Category: Religion

The Natural and the Supernatural: Catholics, Protestants, and Modernity

Here are some notes on a fascinating book our resident historian, Dr. Vito  C. Caiati, recommended to me: Carlos Eire, They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale UP, 2023, xviii + 492 pp. ). The book is about such phenomena as levitation and bilocation.  It is meticulous, well-written, and utterly fascinating.

1) Eire tells us that a fundamental difference between Roman Catholics and Protestants is that, while both accept the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and the reality of both realms, Protestants reject the “intermingling”  of the two. (p. 17) The natural world is the material or physical world. It is the realm of space-time-matter.  The supernatural realm is that of spirit. Both Catholics and Protestants  accept the reality of both realms or orders, and the subordinate status of the natural order. Both also  accept that the supernatural realm is God’s alone.  This by way of contrast to the predominant view of modernity which we can call metaphysical naturalism. This is the view that reality is exhausted by space-time-matter.   If that is the case, then of course there is no God, and the supernatural category is empty.

To put it in my own way, there is a major and a minor opposition. The major opposition is that between supernaturalism and naturalism.  The minor opposition is one within supernaturalism  between a view that allows the irruption of the supernatural into the natural, and one that does not.  So I will say, glossing Eire,  that  Catholics are ‘irruptionists’ and Protestants ‘non-irruptionists.’  But this simple schematization needs qualification which I will provide in sections (3) and (4) below.  But first:

2) An example of what I am calling the irruption of the supernatural into the natural, and what Eire calls the  “intermingling” of the supernatural  and the natural,  is what is supposed to occur in the traditional Catholic mass, namely, the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ.  The technical theological term for this is ‘transubstantiation.’ The idea is that in the mass at the moment of consecration, Christ himself becomes really present, literally not figuratively present,  in the consecrated elements, bread and wine.  This is an irruption that no Protestant countenances.

3) But if there had never been any irruptions of the supernatural into the natural, would any religions ever have arisen?  Presumably not, as Eire suggests: “. . .all encounters with a supernatural reality are the bedrock upon which religions have been built.” (xiv) He goes on to refer to these encounters  as “theophanies,” “hierophanies,” and “irruptions of the sacred.” Given that an irruption of the supernatural is a miracle (miraculum, prodigium) as Eire points out (p. 15), and given that Protestantism is a religion or a family of religions, it follows that  there had to have been some miracles that Protestants countenance. Which?

4) Protestants countenance only those that occurred before the first century anno domini.  This is the doctrine of the “cessation of mysteries” or the “cessation of charismata.”  Eire tells us that this doctrine was accepted by Protestants of all stripes. (p. 17)  The miracles related in the Bible really occurred but “became unnecessary after the birth of the early church and would never, ever happen again.” (ibid.)

5) It follows from (4) that levitations, bilocations, stigmata, supernatural hyperosmia (a heightened sense of smell that allows the mystic to detect the sins of others), and many  other bizarre phenomena, including supernatural insomnia, the power to get by with little or no sleep [Trump?] —  all of  them listed by Eire on p. 13 — could not be the work of God.  Curiously, however, their occurrence is not deemed impossible by Protestants, but held actually to have occurred.

6) It follows from (4) & (5) that all of the above miraculous occurrences that occurred after the first century A. D. are diabolical in origin! Now whether this is really the Protestant line, one that Protestants of every stripe adhere to, is not for me to say, given my limited familiarity with Protestantism. I am simply reporting what Eire says. But it sounds right.

7) If Eire is right, then “miracles became a marker of difference  between Catholics and Protestants . . . .” (p. 18)  For the Protestants, all supposed miracles after the first century were either fraudulent or diabolical in origin. Not so for Catholics, who, while not denying that many supposed miracles are either fraudulent or diabolical in origin, held also that there are genuine miracles whose origin is divine.  Enter the need for what is called “discernment” as between diabolical and divine etiology of presumptive miracles.  As I read Eire, he is telling us that for  Protestants, there are exactly two disjoint classes of presumptive miracles after the first century A. D., the fraudulent ones and the diabolical ones. For the ‘Romanists’ as Protestants sometimes call them, there are exactly three disjoint classes of presumptive miracles: the fraudulent, the diabolical, and the divine.

Perhaps we can say (and this is my formulation): for the traditional Catholic, miracles are presumed either fraudulent or diabolical unless proven divine.  Now  in the Anglo-American system of positive law, if a person is presumed innocent it does not follow that he is innocent,  nor does it follow that he is not. Similarly with respect to miracles: the presumption of  fraud or deviltry does not entail either, not does it not entail either.  Hence the need for inquiry, trial, inquisition, The Inquisition.  Either defeat the presumption or uphold it.

It just now occurs to me that in Protestantism there is no need for such an institution as the Inquisition because there is no need to discern between diabolical and divine  causation of miracles.   Why not? Because for the Protestants, no presumptive miracles are of divine origin.  Protestants burned plenty of witches, but not after an inquiry into whether a given witch was a good witch or a bad witch: which type of witch is this witch is a question not posed.   All were presumed bad, and the presumption was non-defeasible. Correct me if I am wrong about this.

8) Now we are getting in deep, where an historian of ideas such as Carlos Eire will not go.  His history of the impossible is a history of the presumptively impossible, not the impossible an sich.  He is clear about this, even though he doesn’t put it in quite the way I am putting  it.  Obviously, there cannot be a history of the impossible sensu stricto. For the impossible is that which cannot occur in any sense of ‘cannot’ whether  logical, metaphysical, nomologically . . . .  What cannot occur never occurred, whence it follows that there cannot be any history of it.   So Eire is using ‘impossible’ sensu lato, to refer to ideas and views about occurrences such as levitations and bilocations according to which these putative occurences are regarded as impossible in the strict sense.  That is his factual basis: views and opinions as attested by testimonies and documents in archives. Eire could rightly claim the title Archivarius Maximus given the load of lore he has laid before us in his 500 page tome.

9) The philosopher of religion wants to know, not just what various people at various times have opined about, say, the difference between religion and magic, or the difference between religion and superstition, but what these differences are, and whether they really obtain.  If he is a Christian, he wants to know whether characteristic Christian doctrines such as Trinity and Incarnation are or are not superstitious nonsense.  If he is a traditional  Roman Catholic Christian, he wants to know whether or not  the words of consecration in the mass Hoc est enim corpus meum are hocus pocus.

A Pre-Print of THE HOLOCAUST ARGUMENT for Comments

Chad McIntosh, the editor of the new journal Triptych, invited me to submit an article to his online publication. He suggested a revision of an old Substack article of mine.  Here is the redacted version.  I solicit your comments on content and style.  The final section is incomplete.   My deadline for submission is 1 September. 

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THE HOLOCAUST ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

In The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, Andrew Klavan writes,

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. (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2016, p. 231)

I’ve often had a similar thought. In this article I will present an argument from the fact of great moral evil to the existence of God. I will conclude with a brief comparison of my argument to some others in the literature.

Project

The usual order of proceeding is 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. (See J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for an against the Existence of God, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) There is no need to rehearse the familiar logical and evidential arguments from evil to the nonexistence of God. They are well-known and have been carefully studied. There is no denying their force. Some of them are plausible even if none of them are strictly probative. But one can also plausibly argue from the fact of evil to the existence of God, and in several different ways.

One way is to argue that there could be no objective difference between good and evil without God. That there is such an objective difference is a presupposition of the stock atheist arguments. They can’t get off the ground without it. Given this objective difference, how is it possible? Might “the moral law within me” (Kant) require a transcendent lawgiver? One could argue that the objective difference between good and evil either requires a divine ground or is best explained by the positing of a divine ground. This is not the way I will be arguing. I do, however, presuppose that there is an objective difference between good and evil.

Another way of arguing, an instance of which will be presented here, does not argue to the existence of God from the objective difference between good and evil, or from evil in general, or from natural evil in particular, or from moral evil in general, but from a special feature of some moral evils. The special feature I will focus on is the horrific depth and severity of some moral evils, a phenomenon that beggars naturalistic understanding. This type of argument is what Klavan is hinting at above.

My aim is not to give a rationally coercive or ineluctably conclusive argument for the existence of God from horrendous moral evils. So I do not maintain, with Klavan, that the depth of these evils “requires” or entails God’s existence. There is no valid deductive argument the premises of which are either absolutely certain or ‘morally certain’ (certain beyond a reasonable doubt) that can take us from the fact of horrendous moral evils committed by humans to the existence of God. The most we can hope for is an abductive argument to God as the best explanation of the fact of horrendous moral evils. Given that ‘refute’ is a verb of success, my aim here is not to refute atheist arguments from evil but merely to neutralize them by showing that the tables can be turned: the objective fact of moral evil can just as easily be marshaled in support of God. This is especially so if we focus on the worst instances of moral evil.

Further, I have no illusions about neutralizing atheist arguments from evil in the eyes of atheists. My old friend Quentin Smith once said to me, “If you were God, would you have created this world?” For him this question had the force of a refutation, articulating as it did one of his deepest convictions: the godlessness of the universe. Against convictions that run as deep as this, convictions ‘bred in the bone before born in the brain,’ argument comes too late. So my purpose in the following is merely to show theists that their position is rationally acceptable and thus rationally defensible. A secondary purpose is to show that those who are inclined to accept theism, but have not yet committed themselves, may embrace it while remaining within the precincts of reason. A tertiary purpose is to foster this inclination in those who are open-minded ‘fence-sitters.’

Definitions, distinctions, and assumptions

By “God’ I mean the God of the Christian Bible replete with the standard omni-attributes, the very ones exploited by Hume et al. for their atheistic purposes. More specific attributes such as divine simplicity and divine tri-unity are not relevant to what follows.

I provisionally assume the standard distinction between moral and natural evil. Moral evil is evil that has its source in a misuse of free will. Whose misuse? The only moral agents we are familiar with are ourselves, human beings. Human beings are physically embodied and reside in the natural world. But we ought not assume that all finite moral agents reside in the natural world. Between the natural and the supernatural lies the preternatural wherein presumably are located such finite spirits as angels, fallen angels (demons) and perhaps pre-embodied and disembodied human souls. Demons are demons because of their misuse of free will. If there are demons, then moral evil has one source in us and another in them. If demons are allowed into our ontology, then the distinction between moral and natural evil remains, but with the proviso that natural evil is, or can reasonably be viewed as, a species of moral evil, namely, the evil bought about by demons by their pernicious influence on us, on lower animals, and on inanimate nature. The Christian theist can then account for all evil as moral evil. Multifarious are the ways in which demons are supposed to bring about evil. Most common is temptation, an ‘ordinary’ diabolical influence. But there are also ‘extraordinary’ diabolical assaults which include possessions, oppressions, and vexations. The Roman Catholic exorcist, Fr. Carlos Martins distinguishes six types of demonic activity. The first type is ‘ordinary,’ the rest ‘extraordinary’: temptation, vexation, infestation, oppression, obsession, and possession. (See his The Exorcist Files, New York: Faith Words, 2024, pp. 43-60)

If there are no demons, and natural evil is not a species of moral evil, then this irreducibly natural evil, affecting as it does both humans and lower animals, is a very powerful reason to reject theism. Intellectual honesty demands that we admit this. Without the reduction of natural evil to a species of moral evil, nature “red in tooth and claw” is hard to square with theism. The notion that a world so apparently awful as ours could be the creation of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving deity, one who providentially cares about his creatures, strikes many as either a sick joke, a feel-good fairy tale, or something equally intellectually disreputable. To repeat what Quentin Smith once said to me, “If you were God, would you have created this world?” A world in which sentient beings eat each other alive, are biologically programmed to do so to survive, and lack the ability to commit suicide, does not seem to be a world optimally arranged. If you were the omni-competent and omni-benevolent architect of our world, would you design it to be a slaughterhouse? (See Quentin Smith, “An Atheological Argument from Evil Natural Laws (Religious Studies, 1991), https://infidels.org/library/modern/quentin-smith-evil-laws/) If, on the other hand, natural evil is a species of moral evil, then this ‘abattoir objection’ to theism can be turned aside. Natural evil can be charged to the account of the demons.

But are there demons? Well, they are attested in the Bible, in the Pauline letters and elsewhere, and are essential to the Christian narrative. If you want empirical evidence of their existence, I refer you to Richard Gallagher, M. D., Demonic Foes: My Twenty-Five Years as a Psychiatrist Investigating Possessions, Diabolic Attack, and the Paranormal (Harper One, 2020). See also Fr. Carlos Martins, op. cit.

I assume that the difference between good and evil is objective, and not a matter of attitude or anything merely subjective. When I say that the horrific depth and intensity of some moral evils “beggars naturalistic understanding,” I mean that the magnitude of these evils is hard to understand if naturalism is true. By ‘naturalism,’ I mean metaphysical naturalism. David M. Armstrong’s ‘strict observance’ definition serves present purposes.

According to Armstrong, naturalism is the thesis that “all that exists is the space-time world . . . .” (D. M. Armstrong, Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics, Oxford UP, 2010, p. 1). The space-time world is the physical world. The thesis of naturalism, then, is that reality is exhausted by physical reality. Armstrong deploys a criterion of reality that is at once both physical and causal: an item is real if and only of it it is physical and causally active/passive. Other philosophers, such as Graham Oppy, favor a more latitudinarian definition that allows the ontological inventory to include causally inert abstract objects in addition to spatiotemporal concreta. Oppy’s position, however, is just as inhospitable to theism as Armstrong’s since both sorts of naturalist “suppose that causal reality just is natural reality” and that theists “suppose that in addition to natural reality there is a further nonnatural causal reality,” one that includes God, angels, and departed souls. (Graham Oppy, “Conflict Model,” Four Views on Christianity and Philosophy, Zondervan 2016, p. 31)

The holocaust argument

The argument is animated by the intuition that homo homini lupus does not capture the full extent of human depravity: man is not a wolf to man, but a demon to man. The Latin saying is an insult to the wolves to boot, who are by nature predatory. Lacking free will, they cannot help eating animals alive. By contrast, a man who behaves savagely towards human beings does so by free choice. His savagery is not plausibly viewed as merely animalic, a matter of biological ‘programming,’ but is plausibly regarded as spiritual in origin, and in a two-fold way: as deriving internally from a will that is free, but also as deriving externally from demonic influence. Free will is a spiritual attribute: no wholly material system possesses it. And of course demons are pure spirits. Human savagery is therefore two-fold in origin.

Before proceeding it would be good to have before us an example of human savagery. Fidel Castro, 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. (Ronald Radosh, “Surviving Castro’s Tortures,” The New York Times, June 8. 1986. https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/08/books/surviving-castro-s-tortures.html?pagewanted=all)

Now no man is a demon, but a man can freely choose to play the demon in his behavior towards other animals both human and non-human. If he so chooses, the person is morally and not merely causally responsible for his morally horrific behavior. Moral responsibility presupposes freedom of the will. But although we are free, we are susceptible to the influence of any demons there might be. Of course, it does not follow from our choice to behave in a demon-like way that there are demons. The evidence for their existence is impressive, but hardly conclusive. For all we can claim to know, there may or may not be any demons. But if there are, we would be open to their malign influence and, though we would not be determined to act in accordance with their influence, we would be inclined to do so by our morally ambivalent (fallen) nature, such that some of us would succumb and freely follow their leading. Phase I of my overall abductive argument goes like this:

1) Although none of us are demons, some of us freely play the demon with respect to fellow humans by treating them savagely.

2) While it does not follow from (1) that there are demons, their malign influence on us would help explain what would otherwise be naturalistically inexplicable, namely, the horrendous depravity of the moral evils inflicted by some of us on others of us.

3) That this horrendous depravity is naturalistically inexplicable is supported by the following sub-arguments:

a) We are morally responsible for some of what we do and leave undone. 

b) Moral responsibility presupposes (and thus entails) free will. Therefore:

c) Torturers are morally responsible for the torment they inflict upon their victims.

d) If naturalism is true, however, then free will and moral responsibility are illusions.

e) It is not the case that free will and moral responsibility are illusions. Therefore:

f) Naturalism is not true.

In support of (e), I offer the following epistemic argument:

g) We are directly aware of our libertarianly-free agency, our freedom in the unconditional ‘could have done otherwise’ sense.
h) That we enjoy this direct awareness is better known than the proposition that all of our mental and physical processes are causally necessitated by events antecedent to our births. Therefore:
i. We are justified in believing that we are libertarianly-free even if we cannot explain how this is possible given the putative (macro) determinism of nature.

Have I proven (definitively established) that horrendous moral evils are naturalistically inexplicable? No. But this should come as no surprise because in philosophy and theology there are no proofs of any substantive theses. Since the meta-thesis just enunciated is substantive, and a thesis of philosophy, a branch of which is metaphilosophy, there is no proof of my metaphilosophical thesis either. I accept this consequence with equanimity. But it is eminently reasonable to believe the meta-thesis, and like it or not, reasoned belief is as good as it gets in philosophy and metaphilosophy. It is as good as it gets and it is good enough.

Now for Phase II of my overall abductive argument. The truth of (3) — horrendous moral evils are naturalistically inexplicable — is logically consistent with the nonexistence of God. How do we get from the falsity of naturalism and the truth of (3) to the existence of God? How do we get from evil demons to the all-good God? As follows.

4) Given the falsity of naturalism, the existence of demons cannot be ruled out.

5) And given that our horrific demon-like behavior would be explained by our free acquiescence in demonic suggestions, the actual existence of these demonic agents is abductively inferrable. Abductive inference is admittedly ‘shaky’ as is every non-deductive inference. Nor can we be certain that the inference terminates in the best explanation. But abductive inferences are not in general irrational, and neither is this one in particular.

6) But we still need to get from the preternatural to the supernatural. The following argument rationalizes this move, in the sense that it renders it rationally acceptable.

j. The demonic host is a hierarchical order at the apex of which is an Evil Principle (and Principal). The undeniable reality of evil has a unified metaphysical ground. Call it Satan.

k. It is not unreasonable, then, to posit an Evil Principle to explain the full range and depth and depravity of evil. One might now speculate that God and Satan are equal but opposite principles and Principals, eternally at war with each other. Manicheanism looks to be a possible explanation of the depth of moral evil. It has been classically maintained, however, that Good and Evil are not co-equal principles. Such bifurcation would destroy the unity of Being which is the objective correlate of the mind’s drive toward explanatory unity.

l. So Good is primary, evil secondary and derivative. It is secondary and derivative in that it cannot exist without Good. One way to cash this out is by holding that evil is privatio boni, a lack, a privation, an absence of good. A stock example is ocular blindness. The evil of blindness is a lack of sight. Many evils can no doubt be assayed as defects, privations, insufficiencies, absences. But the privatio boni doctrine, while it accounts for the privative character of evil, does not explain its positive character. Surely there is more to evil than a mere lack of good. Glance back at the tortures inflicted by Castro’s henchmen on fellow Cubans. Was their suffering the absence of pleasure or the absence of a neutral hedonic state? Obviously not. And it was not merely horrific physical suffering that they endured, but the spiritual suffering of being the object of unremitting hatred and the concomitant sense of total abandonment by man and apparently also God, an abandonment akin to what Christ suffered on the cross: “My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34, harking back to Psalm 22:1)

If there is an Evil One as the source of horrendous evil, however, then the positivity of such evil can be charged to the Evil One’s account. The positivity of horrendous evil would then be grounded in the existence of the Evil One and the malevolence emanating from his misuse of his free will. Satan, after all, is not a mere absence of good, but a positive entity in his own right who, although good in his Being, is evil in his Willing. The Father of Lies is good insofar as he is: ens et bonum convertuntur. To be is to be good; hence every being (ens) is good insofar as it participates in esse (Being) Yet Satan is the ultimate source of evil in that his exercise of free will is malevolent.

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

The holocaust argument and other similar arguments [incomplete]

There is more than one way to argue from evil to God. In a very useful article, “Theistic Arguments from Horrendous Evils,” Daryl Ooi distinguishes three types of argument, arguments from objectively horrifying evil, pragmatic arguments, and arguments from reasonable responses. (See Ooi, D., “Theistic Arguments from Horrendous Evils,” Philosophy Compass 2022 17(8), pp. 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12866 )

Alvin Plantinga has sketched arguments of the first type. (See Ooi, op. cit. for references.) My ‘demonological’ argument is also of this type. Marilyn McCord-Adams offers a pragmatic argument, the gist of which is as follows.

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Rudolf Höss, not to be confused with Hitler’s Landsberg amanuensis, Rudolf Hess, was a torturer by day but a loving family man by night. [ENDNOTE: Rudolf Höss (1900–1947) was a German SS officer and the longest-serving commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp complex, serving from 1940 to 1943 and again in 1944. Höss was instrumental in industrializing mass murder, introducing Zyklon B as the primary method of execution in Auschwitz gas chambers. During the Nuremberg Trials, he provided detailed affidavits and testimony regarding the camp’s operations, admitting to personally supervising the extermination of approximately 1.1 million people. AI generated.]

Notes on Advaita Vedanta in Relation to Christianity

Jottings from December, 2023. Consume with caution. I am not a specialist in Asian philosophy.

1) I am always already my True Self. I do not need to become my True Self. I need only to realize (come to have insight into) this timeless fact. Not make it real, but become aware of its antecedent reality.  There is no theosis if this means to become God-like.  The mundus sensibilis is not a vale of soul-making. I am ‘already’ God, or rather, the eternal Atman. I may need time to achieve the realization but not to become who I ‘already’ am. To achieve the realization is to become enlightened.  To become enlightened is to achieve salvation. Salvation is thus noetic and achievable in the here and now in the midst of the samsaric crapstorm, or mayic world-dream.   You don’t have to wait for salvation or release.  It is not in the future at the end of history. Salvation is noetic or gnostic, not eschatological.

2) Time is merely phenomenal and thus metaphysically illusory as belonging to maya. It seems to follow that the realization (the coming to have insight into the timeless fact of one’s identity with the eternal Atman) is itself illusory. Is this a problem?  A bug or a feature?

3) Advaitins don’t explain the world; they explain it away.  They say about the physical world what some (Daniel Dennett, for example) say about consciousness, namely, that  it is an illusion. It would not be inaccurate to say of Dennett & Co. that they do not explain consciousness (despite the title of his eponymous book); they explain it away.  Makes no sense to me, but that is what they maintain.

Christian metaphysics, by contrast, explains the world. You cannot explain what does not exist or is not the case. (Think about it: would it make sense to demand an evolutionary,  or any, explanation of why unicorns have only one horn?)  The physical world (cosmos) exists.  Given this fact, and given that it exists contingently, it is natural in Christian and not just Christian metaphtsics to ask why it exists.

4)  Advaita Vedantists will try to assimilate Christianity to their  view, but the latter in all of its mainstream versions (Orthodox, Roman, and Protestant) remains unassimilably  distinct from Vedantism.  On the former, there is no plurality of  real individual egos.  Such a plurality  is metaphysically illusory, as are the members of the plurality.  There is only one Self, the eternal Atman, which is numerically the same in all of us. At metaphysical bottom, I am the  eternal Atman and so are you. At bottom, then, you and I are one. Not so on the Christian view according to which individual egos  or selves, although created by God, and thus ontologically dependent on God, are nonetheless real and remain separate from each other and from God after their creation.

Roughly, then, for the Advaitin there is only one Self whereas for the Christian there are many selves with God being a supereminent self among the many selves.

5) There is a tension, however, in the Christian position. It leads to what I call the ultimate paradox of divine creation:

The difficulty can be framed as an aporetic dyad. We have two propositions each of which makes a very strong claim on our acceptance, but which seem to be such that they cannot both be true. They are individually plausible to a very high degree, but collectively inconsistent. The dyad displayed:

a) Everything other than God is created and sustained by God and is nothing at all in itself apart from this ongoing creation and sustenance. Everything other than God is an object of the divine mind the Being of which is exhausted by its objecthood.

b) Among creatures are free, autonomous agents that have been released into ontological independence and so exist in themselves as subjects in their own right and not as mere objects of the divine mind.

This aporia is what I am calling the ultimate paradox of divine creation. To solve it one would have to show either that one of the limbs of the dyad is false, or that the limbs are logically consistent.

I have no idea how to solve it. And apparently Ratzinger did not know how to solve it either: after stating it, he went on to something else. I conjecture, although I cannot strictly prove, that the problem is absolutely insoluble by minds of our discursive/dianoetic constitution. If so, is divine creation a mystery or an impossibility?

If an impossibility, then God as classically understood cannot exist. (Some will opt for deism as a solution, but it has its own problems.) But for all we know we might be in the presence of a mystery: the solution to the aporetic dyad might exist but lie beyond our ken. Perhaps our cognitive architecture such as it is here below bars access to the solution. That is an epistemic possibility.

Perhaps we should say that the sui generis, absolutely unique status of God and his relation to the world is good reason to withhold both appellations, ‘realism’ and ‘idealism.’ Perhaps classical theism cannot be fit neatly into that oppositional schema. Still and all, classical theism is closer to idealism than anything that could be called realism.

6) The tension between the noetic/gnostic versus the eschatological, mentioned above, Thomas Merton sees as a tension between contemplation and eschatology.  He says he will always be “committed to the latter.” (Journals, vol. 5, p. 181, entry of 22 December 1964.) An on p. 182: “what this means is that my faith is an eschatological faith, not merely a means of penetrating the mystery of the divine presence resting in Him now.”

7) A related problem is that “I cannot suffer the loss of my immortal soul” if I am ‘already’ the eternal Atman. Is the world a vale of soul-making or of Self-realization? Does it matter how I live here below? Is there something really at stake? How could there be if there is no individual soul either to save or to lose?

Pray for Light or Pray for Faith?

I

One day in the ’90s, standing in my kitchen, I suddenly prayed, “Lord, give me light!” The ‘reply’ came just as suddenly, “The light comes later.” This is an example of an inner or interior locution. Grokipedia:

Interior locution is a concept in Christian mysticism, particularly within Catholic theology, referring to a supernatural form of private revelation in which a divine message or communication is received directly in the intellect or soul, without audible words, external sounds, or sensory involvement. This inner “voice” or infusion of knowledge is distinct from exterior locutions, which may be heard aloud by others, and from visions, which involve imaginative or corporeal imagery; instead, it operates purely on a spiritual level, often providing guidance, reassurance, or enlightenment during prayer or spiritual trials.

The above definition is accurate. How do I know? I have read the great mystics (Juan de la Cruz, Teresa de Avila et al., and the best of the commentators Augustin Poulain and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, to mention just two. An article of mine on Poulain here.)

I hasten to point out that while the experiencing of an inner locution cannot be doubted, at least while it is occurring, one reasonably can and perhaps ought to doubt the source of the experience. I petitioned the Lord for light (knowledge, enlightenment, understanding),  and I ‘received’ an ‘answer.’ But from whom? From the Lord?  Which lord? Lord Krishna? Lord Jesus Christ? That it was Jesus  cannot be read off from the experience itself.  Such a reading goes beyond the phenomenology of the experience.  On another occasion, while in deep meditation, I ‘heard’ the locution, “I want to tear you apart.” Presumably that was not from Jesus Christ or any good denizen of the Unseen Order.  But neither does it follow that it was from a demonic agent. The experience qua experience is neutral on the question whether there are any demonic agents.  On a third occasion, during a solitary desert hike, pondering a certain course of action, the ‘message’ was: I am with you. As far as the phenomenology shows, that ‘message’ could have been from Christ or it could have been from a demon impersonating Christ or from the depths of my own psyche.

II

The above is preliminary to my title question. Spelled out, what I am asking myself is whether I should be praying for light (infused contemplation, verification of faith contents, objective certainty) or praying instead for a deepening of faith, and a strengthening of the will to go forward by faith,  That I pray at all shows that I have some faith. (Can you imagine Richard Dawkins or Galen Strawson or Daniel Dennett or David Stove  praying while they are or were healthy?  When Stove got sick and near death, his stridently cocksure atheistic convictions began to totter.)  Pondering the question of whether I should be praying for infused contemplation or for a deepening of faith while remaining (relatively speaking) ‘in the dark,’ I imagined a conversation between me and God.  What follows is of course not a report of an inner locution, but a made-up story.

I pray, “Give me light, Lord!” The Lord replies:

Look man, I’ve given you enough light in the form of what you call glimpses, vouchsafings, peeks behind the veil, intimations of Elsewhere. I’ve given you enough light on which to go forward.  The human predicament is probationary and penal.  You want it to be full of light. But part of your probation is to see if you can hold out in the dark. The light comes later!

Plato saw the world  for what it is: a speluncular chiaroscuro of light and dark, a shadowland in which substance is rarely descried but easily denied.  So now your test is to live by faith. To quote one of your favorite philosophers, “There is light enough for those who wish to see and darkness enough for the contrary-minded.” (Pascal)  Even men of far higher spiritual rank than you such as Augustine and Aquinas were permitted the visio mystica on rare occasions only. You yourself have written about the mysticism à deux of Augustine and his mother Monica when they shared the vision at Ostia.

And you know that monks in monasteries have spent long lives without experiencing infused contemplation. So settle down in the dark, listen, wait, and stop asking me for light. 

 

 

The Infirmity of Reason versus the Certitude of Faith

Substack latest. Some thoughts on Pierre Bayle.

Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively as regards the ultimate questions that most concern us. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, “that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt.” (Pyrrho entry, Bayle’s Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude of faith is no solution either! Recoiling from the labyrinth into which unaided human reason loses itself, Bayle writes:

On Suspending Judgment Regarding the Big Questions

Does God exist? You can reasonably argue it both ways. The same goes for such other ‘big questions’ as whether there is personal survival of bodily death.  Now on many other issues where the arguments and evidential considerations  pro et contra are equally good and cancel out, it is reasonable to suspend judgment and unreasonable not to.  But not with respect to the big or ultimate questions. Or so I shall argue.   But first some terminological regimentation.

There are four different types of attitude one can take with respect to a proposition:  Accept, Reject, Suspend, Bracket.

To accept a proposition is to affirm it.  To reject a proposition is to deny it. One cannot on pain of embracing a contradiction accept and reject one and the same proposition.   LNC rules the discursive plane.

To suspend a proposition is to take no stance with respect to its truth or falsity, its ‘truth-value’ as the philosophers say.  It is neither to affirm it nor to deny it. One suspends judgment as to its truth-value. There is no doxastic commitment either by way of belief or disbelief.

What I am calling ‘bracketing’ is something different still. Consider the Trinitarian dogma,  “There is one God in three divine persons.”  Some will affirm, some deny, others suspend the proposition they take it to express; there is, however, a fourth possibility.

Here is a little speech someone might give.

“The Trinitarian sentence you uttered makes no sense; it is unintelligible, if not in itself then at least for me.  It strikes me as self-contradictory and thus expresses no definite thought or proposition. I cannot accept or reject since I do not know what I would be accepting or rejecting. For the same reason I cannot suspend: with respect to what proposition would I be suspending judgment?”

The fourth stance, bracketing, is a sort of suspension, but not with respect to truth-value but with respect to propositional sense. The sense of a declarative sentence (a sentence in the indicative mood) is the proposition it is used to express. And so the bracketing stance or attitude amounts to a suspension of commitment to there being a proposition the sentence expresses.

“I cannot evaluate a thought unless there is a thought to evaluate, and the Trinitarian sentence does not seem to me to express a thought.  The sentence, being self-contradictory, lacks a determinate propositional sense and therefore is unintelligible to me.”

That is surely a stance one can, and some do, take. Note that I mentioned the Trinity doctrine only as an example in order to explain bracketing.  The topic is not the Trinity. So please no comments on the coherence or incoherence of that doctrine.

With the above as background, I advance to my thesis.

THESIS: With respect to many propositions, both the theoretically rational  and the practically rational course is to suspend judgment; with respect to some propositions, however, it would be practically irrational to suspend judgment. It would be imprudent or pragmatically ill-advised. Among the latter: there is a God; the soul is immortal; we will be judged, rewarded and punished in the hereafter for some of what we have done and left undone here below. (I am presupposing a distinction between theoretical and practical (pragmatic, prudential) rationality.)

My point is that for beings  of our constitution it would be practically irrational and highly imprudent to suspend judgment on the questions of God and personal immortality. For if one did so one would not be likely to live here and now in such a way as to assure a positive post-mortem outcome.  After all, we do not know that the soul is immortal nor do we know that it is not. The questions are theoretically undecidable.

But man does not live by theory alone. We are not mere transcendental spectators but interested free agents, interested in the sense of embedded in real being. (inter esse) We have interests in this life and beyond it: we are concerned with our ultimate felicity, well-being, and continuance in being.

If we had no interests beyond this life, if we were pure spectators, we should suspend judgment on the ultimate questions and go back to the everyday and its proximate concerns.    That would be the reasonable thing to do — if we were pure spectators and the big questions were of merely theoretical interest.   Whether God and the soul are real or unreal would then be on a par with  whether the number of electrons in the universe is odd or even.  Since the latter question is theoretically undecidable, it would be practically irrational to waste any time on it.

This is essentially the attitude of the worldling when it comes to God and soul and the like. “Who knows?” “People say different things.” “The supposedly wisest among us have contradicted one another since time immemorial.” “Why waste time on this philosophy nonsense when you could be living to human scale by pursuing a profession useful to others, making money, buying a house, founding a family?” Remain true to the earth; make friends with the finite; don’t hanker after a hinter world; this world is all there is.

My thesis, however, is that while is is both theoretically and practically rational to suspend judgment on many questions, this does not hold for those  questions pertaining to our ultimate felicity and well-being. My thesis presupposes the real possibility of ultimate felicity and well-being.  And so, to appreciate my thesis you cannot have the mentality of a worldling. You have to have had the experience of the ultimate nullity  of the proximate concerns I mentioned. You must have the sense that this world and this life are ‘vanishing quantities.’ You have to have been struck and troubled by the transience of life and the impermanence of things. You have to take that troubling impermanence as an indicator of the relative (not absolute) unreality of this life.  You have to possess the Platonic sensibility.

Now I can’t argue you into that sensibility any more than you can argue me out of it. Argument comes too late. Or rather it comes too soon. What I mean is that argument and counter-argument disport upon the discursive plane which is foreground to the ultimate background, the Unseen Order.  What breaks the standoff for some of us is a glimpse into the  Transdiscursive, a peek behind the veil.  But only some have had the Glimpse. It is  a divine gift, a gratuitous granting ab extra.  Others will say that the Glimpse experience has zero noetic quality; it is something on the order of a Spinozistic  experientia vaga, or a random neuronal swerve, a ‘brain fart.’  There is no resolution to this dispute over noetic quality on the plane of theoretical reason. You will have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.

In sum:

You are violating no canon of theoretical or practical rationality if you decide to live as if God and the soul are real.  And since the questions are theoretically undecidable, you will decide either by an explicit act of will or willy-nilly (nolens volens) how you will live. The will comes into it. Why do I say you will decide? Because if you don’t decide, that non-decision amounts practically to a decision for the other side of the question.

The atheist and the mortalist who abstain from taking a stand  cannot help but take a stand, practically, though not theoretically, for atheism and mortalism.

More on Hylomorphic Dualism and the Distinctness of Souls Post Mortem

Edward Feser writes,

Hey Bill, many thanks for your Substack post on Immortal Souls.  I’ve written up a reply   As you’ll see, at the end I give a shout out to your book Life’s Path: Some Trail Notes which I have enjoyed and profited from.  You are the rare contemporary philosopher who has both technical chops and the virtue of wisdom in the broad sense that includes understanding of concrete human life.  It’s amazing and depressing how many academics are utterly devoid of the latter.

Thanks for the kind words, Ed.  Now on to your criticisms.

You say that on the A-T theory, “while each individual physical substance has its own substantial form, with physical substances of the same species their substantial forms are of the same kind.” You suggest that this is something I haven’t understood, but I don’t disagree with you.  Your point is that each physical substance has its own substantial form.  That’s right;  we all understand that Aristotelian forms are not Platonic Forms.  Unlike Platonic Forms, which enjoy a transcendent existence in a topos ouranios whether or not they are instantiated here below, Aristotelian forms  can exist only in concrete particulars.  Platonic Forms  are transcendent, Aristotelian forms  immanent. As I see it, Platonic Forms are transcendent in two senses: (i) they exist whether or not any concrete particulars participate in them; (ii) they do not enter into concrete particulars as constituents of them.  Aristotelian (substantial) forms, by contrast, are not transcendent but immanent, and in a two fold-sense: (iii) they cannot exist on their own but only  in concrete particulars; (iv) they exist in concrete particulars as their constituents.  Thus Platonic participation (methexis, μέθεξις) is very different from the relation that obtains between a complete Aristotelian primary substance and its ontological constituents or ‘principles’ which are not themselves substances. Plato and Aristotle thus offer two very different theoretical explications of the pre-analytic or pre-theoretical notion of instantiation.

As you say, and I agree, an Aristotelian substantial form “is a concrete principle intrinsic to a substance that grounds its characteristic properties and powers.”  You also say, and I agree, that on the A-T theory, “the soul is a substantial form of the kind that gives a physical substance the distinctive properties and powers of a living thing.” It follows from these two points that each living physical substance has its own soul or psyche, where the soul of a living thing is its life-principle.   This holds for both human animals such as Socrates and Plato and for non-human animals. We also agree that humans, unlike other living things, have both corporeal and noncorporeal properties and powers. So far, I believe we are ‘on the same page’ at least with respect to what the A-T theory says. I take it we agree on the content of the theory; our dispute concerns its coherence.

But let’s dig a little deeper. It seems to me that the A-T conception further implies that matter (materia signata) plays a dual role: it both individuates and differentiates.  These are different ‘ontological jobs’ even though on the A-T scheme  signate matter does both of them.  Two questions.

(Q1)  Why do Socrates and Plato each have their own individual substantial forms and thus — given that souls are substantial  forms — their own individual souls? Answer: because forms, which cannot exist Platonically, but only in concrete particulars,  are individuated or particularized  by  the  parcels of matter which they inform or in which they inhere.

(Q2) Why do Socrates and Plato differ numerically? Why are they two and not one? Because each is a numerically different hunk of matter.  So matter (designated matter) is the ground both of the individuation of forms — that which makes them individuals and not universals — and that which grounds the  numerical difference of the two complete physical substances.

So much for the pre-mortem situation of Socrates and Plato.  With respect to the pre-mortem  situation, Aristotle and Thomas pretty much agree about human beings (rational animals). Post-mortem, however, important differences surface due to Thomas’s Christian commitments which, needless to say, are not shared by Aristotle.  And so we need to ask how well these Christian commitments comport with the Aristotelian scheme.

For Thomas, human souls after death are (1) subsistent, (2) separable, (3) multiple, (4) incomplete,  (5) personal, and (6) such that the soul no longer functions as a life-principle but  only as a ‘seat’ of noncorporeal intellectual operations. I’ll explain these points seriatim.

Ad (1).  The souls of rational animals, unlike the souls of nonrational animals,  continue to exist after death.

Ad (2). The souls of rational animals can and do exist after death in a disembodied state, i.e., apart from  matter. So they don’t merely subsist; they subsist in an immaterial way.

Ad (3). Just as there are many human beings ‘on earth,’ i.e., in the physical realm, there are many disembodied human souls after death. Whatever the number is, it is neither one nor zero.  Moreover, for each human being that existed ‘on earth,’ there is exactly one soul after death (whether in heaven, hell, purgatory, or limbo) and this soul after death is numerically identical to the soul of the human before death. Thus the soul of Socrates after death is numerically the same as the soul he had before death.

Ad (4). Human souls after death, but before resurrection, are substances all right, but  incomplete substances in that they lack a body when it is their nature to exist in an embodied state.

Ad (5). Human souls after death are persons in that they are conscious and self-conscious, albeit in non-sensory ways. In Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, chs. 92-95, Aquinas elaborates on the will’s fixity after death: “souls immediately after their separation from the body become unchangeable in will with the result that the will of [a] man cannot further be changed, neither from good to evil, nor from evil to good.” (Ch. 92, top.)  Suppose you go straight to heaven after death.  Your will will be eternally fixed upon the good. This fixity of will is a modality of consciousness and also of self-consciousness inasmuch as the soul will be aware of its fixity of will.  That is, the soul is aware that it wills, and what it wills. What’s more, the souls in heaven presumably can ‘hear’ petitionary prayers from souls ‘on earth’ and ask God to grant those petitions.  This non-sensory ‘hearing’ is a modality of consciousness. The souls in heaven are aware of the petitions and formulate the intention to intercede with God for the benefit of the earthly petitioners.

Ad (6). Dead humans are no longer alive.   So the soul of a human after death and before resurrection does not function as a life-principle.  It can so function only if it is joined to an animal body that it enlivens or animates. But the soul of a human after death does function as the subject of conscious states such as the volitional state of willing only the good.  The soul of a human before death, however, functions in both ways, as an animating principle, and as that in a human which is aware when it is aware of this or that.  The difference is between the soul as life-principle and the soul as subject or ego or I.

I hope I have made clear that I really do understand what the A-T theory maintains.  My disagreements with Ed Feser are not about the content of the theory, but about its coherence and thus its tenability.

The point I was making in the Substack piece could be put like this.  After the death of a mortal man such as Socrates, and the dissolution of his material body, the soul he had can no longer be his soul. The reason for this is that the individuating or particularizing  factor, signate matter, which made the soul he had his soul, is no longer present after death. To appreciate this point you must not forget that the form of a  (primary) substance is not itself a (primary) substance, but a ‘principle’ — Ed uses this very word — or constituent of a substance which together with the material  constituent constitutes a (primary) substance. Thus the constituents or ‘principles’ of a substance are not themselves substances and therefore not themselves metaphysically capable of independent existence.  Bear in mind that for Aristotle, primary substances are basic entities in the sense that they do not depend on anything else for their existence in the way a smile depends on  face.  But what I have just argued — that the soul of Socrates after death cannot be his own soul — contradicts (3) which is a non-negotiable doctrinal commitment of Thomism.  The lesson to be learned from this is that Aristotelian hylomorphism is not consistent with the characteristic commitments of Thomism.  Note that I am not denying the doctrinal commitments listed above.  My point is that they cannot be rendered intelligible by the use of Aristotelian conceptuality, in particular, hylomorphism.

My point can also be made from the side of differentiation.  Thomas is committed to saying that Socrates and Plato are as soulically  or psychically distinct  in the afterlife as they are in this life.  But in the afterlife before resurrection they lack material bodies.  Lacking bodies, they lack that which could ground their numerical difference. So if the two men after death are two numerically different souls, then souls are not mere Aristotelian forms. They are substances in their own right.  This is why Richard Swinburne, no slouch of a philosopher, speaks plausibly and indeed correctly of “Thomist substance dualism.” (Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019, p. 82)

Aristotle is not a substance dualist, but Thomas is.  This is not to say that Thomas is a substance dualist in the very same sense that Descartes is. But he is a substance dualist nonetheless.

I expect Ed to balk at this and reiterate the bit about ‘incomplete’ substances formulated above in point (4).  Let’s think this through as sympathetically as possible.  If a life-principle is actually functioning as such, then there must be a physical body it enlivens or animates. It therefore makes perfect sense for Thomas to say to say  that it is the nature of  a  life-principle to be joined to a body.  For a life-principle to be a life-principle of a material thing, there must be a material thing whose life-principle it is. So if human souls are life-principles, then it is the nature of the human soul to have a body. But post-mortem souls before resurrection are not functioning as life-principles. And yet Thomas insists that after death and before resurrection human souls continue to exist and are numerically the same as the souls that existed before death.   One survives one’s bodily death as a person, as a self, as a subject of conscious states. So is it not obvious that human souls before death and after death (but before the re-embodiment consequent upon resurrection) are not mere substantial forms but substances in their own right?  I say it is obvious and it puzzles me that what is obvious to me is not obvious to Ed.  Try this syllogistic chain on for size.

  1. No forms for Aristotle are substances.
  2. All souls for Aristotle are forms. Therefore:
  3. No souls for Aristotle are substances. (1, 2)
  4. All and only substances for Aristotle are capable of independent existence. Therefore:
  5. No souls for Aristotle are capable of independent existence. (3, 4)
  6. Some souls for Aquinas are capable of independent existence. Therefore:
  7. Some souls for Aquinas are not souls in Aristotle’s sense of ‘soul.’ (5,6)

I conclude that Aquinas’s conception of the soul is not hylomorphic sensu stricto but substance-dualist. Hylomorphism does not render the angelic doctor’s doctrinal commitments intelligible.  And that was my point.

I have heard it said that Thomas is an Aristotelian on earth, but a Platonist in heaven.  That is an approximation to the truth, but it just now occurred to me that it is not quite right, and may be more clever than truthful.   For Aquinas is committed to the diachronic numerical identity of the person or self both in this life and on into the after life. So even in this life there has to be more to the soul than a life-principle. I conclude that even in this life Thomas is not wholly Aristotelian.  If Thomas is a substance-dualist in heaven, he must also be one on earth as well .A follow-up post will make this more clear.

Addendum (10/29).  This morning I found a section  on Aquinas in John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, Eerdmans 1989, p. 11-13.   Cooper makes points that support what I argue above. He states that Thomas “combined important features of the Aristotelian body-soul relation with a basically Augustinian dualistic framework.” Although “Thomas uses Aristotle to emphasize the unity of human nature,” he “remains with Augustine in affirming that the soul is a distinct substance which can survive biological death.” Cooper appreciates that a Christian cannot take an Aristotelian  approach to the soul. “For Aristotle’s soul is only the form of the body and not a substance as such. Therefore it cannot survive death as an individual entity.” (13) Thomas abandons Aristotle by holding that “the soul is both the form of the body and an intellectual substance in its own right.” 

Swinburne, Cooper, and I are saying the same thing.

Is Trump Still the TACO Man? Or is he now THE HAMMER?

VDH, Ten Iranian Questions:

Trump had warned the Iranians on numerous occasions. They never got the message. They were apparently listening to the American Left’s smears of Trump as a “TACO” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”)—a silly slur phrase that just died Saturday night.

And die it did. To hell with the American Left with its Tampon Timmies, its Joyless Behars, its cortically-challenged Cortezes, and its Kamalian clowns.   (It should be clear that I am no longer quoting my man Hanson.)

Some fear that Midnight  Hammer will lead to a wider war. It might. The world, led by  the USA, will then have the opportunity to rid itself once and for all of the current Iranian Islamist theocracy. That would be a good thing, and easy to accomplish: destroy the oil refineries first, and see if that gets them to back off, and "build back better," to coin a phrase.  If they remain recalcitrant, destroy their power grid.  No more pussy-footing around with these evil-doers. It's not 1979 any more, or the Carter administration.

Their  particular brand of Islamist insanity would then be finished forever. Do you doubt that? It would be finished in its concrete exemplification just as Nazi ideology was finished in its concrete exemplification in 1945. By 'concrete exemplification of an ideology' I mean its existence in an actual State.  Once the current Iranian Islamist theocracy is concretely at an end,  it is not likely to come back.  I will fire off two more points and you guys can have at me in the combox.

First. A great power such as the USA cannot be wholly non-interventionist, although it ought to be as non-interventionist as it can be consistent with self-preservation and the defense of its allies.  No nation-building! Non-interventionism is good, but it has limits. One limit is reached when anti-civilizational savages pose an existential threat to we us  the (more or less) civilized.  I call our enemies 'anti-civilizational,' but you ought not call them  'medieval' as some pundits do unless you want to advertise your historical ignorance and slam an entire epoch.

An existential threat is a threat not merely to one's physical existence or biological life, but to one's way of life.  The radical Islamist trilemma: conversion, dhimmitude, or death is radically unacceptable — which is why I call it a trilemma: three prongs, each of which is unacceptable.  If one has been nuked out of physical existence, then one has been 'nuked' out of cultural existence as well.   

This is why Khamenei and the boys cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. We do not yet know the extent or efficacy of Trump's bunker-busting despite Trump's typical boasts and exaggerations. (Trump is a builder, a promoter, and a bit of a carnival barker, but still vastly superior to any of the electable Democrats.) The Iranian nuclear program has, however, surely suffered a major set-back.  If they get it going again the IDF and the USAF will kick the mullahs' collective ass one more time.

Second. The Iranian people have a right to any system of government they choose so long as it poses no existential threat to any other State.  Who the hell are we to tell them how to live when our Western societies, dripping with decadence, are hanging by a thread?  (Leastways, until Trump came along.) If the Iranians want a theocracy, that is their business.  Is it objectively certain that our classically liberal system is better than a theocratic system?  No, or so say I, even though I firmly believe that our system is better than any theocracy. What if they want an Islamic theocracy? No problem with that either, so long as the Islam in question is moderate and wields no such trident as the one lately described.  I wish Zuhdi Jasser the best of luck in his quixotic quest to reform Islam.

Ann Coulter a while back said that we should invade the Muslim lands and convert them to Christianity.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.

Convert Muslims? Sheer madness. Coulter is a very intelligent woman, but sometimes intelligent people say stupid things.  Of the Abrahamic religions, Islam is the worst. Schopenhauer describes it as "the saddest and poorest form of theism."  It is the religion of terror at the present time. An inferior religion, it gives rise to an inferior culture, downstream of which is a benighted politics.  But Islam is their religion and it is better than no religion. Try barging into people's lives to convince them to renounce their parents, their hometown, their region, their religion, their folkways.  Try that down in Hillbilly Holler or anywhere.

Convert the benighted Muslims for the sake of their immortal souls because Jesus claimed to be via, veritas, vita? "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." (John 14:6, KJV. I was brought up on Douay-Rheims, but I love that old English.)   Why not make it more specific: extra ecclesiam salus non est, where the ecclesia in question is the Roman Catholic Church? That won't sit well with our Protestant or Eastern Orthodox pals, and it shouldn't. I go a step further: paths to salvation are many. I won't argue it out, leastways not now; I'll just refer you to the work of Frithjof Schuon. See, for example, The Transcendent Unity of Religions.

How about converting the Jews? Another form of folly. Here is an instructive short piece by Rabbi Yehiel Poupko.

Are Catholics Christians?

A fellow philosopher writes,

While reading Clarence Thomas’s opinion in Ames v. Ohio Dept. of Youth Services (2025), I came across this sentence: “Americans have different views, for example, on whether Catholics are Christians.” I’ve heard it said, before, that Catholics aren’t Christians, but never knew what to make of it. (The same thing is said about Mormons.) Have you written about this (about whether Catholics are Christians)? What must one think Christianity is in order to believe that Catholics aren’t Christians? Strange.
I haven't written about this topic because it is perfectly obvious that (Roman) Catholics are Christians.  Proof: The Catholic Apostle's Creed. Every Catholic is a Christian, but not conversely.  Calvinists, for example are Christians but not Catholics. Similarly for all the other Protestant sects. No Protestant is a Catholic. That too is obvious.  
 
Did Justice Thomas, for whom I have great respect by the way, cite anyone who claimed that Catholics are not Christians?  Who would say such a thing?
 
People say the damndest things. There are people who say that math is racist. Now that does not even begin to make sense, involving as it does a Rylean category mistake. Not making sense, it cannot have a truth value, that is, it cannot be either true or false. Mathematics does not belong to the category of items that could sensibly be said to be either racist or non-racist.  Compare: 'How prevalent is anorexia nervosa among basketballs? More prevalent than among footballs?' Those questions involve category mistakes.  Other examples: What is the volume of the average thought? What is the chemical composition of the number nine?  What size shoes does God wear?
 
People who assertively utter 'Math is racist' are using those words to say something else, although it is not clear what. Perhaps they  mean to say that since blacks as a group are not good at mathematics, giving them math tests is a way of demeaning or oppressing them and can have no other purpose. Or something.  Speaker's meaning in this case strongly diverges from sentence meaning.
 
Can this distinction help us explain what people mean when they say that Catholics are not Christians?  Going by sentence meaning, the claim is obviously false.  But one might use those words to express the proposition that Catholics are not true Christians, where a true Christian is defined in some narrow and tendentious way, as, for example, someone who refuses to accept the Hellenically-tainted doctrines emanating from a magisterium (teaching authority)  that interposes itself between the individual soul and God as revealed in Holy Writ.
 
We are now in the vicinity of No True Scotsman.  Among the so-called informal fallacies is Antony Flew's No True Scotsman. Suppose A says, "No Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge." B replies, "But my uncle Angus puts sugar in his porridge." A responds, "Your Uncle Angus is no true Scotsman!"
 
Similarly, A says, "No Christian is a Roman Catholic." B replies, "But my Uncle Patrick is a Roman Catholic."  A responds, "Your Uncle Patrick is no true Christian!"

From the Mail Bag: Old-Time Reader Swims the Tiber

This just in from Russell B.:

Long time no talk.

I hope you’re doing well. I have been thinking about your work on existence over the past 3-4 years very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it has made me swim the Tiber (well, I was born and raised Catholic so did I actually leave?). But I had to leave Protestantism; there was nothing left for me there. However, my biggest problem was divine simplicity. Long story short: I think your view (and Barry Miller’s view) is more or less the proper way to think about existence which in turn helps make DDS easier to swallow. And, if I might add, while the view is philosophically rich, I find the mystical and religious implications much richer. I have been obsessed with the mystics and in particular Teresa of Avila and Juan de la Cruz. I am unsure if you have felt similar ways in which their ideas deeply coincide with a God that just is Being itself. I don’t really know if I have words to describe how other than it just 'appears' to me that way.
 
Another way in which you helped me religiously was helping me decide between between Eastern Orthodoxy and Rome. They are essentially the same religion but I remember you saying that we need to approach truth from four different angles: philosophically, morally, religiously, and mystically. Well, I would say that Catholicism uses all four of these approaches while Orthodoxy ignores the first. This was huge for me. Now I know you have problems with the amount of dogma the Catholic Church has. This was also a stumbling block for me but I have tried to approach the matter like the parable where Jesus says only a child will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. It has been humbling to say the least. 
 
Very good to hear from you, Russell.  Here are a couple of questions and some comments that will interest you and perhaps others.
 
1) What were your reasons for becoming a Protestant in the first place and then leaving Protestantism, apart from acceptance of DDS? And what sect did you leave?
 
2) You ask whether I think  mysticism, particularly that of the two great Spanish mystics you mention, coheres with the notion of a God who is ipsum esse subsistens.  I do indeed. I am sure you are aware of Exodus 2:14: Ego sum qui sum . . . dic illis: QUI EST misit me ad vos. On Mount Sinai God reveals himself to Moses, and communicates to him the following message to be relayed to those at the foot of the mountain, a message presumably not couched in the words of  any human language: "I am who am . . . say this, 'He Who Is sent me to you.' "
 
To my mind, this passage from Exodus expresses the identity of the God of the Bible with the God of the philosophers. The God of the Bible, a being, reveals himself to man as Being itself.  The two upward paths, that of religion and that of philosophy, come together as one at the apex of the ascent in the divine simplicity.  The ascent to the Absolute is thus onto-theological.  And so, the two paths, neither of which in itself is a mystical path, culminate in a mystical unity, that of the simple God.  It is a mystical unity in that it defies discursive grasp.  We ineluctably think in opposites and naturally balk at talk of a thing identical to its attributes, its attributes identical to one another, its essence  identical to its existence, and so on.
 
You can come to understand how a God worth his salt must be ontologically simple without being able to understand how he could be ontologically simple. You can reason your way up to the simple God, but not into him or his life.  There will be no syllogizing in the Beatific Vision.  Discursivity must be dropped as it must also be dropped in the transition from ordinary, discursive prayer to the Prayer of Quiet, the first stage of infused contemplation, with several more beyond it.  These stages are well-described in Teresa's Interior Castle, and in all the manuals of mystical theology.  Poulain, about whom I say something over at Substack, is particularly good.
 
Mystics properly so called, such as Teresa de Avila and Juan de la Cruz, are able to jump immediately to the apex by mystical intuition.  And so there are three upward paths, although the mystical way is perhaps not well-described as a path inasmuch as it can be trod in an instant  without any preparatory ascesis if one receives an infusion of divine grace. (Grace is gratuitous and so cannot be brought about by any technique.)   The philosopher plods along, discursively, step by step. The religionist proceeds tediously with rites and rituals, petitions and penances and processions, fasting and almsgiving, kneeling and standing.  Mystics, properly so-called, do these things  as well, but not as well and not as much.  You may have noticed, Russell, that St. Teresa is a pretty sharp thinker who works out a criteriology for the evaluation of mystical experiences in The Interior Castle, a late work of hers, and the one I would recommend to people above her others.  It is short and easy to read.
 
As for Thomas Aquinas, the main exponent of DDS, he too is a mystic, a minor mystic if you will, not at the level of Teresa and Juan, not to mention Meister Eckhart, et al.   I believe the only experience of Thomas's we are aware of is the one at the end of his life which prompted him to give up writing. See my Substack article, Why Did Thomas Aquinas Leave his Summa Theologiae Unfinished? Aquinas is all three: philosopher, religionist, mystic.  Or it might be better to say he wears four hats: philosopher, religionist, theologian, mystic. 
 
This response is beginning to get lengthy, so I'll leave two more comments I have until later.  The Comments are enabled.
 
 
Ipsum esse tattoo

Could a Jew Pray the “Our Father”?

I return an affirmative answer at Substack.

It dawned on me a while back that there is nothing specifically Christian about the content of the Pater Noster. Its origin of course is Christian. When his disciples asked him how they should pray, Jesus taught them the prayer. (Mt 6:9-13) If you carefully read the prayer below you will see that there is no mention in it of anything specifically Christian: no mention of Jesus as the Son of God, no mention of the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us (the Incarnation), no mention of the Resurrection, nothing that could be construed as even implicitly Trinitarian. So I thought to myself: a believing (non-Christian) Jew could pray this prayer, and could do so in good faith. There is nothing at the strictly doctrinal level that could prevent him. Or is there?

Read the rest.