Walters on TLS

JD Walters of the blog Unnatural Theology kindly reviews The Last Superstition. (The review is cross-posted at CADRE Comments.) He says some very nice things about it, and puts forward some thoughtful criticisms. I thank him for the compliments, and want to offer here some replies to his objections.

First, Walters takes exception to what he describes as the “very, very abrasive” tone I take in the book toward my opponents, and implies that it would be more appropriate for a Christian to take a softer touch. I concede that the book is often just as abrasive as he says. But while I do describe certain opinions and practices, and even certain specific individuals, in very harsh terms, it is not fair to say that I direct this abuse to people I disagree with in general. (To be sure, Walters does not explicitly say that I do this, but he does seem to me to give that impression.) On the contrary, I make it very clear several times in the book that I am happy to acknowledge that there are secularists and atheists of good will and for whom I have respect. The polemics are directed only at specific people who have themselves either taken an unjustifiably obnoxious and unfair tone toward religious believers, or have defended views so extreme and despicable that no one who is sane and/or morally decent could put them forward. In other words, I aim my fire only at people who have been “asking for it.”

Of course, many readers will object: “Shouldn’t we always separate the opinion from the character of the person advancing it? Couldn’t any view, however outrageous, nevertheless be defended by someone who, because he sincerely holds it, might still be morally admirable, or at least morally blameless?” The answer to both questions is a firm No, and each question is based on a false understanding of moral psychology that flows from the same bad modern philosophical assumptions I attack in the book. I maintain that there are some views that are so evil that no one who is morally upright could possibly uphold them. To take just one, particularly disgusting, example, it is precisely because Peter Singer sincerely believes that bestiality is morally justifiable that we can know that he has a corrupt moral character. For given the correct (classical natural law) approach to morality and moral psychology, no one whose sensibilities are such that he could seriously entertain such an idea could possibly fail to be morally corrupt.

Hence, I maintain that there are certain ideas that cannot be described accurately and objectively unless they, and sometimes even the people who hold them, are described in language that might seem abusive and polemical. (E.g. not to see that someone even seriously considering whether bestiality might be permissible is morally corrupt is not to understand what moral corruption objectively is.) The assumptions that lead modern people to assume otherwise (the so-called “fact/value distinction,” the cult of “authenticity,” etc.) are just false, and themselves morally corrupting. I have said a little more about this elsewhere, and though the topic is not explicitly discussed in The Last Superstition, readers of that book will get a pretty clear idea of why this view follows from a classical natural law approach to morality. Suffice it to say that, from an Aristotelian point of view, moral character is more a matter of having the right dispositions, habits, and sensibilities than it is a matter of having the right opinions.

I also deny that a Christian should always take a softer touch. There is a time and place for that, of course, but there is also a time when a good Christian ought to take the bark off of an opponent, and indeed when it would be immoral not to do so. Everyone acknowledges that harm to, or a threat to, another person’s life, liberty, or possessions can merit harsh retaliation (e.g. imprisonment, and in extreme cases even death). Similarly, someone who spreads calumnies, or corrupts public morals, or in some other way harms others spiritually, can also merit harsh treatment of a verbal and moral sort. Now of course, that someone deserves some punishment or reproof does not always entail that it should be inflicted upon him; there are many cases where mercy is called for. But not always, especially where the public good or the safety of innocents is concerned, and where the offender is unrepentant. This is as true in the spiritual realm as in the material realm. Some ideas are so odious, and some purveyors of those ideas so dangerous and corrupt, that it can be justifiable to expose them to ridicule and contempt, so as to bring infamy upon them and counteract the bad effect they might have on others. And in some cases, I maintain, this might even be morally required of us.

(There is an old book called Liberalism is a Sin by Fr. Felix Sarda y Salvany which has a couple of useful chapters on this subject, showing, among other things, how polemical attacks, even against individuals, have always rightly been among the weapons in the arsenal of Christian apologists. See here and here. Be warned that this is not a book likely to cause anything but offense to modern progressive ears!)

Walters also laments my failure to say much in the book about why the God of the philosophers is identical to the God of Christianity (though he does seem to recognize that this was simply beyond the scope of the book, which is concerned almost entirely with natural theology). This is an issue that might be approached from two directions. On the one hand there are those who sympathize with the arguments of natural theology but who reject the move from these philosophical arguments to the God of divine revelation. On the other hand there are certain Christian theologians who are uncomfortable identifying the God of the Bible with the God whose existence is argued for in the classical theistic proofs. Walters’ concern seems to be of the latter sort, given that he emphasizes that “more than one great theologian has doubted whether the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle and God the Father of Abraham, Isaac and Jesus can be equated.” I have never understood this latter sort of worry. The classical theistic arguments either work or they do not work. I claim to show in my book that they do work, and thus that the God whose existence they argue for really exists. (Not that Aristotle himself personally got everything right, mind you, but only that the approach of the broad Aristotelian tradition gets you to a correct, if incomplete, account of God’s existence and nature.) Whether Walters agrees with me or not, he at least doesn’t dispute this claim in his review. But in that case, what’s the problem exactly? If the God of the philosophers really exists and if the God of Christianity exists, then it follows that they must be identical, since both the philosophical arguments and divine revelation entail that there is and can only be one God.

To be sure, Walters also appeals to the role “higher biblical criticism” has had in leading some theologians away from identifying the God of the Bible with the God of the philosophers, though he suspects that I “would probably see it as yet another symptom of the modern malaise.” Exactly right. I consider much of modern biblical “scholarship” totally worthless. Bad enough is the false methodological naturalism it simply takes for granted without any serious philosophical argumentation whatsoever. (Bultmann’s famously glib dismissal of supernaturalism as out of place in the “age of the wireless” has long been an object of ridicule among Christian philosophers, and the philosophical acumen of biblical scholars since his time hasn’t gotten any better.) But there is also the ludicrous methodology of boldly reconstructing hypothetical texts, indeed hypothetical texts within hypothetical texts, identifying hypothetical oral traditions and the like underlying these hypothetical texts, reconstructing the theology and ethos of the “communities” who allegedly produced these purported traditions and texts, and then confidently claiming to have discovered on the basis of this set of fantasies what e.g. the historical Jesus (and/or the original “Jesus movement”) “really” believed. What is amazing is not that traditional Christian belief has survived in the face of this “challenge”; what is amazing is that this preposterous pseudo-historical method ever survived the laugh test in the first place. To paraphrase Rowan Atkinson, I wouldn’t trust the average modernist biblical scholar to sit down the right way on a toilet seat.

Anyway, as I’m sure Walters would agree, merely pointing out that some theologians reject any identification of the God of the philosophers with the God of the Bible doesn’t by itself prove anything. The devil is in the details. What is needed is a specific argument showing there to be some incompatibility, and it had better not be an argument that begs the question against the case I make in the book for the existence of the God of the philosophers and the falsity of naturalism.

Regarding the ethics-related material in The Last Superstition, Walters says that he is “skeptical of natural law arguments because of the way they have been used throughout history to legitimize degrading, exploitative conditions for certain classes of people, such as slaves and women.” Two points must be made in response. First of all, and as I note in the book, one must be careful in accusing classical natural law theory of entailing the justifiability of slavery. In fact the sorts of things most people think of when they hear the word “slavery” – chattel slavery, racial slavery, kidnapping, breaking up families, the African slave trade, etc. – are not justifiable on classical natural law theory. Indeed, classical natural law theory condemns these things as immoral even in principle. What it does allow as justifiable in principle is the much less harsh form of servitude involving a prolonged obligation to labor for another as payment of a debt, punishment for a crime, and so forth. And even this has rightly been regarded by modern natural law theorists as too fraught with moral hazard to be justifiable in practice. The common charge that natural law theory would support slavery as it was known in the American context is therefore simply a slander.

Secondly, Walters’ complaint isn’t really an argument in the first place. He says, for example, that “great care is required in employing natural law arguments, to make sure that they do not simply reinforce or legitimize an unjust or corrupt status quo.” OK, but that just raises the question of how we know what counts as unjust or corrupt in the first place, if we don’t know it through natural law theory itself. And to assert that natural law theory must be wrong because it leads to such-and-such a conclusion that we don’t like is simply to beg this question. From a classical natural law point of view, it isn’t natural law theory that must be judged in terms of modern liberal attitudes about sexual morality, traditional sex roles, etc., but rather those attitudes which must be judged in terms of natural law theory. Simply pointing out that there is a conflict proves precisely nothing if one does not also independently prove (and not simply assume) that modern liberal attitudes are correct.

Walters takes issue with my criticism in the book of the “representationalist” approach to the mind that came to dominate modern philosophy after Descartes, and he cites various empirical considerations in support of the idea that representations of a sort do exist in the brain. But his objection is misplaced, because he fails to take note of the distinction between the objects of the intellect on the one hand (abstract concepts and propositions) and the objects of sensation and imagination on the other (such as mental images and the like). My criticisms of representationalism pertained to the former. Sensation and imagination, which from an Aristotelian point of view are (unlike the intellect) material in nature anyway, no doubt do involve processes in the brain that can be characterized as “representations” of a sort. (I have discussed this issue several times in earlier posts, most recently here.)

Finally, Walters complains that I fail to explain why the Aristotelian approach I favor is superior to “an interpretation of the world in terms of Atman, Brahman, Dharma and Samsara.” It is true that I don’t explicitly address this question, again for reasons of space. But it should be clear why I think the Aristotelian approach is superior. I claim to have shown in the book, through detailed arguments, that the Aristotelico-Thomistic metaphysical picture of the world is correct. If that is true, then since its key elements – classical theism, the existence of distinct individual immortal souls, etc. – are incompatible with the key ideas of Indian philosophy (such as pantheism), it follows that those latter ideas are false.

Some small points: It is Aquinas’s brief summary of the theistic proofs in the Summa Theologiae (rather than in the Summa contra Gentiles, as Walters says) that I say are all that most atheists have bothered to read. And while Walters is right that I have no truck with “Intelligent Design” theory, it is not quite right to claim, as he does, that I advocate an “undiluted evolutionary theory.” As I note in the book, while the standard Darwinian story no doubt contains much that is correct, I reject the view that it can explain every aspect of the biological realm, even in principle. For example (and again, as I make clear in the book) I maintain that it cannot possibly account for the origin of the human intellect, precisely because the intellect is immaterial. On general Aristotelian (not “Intelligent Design”) grounds, I also reject the claim that it can account for the transition from inorganic processes to organic ones, or from non-sentient life to sentient life. But that takes us into issues that go beyond anything I say much about in the book, and which need not be addressed in order to make the case I want to make in the book.