Glenn Reynolds reports on successful pushback against such outrages as the FCC's "plan to 'monitor' news coverage at not only broadcast stations, but also at print publications that the FCC has no authority to regulate."
I hereby introduce 'obamination' to refer to those abominations perpetrated against the populace by big government, whether perpetrated by the POMO prez himself or by any liberal fascist. Every obamination is an abomination, but not conversely.
The Obaminator himself claims not to be for big government. We already know, however, that he is the most brazen liar ever to occupy the presidency. Here's more evidence. And here is documentation of Obama's mendacity in refusing to own up to his own call for a fundamental transformation of America.
George Zimmerman felt threatened by a boy almost half his age. When Trayvon Martin couldn’t produce papers proving that he wasn’t a “punk,” Zimmerman felt justified in killing him. The judicial system backed him up.
The verdicts matter. Zimmerman’s acquittal lent legal imprimatur to the understanding that it is open season on young black men; Dunn’s mistrial on the key charge of murder did nothing to discredit that. But these tales go beyond the legal arena: they reflect a violent, racist culture in which the black body, particularly when it is young and male, is considered fair game.
You have to be moral scum to write crap like this. There are certain views the holding of which morally condemns the holder. See my articles below.
Reflecting on the seeming tautology, 'What exists exists,' Jacques Maritain writes,
This is no tautology, it implies an entire metaphysics. What is posited outside its causes exercises an activity, an energy which is existence itself. To exist is to maintain oneself and to be maintained outside nothingness; esse is an act, a perfection, indeed the final perfection, a splendid flower in which objects affirm themselves. (A Preface to Metaphysics, Sheed and Ward, 1939, pp. 93-94)
This is the sort of writing, florid and French, that drives analytic philosophers crazy and moves them to mockery. But I think Maritain is here expressing an important insight. Let me see if I can explain it with as little reliance as possible on Maritain's Thomistic machinery.
1. A tautology is a logical truth, a truth true in virtue of its logical form alone. Now it certainly does seem that 'What exists exists' is true in virtue of its logical form alone. Write it like this: For any x, if x exists, then x exists. By Universal Instantiation, we get if a exists, then a exists, which is of the form, if p then p, which is equivalent to p or not-p, which is the Law of Excluded Middle.
2. On the other hand, it has been clear for a long time that 'exist(s)' is no ordinary predicate. To say of an item that it exists is not to characterize it or classify it. Existence is not a classificatory concept. It doesn't partition neutral items into two classes, the existent ones and the nonexistent ones. Pace Meinong, there are no nonexistent items. And existence certainly does not partition existing items into two classes, the existing and the nonexisting. When I say of a thing that it exists I am saying that it is not nothing. I am not saying that it is F or G, but that it is. I am pointing to its sheer being or existence.
3. The same goes for 'What exists, exists.' Although it can be used to express a tautology, it can also be used non-tautologically. Used non-tautologically, it does not say that that-which-exists is that-which-exists; it says that that-which-exists exists. In other words, it does not say, tautologically, that beings are beings; it says, non-tautologically, that beings are.
4. Somewhere in The Enneads Plotinus writes, "It is by the One that all being are beings." But there would be no need to drag The One into the picture if 'all beings are beings' is a tautology. Tautologies do not need truth-makers. Plotinus' point, of course, is that it is by the One that all beings are. They are in virtue of the One; their Being derives from the One. Whether or not that it true, we understand what is being said and we understand that 'all beings are being' is not a tautology.
5. Metaphysics targets the existence of that-which-exists, the Being of beings, the esse of entia, das Sein des Seienden. Thus metaphysics presupposes a difference between existence and the existent. But existence is "odious to the logician" as George Santayana once observed. (Scepticism and Animal Faith, Dover, 1955, p. 48, orig. publ. 1923.) And so the logician will try to knock the wind out of the metaphysical sails by trying to accommodate the difference between existence and what exists in some such aseptic fashion as the following:
x exists =df for some y, y = x.
Accordingly, existence is identity-with-something-or-other. 'Exists' as a load-bearing predicate gets replaced by some purely logical machinery: the particular quantifer, a bound variable, the identity sign, and a free variable. Existence for the logician is a 'thin' topic. Thin to the point of being anorexic. It is just logical bones bare of metaphysical meat.
6. Well, why not be a thin theorist? I have written a lot on this topic, so now I will be very brief. While it is of course true that everything that exists is identical to something, namely, itself, this presupposes that the things in question exist in a sense that cannot be captured by the above definition. Another way of putting the point is that the above definition is circular. For it amounts to
x exists =df for some y that exists, y = x.
If I want to know what it is for something to exist, I learn nothing by being told that it is identical to something that exists, although that is of course true.
7. Getting back to Maritain, he is right as against the thin theorists: existence is a metaphysically weighty topic. 'What exists exists' can be given a non-tautological reading. But on the thin theory, it could only amount to the tautological 'What is identical to something is identical to something.' But whether existence is a perfection, or indeed the final perfection, or rather the opposite, as Santayana and Sartre would maintain, is a further question.
8. Unfortunately, no resolute thin theorist will be persuaded by anything I or anyone says to abandon his theory. All my dialectic can do is lead the reader to a point where he either gets it or he doesn't, where he either sees it, or he doesn't. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
It's a bit like arguments over religion. If you think that religion is nothing but a tissue of childish superstitions, will I ever be able to convince you otherwise? No. For it is not a matter of analytical intelligence, but of insight, or rather, in your case a lack of insight.
A post from last year applicable to the Michael Dunn case. Like Trayvon Martin, Michael Dunn has ruined his life by failing to exercise self control.
…………..
There is so much to learn from the Trayvon Martin affair. One 'take-away' is the importance of self-control. If Martin had been taught, or rather had learned, to control himself he would most likely be alive today. But he didn't. He blew his cool when questioned about his trespassing in a gated community on a rainy night. He punched a man in the face and broke his nose, then jumped on him, pinned him down, and told him that he was going to die that night. So, naturally, the man defended himself against the deadly attack with deadly force. What George Zimmerman did was both morally and legally permissible. If some strapping youth is pounding your head into the pavement, you are about to suffer "grave bodily harm" if not death. What we have here is clearly a case of self-defense.
Does race enter into this? In one way it does. Blacks as a group have a rather more emotional nature than whites as a group. (If you deny this, you have never lived in a black neighborhood or worked with blacks, as I have.) So, while self-control is important for all, the early inculcation of self-control is even more important for blacks.
Hard looks, hateful looks, suspicious looks — we all get them from time to time, but they are not justifications for launching a physical assault on the looker. The same goes for harsh words.
If you want to be successful you must learn to control yourself. You must learn to control your thoughts, your words, and your behavior. You must learn to keep a tight rein on your feelings. Before leaving your house, you must remind yourself that you are likely to meet offensive people. Rehearse your Stoic and other maxims so that you will be ready should the vexatious and worse heave into view. Unfortunately, liberals in positions of authority have abdicated when it comes to moral education. For example, they refuse to enforce discipline in classrooms. They refuse to teach morality. They tolerate bad behavior. So liberals, as usual, are part of the problem.
But that is to put it too mildly. There is no decency on the Left, no wisdom, and, increasingly, no sanity. For example, the crazy comparison of Trayvon Martin with Emmet Till. But perhaps I should put the point disjunctively: you are either crazy if you make that comparison, or moral scum.
Less crazy, but still crazy is the comparison of Michael Dunn to George Zimmerman.
"First, if your justification of state involvement in marriage is the production and protection of children, then I think you open yourself to intervention of the state beyond what a limited government conservative should be comfortable with. If protection of marriage by the state for such a goal is the standard, many other activities should be outlawed. Adultery, divorce, pornography are all things that create a poor environment to raise and nurture children, but I don't see us banning said actions."
I Reply
Conservatives are committed to limited government, and I'm a conservative. It is obvious, I hope, that the state ought not be involved in every form of human association. State involvement in any particular type of human association must therefore be justified. We want as much government as we need, but no more. The state is coercive by its very nature, as it must be if it is to be able to enforce its mandates and exercise its legitimate functions, and is therefore at odds with the liberty and autonomy of citizens. It is not obvious that the government should be in the marriage business at all. The burden is on the state to justify its intervention and regulation. But there is a reason for the state to be involved. The state has a legitimate interest in its own perpetuation and maintenance via the production of children, their socializing, their protection, and their transformation into productive citizens who will contribute to the common good. (My use of 'the state' needn't involve an illict hypostatization.) It is this interest that justifies the state's recognition and regulation of marriage as a union of exactly one man and exactly one woman.
If one takes this view, does it follow that adultery, divorce, and pornography should be outlawed? Not at all. Slippery slope arguments are one and all invalid. (Side-issues I won't pursue: (i) Adultery is a legitimate ground for divorce, so divorce cannot be outlawed. (ii) Another freason why divorce ought not be outlawed is that it is often good for offspring.)
Slippery Slope Arguments
But perhaps I should say something about slippery slope arguments. They come up quite often, in the gun debate, for example. "If citizens are allowed to own semi-automatic pistols and rifles, then they must be allowed to own other sorts of weaponry." That is often heard.
There is, however, no logical necessity that if you allow citizens to own semi-automatic rifles, then you must also allow them to own machine guns, grenade launchers, chemical and biological weapons, tactical nukes . . . . At some point a line is drawn. We draw lines all the time. Time was when the voting age was 21. Those were the times when, in the words of Barry McGuire, "You're old enough to kill, but not for votin'." The voting age is now 18. If anyone at the time had argued that reducing the age to 18 would logically necessitate its being reduced to 17, then 16, and then 15, and so on unto the enfranchisement of infants and the prenatal, that would have been dismissed as a silly argument.
If the above anti-gun slippery slope argument were valid, then the following pro-gun argument would be valid: "If the government has the right to ban civilian possession of fully automatic rifles, then it has the right to ban semi-automatic rifles, semi-autos generally, revolvers, single-shot derringers, BB guns, . . . . But it has no right to ban semi-autos, and so on. Ergo, etc.
I have been speaking of the 'logical' slippery slope. Every such argument is invalid. But there is also the 'causal' or 'probabilistic' slippery slope. Some of these have merit, some don't. One must look at the individual cases.
Supposing all semi-auto weapons (pistols, rifles, and shotguns) to be banned, would this 'lead to' or 'pave the way for' the banning of revolvers and handguns generally? 'Lead to' is a vague phrase. It might be taken to mean 'raise the probability of' or 'make it more likely that.' Slippery slope arguments of this sort in some cases have merit. If all semi-auto rifles are banned, then the liberals will be emboldened and will try to take the next step, the banning of semi-auto pistols. The probability of that happening is very high. I would lay serious money on the proposition that Dianne Feinstein of San Bancisco, who refuses to use correct gun terminology, though she knows it, referring to semi-automatic long guns as 'assault rifles,' a phrase at once devoid of definite meaning and emotive, would press to have all semi-autos banned if she could get a ban on semi-auto rifles.
But how high is the probability of the slide in the other direction? Not high at all. In fact very low, closing in on zero. How many conservatives are agitating the right to buy (without special permits and fees) machine guns (fully automatic weapons)? None that I know of. How many conservatives are agitating for the right to keep and bear tactical nukes?
I return to my reader's claim. He said in effect that if the State regulates marriage then we are on a slippery slope toward the regulation and in some cases banning of all sorts of things that are harmful to children. But the argument is invalid if intended as a logical slippery slope (since all such arguments are invalid), and inductively extremely weak if intended as a causal or probabilistic slippery slope. The likelihood of, say, a clamp-down on the deleterious dreck emanating from our mass media outlets is extremely low.
There are a couple of old men on my street who have made it past 90. Shaky Jake, as I call him, is 91, except that there is nothing shaky about him. I encountered him the other day on the rocky trails of the Superstition foothills, upright, lucid, happy.
Across the street from Jake lives Tim, still self-reliant and sharp at 95.
From my conversations with them, the quality of their lives is good. But attitude is everything, here as elsewhere.
Unquestionably philosophy is among of the most male-dominated disciplines in universities today, but inviting outside review by the American Philosophical Association's (APA) Committee on the Status of Women was guaranteed to produce a finding as predictable as the Salem Committee to Investigate Witchcraft in 1691. The irony of this situation is the unacknowledged reversal of the presumption of "privilege" that was at the heart of the original (and justified) feminist complaint about sexism a generation ago. While it may still be justified in the case of academic philosophy, it should not be beyond question whether mere statistical "underrepresentation" should be regarded as prima facie evidence of guilt, and therefore allowing the APA report to assert damning findings about the whole department while disclosing virtually no concrete facts.
One of the few meager facts in the APA report is that there have been "at least" 15 formal complaints to the University's Office of Discrimination and Harassment (ODH) out of the Philosophy department. "At least" 15 complaints? Is the actual number higher? Over what time period? How does this compare with the rate of complaints from other departments? How were these complaints disposed? How many were regarded as serious offenses? The report nowhere says, beyond a few vague hints that a handful of instances drew reprimands of some kind. Without a time frame or baseline against other departments it is impossible to make a relative judgment.
The APA can't be wholly blamed for this terminal vagueness, as the disposition of formal harassment complaints is handled confidentially for the most part. Unlike police departments whose arrests and investigations are a matter of public record, ODH does not disclose the data or details of their cases, and complaints, once made, require a virtual lockdown of discussion among bystanders and affected parties. This No-Persons-Land of university self-policing stems from the erosion of robust due process that would be intolerable in criminal and civil complaints outside university grounds, and campus feminists have been the prime mover in the erosion of due process standards.
Likewise the report's finding that "some male faculty have been observed 'ogling' undergraduate women students" should require something more substantial than was offered. Count me as shocked, shocked, that faculty ogling would occur. I am sure this has never happened before. Is there a relative scale for judging degrees of "ogling," by the way? Is "ogling" a more or less serious offense than a leer? I get it that the "power relationship" of a professor over a student makes this kind of behavior more serious than the normal private behavior of frat boys on a Saturday night, but are undergraduate women presumed to be so helpless or defenseless as to be unable to process and fight back against the lecherous leers of an analytical philosopher?
Likewise the APA report punts on offering any details about "bullying" in the department because it would "reveal… the perpetrators." Instead it offers general characterizations of a department that could easily be confused with the Miami Dolphins locker room, with an after-hours culture that is a poor imitation of Monty Python's "Philosopher's Song." Is the majority of the department faculty complicit in this, or just two or three bad actors? If the latter (as most people strongly suspect), why not name them? And rather than require the entire department to submit to a re-education camp, why not make it easier for the department or the administration to fire the bad actors? Nothing will spur better behavior faster than the prospect of termination.
The report complains that "The Department uses pseudo-philosophical analyses to avoid directly addressing the situation." Does this mean that philosophers actually philosophized about the problem? Again, shocking. The APA may be right that this approach is inadequate, but how would this differ essentially from the mode of reaction from feminist professors about complaints made in a women's studies program, where complaints would be run through the filters of gender theory?
Communism as a political force, though not quite dead, is moribund; but one of its offspring, Political Correctness, is alive and kicking especially in the universities, the courts, in the mainstream media, in Hollywood, in the Democrat Party, and indeed wherever liberals and leftists dominate. This is one of the reasons why I am interested in the history of Communism. I want to understand PC, and to understand PC one must understand the CP, for the former is child of the latter.
In her fascinating memoir, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (Oxford 1990), Healey mentions the tendency leftists have of purging one another on grounds of insufficient ideological purity: it is almost as if, for a leftist, one can never be too far left. Healey writes:
The great irony of the McCarthy period is that we did almost as much damage to ourselves, in the name of purifying our ranks, as Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover and all the other witch-hunters combined were able to do. One of the most catastrophically stupid things we ever did was to choose this moment to launch an internal campaign against white chauvinism. (125)
'White chauvinism' was the term used in the '50s in CPUSA circles for racism. After singing the praises of the Party for its commitment to racial equality, Healey continues:
However, with the white chauvinism campaign of 1949-1953, what had been a legitimate concern turned into an obsession, a ritual act of self-purification that did nothing to strengthen the Party in its fight against racism and was manipulated by some Communist leaders for ends which had nothing to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole campaign. Once an accusation of white chauvinism was thrown against a white Communist, there was no defense. Debate was over. By the very act of denying the validity of the charge, you only proved your own guilt. Thousands of people were caught up in this campaign — not only in the Party itself, but within the Progressive Party and some of the Left unions as well. In Los Angeles alone we must have expelled two hundred people on charges of white chauvinism, usually on the most trivial of pretexts. People would be expelled for serving coffee in a chipped coffee cup to a Black or serving watermelon at the end of dinner. (p. 126 emphasis added.)
Healey goes on to describe how she herself was brought up on a white chauvinism charge, was forced to admit guilt, sign a statement, etc. She details how it was impossible to criticize even the most incompetent of Black party members. (pp. 126-129)
Not much has changed in this regard. There is nothing a liberal fears more than to be labeled a racist, and, like 'fascist,' 'racist' is a term they apply indiscriminately to their political opponents as an all-purpose smear word.
I thank Jannai Shields for referring me to Peter van Inwagen's Russell's China Teapotand Andrew Bailey for making van Inwagen's papers available on the Web.
Again, what is Putin? He is a constant reminder to the postmodern Western mind that the human condition has not yet evolved beyond the fist. He is a bumper-sticker example of Aristotle’s dictum that it is easy to be moral in your sleep, given that verbiage without power is hardly moral or difficult. He is also a reminder about what is important in the most elemental sense. As we debate former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s remonstrances on oversized Cokes or Michelle Obama’s advocacy of celery sticks, Putin has dogs shot down to spruce up the Olympic grounds. We calibrate to the point of paralysis just how large a carbon footprint the Keystone Pipeline may or may not have; Putin ignores the Arctic tundra to enrich kleptomaniac Russian oligarchs and prop up his dysfunctional state.
Bare-chested Putin gallops his horses, poses with his tigers, and shoots his guns — what Obama dismisses as “tough-guy schtick.” Perhaps. But Putin is almost saying, “You have ten times the wealth and military power that I have, but I can neutralize you by my demonic personality alone.” Barack Obama, in his increasingly metrosexual golf get-ups and his prissy poses on the nation’s tony golf courses, wants to stay cool while playing a leisure sport. It reminds us of Stafford Cripps being played by Stalin during World War II. “Make no mistake about it” and “Let me be perfectly clear” lose every time. Obama’s subordinates violate the law by going after the communications of a Fox reporter’s parents; Putin himself threatens to cut off the testicles of a rude journalist.
Putin is a reminder not just of our dark past, where raw force, not morality, adjudicated behavior, but, more worrisome, perhaps of a dark future as well, in which we in the West will continually overthink, hyperagonize, and nuance to death every idea, every issue, and every thought in terror that it might not be 100 percent fair, completely unbiased, absolutely justified. We will do anything to have the good life above all else; Putin prefers the bad life on his own terms.
Gary Gutting recently interviewed Alvin Plantinga in the pages of The New York Times and brought up the business about Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot. The following response of Gutting to Plantinga comes early on in the interview:
G.G.: You say atheism requires evidence to support it. Many atheists deny this, saying that all they need to do is point out the lack of any good evidence for theism. You compare atheism to the denial that there are an even number of stars, which obviously would need evidence. But atheists say (using an example from Bertrand Russell) that you should rather compare atheism to the denial that there’s a teapot in orbit around the sun. Why prefer your comparison to Russell’s?
Russell's comparison has long struck me as lame, and so I want to revisit and rethink this topic. What follows is an old post from August 2010 amended and substantially expanded:
Gutting, Dawkins, and Russell's Celestial Teapot
In his recent NYT Opinionator piece, On Dawkins's Atheism, Notre Dame's Gary Gutting writes, describing the "no arguments argument" of some atheists:
To say that the universe was created by a good and powerful being who cares about us is an extraordinary claim, so improbable to begin with that we surely should deny it unless there are decisive arguments for it (arguments showing that it is highly probable). Even if Dawkins’ arguments against theism are faulty, can’t he cite the inconclusiveness of even the most well-worked-out theistic arguments as grounds for denying God’s existence?
He can if he has good reason to think that, apart from specific theistic arguments, God’s existence is highly unlikely. Besides what we can prove from arguments, how probable is it that God exists? Here Dawkins refers to Bertrand Russell’s example of the orbiting teapot. We would require very strong evidence before agreeing that there was a teapot in orbit around the sun, and lacking such evidence would deny and not remain merely agnostic about such a claim. This is because there is nothing in our experience suggesting that the claim might be true; it has no significant intrinsic probability.
But suppose that several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot and, later, a number of reputable space scientists interpreted certain satellite data as showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object, even though other space scientists questioned this interpretation. Then it would be gratuitous to reject the hypothesis out of hand, even without decisive proof that it was true. We should just remain agnostic about it.
The claim that God exists is much closer to this second case. There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being, and there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence. Therefore, an agnostic stance seems preferable to atheism.
I have a serious problem with Gutting's response to the Russell-Dawkins tag team. Gutting concedes far too much in his reply, namely, that it even makes sense to compare the claim that there is an orbiting teapot with the claim that God exists. Instead of attacking this comparison as wrongheaded from the outset, Gutting in effect concedes its aptness when he points out that, just as there could be (inconclusive) scientific evidence of a celestial teaspot, there could be (inconclusive) experiential and argumentative evidence for the existence of God. So let me try to explain why I think that the two existence claims ('God exists' and 'A celestial teapot exists') are radically different.
If someone asserts that there there is a celestial teapot orbiting the Sun, or an angry unicorn on the far side of the Moon, or that 9/11 was an 'inside job,' one will justifiably demand evidence. "It's possible, but what's your evidence for so outlandish a claim?" It is the same with God, say many atheists. The antecedent probability of God's existence, they think, is on a par with the extremely low antecedent probability of there being a celestial teapot or an irate lunar unicorn, a 'lunicorn,' if you will.
But this is to assume something that a sophisticated theist such as Thomas Aquinas would never grant, namely, that God, if he exists, is just another being among the totality of beings. For Aquinas, God is not an ens (a being) but esse ipsum subsistens (self-subsistent Being). God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. Admittedly, this is not an easy notion; but if the atheist is not willing to grapple with it, then his animadversions are just so many grapplings with a straw man.
Why can't God be just another being among beings in the way an orbiting teapot would be just another being among beings were it to exist? I hope it is clear that my point is not that while a teapot is a material object, God is not. That's true, of course, but my point cuts much deeper: if God exists, he exists in a way dfferent from the way contingent beings exist.
First of all, if God exists, then God is the metaphysical ground of the existence of every contingent being. Every such being on classical theism is continuously maintained in existence by the exercise of divine power. Thus every contingent being is radically dependent for its existence on divine activity. The same cannot be said about an orbiting teapot. If 'ontic' means pertaining to beings, and 'ontological' means pertaining to the Being of beings (the esse of entia), then 'God exists' is both ontic and ontolological. It says that there is a being possessing such-and-such divine attributes, but it also says something about the Being of what is other than God, namely, that its Being is createdness, a form of continuous ontological dependency. 'An orbiting teapot exists,' however is merely an ontic claim. It says or implies nothing about the Being of anything distinct from it. Now this difference between an ontic-ontological claim and a merely ontic one strikes me as very important. It is a difference that throws a spanner into the works of such facile comparisons as Russell's.
Second, on some accounts necessarily existent abstracta are also dependent on God. If (Fregean) propositions are divine thoughts then they are dependent on God despite their metaphysical necessity. The exist necessarily, but they have their necessity not from themselves but from another. Not so for the teapots and the unicorns.
Third, God is not only the ultimate ground of all beings, both contingent and necessary (except himself); he is also the ultimate ground of the intelligibility of all beings, of their aptness to be understood by us or anyone, their aptness to be subjects of true predications. Propositional or sentential truth is made possible by ontic truth, the intelligibility of that which is veridically represented by true propositions. But I don't think one would want to say that an angry unicon on the far side of the moon is the ultimate ground of intelligibility.
Fourth, God is the ultimate source of all value.
Fifth, God is the all-pervasive One, immanent in each thing yet transcendent of all things. This is not true of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility and its value snd its unity in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic purely spiritual being, a being who does not have existence like a teapot but is its existence
So, on a sophisticated conception, God cannot be just one more being among beings. The Source of being is not just another thing sourced. The ground of intelligibility is not just another intelligible item. The Thinker behind every thought is not just another thought. The locus and source of all value is not just another valuable thing. The One is not just another member of the Many.
These differences between God classically conceived and outlandish specimens of space junk is connected with the fact that one can argue from general facts about the universe to the existence of God, but not from such facts to the existence of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. Thus there are various sorts of cosmological argument that proceed a contingentia mundi to a ground of contingent beings. But there is no similar a posteriori argument to a celestial teapot. There are also arguments to God from truth, from consciousness, from apparent design, from desire, from morality, and others besides. But as far as I know there are no similar arguments to teapots or unicorns or flying spaghetti monsters.
The very existence of these arguments shows two things.
First, since they move from very general facts (the existence of contingent beings, the existence of truth) to the existence of a source of these general facts, they show that God is not a being among beings, not something merely in addition to what is ordinarily taken to exist. Affirming and denyng the existence of God is not simply a matter of adding to or subtracting from a pre-given ontological inventory. For God does not make a merely ontic difference, but an ontological one as well. The existence of God changes the ontology. For if God exists, then the Being of non-divine entities is createdness, hence different from what it would be were there no God. Socrates is a being whose existence/nonexistence makes no difference to the system of ontological categories, and no difference to the nature of existence, property-possession, etc. God, however, is a being whose existence/nonexistence does make such a difference.
Second, these arguments give positive reason for believing in the existence of God. Are they compelling? No, but then no argument for any substantive philosophical conclusion is compelling.
People like Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the classical theist's assertions. To sum up. (i) God is not a gratuitous posit in that there are many detailed arguments for the existence of God; (ii) God is not a physical being; (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings. In all three respects, God is quite unlike a celestial teapot, a lunar uncorn, an invisible hippopotamus, and suchlike concoctions.
God is a not a being among beings, but the very Being of beings. To deny God, then, is not like denying an orbiting teapot; it is more like denying Being itself, and with it, beings. Or it is more like denying truth itself as opposed to denying that a particular proposition is true.
One who appreciates this ought to find discussions about the antecedent probability of theism as compared to teapotism faintly absurd. The question of the antecedent probability of something like Russell's teapot makes sense and has an easy answer: very low! The question of the antecedent probability of there being truths has no clear sense. The probability of a proposition is the probability of its being true. Hence, that there is truth, or that there are truths, is a presupposition of any meaningful talk of probability. It is therefore senseless to ask about the antecedent probability of there being truths, and the following answer is clearly absurd: the antecedent probabilty of there being any true propositions is extremely low.
Now my point is that the God question is like the truth question, not like the teapot question.
Unfortunately, the line I have sketched here will be rejected both by all atheists, but also by many theists, those theists who think of God as a being among beings, uniquely qualified no doubt, but no different in his Being or in the way he has properties than any other being qua being. Or, in the quasi-Heideggerian jargon employed above, these theists will say that 'God exists' is an ontic, not an ontic-ontological claim, and as such no different than 'Socrates exists' or 'Russell's celestial teapot exists.'
And the widely-bruited 'death of God?' It is an 'event' of rather more significance than the discovery that there is no celestial teapot (or Santa Claus, or . . . ) after all. As Nietzsche observed, the death of God is the death of truth.
Our long-time friend Horace Jeffery Hodges kindly linked to and riffed upon my recent quotage of a bit of whimsicality from the second volume of J. N. Findlay's Gifford lectures. So here's another Findlay quotation for Jeff's delectation, this time from Plato and Platonism: An Introduction (Times Books, 1978):
It is not here, we may note, our task to defend Plato's Great Inversion, the erection of instances into ontological appendages of Ideas rather than the other way round. It is only our task to show what this inversion involves, and that it does dispose of many powerful arguments. For despite much talk of the concretely real and of what we can hold in our hands, it is plain that nothing so much eludes us or evades us as the vanishing instances which surround us or which go on in us. Even our friends leave nothing in our hands or our minds, but the characteristic patterns on which we can, alas, only ponder lovingly when as instances they are dead, and we ourselves and our whole life of care and achievement leave nothing behind but the general memory of what we did and were. (23)
My esteemed teacher's poetic prose may have got the better of him in that last sentence redolent as it is of an old man's nostalgia. For it is not only Findlay's characteristic patterns once so amply instantiated here below that I now ponder lovingly, but the actual words he wrote, many of them printed, some of them hand-written, that strikingly singular voluminous flow of Baroque articulation so beautifully expressive of a wealth of thoughts. In his books, I have the man still, and presumably at his best, even if he himself, long dead as an instance, has made the transcensive move from the Cave's chiaroscuro to the limpid light wherein he now, something of a Platonic Form himself, beholds the forma formarum, the Form of all Forms.
You will be forgiven if you think my poetic prose has gotten the better of me.
