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W. K. writes, and I reply:

I agree with most of that [Mature Religion is Open-Ended Too], except what I take to be your idea of dogma. You say that the 'dogmatic contents' of religion is 'where it is weakest' and 'dogmatics displaces inquiry'. In both cases, for Catholicism, this is not only a misconception but the opposite of what dogma is.

In the first case, the dogmatic contents of Catholicism are revealed by God, who cannot possibly err, so given sufficient rational grounds for believing that there is a God, and that he has indeed revealed himself to man, and that this revelation is to be found where it is claimed to be found, its dogmatic contents are where it is strongest. [. . .]

I can grant all your premises but one.  As I see it, the dogmatic contents, i.e., the dogmatic propositions,  of Catholicism are not revealed by God.  They are at best human formulations of what is revealed by God, formulations that bear the mark of their human origin.  As such, they are debatable, disputable, and starting points for inquiry.  They are not indisputable certainties that must be accepted on pain of damnation.  To discuss this concretely we need to examine some examples of dogmatic contents.  Here are some:

• God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty, by the natural
  light of reason from created things.
• The divine attributes are really identical among themselves and with
  the Divine Essence.
• God is absolutely simple.

If these dogmas are revealed by God, where can we find them in the Bible?  As far as I know, the Bible is silent on the question of  divine simplicity, which is what the second two propositions articulate. The doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS), as set forth by Thomas Aquinas, has a noble philosophical pedigree, but no Biblical pedigree.  I am not saying that God is not ontologically simple.  In fact, I am inclined to say that God must be simple: otherwise he would not be absolute, and hence would not be God.  (See my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on this topic.)  Nor am I saying that that DDS is inconsistent with what is in the Bible. Perhaps it is possible to render consistent the simple God of the philosophers with the living, acting, non-impassible God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who acts in history, takes sides in tribal warfare, hears and responds to prayers, etc.    I am saying precisely this: the DDS is a human attempt to articulate in discursive terms the divine transcendence and aseity.  As such, DDS is open to scrutiny and debate.

This ought to be obvious from the fact that prominent philosophers of religion such as Alvin Plantinga, who are also classical theists, though not Catholics, question the DDS, and with good reason.  Questioning it, they do not take themselves to be questioning divine revelation, nor are they questioning divine revelation.  They are questioning a philosophical doctrine that has much to be said for it, but also much to be said against it. They are questioning something that is eminently questionable.

At this point one might try the following response.  "Admittedly, DDS is not in the Bible; but it is taught by the Catholic Church, the one, true, holy, and universal church, the church founded by Christ himself who is God, a church presided over and guided by by the Holy Ghost  (I don't use 'Holy Spirit' which is a  Vatican II innovation) in all it conciliar deliberations with respect to faith and morals, a church, therefore, whose pronouncements on matters of faith and morals are infallible.  Since the Roman church was founded by God himself, its epistemic credentials are absolutely impeccable, and everything it teaches, including DDS, is not only true, but known with absolute objective certainty to be true because it comes from an absolutely reliable Source, God himself."

Is the Roman church all that it claims to be?  That is the question.  If it is then everything it teaches, including the dogmas about its own divine origin and utter reliability (see here, scroll down to VI #s 1-20), are true.  But is it all that it claims to be? You are free to believe it of course.  But how do you know?  If you say you know it because the Roman church teaches it, then you move in a circle of rather short diameter.  You are saying in effect: The Roman church is God's very church because it claims to be, and its claims are true and certain because they made by God's very church, the church that God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, who is absolutely inerrant and trustworthy, established.

To avoid the circle, one must simply accept that the Roman church is all that it claims to be.  But ought one not be unsettled by the fact that sincere, intelligent adherents of other Christian denominations (let alone adherents of other faiths such as Judaism and Islam) reject the Roman claims? 

"No, why should I find that unsettling?  Those other denominations are just wrong.  The Eastern Church, for example, went astray at the time of the Great Schism."  That's possible, but how likely is it? Isn't it much more likely that the extreme claims that the Roman church makes on its behalf are simply the expression of an exceedingly deep need for doxastic security, i.e., an inability to tolerate the least bit of uncertainty in one's beliefs?  Here is one of the extreme claims:

• Membership of the Catholic Church is necessary for all men for salvation.

Extra ecclesiam, nulla salus.  No salvation outside the church.  Which church?  The Eastern church?  Well, no.  Our church.  It would be absurd to say that the true church is true because it is ours.  It would be better to say that it is ours because it is the true church: we joined it because it is true.  But how justify that claim in a non-circular way?

Some will tell me that the Roman church has softened on the dogma just quoted.  But if dogmas are divinely revealed as my correspondent W. K. claims, how could there be any need for softening or modification?  And why would any more dogmas need to be added, as they were added in the 19th century?

Consider another dogma:

The Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and from the Son as from a single
principle through a single spiration.

This proposition contains the famous filoque, "and from the Son," which was the main doctrinal bone of contention that led to the Great Schism. (See East Versus West on the Trinity: The Filioque Controversy.)  Is this Catholic dogma in the Bible? Where?  Does the Bible anywhere take a stand on this theological arcanum?  I don't think so.

And then there are the Marian dogmas.  I count three: Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, and Assumption. According to the first, Mary was conceived without original sin.  And so the dogma of Original Sin is presupposed.  That man is a fallen being in some sense or other I don't doubt.  But the Fall as a sort of 'fact' and the Fall as an explicitly formulated doctrine are two and not one.  Here is what I mean by the 'fact':

 . . . man is wretched and only man is wretched. Man's wretchedness is 'structural': man qua man is wretched. Wretched are not merely the sick, the unloved, and the destitute; all of us are wretched, even those of us who count as well off. Some of us are aware of this, our condition, the rest hide it from themselves by losing themselves in what Pascal calls divertissement, diversion. We are as if fallen from a higher state, our true and rightful state, into a lower one, and the sense of wretchedness is an indicator of our having fallen. We are in a dire state from which we need salvation but we are incapable of saving ourselves by our own efforts, whether individual or collective.

Now compare the 'fact' with the dogmatic propositions that make up the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin:

• Our first parents, before the fall, were endowed with sanctifying
  grace.
• In addition to sanctifying grace, our first parents were endowed with
  the preternatural gift of bodily immortality.
• Our first parents in Paradise sinned grievously through transgression
  of the Divine probationary commandment.
• Through sin our first parents lost sanctifying grace and provoked the
  anger and the indignation of God.
• Our first parents became subject to death and to the dominion of the
  devil.
• Adam's sin is transmitted to his posterity, not by imitation but by
  descent.
• Original sin is transmitted by natural generation.
• In the state of original sin man is deprived of sanctifying grace and
  all that this implies, as well as of the preternatural gifts of integrity.
  
• Souls who depart this life in the state of original sin are excluded
  from the Beatific Vision of God.

I'll make a couple of quick points. There were no first parents, and there is no transmission in the manner described.(Further details and explanations in Original Sin category.)

In sum, I oppose both the critics of religion who, failing to appreciate its open-ended, quest-like character,  want to pin it down, reducing it to dogmatic contents, so as to attack it where it is weakest.  I also oppose the (immature) religionists who also want religion pinned down and dogmatically spelled out for purposes of self-definition, doxastic security, other-exclusion, worldly promotion, and political leverage.

In a slogan: Religion is more quest than conclusions.

If it is a mere absence of sound, why is it so delicious?  Turn off some noisemaker and the silence is there, palpably.  It is supereminently there if you succeed in turning off that most noisy and hard-to-turn-off noisemaker, your own mind. 

Max Picard proved unhelpful.  His effusions are vaguely suggestive but neither fish nor fowl, neither philosophy nor poetry. More help is to be had from the Beatles: "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.  It is not dying, it is not dying . . . ."

Related articles

An Aphorism of Mine Translated into Slovak

How can Dick Morris and other conservative pundits be so cocksure that Romney will win big?  Do they have crystal balls?  It's more a case of brass balls.  Do they think that by confidently predicting a Romney landslide they will energize the conservative base?  Why wouldn't it have the opposite effect?  ("If Romney's going to win in a landslide, there's no need for me to head for the polls.") There is something I am not understanding here.

I am preparing for the disaster of an Obama victory.  Lawrence Auster speaks of the "horror" of such a thing:

Why horror? To repeat: For America to re-elect a president who has presided over an economic and fiscal disaster and who has made it crystal clear that he intends to keep following the same policies in his second term, would mean that America has become in the full sense of the word a parasitical leftist country. Meaning, a country which believes, as Obama believes, that the conditions making possible the production of all the goods of society can be ignored, because somehow the goods of society will always be there, like rocks and stars, no matter how much we condemn and punish those who provide them, and therefore all we need to do is appropriate and distribute the goods—more and more and more of them—to the unfortunate and the oppressed, with the unfortunate and oppressed including such as groups as woman who lack totally free contraceptives; blacks who have been deprived by white racism of an education that will turn them into the intellectual and economic equals of whites; and blacks who have been deprived by America’s racist geography of full access to the white tax base.

Although I consider Auster an extremist in some ways, the above statement eloquently expresses the fundamental  and deeply pernicious ignorance of human nature and of economics at the root of Obama's vision.

If Obama wins, what then?  We soldier on, of course.  We continue the fight but without falling into the totalitarian error of leftists for whom politics is everything.  But of course this is why it is so difficult to defeat them.  They seek and find their very meaning in the political sphere.  Politics is their religion.  Curiously, it's a religion without any morality: they will do anything to win.  This puts us at  a two-fold disadvantage: we don't bring the full measure of our energy and commitment to the fight, and we have moral scruples.    I call it The Conservative Disadvantage.

Addendum:  I just found the following at Keith Burgess-Jackson's weblog:

Why do almost all Romney supporters think he will win, and why do almost all
Obama supporters think he will win? It would be refreshing, from time
to time, to hear a representative of possibility 2 or possibility 4. I, for
example, want Romney to win, but I believe that Obama has a good chance of
winning. I won't go as far as to say that Obama will win, since I have
no basis for such a decisive judgment, but I won't be surprised if he does.

Is this evidence that great minds think alike?

I wrote:

Here we observe once again the patented Kraussian 'bait and switch' dialectical ploy.  Note the scare quotes around 'wrong.'  Krauss  is switching from the relevant normative sense of the word to an irrelevant nonnormative sense.  That is the same type of trick  he pulled with respect to the Leibnizian question why there is something rather than nothing.  He baited us with a promise to answer the Leibnizian question but all he did was switch from the standard meaning of 'nothing' to a special meaning all his own according to which nothing is something.  So instead of answering the question he baited us with — the old Leibniz question — he substituted a different physically tractable question and then either stupidly or dishonestly passed off the answer to the physically tractable question as the answer to the philosophical question.

He is doing the same thing with the homosexuality question.  He is equivocating on 'right' and 'wrong' as between nonnormative and normative senses of the term.  Avoid that confusion and you will be able to see that a practice cannot be shown to be morally acceptable by showing that the practice is engaged in.  Slavery and ethnic cleansing are practices which have proven to be be very effective by nonnormative criteria.  World War II in the Pacific was ended by the nuclear slaughter of noncombatants.  Questions about moral acceptability and unacceptability cut perpendicular to questions about effectiveness, survival value and the like.

Joel Hunter responds:

. . . this causes me to wonder, in a charitable vein, whether Krauss is not, after all, performing an intentional bait-and-switch in his theorizing about "nothing," morality, and the will. Rather, because of his unassailable prior commitment to naturalize all phenomena, perhaps he's engaged in simply translating away genuine philosophical problems in much the same way that an emotivist translates away the propositional content of general moral principles. There's a logic to the naturalizing procedure whereby concepts of the nonphysical must be translated as something physical. That's the only way "nothing" is intelligible given his ground convictions. Of course, this doesn't excuse his equivocation on such matters. But if he had proposed something like the following, perhaps the bait-and-switch charge wouldn't stick: "The Leibniz question is a real puzzler. But in its classic form it is unanswerable because it is unintelligible using the explanatory tools we have at our disposal. The good news is that we can make it intelligible by translating physically nebulous terms into terms with definite physical meaning." As we both know, he is unlikely to speak this way because it is too intellectually humble, an indulgence of virtue he cannot afford since the more important aim of the translation project is to ghettoize the religious.

If I understand Professor Hunter, he is, with admirable exegetical charity, raising the question whether Krauss,  rather than engaging in an intellectually dishonest 'bait and switch' ploy, is instead proposing that intractable philosophical questions such as the one Leibniz famously  raised be replaced  by tractable scientific ones.  Accordingly, Krauss is not trying to the answer the questions of philosophy using empirical science, but is instead aiming to replace the philosophical questions with different ones, questions that are amenable to scientific solutions.  Clearly, the following strategies are different:

1. Answer the traditional questions of philosophy using scientific methods.

2. Replace the traditional questions with scientifically tractable ones since the former have proven intractable.

On (1), the traditional questions can be answered, but not by the 'arm chair' methods of philosophy, but empirically.  Science comes to occupy the domain of philosophy.  On (2), the traditional questions cannot be answered and so must be replaced by questions that can be scientifically  answered.   Science does not come to occupy the domain of philosophy; it establishes its own domain.  (Here is an example that would require a separate post to exfoliate.  When psychology first broke away from philosophy, it ceased to concern itself with the topics philosophers of mind treated: it changed the subject to observable behavior.  It is not just that psychology  abandoned the method of introspection; it also abandoned the subject matter that introspection was thought to reveal.)

Consider the Kraussian metaphor of "growing up and leaving home." When a young person does this he does so without prejudice to his diachronic identity: it is not as if the person-at-home perishes to be replaced by a numerically different person-away-from-home.  One and the same person is first at home and then away.  So the metaphor suggests that Krauss' strategy is (1).  That  is also the impression one gets from his awful book on something and nothing.  But there is also evidence that his strategy is (2).

I suggest that the man is just not clear as to what he is up to.  Hence the impression of 'bait and switch.'  He baits us with a traditional questions as if he is out to solve it scientifically; but then  he switches to a different question, replacing the philosophical question with a different one.

For example, instead of answering (or rejecting as senseless) the Leibniz question as to why  anything at all exists, he substitutes an entirely different question about how the physical universe has evolved from an initial material state (which is obviously not nothing).   Not that there is anything wrong with the second question; it is just not the question he baited us with.  Krauss' how-question and its answer are simply irrelevant to the why-question.  And yet our man thinks that somehow they are relevant.  Hence I say he is, if not intellectually dishonest, then badly confused. 

I discussed one of the Peter van Inwagen's arguments here and found it wanting.  He has a second argument:  ". . . 'exists' is univocal owing to the interdefinability of 'there exists'  and the obviously univocal 'all.'  But this is a powerful argument, for, surely, 'all' means the same in 'All natural numbers have a successor' and 'All Greeks are mortal'?" (484).  The argument could be put as follows:

'Every' is univocal.

'Exist(s)' and 'every' are interdefinable:  'Fs exist' is equivalent to 'It is not the case that everything is not an F.'

Therefore

'Exist(s)' is univocal.

I accept this crisp little argument — but with a restriction: 'exist(s)' is univocal across all affirmative and negative general existential sentences.  But what about a singular existential such as 'Peter exists'?  Does 'exist' in the latter have the same sense that it has in 'Rabbits exist'?  I say it doesn't:  'exist(s)' is not univocal across all existence sentences, general and singular.

To warm up, what are we saying when we say that rabbits exist? On Frege's approach, we are saying that the concept rabbit is instantiated.  So 'exist(s)' in general existentials means 'is instantiated.'  But 'Peter exists' does not say that Peter is instantiated.  So is it not spectacularly obvious that 'exist(s)' is not univocal across singular and general existentials? 

But we needn't follow Frege is holding that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate.  And van Inwagen does not follow him in this.  Perhaps it would not be unfair to characterize van Inwagen as a half-way Fregean: he likes the notion that "existence is allied to number" but he does not take that characteristic Fregean thesis to entail that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate, i.e., a predicate of concepts, not objects.  Van Inwagen could and would say something along these lines:

1. Rabbits exist:  It is not the case that everything is not a rabbit.  ~(x)~Rx.

2. Peter exists:  It is not the case that everything is not identical to Peter.  ~(x)~(x = Peter)

I will now try to show that, even on van Inwagen's preferred translations, there is still equivocity as between general and singular existentials. (1) and (2) are equivalent to

1*. Rabbits exist: Something is a rabbit. (Ex)Rx.

and

2*. Peter exists:  Something is (identically) Peter. (Ex)(x = Peter).

Now it seems to me that we are still stuck with equivocation.  The predicate in (1*) is 'something is (predicatively) ___.'   The predicate in (2*) is 'something is (identically) ___.'  Now the 'is' of predication is not the 'is' of identity.  So the equivocation on 'exist(s)' remains in the form of an equivocation on 'is' as between the 'is' of predication and the 'is' of identity.

The equivocation ought to be obvious from the notation alone.  The immediate juxtaposition of 'R' and 'x' in '(Ex)Rx' signifies that x is (predicatively) R.  But in '(Ex)(x = Peter)' we find no such juxtaposition but a new sign, '=.'  

My thesis, then, is that while 'exist(s)' is univocal across all general existentials, it is not univocal across all existentials.  This reflects that fact that — to switch over to material mode — existence cannot be reduced to or eliminated in favor of any thin logical notion or combination of such notions.

Bill Keezer writes,

I was reading your recent post on profiling and it moved me to share with you a point I've shared with others many times.  I worked a long time ago in insurance, and profiling in insurance is not only commonplace it is necessary and accepted by the public. Most adults know, for instance, that females receive better rates than males. It is no moral commentary on being a guy that males receive higher rates than women. It is simply a statistical fact that males cost more money to insure than females, and so insurance companies rate accordingly.

Further, insurance rates are based on credit score in part. It is not some moral judgment on companies' part. Insurance companies do not think that if you have bad credit you are inherently 'worse' than someone with good credit. It is simply a statistical fact that bad credit correlates  with higher accident ratios. And insurance companies set their rates accordingly.

Of course no one complains about men receiving higher rates than women. But I have little doubt that if women were the ones to receive the higher rates, it would be a big deal. It is the same reason race cannot be included in insurance calculations. Surely it is no more inherently 'sexist' to rate men differently than would be 'racist' to rate different races differently. It is simply facing statistical facts.

For me, it doesn't get any better than the late piano sonatas of Beethoven, especially Op. 109, 110, 111. This is music preeminent and unsurpassable, though some of Brahms comes close. Here is Claudio Arrau performing the First Movement of Sonata 32, Opus 111.

And here is Daniel Barenboim playing the 2nd movement.  If this doesn't move you to tears, then you need a major soul-adjustment.

I am an elitist, but not a snob. An elitist in that I maintain that such popular genres as blues, jazz, folk, rock, and so on are not music in the eminent sense: they do not speak to what is highest and best in us. But there is nothing wrong with that. The claims of the lower self have their limited validity. Not a snob, in that I enjoy and appreciate music of all kinds, with only a few exceptions, as witness my Saturday Night at the Oldies series.    

To say that the best of the blues is the equal of the best of Beethoven is a bit like saying that the best of Carnap is equal to the best of Plato. Either you see what is wrong with that or you don't. If you don't, I can't help you. Here we enter the realm of the unarguable.

Positivism is to philosophy as muzak is to music.  Put that on your Stove and cook it!

Addendum:  Ed Farrell suggests that it does get better, and mentions the late quartets.  He has a point as witness the third movement of opus 132, Heiliger Dankgesang.  Click on the Farrell link and enjoy his fine photography.

Opening paragraph:

We don't often defend the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but Attorney General Eric Holder can inspire strange alliances. Recently, the Justice Department asked the full circuit to overturn the unanimous and enlightened decision of a three-judge panel allowing bone marrow donors to be compensated for their donations.

Why not allow compensation?

. . . allowing compensation would "undermine the efforts to encourage voluntary donations" and that Congress has established that bone marrow transplants "should not be subject to market forces."

This is a perfect example of how contemptibly and willfully stupid leftists are.  Allowing compensation would not undermine but enhance voluntary donations.  That's obvious.  They don't see it because they are blinded by their own lust for power, desire for total control, and hatred of liberty and free markets.

Read the whole piece to fully savor the illogic of the boneheads over at Justice.

A young man who was brought up Mormon, retains much if not all of the salutary character formation, but is now an atheist, writes (emphasis added):

I've been thinking about some of our conversations about theology and epistemology. Particularly the stuff on Mormonism. I'm sitting in on [Professor X's] medieval philosophy class reading St. Anselm among others, and I'm constantly struck by how far removed Anselm's view of God is from the one I grew up with. And, it seems to me, how far removed from the God of the Bible. I mean, Anselm and Aquinas both are absolutely relentless in denying God any anthropogenic [anthropomorphic?] qualities whatever. We are left with something that is faceless, devoid of human emotion, and about as difficult to relate to as anything I can even imagine. I can appreciate the intellect of men like Anselm and Aquinas, but this picture of God seems repugnant.

Being an atheist, I don't have a dog in this fight, but it does seem to me that there is more to be said for the Mormon view of God than most theists, you included, seem to realize. I recently read a book called The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion by Sterling McMurrin. I highly recommend you check it out and read it, especially the supplementary chapter in later versions on the question of whether God is a person. I think if you do, you will find yourself forced to take Mormonism a bit more seriously as a religion.

I have spoken more than once of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem, and Athens and Benares.  I am now tempted to speak of the tension between Athens and Salt Lake City, though this third tension is but an exacerbated form of the first.   My understanding of Mormonism is limited,  so I won't address it directly. But my understanding is that Mormons maintain that God is a physical being who inhabits a physical planet.  This conception of God, whether or not it is exactly what Mormons accept, is  as repugnant to me as the Anselmian-Thomistic one is to my correspondent.  This post raises the question of anthropomorphism in religion.

Imagine a spectrum of positions. 

1. At one end crude anthropomorphism:  God as a physical being, a superman, as is suggested by such phrases as 'the man upstairs'  and 'the big guy in the sky.'  This is the way many if not most atheists think of God and why they indulge in such mockeries as 'flying spaghetti monster,' and compare God with the Tooth Fairy (Dennett), Santa Claus, a celestial teapot (Russell), an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon (Ed Abbey), etc.  Many if not most atheists, being most of them materialists, can only think in material terms:  the only way God could be real would be for him to be a physical being.  (The tacit assumption being that to be real = to be a denizen of spacetime.)  So they think that if God is real, then he must be a physical being; and since the 'highest' physical being is man, then God is a Big Man  literally out there somewhere.  (Does he perhaps drink Celestial Seasonings (TM) tea from Russell's teapot?)  On his 1961 suborbital flight, about a month before astronaut Alan Shepard's, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was reported to have said  that he didn't see any God.  When I heard the news report I was 11 years old.  I exclaimed: "That dumb commie doesn't know that God is a purely spiritual being!"  Atheists, who typically can think only in material terms, then naturally deny the existence of God since it is surely absurd to think of God as a Big Man, mit Haut und Haar (Schopenhauer), etc.  So I sincerely hope that Mormons do not hold that God is literally a physical being with skin, hair, a GI tract . . . .  If that were the only option for theists, then we should all be atheists.

2.  At the other end of the spectrum, a conception of God so attenuated and diluted as to turn God into a mere concept, or a mere feeling ('God is the feeling one has when one is with those one loves') or one's ultimate concern (Tillich), or an unconscious anthropomorphic projection (Ludwig Feuerbach) or perhaps a causally inert abstract object, a denizen of the Platonic menagerie. 

3.  The positions at both ends of the spectrum are demonstrably untenable.  Briefly, God cannot be a physical being because no physical being is a necessary being, and God is a necessary being.  By definition, God is the ultimate ground of the existence of everything contingent.  (He is more, of course, but at least that.)  As such, he cannot himself be contingent, and so cannot be physical.  That is just one argument.  I am not assuming that God exists; I am merely unpacking the concept of God.  It is equally easy to show that God cannot be a concept, or an anthropomorphic projection, or an abstract entity.  I needn't waste words on whether God is a feeling or one's ultimate concern.

God cannot be a concept because concepts depend for their existence on minds, and God, by definition, is a se,  and so cannot depend for his existence on anything, not even himself. ('Causa sui' is to be taken privatively, not positively: God does not cause himself, which would require that he be logically or temporally prior to himself; it is rather the case that God is not caused by another.)  There are of course concepts of God, but God cannot be a concept.

For similar reasons, God cannot be an anthropomorphic projection.  The concept of God is the concept of a being that exists whether or not humans exist.  Obviously, such a being cannot be an anthropomorphic projection.  So if one says that God is an anthropomorphic projection, that is just a roundabout way of saying that God does not exist.  Nor can God be an abstract entity.  Abstracta, by definition, are causally inert, and God, by definition, is the first cause.

4.  The interesting positions are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.  God is not physical; God does not depend on any mind for his existence; God is not an abstract entity.  What is left but to say that God is a mind?  Now the only minds to which we have access in the first-person way, that way which alone reveals them in their true intrinsic nature, are our minds.  Since I know my own mind, and know it to be both causally efficacious and not physical, I conjecture that either God is a mind, or more like a mind than like anything else.  One's own mind provides a model whereby one can think about God. In fact, it is the only decent model we have.   So the most adequate, and only,  way to think about God is to think about God as an unembodied mind, or better as an unembodied person where a person is a "subsistent individual of a rational nature." (Aquinas, ST I, 29, 3.)  Thinking  of God as person might not be perfectly adequate, but the other ways I have mentioned are entirely  inadequate and utterly hopeless.  So God is a person but not  a man.  A person needn't be human.

5.  If we think of God as a bodiless person we avoid the Scylla of anthropomorphism.  God is not in the form of a man; it is the other way around; man is in the form of God.  God is not anthropomorphic; man is theomorphic.  This is how we ought to read Genesis 1, 26-27:

Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram . . . (Gen 1, 26) Let us make man in our image and likeness. . .

 Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam. . . (Gen 1, 27) And God created man in his image. . .

 An oft-repeated mistake is to take these spiritual sayings in a materialistic way as if to imply that God has the form of a man.  It's as if one were to argue:

Man is made in God’s image.
Man is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.
Therefore
God is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.

But that would be  like arguing:

This statue is made in Lincoln’s image.
This statue is composed of marble.
Therefore
Lincoln is composed of marble.

The point of Gen 1, 26-27  is not that God must be physical because man is, but that man is a spiritual being just like God, potentially if not actually. The idea is not that God is a big man, the proverbial ‘man upstairs,’ but that man is a little god, a proto-god, a temporally and temporarily debased god who has open to him the possibility of a higher life with God, a possibility whose actualization requires both creaturely effort and divine grace.

6.   The upshot is that God is a person, a pure spirit or unembodied mind, or at least more like a person than like anything else with which we are familiar.  The Scylla of anthropomorphism and 'spiritual materialism' is avoided by thinking of God as a bodiless person.  The Charybdis of abstractionism/conceptualism is avoided by thinking of God as a person, and thus as a concrete individual who knows, loves,  and freely acts.

If we stop right here we have a position in the middle of our spectrum, one that is represented by many contemporary theists, Plantinga being one of them.  But we can't stop here, as it seems to me.

For God  is also the absolute reality.  If God is absolute, then God is ontologically simple: he is Being itself in its prime instance, and wholly partless and incomposite, hence free of act/potency composition.  I can't repeat the arguments here.  The simple God of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas is a second position in the middle of the spectrum, one even farther from anthropomorphism than the first according towhich God is a bodiless person, but not simple. 

I can easily understand how my correspondent above would find the simple God to be, as he says, "repugnant."  We are left with something that is faceless, devoid of human emotion, and about as difficult to relate to as anything I can even imagine. In response I will say two things.

First, the simple God of Anselm, et al., despite  its difficulties — which intellectual honesty forbids me from 'papering over' –  is vastly superior to the crude anthropomorphism which Mormons apparently accept.  (If I have misrepresented the Mormon position, then I should like to hear exactly what their position is on the topic under discussion.)  

Second, religion is about transcendence and transcending, about reaching beyond the human-all-too-human, and beyond all the images  of  the picture-loving imagination.  Religion is not about the positing of a hinterworld that duplicates this world with the negative removed.  It is not about crude, materialistic, wish-fulfillment.  This is why we find the Islamic 72 virgins conception of paradise so paltry and ridiculous:  it is a blatant pandering to the basest elements in our nature, a pandering at once both superstitious and idolatrous.  Religion aims at a spiritualizationof the human being which cannot  be imagined and is just barely conceivable.  It is about theosis (deification) as is maintained in Orthodox Christianity.  And because the ultimate goal for humans is not imaginable and barely conceivable, it is repeatedly pictured in crude and absurd materialistic  ways — which only fuels the fires of atheism.  Actually, one ought to be an atheist in respect of the anthropomorphic God-conceptions.

This is a difficult topic to write about and of course no materialistically-minded worldling could possibly be persuaded by it.  No matter how much light one sheds on an object, a blind man won't see it — he lacks the requisite organ.   But perhaps an analogy may be of some use.  Imagine a fetus in the womb who finds his environment quite acceptable, and indeed the ultimate in what is real and worthwhile.  You try to persuade the fetus that staying  in the womb indefinitely is decidely suboptimal, a mistake in that he  is capable of a marvellous development after an event called  'birth.'  He of course doesn't know what you are talking about and is in no position to imagine what it is like to be born and develop.  And he will find it almost impossible to conceive. For him birth is death: the end of his cozy and secure womb-life.   His natural tendency is to say that you are 'bullshitting' him: 

"Look man, this is reality, this is what I know, this is what I have evidence for; you are pushing some fantasy projection, some opiate so that we we fetuses won't work to improve conditions here in the womb but will waste our time dreaming about some nonexistent goodies on the other side of what you call 'birth' but we know to be death and annihilation.  Sure,  it would be nice if there were something more, but there ain't.  Your talk of infants, and children, and adolescents, and adults, is just a lie to make people denigrate the only reality there is, the reality here and now, in what you call 'womb' but we anti-birthers  call 'reality.'"

Both passed on this last week Otis at 90, James at 73.  Johnny Otis' signature number is of course "Willy and the Hand Jive."  In this curious clip, we are first treated to a late '50 car commercial which should stir up memories in Los Angelenos of a certain age and then to a performance  by Otis and his band with the hand jive itself illustrated by a trio of meaty mamas.  I always thought that Otis was a very light-skinned black man.  But in real life he rejoiced under the name Veliotes and was pure Greek.

Etta James' signature number is of course At Last.  Her version of "The Very Thought of You" compares favorably with Billie Holliday's.

One of the elements in my personal liturgy is a reading of the following passage every January 1st. I must have begun the practice in the mid-70s. 

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Four, #276, tr. Kaufmann:

For the new year. — I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year — what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn to see more and more as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all and all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

Nietzsche found it very difficult to let looking away be his only negation. And so shall I.

'Tis the season for the letter carriers of the world to groan under their useless burdens of impersonal greetings.

Impersonality in the minimalist style may take the form of a store-bought card with a pre-fabricated message to which is appended an embossed name. A step up from this is a handwritten name. Slightly better still is the nowadays common family picture with handwritten name but no message.

The maximalist style is far worse. Now we are in for a lengthy litany of the manifold accomplishments of the sender and his family which litany may run to a page or two of single-spaced text.

One size fits all. No attempt to address any one person as a person.

"It's humbug, I tell you, humbug!"

Having just mentioned naturalism and scientism  in my plug for Plantinga's new book, you may be wondering what naturalism is and how it is related to scientism.   J. P. Moreland gives a full answer in his book The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (SCM Press, 2009).  What follows is my summary of Moreland's explanation with a critical comment near the end.  My summary is excerpted from my post, J. P. Moreland on Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism.

……………….

Moreland views contemporary naturalism as consisting of an epistemology, an etiology, and a general ontology.

A. The epistemology of naturalism is (weak or strong) scientism with its concomitant rejection of first philosophy. Strong scientism is the view that "unqualified cognitive value resides in science and nothing else." (6) Weak scientism allows nonscientific subjects some cognitive value, but holds that "they are vastly inferior to science in their epistemic standing . . . ." (6) On either weak or strong scientism, there is no room for first philosophy, according to which philosophy is an autonomous discipline, independent of natural science, and authoritative in respect to it. So on scientism, natural science sets the standard in matters epistemic, and philosophy’s role is at best ancillary. The method of explanation allied to this scientistic epistemology is combinatorial and third-personal. It is combinatorial in that every complex entity is to be understood as a combination of simpler entities. Whether this enormously fruitful approach, which resolves wholes into parts and complexes into simples, can work for types of unity such as consciousness is one of the key issues in the debate. The scientistic method of explanation is third-personal in that first-personal "ways of knowing" are eschewed in favor of third-personal ways. (8)

B. The etiology or "Grand Story" of naturalism is an event-causal account of how everything came to be, spelled out in the natural-scientific terms of physics, chemistry, and evolutionary biology. There are three main features of the Grand Story. The first is that the event-causal account must proceed bottom-up, as is done in the atomic theory of matter and in evolutionary biology, not top-down. A second feature is "scientistic philosophical monism" according to which everything falls under the aegis of the methods of natural science. As monistic in this sense, naturalism is most consistently understood to entail strong physicalism, the view that everything is "fundamentally matter, most likely, elementary ‘particles’ (whether taken as points of potentiality, centers of mass/energy, units of spatially extended stuff/waves, or . . . ) organized in various ways according to the laws of nature." (9) If a naturalist fights shy of this strong physicalism, in the direction of admitting supervenient or emergent entities, he will nonetheless have to maintain, if he is to remain a naturalist, that all additions to his ontology in excess of what strong physicalism allows must be rooted in and dependent upon the physical items of the Grand Story. The third feature of naturalism’s Grand Story is that its account of things, because it is event-causal, must reject both agent-causal and irreducibly teleological explanations. Fundamentally, the only allowable explanations are "mechanical and efficient-causal." (9) A corollary is that the Grand Story is both diachronically and synchronically deterministic. Diachronically, in that the state of the universe at a given time together with the laws of nature determines or fixs the chances for the state of the universe at later times. Synchronically, in that the properties and changes of macro-wholes are determined by and dependent upon micro-events.

C. The general ontology of naturalism countenances only those entities that figure in a completed physics or are "dependent on and determined by the entities of physics. . . ." (6) There are three main features of naturalism’s general ontology. The first is that the only admissible entities are those "knowable by third-person scientific means." (10) The second feature is that it must be possible, with respect to any entity admitted into the general ontology, to show how it had to arise by chains of event causation in which micro-entities combine to form increasingly complex aggregates. The third feature of naturalism’s general ontology concerns supervenience/emergence. The idea is that anything admitted in excess of the entities of physics, chemistry, and biology must be shown to be determined by and depend upon (whether with metaphysical or nomological necessity) natural scientific entities.

Moreland grants that a naturalist can stray ‘upwards’ from strong physicalism by admitting emergent properties, but in only two senses of ‘emergence.’ A feature is emergent₀ if it can be deduced from its base. Moreland gives the example of fractals. For a simpler example, my own, consider the weight of a stone wall. Its weight can be computed (and thus deduced) from the weights of its constituent stones. Suppose the wall has a weight that is utterly novel: nothing in the history of the universe before this wall came into existence had its exact weight. The property of weighing 1000.6998236 lbs, say, despite its utter novelty, is innocuously emergent and surely no threat to naturalism’s epistemology or Grand Story or ontology. Ordinary structural properties are emergent₁. The property of being water, for example, is structural in that it is "identical to a configurational pattern among the subvenient entities," (10) in this case atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. Structural emergent properties are also easily countenanced by naturalists. But there are five other types of emergent entities that according to Moreland are beyond the naturalist pale: sui generis epiphenomenal properties; sui generis properties which induce causal liabilities in the things that have them; sui generis properties that induce active causal powers in the things that have them; emergent egos which are consciously active and rational; emergent egos which are conscious, active, and rational and are rights-possessors.

With the exception of the first two types of emergence, emergent entities, whether properties or substances, "defy naturalist explanation and they provide confirmation for biblical theism construed as a rival to naturalism." (11-12) Human persons in particular "are recalcitrant facts for naturalism and provide evidence for Judeo-Christian monotheism." (14)

At this point I need to register a misgiving I have over Moreland’s use of ‘emergence.’ On his way of thinking, human persons are emergent entities, albeit ones that cannot be accommodated by naturalism. But I should think that, because Moreland’s purpose is to "provide confirmation for biblical theism," human persons and "suitably unified mental egos" (11) are precisely the opposite of emergent. If persons are created by God in his image, then they do not emerge since what emerges emerges ‘from below,’ from suitably organized material configurations. But it all depends on how we will use ‘emergence.’ There is an innocuous sense of the term according to which an entity emerges just in case it manifests itself or comes into being. Apparently this is the way Moreland uses the word. But in its philosophically pregnant sense, ‘emergence’ is a theoretical term, a terminus technicus, that always implies that that which emerges has an origin ‘from below,’ from matter, and never ‘from above,’ from spirit or mind. (See the opening paragraph of Timothy O'Connor's SEP article, Emergent Properties.) I suggest we use it as a technical term, but Moreland is of course free to disagree.

Here.