God – Page 4 – Maverick Philosopher

Omnia Sana Sanis

"All is reasonable to the reasonable." Herein lies a reason to limit one's reasonableness.

For it is not reasonable to be reasonable in all things or in relation to all persons. We live among enemies. The enemy needs sometimes to experience the hard fist of unreason, the brute rejection, the blind refusal, the lethal blow. Or at least he must be made to fear this response, and you must be capable of making it. The good are not the weak, but those capable of violence while remaining the masters of its exercise.

Otherwise, are you fit for this world? On the other hand, it might be better not to be fit for this world. What sort of world is it in which the good must be brutal to preserve the reign of the Good?

Of Russell’s Teapot and Abbey’s Angry Lunicorn

Does the angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon manage his anger by sipping herbal tea from Russell's teapot?

Substack latest.

The Concept GOD as a Limit Concept

The concept GOD is the concept of a being that cannot be constituted in consciousness in Husserl's sense of 'constitution,' a being that cannot be a transcendence-in-immanence, but must be absolutely transcendent, transcendent in itself, not merely for us. It follows that there cannot be a phenomenology of God. At best, there can be a phenomenology of such of our experiences as purport to be of or about God.

We know that the concept GOD is the concept of something absolutely transcendent, and we know this by purely conceptual means. We have the concept GOD and we analyze it: we simply unpack its meaning. Whatever the origin of this concept, it is there in us and available for analysis. Of course, we cannot learn by conceptual analysis that God exists, but we can know something about what God cannot be like, if he does exist. We can know, for example, that God, if he exists, is not a concept. No surprise here, and nothing that distinguishes God from my chair, since my chair is not a concept either. (One cannot sit on a concept.) The difference between the concept CHAIR and the concept GOD is the difference between an ordinary concept and a limit concept (Grenzbegriff).*

This is the distinction between those concepts that can capture (mirror, represent) the essences or natures of the things of which they are the concepts, and those concepts that cannot. Call the first type ordinary concepts and the second limit concepts. Thus the concept CUBE captures the essence of every cube, which is to be a three-dimensional solid bounded by six square faces or sides with three meeting at each vertex, and it captures this essence fully. The concept HELIOTROPIC PLANT captures, partially, the essence of those plants that exhibit diurnal or seasonal motion of plant parts in response to the direction of the sun. Concepts are mental representations. Essences are extra-mental.

Now the concept GOD cannot be ordinary since this concept cannot capture the essence of God. For (i) in God essence and existence are one, and (ii) there is no ordinary concept of existence.

Ad (i). That in God essence and existence are one follows from the fact that nothing could count as the Absolute if it were a composite of essence and existence. And we know by conceptual analysis that God is the Absolute: the concept GOD is the concept of 'something' absolute. This is the case whether or not God exists.

Ad (ii). When I say that there is no ordinary concept of existence, I mean that there is no ordinary (non-limit) concept that is adequate to existence. (There are bogus concepts of existence such as Quine's.) There is no ordinary (non-limit) concept of existence because the existence of a thing, as other than its essence, cannot be conceptualized. Why not?

This is because each existing thing has its own existence. Thus the existence of Al is Al's existence, the existence of Bob is Bob's, and the existence of Carla is Carla's. For the existence of a thing is that which makes that very thing exist. Existence cannot be a property like being human, being sentient, being sunburned. These properties are multiply instantiable; existence, however, is not multiply instantiable. There are no instances of existence.

Now if each thing has its own existence, then existence is implicated in the irreducible singularity of each existing thing. Irreducible singularity, in turn, cannot be conceptualized by minds like ours which trade only in the general and multiply instantiable. It's an Aristotelian point. If Aristotle wrote in Latin it would go: individuum qua individuum ineffabile est. The individual as such, the singular as such, is ineffable and cannot be conceptualized. The Peripatetic tells us that science is never of the particular as particular but only of the particular as exhibiting general or repeatable features. The particular as such is unrepeatable. But of course there are no individuals (particulars) bare of properties. Every finite individual is a this-such. This is a law of metaphyica generalis. So, while the individual as individual cannot be conceptualized, the individual as bearer of properties can be conceptualized as an instance of those properties. If I think of Mary as an instance of lovable properties, then I abstract from the haecceity (thisness) that makes her different numerically from her indiscernible twin Sherry. So if I love Mary precisely and only as an instance of lovable properties, then it will make no difference to my so loving her whether Mary or Sherry is its object. It will, however, make a difference to Mary. "I want that you should love me for what makes me me, and not for what I have in common with her!" I explain this all in great detail in Do We Love the Person or Only Her Qualities?

The crucial point here is that when we think of an individual as an instance of properties, we abstract from (leave out of consideration) the individual's thisness and its existence. I am not saying that the existence and the thisness of a concrete individual are one and the same; I am saying that that they go together as a matter of metaphysical necessity.

Ad (i + ii). In God there is no real distinction between existence and nature. That was the first point. The second was that no ordinary (non-limit) concept captures the individuality of the thing of which it is the concept. Therefore, since God is (identically) his nature, there can be no ordinary concept of God, whence it follows frat GOD is a limit concept.

There is, then, a clear sense in which God is unconceptualizable or unbegreiflich: he cannot be grasped by the use of any ordinary concept. But it doesn't follow that we have no concept of God. We do. The concept GOD is a limit concept: it is the concept of something that cannot be grasped using ordinary concepts. Our cognitive architecture is such that we can grasp only the general, the repeatable, but never the irreducibly singular. The concept GOD, however, is the concept of 'something' absolutely and irreducibly singular. God is one without a second, one without even the possibility of a second. Any god that doesn't satisfy this metaphysical exigency just isn't worth his salt.

The concept GOD is the concept of something that lies at the outer limit of discursive intelligibility, and indeed just beyond that limit. We can argue up to this Infinite Object/Subject, but then discursive operations must cease. We cannot penetrate the divine essence since this essence is one with existence, and existence cannot be conceptually penetrated. We can however point to God, in a manner of speaking, using limit concepts. The concept GOD is the concept of an infinite, absolute and wholly transcendent reality whose realitas formalis so exceeds our powers of understanding that it cannot be taken up into the realitas objectiva of any of our ordinary concepts.

Now if you have followed that, then you are in a position to see that the following objection is a 'cheap shot' easily dismissed. "You contradict yourself. You say that God cannot be conceptualized but at the same time you operate with a concept of God as unconceptualizable." But no contradiction arises once we distinguish ordinary from limit concepts.

If the critic accuses me of inventing a distinction ad hoc to save the ineffability and transcendence of God, then my reply will be that there are numerous other examples of limit concepts. See the aptly appellated category, Limit Concepts.

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*The term Grenzbegriff first enters philosophy in 1781 in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Curiously, he uses the term only once in the works he himself published. The term surfaces a few more times in his Nachlass. The sole passage in the published works is at A255/B311 where Kant remarks that the concept noumenon is a Grenzbegriff.

Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain, Part One (2021 Version)

For Vito Caiati. This 2021 version of a November 2010 post corrects unclarities, infelicities of expression, and outright errors in the initial entry . And the font is more legible for ancient eyes.

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When theists are confronted by atheists with the various arguments from evil, the former should not reject the premise that objective evil exists. That would eliminate the problem, but eliminativism here as elsewhere in philosophy is a shabby evasion. (Example: How does brain activity give rise to consciousness? No problem! Consciousness is an illusion!) Evil exists and it is not merely subjective. But the same is true of holes. See Holes and Their Mode of Being. Holes are not nothing, and that is objectively the case despite their being absences. You could say that holes have no positive entitative status and are only as privations. (Curiously, as argued in the linked entry, they are empirically detectable absences which is another reason to hold that they are not nothing.)

So, to accommodate the objective reality of evil we should consider whether perhaps evil has no positive entitative status and is only as a privation. In classical jargon, this is the view of evil as privatio boni. Thus Augustine, Enchiridion XI:

For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present –namely, the diseases and wounds — go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance, — the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils — that is, privations of the good which we call health — are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.

If evil is a privation or absence then the ancient problem — dating back beyond David Hume to Epicurus — of reconciling the existence of God (as traditionally defined) with the existence of evil seems either to dissolve or else become rather more tractable. Indeed, if the evil-as-privation thesis is coupled with the Platonic notion alive in both Augustine and Aquinas that Goodness is itself good as the Primary Good, the unique exemplar of goodness whence all good things receive their goodness, then one can argue from the existence of evils-as-privations to the existence of that of which they are privations. But that is a separate and very difficult topic.

Without going that far, let us first note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent. Thus in one clear sense good and evil are opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good. In fact, I will lay it down as a condition of adequacy for any theory of evil that evil not be hypostatized. If a (primary) substance is anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then evil is not a substance. That way lies Manicheanism. There are no two co-equal 'principles' eternally at war, Good and Evil.

The Problem of Pain

But then 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 pain is something all-too-positive. The what-it-is-like is something quite distinctive. (This hyphenated locution from Thomas Nagel.) 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.

Two Possible Responses

Felt pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:

A. One might argue that felt pains are evil but that the painfulness of a felt pain is a matter of projection. One might flesh this out as follows. There is a certain sensory quale that I experience when my knee slams into the leg of the table. Call this the experiential substratum of the pain. I am not talking about the physical damage to the knee, if any, or about anything physical. By the experiential substratum I mean the felt datum precisely and only as felt, as lived though, as experienced. I am talking about the physical pain as a phenomenal datum. The painfulness of this felt pain is something else again. On the objection now being considered, the painfulness of the felt pain is a matter of projection or interpretation or 'attitude': it is something supplied by the subject. The experiential substratum, the sensory quale, exists in objective reality despite the fact that its esse est percipi. But the painfulness, and thus the evil or badness of the sensory quale is an interpretation from the side of the sufferer.

What's more, this interpretation or projection can be altered or withdrawn entirely. Thus, with practice, one can learn to focus one's attention on a painful sensory quale and in so doing lessen its painfulness. If you try this, it works to some extent. After a long day of hiking over rocky trails, my feet hurt. But I say to myself, "It's only a sensation, and your aversion to it is your doing." "Master desire and aversion!" Focusing on the sensation in this way, and noting that one's attitude towards it plays a role in the painfulness, one can reduce the painfulness. One reduces the painfulness but without eliminating the felt pain. You still feel the sensation, but you have withheld the aversive overlay. If you try it, you will see that it works to some extent. This suggests that the painfulness is merely subjective.

Unfortunately, this response is not convincing as a general response to the problem of pain. Imagine the physical and mental suffering of one who is being tortured to death. And then try to convince yourself that the pain in a situation like this is just a matter of 'attitude' or aversion. "Conquer desire and aversion" is a good Buddhist maxim. And a good Stoic one as well. But I find it hard to swallow the notion that the painfulness of every painful sensation derives from the second-order stance of aversion.

I conclude that plenty of felt pains are not only objectively real but also objectively evil: their evilness is not a subjective addition.

B. One might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil since they are outweighed by greater goods. But I'll leave the elaboration of this response for Part II. Brevity is the soul of blog.

Is Theism Empirically Refutable?

Consider the following passage from J. J. C. Smart:

It looks as though the theistic hypothesis is an empirically refutable one, so that theism becomes a refuted scientific theory. The argument goes: (1) If God exists then there is no evil, (2) There is evil, therefore (3) It is not the case that God exists. Premiss (1) seems to follow from our characterization of God as an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent being. (2) is empirical. We can hardly reject (2). It seems therefore that the theist has to find something wrong with (1) and this is not easy. (J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism, Blackwell 2003, 2nd ed, p. 60)

Smart's argument from evil is plainly valid, being of the form modus tollens. But for an argument to be probative, other conditions must be met. One of these conditions is that the premises be true. Another is that the argument involve no 'informal fallacy' such as equivocation.

So let us ask: how would 'evil' in (1) have to be construed so that (1) comes out true? I say that 'evil' must be short for 'gratuitous evil.' But then, to avoid equivocation, we would have to replace 'evil' in (2) with 'gratuitous evil.' The result would be:

1*. If God exists, then there is no gratuitous evil.
2*. There is gratuitous evil.
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3. It is not the case that God exists.

The resulting argument is valid, and (1*) is plainly true, unlike (1) which is not plainly true, but false. That (1) is false can be seen from the fact that an omni-qualified God could easily permit the existence of an evil that was necessary for the attainment of a greater good. Such an evil would not be gratuitous. So it is just false to say, "If God exists, then there is no evil."

But (1*) is plainly true. Now it may be — it is epistemically possible that — (2*) is also true. The reformulated argument would then be sound. A sound argument, by definition, is a deductive argument that is both valid in point of logical form and whose premises are all of them true. As for epistemic possibility, a proposition p is epistemically (doxastically) possible for a subject S if and only if p is logically consistent with what S knows (believes).

But note that a sound argument will be probatively worthless if it begs the question, if it is such that one cannot know a premise to be true without already knowing the conclusion to be true. So let us ask a very simple question: How does one know that (2*) is true? How does one know that there is gratuitous evil? Smart tells us that (2) is empirical. 'Empirical' is a term of epistemology. It is applied to those propositions that are known from experience, by observation via the senses and their instrumental extensions (microscopes, telescopes, etc.) Now I am willing to grant arguendo that (2) — There is evil — is an empirical truth. (2), however, is not what Smart needs to make his argument work. He needs (2*). But is (2*) an empirical truth? Can one know from sensory experience (whether inner or outer) that there is gratuitous evil? Is gratuitousness an empirical attribute of the evils one experiences?

Consider the evil of intense pain. I am acquainted with pain by 'inner sense.' And I am willing to grant arguendo, though it is not quite obvious, that I am acquainted empirically with the evil of intense pain. But I am surely not acquainted empirically with the gratuitousness of experienced evils. Gratuitousness is no more an empirical attribute than the createdness of the natural world. It is not evident to the senses that nature is a divine creation. Similarly, it is not evident to the senses that instances of evil are gratuitous. Is it not epistemically possible that they are all non-gratuitous?

To say that an evil is gratuitous is equivalent to saying that it is an evil inconsistent with the existence of the omni-qualified God. It is to say that it is an evil that no such God could have a morally sufficient reason for permitting. Clearly, one cannot 'read off' such a complex relational attribute from any instance of evil. Even if it is empirically obvious that there are evils such as the intense pain both physical and psychological of a fawn being incinerated in a forest fire, it is not empirically obvious that this evil is gratuitous.

The conclusion I am driving towards is that Smart's argument supra is question-begging. For in order to know that premise (2*) is true, I must know that the conclusion is true. That is, to know that there are gratuitous evils, I must know that God does not exist. For if God exists, then then there are no gratuitous evils. At most, there would only seem to be such.

Smart tells us above that the theistic hypothesis is empirically refutable. But I say Smart is mistaken: he needs (2*) for his argument to work, but this proposition — There is gratuitous evil — is not empirical. It may be true for all that, but it is not knowable by experience. You may be convinced that it is true, and I won't blame you if you find it much more plausible than the truth of 'God exists'; but it is not an empirical truth, if it is a truth. It is an interpretation imposed upon the data. It is as metaphysical as 'God exists.'

One last observation. There is something strange about referring as Smart does to theism as an empirical hypothesis. This is not the place to pursue this. I will merely suggest that the existence of God is more like the existence of truth than it is like the existence of something empirically confirmable or disconfirmable. It would be easy to show the absurdity of the question, Is the existence of truth empirically refutable? So too, perhaps, with the existence of God. The existence of truth is an ultimate presupposition of all inquiry and all assertion. The existence of God may be in the same logical boat.

If you are thinking of God along the lines of Russell's celestial teapot, you have missed the boat.

C. S. Lewis on the (Non) Additivity of Pain in Relation to the Problem of Evil

In The Problem of Pain (Fontana 1957, pp. 203-204, first publ. in 1940), C. S. Lewis writes,

We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the 'unimaginable sum of human misery'. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and all space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.

I think that Lewis is right that felt pain is not additive across different subjects. Your pain and my pain cannot be summed. This holds for both physical and psychological pain. Pain is additive only in a given subject and not across subjects. "There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it."

So far, so good. It is equally true, however, that two people being tortured to death is worse than one person being tortured to death. Both states of affair are evil, but the first is more evil than the second. The quantity of felt pain is the same, but in the first there are twice as many evils than in the second.

I conclude that the question of the quantity of pain in the world is distinct from the question of the quantity of evil in the world. This is relevant to the problem of evil faced by theists. Lewis has shown that "the maximum that a single person can suffer" is "all the suffering that there ever can be in the universe." And that includes all the suffering of the non-human animals who suffer. But the problem of evil faced by the theist is precisely a problem of evil and not a problem of felt pain. And this despite the fact that many pains are evil (all those, I should think, the suffering of which does not lead to a greater good.)

My tentative conclusion is that the considerations adduced in the passage quoted above do little to alleviate the severity of the problem of evil faced by traditional theists.

Generic and Specific Problems of Evil

Substack latest.

The nature and tractability of the problem depends on the type of theism espoused.

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Vito Caiati comments:

I very much profited from the short essay “Generic and Specific Problems of Evil” that you posted on Substack yesterday. I have read it several times, and, if viewed from the perspective of the ultimate destiny of the members of our species alone, I see the merit of your claim that “It is arguable that there is no insoluble problem of evil for theists-A, . . . [those who regard] this world [as] a ‘vale of soul-making’ (the phrase is from John Keats) in which human beings, exercising free will, make themselves worthy, or fail to make themselves worthy, of communion with God. Combine this soul-making idea with post-mortem existence, and the existence of purgatory but not hell, and we have perhaps the elements of a solution to the problem of evil.”

However, what about non-human animals, who “Despite being wholly corporeal, . . . enjoy and suffer sentience: they are the subjects of conscious states, contra Descartes. Among these conscious states are non-intentional states such as pleasure and pain, but also . . . intentional (object-directed) states such as affection and anger” (Maverick Philosopher, “Soteriology for Brutes,”3/21/2019)?

It seems to me, who, as you know, is a philosophic neophyte in these matters, that the theist-A operates with too narrow a perspective on sentience, for ultimate value is placed only on those sentient beings that are rational and hence capable to abstract thought and moral judgments. The suffering of all the others, including the highest mammals, counts very little or not at all; it certainly does not figure in the soteriology of, say, Christianity, which is obsessively centered on human sin and the need for salvation from it, rather than on the agony and death that permeates the natural world. Perhaps “death is the wages of sin” for mankind, but what explains the agonizing deaths of our fellow sentient creatures that have not sinned? Only by remaining in his sin/redemption theory of salvation, which is necessarily restricted to human beings, can theist-A be more reconciled to the existence of evil.

None of these may be worth your time, but I wanted to share it with you, since it is one of the central concerns of my intellectual and emotional life.

You have pointed out a serious lacuna in my discussion, Vito. I focused on moral and natural evil as it pertains to human animals but left out of account the natural evil, including both physical and mental suffering, that besets non-human animals. I will now try to formulate your objection to me as trenchantly as I can. 'You' in what follows refers to me!

1) You maintain that the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of God is considerably more tractable if we humans survive our bodily deaths and come to enjoy (after a period of purgation) eternal bliss.

2) You also argue that "It is dialectically unfair for atheists to argue against all (classical) theists from the fact of the evil in this world when . . . some theists believe that the transient evils of this short life are far outweighed by the unending bliss of the world to come."

3) You are presenting a sort of "All's well that ends well" response to moral and natural evil. You are arguing that the evils of this life are far outweighed and almost completely made up for by the unending bliss of the world to come, so much so that the the 'problem' of evil vanishes for those who subscribe to the specific theism that you call Theism-A.

4) You ignore, however, the problem of animal pain which is certainly real. (We both reject as preposterous the Cartesian view that non-human animals are insensate or non-sentient.) Given that non-human animals are not spiritual beings as we are, and do not survive their bodily deaths, there is no redemption for them: their horrific suffering — imagine the physical pain and mental terror of being eaten alive! — is in no way recompensed or outweighed. And given how many species of non-human critter there are, and how many specimens per species, and how long these animals existed before man made the scene, there is a VAST amount of evil that goes unredeemed.

5) Your argument therefore fails to get God off the hook.

I take this objection seriously and I thank Dr. Caiati for raising it. At the moment, three possible lines of response occur to me, assuming that there is no Cartesian way out.

A. We can take something like the line that David Bentley Hart champions against Edward Feser, which I briefly discussed in "Soteriology for Brutes?" (linked above) namely, that animals do survive their bodily deaths and 'go to heaven.' (Lacking as they do free will, I see no reason to posit purgatory or hell for them. The savagery of a tiger devouring its prey alive is amoral unlike the savagery of humans. No homo is literally homini lupus.)

B. Without embracing Cartesianism, one might argue that we are engaging in illicit anthropomorphic projection when we project into animals our terrors and physical pains. One might to try to argue that their sufferings, while real, are next to nothing as compared to ours and don't really count very much or at all when it comes to the problem of evil.

C. One might take a mysterian tack. God exists and evil exists. Therefore, they co-exist, whence it follows that it is possible that they co-exist. The fact that we cannot understand how it possible reflects poorly on our cognitive architecture but has no tendency to show that God and evil do not co-exist. Of course, if one took a line like this, one could evade the particulars of my Substack proposal.

While (B) strikes me as lame, (A) and (C) show promise, (A) more than (C).

ComBox now open.

ADDENDUM (9/17)

This morning I found a passage in Berdyaev that supports Dr. Caiati's intuitions about animal suffering from a broadly Christian perspective.

The death of the least and most miserable creature is unendurable, and if it is irremediable, the world cannot be accepted and justified. All and everything must be raised to eternal life. This means that the principle of eternal being must be affirmed in relation to human beings, animals, plants and even inanimate things. [. . .] Christ's love of the world and for man is victory over the powers of death and the gift of abundant life. (Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, tr. Natalie Duddington, Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p. 253.)

The (febrile) Russian existentialist is making a surprisingly radical claim here. He is maintaining that the existence of the world is justified and our lives in it are affirmable as worth living only if absolutely everything is redeemed and preserved in the end, not only everything living, but the inanimate as well. Somehow everything temporal must be somehow cancelled and preserved — aufgehoben in Hegel's sense — in eternity. How the inanimate could be brought to eternal life is of course a thought transgressive of the discursive and hard by the boundary of the mystical.

In Berdyaev as in Simone Weil, we are at the outer limits of the religious sensibility.

Presentism and Evil: If Presentism is False, then God does not Exist

Bradley Schneider sent me the following argument and would like my opinion. I am happy to accommodate him. (I have edited his argument for the sake of brevity, the soul of blog. I have also given it a title.)

PRESENTISM FALSE? THEN GOD DOES NOT EXIST!

1) An all-good, omniscient, omnipotent God should not allow any horrendous evil.

2) If there is a solution to the problem of evil, it must entail that God eventually defeats evil and, to defeat evil, God must not only compensate the victims of evil but destroy evil's existence.

3) If presentism is not true, however, it means that past events still exist, even if they do not exist now.

4) But this implies that a horrendous evil that occurred in, say, 1994 (the Rwandan genocide, for example) still exists. Not only that, it will always exist. As will every other horrendous evil throughout human history.

5) God may be able to vanquish evil at the eschaton, but all of the horrendous evils will persist throughout all eternity. Even while the blessed are enjoying heaven, the horrendous evils will continue to exist. All of the past evils will remain real and hence undefeated, even if God can assure that no further evil will occur post-eschaton.

6) So God ultimately cannot vanquish evil if presentism is false.

7) Therefore, God doesn't exist if presentism is false.

The problem is with (3). If presentism is not true, then presumably eternalism is true. Presentism is the view that only temporally present items (times, events, . . .) exist. That is, everything that exists exists at present. On eternalism, this is not the case: past and future items also exist. Now for these two views to be contradictory, 'exist(s)' must be used in the same sense. But what sense is that? It cannot be the present-tensed sense because that would reduce presentism to a tautology and eternalism to a contradiction. How so?

Well, 'Everything that exists (present tense) exists at present' is a trivial logical truth devoid of metaphysical import. On the other hand, 'Past, present, and future items all exist (present tense)' is logically contradictory since wholly past and wholly future items are not temporally present. Presentism and eternalism are substantive metaphysical theses that contradict each other only if 'exist(s)' is taken tenselessly.

Now glance back at (3). It reads, in part, "If presentism is not true, however, it means that past events still exist . . . " This is arguably a presentist misunderstanding of what the eternalist is saying. 'Still exists' means 'existed and exists (present tense).' That is not what the eternalist is saying. He is not saying, for example, that the gladiatorial combat in the Coliseum is still going on. He is saying that past events, i.e., events earlier than his speaking, exist simpliciter, i. e., tenselessly, whatever that comes to.

Note also that if past events still exist, then they do exist now, which contradicts the rest of (3): " . . . even if they do not exist now."

So Schneider's argument needs some work.

My view is that both eternalism and presentism are fraught with insuperable difficulties. Using either for theological purposes is not likely to get us anywhere.

Shestov on the Fool

Lev Shestov (1866-1938), Job's Balances:

"The fool said in his heart: There is no God." Sometimes this is a sign of the end and of death. Sometimes of the beginning and of life. As soon as man feels that God is not, he suddenly comprehends the frightful horror and the wild folly of human temporal existence, and when he has comprehended this he awakes, perhaps not to the ultimate knowledge but to the penultimate. Was it not so with Nietzsche, Spinoza, Pascal, Luther, Augustine, even with St. Paul?

Quoted from D. M. White, Eternal Quest (Paragon, 1991), p. 111.

The penutimate knowledge, I take it, would be the knowledge that without God, life is meaningless, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." This was Nietzsche's knowledge, and Nietzsche's dead end. The ultimate knowledge would then be the knowledge that God exists, a knowledge that begins in earnest once one has come through the Great Doubt expressed by the fool.

God and Existence: How Related?

A reader asks:

You seem to hold that, if God is identical to his existence, then God is Existence itself. Why think that? Why not think instead that, if God is identical to his existence, then he is identical to his 'parcel' of existence, as it were?

This is an entirely reasonable question. I will try to answer it.

First of all, when we say that God is identical to his existence, we mean that there is no real distinction in God between essence (nature) and existence in the way in which there is a real distinction in Socrates (our representative creature) between essence (nature) and existence. It is the real distinction in Socrates that grounds his metaphysical contingency, while it is the lack of such a distinction in God that grounds his metaphysical necessity.

This is to say that God, unlike creatures, is ontologically simple. In a slogan of St Augustine, God is what he has. Thus he has his existence by being his existence. In this one case, the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication coalesce. Why must God be simple? Because he is the absolute reality. If your god is not the absolute reality, then your god is not God but an idol. The absolute cannot depend on anything else for its nature or existence on pain of ceasing to be the absolute. It must possess aseity, from-itself-ness.

Now Existence is in some way common to everything that exists, though it is not common in the manner of a property or a concept. Thus God and Socrates have Existence in common. If God is not identical to Existence, then he is like Socrates and must depend on Existence as something other than himself to exist. But this violates the divine aseity.

Therefore, God is not only identical to his existence, he is identical to Existence itself.

Objection: "If God is identical to Existence, then God alone exists, which flies in the face of the evident fact that there is a plurality of non-divine existents."

Reply: The objection succeeds only if there are no different ways of existing. But if God exists-underivatively and creatures exist-derivatively, then God's identity with Existence does not entail that God alone exists; it entails that God alone exists-underivatively.

The picture is this. Existence is that which makes derivative existents exist. If Existence did not itself exist, then nothing would exist. So Existence itself exists. It is identical to God. God is the unsourced Source of everything distinct from God. God, as Existence itself, is the Paradigm Existent. God is at once both Existence and the prime case of Existence.

In this respect, God is like a Platonic Form in which all else participates. (It is worth recalling in this connection that Aquinas speaks of God as forma formarum, the form of all forms.) God is self-existent Existence; creatures are not self-existent, but derive their existence from self-existent Existence.

Objection: "This scheme issues in something like the dreaded Third Man Regress. If Socrates and Plato both exist by participating in Existence, which exists, then there are three things that exist, Socrates, Plato, and Existence, each of which exists by participation. If so, there must be a second Existence, Existence-2 that Socrates, Plato and Existence-1 participate in. But then an infinite regress is up and running, one that is, moreover, vicious."

Response: The Third Man Regress is easily blocked by distinguishing the way Existence exists and the way derivative existents exist. Socrates exists by participating in Existence; Existence exists, not by participation, but by being (identical to) Existence.

There is exactly one case in which existence = self-identity. This is the case of the Paradigm Existent, which is Existence itself, which is God. If God is God, then God exists. (Bonaventura) In every other case, existence is not self-identity. No doubt Socrates is self-identical; but his self-identity is not the ground of his existence.

Platonism and Christianity

Brother Dave writes,

I'm re-reading Boethius' Consolation. Boethius does have a foot in Athens and one in Jerusalem, it seems to me. Now you sir are a Christian, and argue your positions in a blog subtitled Footnotes to Plato . . . . Would it be fair to refer to you, as I would to Boethius, as a Christian Platonist?

As for whether I am a Platonist, all of us who uphold the Western (Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman) tradition are Platonists broadly construed if Alfred North Whitehead is right in his observation that:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)

So in that general sense I am a Platonist. And I also like the modesty conveyed by "footnotes to Plato." Some say the whole of philosophy is a battle between Plato and Aristotle. That is not bad as simplifications go, and if you forced me to choose, I would throw in my lot with Plato and the Platonists. So that is a more specific sense in which I provide "footnotes to Plato."

As for Platonism and Christianity, you could refer to me fairly as a Christian Platonist. But what does that come to?

Part of what it means for me is that a de-Hellenized Christianity is of no interest. Christianity is a type of monotheism. The monotheistic claim is not merely that there is one god as opposed to many gods. Monotheism as I see it overturns the entire pantheon; it does not reduce its membership to one god, the tribal god of the Jews. Monotheism does of course imply that there is exactly one God, but it also implies that God is the One, and that therefore God is unique, and indeed uniquely unique. To understand that you will have to follow the link and study the entry to which it leads. Now if God is uniquely unique, then God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. He is not an ens among entia, but esse: ipsum esse subsistens. Kein Seiendes, sondern das Sein selbst.

Now we are well up into the Platonic stratosphere. Jerusalem needs Athens if theism is not to degenerate into a tribal mythology. (That Athens needs Jerusalem is also true, but not my present theme.)

I don't believe I am saying anything different from what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) says in his Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius, 2004, orig. publ. in German in 1968). Here is one relevant quotation among several:

The Christian faith opted, we have seen, against the gods of the various religions and in favor of the God of the philosophers, that is, against the myth of custom and in favor of the truth of Being itself and nothing else. (142)

Writing of the unity of belief and thought, Ratzinger tells us that

. . . the Fathers of the Church believed that they had discovered here the deepest unity between philosophy and faith, Plato and Moses, the Greek mind and the biblical mind. (118)

Plato and Moses! The God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are one and the same.

The problematic is rich and many-sided. More later.

Whether ‘Image and Likeness’ Supports God’s Having a Body

Latest Substack entry.

How are God and Truth Related? (2021 Expanded Version)

By my count, there are five different ways to think about the relation of God and truth:

1) There is truth, but there is no God.

2) There is truth, and there is God, but God is not the ontological ground of truth.

3) There is truth, there is God, and God is the ontological ground of truth: truth ultimately depends for its existence on the existence of God. There is truth only because there is God. (This 'because' signifies a relation that is neither empirically-causal nor merely logical. Call it the relation of ontological grounding.)

4) There is no truth, because there is no God.

5) There is God, but no truth.

Ad (1). This is the view of many if not most today. There are truths, and among these truths is the truth that God does not exist. This, I take it, is the standard atheist view. The standard atheist does not deny that there are truths; he presupposes that there are and that they are absolute. It is just that one of these truths is that there is no God.

Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers. There are truths, and one of the truths is that God exists. Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and who also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths. Such a philosopher would have to hold that the existence of God is logically equivalent to the existence of some truths. That is, he would have to hold that, necessarily God exists if and only if truths exist. But this philosopher would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either. That is, he would deny that God is the ontological ground of truth.

Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept, were I to accept a view. Thus I would affirm the subjunctive conditional lately mentioned. The difference between (2) and (3) is subtle. On both sides it is held that both the existence of God and the existence of some truths are necessary, but the Augustinian — to give him a name — holds that God is the ultimate 'source' of all truth and thus of all intelligibility, or, if you prefer, the ultimate 'ground' of all truth and intelligibility. Therefore, if, per impossibile, God were not to exist, truth would not exist either.

Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view. Tod Gottes = Tod der Wahrheit. The death of God is the death of truth. By 'truth' I of course mean absolute truth which cannot be perspectival or in any way relative. Truth cannot be relative, as I have argued many times.

Ad (5). I have the impression that certain post-modernists hold this. It is a view not worth discussing.

I should think only the first three views have any merit.

But each of the three has difficulties and none of the three can be strictly proven.

A. I will argue against the admittedly plausible first view by arguing for the third view.

Among the truths, there are necessary truths such as the laws of logic. Now a truth is a true truth-bearer, a true proposition, say. (There are different candidates for the office of truth-bearer; we needn't list them here.) Now nothing can have a property unless it exists. (Call this principle Anti-Meinong). So no proposition can have the property of being true unless the proposition exists. By definition, a necessary truth is true in every metaphysically possible world. It follows that a necessarily true proposition exists in every possible world including worlds in which there are no finite minds. (I assume, plausibly, that there are such worlds.)

But — and this is the crucial move in this reasoning — a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exist except in, or rather for, a mind. Thus there are no truths in themselves that float free of minds. Now if there is no God, or rather, if there is no necessarily existent mind, then every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a possible world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind. For example, the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12' is true and exists in every possible world including those worlds in which there are no minds. This contradiction ensues on the assumption that there is no necessarily existent mind.

Therefore, there is a necessarily existent mind. "And this all men call God."

If the argument just given is sound, then (3) is true, and (1) is false.

Here are the ways an atheist might respond to the argument for (3):

a) Deny that there are necessary truths.

b) Deny that truth is a property of propositions.

c) Deny Anti-Meinong, the principle that whatever has a property exists.

d) Deny that propositions are thought-accusatives; accept some sort of Platonism about propositions.

But each of these denials involves problems of its own.

Deism, Classical Theism, and Existential Inertia

On deism, God starts the universe existing, but then he takes it easy, allowing it to exist on its own in virtue of its 'existential inertia.' The latter is an analog of inertia in physics. Newton's First Law states that a body at rest or in uniform rectilinear motion continues in its state of rest or motion unless acted upon by an external force. Analogously, what could be called the First Law of Deistic Metaphysics states that an existing thing continues to exist on its own without external assistance unless acted upon by an external annihilatory force. This is but a rough and preliminary formulation of the thesis of existential inertia. Continuing to exist is the 'default.' Suppose I bring a primitive table into existence by placing a board on a stump. The thought behind 'existential inertia' is that the compound object that just came to be does not need something to keep it from blinking out of existence a nanosecond, microsecond, millisecond . . . later.

On classical theism, by contrast with deism, God is no mere cosmic starter-upper: creatures need God not only to begin to exist but to continue existing moment by moment. A defense of classical theism against deism must therefore include a rejection of existential inertia.

Steven Nemes offers a rejection of existential inertia in his article Deism, Classical Theism, and Existential Inertia. He solicits my comments. I am happy to oblige.

He defines the phrase as follows:

Let’s say that the existence of a thing is “inertial” if and only if it continues to exist over time, in the absence of annihilating factors, without the assistance of anything outside of it.

He gives the example of a cat which, "once in existence, continues to exist over time, so long as nothing intervenes to destroy it, without anything outside of the cat helping it or sustaining it in existence." But surely the cat cannot continue to exist without air, water, food, a tolerable range of temperatures, and so on, factors clearly external to the cat. Note also that Nemes' definition presupposes that only temporal items are existentially inertial which is not obvious: on a classically theistic scheme even so-called 'abstract objects' are going to have to be existentially inertial. But I won't worry this second point in this entry.

Here is a better way to convey the notion of existential inertia. Suppose a deistic god creates exactly one iron sphere and nothing else. In this world there is nothing to cause the sphere to rust or otherwise corrode away into nonexistence. Nor does it, like a living organism, require anything external to it to continue to exist. It doesn't need oxygen or water like Nemes' cat. And it has no internal mechanism to self-destruct. The sphere exists inertially iff its 'default setting' is continued existence which is to say: it has no intrinsic tendency to cease to exist.

The sphere is of course a contingent being. Hence there is no necessity that it continue to exist. But while there is no necessity that it continue to exist, it will continue to exist absent some external annihilatory force. The deistic god could zap it out of existence, but if he doesn't, it will continue to exist on its own 'steam.' He needn't do anything to keep it in existence, and of course he can't if he is truly deistic.

And the same goes for the cat, despite the cat's need for materials in its environment such as oxygen and food. It too will continue to exist if those things are supplied without the need for a special metaphysical factor to keep it from sliding into nonbeing. The critter's natural default is to existence.

Nemes's Argument against Existential Inertia

1) The real existence of the cat does not show itself as one of its properties.

2) "The real existence of the cat is thus not a part of that total complex of individuated properties which make up the particular cat which we experience. "

3) "The unexperienceable real existence of the experienceable cat must therefore be something that is somehow “outside” of the cat, and yet “pointed at it” in such a way that the cat exists."

4) "This is easy to understand if we say that the existence of the cat consists in its standing on the receiving end of an existence-endowing relation to “something else.” ". . . a “something else” that is not itself an individual thing with properties but rather pure existence itself. And this “pure existence itself,” according to classical theists, is God."

(1) is true. (2) appears merely to unpack (explicate) (1); if so, it too is true. The transition to (3), however, is a non sequitur. The real existence of the cat might be hidden within it or an empirically inaccessible feature of it. Absent further premises, one cannot conclude that the real existence is 'outside' the cat.

Of course, I am not endorsing existential inertia; I am merely pointing out that the above argument, as it stands, is invalid. Perhaps with further work it can be made valid.

Can Kant Refer to God?

This is a re-working of an entry from 19 September 2016. It relates to present concerns about limit concepts and whether and to what extent God can be subsumed under our concepts.

……………………….

Ed Buckner raises the title question, and he wants my help with it. How can I refuse? I'll say a little now, and perhaps more later.

Kant was brought up a rationalist within the Wolffian school, but then along came David Hume who awoke him from his dogmatic slumber. This awakening began his Critical period in which he struggles mightily to find a via media between rationalism and empiricism. The result of his struggle, the Critical philosophy, is of great historical significance but it is also an unstable tissue of apparently irresolvable tensions. As a result there are competing interpretations of his doctrines.

I will propose two readings relevant to Ed's question. But first a reformulation and clarification of the question.

Can one think about God and meaningfully predicate properties of him? For example, can one meaningfully say of God that he exists, is omnipotent, and is the cause of the existence of the natural world? Or is it rather the case that such assertions are meaningless and that the category of causality, for example, has a meaningful application only within the realm of phenomena but not between the phenomenal realm as a whole and a putative transcendent causa prima? Are the bounds of sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) also the bounds of sense (Sinn), or are there senseful, meaningful assertions that transgress the bounds of sensibility?

Weak or Moderate Reading. On this reading, we can think about God and meaningfully make predications of him, but we cannot have any knowledge of God and his attributes. We cannot have knowledge of God because knowledge necessarily involves the interplay of two very different factors, conceptual interpretation via the categories of the understanding, and sensory givenness. God, however, is not given to the senses, outer or inner. In Kantian jargon, there is no intuition, keine Anschauung, of God. For intellects of our type, all intuition is sensible intuition. The Sage of Koenigsberg will not countenance any mystical intuition, any Platonic or Plotinian visio intellectualis, at least not in this life. That sort of thing he dismisses in the Enlightenment manner as Schwaermerei, 'enthusiasm' in an obsolete 18th century sense of the English term.

But while Kant denies that there is knowledge of God here below whether by pure reason or by mystical intuition, he aims to secure a 'safe space' for faith: "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." (Preface to 2nd ed. of Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1787, B xxx.) Now if God and the soul are objects of faith, this would imply that we can think of them and thus refer to them even if we cannot have knowledge of them.

As for the soul, it is the object of the branch of metaphysica specialis called rational psychology. Since all our intuition is sensible, there is no sensible intuition of the soul. As is well-known, Kant denies that special metaphysics in all three branches (psychology, cosmology, and theology) is possible as science, als Wissenschaft. To be science it would have to include synthetic a priori judgments, but these are possible only with respect to phenomena.

Kant's key question is: How are synthetic a priori judgments possible? He believes that they are actual in mathematics and physics, and would have to be actual in metaphysics if the latter were a science. Kant concludes that synthetic a priori judgments are possible in mathematics and physics only because the world of experience (Erfahrung) is not a world of things in themselves whose existence, nature, and law-like regularity are independent of our mental contribution, but a merely phenomenal world to whose construction (transcendental) mind makes an indispensable contribution.

The dignity and necessity of the synthetic causal principle — every event has a cause — is rescued from the jaws of Humean skepticism, but the price is high: the only world we can know is the world of phenomena. This is not a world of illusions, but a world of intersubjectively valid objects of experience. But while objective in the sense of intersubjectively valid, these objects do not exist in themselves. Things in themselves (noumena in the negative sense) are beyond our ken. Yet we must posit them since the appearances are appearances of something (obj. gen.). And it is presumably the affection of our sense organs by these things in themselves that gives rise to the sensory manifold that is then organized by a priori forms (categories and forms of sensibility) on the side of the subject. The restriction of human knowledge to phenomena secures the objectivity (intersubjective validity) of our knowledge, but by the same stroke rules out any knowledge of the objects of special metaphysics (God, the soul, the world as a whole).

On the moderate reading, then, Kant restricts the cognitive employment of the categories of the understanding to phenomena but not their thinking employment. We can think about and refer to the positive noumena, God, the soul, and the world as a whole, but we cannot have any knowledge of them. (And the same goes for the negative noumena that correspond to sensible appearances.) We can talk sense about God and the soul, and predicate properties of these entities, but we cannot come to have knowledge of them. Thus we can meaningfully speak of the soul as a simple substance which remains numerically self-same over time and through its changing states, but we cannot know that it has these properties.

The weak reading is represented by the following argument:

1) A necessary condition of knowledge is intuition (Anschauung).

2) In us, the only mode of intuition is sensible. We have no faculty of intellectual intuition.

3) The concept of God is the concept of an entity that cannot be an object of the senses.

Therefore

4) God is unknowable by us. (1, 2, 3)

Nevertheless

5) God is thinkable by us. (3)

Strong or Extreme Reading. On this reading, we cannot talk sense about positive or negative noumena: such categories as substance and causality cannot be meaningfully applied beyond the bounds of sensibility to God, the soul, angels, libertarianly free noumena agents, the world as a whole, or even things in themselves. Riffing on P. F. Strawson one could say that on the strong reading the bounds of sensibility are the bounds of sense. This reading wins the day in post-Kantian philosophy. Fichte liquidates the Ding an sich, the neo-Kantians reduce the transcendental ego to a mere concept (Rickert, e.g.), the categories which for Kant were ahistorical and fixed become historicized and relativized, and we end up with a conceptual relativism which fuels a lot of the nonsense of the present day, e.g., race and sex as social constructs, etc.

The strong reading is represented by the following argument:

1*) A necessary condition of meaningful objective reference is intuition.

2) In us, the only mode of intuition is sensible. We have no faculty of intellectual intuition.

3) The concept of God is the concept of an entity that cannot be an object of the senses.

Therefore

4*) God cannot be meaningfully referred to by us.

So my answer to Ed Buckner's title question is: It depends. It depends on whether we read Kant in the weak way or in the strong way. Read in the weak way, Kant is saying that the categories of the understanding have no cognitive employment in the absence of sensory input, but they do have an empty logical employment and objective reference/meaning. Read in the strong way, the categories are devoid of objective reference/meaning in the absence of sensory givenness. If so, the concept of God is a limit concept in the negative sense: it merely marks a limit to our understanding, but does not point beyond that limit. At best, the concept of God is a regulative Idea whose employment is purely immanent.