Postscript on plastic

What better way is there to start off the new year than with another blog post about plastic?  You’ll recall that in a post from last year, I raised the question of why old plastic -- unlike old wood, glass, or metal -- seems invariably ugly.  I argued that none of the seemingly obvious answers holds up upon closer inspection.  In particular, I argued that the “artificiality” of plastic is not the reason, both because there are lots of old artificial things we don’t find ugly and because there is a sense in which plastic is not artificial.

Nudge nudge, wink wink

Suppose you go out on a blind date and a friend asks you how it went.  You pause and then answer flatly, with a slight smirk: “Well, I liked the restaurant.”  There is nothing in the literal meaning of the sentence you’ve uttered, considered all by itself, that states or implies anything negative about the person you went out with, or indeed anything at all about the person.  Still, given the context, you’ve said something insulting.  You’ve “sent the message” that you liked the restaurant but not the person.  Or suppose you show someone a painting and when asked what he thinks, he responds: “I like the frame.”  The sentence by itself doesn’t imply that the painting is bad, but the overall speech act certainly conveys that message all the same.  Each of these is an example of what H. P. Grice famously called an implicature, and they illustrate how what a speaker says in a communicative act ought not to be confused with what his words mean.  Obviously there is a relationship between the two, but they are not always identical.

Carroll on laws and causation

People have been asking me to comment on the remarks about causation made by atheist physicist Sean Carroll during his recent debate with William Lane Craig on the topic of “God and Cosmology.”  (You’ll find Craig’s own post-debate remarks here.)  It’s only fair to acknowledge at the outset that Carroll cannot justly be accused of the anti-philosophical philistinism one finds in recent remarks by physicists Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Neil deGrasse Tyson.  Indeed, Carroll has recently criticized these fellow physicists pretty harshly, and made some useful remarks about the role of philosophy vis-à-vis physics in the course of doing so.

Are you for real?

In a recent post, I gave as an example of an obviously wrongheaded conception of God’s relationship to the world the idea that we are literally fictional characters in a story He has authored – though I also allowed that as a mere analogy the idea may have its uses.  Vincent Torley wonders whether there might not be something more to the idea, though, citing the use Hugh McCann makes of it in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “Divine Providence” (see especially section 6 of the article).

Q.E.D.?

The Catholic Church makes some bold claims about what can be known about God via unaided reason.  The First Vatican Council teaches:

The same Holy mother Church holds and teaches that God, the source and end of all things, can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason…

If anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema.

In Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII reaffirmed this teaching and made clear what were in his view the specific philosophical means by which this natural knowledge of God could best be articulated, and which were most in line with Catholic doctrine:

[H]uman reason by its own natural force and light can arrive at a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, Who by His providence watches over and governs the world…

Modern biology and original sin, Part II

In part I of this series (and in a response to critics of part I) I addressed the question of whether monogenism of the sort entailed by the doctrine of original sin is compatible with modern biology.  I have argued that it is.  In this post I want to address the question of whether modern biology is consistent with the claim that the ancestors of all human beings transmitted the stain of original sin to their descendents via propagation rather than mere imitation.  The correct answer to this question, I maintain, is also in the affirmative.  Critics of the doctrine of original sin often suppose that it claims that there is something like an “original sin gene” passed down from parents to offspring.  And this, of course, seems highly dubious from a biological point of view.  They also suppose that to say that Adam’s descendents inherited from him the stain of original sin is like saying that Al Capone’s descendents somehow inherited from him his guilt for the crimes he committed, and deserve to be punished for those crimes.  And this too seems absurd and unjust.  But both of these objections rest on egregious misunderstandings of the doctrine.

Liberalism and the five natural inclinations

By “liberalism” I don’t mean merely what goes under that label in the context of contemporary U.S. politics.  I mean the long political tradition, tracing back to Hobbes and Locke, from which modern liberalism grew.  By natural inclinations, I don’t mean tendencies that that are merely deep-seated or habitual.  I mean tendencies that are “natural” in the specific sense operative in classical natural law theory.  And by natural inclinations, I don’t mean tendencies that human beings are always conscious of or wish to pursue.  I mean the way that a faculty can of its nature “aim at” or be “directed toward” some end or goal whether or not an individual realizes it or wants to pursue that end -- teleology or final causality in the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) sense.

Walters on TLS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canine theology

In Western culture, the dog is often described as “man’s best friend,” and in Western art, the dog is often used as a symbol for faithfulness.  Suppose, then, that we compare the Catholic faith to a healthy dog.  The analogy might be useful for understanding how other religions appear from the point of view of traditional Catholic theology.  Perhaps non-Catholics will not be amused by the comparisons to follow.  But dog lovers may appreciate them.

Pre-Christian apologetics

Christianity did not arise in a vacuum.  The very first Christians debated with their opponents in a cultural context within which everyone knew that there is a God and that he had revealed himself through Moses and the prophets.  The question, given that background, was what to think of Jesus of Nazareth.  Hence the earliest apologists were, in effect, apologists for Christianity as opposed to Judaism, specifically.  That didn’t last long.  As Christianity spread beyond Judea into the larger Mediterranean world, the question became whether to accept Christianity as opposed to paganism.  Much less could be taken for granted. 

Still, significant common ground for debate was provided by Greek philosophy.  In Book VIII of The City of God, Augustine noted that thinkers in the Neoplatonic tradition had seen that God is the cause of the existence of the world; had seen also that only what is beyond the world of material and changeable things could be God; had understood the distinction between the senses and their objects on the one hand, and the intellect and its objects on the other, and affirmed the superiority of the latter; and had affirmed that the highest good is not the good of the body or even the good of the mind, but to know and imitate God.  In short, these pagan thinkers knew some of the key truths about God, the soul, and the natural law that are available to unaided human reason.  This purely philosophical knowledge facilitated Augustine’s own conversion to Christianity, and would provide an intellectual skeleton for the developing tradition of Christian apologetics and theology.

The trouble with William Paley

In The Last Superstition and elsewhere, I have been very critical of both William Paley of “design argument” fame and of contemporary Intelligent Design theory. These criticisms have had nothing whatsoever to do with a desire to conform to Darwinian orthodoxy. They have had to do instead with a rejection of the most basic metaphysical and methodological assumptions underlying by the “design inference” strategy shared by Paley and ID theorists. (I am aware that not all ID theorists are trying to do exactly what Paley was doing. But the differences are irrelevant, because what I object to is what they have in common.)

The problems are twofold. First, both Paleyan “design arguments” and ID theory take for granted an essentially mechanistic conception of the natural world. What this means is that they deny the existence of the sort of immanent teleology or final causality affirmed by the Aristotelian-Thomistic-Scholastic tradition, and instead regard all teleology as imposed, “artificially” as it were, from outside. I devoted a couple of recent posts to explaining in some detail the differences between these approaches to teleology (here and here). And I emphasized that one of the objections the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition has to the mechanistic denial of final causality is that it makes efficient causality unintelligible. Causes and effects become “loose and separate”; any effect or none might in principle follow upon any cause. This not only paves the way for the paradoxes of Hume, but (more to the present point) undermines the possibility of showing how the very fact of causation as such presupposes a sustaining First Uncaused Cause. The metaphysically necessary connection between the world and God is broken; in principle the world could exist and operate just as it does apart from God. The most we can say is that this is so improbable a hypothesis that it can safely be ruled out; for as Paley and Co. assure us, it is far more likely that an extremely powerful and intelligent “designer” put together the “machine” that is the universe.

The second problem is that Paley and Co. conceptualize this designer on the model of human tinkerers, attributing our characteristics (intelligence, power, etc.) to him in a univocal rather than an analogous way (to allude to a crucial Thomistic distinction explained in a previous post). To be sure, “design arguments” also emphasize that the differences between human artifacts and the universe indicate that the designer’s power and intelligence must be far vaster than ours. But we are necessarily left with a designer conceived of in anthropomorphic terms – essentially a human being, or at least a Cartesian immaterial substance, with the limitations abstracted away. The result is the “theistic personalism” (as Brian Davies has labeled it) which has displaced classical theism in the thinking of many contemporary philosophers of religion.

“OK,” you might say, “so the arguments in question do not get us with certainty all the way to the God of classical theism. So they only get us part way, and only with probability. That’s something, isn’t it?”

Well, no, actually it isn’t. Suppose you are a Christian, and suppose I gave you a powerful argument for the existence of Zeus, or of Quetzalcoatl. Would you run out and wave it defiantly in the faces of your New Atheist friends? Presumably not; it would be less a vindication than an embarrassment. To be sure, such an argument wouldn’t necessarily be incompatible with Christianity. You could always interpret Zeus or Quetzalcoatl as merely an unusually impressive created being – a demon, say, or an extraterrestrial. Indeed, that’s how you should interpret them if they are real, because whatever Zeus or Quetzalcoatl would be if they existed, they would not be divine in the classical theistic sense of “divine.” On classical theism, there doesn’t simply happen to be one God, as if only one applicant bothered responding to the "Creator needed; long hours but good benefits" job ad; there couldn’t possibly be more than one God, given what God is. Anything less than Being Itself or Pure Act, anything less than That Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived, anything less than that which is absolute divine simplicity, absolutely incomparable, would simply not be God. There is no such thing as “almost” being God; it’s all or nothing. But precisely for that reason, while to prove the existence of Zeus or Quetzalcoatl would not be to disprove God’s existence, neither would it advance you one inch to proving it. It would be completely irrelevant.

Same thing with the arguments of Paley and Co. You do not get from them – not one inch, not one degree of probability – to the God of classical theism, of Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, of the Creeds and councils of the Church, the “I am who am” of Exodus. What you get instead is something like the Ralph Richardson Supreme Being character from Time Bandits. Really really powerful? – no doubt about it. Super smart too – wouldn’t want to play Trivial Pursuit against him! A snappy dresser. But not God. Because a god apart from whom the world might in theory exist anyway – as a mechanical conception of nature entails – is not, cannot be, the God of classical theism. Nor can a god who is powerful and intelligent in just the way we are, only more so.

Or as the analytical Thomist philosopher Christopher F. J. Martin amusingly puts it in his very fine book Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations:

The Being whose existence is revealed to us by the argument from design is not God but the Great Architect of the Deists and Freemasons, an impostor disguised as God, a stern, kindly, and immensely clever old English gentleman, equipped with apron, trowel, square and compasses. Blake has a famous picture of this figure to be seen on the walls of a thousand student bedrooms during the nineteen-seventies: the strong wind which is apparently blowing in the picture has blown away the apron, trowel and set-square but left him his beard and compasses. Ironies of history have meant that this picture of Blake’s is often taken to be a picture of God the Creator, while in fact Blake drew it as a picture of Urizen, a being who shares some of the attributes of the Great Architect and some of those of Satan.

The Great Architect is not God because he is just someone like us but a lot older, cleverer and more skilful. He decides what he wants to do and therefore sets about doing the things he needs to do to achieve it. God is not like that. As Hobbes memorably said, "God hath no ends": there is nothing that God is up to, nothing he needs to get done, nothing he needs to do to get things done. In no less lapidary Latin, Aquinas said "Vult ergo Deus hoc esse propter hoc; sed non propter hoc vult hoc". In definitely unlapidary English we could say: The set-up, A-for-the-sake-of-B is something that God wants; but it is not that God wants B and for that reason wants A. We know that the set-up A-for-the-sake-of-B is something that God wants, because it is something that exists, and everything that exists, exists because of God’s will. But it is simply profane to think that you can infer from that the unfathomable secrets of the inside of God’s mind and will. Acorns for the sake of oak trees, to repeat an example of Geach’s, are definitely something that God wants, since that is the way things are. But it is not that God has any special desire for oak trees (as the Great Architect might), and for that reason finds himself obliged to fiddle about with acorns. If God wants oak-trees, he can have them, zap! You want oak trees, you got ’em. "Let there be oak trees", by inference, is one of the things said on the third day of creation, and oak trees are made. There is no suggestion that acorns have to come first: indeed, the suggestion is quite the other way around. To "which came first, the acorn or the oak?" it looks as if the answer is quite definitely "the oak". In any case, what’s so special about oak trees that God should have to fiddle around with acorns to make them? God is mysterious: the whole objection to the great architect is that we know him all too well, since he is one of us. Whatever God is, God is not one of us: a sobering thought for those who use "one of us" as their highest term of approbation.

The argument from design fails, then, because [as Martin argues earlier in the book] it is an argument from ignorance, because it confuses the final and efficient modes of explanation, and because even if it succeeded it would not prove the existence of God but of some Masonic impostor. But like other bad arguments, its defeat and death has left it to wander the world like a ghost, oppressing the spirits of those who are looking for other and better arguments. (pp. 181-2)

Needless to say, to worship Urizen or Ralph Richardson is not to worship God. But then, to devote enormous amounts of energy to defending arguments which could only ever get you to Urizen or Ralph Richardson would seem an odd enterprise for those whose interest is in promoting the worship of God. This is part of the problem with Paley-style “design arguments” and ID theory, at least insofar as the latter is thought to give support to theism. Even if they are successful – and my own view is that they are at least better than Martin gives them credit for – they distract attention from arguments which really do establish the existence of God. Worse, they lead people to a false conception of God – God as an anthropomorphic tinkerer, God as a cosmic Boy Scout or Santa Claus, a god-of-the-gaps, a scientific posit on all fours with quarks and selective pressures.

“But ID arguments raise serious questions about Darwinism!” Maybe so, and that is not unimportant. But my interest here is in the question of what sorts of arguments establish the existence of the God of classical theism. And to challenge Darwinism, even to refute Darwinism, would not be to establish classical theism. Indeed, it would not even be to refute naturalism. For, the pretenses of its less astute advocates notwithstanding, naturalism is a metaphysical theory, not an empirical one; and it is always possible for a naturalist to throw up his hands at Darwinism’s failure to explain this or that, and insist on general metaphysical grounds that there must nevertheless be some other naturalistic explanation or other out there, even if we have not or cannot discover it. That is in effect the approach taken by wiser naturalists – not Darwinian religious fanatics like Dawkins, Dennett, and Co., but more sober and serious theorists like David Stove, Jerry Fodor, Thomas Nagel, and Noam Chomsky, none of whom thinks Darwinism has come anywhere close to a complete naturalistic explanation of biological phenomena.

That is not to say that I think naturalistic metaphysics is believable even for a moment. It isn’t. But the point is that the dispute concerns basic metaphysics, not empirical science. Where the dispute over theism, specifically, is concerned, it is a waste of time to try to beat the naturalists at their own game, viz. empirical theorizing on the basis of a mechanistic conception of nature. That sort of thing will only ever get you at best to very remote, unusual, even extremely unexpected and impressive – but still perfectly natural – phenomena. It will not get you in the slightest toward God, because God is not one natural object among others, not even the most powerful and intelligent natural object, not even an immaterial natural object. (From a Scholastic point of view, “natural” does not entail “material” – angels and demons are immaterial, but still part of the natural, created order. Nor does the entailment seem to hold even from a naturalistic point of view, given e.g. that Quine is perfectly happy to countenance abstract objects if they are necessary to make sense of empirical science.)

The trouble with Paley-style arguments, then, is not that they are bad science – they may or may not be, depending on which ones we are talking about – but that they are bad theology. If you assume otherwise, then perhaps – as J. B. Phillips put it in a different context – your god is too small.

Atheistic teleology?

There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere and elsewhere about former atheist blogger Leah Libresco’s recent conversion to Catholicism.  It seems that among the reasons for her conversion is the conviction that the possibility of objective moral truth presupposes that there is teleology in the natural order, ends toward which things are naturally directed.  That there is such teleology is a thesis traditionally defended by Catholic philosophers, and this is evidently one of the things that attracted Libresco to Catholicism.  A reader calls my attention to this post by atheist philosopher and blogger Daniel Fincke.  Fincke takes issue with those among his fellow atheists willing to concede to Libresco that an atheist has to reject teleology.  Like Libresco, he would ground morality in teleology, but he denies that teleology requires a theological foundation.

The divine intellect

A reader asks:

[I] was curious, given your work in philosophy of mind, what you would say is the most plausible notion we have of God's mental content… [T]he popular theories (functionalism, phenomenology, holism, etc) all seem to violate the doctrine of divine simplicity… I have a hard time conceiving of any conception of minds on which the mind is not, in some sense of the word, modular, or complex.  Minds have got to have thoughts at the very least on the most basic, primitivist conceptions, and that seems to require that minds have parts.

Reply to Torley and Cudworth

This is the second installment of a two-part post on the dispute between Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics and “Intelligent Design” (ID) theory (a post which I hope will put the subject to rest for a while).  Having in my previous installment set out the Aristotelian distinction between “nature” and “art” (or natural objects and artifacts), I now turn to consider the recent remarks of ID defenders Vincent Torley and Thomas Cudworth over at the blog Uncommon Descent.  (Those who haven’t read the previous installment are urged to do so before reading this one.  It also wouldn’t hurt if you had some familiarity with the other things I’ve said on this topic in many previous posts.)

Debased Coynage

I had a lot to say about Jerry Coyne’s Faith versus Fact in my First Things review of the book, but much more could be said.  The reason is not that there is so much of interest in Coyne’s book, but rather because there is so little.  I was not being rhetorical when I said in my review that it might be the worst book yet published in the New Atheist genre.  It really is that awful, and goes wrong so thoroughly and so frequently that it would take a much longer review than I had space for fully to catalog its foibles.  An especially egregious example is Coyne’s treatment of Alvin Plantinga’s “evolutionary argument against naturalism” (or EAAN).

Stop it, you’re killing me!

In an op-ed piece in The New York Times, Ferris Jabr of Scientific American kindly informs us that nothing is really alive, not even Jabr himself or his readers.  Fairly verbose for a dead guy, he develops the theme at length -- not by way of giving an explicit argument for his claim, so much as by putting forward considerations intended to make it appear something other than the killer joke it seems on its face to be.

The routine is familiar, even if Jabr’s thesis is a bit more extreme than that of other biological reductionists.  There’s no generally agreed upon definition of life; there are borderline cases such as viruses; living and non-living things are all made up of the same kinds of particles; so…

Plotinus contra modernity

Plotinus’ thought is sublime. We find in it not only an important statement of the classical theistic position that all reality derives from an absolutely simple first cause, but also the notion that our fulfillment lay in our return to that cause. (The theme of God as our First Cause and Last End, He from Whom the world derives and to Whom it will return, would later go on to provide the structure for Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.) As Fr. Copleston has said, “from the point of view of Christianity itself, Neo-Platonism had an important function to fulfil, that of contributing to the intellectual statement of the Revealed Religion, and so the convinced Christian cannot but look with sympathy, and a certain reverence, on the figure of Plotinus, to whom the greatest of the Latin Fathers (and so the Universal Church) owed no inconsiderable debt.” (A History of Philosophy, volume I)

Nor is it in metaphysics alone that we can find inspiration in him. There is also his moral vision. Consider this beautiful passage from the first tractate of the Fifth Ennead (MacKenna translation):

What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It?

The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self-ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged their own motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting further and further, they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. A child wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature; ignorance of their rank brings self-depreciation; they misplace their respect, honouring everything more than themselves; all their awe and admiration is for the alien, and, clinging to this, they have broken apart, as far as a soul may, and they make light of what they have deserted; their regard for the mundane and their disregard of themselves bring about their utter ignoring of the divine.

Admiring pursuit of the external is a confession of inferiority; and nothing thus holding itself inferior to things that rise and perish, nothing counting itself less honourable and less enduring than all else it admires could ever form any notion of either the nature or the power of God.

We see from these words that Plotinus would condemn not only the naturalism that is the ruling ideology of our age, but also the liberalism that is its moral concomitant. It is “self-will” and “the desire for self-ownership” that leads the soul to deny its true source in the divine. (Libertarians take note.) The O’Brien translation has “desiring to be independent” in place of “self-ownership,” and renders the next sentence: “Once having tasted the pleasures of independence, they use their freedom to go in a direction that leads away from their origin.” We are by nature oriented to the divine; that alone can fulfill us. When, as moderns are prone to do, we make an idol of freedom and “reserve the right” to pursue some other good as if it were highest, we implicitly deny our nature. The resulting madness leads us “further and further” from the divine to the point of what Plotinus calls “self-depreciation” and the pursuit of what is “inferior” to the soul – sensual pleasure, money, and worldly power. The sequel to thus living contrary to reason, like mere animals, cannot fail to be a tendency to sentimentalize the non-human world. “Honouring everything more than themselves; all their awe and admiration is for the alien” – Plotinus might as well have been describing the contemporary environmentalist or animal rights activist. That the liberal-cum-naturalist avant-garde now effectively denies reason itself (in the name of reason!) would have surprised Plotinus not at all.

Plotinus rises up to condemn this modernist disease. We must be grateful to him for that. Not that his work was without error. His conceptions of both God and the soul need to be corrected in an Aristotelian-Thomistic direction (or so we A-T types would contend). His ethics, like that of all Platonists, is excessively rigorist because of its failure to see that the soul is the form of the body, and thus that man is an essentially embodied creature. For the Platonist, “each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body,” as the Phaedo memorably puts it. But from the A-T perspective – though itself too austere from the point of view of the modern liberal – this is a touch melodramatic. Pleasure must always be subordinated to intellect, and to the knowledge of God which is our natural end, but it has its place in a normal human life. For A-T, you can enjoy your top sirloin, martini, and tobacco, then retire to the bedchamber with the wife, all in good conscience. Some asceticism now and then is a good thing for everyone. And an entire life of asceticism is indeed a higher form of existence for those called to sacrifice lower goods in the interests of a single-minded pursuit of the highest one. But the lower goods remain goods, and those who do not have the calling in question are guilty of no moral failing for pursuing them in moderation.

All the same, in the age of MTV, pot clinics, internet pornography, and “supersizing,” Plotinus’ stern ethos is a welcome corrective. Compared to the war between the ancients and the moderns, the dispute between Platonists, Aristotelians, and Thomists and other Scholastics is a mere family squabble.

Reading Rosenberg, Part VIII

And now, dear reader, our critical look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality brings us to the pseudoscience du jour.  Wittgenstein famously said that “in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion” (Philosophical Investigations, II, xiv, p. 232).  He might as well have been talking about contemporary neuroscience -- or, more precisely, about how neuroscience becomes distorted in the hands of those rich in empirical data but poor in philosophical understanding.  Every week seems to bring some new sensationalistic claim to the effect that neuroscience has “shown” this or that -- that free will is an illusion, or that mindreading is possible, or that consciousness plays no role in human action -- supported by arguments notable only for the crudeness of the fallacies they commit.  

Tyler Burge has given the label “neurobabble” to this modern intellectual pathology, and Raymond Tallis calls it “neurotrash,” born of “neuromania.”  I’ve had reason to comment on it in earlier posts (here and here) and an extreme manifestation of the disease is criticized in the last chapter of The Last Superstition.  M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker subject neurobabble to detailed and devastating criticism in their book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, and Tallis does a bit of housecleaning of his own in Aping Mankind.  Neurobabble is a key ingredient in Rosenberg’s scientism.  Like so many other contemporary secularists, he has got the brain absolutely on the brain, and maintains that modern neuroscience vindicates some of his more outrageous metaphysical claims.  In particular, he thinks that so-called “blindsight” phenomena establish that consciousness is irrelevant to our actions, and that neuroscientist Benjamin Libet’s experiments cast doubt on free will.  (Jerry Coyne, in a recent article, has made similar claims about free will.  What I’ll say about Rosenberg applies to Coyne as well.)

Voluntarism and PSR

Aquinas holds that “will follows upon intellect” (Summa Theologiae I.19.1).  He means in part that anything with an intellect has a will as well, but also that intellect is metaphysically prior to will.  Will is the power to be drawn toward what the intellect apprehends to be good, or away from what it apprehends to be bad.  Intellect is “in the driver’s seat,” then.  This is a view known as intellectualism, and it is to be contrasted with voluntarism, which makes will prior to intellect, and is associated with Scotus and Ockham.  To oversimplify, you might say that for the intellectualist, we are essentially intellects which have wills, whereas the voluntarist tendency is to regard us as essentially wills which have intellects.

Spinoza on final causes

Among the central themes of The Last Superstition is that final causality – teleology, purpose, or goal-directedness – is as objective a feature of the natural world as mass or electric charge, and that the arguments to the contrary given by various early modern philosophers are worthless. One thinker I did not discuss in TLS is Spinoza, who puts forward a critique of final causes in the Appendix to Book I of the Ethics. Spinoza’s metaphysics is notoriously idiosyncratic and has had few defenders, which is why I did not devote space to him in the book. His critique of final causality is closely tied to that metaphysics, and inherits its weaknesses. Still, Spinoza is one of the chief architects of modernity: the militantly secularist liberalism which has now displaced the milder and theologically-based Lockean brand of liberalism in the thinking of the contemporary Western intelligentsia has its roots in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. And his critique of final causality evinces some of the same fallacies and errors to be found in other early modern writers. So it’s worthwhile giving his critique a brief look.

Spinoza’s discussion has three parts: first, an account of the origins of belief in final causes; second, a set of arguments purporting to show that final causes do not exist; and third, a discussion of the implications of abandoning final causes for our judgments concerning good and evil, order and disorder, beauty and ugliness. Let’s consider them in order.

I. The genealogy of belief in final causes

Spinoza claims that belief in final causes springs from a projection onto the world of our own self-seeking desires. We are obsessively concerned with our own well-being – for example, with feeding, clothing, and sheltering ourselves. And this narcissism leads us to imagine that there are in nature something like the purposes we have, that water, animals, plants, and other natural objects exist for our sake, to provide us with the raw materials requisite to fulfilling our needs. Wondering how things could have come to be arranged so beneficially, we infer in turn that there must be supernatural powers lying behind the purposes we think we see in nature, whose interest is in making things go well for us.

Note how Spinoza foreshadows here what would become standard shtick among later secularist writers: debunking some hated idea by providing a “genealogical” account of it (Nietzsche, Marx, Freud), and dismissing metaphysical claims by attributing them to the “projection” of human interests (Feuerbach) or to anthropocentric bias (Darwinism).

Now even if such “just so” stories were plausible, any suggestion that they suffice to refute the targeted beliefs would commit the genetic fallacy. But Spinoza’s own “just so” story is not plausible in any case. Contrary to the standard caricature, the Aristotelian-cum-Scholastic attribution of final causes to natural objects and processes did not essentially involve identifying some respect in which they served human interests. Aquinas’s central argument for final causes is that without them we can make no sense of how efficient causes are possible. The basic idea is that if A regularly brings about B – rather than C, or D, or no effect at all – that can only be because there is something in the nature of A by virtue of which it is “directed at” or “points” to the generation of B specifically. This is an entirely general point about causation; it has nothing necessarily to do with human beings at all.

Another problem is that Aristotle – rather famously – believed in final causes without regarding them as deriving from any supernatural mind at all. He thought they were just there in nature, mostly completely divorced from any consciousness, and that was that. (He did, of course, believe in a divine Unmoved Mover, but his arguments here were based on efficient causality rather than final causality.) To be sure, the Scholastics would later disagree with Aristotle about this, and hold (as Aquinas did in the Fifth Way) that final causality must itself ultimately be explained in terms of the divine intellect. But the point is that there was from the beginning of philosophical reflection on final causes conceptual space left open for views very different from the one Spinoza seems to think is their inevitable concomitant.

Of course, Spinoza might reply that none of this constitutes anything more than an idiosyncratic departure from the “core” anthropocentric and theological sources of belief in final causes. But there are two problems with such a response. First, it seems to add to the genetic fallacy the fallacy of cherry-picking the evidence, arbitrarily putting aside possible sources of belief in final causes other than the ones Spinoza wants to recognize. Second, and related to this, it fails to address the actual arguments of writers like Aquinas and Aristotle, which, if they are sound, show that final causes exist whether or not Spinoza’s genealogical speculations are correct.

II. Arguments against final causes

Still, as I have said, Spinoza does offer arguments of his own against the existence of final causes. There are five of them. But we have already seen what is wrong with the first of them:

A. Spinoza’s account of the origin of belief in final causes shows they do not exist.

Spinoza’s first argument is that his genealogical account itself constitutes a disproof of the reality of final causes, but as we have seen, the account is dubious and any such argument would commit the genetic fallacy in any event. So let’s move on to his second argument:

B. The truth of Spinoza’s metaphysical system entails that there are no final causes.

The argument here is that Spinoza’s pantheistic metaphysics entails that everything that happens follows with necessity from Deus sive Natura via (a bastardized conception of) efficient causation, so that there is no work left for final causes to do.

One obvious problem with this argument is that it will have no force for anyone who rejects Spinoza’s metaphysics – which is pretty much everyone. Another problem, as Michael Della Rocca points out in his recent book on Spinoza, is that it is hard to see why God’s acting from necessity would exclude final causes or directedness towards an end: Why can’t we say that Spinoza’s God seeks to realize such-and-such an end, even if he does so of necessity?

C. The doctrine of final causes reverses the order of causation, making what is in reality an effect into a cause and vice versa.

The argument here is that a cause must precede its effect, whereas purported final causes come after their effects. For example, the oak is supposed to be the final cause of the acorn, even though the oak exists only after the acorn does.

One problem with this argument is that it simply begs the question. The defender of final causes will say that while causes must precede their effects in the order of efficient causation, the very idea of a final cause is that of a cause which, in a sense, follows its effect. Spinoza’s “argument” is really nothing more than a dogmatic insistence that all genuine causes are efficient causes.

Of course, someone might still complain that this feature of final causes makes them mysterious. But as Della Rocca points out, the efficacy of final causes can be made perfectly intelligible if we think of them as the intentions of an agent, in particular, of God. The oak can cause the acorn to be what it is precisely because it exists as an idea in the divine mind. This was indeed more or less Aquinas’s argument in the Fifth Way: that the vast system of final causes underlying the equally vast network of efficient causes constituting the natural world must ultimately be traced to the conserving action of the divine intellect, apart from whose constant ordering of things to their ends the entire causal structure of the world would instantly collapse.

This naturally brings us to Spinoza’s next argument:

D. The idea of final causes entails that God has ends, and thus detracts from his perfection.

There are several problems with this argument. First, as we have seen, not all defenders of final causality conceive of them as deriving from God: Aquinas does, but Aristotle does not. (Aristotle thinks of God as the final cause of the world, who moves it by virtue of being “desired” by it, but he does not think of God himself as having ends or putting them into nature. They’re just there.)

Second, even if final causes do depend on God, this objection would show, not that there are no final causes, but rather that a certain conception of God is mistaken.

Third, Spinoza is just wrong in any event to claim that explaining final causes in terms of God (as Aquinas would do even if Aristotle would not) necessarily detracts from God’s perfection. It would do so only if the point of realizing the ends in question were to remedy some deficiency in the divine nature. But the ends in question do not benefit God, who is already perfect, but rather his creatures, who are not. (It is true of course that the point of the creation as a whole is nevertheless to manifest the glory of God, but this is not because God needs to manifest his glory in this way, which he does not. Obviously this raises further theological questions, but the discussion then concerns which view of God to take, not whether final causes exist.)

Spinoza’s final argument against final causes is:

E. Purported explanations couched in terms of final causes inevitably reduce to appeals to ignorance, which explain nothing.

“For example,” says Spinoza in expanding on this objection, “if a stone falls from a roof on to some one's head and kills him, [defenders of final causality] will demonstrate by their new method, that the stone fell in order to kill the man; for, if it had not by God's will fallen with that object, how could so many circumstances (and there are often many concurrent circumstances) have all happened together by chance?” If it is suggested instead that the wind blew the stone off of the roof while the man happened to be walking by, the defender of final causes will ask why the stone fell at exactly that time. And so on. The only explanation the defender of final causes will accept is one that appeals to the inscrutable will of God. And yet this, Spinoza says, is no explanation at all.

Here again there are several problems. First, Spinoza’s scenario is a complete travesty of the Scholastic understanding of final causes. The view of writers like Aquinas, anyway, was not that nothing ever happens due to chance. Stones sometimes do indeed fall off of roofs and kill hapless passersby, entirely by accident. It is true that the Scholastic view was that even chance events presuppose final causality, but not in the sense Spinoza imagines. To take a stock example, when a farmer plows a field and discovers buried treasure, this event is correctly described as a chance occurrence, unintended by anyone. Still, this chance event was made possible by the farmer’s decision to plow and some other person’s decision to bury treasure at exactly that spot, neither of which was due to chance. In general, the Scholastics would say, chance events always presuppose, at some level, the operation of causal regularities manifesting (as all efficient causes do) finality or end-directedness.

Second, it is simply false to say that Scholastic explanations in terms of final causality necessarily reduced to empty appeals to an inscrutable divine will. For Thomists, anyway, to discover the end toward which something is directed is to discover something about its nature or essence, something which could not have been otherwise. If things did not have the causal powers they do in fact have, they simply would not be the things they are. We are not in the position of saying (for example) that eyeballs are for seeing only because God arbitrarily decided to make them for seeing, as if he could have made them instead for digesting food or for flying. Such pseudo-explanatory appeals to sheer divine fiat might be the logical outcome of the nominalist rejection of universals and essences, but they were no part of the Thomistic view of divine creation.

Finally, as Della Rocca points out, to complain that we do not know what God’s purposes are would not (even if it were generally true) be to show that he does not have any purposes, and thus it does nothing to show that there are no final causes.

All told, then, Spinoza’s arguments against final causes are about as good as those of the other early modern philosophers – that is to say, not good at all.

III. Implications of abandoning final causes

Where Spinoza does have something plausible to say about final causes is in his discussion of what would follow from abandoning them. Lurking in the background of his discussion here is the objection his critics would raise against his pantheism to the effect that Deus sive Natura would seem less than perfect if the evil and ugliness we see in the world around us were thought to follow necessarily from his nature. Spinoza answers that our ordinary conceptions of good and evil, order and disorder, beauty and ugliness derive from belief in final causes, so that if the latter is abandoned so too must the former be abandoned. And when that is done, we will see that we have no basis for describing anything that follows necessarily from Deus sive Natura as evil, ugly, etc. Such judgments reflect only our parochial concern with ourselves, rather than an informed understanding of our (relatively trivial) place in the larger scheme of things.

Here at last, I would say, Spinoza is right: Our ordinary conceptions of good and evil, order and disorder, beauty and ugliness – and indeed, any conception of these things – cannot survive the abandonment of final causes. And absolutely nothing that human beings might either suffer or perpetrate can consistently be judged evil, ugly, or disordered in their absence. That is precisely why the world has grown progressively uglier, more disordered, and more evil and irrational the more thoroughly it has assimilated the anti-teleological worldview of Spinoza and the other moderns.