God – Page 8 – Maverick Philosopher

The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation

God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality. God creates potential rebels. He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway. Lucifer as the father of all perversity.

God creates and sustains, moment by moment, other minds, like unto his own, made in his image, who are yet radically other in their inwardness and freedom. He creates subjects who exist in their own right and not merely as objects of divine thought. How is this conceivable?

We are not mere objects for the divine subject, but subjects in our own right. How can we understand creation ex nihilo, together with moment by moment conservation, of a genuine subject, a genuine mind with intellect and free will and autonomy and the power of self-determination even unto rebellion?

This is a mystery of divine creation. It is is above my pay grade. And yours too.

God can do it but we can't. We can't even understand how God could do it. A double infirmity. An infirmity that sires a doubt: Perhaps it can't be done, even by God. Perhaps the whole notion is incoherent and God does not exist. Perhaps it is not a mystery but an impossibility. Perhaps Christian creation is an Unbegriff.

Joseph Ratzinger accurately explains the Christian metaphysical position, and in so doing approaches what I am calling the ultimate paradox of divine creation, but he fails to confront, let alone solve, the problem:

The Christian belief in God is not completely identical with either of these two solutions [materialism and idealism]. To be sure, it, too, will say, being is being-thought. Matter itself points beyond itself to thinking as the earlier and more original factor. But in opposition to idealism, which makes all being into moments of an all-embracing consciousness, the Christian belief in God will say: Being is being-thought — yet not in such a way that it remains only thought and that the appearance of independence proves to be mere appearance to anyone who looks more closely.

On the contrary, Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence. In this it goes beyond any mere idealism. While the latter , as we have just established, explains everything real as the content of a single consciousness, in the Christian view what supports it all is a creative freedom that sets what has been thought in the freedom of its own being, so that, on the one hand, it is the being-thought of a consciousness and yet, on the other hand, is true being itself. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, German original 1968, latest English version Ignatius Press, 2004, p. 157)

And that is where the good Cardinal (later Pope Benedict the XVI) leaves it. He then glides off onto another topic. Not satisfactory! What's the solution to the paradox?

If you tell me that God creates other minds, and then somehow releases them into ontological independence, my reply will be that makes hash of the doctrine of creatio continuans, moment-by-moment conservation. The Christian God is no mere cosmic starter-upper of what exists; his creating is ongoing. In fact, if the universe always existed, then all creation would be creatio continuans, and there would be no starting-up at all.

On Christian metaphysics, "The world is objective mind . . . ." (155) This is what makes it intelligible. This intelligibility has its source in subjective mind: "Credo in Deum expresses the conviction that objective mind is the oproduct of subjective mind . . . ." (Ibid.) So what I call onto-theological idealism gets the nod. You don't understand classical theism unless you understand it to be a form of idealism. But creatures, and in particular other minds, exist on their own, in themselves, and their Being cannot be reduced to their Being-for-God. Therein lies the difficulty.

Is divine creation a mystery or an impossibility?

How Can a Simple God Know Contingent Truths?

Chris M writes,

If God simply is his act of existence, and if his existence is necessary, how can God have knowledge of contingent truths? What I mean is that it is possible for God to do other than he does (say not create, or create different things.) If he did differently – say, if the world didn't exist – his knowledge would be different in content. Yet God is supposed to be a single act of being, purely simple and identical across all possible worlds. God's essence just is his act of necessary existence, knowing and willing. It seems God's knowledge of contingents thus is an accident in him. But God can have no accidents. How then can he, as actus purus and necessary existence, have properties (such as knowing x or willing x) which he may not have had ?

That is a clear statement of the difficulty. As I see it, the problem is essentially one of solving the following aporetic tetrad:

1) God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2) God knows some contingent truths.

3) Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4) God exists necessarily.

The classical theist, Aquinas for example, is surely committed to (1), (2), and (4). The third limb of the tetrad, however, is extremely plausible. And yet the four propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.

For example, it is contingently true that Socrates published nothing and contingently true that God knows this truth. He presumably knows it in virtue of being in some internal mental state such as a belief state or some state analogous to it. But this state, while contingent, is intrinsic to God. The divine simplicity, however, requires that there be nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God. Since God exists necessarily, as per (4), the belief state exists necessarily, which contradicts the fact that it must exist contingently.

I discuss this problem here, and in nearby posts in the Divine Simplicity category.

God, Necessity, and Truth

Jacques e-mails:

You think that if God exists, He exists necessarily, and if He does not exist, He does not exist necessarily. But suppose that God does not exist. We agree, I think, that we can't rationally rule out the possibility? For instance, you've often argued that our evidence doesn't settle the question of theism versus atheism. But then, supposing that God doesn't exist, and supposing that He might not exist in the actual world (for all we know), isn't it evident that regardless there are lots of truths? For instance, even if God does not exist, it would still be true that He does not exist, or that He does not exist necessarily. I'm not sure that you'd agree with this, but if you would, shouldn't you also agree that if God does not exist, there are some truths?

That is not quite what I said. I accept what I call Anselm's Insight: if God exists, then he exists necessarily; if he does not exist, then necessarily he does not exist. What does not exist necessarily might be contingent; what necessarily does not exist is impossible. I know you understand the idea; it is just that your formulation suffers from scope ambiguity. Anselm's Insight, then, is that God is either necessary or impossible. He is necessarily non-contingent. (The non-contingent embraces both the necessary and the impossible.) In the patois of possible worlds, either he exists in every, or in no, world. If you wonder why I don't capitalize 'he,' it is because I hold that while piety belongs in religion, it does not belong in philosophy of religion.

Agreed, we cannot rationally rule out the possibility of God's nonexistence. I would say we cannot rationally rule it out or rule it in. "But then, supposing that God doesn't exist, and supposing that He might not exist in the actual world (for all we know), isn't it evident that regardless there are lots of truths? "

I would rewrite your sentence as follows:

It is epistemically possible that God not exist. Nevertheless, it is evident that there are truths.

I agree with the rewrite. It is evident that there are truths, but for all we can claim to know, God does not exist. But this leaves open how God and truth are related. Here are five different views:

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 truth ultimately depends on the existence of God. There is truth because there is God.

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

5) There is God, but no truth.

Ad (1). This I would guess is the view of many. There are truths, and among these truths is the truth that God does not exist. This, I take it, would be the standard atheist view.

Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers. Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths, but would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either.

Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept. 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 God and truths are necessary, but the Augustinian — to give him a name — holds that God is the ultimate 'source' of all truth and thus all intelligibility, or, if you prefer, the ultimate 'ground' of all truth and intelligibility.

Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view.

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

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

Each of the three has difficulties and none of the three can be proven.

I will mention quickly a problem for the admittedly plausible first 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. 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. 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. But a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exists except for a mind. If there is no God, every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind.

Here are some ways an atheist might 'solve' the problem:

a) Deny that there are necessary truths.

b) Deny that truth is any sense a property of propositions.

c) Deny Anti-Meinong.

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

But each of these denials involves problems of its own which I would have no trouble unpacking.

What say you, Jacques?

God, Truth, Reality Denial: A Response to Some Questions

It is always a pleasure to get a challenge from a professional philosopher who appreciates the intricacies of the issues and knows the moves. The comments below address things I say here. My responses are in blue.

A few questions about this idea:

"As Nietzsche saw, if there is no God, then there is no truth. And if no truth, then no intrinsic intelligibility. Next stop: perspectivism, Nietzsche's central epistemological doctrine."

1) Suppose that if p, nothing is true. Does that make sense? Surely whatever p is, if p then at least p itself is true.

BV: What you are saying is something I agree with, namely, that it is incoherent, indeed self-refuting, to maintain that nothing is true. For either it is true that nothing is true or it is is false. (Assume Bivalence to keep it simple.) If true, then false. If false, then false. Therefore, necessarily false.

Now could it be true that if there is no God, then there is no truth? Easily. A true conditional can have a false antecedent and a false consequent. We have just seen that the consequent is false, indeed, necessarily false. That the antecedent is true is not excluded by anything we know. So assume it true. Where's the problem?

2) A related problem: How do we understand or reason about anything in some scenario where, supposedly, nothing is true? How do we understand things like 'if … then …' except in terms of what is or would be true given the truth of the antecedent?

BV: Well, can't we reason about incoherent ideas, among them necessarily false propositions? Consider the following subjunctive conditional

A. If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then there would be no truth.

Both antecedent and consequent are necessarily false; yet the conditional is (arguably) true! The antecedent is necessarily false because God is a necessary being. I accept Anselm's Insight (but not his Ontological Argument). The Insight is that nothing divine can have contingent modal status: God is either necessary or impossible.

Surely we can argue, correctly, to and from necessarily false propositions such as Nothing is true. Of course, when we engage in such reasoning we are presupposing truth. If that is your point, then I agree with it.

3) If there's a 'total way things are', and that's 'the truth' or the truth about the actual world, then surely there has to be a truth about a world where God does not exist–there's a total way things are, including various states of affairs but not including the existence of God. How are we to understand the idea that, if the actual world is Godless, there's some total way things actually are, and yet no truth? What more is needed for there to be truth, or the whole truth, in a Godless world? Or do you mean to say that in a Godless world there is no 'total way things are'? But then how would that even count as a world, or a scenario? (Is there even a less-than-total-way-things-are, at least? And in that wouldn't there have to be some particular truths, if not total truth or Truth?)

BV: I accept Anselm's Insight: If God exists, then he exists in every metaphysically possible world; if God does not exist, then he exists in no metaphysically possible world. I also accept Nietzsche's Insight that if there is no God, then there is no truth. no total, non-relative, non-perspectival way things are independent of the vagaries of human belief and desire. So I disagree when you say "surely there has to be a truth about a world where God does not exist."

4) In some of your other entries on this topic you are suggesting that truth might be a property of God's thoughts, or maybe just the totality of His thoughts. (Is that right?) But intuitively there is a distinction between the truth of a thought and the thought itself, so that even though God's thoughts are necessarily true, those same thoughts could have been false thoughts (though not while being His thoughts, of course). Suppose this is right. Then, in a Godless world, there is some totality of thoughts–merely possible thoughts, maybe, for lack of a suitable Thinker–that fully characterizes that world. Why can't we say that there's truth in that world simply in virtue of the totality of thoughts that would have been true if God had existed there?

BV: Let's distinguish some questions:

a) Is there truth? Is there a total way things are that is not dependent upon the vagaries of human (or rather ectypal-intellect) belief and desire? Answer: Yes, truth is absolute, hence not a matter of perspective.

b) What is the truth? This is the question about which propositions are true. Obviously, not all are. It presupposes an affirmative answer to the first question. Only if there are some true propositions or other can one proceed to ask which particular propositions are true.

c) What is truth? This question concerns the property — in a broad sense of 'property' — the possession of which by a truth-bearer makes it true. If a truth is a true proposition, then all true propositions have something in common, their being true; what is this property?

Frege uses Gedanke, thought, to refer to what we refer to by 'proposition.' Let's adopt this usage. A proposition, then, is a thought, not an act of thinking, but the accusative or direct object of an act of thinking. Frege held that thoughts have a self-subsistent Platonic status. That's dubious and can be argued against. Arguably, there is no thought without a thinker. Thoughts/propositions, then, have a merely intentional status. But some thoughts are necessarily true. It follows that there is need for a necessary mind to accommodate these thoughts. I lay this out rigorously in a separate post to which I have already linked.

I don't say that the truth is the totality of God's thoughts since some of these thoughts are not true. Socrates dies by stangulation, for example, is false, but possibly true. And yet it is a perfectly good thought. God has that proposition/thought before his mind but he doesn't affirm it. This is equivalent to saying that God did not create a world in which Socrates dies by strangulation.

Of course, I distinguish between the thought and its truth value, and I don't think every thought is necessarily true. Why do you say that God's thoughts are necessarily true? Of course, God, being omniscient, knows everything that it is possible to know. But only some of what he knows is necessarily true. He can't know false propositions, but he can think them by merely entertaining them (with or without hospitality).

Think of a possible world as a maximal proposition, a proposition that entails every proposition with which it is logically consistent. God has an infinity of these maximal propositions/thoughts before his mind. He entertains them all, but affirms only one. After all, there can be only one actual world. I of course reject David Lewis' theory of actuality.

If God does not exist, then God is impossible. (Anselm's Insight again.) He then exists in no world including the actual world. But then there are no truth-bearers in the actual world, and hence no truths. But if no truths, then no total way things are.

You speak of "merely possible thoughts." But that's ambiguous. Do you mean a thought/proposition that actually exists but is merely possibly true? Or do you mean that the proposition itself is merely possibly existent? I am assuming that there are all the propositions there might have been; that some are true and some false; and that among the false propositions some are necessarily false (impossibly true) and that some are possibly true.

5) If there is no truth, how could that rationally support perspectivism? Maybe I just don't understand perspectivism, but suppose this is the idea that any old thought can be true (perspectivally, at least) just in case it seems true to someone, or enhances their feeling of power, or whatever… In a truth-less world, THAT is also not true: it's just not true that any old thought can be true or be rationally considered true under circumstances x, y or z. Perspectivism isn't true, or isn't any truer than anti-perspectivism. In other words I don't understand why granting that God is necessary for truth justifies Nietzsche in affirming some other, merely perspectival concept of truth; he should just be a nihilist about truth, I guess.

BV: I insist that truth, by its very nature, is absolute and thus cannot be perspectival. I reject perspectivism. So there is no question of rationally supporting perspectivism. It is an irrational and self-defeating doctrine.

You say, "I don't understand why granting that God is necessary for truth justifies Nietzsche in affirming some other, merely perspectival concept of truth; he should just be a nihilist about truth, I guess."

I am not claiming that Nietzsche rationally justifies his perspectivism. But one can understand how he came to the doctrine. He has a genuine insight: no God, no truth. (By the way, for me 'insight' is a noun of success in the way that 'know' is a verb of success: there are no false insights any more than there is false knowledge.) There are no truths, but there are interpretations and perspectives from different power-centers; these interpretations and perspectives are either life-enhancing and 'empowering' or not. This can be (misleadingly) put by saying that truth is perspectival.

Is perspectivism identitarian or eliminativist? Is Nietzsche saying that there is truth but it is perspectival in nature, or is he saying that there is no truth? I would say that the identity collapses into an elimination. Truth cannot be perspectival; so to claim that it is amounts to claiming that there is no truth. So I agree that one could say that he is a nihilist about truth.

What makes this all so relevant is that cultural Marxism is heir to Nietzsche. To understand the Left you have to understand Nietzsche and his two main claims, one ontological the other epistemological. "The world is the will to power and nothing besides." Truth is perspectival. This sires the leftist view that everything is power relations and social construction. Reality and its intrinsic order are denied.

Are Any Substantive Philosophical Propositions Epistemically Certain?

I asked our Czech colleague Lukáš Novák for examples of philosophical propositions that he considers to be not only true, but knowable with certainty. He provided this list:

a) God exists.
b) There are substances.
c) There are some necessary truths, even some de re necessary truths.
d) Human cognition is capable of truth and certainty.
e) There are no contradictions in reality.

In this entry I will discuss only the first example.

Is it certain that God exists?

My position is that it is true that God exists, but not certain that God exists. How can a proposition be true but not certain? Logically prior question: What is certainty?

We first distinguish epistemic from psychological certainty. If S is epistemically certain that p, then S knows that p. But if S is psychologically certain that p, i.e., thoroughly convinced that p, it does not follow that S knows that p. For people are convinced of falsehoods, and one cannot know a falsehood, let alone be epistemically certain of it. There was the case not long ago of the benighted soul who was convinced that Hillary Clinton was running a child-abuse ring out of a pizzeria. He was certain of it! This shows that we must distinguish subjective or psychological certainty from objective or epistemic certainty. Epistemic certainty alone concerns us.

But what is epistemic certainty?

On one approach, a proposition is epistemically certain just in case it is indubitable. By indubitability I don't mean a psychological inability to doubt, but a property of some propositions. For example, the proposition I exist has the property of being such that no subject S who entertains and understands this proposition can doubt its truth. There are any number of propositions about one's state of mind at a given time that are epistemically certain to the subject of these states. Examples: I seem to see a tree (but not: I see a tree); I seem to recall first meeting her on a April 2014 (but not: I recall meeting her on 1 April 2014).

The facts about one's mental life are a rich source or epistemic certainties. But there is also a class of truths of reason that are epistemically certain, for example propositions true ex vi terminorum, e.g., every effect has a cause, and formal-logical truths such as a proposition and its negation cannot both be true, etc.

God exists, by contrast with the members of the two classes just mentioned, is not indubitable. One can easily doubt it. Atheists go so far as to deny it. So if epistemic certainty is defined in terms of indubitability, then God exists is not epistemically certain.

We also note that God exists does not record a fact about anyone's mental life, nor is it true ex vi terminorum. So it belongs to neither class of the epistemically certain.

At this point one might respond that God exists, while not indubitable by itself, is indubitable as the conclusion of an argument. Well, suppose you give a valid deductive argument for the proposition that God exists. The conclusion will be epistemically certain only if each premise of the argument is epistemically certain. But is there such an argument?

I don't believe there is. I am, however, quite willing to change my view if someone could present one. Indeed I would positively love to be refuted on this point. After all, I have already announced that I believe it is true that God exists; if it is absolutely epistemically certain, then all the better! To get a feel for the problem, consider the Kalam argument

1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause;

2) The universe began to exist; Therefore:

3) The universe has a cause. (And this all men call God.)

This is a valid deductive argument and the premises are highly plausible. What's more, they may well be true. But they are not both certain. Is (1) epistemically certain? No. Its negation, Something begins to exist without a cause, is not a formal-logical contradiction. Nor is (1) an analytic or conceptual truth.

If an argument is presented for (1), then I will show that the premises of that argument are not, all of them, certain.

Patrick Toner tells me that the "modal ontological argument [is] compelling," and that we can "know God and the soul with certainty through the use of natural human reason." (emphasis added) In Is the Modal Ontological Argument Compelling?, however, I return a negative answer by showing that the crucial possibility premise is not certain.

An impressive argument, no doubt, but not rationally compelling or such as to deliver epistemically certain insight into the truth of its conclusion. The same goes for another powerful argument, From the Laws of Logic to the Existence of God.

What say you, Professor Novak? Can you show me that I am wrong? I would be much obliged if you could.

Physicalist Christology? Notes on Merricks

"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us . . . . (John 1:14)

Physicalism is popular among philosophers these days. So it is no surprise that Christian philosophers are drawn to it as well, including those who subscribe to the central teaching that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the Logos or Word, became man in Jesus of Nazareth.

Incarnation, whatever else it involves, involves embodiment. How is God the Son during his earthly tenure related to his body? Trenton Merricks assumes that "God the Son . . . is related to his body just as you and I are related to our respective bodies." ("The Word Made Flesh," 261.) One might have thought that the embodiment relation that connects the Son to his body would have to be very special or even sui generis; after all, the Logos is sui generis and so it might naturally be thought that any relation into which it enters would inherit that sui-generic quality. Merricks, however, assumes that divine and human cases of embodiment are cases of one and the same embodiment relation. The divine case is just a special case. Call this the Same Relation assumption. (My tag, not Merrick's).

And what relation is that? On physicalism, "You have a body if and only if you are identical with that body." (294) So the Same Relation assumption in conjunction with physicalism yields the conclusion that the Incarnate Son is "identical with the body of Jesus." (294) So in becoming human, the Incarnate Son "became [numerically identical to] a body."

This does not make much sense to me and I find it more worthy of rejection than of acceptance. My problems begin with physicalism itself.

Physicalism

The physicalism in question is not physicalism about everything, but about beings like us, minded organisms, if you will, which include all human animals. (If there are so-called 'abstract objects,' then they are not physical, and presumably before the Incarnation, no member of the Trinity was a physical object.) Physicalism is "the claim that each of us is a physical object." (294). Now there is a sense in which it is obviously true that each of us is a physical object, and that is the sense in which it is obviously true that each of us has a body; but one quits the precincts of the obvious and the datanic and enters the space of philosophical theories when one claims that one has a body by being numerically identical to a body, or that the the 'is' in 'Each of us is a body' is the 'is' of identity.

For this is not obvious. How do you know that the 'is' in 'Each of us is a body' is not the 'is' of composition? (Compare: 'Each of these statues is bronze.' That can't mean that each of the statues is identical to bronze or to a particular hunk of bronze. A statue and its proximate matter have different persistence conditions both temporally and modally.)

But we are discussing physicalism. I am not asserting that we are composite beings. And I am not espousing substance dualism either. I am merely considering whether physicalism about minded organisms is an intellectually satisfying position. Does it command our assent? Merricks thinks it is "pretty obvious" that physicalism is true. (294) I don't find it obvious at all. And as Hilary Putnam once quipped, "It ain't obvious what's obvious."

On physicalism, I am identical to the living, breathing, sweating animal wearing my clothes. Of course, I am not always sweating and not always wearing clothes; but if I cease breathing, I cease living and, on physicalism, I cease existing. (The physicalist claim is obviously not that I am identical to a corpse or an inanimate hunk of human-looking flesh and bones wearing my clothes.) To underscore the obvious, when I speak of identity I mean numerical identity.

One might find physicalism hard to swallow. If x and y are identical, then whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa. That is necessarily so, and part of what we mean by 'identity.' But it is true of me that I am a "spectator of all time and existence," (Plato, Republic VI) whereas that is not true of my body. So I can't be identical to my living body. To take a less grand example, I am now thinking of a girl I used to know. So is my body thinking of her? The whole body? Some proper part or parts thereof? Presumably not the plantar fascia in my left foot. My brain? The whole brain? Some proper part thereof? How could any portion of the brain be the subject of acts of thinking? That doesn't make much sense. In fact, it does not make any sense. A bit of highly organized meat is the subject of acts of thinking in the broad Cartesian sense of 'thinking' which includes memorial acts? Are you serious?

Could it nonetheless be true that what thinks in me when I think is the brain or some portion thereof? I suppose, but then it would be a mystery how it is true. The Incarnation may be a mystery, but if we are trying to understand the Incarnation physicalistically, then physicalism had better not be a mystery too. I'll come back to this point below.

The obviousness of physicalism seems to have vanished. Merrick does not give the following invalid argument, but what he says on 294 ff. suggests it:

Whatever has physical properties is a physical object.
Socrates has physical properties.
Therefore
Socrates is a physical object.
Therefore
Physicalism is true.

The argument is rendered invalid by an equivocation on 'is' as between the 'is' of class inclusion and the 'is' of identity.

What I have said does not refute physicalism, but it does show that physicalism is far from obvious and does not follow from such Moorean facts as that you and I have shape and mass. So I balk at Merricks' "it seems pretty obvious that physicalism . . . is true." (294) It is not obvious at all.

Property Dualism

Can these objections be met by adopting property dualism? Merricks' view is that while we are physical objects having physical properties, we are not merely physical objects: we also have mental properties. "Persons also have mental properties." (295) Furthermore, these mental properties are irreducible to physical properties. Merricks tells us that his physicalism is consistent with property dualism. (295) I think it is fair to say that with respect to beings like us, he is a substance monist and a property dualist.

The idea is that the human individual having properties is a physical object, but that it has two different mutually irreducible sorts of properties, physical properties and mental properties. But how does this help? I am thinking about a girl I used to know, a particular girl, Darci. Is there a mental property corresponding to the predicate '___ is thinking about Darci'? I doubt it, for reasons I don't have ther space to go into, but suppose there is this strange property. Call it 'D.' Presumably it is an abstract object unfit to do any thinking. So it is not the subject of the thinking, that in me which thinks when I think.

Should we say that I am thinking about Darci in virtue of my instantiating of D? But who am I? On physicalism, I am identically this living body. So this animal body instantiates the mental property. But this brings us right back to our earlier question as to which part of the animal body does the thinking. Introducing a dualism of properties does not answer this question.

How Could a Non-Physical Object Become a Physical Object?

But even if physicalism is true, how could it, in tandem with the Same Relation assumption mentioned above, be used to make sense of the Incarnation, or rather the embodiment the Incarnation implies? How could the second person of the Trinity, a purely spiritual, nonphysical person, at a certain point in history become numerically identical to the body of Jesus? How could an immaterial being become a material being? I should think that an item's categorial status is essential to it. So if an abstract object such as the number 7 or the set of primes is nonphysical, then this object is nonphysical in all possible worlds in which it exists, and indeed in all possible worlds, full stop, given that 7 and the number of primes are necessary beings. If so, then in no possible world could the number 7 or the set of primes become a concrete item sporting causal properties and spatiotemporal locations.

Something similar holds for that necessary being which is the second person of the Trinity. Its purely spiritual, wholly nonphysical nature is essential to it. So, on the face of it, its embodiment in a particular human being cannot be understood as its becoming numerically identical to that human being. For then, per impossibile, it would have to quit its kind and become another kind of thing.

Rejecting Kind-Essentialism

Now the above is an obvious and obviously powerful objection to which Merricks makes a daring response. He recommends rejecting the kind-essentialism that is at the back of it:

Believers in the Incarnation must reject kind-essentialism. Once kind-essentialism is rejected, it is hard to see why the non-physical God the Son could not become [numerically identical to] a human organism. Perhaps this is the sort of thing that might not seem possible merely upon reflection, given no relevant revelation. But the same thing goes for God the Son's becoming human. This is the mystery. (296)

I don't follow the reasoning here. Let us assume that we accept as revealed truth that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. And let us assume that the Incarnation is, as Merricks says, a mystery. Now faith seeks understanding. Fides quarens intellectum. In this case we want to understand how God became man. How is understanding helped by the rejection of what appears to the unaided intellect as obviously true, namely, kind-essentialism? Is its falsity supposed to be a mystery too?

If I want to understand the Incarnation, I have to use principles that to the unaided discursive intellect appear secure. If I use the Incarnation to reject kind-essentialism, which is one of the principles that appear secure to the finite intellect, then I haven't made sense of the Incarnation; I have wreaked havoc on the discursive intellect. Would it not be better simply to rest with the Incarnation as mystery and forgo desperate attempts to make sense of it that violate very secure principles that are arguably definitive of finite understanding?

Why Not Reject the 'Same Relation' Assumption?

Suppose one wants to retain one's physicalism about humans at all costs and to accept the Incarnation as well. Would it not be better to jettison the 'same relation' assumption? Would it not be better to say that embodiment in the divine case is a different relation from embodiment in (merely) human cases? Suppose that in the merely human cases, to have a body, i. e., to be embodied, is just to be a body, i.e., to be identical to a (living) body, while in the divine case to have a body is something else, something perhaps incomprehensible to us in our present state. One could then be a physicalist without rejecting kind-essentialism.

Note that Merricks is not a physicalist about God or any of the persons of the Trinity prior to the Incarnation. He does not hold that every mind is physical. He makes an exception for the divine mind. Well, then he can make an exception in the way a divine mind becomes embodied should such a mind become embodied.

There seems to be two ways to go for one who aims to accept the Incarnation while also accepting physicalism about minded organisms. Accept either package A or package B:

Package A

Incarnation; physicalism; 'same relation' assumption; rejection of kind-essentialism.

Package B

Incarnation; physicalism; 'different embodiment relation' assumption; acceptance of kind-essentialism.

I should think that Package B is the more attractive of the two.

Merricks' paper is here. Many thanks to Professor Andrew M. Bailey for uploading it! Ditto to Kevin Wong for drawing my attention to it and for supplying me with a bibliography of recent work on physicalist Christology. Mr. Wong is a gentleman and a scholar!

“Some of Us Just Go One God Further”

A revised version of an entry from 26 July 2010.

…………………

I've seen the above-captioned quotation attributed to Richard Dawkins. From what I have read of him, it seems like something he would say. The idea, I take it, is that all gods are on a par, and so, given that everyone is an atheist with respect to some gods, one may as well make a clean sweep and be an atheist with respect to all gods. You don't believe in Zeus or in a celestial teapot. Then why do you believe in the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob?

What Dawkins and his New Atheist colleagues seem to be assuming is that the following questions are either senseless or not to be taken seriously: 'Is the Judeo-Christian god the true God?' 'Is any particular god the true God' 'Is any particular conception of deity adequate to the divine reality?'

The New Atheist presupposition, then, is that all candidates for deity are in the same logical boat, and that this boat is one leaky vessel. Nothing could be divine. Since all theistic religions are false, there is no live question as to which such religion is true. It is not as if there is a divine reality and that some religions are more adequate to it than others. One could not say, for example, that Judaism is somewhat adequate to the divine reality, Christianity more adequate, and Buddhism not at all adequate. There just is no divine reality. There is nothing of a spiritual nature beyond the human horizon. There is no Mind beyond finite mind. Man is the measure. This is it!

That is the atheist's deepest conviction. It seems so obvious to him that he cannot begin genuinely to doubt it, nor can he understand how anyone could genuinely believe the opposite. Belief in God is like belief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or Ed Abbey's Angry Unicorn on the Dark Side of the Moon. You don't believe in any of those nonentities, do you? Well, Dawkins & Co. just go one nonentity further!

This morning I received a message from a Canadian reader, C. L., who asks whether Dawkins and friends are begging the question against the theist. That depends on whether they are giving an argument or just making an assertion. It also depends on what exactly 'begging the question' is. If they are just making an assertion then I say: Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. But suppose they intend the following argument:

1) All gods are on an epistemic/doxastic par: they are all equal in point of rational acceptability. Therefore:

2) If one god is such that its existence is not rationally acceptable, then this is true of all gods.

3) There are gods such as Zeus whose existence is not rationally acceptable. Therefore:

4) No god is such that its existence is rationally acceptable.

This is a valid argument: it cannot be the case that the premises are true and the conclusion false. Does it beg the question? The problem here is that it is not very clear what the informal fallacy in question (pun intended) is supposed to be. If I argue that The Los Angeles Times displays liberal bias because its reportage and editorializing show a left-of-center slant, then I reason in a circle, or beg the question. That is a clear example. But suppose I argue that The L. A. Times displays liberal bias because all mainstream media outlets display liberal bias and The L. A. Times is a mainstream media outlet. Have I begged the question? Not so clear. Surely we don't want to say that every valid argument begs the question! (John Stuart Mill floated this suggestion.) On the other hand, it is impossible for a valid argument to have true premises and a false conclusion which suggests that he who accepts the premises of the second argument above has in so doing begged the question: he has at least implicitly committed himself to an affirmative answer to the question, 'Does The L. A. Times display liberal bias?'

'Beg the question,' I suggest, is not a very useful phrase. Besides, people nowadays regularly conflate it with 'raising a question.' See On Begging the Question. It is becoming a useless phrase.

Regarding the above argument, I would say that, while valid, it is nowhere near rationally compelling and is therefore rationally rejectable. What reason do we have to think that all candidates for divine status are on a doxatic/epistemic par?

In sum, either Dawkins is asserting or he is arguing. If he is asserting, then his gratuitous assertion can be met with a gratuitous counter-assertion. If he is arguing, and his argument is as above, then his argument is easily turned aside.

The fundamental issue here is whether there is anything beyond the human horizon. The issue dividing theists and atheists can perhaps be put in terms of Jamesian 'live options':

EITHER: Some form of theism (hitherto undeveloped perhaps or only partially developed) is not only logically and epistemically possible, but also an 'existential' possibility, a live option;

OR: No form of theism is an existential possibility, a live option.

Theist-atheist dialog is made difficult by a certain asymmetry: whereas a sophisticated living faith involves a measure of purifying doubt, together with a groping beyond images and pat conceptualizations toward a transcendent reality, one misses any corresponding doubt or tentativeness on the part of sophisticated atheists. Dawkins and Co. seem so cocksure of their position. For them, theism is not a live option or existential possibility. This is obvious from their mocking comparisons of God to a celestial teapot, flying spaghetti monster, and the like.

For sophisticated theists, however, atheism is a live option. The existence of this asymmetry makes one wonder whether any productive dialog with atheists is possible. It is probably no more possible than productive dialog with leftists. We live on different planets.

Companion post: Russell's Teapot: Does It Hold Water?

Nature, Signs, and Religious Experience

Reader P. J. offers us for delectation and analysis the following quotation from Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God:

[Brother Lawrence] was eighteen at the time, and still in the world. He told me that it had all happened one winter day, as he was looking at a barren tree. Although the tree's leaves were indeed gone, he knew that they would soon reappear, followed by blossoms and then fruit. This gave him a profound impression of God's providence and power which never left him. Brother Lawrence still maintains that his impression detached him entirely from the world and gave him such a great love for God that it hasn't changed in all of the forty years he has been walking with Him.

P. J. comments that

. . . nature is sometimes said to serve as a 'signpost' to God's existence, without the need for auxiliary premises such as the complexity of things, the orderly patterns of substances as described by the laws of nature, the intelligibility of the world, and so on and on. It is almost as if — at least for Br. Lawrence — nature, just by being there, served to point toward God in a primitive or non-inferential way. Nature, for him, pointed not simply to God's existence, but to a more positive account of God as the providential orderer of nature.

I admit that I don't know where to take this idea, or how far it can be taken, but it strikes me as an interesting topic to research in natural theology: the way(s) in which nature, without the aid of auxiliary premises, can point to God's existence, and to a more content-rich account of the divine attributes.

I agree that the question is interesting and important. Perhaps we can formulate it as the question whether nature can be taken as a natural sign of the existence of God, and certain features of nature as natural signs of certain of the divine attributes. I will consider here only the first question. Whether nature as a whole can be taken as a natural sign of the existence of God will depend on what we understand by 'natural sign.' Suppose we adopt Laird Addis' definition:

An entity is a natural sign if by its very nature, it represents some other entity or would-be entity, that is , if it is an intrinsically intentional entity. (Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality, Temple UP, 1989, p. 29)

I don't doubt that there are intrinsically intentional entities, thoughts (acts of thinking) being an example. Intrinsic intentionality is to be understood by contrast with derived intentionality. The intentionality or aboutness of a map, for example, is derivative, not intrinsic. A map is not about a chunk of terrain just in virtue of the map's intrinsic properties such as physical and geometrical properties. Suppose a neutron bomb wipes out all minded organisms. Maps and chunks of terrain remain. Do the maps in this scenario map anything, mean anything? No. This is because there are no minds to give the maps meaning.

Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. But that closer together should mean steeper is a meaning assigned and agreed upon by the community of map-makers and map-users. This meaning is not intrinsic to the map qua physical object. Closer together might have meant anything, e.g., that the likelihood of falling into an abandoned mine shaft is greater. The intentionality of the map and its features (contour lines, colors, etc.) is derivative from the intrinsic intentionality of minds.

So our question becomes this: Could nature be a natural sign in virtue of being intrinsically intentional? I don't think so. Nature can be taken or interpreted or read as pointing to God, but that would be a case of derivative intentionality: we would then be assigning to nature the property of pointing to God. But there is nothing intrinsic to nature that makes it point to God.

But of course one might mean something else by 'natural sign.' Fresh bear scat on a trail is a natural sign that a bear has been by recently. A natural sign in this sense is a bit of the natural world, or a modification of the natural world, that typically has a natural cause and that by its presence 'refers' us to this cause. The scat is the scat of a bear, but this 'of' is not the 'of' of intentionality. Similarly with the tracks of a mountain lion. They are typically caused by a mountain lion but they are not about a mountain lion.

Note the difference between the subjective and the objective genitive. The tracks of a mountain lion are a mountain lion's tracks (genitivus subjectivus) whereas the hiker's fear of a mountain lion is not a mountain lion's fear but the hiker's fear (genitivus objectivus). Both genitives can occur in one and the same sentence. My favorite example: Timor domini initium sapientiae. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A second example: Obsidis metus mortis magnus est. The fear of death of the hostage is great. The hostage is the subject of fear; death the object. Analysis of this example in German here.

But I digress.

Could the natural world point to God in the way mountain lion tracks point to a mountain lion? Yes, if the natural world is the effect of a divine cause. But how do we know this? One cannot tell that the natural world is a created world just by observing it. Even if it is created, its createdness cannot be 'read off' from it. It can only be 'read into' it.

Now let me try to answer my reader's question. I take him to be asking the following question:

Q. Does the the natural world, by its sheer existence, directly show (i.e., show without the aid of auxiliary premises), that there exists a transcendent creator of the natural world?

If (Q) is the question, my answer is in the negative. This is invalid: the universe exists; ergo, God exists. This is valid: the universe exists; the universe is contingent; whatever contingently exists cannot exist as a matter of brute fact but must have a cause of its existence; nothing can cause its own existence; ergo, God as transcendent causa prima exists. Whether the second is a sound argument and how one would know it to be sound are of course further questions; it is, however, a valid argument.

But we had to bring in auxiliary premises. And similarly for this question:

Q*. Does the apparent designedness of the natural order directly show the existence of a transcendent designer?

And this one:

Q**. Does the beauty of "The starry skies above me" (Kant) directly show that this beauty has a transcendent Source which "all men call God" (Aquinas)?

Closely Related: Overbelief and Romans 1: 18-20

Again on Divine Simplicity and God’s Knowledge of Contingent Truths

This entry continues yesterday's discussion. The question was: How can an ontologically simple God know contingent truths? Here again is yesterday's aporetic tetrad:

1. God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2. God knows some contingent truths.

3. Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4. God exists necessarily.

I briefly discussed, without endorsing, an externalist way of rejecting (3). Reader Dan M. has a different idea for rejecting (3):

. . . a kind of nominalism about mental acts or states.

To illustrate, consider this truth: (A) Bill is sitting. Because 'Bill' is a singular term denoting a man, (A)'s truth implies the existence of at least one item. But there's disagreement about whether (A) implies the existence of other items. A property realist might say: (A) implies the existence of a property, sitting-ness. An event or state realist might say: (A) implies the existence of an event or state, Bill's sitting. But a nominalist may say: no, an item (e.g. Bill) can be a certain way (e.g. sitting), without that consisting in (or otherwise committing us to) the existence of any further items (such as a property of sitting, or a state or event of Bill's sitting).

Bringing in God's knowledge, we can say: (B) God knows that Bill has two cats. Someone who accepts proposition 3 might say: (B) implies the existence of an item intrinsic to God, namely a particular state of knowledge. If I understand you on knowledge externalism, that sort of response takes issue with 'intrinsic'. On the alternative view I'm entertaining, we take issue with 'item' instead. We say: there is no item of God's knowing that Bill has two cats. Just as Bill can sit without there being a state of Bill's sitting (construed as a bona fide item), God can know that something is the case without there being a state of God's knowing it (construed as a bona fide item).

Very interesting!

The suggestion, to put it generally, is that if a subject S believes/knows/wants/desires (etc.) that p, a correct ontological assay of the situation will not turn up anything in addition to S and p. Thus there is no need to posit any such item as the state (or state of affairs or fact or event) of S's believing/knowing/wanting/desiring that p. So on Dan's proposal, if 'God knows that Bill has two cats' is true, this truth does not commit us ontologically to the state (state of affairs, fact, event) of God's knowing that Bill has two cats.

In Cartesian terms, there is an ego and a cogitatum, but no cogitatio. This amounts to a denial of mental acts and thereby a denial of the act-content distinction.

Well, why not? One reason off the top of my head is that such a parsimonious scheme cannot account for the differences among believing, doubting, suspending judgment, wanting, desiring, willing, imagining, remembering, etc.

One and the same proposition, that Bill has two cats, is known by me, believed but not known by my loyal and trusting readers, doubted by a doubting Thomas or two, suspended by Seldom Seen Slim the Skeptic who takes no position on the weighty question of the extent of my feline involvement, remembered by last year's house guests, etc. Indeed, one and the same subject can take up different attitudes toward one and the same proposition.

Suppose a neighbor tells me there's a mountain lion in my backyard. I begin by doubting the proposition, suspecting my neighbor of confusing a mountain lion with a bobcat, but then, seeing the critter with my own eyes, I advance to believing and perhaps even to knowing. So one and the same subject can take up two or more different attitudes toward one and the same proposition.

These examples are phenomenological evidence that we cannot eke by with just the subject and the object/content but also need to posit mental acts, particular mental occurrences or episodes such as Bill's seeing here and now that there is a mountain lion in his backyard. The differences among believing, knowing, doubting, desiring, remembering, etc. will then be act-differences, differences in the types of mental acts.

How would a resolute denier of mental acts account for these differences? Will he shunt all the differences onto propositional contents? Will he theorize that there are memorial, imaginal, dubitable, desiderative, etc. propositional contents? Good luck with that.

Suppose that S goes from doubting that p to believing that p. The denier of mental acts would have to redescribe the situation as one in which there are two propositions, call them a dub-prop and a cred-prop, with awareness of the first followed by awareness of the second. How could one display these two propositions? Dubitably, there is a mountain lion on the backyard and Credibly, there is a mountain lion in the back yard?

Perhaps such a theory can be worked out plausibly. But it makes little sense to me.

And so we are brought back to our problem: How can a simple God know contingent truths?

Divine Simplicity: Is God Identical to His Thoughts?

Theophilus inquires,

I've been researching the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) recently and I've had a hard time figuring something out. On DDS, is it the case that God is identical with his thoughts? Surely on the view (as you say in your SEP article) God is identical with his omniscience. But does that also mean he is identical with the content of that attribute?

I would appreciate your input on this question, and your SEP article has given me a lot to think about.

The good news for Theophilus is that he has stumbled onto a serious problem. The bad news is that there is no really satisfactory solution known to me.

On DDS, God is identical to his attributes. Omniscience is one of the divine attributes; ergo God is identical to omniscience. This seems to imply that God is identical to the mental states in which his omniscience is articulated. But a good lot of what God knows is contingent, for example, that I am the author of the SEP entry in question. Someone else might have been the author of that encyclopedia entry, not to mention the fact that there might not have been any such entry, or any such encyclopedia.

If we think of knowledge as a propositional attitude, and if this holds for God as well as for us, then there are many contingently true propositions with respect to which God is in corresponding contingent mental states. For if it is contingent that p, then it is contingent that God is in the state of knowing that p. Thus God is contingently in the state — call it S — of knowing that there is such an on-line publication as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

But how can God be identical to S? This, I take it, is the question that vexes Theophilus. He is right to be vexed. How can an ontologically simple God know contingent truths?

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

1. God is simple: there is nothing intrinsic to God that is distinct from God.

2. God knows some contingent truths.

3. Necessarily, if God knows some truth t, then (i) there an item intrinsic to God such as a mental act or a belief state (ii) whereby God knows t.

4. God exists necessarily.

The plausibility of (3) may be appreciated as follows. Whatever else knowledge is, it is plausibly regarded as a species of true belief. A belief is an intrinsic state of a subject. Moreover, beliefs are individuated by their contents: beliefs or believings with different contents are different beliefs or believings. It cannot be that one and the same act of believing has different contents at different times or in different possible worlds.

That the tetrad is inconsistent can be seen as follows. Suppose God, who knows everything there is to be known, knows some contingent truth t. He knows, for example, that I have two cats. It follows from (3) that there is some item intrinsic to God such as a belief state whereby God knows t. Given (1), this state, as intrinsic to God, is not distinct from God. Given (4), the state whereby God knows t exists necessarily. For, necessarily, if x = y, and x is a necessary being, then y is a necessary being. But then t is necessarily true. This contradicts (2) according to which t is contingent.

Opponents of the divine simplicity will turn the tetrad into an argument against (1). They will argue from the conjunction of (2) & (3) & (4) to the negation of (1). The classical theist, however, accepts (1), (2), and (4). If he is to solve the tetrad, he needs to find a way to reject (3). He needs to find a way to reject the idea that when a knower knows something, there is, intrinsic to the knower, some mediating item that is individuated by the object known.

So consider an externalist conception of knowledge. I see a cat and seeing it I know it — that it is and what it is. Now the cat is not in my head; but it could be in my mind on an externalist theory of mind. My awareness of the cat somehow 'bodily' includes the cat, the whole cat, all 25 lbs of him, fur, dander, and all. Knowledge is immediate, not mediated by sense data, representations, mental acts, occurrent believings, or any other sort of epistemic intermediary or deputy. Seeing a cat, I see the cat itself directly, not indirectly via some other items that I see directly such as an Husserlian noema, a Castanedan ontological guise, a Meinongian incomplete object, or any other sort of merely intentional object. On this sort of scheme, the mind is not a container, hence has no contents in the strict sense of this term. The mind is directly at the things themselves.

If this externalism is coherent, then then we can say of God's knowledge that it does not involve any intrinsic states of God that would be different were God to know different things than he does know. For example, God knows that I have two cats. That I have two cats is an actual, but contingent fact. If God's knowledge of this fact were mediated by an item intrinsic to God, a mental act say, an item individuated by its accusative, then given the divine simplicity, this item could not be distinct from God with the consequence that the act and its accusative would be necessary. This consequence is blocked if there is nothing intrinsic to God whereby he knows that I have two cats.

I don't find externalism plausible, so I am left with an impasse. I cannot see how God can exist without being ontologically simple. So I cannot reject (1). And of course I cannot solve or rather dissolve the problem by disposing of the presupposition that God exists. As for (2), I am not about to deny that there are contingent truths or that God knows contingent truths. As for (4), if God is simple, then surely he is a necessary being. A being that is its existence cannot not exist.

Few philosophers will follow me to the conclusion that our tetrad is a genuine aporia. Most theists will cheerfully deny (1). A few will deny (4) which implies the denial of (1). Atheists will dismiss the whole discussion as an empty academic exercise since it is plain to them that there is no God. A few brave souls will deny (2) either by denying that there are contingent truths or that God knows them. And then there are those who will deny (3). This I should think is the best way to go if there is a way forward.

Could we go mysterian on this? The limbs of the tetrad are each of them true, and so collectively consistent; it is just that we cannot understand how they could all be true.

REFERENCE: W. Matthews Grant, "Divine Simplicity, Contingent Truths, and Extrinsic Models of Divine Knowing," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 29, no. 3, July 2012, pp. 254-274.

Which is More Certain, God or My Hands?

A reader inquires, "I'm curious, if someone asked you what you were more certain of, your hands or belief in the existence of God, how would you respond?"

The first thing a philosopher does when asked a question is examine the question. (Would that ordinary folk, including TV pundits, would do likewise before launching into gaseous answers to ill-formed questions.) Now what exactly am I being asked? The question is ambiguous as between:

Q1. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of the existence of God?

Q2. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of your belief in the existence of God?

My reader probably intends (Q1). If (Q1) is the question, then the answer is that I am more certain of the existence of my hands than of the existence of God. My hands are given in sense perception throughout the day, every day. Here is one, and here is the other (he said with a sidelong glance in the direction of G. E. Moore). It is not perfectly certain that I have hands, or even that I have a body – can I prove that I am not a brain in a vat? — but it is practically certain, certain for all practical purposes.

By the way, it borders on a bad joke to think that one can prove the external world by waving one's hands around as Moore famously did. Still, if I don't know basic facts such as these 'handy' facts, then I know very little, things of the order of 'I now seem to see a hand' but not 'I now see a hand.' (I am using 'see' as a verb of success: If S sees an F, there there exists an x such that x is F and S sees x.)

So, for practical purposes, I am certain that my hands exist. But I am not certain in the same sense and to the same degree that God exists. The evidence is a lot slimmer. This is not to say that there is no evidence. There is plenty of evidence, it is just that it is not compelling. There is the evidence of conscience, of mystical and religious experience, the consensus gentium; there is the 'evidence' of the dozens and dozens of arguments for the existence of God, there is the testimony of prophets. But none of this evidence, even taking the whole lot of it together, gets the length of the evidence of my hands that I get from seeing them, touching them, clapping them, manipulating things with them.

When I fall down and feel my hands slam into the hard hot rock of a desert canyon, then I know beyond any practical doubt that hands exist and rock exists. Then I say with 'Cactus Ed' Abbey, "I believe in rock and sun." In that vulnerable moment, alone in a desolate desert canyon, it is very easy to doubt that there is any providential order, that there is any ultimate intelligibility, that there is any Sense beyond the flimsy and fragmented sense we make of things. But it is practically impossible to doubt hands and rock and sun.

The difference could be put like this. The existence and the nonexistence of God are both of them epistemic possibilities: for all I can claim to know, there is no God; but also: there is a God. Both states of affairs are consistent with what I can claim to know. But it is not an epistemic possibility that these hands of mine do not exist unless one takes knowledge to require an objective certainty impervious to hyperbolic doubt.

In the case of my hands there is really no counter evidence to their existence apart from Cartesian hyperbolic doubt. But in the case of God, not only is the evidence spotty and inconclusive, but there is also counter evidence, the main piece of which is the existence of evil. It is worth noting, however, that if one would be skeptical, one ought to doubt also the existence of evil, and with it, arguments to the nonexistence of God from the putative fact of evil. How do you know there is evil? No doubt there is pain, excruciating pain. But is pain evil? Maybe pain is just a sensation that an organism feeling it doesn't like, and the organism's not liking it is just an attitude of that organism, so that in reality there is no good or evil. Pain is given. But is evil given? Pain is undeniable. But one can easily deny the existence of evil. Perhaps the all is just a totality of value-indifferent facts.

As for (Q2), it makes reference to my belief in God. Whether you take the belief as a disposition or as an occurrent state, the belief as a feature of my mental life must be distinguished from its truth-value. I am not certain of the truth of my belief that God exists, but I am certain of the existence of my belief (my believing) that God exists. As certain as I am that I have hands? More certain. I can doubt that I have hands in the usual Cartesian way. But how can I doubt that fact that I have a belief if in fact I have it?

How Could a Simple God be a Person?

The Worthy Opponent writes,

And how is the view of divine simplicity and consequent unintelligibility consistent with the view of God as a person? A person has a mind whose thoughts and feelings are distinct and successive. As Hume (1711–76) argued, a being who is simple has ‘no thought, no reason, no will, no sentiment, no love, no hatred; or in a word, is no mind at all’.ⁱ Yet God is obviously a person, according to Plantinga and othersⁱⁱ. Then he is obviously not simple.

i Hume, David. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Edited by Richard Popkin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980, part 4.

ii Does God Have a Nature? Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1980. See Eleanor Stump on the same. ‘We can say ‘you’ to God’. God is a particular, with a mind and a will. ‘We can say ‘you’ to one another, and say ‘you’ to God’.

This is a very hard nut to crack. The problem cannot be solved, in my opinion, by simply denying the divine simplicity. For there is a very powerful argument for it. As I say elsewhere:

I believe a case can be made, pace Alvin Plantinga and other theistic deniers of divine simplicity, that to deny the absolute ontological simplicity of God is to deny theism itself. For what we mean by 'God' is an absolute reality, something metaphysically ultimate, "that than which no greater can be conceived." (Anselm) Now an absolute reality cannot depend for its existence or nature or value upon anything distinct from itself. It must be from itself alone, or a se. Nothing could count as divine, or worthy of worship, or be an object of our ultimate concern, or be maximally great, if it lacked the property of aseity. But the divine aseity, once it is granted, seems straightaway to entail the divine simplicity, as Aquinas argues in ST. For if God is not dependent on anything else for his existence, nature, and value, then God is not a whole of parts, for a whole of parts depends on its parts to be and to be what it is. So if God is a se, then he is not a composite being, but a simple being. This implies that in God there is no real distinction between: existence and essence, form and matter, act and potency, individual and attribute, attribute and attribute. In sum, if God is God, then God is simple. To deny the simplicity of God is to deny the existence of God. It is therefore possible for an atheist to argue: Nothing can be ontologically simple, therefore, God cannot exist.

A theist who denies divine simplicity might conceivably be taxed with idolatry inasmuch as he sets up something as God that falls short of the exacting requirements of deity. The divine transcendence would seem to require that God cannot be a being among beings, but must in some sense be Being itself . (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens: God is not an existent but self-subsisting Existence itself.) On the other hand, a theist who affirms divine simplicity can be taxed, and has been taxed, with incoherence. As an aporetician first and foremost, I seek to lay bare the problem in all its complexity under suspension of the natural urge for a quick solution.

In sum, God must be simple to be God. On the other hand, there can no denying of the force of the Opponent's objection. It has two prongs: the notion of a simple being is unintelligible; no person is simple. But God is a person. This cannot be denied either. We appear to be nailed to the cross of the following aporetic triad:

A.God is a person.
B. No person is simple.
C. God is simple.

The classical theist accepts all three propositions. But they are inconsistent. Some theists will argue that the inconsistency is merely apparent. I don't believe that this can be compellingly established, and neither does the Opponent. He thinks the inconsistency real and so concludes that God is not simple. This makes sense, of course, but it is not quite satisfactory, ignoring as it does the powerful arguments for divine simplicity. God can be neither an impersonal absolute nor a personal non-absolute. The Opponent ends up with the view that God is a personal non-absolute.

I myself am inclined to adopt a mysterian 'solution' according to which we accept all three propositions while confessing that we cannot understand how they could all be true.

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

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

Compare the mind-body problem. Many are inclined to say that that in us which thinks is the brain. But the brain is wholly material, and matter can't think. No physical state as physical states are understood by physics has semantic content and is directed to an object. Colin McGinn suggests that our cognitive architecture is such as to prevent us from understanding how the limbs of this apparent contradiction can all be true. How the brain thinks is thus a mystery. I am not endorsing McGinn's materialist mysterianism but suggesting that a mysterian approach to theological topics may be the best we can do. Besides divine simplicity, Trinity, Incarnation, and Real Presence are all arguably impervious to understanding by the discursive intellect. We just cannot see how they could be logically possible.

The Holocaust Argument for God’s Existence

Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing, Nelson, 2016, p. 231:

There are people who say that an evil as great as the Holocaust is proof there is no God. But I would say the opposite. The fact that it is so great an evil, so great that it defies any material explanation, implies a spiritual and moral framework that requires God's existence.

I've had a similar thought for years.

One can of course argue, plausibly, from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God. From Epicurus to David Hume to J. L. Mackie, this has been a staple in the history of philosophy. There is no need to rehearse the logical and evidential arguments from evil to the nonexistence of God (See my Good and Evil category.) But one can argue, just as plausibly, from the fact of evil to the existence of God. I envisage two sorts of argument. One type argues that there could be no objective difference between good and evil without God. The other type, an instance of which will be sketched here, argues from a special feature of the evil in the world to the existence of God. This special feature is the horrific depth and intensity of moral evil, a phenomenon which beggars naturalistic understanding. This second type of argument is what Klavan is hinting at.

How might such an argument go? Here is a sketch. This is merely an outline, not a rigorous development.

I should also say that my aim is not to sketch a rationally compelling argument for the existence of God. There are no compelling arguments for substantive theses in philosophy and theology. My aim is to neutralize the atheist arguments from evil by showing that the tables can be turned: evil can just as easily be marshaled in support of God. Further, I have no illusions about neutralizing atheist arguments in the eyes of atheists. The purpose of the following is simply to show theists that their position is rationally defensible.

A. Consider not just the occurrence, but also the magnitude, of moral evil. I don't mean just the ubiquity of moral evil but also its horrific depth. Fidel Castro, for example, that hero of the Left, did not merely imprison his political opponents for their dissent, he had them tortured in unspeakable ways:

Mr. Valladares and other prisoners who refused ''political rehabilitation'' were forced to live in the greatest heat and the dampest cold without clothes. They were regularly beaten, shot at and sometimes killed; they were thrown into punishment cells, including the dreaded ''drawer cells,'' specially constructed units that make South Vietnam's infamous tiger cages seem like homey quarters. Eventually, together with several others, Mr. Valladares plotted an escape from their prison on the Isle of Pines. But the boat that was to pick them up never arrived. He and his accomplices were brought back to their cells and given no medical attention, though Mr. Valladares had fractured three bones in his foot during the escape attempt.

The retribution was swift. Mr. Valladares writes: ''Guards returned us to the cells and stripped us again. They didn't close the cell door, and that detail caught my attention. I was sitting on the floor; outside I heard the voices of several approaching soldiers. . . . They were going to settle accounts with us, collect what we owed them for having tried to escape. . . . They were armed with thick twisted electric cables and truncheons. . . . Suddenly, everything was a whirl – my head spun around in terrible vertigo. They beat me as I lay on the floor. One of them pulled at my arm to turn me over and expose my back so he could beat me more easily. And the cables fell more directly on me. The beating felt as if they were branding me with a red-hot branding iron, but then suddenly I experienced the most intense, unbearable, and brutal pain of my life. One of the guards had jumped with all his weight on my broken, throbbing leg.''

That treatment was typical. In the punishment cells, prisoners were kept in total darkness. Guards dumped buckets of urine and feces over the prisoners who warded off rats and roaches as they tried to sleep. Fungus grew on Mr. Valladares because he was not allowed to wash off the filth. Sleep was impossible. Guards constantly awoke the men with long poles to insure they got no rest. Illness and disease were a constant. Even at the end, when the authorities were approving his release, Mr. Valladares was held in solitary confinement in a barren room with fluorescent lights turned on 24 hours a day. By then he was partially paralyzed through malnutrition intensified by the lack of medical attention.

B. What explains the depth and ferocity of this evil-doing for which Communists, but not just them, are notorious? If you wrong me, I may wrong you back in proportional fashion to 'even the score' and 'give you a taste of your own medicine.' That's entirely understandable in naturalistic terms. You punch me, I punch you back, and now it's over. We're even. That may not be Christian behavior, but it's human behavior. But let's say you steal my guitar and I respond by microwaving your cat, raping your daughter, murdering your wife, and burning your house down. What explains the lack of proportionality? What explains the insane, murderous, inner rage in people, even in people who don't act on it? What turns ordinary Cubans into devils when they are given absolute power over fellow Cubans? There is something demonic at work here, not something merely animalic.

Can I prove that? Of course not. But neither can you prove the opposite.

Homo homini lupus does not capture the phenomenon. And it is an insult to the wolves to boot who are by (fallen) nature condemned to predation. Man is not a wolf to man, but a demon to man. No bestial man is merely bestial; he is beneath bestial in that he has freely chosen to degrade himself. His bestiality is spiritual. Only a spiritual being, a being possessing free will, can so degrade himself. Degrading themselves, the torturers then degrade their victims.

Now, dear reader, look deep into your own heart and see if there is any rage and hate there. And try to be honest about it. Is there a good naturalistic explanation for that cesspool of corruption in your own heart, when you have had, on balance, a good life? What explains the intensity and depth of the evil you find there and in Castro's henchmen, not to mention Stalin's, et al. What explains this bottomless, raging hate?

As a sort of inference to the best explanation we can say that moral evil in its extreme manifestations has a supernatural source. It cannot be explained adequately in naturalistic terms. There is an Evil Principle (and Principal) the positing of which is reasonable. The undeniable reality of evil has a metaphysical ground. Call it Satan or whatever you like.

C. It is plausible, then, to posit an Evil Principle to explain the full range and depth and depravity of moral evil. But Manicheanism is a non-starter. Good and Evil are not co-equal principles. Good is primary, Evil secondary and derivative. It cannot exist without Good. The doctrine that evil is privatio boni, a lack of good, does not explain the positive character of evil. But if there is an Evil One as the source of evil, then the positivity of evil can be charged to the Evil One's account. The positivity consists in the existence of the Evil One and his will; the privation in the Evil One's malevolent misuse of his free will. Satan is good insofar as he is: ens et bonum convertuntur. He is the ultimate source of evil in that his exercise of free will is malevolent.

D. If the existence of evil presupposes the existence of good, and evil exists in its prime instance as as an Evil Person, then good exists in its prime instance as God.

This sketch of an argument can be presented in a rigorous form with all the argumentative gaps plugged. But even then it won't be rationally compelling. No naturalist will accept the premise that there are some evils which require a supernatural explanation. He will hold to his naturalism come hell or high water and never give it up no matter how lame his particular explanations are. His attitude will be: there just has to be a naturalist/materialist explanation.

And so I say what I have said many times before. In the end, you must decide what you will believe about these ultimate matters, and how you will live. There are no knock-down arguments to guide you. And yet you ought to be able to give a rational account of what you believe and why. Hence the utility of the above sort of argument. It is not for convincing atheists but for articulating the views of theists.

Addendum (1/24). Paulo Juarez comments,

I just read your article regarding the Holocaust argument for the existence of God. It was gut-wrenching, as it was convincing in my eyes.

One line of argument worth considering (one that I sketch here) is that, on the supposition that the problem of evil is sound, and God does not exist, then presumably justice falls to us and no one else. But there is a disproportion between the justice we are able to administer, and the kind of justice everyone in their heart of hearts desires: justice for every person to ever live and to ever have lived [every person who will ever live and who has ever lived]. This desire for justice, unconditioned and absolute, can only be met if God exists, and so the very argument that is supposed to show an incompatibility between God and the existence of evil (particularly horrendous evils) fails to take into account that only if God exists, can there possibly be justice for the sufferer of evils (especially horrendous evils).

From there one could argue, either a) that our desire for justice unconditioned and absolute (call it 'cosmic justice') must have a corresponding object (God), or b) you could take a Pascalian route similar to the one we discussed last week.

Of course, an atheist could bite the bullet and say that there just are unredeemed and unredeemable evils. But then a different argument of mine kicks is, one that questions how an atheist could reasonablly affirm life as worth living given the fact of evil. See A Problem of Evil for Atheists.

Dolezal, Knowledge, and Belief

Soloveitchik on Proving the Existence of God

John Passmore on Entity-Monism and Existence-Monism

Is the Modal Ontological Argument Compelling?

In a comment, Patrick Toner writes,

. . . there is no substantive philosophical position for which there is *better* philosophical support than theism. I'm open to the possibility that at least one other philosophical position–namely, dualism–is at least as well supported by philosophical argument as theism. But nothing's got better support.

[. . .]

That said, I find St. Thomas's second way indubitable. I also find the modal ontological argument compelling. The kalam cosmological argument seems pretty much irrefutable.

In another comment in the same thread, Toner writes,

But we still do (or can) know God and the soul with certainty through the use of natural human reason. (emphasis added)

What interests me in this entry is Toner's explicit claim that the modal ontological argument is (rationally) compelling, and his implicit claim that this argument delivers (objectively) certain knowledge of the existence of God. While I consider the argument in question to be a good argument, I don't find it to be compelling. Nor do I think that it renders its conclusion certain. My view is that no argument for or against theism is rationally compelling. No such argument resolves the issue. I think it would be wonderful if there were a compelling argument for the existence of God. The metaphysical knowledge generated by such an argument would be the most precious knowledge that one could possess. So I would be much beholden to Toner if he could show me the error of my ways.

Perhaps there is a theistic argument that is rationally compelling. If there is I should like to know what it is. I am quite sure, however, that the following argument does not fill the bill.

A Modal Ontological Argument

'GCB' will abbreviate 'greatest conceivable being,' which is a rendering of Anselm of Canterbury's "that than which no greater can be conceived." 'World' abbreviates 'broadly logically possible world.' 'OA' abbreviate 'ontological argument.'

1. Either the concept of the GCB is instantiated in every world or it is instantiated in no world.

2. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in some world. Therefore:

3. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in every world. (1, 2 by Disjunctive Syllogism)

4. The actual world is one of the worlds. Therefore:

5. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in the actual world. (3, 4 ) Therefore:

6. The GCB exists. (5)

This is a valid argument: it is correct in point of logical form. Nor does it commit any informal fallacy such as petitio principii, as I argue in Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 97-110. Note also that this version of the OA does not require the controversial assumption that existence is a first-level property, an assumption that Frege famously rejects and that many read back (with some justification) into Kant. (Frege held that the OA falls with that assumption, cf. Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, sec. 53; he was wrong: the above version is immune to the Kant-Frege objection.)

(1) expresses what I call Anselm's Insight. He appreciated, presumably for the first time in the history of thought, that a divine being, one worthy of worship, must be noncontingent, i.e., either necessary or impossible. I consider (1) nonnegotiable. If your god is contingent, then your god is not God. There is no god but God. God is an absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is contingent. End of discussion. (If, however, (1) is reasonably disputable, then this only strengthens my case against compellingness.)

It is premise (2) — the key premise — that ought to raise eyebrows. What it says — translating out of the patois of possible worlds — is that it it possible that the GCB exists.

Whereas conceptual analysis of 'greatest conceivable being' suffices in support of (1), how do we support (2)? Why should we accept it? How do we know that (2) is true? Some will say that the conceivability of the GCB entails its possibility. But I deny that conceivability entails possibility.

Conceivability Does not Entail Possibility

The question is whether conceivability by finite minds like ours entails real possibility. A real possibility is one that has a mind-independent status. Real possibilities are not parasitic upon ignorance or on our (measly) powers of conception. Thus they contrast with epistemic/doxastic possibilities. Since what is epistemically possible for a person might be really impossible (whether broadly-logically or nomologically), we should note that 'epistemic' in 'epistemically possible' is an alienans adjective: it functions like 'decoy' in 'decoy duck.' Ducks don't come in two kinds, real and decoy. Similarly, there are not two kinds of possibility, epistemic and real. To say that a state of affairs is epistemically/doxastically possible for a subject S is to say that the obtaining of the state of affairs is logically compatible with what S knows/believes. For example, is it possible that my State Farm insurance agent Tim be working his office during normal business hours today ? Yes, epistemically: it is not ruled out by anything I know. But if Tim unbeknownst to me 'bought the farm' last night, then it is not really possible that Tim be working in his office today.

By 'conceivability' I mean thinkability by us without apparent logical contradiction.

First Argument

Why should the fact that a human being can conceive something without apparent logical contradiction show that the thing in question can exist in reality? Consider the FBI: the floating bar of iron. If my thought about the FBI is sufficiently abstract and indeterminate, then it will seem that there is no 'bar' to its possibility in reality. (Pun intended.) If I think the FBI as an object that has the phenomenal properties of iron but also floats, then those properties are combinable in my thought without contradiction. But if I know more about iron, including its specific gravity, and I import this information into my concept of iron, then the concept of the FBI will harbor a contradiction. The specific gravity of iron is 7850 kg/cu.m, which implies that it is 7.85 times more dense than water, which in turn means that it will sink in water.

The upshot is that conceivability without contradiction is no sure guide to (real) possibility. Conceivability does not entail possibility.

Second Argument

Both the existence and the nonexistence of God are conceivable, i.e., thinkable by us without apparent logical contradiction. So if conceivability entails possibility, then both the existence and the nonexistence of God are possible. If so, God is a contingent being. But this contradicts the Anselmian Insight according to which God is noncontingent. So if the Anselmian Insight is true, then conceivability-entails-possibility is false and cannot be used to support premise (2) of the modal OA. The argument can be put in the form of a reductio:

a. Conceivability entails possibility. (assumption for reductio)

b. It is conceivable that God not exist. (factual premise)

c. It is conceivable that God exist. (factual premise)

d. God is a noncontingent being. (true by Anselmian definition)

Ergo

e. It is possible that God not exist and it is possible that God exist. (a, b, c)

Ergo

f. God is a contingent being. (e, by definition of 'contingent being')

Ergo

g. God is a noncontingent being and God is a contingent being. (d, f, contradiction)

Ergo

~a. It is not the case that conceivability entails possibility. (a-g, by reductio ad absurdum)

Or, if you insist that conceivability entails possibility, then you must give up the Anselmian Insight. But the modal OA stands and falls with Anselmian insight.

Is Conceivability Nondemonstrative Evidence of Possibility?

We don't need to discuss this in any depth. Suppose it is. This won't help Toner's case. For if it is not certain, but only probable that (2) is true, then this lack of certainty will be transmitted to the conclusion, which will be, at most, probable but not certain. In that case, the argument will not be compelling. I take it that an argument is compelling if and only if it renders its conclusion objectively certain.

Are There Other Ways to Support the Possibility Premise?

I can think of one other way. It has been suggested that the possibility premise can be supported deontically:

A. A maximally perfect being ought to exist.
B. Whatever ought to exist, is possible.
Therefore
C. A maximally perfect being is possible.

I discuss this intriguing suggestion in a separate post wherein I come to the conclusion that the deontically supercharged modal OA is also not compelling.

What is it for an Argument to be Compelling?

My claim on the present occasion is that the modal OA provides no demonstrative knowledge of the truth of theism. Demonstrative knowledge is knowledge produced by a demonstration. A demonstration in this context is an argument that satisfies all of the following conditions:

1. It is deductive
2. It is valid in point of logical form
3. It is free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii
4. It is such that all its premises are true
5. It is such that all its premises are known to be true
6. It is such that its conclusion is relevant to its premises.

To illustrate (6). The following argument satisfies all of the conditions except the last and is therefore probatively worthless:

Snow is white
ergo
Either Obama is president or he is not.

On my use of terms, a demonstrative argument = a probative argument = a proof = a rationally compelling argument. Now clearly there are good arguments (of different sorts) that are not demonstrative, probative, rationally compelling. One type is the strong inductive argument. By definition, no such argument satisfies (1) or (2). A second type is the argument that satisfies all the conditions except (5).

And that is the problem with the modal OA. Condition (5) remains unsatisfied. While the possibility premise may be true for all we know, we do not know it to be true. So while the modal OA is a good argument in that it helps render theism rational, it is not a compelling argument.

Creation: Ex Nihilo or Ex Deo?

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

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

The latter principle seems intuitively obvious. It is not the case that something comes from nothing. Had there been nothing at all, there would not now be anything. (ENN) is not, however, a logical truth. A logical truth is one whose negation is a formal-logical contradiction. Negating (ENN) yields: something comes from nothing. This is logically possible in that no contradiction is involved in the notion that something come to be out of nothing. Logical possibility notwithstanding, that is hard to swallow. Rather than explain why — a fit topic for yet another post — I will assume for present purposes that (ENN) is a necessary truth of metaphysics. It is surely plausible. (And if true, then necessarily true.) Had there been nothing at all, there would have been nothing to 'precipitate' the arisal of anything. (But also nothing to prevent the arisal of something.)

You are not philosophizing until you have a problem. My present problem is this: If (ENN) is true, how can (CEN) be true? How can God create out of nothing if nothing can come from nothing? It would seem that our two principles form an inconsistent dyad. How solve it?

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

Admittedly, what I just stated, though very plausible, is not obvious. Distinguished philosophers have held that the divine will is not limited in the way I have described. But to enter this can of worms would take us too far afield, to mix a couple of metaphors. So we add to our problem the plausible background assumption that there are logical and non-logical limits on divine power.

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

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

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

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

When I say that God creates ex Deo what I mean is that God operates on entities that are not external to God in the sense of having existence whether or not God exists. I build a rock cairn to mark the trail by piling up otherwise scattered rocks. These rocks exist whether or not I do. My creation of the cairn is therefore neither out of nothing nor out of me but out of materials external to me. If God created in that way he would not be God as classically conceived, but a Platonic demiurge.

So I say that God creates out of ‘materials’ internal to him in the sense that their existence depends on God’s existence and are therefore in this precise sense internal to him. (I hope it is self-evident that materials need not be made out of matter.) In this sense, God creates ex Deo rather than out of materials that are provided from without. It should be obvious that God, a candidate for the status of an absolute, cannot have anything ‘outside him.’

To flesh this out a bit, suppose properties are concepts in the divine mind. Then properties are necessary beings in that they exist in all metaphysically possible worlds just as God does. The difference, however, is that properties have their necessity from another, namely God, while God has his necessity from himself. (This distinction is in Aquinas.) In other words, properties, though they are necessary beings, depend for their existence on God. If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then properties, and indeed the entire Platonic menagerie (as Plantinga calls it) would not exist.

Suppose that properties are the ‘materials’ or ontological constituents out of which concrete contingent individuals – thick particulars in Armstrong’s parlance – are constructed. (This diverges somewhat from what I say in A Paradigm Theory of Existence, but no matter: it is a simplification for didactic purposes.) We can then say that the existence of contingent individual C is just the unity or contingent togetherness of C’s ontological constituents. C exists iff C’s constituents are unified. Creating is then unifying. (We have a model for this unifying in our own unification of a sensory manifold in the unity of one consciousness.) Since the constituents are necessary beings, they are uncreated. But since their necessity derives from God, they are not independent of God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In any case, one thing seems clear: there is a problem with reconciling CEN with EEN. The reconciliation sketched here involves reading creatio ex nihilo as creatio ex Deo. The solution is not pantheistic, but panentheistic. It is not that all is God, but that all is in God.

I discuss and reject a different solution to the problem in On Reconciling Creatio Ex Nihilo with Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit.