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.

Necessary Being: A Note on a Post by James Barham

In the context of a reply to a "nasty attack on [Alvin] Plantinga by Jerry Coyne that cannot go unanswered," James Barham explains why he is an atheist:

The other reason I balk [at accepting a theism like that of Plantinga's] is that I can’t help suspecting there is a category mistake involved in talking about the “necessity” of the existence of any real thing, even a ground of being. When we speak of the ground of being’s existing “necessarily,” perhaps we are conflating the nomological sense of “necessity”—in the earth’s gravitational field an unsupported object necessarily accelerates at 32 feet per second squared—with the logical sense of the word—if all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then necessarily Socrates is mortal.

Many experience intellectual discomfort at the thought of a being that is, as Barham says, real (as opposed, presumably, to ideal or abstract) but yet exists of broadly logical (metaphysical) necessity.  To discuss this with clarity I suggest we drop 'real' and use 'concrete' instead.  So our question is whether it is coherent to suppose that there exists a concrete being that necessarily exists, where the necessity in question is broadly logical.  The question is not whether it is true, but whether it is thinkable without broadly logical contradiction, and without 'category mistake.'   But what does 'concrete' mean?  It does not mean 'material' or 'physical.' Obviously, no material being could be a necessary being. (Exercise for the reader: prove it!)  Here are a couple of definitions:

D1. X is concrete =df X is causally active or passive.
D2. X is abstract =df X is causally inert, i.e., not concrete.

The terms of the concrete-abstract distinction are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive:  everything is one or the other, and nothing  is both.  And the same goes for the physical-nonphysical distinction.  The distinctions are not equivalent, however: they 'cut perpendicular' to each other.  There are (or at least it is coherent to suppose that there could be) nonphysical concreta.  Whether there are physical abstracta is a nice question I will set aside for now.

Plantinga's God, if he exists, is concrete, wholly immaterial, and necessarily existent.  Obviously, one cannot imagine such a being.  (A point of difference with Russell's celestial teapot, by the way.) But I find Plantinga's God to be conceivable without contradiction or confusion or conflation or category mistake.   Barham thinks otherwise, suggesting that the notion of a necessarily existent concretum trades on a confusion of nomological necessity with logical necessity.  I find no such confusion, but I do find a confusion in Barham's thinking.

First of all, there is a genuine distinction between nomological necessity and logical necessity. Barham's sentence about an unsupported object in Earth's gravitational field is nomologically necessary, but logically contingent.  It is the latter because there is no logical contradiction in the supposition that a body in Earth's gravitational field accelerate at a rate other than 32 ft/sec2.   The laws of nature could have been other  than what they are.  But what does this have to do with the possibility of the coherence of the notion of a concrete individual that exists in all broadly logically possible worlds if it exists in one such world?  Nothing that I can see.  Barham points, in effect, to a legitimate difference between:

1. Necessarily, an unsupported object in Earth's gravitation  falls at the rate of 32ft/sec2
and
2. Necessarily, if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal.

The difference is in type of modality.  In (1) the modality is nomological while in (2) it is logical.  Both cases are cases of de dicto modality: the modal operator operates upon a dictum or proposition.  But when we speak of God as a necessary being, we are not speaking of the necessary truth of a proposition, whether the necessity be nomological or logical.  We are speaking of the necessary existence of a 'thing,' a res. Accordingly, the modality is de re. So I am wondering whether Barham is succumbing to de dicto-de re confusion.  Of course, there is the proposition

3. Necessarily, God exists

where the necessity in question is broadly logical.  The truth-maker of this proposition, however, is God himself, a necessarily existent concrete individual.

My point, then , is that there is no logical mistake involved in the concept of God as necessary being, no confusion, no category mistake.  Even if the concept fails of instantiation, the concept itself is epistemically in the clear.

Barham will no doubt continue to be an atheist.  But he ought to drop the above accusation of category mistake.  He can do better. He could argue that all modality is de dicto.  Or that all necessity is linguistic/conventional in origin.  Or he could give J. N. Findlay's 1948 ontological disproof, which I will feature in my next post.  

I should add that Barham's post, What Happened to Jerry Coyne's Sensus Divinitatis, only a small part of which I examined above, is extremely good and should be carefully read.

The Sudduth Surge Continues

Before I posted Michael Sudduth's open letter on Saturday, site traffic for the month was averaging between 1600-1900 page views per day;  yesterday, however, saw a surge — the Sudduth surge to give it a name — up to 2880, and now, at high noon Tuesday, I'm at 2200.  Meanwhile, the industrious Mr. Lull (cybernaut extraordinaire, etc. etc.) has supplied me with two further links on the topic.

Daniel Silliman, The Experience of Conversion as Always-Already Having Been.  From the title alone I know that Mr. Silliman has come under the influence of Heidegger:  'always already'  is a Heideggerism familiar to students of Sein und Zeit as immer schon.

And scroll down here for a review of Michael Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology.

UPDATE (5 PM):  traffic for the day came to 2965 page views.  I thank you for your patronage.

Could Free Will Be an Illusion? (2012 Version)

1.  Could freedom of the will in the strong or unconditional 'could have done otherwise' sense be an illusion?

2.  Suppose A and B are mutually incompatible but individually possible courses of action, and I am deliberating as to whether I should do A or B. (Should I continue with this blogging business, or give it up?) Deliberating, I have the sense that it is up to me what happens. I have the sense that it is not the case that events prior to my birth, together with the laws of nature, necessitate that I do what I end up doing. Seriously deliberating, I presuppose the falsity of determinism.  For if I were thoroughly and truly convinced of the truth of determinism it would be psychologically impossible for me to deliberate.  (Compare:  were I thoroughly and truly convinced of the truth of naturalism it would be psychologically impossible for me to pray or engage in any spiritual practice the successful outcome of which requires the falsity of naturalism.)

3. Determinism is the thesis that, given the actual past, and the actual laws of nature, there is only one possible future. When I seriously deliberate, however, my deliberation behavior manifests the belief that there is more than one possible future, and that it is up to me which of these possible futures becomes actual. There is the possible future in which I hike tomorrow morning and blog in the afternoon and the equipossible future in which I blog tomorrow morning and hike in the afternoon. And which becomes actual depends on me.

One may be tempted to say that the indisputable fact of deliberation proves the reality of free will.

4.  But then someone objects: "The sense that it is up to you what happens is illusory; it merely seems to you that you are the ultimate source of your actions. In reality your every action is determined by events before your birth." The objector is not denying the fact of deliberation; he is denying that the fact of deliberation entails the reality of free will. He is claiming that the fact of deliberation is logically consistent with the nonexistence of free will.

5.  To evaluate this objection, we need to ask what is meant by 'illusory' in this context. Clearly, the word is not being used in an ordinary way. Ordinary illusions can be seen through and overcome. Hiking at twilight I jump back from a tree root I mis-take for a snake. In cases of perceptual illusion like this, one can replace illusory perceptions with veridical ones. Something similar is true of other illusions such as those of romantic love and the sorts of illusions that leftists cherish and imagine as in the eponymous John Lennon ditty. In cases like these, further perception, more careful thinking, keener observation, 'due diligence' and the like lead to the supplanting of the illusory with the veridical.

But if free will is an illusion, it is not an illusion that can be cast off or seen through no matter what I do. I must deliberate from time to time, and I cannot help but believe, whenever I deliberate, that the outcome is at least in part 'up to me.' Indeed, it is inconceivable that I should disembarrass myself of this 'illusion.' One can become disillusioned about many things but not about the 'illusion' of free will. For it is integral to my being an agent, and being an agent is part and parcel of being a human being. To get free of the 'illusion' of free will, I would have to learn to interpret myself as a deterministic system whose behavior I merely observe but do not control. I would have to learn how to cede control and simply let things happen. But this is precisely what I cannot do.

It would be nice if one could 'switch off' one's free agency.  Sophie's choice was agonizing because she knew that it was up to her which child would remain with her and which would be taken away by the Nazi SS officer.  Now which is more certain:  that she knows that she is a free agent responsible for her choices, or that she knows that she is a wholly deterministic system and that the sense of free agency and moral responsibility are but illusions?  The answer ought to be obvious: the former is more certain .  One is directly aware of one's free agency, while it is only by shaky abstract reasoning that one comes to the view that free will is an illusion.

We are not free to be free agents or not.  It is an essential  attribute of our humanity.  Thus we are  "condemned to be free" in a famous phrase of Jean-Paul Sartre. The sound core of the Sartrean exaggeration is that being free is constitutive of being human. No doubt I can try to view myself as a mere deterministic system pushed around by external forces, but that is a mode of self-deception, a mode of what Sartre calls mauvaise-foi, bad faith. Determinism is "an endless well of excuses" as I seem to recall Sartre saying somewhere.  Being free is constitutive of being human.

6. Or is it only the (false) belief that one is free that is constitutive of being human? Perhaps the fact of deliberation proves merely that one must view oneself as free when in reality we are not free.   Why couldn't it be the case that we all go through life with the irremovable false belief that some of what happens is up to us when in reality nothing is up to us?

My considered opinion is that this ultimately does not make any sense. It makes as little sense as the notion that consciousness is an illusion. Consciousness cannot be an illusion for the simple reason that it is a presupposition of the distinction between reality and illusion. An illusion is an illusion to consciousness, so that if there is no consciousness there are no illusions either. There simply is no (nonverbal) distinction between the illusion of consciousness and consciousness.  Similarly for the difference between the illusion of being a free agent and the reality of being a free agent. It is difficult to see any (nonverbal) difference.

Connected with this is the impossibility of existentially appropriating the supposed truth of determinism. Suppose determinism is true. Can I live this truth, apply it to my life, make it my own? Can I existentially appropriate it? Not at all. To live is to be an agent, and to be an agent is to be a free agent. To live and be human is not merely to manifest a belief, but an all-pervasive ground-conviction, of the falsity of determinism. Determinism cannot be practically or existentially appropriated. It remains practically meaningless, a theory whose plausibility requires a third-person objective view of the self. But the self is precisely subjective in its innermost being and insofar forth, free and unobjectifiable.

If you look at the self from a third person point of view, then determinism has some plausibility, for then you are considering the self as just another object among objects, just another phenomenon among phenomena subject to the laws of nature. But the third person point of view presupposes the first person point of view, and it is the latter from which we live. We are objects in the world, but we live as subjects for whom there is a world, a world upon which we act and must act. Subjectivity is irreducible and ineliminable.

We are left with a huge problem that no philosopher has ever solved, namely, the integration of the first-person and third-person points of view. How do they cohere? No philosopher has explained this. What can be seen with clarity, however, is that subjectivity is irreducible and ineliminable and that no solution can be had by denying that we are irreducibly conscious and irreducibly free. One cannot integrate the points of view by denying the first of them.

All indications are that the problem is simply insoluble and we ought to be intellectually honest enough to face the fact.  It is no solution at all, and indeed a shabby evasion, to write off the first-person point of view as illusory.

The 2012 Election Circus

For commentary on the passing scene, Victor Davis Hanson is hard to beat.  Here is his latest. Bill Keezer deserves thanks for keeping me apprised of what flows from Hanson's pen.  Hanson on Ron Paul:

For someone so savvy about the nature of the disaffected, why did Dr. Paul believe that in the South he could go on rants about U.S. foreign policy that centered around American culpability? Of course, South Carolinians would be receptive to arguments that U.S. expense abroad earned only ingratitude or was counter-productive; but when Paul suggests that we earned hostility on 9/11 by our foreign policy, did he not expect to be widely repudiated? (e.g., So the country that saved Muslims in Kuwait, fed them in Somalia, helped them against the Russians, and bombed a European Christian country to keep them alive in Bosnia and Kosovo had a worse record on Islam than China and Russia, who were not attacked on 9/11?)

Paul has an eerie ability to win over almost anyone on matters of debt and financial insolvency, and lose them in a nano-second when he turns to foreign policy, where he loses clarity and conflates American gullibility with American culpability. A conservative might think it is unwise right now to attack Iran, but he does not wish to be told to look at the situation through the creepy Iranian regime’s eyes.

Hanson on Obama:

What a strange fellow: damning the 1% only to hire three-in-a-row multimillionaire “fat-cat” ex-Wall-streeters as his chiefs-of-staff, while he lives a life indistinguishable from those he caricatures. Obama brags of killing bin Laden, without the slightest concession that he employed protocols to do it that he once smeared, or that he got the troops home for Christmas, without a peep that he followed the Bush-Petraeus plan and not his own that once called for complete flight by March 2008. Poor conservatives: should they praise him for get-real flip-flops or damn him for his hypocrisy and the damage he once did as a critic of what kept us safe? He is a figure right out Aristophanes, a polypgramon scoundrel, a demagogic genius, who can bomb Libya without congressional authority, claim it was not military action — and all the while keep the Michael Moore left silent if not proud of their guy’s duplicity, while begging the right to dare argue that Libya is not better off without the nightmare of Gaddafi.

The man's brilliant and penetrating. (Those are distinct attributes. And of ocurse I'm talking about Hanson.) 

Belief Change

The indefatigable Dave Lull, argonaut nonpareil of cyberspace, friend and facilitator of many a blogger, pointed me this morning to Triablogue where there is some commentary here and here of a mainly churlish sort on the recent conversion of Michael Sudduth.  Comments like those encountered there reinforce me in my view that comboxes are often better kept closed, except that our old friend Tony Flood did surface there and made a decent comment.  (I wouldn't be surprised if it was the industrious Lull who hipped Flood to the Triablogue posts.)

In any case, reading Flood's comment put me in mind of his main site and I wondered what was happening over there.  Well, it looks like old Tony himself has made a doxastic shift too, one  back to his origins:

I have returned to the Christian orthodoxy from which (this may come as a surprise to some of you) my thinking strayed. Those fields did not yield what they seemed to promise. The harvest of my intellectual discontent is still on display here, but henceforth new content will reflect my new-old interests.

My current priority is situate myself mentally within Christian orthodoxy, a matter that I do not think has been settled for me. I believe myself to be a member in good standing of the Roman Catholic communion within the Catholic Church, from whose fold I do not exclude Eastern Orthodox and Reformed Christians.

The distinguished members of Tony's Gallery of Heroes are now under quarantine.

Inasmuch as mature religion is more quest than conclusions, a truth  lost on the New Atheists and their cyberpunk auxiliary legions, belief change is to be expected and is often  a sign of a vital and sincere seeking for a truth which is hard for us in our present predicament to discern.  So my hat is off to Mike and Tony as the one swims the Ganges while the other refreshes himself in the Tiber.

Addendum 1/23:   Logging on this morning, I found three messages from Dave Lull and one from Tony Flood.  Lull apprises me of a second comment by Flood at Triablogue, a comment even better than the first, one that I have just now read, and mostly agree with.

More on Jerry Coyne on Free Will

This is a sequel to an earlier discussion.  You should read it first.  Coyne writes,

There's not much downside to abandoning the notion of free will. It's impossible, anyway, to act as though we don't have it: you'll pretend to choose your New Year's resolutions, and the laws of physics will determine whether you keep them. And there are two upsides. The first is realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains, and contemplating the notion that things like consciousness, free choice, and even the idea of "me" are but convincing illusions fashioned by natural selection. Further, by losing free will we gain empathy, for we realize that in the end all of us, whether Bernie Madoffs or Nelson Mandelas, are victims of circumstance — of the genes we're bequeathed and the environments we encounter. With that under our belts, we can go about building a kinder world.

This, Coyne's concluding paragraph, has it all: scientism, incoherence, and liberal victimology.

1.  Coyne realizes that we cannot deliberate, choose, and act without the belief in free will. He realizes that one cannot, say, choose to eat less in the coming year without believing (even if falsely) that one is freely choosing, without believing that the choice is 'up to oneself.'    But then Coyne immediately confuses this unavoidable false believing with pretending to choose.  He seems to think that if my choice is determined and not free (in the libertarian sense explained in the earlier post), then it is not a genuine choice, but a pretend choice.  But that is not the case.  A choice is genuine whether or not it is determined. 

People deliberate and choose.  Bicycles don't. That's part of the pre-analytic data.  It is also part of the pre-analytic data that people sometimes pretend to deliberate and pretend to choose.  It is a grotesque confusion on Coyne's part to think that if one is determined to choose then one's choice is not genuine but pretend.  (Note also that if determinism is true, then one's pretending to choose is also determined without prejudice to its being a real case of pretending to choose.)

Coyne is making a mistake similar to the one he made at the beginning of the piece.  There he implied that if a choice is not free then it is not a choice. But a choice is a choice whether free or determined.  Coyne was confusing the question, Are there choices? with the question, Are there free choices?  He now thinks that if a choice is determined, then it not a real, but a merely pretend, choice.  That is doubly confused.  Just as a pretend choice can be free, a real choice can be determined.

2. We are then told that consciousness, free choice, and the idea of the self are "illusions fashioned by natural selection."  This is nonsense pure and simple.

First of all, consciousness cannot be an illusion.  Consciousness cannot be an illusion for the simple reason that it is a presupposition of the distinction between reality and illusion. An illusion is an illusion to consciousness, so that if there is no consciousness there are no illusions either. There simply is no (nonverbal) distinction between the illusion of consciousness and consciousness. If one is under the illusion that one is conscious, then one is conscious, really conscious, and therefore not under any illusion about the matter.

The thesis that consciousness is an illusion is self-refuting.  If I merely seem to be conscious, but am not conscious, then I am conscious.  And if I do not merely seem to be conscious, but am conscious, then (of course) I am conscious.  Therefore, necessarily, if I seem to be conscious, then I am conscious. Here we bite on granite, and "our spade is turned" — to mix Nimzovich and Wittgenstein metaphors.  Or in the words of a German proverb, Soviel Schein, soviel Sein. 

Consciousness, in this regard, is analogous to truth.  If you try to say something about truth, you presuppose truth.  For if you try to say something about truth, presumably you are trying to say something true about truth.  So if you say that truth is an illusion, and that there are no truths, then you are saying that in truth there are no truths — which is self-refuting.  If, on the other hand, you are simply making noises or perhaps aiming to say something false, the we ignore you for those reasons.

3. I don't believe that one can show in the same clean 'knock-down' way that free will is not an illusion.  That consciousness is an illusion is a plainly incoherent idea; the incoherence of the notion that free will is an illusion is harder to uncover.  But suppose we ask, "In which sense of 'illusion' is free will an illusion?"  It is nothing like a correctable perceptual illusion of the sort we are subject to on a daily basis.  The 'illusion' of free will, if illusion it be, cannot be thrown off.  I cannot function as an agent without taking myself to be free, and I cannot cease being an agent short of suicide.  Echoing Sartre, I am condemned to agency and to that extent "condemned to be free."  Even a mad-dog quietist who decided to renounce all action, would be deciding to renounce all action and thereby demonstrating willy-nilly the ineradicable reality of his agency.  An 'illusion' that it constutive of my very being an agent is no illusion in any worthwile sense of the term. 

It's a bit like an Advaitin (an adherent of Advaita Vedanta) telling me that the multiple world of our ordinary sense experience is an illusion.  "OK, but what does that mean?  When we are at the shooting range, you are going to take care not to be down range when the shooting starts, right?  Why, if the world of multiplicity, the world of shotguns and shells and targets and tender human bodies is an illusion?  Why would it matter? Obviously, you are playing fast and loose with 'illusion' and don't really believe that this gun and your head are illusions.)

One cannot distinguish (except verbally) the mere appearance of consciousness and the reality of consciousness.  Similarly, I suggest that one cannot distinguish between the 'illusion' of free will and its reality.  This thesis of course requires much more development and support!  But hey, this is a blog, just an online notebook! 

Those who claim that free will is an illusion are simply playing fast and loose with the word 'illusion.' There are not using it in an ordinary way, in the sort of way that gives it its ordinary 'bite'; they are using it in some extended way that drains it of meaning.  It is a kind of bullshitting that scientists often fall into when they are spouting scientism in the popular books they scribble to turn a buck.  Doing science is hard; writing bad philosopohy is easy.  By the way, that is why we need philosophy.  We need it to expose all the pseudo-philsophy abroad in the world.

We need philosophy to bury its undertakers lest there be all those rotting corpses laying about.

4.  Finally, Coyne tells us we are all "victims of circumstance."  But I've had enough of this guy for one day.  I shouldn't be wasting so much time on him. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Remembering Johnny Otis and Etta James

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

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