The principle
of sufficient reason (PSR), in a typical Neo-Scholastic formulation, states
that “there is a sufficient reason or adequate necessary objective explanation
for the being of whatever is and for all attributes of any being” (Bernard
Wuellner, Dictionary
of Scholastic Philosophy, p. 15).
I discuss and defend PSR at some length in Scholastic
Metaphysics (see especially pp. 107-8 and 137-46). Prof. Michael Della Rocca
defends the principle in his excellent article “PSR,”
which appeared in Philosopher’s Imprint
in 2010 but which (I’m embarrassed to say) I only came across the other day.
Among the arguments for PSR I put forward in Scholastic Metaphysics are a retorsion argument to the effect that if PSR were false, we could have no reason to trust the deliverances of our cognitive faculties, including any grounds we might have for doubting or denying PSR; and an argument to the effect that a critic of PSR cannot coherently accept even the scientific explanations he does accept, unless he acknowledges that there are no brute facts and thus that PSR is true. Della Rocca’s argument bears a family resemblance to this second line of argument.
Among the arguments for PSR I put forward in Scholastic Metaphysics are a retorsion argument to the effect that if PSR were false, we could have no reason to trust the deliverances of our cognitive faculties, including any grounds we might have for doubting or denying PSR; and an argument to the effect that a critic of PSR cannot coherently accept even the scientific explanations he does accept, unless he acknowledges that there are no brute facts and thus that PSR is true. Della Rocca’s argument bears a family resemblance to this second line of argument.
Della Rocca notes, first, that even among philosophers who reject PSR, philosophical theses are often defended by recourse to what he calls “explicability arguments.” An explicability argument (I’ll use the abbreviation EA from here on out) is an argument to the effect that we have grounds for denying that a certain state of affairs obtains if it would be inexplicable or a “brute fact.” Della Rocca offers a number of examples of this strategy. When physicalist philosophers of mind defend some reductionist account of consciousness on the grounds that consciousness would (they say) otherwise be inexplicable, they are deploying an EA. When early modern advocates of the “mechanical philosophy” rejected (their caricature of) the Aristotelian notion of substantial forms, they did so on the grounds that the notion was insufficiently explanatory. When philosophers employ inductive reasoning they are essentially rejecting the claim that the future will not be relevantly like the past nor the unobserved like the observed, on the grounds that this would make future and otherwise unobserved phenomena inexplicable. And so forth. (Della Rocca cites several other specific examples from contemporary philosophy -- in discussions about the metaphysics of dispositions, personal identity, causation, and modality -- wherein EAs are deployed.)
Now, Della
Rocca allows that to appeal to an EA does not by itself commit one to PSR. But suppose we apply the EA approach to the
question of why things exist. Whatever we end up thinking the correct
answer to this question is -- it doesn’t matter for purposes of Della Rocca’s
argument -- if we deploy an EA in defense of it we will implicitly be committing ourselves to PSR, he says, because
PSR just is the claim that the existence of anything must have an
explanation.
In responding to these different examples of EAs, one could, says Della Rocca, take one of three options:
(1) Hold that some EAs are legitimate kinds of argument, while others -- in particular, any EA for some claim about why things exist at all -- are not legitimate.
(2) Hold that no EA for any conclusion is legitimate.
(3) Hold that all EAs, including any EA for a claim about the sheer existence of things, are legitimate kinds of argument.
Now, the critic of PSR cannot take option (3), because that would, in effect, be to accept PSR. Nor could any critic of PSR who applies EAs in defense of other claims -- and the EA approach is, as Della Rocca notes, a standard move in contemporary philosophy (and indeed, in science) -- take option (2).
So that leaves (1). The trouble, though, is that there doesn’t seem to be any non-question-begging way of defending option (1). For why should we believe that EAs are legitimate in other cases, but not when giving some account of the sheer existence of things? It seems arbitrary to allow the one sort of EA but not the other sort. The critic of PSR cannot respond by saying that it is just a brute fact that some kinds of EAs are legitimate and others are not, because this would beg the question against PSR, which denies that there are any brute facts. Nor would it do for the critic to say that it is just intuitively plausible to hold that EAs are illegitimate in the case of explaining the sheer existence of things, since Della Rocca’s point is that the critic’s acceptance of EAs in other domains casts doubt on the reliability of this particular intuition. Hence an appeal to intuition would also beg the question.
So, Della Rocca’s argument is that there seems no cogent way to accept EAs at all without accepting PSR. The implication seems to be that we can have no good reason to think anything is explicable unless we also admit that everything is.
Naturally, I agree with this. Indeed, I think Della Rocca, if anything, concedes too much to the critic of PSR. In particular, he allows that while it would be “extremely problematic” for someone to bite the bullet and take option (2), it may not be “logically incoherent” to do so. But this doesn’t seem correct to me. Even if the critic of PSR decides to reject the various specific examples of EAs cited by Della Rocca -- EAs concerning various claims about consciousness, modality, personal identity, etc. -- the critic will still make use of various patterns of reasoning he considers formally valid or inductively strong, will reject patterns of reasoning he considers fallacious, etc. And he will do so precisely because these principles of logic embody standards of intelligibility or explanatory adequacy.
To be sure, it is a commonplace in logic that not all explanations are arguments, and it is also sometimes claimed (less plausibly, I think) that not all arguments are explanations. However, certainly many arguments are explanations. What Aristotelians call “explanatory demonstrations” (e.g. a syllogism like All rational animals are capable of language, all men are rational animals, so all men are capable of language) are explanations. Arguments to the best explanation are explanations, and as Della Rocca notes, inductive reasoning in general seems to presuppose that things have explanations.
So, to give up EAs of any sort (option (2)) would seem to be to give up the very practice of argumentation itself, or at least much of it. Needless to say, it is hard to see how that could fail to be logically incoherent, at least if one tries to defend one’s rejection of PSR with arguments. Hence, to accept the general practice of giving arguments while nevertheless rejecting EAs of the specific sorts Della Rocca gives as examples would really be to take Della Rocca’s option (1) rather than option (2).
Della Rocca also considers some common objections to PSR. In response to the claim that PSR is incompatible with quantum mechanics, Della Rocca refers the reader to Alex Pruss’s response to such objections in his book The Principle of Sufficient Reason, but also makes the point that appealing to QM by itself simply does nothing to rebut his own argument for PSR. For even if a critic of PSR thinks it incompatible with QM, he still owes us an answer to the question of where we are supposed to draw the line between legitimate EA arguments and illegitimate ones, and why we should draw it precisely where the critic says we should. (For my own response to QM-based objections, see pp. 122-27 and 142 of Scholastic Metaphysics.)
Della Rocca also considers an objection raised by philosophers like Peter van Inwagen and Jonathan Bennett to the effect that PSR entails necessitarianism, the bizarre claim that all truths, including apparently contingent ones, are really necessary truths. Della Rocca thinks van Inwagen and Bennett are probably right, but suggests that the defender of PSR could simply bite the bullet and accept necessitarianism, as Spinoza notoriously did. And in that case, to reject Della Rocca’s argument for PSR on the grounds that necessitarianism is false would just be to beg the question.
Here again I think Della Rocca concedes too much. As I argue in Scholastic Metaphysics (pp. 140-41), objections like the one raised by van Inwagen and Bennett presuppose that propositions are among the things PSR says require an explanation, and that for an explanans to be a sufficient reason for an explanandum involves its logically entailing the explanandum. But while rationalist versions of PSR might endorse these assumptions, the Thomist understanding of PSR does not.
Della Rocca also remarks:
I suspect that many of you simply will not see the force of the challenge that I am issuing to the non-rationalist. (I speak here from long experience, experience that prompted me to call my endeavor here quixotic.) Philosophers tend to be pretty cavalier in their use of explicability arguments -- using them when doing so suits their purposes, refusing to use them otherwise, and more generally, failing to investigate how their various attitudes toward explicability arguments hang together, if they hang together at all. We philosophers -- in our slouching fashion! -- are comfortable with a certain degree of unexamined arbitrariness in our use of explicability arguments. But my point is that a broader perspective on our practices with regard to explicability arguments reveals that there is a genuine tension in the prevalent willingness to use some explicability arguments and to reject others.
Amen to that. As with the urban legend about First Cause arguments resting on the premise that “everything has a cause,” the notion that the PSR is a relic, long ago refuted, is a mere prejudice that a certain kind of academic philosopher stubbornly refuses to examine. It doesn’t matter how strong is an argument you give for PSR; he will remain unmoved. He “already knows” there must be something wrong with it, because, after all, don’t most members of “the profession” think so?
In responding to these different examples of EAs, one could, says Della Rocca, take one of three options:
(1) Hold that some EAs are legitimate kinds of argument, while others -- in particular, any EA for some claim about why things exist at all -- are not legitimate.
(2) Hold that no EA for any conclusion is legitimate.
(3) Hold that all EAs, including any EA for a claim about the sheer existence of things, are legitimate kinds of argument.
Now, the critic of PSR cannot take option (3), because that would, in effect, be to accept PSR. Nor could any critic of PSR who applies EAs in defense of other claims -- and the EA approach is, as Della Rocca notes, a standard move in contemporary philosophy (and indeed, in science) -- take option (2).
So that leaves (1). The trouble, though, is that there doesn’t seem to be any non-question-begging way of defending option (1). For why should we believe that EAs are legitimate in other cases, but not when giving some account of the sheer existence of things? It seems arbitrary to allow the one sort of EA but not the other sort. The critic of PSR cannot respond by saying that it is just a brute fact that some kinds of EAs are legitimate and others are not, because this would beg the question against PSR, which denies that there are any brute facts. Nor would it do for the critic to say that it is just intuitively plausible to hold that EAs are illegitimate in the case of explaining the sheer existence of things, since Della Rocca’s point is that the critic’s acceptance of EAs in other domains casts doubt on the reliability of this particular intuition. Hence an appeal to intuition would also beg the question.
So, Della Rocca’s argument is that there seems no cogent way to accept EAs at all without accepting PSR. The implication seems to be that we can have no good reason to think anything is explicable unless we also admit that everything is.
Naturally, I agree with this. Indeed, I think Della Rocca, if anything, concedes too much to the critic of PSR. In particular, he allows that while it would be “extremely problematic” for someone to bite the bullet and take option (2), it may not be “logically incoherent” to do so. But this doesn’t seem correct to me. Even if the critic of PSR decides to reject the various specific examples of EAs cited by Della Rocca -- EAs concerning various claims about consciousness, modality, personal identity, etc. -- the critic will still make use of various patterns of reasoning he considers formally valid or inductively strong, will reject patterns of reasoning he considers fallacious, etc. And he will do so precisely because these principles of logic embody standards of intelligibility or explanatory adequacy.
To be sure, it is a commonplace in logic that not all explanations are arguments, and it is also sometimes claimed (less plausibly, I think) that not all arguments are explanations. However, certainly many arguments are explanations. What Aristotelians call “explanatory demonstrations” (e.g. a syllogism like All rational animals are capable of language, all men are rational animals, so all men are capable of language) are explanations. Arguments to the best explanation are explanations, and as Della Rocca notes, inductive reasoning in general seems to presuppose that things have explanations.
So, to give up EAs of any sort (option (2)) would seem to be to give up the very practice of argumentation itself, or at least much of it. Needless to say, it is hard to see how that could fail to be logically incoherent, at least if one tries to defend one’s rejection of PSR with arguments. Hence, to accept the general practice of giving arguments while nevertheless rejecting EAs of the specific sorts Della Rocca gives as examples would really be to take Della Rocca’s option (1) rather than option (2).
Della Rocca also considers some common objections to PSR. In response to the claim that PSR is incompatible with quantum mechanics, Della Rocca refers the reader to Alex Pruss’s response to such objections in his book The Principle of Sufficient Reason, but also makes the point that appealing to QM by itself simply does nothing to rebut his own argument for PSR. For even if a critic of PSR thinks it incompatible with QM, he still owes us an answer to the question of where we are supposed to draw the line between legitimate EA arguments and illegitimate ones, and why we should draw it precisely where the critic says we should. (For my own response to QM-based objections, see pp. 122-27 and 142 of Scholastic Metaphysics.)
Della Rocca also considers an objection raised by philosophers like Peter van Inwagen and Jonathan Bennett to the effect that PSR entails necessitarianism, the bizarre claim that all truths, including apparently contingent ones, are really necessary truths. Della Rocca thinks van Inwagen and Bennett are probably right, but suggests that the defender of PSR could simply bite the bullet and accept necessitarianism, as Spinoza notoriously did. And in that case, to reject Della Rocca’s argument for PSR on the grounds that necessitarianism is false would just be to beg the question.
Here again I think Della Rocca concedes too much. As I argue in Scholastic Metaphysics (pp. 140-41), objections like the one raised by van Inwagen and Bennett presuppose that propositions are among the things PSR says require an explanation, and that for an explanans to be a sufficient reason for an explanandum involves its logically entailing the explanandum. But while rationalist versions of PSR might endorse these assumptions, the Thomist understanding of PSR does not.
Della Rocca also remarks:
I suspect that many of you simply will not see the force of the challenge that I am issuing to the non-rationalist. (I speak here from long experience, experience that prompted me to call my endeavor here quixotic.) Philosophers tend to be pretty cavalier in their use of explicability arguments -- using them when doing so suits their purposes, refusing to use them otherwise, and more generally, failing to investigate how their various attitudes toward explicability arguments hang together, if they hang together at all. We philosophers -- in our slouching fashion! -- are comfortable with a certain degree of unexamined arbitrariness in our use of explicability arguments. But my point is that a broader perspective on our practices with regard to explicability arguments reveals that there is a genuine tension in the prevalent willingness to use some explicability arguments and to reject others.
Amen to that. As with the urban legend about First Cause arguments resting on the premise that “everything has a cause,” the notion that the PSR is a relic, long ago refuted, is a mere prejudice that a certain kind of academic philosopher stubbornly refuses to examine. It doesn’t matter how strong is an argument you give for PSR; he will remain unmoved. He “already knows” there must be something wrong with it, because, after all, don’t most members of “the profession” think so?
Why, it’s almost as if such philosophers don’t want the PSR to be true, and thus would rather not have their prejudice against it disturbed. Can’t imagine why that might be, can you?
Some related posts:
Marmodoro on PSR and PC
An exchange with Keith Parsons, Part IV [on “brute facts”]
Nagel and his critics, Part VI [on rationalism, PSR, and the principle of causality]
@Santi:
ReplyDeleteYou seem to be implying a false dilemma here. The choice is apparently between 'start with experience' (really just a shorthand for your Logical Positivist epistemology, it seems) and to 'leap into a faith tradition with both feet'.
Trouble it, those aren't remotely your only choices. No-one here is asking you to 'leap' into anything. You could also think carefully about Thomism, carefully consider objections to your own views, and so on. At this point you're pretty much admitting that that isn't your intention. Indeed, you don't even seem to see the possibility of thinking carefully about alternatives to your own views any more.
But hey, I guess it all seems 'superstitious', 'ethically icky' and 'woo', so who needs to think about it, huh? A creationist could make similar excuses you do to avoid thinking about evolution.
You also still seem blissfully unaware that Thomism does 'start from experience'. Aquinas thought that 'Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses', after all. Ironically, you keep ignoring the empirical feedback and clinging to your own preconceptions about what Thomism, or religion, or 'faith-traditions', or whatever, are supposed to be like.
As a side note, I never understood why something being 'ethically icky' is meant to be such a problem. Surely any moral position other than your own is going to seem 'ethically icky' to some extent. That's just how moral disagreement works.
ReplyDeleteYou might as well describe any position other than your own as 'intellectually icky'. If you're going to actually think about stuff, you can't worry about what's 'icky'.
"Well, I'm pleased at least you don't think burning at the stake is now an appropriate punishment for thought-crime such as that committed by Tom Cruise and Deepak Chopra. Perhaps a hand chopped off or a tongue extracted?
ReplyDeleteWhen people like you start talking about punishing those who express a differing view, I see that my concerns about traditional Catholicism are not unfounded."
Alan,
Gottfried has already pointed out the rashness of your reply to me. I think I should say something for myself, though:
1. I am not Catholic, traditional or otherwise.
2. As Gottfried notes, why do a bit more than imply that my own intent has such a sinister quality, and then go on to suggest a legal means of compensation for people who have been taken in by ideological hustlers? I think I made it quite clear that capital sorts of punishment are not the sort I had in mind - if I had any punishment in mind at all (which, frankly, I did not). The inconsistency and lack of charity you display in a single comment is indeed a feat.
3. I'm willing to grant that your remarks are simply the result of haste and some intemperance on your part, and not so mean spirited as they seem. Still, that bit about the removal of hands and tongues is, at best, in poor taste, and I think it is reasonable to ask you to apologize.
@Greg
ReplyDelete"... you are leaving no doubt that, for you, philosophy is an instrumental pursuit to justify propositions that you place beyond doubt."
Fom Bayes to Wittgenstein, from Wittgenstein to Hume, and then from Hume to Marx.
@Matt Sheean:
ReplyDelete"I think it is reasonable to ask you to apologize."
For whatever it's worth, I agree, but I suspect the apology won't be forthcoming. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, though.
Incidentally, to your other points (with which I also agree) I'd add that the really nasty forms of punishment that we tend to associate with pre-modern Europe generally predated Christianity and were usually imposed by secular authorities; overall, the Church was actually instrumental in ameliorating them.
Greg,
ReplyDeleteYou're always so thoughtful. I appreciate your responses.
You said that I presume that "desires, by virtue of being desires, ought to be permitted and satisfied..."
I agree with you that this would be an incoherent way to set up ethics. A psychopath desires murder, therefore ... etc.
But what I'm saying is that, existentially, human beings are bodily creatures with evolved traits toward eating, sex, territoriality, etc.
And when you can channel those traits in the direction of love, commitment, kindness, building a life together etc., then those traits should be given space to flourish.
The Thomistic system should be able to incorporate gay marriage into its metaphysical hierarchy if it orients to love (as opposed to worrying about reproduction).
This is where history is getting ignored. Thomism did not emerge out of a vacuum. It was hard to keep the human population up 700 years ago. Naturally, marriage was seen at that time as focusing on children. Half of all human being who have ever been born have not survived to their fifth birthday.
We don't have an underpopulation problem anymore. We have plenty of people on the planet. We now have an under-love problem that we can focus on (not enough love in the world). One way to increase respectful, dignified coupling between people who were made with same sex attraction is to take that desire and love out of the shadows and give it a place in the hierarchy of positive values.
It's not just about sex, it's about companionship and love. Bodily creatures couple and connect sexually and also cement relationships in physical bonding. You are too focused on the bodily component as opposed to the bonding that emerges out of that component.
Thomism ought to be able to incorporate these distinctions.
Greg,
ReplyDeleteYou said AIDS "is illustrative of the extent to which purveyors of liberated sexuality will go to ensure that people feel affirmed--even to the detriment of those they are trying to 'liberate'."
I'm inclined to agree with you that liberated sexuality carries high costs that are often sublimated by liberals like me. Fine. But gay marriage then is a conservative, Thomist response to this problem. The dionysian energies of sexuality can be channeled into more stable forms through gay marriage; it can be oriented toward love, commitment, and a shared life.
Think of the Eleanor Rigby song. Love does not consign individuals to lives of sexual frustration, spinsterhood, and isolation.
If HIV should teach liberals about the Dionysian energies surrounding sex, psychology should teach conservatives that sexual repression and isolation are forms of cruelty not in keeping with orienting towards love.
I can't possibly be alone in my tremendous amusement that "the dionysian energies of sexuality" have suddenly found a place in the materialist universe (alongside a fair number of logical and ethical "oughts").
ReplyDeletePerhaps Daniel would like to call Santi a taxi.
I'm just surprised that Santi finds comments he appreciates all of a sudden.
ReplyDelete"f HIV should teach liberals about the Dionysian energies surrounding sex, psychology should teach conservatives that sexual repression and isolation are forms of cruelty not in keeping with orienting towards love."
ReplyDeleteWell, if we're going to talk about Conservatives and Liberals and what should be repressed and what should not...
"Human government is derived from the Divine government, and should imitate it. Now although God is all-powerful and supremely good, nevertheless He allows certain evils to take place in the universe, which He might prevent, lest, without them, greater goods might be forfeited, or greater evils ensue. Accordingly in human government also, those who are in authority, rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain greater evils be incurred: thus Augustine says (De Ordine ii, 4): "If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust." Hence, though unbelievers sin in their rites, they may be tolerated, either on account of some good that ensues therefrom, or because of some evil avoided."
This bein' from the ST, second part of the second part, Question 10, article 11.
Santi Tafarella said...
ReplyDelete‘It's not just about sex, it's about companionship and love. Bodily creatures couple and connect sexually and also cement relationships in physical bonding. You are too focused on the bodily component as opposed to the bonding that emerges out of that component.
Thomism ought to be able to incorporate these distinctions.’
I will take you up on that. Suppose for the sake of the argument that I do agree that homosexuality is not immoral and hold the propositions ‘Homosexuality is Non-Immoral’ and ‘Homosexual love is a good’ to be objectively true. Were I to do so I would appeal to objective facts about the human nature, the essence, as Thomists do with all other moral positions. You on the other hand have admitted that there is no objective morality and thus cannot hold that the above propositions have any rational basis. The only way you justify the ‘morality’ of homosexuality is to deny morality in the first place in which case my acting as if homosexuality is good would be as rational as my acting as if it were abhorrent.
@ Santi
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that this would be an incoherent way to set up ethics. A psychopath desires murder, therefore ... etc.
The position that desires deserve to be satisfied was implicit in what you said before (and even what you say now), and the 'counterexample' you give here does not absolve you of your proposal's commitment to it (since one would presumably add the qualifier that the desires should not interfere with others' desires... i.e. the utilitarian position).
One way to increase respectful, dignified coupling between people who were made with same sex attraction is to take that desire and love out of the shadows and give it a place in the hierarchy of positive values.
It's not just about sex, it's about companionship and love. Bodily creatures couple and connect sexually and also cement relationships in physical bonding. You are too focused on the bodily component as opposed to the bonding that emerges out of that component.
No one said it's 'just about sex.' As you know, Thomistic ethics does not justify evils by reference to attendant goods. One cannot 'increase respectful, dignified coupling' by encouraging immoral behavior; to encourage immoral behavior in fact is disrespectful to the dignity of those so engaged. This proposal would require that homosexual relationships are not a perversion of the end of sex; but as I've said, that is impossible to do without equivocating on the sense of 'nature' relevant to natural law.
Marriage, on the Catholic and Thomist understanding, is a pre-political and pre-ecclesial institution. Its purpose is not 'bonding', 'respectful, dignified coupling', or affirming people who do not feel affirmed. The 'bodily component' is not all that is relevant, but it is a necessary condition without which there is no marriage. There is not an option of extending marriage to others who cannot instantiate the particular values for which marriage exists; one is then simply introducing a term 'marriage(2)' and using it to refer to a collection of distinct institutions. The motivation is not the nature of marriage or the people involved; it is including people under a distinction that they cannot instantiate.
We don't have an underpopulation problem anymore.
Not anymore, and not yet. Give Europe, Japan, and the United States a few years. We can probably give the rest of the world a few decades, depending on how efficiently and earnestly we export western sexual mores.
But gay marriage then is a conservative, Thomist response to this problem. The dionysian energies of sexuality can be channeled into more stable forms through gay marriage; it can be oriented toward love, commitment, and a shared life.
ReplyDeleteIt really is not. Those who defend 'gay marriage' as 'conservative' generally reveal to be full of it. Andrew Sullivan defended that position many years ago and eventually went on to embrace all kinds of oddities like 'the dignity of anonymous sex' which is obviously impossible to square with Thomism and Catholicism. There is also the problem that many architects of gender ideology have expressed less publically that they have advocated 'gay marriage' in order to subvert the institution of marriage itself. Insofar that the understanding of marriage now enshrined in many laws is contrived for that end, the idea of a 'conservative, Thomist' compromise is a farce.
Is it possible to avoid that tendency? I doubt it. The issue here is that the redefinition of marriage is motivated by the satisfaction of desire. One is not saying: This is what marriage is, so it should include these other groups. One is saying: There other groups are not included, and that is the problem with marriage as-is.
The proper 'response' to this problem is not to encourage people to engage in unsafe behavior simply because they want to and, after all, we're all imperfectionist liberals who can't help but have sex. This is an extremely common phenomenon among social liberals; you can see it in all of the issues cropping up around sexual assault on campuses. Why do sexual assaults happen so frequently? People are encouraged to drink copious amounts and dress immodestly. If these things are pointed out, enlightened liberals charge others of excusing the rapist or 'blaming the victim'. The idea that alcohol consumption or immodest dress should exculpate the perpetrator is, of course, absurd, but there are surely true counterfactual conditionals of the form "if x did not drink this much, then x would not have raped y"--and for that reason, those encouraging such behavior are responsible when such events happen. But in spite of the risks and the collateral damage that such mores inevitably lead to, the 'fruits' of the sexual revolution cannot be ceded or questioned. (It's actually the conservative's fault, for being too stuffy and mean and not liberating themselves.) The liberal dream is that all social ills can be eliminated by the right legislation. (I live in an academic environment; people propose that we add another workshop to orientation.)
In case Santi wants to know my actual position on homosexuality I freely admit to having no strong thoughts on it one way or another. If it were found tomorrow that the relevant metaphysical considerations proved it the equal to heterosexuality then it wouldn’t bother me over much (in fact I might go overtly cynical and think ‘good! At least no people can stop waxing hysterical about it and think more soberly at metaphysical issues).
ReplyDelete@Scott,
Ohh no I've spent most of the evening having to write about Zoltan Istvan whose take on metaphysics and ethics isn't much better (his main moral imperative, that 'we should seek omnipotence and crush all that stands in ''our'' way' is more colourful though). I largely gave up with this when the combination of a Humean sensation phenomenalism with an Eliminativist Third-person only view of the world began to emerge.
Alan:
ReplyDeleteYou said, "But hey, I guess it [religion] all seems 'superstitious', 'ethically icky' and 'woo', so who needs to think about it, huh?"
I am thinking about it. If I draw conclusions about it, isn't that also thinking about it?
So I don't know if you're straw-manning me, or what your point is. Religion is quite often deeply, deeply superstitious. It always has been. It's also quite often ethically grotesque (putting children to death for disrespecting parents, condoning slavery, frightening congregants with the terror that they'll go to hell and be tortured by demons for eternity if they don't stay with the program). There's a lot not to like.
Perhaps you might tell me, Alan. Do you believe in hell? As in, eternal hell for those who do not find salvation in Jesus?
Does the resurrected physical body of the unredeemed sinner burn in fire forever?
Matt,
ReplyDeleteYou said, "though unbelievers sin in their rites, they may be tolerated, ..."
I'll take that as a gesture of coming half way on the issue of gay marriage, toward the direction of civil marriage for gays, if that is what you meant by the Augustine quote.
That's excellent.
But I don't think, if it's clearly established by science that gay desire is oriented by biology, that gay marriage should be treated by Thomists as an evil. Indeed, it's the logical consequence of any Thomism that is oriented toward love to endorse gay marriage.
Heterosexual marriage, after all, is in part a way to manage natural sexual desire in a stable way, and direct it toward love (rather than, say, lust with a prostitute).
If Thomism's orientation is placed on love, on God as love, and the reasoning follows from there, then gays needn't change their orientation or abstain from sex to be good Catholics. They just need to channel it (exactly as religious heterosexuals do) into a committed marital relationship.
The new Pope, it seems to me, is trying to nudge the Church toward this love and acceptance orientation, incorporating gay people into this orientation. Thomist intellectuals should start (in my view) making use of their considerable talents at reasoning to show how a Thomism oriented toward love can arrive at gay marriage.
Your Augustine quote shows that it can be done. That quote alone gets gay marriage halfway there (in the civil realm).
@Santi:
ReplyDelete'I am thinking about it. If I draw conclusions about it, isn't that also thinking about it?'
What I was referring to here is rational thinking, and no, for that, simply drawing conclusions isn't enough. You must genuinely reason. I'm sure you'll agree with that much.
My 'point' was that calling Thomism, or religion, or whatever, 'superstitious', 'ethically icky' or 'woo' isn't substantial. It doesn't really mean anything.
Even if certain forms of religion are 'superstitious', or there are certain propositions within it that are wrong, hardly means that theism as a whole is wrong. After all, 'some statements' are wrong, but that needn't tarnish the reputation of statements per se, right? Why assume that all religion is (relevantly) the same?
Again, you seem to have a long list of stereotypes of what religion, and metaphysics, and Thomism are meant to be like, and it's clear that you'd rather listen to those than the actual Thomists here.
Finally, since you asked, no, I don't 'believe in hell'. I'm actually an agnostic, like you. I don't see how that's relevant, though.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteScott,
ReplyDeleteDo you believe that gay marriage can be plausibly and faithfully incorporated into Thomism?
Would you (as the Augustine quote on the "rites" of nonbelievers suggests) support civil marriage for gays?
"The new Pope, it seems to me, is trying to nudge the Church toward this love and acceptance orientation, incorporating gay people into this orientation."
ReplyDeleteWait, this is the Pope who has consistently affirmed the Church's teachings on homosexuality and opposed same-sex marriage in Argentina while he was Cardinal Bergoglio, but insists that gay people should be treated with love?
Oops. Try again.
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteYou keep insisting that if I'm agnostic I can't make ethical arguments. But I'm trying to pick up the tool of Thomism, and reason from it, and ask if it can be coherently incorporated with gay marriage.
If you ask me if God exists, I don't know. If you ask me the basis of morals, I think it's groundless if God doesn't exist, and grounded in God if God does exist.
In the meantime, I have to live, pragmatically, with other social primates, and I have a moral sense born of our social evolution. That gives me moral intuitions, such as that love is preferable to hate.
You want firmer ground. You can pretend the ground is firmer than that. I prefer not to. I am trying to live in the fog of this existence as best I can. "For now we see through a glass darkly," said St Paul (who, by his absolutest pronouncements, often showed that he forgot this).
"To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge" (Confucius).
Happily, if God exists and is love, and if in fact we orient ourselves toward love and cooperation for no other reason than that we are social primates, we will stumble on God regardless (if God exists).
It's a win-win. God is love and social primates are oriented to their circle of love, acceptance, and forgiveness (which they can imaginatively expand).
So I don't think it's incoherent for agnostics or atheists to debate ethical issues.
If we were intelligent sharks and not social primates, we would be oriented toward the far spectrum of selfishness, and then your point would make more sense (if God is love).
@Santi Tafarella:
ReplyDeleteI haven't directly addressed you in a while, but since you've asked me a couple of direct questions, I'll do so now.
"Do you believe that gay marriage can be plausibly and faithfully incorporated into Thomism?"
No.
"Would you (as the Augustine quote on the 'rites' of nonbelievers suggests) support civil marriage for gays?"
"Civil marriage" isn't a sacrament (and isn't, or at least needn't be, what the Church means by "marriage") and I see no reason why it shouldn't be extended to same-sex couples with regard specifically to recognition by the government. However, I don't think any private parties (including the Church) should be legally required to acknowledge such unions (same-sex or otherwise) as "marriages," and I'm most certainly opposed to forcing (say) bakers and photographers (I'm sure you're familiar with the cases I have in mind here) to accept business involving same-sex weddings if they oppose them.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteAndrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic, has been making a great deal of hay over some of the new Pope's recent public signals and "political" moves within the church bureaucracy.
He has a different impression of the pope's recent signals regarding gays than you.
And I've noticed some conservative journals are not pleased with the Pope's "liberal" attitude toward gays.
Are these the rumblings of something toward gay equality? You don't think so. Why not?
@ Scott
ReplyDelete"Wait, this is the Pope who has consistently affirmed the Church's teachings on homosexuality and opposed same-sex marriage in Argentina while he was Cardinal Bergoglio, but insists that gay people should be treated with love?"
One of the many reasons I don't trust the media on anything involving religion; you might as well pick up a copy of the Inquirer, it's probably even more accurate...
Of course, the only thing I find more silly than the people who write these reports are the liberal and especially the conservative Catholics who take them dead seriously...
"Why not?"
ReplyDeleteDid I not already give my reasons? Can you not read?
@Greg:
ReplyDeleteYou call gay sex a form of immorality.
What, on Thomism, is immoral about it? That the semen does not get ejaculated into a vagina?
Is this the end of sex, to procreate?
And if so, how can you not see this as a historically generated (as opposed to a heavenly generated) deduction from a time when it was difficult to maintain population?
In other words, this is a completely arbitrary, historically contingent, standard for what sex's end is. You can just as easily say that sex's end is love, for embodied souls are made to express love. Another end of sex is fun. Sex is fun. (Or is God against fun?)
There are so many positive elements to sex. It can be good for your health. This narrowing of sex to a pragmatic procreation tool is what I mean by the possibility of being more creative about how God makes things to be used.
And evolution exploits contingencies. If Thomism clings to singular ends in its reasoning, it's an example of it not taking into account biology, for which organs have multiple, contextually driven ends, and how life evolves creative solutions to problems.
So rather than the penis being "monologic," why can't it be "dialogic"? Why can't it be akin to the Panda's thumb? (I hope you're smiling at the analogy.)
"He has a different impression of the pope's recent signals regarding gays than you."
ReplyDeleteRight, impressions of signals. How very covert, and how much fun for the kids among us who like to play 007. Unfortunately those impressions of those signals contradict what Pope Francis has actually and explicitly said, so oops, tough luck there.
I'm on record here as thinking that the wrongness of homosexual sex can't strictly be derived from a natural-law ethic, but that there's a pretty obvious sense in which sticking a penis into an anus constitutes operation outside of design parameters. I'm also on record as thinking that if God says we shouldn't do something (as is the case if the Torah's proscriptions on a man's lying with a man as one lies with a woman are genuine revelation), then it's a pretty damn good idea not to do it.
"What, on Thomism, is immoral about it? That the semen does not get ejaculated into a vagina?"
ReplyDeleteMore precisely, that the semen does not get ejaculated into the unprotected vagina of the male partner's lawfully wedded female wife. Did you really not know this?
Scott:
ReplyDeleteYou said, ""Civil marriage" isn't a sacrament (and isn't, or at least needn't be, what the Church means by "marriage") and I see no reason why it shouldn't be extended to same-sex couples with regard specifically to recognition by the government. However, I don't think any private parties (including the Church) should be legally required to acknowledge such unions (same-sex or otherwise) as "marriages," and I'm most certainly opposed to forcing (say) bakers and photographers (I'm sure you're familiar with the cases I have in mind here) to accept business involving same-sex weddings if they oppose them."
Concerning this paragraph, I agree with you completely.
Scott:
ReplyDeleteYou said, "... there's a pretty obvious sense in which sticking a penis into an anus constitutes operation outside of design parameters."
But wait. If you orient Thomism toward love, and this is within marriage, why can't gay sex (or heterosexuals who engage in anal sex) be within design parameters--the design of expressing play and love with one's spouse?
And these sorts of parameters were set at a time before biology discovered just exactly how common it is for organisms to exploit different uses of their existing organs for different contexts (the panda's thumb, the penguin's wing evolved to the sea, etc.). If one orients Thomism to love, rather than procreation, and toward post-Darwinian biology, as opposed to the fixity of species presumed by medievalists, why can't Thomism incorporate gay marriage into its system.
(I know you appealed to the Bible as well, but set that aside for the moment and just explain why the Thomist system can't adjust its notion of design.)
Good. But you should also be aware that I am not (yet) a Catholic and that my opinion is just that and does not represent anyone else's.
ReplyDeleteI also think that closer examination would uncover some differences between our opinions.
"[W]hy can't gay sex (or heterosexuals who engage in anal sex) be within design parameters--the design of expressing play and love with one's spouse?"
ReplyDeleteWhy can't stabbing your partner in the spleen (most caressingly, of course!) constitute sexual play?
I'm done for the night here, so don't expect any more posts from me until (at least) tomorrow.
If it's helpful, santi, I think you are failing to use "design" in the way that Scott is - or at least your language is vague enough that it is not clear whether or not you are equivocating.
ReplyDelete"Design parameters" can mean the reason for which the organ has developed and survived, namely procreation. On the other hand, "design parameters" in the way you use it seems to be something more like "designs that the person sets for the organ", namely expressions of affection and mutual play. Play and expressions of love, while being natural and healthy activities, do not make just any old expression of love or play unproblematic. Sadistic and masochistic forms of sexual play, for instance, can be described as demonstrations of love and affection, play, even deeply intimate by those that participate in such activities (of course, you might think that they're within their rights to say such things, I don't know).
I'm not saying anything conclusive here, other than that an activity being intended as affection or play does not render it natural, within "design parameters", or good.
I should also say that "love" and "play" as you use them are indeterminate, as any number of activities can be described as loving and playful. Ergo, the description of certain sexual activities as loving and playful is a matter of intending that they be so, and not something natural to the activities as such.
ReplyDeleteThat is why I say you are using "design parameters" in a different manner than Scott.
Santi, you can get a primer on the objections to homosexual "marriage" here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.scifiwright.com/2014/10/snap-out-of-it/#more-12507
(The author is Catholic, but not a professional philosopher)
Scott: Can you not read?
ReplyDeleteIs that a rhetorical question?
@ Santi,
ReplyDeleteI’m not going to be sarcastic or silly about this since you’ve replied in good faith but here seems to be a confusion: Thomists, not to mention virtually all other Classical Theists, do not say morality is grounded in God directly instead that claim that morality is grounded in a being’s Essence which in turn is grounded in God*. One could uphold the former without endorsing that latter part (perhaps Essences are freestanding Platonic abstracta). One could even uphold Atheism or Agnosticism about God and still uphold this model of Goodness as part of a more ‘Naturalism friendly’ type of Realism a la David Armstrong. The pivotal point here is Nominalism as opposed to Atheism per say. Of course a lot of people here would argue that there are proofs of God’s existence that begin directly with Realism like the Fourth Way.
*An important consequence of this being that God cannot arbitrarily alter what is good for a species.
In the meantime, I have to live, pragmatically, with other social primates, and I have a moral sense born of our social evolution. That gives me moral intuitions, such as that love is preferable to hate.
It gives you and me instinctive reactions but without any further support there is no particular reason why we ought or not not to follow them. Even were every human being since recorded history began to hold the same set of moral values that alone would not be enough – alone it would be a mere appeal to ‘customs and habit’. Also the very capacity to make statements that hold of necessity about a nature be it Humanity, Hydrogen or requires a commitment to some form of Realism.
Also, I am not sure you can even reference to ‘senses’ or ‘intuitions’ even on a descriptive basis given the form of Eliminativism you appear to tacitly endorse a la Michael Graziano (the last sentence in that article you linked to comes to mind). I will qualify this though since I found the message of the essay conflicting, since it’s precisely the between how things appear to our senses and how they are in ‘reality’, the difference between what gives rise to the sensation of white light and the sensation itself, which gives rise to the Qualia problem Eliminativism claims to solve.
Hi Brandon and Scott,
ReplyDeleteI'm in an Internet cafe now, so my time is limited, but I'd just like to say something about simple vs. conditional necessity. From what I gather, Brandon, you seem to be arguing that the Banezian view of freedom is as follows:
(1) An agent b performs an action X freely if and only if (iff):
(i) b chooses to X;
(ii) it is not necessarily the case that b X's.
Children and animals partake of the voluntary, as Aristotle says. By extension, we might define "voluntary" as follows:
(2) An agent b performs an action X freely if and only if (iff):
(i) b wants to X;
(ii) it is not necessarily the case that b Xs.
(3) An agent b is in control of its action of X-ing iff it would not X (or at the very least, it would not X in the same way) if it did not choose to (or in the case of animals, if it did not want to).
(4) An agent b has the power to refrain from X-ing iff it is not necessarily the case that b Xs.
The libertarian account of freedom would add an extra condition to (1), (2), (3) and (4): there is no agent c and no action Y such that necessarily, whenever c performs action Y, b Xs.
Now I'd like to explain why I see the Banezian account as deficient. Consider Flipper the dolphin. Dolphins, as I understand it, breathe voluntarily (unlike us). Suppose there is a mad scientist named Tom, who has implanted a remote-controlled device in Flipper's brain, such that whenever Tom turns the knob on the remote control, Flipper feels the urge to breathe, and breathes because that is what he wants to do. On the Banezian definition, Flipper's action would qualify as voluntary, and as being under his control.
You might say that because the will is a spiritual faculty, the same analysis would not apply to free will, but what you're saying then is that the only reason why the actions of a person whose desires are manipulated by a remote-controlled are not free is that they proceed from his/her lower appetites (which are not spiritual but physical). That to me is a reductio ad absurdum of the Banezian view. Its view of freedom is Pickwickian.
If you don't think I have done the Banezian view justice, then could you please supply your own list of conditions fro freedom, in the same simple, clear mathematical language as I have employed? Cheers.
Hi Scott,
ReplyDeleteYou ask: "Where do you think Aquinas (or G-L) departs from Boethius on this subject of free will?"
On the Boethian view, as it is commonly called, God is a timeless spectator of human choices, like a watcher on a high hill: that is, our choices make Him (timelessly) aware of what we have decided. This view makes God dependent on creatures for information, which is why G-L found it so offensive. As he wrote: "God determining or determined: there is no other alternative." He found the latter view offensive because it makes God dependent on creatures, because it is incompatible with the notion of God as Pure Act and because it seemed (to him) to contradict the Vatican I doctrine that God is impassible.
I hold that Vatican I's definition simply means that no creature can make God suffer or control God's choices, actions or feeling. I don't hold to a view of God as Pure Act, as I explained in my recent post "On not putting all your theological eggs in one basket" on Uncommon Descent. And I don't see a problem with God being dependent on creatures for information about their choices if He has chosen to make Himself dependent.
Really got to go now. Cheers.
The libertarian account of freedom would add an extra condition to (1), (2), (3) and (4): there is no agent c and no action Y such that necessarily, whenever c performs action Y, b Xs.
ReplyDeleteThis is not a 'libertarian account of freedom'. You can pick up practically any work that has ever been written on libertarianism and you will not find this condition at all; it is something you have just made up for the specific purpose of ruling out Banezianism.
However, let's assume it stipulatively. This condition rules out the possibility that you are libertarian. You claim to be a Boethian. On a Boethian account, the following is true:
(4B) There is an agent, God, and an action, knowing, such that necessarily, whenever God knows that b is doing X, b Xs.
Indeed Boethius himself argues at great length in Book V of the Consolation of Philosophy that this must be the case and that it does not violate free will. God is an agent, knowing is an action, necessarily what God knows occurs: (4B) is logically inconsistent with (4). You are not a libertarian on your own account.
Nor is this pitfall at all surprising. Conditions to rule out Banezianism have to be formulated very precisely for a reason I have already several times noted: On the Banezian account divine premotion has exactly the same account as divine foreknowledge. Molinists, for instance, went through very careful, very technical lengths to criticize the former in ways that would not make the latter problematic.
I don't see what the point is of asking for "simple, clear mathematical language" when you won't even bother to think through your own.
(Dolphins, as I understand it, breathe voluntarily (unlike us).
ReplyDelete(And humans, as most everyone else understands, do have and can exercise voluntary control over their breathing.)
@ Santi
ReplyDeleteAs most of your posts here indicate, your interest in homosexuality and your firm belief that homosexual acts are the pinacle of morality seem to assume priority over all positions and views you have or can have, I suggest you read this blog.
http://beatushomo.blogspot.ru/2013/01/the-good-bad-and-gay-overview.html
It belongs to a gay, celibate Catholic man. Who actually is a Thomist in his thinking.
@Matt Sheean:
ReplyDeleteYou wrote that it would perhaps be wrong to be too casual about S&M. You wrote that some would say that "Sadistic and masochistic forms of sexual play, for instance, can be described as demonstrations of love and affection..."
They can also be a form of art expression between partners. In other words, to enact in the bedroom sado-masochism is to mirror the domination, submission, and hierarchy that plays out in nature. It is mimetic ("to hold as it were the mirror up to nature") of what really goes on in nature, but it is done IN A SAFE PLACE, in a place where no actual harm to the body or society occurs.
It is akin to children crashing toy cars together or playing with toy guns. It controls anxieties by enacting them. (I would add that attending a passion play is arguably a form of this.)
S&M can be, therefore, a stage for producing catharsis exactly in the same way one might attend a Shakespeare tragedy or an ancient Greek performance of Euripides' The Bakkhai.
The complexity of the human imagination should not be restrained by celibate priests who have never in their lives had sex, or had to wrestle first hand with the complications of sex.
And the role of ambivalence shouldn't be lost here either. Couples have to be in situations with one another where it's safe for them to express the full range of their emotions in an accepting environment.
When we speak of the design of a complex, modular, and multitasking organ like the brain, it's absurd to say that it's made for one primary purpose (reason, or whatever).
The brain is the largest organ in play in the bedroom, not the penis. And the brain cannot be simplified to one overriding purpose (what it's designed for). Lots of things get worked out in the bedroom, not just procreation.
@ Santi
ReplyDeleteWhat, on Thomism, is immoral about it? That the semen does not get ejaculated into a vagina?
Is this the end of sex, to procreate?
And if so, how can you not see this as a historically generated (as opposed to a heavenly generated) deduction from a time when it was difficult to maintain population?
In other words, this is a completely arbitrary, historically contingent, standard for what sex's end is. You can just as easily say that sex's end is love, for embodied souls are made to express love. Another end of sex is fun. Sex is fun. (Or is God against fun?)
The problem with homosexual intercourse is not just that it does not result in reproduction. The sexual faculties are directed toward procreation which also involves the raising of children and the union of husband and wife. It is the openness to procreation that properly directs the sexual act to its natural end (and the attendant ends in the union of the spouses), even if reproduction in the given instance does not obtain.
No one stipulates that procreation is sex's end, since the size of the population does not change what, constitutively, sex is 'for'.
I think you should view this in the context of the rest of the Church's natural law teachings on sexual ethics. The Church also teaches that masturbation and contraception are morally wrong; would you encourage it to drop those teachings as well? Earlier when you were waxing poetic about 'love,' it would have seemed that you'd have a ground to rule out masturbation at least, although the points you are making here would permit masturbation as well. So the question is, when you propose that it is possible to make 'same-sex marriage' consistent with Thomism, how much of Thomism do you intend to unravel? I know consistency is not your main concern in this project, but it is one of mine.
@ Santi
ReplyDeleteAndrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic, has been making a great deal of hay over some of the new Pope's recent public signals and "political" moves within the church bureaucracy.
I mean, one doesn't have to reach very far for handfuls of liberal Catholics that read Pope Francis a particular way. (Just head over to National Catholic Reporter.) I suppose Sullivan fancies himself a conservative but on social issues I think he has played out that hand.
In the end, Pope Francis is the pope and has defended the Church's teaching throughout his life. 'Conservatives' fret because he is 'too pastoral' and often speaks vaguely. The liberal understanding of the world is this: Over time, every institution liberalizes. But the political lens is the wrong lens by which to view the Catholic Church.
I'll add (borrowing an example from a new natural lawyer, though it is consistent with the old natural law position as well) that the natural law understanding is not that sex is just for procreation. The natural lawyer may insist that sex strictly for the purpose of procreation is wrong, i.e. if Henry VIII intended to dispose of one of his wives after getting a male heir, and only engaged with her sexually insofar as he meant to obtain a male heir, then a natural lawyer would critique him--for the sexual act was instrumentalized for an end other than the marital union of the spouses for the purpose of reproduction (which also includes raising any child jointly).
ReplyDeleteThe end of procreation does not make procreation a sufficient condition for sex to be permissible and good. Likewise, it would not follow that you can stipulate that love is the end of sex, such that then love between those engaging would be sufficient for the act to be good.
(Also, if one wants to get semantic, then one could also say that in the term 'anal sex', 'anal' is an alienans adjective. There is a very relevant sense in which anal sex is not sex. A similar argument could be made in the case of 'contraceptive sex'.)
Developing that last point: as a social institution (which the Church holds marriage to be, and which I think the natural institution of marriage clearly is), marriage is an institution for the development and growth of families, so openness to children is absolutely essential to it. Children cannot result from anal sex, and children result only accidentally from contraceptive sex. This is why natural lawyers are very particulars with the intentions that are consistent with natural family planning; if it is undertaken with a contraceptive mentality, then it is immoral.
ReplyDelete@Mr. Green:
ReplyDelete"Is that a rhetorical question?"
Is the Pope Catholic? ;-)
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteYou wrote, "God cannot arbitrarily alter what is good for a species" qua species, and thus orient it towards something else, such as God's love.
But that's arbitrarily stacking the deck before engaging in additional, science informed, reflection.
Starting with procreation, one set of conclusions tumbles forth from Thomistic reasoning, but if Aquinas was wrong to have started his reasoning from this single and too-broad point, then another starting point can be established on Thomistic grounds.
Scientists have discovered, for example, that homo sapiens have Neanderthal genes, which means that our very species wouldn't even be what it is today if some of its members had not violated "the good of the species" and engaged in beastiality, sleeping with creatures outside their own.
Thus pretending to know the gambles of evolution in sexual behavior in advance is a fool's game. You can't know what's good for the species qua species because the evolutionary strategy put in play (be more selfish or cooperative; sleep with unrelated, but nearby species or races, or never do this; have members that practice homosexualty, or never do this; be risk taking, or cautious; be promiscuous or monogamous, etc.) cannot be known in advance to work or not. The gamble has to play itself out in the contingent environment.
Evolution plays dice. Beyond survival, no species is ever fixed or directed to a purpose, and there is simply no way to know the path through the evolutionary landscape that will guarantee a species survival. Gay people may play a key role in our species next step in survival (a genius might be born who is gay, and it will be important for her to be born in an environment where she can flourish).
Thomism has to absorb the consequences of this if it is to be a scientifically informed metaphysical system. It cannot ground what's good for the species in a simplistic notion of straightforward heterosexual procreation.
It has to account for the hybrid and contingent nature of biological and species existence (and existence in general). It has to account for the fact that we're tribal animals, and that tribes can organize themselves for survival in different ways.
God (and evolution) may have created gay people, for example, not for procreation, but to support bonds of love among men in times of war. You don't know. Affectionate men may foster cooperation in the tribe, give psychological comfort to be around, and this may have survival benefits that evolution selected for. Again, you don't know.
Homosexuality may be an artifact of female hormones received in the mother's womb, or it may be genetic, but for whatever reason, evolution has retained the trait as a percentage in the population, and gays can find other gay people and form bonds within the human community that are grounded in love.
So given what we know from contemporary biology and evolution, it is outrageous that Thomists currently exclude gays from the institution of marriage on the grounds that they don't procreate.
In terms of biology, appealing to simple procreation is sledgehammer reasoning. What is needed is fine grained distinctions, because that's what evolution actually works upon.
And culturally, as gays have come out of the closet, they've been able to add vibrantly to contemporary urban life, enhancing art and the sciences. There's no evidence whatsoever that gays in any way harm evolutionary group selection or the success of those urban tribes that give room for full gay equality.
For example, West Hollywood and San Francisco are vibrant gay equality communities. Gays do not cause these communities to be less robust. They don't enfeeble or in any way harm the flourishing of communities, and it's because they happen to fit into the human evolutionary fabric for reasons that are complicated, and that Thomists need to take full account of.
"[I]t is outrageous that Thomists currently exclude gays from the institution of marriage on the grounds that they don't procreate."
ReplyDeleteWait, according to which Thomists are gays not allowed to marry?
(Seriously, I'm sure Santi means that gay men aren't allowed to marry other men. But neither are non-gay men, and at any rate it's not just "Thomists" who say so.)
Alan Turing's tragic suicide has to be always kept in mind when reasoning about gay equality and "the good of the species." Had he lived, and not been persecuted for his homosexuality, and been driven to suicide because of it, he might have created more science to assist our collective survival. It can benefit the species to incorporate gays into full equality in a community, and for Thomism, this entails rethinking one's broad generalizations about biology and what's good for the species, and reorienting toward God's love.
ReplyDeleteHere's Wikipedia on Turing:
Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952, when such acts were still criminalised in the UK. He accepted treatment with oestrogen injections (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning.
@ Santi
ReplyDeleteScientists have discovered, for example, that homo sapiens have Neanderthal genes, which means that our very species wouldn't even be what it is today if some of its members had not violated "the good of the species" and engaged in beastiality, sleeping with creatures outside their own.
Mules are not produced by bestiality, though their parents are different species. There is no reason to hold that humans mating with neanderthals is constitutive of bestiality. (Especially considering that Thomists reject the cladistic species concept. See Ch 9 of Oderberg's Real Essentialism.)
You can't know what's good for the species qua species because the evolutionary strategy put in play (be more selfish or cooperative; sleep with unrelated, but nearby species or races, or never do this; have members that practice homosexualty, or never do this; be risk taking, or cautious; be promiscuous or monogamous, etc.) cannot be known in advance to work or not. The gamble has to play itself out in the contingent environment.
Evolution plays dice. Beyond survival, no species is ever fixed or directed to a purpose, and there is simply no way to know the path through the evolutionary landscape that will guarantee a species survival. Gay people may play a key role in our species next step in survival (a genius might be born who is gay, and it will be important for her to be born in an environment where she can flourish).
The role of a feature in natural selection is not relevant to finality as Thomists understand it. There is a very simple argument for this: the irrelevance of origins. If humans were realized by two distinct evolutionary chains (or, say, some humans evolved, whereas others were created ex nihilo by God at some point in the past), then they would have different ends, if a feature's role in evolution were relevant to its ends. But clearly they do not; they are the same, as we have stipulated. It is the constitutive rather than historical account of their essence (to adopt Nagel's terms) that is relevant to their flourishing and obligations.
I'm also not sure which "Thomists" are expected to disagree that gay people can and should "form bonds…grounded in love."
ReplyDeleteBut then I suspect Santi really means something other than "love" here. It's entirely possible to love someone without insisting that he/she bring you to orgasm; most of us do it all the time with, you know, friends, family, and so forth.
I would have thought there was quite a lot of middle ground between persecuting gays and allowing them to marry one another within the Church.
ReplyDelete@ Scott
ReplyDeleteBut then I suspect Santi really means something other than "love" here. It's entirely possible to love someone without insisting that he/she bring you to orgasm; most of us do it all the time with, you know, friends, family, and so forth.
But isn't romantic love all there is?
@Greg:
ReplyDelete"But isn't romantic love all there is?"
Oh, that's right; I forgot that. Also, all romantic love leads inevitably to sex.
…because science.
ReplyDelete@ Santi
ReplyDeleteAlan Turing's tragic suicide has to be always kept in mind when reasoning about gay equality and "the good of the species." Had he lived, and not been persecuted for his homosexuality, and been driven to suicide because of it, he might have created more science to assist our collective survival.
As Scott pointed out, it is absurd to suggest that our two options are persecuting homosexuals and marrying them in the Church. In fact, Pope Francis, like the previous popes, is advocating precisely such a third way.
Your second sentence here is a bit odd. It is as though you are justifying the counterfactual situation in which he lives by future contributions to science and 'our collective survival'. Turing's life is instrumentalized. The Thomist regards his suicide as tragic because his life was valuable apart from any contingent contributions he made to human progress.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete@Vincent Torley:
ReplyDelete"On the Boethian view, as it is commonly called, God is a timeless spectator of human choices, like a watcher on a high hill: that is, our choices make Him (timelessly) aware of what we have decided."
I didn't ask you for Boethius's view of God's eternality and foreknowledge. I asked you where you think Aquinas departs from his view of free will.
Both Aquinas and G-L would agree that God has timeless foreknowledge of our decisions and deny that this means we don't have free will. Does Boethius somewhere deny or otherwise contradict Aquinas's view that God's will is the first cause of human will and makes the latter effective?
"This view makes God dependent on creatures for information[.]"
Only on the unstated assumption that God acquires this knowledge passively. If God's will and God's knowledge are the same thing, that assumption is false.
"…which is why G-L found it so offensive."
Where does G-L attribute to Boethius the view you describe?
@Greg:
ReplyDelete"It is the constitutive rather than historical account of their essence (to adopt Nagel's terms) that is relevant to their flourishing and obligations."
Once again, that's stacking the deck (and making it basically impossible to historically or scientifically inform the discussion).
Greg,
ReplyDeleteBy bringing up masturbation and contraceptives, you're clearly showing that your sole concern is not the truth, or objective reasoning that arrives at the truth of a matter, but with also preserving a tradition.
The anxiety that the tradition might not survive it's own logical tools if they are reoriented from procreation and toward evolutionary insights, biological complexity, and God as love is causing you to erect walls that make the metaphysics impervious to biological nuance (what's the organ of the brain for?) and reality testing.
By bringing up masturbation and contraceptives, you're clearly showing that your sole concern is not the truth, or objective reasoning that arrives at the truth of a matter, but with also preserving a tradition.
ReplyDeleteBy bringing up these things he was quite clearly trying to clarify what your view was. That was the explicit purpose of what he said: "So the question is, when you propose that it is possible to make 'same-sex marriage' consistent with Thomism, how much of Thomism do you intend to unravel?" This is a very specific question, one that is directly relevant to discovering the truth, and one that any honest arguer would address.
Lying about what your interlocutors are doing is bad faith.
@ Santi
ReplyDeleteOnce again, that's stacking the deck (and making it basically impossible to historically or scientifically inform the discussion).
What do you mean it's stacking the deck? The Thomist principle of finality is rooted in the Aristotelian conception of potency. A thing's ends are entailed by what potentialities are inscribed by its essence. The question is purely constitutive and not historical.
Not to mention, how am I stacking the deck when I gave an argument that origins are irrelevant: two identical organisms, one arising from evolution and the other created ex nihilo, would not have different ends.
Also, the principle of finality applies to inanimate matter, so there is nothing odd about asking why it should apply in a profoundly different sense in the case of animate matter.
Furthermore, you are the one who is claiming the endorsement of 'same-sex marriage' is consistent with Thomism. The deck is supposed to be stacked in favor of Thomism, if you are to make that argument. Or, you should be clear about what implications the endorsement should have for Thomism.
By bringing up masturbation and contraceptives, you're clearly showing that your sole concern is not the truth, or objective reasoning that arrives at the truth of a matter, but with also preserving a tradition.
Exactly what Brandon said: I am trying to figure out what your position is. If you want to argue that Thomists should abandon their positions on masturbation and contraception as well, you are free to take up that argument.
That said, if you have nothing but hollow accusations, I won't bother replying.
Santi,
ReplyDeleteOf course, my point doesn't hinge on the morality or otherwise of sadomasochistic play. It was, and still is, that "love" and "play", as you use them, are indeterminate with respect to actions. Any action can be described as loving, playful, etc.
Since they are indeterminate, the sense in which you use "design" so as to attribute play, for instance, to an organ as natural to it does not make sense. It is the use of the organ that is playful. So, you and Scott are using "design parameters" in a different way.
Now, in your reply you choose to sidestep the whole issue of "design parameters" by stating that the brain is the primary organ of sexual (and presumably every other human) activity, and that it is too complex to have any particular end. That is quite a claim. I wonder how neuroscience is possible then, if the brain is such a protean thing.
If evolution is true, individual humans are exactly the way Aquinas posited angels to be. Aquinas said every angel is unique; it is its own species. Likewise, each one of us, in reality, is its own species. Each of us is one of a kind.
ReplyDeleteWe have our own genetic logic and contingent evolutionary survival set points. We are more or less aggressive, more or less daring, more or less outgoing, more or less attracted to this or that gender (or both), more or less capable of processing insulin, etc. As Blake put it, the eagle shouldn't take advice from the crow.
We are hybrids from two hybrids (our mother and father), and our children are fast becoming cyborgs.
Homosexuals, like cyborgs, bring to consciousness the contingent hybridity that is always there in evolution, but that gets sublimated into what’s “normal.” Each of us has a contingent existence that can only be generalized about pragmatically, not absolutely. Species boundaries, ever since Darwin, have always been conventions of speech, not essences. It doesn't look that way from our rough-grained perspective, but biology tells us that this is, in fact, the way it is.
Scientists also tell us that glass is an amorphous solid (neither solid nor liquid). In other words, a glass for drinking is blobbing along imperceptibly to us. The glass is usable, but its current iteration in this moment as "something for drinking with" is not an essential thing about it. The glass is on the move, albeit extremely slowly. So are we as a species. (Scientific American says this: "A mathematical model shows it would take longer than the universe has existed for room temperature cathedral glass to rearrange itself to appear melted.")
So if you start your reasoning, as Greg proposes, ignoring evolution (“It is the constitutive rather than historical account of their essence … that is relevant to their flourishing and obligations”), you are basically saying, “I’m going to pretend Darwin never happened, rely on my rough-grained intuitions about what’s common to the species, call that its ESSENCE, and declare it is God's will that we conform to it.”
If we’re going to bring masturbation into this discussion, there it is. Mental masturbation. This is what it means to have no contact with reality, and desiring none.
So if you start your reasoning, as Greg proposes, ignoring evolution (“It is the constitutive rather than historical account of their essence … that is relevant to their flourishing and obligations”), you are basically saying, “I’m going to pretend Darwin never happened, rely on my rough-grained intuitions about what’s common to the species, call that its ESSENCE, and declare it is God's will that we conform to it.”
ReplyDeleteIf we’re going to bring masturbation into this discussion, there it is. Mental masturbation. This is what it means to have no contact with reality, and desiring none.
Again, lying about what your interlocutor is doing is intellectual dishonesty. And you still haven't addressed the clarificatory question. Why are you trying to avoid it?
"By bringing up masturbation and contraceptives, you're clearly showing that your sole concern is not the truth, or objective reasoning that arrives at the truth of a matter."
ReplyDeleteTo what Brandon and Greg have already said, I'll add that Santi specifically asked the following question: "What, on Thomism, is immoral about [gay sex]? That the semen does not get ejaculated into a vagina?" And to that question I gave the following answer: "More precisely, that the semen does not get ejaculated into the unprotected vagina of the male partner's lawfully wedded female wife."
I think a moment's reflection will reveal that masturbation and contraception were introduced well before Greg allegedly brought them up—that, in fact, they were implicitly introduced by Santi's own question about why Thomism regards gay sex as immoral, as he would know if he were honestly asking the question and genuinely seeking an answer.
@ Santi
ReplyDeleteScientists also tell us that glass is an amorphous solid (neither solid nor liquid). In other words, a glass for drinking is blobbing along imperceptibly to us.
Wittgenstein is turning over in his grave.
Regarding everything else you have to say, it is completely non-serious and question-begging. If there's a problem here, it has nothing to do with homosexuality. You have successfully shown that the endorsement of 'same-sex marriage' is not so easily tacked on to Thomism and would require several theses (essentialism, finality) to be overhauled, even though Thomists have argued for these positions independently in light of 'Darwin'.
"Species boundaries, ever since Darwin, have always been conventions of speech, not essences. It doesn't look that way from our rough-grained perspective, but biology tells us that this is, in fact, the way it is."
ReplyDeleteBiology tells us that the fact that dogs can't interbreed with cats is a matter of linguistic convention?
Greg is right; if Wittgenstein were alive today, he'd be…well, actually, he'd be screaming in terror and scratching madly at the lid of his coffin. But you know what I mean.
"I wonder how neuroscience is possible then, if the brain is such a protean thing."
ReplyDeleteThe brain is not just protean, but MODULAR. That's one way it can be studied. And it raises another interesting issue: the brain's modular components can be in competition and at cross purposes with one another. The brain's "end" isn't just multiple, but competitive with itself. It's how evolution makes its gambles with an organism. Things vie for attention in the same brain.
Nature dices to no particular end, and it results in "whatever works" or "whatever doesn't."
A neuron fires, wins conscious attention through a cascade of contingencies (hormonal, synaptic, environmental), and suddenly I want to go to New York City. Hmm.
Who wants to go to New York City?
If biology reveals life to have an "essence," it is to play the odds, to gamble, to cast a bet on a conserved iteration of form or a new iteration of form.
"And it raises another interesting issue…"
ReplyDelete…without, let us note, addressing the first one.
Santi,
ReplyDeleteThat's fascinating. So, if I understand you correctly, what you are saying is that our actions, including the expression of our beliefs here, are the result of an evolutionary game being played out in the modular structure of the brain. All the contention in this comment thread is really just part of the process of natural selection whereby a particular cognitive archtiecture - one that is ordered by love - and another - a repressive, rule abiding sort - are being pitted against each other. That dialectic that plays out internally is being made external here between this brain and that. This leads me to another thought, which is that perhaps it is not quite right to think of "you and I", but maybe just "we", or perhaps no pronoun is adequate at all - we are all one mind, the universe considering itself under different aspects? Why, after all, say that this bundle of neurons here is really distinct from that one over there? "Your" neurons and "mine" are just testing ideas together, just as ideas compete within "my" brain when I sit to myself and think.
Steve,
ReplyDeleteYou said, "Biology tells us that the fact that dogs can't interbreed with cats is a matter of linguistic convention?"
No, biology tells us that there was no first human.
That's what you're missing. In your own lineage, it is a matter of arbitrary convention to say, "This is the first human." You also cannot say, "This is the second human." You also cannot say, "That second human was followed by this third human."
You can't say this because your lineage rests on a continuum. While it is true that your lineage branched from cats and dogs long ago, and you couldn't have had sex with an Australopithecine ancestor and produced children, it's also true that you cannot say, "Here's the ancestor where Australopithecus stopped being Australopithecus and started being Homo habilis."
Talking about species demarcation in your own lineage, which goes back to the first cell, is a linguistic convention. J.B.S. Haldane put it this way: "The concept of a species is a concession to our linguistic habits and neurological mechanisms" (1956).
You thus also can't say objectively, "Here's where the human species stops--the last human--and a new species gets started."
That means, if you're going to take evolution at all seriously, that you've got to let go of "essence" applied to the category "human species."
You can't apply the category to the margins, and each new birth is at a margin.
The next person in the series of descendants, for example, might wish to designate herself the first member of a new species. And it would be completely within her epistemic rights to do so. Her ancestors might die off within three generations, or go on to thrive for a million years. Nobody knows. She could be the beginning of a twig or a branch.
Likewise, you could be (unbeknownst to you) the first member of a new species. Some scientist among a species far in the future could choose you as her starting point for the branching that led to her species precisely because you, and you alone, carried around a marker that proved to be that.
Put another way, there's no objective way for saying that the next human born should still be called a member of our species and not the beginning of a new one. None.
If all of us had our DNA frozen and sent 300,000 years into the future, a descendant of a branching species could test the DNA to discover which one of us walking around today actually carried the genetic markers characteristic of that future "species x."
That descendant might then talk about that individual in this way: "Was that really the first parent of my species? It looks more like a human than like us. Indeed, it had human parents! And it gave birth to what looks, for all the world, like just another human being! But it led to us. It was one of us. Yet it just doesn't seem sufficiently like us. Could we have bred with it?"
@Matt:
ReplyDeleteYes!!!
I love your paragraph connecting our brains up. Whether you were joking, or having an insight, I agree.
You wrote: ""Your" neurons and "mine" are just testing ideas together, just as ideas compete within "my" brain when I sit to myself and think."
Again, yes. That's part of the value of being a social animal.
And the good and bad angels of our nature, though they are at war, they needn’t be taken as wholly at war, for we possess both cooperative and selfish—and even rational and irrational—traits for a very good reason: they are adaptive. When they contend with one another inside us, or when we incline one way or the other, that's evolution in the process of gaming us into the world.
Harvard evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson puts it this way (your paragraph prompted my memory of this quote): “The internal conflict in conscience caused by competing levels of natural selection is more than just an arcane subject for theoretical biologists to ponder. It is not the presence of good and evil tearing at one another in our breasts. It is a biological trait fundamental to the human condition, and necessary for survival of the species. The opposed selection pressures during human evolution produced an unstable mix of innate emotional responses. They created a mind that is continuously and kaleidoscopically shifting in mood — variously proud, aggressive, competitive, angry, vengeful, venal, treacherous, curious, adventurous, tribal, brave, humble, patriotic, empathetic and loving. All normal humans are both ignoble and noble, often in close alternation, sometimes simultaneously.”
"Steve,"
ReplyDelete?
"No, biology tells us that there was no first human."
Biology tells us that there was no time in history when God endowed a primate with a rational soul? No, I'm pretty sure biology doesn't address that claim at all.
"That means, if you're going to take evolution at all seriously, that you've got to let go of 'essence' applied to the category 'human species.'"
No, it doesn't. I have no trouble whatsoever taking evolution seriously and still thinking that there was a first human ("rational animal") and that there's such a thing as the "essence" of humanity ("rational animality").
Santi,
ReplyDeleteI was being facetious.
To add to the comments about essence,
ReplyDeleteThe problem of demarcation in evolutionary history is not any point against the notion of an essence. For any organism in the chain of life, it can be asked "what is it?"
@Matt Sheean:
ReplyDelete"The problem of demarcation in evolutionary history is not any point against the notion of an essence. For any organism in the chain of life, it can be asked 'what is it?'"
True. I should have pointed out in my own post that even if each of us were sui generis, that wouldn't mean that we didn't each have our own essence.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteYou wrote: "I have no trouble whatsoever taking evolution seriously and still thinking that there was a first human ("rational animal") and that there's such a thing as the "essence" of humanity ("rational animality")."
"Rational animality" is broad enough to include dolphins, so you're really reaching now. Dolphins also show signs of self awareness and reasoning. Yet there is no evidence for a first specially created dolphin conveying dolphin essence down through the dolphin lineage.
Likewise, there's no evidence for a first specially created human. And it would be odd for God to personally and directly interfere with human evolution on this little out-of-the-way planet of ours, don't you think?
Positing a miracle in the midst of the evolutionary process is not taking scientific evolution "seriously," especially absent evidence. It's just deflecting the implications of biology from Thomism.
And did God also intervene to set the species lineages of dogs as well? And cats? And trilobites? Even if you bracket off humans for a special act of creation--"I wave my Prospero-wand and behold: the first rational animal!"--that still leaves every other living lineage without an objective (essential) species boundary.
And the miracle you posit (without evidence) only helps you with the human species' lineage border of the past. If you take evolution seriously NOW, as an ongoing process, then each child born is capable of being the first member of a new species, a new branch of evolution.
To save Thomism, the human species lineage margin has to be covered going backward AND going forward. You achieved this (dubiously) by invoking an unwarranted miracle for the past boundary marker, but you can't apply this with each birth going forward over the next million years.
Or can you? Do your miracle invocations know no bounds?
Evolutionary biology tells us that the next child born is always a potential candidate for the first member of a new and branching species of primate. This leaves the child's "essential nature" to be either sui generis (like Thomas' angels) or open.
As opposed to your form of evolution, which allows for miracles here and there to tidy up Thomistic boundary difficulties, if actual scientific evolution is true, what the new-born child can't be is located in its essential nature by specific species boundary markers past and future. (Evolution does not work by averaging animal characteristics within lineage boundary borders.)
Therefore, essential human nature doesn't exist because (absent Scott's miracle) there was no first human. There was no first dog, either. And no first cat.
Any exception to the rule could be the beginning of a new rule. And a new species.
"'Rational animality' is broad enough to include dolphins[.]"
ReplyDeleteWell, sure, if dolphins show evidence that they possess an immaterial intellect. So far I don't think they've done so, but if they ever do, that's fine. Why would I need to rule dolphins out?
"And it would be odd for God to personally and directly interfere with human evolution on this little out-of-the-way planet of ours, don't you think?"
No. Why?
"And the miracle you posit (without evidence)…"
…other than the fact that human do possess immaterial intellects…
"…only helps you with the human species' lineage border of the past."
Ah, so you're saying it helps only with the point I was addressing. Here's me not quite seeing why that's a problem.
"If you take evolution seriously NOW, as an ongoing process, then each child born is capable of being the first member of a new species, a new branch of evolution.
To save Thomism, the human species lineage margin has to be covered going backward AND going forward."
"Thomism," you say. You keep using that word…
As a matter of fact, Thomism doesn't depend in any way on the "human species lineage margin"'s being "covered" either forward or backward.
I'm still chuckling over this:
ReplyDelete"…this little out-of-the-way planet of ours…"
Does Santi seriously think that people believed God took note of the fall of every sparrow only because, until Science™ taught us otherwise, we thought sparrows were the size of galaxies?
Does Santi think that small things are thereby unimportant? If we lived on a larger 'out-of-the-way planet', would we be more important? Are larger people more important than smaller people?
ReplyDeleteWell, no, of course not.
"And did God also intervene to set the species lineages of dogs as well? And cats? And trilobites?"
ReplyDeleteNot as far as I know, but if it turns out that, contrary to my current understanding/expectation, the existence of dogs or trilobites can't be explained by natural selection, then sure. Why not?
What is it about your "empiricist" worldview that rules that out?
@Arthur:
ReplyDelete"Are larger people more important than smaller people?"
Oh, I hope not. That would pose a serious problem for my current attempts to lose weight.
"Do your miracle invocations know no bounds?"
ReplyDeleteOf course they do. No miracle could, for example, make 2 + 2 equal 5, the angles of a Euclidean triangle add up to less than 180 degrees, or sticking a penis into an anus constitute "sex" in the common understanding of the term.
Santi, is it really necessary--or charitable, or prudent--to write every post as though you have definitively refuted the position on which you are commenting? Thomists have had tons to say about the stuff you're talking about. Oderberg writes quite a lot about species concepts and vagueness in biology. MacIntyre considers recent research on dolphin intelligence in his Dependent Rational Animals. Feser has written about 'metaphysical man' as opposed to homo sapiens. Sure, they might all be wrong, but why do you suspect that you stumbled on something decisive even though you clearly and demonstrably have no idea how a Thomist would respond? A sorites paradox? Really?
ReplyDeleteScott:
ReplyDeleteYou wrote, "What is it about your "empiricist" worldview that rules that [God intervening to set species boundaries] out?"
Because there is no species boundary to objectively set in terms of one's lineage. It's an arbitrary thing (identifying exactly when a species begins and ends and another begins). I except extinction from this, of course. A lineage can have a termination point, but in the line from the first cell to you, there was no first australopithicine, no first homo habilis, no first man.
Therefore, a person who discovers in herself a same-sex desire, or a desire to live her life quite different from the way most of those of her gender have lived it in the past, is not living a disordered existence, or an unnatural or lesser existence. She might in fact be flourishing according to her nature by not following her "God given role" as conceived by the way it has been in the past.
In other words, she might be living out her existence in accord with her own sui generis nature and temperamental set points. These were given to her by the most recent roll of the evolutionary dice (and if you're a theist, you can say that God let this roll happen). Her nature goes back no further. She needn't set her standards by the inertia of the past, or the reasoning of a medieval theologian like Aquinas, if she doesn't want to. And there's no reason to think she's displeasing God if she is oriented toward love.
The chief reason Thomism posits a human species with organs designed for a hierarchy of purposes (the hand is primarily for grasping, the penis for reproduction, the mind for attention to God, etc), is to establish norms and police norms.
But if each person is a sui generis variant from sui generis variants going back 3 billion years--and that's what evolutionary biology has discovered--then there is nothing essential in an individual but that individual's inherited make-up.
Belonging to a species and gender where this or that religion says one ought to be doing x, y, and z is too restrictive. Species and gender are only rough approximations to what a contingent person living right now in a contingent environment might be inclined toward by some important aspect of their nature.
When some of the early ancestors of penguins were told by their fellow birds--"You really ought to stay out of the cold water. It's not the best use of wings, and you'll catch your death of cold"--it would have been contrary to the nature of those ancestors to listen to that advice. They liked the cold for some reason, and could tolerate it. They saw food sources others missed, and they could exploit them without as much use of their wings.
Evolution is like that. It's creative with contingencies, and works with the tools at hand. When God (as you posit) gave human beings a big brain, that was the end of telling them what to do with the rest of their body (their hands, their sex organs, etc). The brain itself could imagine new ways to do everything, and make tools that would become extensions of human beings. Evolution could take it from there, and it has. Whatever works.
Greg,
ReplyDeleteYou said, "If you want to argue that Thomists should abandon their positions on masturbation and contraception ... take up that argument."
I don't see the problem with either of these if Thomism orients toward love. These are forms of sexual regulation that are only relevant if one takes seriously the notion that the penis and vagina are the sole organs capable of procreation. They're obviously not.
By God giving human beings a huge brain, it is clearly the organ of procreation that we will use to make babies in the future. In other words, God has given human beings two penises: one that is metaphorical, the brain, and a second one that is literal.
Within 100 years (a drop in the evolutionary bucket), the whole sex game will have been solved in the lab by the human big brain. Children will be brought into the world start to finish without penises or uteruses. We are heading for what could be a nightmare, something akin to Huxley's Brave New World, or we could be heading for something more benign. But the reality is that the moment humans acquired such a vast brain, they've been able to conquer the planet, populate it exponentially, and now they stand to master reproduction and direct their own evolution.
Thomism is making medieval arguments at the very moment in history when the singularity is about to crash into us (the moment machines reach general intelligence comparable to humans). The world won't remotely look the same 100 years from now.
The future is this: old biological penises and vaginas will be for pleasure. Everyone will be hybrids of some sort (with artificial organs, cyber properties, etc.). This won't be unnatural, it will be the result of the big brain God gave humans.
So when someone digs in on gay marriage, masturbation, and contraception, it's like a Muslim digging in on the infallibility of the Quran. Are you pulling your head out of the desert sand and looking around at where the world is going at all?
How Thomism could help the world adjust to its fast emerging superpowers is to orient toward love. It's the only thing that Thomism has left. It's not going to have any control over the body. There's no amount of hell threats that are going to deter people from the enticements of the techno-future. Some people will live for centuries. Tattoos and gay marriage are just baby steps toward the sorts of self creation that people will experiment with in the use of their bodies, and this is coming in the very near future.
So if Thomism has a contribution to the future at all, it's in making this future more humane, not by resisting it (it can't be resisted). Love. Orient to love. If that means upending certain premises underlying the old time metaphysics, you better start thinking about how to do it now. You don't want to end up fifty years hence looking like the hysterics waving Qurans into the camara because somebody drew a picture of Mohammad.
premise: it is difficult, if not impossible to tell where one species ends and a new one begins (when surveying evolutiOnary epochs)
ReplyDeleteConclusion: every thing exists sui generis
somebody please tell me how that leap gets made.
Hi Brandon,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your critique. For once I agree with you: the condition I proposed for libertarian freedom needs to be amended. Instead of:
"there is no agent c and no action Y such that necessarily, whenever c performs action Y, b Xs,"
the condition should read:
"there is no agent c and no action Y such that necessarily, c's act of performing action Y causes b to X."
That amendment means that God's foreknowledge (like that of a watcher on a high hill) in no way conflicts with human free will, as it is logically [and ontologically] subsequent to our choices, but that any action of God which causes my choice of X, in such a way that necessarily, when God performs this action, I choose X, does conflict with human free will, because the causation is logically prior to the choice.
As to the relevance of my account to contemporary libertarian accounts of free will, it's quite simple. Libertarians reject determinism. The Banezian view is compatible with determinism. Boethius held that God's foreknowledge is infallible, but does not determine our choices.
By the way, in my definition (2) where I defined "voluntary", the definition should read:
(2) An agent b performs an action X voluntarily if and only if (iff):
(i) b wants to X;
(ii) it is not necessarily the case that b Xs.
Cheers.
Brandon,
ReplyDeleteYou write:
"A CAUSE of X may be a necessary condition for X, or a necessary and sufficient condition for X" is an obviously false dichotomy. There are causes that are INUS conditions; there are adequate-but-not-sufficient causes (as when causes are defeasible); there are causes that are not necessary conditions (e.g., in cases of overdetermination); there are probabilistic causes; and any number of others."
Quite true. But none of these kinds of causality apply to God. An INUS condition is an insufficient but non-redundant part of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the occurrence of the effect. God, however, is necessary for the production of every effect.
Causes that are not necessary conditions would not include God, for the same reason.
Probabilistic causes would not include God, as God is not subject to any statistical laws.
That leaves adequate-but-not-sufficient causes, which are defeasible. God, however, cannot be annulled by any creature.
So the only question is whether God is a necessary cause or a necessary and sufficient one.
You write that Garrigou-Lagrange repeatedly denies that Divine premotion necessitates our choices. Given the Banezian definition of freedom and necessitation, we can see what he means here. On the Banezian view:
1) An agent b performs an action X freely if and only if (iff):
(i) b chooses to X;
(ii) it is not necessarily the case that b X's.
and ...
4) An agent b has the power to refrain from X-ing iff it is not necessarily the case that b Xs.
So when Banez writes that Divine premotion does not necessitate our choices, he simply means that for any choice I make, it is not necessarily the case that I make it. But it is still necessarily the case, according to Banez, that if God wills that I make this choice, then I will make it - and Banez would add that in doing so, I act freely.
I recall Dr. Feser referring to someone seemed to have mistaken a textbook of logical fallacies for a how-to guide. He could have been talking about Santi. As I said earlier, the self-assurance combined with gross fallacies is astounding, and he only seems to be getting worse.
ReplyDelete'Thomism is making medieval arguments...'
ReplyDeleteDo I detect Chonological Snobbery?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronological_snobbery
Santi clearly hasn't read The Abolition of Man.
ReplyDeleteHis last comment makes one wish to break out the banners of Captain Ludd, or at least Peter Simple's columns.
Just as in the other thread Santi repeatedly asked about the relationship between A-T metaphysics and findings from the modern natural sciences yet when we tell him about philosophers who have taken up the relevant topics in great detail goes completely mute, not even asking for a brief summary…
ReplyDeleteTo give a final comment on the topic of homosexuality:
I think the best ways in which someone might make a case for homosexual love being an active good as opposed to just something that isn't immoral would be to argue along the lines of Love being a 'Pure Perfection' in the Anselm, Scotus, Seifert sense and since sexual stimulation can (note 'can' not 'is') be an expression of love then loving homosexuality is a good. The immediate issue with this is that by these standards alone we should allow incest between consenting parties, which seems counter-intuitive. Perhaps that could be answered by claiming different types of love exclude and include different actions but, again, this would seem ad hoc since we have no more reason to assert it as excluding sexual acts in the case of incest as we do with homosexuality.
Alternatively one could argue that homosexuality serves a group bonding purpose in man and the higher apes and thus is by nature a secondary goal of the sexual organs. This might be more to Santi taste as it appeals to zoological concerns and observation. The trouble is without Natures i.e. Essences to ground these facts in it can't even begin to get off the ground.
So it seems we’re back to the old point: Santi, even whilst claiming to ostensibly take up an opposing point of view for the sake of the argument, has ceded the ground needed to make an objective ethical statements. I say we invert Putnam’s famous remark and give a clear statement: ‘No Ethics without Ontology;.
Scott said
I'm on record here as thinking that the wrongness of homosexual sex can't strictly be derived from a natural-law ethic…
I'm also on record as thinking that if God says we shouldn't do something
I would tend to agree on both points though if the latter case is true there still must in the end be a reason why such prohibited action is wrong. God must have a Sufficient Reason (OP cameo) for declaring something wrong.
"there is no agent c and no action Y such that necessarily, c's act of performing action Y causes b to X.
ReplyDeleteWe've been through this, Vincent. On Garrigou-Lagrange's account, God does not cause b to X; He causes X as first cause. The relation of this causation to b causing X is one of infallible connection rather than necessitation, forcing, or restriction to one effect. What He causes with respect to b is the actual possession of free will that can be effective.
Libertarians reject determinism. The Banezian view is compatible with determinism. Boethius held that God's foreknowledge is infallible, but does not determine our choices.
Banezianism is not compatible with determinism; Banezians explicitly reject determinism. The will is not necessitated, it is the genuine source of its choices so that nothing is out of its control, and God causes us to have free will that can do otherwise. There is no possible form of determinism consistent with all three of these. This is precisely the point: you can argue, as Molinists, that they are failed indeterminists, unable to maintain their rejection of determinism consistently, but to argue that their position is consistent with determinism just shows that you don't understand their position.
That leaves adequate-but-not-sufficient causes, which are defeasible. God, however, cannot be annulled by any creature.
The list was explicitly not exhaustive, and with so many obvious exceptions to your claim, there would be nothing wrong with a Banezian suggesting that God was a sui generis exception to it. But the above claim makes the illicit assumption that if God's causation is logically defeasible that this means that it is 'annulled' by a creature; when in fact logical defeasibility requires simply that it be possible for it to be otherwise, which Garrigou-Lagrange explicitly insists is the case.
But it is still necessarily the case, according to Banez, that if God wills that I make this choice, then I will make it - and Banez would add that in doing so, I act freely.
In exactly the same sense that if God knows that I make this choice, I make it, and do so freely. We've been through this about a thousand times now; it's the explicit Banezian position that premotion has the same structure as foreknowledge.
@Santi:
ReplyDelete"It's an arbitrary thing (identifying exactly when a species begins and ends and another begins)."
If it is arbitrary where a species "begins and ends", it is arbitrary to say that this or that is a member of said species. It follows it is arbitrary whether you are a member of the human species, and so it is arbitrary whether you are a human being, from which it follows that de facto you are not a human being, because there are no such critters. You are no different from a turnip or a mule. So no one here has any more reason to engage with you than to engage with a turnip or a mule.
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ReplyDeleteMatt,
ReplyDeleteYou asked about how I could argue that each creature born is sui generis, and that this is what evolution has discovered.
Think of your own evolutionary lineage (from the first cell, to the first fish, to the first land animal, to the first human) as a deck of cards. Pull out of the deck the image of your first fish ancestor. You don't have one, obviously, because the gradation from parent to offspring is small, and you cannot detect the differences to decide between them which was the first fish. Likewise with the first human. There was no first human. There is only the continuum of your specific lineage of ancestors.
You can play the same game if you took a picture of yourself every hour since you were conceived in your mother's womb. In what hour did you move in your development from being an infant to being a toddler? There was no first toddler picture. There was never a day that you could point to and say, "This was the first day I was a toddler." There was just a continuum.
I'm surprised that some Thomists in this thread don't know of the "no first human" principle in biology. It really does make it perfectly clear just how radical biology conceives of change, and the impossibility of demarcating species lineages in all but name. There's nothing essential about them, if evolution is true.
"Species" in relation to your own direct lineage are constructs for classification, and they're pragmatically useful, but they shouldn't obscure the fact that the next birth could be considered the first "twig" in a new branch of evolution; the first item in a new series of items (as opposed to being a member of an old series of items).
When it comes to lineage and processes of development, it really is true that you can't say what the exact moment is that one thing became another. (The first genuine wing, the first fin, the first hand, etc.) There was no first hand, but we have hands.
Here's a video link that presents the basic idea (from PBS):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdWLhXi24Mo
Santi, I'm hardly an expert on evolution or Thomism, but it seems to me that you're - as usual - ignoring the counter-arguments others are giving you and just repeating yourself.
ReplyDeleteMatt,
ReplyDeleteLet me put the sui generis issue this way: if there is an essentail nature about a newly born person, it is this: she is born of the contingency of a very particular and contingent roll of the genetic dice combined with the contingencies of her environment. She's a unique being in space and time. What's good for her may not have been good for the first creature you designate as the first "person" in the series of her species. And she may just as well be considered the first twig in a new and branching series of what we'll call a new species.
If we are going to refer to her traits and nature, that's it. From the vantage of evolution, she is sui generis. She's ready to roll with her unique combination of genes in the unique and one-of-a-kind (and contingent) environment that she'll navigate.
Think of the Seals and Croft song, "We may never pass this way again." Nobody steps into the same evolutionary river twice. The genes and environment interacting are always a fresh iteration of existence in each moment, never to be replicated again in our cosmos' history.
So being embedded in an ecosystem, that also means that we can think of her as an interdependent, mutual arising with everything else in the moment of her birth (and so on in each subsequent moment, until she dies).
Thus, from the vantage of evolution and ecology, it doesn't entirely make sense to speak of her having a nature or essence at all. When she's old enough to have a sense of self, she'll essentially be doing with the blocks of her experience what we do when we speak of species: she'll chop them up in a certain way, telling a story of development, including some things, ignoring others. It will be the story she tells herself. She might even mistake that story for what is essential about her (as I think Thomists do when they speak of "real essentialism"; they've come under the spell of a category mistake). There is no "real essentialism"; there's only moments that we chop up in ways that make meaning for us, and on which we then overlay schemas and narratives. Perhaps we should call this our "model dependent reality" (which is rarely--perhaps never--the same thing as reality itself, which is shifting in each moment).
So are you the same person you were as a teenager? What is the story you tell yourself, and is that story what you mean when you speak of yourself? If you told the story differently, and chopped it up differently, would that make you a different self? Maybe the stories we tell about ourselves are akin to telling the story of our deck of cards lineage. Hmm.
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteI'm happy for you to school me on any aspect of Thomistic metaphysics you please. Tell me, for example, what you understand essentialism to mean (in a simple way, if you feel it can be stated simply). Then when I use the word, maybe I can align it with the precision of the Thomist usage (so we're not misunderstanding one another).
As for your scholastic-style arguments on homosexuality, it sounds to me like you're moving in the right direction, wrestling with the issue from different vantages, trying to see how (if) gay marriage might be something Thomism could incorporate. I would hope that a lot of Thomists would use their collective brainpower to talk this through.
ok, Santi. Please complete these arguments for me, it will help me understand what you are trying to say:
ReplyDeletePremise: There was no first human
Conclusion: every so-called human creature exists sui generis
It seems to me as silly as this:
Premise: There was no point at time that we can point to at which the present-day bevy of words in the English language emerged from the previous bunch of English words.
Conclusion: Therefore, there is no English language
@Matt Sheean:
ReplyDelete"ok, Santi. Please complete these arguments for me, it will help me understand what you are trying to say:
Premise: There was no first human
Conclusion: every so-called human creature exists sui generis"
And don't forget the second conclusion: that no so-called human creature has an essence. We're still waiting for an explanation of how that's supposed to follow from everything's being one of a kind.
@Scott
ReplyDeleteThere's a whole lot of juice he manages to squeeze out of that raisin.
Thinking about the cards stacking a lineage, and how it's arbitrary where we put the species boundaries in our own lineage, I'm struck by the similarity of this insight to hylomorphism.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, insofar as I understand hylomorphism, it's where a designer takes raw material and uses her mind and hands to impose purpose and form on it, as when St Paul writes, "Shall the clay say to the potter, why have you made me thus?"
When we impose a species boundary on our lineage ("Here is the first human, here is the second... and you are the last human to date in the series--and this species boundary tells you essential things about yourself"), the question immediately gets asked, "Why have you imposed that form on this matter? Why did you begin there, exactly?"
In our evolutionary lineage, what there is is matter and change, which we can visualize as snapshots in time; a tall deck of picture cards. When we chop that up, we're in the role of God, imposing a model of meaning on the deck.
But once you realize that the deck can be cut in any number of ways, you realize that there's nothing essential about the species boundary WITHOUT YOU.
You are in the role of God. You are making the meaning. Without you, the deck of cards is just a deck of cards. If there's anything essential about it, it's anchored by your declaration alone.
This suggests to me that our arguments about God, justification, purpose, and ethics is playing out this same game. Without someone from the outside to impose order on the deck of justification, purpose, and ethics, we can chop it up any way we want. We become God. Nothing is essential except what we declare to be so.
But only if God exists is anything really and truly essential.
And yet here's the irony: God is silent as to how (S)he cuts the deck.
So we have to guess. If God is love, and is primarily concerned with that, then God cuts the deck this way; if God is concerned with procreation and the use of organs in a certain way, then God cuts the deck that way. The matter receives its form from the one doing the chopping. And since ultimate justification can only come from God, everything else is question begging. ("Why did you chop there?")
So God has to exist to ground (and essentialize) any chopping. Otherwise, we're doing the chopping.
Also, Santi's argument bears some similarity to Dennett's "Prime Mammal" argument:
ReplyDeleteevery mammal has a mammal for a mother, and there have only ever been a finite number of mammals
but if one mammal has existed, then an infinity of mammals must have existed (from "every mammal has mammal for a mother")
But, "every mammal has a mammal for a mother" and "there have only been finite mammals" contradict!
Therefore, there are no mammals!
At best, as I understand Dennett, this just means that we need to be careful when talking about species in terms of their evolutionary history (drawing "bright lines" around species, as he puts it). Even then, it seems to me to be a bad argument, the first premise seems to me a straw man - or at least, at best, it might apply to Ken Hamm.
also, he takes disagreements concerning the morality, or even advisability, of a particular act as a reductio against his opponents.
ReplyDeleteNobody else here has been so foolish as to say, "sodomy is inadvisable/immoral, therefore Thomism."
Matt and Scott:
ReplyDeleteI'm hoping my hylomorphism observation above is answering how I can say that each "card" is sui generis. You can cut the deck of a million cards any way you want if you have the authority of the deck-cutter, including designating each card its own species.
If God exists, God cuts the deck. If God doesn't exist, we cut the deck. If God isn't speaking, we guess at how God cuts the deck.
Also
ReplyDelete"So God has to exist to ground (and essentialize) any chopping."
Ok, that might mean some progress. You must admit then, if you say "we do the chopping" full stop, that you are begging the question. That "we do the chopping" only follows if "There is no God" is true.
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ReplyDeletelet me rephrase:
ReplyDelete"If God isn't speaking, we guess at how God cuts the deck."
Or, Every thing has a thingness about it, a "what it is", and essence, and we do our best to speak of each thing according to its essence/nature as best as we can understand.
"I'm hoping my hylomorphism observation above is answering how I can say that each 'card' is sui generis."
ReplyDeleteWell, sure! Your argument is that nothing has an essence because cutting a deck of cards reminds you of hylomorphism.
Why didn't you just say so in the first place?
@Santi Tafarella...
ReplyDeleteIrish Thomist:
You wrote: "Have I missed your answer to my very pointed questions?"
Sorry, I got so much incoming, that I couldn't respond to everything, and now I can't seem to locate your comment.
If I recall, was it you that asked me about my metaphysical starting point (existentially lost in space)? Why do I start there, etc?
No so I will find the questions now and repost them.
Here are some of them
So please tell us a good argument against philosophy? (the question had nothing to do with Wittgenstein)
Then
Tell me is your position really rational or logical?
Also October 14, 2014 at 1:02 PM and the comment after it may be of interest.
Have a nice day.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteYou wrote: "Your argument is that nothing has an essence because cutting a deck of cards reminds you of hylomorphism."
Okay, but help me out here and get off the fence (rather than just making the observation). You understand the details of hylomorphism far better than I do, obviously. Am I in the ball park of getting at the crux of the issue or not (in your view)?
In other words, is the evolutionary lineage matter (the deck of cards), and the form imposed upon it (species categories) a way of thinking about hylomorphism, and does it then follow that whoever has the authority to cut the deck (or shape the clay, or name the animals) is in the role of the designer, the fashioner?
Matter, to have meaning, must be given form by a meaning-maker. And if the ultimate meaning-maker, God, doesn't exist, then we make our own forms?
This feels to me like a choice between Aquinas and Sartre.
@ Santi
ReplyDeleteI think I will bow out now. I would just like to take a moment to thank you for taking the time and putting in the effort to refute yourself, so that I don't have to.
Greg,
ReplyDeleteWell, you're welcome (I suppose).
What Greg said. I'm done here as well.
ReplyDeleteSanti, if you want to understand hylomorphism (or Thomism generally), I think you know what resources to investigate. You can find out most of what you want to know just by digging around on this blog, and I seem to recall that Ed might have published a couple of books that might be helpful as well. You'll also find David Oderberg's Real Essentialism helpful.
But as far as I'm personally concerned (and I doubt I'm alone in this), you've so thoroughly demonstrated your lack of bona fides that I think undertaking to educate you in a combox would be a losing proposition.
However, lest it be thought that I'm a fence-sitter, I suppose I'd better answer this:
ReplyDelete"Am I in the ball park of getting at the crux of the issue or not (in your view)?"
No.
Brandon,
ReplyDeleteI've followed your exchange with Vincent, and I'm wondering if I've grasped the point you are making. I'd like to put it in my own (plain) terms and ask you if I have gotten it right.
God created me and everything about me, including my will, intellect and particular character. Furthermore, he created the world and is knowledgeable of all circumstances in His Creation.
Therefore, knowing exactly the kind of guy I am, and exactly what circumstances I will be in, he knows precisely how I will respond to them. But this is no contradiction of free will, since I freely choose what I will do, only God knows exactly what I will do.
An example: Earlier in the thread the Monty Hall problem was mentioned. Anyone who truly understands the problem knows that your chances of winning increase by taking Monty's offer to switch doors. Therefore, even I can predict with near certainty how someone educated in the problem will respond to it if put in that situation (I do not say absolute certainty since I don't have absolute knowledge of someone else's education or circumstances). But my knowledge of what a statistically savvy individual will do with the Monty Hall problem in no way compromises that individuals' free will. I merely understand what an educated and free will would do in such circumstances. The same thing holds for God in an absolute sense.
Hi, David T,
ReplyDeleteWhat you're suggesting sounds somewhat closer to Molinism than Banezianism. It's (traditional) Molinists who usually hold that God has foreknowledge of free choices because of his 'supercomprehension' of those who have free will.
Banezians will take a different approach: God knows what we will actually choose because God's causal activity is required for anything to become actual at all. So whenever I freely will to do X rather than Y or Z, my actually doing X depends not just on my freely choosing it but also on God infallibly from eternity willing my free will to be effective. Thus God's knowledge of my free choices is an infallible practical knowledge of what He contributes to them, namely, actuality.
Brandon, are you familiar with Linda Zagzebski's book on freedom and foreknowledge? What is your opinion of her (extremely brief) treatment of Banezianism? I don't have the book on hand, but if I recall correctly, she introduces Molinism and says that, on Molinism, God knows counterfactuals of human action. She says the distinction between Banezianism and Molinism is that the counterfactuals are brute (although I don't think she uses that term), whereas on Banezianism they depend on God. So she rejects Banezianism immediately, saying that since the counterfactuals about human action depend on God, it does not seem possible that humans can be free at all. I hope I am not missing important distinctions here, although I probably am.
ReplyDeleteHer treatment did not look a whole lot like this discussion, though. I wish I remembered who she cited (perhaps just Banez). I suppose I should read G-L's books.
Brandon, are you familiar with Linda Zagzebski's book on freedom and foreknowledge? What is your opinion of her (extremely brief) treatment of Banezianism? I don't have the book on hand, but if I recall correctly, she introduces Molinism and says that, on Molinism, God knows counterfactuals of human action. She says the distinction between Banezianism and Molinism is that the counterfactuals are brute (although I don't think she uses that term), whereas on Banezianism they depend on God. So she rejects Banezianism immediately, saying that since the counterfactuals about human action depend on God, it does not seem possible that humans can be free at all. I hope I am not missing important distinctions here, although I probably am.
ReplyDeleteHer treatment did not look a whole lot like this discussion, though. I wish I remembered who she cited (perhaps just Banez). I suppose I should read G-L's books.
Brandon,
ReplyDeleteIs the Benezian point about God's relationship to the will simply a special case of the more general case that God is the ultimate cause of the final cause of every particular being? I can only will because God wills that I will, just as he wills that fire burn?
Do the Molinists deny this relationship?
Hi, Greg,
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I haven't read Zagzebski's book. Her SEP article on the subject is, I think, a partial summary of the argument of the book, but she doesn't mention Banezianism in it. (The article itself strikes me as very jumbled; I don't think anyone would reading it would come away with a very accurate idea of most of the positions she discusses in it, unless they already knew them well enough not to need the article.)
The distinction between Banezianism and Molinism just is over whether there is a scientia media, a middle knowledge, logically after God's knowledge of His own nature (which is knowledge of the possible) and logically before God's knowledge of His own will (which is knowledge of the actual). Molinists take God's foreknowledge of free choices to be part of scientia media; Banezians (or Thomists, as they used to be called), hold that there is no scientia media, so God's foreknowledge of free choices must belong to His knowledge of His own will.
All right, thanks.
ReplyDeleteDavid T,
ReplyDeleteIs the Benezian point about God's relationship to the will simply a special case of the more general case that God is the ultimate cause of the final cause of every particular being?
Banezians (or Thomists, as they used to be called) typically think of it more in terms of God as first mover (hence divine premotion): assuming they are right that it's coherent, it's a special case of the more general case that God is the first principle of actuality for anything that becomes actual.
Summarizing Molinism briefly is tricky; it's a very highly technical position, even more so than Banezianism. Molinists historically don't deny that God is first cause even of free choices; they simply deny that an appeal to God's will is adequate for an account of God's foreknowledge of free choices. You need to suppose a middle knowledge that is not just a knowledge of possibility but not yet knowledge of actuality, where God would know what we would freely choose in some possible history of the world ('order of nature', as the old Molinists used to say). God then actualizes the world-history that he deems fit, including all the free choices in it. Banezians think that this both takes away from God's primacy (middle knowledge at first look seems to imply that there are contingents that don't depend on God) and from free will (God simply selects the world-history in which we make the choices He wants).
Brandon,
ReplyDeleteThat makes things clearer, thanks.
@Irish Thomist:
ReplyDeleteYou asked me two questions: "So please tell us a good argument against philosophy?" and "[I]s your position really rational or logical?"
With regard to the first question, I'm not against philosophy, I like philosophy. But I think of metaphysics as akin to poetry. If you can't ground arguments in empiricism and experience, you can't really say with certainty whether what you're claiming is in fact true or merely clever.
So my first argument against metaphysical philosophy is that it is poetry. It is a way of framing the world; of narrating it; of making some parts of it central and seen (the locus of attention), and other parts marginal or not seen. Like poetry, especially epic poetry, does.
And this is fine if you aren't under the spell of your metaphysical system. But when you translate your metaphysics into dogma, you've stopped taking your poetry with a light touch, and you're now in the realm of treating your deductions and system with 100% certainty. This is akin to the way a fundamentalist reads the Bible or Quran. The system is impermeable to reality testing even in principle, and you believe it 100%.
This is folly because of our existential situation. We are evolved primates on a tiny planet adrift in the vast ocean of space. We necessarily inhabit the realm of probability; a realm of fog; of life "beneath the moon" (the sublunary).
Shakespeare, for this reason, is a better philosopher than Aquinas. And even Charlton Heston gets closer to the truth than Aquinas in the 1960s version of Planet of the Apes ("It's a mad house! A mad house!"). And Camus is also superior to Aquinas. The cosmos is absurd from our vantage; it does not answer to human longing. But Camus tells us that we still have solidarity and rebellion against the absurd (making collective and private meaning for ourselves as best we can in spite of our seemingly hopeless situation). Camus' "The Plague" is a better guide for living than "The Summa."
So we've got, for example, reason as a tool to help us along. We know, for instance, that if the premises of a deductive argument are true, the conclusion is 100% certain. That's a great tool to have for coming at the world. But it's often difficult to know, absent experience and empiricism, whether the premises put forward in an argument really are true. And this means that a philosophical system that cannot reality test even in principle is akin to speculating about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
My second argument against metaphysical philosophy of the Aquinas sort is that it pretends to transcend history. For example, I think it's quite obvious that the starting point for Thomistic reasoning about sex is a contingent historical byproduct of an age in which maintaining population size was difficult and the priests writing the laws of sexual conduct were sexual innocents themselves (and all male). Rather than procreation, Thomistic philosophizing about sex could be started with love and (gender and orientation) equality.
So what Thomists don't seem to acknowledge is just how historically situated the premises from which their reasoning proceeds is. Thomas started his project as an attempt to escape the contingent and transcend it with an act of pure reasoning and appeals to divine authority (the Bible, etc.) absent experience. And that was his first mistake.
@Irish Thomist:
ReplyDeleteAs to your second question, I think my existentialist and empiricist position is reasonable because we could be in only one of three possible worlds: God exists and is speaking; God exists and is silent; God does not exist.
Obviously, we don't live in the first world, but either the second or third. If we lived in the first sort of world, we wouldn't need to philosophize. But since we don't know whether we're in the second or third sort of world, we're pretty much stuck with a priori speculation (not of the highest value in my opinion) and theorizing accompanied by empiricism (certainly the most productive method for reflection, given our circumstances). We are in the realm of probability, not certainty. That's our existential situation.
I like the way Bertrand Russell puts this in his A History of Western Philosophy (1945, p. 517 in the 2007 Touchstone edition): "[I]t is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition."
Brandon,
ReplyDeleteCongratulations! You've finally managed to express your ideas clearly and effectively. You write:
"On Garrigou-Lagrange's account, God does not cause b to X; He causes X as first cause. The relation of this causation to b causing X is one of infallible connection rather than necessitation, forcing, or restriction to one effect. What He causes with respect to b is the actual possession of free will that can be effective."
So what you are saying is:
God-------->
X
b==========>
where -----> denotes "causes, as a primary cause" and =====> denotes "freely chooses." You also say that God causes X whenever b chooses X, but that God does not cause b to choose X. All God does to b is maintain b in existence, while b chooses X.
Now I don't think for a moment that this is Garrigou-Lagrange's view, but I'll humor you, all the same. The problem with this view is a simple one: what guarantees that the choices God causes will be the same as the choices b freely makes? Remember: on your own account, God does not cause b to X. Also, God is Pure Act, so there is no way b could send a message to God, letting Him know what his choice was. So if God does not determine b's choice and is not determined by b's choice, then how would God know which choice (X or Y, say) to cause?
I could say more, but I'm in a hurry now. Talk to you later.
Hi Brandon,
ReplyDeleteSorry, that arrow diagram didn't come out well. The X should be to the right of both arrows, as an effect caused by God and b. Let's see if this works (I'll use the underscore instead of the space bar):
God-------->
_____________X
b==========>
Cheers.
Santi,
ReplyDeleteHave you ever considered investing in a introductory logic or critical thinking textbook? Your rambling nonsense could really do with it.
For example, your first argument against Thomism argues against being under the spell of a metaphysical (and epistemological) system by judging Thomism against a metaphysical (and epistemological) system.
Again, there is ironically no sense of humility in your comments. You come across as clearly not knowing what you are talking about, but seem to feel no sense of embarrassment in coming to sweeping conclusions about Thomism or metaphysics or philosophy.
How about you actually try and learn something (how to avoid gross fallacies would be a nice start) and stop pontificating about that which you know little. Your commentary is pointless anyway, as it is hardly going to be taken seriously.
A parting shot:
ReplyDeleteSanti: "Okay, but help me out here and get off the fence (rather than just making the observation). You understand the details of hylomorphism far better than I do, obviously. Am I in the ball park of getting at the crux of the issue or not (in your view)?"
Scott: "No."
Wittgenstein: "What can be said at all can be said
clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent."
Vincent,
ReplyDeleteSince my comment mostly just repeated things I already told you before (and in fact I explicitly emphasized that fact in the comment), I'm a bit amused at your claim that I've now, suddenly, made myself clear. And since we've already established that you haven't read Garrigou-Lagrange seriously on the subject for almost as long as I've been alive, and since you've repeatedly attributed to Garrigou-Lagrange positions that are exactly the opposite of what he says, I take your humoring me on the subject for exactly what it's worth, which is to say, nothing.
I have no idea what your diagram means, even with your explanations.
what guarantees that the choices God causes will be the same as the choices b freely makes?
This is a poorly formulated question, involving a logical error in context. Any choice is, on Banezian principles, necessarily the effect of the hierarchical cooperation of God and b; it's logically impossible for the choice made determinate by God and the choice freely chosen by b not to be the same. What you actually mean to ask, I take it, is what can ground the infallibility of divine premotion without requiring determinism. And a Banezian will in general answer that it's the same thing that can ground the infallibility of divine foreknowledge without requiring fatalism; the two infallibilities are the same kind of infallibility on a Banezian account, as I have already explicitly noted several times.
(Rewritten to correct a crucial typo)
Brandon,
ReplyDeleteSorry, but you've lost me again. Look. Here's the picture. God, you say, doesn't cause human agent b to choose X. However, you also say that God causes X whenever b chooses X.
Now here's the problem. Let's say b is faced with a choice between X and Y and b chooses X. My question is: how does God know what to cause - X or Y - if He does not cause b to choose X and if b does not cause Him to be aware of b's choice (X)? What I'm assuming here is that all knowledge of non-analytic truths requires a causal link between the knower and what is known. In other words, God cannot "just know." That makes no sense, as it fails to distinguish knowing from making a lucky guess. The causal link is what justifies the knower's belief (in this case, the belief we are talking about is the belief that b chooses X and not Y). [This is not stuff I'm making up here: read up on the Gettier problem in SEP if you haven't already, and you'll understand what I mean.] In the absence of a causal link which specifies the option chosen (e.g. a Divine decree which infallibly guarantees that b will choose X, or a timeless transmission of information to God informing Him of b's choice of X), God is in the dark. The best He could do then is to cause X in the same sense as He causes Y - i.e. as an enabling cause, or ground of being. But if that's all you mean, then all God knows is that b chooses X or Y. God does not know that b chooses X and not Y, because His act of causation is the same in both cases.
You write: "Any choice is, on Banezian principles, necessarily the effect of the hierarchical cooperation of God and b; it's logically impossible for the choice made determinate by God and the choice freely chosen by b not to be the same." But it seems to me that on your account, God does nothing to make the choice determinate; all He does is ground the possibility of b's making the choice, by maintaining b in existence as an agent with free will.
Finally, you write that what grounds the infallibility of divine premotion is the same as what grounds the infallibility of divine foreknowledge. Which is???
I'm afraid it seems to me that your account of God's foreknowledge smacks of Open Theism.
We necessarily inhabit the realm of probability; a realm of fog; of life "beneath the moon" (the sublunary).
ReplyDeleteYou really don't see the self-contradiction in this position?
How can I necessarily know that I inhabit the realm of probability if in fact I inhabit the realm of probability?
Brandon,
ReplyDeleteBack again. While we're on the subject of the interpretation of Garrigou-Lagrange, here are a few quotes I've dug up. (I live in Japan and can no more access a good Catholic library than fly to the moon, and buying books is out of the question too, but I can still use the Internet, thank God.)
"On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the Concordia" by Luis de Molina contains a foreword by Catholic philosopher Alfred Freddoso. On pages 37 and 39 he writes:
"So on the Banezian scheme God foreknows the good contingent effects of created agents just because He causally predetermines those effects. The evil effects He knows by the very fact that He has not efficaciously concurred with their causes to produce the corresponding good effects...
If, for example, God does not predetermine, via His intrinsically efficacious grace, the intended effect of Judas repenting, it follows directly that Judas will not repent - even though God intends that he repent and gives him grace sufficient for, albeit merely sufficient for, repentance."
See? Freddoso interprets the Banezian view in the same way I do.
Here's an excerpt from an irenic pamphlet titled "Predestination" ( http://www.ewtn.com/library/scriptur/predesti.txt ) by Catholic apologist Fr. William M. Most, written in 1971, which attempted to resolve the differences between Banezians and Molinists. Fr. Most spent some time talking to both Dominicans and Jesuits, so I should think he knows what he's talking about. He writes:
"Views of the Thomists and the Molinists:
a) Thomists: they say that God predestines and reprobates
without considering merits or demerits. Objection: Here is Joe
Doaks, whom God has decided to reprobate without even seeing how
Joe lives. Can He do this, and also say (1 Tim 2:4) that He
wills all to be saved - which would include Joe Doaks? Obviously
not.
This impossibility was admitted by the real founder of the
'Thomist' system, Domingo Banez who was followed by Cardinal
Cajetan. But later generations of Dominicans insisted this view
is not incompatible with 1 Tim 2:4. What they failed to see is
this: To love is to will good to another for the other's sake. So
to will salvation to all is to love. So in this 'Thomist' view, God would not love Joe Doaks. And because He would decide to reprobate many without any consideration of their demerits, He would really not love anyone at all."
And here's Eleonore Stump in her book "Aquinas" (Routledge, p. 119):
"Garrigou-Lagrange thus postulates a dilemma: for everything, God either determines it or he is determined by it, where determination for Garrigou-Lagrange either is or is equivalent to causation, as the preceding texts [quoted from G-L] make clear. And he argues for the first horn of the dilemma on the grounds that the second presupposes passivity, which cannot be in a God who is pure actuality."
And here's Thomas Flint, in "Divine Providence: The Molinist Account" (Cornell University Press, p. 85):
"As Thomists see it, though, Molinists ... fail to take seriously the central Christian tenet that God is in control of all contingent truths, and they thereby render God passive or dependent."
These authors read Garrigou-Lagrange and understand Banezianism just as I do.
You say there are passages in G-L's books where he rejects determinism. That's true, but the determination he is rejecting is not theological determinism but a "determinism of circumstances," as he calls it, which he thinks Molinism implies.
I shall stop there for today. Cheers.
The cosmos is absurd from our vantage; it does not answer to human longing.
ReplyDeleteAnd, like Camus, you assert this with self-assured certainty despite your claim to inhabit only a realm of "probability."
What's interesting about your comments is the frequency with which you dogmatically assert controversial and highly disputable conclusions (like your insistence that "...it's quite obvious that the starting point for Thomistic reasoning about sex is a contingent historical byproduct") while insisting that we are restricted to a realm of probability. Even more delicious is that you seem blissfully incapable of seeing the irony.
We can also add Shakespeare to those topics Santi has butchered. Shakespeare's concerns are essentially Platonic, Christian, and mystical, especially from 1599 onwards as Martin Lings, amongst others, have written well upon.
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty clear that Santi generates delusions faster than anyone could be expected to refute them. He also, like other commenters have, seems to confuse a statement with an 'argument'. The way things are going, he'll never learn the difference.
ReplyDeleteVincent,
ReplyDeleteNone of your quotations actually state any of the false claims you have made: that G-L thinks God's premotion necessitates, that Banezianism is itself compatible with determinism, that G-L holds that free choices are due to circumstances entirely outside our control, or any other of the nonsense you have been peddling and that I have specifically addressed. Nor do any of these quotations show signs of the specific logical errors I have identified. I haven't been arguing that it is impossible for someone to come up with an argument against Banezianism worth taking seriously -- I have on occasion specifically noted that such arguments exist. Nor do I deny that someone could come up with more competent versions of the arguments you have been giving. I have instead been arguing that your attempts to build such an argument repeatedly impute things to Garrigou-Lagrange and other Banezians that they specifically deny, or try to draw conclusions directly from their claims by arguments that are either terminologically ambiguous or logically fallacious.
On your argument about causal links, which is the first legitimate one that you've given, Banezians hold, of course, that God causes not just b's choice but also the free will itself by which b makes it. That's the causal link. Garrigou-Lagrange is quite upfront about saying that we do not fully know how this works, but it is the Banezian position that we do know that God's premotion is infallible for exactly the same reasons we know his foreknowledge is.
I'm afraid it seems to me that your account of God's foreknowledge smacks of Open Theism.
This is fairly surprising, since I haven't given an account of God's foreknowledge, having merely pointed out (repeatedly, by this point) that Banezians take premotion and foreknowledge to have the same account, and to be infallible in the same way.
@David T:
ReplyDeleteYou wrote that I "dogmatically assert," but your examples are where I'm appealing to subjective experience (or more precisely, generalizing about a common subjective experience--the feeling that existence often doesn't answer to our deepest longings, etc.).
Perhaps you know Auden's poem, "Musee des Beaux Arts." That's all I'm saying.
Wherever I don't speak in terms of probabilities, it's going to be because one of three things is going on:
(1) I'm appealing to experience or an empirical finding; (2) I'm making a deductive, as opposed to an inductive argument; or (3) I'm offering a framing gesture--"Here's what I think x is about..." The framing gesture is a possible (and to me reasonable, perhaps the most reasonable) way to look at a thing, not because I think it's the only way to frame the issue, or that you have to believe it.
None of these are dogmatic gestures in the sense that you're using the term.
Santi,
ReplyDeleteYour original statement was:
The cosmos is absurd from our vantage; it does not answer to human longing.
This is apparently a straightforward assertion about the cosmos. Now you say you are really only talking about your feelings about the cosmos, not the cosmos itself. Fine, but your conclusions can go only so far as your premisses, so I take your conclusions to concern your feelings about metaphyiscs, rather than metaphysics itself. And on your feelings about metaphysics or anything else I will not dispute you.
And here's Eleonore Stump in her book "Aquinas" (Routledge, p. 119):
ReplyDelete"Garrigou-Lagrange thus postulates a dilemma: for everything, God either determines it or he is determined by it, where determination for Garrigou-Lagrange either is or is equivalent to causation, as the preceding texts [quoted from G-L] make clear. And he argues for the first horn of the dilemma on the grounds that the second presupposes passivity, which cannot be in a God who is pure actuality."
And here is an excerpt from Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange OP: Teacher of Thomism:
"Garrigou-Lagrange was wont to argue that the issue is one of 'God determining or determined'. And this is true, in that Perfect Act cannot be a passive spectator vis a vis the positive actuality of choice without implicitly derogating the divine transcendence, omnipotence, and causal efficacy. Moreover, clearly that quantum of actuality and perfection that differentiates act from non-act must be accounted for by divine causality, unless one is prepared to abandon the claim of theism that God is the author of everything that is insofar as it is--a claim which is buttressed by the evidence of movement from potency to act as well as by the real distinction of essence and existence in finite things. Nonetheless, to the ears of those accustomed only to an incorrectly conceptualized account of liberty that pits 'determinism' against an irrationalist & voluntarist freedom, this language may prove distracting and forbidding...
"In defining human liberty the tendency today is not to follow St. Thomas in the earlier-cited passage from De malo [q 16 a 7 ad. 15]: 'therefore necessity and contingency in things are distinguished not in relation to the divine will, which is a universal cause, but in relation to created causes which the divine will has ordered proportionately to the effects, namely in such a way that the causes of necessary effects are unchangeable, and of contingent effects changeable.'
"Rather than distinguishing necessity and contingency in things 'in relation to created causes', there is a tendency to distinguish necessity and contingency absolutely and logically. The consequence is a notion of liberty that is incompatible with creaturliness as such. Thus it is thought that to be 'free' is to be the absolute and first cause of one's acts, a notion that by its very nature can pertain solely to God. Even when the absurdity of this notion of human free will begins to become clear, many still wish to define contingency of the human will in relation to God rather than in relation to created causes. This manner of defining the contingency of the human will in relation to God rather than in relation to the will's proximate created objects requires the postulation of an absolute liberty of indifference on the part of the created will vis a vis the divine causality. Rather than locating the source of liberty in the very intellectual/rational nature whereby the will is ordered to universal good and hence cannot be coerced by any finite good whatsoever, this view defines the liberty of the will as an exemption from the universal causality of God. Such a postulation of freedom as a zone of independence from divine causality and providence is simply incompossible with theism."
(cont)
This brings us full circle--or at least back near the beginning -- to when:
ReplyDeletea) Scott wrote, "Fr. G-L's view was that God's 'determination' (as primary cause) of our choices doesn't make those choices occur by necessity (at the level of secondary causation) but in fact ensures that they take place contingently and freely... You may disagree that this view makes sense, but there's no denying that it was Fr. G-L's view (or that Ed shares it)"; and,
b) Vincent replied, "I also realize perfectly well that Garrigou-Lagrange held that we determine our choices. He also held, however, that we determine our choices as secondary causes, and that God determines them as the primary cause. In other words, according to Garrigou-Lagrange, God ultimately determines everything that I think, say or do; and that fact that he also says that God makes me determine my choices in no way alters that simple fact."
One may get the impression that although Vincent recognizes that G-L distinguished necessity and contingency in things 'in relation to created causes', since he, Vincent, apparently distinguishes necessity and contingency absolutely and logically, it is (somehow) manifestly obvious to him that G-L, who only thought he had done otherwise, actually did the same thing.
Since "the received is in the receiver according to the mode of the receiver", G-L's view is in Vincent's mind not as G-L's view is in and of itself, but as Vincent's way of thinking has him viewing it.
ReplyDeleteIf anyone (including especially Vincent) is interested in what Aquinas himself argued on this subject, here, here, and here are some good places to look.
ReplyDeleteHere's a short version, from Fr. G-L summarizing and defending Aquinas's view: "The divine motion, since it does not render the action of secondary causes superfluous but gives rise to it, cannot be necessitating, in the sense that it would suppress all contingency and liberty. But under the divine influx, secondary causes act as befitting their nature, either necessarily, as the sun gives light and heat, or contingently, as fruits become more or less ripe in time; or else freely, as in the case of man who chooses." (Predestination, pp. 243-244.)
Glenn's source is apt and quite on point.
Santi Tafarella wrote (way upthread):
ReplyDeleteAnd since I have your [Feser's] attention, let me say I'd look forward to you reviewing Michael Graziano's book.
Santi,
I'm reading Consciousness and the Social Brain at the moment. It is also being discussed at TSZ and Michael Graziano has promised to join the discussion. Don't know if you are interested but you'd be very welcome to pop in for a bit of R and R
@Vincent Torley:
ReplyDelete"These authors read Garrigou-Lagrange and understand Banezianism just as I do."
No, they don't. As Brandon has already (repeatedly) pointed out (and as I initially said quite a while back), the Thomist/Bañezian view, shared by Fr. G-L, is that God's causal predetermination is not necessitating. None of the authors you've quoted says otherwise; somehow even the Molinists among them manage to state the opposing position fairly and accurately.
(Or rather it's not necessitating in the case of free human choices or of contingent events.)
ReplyDeleteBrandon and Scott,
ReplyDeleteYou (Scott) write:
"As Brandon has already (repeatedly) pointed out (and as I initially said quite a while back), the Thomist/Bañezian view, shared by Fr. G-L, is that God's causal predetermination is not necessitating. None of the authors you've quoted says otherwise; somehow even the Molinists among them manage to state the opposing position fairly and accurately."
Not so. Please have a look at this 2013 paper by Alfred Freddoso at http://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/papers/freedom%20and%20God.pdf , titled, "Introduction to the Problem of Free Will and Divine Causality." The computer I'm sitting at won't let me use HTML, so I'll use << and >> for Freddoso's italics and capitals for passages I with to bold. (Sorry!)
On page 4, Freddoso defines freedom of indifference (FI):
"PRESCINDING FROM GOD'S CONCURRENCE, the relevant definition goes like this:
"(FI) An agent A is free at time t in circumstances C just in case, with all the prerequisites for acting having been posited at t in C, A is (a) able to act – that is, to will – and also able not to act (<>) and (b) able to will an object and also able to will some contrary object (<>).
"In contemporary parlance, both Dominicans and Jesuits are 'libertarians' — and not compatibilists or hard determinists — with respect to the order of CREATED CAUSES."
So it is only with regard to created causes that Dominicans reject determinism. On page 6, Freddoso explains that with respect to God, the situation is quite different, for Dominicans. Freddoso does this by showing how a Dominican would respond to various objections that a Jesuit would make:
"Well, how is created metaphysical freedom compatible with God's causally predetermining allegedly 'free' choices?" [Objection 1] [Response:] If God were just another created cause, you would have a legitimate worry; and — don't you see? — that's just what you Jesuits are doing, viz., treating God like a created agent. You seem to have lost all sense of God's transcendence and devolved into anthropomorphism. God's predeterminations are gentle and perfectly coordinated with the created will. THERE IS NO HINT OF COERCION OR INVOLUNTARINESS. As St. Thomas indicates, God determines not just the <> of created effects, but their <> as well. And in the cases in question, that means that He determines them to be free choices. Besides, GOD'S CAUSALITY "NECESSITATES" THE ACTION ONLY IN THE COMPOSED SENSE. That is, IT'S A NECESSARY TRUTH THAT IF GOD ACTS IN <> WAY, THE CREATED WILL ACTS IN <> WAY. But this is still compatible with the created will retaining its NATURAL POWER not to act in that way.
"But it can't <> that power!" [Objection 2] [Response:] Well, that's a matter of interpretation. It still has this power, and IT WOULD EXERCISE IT IF GOD PRE-MOVED IT TO! The only thing that follows is that it won't exercise a power it <> exercised UNDER SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES, viz., if it were PRE=MOVED TOWARD A DIFFERENT OUTCOME. So God is the first source of all goodness in the created will.
"But doesn't your view make God a direct cause of evil acts?" [Objection 3] [Response:] No, the defectiveness of any act of will is always traceable to the faulty human or angelic instrument, and not to God's causality — just like St. Thomas said, and just like you Jesuits say. You're basically in the same position as we are on this particular issue."
(End of Quote)
(To be continued)
Thank you for the invite. I'll look forward to hearing your impressions of Graziano's book down the road.
ReplyDeleteBrandon and Scott,
ReplyDeleteSorry, that came out badly. The computer deleted the words between my << >> signs. I'll try again, using asterisks for italics.
You (Scott) write:
"As Brandon has already (repeatedly) pointed out (and as I initially said quite a while back), the Thomist/Bañezian view, shared by Fr. G-L, is that God's causal predetermination is not necessitating. None of the authors you've quoted says otherwise; somehow even the Molinists among them manage to state the opposing position fairly and accurately."
Not so. Please have a look at this 2013 paper by Alfred Freddoso at http://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/papers/freedom%20and%20God.pdf , titled, "Introduction to the Problem of Free Will and Divine Causality." The computer I'm sitting at won't let me use HTML, so I'll use ** and ** for Freddoso's italics and capitals for passages I with to bold. (Sorry!)
On page 4, Freddoso defines freedom of indifference (FI):
"PRESCINDING FROM GOD'S CONCURRENCE, the relevant definition goes like this:
"(FI) An agent A is free at time t in circumstances C just in case, with all the prerequisites for acting having been posited at t in C, A is (a) able to act – that is, to will – and also able not to act (**freedom with respect to exercise**) and (b) able to will an object and also able to will some contrary object (**freedom with respect to specification**).
"In contemporary parlance, both Dominicans and Jesuits are 'libertarians' — and not compatibilists or hard determinists — with respect to the order of CREATED CAUSES."
So it is only with regard to created causes that Dominicans reject determinism. On page 6, Freddoso explains that with respect to God, the situation is quite different, for Dominicans. Freddoso does this by showing how a Dominican would respond to various objections that a Jesuit would make:
"Well, how is created metaphysical freedom compatible with God's causally predetermining allegedly 'free' choices?" [Objection 1] [Response:] If God were just another created cause, you would have a legitimate worry; and — don't you see? — that's just what you Jesuits are doing, viz., treating God like a created agent. You seem to have lost all sense of God's transcendence and devolved into anthropomorphism. God's predeterminations are gentle and perfectly coordinated with the created will. THERE IS NO HINT OF COERCION OR INVOLUNTARINESS. As St. Thomas indicates, God determines not just the **nature** of created effects, but their **modality** as well. And in the cases in question, that means that He determines them to be free choices. Besides, GOD'S CAUSALITY "NECESSITATES" THE ACTION ONLY IN THE COMPOSED SENSE. That is, IT'S A NECESSARY TRUTH THAT IF GOD ACTS IN **this** WAY, THE CREATED WILL ACTS IN **that** WAY. But this is still compatible with the created will retaining its NATURAL POWER not to act in that way.
"But it can't **exercise** that power!" [Objection 2] [Response:] Well, that's a matter of interpretation. It still has this power, and IT WOULD EXERCISE IT IF GOD PRE-MOVED IT TO! The only thing that follows is that it won't exercise a power it **could have** exercised UNDER SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES, viz., if it were PRE=MOVED TOWARD A DIFFERENT OUTCOME. So God is the first source of all goodness in the created will.
"But doesn't your view make God a direct cause of evil acts?" [Objection 3] [Response:] No, the defectiveness of any act of will is always traceable to the faulty human or angelic instrument, and not to God's causality — just like St. Thomas said, and just like you Jesuits say. You're basically in the same position as we are on this particular issue."
(End of Quote)
(To be continued)
@Vincent Torley:
ReplyDelete"[I]t is only with regard to created causes that Dominicans reject determinism."
So what? Even assuming that all Dominicans are Bañezians, what in the bloody hell does that does that have to do with their acceptance/rejection of the view that God's "determination" is necessitating? The quotes you present from (the Molinist) Freddoso support precisely the opposite view, the view that both Brandon and I have repeatedly described to you, namely that God's predetermination is not necessitating—that, on the contrary, God's action is what determines human choices to be made freely at all.
Hi Brandon and Scott,
ReplyDeleteYou see? According to Freddoso, the Dominican position is that the will has a **natural** power to choose X or refrain from choosing X. But it's still a necessary truth that if God acts in a certain way (e.g. if He gives the will the efficacious grace to make a good choice, namely X), the created agent's will acts in that way (e.g. chooses X). [And necessarily, if God gives the will a merely sufficient grace, the will does not choose what is good.] That is what I have been saying, over and over again. And that is what takes away genuine freedom, in my view. When you factor in God's causation, the will no longer has the power to do otherwise. The only sense in which the will, under God's influence, remains able to choose otherwise is in a counterfactual sense: if God had acted differently, the will would have chosen differently.
Scott, our quotation from Garrigou-Lagrange (thank you for supplying it, by the way) relates only to simple necessitation, and not conditional necessitation: "The divine motion... cannot be necessitating, in the sense that it would suppress all contingency and liberty. But under the divine influx, secondary causes act as befitting their nature, either necessarily, as the sun gives light and heat, or contingently, as fruits become more or less ripe in time; or else freely, as in the case of man who chooses." All this quote proves is that the will, considered in itself, does not necessarily choose what it does. But what G-L also believes is that it is a necessary truth that the will, when it receives God's efficacious grace, [freely] chooses to do the right thing; whereas if it receives a merely sufficient grace, it [freely] chooses to do the wrong thing. That's theological determinism, no matter how you slice it and dice it.
Modifying Freddoso slightly, I define freedom as follows:
(FI) An agent A is free at time t in circumstances C [**which include not only created causes but also God's influence**] just in case, with all the prerequisites for acting having been posited at t in C, A is (a) able to act – that is, to will – and also able not to act (**freedom with respect to exercise**) and (b) able to will an object and also able to will some contrary object (**freedom with respect to specification**).
G-L doesn't think we have freedom in this sense. Neither does Banez. Do you?
Perhaps you're still muddling up your modalities?
ReplyDeleteAre you still mistakenly supposing that Freddoso's statement that "IT'S A NECESSARY TRUTH THAT IF GOD ACTS IN **this** WAY, THE CREATED WILL ACTS IN **that** WAY" with the very different view that if God acts in this way, then it is necessary that the created will acts in that way?
Never mind, your follow-up post (which you submitted while I was composing my own) confirms my suspicion.
ReplyDelete"That's theological determinism, no matter how you slice it and dice it."
Perhaps. However, on Fr. G-L's own terms, it's not theological necessitarianism, which has been the point you've been missing or ignoring all along.
"G-L doesn't think we have freedom in this sense. Neither does Banez."
ReplyDeleteSure they do.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteWhen I say that God's predetermination is necessitating, I mean that it is a necessary truth that that if God acts in the way He does when I make my choice, I shall make the choice that I make. That was all I ever meant. You seem to think I meant something more than that. I don't know why. I do hold, of course, that the kind of necessitation described above is incompatible with free will (see my definition in my previous post). Garrigou-Lagrange disagreed, because he held to a different view of freedom.
When I spoke of my choice as being determined by circumstances beyond my control (on the Banezian account), I meant that God's acting in the way He does when I make my choice is something over which I have no control. Simple as that.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteYou ask:
"Are you still mistakenly supposing that Freddoso's statement that "IT'S A NECESSARY TRUTH THAT IF GOD ACTS IN **this** WAY, THE CREATED WILL ACTS IN **that** WAY" with the very different view that if God acts in this way, then it is necessary that the created will acts in that way?"
No. What I'm saying is that even the former statement is incompatible with libertarian freedom. See my modified definition, adapted from Freddoso.
Brandon and Scott,
ReplyDeleteHere's how Professor Kevin Tempe (who teaches philosophy at Northwest Nazarene University) summarizes Garrigou-Lagrange's view on his blog:
"In other words, the only way for God to have knowledge of our actions is to determine those actions. Garrigou-Lagrange, for instance, voices a version of this objection when he writes that 'the knowledge of God is the CAUSE of our free determinations, or else it is CAUSED by them.' Garrigou-Lagrange rejects the latter disjunct, and so favors the former – and theological determinism."
(See http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/2006/03/12/divine_eternity/ )
See? "Theological determinism." I'm not the only one who reads G-L this way, and I'm not dense after all, as you both seem to be implying.
Dr. Steve Duncan, who teaches philosophy at Bellevue College, also accuses G-L of "theological determinism (amounting to a kind of crypto-Calvinism)" in a review here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R10RMEPL2UACBT .
Here's another quote, from a 2004 Ph.D. dissertation by Notre Dame student James Rissler, titled "Divine Providence and Human Libertarian Freedom: Reasons for Incompatibility and Theological Alternatives." Note that Thomas Flint and Alvin Plantinga are listed as the co-directors of the dissertation (available online at http://etd.nd.edu/ETD-db/theses/available/etd-03042004-211128/unrestricted/RisslerJD032004.pdf ), so they would have presumably scrutinized his account of Bañezianism before he submitted it. Rissler writes:
"Unlike Molinists, who believe that God's grace is intrinsically sufficient for good action but extrinsically (because determined by the agent) efficacious or not efficacious, Bañezians hold that the efficaciousness of God's grace is also a matter of the intrinsic quality of that grace. While God gives all persons sufficient grace by giving their wills a physical premotion that is said to give them the capacity to will a salutary act, it is only with the addition of another premotion that is intrinsically efficacious that the will actually wills such an act. If this second intrinsically efficacious premotion is not given, then the agent cannot act in a salutary manner, and thus sins... It seems clear, therefore, that the agent necessarily acts in the manner that God causes it to via physical premotions. And given that the agent cannot act meritoriously without intrinsically efficacious grace, it is very difficult to understand how God is not responsible for sin on such a view." (pp. 182, 184)
And from the Abstract:
"Finally, I end my dissertation by considering the two most plausible theological alternatives open to those who reject the compatibility of the traditional Christian view of divine providence with human libertarian freedom: Thomism and Open Theism. The former gives up libertarian freedom to maintain the traditional view of providence; the latter maintains libertarian freedom at the expense of meticulous sovereignty."
I believe James Rissler taught at Notre Dame in 2006. I think he's a Mennonite pastor now.
I was waiting to receive my copy of Scholastic Metaphysics before posting here, but it's still not here and the thread has grown long.
ReplyDeleteIt's strange that I never see any atheists defending the PSR. I first learned of the PSR reading about Schopenhauer. But I never see atheists defend the PSR now.
Jeremy Taylor,
Much earlier in the thread, you contrasted the Schoolmen with the Eastern Church's spiritual and philosophical approach. Probably I'm just ignorant about Eastern Orthodoxy. But could you explain what the difference, or reason for contrasting these?
Thank you.
@Vincent Torley:
ReplyDelete"See? 'Theological determinism.' I'm not the only one who reads G-L this way, and I'm not dense after all, as you both seem to be implying."
I don't recall anyone's saying you were the only one who read G-L as some sort of theological determinist. G-L himself used the term "predetermination" (or rather its French equivalent, whatever that is). The point is, and has always been, that what G-L meant by "determinism" and "predetermination" is not what you mean by those terms and not what you keep insisting he must have meant by them.
"What I'm saying is that even the former statement is incompatible with libertarian freedom."
I'm pretty sure that Brandon and I both know what you're saying. But I'm even more sure that he and I both know you're misunderstanding and/or misrepresenting what Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange was saying.
"When I say that God's predetermination is necessitating, I mean that it is a necessary truth that that if God acts in the way He does when I make my choice, I shall make the choice that I make. That was all I ever meant."
Well, that's jolly good, and if you didn't ever mean that God's predetermination made your choices occur by necessity, then welcome back to Bañezianism. I just hope you'll be more careful in expressing yourself in the future.
Brandon,
ReplyDeleteLet me rest my case here. You write:
"God does not cause b to X; He causes X as first cause. The relation of this causation to b causing X is one of infallible connection rather than necessitation, forcing, or restriction to one effect. What He causes with respect to b is the actual possession of free will that can be effective."
Either God's causation of b's choice X is (a) neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for X, (b) a necessary but not a sufficient condition for X, (c) a sufficient but not a necessary condition for X, or (d) both a necessary and a sufficient condition for X. We can rule out (a) and (c), as God is a necessary condition for all contingent states of affairs, including choice X. That leaves (b) or (d). Which do you hold?
If you hold (b), then your problem is that God's being a necessary but not a sufficient cause of X cannot, of itself, justify God's belief that X.
If you hold (d), then your problem is that God's being a sufficient cause of X can only justify God's belief that X. It cannot justify God's belief that b chooses X. God's causation with respect to b is merely permissive: He gives b the free will that enables b to choose X, if b decides to.
In affirming that God causes X but denying that God causes b to choose X, your account divorces choices from the agents making them - which means that even if God knows that X occurs, He no longer knows thereby that b chooses X. This is a Cheshire cat view of choice: God knows the choice without knowing which human agent makes the choice (if any).
To sum up: if God is to have a justified belief that an agent b makes a choice X, God must stand in a causal relationship to b making that choice. There are only three possibilities: God's causation is either prior to b's act of choosing, posterior to it or parallel to it. You explicitly deny the first option, as you deny that God causes b to choose X. You also deny the second, as it makes God's knowledge posterior to our choices (the Boethian view, which is anathema for Banezians). That leaves the third option.: parallelism. The problem here is that if b has libertarian freedom as you insist, then there is nothing to guarantee that b's choices will track (or march in step with) God's acts of causation. God's causation and b's choice could diverge: God could cause X even though b does not choose X.
So it seems your account of Divine foreknowledge and human freedom is an incoherent one. Cheers.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteI wrote:
"When I say that God's predetermination is necessitating, I mean that it is a necessary truth that that if God acts in the way He does when I make my choice, I shall make the choice that I make. That was all I ever meant."
You commented: "Welcome back to Banezianism."
Um, I think I made it pretty clear in my posts above that I'm not a Banezian, but a Boethian, and that I don't regard the Banezian view as compatible with true libertarian freedom. Cheers.
But what G-L also believes is that... if [the will] receives a merely sufficient grace, it [freely] chooses to do the wrong thing.
ReplyDeleteOn the contrary, this is what G-L believed:
1. Sufficient grace gives the power to go good, and efficacious grace brings the good act itself to pass.
2. The sufficient grace received by a will can be resisted or not resisted.
3. If the sufficient grace is resisted, then that efficacious grace which would bring the good act to pass is not received.
4. If the sufficient grace is not resisted, then that efficacious grace which will the good act to pass is received.
5. Resistance comes from the soul alone.
To shoehorn that into "theological determinism" is to claim that G-L believed that God sometimes wills a man to not do what He wills him to do.
(s/b 4. ...which will bring the good act to pass...)
ReplyDelete@Vincent Torley:
ReplyDelete"Um, I think I made it pretty clear in my posts above that I'm not a Banezian, but a Boethian, and that I don't regard the Banezian view as compatible with true libertarian freedom. Cheers."
Um, I think I've made it pretty clear that what you reject is not Bañezianism but your own misunderstanding of it. I also don't seem to recall that you answered my questions about where you think Aquinas, Bañez, or Garrigou-Lagrange departed specifically from Boethius's account of free will even though they shared his view of divine foreknowledge, so it's not at all clear to me in what sense you claim to be a Boethian rather than a Bañezian. Cheers.
I just noticed another typo in my 8:07 PM comment of yesterday, located in: "Sufficient grace gives the power to go good..." Of course, that should be: "Sufficient grace gives the power to do good..."
ReplyDeleteOn further reflection, however, the typo proves to be an interesting one -- for:
a) if it is a career criminal who is in reception of sufficient grace, then the sufficient grace gives him the power to go [straight]; and,
b) if it is an inveterate sinner who is in reception of sufficient grace, then the sufficient grace does indeed give him the power to go good.
Anyway...
In chapter 6 of his Grace: Commentary on the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas, G-L provides refutations for some of the objections against the Thomistic doctrine of sufficient grace.
One of the objections refuted looks like a cousin -- a distant cousin, perhaps, but a cousin nonetheless -- of what another commenter has alleged G-L himself to have believed ("if [the will] receives a merely sufficient grace, it [freely] chooses to do the wrong thing").
Let's see how G-L refutes his (perhaps distant) cousin:
Objection: "I insist. To neglect or resist sufficient grace is not to consent to it or to sin at least by a sin of omission. But in order that a man may not neglect or resist sufficient grace, efficacious grace is required. Therefore man sins because he is deprived of efficacious grace, in other words, from an insufficiency of help."
Refutation: "Reply. I grant the major, and the minor as well, but deny the conclusion, for the real conclusion is: 'therefore, in order that a man may not sin, but consent to sufficient grace, efficacious grace is required,' and this is true. (Cf. De malo, q. 3, a. I ad g.) But it is false to say that man sins because he is deprived of efficacious grace; rather, on the contrary, it should be said that he is deprived of efficacious grace because by sinning he resists sufficient grace. For a man to sin, his own defective will suffices..."
(Yikes, he did it again: "...another typo in my 8:07 PM comment.." s/b "...another typo in my 8:06 PM comment.." Life is never dull.)
ReplyDelete@Santi
ReplyDeleteI lost interest in your 'argument' now that you have changed your mind and embrace philosophy 'just not metaphysics' now. So changing ones position just to win is okay then. To me this all seems sophist.
But I think of metaphysics as akin to poetry. If you can't ground arguments in empiricism and experience, you can't really say with certainty whether what you're claiming is in fact true or merely clever. I mean what? You must be new to Aquinas or at the very least misunderstand the entire Thomistic line.
I like Santi. He is engaging and generally respectful, even if he can seem a bit sure of himself at times. I don't think it is malicious. I think he believes he has Thomism figured out quite completely.
ReplyDeleteHe obviously cares, and isn't a troll in the usual sense. He doesn't snipe anyone, usually, and doesn't engage in ad hominems.
But, he obviously doesn't want to put the time in that it takes to understand Thomism. And, he doesn't want to put the time in to see what the genuine disapprovals that the majority have here would do to the critiques he has concocted. Thus, his understanding isn't really subject to error or correction. This became particularly obvious to me when I googled his name and found a blog article he wrote on Thomism.
Of course, it has the same arguments he has used here. What a shame.
Taylor,
ReplyDeleteYou are correct he is generally cordial and non-aggressive, but he does have many trolling characteristics which make it pointless to engage with him, such as an unwilling to learn about the positions he is critiquing; making self-assured statements about a wide variety of areas he clearly knows little about; committing numerous gross fallacies and not realising or carrying; and generally jumping from half-baked claim to half-baked claim.
This type of troll, for want of a better name, is quite common. Alan Fox is similar, though he doesn't write as well as Santi.
Santi tried to play the epistemic game of cool dispassionate agnosticism.
ReplyDeleteThen he decided that even though he does not believe there are any objective values (he ascribes the claim a probability of less than 1%), if there were objective values, then certainly 'gay marriage' would be among them, and it would be consistent with Thomism. (How someone who disbelieves in objective values and is unfamiliar with Thomistic metaethics or essentialism acquired this intuition remains obscure.) So he embarked upon a task of insisting that there is a way to integrate 'gay marriage' into Thomism. Ultimately there was some flexibility allowed in what 'integrating' would constitute. He neatly summarized his point: "Love. Orient to love. If that means upending certain premises underlying the old time metaphysics, you better start thinking about how to do it now." Start with the conclusion; fit the principles to the conclusion. (Justify this move by designating every conclusion you favor as "oriented to love.")
Santi believes that this is what everyone else does when they do metaphysics. But what I think he has shown us is that it is not actually the case (as he earlier claimed) that one can derive whatever conclusions one wants from 'non-empirical' metaphysical speculation.
Hi Glenn, Scott and Brandon,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comments. I'd like to clear up the issue of determinism once and for all.
Determinism, in a nutshell, is the view that it is not possible for identical causes in identical circumstances to have dissimilar effects. The effect we are talking about in this case is a human agent's choice to do X or not do X. Theological determinism is simply the view that if God acts in a particular way in circumstances C where a human agent is making a choice between X and not-X, and the agent chooses X, then it would not have been possible for God to have acted in the same way in the same circumstances on the same agent, and for that agent to have chosen not-X.
I've found some more passages in Garrigou-Lagrange which establish beyond all doubt that he was a theological determinist. They can be found online at http://www.ewtn.com/library/Theology/grace1.htm and http://www.ewtn.com/library/Theology/grace7.htm , and are taken from his Commentary on the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas, Chapters One and Seven.
In chapter one, G-L writes:
"This principle of predilection presupposes that the divine decrees in regard to our future acts conducive to salvation are INFALLIBLY EFFICACIOUS OF THEMSELVES and not from a foreknowledge of our consent (Ia, q. 19, a. 8). Otherwise, OF TWO MEN EQUALLY LOVED AND ASSISTED BY GOD, ONE WOULD BE IN SOME RESPECT BETTER. He would be better of himself and not so far as preferred by God; and therefore the free determination in him to be saved would be something good which would not proceed from the source of all good, contrary to the words of St. Paul: 'For who distinguisheth thee? Or what hast thou that thou hast not received?' (I Cor. 4:7.)"
In chapter seven, G-L quotes a passage from Aquinas in an attempt to show that Aquinas held the same view as he did.
"Question 14, On the knowledge of God, a.5: 'Since the divine power is extended to other things, inasmuch as it is itself the first effective cause of all being, it must be that God knows other things than Himself. He sees other things not in themselves, but in Himself.' BUT IF, OF TWO MEN EQUALLY TEMPTED AND EQUALLY ASSISTED, ONE SHOULD BE CONVERTED AND NOT THE OTHER, THIS DIFFERENCE WOULD NOT BE FROM GOD. Therefore God could not know it in Himself, in His own power, contrary to the principle of St. Thomas."
Later, he quotes from the Summa Theologica, question 19, article 4:
"'The will of God is the cause of goodness in things and so, on this account, some things are better, because God wills greater good to them. Hence it follows that He loves better things more.' BUT OF TWO MEN EQUALLY TEMPTED, IF ONE DOES NOT RESIST GRACE AND THE OTHER DOES, THE FIRST IS BETTER. Therefore he is better because God wills greater good to Him. In other words, THE PRINCIPLE OF PREDILECTION (nobody is better than another unless he is better loved by God) PRESUPPOSES GRACE TO BE EFFICACIOUS OF ITSELF AND NOT FROM OUR CONSENT. Likewise, De providentia, Ia, q. 22, a. 2 ad 4; a. 4."
To be continued...
Hi Glenn. Scott and Brandon,
ReplyDeleteBack again. In these passages, G-L clearly denies the possibility of God giving the same grace to two men in identical circumstances, and of one repenting (choice X) and the other not repenting (choice not-X). He also declares that efficacious grace produces virtuous choices "of itself and not from our consent."
That's theological determinism. No two ways about it.
Glenn, you quoted me the following passages in Garrigou-Lagrange:
Objection: "I insist. To neglect or resist sufficient grace is not to consent to it or to sin at least by a sin of omission. But in order that a man may not neglect or resist sufficient grace, efficacious grace is required. Therefore man sins because he is deprived of efficacious grace, in other words, from an insufficiency of help."
Refutation: "Reply. I grant the major, and the minor as well, but deny the conclusion, for the real conclusion is: 'therefore, in order that a man may not sin, but consent to sufficient grace, efficacious grace is required,' and this is true. (Cf. De malo, q. 3, a. I ad g.) But it is false to say that man sins because he is deprived of efficacious grace; rather, on the contrary, it should be said that he is deprived of efficacious grace because by sinning he resists sufficient grace. For a man to sin, his own defective will suffices..."
(End of Quote)
Notice that G-L freely admits that "in order that a man may not sin, but consent to sufficient grace, efficacious grace is required." Once again, he's acknowledging that if sufficient grace is given to the man, and nothing more, he will sin. In order for him not to sin, efficacious grace must be additionally bestowed.
But then G-L tries to exonerate God from blame. He writes that the man "is deprived of efficacious grace because by sinning he resists sufficient grace." But this is wholly unconvincing. God bestows on the man sufficient grace and nothing more. The man then resists it - as he certainly will, if he is given merely sufficient grace. God says: "Wicked man! You resisted my sufficient grace! Because you did that, I'm not going to give you any efficacious grace!" And G-L has the hide to blame the man's defective will! Come on. That's a lame argument if ever I saw one.
So G-L was a theological determinist after all - he just wasn't very good at justifying his position.
Would it be too much to ask for an apology?
Scott writes:
ReplyDelete"it's not at all clear to me in what sense you claim to be a Boethian rather than a Bañezian."
What I maintain as a Boethian is that God's knowledge of human agents' choices is CAUSED BY those agents making those choices. In other words, human agents make God (timelessly) aware of their decisions. Human agents thus have the power to determine God. To Banezians, such a doctrine is anathema: nothing, they say, can determine God, as He is Pure Act.
I reply: there is nothing objectionable or contrary to God's dignity in Him freely choosing to confer upon His creatures the power to make Him (timelessly) aware of their free decisions. Also, the argument from motion (Aquinas' First Way) does not establish the existence of a Being Who is Pure Act. Rather, what it establishes is the existence of a Being Whose power to actualize things (by maintaining them in existence) is not derived from any other being. That's all. I could explain in more detail, but I've already done so in my post, "On not putting all your theological eggs into one basket" at http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/on-not-putting-all-your-theological-eggs-into-one-basket/ .
Well, all good things must come to an end. It's about time for me to sign off now, I think. We have had a lively and vigorous discussion. Hopefully we all understand one another's views a little better now. All the best, Vincent.
@Vincent Torley:
ReplyDelete"I've found some more passages in Garrigou-Lagrange which establish beyond all doubt that he was a theological determinist."
This has grown well beyond tiresome.
"Would it be too much to ask for an apology?"
Yes. You're wrong yet again, for the very same reasons we've pointed out to you repeatedly.
"What I maintain as a Boethian is that God's knowledge of human agents' choices is CAUSED BY those agents making those choices."
I already know what you maintain; I asked you where Boethius maintained it. But you needn't bother replying, especially since I'm fairly confident that you can't.
Vincent,
ReplyDeleteNotice that G-L freely admits that "in order that a man may not sin, but consent to sufficient grace, efficacious grace is required."
Technically, he granted it. But we'll let that slide. More pertinent is that non-resistance is prior to consent, and that if there is non-resistance, then the efficacious grace is given (i.e., not rendered sterile (see below)), and the sufficient grace is consented to.
Once again, he's acknowledging that if sufficient grace is given to the man, and nothing more, he will sin.
If sufficient grace is given to the man, and the man resists it, then nothing more is given (so to speak).
In order for him not to sin, efficacious grace must be additionally bestowed.
In order for that efficacious grace to be bestowed, he must first not resist the sufficient grace.
But then G-L tries to exonerate God from blame.
What man (homo) who is a man (vir) would seek to exonerate the creature and blame God?
He writes that the man "is deprived of efficacious grace because by sinning he resists sufficient grace." But this is wholly unconvincing.
Why? Think ye perhaps that sinning constitutes non-resistance to sufficient grace?
God bestows on the man sufficient grace and nothing more.
God bestows both sufficient grace and efficacious grace -- "Doubt: 'How is efficacious grace offered to us in sufficient grace?' Reply: 'As the fruit is offered to us in the flower[.]" The latter, however, is rendered sterile through resistance to sufficient grace.
The man then resists it - as he certainly will, if he is given merely sufficient grace.
It is not at all certain that the man will resist it. And if he doesn't resist it, then the efficacious grace does its thing.
God says: "Wicked man! You resisted my sufficient grace! Because you did that, I'm not going to give you any efficacious grace!"
A shot in the dark: Perhaps some adult in your childhood 'reasoned' with you in such a manner, and you are now putting in God's mouth a paraphrasing of that chastisement.
And G-L has the hide to blame the man's defective will!
Once again, "[T]he received is in the receiver according to the mode of the receiver."
Come on. That's a lame argument if ever I saw one.
For the man (homo) who cares not about being a man (vir) it likely is.
So G-L was a theological determinist after all - he just wasn't very good at justifying his position.
Yup, G-L did a poor job at justifying his position as a theological determinist--and so far you haven't done any better in attempting to rationalize it.
Would it be too much to ask for an apology?
You're free to ask. But I think it would be premature for you to do so at this time.
@yaylormweaver
ReplyDeleteBut, he obviously doesn't want to put the time in that it takes to understand Thomism. And, he doesn't want to put the time in to see what the genuine disapprovals that the majority have here
I do take issue with how badly his arguments are formed, that and they can be quite long. It makes a reply tiresome.
I will agree he isn't as snarky as others even if he is more confident than justified.
Vincent,
ReplyDeleteYou dramatize G-L's position as follows: God says: "Wicked man! You resisted my sufficient grace! Because you did that, I'm not going to give you any efficacious grace!"
1. Rev 3:20: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me."
2. G-L (Chapter 59 here): "[I]f the sinner would not resist sufficient grace, he would receive the efficacious grace, which is offered in the preceding sufficient grace, as fruit is offered in the blossom. If he resists he merits privation of new aid."
3. Observation: In light of how G-L's position has been dramatized above, perhaps Rev 3:20 ought to be dramatized as follows, "Wicked man! You resisted my voice and refused to open the door! Because you did that, I'm not going to sup with you, nor allow you to sup with me!" (For shame, for shame.)
- - - - -
As for 'not resisting' and 'consenting', the former and the latter are not one and the same. If it be thought that they are, then mustn't it likewise be thought that Jesus was telling us to consent to evil when He told us not to resist it? (For shame, for shame.)
Scott,
ReplyDeleteJust a short response to your query about Boethius. In describing myself as a Boethian, I was very careful not to say that this was Boethius' own view. Scholars continue to argue about that, and it seems that he probably wasn't one. See here (especially the last paragraph of section 6): http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/boethius/#6 . One theologian who did uphold the Boethian view, however, was Origen in his "Contra Celsus" Book II chapter 20 ( http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/04162.htm ): "Celsus imagines that an event, predicted through foreknowledge, comes to pass because it was predicted; but we do not grant this, maintaining that he who foretold it was not the cause of its happening, because he foretold it would happen; but the future event itself, which would have taken place though not predicted, afforded the occasion to him, who was endowed with foreknowledge, of foretelling its occurrence." (See http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/04162.htm .)
Re determinism, I might add that while modal logic is not my specialty, I do have a Ph.D. in philosophy and am quite familiar with the mathematical notation used to express propositions in modal logic. I don't know what your back ground is, but the fact that neither you nor Brandon attempted to formalize what you were trying to say in mathematical terms, or to provide any rigorous definitions for your terms, speaks for itself.
And now I really must go. Bye.
TaylorMWeaver: I like Santi. He is engaging and generally respectful, even if he can seem a bit sure of himself at times. I don't think it is malicious.
ReplyDeleteBut the fact is he isn’t respectful; he’s actually quite rude. His posts may not be laced with obscenities, but he does not pay attention when people reply to him, he does not make a meaningful attempt to find out what he’s talking about, he veers off-topic (and doesn’t even stick to his own topic(s)), and ends up drowning out thoughtful conversations in any thread by clogging it up with interminable maundering chatter. It’s rude to the people trying to converse with him, it’s rude to the people who are trying to follow the serious discussions, and it’s rude to Ed as host of this forum.
I’m not immune to the temptation to respond to these sorts of comments myself, but I think it behooves us in general to give certain posters the lack of attention they deserve. Even whether someone is deliberately malicious or not is in many respects pragmatically irrelevant. If someone wants serious responses, he should act seriously.
Torley: In describing myself as a Boethian, I was very careful not to say that this was Boethius' own view. Scholars continue to argue about that, and it seems that he probably wasn't one.
ReplyDeleteYou mean you are Boethian, but it seems Boethius wasn't Boethian?
Just when I thought it can't get any better, or should I say worse...
Glenn,
ReplyDeleteSorry, but your attempt to vindicate Garroigou-Lagrange is unconvincing. You argue that 'not resisting' and 'consenting' are not the same thing, and you further suggest that in order for efficacious grace to be bestowed on a man, he must first not resist the sufficient grace, adding that "if sufficient grace is given to the man, and the man resists it, then nothing more is given." What you're saying, then, is that the same sufficient grace might be given by God to two men, Alex and Bob, in identical circumstances, and that Alex might resist this grace (and because of this, God will withhold efficacious grace from him), while Bob might not resist it, and that consequently, God will bestow efficacious grace upon Bob, who will then make a good choice. But Garrigou-Lagrange explicitly denies this in the passages which I quoted above:
"Question 14, On the knowledge of God, a.5: 'Since the divine power is extended to other things, inasmuch as it is itself the first effective cause of all being, it must be that God knows other things than Himself. He sees other things not in themselves, but in Himself.' BUT IF, OF TWO MEN EQUALLY TEMPTED AND EQUALLY ASSISTED, ONE SHOULD BE CONVERTED AND NOT THE OTHER, THIS DIFFERENCE WOULD NOT BE FROM GOD. Therefore God could not know it in Himself, in His own power, contrary to the principle of St. Thomas."
Here, G-L categorically rejects the possibility of two men in identical circumstances (equally tempted and equally assisted) responding to God's grace in different ways (with one being converted and not the other), because then God would have no way of knowing "in Himself" [i.e. without the help of creatures] how any particular man would respond to His grace - that is, whether he would accept it or reject it.
So I'm afraid your proposal to get the Banezian God off the hook and exonerate Him from responsibility for sin does not succeed.
Scott:
I gave you links relating to Boethius' actual views, to save you the trouble of searching for them, and I adduced a quote from Origen showing that he held the Boethian view of God's foreknowledge even if Boethius himself probably didn't. What are you complaining about?
Goodbye.
Vincent,
ReplyDeleteThe passage you quote has to do with efficacious grace, not sufficient grace.
However, G-L does turn his attention to sufficient grace later in the chapter, where, amongst other things, he writes:
"[T]he will lacks efficacious grace because it resists sufficient grace; but if its resists sufficient grace, this is not because it lacks efficacious grace; its own deficiency suffices as a cause of such resistance." Cf. Ia IIae, q. 112, a. 3 ad 2: 'The first cause of this deficiency of grace is on our part, but the first cause of the conferring of grace is on the part of God, according to the words: "Destruction is thy own, O Israel: thy help is only in Me."'"
That it cannot be that "of two men equally tempted and equally assisted, one should be converted and not the other" in no way supports your contention that it cannot be that "the same sufficient grace might be given by God to two men, Alex and Bob, in identical circumstances, and...Alex might resist this grace[,] while Bob might not resist it".
Note that while the former case cannot obtain, the latter case can obtain; and that the reason for this difference is that -- as already indicated -- the former case has to do with efficacious grace, and the latter case with sufficient grace.
("...in no way supports your contention that it cannot be that..." s/b "...in no way supports your contention that, by that, G-L explicitly denied that...")
ReplyDeleteVincent,
ReplyDeleteMe: The passage you quote has to do with efficacious grace, not sufficient grace.
What I mean by that is that the passage you quote has to do with two men each of whom receive efficacious grace but only one of whom is not converted, whereas your gedankenspiel has to do with two men each of whom receive sufficient grace but only one of whom does not resist.
That the kind of grace receiving primary attention differs in the passage and the gedankenspiel is enough to show that the passage and the gedankenspiel are not relevantly connected with respect to the point in dispute.
Even though efficacious grace is not explicitly mentioned in the passage, we may know that it is efficacious grace which is the grace receiving primary attention in it:
1. The title of the chapter containing the passage is EFFICACIOUS GRACE;
2. from the beginning of that chapter up to and including the passage, sufficient grace is mentioned but once (and only briefly in a parenthetical comment), whereas efficacious grace is mentioned five times; and, finally,
3. the passage constitutes the fourth paragraph of a section commencing with: "4. St. Thomas. We shall first cite the texts from the Summa in proper sequence so that it may appear how this doctrine of intrinsically efficacious grace is necessarily connected with all the principles of St. Thomas' doctrine with regard to the relations between God and creatures."
If you'd like to see a more 'mathematical'-like approach showing that, how and why your gedankenspiel is not relevantly connected to the passage, then here it is:
1. there are two men, Alex and Bob;
2. there also are two basic kinds of grace, sufficient grace and efficacious grace;
3. each of the two basic kinds of grace can be either received or not received; so that, given that the two men receive equal assistance,
4. there are four possible cases as follows:
a) Alex[s,e] and Bob[s,e]
b) Alex[s,E] and Bob[s,E]
c) Alex[S,e] and Bob[S,e]
d) Alex[S,E] and Bob[S,E]...
...where both 's' and 'S' pertain to sufficient grace -- with lower case 's' representing sufficient grace not received and upper case 'S' representing sufficient grace received; and both 'e' and 'E' pertain to efficient grace -- with lower case 'e' representing efficient grace not received and upper case 'E' representing efficient grace received.
If three of the four cases can be ruled out as not being relevantly connected to P, where P refers to the passage you quote, then the remaining case must be the case which is relevantly connected to P.
Case a) can be ruled out in two ways: i) on the technicality that, since neither Alex nor Bob receive any grace, Alex and Bob do not receive equal assistance; and, ii) on the premise that no one can be converted without receiving efficacious grace.
Case b) can be ruled out on the premise that no one can receive efficacious grace without also receiving sufficient grace.
And case c) can be ruled out for the second reason case a) has been ruled out, i.e., on the premise that no one can be converted without receiving efficacious grace.
This leaves case d) as the lone, sole, one and only of the four cases relevantly connected to P.
What G-L says in P is that Alex[S,E] and Bob[S,E] -- when only one of the two is converted -- is not possible.
Your gedankenspiel involves Alex[S,e] and Bob[S,E], which isn't one of the four possible cases, and, therefore, is not relevantly connected to P.
And, of course, since your gedankenspiel is not relevantly connected to P, P does not deny what your gedankenspiel asserts, i.e., P does not deny that "the same sufficient grace might be given by God to two men, Alex and Bob, in identical circumstances, and...Alex might resist this grace[,] while Bob might not resist it".
ReplyDelete(And, to pick a nit, even if it did -- which it clearly does not -- the denial would be an implicit denial rather then an explicit denial.)
('Efficacious' should be substituted for each instance of 'efficient' in "...and both 'e' and 'E' pertain to efficient grace -- with lower case 'e' representing efficient grace not received and upper case 'E' representing efficient grace received.")
ReplyDelete@Vincent Torley:
ReplyDelete"I gave you links relating to Boethius' actual views, to save you the trouble of searching for them, and I adduced a quote from Origen showing that he held the Boethian view of God's foreknowledge even if Boethius himself probably didn't. What are you complaining about?"
[tap tap tap] Is this microphone on? I wasn't asking you what "Boethius' actual views" were. If I ever need a refresher on that, I'll get it from Boethius (by reaching to the bookshelf a foot to my left), not from someone who has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to present anyone's views other than his own without getting them wrong.
No, my question was how you had managed to persuade yourself that Boethius agreed with you (and, especially, rather than with Bañez, as though there were a significant contrast between their views on the present subject). But now that you've discovered* he didn't, the question is settled as far as I'm concerned.
I'm also not sure why you regard Origen as relevant. Here, too, I was already familiar with his views on this subject, but I'm fairly sure he never claimed to be "Boethian"; that would have been difficult, as he died a bit over two centuries before Boethius was born. (Nor do I admit that his view is irreconcilable with those of Aquinas, Bañez, and Garrigou-Lagrange, but that's another discussion.)
As for your alleged mathematical rigor, perhaps the less said the better. But it doesn't look very much like the mathematical rigor I encountered while earning a master's degree in the subject.
Nor does it surprise me that, if you're relying so heavily on your "familiar[ity] with the mathematical notation used to express propositions in modal logic" [my emphasis], you have so much trouble understanding what Fr. G-L meant by non-necessitating predetermination**. I'm pretty sure there's no handy mathematical symbol for that modal operator.
Brand Blanshard once related that a teacher of his had told him it was wise to know enough mathematics not to be taken in by it. I think I (and a number of other regulars here) qualify; I'm fairly sure you don't, which is probably why you seem to think non-mathematical subjects should look like math.
Now, I don't intend to reply further to you on this subject; as far as I'm concerned, you came here with an axe to grind and you've been thoroughly exposed as, frankly, not knowing what the hell you were talking about—first about Fr. G-L, and then about Boethius. That's the end of it for me. You keep saying you're resting your case, but if you want the last word, it's yours.
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* Don't waste your time (or mine) by trying to tell me you already knew. If you had, you've had ample occassion to say so—most notably, perhaps, in reply to my initial question, "Where do you think Aquinas departs from Boethius on this subject?" and then in reply to my question, "Does Boethius somewhere deny or otherwise contradict Aquinas's view that God's will is the first cause of human will and makes the latter effective?" If you were aware at the outset that you were using "Boethian" to mean "in disagreement with Boethius," don't you think you should have mentioned it sooner?
** The expression is his; he used it e.g. on p. 529 of the second volume of the work to which you initially made reference and over which you supposedly pored so hard that you left the Catholic Church—so hard, indeed, that you still understand it clearly (and assume you understood it in the first place) despite not having read it for thirty years.
Professor Feser,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your post. I'm very sympathetic to the PSR, but had a question I was hoping you could answer.
You write that a Thomistic understanding of the PSR does not require one to accept that "propositions are among the things [that] require an explanation." Would you mind explaining how this claim does not amount to a version of (1) — i.e., that only those EAs which are not attempting to explain propositions are legitimate?