Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Information Realism?

    Physicists love to play the philosopher, and when they do the result is often nonsense. A recent example is the so-called information realism of physicist Max Tegmark. Here is the gist of it:

    . . . according to information realists, matter arises from information processing, not the other way around. Even mind—psyche, soul—is supposedly a derivative phenomenon of purely abstract information manipulation.

    When I read this, I said to myself, "I will have no trouble blowing this nonsense out of the water." Reading on, however, I noted that the author of the Scientific American piece, Bernardo Kastrup, did exactly that. 

    We humans naturally philosophize.  But we don't naturally philosophize well.  So when science journalists and scientists try their hands at it they often make a mess of it.  (See my Scientism category for plenty of examples.) This is why there is need of the discipline of philosophy one of whose chief offices is the exposure and debunking of bad philosophy and pseudo-philosophy of the sort exhibited in so many 'scientific' articles.  Although it would be a grave mistake to think that the value of philosophy resides in its social utility, philosophy does earn its social keep in its critical and debunking function.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Remembering Bob Koepp

    Robert V. Koepp, long-time commenter at this weblog, died on Leap Day, 2012.  Here is what I had to say about him in 2012.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Sound or Unsound on Classical Theism? If Sound, then What?

    1) The existence of God is necessary for the existence of creatures: no God, no creatures.

    2) The existence of God is not sufficient for the existence of creatures: the existence of God does not entail the existence of creatures.

    Therefore

    3) God is really distinct from the act whereby he brings creatures into existence.

    It is interesting to note that the argument is sound even if God is a contingent being. The premises are commitments of classical theism and are therefore true within classical theism.  The conclusion follows from the premises.  

    So the argument is sound.  Does it have any consequences for the doctrine of divine simplicity?

    Addendum (3/1)

    The argument above is an enthymeme and not formally valid as it stands. The addition of the following auxiliary premise ensures formal validity. ('Formally valid' is a pleonasm but useful for paedagogical purposes.)

    2*) If the existence of God is not sufficient for the existence of creatures, then God is really distinct from the act whereby he brings creatures into existence.

    Bill Vallicella

    20 responses to “Sound or Unsound on Classical Theism? If Sound, then What?”

  • Necessary God, Contingent Creatures: Another Round with Novak

    In an earlier thread, Lukas Novak writes,

    . . . God simply does not need any causal acts to mediate his causal power. He is causally efficient through his very essence, directly, and contingently, imparting being to the created essences immediately. It is only with respect to this causal power which is an aspect of his essence that we call the selfsame essence an "act" (in the sense of activity).

    The above is a response to the line I have been taking, which is essentially as follows. 

    God necessarily exists. What's more, he is simple. God creates our universe U. U, having been created, exists. (And it wouldn't have existed had it not been created by God.) But U exists contingently, which implies (given that God created U) that God might not have created U.   Now consider God's creating of U.  This creative action is at least notionally distinct both from God and from U.  On the face of it, we must distinguish among God, God's creative action, and the effect of this action, namely, U.

    We now ask: Is the divine creative action necessary or contingent?  I will now argue that it is not necessary.  God exists in every possible world. If his creating of U occurred in every possible world, then U would exist in every possible world. But then U would not be contingent (existent in some but not all worlds), but necessary. Therefore, God's creating of U, given that U is contingent, is also contingent: it occurs in all and only those world in which U exists.  

    So God's creating U is contingent. But God is necessary. It follows that God cannot be identical to his creating U.  But this contradicts the doctrine of divine simplicity one of the entailments of which is that God is identical to each of his intrinsic properties. So the following propositions constitute an inconsistent triad, or antilogism.

    1) God is simple

    2) All created concreta are contingent.

    3) No contingent effect has a necessary cause.

    Given that the limbs of the triad are collectively inconsistent, one of them must be rejected.

    A) Reject simplicity. If God is not simple, then we can say that God is really (and not just notionally) distinct from his creative acts, and that, while God exists in every world, he creates only in some.   This solution upholds the contingency of created concreta, and preserves the intuitive notion that a contingent effect cannot have a necessary cause.

    B) Retain simplicity but accept the consequence that creatures are necessary beings.  That is, retain simplicity and accept modal collapse.

    C) Retain simplicity, but reject the notion that no contingent effect has a necessary cause.  This, I take it, is Novak's way out.  As I quoted him above, ". . . God simply does not need any causal acts to mediate his causal power. He is causally efficient through his very essence, directly, and contingently, imparting being to the created essences immediately."

    The difference between me and Novak is that I consider the above triad to be an aporia, a problem for which there is no satisfactory solution. Novak, however, thinks that there is a satisfactory rational solution by way of rejecting (3). He accepts divine simplicity, and he rejects modal collapse.  He concludes that there is no difference in God corresponding to the difference between the existence of U and the nonexistence of U.  The creation of U is not the realization of a divine potential to create U, and God's refraining from creating anything is not the realization of a divine potential to refrain from creating.  And this for the reason that there is nothing potential in God: God is purely actual.

    Novak's solution satisfies him, but it doesn't satisfy me. It sounds like magic to me.   I find the following unintelligible: "He [God] is causally efficient through his very essence, directly, and contingently, imparting being to the created essences immediately." The words make sense, of course, but I find that they do not express an intelligible proposition.

    Here, I think, is where the discussion must end.

    Bill Vallicella

    9 responses to “Necessary God, Contingent Creatures: Another Round with Novak”

  • Thomas Merton on Henry Thoreau

    Journals, vol. 4, p. 235, 8 August 1962:

    Thoreau's idleness was an incomparable gift and its fruits were blessings that America has unfortunately never learned to appreciate. Yet he made his gift, though it was not asked for. And he went his way. If he had followed the advice of his neighbors in Concord, America would have been much poorer, even though he might have sweated a good deal. He took the fork in the road.

    Thoreau different drumOld Henry David has meant a lot to me too. My mind drifts back to Wayne Monroe, high school history teacher, a grotesquely obese and superficial man who mocked Thoreau as  a hippy who didn't want to work.  "Freight Train Wayne," as we called him, drove a 1964 Pontiac Catalina. When he got in the vehicle it would list pronouncedly to the port side.  We observing wits would typically make a crack about his Monro-matic schock absorbers.

    That Merton was drawn to Thoreau has something to do with my being drawn to both of them.  Thank you, gentlemen, for living your lives in your way and writing it all down for men like me to savor.  Hats off, glasses raised, your memory will be preserved by the like-minded and discerning.

    Thoreau was a great aphorist. My favorite: "A man sits as many risks as he runs."  In those ten syllables, the sage of Walden Pond achieves aphoristic perfection. Study it if you would learn the art.

    America may not have appreciated him, but the greatness of America is that it allows his like to flourish.

    Success is living your own life in your own way.

    Thoreau fronting the essential factsTheme music

    Bill Vallicella

  • Is it Free?

    As the saying goes, if you aren't paying, then you are the product.  I decided not to save a few bucks with the Honey browser extension. But then I am a wary conservative. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Life’s Fugacity

    Tempus fugit carpe diemAs we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate.  This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate.  When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us.  But to us mid-streamers and late-streamers the fluxious fugacity of this life is all too apparent.

    Why does time's tempo seem to speed up as the years roll on?  Part of the explanation must be that there is less change and more stasis from decade to decade.  Dramatic changes in body and mind and environment occur in the first two decades of life.  You go from being a helpless infant to a cocky youth.  Your horizon expands from the family circle to the wide world.  In the third decade, biological growth over with,  one typically finishes one's education and gets settled in a career.  But there are still plenty of changes.  From age 20 to 30, I lived in about 15 different places in California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Austria, and Germany, studied at half a dozen universities, and worked as a guitar player, logger, tree planter, furniture mover, factory worker, mailman, taxi driver, exterminator, grave digger, and philosophy professor.  But from 30 to 40, I lived in only five different places with exactly one job, and from 40 to 50 in three places,  and from ages 49 to the present I have had exactly one permanent address.  And it won't be long, subjectively speaking, before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Ash Wednesday

    Vanitas2"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

    How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

    The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence.  This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't.  If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist.  That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.

    More here.

    You Are Going to Die.

    Christopher Hitchens has been dead for over eight years now.  In Platonic perspective, what no longer exists never truly existed.  So here we have a man who never truly existed but who denied the existence of the Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Euthyphro Dilemma, Divine Simplicity, and Modal Collapse

    The Question

    God commands all and only the morally obligatory. But does he command it because it is obligatory, or is it obligatory because he commands it? The question naturally arises, but issues in a dilemma. A dilemma is a very specific sort of problem in which there are exactly two alternatives, neither of which is acceptable. Thus we speak of the 'horns' of a dilemma, and of being 'impaled' on its horns.

    Bear in mind the following tripartite distinction. For any agent that issues a command, there is (i) the commanding, (ii) that which is commanded (the content of the act of commanding), and (iii) the relevant normative property of the content.   Contents of commands can be either permissible, impermissible, or obligatory.  Note the ambiguity of 'command' as between the act of commanding, and the content commanded. And note that while finite agents sometimes command what is morally impermissible, this is never the case with God. Everything God commands is morally obligatory.  The question is whether the divine commanding makes the action obligatory, or whether it is obligatory independently of God's command.  In the latter case, God is at most the advocate and enforcer of an obligation but not its legislator.

    Horn One

    If God commands an action because it is obligatory, then the obligatoriness of the action is not due to God's command, but is logically antecedent to it. God is then subject to an independently existing system of norms that are not in his control. He is then an advocate of the moral order and its enforcer, but not its source, with negative consequences for the divine sovereignty.  God is the Absolute, and the Absolute cannot be dependent on anything external to it for its existence, nature, modal status, or anything else, including the justification of its commands.  The sovereign God is the absolute lord of all orders, including the moral order.

    Horn Two

    If an action is obligatory because God commands it, then the normative quality of the action — its being obligatory — derives from a fact, the fact of God's commanding the action. This is puzzling: how can the mere fact that an agent issues a command make the content of the command objectively binding?  Of course, God is not any old agent: he is morally perfect.  So you can be sure that he won't command anything that is not categorically obligatory. Still, the  move from fact to norm is puzzling. The puzzle is heightened if the agent is free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense.  If God is free in this sense, libertarianly free, then he might not have commanded the action, in which case it would not have been obligatory.  This is an unacceptable result.  If it is impermissible to kill babies for sexual gratification, and obligatory to refrain from such an action, normative properties cannot derive from any being's free will.  For that would make morality arbitrary. The normative proposition It is impermissible to kill babies for sexual gratification, if true, is necessarily true. Its truth value cannot then depend on a contingent command even if the one who commands is God.

    Constraints on a Solution

    We are assuming that God exists, that morality is objective and not up to the whim of any being, and that God is sovereign over the moral order, and indeed, absolute lord of all orders.  So we cannot solve the dilemma by denying that God exists, or by grasping one or the other of the horns, or by limiting divine sovereignty.  We must find a way between the horns.  If we succeed, we will have shown that the dilemma is a false alternative.  

    The problem has two sides. First, how do we get from a fact to a norm? To be precise, how do get from the facticity of a commanding to the normativity of the content commanded? Second, how do we ensure that the norm is absolute?  We would have a solution if it could be shown that the fact just is the norm, and the fact could not have been different.

    William Mann's Solution via Divine Simplicity

    Mann's solution is built on the notion that, with respect to necessary truths and absolute values, God is not free to will otherwise than he wills. In this way the second horn, and arbitrarity, is avoided. But how can God be sovereign over the moral order if he cannot will otherwise than he wills? If I understand the solution, it is that sovereignty is maintained and the first horn is avoided if the constraint on divine freedom is internal to God as it would be if “absolute values are the expression of that [God's] rational autonomy.” (William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality, Oxford UP, 2015,168) Thus God is not free as possessing the liberty of indifference with respect to necessary truths and absolute values, but he is nonetheless  free as the rationally autonomous creative source of necessary truths and absolute values. God then is the source of necessary truths and absolute values, not their admirer or advocate.  God is not subject to the moral order; he is the source of it. Indeed, he is identical to it. Does Mann's solution require the doctrine of divine simplicity? It would seem so. This doctrine implies that knowing and willing are identical in God.  If so, then the truth value and modal status of necessary truths, including necessary moral truths, cannot be otherwise in which case God cannot will them to be otherwise.

    On the doctrine of divine simplicity, then, the Euthyphro Dilemma turns out to be false dilemma: the simplicity doctrine allows for a third possibility, a way between the horns.*  God is Goodness itself, not a good being among others. As such, he just is the content of morality.  The moral order is not external to him nor antecedent to him logically or ontologically: he is not subject to it.  Sovereignty is preserved. Arbitrarity is avoided because God cannot will any moral contents other than the ones he wills.

    Problem Solved?

    If God is absolutely sovereign, as he must be to be God, then he is sovereign over every order including the MODAL order.  It is cogently arguable, however, that the simplicity doctrine entails the collapse of modal distinctions and thus the collapse of the modal order. 

    It looks as if we can solve the Euthyphro problem, but only by generating a different problem. The Euthyphro problem is solved by saying that (i) the obligatory is obligatory because God commands it, but (ii) the contents of the divine commands could not have been otherwise. They could not have been otherwise because these contents are contained within the unchangeable divine nature.  Hence  God is neither subject to an external moral order, nor the arbitrary creator of it.  God is the moral order. In God, the facticity of the commanding and the normativity of the contents commanded are one. 

    But if God, because he is absolutely sovereign, cannot be subject to a logically prior MORAL order, then he also cannot be subject to a logically prior MODAL order. As absolutely sovereign, God must be sovereign over all orders. It cannot be that the possible and the necessary subsist in sublime independence of God.  It cannot be that creation is the selective actualization of some proper subset of self-subsisting  mere possibles, or the actualization of one among an infinity of possible worlds.   Creation is not actualization. For then God would not be creating out of nothing, but out of possibles the Being of which would be independent of God's Being. 

    God, then, cannot be subject to a modal order independent of him. So one might think to import into God the modal distinctions, for example, the distinction between the merely possible and the actual.  This importation would parallel the importation into the divine nature of the various contents of divine commands. Perhaps it is like this. God entertains mere possibles which, as merely possible, subsist only as accusatives of his thinking, but actualizes some of them, super-adding existence to them.  The mere possibles that need an act of divine actualization in order to exist would then contingently exist, which is of course the result we want.  Unfortunately, the contingency of actual creatures (Socrates, for example, as opposed to his merely possible brother Schmocrates)  entails the possibility of no creatures and of other creatures who remain merely possible. But then we have in God a distinction between his actual and his merely possible creative decisions.  This conflicts with DDS and its commitment to God's being purely actual (actus purus).

    Conclusion

    The doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) allows for a solution of the Euthyphro dilemma with the following advantages: it upholds the existence of God, the objectivity of morality, the non-arbitrarity of the divine will, and God's sovereignty over the moral order. But God, to be God, must be the absolute lord of all orders, including the modal order.  The simplicity doctrine, however, needed to solve the Euthyphro dilemma entails the collapse of the modal order in which case it is not there to for God to be sovereign over. The objectivity of the modal distinctions needs to be upheld just as much as the objectivity of morality. But this is impossible if DDS is true. So while God must be simple to be God, he cannot be simple if if he is the creator of our universe, a universe whose contingency is the point of departure for the ascent to the divine absolute.

    Welcome to the aporetics of the Absolute!

    ________________________________

    * A dilemma is said to be false if there is a third possibility, and thus a way between the horns.  The contemporary Thomist, Edward Feser, maintains that the Euthyphro dilemma is false:

    Divine simplicity also entails, of course, that God’s will just is God’s goodness which just is His immutable and necessary existence. That means that what is objectively good and what God wills for us as morally obligatory are really the same thing considered under different descriptions, and that neither could have been other than they are. There can be no question then, either of God’s having arbitrarily commanded something different for us (torturing babies for fun, or whatever) or of there being a standard of goodness apart from Him. Again, the Euthyphro dilemma is a false one; the third option that it fails to consider is that what is morally obligatory is what God commands in accordance with a non-arbitrary and unchanging standard of goodness that is not independent of Him. 

     

    Bill Vallicella

    8 responses to “The Euthyphro Dilemma, Divine Simplicity, and Modal Collapse”

  • Spiritual Mountebanks

    The world is full of hustlers and charlatans who prey upon spiritual seekers. One ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims enlightenment or special powers. The acid test, perhaps, is whether they demand money or sex for their services. If they do, run away while holding onto your wallet. 'Bhagwan Shree' Rajneesh  is a good example from the '80s. 

    Recoiling from the mountebanks, some go to the opposite extreme, holding as fraudulent all spiritual teachers.

    Some people are gullible and credulous, without a skeptical bone in their bodies. Others are skepticism incarnate, unable to believe anything or admire anything. A strange case of the latter is U. G. Krishnamurti, the anti-guru and 'anti-charlatan.' Please don't confuse him with the much better known J. Krishnamurti.

    An obsessive doubter and debunker, U. G. Krishnamurti is a bit like the atheist who can't leave God alone, but must constantly be disproving him. U.G. can't leave the enlightenment quest and 'spirituality' alone. It's all buncombe, he thinks, but he can't be done with it.

    Buddha, Jesus, and the rest were all just kidding themselves and misleading others. But U. G. can't just arrive at this conclusion and move on to something he deems worthwhile. For he is an 'anti-quester' tied to what he opposes by his self-defining opposition to it. Curiously perverse, but fascinating. He is a little like the later Wittgenstein who, though convinced that the problems of philosophy arose from linguistic bewitchment, couldn't move on to something worth doing, but instead obsessively scribbled on in any attempt to show a nonexistent fly the way out of a nonexistent fly-bottle.

    Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

    The gullible Merton appears to have been taken in by Trungpa.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Foolish Leftists

    The political authorities are tasked with the protection of life, liberty, and property. But when the authorities abdicate, fearing the charge of 'racism,' the citizen must look to his own protection. And so the leftist foolishly works against his own interest: he wants fewer guns in civilian hands, but coddles criminals, thereby giving the citizen a reason to arm himself.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Clemency

    Is a presidential pardon an act of mercy? If it is, then it cannot be said to be just or unjust. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Infatuation

    It is fitting that infatuation is fleeting.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Logic

    The study of logic is profitable only to those who don't need it.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Wasted on the Young

    A crude adage has it that virgins are wasted on the young. The same could be said of philosophy.

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

  4. Bill, One final complicating observation: The pacifist interpretation of Matt 5:38-42 has been contested in light of Lk 22: 36-38…

  5. The Kant-Swedenborg relation is more complicated than I thought. https://philarchive.org/archive/THOTRO-12

  6. Ed, Just now read the two topmost articles on your Substack. I’m a Kant scholar of sorts and I recall…

  7. Hi Ed, Thanks for dropping by my new cyber pad. I like your phrase, “chic ennui.” It supplies part of…

  8. Very well put: “phenomenologists of suburban hanky-panky, auto dealerships, and such.” In my student years reading Updike and Cheever was…

  9. Bill, I have been looking further into Matt 5: 38-42 and particularly how best to understand the verb antistēnai [to…

  10. Bill and Steven, I profited from what each of you has to say about Matt 5: 38-42, but I think…

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