Whether ‘Image and Likeness’ Supports God’s Having a Body
How are God and Truth Related? (2021 Expanded Version)
By my count, there are five different ways to think about the relation of God and truth:
1) There is truth, but there is no God.
2) There is truth, and there is God, but God is not the ontological ground of truth.
3) There is truth, there is God, and God is the ontological ground of truth: truth ultimately depends for its existence on the existence of God. There is truth only because there is God. (This 'because' signifies a relation that is neither empirically-causal nor merely logical. Call it the relation of ontological grounding.)
4) There is no truth, because there is no God.
5) There is God, but no truth.
Ad (1). This is the view of many if not most today. There are truths, and among these truths is the truth that God does not exist. This, I take it, is the standard atheist view. The standard atheist does not deny that there are truths; he presupposes that there are and that they are absolute. It is just that one of these truths is that there is no God.
Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers. There are truths, and one of the truths is that God exists. Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and who also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths. Such a philosopher would have to hold that the existence of God is logically equivalent to the existence of some truths. That is, he would have to hold that, necessarily God exists if and only if truths exist. But this philosopher would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either. That is, he would deny that God is the ontological ground of truth.
Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept, were I to accept a view. Thus I would affirm the subjunctive conditional lately mentioned. The difference between (2) and (3) is subtle. On both sides it is held that both the existence of God and the existence of some truths are necessary, but the Augustinian — to give him a name — holds that God is the ultimate 'source' of all truth and thus of all intelligibility, or, if you prefer, the ultimate 'ground' of all truth and intelligibility. Therefore, if, per impossibile, God were not to exist, truth would not exist either.
Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view. Tod Gottes = Tod der Wahrheit. The death of God is the death of truth. By 'truth' I of course mean absolute truth which cannot be perspectival or in any way relative. Truth cannot be relative, as I have argued many times.
Ad (5). I have the impression that certain post-modernists hold this. It is a view not worth discussing.
I should think only the first three views have any merit.
But each of the three has difficulties and none of the three can be strictly proven.
A. I will argue against the admittedly plausible first view by arguing for the third view.
Among the truths, there are necessary truths such as the laws of logic. Now a truth is a true truth-bearer, a true proposition, say. (There are different candidates for the office of truth-bearer; we needn't list them here.) Now nothing can have a property unless it exists. (Call this principle Anti-Meinong). So no proposition can have the property of being true unless the proposition exists. By definition, a necessary truth is true in every metaphysically possible world. It follows that a necessarily true proposition exists in every possible world including worlds in which there are no finite minds. (I assume, plausibly, that there are such worlds.)
But — and this is the crucial move in this reasoning — a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exist except in, or rather for, a mind. Thus there are no truths in themselves that float free of minds. Now if there is no God, or rather, if there is no necessarily existent mind, then every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a possible world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind. For example, the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12' is true and exists in every possible world including those worlds in which there are no minds. This contradiction ensues on the assumption that there is no necessarily existent mind.
Therefore, there is a necessarily existent mind. "And this all men call God."
If the argument just given is sound, then (3) is true, and (1) is false.
Here are the ways an atheist might respond to the argument for (3):
a) Deny that there are necessary truths.
b) Deny that truth is a property of propositions.
c) Deny Anti-Meinong, the principle that whatever has a property exists.
d) Deny that propositions are thought-accusatives; accept some sort of Platonism about propositions.
But each of these denials involves problems of its own.
Substack
I opened an account yesterday. Only one entry so far, and less than ten subscribers. It's free. Go here and do a search on my name.
If you are a good writer and impecunious, you can turn a buck on this site. On second thought, you can do so whether or not you are impecunious. The quality of the writing on Substack and the standing of many of the authors suggests to me that the latter-day book burners will probably keep their hands off of it.
Style, Substance, and Michel Henry
Some philosophers write so obscurely that the problems they purport to discuss are occluded by the problems they cause the reader. One has to waste time figuring out what the author is saying, time that ought to be spent on assessing whether what is being said is true. The French are prime offenders, allergic as they are to plain talk and clarity of expression with their pseudo-literary pirouettes and their overuse of universal quantifiers. The French Continental style draws attention away from the substance so much so that one wonders whether there is any substance beneath the stylistic flummery. And yet I sense that Michel Henry has something interesting to say about Husserl and Heidegger and so I will continue to plough through the turgid prose of Material Phenomenology.
Worse than obscurantism in the French style, however, is the attitude of a certain sort of analytic philosopher who dismisses as meaningless what does not instantly make sense to his shallow pate. And among these benighted souls, the nadir is reached in a positivist like David Stove.
I coined a name for people like him: 'philosophistine.' A philistine out of his depth among real philosophers.
The maverick philosopher, avoiding both camps, strives for clarity with content with a fidelity to reality that tolerates such obscurity as is unavoidable.
New Morning
Old memories dressed in the rags of too many rehearsals
Block the light of a dawn that would be new
And not merely another.
I Didn’t Start Out Conservative
Like many conservatives, I didn't start out as one. My background is working class, my parents were Democrats, and so was I until the age of 41. I came of age in the '60s. One of my heroes was John F. Kennedy, "the intrepid skipper of the PT 109" as I described him in a school essay written in the fifth grade. I was all for the Civil Rights movement. Musically my heroes were Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. I thrilled to his Blowin' in the Wind and his other civil rights anthems.
As I see it, those civil rights battles were fought and they were won. But then the rot set in as the party of JFK liberals became the extremists and the destructive leftists that they are today. For example, Affirmative Action in its original sense gave way to reverse discrimination, race-norming, minority set-asides, identity politics and the betrayal of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream that people be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." To judge people by the content of their character is to judge them as individuals which is precisely the opposite of what tribalists and identity politicians do.
As liberals have become extremists, people with moderate views such as myself have become conservatives.
Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day, a good day to read his Letter from a Birmingham Jail and reflect on how the race-delusional totalitarians who now infest the Democrat Party have strayed from King's ideas and vision.
Toleration Extremism: Notes on John Stuart Mill
Given the extreme polarization in the political sphere, the Left's totalitarian crack-down on free speech gives aid and comfort to the opposite extreme and the notion that all speech must be tolerated. One finds this extremism in John Stuart Mill. I show what it wrong with it in a penetrating entry enshrined at MavPhil: Strictly Philosophical.
Intellectual Hygiene
I am all for intellectual hygiene. But it can be taken to an extreme by a certain sort of analytic philosopher who is afraid to touch anything that might in the least be infected with the murk and messiness of life as she is lived. Such types remind me of neurotic hand-washers and those who, fearful of the Chinese flu, walk around in the open air, alone, in masks.
To Be Human
To be human is to be flawed; to be conservative is to know this.
As the World Grows Dark
The darkening of the world has this advantage: it inspires us to seek for light where it is more likely to be found.
Readings for Dark Times
When the light of liberty was extinguished in Germany 1933-1945, many escaped to America. But when the light of liberty is extinguished here, there will be no place left to go.
What was it like to live in the Third Reich? What can we learn that may be of use in the present darkness? I come back again and again to the following four.
Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, tr. A Dru, Pantheon, 1950.
Paul Roubiczek, Across the Abyss: Diary Entries for the Year 1939-1940, tr. George Bird, Cambridge UP, 1982.
Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, tr. O. Pretzel, Picador, 2000.
Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, The University of Chicago Press, 1955, 2017
Related: Theodor Haecker entries
Fruitful Disagreement
When there is an excess of agreement, discussions in politics and elsewhere are often tiresome and boring: the parties are as if in competition to see who can express the most outrage. One is preaching to the preachers. But an excess of agreement is better than a paucity thereof. The ideal discussion, however, is one in which broad agreement on fundamentals leaves room for disagreement on details. We are farther from that ideal than we have ever been in these no longer United States.
A Contingent Self-Existent?
Tom asks,
Does it make sense to say that something could be contingently self-existent? I'm assuming that 'being self-existent' is not the same thing as 'existing necessarily', for then my question wouldn't make sense. Maybe I'm wrong to make this distinction. But if I'm not, can it be a contingent matter that x exists and has self-existence?
The answer depends on what 'self-existent' is taken to mean. If it doesn't mean necessarily existent, then the only other possibility that comes to mind is self-causing. Accordingly, if x is self-existent, then x is not caused by another to exist, but causes itself to exist. This, however, is inconceivable. For a thing cannot do any causing unless it already (logically speaking) exists. Therefore, nothing can cause its own existence. There is no 'existential bootstrapping.' Nothing can haul its (nonexistent) self out of the dreck of nonexistence by its own (nonexistent) bootstraps.
My answer, then, is that nothing is contingently self-existent.
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ADDENDUM (1/11)
After writing the above, I recalled that my late friend Quentin Smith had argued that the universe caused itself to exist, and that I responded in the pages of the British journal Philosophy 75 (2000), pp. 604-612.
ABSTRACT: This article responds to Quentin Smith's, "The Reason the Universe Exists is that it Caused Itself to Exist," Philosophy 74 (1999), 579-586. My rejoinder makes three main points. The first is that Smith's argument for a finitely old, but causally self-explanatory, universe fails from probative overkill: if sound, it also shows that all manner of paltry event-sequences are causally self-explanatory. The second point is that the refutation of Smith's argument extends to Hume's argument for an infinitely old causally self-explanatory universe, as well as to Smith's two 'causal loop' arguments. The problem with all four arguments is their reliance on Hume's principle that to explain the members of a collection is ipso facto to explain the collection. This principle succumbs to counterexamples. The third point is that, even if Hume's principle were true, Smith's argument could not succeed without the aid of a theory of causation according to which causation is production (causation of existence).
My article is here.
The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation
God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality. God creates potential rebels. He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway. Lucifer as the father of all perversity.
God creates and sustains, moment by moment, other minds, like unto his own, made in his image, who are yet radically other in their inwardness and freedom. He creates subjects who exist in their own right and not merely as objects of divine thought. How is this conceivable?
We are not mere objects for the divine subject, but subjects in our own right. How can we understand creation ex nihilo, together with moment by moment conservation, of a genuine subject, a genuine mind with intellect and free will and autonomy and the power of self-determination even unto rebellion?
This is a mystery of divine creation. It is is above my pay grade. And yours too.
God can do it but we can't. We can't even understand how God could do it. A double infirmity. An infirmity that sires a doubt: Perhaps it can't be done, even by God. Perhaps the whole notion is incoherent and God does not exist. Perhaps it is not a mystery but an impossibility. Perhaps Christian creation is an Unbegriff.
Joseph Ratzinger accurately explains the Christian metaphysical position, and in so doing approaches what I am calling the ultimate paradox of divine creation, but he fails to confront, let alone solve, the problem:
The Christian belief in God is not completely identical with either of these two solutions [materialism and idealism]. To be sure, it, too, will say, being is being-thought. Matter itself points beyond itself to thinking as the earlier and more original factor. But in opposition to idealism, which makes all being into moments of an all-embracing consciousness, the Christian belief in God will say: Being is being-thought — yet not in such a way that it remains only thought and that the appearance of independence proves to be mere appearance to anyone who looks more closely.
On the contrary, Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence. In this it goes beyond any mere idealism. While the latter , as we have just established, explains everything real as the content of a single consciousness, in the Christian view what supports it all is a creative freedom that sets what has been thought in the freedom of its own being, so that, on the one hand, it is the being-thought of a consciousness and yet, on the other hand, is true being itself. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, German original 1968, latest English version Ignatius Press, 2004, p. 157, emphasis added)
And that is where the good Cardinal (later Pope Benedict the XVI) leaves it. He then glides off onto another topic. Not satisfactory! What's the solution to the paradox?
If you tell me that God creates other minds, and then somehow releases them into ontological independence, my reply will be that makes hash of the doctrine of creatio continuans, moment-by-moment conservation. The Christian God is no mere cosmic starter-upper of what exists; his creating is ongoing. In fact, if the universe always existed, then all creation would be creatio continuans, and there would be no starting-up at all.
On Christian metaphysics, "The world is objective [objectified] mind . . . ." (155) This is what makes it intelligible. This intelligibility has its source in subjective mind: "Credo in Deum expresses the conviction that objective [objectified] mind is the product of subjective mind . . . ." (Ibid.) So what I call onto-theological idealism gets the nod. You don't understand classical theism unless you understand it to be a form of idealism. But creatures, and in particular other minds, exist on their own, in themselves, and their Being cannot be reduced to their Being-for-God. Therein lies the difficulty.
Is divine creation a mystery or an impossibility?