The Marriage Killer

My angelic wife doesn't nag, so I don't have this problem.  But you might.  She doesn't nag, but she becomes inordinately happy when I do any work around the house.  Curiously irrational but delightful nonetheless.  Women are unduly attuned to the values of domestic order and cleanliness.  Not that these aren't values; but in a sound axiological hierarchy they must be assigned a position well below the values of, say, playing chess and writing philosophy, hiking and biking, acquiring and reading more books, building bookshelves to house them . . . .

Can God Break a Law of Nature?

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Plantinga's new book.  They are  collected under the rubric Science and Religion.  In the third chapter of Where the Conflict Really Lies, Plantinga addresses questions about divine action and divine intervention in the workings of nature.  A miracle is such an intervention.  But aren't miracles logically impossible?  Plantinga doesn't cite Earman, but I will: 

John Earman, Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (Oxford 2000), p. 8, writes:

 . . . if a miracle is a violation of a law of nature, then whether or not the violation is due to the intervention of the Deity, a miracle is logically impossible since, whatever else a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity.

According to one way of thinking, miracles are violations of laws of nature. And so one may argue:

1. A miracle is an exception to a law of nature.
2. Every law of nature is an exceptionless regularity (though not conversely).
Therefore
3. A miracle is an exception to an exceptionless regularity.
Therefore
4. Miracles are logically impossible.

 Please note that (2) merely states that whatever a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity. Thus (2) does not commit one to a regularity theory of laws according to which laws are identified with exceptionless regularities. The idea is that any theory of (deterministic) laws would include the idea that a law is an exceptionless regularity.

The above argument seems to show that if miracles are to be logically possible they cannot be understood as violations of laws of nature. To avoid the conclusion one must deny (1). How then are miracles to be understood?  Plantinga supplies an answer:

Miracles are often thought to be problematic, in that God, if he were to perform a miracle, would be involved in 'breaking,' going contrary to, abrogating, suspending, a natural law.  But given this conception of law, if God were to perform a miracle, it wouldn't at all involve contravening a natural law.  That is because, obviously, any occasion on which God performs a miracle is an occasion when the universe is not causally closed; and the laws say nothing about what happens when the universe is not causally closed.  Indeed, on this conception it isn't even possible that God break a law of nature. (pp. 82-83)

As I understand him, Plantinga is saying that a miracle is not a divine suspension of a law of nature, but a  divine suspension of causal closure.   Conservation and other natural laws apply to isolated or closed systems (78).  God cannot intervene without 'violating' closure; but that does not amount to a violation of a law since the laws hold only for closed systems.  "It is entirely possible for God to create a full-grown horse in the middle of Times Square without violating the principle of conservation of energy.  That is because the systems including the horse would not be closed or isolated." (79)

Plantinga is maintaining that it is logically impossible, impossible in the very strongest sense of the term, for anyone, including God, to contravene a law of nature.  But it is logically possible that God contravene causal closure.  This implies that causal closure is not a law of nature.

But isn't it a proposition of physics that the physical universe is causally closed, that every cause of a physical event is a physical event and that every effect of a physical event is a physical event?  No, says Plantinga.  Causal closure is a "metaphysical add-on," (79) not part of physics.  That's right, as far as I can see.  I would add that it is the mistake of scientism to think otherwise.

Whether or or not God ever intervenes in the physical world, I do it all the time.  It's called mental causation.  That it occurs is a plain fact; that mental causes are not identical to physical causes is not a plain fact, but very persuasively arguable, pace Jaegwon Kim.   So if a frail reed such as the Maverick Philosopher can bring about the suspension of causal closure, then God should be able to pull it off as well.  (This comparison with mental causation is mine, not Plantinga's.)

A Temple to Atheism in the Heart of London?

Alain de Botton's proposal  to enshrine atheistic and this-worldly values has raised the hackles of Richard Dawkins on the ground that "the money was being misspent and that a temple of atheism was a contradiction in terms."  If I were an an atheist, I would support, or at least not oppose, de Botton's idea.  It is the negativism of the Dawkins Gang that turns many away from the New Atheism, a virulent example being A. C. Grayling's rant against religion as child abuse. 

Creatio ex Deo and Pantheism

The following post draws mainly upon Robert Oakes, "Does Traditional Theism Entail Pantheism?" American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 1 (January 1983), pp. 105-112. Reprinted in Tom Morris, ed. The Concept of God (Oxford U. Press, 1987). 

The question arises:   Does my construal of creatio ex nihilo in terms of creatio ex Deo commit me to pantheism? If so, how does that comport with my avowed onto-theological personalism? I will try toshow that my construal does not commit me to pantheism, or at least not to the pantheism that Oakes seems to embrace.

The logically first question concerns just what pantheism is and is not. I’ll begin with what it is not.

A. Pantheism worth discussing is not the view that God (G) is identical to the physical universe (U). For that would amount to saying that God does not exist. Whether or not God exists, the divine nature excludes the possibility of God’s being a system of physical objects. The reduction of G to U thus amounts to the elimination of G. Therefore, the use of ‘God’ to refer to U is simply an egregious misuse of the term ‘God,’ a misuse on a par with Tillich’s misuse of ‘God’ to refer to one’s ultimate concern.

B. What of the opposite reduction of U to G? This is also a type of pantheism not worth discussing: it implies that God exists but the physical universe does not. For it is self-evident that the physical universe cannot exist unless it is in some sense distinct from G. After all, G is immutable whereas U is mutable; hence, by what McTaggart calls the Discernibility of the Diverse (the logical contrapositive of the Indiscernibility of Identicals), U cannot be identical to G if both exist.

C. If pantheism is to be worth discussing, it must somehow allow for a difference of some kind between God and the cosmos. It must steer a middle course between a strict identity of G and U and a type of difference that would render them ‘indifferent’ to each other, i.e., a type of radical difference that would allow the possibility of U existing without G existing. A viable pantheism must therefore avoid three positions: (1) God is world-identical; (2) The world is God-identical; (3) God and the world are externally related in the sense that either could exist without the other.

One way to satisfy these requirements is by saying, Spinozistically, that created entities are modes of God, or as Oakes says, "aspects or modifications" of God. (p. 106 et passim) For if x is a mode (aspect, modification) of y, then x is not identical to y, y is not identical to x, and x and y are not merely externally related.

It is important to realize that classical theism must also satisfy the requirements, (1)-(3). In particular, classical theism must deny that U can exist without G. For it is a central tenet of classical theism that God is not merely a cause of the inception of the universe, but a cause of its continuance as well. God is not merely a deistic 'starter-upper,' but a moment by moment conserver. How exactly creatio originans and creatio continuans fit together involves problems that cannot be discussed in this post.  (Cf. William F. Vallicella (2002), The Creation–Conservation Dilemma and Presentist Four-Dimensionalism, Religious Studies 38 (2):187-200.)  But there can be no doubt that for classical theism as it is found in Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley and others, creation in the full sense involves both notions, both originating creation and continuing creation. 

Now given the fact just mentioned, how are we to distinguish classical theism (CT) from pantheism in the (C)-sense, the only sense in play here? Does (CT) perhaps entail pantheism? (To say that p entails q is to say that, necessarily, if p is true, then q is true. Equivalently, it is to say that it is impossible that p be true, and q false.)

You will notice that the doctrine of conservation ‘shortens’ the ‘ontological distance’ between creator and creatures. It implies that at each moment divine activity is required to keep the creature from lapsing into nonbeing. The point is not merely that God as a contingent matter of fact conserves creatures moment by moment, but that creatures are necessarily such that they are conserved moment by moment by divine activity. This suggests that the very being of creatures is their being-conserved moment by moment, which in turn gives rise to the following worry: How then can creatures retain any ontological independence?

Drawing on Oakes, the following Argument from Conservation can be mounted for the thesis that classical theism entails pantheism (but of course not pantheism in the absurd (A) or (B) senses). (The argument is in Oakes, but the reconstruction is mine.)

1. Every contingent being is necessarily such that it is existentially dependent on God at each moment of its existence.

2. If anything X is necessarily such that it is dependent on something Y at each moment of its existence, then X is a mode (aspect, modification) of Y.

Therefore

3. Every contingent being is a mode (aspect, modification) of God, which amounts to pantheism.

The validity (formal correctness) of this argument is not in question, and premise (1) merely states the conservation doctrine, an essential subdoctrine of classical theism. So the soundness of the argument rides on premise (2).

Premise (2) fits some cases very well. A wrinkle in a carpet satisfies both the antecedent and the consequent of (2). Same holds for the dance and the dancer. Suppose Little Eva is doing the Locomotion ("C’mon baby, do the Lo-co-mo-shun . . ..) There is the dance-type and its various actual and possible tokens. Little Eva’s gyrations at time t constitute one of these tokens such that the token in question could not possibly exist except as an aspect or modification of Little Eva at t. Similarly for felt pleasures and felt pains. The esse of a pain just is its percipi: a pain cannot exist except as perceived. Pains and the like are therefore plausibly construed as aspects or modifications of perceivers. Finally, it is plausibly maintained that a particular thinking, believing, imagining, is an aspect or modification of a thinker or a believer or an imaginer.

But now consider an object imagined as opposed to the act of imagining it. I mean an object that does not exist apart from its being imagined, a purely intentional object. (A rich vein of gold at the base of Weaver’s Needle; a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater.) Said object does not exist on i
ts own, but only as the accusative of an act (or acts) of imagining. Now while it makes sense to say that the act (the occurrent episode) of imagining is an aspect or modification of an imaginer, it does not make much sense to say this of the intentional object (the accusative) of the act. Indeed, we cannot even say that the intentional object is an aspect or modification of the act trained upon it. Why not?

Note that if x is an aspect or modification of y, then x cannot exist without y, but y can exist without x. (A carpet wrinkle cannot exist without the carpet of which it is the wrinkle, but the carpet can surely exist without that, or any, wrinkle.) By contrast, if x is the intentional object of act y, then x cannot exist without y, AND y cannot exist without x. An imagining cannot exist except as the imagining of a definite object, and that object, qua intentional object, cannot exist without the act. I conclude from this difference that the intentional object cannot be an aspect or modification of the act. It is not a property of the act, but its object or intentum. A fortiori, it cannot be an aspect or modification of the subject of the act, the imaginer in the case of an act of imagining.

We therefore have a class of counterexamples to premise (2) above. The Argument from Conservation therefore fails, and classical theism does not collapse into pantheism – or at least not for the reason that Oakes provided in the article under discussion.

So far, then, I cannot see that I am committed to pantheism in any of the three senses lately distinguished by my construal of creatio ex nihilo  as creatio ex Deo.

Dolezal on Divine Simplicity: Does He Make a Mysterian Move?

Dr. James Dolezal kindly sent me a copy of his very recent book, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness (Pickwick, 2011).  Herewith, some quick notes and commentary based on a partial reading. 

1.  God is an absolute, or rather the absolute.  That is a non-negotiable starting point for both of us.  To uphold the divine absoluteness, however, it is necessary to think of God as ontologically simple, as devoid of metaphysical complexity and composition.  For if God is absolute, then he cannot depend on anything else for his existence or nature.  It follows that God cannot be an instance of his attributes but must be them; nor can he be an existent among existents: he must be his existence and existence itself.  Indeed, God as absolute must be ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsisting Existence.  These are hard sayings and sharp heads, Plantinga being one of them, find them incoherent.  For details and a bit of a response to Plantinga, I refer you to my Stanford Encyclopedia article.  Note also that an absolute cannot be lacking anything or in need of developing itself: it is, eternally, all that it can be.  This implies that there is no act/potency distinction in God, no unrealized powers or potentialities.  In the classical phrase, God is actus purus, pure act, wholly actual.  Dolezal puts it very well when he writes, "The consideration of God as ipsum esse subsistens and actus purus is crucial for any confession of God's absolute existence." (214)

2. But to uphold the divine absoluteness, it is also necessary that God be libertarianly free in his production of creatures.  For suppose there is something in the divine nature that necessitates God's creation.  Then God would depend on the world to be himself and to be fully actual.  He would need what is other than himself to actualize himself.  This entanglement with the relative would compromise the divine absoluteness.  God would need the world as much as the world needs God.  Each would require the other to be what it is.  (210)

3.  So God must be both simple and free to be absolute.  But it is very difficult to understand how a simple being could be free in the unconditional 'could have done otherwise' sense.    If God is simple, then he is pure act in which case he is devoid of unrealized powers, potentialities or possibilities.  To act freely, however is to act in such a way that one (unconditionally) could have done otherwise, which implies unrealized possibilities.  Now Dolezal's view if I have understood him — and he can correct me in the ComBox if I am wrong — is that it is not only difficult to reconcile simplicity and freedom, but impossible for us, at least in our present state.  "Though we discover strong reasons for confessing both simplicity and freedom in God, we cannot form an isomorphically adequate notion of how this is the case." (210)  In footnote 55 on the same page, Dolezal brings up wave-particle duality: light behaves both like a particle and like a wave.  We have good reason to believe that it is both despite the difficulty or impossibility of understanding  how it could be both.  On the basis of the quotation and the footnote I hope that Dolezal will forgive me for pinning the label 'mysterian' on him, at least with respect to the simplicity-freedom problem which is only one subproblem within the the divine simplicity constellation.

 4. I grant that if we have good reason to believe that p is true, and good reason to believe that q  is true, then we have good reason to believe that p and q are logically  consistent (with each other) despite an absence of understanding as to how they could be mutually consistent. What is actual is possible whether or not one can render intelligible how it is possible.  To give an example of my own, motion is actual, hence possible, despite my inability in the teeth of Zenonian considerations to understand how it is possible. Many similar examples could be given.

And so a mysterian move suggests itself:  We are justified in maintaining both that God is simple and that God is free despite the fact that after protracted effort we cannot make logical sense of this conjunction.  The fact that the conjunction  — God is simple & God is free — appears to us, and perhaps even necessarily appears to us, given irremediable cognitive limitations on our part, to be or rather entail  an explicit  logical contradiction is not a good reason to reject the conjunction.  The mysterian is not a dialetheist: he does not claim that there are true contradictions. Like the rest of us, the mysterian eschews them like the plague.  His point is rather that a proposition's non-episodic and chronic seeming to be a contradiction does not suffice for its rejection.  For it may well be that certain truths are inaccesible to us due to our mental limitations and defects, and that among these truths are some that appear to us only in the guise of contradictions, and must so appear.

Of course, Dolezal's  mysterian move cannot be reasonably made unless the extant attempts (by Barry Miller, Eleonore Stump, Brian Davies, et al.)  to reconcile simplicity and freedom are failures.  Since I agree with Dolezal that they are, I grant him this.

5.  So what are some possible questions/reservations?

First, if  a (conjunctive) proposition's seeming, after careful and repeated scrutiny, to be or entail an explicit logical contradiction is not sufficient evidence of its being a contradiction, what would be?  To put it another way, my inability to explain how it could be true both that p and that q does seem to be pretty good evidence that p and q are not both true.  Now  I said above that the actual is possible whether or not I can explain how it's possible.  Granted, but if I cannot explain the how, doubt is cast on the actuality.

How adjudicate between these opposing lines of argument:  A:  Because X is actual, X  is possible, whether or not anyone can explain how it is possible! B:  Because no one can explain how it is possible, it is not possible, and therefore not actual!

Second,  if all extant attempts to reconcile simplicity and freedom fail, it does not follow that there isn't a solution right over the horizon.  How can a mysterian rule out the possibiity of a future solution?  The mysterian seems committed to saying that it is impossible (at least in this life) that there be a solution.  How can he be sure of this?

Third,  if a proposition appears under careful scrutiny to be or entail a contradiction, then is there even a proposition before the mind?  If you require for my salvation that I believe that God is one and God is three, what exactly are you demanding that I believe?  Before I can affirm a proposition as true I must understand it, but how can I affirm as true a proposition that appears necessarily false?  Such a 'proposition' is arguably not a proposition at all.  (This requires development, of course . . . Richard Cartwright's Trinity paper will help you see what I am getting at.))

Creation: Ex Nihilo or Ex Deo? Am I a Panentheist?

In an e-mail Michael Sudduth asked me what I thought of panentheism.  I suspect my position, as developed in A Paradigm Theory of Existence and various articles, points in a panentheistic direction.  For when I think about the relation of the One and the Many, I think of the Many as 'in' the One in a manner analogous to the way an intentional object is 'in' the mind.  The manifold of contingent beings is 'in' the divine One.   The present post will sketch a way panentheism might  be teased out of classical theism.

Classical theists hold that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. This phrase of course carries a privative, not a positive, sense: it means not out of something as opposed to out of something called ‘nothing.’ This much is crystal clear. Less clear is how creation ex nihilo (CEN), comports, if it does comport, with the following principle:

ENN: Ex nihilo nihit fit. Nothing comes from nothing.

The latter principle seems intuitively obvious. It is not a truth of formal logic — since its negation is not self-contradictory — but it does appear to be a truth of metaphysics, indeed, a necessary truth of metaphysics. But if (ENN) is true, how can (CEN) be true? How can God create out of nothing if nothing can come from nothing?

It would be unavailing to say that God, being omnipotent, can do anything, including making something come out of nothing. For omnipotence, rightly understood, does not imply that God can do anything, but that God can do anything that any possible agent could possibly do. But there are limits on what is possible. For one thing, logic limits possibility, and so limits divine power: not even God can make a contradiction true. There are also extra-logical limits on divine power: God cannot restore a virgin. There are past events which possess a necessitas per accidens that puts them beyond the reach of the divine will. Nor can God violate (ENN), given that it is necessarily true. God is subject to necessary truths. Some may see a problem with that, but I don’t. Necessary truths, like all truths, are accusatives of the divine intellect and so cannot exist unless the divine intellect exists. The divine intellect limits the divine will.

So the problem remains: How can God create the world out of nothing if nothing can come from nothing? How can we reconcile (CEN) with (ENN)?

One response to the problem is to say that (CEN), properly understood, states that God creates out of nothing distinct from himself. Thus he does not operate upon any pre-given matter, nor does he bestow existence on pre-given essences, nor create out of pre-given possibles.  But if God creates out of nothing distinct from himself, this formulation allows that, in some sense, God creates ex Deo, out of himself. Creating the world out of himself, God creates the world out of nothing distinct from himself. In this way, (CEN) and (ENN) are rendered compatible.

In sum, ‘Creatio ex nihilo’ is ambiguous. It could mean that God creates out of nothing, period, in which case (CEN) collides with (ENN), or that God creates out of nothing ultimately distinct from himself. My proposal is that the Latin phrase be construed in the second of these ways. So construed, it has the sense of ‘creatio ex Deo.’

But what exactly does it mean to say that God creates out of God? A critic once rather uncharitably took me  to mean precisely what I do not mean, namely, that God creates out of God in a way that implies that the product of the creative operation (creation in the sense of created entities) is identical to its operator (God) and its operand (God). That would amount to an absurd pantheism in which all distinctions are obliterated, a veritable "night in which all cows are black," to borrow a phrase from Hegel.

When I say that God creates ex Deo what I mean is that God operates on entities that are not external to God in the sense of having existence whether or not God exists. I build a rock cairn to mark the trail by piling up otherwise scattered rocks. These rocks exist whether or not I do. My creation of the cairn is therefore neither out of nothing nor out of me but out of materials external to me. If God created in that way he would not be God as classically conceived, but a Platonic demiurge. So I say that God creates out of ‘materials’ internal to him in the sense that their existence depends on God’s existence and are therefore in this precise sense internal to him. (I hope it is self-evident that materials need not be made out of matter.) In this sense, God creates ex Deo rather than out of materials that are provided from without. It should be obvious that God, a candidate for the status of an absolute, cannot have anything ‘outside him.’

To flesh this out a bit, suppose properties are concepts in the divine mind. Then properties are necessary beings in that they exist in all metaphysically possible worlds just as God does. The difference, however, is that properties have their necessity from another, namely God, while God has his necessity from himself. (This distinction is in Aquinas.) Inother words, properties, though they are necessary beings, depend for their existence on God.  Suppose that properties are the ‘materials’ or ontological constituents out of which concrete contingent individuals – thick particulars in Armstrong’s parlance – are constructed. (This diverges somewhat from what I say in PTE, but no matter: it is a simplification for didactic purposes.) We can then say that the existence of contingent individual C is just the unity or contingent togetherness of C’s ontological constituents. C exists iff C’s constituents are unified. Creating is then unifying. (We have a model for this unifying in our own unification of a sensory manifold in the unity of one consciousness.)  Since the constituents are necessary beings, they are uncreated. But since their necessity derives from God, they are not independent of God.

In this sense, God creates out of himself: he creates out of materials that are internal to his own mental life. It is ANALOGOUS to the way we create objects of imagination. (I am not saying that God creates the world by imagining it.) When I construct an object in imagination, I operate upon materials that I myself provide. Thus I create a purple right triangle by combining the concept of being purple with the concept of being a right triangle. I can go on to create a purple cone by rotating the triangle though 360 degrees on the y-axis. The object imagined is wholly dependent on me the imaginer: if I leave off imagining it, it ceases to exist. I am the cause of its beginning to exist as well as the cause of its continuing to exist moment by moment. But the object imagined, as my intentional object, is other than me just as the creature is other than God. The creature is other than God while being wholly dependent on God just as the object imagined is other than me while being wholly dependent on me. 

A  critic thinks  that "The notion of total dependence, dependence in every respect, entails identity, and therefore no dependence at all. If a is dependent on b in all respects, then a ‘collapses’ into b, taking dependency, and difference, with it." So if the creature is dependent on God both for its existence and for its nature, the creature collapses into God. And of course we can’t have that. It is obvious that the manifest plurality of the world, the difference of things from one another and from God, must be maintained. We cannot allow a pantheism according to which God just is the wo
rld, nor one on which God swallows up the plural world and its plurality with it. 

The  principle lately quoted is refuted by every intentional object qua intentional object. The object imagined is totally dependent in its existence on my acts of imagining. After all, I excogitated it: in plain Anglo-Saxon, I thought it up, or out. This excogitatum, to give it a name, is wholly dependent on my cogitationes and on the ego ‘behind’ these cogitationes if there is an ego ‘behind’ them. (Compare Sartre’s critique of Husserl on this score in the former’s Transcendence of the Ego.) But this dependence is entirely consistent with the excogitatum’s being distinct both from me qua ego, and from the intentional acts or cogitationes emanating from the ego and directed upon the excogitatum. To press some Husserlian jargon into service, the object imagined ist kein reeller Inhalt, it is not "really contained" in the act. The object imagined is neither immanent in the act, nor utterly transcendent of the act: it is a transcendence in immanence. It is ‘constituted’ as a transcendence in immanence. 

The quoted  principle may also be refuted by more mundane examples, examples that I would not use to explain the relation between creator and creature. Consider a wrinkle W in a carpet C. W is distinct from C. This is proven by the fact that they differ property-wise: the wrinkle is located in the Northeast corner of the carpet, but the carpet is not located in the Northeast corner of the carpet. (The principle here is the Indiscernibility of Identicals.) But W is wholly (totally) dependent on C. A wrinkle in a carpet cannot exist without a carpet; indeed, it cannot exist apart from the very carpet of which it is the wrinkle. Thus W cannot ‘migrate’ from carpet C to carpet D. Not only is W dependent for its existence on C, but W is dependent on C for its nature (whatness, quiddity). For W just is a certain modification of the carpet, and the whole truth about W can be told in C-terms. So W is totally dependent on C. 

So dependence in both essence and existence does not entail identity.

Somehow the reality of the Many must be upheld.  The plural world is no illusion.  If Advaita Vedanta maintains that it is an illusion, then it is false.  On the other hand, the plural world is continuously dependent for its existence on the One.  Making sense of this relation is not easy, and I don't doubt that my analogy to the relation of finite mind and its intentional objects limps in various ways.

In any case, one thing seems clear: there is a problem with reconcling CEN with EEN.  I discuss and reject a different solution to the problem in On Reconciling Creatio Ex Nihilo with Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit.

Obama on Stuff

Barack Obama wants an economy "Where we're making stuff and selling stuff and moving it around and UPS drivers are dropping things off everywhere." 

Stuff it, Mr President.  And take a gander at my On 'Stuff' and 'Ass' while you're at it.

The real problem, of  course, is not that Obama lacks gravitas, but that he is utterly clueless and incompetent when it comes to the the problems facing the nation, the chief of which is the debt crisis.

The Stupider the Citizen, the More the Justification for Governmental Overreach

If this Daily Mail  story is to be believed, a 17 year old English girl has subsisted on little more than McDonald's chicken nuggets and fries for the past 15 years. "The factory worker – who says she has never tasted fresh fruit or vegetables – had to be taken to hospital earlier this week when she collapsed after struggling to breathe."

Stories like these are used by nanny-staters to justify ever more government intrusion.  But the more the government intrudes, the less self-reliant and childish the people become — which justifies even more intrusion.  Or as Dennis Prager likes to say, "The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen."  To which I add, "The bigger the government, the more to fight over."  So if you want a politics increasingly polarized and embittered, agitate for more government control and less individual  liberty.

Sudduth, Simplicity, and the Plotinian One

Dave Lull has once again pointed me to a fascinating post, Michael Sudduth Follows His Monad Back to Vaishnava Vedanta. Excerpt:

A major problem with Scholasticism is the innate desire that all men have to participate directly and ontologically in their God. We all want that real connection. Sudduth explains, “I pondered this experience for several minutes, while at the same time continuing to experience a most blissful serenity and feeling of oneness with God”.

The fact is Van Tilism and Scholasticism, its Grandfather, can never give man real and ontological connection because like the fools they were, they tried to take the Ultimate Principle of Plotinus and the Pagans and somehow get a Christian worldview out of it with their theory of Absolute Divine Simplicity. This leaves only a pagan ecstatic trance state for Christian men to seek in their attempts to connect to their creator. Thus Sudduth, was in my opinion, simply following his monad back to its Pagan source. He is being consistent. Sudduth says, “I had gone so far in my Christian faith, but it was now necessary for me to relate to God as Lord Krishna.” Notice he doesn’t say, “through Lord Krishna” but “as” Lord Krishna. In Plotinus’ construction hierarchies of being emanated from the One which represent levels of composition , and at each hierarchy was an intermediary. In different versions of this metaphysical construction, the gods are intermediaries on this chain of being. As one move up the chain of being one becomes ontologically identified with the intermediary. Sudduth says, “Since this time I have experienced Krishna’s presence in the air, mountains, ocean, trees, cows, and equally within myself. I experience Him in the outer and inner worlds, and my heart is regularly filled with serenity and bliss.” You see on his view, God is in the state of mind not the proposition.

In conclusion, I commend Sudduth for his logical consistency. When will the rest of the Scholastic Reformed have the courage to do the same? My Scholastic reader, Sudduth is taking Absolute Divine Simplicity to its logical end. I have two options for you.

1. Follow Sudduth

2. Leave Scholastic Neoplatonism for Gordon Clark’s Scripturalism: An absolute Triad: Three ontologically distinct persons; three distinct complex-non-simple eternal divine minds who find their hypostatic origin in the person of the Father.

I'd love to comment, but I have a dentist appointment.  Man does not live by bread alone, but without bread and the properly maintained tools of mastication, no philosophy gets done, leastways, not here below.

Afternoon Update:  I now have time to hazard some brief and off-the-cuff bloggity-blog commentary. 

Earlier in the post, the author writes, "Once someone believes that truth and God cannot be found in a proposition, but in a psychological state, truth by definition becomes something subjective and arbitrary." The full flavor of this no doubt escapes me since I haven't read Van Til or Gordon Clark.   Not that surprising given my background, which is Roman Catholic, though as 'Maverick Philosopher' suggests, I aim to follow the arguments where they lead, roaming over the intellectual landscape bare of a brand,  and free of institutional tie-downs  and dogmatic ballast.  The lack of the latter may cause my vessel to capsize, but it's a risk I knowingly run. 

But speaking for myself, and not for Sudduth, though I expect he will agree with me, I do not understand how anyone could think that the ultimate truth or God (who is arguably the ultimate truth) could be found in a proposition or a body of propositions. Doctrine surely cannot be of paramount importance in religion.  That is a bare assertion, so far, and on this occasion I cannot do much to support it. But I should think that doctrine is but a "necessary makeshift" (to borrow a phrase from F. H. Bradley) to help us in our  "Ascent to the Absolute" (to borrow the title of a book by my teacher  J. N. Findlay).  The name-dropping gives me away and indicates that I nail my colors to the mast of experience in religion over doctrine. (Practice is also important, but that's a separate topic.)

Thoughts lead to thoughts and more thoughts and never beyond the circle of  thoughts.  But I should like to experience the THINKER behind the thoughts, which thinker can no doubt be thought about but can never be reduced to a thought or proposition.  Philosophy operates on the discursive plane, cannot do otherwise, and so is limited, which is why we need religion which in my view, and perhaps in Sudduths', is completed in mystical experience.

The path to the ultimate subject that cannot be objectified, but is both transcendentally  and ontologically the condition of all objectivity, is an inner path.  I needn't leave my own tradition and make the journey to the East  to find support.  I find it in Augustine:  Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. In interiore homine habitat veritas .  "Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. The truth resides in man's interiority."  The way to God is through the self.  The way is not by way of propositions or thoughts or doctrines, and certainly not by fighting over doctrines or condemning the other guy to hell for holding a different doctrine, or a doctrine that plays down the importance of doctrine.

The ultimate truth is not propositional truth, which is merely representational, nor the ontic true of things represented, but the ontological truth of God. (This tripartition can be found in both Heidegger and in Thomas.)   Now if I find God, but not "in a proposition," but by experience (in fitful glimpses as if through a glass darkly here below, in the visio beata yonder) does it follow that that I have merely realized "an arbitrary and subjective psychological  state"?  That is a false alternative.  Not that I wish to deny that some mystical experiences are nonveridical and misleading.  Humans are subject to deception and self-deception in all areas of life.

There is also the matter of the divine simplicity.  Here I will just baldly state that a God worthy of worship must be an absolute,  and that no decent absolute can be anything other than ontologically simple.  For more, I refer you to my Stanford Encylopedia article and the divine simplicity category of this weblog.

This is hotly contested, of course.  Athens and Jerusalem are in tension, and you can see that my ties to Athens — and to Benares! — are strong and unbreakable.  There are deep, deep issues here.  I am not a master of them; they master me.  One issue has to do with the role of reason and the power of reason.  While confessing reason's infirmity, as I have on many occasions in these pages, I must also admit that it is a god-like faculty in us and part of what the imago Dei must consist in — and this despite what I have said about the discursive path being non-ultimate.

I grant that the Fall has (not just had) noetic consequences: our reason is weaker than it would be in a prelapsarian state.  But we need it to protect us from blind dogmatism, fundamentalism and the forms of idolatry and superstition that reside within religion herself such as bibliolatry and ecclesiolatry.

We should not paper over the deep tensions within Christianity but live them in the hope that an honest confrontation with them will lead to deeper insight.

And a little Christian charity can't be a bad idea either, especially towards such 'apostates' as Michael Sudduth.

Jerry Coyne’s Modal Confusion

In the course of studying Plantinga's new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies, I have encountered some surprisingly hostile web materials directed against Plantinga.  Some of this stuff is too scurrilous to refer to, and I won't.  Coyne's rants against Plantinga are somewhat milder but still unseemly for someone in the academic world.  Alvin Plantinga: Sophisticated Theologian? appears to be Coyne's latest outburst.

That Coyne is muddled in his thinking about free will has already been demonstrated here and here.  This post will showcase a sophomoric blunder he makes with respect to the concept of a necessary being.  Coyne writes:

No theologian in the world is going to convince me that it’s impossible for God to fail to exist because he’s a “necessary being.” Science has shown that he’s not “necessary” for anything we know about the universe.

Given the silly blunders and nonsensical assertions Coyne makes in his free will piece, I am not surprised that the man fails to grasp a very simple point.  To say that X is a necessary being is not to say that X is necessary for something.  Could he really not understand this?   If X is necessary for Y, it does not follow that X is necessary simpliciter.  Sunlight is necessary for photosynthesis, but the existence of sunlight is logically contingent.  And if X is a necessary being, it doesn't follow that X is necessary for anything.  If Plantinga's God exists, then he exists necessarily and does so even in possible worlds in which nothing distinct from God exists, worlds in which he is not necessary for anything.

What about Coyne's second sentence in the above quotation?  Pure scientistic bluster.  One thing we know about the universe is that it exists.  Has science shown that God is not necessary for an explanation of the universe's existence.  Of course not.  How could it show any such thing?  Or will Coyne make an absurd Kraussian move?

An Ontological Disproof of God

Nothing could count as God that did not have the property of aseity, or in plain Anglo-Saxon, from-itself-ness. The concept of God is the concept of something that by its very nature cannot be dependent on anything else for its nature or existence, and this holds whether or not anything in reality instantiates the concept. This is equivalent to the assertion that God exists necessarily if he exists at all. But if everything that exists exists contingently, as philosophers of an empiricist bent are likely to maintain, then we have the makings of an ontological disproof of God. In a 1948 Mind article, J. N. Findlay gave essentially the following argument:

a. God cannot be thought of as existing contingently.
b. Everything that exists can only be thought of as existing contingently.
Therefore
c. God does not exist.

This ontological disproof of God turns Anselm on his head while retaining the Anselmian insight that God is “that than which no greater can be conceived.” Precisely because God is maximally great, supremely perfect, id quo maius cogitari non nequit, he cannot exist. For if everything that exists exists contingently, then nothing exists necessarily. Necessary existence, however, is a divine perfection. Ergo, God does not exist.

The trouble with Findlay’s 1948 argument, an argument which the older and wiser Findlay renounced, is that premise (b) is by no means obviously true, even if we replace ‘everything’ with ‘every concrete thing.’ Indeed, I believe that (b) is demonstrably false. But the argument for this belongs elsewhere.