Carrier carries on

Richard Carrier has replied to my recent response to his critique of Five Proofs of the Existence of God, both in the comments section of his original post and in a new post.  “Feser can’t read,” Carrier complains.  Why?  Because – get this – I actually took the first six paragraphs of the section he titled “Argument One: The Aristotelian Proof” to be part of his response to the Aristotelian proof.   What was I thinking?

It’s all at about that level.  Trash talk, unacknowledged backpedaling, rookie misinterpretations of Thomistic claims, misrepresentations of what I said, question-begging scientism, persistent missing of the point, all expressed in prose with the flow and clarity of tar.  It would take a second book to explain all the ways Carrier gets the first one wrong.  Several readers have begged me not to engage with him any further, on the grounds that it would manifestly be a waste of time to do so.  And they are right.

Except for this: Carrier’s self-confidence is so absurdly out of proportion to his actual competence that he does not realize that the only deathblows he delivers are of the self-inflicted kind.  In particular, in no fewer than three places in his response, Carrier has inadvertently revealed himself to be either an extremely reckless liar or guilty of malpractice that would make any actual scholar (as opposed to the online hobbyist Carrier is) a professional laughingstock. 

No honest and objective Carrier reader who considers the examples that follow can have any further doubt (if any still remained) that Carrier has no credibility and should not be taken seriously, certainly not on the subject of Five Proofs.  Establishing that, as I think all my readers will agree, is worth one more post on Carrier.  So let’s get to it.

Exhibit A:

In my initial response, I pointed out that the apparent force of one of Carrier’s objections rested in part on his conflation of two separate premises from my Aristotelian proof.  In his latest post, Carrier responds as follows:

I won’t address every weird and false thing Feser says about my article.  There are many.  But, for example, Feser falsely claims I collapsed two premises into one when addressing his Aristotelian argument.  Nope.  I quote only Premise 41, exactly as he wrote it, verbatim. (Emphasis added)

End quote.  Now, why Carrier would bother making so easily refutable an assertion, I have no idea, but there it is.  Let’s now compare what he actually said in his original post with what I actually said in my book.  Here is the relevant passage from Carrier’s original post:

Feser’s formalization of this argument appears around page 35.  It has 49 premises.  I shit you not.  Most of them are uncontroversial on some interpretation of the words he employs (that doesn’t mean they are credible on his chosen interpretation of those words, but I’ll charitably ignore that here), except one, Premise  41, where his whole argument breaks down and bites the dust: “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.” (Emphasis added)

End quote.  And here is the passage from my book that he is quoting from, at p. 37:

40. So, the forms or patterns manifest in all the things it causes must in some way be in the purely actual actualizer.

41. These forms or patterns 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.

End quote.  As you can plainly see, Carrier really did do exactly what I said he did and what he now strenuously denies doing – he collapsed steps 40 and 41 into one step without telling the reader that that is what he was doing.  (See my previous response to Carrier for an explanation of why this is significant.)  Anyone who actually has a copy of my book and reads Carrier’s original review can easily check and see that I am telling the truth and Carrier is not.  (By the way, as a precaution, I took a screen capture of this Carrier passage and the ones to follow.  I will post these if Carrier attempts to go back and doctor his original posts by way of damage control.)

Exhibit B:

In his latest post, Carrier writes:

His attempt to defend his Aristotelian argument against my rebuttal illustrates this very point: he falsely claims I argued that he did not consider Platonism; false.  I said he did not consider Aristotelian Forms Theory, not Platonic Forms Theory.  And lo, he didn’t.  Nowhere in his book. And still not even in this response to my rebuttal.  It’s almost like he does not comprehend there is a difference between those two theories or what it is. (Emphasis added)

End quote.  Yes, you read that right.  Carrier actually asserts that “nowhere” in my book do I “consider Aristotelian Forms Theory,” and that it seems that I do not even “comprehend that there is a difference between those two theories or what it is.”  Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of my work will find this an absolutely bizarre claim, given that one of the things for which I am best known is, of course, being an unreconstructed Aristotelian hylemorphist.  For example, I devote a whole chapter of Scholastic Metaphysics and big chunks of Aquinas, The Last Superstition, and other works to defending the Aristotelian approach to form.

More to the present point, I do in fact explicitly address the topic several times in Five Proofs itself.  For example, at p. 97 I write: “There are three alternatives: Platonic realism, Aristotelian realism, and Scholastic realism.  Let’s consider each in turn.”  I then go on to do exactly that from pp. 97-102.  Earlier in the book, at pp. 28-29, I explicitly discuss the Aristotelian hylemorphist analysis of material substances as composites of substantial form and prime matter.  I discuss it again at pp. 55-56, 72-73, and elsewhere in the book. 

Again, anyone who has a copy of my book can easily verify that I am telling the truth and Carrier is not.  (And again, I’ve taken a screen capture in case Carrier decides to alter what he wrote in order to save himself from embarrassment.)

Exhibit C:

In a combox remark under his original post, a reader asks Carrier if my book “argue[s] for the Judeo-Christian God or just a generic diety [sic] he calls God.”  Carrier responds:

His closing chapters attempt to bootstrap his way to a traditional Christian God of some sort, by building on his five Proofs (which alone don’t get that far).  But since his Five Proofs don’t work, there was no need to bother addressing his attempts to build on them.  One could perhaps write a critique of just how he gets from the God of his Proofs, all the way to Christianity, but I found that a tedious waste of time.  His Proofs are false.  So why bother exploring what else he does with them? (Emphasis added)

End quote.  Now, as anyone who has read Five Proofs knows, in fact not only do I not address any specifically Christian claims in the book, I explicitly decline to do so.  For example, at p. 15, I write:

The real debate is not between atheism and theism.  The real debate is between theists of different stripes – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, purely philosophical theists, and so forth – and begins where natural theology leaves off.  This book does not enter into, much less settle, that latter debate.  (Emphasis added)

End quote.  On pp. 268-9 I consider the following objection:

“Even if it is proved that there is a First Cause, which is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and so forth, this would not by itself show that God sent prophets to ancient Israel, inspired the Bible, is a Trinity, and so forth.”

And then in response, I write:

This is true, but completely irrelevant.  Arguments like the ones defended in this book are not claiming in the first place to establish every tenet of any particular religion, but rather merely one central tenet that is common to many of them – namely, that there is a cause of the world which is one, simple, immaterial, eternal, immutable, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and so forth.  If they succeed in doing that, then they show that atheism is false, and that the only remaining question is what kind of theism one ought to adopt – a purely philosophical theism, or Judaism, or Christianity, or Islam, or some other more specific brand of theism.  Deciding that would require further investigation and argumentation.  It would be silly to pretend that since the arguments of this book don’t answer every question about God, it follows that they don’t answer any question about God.  (Emphasis added)

End quote.  Once again, anyone who has a copy of my book can easily verify that I am telling the truth and Carrier is not.

Since Carrier cannot get even simple matters like these right, it is no surprise that he horribly mangles the more complex topics he addresses.  For example, he clearly hasn’t the faintest clue as to what Thomists and other classical theists mean when they attribute simplicity or intellect to God.  But that doesn’t stop him from devoting paragraph after turgid paragraph to developing objections that intersperse these misunderstandings with completely irrelevant blathering about the nature of space-time.  Then he declares victory when I don’t follow him on this wild goose chase.

If you’ve ever gotten stuck at a party sitting next to some bore who won’t shut up about the Trilateral Commission, or UFOs, or some other crackpot subject, and thinks he’s scored some major points because you’ve simply nodded politely and then beat a hasty retreat without having rebutted his assertions, then you have an idea of what it’s like to engage in an online exchange with Richard Carrier.  The guy badly needs someone to take him aside and offer some bracing maternal advice.