was that there is no God in reality, there is only the idea of God in our minds, and that this idea is one we arrive at by considering ourselves and our attributes.  We take our attributes and 'max them out.' We are powerful, knowing, good, and present, but limitedly, not maximally. Although we are not  all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good or omnipresent, we can form these maximal predicates and imagine them true of one and the same being, which we then project into external reality. By this unconscious mechanism we fabricate the idea of God. But since the mechanism of fabrication is unconscious or perhaps subconscious we fool ourselves into thinking that there really is such a being as we imagine. The God idea, then, turns out on my reading of the Feuerbachian analysis to be factitious in  Descartes' tripartition. (He distinguishes between innate, acquired, and factitious (made up, from the L. facere, to make)  ideas. As examples of the last-mentioned, Descartes cites sirens and hippogriffs.)  In sum, the presence in us of the God-idea is adequately explained by our own  unconscious or subconscious doing. No God need apply.

Descartes' Anticipation of the Objection

Descartes seems to have anticipated the objection. He writes:

But possibly I am something more than I suppose myself to be. Perhaps all the perfections which I attribute to the nature of a God are somehow potentially in me, although they [(are not yet actualized and)] do not yet appear (47) and make themselves known by their actions. Experience shows, in fact, that my knowledge increases and improves little by little, and I see nothing to prevent its increasing thus, more and more, to infinity; nor (even) why, my knowledge having thus been augmented and perfected, I could not thereby acquire all the other perfections of divinity; nor finally, why my potentiality of acquiring these perfections, if it is true that I possess it, should not be sufficient to produce the ideas of them [and introduce them into my mind].

Nevertheless, [considering the matter more closely, I see that] this could not be the case. For, first, even if it were true that my knowledge was always achieving new degrees of perfection and that there were in my nature many potentialities which had not yet been actualized, nevertheless none of these qualities belong to or approach [in any way] my idea of divinity, in which nothing is merely potential [and everything is actual and real]. Is it not even a most certain [and infallible] proof of the imperfection of my knowledge that it can [grow little by little and] increase by degrees? Furthermore, even if my knowledge increased more and more, I am still unable to conceive how it could ever become actually infinite, since it would never arrive at such a high point of perfection that it would no longer be capable of acquiring some still greater increase. But I conceive God to be actually infinite in such a high degree that nothing could be added to the [supreme] perfection that he already possesses. And finally, I understand [very well] that the objective existence of an idea can never be produced by a being which [38] is merely potential and which, properly speaking, is nothing, but only by a formal or actual being.

And certainly there is nothing in all that I have just said which is not easily known by the light of nature to all those who will consider it carefully. But when I relax my attention some¬ what, my mind is obscured, as though blinded by the images of sensible objects, and does not easily recall the reason why my idea of a being more perfect than my own must necessarily have been imparted to me by a being which is actually more perfect.

Evaluation

I am actually powerful, but not actually all-powerful. And  likewise for the other attributes which, when 'maxed-out,' become divine attributes. Am I potentially all-powerful? No. Descartes is right about this. But if I am not potentially all-powerful, all-knowing, etc., then my fabricated ideas of omnipotence and omniscience, etc. lack the objective reality they would have to have to count as ideas of actual divine attributes.  That seems to be what Descartes is saying.  He seems to be assuming that the objective reality or representational content of an idea must derive from an actual source external to the idea. That source cannot be a human being since since no such being is potentially omnipotent, omniscient, etc. and so could not ever be actually omnipotent, omniscient, etc.

But none of this is very clear because the underlying notions are obscure: those of causation, degrees of reality, and realitas objectiva.

 

A Clarkian-Barthian Argument for your Evaluation

Gordon Clark in Religion, Reason, and Revelation ( The Trinity Foundation, 1986, pp. 37-38) discusses and agrees with Karl Barth (Church Dogmatics II, 1, pp. 79 ff.).  The following is my distillation of the Barthian argument to which Clark assents.  Barth is attacking the Roman Catholic viewpoint as expressed at the Vatican Council of 24 April 1870.

1) The Christian God is triune.

2) The rationally demonstrable God is not triune. 

Therefore

3) The Christian God is not the rationally demonstrable God.

Therefore

4) The Christian God is not the God of the philosophers.

Therefore

5) We cannot know God from nature, 'cosmologically,' by natural reason. (Natural theology is a non-starter.)

Therefore

6) We can know God only through God.

It is perhaps obvious why the presuppositionalist Clark would like this argument. Clark strikes me as the best theologian among the presuppositionalists.  The book cited is extremely rich in provocative ideas. 

God, Doubt, Denial, and Truth: A Note on Van Til

Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., P&R Publishing, 2008, p. 294: "To doubt God is to deny him."

I take that to mean that to doubt that God exists is to deny that God exists. The obvious objection to this is that doubt and denial are very different propositional attitudes. In most cases, one can doubt that p without denying that p.  I can doubt that Biden will get a second term without denying that he will. 

In almost all cases. But in every case?  Suppose we replace 'p' with 'truth exists.'  Can we doubt that truth exists without denying that truth exists.  No! In the case of truth, the distinction between doubt and denial collapses. 

To doubt that truth exists is to presuppose that truth exists. For if you doubt that truth exists, you are doubting whether it is true that truth exists.  The same goes for denial. If you deny that truth exists, you affirm that it is true that truth does not exist. 

Whether you doubt or deny that truth exists, you presuppose that truth exists. Truth is such that doubt and denial are the same. Truth cannot be doubted and it cannot be denied. The existence of truth is the ultimate transcendental condition of all our intellectual operations, doubt, denial, affirmation, predication, reasoning, and so on. So we may say:

To doubt truth is to deny her.

Of course, it remains that case that doubt and denial are different propositional attitudes. But in the case of truth, doubt becomes denial.

Therefore,  if God is identical to truth, then Van Til is right: "To doubt God is to deny him." If God is identical to truth, then God is the ultimate transcendental condition of all our intellectual operations, including giving arguments for God's nonexistence! If so, then Van Til and his followers are not begging the question against atheists and agnostics by simply assuming what they need to prove; they are giving a noncircular transcendental argument for the existence of God.

But is God identical to truth? Is it true that God is identical to truth? These remain open questions. I grant that if God is identical to truth, then God exists as the necessary condition of all affirmation, denial, and argument, including atheistic argument.  But how do we know that the antecedent of this conditional is true?

It may be that in reality apart from us, God and truth are the same. But from our point of view, the only POV available to us, God and truth are not the same. To see this, note that it is conceivable (thinkable without contradiction) that God not exist, but not conceivable that truth not exist. So it might be true that God exists and it might be true that God does not exist.  The 'might' in the preceding sentence in both of its occurrences is epistemically modal. It is epistemically possible that God exist and epistemically possible that God not exist.  For all we know, either could be the case. But it is epistemically necessary that truth exist: we cannot help presupposing it.  Given that we know anything at all, truth must exist. So the argument could be put like this:

a) That truth exists is epistemically necessary: we cannot help presupposing that it exists.

b) That God exists is not epistemically necessary: we can conceive the nonexistence of God.

Therefore

c) God cannot be proven to exist by proving that truth exists.

Therefore

d) The Transcendental Argument for God fails as a proof.

Euthyphro Dilemma, Divine Simplicity, and Modal Collapse

Top o' the Stack. Another deep dive into one of the gnarliest conundra in natural theology.

The problem may be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad:

1) Classical theism is untenable if the ED cannot be defeated.

2) The ED can be defeated only if DDS is true.

3) DDS entails the collapse of modal distinctions.

4) Classical theism is inconsistent with the collapse of modal distinctions because, on classical theism, God is metaphysically necessary while the world of creatures is metaphysically contingent. 

The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God: A First Response to Flood

I thank Anthony G. Flood for his The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God Revisited: Toward a Response to Bill Vallicella.  Herewith, a first installment by way of rejoinder. Convergence upon agreement is not to be expected, but clarification of differences is an attainable goal. In any case, philosophy is a joy to its true acolytes, and in dark times a great consolation as well. Now let's get to work.

Tony introduces the theme skillfully:

Preamble: if the God of the Bible, who created human beings in his image to know and love him and to know, value, and rule the rest of creation under him (hereafter, “God”), exists, then we know one way that the conditions of intelligible predication (IP) can be met. The preceding sentence includes key aspects of the Christian worldview (CW)—the Theos-anthropos-kosmos relationship—expressed on the pages of the Bible.

If no alternative explanation for IP is possible, then Biblical theism is necessarily true (which is what the CW predicts).

[. . .]

If no worldview other than the Christian (CW) can account for IP, if (as I now hold) an alternative to the CW when it comes to accounting for IP cannot even be conceived, then to hold out for an alternative, as though doing so were an expression of rational exigency (“demandingness”)—that to reserve judgment somehow accords with epistemic duty—models only dogmatic stubbornness, not tolerant liberality.

Given the actual fact of intelligible predication, which is not in dispute, and assuming, as we must, the modal axiom ab esse ad posse valet illatio, it follows that intelligible predication (IP) is possible. Necessarily, whatever is actual is possible. So we ask the transcendental question: under what conditions is IP possible? What condition or conditions would have to obtain for it to be possible that there be actual cases of intelligible predication?  An example of an intelligible predication is any true or false statement, such as 'The Moon is presently uninhabited' which happens to be true, or its negation which happens to be false. 

Now I agree with Flood that if the God of the Christian Bible (hereafter 'God') exists, then the condition or conditions of the possibility of IP are satisfied. The existence of God suffices for the possibility of intelligible predication. But here we need to remind ourselves of a couple or three simple points of logic.

The first is  that if X is sufficient for Y, it does not follow that X is necessary for Y. So if the existence of God is not only a sufficient but also a necessary condition of IP, this will require further argumentation. The second point is that to assert a conditional is not to assert either its antecedent/protasis or its consequent/apodosis.  To assert or affirm a conditional is to assert or affirm a connection between antecedent and consequent, the nature of the connection depending on the type of conditional it is, whether logical or nomological or whatever. The third point is that some conditionals are true despite having a false antecedent and a false consequent.

And although it is not self-evident, I also agree with Flood that there is and must be some condition or set of conditions that make IP possible. Let 'TC' stand for this transcendental condition or set of conditions. We agree then that the TC necessarily exists.

We seem to have found some common — dare I say 'neutral'? — ground: (a) there are actual cases of IP; (b) given that they are actual, they are possible; (c) it is legitimate to launch a regressive (transcendental) inquiry into the condition or conditions of the possibility of these actual cases; (d) there must be such a transcendental condition; (e) the existence of God suffices for the possibility of IP. 

This leaves us with the question whether the God of the Christian Bible  = TC. Is God's existence not only sufficient but also both necessary for the possibility of IP? Flood will answer with alacrity in the affirmative: yes, God and God alone is (numerically) identical to the ultimate transcendental condition of all intelligible predication. This of course implies that it is not possible that anything distinct from God be the TC. God necessarily exists, and is necessarily identical to the ultimate transcendental condition of intelligible predication.  

But wait, there's more! Flood tells us that  "an alternative to the CW [the Christian worldview] when it comes to accounting for IP cannot even be conceived." So it is not just impossible that anything other than God be identical to the TC; this is inconceivable as well. 

Here is one of the places where Flood blunders: he confuses the epistemic modality inconceivability with the ontic modality impossibility. Conceivability and inconceivability are tied to the thinking powers of such  finite and limited intellects as ours. By contrast, what is possible and impossible in reality are independent of what we frail reeds are able to think and unable to think.  I will have more to say about this in subsequent posts since it appears to be a trademark mistake of presuppositionalists to conflate epistemic and ontic modality.

In any case, it is very easy to conceive of alternatives  to Flood's candidate for TC status. Here is a partial catalog of candidates in which (B), (C), and (D) are alternatives to Flood's candidate, (A).

A. Intelligible predication  presupposes the truth of the Christian worldview  (Van Til & Co.) as the transcendental condition of IP's very possibility.

B. Intelligible predication presupposes the existence of God, but not the Christian worldview as the Calvinist Van Til and his followers calvinistically understand it, the essential commitments of which include such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity, Incarnation, etc. as well as the specifically Calvinist TULIP doctrines. Some who call themselves Christians are unitarians and deniers of the divinity of Christ. Our friend Dale Tuggy is such a one.  And those the presuppositionalists refer to as 'Romanists' who do accept Trinity and Incarnation don't accept the specifically Calvinist add-ons.

C. Intelligible predication presupposes the truth of Kant's transcendental idealism according to which "The understanding is the law-giver of nature," and space and time are a priori forms of our sensibility.  For Kant the ultimate transcendental condition of the objective validity of every judgment, and thus of every intelligible predication, is located in the transcendental unity of apperception which is assuredly not God, whatever exactly it is. 

D. Intelligible predication presupposes, not the God of the Christian Bible, but  an immanent order and teleology in nature along the lines of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos (Oxford 2012). On Nagel's view, the rational order of nature is self-explanatory, a necessary feature of anything that could count as a cosmos. Nagel views the intelligibility of the world as "itself part of the deepest explanation why things are as they are." (17).  Now part of the way things are is that they are understandable by us.  Given that the way things are is intelligible, it follows that the intelligibility of the world is self-explanatory or self-grounding. "The intelligibility of the world is no accident." (17) But neither is it due to theistic intervention or imposition. "Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings." (17) See my overview of Nagel's book for details.

I am not endorsing any of the above-listed alternatives to (A). They all have their problems as does (A). My point is that they are conceivable alternatives to (A). This being the case, Flood's asseveration, "an alternative to the CW [the Christian worldview] when it comes to accounting for IP cannot even be conceived" is false.

It is quite clear that what Van Til & Co. want is a rationally compelling, 'knock-down,' argument for the existence of the God of the Christian Bible calvininstically interpreted.  But they know (deep down even as they suppress the knowledge) that no circular argument is probative.  So they essay the above transcendental argument.

What I have shown, however, is that the transcendental argument is not probative.  It fails to establish that the God of the Christian Bible is both sufficient and necessary for the possibility of intelligible predication. At most, it renders rationally acceptable the conclusion that the God of the Christian Bible exists.

I am not denying that the God of the Christian Bible exists. Nor am I denying that if said God exists, then he flawlessly executes all the transcendental functions that need executing.  How could he fail to? In particular, how could he fail to be the ultimate ungrounded transcendental-ontological ground of intelligible predication?  My point is that the presuppositionalists have not proven, i.e., established with objective certainty, that God alone could play the transcendental role.

 

Argumentative Circles and their Diameters: More on Presuppositionalism

The day before yesterday, re: presuppositionalism, I wrote:

We need to bear in mind  that arguments have premises and that no argument can prove its own premises. An argument of the form p therefore p is an argument valid in point of logical form in which premise and conclusion are identical, but no one will take an argument of this form as proving that p. Every circular argument of the above form is valid, and some are sound; but none are probative. By that I mean that no such argument constitutes a proof.  That ought to be perfectly obvious.

'Circularity' in respect of arguments is of course a metaphor: no argument is literally a geometrical circle. But it is a useful metaphor and I propose we extend it by speaking of the 'diameter' of a circular argument.  The logical form italicized above — p therefore p — has a 'diameter' than which no shorter can be conceived.  Its 'diameter' is zero. If a geometrical circle has a diameter of zero, then it is not a circle but a point.  The diameter of a circular argument of the above form is also a 'point,' figuratively speaking, the point being the one proposition that serves as both premise and conclusion.

A circular argument of zero diameter is said to be 'vicious.' Are there then 'virtuous' or if not positively virtuous then  'non-vicious' circular arguments?  Can one argue in a way that is circular but logically acceptable? Brian Bosse brought up this issue over lunch Sunday as we were discussing my longish entry on presuppositionalism. He may have had John M. Frame in mind.

Presuppositionalists such as Frame take the Word of God as set forth in the Protestant Christian Bible as their "ultimate presupposition." (Five Views on Apologetics, Zondervan 2000, 209) It is their "ultimate criterion of truth." (209)  This commitment of theirs is faith-based:

. . . for Christians, faith governs reasoning just as it governs all other human activities. Reasoning is not in some realm that is neutral between faith and unbelief. There is no such realm, since God's standards apply to all of life. (209)

What causes faith? ". . . God causes faith by his own free grace." (209) What is the rational basis of faith? ". . . the answer is that faith is based on reality, on truth. It is in accord with all the facts of God's universe and all the laws of thought that God has ordained. . . . The faith he gives us agrees with God's own perfect rationality." (209-210)

We want to know what rationally justifies faith in God and in his Word as found in the Bible. We are told that this faith is justified because it is true, agreeing as it does with all of the laws of thought that God has ordained. God himself, as the ultimate source of all things, including rationality, is the ultimate rational justification of our faith in him and his Word.  The reasoning here is plainly circular as Frame admits:

There is a kind of circularity here, but the circularity is not vicious. It sounds circular to say that faith governs reasoning and also that it is based on rationality. It is therefore important to remember that the rationality that serves as the rational basis for faith is God's own rationality. The sequence is: God's rationality –>human faith –>human reasoning. The arrows may be read "is the rational basis for." That sequence is linear, not circular. (210)

Frame's fancy footwork here is unavailing, an exercise in sophistry. He is obviously reasoning in a circle by presupposing the very thing whose existence he wants to prove. But he is loathe to admit that this is what he is doing. So he introduces a bogus distinction between vicious circles and linear circles.  But just as 'linear circle' in geometry is a contradictio in adjecto , so too is 'linear circle' in logic. 

You are either arguing in a circle or you are not. You are either presupposing what you are trying to prove or you are not. You are either begging the question or you are not. You are either committing the formal fallacy of petitio principii (hysteron proteron) or you are not. That is the long and the short of it. One or the other and no weaseling out via some bogus distinction between vicious and non-vicious circular arguments.

What Frame wants is a 'knock-down' (rationally compelling or rationally coercive) argument for the existence of the God of the Protestant Christian Bible interpreted along Calvinist lines.  He thinks he can get what wants by way of a transcendental argument,  one that issues in God "not merely as the conclusion of an argument, but as the one who makes argument possible." (220)  He wants God to play a transcendental role as the ultimate and unconditioned condition of the possibility of all our intellectual operations including reasoning, whether valid or invalid, sound or unsound. (If his God does play the transcendental role, then Frame can say that the arguments of atheists, just insofar as they are arguments, prove the existence of God!) 

Now it must be granted, as I granted to Brian over lunch, that if Frame's God exists, then he does play the transcendental role. The question, however, is whether it can be proven that nothing other than Frame's God could play the transcendental role. It can be proven that there is a transcendental condition of all our intellectual operations. (See my earlier entry.) Where Frame goes wrong is in thinking that from the fact that there is a rationally compelling argument for the existence of a transcendental condition of the possibility of all our intellectual operations (forming concepts, defining terms, making judgments, giving arguments, replying to objections offering hypotheses, etc.) it follows immediately that his God exists beyond the shadow of a rational doubt.  How does he know that his God alone could play the transcendental role? Frame may be taxed with  giving the following invalid argument:

a) If the God of the Protestant Christian Bible exists, then he plays the transcendental role;

b) It is objectively certain that something plays the transcendental role;

ergo

c) It is objectively certain that the God of the Protestant Christian Bible  plays the transcendental role. 

The premises are true, but the conclusion does not follow from them. For it is not objectively certain that nothing other than the God of the Christian Bible could play the transcendental role. This is because no non-transcendental argument — Frame mentions the "causal argument" — for the existence of God is rationally compelling. Hence no non-transcendental God argument can assure us that the existence of God is objectively certain. 

Here is another way to see the matter. It is rationally demonstrable that there is a total and unique way things are. (For if you assert that there is no way things are, then you are asserting that the way things are is that there is no way things are.) Now if Frame's God exists, then he is the concrete and personal metaphysical ground of the way things are. But how do we know that Frame's God exists? We cannot simply assume that the transcendental proof of the existence of the way things are is also a proof of Frame's God.  So non-transcendental arguments must be brought into to take us to Frame's God, Frame's "causal argument" for example. But these arguments are none of them rationally compelling. They do not generate objective certainty. So how do we know that something else is not the metaphysical ground of the way things are?