Carrier on Five Proofs

In an article at his blog, pop atheist writer Richard Carrier grandly claims to have “debunked!” (exclamation point in the original) Five Proofs of the Existence of God.  It’s a bizarrely incompetent performance.  To say that Carrier attacks straw men would be an insult to straw men, which usually bear at least a crude resemblance to the argument under consideration.  They are also usually at least intelligible.  By contrast, consider this paragraph from the beginning of Carrier’s discussion of the Aristotelian proof:

Really, the most nothingly nothing you can have without facing a logical contradiction, is the absence of everything except logically contradictory states of affairs.  And that means everything.  Including gods, laws of physics, rules, objects, minds, or extensions of space or time.  And by Feser’s own reasoning, the absence of everything except logically contradictory states of affairs entails the presence of every logically necessary thing.  And nothing else.  The absence of everything but logical contradictions is the same thing as the presence of only the logically necessary.  Since if some entity’s existence is logically necessary, by definition its absence would entail a logical contradiction.  That’s literally what “logically necessary” means.

End quote.  If, after fewer than two or three readings, you have the remotest idea what the hell Carrier is going on about here, you are a sharper man than I am.  Certainly it has nothing at all to do with the Aristotelian proof.  Yet Carrier goes on for paragraph after paragraph of this gobbledygook. 

As near as I can tell after reading and rereading those mind-numbingly obscure passages, what Carrier is criticizing is an argument that tries to show that God is the cause of the universe arising from nothing.  And as near as I can tell, his objection is something to the effect that if we think carefully about what a “nothing-state” would be, we will see that that theistic conclusion isn’t warranted.  Other scenarios, such as a multiverse scenario, are no less likely or even more likely.  Of course, this has, again, absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what the Aristotelian proof actually says, and so Carrier’s objection would be completely irrelevant even if it were at all clear what that objection is.  Carrier’s readers will learn as much about what my Aristotelian argument actually says as they would if they’d read an automotive repair manual instead.  Only that would have been more lucid and interesting reading.

Here, Carrier seems to be making a mistake common to so many pop atheist writers and amateur philosophers, viz. attacking some argument he thinks he knows something about and feels confident he can refute, instead of what his opponent actually said.  In this case, he appears fixated on the idea that causal arguments for God are essentially attempts to answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and that they all assume that there could at least in principle have been nothing.  As anyone knows who has actually read my book (as opposed to reading weird things into my book), that is nowhere close to how any of my arguments proceed.  In fact, I explicitly say in the book (at p. 155) that that is a bad way to frame the issue and that in my view there could not in principle have been nothing. 

In response to the argument I actually gave for the existence of a purely actual actualizer (what Aristotle calls the Unmoved Mover), Carrier has absolutely nothing to say.  He is very slightly better when responding to the arguments I gave for ascribing the divine attributes to the purely actual actualizer.  But only insofar as this time he responds, at least initially, to something I really did write.  Discussing my argument for attributing omniscience to the purely actual actualizer, Carrier begins:

[In] Feser’s formalization of this argument…   Premise  41… [says] “the forms or patterns manifest in all the things [the substrate] causes… can exist either in the concrete way in which they exist in individual particular things, or in the abstract way in which they exist in the thoughts of an intellect.”  This is a false dichotomy, otherwise known as a bifurcation fallacy.  It’s simply not true that those are the only two options.

End quote.  “Substrate” is Carrier’s word for the purely actual actualizer and not a good one, but let that pass.  The main problem with this is that I would be guilty of a false dichotomy here only if I did not consider, and give arguments to rule out, alternatives to the two I refer to in premise 41.  But of course, I do consider and give arguments to rule out alternatives to those two.  (Carrier is here quoting from a summary of the argument, and ignoring what I say earlier and later in the book.)  For example, I explicitly note at p. 209, in the context of discussing omniscience in greater detail, that a third alternative would be the Platonic view that forms exist in a third realm distinct from either concrete particular things or intellects.  This is after I spend much of chapter 3 arguing against this third, Platonic alternative.

Furthermore, Carrier distorts what I say here because he collapses two steps of the argument he’s quoting from (steps 40 and 41) into one, without telling the reader that that is what he is doing.  The argument up to step 40 establishes that the forms or patterns in question exist in the purely actual actualizer.  Since the purely actual actualizer is not an abstract entity, that already rules out a third alternative such as the Platonic realm.  Hence the thesis in step 41 is not the leap in logic that Carrier represents it as being.

Carrier, in any case, at this point unfortunately once again lapses back into vigorously attacking an argument that exists only in his imagination.  For some reason, he seems to think I am adopting something like Plato’s view.  (“Aristotle took Plato to task for the mistake Feser is making,” he writes.  No, I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about either.)   As if responding to something I had actually said, he writes: “It’s thus self-contradictory of Feser to insist that potential things must be ‘actualized’ somewhere,” and continues in this vein at obscure and tedious length.  Since I never said anything of the kind, and once again can barely make heads or tails of Carrier’s remarks other than to note that they bear no relation to any argument I actually gave, I will skip these further irrelevancies and move on to what seems to be Carrier’s main objection.

Carrier proposes that instead of the purely actual actualizer, it is plausibly just space-time that is the ultimate reality.  He thinks it could even be said to have the key divine attributes.  He doesn’t endorse this position himself, but thinks that it no less plausibly follows from my premises than my own conclusion does.

One problem with this is that, contrary to what Carrier supposes, this would not be consistent with atheism, but would amount to a kind of pantheism.  The main problem, though, is that space-time simply could not be the ultimate reality, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has read my book.  Space-time, for all Carrier has shown, is contingent.  Accordingly, its essence is distinct from its existence, it is by itself merely potential unless actualized, and thus it requires a cause distinct from it.  Since it is extended, it is also in the relevant sense material (contrary to what Carrier asserts) and is composite rather than simple (contrary to what Carrier asserts).  Of course, Carrier would reject these claims and the philosophical arguments I deploy in order to defend them, but the point is that he gives absolutely no non-question-begging reason to reject them.

There are plenty of other foolish remarks.  For example, Carrier claims that the Aristotelian notions I deploy are “obsolete” and accuses me of “ignoring the sciences.”  But he never tells us exactly why the notions in question are obsolete or exactly what is the relevant scientific evidence that I ignore.  And in fact, at pp. 43-60 I explicitly address the various scientific objections (from Newton, from quantum mechanics, from relativity, etc.) that might be raised against the Aristotelian proof and I explicitly address the charge that the argument presupposes obsolete Aristotelian scientific ideas and show that it has no force.  Carrier says nothing in response to these points.

Carrier repeatedly asserts that my arguments must be non-starters because they are metaphysical rather than scientific.  But of course, throughout the book I defend the claim that science is not the only rational form of inquiry.  For example, at pp. 273-285 I explicitly argue against the scientism that Carrier simply takes for granted.  He has nothing to say in response to those arguments either.

Carrier alleges that the last chapter of my book, wherein I respond to the standard general objections to the project of natural theology, “only ‘succeeds’ by omitting everything that actually undermines his conclusions.”  But not only does he give no actual examples of objections I ignore that undermine my conclusions, he explicitly declines to respond to anything I say in that chapter, claiming that “it won’t serve any function” to do so.  (Evidently, responding to what an author actually wrote is not in Carrier’s view a “function” of a book review.)

Carrier characterizes the purely actual actualizer as “self-actualizing” and says that the intelligence I attribute to the purely actual actualizer is an “organized complexity.”  This is cringe-makingly incompetent, for of course, no Aristotelian or Thomist would ever say such things.  The divine intellect, being absolutely simple, is the opposite of complex, and God’s being purely actual entails that he is not actualized at all, let alone “self-”actualized.  Such basic errors would by themselves suffice to show that Carrier simply doesn’t know what he is talking about, if that weren’t blindingly obvious already. 

My favorite piece of Carrier incompetence is this:

Though there is a lot there of interest if you want to explore Feser’s theology – including a really bizarre, sexist argument for God being a man (around pages 246-57).

End quote.  First of all, the argument he’s referring to is actually at pp. 246-48.  Second, of course I do not argue that God is a “man.”  In fact I explicitly say at pp. 246-7 that “since [God] is not a human being, he is not literally either a man or a woman.  He is sexless” (emphasis added).  Rather, I argue for the appropriateness of using masculine language in a non-univocal way when speaking of God.  Third, I do give actual arguments, which Carrier simply ignores.  Fourth, of course Carrier couldn’t care less about all that, but is just interested in throwing out some red meat to the SJW crowd. 

The rest is trash talk (“He’s done.  Cooked,” “100% bullshit,” etc.), central casting New Atheist straw men (“Giant Ghost hypothesis”), and relentless and relentlessly question-begging dime-store scientism.  Nothing intellectually serious.

It is hard to believe that Carrier actually read Five Proofs through, but I certainly did not bother to read the rest of his critique, judging that if what he has to say about the Aristotelian proof is this awful, it would be a waste of time and energy to proceed any further.  If any reader has bothered to read it and found some gold among the dross, feel free to call our attention to it in the combox below.