People come to philosophy from various 'places.' Some come from religion, others from mathematics and the natural sciences, still others from literature and the arts. There are other termini a quis as well. In this post I am concerned only with the move from religion to philosophy. What are the main types of reasons for those who are concerned with religion to take up the serious study of philosophy? I count five main types of motive.
George W. Bush once referred to Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher, thereby betraying both a failure to grasp what a philosopher is and who Jesus claimed to be.
Jesus Christ is not a philosopher. The philosopher is a mere lover of wisdom. His love is desirous and needy; it is eros, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks. But Jesus Christ lacks nothing; he is is the fullness of wisdom, the Word and Wisdom of God embodied. So Christ is no lover of wisdom in the strict sense in which Socrates is a lover of wisdom. Divine love is not erotic but agapic.
If a sage is a possessor of wisdom, no philosopher qua philosopher is a sage. If a philosopher were to become a sage, he would thereby cease to be a philosopher: one does not seek what one possesses. Socrates is the embodiment of philosophy but not of wisdom. Socrates, then, is not a sage.
The wisdom of Socrates was largely the wisdom of nescience: he knew that he did not know what he did not know. In stark contrast, Christ claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth as recounted in the via, veritas, vita passage at John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me." Ego sum via et veritas et vita; nemo venit ad Patrem nisi per me.
Suppose a philosopher comes to accept Christian doctrine. Does he remain a philosopher in his acceptance of Christian doctrine or does he move beyond philosophy? I say that a philosopher who accepts the revealed truths characteristic of Christianity has moved beyond philosophy in this acceptance. Why?
A philosopher is not only one who, lacking wisdom and desiring it, seeks it, but also one who seeks the truth in a certain way, by a certain method. It is characteristic of philosophy that it is the pursuit of truth by unaided reason. 'Unaided' means: not aided by divine revelation. (It does not mean that the philosopher does not consult the senses.) The philosopher operates by reason and seeks reasons for what he believes. The philosopher relies on discursive reason as he encounters it in himself and accepts only what he can validate by his autonomous use of reason. Qua philosopher, he accepts no testimony but must verify matters for himself. The philosopher is like Doubting Thomas Didymus at John 20:25: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe."
That is the attitude of the philosopher. The philosopher is an inquirer into ultimate matters, and doubt is the engine of inquiry. The philosopher qua philosopher asks: Where's the evidence? What's the argument? What you say may be true, my brothers, but how do you know? What's your justification?
You say our rabbi rose from the dead? That sort of thing doesn't happen! I want knowledge, which is not just true belief but justified true belief. You expect me to believe that Jesus rose on no evidence but your testimony from probably hallucinatory experiences fueled by your fear and hunger and weakness? Prove it! W. K. Clifford takes it to the limit and gives it a moral twist: "It is wrong always and everywhere to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Presumably the testimony of a bunch of scared, unlettered, credulous fisherman would not count as sufficient evidence for Thomas Didymus or Clifford.
The Christian, however, operates by faith. If Reason is the faculty of philosophy, Faith is the faculty of religion. The philosopher may reason his way to the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, but he cannot qua philosopher arrive at the saving truth that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) by the use of reason. The saving truths are 'known' by faith and not by reason. It is also clear that faith for the Christian ranks higher than reason. As Jesus says to Thomas at John 20:29: "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed."
The attitude of the believer who is also a philosopher is fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. But what if no understanding is found? Does the believer reject or suspend his belief? No. If he is a genuine believer, he continues to believe whether or not he achieves understanding. This shows that for the believer, reason has no veto power. The apparent logical impossibility of the Incarnation does not cause him to reject or suspend his belief in Jesus as his Lord and Savior. If he finds a way to show the rational acceptability of the Incarnation, well and good; if he fails, no matter. The Incarnation is a fact 'known' by Revelation; as an actual fact it is possible, and what is possible is possible whether or not we frail reeds can understand how it is possible. The believer in the end will announce that the saving truths are mysteries impenetrable to us here below even if he does not go to the extreme of a Tertullian, a Kierkegaard, or a Shestov and condemn reason wholesale.
The attitude of the philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation is different. He feels duty-bound by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept. This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl. On his death bed, attended by nuns, open to the Catholic faith, he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation.
There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality. As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:
To put it very very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is is the life of autonomous understanding. The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love. The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)
So is the Christian the true philosopher? Only in the sense that philosophy points beyond itself to something that is no longer philosophy but that completes philosophy while cancelling it. I am tempted to reach for an Hegelian trope while turning it on its head: if Christianity is true, then philosophy is aufgehoben, sublated, in it. If Christianity is true, then the Christian arrives at the truth that the philosopher at best aims at but cannot arrive at by his method and way of life, the life of autonomous understanding. To achieve what he aims at, the philosopher would have to be "as a little child" and accept in obedient love the gift of Revelation. But it is precisely that which he cannot do if he is to remain a philosopher in the strict sense, one who lives the life of autonomous understanding.
That is tension some of us live. The life of autonomous understanding and critical examination? Or the life of child-like trust and obedient love?
The problem in what is perhaps its sharpest form is presented in the story of Abraham and Isaac.
The Christian life is not the philosophical life. It lies beyond the philosophical life and, if true, is superior to it.
But is it true?
In the end, you have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.
Politics is a practical game. One has to win to be effective. Merely to have the better set of ideas and policies is to fail. Philosophy, however, is not about winning. It is about ultimate understanding, spiritual self-transformation, and wisdom. A politics fully informed by insight and understanding would be ideal if it were not impossible. This 'ideal,' however is not an ideal for us. Nothing counts as an ideal for us if it is unattainable by us.
Ars longa, vita brevis. The same is true of philosophy. The philosopher has time and takes his time. Hear Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 80: Der Gruss der Philosophen unter einander sollte sein: "Lass Dir Zeit!" "This is how philosophers should greet each other: Take your time!"
The philosopher can resist the urge for a quick solution. He takes his time because he is a "spectator of all time." (Plato, Republic, Book VI) He's in the game for the long haul, for the 'duration.' After his death he is still in the game if his Nachlass is found worthy. He may concern himself with the questions of the day, but he never loses sight of the issues of the ages. And he has an eye for the presence of the latter within the former.
In politics we have enemies; political discourse is inherently polemical. But there are no enemies in philosophy. For if your interlocutor is not a friend, then you are not philosophizing with him. Ideally, philosophy is the erothetic love of truth pursued either in solitude or among friends who love the truth more than they love each other.
Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas. (Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1096a15; but the thought is already in Plato at Republic, Book X, 595b-c and 607c. I am tempted to say that everything is already in Plato . . . .)
The following two propositions are collectively logically inconsistent and yet each is very plausible:
1. Being dead is not an evil for any dead person at any time.
2. Being dead at a young age is an evil for some dead persons.
Obviously, the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true. Each entails the negation of the other. And yet each limb lays serious claim to our acceptance. If you have been following the recent Epicurean discussions in these pages, you know that very plausible arguments can be given for both members of this pair of contradictories.
If philosopher A urges (1) and philosopher B urges (2), and neither can convince the other, then I say that A and B are in a standoff.
On the other hand, there cannot be sound arguments for both limbs. This is because there are no true contradictions. A plausible argument needn't be sound. And a sound argument needn't be plausible. A sound argument, by commonly accepted definition, is a valid deductive argument all of the premises of which are true. It is easy to see that every such argument must have a true conclusion.
So I say that the above standoff is dialectical, not logical.
This means that what generates the standoff or impasse are not logical norms and notions taken in abstracto and applied to propositions taken in abstracto, but logic embedded and applied in a concrete dialogue situation playing out between two or more finite and fallible agents who are trying to arrive at a rational resolution of a difficult question. I will assume that the interlocutors are sincere truth seekers possessing the intellectual virtues. There is thus nothing polemical about their conflict. Of course, some standoffs are polemical, most political ones for example, but at the moment I am not worrying about polemical standoffs. Nor am I concerned with physical standoffs or the sort of standoff that occurs in a game of chess when neither side has sufficient mating material.
A second example.
3. God by his very nature as divine is a concrete being who exists of metaphysical necessity.
4. Nothing concrete could exist of metaphysical necessity.
By 'concrete' I mean causally active/passive. The God in question is not a causally inert abstract object like a number or a set-theoretical set. Clearly, (3) and (4) form a contradictory pair and so cannot both be true. And yet one can argue plausibly for each.
This is not the place for detailed arguments, but in support of (3) there are the standard Anselmian considerations. God is ens perfectissimum; nothing perfect could be modally contingent; ergo, etc. God is "that than which no greater can be conceived"; if God were a merely contingent being, then a greater could be conceived; ergo, etc.
In support of (4), there is the difficulty of understanding how any concrete individual could exist necessarily. For such a being, possibility suffices for actuality: if God is possible, then he is actual. But this possibility is not mere possibility; it is the possibility of an actual being. (God is at no time or in any possible world merely possible, if he is possible at all.) The divine possibility — if it is a possibility at all and not an impossibility — is a possibility that is fully actualized. Possibility and actuality in God are one and the same in reality even though they remain notionally distinct for us. (In classical jargon, God is pure act, actus purus.) Equivalently, essence and existence in God are one and the same in reality even if they must remain notionally distinct for our discursive intellects. It is God's nature to exist. God is an existing essence in virtue of his very essence. God's existence is in no way subsequent to his essence, not temporally, of course, but also not logically or ontologically. So it is not quite right to say, as many do, that God's nature entails his existence; God's nature is his existence, and his existence is his nature.
If you think this through very carefully, you will realize that the ground of the divine necessity is the divine simplicity. It is because God is an ontologically simple being that he is a necessary being. If you deny that God is simple but affirm that he is necessary, then I will challenge you to state what makes him necessary as opposed to impossible. If you say that God is necessary in virtue of existing in all possible worlds, then I will point out that that gets us nowhere: it is simply an extensional way of saying that God is necessary.
Divine simplicity implies no real distinctions in God, and thus no real distinction between essence and existence. It is the identity of essence and existence in God that is the root, source, ground of the divine necessity. The problem is that we, with our discursive intellects, cannot understand how this could be. Anything we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as nonexistent. (Hume) The discursive intellect cannot grasp the possibility of a simple being, and so it cannot grasp the possibility of a necessary concretum. Here then we have the makings of an argument that, in reality, every concretum is contingent, which is equivalent to the negation of (4).
So if one philosopher urges (3) and his interlocutor (4), and neither can convince the other, then the two are in a standoff.
Now you may quibble with my examples, but there are fifty more I could give (and you hope I won't).
Philosophy is its problems and these are in canonical form when cast in the mold of aporetic polyads. The typical outcome, however, is not a solution but a standoff.
The Inquirer, the Dogmatist, the Theoretical and the Practical
I have so far characterized in a preliminary way what a standoff in philosophy is, and I have given a couple of examples in support of the claim that there are standoffs in philosophy. But there are those who are loathe to accept that there are such standoffs. These are people with overpowering doxastic security needs: they have an irresistible need to be secure in their beliefs. They don't cotton to the idea that many of the deepest problems are insoluble by us. These are people in whom the dogmatic tendency wins out over the inquiring/skeptical tendency. Among these are people who think one can PROVE the existence of God, or prove the opposite. Among them are those who are CERTAIN that there are substances in the Aristotelian sense of the term. It would be easy to multiply examples.
As I see it, the spirit of genuine philosophy is anti-dogmatic. A real philosopher does not bluster. He does not claim to know what he does not know, and in some cases, cannot know. A real philosopher does not confuse subjective conviction with objective certainty. He has time and he takes time. He can tolerate suspense and open questions. But his suspension is not a Pyrrhonian abandonment of inquiry, but is in the service of it. His happiness is not a porcine ataraxia, but the happiness of the hunt. Unlike the dogmatist, however, he has high standards with the result that is hunt is long and perhaps endless as long as he remains in statu viae wandering among the charms and horrors of the sublunary.
And yet we are participants in life's parade and not mere spectators of it. Curiously, we are both part of the passing scene and observers of it. To us as participants in the flux and shove of the real order a certain amount of bluster has proven to be life-enhancing and practically necessary. To live is to maneuver, to position oneself, to take a position, to adopt a stance, to grab one's piece of the action and defend it, and in the clinch to shoot first and philosophize later.
As so we are torn. It is a broken world and we are broken on its samsaric wheel. To put it grandly, the human condition is a tragic predicament. We must act in conditions of poor lighting, maintaining ourselves in the Cave's chiaroscuro, with little more than faith and hope to keep us going. At the same time we seek light, light, more light and the transformation of faith into knowledge and hope into having.
To begin with, the idea that “existence exists” excludes the idea that existence doesn’t exist. It denies the subjectivist, pragmatist, postmodernist view that reality is an illusion, a mental construct, a social convention. Obviously, people who insist that reality is not real are not going to buy in to a philosophy that says it is real.
So that’s one huge problem with Rand’s philosophy.
Now I am no fan of Ayn Rand: my Rand category is chock-full of trenchant criticisms of her and her acolytes. But the above is so stupid as to be beyond belief.
Forgive me for stating the obvious. One cannot refute a view by pointing out that there are those who do not accept it.
UPDATE (7:40)
This just in from Patrick Toner:
Off to class in two minutes, but I thought I should send a quick note to say that I think Biddle's piece is satirical. Or something like that. It wasn't meant as a refutation. I hope you're well!
It teaches humility in point of knowledge and belief. It lays bare the infirmity of reason. It prompts us to seek other sources of insight, including mystical intuition and divine revelation, while supplying us with the tools for their evaluation and critique. Its problems, though insoluble, can serve as koans.
Good philosophy debunks bad philosophy, pseudo-philosophy, scientism, epistemic pretense, bad religion, and bad politics. It is a mighty curb on fanaticism of all sorts, that of the religionists as well as that of the anti-religionists. It keeps Jerusalem in check even while it is itself fed and enlivened by Hierosolymic themes and tropes. While serving as prophylaxis on excess and overreach, it yet makes possible a reasoned faith and a reasoned mysticism.
And it does all of this critically and skeptically in the best sense of the term: in the spirit of rational inquiry. It is an enemy of the dogmatism of the religionists and that of politically correct leftist anti-religionists.
So philosophy, while in some ways miserable, is in many ways magnificent.
In any case it is necessary for the good life and worthy of spirited defense, with blood and iron if need be, against the anti-civilizational forces of leftism and radical Islam which work in synergy, whether wittingly or unwittingly.
One goes round and round on the dialectical merry-go-round. Thoughts lead to thoughts which lead to more thoughts, including inconclusive thoughts, semantically indeterminate thoughts, mutually contradictory thoughts. Words beget words unto endlessness. On the side of the subject one never penetrates to the source of thoughts. And on the side of the object one never arrives at the root of the real.
I would understand subjectivity and existence. But I am stymied by the infirmity of reason.
Philosophy is endless because inconclusive. But how is knotting one's thread with a dogma better than going on endlessly? After all, what we want is knowledge of truth, not the mere fixation of belief.
Interesting. Take it with several grains of salt and factor in the fact that it is by a 'transwoman.' The following is borne out by my experience:
But ultimately I don't need academic philosophy to do philosophy. My blogging over the past ten years has reached a larger audience than I could ever hope to achieve through the academic journal system.
On a really good day I'll get 3,000 page views. Usually I bump along at about half of that or less. But I reach people and influence them. Proof is the thick manila folder of fan mail I have received.
I was going to add to this old draft from 15 December 2009, but it looks like I won't be getting around to it. So here it is.
………………………….
Robert Cummins (Meaning and Mental Representation, MIT Press, 1989, p. 12) regards it as a mistake "for philosophers to address the question of mental representation in abstraction from any particular scientific theory or theoretical framework." Thus we ought not naively ask, What is mental representation? as if there is something called mental representation that is common to folk psychology and such theories as orthodox computationalism and neuroscience. "Mental representation is a theoretical assumption, not a commonplace of ordinary discourse."
The right way to proceed, according to Cummins, is to "pick a theoretical framework and ask what explanatory role mental representation plays in that framework and what the representation relation must be if that explanatory role is to be well grounded." In other words, one takes a theory such as orthodox computationalism and then one asks: what must the nature of mental representation be if this theory is to be both true and explanatory?
So the question of mental representation is not a question of 'first philosophy,' i.e., a question to be settled independently of, and prior to, empirical research, but a question in the philosophy of science exactly analogous to the following question in the philosophy of physics: what is the nature of space given that General Relativity is true and explanatory? The properties of physical space are for physics to determine. Philosophy's role is correspondingly modest, that of a handmaiden. To coin a phrase: philosophia ancilla scientiae, philosophy is the handmaiden of science, similarly as it was the handmaiden of theology in the Medieval period. Philosophy becomes the philosophy of science. And according to Quine, who is quoted by Cummins on the fontispiece of his book, "Philosophy of science is philosophy enough."
It ought to be the same, Cummins thinks, with psychology. Whether or not there are mental representations becomes the question whether or not the best theories in cognitive science and psychology posit mental representations, and the nature of the representation relation is to be read off from whichever theory is taken to be true and most explanatory.
But there is a problem with this view. If we want to know about physical space and the nature of matter, we turn to the physicist. And if we want to know about the brain, we turn to the neuroscientist. But if we want to know about the relation of mind and brain, we cannot base ourselves solely on empirical science.
Here is one consideration. The extant empirical theories imply the existence of mental representations. But surely their existence is not obvious. Looking at a photograph of a mountain, I become aware of the mountain and some of its features via the picture. Here it makes sense to say of the picture that it is a representation of the mountain. But when I look directly at a mountain, there is no phenomenological evidence of any epistemic intermediary or representation: I see the mountain itself. I don't see sense-data or representations or any kind of epistemic deputy.
Perhaps I will be told that I am nonetheless aware of an internal image but not aware of being aware of it. Compare the case of walking into a room and seeing a depiction of Hillary Clinton so realistic and convincing that I take it to be Hillary herself. In such a case I am aware of an image, but not aware of being aware of an image. Why couldn't it be the same with outer perception? One crucial difference is that I can come to be aware of the Hillary-image as an image. But I cannot come to be aware of any supposed internal image that mediates my outer perception. This is particularly obvious if the internal image is a brain state. I cannot, while gazing at the mountain, 'focus inwardly' and become aware of the brain state that is supposedly mediating my perception of the mountain. Given this fact, I suggest that it is unintelligible to say that there is an internal image that mediates outer perception. The word 'image is' being misused. An image that I cannot become aware of as an image is in no intelligible sense an image of something.
No doubt the brain and its states are part of the causal basis of perception. And there is no doubt that an organism's brain is in (some) of the states it is in because of what is happening in its environment, e.g., bright light is being reflected from a snow field into the organism's eyes. But to say that some of the brain states represent the environment makes no sense assuming that 'represent' has the sense it has when we attend to the phenomenology of representative consciousness. To speak of material representations literally in the head is to read back into a third person conception of the world notions that make sense only from a first-person point of view.
You may agree with what I just said or not. But the discussion we will have about these matters surely does not belong to any empirical science. It belongs to first philosophy. The question of whether there are mental representations at all, for example, cannot arise within disciplines that presupposes their existence. And the relation between a first- and third-person view of the world cannot be treated within an exclusively third-person point of view. Finally, there is the point that the claim that science alone can clarify these questions is itself unscientific and so an instance of (negative) first philosophy.
Philosophers contradict one another, but that is not the worst of it. The grandest philosophical conclusion is and can only be a proposition about reality and not reality itself. But it is reality itself that we want.
Can religion help? Its motor is belief. But belief is not knowledge, either propositional or direct. And if an appeal to divine revelation is made, then the question inevitably arises: how does one know that a putative revelation is genuine?
If you certify the revelation by appeal to the authority of your church, then I will ask how you know that your church is the true church. After all, not every Christian is Catholic. Are those stray dogs who refuse Rome recalcitrant rebels who simply reject the truth when it is plainly presented to them? I think not.
The motor of philosophy is discursive reason. The motor of religion is belief and obedient acquiescence in authority. Neither Athens nor Jerusalem seems to be a wholly satisfying destination. Nor is straddling them with a leg in each a comfortable posture.
That leaves Benares.
The motor of mysticism is meditation. Its goal is direct contact with ultimate truth. Direct: not discursive or round-about. Direct: not based on testimony.
So should we pack for Benares? Not so fast. It has its drawbacks. Later.
If I want to be read, I have to be brief.
See here for a richer development of these themes.
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.
